For decades, Democrats have been telling themselves that there exists a liberal cliff: Move too far to the left and they’ll fall off it, handing the country to an increasingly draconian Republican Party and dooming the Democrats to years in the political wilderness… The Democratic Party of the past half-century has been defined largely by this timidity.

The vast majority of Democratic primary voters then and now do not identify as democratic socialists. Perhaps Sanders capitalized on unaffiliated anti-establishment types and Democrats who preferred him despite his ideology and not because of it. Move forward to the 2020 contests. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is providing the most substantive, interesting agenda that committed progressives could hope to see. Yet she is lagging in the polls. If this was all about progressive ideology and policy plans, she’d be running rings around the rest of the field.

I witnessed the Republican Party become increasingly hostile to centrists. Now I’m seeing the same thing happening on the left… Democrats over-investigating the administration, or discussing policies outside the mainstream do not help their cause for 2020, in the swing districts that delivered their majority. The midterms were a referendum on Trump. But the 2020 will be different! It will be about the competing visions of the two presidential nominees.

Another advantage to Medicare for America is that it would be cheaper than single-payer, at least so far as the federal budget is concerned. There are no public cost-estimates for the bill yet. But it would almost certainly save Washington money compared to the Sanders approach, because it would not require immediately transitioning the entire employer-sponsored market onto a government health plan. The new version of Medicare also wouldn’t be free for everyone; families earning more than 200 percent of the poverty line would pay premiums…

That Democrats are arguing whether their next health care proposal should cover every American in a government plan in a matter of years or a matter of decades shows how far to the left the party’s internal health care debate has shifted. But in a crowded presidential field, these distinctions are going to be treated as meaningful. O’Rourke is allying himself with more mainstream Democrats, setting up a collision with Sanders and the single-payer purists.

So long as the two big Medicare proposals are understood as two paths — one very simple and equitable, one perhaps more feasible and less disruptive — to the same goal, they may play a limited role in the 2020 Democratic primaries (Republicans will, of course, savage both as “socialized medicine” and as an effort to soak hard-working white taxpayers to provide still more benefits to coddled and idle minorities). But the Beto-versus-Bernie dynamic could make a lot of wonky health policy distinctions politically salient right away.

If a terrorist were to claim that their attack was intended to “add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society,” you might be excused in thinking the perpetrator was an Islamic extremist. But these are the words of a white supremacist and crusader.

The increasingly transnational narratives of far right extremists have strong parallels with other forms of global extremism, in particular Islamism. Like ISIS, the Christchurch attacker’s ideology claims there are no such thing as innocents in this clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, only combatants. Both worldviews emphasize transnational bonds of brotherhood. While the shooter frames his identity as part of a global white European race, ISIS emphasizes a global Islamic identity in its propaganda, which it uses to perpetuate a form of warped solidarity.

The global financial and arms networks into which aspiring Islamists were able to tap at the beginning of this century goes far beyond anything white supremacists can even imagine. Some of these robust and elusive networks remain stubbornly intact. Nothing comparable is available to the white nationalist right in the United States. What’s more, the mature Western democracies they seek to corrupt are far more stable and resilient than the developing nations in which radical Islam thrives, where Islamist terrorist networks serve as an alternative source of civil society and function as communal mediating institutions.

Officials and political analysts in the West Bank say that high poverty levels and food insecurity, in addition to a high unemployment rate, are the real reasons behind the calls in the Gaza Strip for more people to come out and protest… the people were merely demanding an improvement in the standard of living in the Gaza Strip.

Here is an organization that is corrupt, venal and oppressive; most damning of all in its 12 years in charge of Gaza, it has failed to bring the dream of a Palestinian state a single step closer to reality. Yet in spite of it all, the thing bringing Gazans to the streets is the state of the economy — the one thing that Hamas isn’t directly at fault for.

Israeli journalists have observed that right now their country faces a paradox.

Usually, Israel would be pleased to see an uprising against Hamas in Gaza, hoping this could lead to the group’s downfall.

But in the run up to April’s general election in Israel, the country worries about turmoil and what other diversions Hamas might have in mind.

5G technology, a source of bitter contention between the United States and China, is a game changer. For the military, it makes possible the control of vast numbers of autonomous weapons systems, like drone swarms that can overwhelm anti-missile defenses. For industry, it allows robots and control devices to exchange vast amounts of data at speeds 2,000 times that of 4G LTE. It also cheapens the cost of delivering broadband to homes, by transmitting over the airwaves more data than fiber-optic cable now can carry. Developing countries will therefore be able to go straight to 5G at much lower cost, and Huawei is both the cheapest and the most technologically advanced provider… It’s time to stop underestimating China.

If the Trump administration is serious about winning the global race to 5G and staying ahead of China it will ignore calls for a government takeover or a nationalized 5G network and continue to support policies that allow private sector investment to lead the way. The faster the administration gives American companies the tools, the faster they will finish the job.

Have faith in free markets!

The race for 5G is indeed high stakes, and we should be pulling out all the stops to get there. But, contrary to what many seem to suggest, the U.S. isn’t behind because of a lack of government involvement. In fact, the opposite is true.

Current permitting for the infrastructure necessary for a 5G network is done at a local level, and it is perhaps the single largest impediment to effective deployment. A truly national 5G network will require hundreds of thousands of new cell sites. This will all require approval and permitting across nearly 40,000 municipalities and counties.

As much as traditional interpretations vilify Vashti, there’s something empowering about the “evil” queen. Rather than brush over Vashti’s role or revive her simply as “the bad queen,” we should be celebrating her and holding her up as an example of a strong woman, unafraid to assert herself – even in the face of a king.

Esther does not dismantle the patriarchy. At the end of the book, the king is still sovereign and Mordechai is his second-in-command. Esther does get to write her own story, a relatively rare occurrence in the Hebrew Bible. Esther’s power suggests a movement back towards a prelapsarian state in which men and women coexist equally and God interacts with humans freely and in a state of grace.

Wonder Woman. Captain Marvel. Today we are celebrating stories of women who save the world from dark times and bad guys.

While many critical moments in Jewish history revolve around great women, perhaps none express this theme more than the Book of Esther. The Purim story doesn’t just have a strong female lead; it’s a story that reframes the entire Biblical perspective on the power of women.