This Pat Bagley cartoon appears in The Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018. You can check out the past 10 Bagley editorial cartoons below:

• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/08/07/bagley-cartoon-insurance/" target=_blank>Insurance Magic Trick</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/08/06/bagley-cartoon-air-we">The Air We Breathe</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/08/03/bagley-cartoon-orrins/">Orrin’s Outrage</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/08/02/bagley-cartoon-enemy">Enemy of the People</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/08/01/bagley-cartoon-bringing/">Bringing Copiers to a Gun Fight</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/31/bagley-cartoon-smoke-gets/">Smoke Gets in Your Eyes</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/31/bagley-cartoon-wilderness/">Wilderness Trafficking</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/27/bagley-cartoon-physics/">Physics for Dummies</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/26/bagley-cartoon-toting/">2A Toting Tots</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/25/bagley-cartoon-monumental/">Monumental Bull</a>

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The NBA has turned Christmas Day into the most important date on its regular season calendar. For many casual fans, basketball season begins that day, with them beginning to shift their focus to the hardwood as the NFL’s regular season winds down.

That is what makes the NBA’s Christmas Day schedule this year, which was released Wednesday, such a missed opportunity.

Sure, there are compelling games among the five-game slate. Having the Philadelphia 76ers play the Boston Celtics, two massive markets with entertaining teams bursting at the seams with talent, makes complete sense. So, too, does having marquee attractions in the defending champion Golden State Warriors and stars including LeBron James, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook and James Harden all take the stage.

But it still is far less than what it could have been.

Let’s start with the first game, the Milwaukee Bucks facing the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Yes, having Giannis Antetokoumpo playing on a big stage is a good call. But the Knicks? That’s another story. Despite largely being a wreck for two decades, the Knicks have remained a staple on Christmas Day simply because they play in New York, and bring a large audience as a result.

Now, to be fair, the Knicks do seem to be providing some light at the end of the tunnel. The team’s two draft picks this offseason, Kevin Knox and Mitchell Robinson, were impressive at summer league last month in Las Vegas, and they are well-positioned to have max cap space next summer to lure another star free agent to the Big Apple.

But Kristaps Porzingis, the team’s star player, almost certainly won’t be playing after tearing his anterior cruciate ligament in February. Most people within the league think he won’t be back until next February, which would be right in line with recovery times for recent returns from ACL injuries. With him, the Knicks would struggle to be relevant. Without him? They are destined to be one of the NBA’s worst teams.

So why grant them some of the most precious inventory the NBA has at its disposal? Because of where they play? It’s lunacy. And, in doing so, it does a disservice to the league’s successful attempt to turn Christmas Day into a prime way to showcase its product.

The obvious omission from the Christmas schedule — having Kawhi Leonard’s current team, the Toronto Raptors, play his former team, the San Antonio Spurs — is also undoubtedly a market-based decision. While Toronto is one of the largest cities in North America, because it is outside of the United States, its television audience isn’t factored into American television ratings. There is no other reason to explain why a team that won 59 games last year and added one of the league’s most talented players wouldn’t be made a central component of the league’s Christmas slate.

Even some of the games that are attractive are missing an element that would make them better. James facing the Golden State Warriors on Christmas for a fourth year in a row isn’t surprising, but it also isn’t compelling. The Los Angeles Lakers will be fine this season, but not a championship contender. And while having Donovan Mitchell, one of the league’s brightest young stars, playing on Christmas is an inspired choice, having his Utah Jazz host the Portland Trail Blazers leaves something to be desired.

What should the schedule have been? The one matchup the league nailed, the Sixers facing the Celtics, should have led the slate, followed by the NBA Finals rematch that the NBA has placed in the second slot each of the past four years — though replacing the Cleveland Cavaliers should have been the Houston Rockets, who pushed Golden State to the brink in the Western Conference finals.

Next up would be the Oklahoma City Thunder visiting the Los Angeles Lakers, where Paul George and Westbrook — the Southern California natives who both chose to sign long-term to remain in Oklahoma City over the past 12 months — will face the revitalized Lakers with James at the helm, followed by the Raptors traveling to face the Spurs for Leonard’s return to San Antonio. Capping off the night, would be Mitchell and the Jazz hosting Anthony Davis and the New Orleans Pelicans, who happened to sweep the Blazers from the playoffs last spring.

That would be a day featuring five compelling games with emerging young stars and captivating story lines. More importantly, it wouldn't include the Knicks.

Oh, well. Maybe next year.

Taos, N.M. • A father arrested at a ramshackle New Mexico compound where 11 children were found living in filth was training youngsters to commit school shootings, prosecutors said in court documents obtained Wednesday.

The allegations against Siraj Ibn Wahhaj came to light as authorities awaited word on whether human remains discovered at the site were those of his missing son, who is severely disabled and went missing in December in Jonesboro, Georgia, near Atlanta.

The documents say Wahhaj was conducting weapons training with assault rifles at the compound near the Colorado border that was raided by authorities Friday.

Prosecutor Timothy Hasson filed the court documents while asking that Wahhaj be held without bail after he was arrested last week with four other adults facing child abuse charges.

"He poses a great danger to the children found on the property as well as a threat to the community as a whole due to the presence of firearms and his intent to use these firearms in a violent and illegal manner," Hasson wrote.

Prosecutors did not bring up the school shooting accusation during initial court hearings Wednesday for the abuse suspects. A judge ordered them all held without bond pending further proceedings.

In the court documents, authorities said a foster parent of one of the 11 children removed from the compound had told authorities the child had been trained to use an assault rifle in preparation for a school shooting.

Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe previously said adults at the compound were "considered extremist of the Muslim belief." He did not elaborate, saying it was part of the investigation.

Aleks Kostich of the Taos County Public Defender's Office questioned the new accusation of a school shooting conspiracy against by Wahhaj, saying the claim was presented with little information beyond the explanation that it came from a foster parent.

Kostich believes prosecutors are not certain about the credibility of the foster parent, whom he has no way of reaching to verify the claim, he said.

The human remains were being analyzed by medical examiners to determine if they are those of Abdul-ghani Wahhaj, the missing boy.

Earlier this year, his grandfather, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, posted a plea on Facebook for help finding his grandson.

The elder Wahhaj heads the Masjid At-Taqwa in Brooklyn, a mosque that has attracted radical speakers to over the years. He met Mahmud Abouhalima when he came to the site to raise money for Muslims in Afghanistan. Abouhalima later helped bomb the World Trade Center 1993.

In a Georgia arrest warrant, authorities said 39-year-old Siraj Ibn Wahhaj had told his son's mother that he wanted to perform an exorcism on the child because he believed he was possessed by the devil. He later said he was taking the child to a park and didn't return.

He is accused in Georgia of kidnapping the boy.

The arrest warrant issued there says the missing boy has a condition caused by lack of oxygen and blood flow around the time of birth. He cannot walk and requires constant attention, his mother told police.

For months, neighbors worried about the squalid compound built along a remote New Mexico plain, saying they took their concerns to authorities long before sheriff's officials raided the facility described as a small camping trailer in the ground.

The search at the compound came amid a two-month investigation that included the FBI. Hogrefe said federal agents surveilled the area a few weeks ago but did not find probable cause to search the property.

That changed when Georgia detectives forwarded a message to the sheriff that he said initially had been sent to a third party, saying: "We are starving and need food and water."

Authorities found what Hogrefe called "the saddest living conditions and poverty" he has seen in 30 years in law enforcement. He said Wahhaj was armed with multiple firearms, including an assault rifle. But he was taken into custody without incident.

The group arrived in Amalia in December, with enough money to buy groceries and construction supplies, according to Tyler Anderson, a 41-year-old auto mechanic who lives nearby.

He said he helped them install solar panels after they arrived but eventually stopped visiting.

Anderson said he met both of the men in the group, but never the women, who authorities have said are the mothers of the 11 children, ages 1 to 15.

"We just figured they were doing what we were doing, getting a piece of land and getting off the grid," Anderson said.

As the months passed, he said he stopped seeing the smaller children playing in the area and didn't hear guns being fired at a shooting range on the property.

Jason Badger, who owned the property where the compound was built, said he and his wife had pressed authorities to remove the group after becoming concerned about the children.

The group had built the compound on their acreage instead of a neighboring tract owned by Lucas Morton, one of the men arrested during the raid.

However, a judge dismissed an eviction notice filed by Badger against Morton in June, court records said. The records did not provide further details on the judge's decision.

After the raid, Anderson looked over the property for the first time in months.

"I was flabbergasted from what it had turned into from the last time I saw it," he said.

___

Hudetz reported from Albuquerque. Associated Press writers Kate Brumback in Atlanta, and Russell Contreras in Albuqerque, N.M., contributed to this report.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

— L.P. Hartley

Washington • They do things differently in Portland, but not because it is a foreign country, although many Americans might wish it were: At this moment, it is one national embarrassment too many. Rather, the tumults in Portland, which is a petri dish of progressivism, perhaps reveal something about Oregon’s political DNA. A century ago, the state was a bastion of reaction.

Recently in Portland, an "intersectional" feminist bookstore ("intersectionality" postulates that society's victims — basically, everyone but white males — suffer interlocking and overlapping victimizations), which appeared in the television series "Portlandia," closed. It blamed its failure not on a scarcity of customers but on an excess of "capitalism," "white supremacy" and "patriarchy." (Presumably these made customers scarce.) Poor Portland progressives: So much to protest, so little time. However, right wingers spoiling for fights have done "antifa" (anti-fascist) Portlanders the favor of flocking to the city to provide a simulacrum of fascism, thereby assuaging progressives' Thirties Envy — nostalgia for the good old days of barricading Madrid against Franco's advancing forces.

In the Twenties, however, Oregon was a national leader in a different flavor of nonsense, as historian Linda Gordon recounts in "The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition." The Klan's revival began in 1915 with the romanticizing of it in the film "Birth of a Nation," adapted from the novel "The Clansman" by Thomas Dixon. He was a John Hopkins University classmate and friend of Woodrow Wilson, who as president made the movie the first one shown in the White House. Wilson was enraptured: "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

The resuscitated Klan flourished nationwide as a vehicle of post-World War I populism. It addressed grievances about national identity — pre-war immigration (too many Catholics and Jews) had diluted Anglo-Saxon purity — and disappointment with the recalcitrant world that had not been sufficiently improved by, or grateful for, U.S. involvement in the war.

Gordon, who grew up in Portland, says: "Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, and extending through the mid-twentieth century, Oregon was arguably the most racist place outside the southern states, possibly even of all the states." By the early 1920s, "Oregon shared with Indiana the distinction of having the highest per capita Klan membership" because the Klan's agenda "fit comfortably into the state's tradition."

In 1844, Oregon territory banned slavery — and required African-Americans to leave. Prevented by federal law from expelling African-Americans, Gordon says it became the only state to ban "any further blacks from entering, living, voting or owning property," a law "to be enforced by lashings for violators." The state offered free land, but only to whites. It imposed an annual tax on non-whites who remained. Oregon refused to ratify the post-Civil War Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (not doing so until 1959 and 1973, respectively).

In 1920, Oregon's population was 0.006 percent Japanese (they came after the federal government banned Chinese immigration in 1882), 0.3 percent African-American, 0.1 percent Jewish and 8 percent Catholic. To make living difficult for Japanese, Gordon says, the state "banned immigrants from operating hospitality businesses." In 1923, only one state legislator voted against barring immigrants from owning or renting land. In advance of today's progressive hostility to private schools competing with government schools, Klan-dominated Oregon — it was primarily hostile to Catholic schools — banned all private schools. In 1925, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (Gov. Walter Pierce was a Democrat and, Gordon says, "an ardent Klan ally"), the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down this law.

In a let-bygones-be-bygones spirit that Oregon progressives probably are too stern to embrace, let us assume that what Shakespeare said of individuals can be said of American states: “Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?” Today, Portland’s generally irritable, often cranky and sometimes violent progressivism suggests that William Faulkner’s famous axiom — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”— needs this codicil: The bacillus of past stupidities lurks dormant but not dead in the social soil everywhere, ready to infect fresh fanaticisms when they come along, as they invariably do.

Perhaps the proportion of stupidity to intelligence in America is fairly constant over time, and today just seems especially soggy with stupidity because social media and mesmerized journalists give it such velocity. Isn't it pretty to think so?

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Washington Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. georgewill@washpost.com.

Utah Lake has become one big, toxic bowl of cyanobacteria soup.

Health officials are warning the public to stay out of the entire lake, due to high levels of blue-green algae at all testing locations, particularly around marinas at Sandy and Lincoln beaches and Saratoga Springs. That goes for dogs, too, which have been known to die after ingesting water from the lake during past algal outbreaks.

In fact, algal blooms have become a chronic problem at Utah Lake. One in 2016 shut down the entire lake.

Blue-green algae, which are prone to explode in nutrient-laden waters during rising temperatures, releases toxic waste products that trigger diarrhea, vomiting and headaches in those exposed to them. The blooms coat the surface with an olive-green slick and leave fish floating belly up along the shores.

“Water sample results throughout the lake have cell concentrations significantly over the recommended warning threshold level,” the Utah County Health Department said Wednesday in a news release. “Those recreating on Utah Lake should take caution and avoid areas of scum. Recreationists are advised to be mindful of conditions, as they may change over the course of the day.”

This summer, three other lakes are also loaded with concerning levels of toxic algae.

In recent weeks, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality has issued algal bloom warnings for Scofield and Matt Warner reservoirs, near Scofield and Vernal, respectively, after testing showed elevated levels of algal-related toxins.

The agency is also investigating reports of a harmful bloom at Montes Creek Reservoir, a popular fishing destination northeast of Roosevelt where cyanobacteria levels appear to exceed health thresholds.

Sure, we’ve seen malfeasance in Utah politics — sex scandals, run-of-the-mill corruption, pay-to-play.

But I can’t recall ever seeing a public servant conspiring so ruthlessly to deny a Utahn a fundamental constitutional right as we just saw in San Juan County.

I’m referring to San Juan County Clerk John David Nielson, who helped falsify and backdate an election complaint and used it to disqualify Democrat Willie Grayeyes from the County Commission race, asserting Grayeyes was ineligible to run because he didn’t live in the county.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge David Nuffer righted the wrong, ordering Grayeyes’ name be put back on the ballot, basing his decision, in part, on the clerk’s deceit.

Grayeyes’ candidacy was challenged March 20 by Wendy Black, at the time a Republican candidate for the County Commission seat and her complaint was all of three sentences long, stating it had “been brought to my attention” that Grayeyes “may” live outside the county.

That was it. Without a shred of proof, the law is explicit that Nielson should have dismissed the claim on the spot. Instead, he launched an investigation.

That inquiry was already completed a few weeks later when he emailed Black, asking her to refile a formal complaint that would meet the requirements of the law. She wasn’t happy, but came into his office on April 16 anyway.

Here’s the problem: Had they put the actual date on the new complaint, it would have been weeks after the deadline to challenge a candidate. Plus, how would it look to have an investigation completed before a legally valid complaint was filed?

If they wanted Grayeyes off the ballot, the only way to make it stick was to lie. So they did. And we know they did because Nielson admitted it under oath.

In his deposition, Nielson is asked about Black’s April 16 visit to his office.

“The second page of this shows it being completed and signed on March 20, 2018,” said Grayeyes’ attorney, Steven Boos.

Nielson: “Yes.”

Boos: “That is false. Correct?”

Nielson: “Yes.”

Boos: “Did [Black] sign it in front of you?”

Nielson: “Yes.”

Boos: “OK. And she signed it as dating it on the 20th of March?

Nielson: “Yes.”

Boos: “And you signed it as her having signed on the 20th of March?”

Nielson: “Yes.”

Boos: “That was false, too. Correct?”

Nielson: “It was.”

“I realized that that was probably not what I should have done,” Nielson said, “but the thought in my head was that the original challenge was done on March 20th, and so that’s what we were making this, to March 20th.”

The form both Black and Nielson signed states that Black understood the information provided was “subject to penalties of perjury.”

Then for weeks, the county withheld Black’s original deficient complaint from repeated records requests from Grayeyes’ attorney, attempting to pass off the backdated complaint as the only one they had.

San Juan County Attorney Kendall Laws (whose father, Kelly Laws, is Grayeyes’ Republican opponent for commissioner) even sent the flimsy file to Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings to screen for possible criminal charges against Grayeyes. Rawlings’ office declined.

It seems clear on its face that laws were broken here, but not by Willie Grayeyes.

Justin Lee, director of elections for Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox, said they are awaiting Judge Nuffer’s opinion. “If there’s something criminal, we’ll likely send it over to the attorney general’s office to investigate,” he said.

In a broader context, the Grayeyes episode is another chapter in the abysmal treatment of Navajos in San Juan County.

Indeed, the entire reason the seat is even up for election this November is that a federal judge ordered the commission boundaries to be redrawn because for decades they had systematically disenfranchised the Navajo majority.

The Navajos have repeatedly had to go to federal court against the county to demand equal educational opportunities, fair treatment in the justice process, access to the ballot box, and their rightful share of oil and gas royalties.

Grayeyes’ case “fits in altogether too well” with that history, Boos told me.

In court filings, Boos references a 1972 case, where a clerk deliberately gave misleading information to two Navajo residents who wanted to run for office, resulting in them missing a deadline. The federal court in that case intervened and ordered them to be put back on the ballot.

“That was 1972,” said Boos. “The Grayeyes stuff makes it seem as though in the last half century nothing has changed, which is a sad commentary.”

Maybe Nielson and Black weren’t actually trying to stick it to the Navajo candidate. Maybe it was a couple Republicans trying to knock out a Democrat. Or perhaps it was an attempt to stop one of the chief proponents of the Bears Ears National Monument from being elected.

Really, it doesn’t matter. At its core, no matter what his motivation, Nielson violated a public trust.

The job of the county clerk is not a trivial thing. They take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the state and to “discharge the duties of [the] office with fidelity.”

They are tasked with the responsibility of protecting one of the most cherished, fundamental rights of our democracy — the right to vote and the right to run for public office.

So when we have someone who violates that oath and conspires to break the law in order to deprive even one voter of those rights, that is not someone who deserves to be in a position of trust.

That is someone who deserves to go to jail.

Salt Lake’s County will now provide preference to small, women-owned or minority-owned emerging businesses when considering bids for services ranging from office equipment to janitorial contracts.

Those changes to the county’s procurement policy ordinance passed 5-3 in the council’s work session meeting on Tuesday among those who hope it will give a leg up to underprivileged groups.

“We’re going to allow that opportunity for them to get that contract just because of our belief that those are the types of businesses that are historically disadvantaged through government procurement,” said County Councilman Arlyn Bradshaw. “And that’s not going to change with this preference, but I think it’s a small step in the right direction.”

The county already gives preference in awarding contracts to businesses that hire veterans and offer their employees health care. The procurement ordinance also used to give priority to locally-owned businesses, but that provision was recently eliminated in response to federal guidance, Contract and Procurements Director Jason Yocom said at the council meeting.

But the new policy sparked concern among some council members, who worried it would offer special treatment to business owners based not on qualifications but on immutable characteristics.

“We should not discriminate for or against someone based on their skin color and gender,” Council Chairwoman Aimee Winder-Newton said at the meeting. “As we spend taxpayer dollars, we should be looking at who can perform the best service. I don’t believe gender and race should ever be the deciding factor as we choose who to do business with.”

Federal guidance encourages government agencies to make efforts to solicit bids from small minority- and women-owned businesses, according to county documents. But Winder-Newton, who voted against the changes to the county’s ordinance, argued that’s different from providing preferential treatment.

A small business owner herself, with experience in real estate and public relations, Winder-Newton said the idea that women entrepreneurs need special treatment to get ahead is offensive — and potentially unfair to men.

“If you are a white male business owner who wants to do business with Salt Lake County, you could lose the bid to a woman- or minority-owned business — even if you are the lowest bidder/most qualified,” she wrote in a Facebook post after the vote.

Utah routinely ranks at or near the bottom of national equality rankings for women, based on the declining percentage of women who hold top-level jobs, low representation of women in government, the state’s pay gap and other factors.

Susan Madsen, a Utah Valley University professor who directs the Utah Women & Leadership Project, studies women in business and said she thinks the changes to the county’s ordinance are a way to fight unconscious biases against minority groups.

“What they’re doing has been shown in the research to actually be a type of process or system that has been effective in actually helping qualified women and people of color have the same opportunities that qualified men do,” she said. “It’s giving them a chance to actually being on a level playing field — it’s not giving them a chance necessarily to have a real heads up.”

Under the policy, a qualifying business would, at most, receive a few extra points on the scale the county uses to weigh bids, Bradshaw said. The county has rarely seen the pre-existing preferences for veteran hiring and health care affect the awarding of a contract, and the changes would likely also matter only in cases where opposing bids are nearly identical, he said.

County Councilman Richard Snelgrove said he voted against the changes to the ordinance because it allows the county to choose a bid from a qualifying business even if it doesn’t offer the lowest price, as long as the bid is within 4 percent of the cheapest one.

“I suspect that the people of Salt Lake County want their tax dollars to be used to get the best deal,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday, noting that that percentage difference between bids can add up to real money on big procurements. “And so any preference I felt needs to first go to the taxpayer of Salt Lake County.”

But Bradshaw argued that the lowest bid isn’t always the one that’s best for the community.

“If you have a bidder A who’s bidding to provide a catering service to the county and they bid for $100 and bidder B provides the same contract at $104, but bidder B provides health insurance to his employees or has a veterans hiring program or is a local small business, well, we have previously made the policy decision that it is worth the extra four percent to us,” he said.

Washington • How do democratic countries get to the point where they give up on self-rule? Under what circumstances do demagogues capture large audiences through irrational, emotional appeals unmoored from fact, logic or morality? When do politicians responsible for maintaining a democratic system surrender to dictators?

These questions are more pertinent to us in the early 21st century than we would wish. In the 1990s, democracy was thought to be on the march. Now, we worry that the international tide is turning toward autocracy and authoritarianism.

This is why Benjamin Carter Hett's "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic" should join your summer reading list.

Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He joins the company of distinguished scholars, notably Richard J. Evans and Ian Kershaw, who have shed light on the social and political forces that brought a murderous regime to life through a democratic system.

But if this is an oft-told tragic tale, Hett's brisk and lucid study offers compelling new perspectives inspired by current threats to free societies around the world.

"In each era, we see the past differently, according to how we see ourselves and our own experiences," Hett writes. "One era will notice things about the past that another will not. This is one reason why history is, and has to be, constantly rewritten."

It is both eerie and enlightening how much of Hett's account rings true in our time. Consider this declaration from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist: "Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall." There is this dolorous observation from the socialist Ernst Toller: "The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done for us in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us."

As Hett notes, "The key to understanding why many Germans supported [Hitler] lies in the Nazis' rejection of a rational, factual world. ... Hitler could give voice to this flight from reality as could no other German politician of his time."

The larger story he tells resonates, too. Hett argues that the Nazi movement was "a response to an overwhelming triumph of global liberal capitalism at the end of the Great War" and that the logic of a chaotic moment "pushed opponents of austerity to become opponents of liberal democracy as well." The Nazi movement was rooted in anti-Semitism, bigotry and exclusion. But it also exploited economic discontent bred by orthodox economic policies that deepened the pain of the Depression.

And conservatives everywhere should ponder the choices made by the German establishment, including big business, the military, culturally traditional Protestants and big land owners. They all helped bring Hitler to power because they hated the left including the moderate Social Democrats, the backbone of the Weimar Republic more than they loved republican government and political freedom.

Hett writes that members of "the conservative establishment ... could have stopped Hitler in his tracks. Instead, they chose to use him, although the Nazi-conservative alliance was always an awkward one." He notes at another point: "Democracy was not working for them precisely because their interests could not attract the support of a majority, even a large plurality, of voters."

The politicians and power brokers who helped Hitler become chancellor believed they could deploy him to destroy the left but also keep him under control. They achieved the first but not the second. The consequences were catastrophic, to those slaughtered in Hitler’s genocide and to Germany as a whole. German conservatives had no desire to see their country pulverized by war and shrunken in size afterward. But their choices in the 1930s brought about exactly this outcome.

There is a reluctance to draw lessons from the Nazi experience because personal comparisons between contemporary politicians and Hitler are always a mistake. Hitler's crimes are in a category of horror all their own.

But this should not stop us from heeding the warnings of a political era that led to the collapse of freedom in Germany. Seeing it "as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality ... strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers."

Hett adds: "Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar."

It does, and our task is to prevent this "whole thing" from ever happening again.

E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is a government professor at Georgetown University, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio and MSNBC. He is most recently a co-author of “One Nation After Trump.” E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Tuscaloosa, Ala. • Alabama coach Nick Saban responded Wednesday to quarterback Jalen Hurts, saying the QB’s recent comments about his treatment by the staff aren’t an issue for the team and won’t have any bearing on the competition for the starting job.

Hurts expressed some disappointment Saturday in the coaches’ communication with him about the quarterback battle between he and Tua Tagovailoa.

Hurts said the staff never “asked how I felt.”

He hadn’t previously been allowed to speak to reporters since the night of the title game and said now “the narrative has already been created.” The comments made national headlines, but Saban downplayed the impact on the Crimson Tide team.

“Every player has a right to express what he feels and what he thinks, and I think he has every right to do that with every coach or anybody in the organization who he has relationships with, which we certainly do quite often with all players at all positions,” Saban said after Wednesday’s practice.

“Look, this is probably a lot more important to people outside this organization than it is to people inside. I don’t think it has any effect on our team. I’ve talked to a lot of our team leaders. The players are focused on what they need to do.”

Hurts is 26-2 as a starter but then-freshman Tagovailoa replaced him in last year’s national championship game and led a second-half rally against Georgia.

Now, Tagovailoa is regarded as the front-runner for the job. Regardless, Saban said Hurts’ comments won’t decide who emerges as the starter.

“The rhetoric will not have anything to do with who’s the quarterback,” the coach said. “That will obviously be decided on the field by how people execute, how they do their job. The same parameters that we’ve talked about before in terms of who wins the team. And winning the team goes along with execution, leadership, players having confidence and belief.

“And that’s not going to change. I don’t really have any more to say about it than that. I don’t think it is anything that has affected our team one way or the other.”

Members of a state committee that voted on Wednesday to make an offer to buy the 1,100-bed emergency homeless shelter downtown might get a surprise when they find out what the building is worth.

“We’re really hoping the appraisal comes in under $4 million,” said Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox.

That’s the amount the State Homeless Coordinating Committee agreed to offer to the nonprofit owner of The Road Home. And it probably would have been enough, if only the offer was made two months ago.

But under this year’s recently released county property assessment, the value of The Road Home skyrocketed, more than doubling its assessed valuation overnight. The building and land it sits on is now assessed at nearly $7.7 million, up from about $3.2 million in 2017.

Shelter the Homeless, the nonprofit group that owns The Road Home, is having the building appraised to see what it can get for it. It plans to sell the building and use the money to continue building three smaller shelters – two in Salt Lake City and one in South Salt Lake – that will open July 1, 2019, when The Road Home will close.

If the appraisal comes in above $4 million, the chances of a state purchase become less likely.

“If the appraisal comes back significantly more than that, we don’t have the funding right now,” Cox said. “We would have to get legislative approval for that, so it becomes less likely that that transition would take place.”

It’s possible for the building to appraise for less than the assessed value, though deputy county assessor Chris Stavros said his office is required to reflect a building’s fair-market value when the office determines a property’s worth for tax-collection. Generally, assessed valuations are lower than market price.

The assessor’s office took a closer look at the building this year, as it does every five years with buildings throughout the county. Stavros said during this year’s review, assessors compared The Road Home to other buildings in town and found its price-per-square-foot value was below other similar buildings.

“We had the market data to support bringing it in line” with other properties, he said.

The office more than tripled the assessed value of the The Road Home’s building, from $2.1 million in 2017 to $6.5 million. That happened after the building’s value dropped slightly from 2016 to 2017. The assessed value of the land, 1.17 acres of prime real estate in a growing downtown neighborhood, ticked up from $1.1 million to $1.2 million.

Still, state officials who were behind the pitch for making an offer on the building said they were doing so with the idea of knocking the building down and starting over.

“This is probably a pretty good location with a demolition and a reconstruction of the new building,” said Jonathan Hardy, director of housing and community development for the state. “If [state agencies] don’t use it, it would be sold.”

If a sale went through, the state would possibly use the building for a facility that warehouses historic artifacts and art.

Any eventual purchase would require signoff from the Shelter the Homeless board of directors. At least one member of the nonprofit’s board said she isn’t interested in getting rid of the building at below fair market value.

Jean Hill, lobbyist with the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, who also sits on the Shelter the Homeless board, also said she had concerns about voting for anything that doesn’t help solve the problem of homelessness.

“I hope as a board we’ll be able to have a good discussion about what is the best deal for us,” Hill said. “Not only in terms of the monetary value but also in terms of what will happen to the property. I was unaware that the [assessed] value had gone up that much.”

One idea that came to mind, she said, was some sort of low-income housing on the site. The state has a vast shortage of low-income housing.

“I’d prefer to see that property used to help solve homelessness problems,” she said, rather “than simply becoming another state building.”

St. Louis • A walk from the driving range to the 10th tee at Bellerive took longer than usual for Justin Thomas.

One marshal wanted an autograph. Another wanted a selfie.

He made it under the tunnel to find two more people stopping him for pictures. Thomas eventually made it up the stairs, onto the putting green and up a slight hill to the tee box with thousands of fans crammed on both sides and every seat in the grandstands occupied. That’s where some degree of normalcy returned.

He was playing with Tiger Woods.

This was only Wednesday afternoon, and it’s certain to be far more boisterous for the start of the 100th PGA Championship when Thomas tries to become only the second player in 60 years of stroke play to successfully defend his title.

The other was Woods, who has done it twice.

“Being the deepest field in golf and a great golf course and a lot of players trying to knock off that major here at the end of the year that haven’t gotten one yet this year ... any tournament is a tough one to win, but this one especially is,” Thomas said.

Thomas is coming off his first World Golf Championship title last week at Firestone and is among the favorites at Bellerive, which was starting to dry out from downpours earlier in the week.

A year ago, Thomas was one of those guys who had yet to win a major, and he wasn’t getting much attention because it had been seven months since his last victory. Any mention of Thomas included that he was “Jordan Spieth’s buddy.”

Thomas hasn’t heard that in a while.

He won the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow (Spieth was among those who hung around to share in the moment) added a FedEx Cup playoff event (Spieth was the runner-up), captured the FedEx Cup and the $10 million bonus and swept all the big awards, just like Spieth had done two years earlier. Dating to last year at the PGA, Thomas has won five times. Spieth has gone more than a year without winning.

Thomas has come into his own.

“My last couple of wins, or maybe last year probably is when ... I started to get out of that shadow,” Thomas said.

This is a deep friendship that transcends any rivalry, and Thomas was never overly bothered by the mention of being Spieth’s close friend. He understood that Spieth, who turned pro a year earlier and effectively had a two-year start on him, has more majors, has won more tournaments, reached No. 1 first and stayed there longer.

“I’ve always been my own guy,” Thomas said, “but I was perceived by the media as his buddy. Which is fine.”

There remains another shadow that was even stronger at Bellerive, and Thomas fully expects that.

Playing with Woods — along with Brooks Koepka, J.B. Holmes and what felt like half the state of Missouri — made it a true practice round. Thomas plays the opening two days with Woods and Rory McIlroy.

Woods might be bigger now than when he was winning, perhaps because fans had every right to wonder if they would ever see him again, or see him when he was capable of posting low scores. Coming off a fourth back surgery, Woods has made it through eight months without any health issues — though he did have an ice bath after a long week in the heat at Firestone — and has shown flashes.

The most recent was at the British Open, when he had the lead in the final round for two holes in the final round until fading to a tie for sixth. All that did was ratchet up the hysteria that perhaps another major is in the cards. This is his first PGA Championship since 2015, which was the first one Thomas played.

“It will be pretty crazy out there,” Thomas said. “There’s going to be a lot of people, I know that. ... So yeah, it will be a cool week. It will be cool for him to be back, and he obviously has a lot of great success in this tournament, as he does most of the ones he’s played in.”

The players with Woods on Wednesday — and for the next two days — were telling.

Koepka has won the last two U.S. Opens. Thomas is the PGA champion and No. 2 player in the world. McIlroy began his run of four majors in a four-year stretch about the time Woods began dealing with injuries.

And there are plenty more like them, from Dustin Johnson growing impatient about not winning a major in two years to Spieth getting another crack at the career Grand Slam, to Rickie Fowler trying to shed the label as among the best without a major.

“It’s the last opportunity to win one,” Justin Rose said. “A good year becomes a phenomenal year with a major championship. It’s what I build my year around. So absolutely, you’re very keenly aware that this is the last opportunity. ... If you find yourself in contention down the stretch, you’ll be fully aware of what this means.”

For Thomas, a place in the record book with Woods. For Spieth, a place among the most elite group in golf. For Woods, the defining moment of a comeback.

Atlanta • Talk about a tough day.

The Las Vegas Aces lost two games — one on the court, another for refusing to take the court.

The WNBA ruled the Aces must forfeit last weekend’s contest against Washington, which was called off when the Las Vegas players decided not to play because of concerns about their health and safety after 26 hours of travel .

A few hours after the league office handed down its decision, the fired-up Aces faced the second-place Atlanta Dream on Tuesday night. Las Vegas started strong and led much of the way before fading down the stretch, losing 109-100 for a double-setback that largely snuffed out any hopes of making the playoffs.

Just like that, the Aces record went from 12-15 to 12-17, leaving the team 2 1/2 games behind Dallas for the final playoff spot with only five games left in the regular season.

“We still have a chance,” said A’ja Wilson, the Aces’ rookie star. “We just have to do us and continue to lock for 40 minutes every game. No slip-ups.”

No one expressed regret about taking a stand in Washington last Friday after flight delays and cancellations turned what should have been a 4 1/2-hour flight across the country into a grueling, frustrating ordeal that took a detour through Texas and wound up lasting more than a day — more in line with a trip to the other side of the world, sparking a national debate over the sacrifices female athletes must endure in a financially challenged league of their own.

“We made that decision as a team,” Aces guard Kayla McBride said, standing outside the locker room at McCamish Pavilion after losing to the Dream. “We stand by our decision.”

Atlanta coach Nicki Collen was expecting the Aces to play with a lot of energy on the heels of the WNBA’s ruling.

“I knew they had added incentive,” she said. “I knew they would come out at 100 mph.”

Indeed, Las Vegas raced to a 9-2 lead in the opening minutes, forcing Collen to call a quick timeout. The Dream stymied the momentum, setting up a back-and-forth game the Aces led with less than six minutes remaining.

But even after Atlanta lost star Angel McCoughtry to a knee injury, Las Vegas couldn’t hang on. The Dream closed the game on a 16-6 spurt, wrapping up their spot in the postseason — most likely as the No. 2 seed behind Seattle .

There have been only a handful of instances over the past few decades in which major-league teams had to forfeit a game.

Most of those occurred because of fan involvement, notably the Chicago White Sox’s infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979 when the field was so damaged the second game of a doubleheader could not be played.

The WNBA said it “worked extensively” with both teams to find a “workable solution,” but there wasn’t enough time left in the season to find a date in which the arena was available and would be fair to both teams.

The league noted that it delayed the start of the game by an hour to 8 p.m. — about four hours after the Aces finally arrived at their hotel — to give Las Vegas as much time as possible to get ready for tipoff.

It was the first forfeit in the league’s 21-year history.

“While not ideal, it was the best available solution to accommodate both our fans and the scheduling challenges,” WNBA President Lisa Borders said in a statement. “Since the Aces chose not to play, the result is a forfeit.”

Travel delays are nothing new for WNBA teams, which aren’t allowed to fly charter because of the cost and the competitive advantage it could give some teams willing to spend the money.

The Aces were criticized by some — including Washington coach Mike Thibault — for not playing even though they were able to make it to the nation’s capital with a few hours to spare. Others sympathized with their plight, pointing out how male big-league athletes get to travel on spacious charters without all the hassles of commercial flights.

“I kind of feel for everyone,” Collen said. “I don’t know what they endured. But ... I don’t think there’s any doubt that they had to know (a forfeit) was a possible consequence of being in Washington and choosing not to show up.”

There could be a silver lining to missing the playoffs.

Under the WNBA’s lottery system, the Las Vegas franchise would have a shot at landing one of the top picks in the draft for a third year in a row. The first-year team, which moved from San Antonio before the season, got Wilson with the top selection in the 2018 draft. The 6-foot-4 forward is averaging more than 20 points a game, quickly becoming the face of the franchise and a huge cornerstone to build around in future drafts. In 2017, San Antonio drafted Kelsey Plum with the No. 1 pick.

If nothing else, the forfeit could lead to improvements in the way WNBA players get from one city to another. Their union hopes the league will take up its offer to form a group that will develop scheduling and travel guidelines.

Aces coach Bill Laimbeer just wants to move on.

“What happened in the Washington game is past history,” he said. “We’re focused on each game we’re playing right now, trying as hard as we can to win games.”

A fast-moving wildfire in southeastern Utah County grew to more than 6,600 acres by Wednesday night, tripling in size from the morning's estimate and prompting the handful of residents in the largely remote and rural area to evacuate.

“It's making some rather extreme pushes right now,” said fire information officer Leann Fox.

The Coal Hollow Fire, which lightning sparked Saturday, has quickly eaten through thick juniper trees and dry brush. Crews had no containment as the blaze inched closer to homes four days later, threatening at least five structures.

Utah County sheriff’s Sgt. Spencer Cannon said evacuations were ordered west of Scofield Reservoir and in the Soldier Summit area along U.S. Highway 6. There are maybe a dozen cabins in that area, he said.

“Search and Rescue is assisting with notifying campers and the few residents in these areas,” Cannon tweeted late Wednesday.

The fire sent up a mushroom cloud of smoke that was visible from more than 30 miles away in Provo and Alpine. The smoke settled in the valley, too, making it hard to see by nightfall. Officials cautioned drivers to use their headlights.

A hundred firefighters battled the blaze that ballooned in the Manti-La Sal National Forest with heavy winds. It was at 1,100 acres Monday.

“The area is extremely dry,” Fox said. “It's perfect fire conditions.”

Meanwhile, the neighboring Hilltop Fire in central Utah’s Sanpete County, which began Monday afternoon, saw minimal growth Wednesday. It had burned about 1,800 acres southeast of Indianola and was 12 percent contained.

About 40 percent of residents were evacuated from the town and nearby estates after the blaze claimed at least two structures; firefighters were trying to save nearly 200 more still standing in its path.

Earlier Wednesday, the major candidates in Utah’s U.S. Senate race disagreed about what is to blame for the recent rash of wildfires. Jenny Wilson, a Democratic Salt Lake City Councilwoman, cited climate change while Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate and former presidential nominee, cited what he called government failure.

Glendale, Ariz. • Barring unforeseen circumstances, rookie Josh Rosen will begin his first NFL season on the sidelines as Arizona’s backup quarterback.

The preseason, though, will be his chance to shine, beginning Saturday night when the Cardinals play at home against the Los Angeles Chargers.

“We want him to play quite a bit and really get into the flow of the game,” coach Steve Wilks said.

Rosen said his two weeks of training camp have “gone really well.”

“I think I’ve gotten better pretty much every day since I’ve gotten here,” the former UCLA star said before Wednesday’ practice.

Sam Bradford is Arizona’s starter but the Cardinals view Rosen as their franchise quarterback of the future. Why else would they have moved up five spots in the draft to pluck him 10th overall?

Asked for specific areas of improvement since he became a pro, Rosen cites “a bunch of things.”

“The most tangible is probably the playbook,” he said. “I feel a lot more comfortable and fluid with it at the line of scrimmage. I’m focusing more and more with what the defense is trying to do to me rather than making sure I get the right snap count and in the right protection.”

He said he’s also picking up “the little things on how to use the double-cadence to try and buy yourself time and get someone offside, just little tricks of the trade I didn’t know when I was in college.”

From the beginning Bradford and Rosen seem to have gotten along well.

“Sam’s actually really good with all those little things,” Rosen said. “He’s a crafty vet and very successful for a lot of different reasons. He might not share every reason with me, but I’ll take advantage of the ones that he does.”

Bradford said Rosen “asks the right questions.”

“He’s hungry for information,” Bradford said. “It seems like he’s always trying to learn something. It doesn’t stop in the meeting rooms. Even at the dinner table he’ll ask me.

“It’s fun to be around someone like that and to hopefully try to be able to help him. I share with him some of the experiences I’ve had, some of the things I’ve learned over the years. Hopefully it can relate to him and can help him in some way.”

Wilks wouldn’t say how much Rosen will play on Saturday night but it will be long enough to do some serious evaluation.

“The mechanics of really running the offense,” Wilks said, “putting guys in the right position from a protection standpoint, going through his progression and reads and really just trying to detail the fundamentals.”

Rosen is running second on the depth chart, ahead of Mike Glennon, who also figures to play a lot Saturday.

Early in camp, Rosen said he was thinking too much.

“I think I’ve gotten a lot better since then and continue to each day,” he said. “The less thinking you can do, the more you can allow yourself to physically do what I’ve been doing since Pop Warner, and play the game I know.”

As a big-name rookie quarterback, Rosen knows his every move will be scrutinized by fans and critics.

“It’s part of the game,” he said. “I stay relatively offline for the most part. The most pressure I feel from anyone is myself. I’m very, very highly self-critical, almost too much at times. There’s no pressure that should be greater than my own.”

There’s no changing his throwing style either, which includes an occasional sidearm toss on a bubble screen.

“It’s not just how hard or far you can throw it,” Rosen said. “It’s being able to change your arm slot and delivery. I think Aaron (Rodgers) is the best at it because sort of like mid-throw, your ability to throw sidearm to fit a quick screen in there or just kind of contort your body to get halfback screens and stuff in there.”

No one has tried to alter that style, he said.

“They drafted me for what I can do and I’m here to deliver that,” Rosen said.

He said he’s made preparation for the NFL a day-by-day process.

“Right now I’m fully in work mode,” he said. “I’m trying to be the best that I can be and over the course of my career I’m trying to win Super Bowls. And right now I’m trying to put my best foot forward in this preseason game.”

Need a winning goal? Find Katie Stengel.

In a match many around the squad called a “must-win,” Stengel stepped to the forefront in the final 20 minutes to score a winner, keeping the Utah Royals in the NWSL playoff hunt with a 1-0 win over the Washington Spirit at Rio Tinto Stadium on Wednesday night. It was her second winning goal in four days, having found the net against the Houston Dash in the 83rd minute on Sunday.

“I’m surrounded by players who have this mentality that we have to win every game,” Stengel said. “We have to give it everything we have, and people are stepping up in the biggest ways.”

Stengel came to the rescue of a Utah side that was having trouble finding the net. Utah outshot Washington 18-3 overall, with eight Royals shots on goal.

“We’ve won, but we’re frustrated because we could have won it by a lot more,” Royals coach Laura Harvey said.

But the lack of goals couldn’t be chalked up to a lack of effort from Harvey, who played her attacking cards in the starting lineup. Stengel, traditionally a striker, played on the wing, giving Amy Rodriguez room to attack centrally. Midseason acquisition Christen Press started in central midfield, while Erika Tymrak was in the starting lineup opposite Stengel. It was nearly all of the Royals’ attacking options in one unit.

“They’ve been playing a back three recently. We sort of gambled that they would do it again, and they did,” said Harvey of Washington. “The gamble was that we might leave ourselves a bit exposed at the back, but I felt we dealt with that okay.”

It was substitutes Taylor Lytle and Diana Matheson who ended up finding Stengel on the goal. On her first assist of the season, and in only her sixth match, Lytle played a ball to Matheson, who was aware of Stengel behind her and dummied the ball through her legs to allow Stengel to twist and fire in the right-footed shot.

Stengel leads the Royals on the season with five goals, three more than anyone else.

The win was crucial to the Royals’ playoff chances. The Royals are tied for fifth in the NWSL with Chicago and are one point out of the fourth and final playoff spot, currently held by the Portland Thorns. The Royals have played one more match than Portland, and two more than Chicago. The Royals would also lose head-to-head tiebreakers with either squad.

The Royals’ remaining schedule, though, is considerably more favorable. The Royals have two matches left against Washington and Sky Blue FC, teams that have a combined 2-27-8 record. The Royals play again on Saturday at 1:30 p.m. against Seattle.

Before spending a couple of billion dollars on a pipeline or grabbing water from aquifers anywhere else in the state of Utah, there should be a requirement that the water authority agencies for St. George and all of Utah first develop a “toilet to tap” water reclamation system.

There is such a system in San Diego, Bill Gates funded a small prototype in the Seattle area and such a system has been in use in Africa for decades. Given the enormous projected growth of the population in Utah and given the belief that the current droughts are becoming the new normal, such investments should be undertaken everywhere.

It is also good to remember that the Colorado River is overcommitted and not a viable “new” source of water, especially as snowpack and rainfall may continue to decline.

Connie Ball, Kanab

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I am disgusted and heartbroken like Ruth Stevens (Aug. 1) by the picture on the front page of the Utah section of Cameron Hooyer, seconds before he was killed by a train. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you put the video online. I’m only a family friend and I cannot bear to watch it. Can you imagine how it affects the people who loved Cameron, a young man with a bright future? How could you devastate his family again?

Who makes those decisions at the Tribune? They need to learn compassion, as Ruth says. I’ve always loved the Tribune, but not anymore.

Elizabeth Perkins, Cottonwood Heights

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“As the poem goes, you know,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, “first they came for Alex Jones ...”

That is, of course, not how the poem goes. In an irony to end all ironies, Cruz was using the oft-invoked verse about the Holocaust to defend an anti-Semitic conspiracy-monger. But the senator's words do throw into relief the reasoning of those distressed that Facebook and many other platforms removed Infowars from their sites beginning late Sunday: These critics worry about a slippery slope of censorship. And the way tech companies have gone about booting peddlers of disinformation from their sites does little to assuage those misgivings.

Infowars hasn't changed much since it first started warping the Web nearly two decades ago, and it has changed even less in the past month. What has changed since Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's mealy-mouthed rationalizations for keeping Jones on his site just weeks ago is the amount of pressure the media and politicians have put on tech companies to clean up after themselves.

That pressure was enough to prompt Apple to remove almost all Infowars podcasts from its platforms, and Apple's decision was enough to prompt Facebook to do the same. Facebook's decision was enough to prompt YouTube, and somewhere along the way Spotify and Stitcher signed on to the mass exorcism. And then there was one: Twitter, so far, looks unlikely to reverse course. Infowars' native appsat iOS and Android app stores are also still available for download.

Apparently, all it takes for most of today's guardians of the digital galaxy to drive an offending outlet toward obscurity is for one of them to make the first move. That illustrates the immense influence a single action by a single company can have on the online landscape. But it also demonstrates the reluctance of each company to take those actions without cover.

Cover, after all, has been the general theme of the Infowars imbroglio. Amid the applause these sites are receiving for finally drawing a line on false content, their executives are actually refusing to admit they’re drawing a line on false content at all. Instead, they’re relying on pre-existing rules around hate speech, harassment and violence to de-Jonesify their platforms.

“Apple does not tolerate hate speech,”said Apple. “When users violate ... our policies against hate speech and harassment ... we terminate their accounts,” said YouTube. Infowars was “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language” against minorities, said Facebook.

Those rules are important, and they're under-enforced. But policing hate speech is only part of the problem for these tech platforms. The broader problem is policing truth and its ugly converse: disinformation.

In the case of Infowars, only Twitter, the lone holdout among the tech titans, has uttered the word out loud: “truth,” if only to disclaim any duty for umpiring it. Twitter executives claim that is not their role. Its competitors evidently disagree — the conversation about Infowars has always been focused on how Jones makes it his mission to fill the Internet with falsehoods — but they aren’t ready to say so. Facebook, the most explicit about refusing to be explicit, insisted in its statement announcing the purge that “while much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news ... none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this.”

Whether this is even politically intelligent is unclear. Setting a clearer standard on disinformation would invite a torrent of criticism, but now that these companies have removed Infowars, they are due for a reckoning someday. They might as well dislodge themselves from their collective crouch and start running offense.

It would mean recognizing the enormous amount of control they have over the online ecosystem, as well as detailing how they plan to exercise that influence. It means determining a robust framework for removing disinformation (beyond what comes from Russian trolls), and articulating what that framework looks like. It probably also means staffing up to make sure that plan operates well in practice, and perhaps even creating appeals processes for those dissatisfied with the companies' decisions.

So far, there has been a lot of power at play here, and a lot less responsibility. Accepting more of the latter is the only way Facebook and its cohort can defend what they’re doing with any coherence. It’s also the only way they can lay down salt on the slippery slope that has critics so concerned.

Molly Roberts is an editor, writer and producer for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.

In March, I wrote the following about House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc.:

"Of course a GOP legislative leader would be expected to work closely with a GOP president. The degree to which Ryan has prostrated himself to the cause of ... what, exactly? A unified GOP caucus? A president who articulates positions on immigration, trade, foreign policy, that are at variance with Ryan? A president whose rhetoric debased the national discourse on a daily basis?

"Why, exactly, is Paul D. Ryan being so quiet? What does he hope to accomplish at this point? I don't know. I would love to hear from someone who does."

Lo and behold, we get to hear from someone who knows: Paul Ryan himself. The New York Times' Marc Leibovich profiled Ryan for the magazine; the question was clearly on Leibovich’s agenda. And Ryan had clearly prepared an answer:

"Ryan made a determination after Trump's election that to defy the president too forcefully would invite a counterreaction. He tends to speak of the commander in chief as if he were sharing a coping strategy on dealing with a Ritalin-deprived child. 'It boomerangs,' Ryan says of being too critical of Trump. 'He goes in the other direction, so that's not effective.' He added, 'The pissing match doesn't work.'

"Ryan prefers to tell Trump how he feels in private. He joins a large group of Trump's putative allies, many of whom have worked in the administration, who insist that they have shaped Trump's thinking and behavior in private: the 'Trust me, I've stopped this from being much worse' approach. "I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy," Ryan tells me. "I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal."

"I locked in on the word 'tragedy.' It sets the mind reeling to whatever thwarted 'tragedies' Ryan might be talking about. I asked for an example. "No, I don't want to do that," Ryan replied. "That's more than I usually say.' "

What to make of Ryan's claims? On the one hand, it's the perfect dodge. Unless he provides more detail, the reader simply has to take it on faith that Ryan is telling the truth. It's a completely unverifiable claim, which makes it a perfect claim for a politician to make.

On the other hand, there is a ring of truth to what Ryan says. Consider what Axios's Mike Allen wrote in August 2017 during the depths of the Charlottesville fiasco, about why White House staffers were not resigning:

" 'You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill': The most common response centers on the urgent importance of having smart, sane people around Trump to fight his worst impulses. If they weren't there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall."

A lot of that crew left in the next six months, and hey, a lot of those worst-case scenarios have come to fruition. And this is not the first administration in which I have heard this line of thinking. Veterans of the first term of the George W. Bush administration have also told me that their finest moment of public service was shooting down a crazy, dangerous idea that was gaining momentum. Heck, I played a part in this during my stint at Treasury during the first six months of Bush 43. It's a thankless but necessary task to prevent someone in power from doing something really stupid. If Ryan actually did that, props to him.

On the third hand, however, this dog won't hunt. Ryan is not a White House staffer or a bureaucrat, he's the goddamn speaker of the House, a co-equal branch of government, last time I checked the Constitution. If Ryan had said no on a few things, it was not as if Trump could have fired him or forced him out. Sure, Ryan might have faced a more contentious House GOP caucus. It seems clear, however, that no one else who really wanted to be House speaker would have had the juice to oust Ryan. The very fact that Ryan talks as if he is Trump's subordinate suggests the degree of supplication he has accepted in the Age of Trump.

There are plenty of areas where Ryan could have said no — on tariffs, on Russia policy, on protecting the special counsel’s investigation, on whether the press is the enemy of the American people — without rupturing his relationship with Trump. He could have stuck his neck out a bit more in the name of decency. Maybe he did stop some of Trump’s truly crackpot ideas from ever seeing the light of day.

What we have seen from Trump, however, is an awful lot that should appall Ryan. Instead, he chose a different path. He went along with all of Trump's illiberal rhetoric for a budget-busting, growth-enervating tax cut. History will judge that choice harshly.

I hope Ryan enjoys the extra pieces of silver he earned for making Trump's political life more tolerable. The rest of the country will have to borrow that sum many times over just to pay the bills.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

As the Brexit shambles rolls on, I've been puzzled by the hostility of Brexiteers to the proposal that Theresa May is trying to sell at home and to the European Union. A weird domestic alliance of hardline Leavers and zealous Remainers could block May's plans, regardless of how the EU responds — and the result might well be a no-deal Brexit.

Dedicated Leavers might ask, "And what would be wrong with that?" The answer, as they ought to see it, is simple. A with-deal Brexit would be harder to reverse than a no-deal Brexit. Helping May move forward with what most Leavers regard as a squalid compromise — an application for "vassalage," no less — would advance their cause by increasing the probability of a Brexit that sticks.

Wolfgang Munchau recently argued the opposite in the Financial Times. He says there's no plausible way to get from a no-deal Brexit to cancelling Brexit altogether, as Remainers might hope, and thus sees their flirting with this outcome as short-sighted. I think that's wrong. No question, a no-deal Brexit is a risky venture for Remainers, for the reasons Munchau explains, and getting from no deal to cancelling Brexit altogether wouldn't be straightforward. But the path from a with-deal Brexit to getting Brexit reversed would be far more demanding. A no-deal Brexit is a bigger risk for Leavers than for Remainers.

Bear one crucial point in mind. May's plan, or something like it, would be attached to the withdrawal agreement (and to the bill that would make it law in the U.K.) as little more than a statement of intentions regarding post-Brexit talks on future trade relations. It would settle nothing. Even if the EU doesn't reject it first, Leavers would be free in due course to oppose parts of the scheme they don't like — notably the idea of keeping the U.K. in the single EU market for goods, which requires a common rulebook that Britain will have no part in amending. Meanwhile, the U.K. would have left the EU, and in a relatively smooth way.

A smooth exit, leaving the U.K. in the single market for a limited transitional period, won't incline Leave supporters to change their minds. Opinion might even move the other way — when the ceiling, to some Remainers' astonishment, doesn't actually fall in. And rejoining the EU once Britain has left would involve a burdensome and (in the circumstances) humiliating accession process that would likely strip the U.K. of privileges it currently enjoys. All in all, an orderly departure would serve to entrench Brexit pretty well.

Remainers, on the other hand, still have a fighting chance of getting Brexit reversed if the project continues to descend into chaos. Remainers are right that a no-deal Brexit will be highly disruptive — and the closer it gets, the clearer this will become. The plans that the government says it's making to turn miles-long stretches of motorway into improvised lorry parks, not to mention for stockpiling of foods and medicines, are apt to make people wonder if leaving the EU is such a good idea.

Defeating May on her plan would also push British politics even deeper into turmoil. Given her serial blunders and reversals, May's capacity to hang on to leadership of her party (if you can call it leadership) has been impressive. But there must be limits, and defeating her withdrawal plan in parliament would surely finish her as prime minister. New elections could follow, and amid this worsening mayhem and governmental paralysis, the idea of a second referendum could gain ground.

True, the EU would have to indicate a willingness to let Britain change its mind. That can’t be taken for granted. (Europe has leadership problems of its own.) But this doesn’t change the bottom line. Remainers need to persuade people that Brexit will hurt — so the more it hurts, and the sooner it hurts, the better for their purposes.

If hardline Leavers could see where their interests lie, they'd back May's plan, get Brexit done, then press for the kind of post-Brexit arrangements they want. Their idiotic preoccupation with vassalage gives Remainers their last best chance to cancel the whole idea.

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and writes editorials on economics, finance and politics. He was chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times, a correspondent and editor for the Economist and a senior editor at the Atlantic.