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November 1, 2016 — The bikini-clad teen is thrown to the ground. An officer, his knee in her back, grabs her braids and slams her head into the grass. She cries, “Call my mama.” When other teens, leaving a pool party, rush to her defense, the officer stands and lunges into the crowd, gun in hand. It is June 2015 in McKinney, Texas. Four months later, in Columbia, South Carolina, a teacher requests an officer’s assistance with a disobedient teen girl. The student has refused to leave class and go to the principal’s office, as the teacher demands.

The historian Fritz Stern fled the Nazis and helped pioneer the study of German history in the US. Before his death this year, he had been warning for some time of the signs of a resurgent fascism. He was not talking about the land of his birth.

Fascism in the US? The fear is surely overblown. Before we write it off, though, we might ponder what we have learnt about fascism in general, thanks to the work of Stern and others.

With the reopened FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails when she was secretary of state, Americans are once again considering what counts as negligence in how officials — and in particular, Clinton — handle potentially sensitive information.

"Sign, sign, everywhere a sign — blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind."

Apologies to the Five Man Electrical Band and its 1971 hit song, but campaign Sard signs are sprouting like weeds in this particularly polarizing election cycle. With them have come vandals carving Trump signs into "Rump" signs, and vigilantes defying local ordinances to festoon their properties with dozens of partisan placards.