Protest is all we have left. That’s why people in their 60s and 70s who haven’t marched in decades will be out this weekend. Though slogans, songs and chants were always the rhythm of protests, maybe not this time. Nor will the usual bellowed speeches be necessary. The converted need no preachers. Just a record crowd in one place. And silence. A requiem for humanity.

None of it should be necessary. It should have ended in Myrtle Beach in South Carolina on November 24th, 2015, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump mocked a man’s congenital disability to a cheering crowd. Serge Kovaleski’s remarkable courage in the face of his disability and his Pulitzer-winning journalism threatened their ignorance. Trump gave them permission to shout it out loud.

That was the moment for all moral people in the US to unify and slam the brakes on his fledgling political career. Instead, it marked a different inflection point: the end of empathy.

The right said empathy was “woke”. Gloria Steinem called it the most radical of human emotions. We can argue about overreach, but one thing is plain: when the ability to imagine another’s struggle is jeered and trampled, every single living creature looks like a hammer or a nail. When vengeance, gold and self-deification are the objectives of the world’s most powerful man, nothing and no one is safe or sacred.

A seat in first class and a lesson in Englishness

Clamping vans to exit Dublin city after almost 30 years

Publican says he can’t........

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