Lola Enriquez, from the small district of Maracena in Granada, hasn’t always been open about her support of Vox, Spain’s ultranationalist party. When she first joined the movement in 2015, fears of being called a fascist in her home – an area she describes as a “red enclave” – pushed her to keep a low profile.

But no longer. Today Vox is set to enter parliament after winning over more than 10% of voters in Spain’s general election on Sunday. It is the first far-right party to gain a foothold in the Spanish legislature in the country’s democratic history – an achievement unthinkable just a few years ago.

While still on the fringe – the party placed fifth – it is an “inspiration” to a potpourri of Spanish citizens. Supporters include devout Catholics, underpaid or unemployed youths, pensioners unable to make ends meet, farmers and small enterprise workers, and qualified professionals with international experience.

“We are gaining strength,” Ms. Enriquez says outside the poorly lit Vox campaign office at a high-end hotel in Granada. “We have a lot of hopes, although we are aware that other parties have more weight. … People might take our material discreetly, but they take it. They used to call us fascists – some still do – but our vision and our numbers are growing.”

Extreme necessity?

The rise of Vox (“voice” in Latin) has been quick. It won seats for the first time in December local elections in Andalusia. In the span of five months, it has picked up 24 seats in the national legislature.

“We told you that we were starting a reconquest of Spain, and that is exactly what we have done,” said Vox leader Santiago Abascal, who mobilized such sizable crowds ahead of the vote that supporters dreamed of a stronger outcome while critics panicked over rising fascism. “We can can clearly say to all of Spain that Vox is here to stay.”

Vox rejects the far-right label, casting itself as a party of “extreme necessity.” But its view on immigration and Islam place it in the camp of European right-wing populist parties such as France’s National Front and Italy’s League.

Vox has outlined its vision in a 100-point manifesto of “urgent measures.” Its family-first worldview translates into a desire to repeal laws against gender violence, and opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. The party wants to expel legal migrants in Spain if they have committed an offense and wants to prevent unauthorized migrants from staying.

Supporters cast themselves as the victims of a “so-called progressive” fascism that has imposed liberal values. They defend Spanish traditions such as bullfighting and want to relax gun ownership laws.

The party also defends centralization of government, a message that resonated strongly among some voters in the wake of Catalonia’s independence bid in 2017, which was later declared illegal. One of the seats it picked up on Sunday was in Barcelona, the capital of the Catalonia region.

“Vox defends my values, Spanish unity above them all,” says Paloma Gomez, a lawyer who worked in England, Italy, and Switzerland before returning to Granada for the elections. “Every country has to defend what is theirs. You cannot break up Spain.”

But critics see the party as a throwback to the dark decades of dictatorship. “Vox is still too radical,” says Alicia Martinez, a working mother who sells marmalade in flavors ranging from sweet pepper to olive oil. “They are right in a couple of things, but they want to take us back 40 years.”

Migration in farm country

One region where Vox boasts above average support is in the so-called “Mar de plástico” (sea of plastic), the southeastern province of Almería. Intensive farming in this area has covered the arid landscape with hundreds of miles of greenhouses that glitter almost as much as the Mediterranean on a sunny day. Farmers here are largely dependent on migrant labor.

Sub-Saharan Africa migrants roam back roads on basic bicycles in the hope that a sympathetic – or unsympathetic – Spanish farmer will grant a day of labor at €35. “It’s the best we can get,” says Mohammed from Senegal, who arrived by boat and has spent two years as an undocumented migrant in Spain.

Dominique Soguel

Luis, a Spanish watermelon and tomato farmer, rides his tractor on April 27 in Nijar, Spain. He cast his votes in favor of Vox because of its hard-line stance on illegal immigration.

Just down the road, Luis, a Vox supporter, is using a tractor to clear his fields. Declining to give his last name, he pauses the engine just long enough to explain that he is “up to here” with illegal migration. He says that while he employs 108 migrants legally at his tomato and watermelon farms, hiring unauthorized migrants asks too much of farmers and needs to be stamped out.

“If they come, they should come with their contract in hand and not in boats brought over by mafias,” he argues (though getting a seasonal work visa abroad is often impossible for migrants). “The poor guys are coming at any cost, even if they drown. On this end, if we take pity and give them a job, we get fined €8,000 to €9,000.”

Elsewhere in the province of Almería, it is clear that feelings against migrants don’t stop with those whose presence in Spain is unauthorized. Graffiti such as “No Moors” is carved onto walls and even solitary rocks on dirt roads leading to national park and beaches that have the coasts of Morocco in sight.

In the town of El Ejido, where Vox had the support of roughly a fifth of voters, discussions on migration can border on the choleric. The town has nearly 85,000 people, roughly a third of them classed as foreign, with Morocco being the most common country of origin. Accounts of racial tensions that exploded around a murder almost 20 years ago in 2000 are relayed as if they happened yesterday, even by those who were too young to have their own memory of the event.

“That is something you don’t forget,” says Manuel Fuentes, a 20-year-old agriculture student on his third unpaid internship. “My mother is scared to walk the streets alone. There are many things I don’t like about Vox, such as their views on gender, but on the question of migration, it is the only party that calls it as it is.”

Karen Norris/Staff

‘They say we are racist, but we have to be’

Some in El Ejido say that the presence of migrants in town makes them worry about increased crime, particularly against women, as well as religious tensions. That’s why they say they support Vox.

“We are all for Vox,” says Antonio, who considers himself a failed businessman. “They say we are racist, but we have to be. It can’t be that our streets are unsafe after 9 p.m. It can’t be that these people get benefits while the poor of Spain don’t.”

“They get all the help, and then they don’t respect our values,” chimes in Ana, a young salesperson out at a cafe. “I don’t see this as a far-right issue. You just have to put some rules.”

While Vox has toned down its public rhetoric by deploying the more widely palatable terminology of “uncontrolled migration,” anti-Muslim videos circulate freely over WhatsApp messages exchanged by its members.

Conchi Perez, monitoring the elections at a school in the outskirts of Granada, says the Vox movement has restored her pride in Spain. “It has revived so many values that lay dormant: love of the homeland, Spanish unity, the greatness of Spain. Don’t forget, we reached five continents.”

Devin Powell/NOAA/AP/File

The U.S. Coast Guard Icebreaker Healy facilitates a research cruise in the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean. The Trump administration over the weekend reversed course on plans to expand offshore drilling that would have included a reversal of environmental protections in Alaska.

When the small town of Cape May, New Jersey, held a “Save our Seas” rally on a blustery Monday in March, close to 400 people showed up to protest offshore drilling or exploration.

That was a big number, says Vicki Clark, the president of the county’s chamber of commerce. “New Jersey is very partisan, but our entire congressional delegation is united in the position of opposing the administration’s plan for exploration and drilling in the Atlantic,” she says.

On one hand, she says, there are the threats to coastal economies and ecosystems from a spill. On the other, densely populated Atlantic states like New Jersey lack greenfield sites for oil refining infrastructure, so there’s limited investment upside. “It’s all risk and no reward for us,” she says.  

Now, a year after the Trump administration proposed opening up more than 90 percent of federal waters to oil and gas leasing, the administration is putting its plans on hold.

The reason, newly confirmed Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told The Wall Street Journal last week, is uncertainty in the wake of a recent court ruling in Alaska that reinstated an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in much of the Atlantic and Arctic waters.  

But the original proposal was also met with near-universal disapproval along America’s coasts, uniting many Republicans and Democrats in a rare bipartisan pushback.

The “Drill, baby, drill” rallying cry of the 2008 GOP presidential campaign has shifted for many Republicans, especially those living along the coast. A pro-drilling sentiment and the promise of oil wealth and energy independence are still strong in conservative circles, but it now faces countervailing trends.

These include active grassroots organizing and education efforts; growing coastal economies that depend on tourism, fishing, and a healthy ocean ecosystem; and memories of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 people and caused the largest-ever oil spill in U.S. waters. 

Claire Douglass, a longtime campaigner against offshore drilling, says many people she talked to supported drilling in the abstract. “But when you help them connect the dots, of how it’s going to affect their own communities and their way of life, it’s a different story. It makes it more real; it’s more tangible,” says Ms. Douglass, national campaign director for the National Audubon Society, an environmental nonprofit. 

Ted S. Warren/AP

Federal waters that could potentially be leased for offshore oil and gas drilling are shown in yellow on a map at a public meeting on March 5, 2018. The Trump administration proposed in 2018 to expand offshore oil drilling off the Pacific Northwest coast, among others.

For months, both drilling advocates and those opposed have speculated over what the Trump administration’s final plan would be. The oil industry has long sought expanded access to offshore deposits even though U.S. oil production and exports are currently at record highs, primarily due to fracking. 

President Donald Trump’s initial plan was panned by governors along both coasts, including Florida's, whose Republican governor Rick Scott won an exemption that was seen as a political sop to help Florida Republicans in the 2016 midterms. But it was unclear if Secretary Bernhardt, who took over as acting Interior secretary in January and was confirmed earlier this month, would honor that agreement. 

Offshore oil and gas extraction in Alaska has long been controversial. Before leaving office, President Barack Obama issued an executive order to block offshore drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. Last month, a federal judge in Alaska ruled that Mr. Trump lacked the authority to overturn this order, dealing a major setback to his policy of expanding U.S. offshore production.

The administration is appealing the ruling, but the process is likely to take a while, and the ban remains in effect unless it is reversed.

“By the time the court rules, that may be discombobulating to our plan,” Mr. Bernhardt told The Wall Street Journal.

Finding common ground

Secretary Bernhardt also acknowledged in the interview that the opposition from coastal governors and lawmakers has been an issue and that finding common ground has been a challenge.

Those coastal politicians, regardless of political party, have in recent years become more firm opponents of offshore drilling, along with their constituents. For many of those constituents, the reasons are economic: Coastal economies are flourishing and depend on a healthy ocean ecosystem. Even seismic testing – which, in the Atlantic, would precede any potential drilling – can pose a threat to marine life before the risk of a colossal spill like Deepwater Horizon’s.

It’s an issue that can even help tip elections. South Carolina Rep. Joe Cunningham, a Democrat, won an upset victory last year – the first time since 1986 that South Carolina Democrats have flipped a House seat – largely on the basis of his opposition to offshore drilling.

In a statement last week on the administration’s decision, Mr. Cunningham drove home the point. ”This decision is the result of constant pressure from coastal communities, environmental groups, and elected officials who made it abundantly clear that offshore oil and gas drilling is dangerous, unwanted, and a threat to our economy and way of life,” he said.

Other coastal Republicans, including Trump loyalists and longtime supporters of drilling and energy independence, have taken note. In the past year, many governors and both local and federal lawmakers have urged a moratorium on drilling or seismic testing in the Atlantic.

“I support an all-of-the-above type energy policy,” says Buddy Carter, a Republican congressman from Georgia whose district stretches along the state’s coast. “But as much as I believe in offshore energy, I believe more strongly in state sovereignty. The people of the 1st District have made it known that they don’t want this yet until they get some answers.”

Representative Carter recently asked that Georgia be excluded from any offshore drilling plans. He complains that when the administration held public meetings about offshore drilling, they went to Atlanta. “The further inland you move, the less resistance you get,” he says. “The people who live on the coast – they’re the ones opposed to it.”

To some of those not on the coast, such opposition can seem extreme, given that it’s not yet clear whether drilling in the Atlantic is economically viable, absent seismic testing of reserves. 

“I’ve never seen an issue come up before where people just don’t want the information,” says Don Weaver, president of the South Carolina Association of Taxpayers, which supports seismic testing.

He’s skeptical about claims that seismic testing will harm marine life and wants to see the state benefit from offshore oil exploration, particularly if it becomes more profitable in the future. 

A tough sell in Florida

For areas like Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the prospect of drilling wells is more immediate and there’s strong interest from oil companies, opposition is even more solid. One reason: tourism and fears of what spills could do to tourist-dependent towns. 

Since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, “I have not met one person who could tell me that exploring in the Gulf waters and Florida state waters is a great idea,” says Robin Miller, president of the Tampa Bay Beaches Chamber of Commerce. While no tar balls washed up on Tampa Bay beaches after the spill, says Ms. Miller, widespread perception that the entire Florida Gulf coast was covered in oil drove tourists away; numerous local businesses suffered losses or had to close.

“If anyone could say there is anything to come out of that explosion that had anything positive, it’s the effects that it has had on the current political landscape on making a decision to drill in those waters,” Ms. Miller adds.

For now, it’s not clear when or if the Trump administration will be able to open up more federal waters for drilling. Opponents say the respite should give decision-makers even more pause about the wisdom of expanding drilling, especially at a time when U.S. fracking has raised oil production and exports to record highs.

“Our main message is that the Trump Administration’s approach is reckless,” says Andrew Hartsig, director of the Arctic program for the Ocean Conservancy. “The ocean is a vital food source for many people and a source of economic livelihood. They’re jeopardizing all of this in the push to expand offshore drilling.”

The staff of candy company Kintaro-Ame was fixated on the television April 1, awaiting news of the name of Japan’s new imperial era.

Finally, at midday, a serious, suited official appeared on the screen, bearing a white placard. “Reiwa” (pronounced Ray-wah), it proclaimed in bold black calligraphy. The Kintaro-Ame workers leaped into action. Within a half-hour, they were brewing molten rivers of colored sugar and coaxing them into cylindrical designs.

In another two hours, the first “Reiwa”-branded candies were bagged in shiny plastic and placed on shelves, each piece displaying the tiny characters for “beautiful harmony,” as the Foreign Ministry translates the new era’s name.

“First came an order for 10,000 pieces,” says Kintaro-Ame president Akio Watanabe, a member of the sixth generation to run the family confectionery. Then came the local media, followed by corporate customers. “Now we’re barely keeping up with demand. We’ve sold 50 times what we expected.”

On the eve of Emperor Akihito’s abdication and his son Naruhito’s ascension to the throne, companies have stumbled upon imperial naming gold. Unlike the last transition in 1989, when the long illness and death of wartime emperor Hirohito triggered national mourning, the departing Emperor Akihito is healthy, and the Japanese are looking ahead to a new, more hopeful era.

A vast majority of Japanese approve of Emperor Akihito’s request to step down, the first time in roughly 200 years that an emperor in the world’s oldest continuous monarchy has done so. Emperor Akihito and his wife are seen as much more accessible and human than his father, Emperor Hirohito, whose demigod status and political power came to an end with his country’s defeat in World War II. During Emperor Akihito’s reign, known as Heisei, or “achieving peace,” Japan has worked to distance itself from its brutal wartime past and the pain of the early post-war era. But it has also watched its economic might slip from the seemingly boundless growth of the 1980s to stubborn stagnation and a national soul-searching about its future. Naruhito’s accession provides a welcome diversion.

“People are using the era change as an excuse to be festive,” says Chuo University sociologist Masahiro Yamada. “The Japanese love to have fun … love a reason to celebrate.”

The circumstances are just right for a spending spree. Imperial transition ceremonies will fall inside a 10-day holiday, the longest-ever Golden Week. Branding expert Ryuji Ando calls it “good national policy. It’s an opportunity to boost our economy in Japan. The money will flow.”

Also in the back of Japanese minds is a pending consumption tax hike of 2%, scheduled for October. In other words, buy now. Brands including Coca-Cola, Kit Kat, and instant noodle manufacturer Nissin Food Products have launched Reiwa-themed goods. Website domain registries are reporting a jump in Reiwa-related registrations.

Heisei: A time of challenges

For many, the three-decade Heisei era under Emperor Akihito will be remembered as a time of struggle, a fall made more poignant because the era began at the country’s economic peak. After the devastation of WWII, Japan’s decades of economic recovery and growth were seen as almost a miracle. Indeed, the start of the Heisei was so flush that a businessman might jet to Seoul just to have dinner and land back in Tokyo for breakfast, says Stephen Nagy, professor of international relations at International Christian University in Tokyo.

Yet that “bubble economy” soon burst, ushering in a recession. The country lost its economic footing and eventually slipped from the world’s second-largest economy to third, behind the United States and China. The population began a slow and ominous decline, prompting further economic anxieties as the workforce shrank.

The Heisei era also saw a series of natural disasters now cemented in the national consciousness, including the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack two months later – not to mention the magnitude 9 quake and tsunami in 2011 that killed around 16,000 people, with thousands still missing. The government is still cleaning up the resulting Fukushima nuclear disaster, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

The solemnity that simmers beneath the national consciousness, in fact, has led to a groundswell of resistance to Tokyo’s hosting of the 2020 Olympics, which many analysts say will leave a debt-ridden government even more cash-strapped.

It’s a great time for new beginnings.

Reiwa: Beautiful harmony

“I can feel society’s celebratory mood,” says sales manager Hidetoshi Mio at Bunmeido, a cake company that dates back to 1900. Bunmeido did not sell a Heisei-named good during the 1989 imperial transition, but this time, Mr. Mio says, the “emperor is still well.”

Indeed, Emperor Akihito wielded great moral authority, using his symbolic role to subtly emphasize peace and remorse for Japan’s midcentury aggressions. He is more visible than his long line of predecessors, though the royal family’s remove from the public is still far greater than that of their European peers. And there’s a sense of national gratitude for the emperor’s handling of the post-bubble stagnation, says Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University in Tokyo.

Asahi, the nation’s largest beer company, is feting Emperor Akihito’s retirement with a Reiwa beer that has already clocked orders of 570,000 cases, twice initial projections, according to a company spokesperson. Ozeki Sake is selling a Reiwa sake as a nod to the future as well as the past: Reiwa labels are being placed on a product first introduced around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, an emblem of Japan’s post-war reconstruction and national reinvention.

Lenora Chu

Akio Watanabe, president of Kintaro-Ame candy company, behind the counter in his Tokyo shop. His family's candy factory has operated out of a second-floor production room for decades.

Most Japanese are expected to watch the televised transition ceremonies, and after the hubbub dies down, the imperial name will be woven into the fabric of everyday life. In the Japanese calendar, used alongside the Western date on formal documents, coins, and government forms, Year 1 of the Reiwa era will begin May 1.

At the department store Tokyu Hands, shopper Yoko Inoue is browsing a Reiwa-themed display. “I was looking for a gift for a friend,” Ms. Inoue says. “He’s moving to America, and I thought Reiwa would be good for someone starting a new life.”

A family story mirrors Japan’s journey

Back at Kintaro-Ame, a week before the imperial transition, workers in hairnets begin hand-rolling melted sugar in an upstairs production room. In the downstairs office, Mr. Watanabe reminisces as he readies for the busy holiday period, pencil tucked into a slim pocket on his left shirtsleeve.

In its heyday, Kintaro-Ame boasted more than 30 candy stores. “Now we’re down to three stores,” Mr. Watanabe says of the family business that his ancestors began in the 1870s. “Candy consumption has been falling for years.”

Mr. Watanabe’s journey down his family’s memory lane reflects the ebb and flow of a nation: the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which spared the main store in Tokyo; the U.S. air raids during WWII, which forced the family to evacuate Tokyo for their hometown in Saitama prefecture; the ensuing food shortages that lasted several years, including a time the family couldn’t buy sugar to make candy; the declining sales of chitose ame, “thousand-year candy” given to children reaching the milestones of ages 3, 5, and 7, as Japan’s birth rate slipped to its lowest levels in history.

The imperial transition is a welcome break from everyday business. Mr. Watanabe had devised Reiwa-branded candy “just for fun,” he says, but now the company’s future is looking a little bit more colorful.

An imperial transition is “once in a lifetime,” he says.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., talks to reporters about the report by special counsel Robert Mueller in Washington on March 25. Senator Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump, has said his committee will investigate the actions of the Justice Department in the Russia investigation, including the FBI's use of a dossier compiled by British spy Christopher Steele.

Secret meetings between Trump campaign officials and Kremlin-linked figures. A covert Russian operation to elect Donald Trump. Russian attempts to sow discord in the United States and between the U.S. and its Western allies.

Mueller report details? Yes – but also bullet points from the notorious “Steele dossier,” a group of memos based on information from confidential Russian sources and composed in 2016 by former British intelligence official Christopher Steele.

The Steele dossier is getting renewed attention in Washington in the wake of last week’s release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Partly that’s because it’s barely mentioned in Mr. Mueller’s work. The special counsel didn’t confirm many of the dossier’s most sensational specific assertions.

Partly it’s because some of the dossier’s general points were echoed by Mr. Mueller, including its conclusion that figures connected to Mr. Trump met clandestinely with Russian government-linked officials during the presidential campaign.

But mostly the Steele dossier’s renewed prominence is due to the fact that both Trump supporters and critics claim it as a symbol of their preferred interpretation of today’s fraught political moment. To Trump defenders it is a hoax, the “witch hunt” made concrete, and a corrupt document that launched a corrupt investigation. To the president’s detractors it is a credible guide to the outline of the Russia probe’s inquiries and nothing more.

Is it disinformation or a distraction?

“The more useful document at this time is the Mueller report,” says Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government and a fellow at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University.

Origins of the dossier

The Steele dossier might more accurately be called the Steele dossiers. It is group of more than a dozen individual memos composed by Christopher Steele between June and December 2016, based on conversations with Russian sources. Mr. Steele, a former British intelligence official, did this work under contract with the U.S. research firm Fusion GPS. The project began as opposition research into Donald Trump funded by a Republican opponent. But a law firm connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign was paying for the investigation by the time Mr. Steele became involved.

The memos consist of raw, unverified intelligence, not vetted and finished conclusions. Their bare bones structure – that Russia was interfering in American politics by computer hacking and other means, that the Kremlin favored Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, that there were communications and interplay between Trump figures and Russia – remains largely accurate.

But on this foundation the intelligence in the dossier spins a grandiose array of assertions that don’t appear to be true and in isolation might seem preposterous and lurid. Trump, in its depiction, was a Manchurian candidate, someone bought and paid for by Russia and totally under its control. He was being blackmailed by the Kremlin, which had collected incriminating information on his personal behavior during Russian trips, including tapes of bizarre liaisons with prostitutes. Retired Russians in the U.S. were running secret communications channels for this affair. Romanian hackers were attacking Democrats, and Trump had moles of his own inside the Clinton campaign.

Campaign manager Paul Manafort was using foreign policy adviser Carter Page as an intermediary with Russia, according to information in the dossier. Mr. Page attended secret meetings in Moscow. Meanwhile, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had met “Kremlin representatives” in Prague in August 2016.

None of this is in the Mueller report. Mr. Mueller’s investigation and intense FBI vetting did not confirm it. The few mentions of the dossier in the Mueller report are in volume two, which deals with questions of obstruction of justice, and refer to discussions of the dossier as a whole. There is one that describes a text from a Russian businessman to Michael Cohen that cryptically says, “Stopped flow of tapes.” The businessman had been told the tapes were fake, according to Mr. Mueller.

Less than two weeks before Mr. Trump’s presidential inauguration, BuzzFeed published the full text of the Steele dossier, despite the fact that it contained raw, unchecked intelligence. Page 23 of the Mueller report’s second volume documents internal White House reaction to this event. Incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus “recalled that when the intelligence assessment came out, the President-Elect was concerned people would question the legitimacy of his win.”

How ‘intelligence’ can be inaccurate

Why was the dossier inaccurate in many of its specifics? Mr. Steele’s sources could have been inaccurate or exaggerating what they knew. They might have inadvertently pumped up things they’d heard secondhand, as in a giant game of telephone. (After all, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Page were both communicating with Russians, though not to the extent or purpose that the dossier described.)

It’s also possible the dossier is shot through with purposeful misinformation disseminated by Russian agents. Mixing the true with the false is a classic Kremlin disinformation tool. It keeps foes off balance and guessing. It confuses and divides. In that sense the dossier might have been part of what it describes.

To Trump supporters it is the tainted source from which a tainted investigation flowed. They question in particular its provenance. Paid for by Clinton money, it was a distorted document used by the FBI as “evidence” to illegally obtain a series of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to eavesdrop on Trump campaign official Carter Page, some Republicans believe.

“How could you use a dossier four different times to get a warrant against an American citizen when it’s a bunch of garbage?” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on April 22.

A document drawn up by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee last year disputes this assertion, noting that the FISA court application for Mr. Page’s warrant noted that the dossier derived from a partisan source, that it contained information from other sources, and that Mr. Page had first drawn the FBI’s attention in 2013. The bureau at that time warned him it had information that Russia had targeted him as a potential U.S. asset.

The Justice Department’s inspector general is currently reviewing the dossier, Mr. Page, the FISA court, and the FBI to determine if improper behavior occurred. Attorney General William Barr has said he will evaluate the FBI’s overall actions in relation to Christopher Steele and his memos.

The president himself continues to cite the dossier as evidence that he has been treated unfairly by the investigation into Russian interference with American politics.

“I think they were spying on the Trump campaign. You can’t say it any better than that,” President Trump said on Mr. Hannity’s Fox show on April 25th.

It’s 12 degrees, the wind is biting, and Sara Creech heads out to feed her livestock. So much for the romance of farming. The wind gusts across frozen pastures, against the small metal barn where her chickens huddle, and through the open cab of her red Kubota four-wheeler, the back loaded with bales of hay.

She stops at a fence, and nine shaggy cattle lumber over. “Come on, buddy!” she calls out to the smallest, lagging behind. “Why so slow?” She tosses them clumps of hay, working with the quick efficiency of someone familiar with daily chores and undaunted by the cold.

“With farming there are a lot of really tough times,” she says. “It’s cold or it’s hot. It’s hard to make money. There are so many things to go wrong.... But I totally feel more at peace in farming than in anything I’ve done in my life. I feel I was made for farming.”

Ms. Creech is a former Air Force nurse and part of a growing effort across the United States to help veterans become farmers. This effort began a decade ago when a California farm manager named Michael O’Gorman assembled a small group of vets and started the Farmer Veteran Coalition. Today the FVC has more than 16,000 members across the country and an increasing number of state chapters. Meanwhile, hundreds of other organizations have joined the effort, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state agricultural universities. “We’ve been able to wake up and mobilize an entire industry,” Mr. O’Gorman says.

Ms. Creech has been both a beneficiary and a leader of this mobilization, a node in an expanding web of veteran farmers and would-be farmers. She has opened her small Indiana farm to them, hosting workshops, giving tours, and offering advice and encouragement. In 2017, she and two veterans at Purdue University started the Indiana chapter of the FVC. The chapter’s big project this year is setting up a small incubator farm where aspiring farmers can spend an extended period in residence.

“Just hearing her story is encouraging,” says Michael Mosier, a Marine veteran in eastern Indiana who has attended workshops on Ms. Creech’s farm. 

Ms. Creech didn’t start out to be a farmer. She grew up on the outskirts of Kalamazoo, Michigan, within sight of cornfields, but that’s as close as she got to agriculture. She went to college, became a nurse, and joined the Air Force. 

She served two years, some of it in a forward surgical team based in Qatar. Deployed with combat units, the team worked to keep wounded soldiers alive until they could be evacuated. In 2006, she left the Air Force with post-traumatic stress disorder. Five years later her husband, Lt. Col. Charles Creech, a pilot, was diagnosed with colon cancer and died. 

Ms. Creech tried to return to nursing. “I hated being in the hospital,” she says. “It brought back too many reminders, too much stress.” At the end of 2011, she bought an old 43-acre dairy farm west of Indianapolis and withdrew to the countryside.

That first spring she planted 50 fruit trees and hundreds of raspberries. At the time she wasn’t thinking of a commercial operation. Like many veterans, she simply yearned for a healthier and more peaceful life. Then she attended a farming seminar with other veterans. “I was really charged,” she says. “I thought, I’m going home and I’m going to start a farm.”

Most Indiana farms grow two things: corn and soybeans. Blue Yonder Organic Farm grows many things. Ms. Creech keeps ducks, turkeys, cattle, sheep, and hundreds of laying hens. She grows many kinds of fruits and vegetables, including shiitake mushrooms. In late winter she makes maple syrup. Diversity is the key, she says. She sells most of what she produces at farmers markets and through community-supported agriculture programs. Farming, she says, has helped her “reconnect to the community.”

Karen Norris/Staff

Ms. Creech and others say veterans are well suited to farming. They say military service instills the discipline and work ethic a farmer needs. Many vets, too, are looking for the sense of purpose that they find in growing crops or tending livestock. Farming also eases their adjustment to civilian life. For some, it can help heal emotional and psychological wounds.

“A lot of it has to do with the fact that you’re taking something like a seed and planting it in the ground and providing care for it and nursing it,” Ms. Creech says. “And something is being born out of that.”

Even as she worked to establish her farm, Ms. Creech was reaching out to her community – to veterans like Caroline Phillips. Ms. Phillips spent seven months at the farm, learning the ropes. Back home from Army service in Iraq, she experienced anxiety and depression. She found it hard to drive or even leave her house. Farming began to change that. “I knew I had plants and animals that relied on me to live,” she says.

At Ms. Creech’s farm she helped build hoop houses and prepare vegetable beds. She planted, weeded, and harvested. She fenced in a small pasture and started her own herd of milk goats. There was always something more to do.

After leaving the farm, Ms. Phillips went to Rome to study food and agriculture. She fell in love, got married, and came into possession of a small olive grove in southern Italy. Today she sells artisanal oil on Amazon. 

“My time with Sara taught me patience and humbled me,” she says. “It gave me purpose, a new mission. It gave me my life back.”

Some vets return home to established family operations, but most, like Ms. Creech, are starting from scratch.

Her days are long. On most nights, she’s on call for an insurance company, arranging medical care, and sometimes evacuations, for people abroad. “You get used to it,” she says. 

Meanwhile, there is new life to tend. On the upper floor of her farmhouse, seedlings are sprouting in racks under fluorescent lights – slender shoots of tomato, lettuce, pepper, spinach, and beet. Fifty chicks are living in her bathtub, tumbling over each other and filling the air with their shrill peeping. The U.S. Postal Service delivered them a few days earlier, when it was too cold for them in the barn.

“In the military it’s all about the bigger mission, being part of something bigger,” Ms. Creech says. “When you come out of the military, an office job just doesn’t have that higher purpose. Farming does.”

Three groups with links to agriculture 

UniversalGiving helps people give to and volunteer for top-performing charitable organizations around the world. All the projects below are vetted by UniversalGiving; 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the listed cause. 

• BRAC USA aims to empower people as well as communities dealing with poverty, illiteracy, disease, or social injustice. Take action: Financially support training for those who work with farmers to improve their harvests.

• Mexican Association for Rural and Urban Transformation promotes the renewal of marginalized communities in Mexico through various programs. Take action: Learn to organically produce food as a volunteer at an ecological center in Palenque, Mexico.

• The HALO Trust is the world’s oldest and largest humanitarian land mine clearance organization. Take action: Financially support the removal of mines in Kosovo, making families and farms safer. 

AP

People of various faiths join in a vigil for the Chabad of Poway synagogue shooting victims at the Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church in San Diego, Calif., April 27.

Last Saturday, just after a lone gunman killed one and injured two at a synagogue in Poway, California, any number of people rushed to repair the rupture of harmony in the community. Two Muslims and a Sikh quickly went to the scene to offer aid. A nearby Orthodox church opened its door to the Jewish victims. Another church organized a candlelight interfaith vigil. Someone set up a GoFundMe page to collect donations. Counselors were sent to the homes of the Chabad of Poway victims.

Such tales of good deeds may never be fully tallied but even these few make a point often reinforced after a terrorist attack. In tragedy, people act in ways to recover the absolute values that bind people together despite differences in faith, politics, race, or anything else that creates today’s Towers of Babel.

In their sorrow, people in Poway told of courageous heroes who sacrificed themselves, as Lori Gilbert-Kaye did in shielding Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein from a bullet at the Passover service.

In their fears, people who were once strangers expressed love through shared prayers, hugs, or simply promises to improve security for houses of worship. “We will walk through this tragedy with our arms around each other,” said Poway Mayor Steve Vaus.

The Poway shooting may not go down in history as a major terrorist attack. Yet its stories of recovery are memorable reminders of how people can curb hate-fueled violence by reaching for ideals such as the sanctity of life, the equality of all, and the infinite worth of each individual. The people of Poway are not retreating from their differences. Yet they have now converged by their acts of comfort and a new reliance on ideals that inspire. Their community harmony was not so much restored as they were restored to the norms of harmony.

“We are all partners in creation,” Rabbi Goldstein said after the shooting. The good deeds in Poway provided a rescue from tragedy. They were also a tender embrace of the goodness behind the deeds.