VICE SIGNALLING:

[T]he Republican Party] has become thoroughly braided into Trump's bigotry. In a nation where the chant of "Trump! Trump! Trump!" has become a racist jeer, the GOP has accepted its rebranding as his subsidiary. To many suburban voters, the party has become a symbol of intolerance. To many younger voters, an instrument of white privilege. At the national level at least, the party's fate is inseparable from the fate of the president.

Most members of the conservative movement will be tainted for flipping their inspiration from Ronald Reagan to George Wallace with hardly a moment's thought. This gives credence to charges of racial prejudice that I once thought exaggerated.

We'll stipulate that the Catholic boys from a high school in Kentucky were a little obnoxious when an indigenous man named Nathan Phillips banged a drum at them in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday. But Phillips was being a lot more obnoxious. To put it another way, if you were minding your own business in a public place and someone came right up to you and put a drum up to your face and made a huge racket inches from your nose, would you be happy about it?

The kids from Covington Catholic High School in Covington, Ky., were ambassadors for causes much bigger than themselves: Catholicism and the right to life. As such, they should have comported themselves better than to jeer and do a tomahawk chop in front of Phillips.

"The world today is often inhabited by fear. It is an ancient disease", but "the call not to be afraid often recurs in the Bible," he said.

"Our time experiences great fear as it faces the vast dimensions of globalization and fear often turns against people who are foreign, different or poor as if they were enemies," he said. Francis noted that "the atmosphere of fear can infect also those Christians who hide the gift they have received, like the slave in the parable: they do not invest it in the future, they do not share it with others, they preserve it for themselves."

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