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On This Week’s Episode:

The trial for the men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks hasn’t started yet. Family members of those who died are still hoping for some kind of accountability, more than 22 years later. On this week’s episode, the story of how one victim’s sister is navigating this historic and twisted case.

This is the finale — episode 9 — of “Serial” season 4, a history of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp told by people who lived through key moments in its evolution.

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The veteran character actor Dabney Coleman died Thursday at 92. Coleman began appearing in movies and TV series in the 1960s, when he was in his early 30s, and from the beginning, he had the look and the attitude of a grumpy middle-aged man.

For most of his career — except on those rare occasions when he got to play a lead role — Coleman’s job was to pop in for a scene or two to growl and grumble in a manner that was generally both humorous and more than a little scary. He reliably brought the kind of antagonistic energy familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with a bad boss or a disgruntled customer.

Much of Coleman’s best TV work — like the short-lived sitcoms “Buffalo Bill” and “The Slap Maxwell Story,” and the soap opera parody “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” — aren’t available to stream. And while he had roles in dozens of very good films and TV shows, he was often low in the billing. The seven Coleman performances below, though, are both outstanding and substantial, showcasing his imposing screen presence and ace comic timing.

‘9 to 5’ (1980)

After nearly 20 years in the business, Coleman’s career really took off in the 1980s, when producers started casting him in parts that let him hang around onscreen a little longer. He had his breakout performance in this hit comedy, which stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as secretaries who try to overcome corporate sexism by imprisoning their boss. Coleman plays that piggish executive, whose disrespect for women in general (and these three employees in particular) is so infuriating to watch that audiences couldn’t wait to see him get his comeuppance.

Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV or YouTube.

‘On Golden Pond’ (1981)

Coleman teamed again with Jane Fonda a year later for an Oscar-winning big-screen adaptation of Ernest Thompson’s play “On Golden Pond,” a passion project for the actress, who wanted to work with her aging father, Henry Fonda. Coleman only has a small part in the film, playing Bill, the fiancé of Jane Fonda’s character Chelsea, the estranged daughter of Henry Fonda’s prickly Norman. Coleman gets to hit some of his usual sour notes when Bill stands up to Norman’s passive-aggressive bullying, but he’s not the villain of the story this time. He’s a decent man who just won’t be pushed too far, a Coleman character shown in a somewhat more flattering light.

Stream it on Peacock or Tubi; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play or YouTube.

‘Tootsie’ (1982)

Like “9 to 5,” this is a zeitgeist-grabbing comedy about endemic sexism in an American cultural institution. But for once, Coleman’s character isn’t the biggest chauvinist in the room. He plays Ron, a soap opera director trying to get the best from his new star, Dorothy Michaels (Dustin Hoffman) — who is actually a struggling New York theater actor named Michael Dorsey posing as a woman and dealing with the handsiness of his blustery co-star John Van Horn (George Gaynes). Ron’s no-nonsense attitude and wry asides amount to only one piece of the film’s fast-paced, intricate comic rhythms. But it is an important piece, and Coleman is as much of a pro as the character he’s playing, hitting his beats with precision.

Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play or YouTube.

‘WarGames’ (1983)

Whenever Coleman wasn’t playing an out-and-out jerk (or a misunderstood jerk, as was the case with “Buffalo Bill” and “Slap Maxwell”), he often took on the role of a snappish authority figure. The richest of those performances came in this Cold War thriller. Coleman played Dr. John McKittrick, an engineer keeping an eye out for Soviet missile attacks at NORAD. When a curious teenage hacker (Matthew Broderick) accidentally triggers a simulated thermonuclear war that threatens to go global, McKittrick’s distrust of this kid runs the risk of making the situation worse. The surly Coleman perfectly embodies the kind of well-meaning bureaucracy that may not be able to adapt in time to stave off an apocalypse.

Stream it on Max; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play or YouTube.

‘Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star’ (1991)

Coleman first appeared in “Columbo” in the 1973 episode “Double Shock,” in which he played a Los Angeles detective who appears in just a few scenes. By 1991, though, he had become a big enough name to be one of the show’s guest villains: a shady attorney who murders his duplicitous girlfriend and frames her lover. Coleman’s character is one of those “Columbo” killers who gets easily irritated by the relentlessness of the rumpled lieutenant (Peter Falk), making it all the more entertaining as his clever alibi gets gradually peeled away.

Stream it on Peacock or Tubi.

‘The Guardian’ (2001-04)

Later in his career, Coleman landed a plum role in this CBS drama, playing a respected lawyer trying to reestablish a relationship with his wayward son, Nick (Simon Baker), a lawyer who has been sentenced to work with children as part of his community service for a drug offense. It is a complicated character, allowing Coleman to show a softer side while still having plenty of opportunities to bark orders and deliver withering wisecracks.

Stream it on Paramount+; buy it on Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV.

‘Boardwalk Empire’ (2010-11)

Coleman had another late-career highlight with this HBO period crime drama, which he guest starred on throughout its first two seasons. He played Commodore Louis Kaestner, an early 20th century Atlantic City politician and business mogul who remains a puppet-master well into the Prohibition era, even as his protégés battle each other for power. Coleman plays the character as a frail but formidable man who relies on the city’s collective memory of all that he built — and everyone he hurt — to maintain control. “Boardwalk Empire” viewers didn’t need to see the Commodore in his heyday in order to understand why so many of the show’s antiheroes were still scared of him. To the end, Coleman could command attention and make people nervous.

Stream it on Max; buy it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV or Google Play.

It is a lonely feeling to know that your country’s leaders do not want you. To be vilified because you are a Muslim in what is now a largely Hindu-first India.

It colors everything. Friends, dear for decades, change. Neighbors hold back from neighborly gestures — no longer joining in celebrations, or knocking to inquire in moments of pain.

“It is a lifeless life,” said Ziya Us Salam, a writer who lives on the outskirts of Delhi with his wife, Uzma Ausaf, and their four daughters.

When he was a film critic for one of India’s main newspapers, Mr. Salam, 53, used to fill his time with cinema, art, music. Workdays ended with riding on the back of an older friend’s motorcycle to a favorite food stall for long chats. His wife, a fellow journalist, wrote about life, food and fashion.

Now, Mr. Salam’s routine is reduced to office and home, his thoughts occupied by heavier concerns. The constant ethnic profiling because he is “visibly Muslim” — by the bank teller, by the parking lot attendant, by fellow passengers on the train — is wearying, he said. Family conversations are darker, with both parents focused on raising their daughters in a country that increasingly questions or even tries to erase the markers of Muslims’ identity — how they dress, what they eat, even their Indianness altogether.

One of them, an impressive student-athlete, struggled so much that she needed counseling and missed months of school. The family often debates whether to stay in their mixed Hindu-Muslim neighborhood in Noida, just outside Delhi. Mariam, their oldest daughter, who is a graduate student, leans toward compromise, anything to make life bearable. She wants to move.

Anywhere but a Muslim area might be difficult. Real estate agents often ask outright if families are Muslim; landlords are reluctant to rent to them.

“I have started taking it in stride,” Mariam said.

“I refuse to,” Mr. Salam shot back. He is old enough to remember when coexistence was largely the norm in an enormously diverse India, and he does not want to add to the country’s increasing segregation.

But he is also pragmatic. He wishes Mariam would move abroad, at least while the country is like this.

Mr. Salam clings to the hope that India is in a passing phase.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, is playing a long game.

His rise to national power in 2014, on a promise of rapid development, swept a decades-old Hindu nationalist movement from the margins of Indian politics firmly to the center. He has since chipped away at the secular framework and robust democracy that had long held India together despite its sometimes explosive religious and caste divisions.

Right-wing organizations began using the enormous power around Mr. Modi as a shield to try to reshape Indian society. Their members provoked sectarian clashes as the government looked away, with officials showing up later to raze Muslim homes and round up Muslim men. Emboldened vigilante groups lynched Muslims they accused of smuggling beef (cows are sacred to many Hindus). Top leaders in Mr. Modi’s party openly celebrated Hindus who committed crimes against Muslims.

On large sections of broadcast media, but particularly on social media, bigotry coursed unchecked. WhatsApp groups spread conspiracy theories about Muslim men luring Hindu women for religious conversion, or even about Muslims spitting in restaurant food. While Mr. Modi and his party officials reject claims of discrimination by pointing to welfare programs that cover Indians equally, Mr. Modi himself is now repeating anti-Muslim tropes in the election that ends early next month. He has targeted India’s 200 million Muslims more directly than ever, calling them “infiltrators” and insinuating that they have too many children.

This creeping Islamophobia is now the dominant theme of Mr. Salam’s writings. Cinema and music, life’s pleasures, feel smaller now. In one book, he chronicled the lynchings of Muslim men. In a recent follow-up, he described how India’s Muslims feel “orphaned” in their homeland.

“If I don’t pick up issues of import, and limit my energies to cinema and literature, then I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror,” he said. “What would I tell my kids tomorrow — when my grandchildren ask me what were you doing when there was an existential crisis?”

As a child, Mr. Salam lived on a mixed street of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in Delhi. When the afternoon sun would grow hot, the children would move their games under the trees in the yard of a Hindu temple. The priest would come with water for all.

“I was like any other kid for him,” Mr. Salam recalled.

Those memories are one reason Mr. Salam maintains a stubborn optimism that India can restore its secular fabric. Another is that Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism, while sweeping large parts of the country, has been resisted by several states in the country’s more prosperous south.

Family conversations among Muslims there are very different: about college degrees, job promotions, life plans — the usual aspirations.

In the state of Tamil Nadu, often-bickering political parties are united in protecting secularism and in focusing on economic well-being. Its chief minister, M.K. Stalin, is a declared atheist.

Jan Mohammed, who lives with his family of five in Chennai, the state capital, said neighbors joined in each other’s religious celebrations. In rural areas, there is a tradition: When one community finishes building a place of worship, villagers of other faiths arrive with gifts of fruits, vegetables and flowers and stay for a meal.

“More than accommodation, there is understanding,” Mr. Mohammed said.

His family is full of overachievers — the norm in their educated state. Mr. Mohammed, with a master’s degree, is in the construction business. His wife, Rukhsana, who has an economics degree, started an online clothing business after the children grew up. One daughter, Maimoona Bushra, has two master’s degrees and now teaches at a local college as she prepares for her wedding. The youngest, Hafsa Lubna, has a master’s in commerce and within two years went from an intern at a local company to a manager of 20.

Two of the daughters had planned to continue on to Ph.D’s. The only worry was that potential grooms would be intimidated.

“The proposals go down,” Ms. Rukhsana joked.

A thousand miles north, in Delhi, Mr. Salam’s family lives in what feels like another country. A place where prejudice has become so routine that even a friendship of 26 years can be sundered as a result.

Mr. Salam had nicknamed a former editor “human mountain” for his large stature. When they rode on the editor’s motorcycle after work in the Delhi winter, he shielded Mr. Salam from the wind.

They were together often; when his friend got his driver’s license, Mr. Salam was there with him.

“I would go to my prayer every day, and he would go to the temple every day,” Mr. Salam said. “And I used to respect him for that.”

A few years ago, things began to change. The WhatsApp messages came first.

The editor started forwarding to Mr. Salam some staples of anti-Muslim misinformation: for example, that Muslims will rule India in 20 years because their women give birth every year and their men are allowed four wives.

“Initially, I said, ‘Why do you want to get into all this?’ I thought he was just an old man who was getting all these and forwarding,” Mr. Salam said. “I give him the benefit of doubt.”

The breaking point came two years ago, when Yogi Adityanath, a Modi protégé, was re-elected as the leader of Uttar Pradesh, the populous state adjoining Delhi where the Salam family lives. Mr. Adityanath, more overtly belligerent than Mr. Modi toward Muslims, governs in the saffron robe of a Hindu monk, frequently greeting large crowds of Hindu pilgrims with flowers, while cracking down on public displays of Muslim faith.

On the day of the vote counting, the friend kept calling Mr. Salam, rejoicing at Mr. Adityanath’s lead. Just days earlier, the friend had been complaining about rising unemployment and his son’s struggle to find a job during Mr. Adityanath’s first term.

“I said, ‘You have been so happy since morning, what do you gain?’” he recalled asking the friend.

“Yogi ended namaz,” the friend responded, referring to Muslim prayer on Fridays that often spills into the streets.

“That was the day I said goodbye,” Mr. Salam said, “and he hasn’t come back into my life after that.”

He wrote dark, erotic verse and poems featuring torture and pain. He also self-published a book that railed against Roma people and asked why Slovakia had not produced a homegrown version of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist.

“Where is the Slovak Breivik? Has he not been born yet? And what if he has been?” he asked in the book. “I didn’t shoot anyone. I told myself — I’ll write a book.”

Then on Wednesday, the 71-year-old former coal mine worker, onetime stone mason and lifelong malcontent was charged with opening fire at point-blank range on Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia.

As soon as news broke that an unidentified man had shot Mr. Fico in central Slovakia, it was obvious to Milan Maruniak, a retired coal miner, who must be responsible.

“I was 99 percent sure it was him. It couldn’t be anybody else,” said Mr. Maruniak, a longtime colleague of the man who has been charged with “attempted premeditated murder” but still has not been named by the authorities.

Wednesday’s shooting, the worst attack on a European leader in decades, sent shock waves across Europe.

But the fact that the man who had lived in this provincial town was arrested came as no real surprise to some who knew him. “He was always so weird and angry,” Mr. Maruniak said. “It was only a matter of time before something happened.”

Slovakia’s prosecutor has placed an embargo on information relating to the case, and banned the police from disclosing the name of the man who has been charged. But the prosecutor’s office said “it would not be wrong” to identify the man as Juraj C., the name widely reported by the Slovakian news media. It is not clear if the suspect has a lawyer.

Officials say the shooter was a “lone wolf,” an unhinged individual acting only for himself — an account of the crime that fits the profile sketched by people who knew Juraj C.

On Friday, however, police officers visited the apartment block where he lived and took video footage from security cameras. Ondrej Szabo, the supervisor for the complex, said that investigators wanted to see if anybody had visited the man’s apartment in the days leading up to the attack. Mr. Szabo said the man never struck him as dangerous and often went for walks hand in hand with his wife. The couple have two children.

Video footage and photographs of the shooter released soon after the attack showed a bearded man whom Mr. Maruniak and other residents of the town, Levice, said they recognized as Juraj C., a local known for his cranky behavior and resentful attitude.

“I was not surprised it was him,” said Maria Cibulova, a member of Rainbow, an area literary club, to which Juraj C. also belonged.

She didn’t like his poetry much. “I’m a romantic and always looking for nice things,” she said, “but he was always writing about ugly, negative things.” When Juraj C. shared his work at bimonthly club meetings, she recalled, other members reacted with more alarm than admiration. “It was always so strange and negative,” Ms. Cibulova said of his work.

One poem, “The Hut,” featured the mountains of Slovakia recast as parts of the female anatomy, while “The Face” was dominated by descriptions of torture and pain. Both poems were included in a self-published book that was seen by The New York Times.

Politicians on both sides of a deep political divide in Slovakia that is split between supporters and foes of Mr. Fico have presented the shooter as a product of the opposing camp. But people who know him say he never sided clearly with either, but jumped on any cause that allowed him to express his anger.

Yet there is one cause, according to people who know him, that he has stuck with for decades: an abiding hostility toward Slovakia’s minority Roma population. Mr. Maruniak said that had been an obsession of Juraj C.’s since the 1970s, when they worked together at a coal mine. “Gypsies and Roma,” a book written and self-published by Juraj C. in 2015, included an openly racist poem about the minority: “On the body of civilization there is a tumor of criminality growing.”

On other matters, however, he regularly switched sides.

In 2016, for example, Juraj C. offered public support for Slovenski Branci, or Slovak Conscripts, a paramilitary group known for supporting Russia. In a statement of support, he said he admired the group’s “ability to act without approval from the state.”

Two years later, however, he began a bitter feud with another member of the literary club who had posted a message on Facebook expressing unease about torchlight parades in Ukraine by radical nationalists. He denounced his fellow writer, who had worked in Russia more than two decades before, as a Russian agent paid by the Kremlin to tarnish Ukraine.

Juraj C.’s pro-Ukrainian views became steadily stronger as he turned against Russia, his previous beacon, particularly after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “He suddenly became extremely anti-Russian,” said the club member, who asked that his name not be published because his family feared retribution.

In 2019, Juraj C. stopped attending meetings of the literary club and seemed strangely detached when he ran into people he had known for years on the street.

“He was off in his own world and reality,” Mr. Maruniak recalled.

A trail of often-contradictory statements and affiliations over the years has given Slovakia’s politicians a wealth of material with which to spin the accused man’s views. The fact that the literary club in Levice is called Rainbow has fueled claims that he is an L.G.B.T.Q. activist, a role that would explain his hostility to Mr. Fico, a champion of traditional family values.

But Ms. Cibulova, who was president of the literary club for several years, said the club had no affiliation with L.G.B.T.Q. causes.

The first person to identify a suspect was Danny Kollar, a Slovak who lives in London, from where he runs one of Slovakia’s most widely followed and vituperative social media outlets.

Mr. Kollar, who traffics in conspiracy theories, immediately linked the shooting to Progressive Slovakia, an opposition party, claiming that the shooter was a party supporter. The party’s leader dismissed that as a lie.

Ms. Cibulova said it was forbidden to discuss politics or religion at meetings of the literary club, so she had no clear idea of the man’s politics, other than that “he was against everything.”

“He had something inside him against the injustice that he felt had been done to him in life,” she said.

In a brief personal biography Juraj C. submitted to the writers’ group, he said he had been “identified as a rebel by state power” in the Communist era, and had been fired from his job as a technical worker at a coal mine in nearby Handlova, the town where Mr. Fico was shot on Wednesday.

According to his own account in the literary club’s journal, in 1989 he became the leader of Levice’s protest council, a branch of a nationwide anti-Communist organization led by Vaclav Havel, who later became the Czech president.

But that, Mr. Maruniak said, is not true. He said Jurjaj C. was kept at arm’s length by activists in the anti-Communist movement, who saw him as too radical and unreliable.

“Nobody really liked him,” Mr. Maruniak said. “He was never part of the team. He was never content with anything. He could never really be part of any group.”

In his 2015 book, Juraj C. gave what now reads like an account of his own personal evolution. It came in a section about a notorious Slovak murderer, Jan Harman, who killed eight people in a shooting spree in 2010.

“They declared him insane, but he wasn’t insane, he just couldn’t carry the burden anymore,” Juraj C. wrote. “He doesn’t have to curse anymore, he doesn’t have to hate anymore. He’s worn his own down to that unknown edge.”

Sara Cincurova and Marek Janiga contributed reporting from Bratislava, Slovakia.

Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president and regular forecaster of a third World War, had no hesitation in comparing the would-be assassin of Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia to the young man who ignited World War I. Europe, he suggested, was once more on the brink.

The individual who shot Mr. Fico, a nationalist leader who favors friendly relations with Russia, was “a certain topsy-turvy version of Gavrilo Princip,” Mr. Medvedev said on the social network X. Princip was the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, started what Churchill called “the hardest, the cruelest” of all wars.

It was on many levels a wild association to make. The Europe of empires that unraveled between 1914 and 1918 is long gone, as is the Europe that replaced it and produced Auschwitz. In their place the painstakingly constructed European Union of 27 members, including Slovakia, has been put in place with the overriding goal of making war impossible on a long-ravaged continent.

Yet, with elections to the European Parliament just three weeks way, ominous indications of brewing violence go well beyond the shooting of Mr. Fico, whose condition remains serious.

A 27-month-old war is raging in Ukraine, outside the E.U. but right on its doorstep. It is increasingly, as in World War I, a conflict involving soldiers reduced to “fodder locked in the same murderous morass, sharing the same attrition of bullet and barrage, disease and deprivation, torment and terror,” as Tim Butcher put it in his book “The Trigger,” an account of Princip’s life.

In significant respects, Russia is waging its war in Ukraine against Europe’s liberal democracies. The question the attempt on Mr. Fico’s life raises is how far Europeans are willing to go to wage war against themselves as extreme political polarization stalks their societies.

The motive behind the shooting remains unclear, but it took place in the context of a poisonous political environment that the assassination attempt will only make more poisonous, in Slovakia at least, but potentially beyond.

Europe is increasingly divided, and dangerously so. As in Slovakia, that divide pits nationalists opposed to immigration against liberals who see in the far right a threat to the rule of law, a free press and democracy itself. In this political world, there are no longer opponents, there are only enemies. All means are good to attack them, up to and, recent events indicate, including violence.

With so much political tinder about, a single spark may be explosive. The assassination attempt on Mr. Fico “demonstrates what such polarization can lead to, and this is something European societies, and the United States too, need to reflect on,” said Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist focused on Central Europe.

The war outside Europe, and the political battles within it, fuel each other. Russian advances on the battlefield, an apparent Ukrainian assault on Russian-occupied Crimea, and a possible NATO deployment of trainers to Ukraine are reminders that escalation is always possible. The shooting of Mr. Fico also demonstrated that.

Mr. Fico opposes the power of the European Union, military aid to Ukraine, mass immigration and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He is hated by liberals for these and other reasons. He is unpopular in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, but popular outside it. In this, his political fortunes conform with the fracture in societies including France, Germany and the Netherlands, where the core fight is now national vs. global.

It pits the forgotten living “nowhere” in industrial wastelands and rural areas who see immigrants as threats to their livelihoods against the prosperous connected global citizens living in the “somewhere” of the knowledge economy.

The Ukraine war sharpens these fissures because nationalists across Europe are aligned with President Vladimir V. Putin’s reactionary moral ideology. They join with him, and with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, in portraying Western liberal urban elites as agents bent on the destruction of church, nation, family and traditional notions of marriage and gender.

Mr. Medvedev called the would-be assassin in Slovakia, who has not been identified beyond being a 71-year-old pensioner, as representative of “the Europe of detestable degenerates with no knowledge of their own history” against which Mr. Fico fought.

His shooting seems to reflect the shrinking middle ground in Europe’s political clashes. “You might be psychologically, verbally or physically assaulted because of what you do or say,” said Karolina Wigura, a Polish historian of ideas. “In our societies, it has become unbearable to accept that somebody else sees or defines something in a completely different way.”

On Thursday, Donald Tusk, the liberal Polish prime minister who returned to power late last year after defeating the governing nationalist Law and Justice party, posted on X a threat from the previous day: “Today, Slovaks gave us an example of what to do with Donald Tusk if he dismisses the CPK.”

This was a reference to a major airport project favored by Law and Justice, but questioned by the new government.

When Mr. Tusk took office in December, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Law and Justice and Poland’s de facto leader since 2015, called him a “German agent.” Such charges, effectively of treason, have become commonplace across Europe. The air is full of “Jewish agents” and “Russian agents.” In the current campaign for the European Parliament election, Mr. Tusk and Mr. Kaczynski have been exchanging accusations of being “Russian spies.”

The Slovakian interior minister, Matus Sutaj Estok, warned this week that “we are on the doorstep of a civil war.”

Political violence has not been limited to Slovakia. In Germany this month, four people assaulted Matthias Ecke, a prominent Social Democratic politician who was hanging campaign posters in Dresden, leaving him with a broken cheekbone and eye socket that required emergency surgery. Mr. Ecke is running for re-election to the European Parliament.

Rapid technology-driven change, the proliferation of social media where any accusation goes, and the unraveling of any agreed notion of truth have all contributed to the succumbing of civility to brutality.

“There is a pervasive feeling of loss,” Ms. Wigura said. “The different becomes a threat.”

But the main factor in the slide toward violent confrontation has probably been the rapid rise in immigration — some 5.1 million immigrants entered the European Union in 2022, more than double the number the previous year — which has sharply divided opinion across the continent.

“The European Union is seen as unable to protect its own borders,” Mr. Rupnik said. “That has led to nations saying, OK, we have to do it ourselves.”

It has also led, in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Slovakia itself, to the rapid rise of xenophobic far-right parties offering jingoistic hymns to national glory. They often have roots in fascism, albeit without its militarism or personality cults, at least up to now. The barriers that once kept these parties — like the Alternative for Germany or the National Rally in France — from power have eroded or crumbled.

These parties are expected to perform strongly in the June 9 elections to the European Parliament, which is a relatively powerless institution but one still important for being the only directly elected body with representatives from all European Union countries. In France, polls show Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally getting about double the vote of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party.

The climate was combustible before the assassination attempt on Mr. Fico; it is more so now. The realm of the possible has grown broader. Postwar Europe has a peace culture, already shaken by the war in Ukraine. It is unused to its leaders being targeted in this way. Almost four decades have passed since Olof Palme, Sweden’s Social Democrat prime minister, was assassinated in Stockholm in 1986.

“I don’t know about World War III,” Ms. Wigura said, “but it does not look good. There are fewer and fewer spaces where you can speak your mind. The situation is much more dangerous than it used to be.”

The placid normalcy of postwar Europe seemed unshakable, history’s painful lessons had been learned. But as Russia’s revanchist war in Ukraine has demonstrated, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was not bloodless after all. Europe’s malevolent ghosts, it seems, have stirred.

For the first two decades of the 21st century, many consumer products on America’s store shelves got less expensive. A wave of imports from China and other emerging economies helped push down the cost of video games, T-shirts, dining tables, home appliances and more.

Those imports drove some American factories out of business, and they cost more than a million workers their jobs. Discount stores and online retailers, like Walmart and Amazon, flourished selling low-cost goods made overseas. But voters rebelled. Stung by shuttered factories, cratered industries and prolonged wage stagnation, Americans in 2016 elected a president who vowed to hit back at China on trade. Four years later, they elected another one.

In separate but overlapping efforts, former President Donald J. Trump and President Biden have sought to revive and protect American factories by making it more expensive to buy Chinese goods. They have taxed imports in legacy industries that were hollowed out over the last quarter-century, like clothes and appliances, and newer ones that are struggling to grow amid global competition with China, like solar panels.

Mr. Biden’s decision on Tuesday to codify and escalate tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump made clear that the United States has closed out a decades-long era that embraced trade with China and prized the gains of lower-cost products over the loss of geographically concentrated manufacturing jobs. A single tariff rate embodies that closure: a 100 percent tax on Chinese electric vehicles, which start at less than $10,000 each and have surged into showrooms around the world, but have struggled to crack government barriers to the U.S. market.

Democrats and Republicans once joined forces to engage economically with Beijing, driven by a theory that America would benefit from outsourcing production to countries that could manufacture certain goods more cheaply, in part by paying their workers low wages. Economists knew some American workers would lose their jobs, but they said the economy would gain overall by offering consumers low-cost goods and freeing up companies to invest in higher-value industries where the United States had an innovation advantage.

The parties are now competing to sever those ties. Lawmakers have taken increasingly hard lines on China’s labor practices, intellectual property theft from foreign businesses and generous subsidies for factories that produce far more than Chinese consumers can buy.

It is unclear what new era of policymaking will emerge from those political incentives: Mr. Biden’s brand of strategic industrial policy, Mr. Trump’s retrenchment to a more self-contained domestic economy, or something else entirely.

It is also not clear whether the American public, still reeling from the country’s most rapid burst of inflation in 40 years, will tolerate the pains that could accompany the transition.

“The old consensus has been blown apart, and a new one has not arisen,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped lead the pioneering research into what has come to be known as the China Shock of the early 2000s, when China’s acceptance into the World Trade Organization helped wipe out manufacturing jobs across the developed world.

But consumers and voters, Mr. Autor cautioned, “can’t have it both ways. You can make a trade-off. All the world is trade-offs. If you want to get to the point where the U.S. maintains and regains leadership in these technological areas, you’re going to have to pay more. And it’s not clear it’ll work.”

Despite their mutual embrace of forms of protectionism, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are offering voters contrasting views of how the American economy should engage with China in their rematch election.

Mr. Trump wants to tear down the bridges of commerce between the world’s two largest economies and dramatically restrict trade overall. He has pledged to raise tariffs on all Chinese imports, by revoking the “most favored nation” trade status that Congress voted to bestow on China at the end of the Clinton administration, and ban some Chinese goods entirely. He would impose new taxes on all imports from around the world.

Mr. Trump bluntly asserts China will pay the cost of those tariffs, not consumers, though detailed economic studies contradict him. But Robert Lighthizer, his former trade representative who remains an influential voice in Mr. Trump’s trade discussions, told New York Times reporters late last year that it was worth trading higher consumer prices for increased manufacturing employment.

“There’s a group of people who think that consumption is the end,” Mr. Lighthizer said. “And my view is production is the end, and safe and happy communities are the end. You should be willing to pay a price for that.”

Mr. Biden rejects Mr. Trump’s proposals as too broad and costly. He wants to build a protective fortress around strategic industries like clean energy and semiconductors, using tariffs and other regulations. Mr. Biden is also showering companies in those sectors with billions in government subsidies, including for green-energy technologies through the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Investment must be paired with trade enforcement to make sure the comeback we are seeing in communities around the country is not undercut by a flood of unfairly underpriced exports from China,” Lael Brainard, who directs the White House National Economic Council, said in a speech on Thursday. “We have learned from the past. There can be no second China Shock here in America.”

Many economists who continue to favor less restricted trade with China have criticized both candidates’ plans, and not simply because they risk raising prices for American shoppers. They say Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s policies could slow economic growth. Cutting off Chinese competition, they say, could force companies and consumers to spend money on artificially expensive domestic goods, instead of on new and innovative products that would create new industries and new jobs.

“We’re going to hurt our productivity by massively overspending on these things,” said R. Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia University economist who led the White House Council of Economic Advisers under former President George W. Bush.

Some Democrats say Mr. Biden’s best hope of building a lasting, successful China trade policy is by spending more, including potentially another round of subsidies for semiconductors and other high-tech manufacturing, and by going further on enforcement. Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, a career-long China and trade hawk in Congress, has pushed Mr. Biden to ban Chinese electric vehicles outright.

Jennifer Harris, a former Biden aide who now leads the Economy and Society Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has pushed the administration to couple its industrial policy spending with even stricter rules on what the recipients of that money can do with it. She wants stronger mandates for domestic automakers to shift to electric vehicles, for example, and stricter curbs on stock buybacks to force companies receiving government grants, like semiconductor manufacturers, to invest more in research and development.

“This begins the much harder chapter that I think is much less attempted in U.S. history of industrial policy,” Ms. Harris said: “Making industry really prove it out.”

Voters will sour on those efforts, she added, if Mr. Biden’s policies do not help quickly drive down prices of Made-in-the-U.S.A. products. “Americans want it both ways, and they’re going to get grumpy when prices go up,” she said.

Polls show voters are already extremely grumpy about price increases, which are related to supply-chain snarls and government and central bank stimulus as the world emerged from the Covid-19 recession.

Inflation concerns are weighing on Mr. Biden’s re-election chances. Current and former Biden aides are hopeful they will not also discredit Mr. Biden’s economic policy strategy, if he were to win a second term. Persistently higher prices from new tariffs could also hurt Mr. Trump’s approval, if he were to regain the White House.

Those political questions are driving uncertainty about what the new era of China policy will ultimately settle into. Mr. Hubbard would like to see a retreat from protectionism and a re-embrace of what you might call more traditional views of trade policy: enforce global rules, invest heavily in national innovation to retain an edge, and when you do lose industries to a global rival, spend big to retrain the workers who are displaced so they can find new jobs.

He concedes there is little appetite in the American electorate for such a policy. So does Ms. Harris. “The idea that we’re just going to run this movie again, knowing the political fallout that came from the first round, is just complete suicide to me,” she said.

Mr. Autor said that, economically speaking, he would not like to return to the previous era of China trade. He is generally complimentary of Mr. Biden’s industrial efforts, including his China policy, but says the president should “give up” on support for some sectors of the economy where China has driven costs extremely low, like solar cells.

His latest research warns of the economic perils of poorly designed trade policy, but it also explains why presidents might keep pursuing it. In a recent paper, written with several fellow economists, Mr. Autor found that Mr. Trump’s tariff-centered approach did not succeed in bringing many factory jobs back to America.

But, the economists found, the policy seemed to have won Mr. Trump and his party more votes.

In her new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times journalist grown disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes about the year 2020, when the combustible confluence of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election made politics and culture go “berserk.” She describes a liberal intelligentsia “wild with rage and optimism,” brimming with “fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society.” Her name for this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” is the “New Progressivism,” and her book attempts, with varying degrees of success, to skewer it.

There is much about that febrile moment worth satirizing, including the white-lady struggle sessions inspired by the risible Robin DiAngelo and the inevitable implosion of Seattle’s anarchist Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Bowles dissects both in the book’s best sections. She seems to be inspired by the great works of 1960s and 1970s New Journalism about the absurdities of the counterculture, most famously Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” But “Morning After the Revolution” is undermined by Bowles’s lazy mockery and insupportable generalizations.

“At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations told me roads and birds are racist,” she writes. “Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist.” Even allowing for 2020’s great flood of social-justice click bait, these are misleading and reductive caricatures. It’s hardly revisionist history, for example, to point out that Interstates were tools of racial segregation.

But my biggest disagreement with Bowles lies in her insistence that the movement she’s critiquing has triumphed. She describes the New Progressivism as the “operating principle of big business,” as well as the tech sector and academia. This week, speaking on the podcast of her wife, the Times Opinion writer turned heterodox media entrepreneur Bari Weiss, Bowles said, “The revolution didn’t end because it lost. It ended because it won.”

It didn’t, though. Even at the zenith of the George Floyd demonstrations, the corporate social-justice stuff was mostly window dressing; the operating principle of big business is and always was the pursuit of profit. And now, we’re in the middle of a furious reversal.

“Plenty of companies are reining in their rhetoric and in some cases action on issues such as sustainability and diversity,” said a recent Business Insider article titled “Woke No More.” Diversity, equity and inclusion departments, briefly prized, are being dismantled. “The backlash is real. And I mean, in ways that I’ve actually never seen it before,” the head of the Society for Human Resource Management told Axios. In the face of right-wing protests, Target, a company once known for its social justice trappings, has decided to stop selling Pride merchandise at some stores. And as The New York Times reported, Wall Street donors who were once hostile to Trump have made their peace with him.

On college campuses, both the Gaza protests and the resulting crackdown have shattered the illusion that radical politics can be seamlessly integrated into elite academic institutions. Long-running arguments about speech and sensitivity have been turned on their heads as leftists demand the right to chant slogans that offend their classmates, while moderates and conservatives invoke the need to keep Jewish students safe from emotional as well as physical harm.

Amid all this upheaval, the era of content warnings and policing of microaggressions may have come to an end. (Certain progressive shibboleths, like the idea that a speaker’s intent is irrelevant in deciding what speech is problematic, have been undercut by protesters insisting that calls for an intifada be interpreted in the most benign possible light.) Donors and administrators, meanwhile, have lost patience with D.E.I. programs, which they accuse of ignoring the concerns of Jews. Last week, M.I.T. became the highest- profile school to jettison mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring. I doubt it will be the last.

There are aspects of the New Progressivism — its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech — that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities. That energy has largely dissipated, right when we need it most, heading into another election with Trump on the ballot.

Bowles writes that her book “is for people who want to understand why Abraham Lincoln is canceled,” referring, I think, to the San Francisco Board of Education’s 2021 decision, quickly reversed, to give new names to a bunch of city schools. But that period now feels terribly distant. Four years ago, in response to the George Floyd protests, the Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia renamed schools that had honored Confederate generals. Last week, the board changed the names back.

Even if it could be sanctimonious and grating, I fear we’ll come to miss the progressive urgency that marked the Trump presidency. Bowles writes as if the uprisings of 2020 were sparked by anomie rather than real crises. She describes them with an analogy to allergy science: “When the area around a child is very well disinfected, her immune system will keep searching for a fight.”

In thinking about that period, I also tend to reach for health metaphors, but different ones. America reacted to Trump as if he were a novel pathogen and became inflamed. Now our immune system is exhausted, and the virus is returning stronger than ever.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia vetoed on Friday two bills that would have revoked tax exemptions for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a century-old organization that has often been at the center of debates over the state’s Confederate past and its racial history.

In doing so, Mr. Youngkin sided with fellow Republicans in the legislature who almost unanimously opposed the bills and the efforts by the state’s Democrats to curtail the Commonwealth’s relationship with Confederate heritage organizations. The bills had nearly unanimous Democratic support in both chambers of the legislature. (One Democrat did not participate in one of the votes.)

The organization’s property tax exemptions were added to the state code in the 1950s, during segregation and when the Commonwealth maintained a closer relationship with the group. The organization’s Virginia division is also exempt from paying recordation taxes, which are levied when property sales are registered for public record.

In a statement explaining his decision, Mr. Youngkin acknowledged that the property tax exemption was “ripe for reform, delineated by inconsistencies and discrepancies.” But, he said that the bills were too narrow, specifically targeting the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and approving them would set “an inappropriate precedent.”

Lawmakers who introduced the bills said that they had wanted to modernize the tax code to reflect the state’s current values; they also stated that the government should not support organizations that promote myths romanticizing the Confederacy. Critics of the legislation said that the bills unfairly targeted the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and claimed that the group and its purposes were misunderstood.

Alex Askew, a Democratic delegate who introduced one of the bills, called the governor’s vetoes “perplexing.”

“The people of Virginia deserve to know why the governor is providing tax relief to historically pro-slavery institutions,” Mr. Askew said in a statement, adding, “Let’s work towards a fairer, more inclusive tax policy that truly reflects our commitment to equality and progress.”

If Mr. Youngkin had signed the bills, two other entities, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Inc. and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, would also have faced threats to their property tax exemptions.

“The governor has consistently worked in a direction that would endear him to the Republican base,” Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, said in April, after the assembly passed the bills. He added that because of political and cultural shifts in Virginia in recent years, he expected the tax exemptions to be revoked the next time a Democrat becomes governor.

The legacy of the Confederacy is still being contested in the state that once contained its capital. In Charlottesville and Richmond, statues and monuments to Confederate figures have come down over the past decade, but earlier this month, a rural school district restored the names of Confederate officers to two schools, four years after voting to remove them.

The legislature also narrowly passed a bill to repeal special license plates featuring Robert E. Lee and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a men’s heritage organization. Governor Youngkin also vetoed that bill on Friday.

With his veto on the tax exemption bills, Mr. Youngkin prevented the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s headquarters, a marble-clad building in Richmond, from becoming subject to property taxation. The building, which doubles as a memorial to wartime women of the Confederacy, opened in 1957 and has been listed for exemption in the tax code ever since.

The organization, which is identified as the owner of the property, would have become responsible for paying the taxes if a law had revoked the exemptions, according to Parrish Simmons, a representative with Richmond’s real estate assessor. The taxes could have totaled over $53,000 annually.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy did not immediately return a request for comment, but members were present in the gallery when the House passed the legislation in February. The women were introduced by Wren Williams, a Republican delegate who voted against both bills; Mr. Williams did not return a request for comment.

In an online public comment in opposition to one of the bills, Susan McCrobie, an officer for the organization, stated that a property tax burden would threaten the “continuation of purposes and objects for which our organization exists.”

Since its founding in 1894, the group has been open to membership for women who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. Though the stated purpose of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is to honor ancestors through memorial preservation and charity work, the organization is most often associated with Confederate statues, which it raised funds to build throughout the 20th century, and which it still defends.

Ms. McCrobie stated that if the bills were to become laws, the organization and the legislature would be “thrust into the courts for adjudication.”

Legislative efforts to revoke the tax exemptions began in 2023, when Don Scott, a Democratic delegate, introduced a bill that failed in the House, which at the time had a narrow Republican majority.

In January, after control of the House flipped and Mr. Scott became Virginia’s first Black Speaker, Mr. Askew reintroduced the bill. In February, he said in an interview that the purpose of the bill was not to interfere with the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s charity work, but to make sure the state code better reflected the Commonwealth’s modern values.

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.

A state ethics panel quietly dismissed a complaint last summer against the New York judge presiding over the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, issuing a warning over small donations the judge had made to groups supporting Democrats, including the campaign of Joseph R. Biden.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, donated a total of $35 to the groups in 2020, including a $15 donation earmarked for the Biden campaign, and $10 to a group called “Stop Republicans.”

Political contributions of any kind are prohibited under state judicial ethics rules.

“Justice Merchan said the complaint, from more than a year ago, was dismissed in July with a caution,” the spokesman for the court system, Al Baker, said in a statement.

A caution does not include any penalty, but it can be considered in any future cases reviewed by the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct. A letter outlining the caution was not released because of the commission’s rules, and Justice Merchan did not make the letter available.

“The Commission on Judicial Conduct is governed by a confidentiality statute and cannot comment on nonpublic dispositions,” said Robert Tembeckjian, the commission’s administrator.

The commission’s decision was first reported by Reuters.

In its 2024 annual report, the commission said it was made aware of dozens of New York judges who had violated the rules against political contributions in recent years. Most were modest amounts, the report said, and many appeared to stem from the misperception that the rules only apply to state campaigns. In fact, judges are prohibited from contributing to any campaigns, including for federal office.

“Like so much of the misconduct the Commission encounters, making a prohibited political contribution is a self-inflicted mistake,” the commission wrote in the report.

For Justice Merchan, the stakes of such a mistake are considerably higher than most: He is the first judge in American history to preside over the criminal trial of a former president.

The donations in part fueled Mr. Trump’s efforts to have Justice Merchan removed from the case before the trial began. Mr. Trump’s lawyers also focused on Justice Merchan’s adult daughter and her work at a Democratic consulting firm.

But Justice Merchan declined to recuse himself, appeals court judges declined to step in, and the trial is now nearing its conclusion.

The case centers on a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, in the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Ms. Daniels says she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, but a $130,000 payment from Mr. Trump’s fixer bought her silence. Mr. Trump is accused of falsifying business records to cover up his reimbursement of the fixer, Michael D. Cohen, casting them as routine legal expenses.

Mr. Trump has denied the accusations against him — and has lashed out at Justice Merchan and the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who brought the case, noting that both are Democrats.

The Academic Senate at the University of California, Los Angeles, voted against two resolutions seeking to rebuke the school’s chancellor, Gene Block, largely over his handling of an attack on a pro-Palestinian encampment two weeks ago.

The results of the votes, conducted after a three-hour meeting on Thursday, were released on Friday and showed that only 43 percent of voting members had backed a no-confidence motion. A motion to censure Dr. Block was evenly split, 88 for and 88 against, failing to achieve a simple majority of support.

“It is clear that we are not united in how we view the major events of the past weeks and the campus response to them,” Andrea M. Kasko, the Senate chair, said in a statement. “I hope that we can try to find common ground as colleagues, and have the courage to listen with open minds and open hearts even when we do not agree.”

Formal rebukes by faculty were unlikely to have practical implications for Dr. Block, 75, who is set to step down as chancellor in July, said William G. Tierney, a professor emeritus of higher education at the University of Southern California who has written about the response to campus protests across the nation.

Dr. Tierney said he doubted that Michael V. Drake, the president of the University of California system, would require Dr. Block’s resignation “before that time.”

But faculty members who backed the resolutions said they felt compelled to speak up on behalf of students and show resolve to Dr. Block’s successor.

“While we were not able to obtain a majority vote on either resolution, it is important to note that 50 percent of those who voted called for a censure of Chancellor Block’s actions,” said Carlos Santos, an associate professor of social welfare and a voting member of the Academic Senate. “I remain committed to joining my colleagues in denouncing Chancellor Block’s actions but also in calling for his resignation.”

Those who voted against rebuking the chancellor said they felt that the effort was motivated by support for the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and not by a desire to improve future processes.

“If we were sincerely concerned about what went wrong and how we can change in the future, we wouldn’t have been so intent on rushing through this poorly thought-out resolution without gathering information or building consensus,” said Jeff Maloy, an associate professor of teaching in the molecular, cell and developmental biology department, and a voting member of the Senate.

Dr. Block, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

A group of faculty members called a special meeting of the Academic Senate last week in the aftermath of the attack on April 30, in which a group of counterprotesters, whom Dr. Block later described as “instigators,” sprayed pro-Palestinian demonstrators with pepper spray, beat them with metal and wood, and shot fireworks into their encampment.

The attack, which began not long after Dr. Block declared the encampment illegal, went on for hours without police intervention. The next day, police officers in riot gear arrested more than 200 protesters as they cleared the encampment.

Faculty members who supported rebuking Dr. Block recounted with horror how they had watched their students suffer injuries during both the attack and when the encampment was dismantled.

A few faculty members spoke against the resolutions, including some who said they were disturbed by some Jewish students’ accounts of antisemitism at the encampment.

While the Academic Senate includes all faculty members who meet certain criteria — generally, those who are tenured or are tenure-track — only a smaller group known as the Legislative Assembly, which consists of members selected to represent campus departments, is allowed to vote on resolutions.

Almost 400 faculty members attended Thursday’s virtual meeting, and several dozen speakers weighed in on the resolutions, with a majority speaking in favor of a no-confidence resolution or a censure.

Faculty members at universities around the country have taken such steps to make their positions known: On Thursday, a Columbia faculty group passed a resolution of no confidence in its president. And last week, faculty members at U.S.C., a private institution across town from U.C.L.A., voted to censure its president.

Regardless of the vote’s outcome, Dr. Tierney said that Dr. Block’s actions in recent weeks would leave “a blemish on an otherwise noteworthy career.”

In the days after April 30, Dr. Drake, the University of California president, as well as state and local leaders demanded investigations into U.C.L.A.’s response.

Dr. Block will also have to answer questions from members of Congress; he has been summoned to testify next week before a House committee that has grilled other education leaders over their responses to antisemitism.