Elizabeth Bruenig | The Atlantic

A Blasphemous President

2026-04-14T15:16:00-04:00

Donald Trump’s recent outbursts at the pope—“WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” he said in one of his Truth Social posts—have renewed questions from observers about the president’s cognitive fitness and his apparently limitless capacity for blasphemy. His attacks also echoed old-fashioned fears about the Vatican as an insidious rival to American power. But more than anything, Trump’s post betrayed a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of who the pope is and what Catholics believe he is empowered to do.

The proximate cause of Trump’s ire was apparently a Saturday peace vigil the pope hosted at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, during which Leo—the first pope born in the United States—prayed for a kingdom of “dignity, understanding, and forgiveness,” to serve as “a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.” Although the pope did not mention Trump by name, his reference to delusions of omnipotence could be seen as a clear rebuke of the president’s hubris in launching war with no real explanation to the public and no clear end in sight.

Trump’s fury was predictable, but his assumption that Leo was merely offering political commentary revealed a lack of regard for Christian fundamentals. Pretensions to omnipotence that rival God’s unlimited powers underlie the faith’s narratives about sin: Satan fell from grace after trying to usurp God’s throne for himself; Adam and Eve conspired to steal divine wisdom reserved only for God. When Leo advised the faithful—in statements that were addressed to everyone, not just to the Trump administration—to reject the mistaken impression that they can assert boundless control over the world, he was advocating for spiritual humility, a foundational element of Christianity.

[Francis X. Rocca: The Iran war showed a new side of Pope Leo]

Perhaps no quality is more alien to Trump than humility, spiritual or otherwise. Trump reinforced this point by following his tirade against the pope with a Truth Social post containing an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, dressed in flowing robes and illuminated by a heavenly glow, ministering to a sick, bedridden man against a backdrop of soldiers and an American flag. Seemingly created to challenge the pope, this image handily insulted not just Catholics but Christians more broadly: Irreverently depicting oneself as Jesus is a fairly clear-cut instance of profaning the sacred. Even Trump’s religious backers have rushed to declare their sense of betrayal. Douglas Wilson, the Calvinist pastor who counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among his followers, promptly called the image “blasphemy.”

The most generous reading of Trump’s decision to post the image is not that he intentionally dreamed up a fresh heresy, but that he acted without actually thinking about Christianity and its tenets whatsoever—despite the fact that Republicans have spent decades building political alliances with conservative Christians. Likewise, when Trump inveighed against the pope, he probably did not consider what this might mean for Catholics, including those who have doggedly supported him—such as Vice President Vance, who will soon release a book about his own Catholic faith. Trump has managed to alienate many of the Christians who brought him to power by revealing the limits of his understanding, not just of Catholicism but of Christian theology writ large. (Perhaps chastened by this response, the president quickly deleted the image and insisted he thought it depicted him as a doctor.)

Catholics believe we are governed by a hierarchy that takes its mandate directly from the word of God. The pope’s role is not to impose his personal will upon the masses, but to teach the faithful how to follow Jesus in their own life. Apostolic succession—the idea that the witness of the 12 apostles has been passed down by bishops in an unbroken chain, linking today’s Catholic leaders with the original leaders of the Church—is a core Catholic doctrine, and it directly links the pope back to those who knew Jesus personally and carried on his teachings. Trump may jealously lash out at any authority that rivals his own, but for Catholics the pope is not a king but a servant—the servus servorum Dei, or servant of the servants of God.

Teaching the faithful is an element of that service. Biblical texts supply principles for leading good lives and making good decisions, but those lessons are often abstract, and life presents innumerable situations in which the proper Christian choice is not clear. Part of the Church’s role is to help Christians understand how the dictates of the faith translate into concrete ethical matters, and politics is merely a branch of applied ethics. Therefore the pope is not only entitled to comment on political matters but obligated to, and indeed popes always have. Pope Leo XIII, who served at the turn of the 20th century and whose pontifical name inspired that of the current pope, famously wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed industrialization by rejecting unbridled capitalism and defending the needs of workers. In 2003, Pope John Paul II condemned the Iraq War as a “defeat for humanity.” Pope Leo XIV’s remarks follow in that tradition.

[Read: The parable of the president]

Trump probably could not predict just how profoundly insulting his posts were to the Christian faithful and Catholics in particular, but the leaders of the Catholic Church in America, including those who have loyally supported Trump, instantly saw that the president had crossed a line. Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement saying that he was “disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father” and defending the pope as “the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.” Bishop Robert Barron, a longtime supporter who smiled indulgently at a White House Easter gathering when Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, favorably compared the president to Jesus, likewise condemned Trump’s outburst as “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” adding, “It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life.”

Pope Leo, for his part, responded to Trump’s tirade with composure. He told reporters aboard the papal plane yesterday that he does not fear the Trump administration and will not “shy away from announcing the message of the Gospel,” then invited all people to look “for ways to avoid war any time that’s possible.” He added that speaking out about the message of the Gospel “is what the Church works for.” This, he implied, is a battle that Trump won’t win.

Trump, accustomed to playing the bully to forge deals, is perhaps discovering that his tactics make little sense against a power that has little need for currying favor. The Vatican is a 2,000-year-old global institution with a divine remit. The 250-year-old United States is still only a footnote, and this president’s term is barely a thought.

The Evidence That God Exists

2026-03-26T12:48:00-04:00

I grew up in a faithful Methodist household in deep-red Texas during the George W. Bush years, when the political sway of evangelicals was at its zenith. At the same time, evangelists of a robust atheism—figures such as the biologist Richard Dawkins, the critic Christopher Hitchens, and the neuroscientist Sam Harris—toured the country offending salt-of-the-earth Americans with their contempt for religious belief. It was hard for me to ignore that a number of their assertions were clearly correct: Young-Earth creationism, for instance, instantly struck me as absurd when I first learned about it from a history teacher in my public junior-high school, who confidently told me that the world is only a few thousand years old.

That wasn’t what my family or church taught, but Christians who subscribed to those beliefs were suddenly ascendant, and their thinking colored the country’s religious landscape. Meanwhile, the New Atheists were making hay of the fact that such faithful misapprehensions about nature were easily disproved by scientific discovery. Though I continued to attend church as usual, I privately wondered whether the entire enterprise might be rooted in nothing more than a misunderstanding.

This steady diminishing of faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.

The unevenly paved lane where I waited was a quiet one-way street tucked away in a clutch of trees. I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things—midterm exams, campus-club minutiae—and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me. Before I could rationally account for what had happened, a verse of poetry from John Ashbery came to mind:

A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

That seemed to explain things perfectly, jarringly so. I was dazed in class as afternoon darkened to evening.

The latest evidence suggests that God most likely exists, argues a big recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré, a computer engineer, and Olivier Bonnassies, a Catholic author. Tracts that aim to prove the reality of God are hardly novel. What makes this endeavor unique, say the French writers behind God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, is the scientific nature of their work. Medieval monks toiling away at poetic meditations on the divine have their place, the authors allow, but their own arguments are meant to surpass mere abstract justifications for belief. Instead they assert that cutting-edge empirical proof observable in the natural world makes a firm case for God. With this, they strive for the ultimate alchemy, transforming faith into fact.

Bolloré and Bonnassies’s book is part of a burgeoning genre of apologetics that relies on relatively new scientific developments and theories, like quantum mechanics and cosmology, to make an ancient case. Their book, which has already sold more than 400,000 copies around the world, arrives at a time of both bloody religious conflict and rapidly collapsing religious belief, especially among the young and the highly educated. It joins other recent projects—including two new documentaries, The Story of Everything: The Science That Reveals a Mind Behind the Universe and Universe Designed—that propose the same tantalizing theory: that there is incontrovertible proof that a divine power created the cosmos, and that this evidence is mounting.

This is a seductive idea, which Bolloré and Bonnassies spend a painstaking 500 pages trying to support. Keen to reassure readers that a sophisticated and intelligent person might reasonably justify belief in God, the authors acknowledge how such a thing became unthinkable. They identify a series of scientific breakthroughs that helped undermine religious faith over the centuries, including Galileo’s heliocentrism, Newton’s clockwork universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the revelation that Earth is not thousands but billions of years old. But in drawing upon those exact fields of study to reverse the long-term march toward unbelief, the authors appear to have missed the mechanism by which those prior discoveries eroded faith: namely, that people had staked their belief on evidence that was overturned by subsequent data. There is always a risk that today’s proof will be undone by tomorrow’s evidence. Trusting in the existence of God largely involves deciding not to operate strictly within the confines of reason as we know it, a choice that usually emerges from sentiment rather than argument.

[Read: Can religion and science coexist?]

Bolloré and Bonnassies do not appear concerned. “We have conducted this work as a rigorous investigation,” they write. “We have always used rationality as our only compass.” Enough, they suggest, with emotional and mystical arguments for the presence of a divine power, or fanciful ideas such as young-Earth creationism; theirs is a project explicitly devoted to reason. Their “panoramic view” of the available evidence spans from the Big Bang, which they say implies an act of creation by demonstrating an absolute beginning to the universe, to the unlikely “fine-tuning” of the cosmos to create the conditions for flourishing life on Earth. Their book includes “one hundred essential citations from leading scientists” across multiple disciplines who have either allowed for the existence of God or asserted it outright. This includes Robert Wilson, an astronomer and a Nobel Prize winner in physics, who is quoted observing that the Big Bang theory makes “the question of creation” unavoidable. Luc Jaeger, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, likewise states that “science practiced in a sincere quest for the truth brings man closer to God.”

To imagine that one might find traces of the divine strewn throughout the universe, or that earthly methods of inquiry might uncover some of those signs, isn’t ridiculous. But this latest round of arguments in favor of intelligent design seems aimed mostly at establishing that God could or should exist within the rational frameworks we already employ. This is both weak grounds for belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.

This was not always apparent to me. I came to this understanding through trial, error, and my own brushes with scientific rebuttals to the existence of God.

After that brisk autumn afternoon, life went on unremarkably, though I continued to mull over what the experience could mean. That it meant something at all was another strong intuition that I could not entirely account for. There were plenty of ordinary and dismissive explanations for what had happened, all related to the vagaries of the brain. Surely I had just been tired, bleary-eyed, suggestible, available—highly sensitized, in other words, to typical seasonal splendor. That made sense to me, but I didn’t believe it. The natural beauty wasn’t the cause of what I had felt, but rather an invitation to pay attention to what I felt.

[From the July 1915 issue: Scientific faith]

I began to ask myself what it would cost me intellectually if I were to choose to metabolize the experience as it had occurred to me. That decision came with several implications. If God is real, then perhaps other things—goodness, righteousness, beauty—that are usually dismissed as matters of subjective experience might also be objectively real. That prospect was much more agreeable to me than another consequential implication of electing to believe: that, as the New Atheists had so vigorously argued, theism meant putting aside any pretensions I had of sophistication or intellect.

As I explored this problem, I spent hours in my college library reading Saint Augustine, a foundational philosopher and theologian. Here I encountered another strange sensation: Every word I read felt like remembering something I had once known but somehow forgotten. This recalled an observation of Plato’s, who argued that the soul contains lost memories of the divine—that we are born knowing the truth of the universe, but forget it all when the mundanities of life get in the way. Maybe he had a point, I thought. And maybe the Christian Neoplatonists, Augustine among them, had some points as well. I contemplated this for a while before I realized that there wasn’t any sense in debating it with myself anymore. I knew what I felt, so I gave up and chose to believe.

I’m still sorting through the ramifications. In my years of working out exactly what I believe, I have been relieved to learn that faith does not in fact demand the surrender of logic and vigorous intellectual inquiry—a case Bolloré and Bonnassies convincingly bolster with numerous testimonials from award-winning scientists. Still, to trust in the existence of God is to accept both the appearance and the possibility of being naive or delusional. No accumulation of promising developments in our analytical understanding of the world can delay confrontation with that essential fact. Having faith is a vulnerable thing.

Bolloré and Bonnassies’s arguments are more likely to shore up the faith of wavering believers than to win new converts. This itself is no small thing. The authors may even be right about the growing evidence for the existence of God secreted away in the latest science. But their approach has a history of upsets. The only way to inoculate belief against that cycle of disruption is to treat faith as a decision that transcends scientific proof.

This Is How a Child Dies of Measles

2026-02-12T15:30:00-05:00

This story is based on extensive reporting and interviews with physicians, including those who have cared directly for patients with measles.

The birthday-party invitation said “siblings welcome,” which means you can bring your 11-month-old son while your husband is out of town. You arrive a little disheveled and a little late. Your 5-year-old daughter rushes into the living room, and you make your way to the kitchen, wearing your son in a sling. You find a few moms around a table arrayed with plates of fruit, hummus, celery sticks, and carrots—no gluten, no nuts, no Red 40. These parents care about avoiding pesticides, screen time, and processed foods, and you do too.

It’s a classic kids’ party: Tears and lemonade are spilled; mud and cake get smeared into the rug; confetti balloons are popped one by one, showering elated children in rainbow-paper flakes. Sunbeams through the windows illuminate floating dust motes—and, imperceptibly, microdroplets of mucus carrying the measles virus, expelled from an infected but asymptomatic child who is hopping and laughing among the others. Your daughter breathes that same air, inhaling the virus directly into her respiratory tract.

The infected aerosolized droplets will linger in the air for hours, which is partly why measles is among the most contagious diseases in the world. The virus infects roughly 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed to it; the infected can then, in turn, infect a dozen to several hundred people each, depending on where they are and what they’re doing. Breakthrough cases are possible among the vaccinated, but they tend to be rare, relatively mild, and less likely to spread. A single dose of the MMR vaccine is 93 percent effective at preventing infection; two doses are 97 percent effective. Among the unvaccinated, one in five people infected with measles in the United States will require hospitalization, and roughly two out of every 1,000 infected children will die of complications, regardless of medical care.

Your daughter behaves normally over the next week while the virus slowly spreads inside her, infecting immune cells that carry it to the lymph nodes, where it replicates and spreads at a rapid pace. Your daughter is at school cutting alphabet shapes out of paper when the virus enters her bloodstream. But she doesn’t feel anything until she seems to come down with a cold—dry cough, runny nose, itchy and watery eyes—about a week after the party, because the virus has multiplied and descended upon her lungs, kidneys, tonsils, and spleen, down to the marrow of her bones. When she starts running a fever, your mind turns to the logistics of taking off work while she’s home from school. You’ve witnessed enough colds as a mother to not be worried about this one. You feel some confidence in your instincts when it comes to your child’s health, and you’ve grown skeptical of medical interventions. It’s why you and your husband decided to wait to vaccinate your kids, though you’re a little conflicted about it. You’re not an extremist. You’re open to new information. You can always change your mind, you reason. You’re just weighing the evidence.

Ten days out from the party, your daughter’s cold has worsened. Her throat is sore, her appetite is low, and she’s running a fever that sometimes ticks up to 104. Colds can be rough. You plant her on the couch with a blanket and put Bluey on the TV while she drifts in and out of sleep. You coax her to eat by offering ice cream, which she says feels good on her throat. She’s a tough kid, but you can tell she’s miserable—there are circles under her eyes as she complains of a headache, then grimaces when she coughs. You can feel with a tender touch that the glands in her neck are swollen and uncomfortable. Her fever still hasn’t dropped. After a few days, you experience the first tug of serious concern. On the phone, your mom suggests that it might be COVID, or maybe the flu. Push fluids, she says, and keep an eye on it. You put your daughter to sleep in your bed, in case she needs you in the night.

[Read: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade]

The next morning, you lay your hand on her forehead, and the heat of her skin sends a ripple of unease through you. The measles virus is attacking the cells that line her lungs and suppressing her immune system, rendering her vulnerable to secondary infections. You step away to feed the baby and put him in clean clothes, but then rush back when you hear her calling you in a strained, croaking voice, her vocal cords swollen and thick with mucus. You find her lying in bed with her hand over her eyelids and tear tracks on her temples. She asks you to close the curtains because the sunlight is hurting her eyes—the virus has triggered a case of conjunctivitis. In all of the colds you’ve nursed her through, she has never complained of pain triggered by light. When you rouse her to give her Tylenol, you see that the whites of her eyes are reddened, and the bases of her eyelashes sticky. You carefully clean her eye area with a damp paper towel, kiss her nose, then leave her to sleep it off.

While the kids are napping, you tap a list of your daughter’s symptoms into Google and find a slew of diseases that more or less match up, because fevers, coughs, and sore throats are common to many illnesses. You post about it to the parents’ group, where a few moms with ill kids offer solidarity, and others commiserate over similar episodes with their own children. One woman says it’s time to call the doctor. You’ve had friction with your pediatrician over vaccinations, but this mom may be right. Later that day, when your little girl is curled up on the couch with a cold chocolate-milk protein shake, you go to take her temperature and find that her face is dotted with a spotty red rash descending from her hairline. The virus has infected capillaries in her skin, which typically happens three to five days after the symptoms start, but you don’t know that. It doesn’t hurt, she says, though it’s itchy. Her fever remains high and unrelenting. You pull out your phone and type chicken pox symptoms into your browser, hoping that you’ve found a viable culprit. It sort of fits, so you hold off on calling the doctor.

But her condition does not improve over the next couple of days. Her cough wracks her whole body, rounding her delicate bird shoulders. She does not sleep well. And as you lift up her pajama top to check her rash one morning, you see that her breathing is labored, shadows pooling between her ribs when she sucks in air. You suffer an icy moment of realization: This is a medical crisis. What you will learn later is that the tiny air sacs inside her lungs have become breeding grounds for the virus, and the inflammation generated by her immune response is inhibiting oxygen from reaching her bloodstream. You don’t want to worry your daughter, so you try to sound calm when you call the pediatrician and describe her symptoms at a rapid clip. The receptionist responds gently, types swiftly, and then pauses. Are your children vaccinated? she asks. Her tone is flat and inscrutable, but you detect an undercurrent of judgment. You wince and tell her the truth. No, you say, no vaccines. She puts you on hold. While you wait, you take your son out of his high chair and wipe his runny nose with his bib.

The receptionist is back. She asks if you can be at the office within the hour. In an even, professional voice, she gives you a number to call as soon as you arrive, but tells you to stay in your car. The doctor, she says, will come to you.

You’re there in 30 minutes, unshowered and wearing sweatpants, with your daughter bundled up and shivering in her pajamas and your son fussing in his car seat. You call the office. From the car, you cannot see the sign on the pediatrician’s office door instructing patients with a list of symptoms like your daughter’s not to come inside. Flashes of the pandemic play back as you see the pediatrician and two nurses approaching in the rearview mirror wearing N95 masks. It hits you: This is not the flu. This is not chicken pox. This is serious.

You twist around in the front seat to watch the pediatrician as she leans into your car and begins her exam, asking you questions about symptoms and timing. A nurse takes swabs from the nose and throat, which will be sent for testing by the local public-health authority, then clips a pulse oximeter onto your daughter’s fingertip. The doctor leans in to lay the cold diaphragm of her stethoscope against your daughter’s back. The doctor tells her to breathe. You tell her she’s doing a great job, and reach back to pet her knee. The doctor hears crackling with every breath your daughter takes, as air moves through the fluid trapped in her lungs. The oximeter reveals that her blood is only 90 percent saturated with oxygen, well below the healthy range of 95 to 100 percent. The pediatrician tells you to drive directly to the hospital. Your daughter is in pain and bewildered and afraid, but you tell her everything is okay; you’re just going to see a different doctor. Your son is fussing in his car seat. You try to keep your voice even, though your heart is pounding.

While you drive a little too fast to the emergency room, the pediatrician’s office calls the hospital warning them that there is a suspected measles patient on the way, and then places a mandatory call to the public-health authority notifying them of your daughter’s condition. Once you arrive, things happen quickly. Because measles is what researchers call a high-consequence infectious disease, health-care professionals undertake a series of strict protocols to limit its spread. You and your daughter are fitted with masks before you are brought in through a side door to avoid contaminating the waiting room, and then herded into an isolated negative-pressure room designed to prevent the aerosolized virus from traveling into the hall. After hospital workers whisk your daughter away for an emergency X-ray, they will shut down the areas of the radiology department for six hours to carry out decontamination measures, a thorough process protracted by the virus’s capacity to cling to walls and linger in the air. While your daughter gets her scan, you try to soothe your son, whose forehead begins to feel worryingly hot to you.

Your daughter looks so small in her hospital bed, her face fitted with an oxygen mask. Nurses collect blood and urine; you hold the cup as she shivers on the toilet, then stroke her hair as the needle spears her vein. When you’ve regained some composure a couple of hours later, a doctor comes to speak with you. This is the first time anyone has used the word measles. The doctor tells you that your daughter has pneumonia, a complication arising in roughly 6 percent of measles cases, though some researchers suspect that the actual rate may be higher. There is no cure for viral pneumonia from measles, but the hospital will provide supportive care to treat the symptoms, including her scalding fever and rash. The doctor doesn’t tell you then that pneumonia is the most common cause of death in measles patients. You will learn that later on.

The swabs taken by the pediatrician test positive for measles, and your child’s case becomes a data point in an outbreak. Each measles patient can infect a dozen or more unvaccinated people, and cases in your community are multiplying rapidly. A public-health official comes to gather information for contact tracing, and asks you to think of everyone your child has interacted with in the past couple of weeks. You think of her class at school, the grocery store, the car wash where you wait indoors, the birthday party.

Articles will soon appear in the local newspaper asking people who may have visited the post office or Target or the indoor playground on various days during various time frames to call the public-health office. Your child’s school will send out emails asking that parents keep unvaccinated children at home for the next three weeks, the virus’s maximum incubation period. As the outbreak spreads, local pediatricians will offer the MMR vaccine to children younger than a year old, because unvaccinated infants are especially vulnerable to the disease. The exponential growth in measles cases in the area attracts media attention, recriminations, and questions about blame.

Not that you notice. You practically live in the intensive-care unit as your daughter slowly recovers. When they discharge her a week later, they send instructions for at-home care, including hydration, decent air humidity, and plenty of rest. The disease will leave her with a lingering cough and occasional wheezing, and it will take months for her lungs to fully heal. She will fall behind in school and need tutoring to catch up, but all of these complications will seem trivial after you’ve come so close to something so dark that you can barely contemplate it. In the meantime, and until her rash heals, your daughter’s doctor insists that she remain under quarantine at home—along with your son.

Given your son’s fever, runny nose, and evident discomfort, you feel a grim sense of resignation when his measles test comes back positive. You are, however, alarmed when you discover there’s nothing his doctors can do about it. Had he been seen by a doctor within 72 hours of his first exposure, they could have given him a prophylactic dose of the MMR vaccine to protect him from infection. But it’s too late for that now. And you couldn’t have known then, anyway—when he was exposed, your daughter wasn’t symptomatic yet.

You feel uneasy caring for your son at home, having witnessed what the infection did to your daughter. But he is medically stable for now, and isolating him at home will limit the spread of the disease. You anxiously wonder whether you’ll know when his needs turn critical, particularly because he is too young to tell you how he feels. He cries inconsolably, unlike your daughter, and sometimes screams. After his rash appears, you notice when he wakes from a nap that pus has drained from his ear onto his crib sheets. You will learn later that an opportunistic bacterial infection has taken advantage of your son’s suppressed immunity by setting up in his middle ear, causing inflammation and fluid buildup to burst his eardrum. You call the pediatrician’s office, and they patch you through to the doctor. You wait for her in the same spot in the parking lot as last time. She diagnoses your son with a severe ear infection and prescribes antibiotics. On a superstitious level, you think this means nothing else bad can happen.

But within a few days, your son’s fever will spike as high as 105 degrees. The virus will break through his underdeveloped blood-brain barrier and begin attacking his brain matter directly, leading to primary measles encephalitis. The condition is rare among older children but more common in infants, who are also more likely to die from measles. You will panic and call an ambulance when he slumps over unconscious on the floor, and another swarm of doctors and nurses will descend upon your child and whisk him away deep into the building while you trail behind as closely as you can. Like your daughter, your son will need supportive care, but he will also need close monitoring of the pressure inside his skull. While your husband stays home with your daughter, you keep vigil at the hospital for as long as you’re allowed, sometimes sleeping in the car to avoid missing any time squeezing his little hand. Days pass, then a week, two weeks. The nurses are kind. There are now several other children in the same hospital unit suffering from measles complications, some of them tethered to ventilators.

Somehow, your son recovers well enough for you to take him home. He has lost some of his hearing, but the doctors say that he could make a full recovery in a matter of months. It is hard to describe the gift this is, the relief you feel. Most children infected with measles will survive the virus, but 30 percent of cases lead to complications, and it is nearly impossible to predict which patients will be affected.

[Katherine J. Wu: The only thing that will turn measles back]

Your children seem so fragile as they recover over the next year, but then the four of you are back to your usual adventures. For roughly eight years, you will believe that your family made it through this crisis without suffering a tragedy. You marvel at your good fortune, and feel a rush of gratitude the day your daughter returns to school and life resumes its normal rhythm. But years later, when your baby is in fourth grade, he will begin struggling with subjects he had once mastered. His teachers will ask to speak with you about how he is suddenly acting out in uncharacteristic ways.

You will not think of his measles infection when he begins suffering muscle spasms in his arms and hands, nor when his pediatrician recommends that you see a neurologist. You realize you have entered a new nightmare when nurses affix metal electrodes to your son’s scalp with a cold conductive paste to perform an electroencephalogram to measure his brain waves. As the neurologist examines the results, she will note the presence of Radermecker complexes: periodic spikes in electrical activity that correlate with the muscle spasms that have become disruptive. She will order a test of his cerebrospinal fluid to confirm what she suspects: The measles never really left your son. Instead, the virus mutated and spread through the synapses between his brain cells, steadily damaging brain tissue long after he seemed to recover.

You will be sitting down in an exam room when the neurologist delivers the diagnosis of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a rare measles complication that leads to irreversible degeneration of the brain. There are treatments but no cure, the neurologist will tell you. She tells you that your son will continue to lose brain function as time passes, resulting in seizures, severe dementia, and, in a matter of two or three years, death. You look at your son, the glasses you picked out with him, the haircut he chose from the wall at the barbershop, the beating heart you gave him. You imagine your husband’s face when you break the news, the talks you will have with your daughter, your mother, your in-laws—though there is no way to prepare for what is coming. And you know that you, too, will never recover.

It Was Too Easy for Her to Kill Herself

2026-02-04T16:50:00-05:00

Updated at 1:50 p.m. ET on March 15, 2026.

The four-star Hotel deLuxe in Portland, Oregon, features a soaring lobby with a gilded ceiling that drips with chandeliers. Eileen Mihich, a 31-year-old woman from nearby Beaverton, checked in on the afternoon of March 6, 2025. Two days later, a hotel employee named Stephen Jones noticed that Mihich had failed to check out at the appointed time and went to her eighth-floor room to investigate. No one answered, and the room was silent behind the door, so he let himself in. He found Mihich dead on the bed, with purpling skin. Jones immediately called the police, who noted the empty pill bottles at Mihich’s bedside, along with a pamphlet: “Step-by-Step Instructions for Taking Aid in Dying Medications.”

Mihich had told her family that she was debilitated by inner suffering and was interested in a medically assisted death. But her suicide still shocked her two closest relatives: her cousin Sarah (who asked to be referred to by her first name, to protect her privacy) and aunt Veronica Torina. Sarah and Torina told me that they had striven to be sources of love and stability in Mihich’s harrowing life. Nearly a year on, they are still trying to solve the mystery of her death.

After Sarah and Torina heard the news about Mihich, they went to the hotel to pick up some of her belongings, including a backpack with library-rental DVDs of Matilda and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as well as a book on spirituality. At the medical examiner’s office weeks later, they received her phone, her wallet, and pharmacy receipts for prescription drugs commonly used to end the lives of patients with untreatable illnesses.

They also learned that Mihich’s body bore no signs of illness. Mihich had been suffering, but she had not been on the verge of death.

Medical assistance in dying—a euphemism for physician-enabled suicide—has been gaining legislative ground in jurisdictions around the country. Twelve states and Washington, D.C., allow doctors to prescribe lethal dosages of medications to patients with terminal illnesses, and a new law takes effect in New York this year. Most Americans now favor laws that allow doctors to assist patients who want to die, and their numbers have grown over time, according to Gallup. In Canada, where the practice has been legal since 2016, physician-assisted suicide now accounts for about one in 20 deaths.

[From the September 2025 issue: Canada is killing itself]

For both advocates and opponents of this medically and culturally sanctioned form of suicide, Mihich’s story is a nightmare. The policy debate over medical assistance in dying generally concerns statutory changes, but new laws are encouraging a shift in social norms. When some people in severe distress imagine a peaceful end to what feels like unbearable pain, the availability of medical assistance in dying may shape their thinking, and current safeguards do not seem sufficient to prevent tragic outcomes.

Torina suspects that her niece would still be alive had it been just a little harder for her to secure lethal medication. “She didn’t really want to die, but she felt that she was powerless to create a life worth living. She mentioned that to me on more than one occasion,” Torina told me. Studies show that even minor barriers to suicide, such as selling pills in blister packs and limiting the amount of analgesics that can be sold over the counter, may deter people from ending their life, perhaps because they introduce delays into what can be a rash act. Shortly before her death, Mihich had ordered eye shadow online, which arrived after she was gone. “She was showing signs that she did want to live,” Torina said.

Mihich had been mentally ill for a long time, her relatives said, and she had needed many things that life did not supply her. An only child of negligent parents, Mihich identified with the Roald Dahl character Matilda, a precocious schoolgirl who learns to fend for herself against sometimes cruel adults. Mihich’s parents had screaming fights in front of her, Sarah and Torina recalled, and Mihich alleged that her father, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had raped her when she was a teenager. (Mihich did not pursue the allegations in court, and her father did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Her mother declined to comment.)

After bouncing from foster home to foster home, Mihich was 15 when she fled her last foster parent and arrived on Torina’s doorstep, asking to be taken in. Torina obliged. Mihich’s psychiatrist eventually diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and borderline-personality disorder, the symptoms of which were so severe that she struggled to hold down a job or a home. She vacated one apartment because, Torina recalled, she felt that it emanated negative energy.

Mihich’s relatives said that she often refused to take the medication prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder, and that she nursed semi-delusional beliefs about her capacity to heal herself. She lived on Social Security Disability Insurance and was occasionally homeless. Mihich sometimes told her family about mysterious trauma situated in her womb. Torina wondered whether this was Mihich’s way of expressing the depredations she had suffered as a woman.

Disappointed with mainstream health care, Mihich sought help from energy healers, spiritualists, and other alternative-medicine practitioners and entrepreneurs, who regularly supported her aversion to psychiatric medications, according to Sarah and Torina. All the while, Mihich repeatedly told her family that her pain was so great, she did not want to live. “She would tell me often that she couldn’t do it anymore,” Torina said. “She was too traumatized and broken” to keep on living.

Sarah and Torina understood why Mihich had decided to die. Once her toxicology report came back, they also knew which medications she had used to kill herself. Many of the drugs prescribed for medical assistance in dying are not commonly thought of as vulnerable to abuse. But when death is a possibility, minor errors can have catastrophic consequences.

To understand just how Mihich had secured these medications, Sarah turned to Mihich’s phone. Reviewing her incoming and outgoing calls in the days leading up to her death, Sarah found that Mihich had been in touch with multiple hospice coordinators and loan agencies, as well as a Washington State pharmacist who runs a compounding pharmacy out of a gift shop. Posing as a California family-practice physician under an assumed name, Mihich requested a prescription order form over email, then completed the paperwork and emailed it back—a method of submitting prescriptions that is illegal in Washington and elsewhere, in most cases. She then asked that the pharmacist coordinate via text with her “patient,” and gave her own phone number.

Ultimately Mihich was able to carry out her fraud with publicly available information and relative ease. Unlike conventional pharmacies, which sell only FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, compounding pharmacies are able to sell customized formulations that are not FDA tested and approved.

[From the June 2023 issue: The outer limits of liberalism]

Compounding pharmacies are the only places capable of dispensing medications that allow for a more peaceful death, as this involves mixing various sedatives, painkillers, and muscle relaxants into something more easily ingested and absorbed. Yet few pharmacists agree to supply these drugs, largely for ethical reasons. Jess Kaan, a Washington-based doctor who works with people seeking end-of-life care, told me that many of her patients have trouble finding a pharmacy that sells this medication, which can make such transactions particularly lucrative for those that do. The drugs Mihich bought cost a little over $2,500, based on her prescription forms, which she likely paid for out of pocket, given regulations that ban the use of federal funds such as Medicaid to cover costs associated with physician-assisted suicide.

To better understand how a pharmacy could have accepted her cousin’s suspicious and invalid prescription, Sarah filed a police report in May. This investigation is ongoing. The pharmacist who supplied Mihich with the drugs that killed her did not respond to requests for comment.

Sarah and Torina knew that Mihich was suffering emotionally and that she had been seeking more permanent relief. But they had assumed that Mihich’s talk of suicide was a way for her to express her misery, not something she was actively pursuing. Torina said they had assumed that Mihich’s aversion to suffering “any more pain” would deter her from making good on any plans. For example, they knew that she had considered starving herself, and that she had acquired a gun explicitly to shoot herself, but that she’d had trouble following through with either method. (They are not sure how she bought the gun.)

Instead, Mihich turned to a suicide approach that is advertised as a dignified way to alleviate pain. Mihich likely did not know that the drugs used to medically induce death do not necessarily guarantee a peaceful exit. In Oregon, where medical assistance in dying has been legal for nearly 30 years, the state’s Health Authority reported in 2024 that the drugs can cause side effects, including seizures, regurgitation, and regaining consciousness after an initial sedation. We can’t know for sure what Mihich experienced, because she died alone.

What we do know is that Mihich found a network of support in her pursuit of a medically assisted death. Her relatives discovered a message on her phone left by a representative of a naturopathic health company called Temple Natural Health, who explained that she had found “a way forward” after discussing Mihich’s case with a hospice-care organization called A Sacred Passing. The message did not include details, and the company did not respond to requests for comment. A representative of A Sacred Passing confirmed that the organization had responded to Mihich’s request for help in seeking medical assistance in dying with “a list of things to do” to get legal medical support—“the ways to reach out and locations to call.” The representative added that she stayed on the phone with Mihich because she sensed that the caller was struggling and needed someone to talk to, but that she didn’t think Mihich would qualify for a medically assisted death.

Eager to bring attention to the loopholes and lapses in judgment that helped end Mihich’s life, Sarah and Torina reached out to a number of organizations that advocate for medical assistance in dying, including the nonprofit Death With Dignity, but received no response. They had more luck when they contacted Aging With Dignity, a nonprofit that advocates against the practice and offers resources to people facing end-of-life problems. This group has worked with Sarah and Torina to create a video about Mihich that helps share her story.

Mihich’s method of suicide was clearly illegal in Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere in the United States, where medical assistance in death is available only to adult patients who are terminally ill, have six months or less to live, and are mentally capable of making their own health-care decisions. But her ability to access fatal drugs is concerning, as the spread of laws allowing medical assistance in dying makes it likely that incidents like this will happen again.

Mihich’s case also raises pressing questions about whether access to an assisted death should extend to people with persistent and severe mental illness—a category of disease that may not be terminal but can be debilitatingly painful. Patients who are suffering from severe psychiatric disorders can already legally seek medical help to end their life elsewhere, including in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and, beginning as soon as 2027, Canada. Yet establishing which psychiatric patients are worthy of this assistance has proved complicated. Authorities in Canada are weighing the case of Claire Brosseau, a 48-year-old woman with severe mental illness who hopes to secure medical help in ending her life but whose own psychiatrists are split over whether her illness is indeed incurable. Many of the country’s top psychiatric groups warn that there is no empirical standard for determining whether a mental-health condition is irremediable.

Advocates who oppose medically assisted suicide—perhaps because they don’t believe the government should play any role in these decisions—may take comfort in the fact that state laws permitting the practice do not currently consider unbearable pain to be a qualifying condition on its own. This makes American laws less vulnerable to arguments that medical assistance in dying should be available for all kinds of suffering, including from psychiatric illness. Yet it may soon be hard to keep these laws narrow, given the logical implications of a growing public acceptance of physician-assisted suicide, which is largely based on the idea that people who want to end their life should not suffer needlessly.

For some, Mihich’s story offers a salient lesson about the importance of greater oversight and tighter regulation of lethal drugs. Others may see in Mihich’s suicide a glimpse of things to come.

This article has been updated to clarify that, according to Eileen Mihich's family, Mihich's pain was psychological rather than physical.

A Breakdown of the American Idea

2026-01-28T16:52:00-05:00

Masked federal officers have now killed two U.S. citizens in the streets of Minneapolis. In both cases, the Trump administration stood by the officers, claiming that the Americans they shot to death were interfering with law enforcement, which has never been a capital offense. These events have set a dark precedent. Americans can no longer assume that they can exercise their established rights to protest and observe public law enforcement without punishment, which raises questions about the exercise of other historically attested rights. If we are not as safe from state violence as we thought we were, then the very foundations of the country seem shaky, and we may be witnessing a breakdown of the American idea.

The United States was founded as an experiment in propositional citizenship, the idea that a nation could be bound not by race, ethnicity, or language but by fidelity to a set of principles—liberty, equality, self-governance, and inalienable rights. In an address in 1858, Abraham Lincoln reminded his audience that although many Americans had been in the country for only a short time, having arrived from Germany, Ireland, France, Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere in Europe, they still found “themselves our equals in all things.” These new citizens might not have been able to trace their roots to the country’s early history, Lincoln said, but they were fully American thanks to their belief in the moral sentiments embedded in “that old Declaration of Independence.” That, Lincoln said, is the “electric cord” that binds “the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together”—a bind that should last “as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

[Quinta Jurecic: ICE’s No. 1 ally]

The very fact that Americanness is transmissible via principles and ideas is a problem for those who prefer the simple profundity of the bonds that Lincoln called “blood of the blood” and “flesh of the flesh.” Such tangible essentialism can give groups a concentrated sense of purpose and meaning—and may be coupled with a powerful urge to persecute members of out-groups. Some on the right prefer to see the country in thinly veiled racial terms, as if white people—or “heritage Americans,” as some on the right have lately classified Americans with familial links to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars—are somehow more American than members of other races. Recent immigrants are naturally inferior Americans, if they are considered American at all. This is a silly gesture at indigeneity. Its absurdity was recently underscored by ICE’s confusing capture of five Native Americans in Minneapolis. But it also demonstrates an urgent desire for a mystical, blood-and-soil connection to the country that is both more concrete and more exclusive than some intellectual “cord.”

A fundamental weakness of the American idea is that, as with any idea, if people stop believing in it, its power evaporates. This has happened before, as in the secession of the Confederacy, and it may be happening now, with the rise of a political movement that sees cherished American rights and premises as nuisances. Demagogues gain power in democracies precisely because they can harness and exploit popular feelings of anger and discontent, and then flout checks on their power by dismissing any precedent born of principles they reject.

But an essential lesson of the backlash against Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security’s paramilitary campaign in Minnesota, is that the American idea is durable—precisely because it belongs to all Americans equally, and because it has inspired Americans to fight to defend it, even if this means resisting the government.

[Adam Serwer: Minnesota proved MAGA wrong]

As ICE and Border Patrol agents descended on Minnesota, volunteers from the community banded together in remarkably short order to exercise their right to track and observe agents as they traveled the streets and snatched people from cars and homes. Volunteers have also organized grocery deliveries and court escorts for neighbors facing the threat of capture and deportation. Federal agents have attempted to frustrate these efforts, but their targets have proved too resourceful, too careful—too determined—to be deterred.

The Declaration of Independence was meant to signal the rejection of tyranny and the empowerment of the individual to resist undue coercion. That principle, so essential to the American idea, may soon end the occupation of Minnesota, but not before two brave individuals lost their lives.

In a clear sign of the operation’s failure, Donald Trump has ordered the Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino out of the state and back to his prior post, where he is expected to retire soon. Perhaps this is a turning point, a moment that forces the Trump administration to lead more cautiously, less aggressively—and perhaps not. America was born from a collection of ideas about who we are and what we believe, but the practical results are still playing out. These principles will survive only if they persist in the American imagination, and only if Americans remain willing to fight for them. It’s too soon to say whether we can salvage every beautiful thing imagined by America’s Founders from every weakness they bequeathed.

This Will Happen Again

2026-01-10T06:00:00-05:00

On an unseasonably warm Wednesday in Minneapolis, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot a woman in the face. The many eyes of our everyday panopticon recorded the event from multiple angles. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mom of three, had stopped her maroon SUV on a snowy street crawling with ICE officials. According to eyewitness reports, multiple men in masks shouted conflicting orders at her: At least one apparently demanded that she exit her vehicle and tried to open her door; another told her to drive away. Good seems to have moved slowly as she tried to maneuver around the agents surrounding her car. After appearing to first wave for someone to move, she reversed slightly and turned away from the agents to continue down the street. An ICE agent who appears to have been knocked back by her front bumper responded by shooting into her vehicle, and shot again as the SUV, suddenly without a conscious driver, careered into a parked car ahead.

Chaos erupted. A man announcing himself as a physician ran toward the scene to attempt to render first aid, but an ICE agent commanded him to step back. When emergency medical workers finally arrived on foot 15 minutes later, they clumsily pulled Good’s body from the driver’s seat, leaving behind a blood-soaked airbag. Onlookers immediately rose up in anger and outrage, screaming at the agents and shouting profanities. One man howled “Murderer! Murderer!” over and over again. Good’s partner, who was near the SUV, can be heard saying through sobs that Good was her wife, that their 6-year-old was at school, and that they were new in town, didn’t know anybody, had no one to call for help.

The alarm was warranted. Everyone on the scene had witnessed the crossing of a crucial line in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation project: ICE had just killed an American citizen on American soil.

The administration has since declared that the agent “is protected by absolute immunity,” whatever that means, a signal of unconditional support for an agency bloated with thousands of new, heavily armed, and minimally trained recruits, deployed around the country to help achieve Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million immigrants a year. Events such as Good’s death set the stage for yet more lethal confrontations, which the administration can be trusted to defend with the same specious pretext. What is now overt, in a way that it hadn’t been Wednesday morning, is that these agents are at war with the public, and have been for some time.

[Read: How ICE lost its guardrails]

Good’s killing was the culmination of months of roiling tensions between the Department of Homeland Security and the communities it routinely invades to round up people for summary deportation. Having more than doubled ICE’s workforce in a matter of months, DHS has been fretting theatrically about how these agents are risking “their lives to remove the worst of the worst.” In retrospect, those concerns now seem like threats—a preemptive excuse for maximum violence.

The Trump administration instantly characterized Good’s killing as a matter of self-defense on the part of the ICE agent, whom The Minnesota Star Tribune has identified as Jonathan Ross, a 10-year agency veteran and member of its Special Response Team. Faced with footage of the incident Wednesday night, Trump offered the MAGA gloss on what took place: “She ran him over.” In fact, videos show that Ross remained upright.

In a press conference, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Good had been killed because she had been “stalking and impeding” ICE agents all day, and that she had tried to “weaponize her vehicle” in an act of “domestic terrorism.” By Thursday, when White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt presented the administration’s official line, the story had grown more baroque. Leavitt maintained that Good was part of a “larger, sinister, left-wing movement that has spread across our country, where our brave men and women of federal law enforcement are under organized attack.” Thus Ross, as a target of a dangerous conspiracy, had merely been operating in self-defense.

In the administration’s closest brush with acknowledging wrongdoing, J. D. Vance mentioned to reporters Thursday that Ross had been involved in an incident with a vehicle several months ago, during which he was dragged for 100 yards and subsequently required numerous stitches: “So you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?” These remarks could reasonably be taken to imply that Ross’s decision to shoot Good was an emotional overreaction based on past trauma, but then Vance pivoted: Ross “deserves a debt of gratitude.” In other words, even if Ross did act in error, Good’s death still bears the administration’s stamp of approval.

[Listen: Federal agents are violating the rights of Americans]

Protesters in Minneapolis have since flooded the streets in the thousands, and ICE agents have responded by apprehending some, shoving others to the ground, and spraying chemical irritants in their faces.

These incidents have ignited mass demonstrations nationwide, in which protesters have wailed “Shame” and “Murder,” banged drums, screeched from metal whistles, and hoisted signs declaring what is no longer deniable: ICE kills.

It therefore felt grimly inevitable when the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement Thursday night confirming that Border Patrol officers shot at two people in a targeted traffic stop in Portland, Oregon. “When agents identified themselves to the vehicle occupants,” the post on X read, “the driver weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law enforcement agents.” There is nothing to stop the echoes of this rationale, and we should expect to hear it again and again. There may come a time when the administration dispenses with offering an explanation at all.

Circles of Epstein Hell

2025-12-19T12:36:27-05:00

Recent document and photograph releases from the ongoing investigation into the life of Jeffrey Epstein have produced little new information about his crimes, but they have filled out the ever-growing roster of his notable associates: Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Noam Chomsky, Donald Trump, and many more. The steady drip of investigative proceeds has brought about a remarkable degree of cross-partisan condemnation. Anyone who spent time with this evil person, the implication seems to be, must also be evil, and quite possibly in the same way that Epstein was evil. But though association with Epstein is certainly worthy of scrutiny, not everyone in his network is guilty of participation in his abusive sexual enterprise—or necessarily guilty at all.

The entire Epstein story is hellish from top to bottom, an almost-Gothic tale of the appalling deference society pays to the rich and powerful. At the lowest rung of this inferno is Epstein himself, always amused or impassive in photographs, a blithe and shallow cipher of a man. His main hobbies appear to have been defrauding people and having sex, which is empty and fleeting enough in its own right. But his fixation on minors meant that the objects of his desire were always slipping away as time conveyed them past the point of his interest, and the fact that he offended so consistently for so many years suggests that he was indeed never satisfied, but was rather driven by a malevolent lust. He was a pedophile, a scoundrel, and a coward.

Accordingly, what emerges from the paper trail of Epstein’s life is not a portrait of deep friendships, but a web of transactional, superficial relationships, designed for mutual enablement. It appears that there was no one in his life with whom he was vulnerable or honest; even his interactions with his closest confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, read as generally businesslike. Maxwell was his procuress at the very least, and, according to victims’ testimony, was sometimes an active participant in sexual abuse herself.

[Read: Virginia Giuffre’s family was shocked that Trump described her as ‘stolen’]

Anyone who directly facilitated Epstein’s abuse—and there were apparently many such people beyond Maxwell—or participated in sexual exploitation themselves belongs on the same rung as Epstein; by their own deeds are they condemned, not simply by association. Britain’s former Prince Andrew, for instance, stands accused of sexually abusing one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, when she was 17 years old. (He has vigorously denied these allegations.) Where Trump fits into this picture is an open question and the subject of furious debate. Trump has repeatedly denied any knowledge of or engagement in Epstein’s illicit sexual activities, and has claimed that he was not in touch with him after the early 2000s.

On the next rung are those among Epstein’s massive network of associates who knew about his sex crimes or suspected something was amiss, but decided that whatever was happening was none of their business, or that it wasn’t their problem, or that it wasn’t their place to intervene, or that interfering would frustrate the transactional opportunities that had brought them into Epstein’s world in the first place. Contained in this group are scores of people who seem mainly to have been interested in ingratiating themselves with Epstein in hopes that he would grant them large sums of money for their various projects, or that his putative financial acumen could make them even richer (though in many cases Epstein was instead scamming them). These people can be distinguished from the prior set by the fact that they themselves neither committed sex crimes nor aided Epstein in doing so. Though, to the degree that Epstein used these relationships to insulate himself from the consequences of his crimes so that he could continue to offend, they are something like accessories after the fact.

In the furthermost reaches of Epstein’s orbit there are people who seem genuinely not to have known about his criminal activity, and who are therefore the least guilty of all of his associates. Consider, for example, Princess Sofia of Sweden, who met with Epstein on several occasions in social settings 20 years ago, when she was a 21-year-old swimsuit model. Epstein’s emails show that Barbro Ehnbom, a Swedish business executive, had effected an email introduction between Epstein and Sofia, sending along a picture of the future princess. Epstein replied with interest, and offered to send her a ticket to visit him in the Caribbean. The role she played in the exchange seems more analogous to the experience of some of Epstein’s victims than his accomplices, in that she was a young and beautiful woman presented to Epstein by a wealthy friend and then invited to an island in the Caribbean. (The Swedish royal palace has stated that Sofia declined the invitation.) Given that context, it seems perfectly plausible that Sofia was not responsible for any crime or for any effort to shield Epstein from accountability. Nevertheless, her reputation has been tarnished by the Epstein affair, which brings with it a strong presupposition of sexual depravity. Again, there is no reason to believe that the princess did anything especially wrong. Her case appears to be a genuine instance of guilt by association, because it seems she is guilty of nothing more than some minor failure of prudence, meaning that she ought to have been more careful with her company.

[Read: Epstein returns at the worst time for Trump]

But many of those moneyed and prestigious Epstein orbiters innocent of sex crimes may be implicated in another category of offense: conspiracy to hoard and entrench wealth. The Epstein affair has produced evidence confirming that many of the people who control society’s wealth, politics, and prestige move in the same small circles, and may work together in private to make consequential decisions about the movement of money through society. This is hugely demoralizing; in a recent NBC poll, 54 percent of Americans now agree that “when it comes to politics and society, nothing really matters because powerful people will always do whatever they want.” They have ample reason for thinking so. It’s hard to imagine how the Epstein narrative could ever conclusively end, because it has also triggered a legitimation crisis.

Evil often presents a front of sophistication and implies a great deal of depth, when in fact it is almost always pathetic, stupid, and meaningless. Epstein was connected to some of the world’s most significant figures and had apparently unlimited resources at his fingertips, but his life seems to have amounted to very little. That is perhaps why one category of Epstein associate appears to have no known members: real and true friends, Maxwell’s superficial closeness to him notwithstanding. Was there anyone Epstein bared his soul to, anyone he cared for beyond their practical use to him, or anyone who saw underneath his slick veneer, if there was anything there to see? This would be a more morally defensible group than his existing crop of allies, because complete isolation from human relationships is never a just penalty (which, among other reasons, is why solitary confinement is a fundamentally inhumane practice: Even the wicked are due a friend or two, supposing they can win them and keep them). And, insofar as those relationships can serve as a kind of tether to the moral community, cutting them off could conceivably be counterproductive. But all of that is likely beside the point, because no such person is evinced in the known fragments of Epstein’s life. He was little more than a hungry ghost.

*Sources: ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters; House Oversight Committee / Sipa / Reuters

The Catholic Church and the Trump Administration Are Not Getting Along

2025-11-06T11:05:29-05:00

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In mid-October, Catholic clergy arrived at the doors of the makeshift ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in hopes of bringing the Eucharist, the central sacrament of the faith, to those inside. As Father David Inczauskis walked alongside the procession, he felt a spark of hope: Maybe ICE really would allow a delegation from their group to offer Communion to people in federal custody. Hundreds of people walked with Inczauskis and fellow clergy, bearing signs invoking scriptural themes alongside images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a dazzling icon of the Virgin Mary as she appeared to an Indigenous peasant in the 16th century in what is now Mexico. Some helped hold aloft the gold-and-white canopy that protected the monstrance, a vessel for displaying the body of Christ.

Catholics believe that the Eucharist is not a mere symbol but the actual flesh of Jesus, which appears to have meant nothing to ICE. “We had done all of this preparation for weeks. It seemed like we had done all the right things. We just prepared for every scenario,” Inczauskis told me. “And we were told no, and we had to sit with that and the humiliation of that.” On Saturday, Inczauskis walked with another procession to the same location—only this time minus a worshipper, he later told me, as ICE had in the meantime arrested one of the people who had held up a banner depicting the mother of God.

[Luis Parrales: What the border-hawk Catholics get wrong]

The procession was one of many such actions carried out by Catholics across the country, a sign of both Catholic solidarity with the targets of the Trump administration’s deportation regime as well as the expanding conflict between President Donald Trump’s policies and the Catholic faith. Although the MAGA movement is home to its share of outspoken Catholics (J. D. Vance, Steve Bannon, and Jack Posobiec, for example, as well as recent influxes of young converts) its anti-migrant attitude directly contradicts Church teaching about the dignity and love that the faithful owe to foreigners and refugees. Because the expulsion of immigrants is as central to the MAGA movement as the Catholic Church’s insistence on universal human dignity is to its very Catholicity, the conflict between the two philosophies is significant and rapidly deepening. But the clash is not merely abstract; in Trump’s America, it is now playing out on streets, in courtrooms, and in churches—directly affecting whether people are treated humanely or cruelly, whether their dignity is respected or brazenly denied.

Catholics nationwide have pushed back against Trump’s immigration agenda, showing up at demonstrations and prayer vigils outside ICE facilities and continuing charitable work with migrants and refugees. Catholic clergy have become especially visible members of this resistance. Anna Marie Gallagher, the executive director of CLINIC, a Catholic immigration-law organization serving hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year, told me that priests and others have been accompanying immigrants to court check-ins, which ICE has used as an opportunity to round people up for summary deportation. In “some of our parishes or dioceses across the country,” she said, “bishops and priests are going to court with people. And what we’re seeing is that ICE is not necessarily detaining in high numbers in situations like that.”

Some of these encounters have grown tense. Father Fabian Arias, a New York City priest who has joined immigrants in court for the past 20 years, was present on September 25 when an ICE official shoved a woman to the ground as she pleaded for answers about her husband, who had just been apprehended. Arias was disturbed by the scene, later telling Scripps News that he worries for the safety not only of the immigrant families he works with but also of their supporters.

Leaders higher up the Church hierarchy have likewise rejected Trump’s anti-migrant mission and are fighting it. Earlier this year in San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham led a delegation of faith leaders to immigration court on World Refugee Day, after offering a homily explicitly addressing the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants and refugees. “I believe most refugees, immigrants, and migrants over the years, whether documented or undocumented, come to the United States seeking opportunities for a better life and success,” Pham, whose family fled South Vietnam in 1980, said. “It is concerning to observe the current situation in the United States,” he added, noting that “families are being separated as a result of policy aimed at deporting people who are called criminal.” Church officials have also adjusted spiritual expectations for Catholics facing the threat of deportation. Since ICE has been capturing people exiting churches after services, the Diocese of San Bernardino released its faithful from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass to help protect them from detention.

These are not the actions of a few rogue believers, but rather reflections of Church teaching. During the 12 years of Pope Francis’s papacy, he repeatedly stressed themes of love and respect for migrants, making a point at the end of his life to address Trump’s position on migration head-on. “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” he wrote in a letter to the American bishops. “With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.”

[Francis X. Rocca: The papacy is forever changed]

Conservative Catholics hoped Pope Leo XIV would be a better ally to the right wing than Francis had been. But Leo has powerfully reaffirmed Francis’s position on welcoming migrants and treating them with respect. "Someone who says I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life," Leo told journalists in September, suggesting that animosity toward immigrants is a violation of one of Catholicism’s most sacred codes. Leo has since encouraged the American bishops to fiercely defend the dignity of newcomers to this country, and warned in an address late last month at the Vatican that “with the abuse of vulnerable migrants, we are witnessing, not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”

Earlier this week, the pope had even harsher words for Americans carrying out Trump’s agenda. “I think there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made,” he said, lamenting the fact that “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what’s going on right now.” Leo also insisted that American authorities allow pastors to see to the spiritual needs of detainees—a sign of support for initiatives like the Eucharistic procession to the Broadview detention center. (A journalist later solicited the White House for comment on the pope’s statements, and was reportedly told that “the pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”)

The Trump administration has rejected the Church’s message altogether. In January, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement condemning the administration’s stated intention of pursuing immigrants at churches and schools, contending that “turning places of care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need, while endangering the trust between pastors, providers, educators and the people they serve, will not make our communities safer.”

Confronted with their remarks on an episode of CBS’s Face the Nation that same month, Vance accused the bishops of merely scheming to enrich themselves. “I was actually heartbroken by that statement,” he said. “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?" When Vance defended the administration’s position on immigration during a Fox News interview in January, he invoked the ordo amoris, a Catholic concept that he said justifies loving immigrants less than Americans. Francis specifically chastised Vance in one of his final missives, writing, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: ‘A very Christian concept’]

Francis’s pointed remarks pared the dispute down to its spiritual core: The Catholic faith in particular is explicitly meant to belong to everyone, regardless of ethnicity or nationality; the Church takes itself seriously as the body of Christ, which unites the faithful in a mystical blood relation. These bonds, and the universal offer of kinship, are the foundation upon which Catholic politics are built. Historically, critics of Catholicism have questioned whether American Catholics could be trusted to serve both Church and country, or whether they would privately maintain primary loyalty to the pope. (Thus John F. Kennedy swore in a 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Organization that he believed in an America “that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source.”)

This notion has generally been treated as an anti-Catholic slander, but it’s also more insightful than its originators may have known. Observant Catholics do have dual loyalties, and it seems obvious to me that one’s religious duties preempt and surpass those due to one’s nation or tribe, for the simple reason that one’s place in eternity takes priority over one’s place in this temporal world. The hope of any Catholic should be that the two sets of duties never conflict, and for everyday people they generally do not. But the Trump administration’s “America First” philosophy actually has arrayed the demands of the faith against the intentions of the law of the land—and if America is first, then Christianity is second.

Christianity is a love story, and the love Christians are called to show their neighbors is not perfunctory and pale, but passionate and sincere. This is a tremendously difficult discipline—punishing, even, because tribalism comes so naturally to human beings, as do hatred and violence. Catholicism does not mandate open borders, but the scale and brutality of Trump’s crackdown leave little for Catholics to endorse, and point toward a deepening rift between MAGA philosophy and Catholic belief, with heightening stakes and no clear terminus. Leaders inside the Church already recognize this, though conservative elected officials are doing their best not to. Speaking during a recent roundtable, El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, an ally of Leo’s, recently suggested that the time will come when Catholics considering cooperation with Trump’s deportation regime will “have to make that difficult moral choice to say in conscience, ‘I can no longer do this.’”

Donald Trump Dreams of More Executions

2025-10-27T08:20:25-04:00

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Donald Trump has been forthright about his intention to bring about a death-penalty renaissance, and now his efforts are coming to fruition. This year has been a particularly lethal one for America’s death-row prisoners. Together, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have executed a total of 40 people in the past 10 months by injection, nitrogen hypoxia, and firing squad, surpassing 2024’s total of 25—a significant spike in an otherwise-downward long-term trend. Trump’s return to power—and the Republican Party’s resurgence more generally—is driving a heavy push for more death sentences and more executions. He has restored the federal death penalty following the prior administration’s moratorium, and Republican state legislatures have sought to expand the list of crimes punishable by death and to allow new execution methods.

Capital punishment is central to Trump’s authoritarian approach to criminal justice. His pro–death penalty views emerged decades before he ascended to the presidency. In 1989, he bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and New York Newsday calling for the alleged perpetrators of a gang rape in Central Park to be sentenced to death. In the text of his ad, Trump blasted Ed Koch, the New York City mayor at the time, for being soft on crime, both spiritually and practically. “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump wrote. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” He repeated the ad’s headline—“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”—by way of conclusion above a now-familiar signature. The five men accused of the Central Park gang rape were later exonerated.

When Trump arrived at the White House, federal executions had not been carried out in more than 17 years—a hiatus Trump promptly dispensed with, presiding over 13 executions in the last several months of his first term. Joe Biden, clearly troubled by those events, issued commutations to 37 of 40 people on federal death row during his last weeks in office, which prevented Trump from picking up where he left off when he returned to the White House. Trump responded furiously online: “As soon as I am inaugurated,” he swore on Truth Social, “I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters. We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!” He did just that. On January 20, Trump signed an executive order intended to reinvigorate the death penalty both federally and at the state level, instructing his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to pursue federal death sentences when possible, and to encourage and assist states in carrying out executions.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Joe Biden’s moral wisdom]

On cue, several states set about realizing Trump’s dreams, Florida chief among them. Under the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has carried out a record 14 executions so far in 2025, with plans for more before the year is over. Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of the nonprofit organization Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told me that this pace of executions is unprecedented in Florida’s recent history, and that DeSantis has now ordered more executions in a single year than any other governor in Florida history.

DeSantis has also overseen efforts to alter Florida’s death-penalty statutes to require mandatory death sentences for any undocumented person convicted of a capital crime, signing a bill in February that would wrest the decision away from juries. Last month, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, wrote a letter to Bondi and White House counsel Dave Warrington asking Bondi to fight to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana, which held that pedophilic sex offenders could not be sentenced to die unless their crimes either resulted or were intended to result in the death of their victims. Doing so would expand capital crimes to include categories other than murder, creating new avenues for states to pursue death sentences. “We have every confidence that, with President Trump’s strong leadership and with principled, rule-of-law Justices on the Supreme Court,” the letter reads, “child rapists can be appropriately punished for their unspeakable crimes.” Officials from 15 states co-signed.

The Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” but states attempting to rack up executions and death sentences can be reasonably sure that the Supreme Court will not stop them. “There has been a clear signal from the Trump Supreme Court that it will not be enforcing constitutional guarantees in death-penalty cases,” Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me, citing this Court’s unwillingness to intervene in states’ efforts to pursue executions using arguably cruel and unusual methods. Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, pointed to the decline in stays of execution issued by the Supreme Court this year relative to prior years as another sign of this Court’s friendly posture toward capital punishment. “The Supreme Court has stepped way back from its historical role in regulating use of the death penalty in the states and staying executions where they are troubled by the circumstances,” Maher said. Alabama’s execution of Anthony Boyd last week is a clear example: Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a dissent joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson that Boyd’s execution via nitrogen suffocation would likely be torturous, the Court declined to entertain his final appeal. Sotomayor was nevertheless proved right, as Boyd’s execution became the most protracted nitrogen execution in history.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Tortured to death in Alabama]

In this permissive environment, efforts are already under way to resurrect the death penalty in jurisdictions that have previously suspended or banned it. Trump has announced plans to revive capital punishment in Washington, D.C., despite the fact that the practice was abolished by the city council in 1981, and residents later overwhelmingly rejected a 1992 referendum to reinstate capital punishment within its borders. When Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August, Trump weighed in to demand the perpetrator be sentenced to death, though North Carolina has not carried out an execution in 17 years. “The ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY. There can be no other option!!!” Legislators in North Carolina got the message, and swiftly passed a sweeping piece of legislation titled “Iryna’s Law” aimed in part in resuming executions and expediting the state’s death-penalty-appeals process. “What’s happened this year is that the Trump administration has attempted to open the floodgates when it comes to executions,” Dunham told me. Considering the success it has had in just the first nine months of Trump’s second term, the worst may be yet to come.

Trump’s abiding interest in capital punishment is not incidental to his overall politics, but seems rather to be an expression of several of his apparent animating impulses: his will to achieve profound and concentrated personal power, for one, and his tendency to channel the conservative id, for another. Trump’s political project is unabashedly authoritarian, as is evident in the prosecution of his enemies, his battles with the free press, and his deployment of the military in major American cities. He seems intent on suppressing the elements of society he considers unfit or dysgenic, and the death penalty maximally empowers heads of state to control civilian populations—which is why countries that still practice executions tend to have authoritarian governments, as in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. “The death penalty has always been political,” Maher told me. “If you look back through history, we have thousands of years of examples of how the death penalty is used by different regimes to repress dissent or to punish opposition.” And Trump’s demands for capital punishment appear closely entwined with his political ambitions. After the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered last month, Trump called for the death penalty before law enforcement even had a suspect in custody, and later said at Kirk’s memorial service, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them,” an echo of his 1989 screed against Ed Koch.

Predicting how far Trump is willing to go to create a more lethal justice system is difficult. If he intends to rely on popular support for his mission, he might find that public opinion about the death penalty does not match his zeal. In 2024, capital punishment merited a 53 percent approval rating—a 50-year low, which suggests that the American people may be less interested in the death penalty than their elected representatives are.

But perhaps that won’t matter: The spike in executions could represent a temporary increase brought about by a political fad, or an omen of an even more brutal future. Trump has allegedly mused in the past about group or televised executions. And though people frustrated with the secrecy surrounding American executions occasionally suggest that if the goings-on inside death chambers were better known, then people would reject the practice, I suspect that significant portions of the public would enjoy the exhibition. When public executions were common, they were widely attended, and I see no reason to believe humans have generally improved in moral quality since those days. The worst-case scenario is that Trump manages to whet the public’s appetite for executions either by featuring them prominently in his rhetoric or by escalating them to spectacles, thereby fashioning a revival in popular demand from his own private fixation.

Tortured to Death in Alabama

2025-10-24T12:06:34-04:00

The state of Alabama has proved that it is incapable of consistently carrying out executions that conform to the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. After a series of botched lethal injections in 2022, correctional officials in Alabama ushered in a new method of execution that would sidestep the legal challenges resulting from those debacles. This new method amounts to suffocation by gas, specifically by the inhalation of pure nitrogen, a technique that was proposed by a California screenwriter in a 1995 National Review article titled “Killing With Kindness: Capital Punishment by Nitrogen Asphyxiation.” Unlike past execution techniques known for horrendous and grisly outcomes—such as hanging, electrocution, poison gas, and lethal injection—nitrogen hypoxia was promised to be humane and painless.

That experiment has utterly failed. Yesterday, Alabama executed Anthony Boyd, a 54-year-old man who was convicted of a 1993 murder related to a drug transaction. (Boyd maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration, and reiterated it in his final words.) Prior nitrogen suffocations in Alabama were deeply troubled—Kenneth Eugene Smith, the first victim of execution by nitrogen hypoxia in the world, reportedly remained conscious for several minutes after inhaling the lethal gas, thrashing uncontrollably on the gurney. Nevertheless, correctional officials decided to subject Boyd to the same ghastly process. But Boyd’s execution was, according to the Alabama reporter Lee Hedgepeth, even more spectacularly brutal than Smith’s. Strapped down with a gas mask affixed to his face, Boyd gasped for air more than 200 times. His eyes rolled back entirely as his body strained and shuddered against his restraints. Boyd took more than 30 minutes to die, making his execution the most protracted nitrogen suffocation in history.

Prisoners in Alabama are sequenced for execution by a secret calculus known only to state officials, and I find myself wondering if Boyd was prioritized specifically because he was sophisticated and thoughtful: He served as the chairman of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, a prisoner-led advocacy group devoted to ending capital punishment. I met Boyd in 2022 through his work with Project Hope; he was intelligent, practical, and shrewd. He was always available to answer questions or brainstorm ideas, though he was careful to avoid observation by hostile prison officials.

[From the July 2025 issue: Inside America’s death chambers]

Boyd’s aspirations were higher than protesting his own execution. He wanted to bring about the destruction of capital punishment in Alabama altogether, publishing a newsletter called On Wings of Hope, which chronicled the lives and concerns of men facing death. “As you all know, right now I’m in a battle for my life and justice,” Boyd wrote in his final editorial for the newsletter. “I would love to tell all of you that I believe truth, justice, and human dignity will prevail, but we’re in Alabama where such things are few and far between.” Boyd noted that the state had questioned him repeatedly about his past work for PHADP. “We are not out numbered, we are not organized,” Boyd wrote, an exhortation for those to follow in his footsteps. “Keep fighting and keep Hope Alive. Be the other voice, until you are heard.”

Boyd noted in that last missive that “courts have become so hell bent on helping states preserve their killing machines that they’ve lost their compass, and the reason they went into law in the first place … JUSTICE!” He was entirely right, and his contention was validated in a dissent issued by Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to his final Court appeal. “You want to breathe; you have to breathe,” Sotomayor wrote in an evocative passage, “but you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe. That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight.” In permitting Boyd’s suffocation, she added, “this Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.” Sotomayor’s prediction has now been proved prescient, though the odds that more of her fellow justices will heed her concerns the next time around remain low.

Throughout American history, states have struggled to comply with the Eighth Amendment while carrying out executions, flitting from method to method as each is tried and fails. Nitrogen hypoxia is only the latest in this long-term quest for a humane style of execution. All along, this effort has been absurd; there is no way to kill someone without some element of torture, either psychological, physical, or both. And although states and the federal government might continue testing various novel methods of execution, the pressure to locate a feasibly humane way to execute has never been lower, precisely because, as Boyd and Sotomayor both pointed out, courts no longer seem invested in defending the constitutional rights of incarcerated citizens. Boyd’s mission to rid Alabama of the death penalty may well succeed in the very long run, as the death penalty has by many measures declined over the course of time. But in the near term, there may be much more torture ahead.

Can a Murderer Earn Redemption?

2025-10-13T07:53:15-04:00

Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET on October 14, 2025

John J. Lennon was 24 years old in December of 2001 when he shot his former friend Alex Lawson with an M-16 assault rifle, then transferred Lawson’s body to a laundry bag with a cinder block inside and hurled it into the Atlantic Ocean. The bag washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach in February of the following year. Lennon is now serving his 24th year of a 28-year sentence at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where he has become a prolific and celebrated writer on matters of criminal justice.

There is considerable demand for content related to true crime; streaming services are awash with episodic shows delving into crime and criminal investigations; podcasts in the same category number in the tens of thousands. Much of the output that falls within that category is true—fact-checked, verified—but what Lennon suggests in his book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, is that a deeper look into the lives of true crime’s villains can reveal a much more ambiguous picture than the genre’s good-versus-evil formula tends to permit. Many people who commit heinous crimes have a history of criminal victimization themselves. From this vantage, evil becomes something dauntingly diffuse, with culpability for any given bad act branching outward through society like spidering veins.

The Tragedy of True Crime is devoted to challenging the simplistic narratives advanced by the true-crime genre, largely by establishing that there is more to the prototypical antagonist than his crimes. In this way, Lennon seems to be making an implicit argument that murderers’ identities should not forever be defined by their worst act. For Lennon, the book itself is an assertion of his identity beyond that of a killer: He is earnestly insistent that his book is a work of journalism, which is hard to dispute, and that he himself is a journalist, which is equally hard to dispute. Lennon is a contributing editor at Esquire, and has written for a wide range of respected publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and The Atlantic. His crime precipitated his career, and his work is two things at once: legitimate, solid journalism, and a bid at redemption. It achieves the former; the latter may be beyond journalism’s power.

Lennon’s book certainly demonstrates an interest in the facts—many of which fall outside the usual true-crime purview, but are just as horrifying. The first of the cases Lennon considers is that of Michael Shane Hale, who was convicted of the 1995 murder of his partner, Stefan Tanner, with whom he’d had a tumultuous and occasionally abusive relationship. When Hale decided to permanently end the affair, a fight broke out between the two men, and Hale bashed Tanner’s head against a concrete floor before stuffing him into the trunk of his car and later covering his head with a plastic bag. In 1999, a New York judge sentenced Hale to a minimum of 50 years in prison with parole eligibility after 50 years.

That much is public record. What Lennon adds to the facts of the case are the elements that preceded it. Hale, Lennon writes, grew up gay in Kentucky, and was sexually abused at age 10 by the father of one of his friends, and by age 11 or 12, in his estimation, he was sexually servicing older boys, and then friends of his father’s, and then, finally, his father himself. “When I did this, dad’s hand would wind up on my head or ass,” Hale tells Lennon. “There was a part of me that had plausible deniability that what was happening was happening. Dad was passed out, and I was so starved for dad’s attention and affection that I would resort to molesting my father.”

Here Lennon offers an account of sexual abuse so frank and blunt, it almost seems addressed to fans of true crime, who may be used to tales of graphic violence but less acquainted with the torture, desperation, and privation that tend to mark the lives of murderers before their offenses. Typically, the gory detail marshaled by true-crime creators serves to heighten a forthcoming catharsis: The more heinous the murder, the more satisfying the eventual incarceration, death, or execution. But here, the level of detail devoted to the crimes committed against Hale in his early years serves to complicate, rather than accentuate, the notion of Hale as irredeemable. The fact that many murderers live horrendously difficult lives prior to their crimes is disquieting: It suggests that murder arises not necessarily from some deliberate private initiative but also from factors outside a person’s control, including innate limitations (such as intellectual disability and mental illness) and psychological and emotional damage inflicted upon them by others.

Lennon is careful not to present any of those factors as an excuse for murder, especially when he considers his own background. He describes a turbulent and impoverished childhood amid a culture of criminality that he credits with his early engagement in using and selling drugs. But Lennon also acknowledges that he is responsible for the catastrophic choices he made leading up to Lawson’s murder, as well as the ones that came after. Lennon writes that he came to prison entirely unreformed, and immediately immersed himself in the violent subculture of prison gangs.

Lennon’s other case studies concern Milton Jones, a New York man who murdered two Catholic priests in 1987, when he was 17 years old, and Robert Chambers, the so-called “preppy killer,” who strangled a teenage girl to death in Central Park in 1986. Milton’s background was marked by poverty, abuse, neglect, and early exposure to violence, and he showed signs of untreated mental illness at an early age. Lennon intimates that childhood experiences beyond Milton’s control inclined him to violence—and then, in an interesting contrast, introduces Chambers’s case, which unfolded in a seemingly opposite way. Unlike Milton, Chambers was born into relative privilege, then attended expensive prep schools and earned admission to Boston University; his upscale background, in conjunction with the youth of his victim, led to a media frenzy around the case. But Lennon’s examination of Chambers’s case reveals an isolated and alienated person, adrift in society, who had descended into drug use, alcoholism, and petty theft. Lennon documents Milton’s struggles with mental illness in prison, where psychiatric disorders are rarely treated adequately—a commentary on incarceration as a form of warehousing the mentally ill. Lennon also tracks Chambers’s experiences with release and reincarceration, a fair-minded acknowledgment that some people are too damaged to take advantage of second chances.

True-crime fans may be primed to prize a neat wrap-up to harrowing tales of violent crime—the perpetrator goes to prison and the matter is settled—but Lennon observes that those conclusions, too, mask deep ambiguities. He reports, for instance, that he interviewed the lead detective on Hale’s murder case and learned that the specific events leading up to Tanner’s death were presented differently by the prosecution than by the detectives. Lennon takes this to suggest that the prosecution may have fabricated some elements altogether. What Lennon finds is not dispositive of prosecutorial misconduct, but the discrepancy ought to give one pause. Many offenders’ cases continue long after they are convicted and imprisoned, often leading to evidence that complicates official narratives.

Crime is criminogenic, meaning that criminal victimization increases a person’s likelihood of committing crimes themselves. This is somewhat difficult to accept, because it reveals that criminal activity is often part of a chain of wrongdoing into which the offender was drawn, and because it implies that abuse might inflict moral damage, among its many harms.

But murder is not something you can undo with the undertaking of a new career. In 2019, The Washington Post Magazine ran an essay by Lennon titled “The Apology Letter,” in which he explores his struggle to come to terms with his remorse for Lawson’s murder, explaining that he has changed radically since the homicide, largely due to his career as a journalist. “The more I published, the more I felt like I was earning a new identity,” Lennon wrote. “I no longer wanted to be the killer, I wanted to be the writer.” Months later, the Post ran a letter to the editor from Lennon’s victim’s sister, Taisha Lawson, who excoriated Lennon as insincere, with an appetite for notoriety. She also posted a petition several years ago on MoveOn.org protesting the possibility of Lennon receiving clemency, which argued that Lennon’s “occupation does not change the fact that he is capable of murder or lying for his own self interest … John J. Lennon the writer is still the man capable of cold-blooded murder.”

Humanizing the criminals behind true crime is, in Lennon’s case, self-serving, and his efforts to fashion a new identity have been met with resistance. For him, insisting upon his identity as a journalist as opposed to a killer means laying claim to the kind of dignity and credibility typically denied to people behind bars, and perhaps the sort of validation and respect he had been searching for when he started down the criminal path that eventually led to murder.

No one in Taisha Lawson’s position could be expected to feel anything but skeptical of that effort. Lennon ended her brother’s life, and he doesn’t deny this; in this instance, he is not looking so much for forgiveness as an opportunity to be something other than a killer. In writing this book, he has inarguably achieved that.

This article originally misidentified Michael Shane Hale as Matthew Shane Hale. It also misstated that Hale was sentenced by a jury; he was sentenced by a judge.

When Child Death Was Everywhere

2025-09-24T07:00:00-04:00

The way we respond to the disappointments, dangers, and defects of the present helps determine our political affiliations. If you think the answers lie somewhere in a future condition we’ve yet to achieve, then you may be persuaded by progressive politics; if you think the resources for rescuing society lie somewhere in the past, you may be attracted to conservative politics.

This general pattern helps explain the recent alignment of conservative politics and the anti-vaccine movement, despite its long-standing association with crunchy, left-ish causes. Today, the two tendencies have joined in mutual agreement about the wholesomeness of natural health versus modern medicine, indulging in nostalgia for a world before the widespread use of vaccines.

The past does contain its share of treasures, and it can be hard to accept that a world so rife with pain and despair is in certain ways the best it has ever been. But the idea that the past held a secret to health and happiness that we’ve lost somehow—especially with respect to infectious disease—is a fantasy with potentially lethal ramifications.

[Read: The neo-anti-vaxxers are in power now]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine-skeptical current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, originally shared politics with the older anti-vaccine advocates, back-to-the-Earth types who themselves demonstrated a conservative impulse in their search for a primeval Eden. (Plenty of left-leaning people persist in that tradition, though it seems better fit for today’s right, which has a certain appreciation for the pastoral.) A Democrat until 2023, Kennedy entered public life as a champion of environmental protection, battling against corporate interests in court to keep harmful waste out of the air and water. Over time, this overall concern with modern impurity destroying pristine nature evidently extended to other areas of his thinking. As his career progressed, Kennedy adopted several controversial opinions regarding healthy eating, condemning, among other things, meat issued from factory farms, seed oils, and processed food. In a 2024 campaign video from his presidential-primary run, Kennedy promised to “reverse 80 years of farm policy in this country,” harkening to a time before synthetic pesticides and chemical additives to animal feed.

If a conservative is, as William F. Buckley Jr. famously wrote, someone who “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” then Kennedy certainly fits the bill. A proper conservative fights to preserve the status quo. But the most reactionary members of the right won’t settle for protecting the ground their party has already staked out; their project is to return to the status quo ante, the way things were in the (sometimes distant) past. The slogan “Make America Great Again” manages to disparage the present while promising a return to an era in which Christianity was nationally dominant, manufacturing jobs were the bedrock of the economy, and the country was ever expanding. Kennedy’s positions on processed food and pharmaceuticals fit perfectly into that picture.

“Today’s children have to get between 69 and 92 vaccines in order to be fully compliant, between maternity and 18 years,” Kennedy said during a recent Senate hearing about Trump’s 2026 health-care agenda, by way of comparison with children of the past, who were required to receive fewer vaccines (if any at all). Likewise, Kennedy has rejected the introduction of fluoride into drinking water, a practice initiated in the mid-1940s to help prevent tooth decay, as well as the pasteurization of milk, which began in the late 19th century. “When I was a kid” in the ’50s and ’60s, Kennedy said earlier this year, “we were the healthiest, most robust people in the world. And today we’re the sickest.”

[Read: How RFK Jr. could eliminate vaccines without banning them]

This is in some respects true, but in other ways dangerously wrong. Kennedy is quick to point out the relative rarity of chronic conditions such as childhood diabetes and autoimmune disorders in the past. But he is apparently hesitant to acknowledge that mid-century America came with its own share of serious health problems, including a high rate of cigarette smoking and horrifying infant mortality rates compared with the present. When Kennedy was young, vaccine-preventable childhood illnesses such as measles routinely killed hundreds annually. So far this year, only three people in the United States have died of measles—largely the result of an outbreak of the disease caused in part by declining vaccination rates. And if modern innovations in food and medicine have come with their share of hazards, it would be wrong to conclude that their predecessors were superior. Raw milk allegedly caused the hospitalization of a toddler and the miscarriage of an unborn child as recently as this summer.

At the center of the “Make America Healthy Again” crusade is a high degree of trust in the wisdom of nature. But the contemporary appeal of unadulterated nature springs from human successes in controlling the elements; it’s hard to romanticize a relatively recent vaccine-free past while considering photographs of children’s bodies ravaged by smallpox, a disease that persisted well into the 20th century. Likewise, long before COVID-19, America experienced cholera and flu pandemics with hundreds of thousands of associated deaths, as well as lesser outbreaks of illnesses such as diphtheria, polio, and pertussis, all three of which were notorious child-killers. Today, the rarity of those conditions has fostered a false sense of security, and a naive assessment of the natural world. Relinquishing the successes of general vaccine coverage, however, is guaranteed to belie the idea that untainted nature contains all the keys to health and wellness. Our historical moment has enough strife without revisiting past battles fought and won.

*Illustration sources: The New York Historical / Getty; GHI / Universal History Archive / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.

‘I Need This to Be a Homicide’

2025-07-31T07:50:50-04:00

It was exactly the kind of case that a prosecutor eager to win more death-penalty convictions looks for: When he arrived at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in 2022, 11-week-old Sawyer Clarke had fractures in both legs and bleeding behind both eyes from a brain hemorrhage; he died a day later. His father, Jordan Clarke, had been supervising Sawyer at the time, and insisted that he hadn’t hurt his son on purpose, but rather had slipped on a plastic grocery bag while holding him and had fallen on top of him. Evidently nobody in a position of authority took his explanation seriously. In very short order, Clarke was arrested and charged with homicide. He remains in police custody awaiting his trial, where he will face the death penalty.

But the district attorney in Pennsylvania’s Washington County, Jason Walsh, was apparently not as certain about the nature of the case as his quick decision to seek capital punishment would suggest. This week, a petition filed in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court argues that Walsh deliberately tampered with the child’s death certificate, allegedly telling Timothy Warco, his county’s coroner, “You know that I need this to be a homicide. I need it to win an election.”

Warco claims that Walsh then pressured him into producing a certificate that listed the death as a “homicide, with shaken baby syndrome/abusive trauma as the mechanism.” A copy of this allegedly fraudulent death certificate is included in the petition. (Walsh disputes Warco’s account, calling the allegations “false and without merit.”)

Society detests child murders, and capital punishment in that context can be especially appealing to the voting public. A canny prosecutor might deduce, therefore, that harshly punishing child killers would increase their odds of reelection. An affidavit signed by Warco suggests that Walsh had said as much privately.

If Walsh did what the petition alleges, it is not only a shocking case of prosecutorial misconduct but also proof of a point that advocates against the death penalty have long argued: The punishment, theoretically reserved for the worst of the worst, is in fact exploited by prosecutors for political advantage, even in cases where guilt is unclear.

The petition was submitted by the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, a nonprofit group (with no connection to this magazine), on behalf of Jordan Clarke and another defendant. It describes Walsh’s lusty pursuit of the death penalty since he became DA, in 2021: “His office has sought a death sentence in 11 out of 18 homicides, a shocking percentage (61%) far outside the mainstream of Pennsylvania capital prosecutions.” (Walsh dismissed the petition as “an attempt by a liberal Philadelphia anti-death penalty group to throw a liberal Hail Mary and also create a liberal smear campaign against a Republican.”)

Warco’s affidavit lays out what he says happened after the baby’s death. The longtime medical examiner in Allegheny County, where the hospital is located, was responsible for performing the autopsy—but Warco attests that Walsh conspired to change jurisdiction over the autopsy to his own county. He did this, presumably, because he doubted that Karl Williams, who was then Allegheny County’s chief medical examiner, would rule the death a homicide, and because believed that he would have more sway over Warco, his local coroner, who indeed eventually acted as he directed. (Walsh disputes these allegations too: “They are made by an individual, whom I have an established record in the Court system of challenging his ability to do his job as coroner. He admits in an affidavit to being a liar and perpetrating a fraud.” He added: “This Office will protect children and seek justice for children when they are victims of heinous crimes.”)

The autopsy was carried out by Warco’s office, which determined that the cause of death was “blunt force trauma to the head” but was unable to determine the manner of death. Those findings were forwarded to Williams’s office, which ruled that the manner of death “could not be determined.” Warco alleges that Walsh, unhappy with this result, pressured him into filing a second death certificate, this one listing the manner of death as a homicide, and shaken-baby syndrome as the mechanism.

When I spoke with Williams, he confirmed that he would never have produced the certificate that Walsh desired. “The most pernicious dogma, especially in pediatrics, is that you can grab a baby and shake them to death,” Williams told me. “There is no scientific foundation for the ability to shake a baby to death,” he said. “It has no science.” The most common criteria for ruling that a child died of shaken-baby syndrome are bleeding in the tissue at the back of the eye and bleeding near the brain. But those injuries can result from a variety of different kinds of trauma. Williams told me that he has been fighting against the notion of shaken-baby syndrome for more than 20 years—and had ruled the manner of death in at least one potential shaken-baby case “undetermined” rather than homicide.

That coroners continue diagnosing shaken-baby syndrome, and that prosecutors keep basing cases on it, despite the fact that the syndrome has come under scientific and legal scrutiny, is “horrible, it’s frightening, it’s scary,” Williams said. And it could get an innocent person killed.

Walsh’s alleged plan to evade that “undetermined” ruling eventually failed. Pennsylvania state officials rejected Warco’s death certificate, ruling that he lacked jurisdiction in the case, despite Walsh’s attempt to convince the court otherwise. But Jordan Clarke is still charged with homicide and aggravating factors including “torture,” and, if convicted, could still face the death penalty—unless the Pennsylvania Supreme Court intervenes. The petition asked it to do just that, and to curtail Walsh’s capacity to pursue the death penalty going forward. If he did what the coroner alleges, it could be construed as obstruction of justice, and it raises the dark possibility that more of Walsh’s cases may be similarly corrupted.

This story also provides a glimpse into the machinery behind capital punishment. Prosecutors, the petition reminds readers, have “considerable discretion to seek the death penalty,” and “might abuse that discretion in a corrupt, illegal, unconstitutional, and self-aggrandizing way.” If nothing else, this case undermines the presumption that the death penalty is administered fairly. It’s impossible to know how many Jason Walshes there might be in America prosecuting cases right now, nor how many Jordan Clarkes, staring down death.

Don’t Degrade Church With Politics

2025-07-19T09:00:00-04:00

In a court document filed earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service quietly revealed a significant break with long-standing practice: Churches will no longer risk their nonprofit status if clergy endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The change stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the agency by evangelical groups that argued that the prior ban on church involvement in political campaigns infringed upon their First Amendment rights. Their victory, though, may turn out to be a Faustian bargain: Churches can now openly involve themselves in elections, but in doing so, they risk becoming de facto political organizations. What may appear to be a triumph over liberalism could in fact be a loss, the supersession of heavenly concerns by earthly ones.

Churches have long been divided over the proper role for religion in American politics. One approach has been to militate against the separation of church and state, insofar as that distinction limits what churches can do to exercise power in society. The IRS change, along with several others by the Trump administration, will soften that barrier, allowing churches to take on a much more pronounced role in electoral politics. Another approach has been to operate within the confines of that separation—which has produced some very noble results: a norm of discouraging churches from turning into mere organs of political parties, and an emphasis on forming the conscience of believers rather than providing direct instructions about political participation.

A conservative 30 years ago might have preferred that latter approach, or at least said so. Back then, members of the right complained that Black churches frequently gave political endorsements or raised funds for electoral campaigns, and that the IRS neglected to enforce its now-eliminated ban, known as the Johnson Amendment. Yet by 2016, that dynamic had reversed, leading Donald Trump, then still a presidential candidate, to court the coveted right-wing evangelical vote by vowing to destroy the amendment once in office. A number of religious leaders took the implications of that promise and ran with them—an investigation by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica published in 2022 found that plenty of evangelical churches were offering endorsement despite the rule. The hope in paring down the Johnson Amendment is apparently that church endorsements will influence the outcome of elections in the right’s favor.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Progressive Christianity’s bleak future]

But there’s little reason to believe that church endorsements will do much in the way of persuasion. American churches have already undergone so much liberal attrition that, in practice, many right-wing evangelical pastors will be instructing their congregations to vote for candidates most members already intend to vote for. To the degree that broadly conservative churches retain some liberal members, endorsing right-wing candidates seems like just the thing to alienate them, which is a loss for those congregations as well as for the faith as a whole. Church intervention in particular electoral races is an efficient polarization machine.

For that and other reasons, this policy shift doesn’t really offer any benefits to Christians qua Christians. Providing political endorsements makes churches susceptible to powerful campaign tactics: PACs, for example, will have incentives to fund churches that reflect their agendas, meaning that pastors’ livelihoods could come to depend on contorting their religious beliefs to suit political interests. Politically active congregants will also have good reason to lobby their pastors for certain endorsements, another source of pressure for church leaders to say that supporting a particular candidate is the will of God. And the practice of offering endorsements prioritizes accepting specific instructions from church leaders over cultivating Christian values and methods of reasoning that allow the faithful to determine which candidates to support for themselves. (Indeed, the Christian religion itself seeks to cultivate those very things for that very reason, rather than providing an itemized list of every behavior to perform and every behavior to avoid.) This is apparently why the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement that Catholic clergy will still decline to make political endorsements. “The Church seeks to help Catholics form their conscience in the Gospel,” the release read, “so they might discern which candidates and policies would advance the common good.”

That is a much more logical way for church leaders to proceed. Dictating which candidates to vote for is at once presumptuous, assuming much more about God’s judgment than can rightly be accounted for, and also nihilistic, assuming that churchgoers are so ill-formed in their faith that they can’t be trusted to figure out the right answers to these earthly, prudential questions. Granting the imprimatur of the faith to ordinary charlatans—the most common breed of politician—is ill-begotten, and borders on sacrilegious.

An Inhospitable Land

2025-07-10T10:54:42-04:00

After the Lord separated the heavens from the Earth, all was dark water. Life emerged from the abyss, which, the biblical narrative goes, God came to regret, because humankind defaced the world he made for them. And so he sent a great flood: Most Sunday-school classes pick up the narrative here, and follow the story of Noah and his ark with its parade of paired animals, lions and chickens and buffalo, two of every kind worth saving. The rest, along with the majority of humanity, drowned in 40 days of ceaseless rain. When telling this story to children, a great deal is made of the arrival of the rainbow, the celestial seal of God’s promise to never again submerge the world in primordial flood waters. But the newly dried ground underneath the colors must have been littered with bodies.

Floods unmake creation and leave behind remnants of an apocalypse. On the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas are relics of a lost world: a summer-camp bunk in muddy disarray, children’s bedding and little girls’ lunch boxes split open on the floor; a sodden pink backpack plucked from the destruction. More than 100 people have been declared dead from the floods, roughly two dozen of them children. Many more are still missing. And when the earth drinks in the last of the floodwaters, the places that remain will be different than they were before—not just stripped of structures and signs of human cultivation, but also turned sacred by overwhelming loss.

Texas is and always has been somewhat inhospitable to human habitation. Its climate is prone to extremes: Hurricanes blast its Gulf coast, tornadoes rip across its plains, and boiling heat beats down ruthlessly all summer. These frequent confrontations with the violent forces of nature perhaps account in part for the grandeur of the Texan spirit; it takes a certain tenacity to persist there when milder alternatives are readily available. This was perhaps doubly true of those Texans who lived and died before society achieved certain compromises with the elements: air-conditioning for the heat, tornado shelters for the storms, seawalls and surge gates for deadly tides. With countless adjustments like those, today’s Texans expect to live relatively comfortably in a volatile environment—a human triumph over nature.

[Zoë Schlanger: The problem with ‘move to higher ground’]

But human activity seems to be tipping that balance in the opposite direction. As greenhouse gases gather in the atmosphere and the Earth warms, intense storms are becoming more common, including storms with massive rainfall. A recent Washington Post analysis found that “freshwater flooding was responsible for 54 percent of all direct deaths from tropical cyclones in the United States between 2013 and 2024,” a much higher percentage than in previous decades. Humanity has created a category of unnatural disasters, climactic events on a biblical scale brought on not strictly by the ordinary vicissitudes of weather but also by political and cultural choices.

This is not to say that what was lost in the flood was in some sense wicked; on the contrary, what was lost was wrenchingly pure and innocent. The fact that climate change generated by human industry may have played a role in precipitating the tragedy by no means indicates that the death and destruction were deserved, as certain commentators have suggested. There are political elements to this story—policies aimed at halting and ameliorating climate change are crucial, and elected officials ought to be judged on whether they’re attempting to fix the problem or exacerbate it in the name of profit and gross excess. But the consequences of those decisions are visited on everyone, the just and the unjust, without respect to desert or fairness: This was not divine punishment with a built-in moral design, but rather a catastrophe half-engineered by humanity, lacking in moral design altogether.

The wreckage left by the floods darkly presages a future Texas where territory once wrested from the elements is lost again, and the civilization once built on the alluvial plains of the Hill Country is washed out or consumed by the earth, old doorframes and fence posts rotting in the mud, high waterlines staining the walls of the structures yet to crumble. Missing from this picture are people, and therefore the soul of Texas. The state is not just its land but its people, a hardy and fine people; may they persist within its borders evermore.

The Conservative Attack on Empathy

2025-06-30T11:25:40-04:00

Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they’re moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that of their home country. In this line of thought, empathetic approaches to politics favor liberal beliefs. An apparent opposition between thought and feeling has long vexed conservatives, leading the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to famously declare that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days. That a conservative presented with these cases might feel betrayed by their own treacherous empathy makes sense; this degree of human suffering certainly ought to prompt an empathetic response, welcome or not. Even so, it also stands to reason that rather than shifting their opinions when confronted with the realities of their party’s positions, some conservatives might instead decide that distressing emotions provoked by such cases must be a kind of mirage or trick. This is both absurd—things that make us feel bad typically do so because they are bad—and spiritually hazardous.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: What happened to empathy?]

This is certainly true for Christians, whose faith generally counsels taking others’ suffering seriously. That’s why the New York Times best seller published late last year by the conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, is so troubling. In her treatise packaging right-wing anti-empathy ideas for Christians, Stuckey, a Fox News veteran who recently spoke at a conference hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, contends that left wingers often manipulate well-meaning believers into adopting sinful argumentative and political positions by exploiting their natural religious tendency to care for others. Charlie Kirk, the Republican activist who runs Turning Point USA, said that Stuckey has demolished “the No. 1 psychological trick of the left” with her observation that liberals wield empathy against conservatives “by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts” and then perverting them “to morally extort us into adopting their position.” Taken at face value, the idea that Christians are sometimes persuaded into un-Christian behavior by strong emotions is fair, and nothing new: Suspicion of human passions is ancient, and a great deal of Christian preaching deals with the subject of subduing them. But Toxic Empathy is not a sermon. It is a political pamphlet advising Christians on how to argue better in political debates—a primer on being better conservatives, not better Christians.

Empathy is an ambiguous concept. When it was imported into English from German a little more than a century ago, empathy referred to one’s capacity to merge experiences with objects in the world, a definition that current usage bears little resemblance to: The Atlantic reported in 2015 that “the social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts,” such as “knowing another’s thoughts and feelings,” “actually feeling as another does,” and “feeling distress at another’s suffering,” a kind of catchall term for having a moral imagination. Stuckey’s definition doesn’t distinguish among these different elements; she instead frames empathy itself as a specific emotion rather than a psychological capacity for understanding the emotions of others, which makes her usage especially confusing. Whatever it is, empathy isn’t something Stuckey wants to reject altogether: Jesus embodied a kind of empathy, and it can be, she says, “a powerful motivation to love those around you.”

[Arthur C. Brooks: What’s missing from empathy]

The toxic kind of empathy, she contends, is the kind that makes you double-check your specifically conservative political priors. Some examples: “If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant” and “If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.” This argumentative technique, in which Christians are asked to consider their political positions in light of the logic of their own faith, can hardly be described as empathy in any common sense of the term. This linguistic confusion between rational arguments about whether a person’s political positions are adequately Christian, on one hand, and arguments that people should reason from emotion, on the other, runs through the entire debate about empathy. What Stuckey seems to be saying is merely that progressive assertions summon certain emotions inside their conservative debate partners—such as pity and compassion—that make them unwilling to defend their premises, regardless of whether said conservatives are actually inhabiting the emotional states of other people. Labeling those emotions as fruits of toxic empathy is a strategy for dealing with them: It resolves the tension between what one feels and what one thinks by dismissing one’s feelings as misguided. This approach glibly ignores the possibility that such emotions are in fact the voice of one’s conscience, and takes for granted that ignoring one’s sympathies for other people is a good Christian habit of mind.

In that sense, the toxic-empathy rhetorical framework, built for producing peace of mind for conservative debaters, threatens to render Christians insensitive to moral demands of Christianity that run contrary to conservative preferences. “Toxic empathy claims the only way to love racial minorities is to advance social justice,” Stuckey writes at one point, “but ‘justice’ that shows partiality to the poor or to those perceived as oppressed only leads to societal chaos.” It’s true that every person should be judged equally in the administration of the law, but it’s also the case that Christianity actually does dictate that the needs of the poor and powerless should be prioritized in society. Far from being a misleading interpretation adduced by bad-faith actors in political debates, it is rather the plain meaning of the Gospels, attested to by thousands of years’ worth of Christian saints and thinkers who have declared that God especially loves the poor and the oppressed. That fact remains as radical today as it was when Jesus was preaching, and now, just as then, there are people who can’t stand to recognize it.

Whose Choice? Whose Life?

2025-06-16T09:45:00-04:00

The case of Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Georgia nurse who has been brain-dead since early February, became the center of a skirmish between the country’s pro-choice and pro-life factions last month after an Atlanta news station’s interview with Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, was picked up by national media. Smith, Newkirk told a local news station, is being kept alive via life support without her family’s prior consent so that her unborn child can continue to gestate until delivery. (Newkirk did not respond to The Atlantic’s requests for comment.)

To the degree that Georgia’s broad abortion ban influenced Emory University Hospital’s decision not to offer Smith’s family any options with respect to her care, the case is indeed about abortion. But the ethical questions involved in Smith’s story are only tangentially related to abortion itself and have more to do with deciding who ought to make decisions for permanently incapacitated people—an altogether different but equally thorny subject that concerns a related but distinct axis of pro-life and pro-choice conflict. Acknowledging this does not require one to agree that the hospital was correct to proceed with life support without consulting Smith’s family, nor does it imply that simple answers exist as to how medical professionals should handle cases like Smith’s. Instead, it offers clarity on whose choice is really relevant in this debate—Smith’s family’s—and whose life: not only that of Smith’s baby but also her own.

According to her mother, Smith was about nine weeks pregnant in early February when she began to complain of severe headaches. She sought treatment at a local hospital and was discharged with medication, but a day later her boyfriend woke up to find her gasping for air. Smith was taken to Emory, where doctors discovered a number of blood clots in her brain. She was then declared brain-dead—but was immediately placed on life support because of her doctors’ concerns about possibly violating Georgia’s abortion ban by letting her, and by extension her unborn child, die. Smith’s doctors made this decision without consulting Smith’s family, which Newkirk strenuously objects to. Newkirk says she was told that the hospital planned to keep Smith alive until the pregnancy was 32 weeks along, at which point the baby would be delivered by Cesarean section, and also that the baby might die shortly thereafter or be born disabled. “I’m not saying we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy,” Newkirk told the local news station. “What I’m saying is we should have had a choice.” Emory released a statement refusing to comment on Smith’s case but noting that the hospital “uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.”

To advocates for abortion rights, Smith’s story registered as yet another episode in a series of nightmarish outcomes caused by states’ post-Dobbs abortion bans: a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio driven out of state to terminate her pregnancy; a Texas mom of four forced to carry a fetus with a fatal abnormality to term; another Texas woman who died after doctors refused to treat her miscarriage for some 40 hours. In that sense, Smith’s case falls within the broad realm of unintended consequences linked to these laws. Philosophically, it reflects what abortion advocates take to be the unstated premises of anti-abortion politics: that women’s bodies and lives are expendable resources meant only to produce children. In a New York Times article typical of this line of thinking, the Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson noted that “reproductive justice advocates have long been clear that abortion law is never only about abortion. It is about the exercise of control over all pregnant women, regardless of whether they plan to carry their pregnancies to term.”

[From the June 1969 Issue: The right of abortion]

Georgia’s anti-abortion statute, State Senator Nabilah Islam Parkes told me last month, has its own specific problems. The state’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, sometime around six weeks of pregnancy, which Parkes characterized as among the most restrictive—and vaguest—abortion laws in the country. “These institutions”—meaning hospitals—“are very risk averse,” Parkes said, and they fear prosecution for running afoul of unclear anti-abortion laws. Parkes sent a letter to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr earlier this month asking for formal clarification on whether Smith’s doctors are legally required to keep her alive until the delivery of her baby; Carr has thus far declined to issue a formal legal opinion on the case.

Partially because of fundamental disagreements about the nature of personhood, and perhaps even more the separate informational universes the opposing advocacy camps inhabit, pro-life commentators received Smith’s story in a radically different way. Speaking to the Associated Press last month, Georgia State Senator Edward Setzler praised Emory for keeping Smith alive for the sake of her fetus: “I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child. I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think the hospital is acting appropriately.” Seltzer was far from the only pro-life figure to cheer Emory’s decision.

In response to the outrage over Smith’s case, some pro-life thinkers have questioned whether the abortion ban was salient in the hospital’s decision at all. A spokeswoman for Carr’s office said late last month that “there is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death. Removing life support is not an action with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.” A representative of Georgia’s state House, meanwhile, told The Washington Post that Georgia’s abortion ban “is completely irrelevant” to Smith’s situation, adding that “any implication otherwise is just another gross mischaracterization of the intent of this legislation by liberal media outlets and left-wing activists.” Some pro-life advocates proposed that the law Smith’s doctors had either cited or meant to cite in their conversation with Newkirk about their legal obligations was not the LIFE Act but rather a more obscure law relating to care for patients with advance health-care directives, as well as a 1986 trial-court ruling mandating that another brain-dead pregnant woman be kept alive in a similar situation, though Smith had no advance directive and the 1986 case was not precedential.

At any rate, from the pro-life vantage point, Smith’s story is not solely about abortion; it’s about preserving Smith’s life, too, as principled pro-life beliefs apply not only to fetuses but to the incapacitated as well. Like 36 other states, Georgia defines death according to a version of the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act, which considers anyone with “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem,” dead—though many pro-life activists take issue with this definition, arguing that brain-dead people are still alive in a meaningful sense. Charles Camosy, a bioethics professor at the Creighton School of Medicine, told me last month that “Adriana requires technology to live—but that’s also true of someone who needs an artificial heart, an ECMO machine, or kidney dialysis. Dependence on machines does not make one dead.”

[Rose Horowitch: Dobbs’s confounding effect on abortion rates]

This question of what constitutes death and the attendant matter of who ought to make decisions for brain-dead people are really at the center of Smith’s story. Developing a theory of what would or would not have justified allowing Smith to die entirely isn’t possible, because the details of Smith’s case, such as her actual diagnosis and condition, are unknown to those outside the situation. Newkirk has not shared much detail about Smith’s medical crisis, nor should she be expected to. This uncertainty haunts the entire debate about Smith’s condition, shrouding much of it in mystery.

What is clear is that mapping abortion rights onto her case is difficult, because Smith herself is likely dead in the eyes of the law, a judgment that seems reasonable enough to me—but that means there can be no legal weighing of maternal interests against those of the fetus, because the mother no longer has any interests. Nor can there be a violation of Smith’s right to choose, because she is no longer making choices. This use of a human body to effectively treat another is certainly grisly and possibly morally questionable, but it isn’t a case of a woman being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, as much of the coverage of Smith’s situation has suggested. Nevertheless, Emory did deny Smith’s family the opportunity to decide whether she ought to be kept on life support, despite the fact that they were most equipped to advocate for Smith’s own wishes in her stead. In that respect, there really was a meaningful abrogation of choice.

More than an exemplar of any political principle, Smith’s story is a tragedy, and no rhetorical framing of her relatives’ suffering will help them heal. Newkirk has said that her family is hoping the baby will make it. She plans to name him Chance.

Inside America’s Death Chambers

2025-06-09T06:00:00-04:00

Art by Peter Mendelsund

Lately, I’ve been having dreams about my own execution. The nightmares mostly unfold in the same way: I am horrified to discover that I’ve committed a murder—the victim is never anyone I know but always has a face I’ve seen somewhere before. I cower in fear of detection, and wonder desperately if I should turn myself in to end the suspense. I am caught and convicted and sentenced to death. And then I’m inside an execution chamber like the ones I’ve seen many times, straining against the straps on a gurney, needles in both arms. I beg the executioner not to kill me. I tell him my children will be devastated—and somehow I know they’re watching from behind a window that looks like a mirror. I feel the burn of poison in my veins. After that comes emptiness.

Maybe everyone dreams of dying, even if not in quite this way. I once had nightmares about being a victim of crime, but after I began witnessing executions, I came to imagine myself on some subconscious plane as the perpetrator instead. This is perhaps a result of overidentification with the men I’ve watched die—and my understanding of the Christian religion, in which we’re all convicted sinners. I’m particularly interested in forgiveness and mercy, some of my faith’s most stringent dictates. If those forms of compassion are possible for murderers, then they’re possible for everyone.

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These questions, combined with a murder that tore into my own family, inspired me, several years ago, to volunteer to witness an execution—one of 13 carried out at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, during the final six months of Donald Trump’s first term. Most of the 23 states that still have an active death penalty allow a certain number of journalists to witness executions, as does the federal government. I sent an application to the appropriate federal office and, somewhat to my surprise, it was approved.

I had been trying to compose my thoughts about the death penalty for a while, distilling them into scraps and stubs of writing, but the only certainty I had going into the Indiana death chamber in December 2020 was the simple sense that it’s generally wrong to kill people, even bad people. What I witnessed on this occasion and the ones that came after has not changed my conviction that capital punishment must end. But in sometimes-unexpected ways, it has changed my understanding of why.

Capital punishment operates according to an emotional logic. Vengeance is elemental. Injustice cries out for redress. Murder is the most horrifying of crimes, and it seems only fitting to pair it with the most horrifying of punishments. All of this made sense to me when I was growing up in Texas, and so I wondered as I approached Terre Haute if some primal part of me would feel satisfaction: Recompense had been made.

The case of Alfred Bourgeois was the kind that advocates like to cite as justification for the death penalty. Bourgeois was a deeply unsympathetic figure—convicted in 2004 of the torture and murder of his toddler daughter, Ja’karenn Gunter, at the naval air station in Corpus Christi, Texas. Prosecutors said he had bashed the girl’s head against the inside of his truck after a prolonged period of abuse and neglect. The case was federal because the murder had been committed on a military base, and now the government was about to execute Bourgeois by lethal injection.

In my memory, everything about that night is green: the neat turf surrounding the penitentiary’s media center, glistening in the rain. The paint on the window frames inside the witness room. The cat eyes of Alfred Bourgeois himself. I was green, too: nervous in my seat in front of the windows that gave onto the execution chamber, sweat beading along my hairline as I breathed hot air against my face behind a pandemic-era mask. Static crackled when Bourgeois spoke his last words into a microphone that had been lowered over him. He protested his innocence, a claim his elder daughter has posthumously pursued with limited success.

And then the prison authorities started the injection. I didn’t expect Bourgeois to thrash on the gurney as he died, but he did. Lethal injection is advertised as easy. His death was not.

Killing Bourgeois was ostensibly about justice, or at least about vengeance. But as for any visceral sense of satisfaction, I felt none: Outside in the rain afterward, I threw up on the concrete. I found the spectacle as unnatural and disturbing as the murder itself had been.

I published an article about the experience, hoping, perhaps naively, that a straightforward account might encourage some people, somewhere, to pause for a moment and think about capital punishment. For the same reason, I also decided to try to serve as a witness on future occasions. I drew a grid on the chalkboard wall of my kitchen, with room for names and dates, so that I could keep track of death-penalty cases and scheduled executions as I learned of them.

I knew this meant I was effectively siding with killers, even if only on a single issue—whether they should be put to death. Morally, that made me nervous. I wanted to be on the exact right side of things: opposed to capital punishment for principled reasons involving the dignity of human life, but at the same time opposed to defending murderers in any way that might seem to downplay the seriousness of their crimes. It felt like a precarious position.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Can America kill its prisoners kindly?]

The next execution I observed was the result of another particularly heinous murder, this one in Mississippi. In 2009, Kim Cox, the estranged wife of a man named David Neal Cox, reported her husband to authorities for allegedly molesting her preteen daughter, Lindsey. Cox was taken into custody and faced charges of sexual battery and child abuse. Nine months later, he was released on bond. He found Kim and Lindsey at Kim’s sister’s trailer, where he took mother and daughter hostage. During an approximately eight-hour standoff with police, Cox shot Kim twice with a .40-caliber handgun. As she lay dying, he sexually assaulted Lindsey. Kim died before a SWAT team stormed the trailer and rescued her daughter. Cox pleaded guilty to all charges.

In September 2012, a Mississippi jury sentenced him to death. By 2018, Cox had begun to send letters to the Mississippi Supreme Court, asking that his lawyers be fired. He also wanted to waive further appeals: “I seek to be executed as I do here this day stand on MS Death row a guilty man worthy of death.” He said he deserved to die and passionately testified to his depravity, writing to the court, “If I had my perfect way & will about it, Id ever so gladly dig my dead sarkastic wife up of in whom I very happily & premeditatedly slaughtered on 5-14-2010 & with eager pleasure kill the fat heathern hore agan.” He saw himself as divided between two “skins,” one that sought “life & relief” and one that sought “death & relief, still.” In 2021, the death-seeking skin prevailed in the courts.

I volunteered to serve as a witness at Cox’s execution, traveling to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, in the low plains of the Delta. It was fall, but the season hadn’t yet touched the Deep South; there were still sleepless crickets in the evenings, and grand trees in summer dress. Prison officials directed witnesses into white vans, which took us along back roads to the execution chamber.

Peter Mendelsund

Cox uttered his last words, declaring in a short speech that he “was a good man, at one time.” In the moment, I didn’t know what to make of that statement, and truthfully I still don’t. Did he mean to say that he was irredeemable—that the path from good to evil ran only one way? Or did he mean the opposite? And which would be the stranger thing to say in his position? In the dim witness room, I transcribed his words. As for the execution, this time I was prepared. It didn’t turn my stomach when Cox’s face subtly changed color on the gurney, from pale to flushed, as the poison ravaged his body.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: A good man, at one time]

Afterward, Burl Cain, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, held a press conference. Cain emphasized that the process had been smooth, in part owing to his own relationship with Cox, which he characterized as congenial. Cox, in his final words, had thanked Cain for his kindness. Cain said he had comforted Cox in the chamber by telling him about angels carrying his soul to heaven. A reporter asked him if he believed that Cox was truly Christian. Cain quoted Matthew: “Judge not lest you be judged.”

Of course, capital punishment as an institution relies on judgment at every level: judgment about guilt, about fairness, about proportion, about pain and cruelty, about the possibility of redemption. Judgment about how to carry out a death sentence and how to behave as one does so. And then there is the judgment that must be directed at oneself and one’s community—the distant, sometimes-forgotten participants. In all of this, I see the arc of my own evolving comprehension.

[Read: Inside America’s death chambers]

In 1764, the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria published his essay “On Crimes and Punishments,” one of the first sustained arguments for abolition of the death penalty, which at the time was meted out as a punishment not only for murder but for crimes such as manslaughter, arson, robbery, burglary, sodomy, bestiality, forgery, and witchcraft. Beccaria reasoned that governments have no authority to violate the rights of their citizens by taking their life and that the death penalty was a less effective deterrent than imprisonment. Beccaria’s work was widely influential in the American colonies. By 1860, no northern state executed criminals for any crimes other than murder and treason.

Conditions in the South were different. In the mid-19th century, one could be executed in Louisiana for a variety of activities that might spread discontent among free or enslaved Black people: making a speech, displaying a sign, printing and distributing materials, even having a private conversation. “Throughout the South attempted rape was a capital crime, but only if the defendant was black and the victim white,” the historian Stuart Banner observes in his 2002 book, The Death Penalty. (There is no known record of a white rapist ever being hanged in the antebellum South.) Enslaved people were subject to a wide array of capital sentences and to exceedingly brutal forms of execution. American capital punishment took on an undeniably racist character.

Over time, the range of permissible execution methods narrowed. Public hangings largely fell out of favor in the 19th century, when the spectacle of executions came to be seen as not only coarse but coarsening. Firing squads, bloody and brutal, became exceedingly rare by the mid-20th century. Executions withdrew behind prison walls as electrocution came into fashion, beginning in the late 1800s. The electric chair was used thousands of times, despite its tendency to produce horrifying unintended outcomes, such as prisoners catching on fire. Execution by lethal gas became available in 1921, but gas, too, resulted in agonizing deaths.

In the late 1960s, the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund launched a nationwide campaign to challenge the death penalty not on strictly moral grounds but on a variety of legal ones, including the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Then, in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court took up three death-penalty cases under the name Furman v. Georgia. Lawyers for William Henry Furman, who had been convicted of felony murder, argued that capital punishment as practiced in America—arbitrarily, and with intense racial bias—violated defendants’ Eighth Amendment protections because it imposed death sentences unfairly. The case split the Court in nine directions, with five justices issuing separate opinions in favor of the petitioner. Of those five, only two found capital punishment unconstitutional per se. The other three found that it was unconstitutional as practiced. One result of Furman was a brief moratorium on executions across the United States.

It was a hinge moment. As the death-penalty scholar Austin Sarat has noted, the “old abolitionism,” where opponents of the death penalty made their case in moral terms—mounting arguments about human worth and dignity—was giving way to a “new abolitionism,” where opponents instead focused their messaging on practical barriers to the just and humane application of capital punishment. These contemporary arguments involve factual observations about the death penalty as practiced—namely, that innocent people may be executed, that sentencing is arbitrary, that the handing-down of death sentences is heavily influenced by racism, and that the use of capital punishment is marked by horrific mishaps.

Executions resumed in 1977 after revisions to state laws. That same year, spurred by the grisly failures of electrocution, Oklahoma passed a bill permitting death by lethal injection, a form of execution that Ronald Reagan once analogized to having a veterinarian put an animal to sleep. Lethal injection was eventually adopted in every state that has the death penalty. It, too, has been the subject of much-publicized failures, as well as fierce litigation.

I learned firsthand about what could go wrong in the summer of 2022, when I received a call from a doctor who works with prisoners on Alabama’s death row. The doctor, Joel Zivot, told me that the state had likely botched the execution of a man named Joe Nathan James Jr.—sentenced to death for murdering Faith Hall, his ex-girlfriend, in 1994—and was keeping the matter secret. Witnesses to the execution reported that they had waited roughly three hours before they were permitted inside the facility, during which time James’s whereabouts were unknown, and that when the curtain to the execution chamber was finally opened, James appeared unconscious. The case drew my attention for another reason: Hall’s family, including her two daughters, had been opposed to the execution, saying that Hall believed in forgiveness and wouldn’t have wanted James put to death. I was struck by the advocacy of a victim’s family, which I wrongly assumed to have been very rare.

Time was short. James had been dead for a couple of days, and burial was imminent. The official autopsy report issued by the state’s Department of Forensic Sciences would not be available for months. With the help of James’s attorney and James’s brother Hakim, Zivot and I arranged for an independent pathologist to conduct a second autopsy to help clarify how James’s death had actually occurred.

The procedure took place at a funeral home in Birmingham on a seethingly hot day. Light shimmered above the pavement. Inside, box fans ventilated the small tiled room where James’s body lay on an examination table, draped in a shroud and a plastic sheet. When I arrived, his torso was already open, slit down the middle, with coils of intestines gathered alongside him. The top of his skull had been sawed off; his brain had been removed and sat in a clear bag. The pathologist lifted up the lungs to weigh them. I rounded the table to look at James’s inner arms.

Zivot had been onto something: Rather than cleanly inserting the two needles required for the injection, executioners appeared to have pierced James’s hands and arms all over in search of a usable vein. Bruises had bloomed near the puncture sites. Just below his bicep, there were slashes consistent with an attempted “cutdown,” when a blade is used to open the skin in order to access a vein. The number of slashes suggested multiple attempts. Mark Edgar, a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, theorized that James had been thrashing on the gurney. (The Alabama Department of Corrections has denied that execution staff administered a cutdown.)

Something about the image—the blood, the nakedness, the evidence of pain—reminded me of giving birth, of the organic intensity that marks both ends of life.

I remembered Burl Cain, the corrections commissioner in Mississippi, saying he’d thought of the victims when David Neal Cox asked on the gurney if he would feel any pain. Cox, after all, had been ruthlessly indifferent to the pain of his victims. A great number of people come to the same conclusion—that to care about death-row prisoners is to slight the people they killed. But Cain made another observation: He couldn’t help the victim of this murder or her family; he could, however, help the prisoner in his custody. For that reason, he had comforted Cox. A similar desire to help, and the fact that the family of James’s victim had publicly forgiven her killer and campaigned to halt his execution, made me more comfortable with the sympathy I felt for him. I took pictures of his cuts and bruises and, in a small office at the mortuary, prayed for the repose of his soul.

Later, I wrote about James’s death, laying into Alabama state authorities for the evidently torturous execution and the attempt to cover it up. What had happened mattered. James was a human being, I meant to say, and, moreover, a member of society. It was around that time, the graphic encounter with James still fresh, that I started to dream of dying by lethal injection.

Joe Nathan James Jr., David Neal Cox, and Alfred Bourgeois were men I had never known personally. The experience of confronting their deaths was vivid, but also, on some level, remote. But that began to change.

To tell the full story of what had happened to James required reaching out to other men on Alabama’s death row. I had no idea what to expect, and was wary. The exchanges were initially terse, but in time became more familiar. I came to appreciate the personalities of the men, their relationships with one another, their complex interior worlds. Some were laconic and businesslike; others were friendly and conversational. I enjoyed talking with them—not just about the specific subject at hand but also about their life inside prison: candy bars from the commissary, visits from members of a local church, vigils for the dying.

Peter Mendelsund

The next prisoner scheduled to be executed in Alabama in 2022 was a man named Alan Eugene Miller, who on a summer day in 1999 had shot and killed two co-workers and a former supervisor. The other men on death row called him Big Miller on account of his 350-pound build. Charles Scott, a psychiatrist retained by Miller’s trial counsel, had concluded that Miller was delusional during his rampage. Another psychiatrist, this one for the prosecution, believed that Miller had suffered from a schizoid personality disorder at the time of the murders. Mental illness is extremely common among prisoners on death row, but the Supreme Court has never ruled that it disqualifies a person from capital punishment. Miller had a tendency to speak at length without much direction, to others as well as to himself. One acquaintance described him as “childlike.”

At first I mainly interacted with Miller through lawyers, friends, and family. Miller himself called me after the article about James was published. He was nervous but polite, with a high, reedy voice. His execution date had been set, and he wanted someone there to document what was going to happen to him. The Alabama Department of Corrections had not replied to requests I’d made about serving as a media witness to executions, and I did not entertain much hope that it ever would. But there was another way in. Each condemned prisoner is entitled to six “personal witnesses,” and Miller made me one of his.

On the night of September 22, 2022, I gathered with Miller’s family to count down the hours until midnight—after which Miller’s death warrant would legally expire. It was the first occasion I’d had to observe how a family experiences a loved one’s execution.

Miller’s family members were down-to-earth, genuine people. I had expected that they would be somber—and they were—but they also displayed a kind of gallows humor. Given the circumstances, any questions I had were ill-timed, but the family put me at ease and answered them. We were sharing something intimate: this preemptive mourning, this encounter with death.

But not long after we’d all moved into the witness chamber, a prison guard ushered us out, saying that the execution had been abruptly called off. As midnight approached, the state still wasn’t ready to proceed. Delays had been caused by Miller’s final appeals and also by technical failures in the chamber: Miller later said that he had been strapped down and pierced multiple times with needles as execution staff tried to access his veins. It would take Alabama time to secure another death warrant from the courts, and so for now, Miller would be spared.

Shortly afterward, I spoke with Kenneth Eugene Smith, the next man scheduled for execution in Alabama. One of Smith’s friends in prison had put us in touch. Right away, Smith was warm and courteous—surprisingly so, considering his situation. Pressure reveals character, and as Smith’s personality fell into relief, I concluded that whatever else he had been, he was also an amiable southern grandpa who reminded me of men I’d known in my childhood in Texas. Talking with him came easily. We connected over conversations about religion, our children, fantasy books and movies, his life on the inside. Eventually I came to think of him as a friend. His execution was scheduled for November.

Smith’s case was complicated. In 1988, Charles Sennett, an Alabama pastor, had resolved to have his wife, Elizabeth, murdered. He was involved in an affair and deeply in debt, so he took out a large insurance policy on his wife and began inquiring around town about paying for a hit. Smith agreed to take the job along with his friend John Forrest Parker. One March day, the two drove to the Sennetts’ home in the country, where they entered and found Elizabeth.

According to the coroner’s testimony, Elizabeth died of multiple stab wounds. The exact circumstances are hard to reconstruct. Smith would later insist that Parker had started battering Elizabeth, first with his fists, then with a cane—anything he could get his hands on. (Parker confessed to beating the minister’s wife, but claimed that he never stabbed her.) While Parker attacked Elizabeth, Smith ransacked the house and stole a VCR. The last time he laid eyes on her, he told police, Elizabeth was lying near the fireplace with a blanket over her body. Smith and Parker fled in Parker’s car.

Charles Sennett killed himself before he could be charged in his wife’s death. In 1989, Parker and Smith were convicted of capital murder. Smith appealed his death sentence, and in 1996, a jury handed down a sentence of life imprisonment instead. But a judge condemned Smith to death anyway—a maneuver known as judicial override, which would eventually be outlawed in Alabama. Existing sentences, however, were allowed to stand.

Parker had been executed in 2010, and Smith’s execution was now coming up. I offered to serve as a personal witness, and Smith accepted. On November 17, 2022, I spent the evening with one of Smith’s lawyers in his hotel room, relaying information as I learned it to Smith’s wife, Deanna “Dee” Smith, who was staying at another hotel nearby. Smith’s final appeal had been denied. All of us were waiting for the summons to the witness chamber. But the summons never came: The execution staff once again faced a midnight deadline and couldn’t beat the clock. The execution was called off. I relayed the news to Dee. That night, after Smith had been returned to his cell, I spoke with him and Dee on a conference call. Smith was in shock. He explained that he had been strapped down and ineffectually stuck with needles—much, I imagined, as Miller and apparently James had been. The execution staff had also jammed a long needle underneath his collarbone, looking for a subclavian vein. On the call, Dee recounted how Smith had dreamed earlier that morning of surviving his execution, marveling at what had occurred.

After Alabama failed to execute Smith in time, Kay Ivey, the governor, instituted a moratorium on executions for a few months so the state could review its procedures and protocols. (The results of the review were never made public.) When the moratorium was lifted and their second execution dates were scheduled, Smith and Miller again asked me to join them as they faced death, this time from suffocation by means of nitrogen hypoxia—according to experts, a form of killing never before used as a method of execution. Smith would die on January 25, 2024, and Miller on September 26.

I understand why people who favor the death penalty—more than 50 percent of all Americans—feel the way they do. Murder is an offense not just against a person and their family but against society itself, and all of us have a stake in how the state responds. Some people favor a lethal brand of justice, and I would have assumed, before murder entered my own life, that almost anyone directly affected by homicide would feel the same.

On a warm June afternoon in 2016, I was asleep in bed with our newborn daughter when my husband, Matt, came into the room to tell me that his 29-year-old sister, Heather, was dead. She had been stabbed to death so brutally that the first responders at the scene initially believed she had sustained a gunshot wound. The killer, a 25-year-old man named Javier Vazquez-Martinez, with whom she had been romantically involved, was apprehended after a police chase across Arlington, Texas. According to incident reports, he was intoxicated and in possession of drugs, an open container of hard liquor, and a knife. When interviewed by law enforcement, he denied ever assaulting Heather, but witnesses told police that Vazquez-Martinez had beaten her so severely in the past few weeks that she had been hospitalized. That’s the part that my father-in-law, Marty, often thinks about.

Marty is a retired forklift driver who still lives in Arlington, where Heather, Matt, and I all grew up. “Heather was a great daughter,” Marty told me. “She cared about everyone.” She was vivacious and beautiful, played basketball, and maxed out her library card every time she visited. Marty and Matt are quiet and reserved; Heather’s sociability made for a contrast. I remember meeting her: She was full of questions and seemed pleased that her shy younger brother had turned up with a girlfriend. Heather was murdered on Father’s Day, and Marty knew something was wrong when she didn’t call.

After the police notified him of her death, Marty was put in touch with a victims’ advocate, who would help shepherd him through the criminal-justice process. Eventually he was summoned to a meeting with a local district attorney in Fort Worth. Despite a lifetime in Texas, where capital punishment has broad support, Marty didn’t go into the meeting with a plan to campaign for the death penalty. “I know Heather wouldn’t have wanted it,” he explained to me. “I have Christian values and beliefs, though they wander from time to time.” He went on, “I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do. I don’t think it helps anybody.” Vazquez-Martinez was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Like his father, my husband remains heartbroken by Heather’s death. It has been bittersweet watching her features blossom on our daughter’s face. Matt knows that the death penalty may serve an expressive purpose—signaling the depth of outrage and pain—but he ultimately holds to the same view of capital punishment that his father has in Heather’s case.

Families of murder victims routinely perform exceptional feats of mercy, if not forgiveness. “We’re pretty forgiving people, but I haven’t forgiven him,” Marty told me. Forgiveness is an emotional process that involves coming to see a wrongdoer as a moral equal again, and inviting them back into the place reserved in your heart for the rest of the world. To forgive someone who has harmed you is to forswear bitter feelings, which is to surrender a certain righteous power—the permission granted by society for retaliation. It is also therefore a kind of sacrifice. Only divinity can demand that of someone; no human being can demand it of another. And the Christian directive is especially exacting, requiring forgiveness for others in order to be forgiven oneself.

But mercy—to refrain from punishing a person to the maximum extent that a transgression might deserve—doesn’t demand half as much. It is hard to imagine forgiveness without mercy, but easy to imagine mercy without forgiveness. In his treatise On Clemency, addressed to the emperor he served, the philosopher Seneca describes mercy as “a restraining of the mind from vengeance when it is in its power to avenge itself”—in other words, a “gentleness shown by a powerful man in fixing the punishment of a weaker one.” The ruler who shows mercy is “sparing of the blood” of even the lowest of subjects simply because “he is a man.” Socially, mercy registers the value of human life. For the benefactor, it is a forge of moral character. For the recipient, it is a godsend.

The age of all-powerful sovereigns is mostly gone, but avenues for public acts of mercy remain. State governors, for instance, frequently opt to commute death sentences based on their evaluation of the circumstances. Legislators in many states have shown mercy to even the worst criminals by voting to end capital punishment. Mercy may be in some sense arbitrary, but so is capital punishment, and although mercy may produce unequal outcomes, unfairness in benefaction is better than the unfairness in harm that defines the American exercise of the death penalty. If one insists on complete and total fairness, then: no mercy, and no capital punishment.

Many people on death row are more worthy of love and respect than one might initially assume, and in such instances, mercy perhaps comes more easily. But choosing mercy is the moral path even in the hardest cases—even if you believe that some people deserve execution, even if you think you can judge the totality of someone’s character from their worst act, and even if you know for a fact that the person in question is guilty and unrepentant.

Seneca’s reasons for advising clemency are Stoic: It is better to restrain one’s impulses than to indulge them, especially when they involve destructive tendencies, such as wrath and cruelty. Self-control is a virtue, and it is possible to educate one’s desires so that they gradually change. To default to mercy is to impose limitations on one’s own power to retaliate, and to acknowledge our flawed nature. To a Christian, mercy derives from charity. And in the liminal space where families of murder victims are recruited into the judicial process—to either bless or condemn a prosecutor’s intentions—showing mercy is an especially heroic decision. To think this way is to understand that the moral dimension of capital punishment is not just about what we do to others. It’s also about what we do to ourselves.

Periodically, forgiveness and mercy meet under the right conditions to produce reconciliation. In the spring of 2001, James Edward Barber murdered 75-year-old Dorothy “Dottie” Epps during a drunken crack binge in Harvest, Alabama. He didn’t do it for money. He didn’t do it for any reason at all. His recollection of the incident was hazy, he testified, but he could recall being inside Epps’s house and picking up a hammer. For a time, Barber would later say, he was in “utter disbelief” and denial about what he had done. He fought in county jail, lashing out in shame and anger. He was living, by his own account, a “worthless life.”

But Barber slowly began to change. Isolated and restless, he began reading a Bible. And he was taken with it—fell in love with it; read it through once, then twice; and, eventually, signed up for correspondence courses. Barber became a friendly face on death row, much like Kenny Smith. “They were approachable open and willing to engage with anyone on almost any topic,” one death-row prisoner wrote to me over Alabama’s prison messaging app. “Jimmie always had a self deprecating joke.” According to his lawyer, Barber’s record inside prison was spotless. But there was something incomplete about his reform.

That changed in 2020, when he opened a letter from Sarah Gregory, Epps’s granddaughter, and found forgiveness inside. “I am tired Jimmy,” she wrote. “I am tired. I am tired of carrying this pain, hate, and rage in my heart. I can’t do it anymore. I have to do this and truly forgive you.” Barber was astonished—brought to his knees. He composed a letter of his own: “Sarah, sorry could never come close to what is in my heart & soul.” He went on: “I made a promise to myself in that nasty, dirty, evil county jail, I was never going to become ‘a convict.’ I made up my mind that when I left prison either on my feet or in a body bag I was going to be a better man than when I arrived.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: What it means to forgive the unforgivable]

Gregory wrote back: “Receiving your letter was the final piece of freedom. The weight was lifted when I forgave you in my heart, but your response back brought me indescribable freedom and release.” The two began talking on the phone about life and God and Gregory’s son. Her forgiveness seemed to bind them together. “I love that girl more than I love anybody else in this world,” Barber told me.

As Barber’s time dwindled, Gregory realized she didn’t want to see him put to death. The day before his scheduled execution, Gregory told me that she was “losing a friend tomorrow.” She said, “I would’ve never thought I would’ve ever said that. He was a friend of mine, and I’m gonna miss him.”

On the night of July 21, 2023, I watched Barber die in Alabama’s death chamber. Afterward, his lawyers shared his final statement: “I made up my mind early on that mere words could not express my sorrow at what had occurred at my hands. And so I hoped that the way I lived my life would be a testimony to the family of Dorothy Epps and also my family, of the regret and shame I have for what I’ve done.” It wasn’t for him to say whether his efforts were successful. But they were enough for Gregory.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Jimi Barber died a forgiven man]

Barber was the first person executed after Alabama lifted its temporary moratorium and resumed lethal injections. I had corresponded with him on Alabama’s prison messaging app, and his sister-in-law had shown me a letter he’d written to her. He was joyful, kind, and encouraging—and grateful for so much, even in his position. I knew him well enough to feel certain that he was sincere in his remorse and repentance. The death penalty is, to some degree, indiscriminate: Both innocent and guilty people have been sentenced to death. But the death penalty is also morally indiscriminate in an additional way, in that it kills guilty people who may have become good people. By the time execution arrives, the offender may be a completely different person from the one who took a life. We can’t know the nature or potential of another’s soul.

Peter Mendelsund

Today, 27 states have abolished the death penalty or have halted executions by executive action. According to the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, as of last summer, 2,213 people resided on America’s death rows, compared with 3,682 people in 2000. In each year during the past decade, fewer than 50 death sentences have been handed down by American courts. The Justice Department declared a moratorium on federal executions after Joe Biden took office, in 2021, and before leaving office, Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men awaiting execution in federal prisons. “It’s not an irreversible momentum,” Austin Sarat, the death-penalty scholar, told me, “but I think the momentum against the death penalty is pretty substantial.”

Yet for now, in the United States, the death penalty continues. Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing federal prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in all applicable cases. South Carolina recently carried out the nation’s first firing-squad execution in 15 years, and Louisiana resumed executions after a long hiatus—this time by nitrogen hypoxia. Perhaps worried about the continued practical feasibility of lethal injection, Oklahoma and Mississippi have also made execution by nitrogen hypoxia statutorily available within their borders. It would be quick and painless, proponents said. Just like going to sleep.

Kenny Smith, who had survived his first attempted execution, would be the first person ever to be put to death by means of nitrogen hypoxia. I arrived at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility a little after eight on the morning of January 24, 2024, the day before his rescheduled execution. I was accompanied by his wife, Dee, and his nieces and nephew. We passed through a metal detector and handed over our IDs, wallets, and keys to a guard stationed outside the visitation room.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Why does Alabama keep botching executions?]

Despite having gotten to know Smith for nearly a year and a half, I had never met him in person. I was surprised to see how tall and broad he was, an imposing presence softened by a graying beard and an avuncular demeanor. “C’mere, Little Bit,” he said, breaking into a smile as he rose from the table where he sat. “Gimme a hug.” The nickname was new; Smith had called me “ma’am” the first time we spoke and “hun” after that.

Smith and I sat down at the plastic-topped table where he huddled with his son Steven Tiggleman, his daughter-in-law Chandon Tiggleman, and his mother, Linda Smith. Dee leaned toward Smith across the table and murmured to him in quiet tones. The scene had the look of a last supper, everyone gathered close with melancholy faces, grieving in advance.

Hours passed. Dee and the others had brought in plastic baggies full of quarters to clink into the vending machines. No outside food was allowed in, so we drank Mountain Dew and Sunkist, and split bags of chips and honey buns and Skittles. Smith leaned against his mother. At one point, a prison worker came in and took pictures of all of us in a group. Smith and I stood together for a photo; he somehow managed a smile. A group of Mennonites came by to sing “Amazing Grace” on the other side of an interior wall. Conversation seemed to proceed in waves of fond reverie that peaked with laughter and then crashed into silence.

As night fell, I joined Smith’s family for dinner. We met at a casino a few minutes from the prison. The place was decked out for Mardi Gras—white artificial Christmas trees stuck with floral sprays of gold, green, and purple; masked harlequin puppets draped in multicolored beads. We sat together in the casino’s steak house. Rain began to fall as we ate, and continued into the next day. The prison’s gutters were flooded and gushing onto the stony pavement as we filed in to visit Smith one last time.

No more quarters were permitted inside, no more snacks and soda. Smith could potentially vomit inside the mask, something the state hoped to avoid by depriving him of food after 10 a.m. on the day he was to die. He’d eaten steak and eggs with hash browns from Waffle House for breakfast that morning, his last meal. Then he sat with us in cheaply upholstered metal chairs and talked.

Everyone took turns crying, holding on to one another for strength. Smith wept in his mother’s arms. Steven, a reserved and courteous man, spoke quietly with his father. Smith kissed Dee, massaged her shoulders, reassured her. She wore a shirt that said Never Alone, a gloss on Hebrews 13:5: “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ ” It was the same shirt she had worn to his first scheduled execution, back in 2022. Now it implied a shred of hope.

Smith led me to a couple of chairs side by side in a far corner of the visitation room and sat down with me. I was emotional, too; so much for steely journalistic resolve. Smith patted me on the back paternally and told me I could ask him anything I liked. So I asked him about his life and how he reflected on it. Smith wasn’t angry about his situation, or frustrated by the length of time he had spent alienated from society. He’d had a life before he went to prison, he told me. He had done a terrible thing, but he had also worked, had children, found love, and made friends. He had sustained those relationships behind bars, where many people wind up isolated and lonely. Smith had a vivid inner life.

Shortly after this conversation, prison officials struck me from Smith’s personal-witness list because I had brought pen and paper, something I had been told I wasn’t supposed to have, into the visitation room. Of course, this wasn’t strictly about pen and paper—it was about what I had already written and published, although the Alabama Department of Corrections denies this. I was summarily barred from Smith’s final moments and would be banned from serving as a personal witness in Alabama going forward. (And so I was unable to attend Alan Eugene Miller’s execution, by nitrogen hypoxia, in September.) But the accounts of others allowed me to follow events that night. Around 7 p.m., the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Smith’s final appeal, clearing the way for the state to carry out the sentence. The execution staff once again strapped Smith to a gurney, this time with an industrial respirator mask fixed to his face. As his family watched through the window between the death chamber and the witness room, the gas began to flow. Smith’s blood oxygen became depleted, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he began to convulse. For 22 minutes, Smith writhed and gasped, struggling for air, and then, finally, he died.

Later that night, at a press conference after the execution, Steven sought out the family of Smith’s victim, Elizabeth Sennett. He hugged them, and apologized—something he told me he had been waiting to do nearly his whole life, haunted by the burden of shame that connected their families. One of Sennett’s sons, Mike, hugged Steven back. When the reporters and TV crews were gone, Dee, Steven, and his brother, Michael, lingered with me on the patio of a Holiday Inn, smoking cigarettes and sharing shots of whiskey from a Dixie cup. Dee wept, swaying softly as she stood. Inside the hotel, she had clutched a green teddy bear Smith had given her, made from some of his prison-issued clothes, with a lock of his hair sewn inside. Now she looked at her phone as news alerts of her husband’s death popped up on the screen.

We stood and talked until midnight, when I said I had better get back to my hotel. I was feeling a little disoriented, fragments of the night’s conversations surfacing through the static in my head. I couldn’t make sense of the fact that Smith had survived once, only to be put to death in the end. Miracles are mercurial. As the time of execution approached, a reporter had asked Smith what his message to the public would be. “You know, brother, I’d say, ‘Leave room for mercy,’ ” he’d replied. “That just doesn’t exist in Alabama. Mercy really doesn’t exist in this country when it comes to difficult situations like mine.”

He was right about that. Now that he was gone, life after Smith had begun. I would clip the pictures of us together onto the refrigerator with a magnet, next to the school papers and crayon drawings. I would continue to seek opportunities to serve as a witness at executions, though now outside Alabama. I would resolve to greet the next person I met on death row with the kindness that Smith, Miller, Barber, and others had shown to me. And I would erase old names from the grid of capital cases on my kitchen chalkboard, adding new ones to take their place.

This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “Witness.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Anti-Natalist’s Revenge

2025-05-23T08:44:11-04:00

When a young man detonated a car bomb in the parking lot of a Palm Springs, California, fertility clinic last week, killing himself and injuring four others, I assumed the attack was related in some distorted way to pro-life politics. Despite the Trump administration’s recent embrace of in vitro fertilization, some pro-lifers, especially conservative Catholics, are opposed to the practice because it can lead to the disposal of embryos. That fact, coupled with the historical association between extreme anti-abortion sentiment and clinic bombings, led me to anticipate a news cycle concerning radical efforts to restrict abortion.

I was wrong. The bombing, carried out by a 25-year-old California native named Guy Edward Bartkus, was an attempt to prevent couples from accessing IVF, not because the process produces some embryos that wind up dead, but rather because it produces some embryos that wind up alive. Bartkus, who left behind an online screed titled “Fuck you pro-lifers!” complete with an index of links and an .mp3 file explaining his agenda, was an avowed “pro-mortalist”—someone who objects to the creation of new people because, the reasoning goes, no one can consent to being conceived, and that initial unfairness only exposes new consciousness to the suffering of life and the inevitability of death. This is the mind virus that Bartkus was hoping to spread with his attack and its explanation. For that reason alone, it deserves refuting: Life is good and worth defending.

Bartkus’s manifesto is arranged like a “frequently asked questions” section, in which he expresses his philosophy and addresses possible counterarguments. “Understand your death is already a guarantee, and you can thank your parents for that one,” he wrote. “All a promortalist is saying is let’s make it happen sooner rather than later (and preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident), to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.” In Bartkus’s view, to have children is to act as “willing agents for a DNA molecule”—that is, to blindly submit to an animal urge to perpetuate one’s genes. None of this is novel, as Bartkus himself pointed out when he cited his philosophy’s kinship to negative utilitarianism, abolitionist veganism, and “efilism,” an evidently Reddit-based phenomenon that views humans as mere slaves to DNA. “Pro-mortalism” is a derivative riff on anti-natalism, a philosophy whose most learned proponent is the South African academic David Benatar. (Benatar has maintained a higher-brow version of the argument against reproduction for the past two decades.) But its most infamous proponent is Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, who sketched out an extremely dark version of the same morbid theory in his library of audio recordings and then enacted it.

[Marc Novicoff: The loneliness of the conservative pronatalist]

The FBI has classified Bartkus’s attack, which devastated the clinic’s offices, as terrorism, though he failed to actually destroy any embryos; the facility’s lab is located offsite. Perhaps the spectacle was intended more to provoke a response from the public than to prevent any particular embryos from developing—and his death surely will be marshaled by both sides of American politics to represent our current failings. To many on the left, the bombing may register as another episode in the country’s ongoing mental-health crisis, with Bartkus as the avatar of dangerously ill youth who could have benefited from early intervention to counter what appears to have been long-term suicidal ideation. For many on the right, the act may read as more overtly political—a sign of the anti-life left’s derangement. Bartkus did address his missive to pro-lifers, and his philosophy is directly contrary to the kind of anti-abortion politics the Trump administration is very deliberately cultivating.

Both analyses contain elements of truth. Bartkus described himself as having borderline personality disorder, and his manifesto is at times rambling and incoherent (as in a subsection where he declares his preference for Satan over God). Although he wasn’t clear about what kinds of suffering make life unworthy of living, he did provide an explanation of his timing by referring to the recent death of a long-distance friend, who he said had died after asking her boyfriend to shoot her in her sleep, which the boyfriend then did, multiple times. Bartkus also appears to have been under the influence of one of those toxic internet subcultures that acts like a transmissible mood disorder, imparting not only grim ideas but also a certain climate of mind. From that vantage, goodness and joy are rendered irrelevant, and all of life’s pain and suffering are read as justifications for their chosen resentments. But sickness and grief don’t negate the fact that the ideas behind Bartkus’s manifesto are serious, deranged responses to current politics, as acts of terrorism frequently are. Attacks like his aren’t representative of any mainstream tendency—but they do reveal what’s simmering below the surface of society: in this case, angst and uncertainty about whether perpetuating human life is an altogether good thing for humans or the planet.

It’s difficult to persuade someone convinced otherwise that human life is more of an affirmative good than a hazard. “Oh, what can you do with a man like that?” John Cheever once wrote. “How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?”

You can’t, it seems. But for anyone on the fence, or who finds themselves somewhat tempted by Bartkus’s premises, I wish they could see that life is indeed good, even when it isn’t easy or pleasurable. Humanity is capable of unique greatness—not only via the spectacular achievements of artists, scientists, and philosophers in which all of us share by nature of kinship, but also in moral terms: the daily miracle of individuals encountering complicated and frustrating situations and choosing to do the right thing anyway. The world is full of such people, though they may be overlooked by those cynical toward humanity’s contributions to history. Their perseverance in goodness is sufficient argument for more of us, more human excellence, great and small. May the future always belong to humankind.

Who Counts as Christian?

2025-05-12T07:00:00-04:00

During his campaign, Donald Trump told Christian supporters that if he became president, they would never have to vote again, because “we’ll have it fixed so good.” Now he’s trying to follow through on his promise by establishing a task force charged with “eradicating anti-Christian bias.” But Christians shouldn’t conclude that this new commission will necessarily defend their interests, let alone fix it “so good.” Eliminating anti-Christian bias will require the task force (and thereby the government) to rule on what exactly constitutes authentic Christian belief and practice—not a straightforward determination to make, nor one that should be entrusted to the Trump administration.

The executive order creating the task force cites a multitude of examples of what the Trump administration considers to be unacceptable discrimination against Christians, including Biden-era prosecutions of Christian anti-abortion protesters under the Freedom to Access Clinic Entrances Act, the promulgation of a (later retracted) FBI memo referring to radical traditionalist Christians as a potential domestic-terrorism threat, and the designation of Easter Sunday of 2024 as the year’s Transgender Day of Visibility.

Conservative Christians may generally agree with Trump’s characterization of those episodes. But determining the authentically Christian perspective on an issue is not always a simple task. Was the Westboro Baptist Church, a Christian group that spent decades picketing the funerals of LGBTQ people and members of the armed forces, justified in stomping on American flags and heckling crowds of mourners in the name of Christ? The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the group at one point and declined to even entertain its argument at another. Or consider the case of an Episcopalian church in Sacramento whose rainbow Pride flag was stolen and burned: Would this task force agree that the attack was an act of aggression against the congregation qua Christians? The church’s priest certainly thought so. To what authority would this task force appeal in order to prove otherwise? Tradition, scripture, the majority opinion of the faithful? Even the most learned Christians disagree on how to derive religious authority, and I doubt this task force will finally settle the debate.

[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

This is not a strictly academic point. As part of carrying out the task force’s mandate, Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas Collins sent a memo to staff asking them to report instances of anti-Christian discrimination—which included, among other things, “adverse responses to requests for religious exemption under the previous vaccine mandates.” In this case, the state seems to have decided that Christians have legitimate reason to request exemptions from vaccine mandates.

But I would contend that vaccines aren’t excluded by genuine Christian ethics, and that these Christian objectors are mistaken in their understanding of the faith. By permitting Christians to obtain vaccine-mandate exemptions, the state is not only misconstruing Christianity, but also causing a great deal of harm—a multistate measles outbreak, for instance, has caused three deaths this year and is still spreading. Vaccine mandates are crucial in preventing such occurrences, and Christians should be particularly willing to offer some small sacrifice for the good of others. That principle is at the heart of the faith.

Nor has this administration been friendly to legitimate Christian belief and practice that runs afoul of its politics. Earlier this year, Vice President J. D. Vance bickered with American bishops over major funding cuts to organizations that aid migrants and refugees, contending that their interest was in making money, not in practicing Christianity faithfully. Pope Francis indirectly chastised Vance in a letter written a few weeks before the pope’s death, but it doesn’t seem that Vance was moved to change his mind. One wonders what the vice president has to say about the recent arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan, who allegedly helped an undocumented man evade arrest by government agents and who also served as the executive director of a branch of Catholic Charities. Was this possibly an example of anti-Christian bias directed at a person practicing the kind of mercy counseled by the late pope?

[Luis Parrales: What the border-hawk Catholics get wrong]

But the task force is just one element of a broader project to recapture political and cultural ground that Christianity has lost over the past several decades. The litany of examples supplied as justification for the task force’s creation generally fit under the rubric of frustrating compromises with liberalism—in the classical sense, as related to the country’s founding: liberty, equality, and freedom of conscience—something Trump alluded to during a celebration of National Prayer Day in the Rose Garden. “They say separation between Church and state,” he remarked. “I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time,’” adding, “We’re bringing religion back to our country, and it’s a big deal.” Liberalism engenders religious tolerance in part by domesticating religion, and some number of Christians long for wilder and fiercer expressions of the faith than are generally on offer within a liberal framework.

There was a time when American Christianity and the liberal state were less frequently in conflict because Christianity was so overwhelmingly dominant in society. But the recent decline of Christianity has changed that. In 1980, more than 90 percent of Americans identified themselves as Christian; today, only 62 percent say they’re followers of Christ. And though recent research suggests that the long-term decrease in Christian affiliation may have halted, the story of the past half century of American Christianity must be read through the lens of these gradual losses and their consequences. The faith no longer has the near-total sociocultural hegemony over American life that it once enjoyed; largely gone are the days of routine prayers and Bible readings in public schools, the suspension of commerce on Sundays, and the broad assumption that whoever you happen to meet will almost certainly be Christian.

There are pains associated with Christianity’s gradual transformation from a monopolizing cultural force into just one offering on an extended religious menu—though still a preeminent offering, at least for now. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the Christians coalescing around Trump want to make American Christianity great again. If the task force’s mandate of mere fairness is essentially a pretext for persecuting perceived enemies of the faith, then its real purpose is to restore this past vision of American Christian dominance.

That’s not to say that the task force won’t also address instances of genuine bias toward Christians. Anti-Christian incidents are real: Attacks and vandalism on Catholic churches, for example, appear to be at an all-time high; hundreds of incidents were reported across the country in 2023, though authorities have at times been reluctant to concede that prejudice was a factor. These episodes are understandably aggravating to Christians, and many may therefore see this task force as a welcome intervention, and a matter of fairness in principle: If other groups are entitled to systematic efforts to root out prejudice toward them, the thinking goes, then why not Christians as well?

Perhaps that’s the irony of this new task force: Nobody appears to view Christianity as just another interest group as much as Donald Trump, who was overtly indifferent to religion until it became clear to him that Christians represented a bloc to pick up with typical political pandering—and pandering works. But Christians should as a rule be skeptical of versions of the faith that are informed overly much by partisan politics, which always have something other than Jesus at their core.

Now I Know What My Mother Was Saying

2025-05-11T07:00:00-04:00

The kids’ folders come home from school fat with dead-stock papers: permission slips, notices, idle doodles, art projects, completed packets of classwork. I sort through it all, checking their work before depositing it into the recycling bin. On my eldest daughter’s first day of kindergarten, I told myself I would keep scads of her schoolwork as mementos in boxes in the attic, but I underestimated how much there would be. At some point, you can’t hold on to everything, which is a hard lesson to accept. Throwing it all out is disturbing in a symbolic way, a material manifestation of the fear that one is frittering away precious days with one’s children. I comfort myself by retaining bits that strike me as significant, like all of the love letters addressed to me.

Children begin writing about love as soon as they’re literate. They’re cooperating with the adage that you ought to write what you know. “Dere mom,” a recent missive from my 5-year-old read. “I love you so much.” The text took up a whole page, was repeated on the back, and repeated again on a second sheet, each iteration in different shades of crayon, an adorable version of the typewriter scene in The Shining, as though repetition was all she had to convey the degree of her emotions. Of course, these are words that I taught her, and habits of expression I’ve modeled: I have told her that I love her every day, several times a day, since before she was born, tens of thousands of declarations, an almost desperate need to express something too profound for words.

This is an acute frustration. The love for one’s children is overwhelming, so intense that its attendant emotions often register as physical sensations: the blossoming euphoria triggered by the scent of the child’s hair, the full-body warmth provoked by a long embrace, the painful twist in the chest at the mere thought of their pain or fear or sorrow. I receive each of my children’s notes as a shot through the heart—not because I despair that they will someday cease but because the satisfaction of requited love is so transcendent right now. We have a closed circuit, a little private world: I shower them with all the love my soul can conjure, and they do the same for me. How to explain the magnitude of this love? It’s enormous; it’s animal; it’s amoral—the things I would do for the sake of this love, which emanates from some primitive, elemental place. I envision ochre paintings on torchlit cave walls: Did they feel this too, and how did they express it? I read once that most cave art was created by women and children. What did they say to one another?

[From the June 1990 Issue: Mother’s Day]

When I was a little girl, I wrote messages of love for my mother, delivering them on construction-paper hearts all throughout my childhood. Now I spend time contemplating more elegant and mature ways to communicate that same sentiment, because the urge to write her love letters has not subsided. It’s taken on a certain urgency now that I understand the sacrifices she made for me. My mother used to pick me up from day care in paisley dresses or broomstick skirts with slouchy boots, hair hot-rolled and blown out, with the lived-in scent of faded perfume: full glam for an eight-hour workday with a 45-minute commute on either end and then a second shift at home, cooking any number of demanding meals—fried chicken, smothered pork chops, breakfast for dinner with biscuits and gravy—and then helping me and my brother with our homework and loading up the dishwasher, all before she took her makeup off. I used to sit beside her and talk with her while she took her evening bath, watching while she rinsed her mascara off and finally breathed. As I got older, she would call the house landline from her office phone to ask me to peel some potatoes, chop some vegetables, preheat the oven, grate some cheese.

Those requests annoyed me at the time, but they, too, were an expression of her love. The comedy of maternal love is that its seismic intensity is expressed, most of the time, in totally mundane drudgery. I would willingly die for you at any moment. Now come here and let me scrub half a tablespoon of popsicle residue off your face. I always knew that my mother loved me. I didn’t realize the full practical cost of her love until experiencing it for myself, at least in part. I do not travel to an office building with a full face of makeup; I work from home in yoga pants, and prepare simple food gradually throughout the day rather than whipping up a southern masterpiece at 6 p.m. in a frenzied rush. But there are still the loads of laundry and the piles of dishes, tolerance mustered for the hazards of children’s “help” in the kitchen, and time taken to assist the kids in realizing tiny dreams: raising tadpoles and butterflies, planting hundreds of flowers, crafting salt-dough volcanoes with vinegar and baking soda. I didn’t quite grasp the astounding force of feeling layered into all of that until I was the one doing the layering. It’s as though I’ve learned a language my mother was speaking all along, and now understand what she was trying to say.

[Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: In praise of single moms on Mother’s Day]

I’m falling in love all over again. I send my mother texts and flowers and invitations for trips just for us. But the words I find to speak aren’t ever equal to what I feel, and I don’t foresee that problem resolving; if anything, I suspect it will get worse as time goes on and my love continues to change and deepen. But perhaps the point of all these professions of love, of the notes in crayon and the loads of laundry, is to memorialize this feeling, not just communicate it. Every gesture means: Here and now, I feel something for you that is all-consuming and primordial, the full meaning of which can be revealed only over time.

Progressive Christianity’s Bleak Future

2025-04-22T15:57:02-04:00

In his final Easter address, Pope Francis touched on one of the major themes of his 12-year papacy, that love, hope, and peace are possible amid a rising tide of violence and extremism: “What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world!” Archbishop Diego Ravelli read the prepared text aloud to crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, because Francis was by then too ill to deliver his remarks himself: “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” The hallmark of a truly Christian sentiment is its radicalism, how deeply it subverts systems of worldly power and domination. Francis understood that.

Accordingly, his observations about the revolutionary truth of Christianity with respect to global political affairs were often rejected, sometimes bitterly, by the world leaders he meant to exhort. His opponents were mainly conservatives of various stripes—some traditionalists upset by his relative coldness toward older liturgies, some members of the political right frustrated with his unwillingness to spiritually cooperate in their sociopolitical projects. Thus some conservatives were positively delighted by Francis’s death. The risible Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “Today there were major shifts in global leaderships. Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.” Greene’s own Christianity was evidently insufficient to discourage such profound judgment, and hers may unfortunately be the way of the future.

[Read: The papacy is forever changed]

To what evil might Greene refer? Perhaps Francis’s embrace of philosophical concerns associated with politically progressive causes—such as climate change, as addressed in his landmark encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Praised Be”). Francis wrote that “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” an epiphenomenon of what he called “throwaway culture,” which encourages not only waste and environmental degradation but also a cavalier disinterest in the lives of the poor in favor of wanton consumption. “We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty,” he wrote, “with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet.” The pope had a keen sense of class consciousness, which he pointedly expressed in a speech last year to leaders of global popular movements: “It is often precisely the wealthiest who oppose the realization of social justice or integral ecology out of sheer greed,” he said, adding that humanity’s future may well depend “on the community action of the poor of the Earth.” The marginalized people of the world were always Francis’s beloved, a Christian principle that led him to intervene on behalf of migrants, documented and undocumented, whenever he could.

In fact, it was the pope’s efforts to quell growing Western hostility toward migrants that recently put him directly at odds with the Trump administration. After Vice President J. D. Vance had a public spat with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over the rollback of a Biden-era law preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending undocumented migrants in schools and churches, Francis wrote a letter that seemed to chastise Vance directly. “The true ordo amoris,” Francis wrote, citing a Catholic term Vance had invoked to defend the proposition that love of kin and countryman should reign supreme, “is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘good Samaritan.’” That is, he continued, “by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

Admirers of Francis’s papacy have reason to worry for the Christianity that lies ahead. I had presumed with some sorrow, tracking long trends of vanishing American religion, that Christianity’s days here were numbered, and perhaps they still are. The country has long been headed in a secular direction. But that seems to be changing now—the decline is on pause, and another shift is under way, from a politically varied multitude to a more decidedly right-wing bloc.

A recent study from Pew Research Center documented the pause. “For the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable,” the study’s authors wrote—hovering just below two-thirds of the population. The reasons for this stabilization are undoubtedly complex, and I was heartened by these numbers—but they may well spell doom for the kind of progressive Christianity that Francis evidently hoped to shore up. In particular, it’s possible that the much-discussed departure of young, progressive people from the faith is almost complete: Virtually everyone who was going to leave has left. And now that the young progressives are nearly all gone, the overall decline has ceased, leaving behind a more solid—and conservative—core of believers. Meanwhile, it also seems that new conservative converts are joining the faith, and bringing their politics with them. The result will be a much more conservative American Christianity.

[Read: What border-hawk catholics don’t get]

Which isn’t to say that American Christianity has generally been associated with progressivism; it hasn’t, but the two weren’t always as opposed as they seem now. Over the past decade, most Christian traditions in America have shifted rightward politically: Ryan P. Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who studies religion, found that from 2008 to 2018, 27 out of 34 Christian traditions surveyed became more conservative, judging by changes in congregants’ party affiliations. Burge alluded to the reason in a social-media post earlier this month, noting that although 42 percent of very liberal survey respondents identified as nonreligious in 2008, by 2024 the number had skyrocketed to 62 percent, meaning that progressives have left religion in droves. Accordingly, the Gallup senior scientist Frank Newport wrote in 2023, “everything else being equal, the more religious the individual in the U.S. today, the higher the probability that the individual identifies with or leans toward the Republican party.”

Today’s American Christianity, therefore, is a good fit for young men of the right. “As pastor of a parish in South Carolina, I am witnessing a remarkable trend,” Father Dwight Longenecker, a conservative priest, wrote in a 2024 article for National Catholic Register: “Almost every week I receive a call, email or visit from at least one young man interested in learning more about the Catholic religion.” These new converts are undoubtedly somewhat diverse in their interests and beliefs, but a common theme in their conversion stories is disillusionment with modernity, and attraction to Catholicism as a source of stability, tradition, and ethics that transcend time and place. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux,” Vance, one such young convert, said of his own recent entry into Catholicism at a 2021 conference. “The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.” This is conservatism in the classical sense, and like Vance, young men journeying into Christianity for conservative reasons typically have conservative politics.

Conservative Christian politics are not everywhere and always destructive, but today’s right is more extreme than its recent predecessors. I fear that the next era of American Christianity will be about conquest and triumph rather than peace and humility, and will profligately lend its imprimatur to nationalist agendas that are hostile to the weak and the marginalized. (Vance’s invocation of the ordo amoris to justify the Trump administration’s extreme anti-immigrant politics is perhaps a preview of things to come.) And that would be a devastating development, not just because of the predictable political consequences of such an alignment, but also because the Christianity Francis represented really is loyal to the Gospels in its devotion to the people Jesus loved so much, whose fortunes are rarely of interest to people in power: the poor, the sick, the oppressed and exploited, the displaced and rejected. It was for those that Francis prayed, wrote, and spoke, and to them that he dedicated his time on the chair of St. Peter. And theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.

The Harem of Elon Musk

2025-04-18T10:03:18-04:00

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Fatherhood looms large in the MAGA imagination: Warming up crowds at a rally last year for Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson characterized the president as a disciplinarian dad incensed at the country’s decline—“When Dad gets home, you know what he says?” Carlson asked. “‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.” Likewise, one popular brand of Trump-themed merchandise features the slogan Daddy’s Home. Trump’s supporters tend to imagine him fulfilling a conservative version of fatherhood, where the role is associated with domination and authoritarian discipline. But the Republican Party now has a very different vision of fatherhood to offer, courtesy of Elon Musk.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Musk is constantly scanning the horizon for new potential mothers for his children, using everything from X interactions and DMs to huge cash incentives to entice would-be incubators, whom he requires to sign legally binding payment agreements with nondisclosure clauses. As a result, Musk has an undisclosed number of children that is likely well above the 14 already publicly known, and he’s shown no obvious intention to stop sowing his seed. But perhaps more interesting than the presence of contracts between Musk and his harem of mothers is the apparent absence of traditional family ties. He appears to acknowledge few, if any, bonds of genuine duty and responsibility among family members, much less bonds of care or love. Musk seems to have reduced traditional family relationships to mere financial arrangements, undermining longtime conservative agreement around the importance of family.

There is a difference, after all, between being pro-natalist and being pro-family. Musk is by now infamous for his interest in raising the birth rate, which appears to be driven by his belief that a catastrophic global population collapse is imminent, as well as by his view that intelligent people in particular ought to be breeding more. (“He really wants smart people to have kids,” Shivon Zilis, Musk’s most favored concubine, told a biographer.) His eugenic bent makes him the most prominent member of the pro-natalist movement’s techno-libertarian wing, which aims to breed genetically superior offspring and which exists alongside and in tension with the traditionalist approach to pro-natalism. The divide in the movement is real: tech versus trad, future versus past, reproduction versus family. And although the trads are largely drawn from the conservative Christian base that once animated the Republican Party, it’s the tech people, like Musk, who have more resources and power to market their ideology.

[Read: Why the left should embrace pro-natalism]

But even eager fans of Musk’s reproductive philosophy won’t be able to replicate the scale of his bloodline empire, because Musk is especially well positioned to use money to fund and structure his preferred familial arrangements, effectively reducing those relationships to a vulgar cash nexus. Musk’s latest consort, the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, told The Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli that Musk had offered her a $15 million lump sum, as well as $100,000 per month for living expenses—if she was willing to sign a contract that would require her to keep their arrangement secret. People familiar with Musk’s habits, Mattioli reported, said that this is a well-established practice for the billionaire, who threatens women financially if they hire an attorney or go public: In St. Clair’s case, Musk terminated his proposed $15 million payment and lowered her recurring payments to $40,000 a month (which, it’s fair to note, is still a lavish income) as the two went to court over paternity testing for their child.

“The timing of the reduction in payments from him are timed with disagreements on testing and gag orders,” Dror Bikel, one of St. Clair’s attorneys, told Mattioli, adding that “the only conclusion we can make is that money is being weaponized.” Money appears to be the only means by which Musk can persuade people who are not actually intimate with him and whose preferences and needs are not of much concern to him. Fatherhood, for Musk, ends with conception, except for lingering payouts. There is no discernible sense of mutual duty or responsibility between Musk and his children or between Musk and his children’s mothers, and no expectation of growth in such bonds or fulfillment in them either: A Musk aide told St. Clair that Zilis “goes in and out of finding contentment,” and that Grimes, another mother of Musk’s children, isn’t “ever going to find true happiness.”

That isn’t surprising—Musk’s family values seem similarly detached from the usual ties of familial love. According to Mattioli, Musk instigates what St. Clair called “harem drama” by lending some of his babies’ mothers, such as Zilis, special status both financially and socially, while others, such as St. Clair, struggle to get so much as responses to their texts, or, in Grimes’s case, their desperate X posts. Likewise, he takes an active interest in some of his children—such as X Æ A-Xii, his toddler son with Grimes, whom he totes to public appearances and state events—more than others. He refused to have his name on the birth certificate of St. Clair’s son, and is estranged from his daughter Vivian altogether. Although past generations of conservatives have hailed family as a “haven in a heartless world,” Musk’s relationships with his children and their mothers seem defined instead by a capitalist-inflected competition; Musk’s “entire world is set up to be, like, a meritocracy,” the Musk aide explained to St. Clair, wherein rewards are granted to “people who do good work.”

Musk is rich enough to carry on his pro-natalist project indefinitely, and the world is full of women of childbearing age who could use $15 million. Musk descendants, therefore, may one day inherit the earth. But before then, Musk may inherit the Republican Party, which he has bought and paid for, and in so doing reshape the right’s traditional thinking about the notion of family. The old days are over, superseded by something worse.

The Pro-Baby Coalition of the Far Right

2025-04-11T11:48:34-04:00

Children were everywhere at the second annual Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, last month, where people devoted to the cause of population growth gathered to swap ideas. A toddler girl twirled on her toes and took a tumble to the floor beneath the grand rotunda of the Bullock Texas State History Museum; nearby, a gaggle of grade-school children encircled a table to play cards. Knee-high siblings wove through clusters of adult conversation made effortless by an open bar. Parents were not monitoring their kids especially closely. Plastic tubs of Hot Wheels cars and puzzle-piece play mats were there to facilitate the seldom-seen phenomenon of children entertaining themselves. It mostly worked: Having more children around is somehow usually easier than having a few. Such was the wisdom of the conference, an odd get-together of far-right online personalities, traditionalist Christians, and envoys from Silicon Valley.

The overarching thesis of the conference—that having children is good and ought to be supported by society—struck me as pretty unobjectionable; if you believe the human race should have a future, you’re pronatalist with respect to somebody. And the pronatalists’ more immediate concerns about aging populations seem similarly well founded: As birth rates continue to drop globally, the relatively smaller number of young people will struggle to care for the elderly, a worrying prospect regardless of one’s political orientation. What was disturbing, therefore, was the degree to which discourse around these fairly innocuous propositions is now dominated by an emerging coalition of the rather far right, whose pronatalist ideas are sometimes intermixed with white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenics.

The speakers’ roster included a range of figures, some more extreme than others. There were far-right culture warriors whose interest in pronatalism seemed incidental, including Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon_of_Akkad, a relic of Gamergate who’s become an ardent opponent of feminism, and the headliner Jack Posobiec, a Donald Trump super fan who spends a good deal of time issuing trollish proclamations about, for instance, overthrowing democracy, and certainly appears to sympathize with extreme forms of far-right politics. But there were also ordinary and mainly uncontroversial presenters, such as Lyman Stone, a senior fellow and the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and Daniel Hess, a researcher with a background in tech.

[Read: Why the left should embrace pro-natalism]

The more radical attendees proposed a variety of odd and unsettling ideas about falling birth rates and how to boost them, some of which seemed rather deliberately formulated for provocation—such as a suggestion by Charles Cornish-Dale, a puckish English reactionary with a large online following who goes by the name of Raw Egg Nationalist, that war may be a useful driver of population growth, and Benjamin’s assertion that society ought to be reorganized to prioritize families, arguing that “if you don’t marry and have children, then your opinion is irrelevant.” (A flyer advertising the presentation of the pseudonymous speaker Yuri Bezmonov featured Trump in a McDonald’s apron leaning out of a drive-through window with the inscription TRUMP: THE ART OF THE TROLL.) And there was much consideration of the decline of the West in particular (though birth rates are dropping globally), a tendency closely associated with nationalism and theories of racial superiority. “The racism and misogyny of pro-natalist circles often gets overblown in skeptical media outlets,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who works on pro-family policy, recently wrote in an article for The Dispatch discussing the conference. “But that doesn’t mean those strains are completely absent from the lineup in Austin or the broader pro-natalism movement.”

More than a whiff of eugenics was also apparent. The press-hungry couple Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of former venture capitalists living in Silicon Valley, were on the speakers’ roster, bringing their peculiar approach to childbearing and parenting to the conference floor. The Collinses have chosen to procreate using IVF technology that allows for the selection of genetically superior embryos, a decidedly techno-futurist approach. Their parenting style, meanwhile, is more retrograde; Malcolm Collins once struck his child’s face in the presence of a journalist. (The couple told the reporter that their use of corporal punishment was inspired by their observation of a tiger swiping its cub in the wild.) Certain elements of their self-presentation are, again, seemingly intended to troll—Simone wears some kind of puritanical getup complete with a bonnet, and the duo proudly displays multiple guns on the walls of their house full of kids.

If some of those aims seem to contradict the goals of religious traditionalists also interested in the revival of big families, it’s because the two sets of ideas—the “trad” and the “tech”—belong to separate factions that have formed an alliance on several fronts, pronatalism included. The tech crowd is made up of people like the Collinses—Silicon Valley types who envision a radically different future made possible by innovations in technology. The trads, meanwhile, hearken to the religious beliefs and practices of the past, and are skeptical of many aspects of modern life. The tech people are interested in pioneering new reproductive technologies; the trads—at least the Catholic ones—object in principle to IVF and dream of a society with a tolerance for simple human difference, the kind of world in which a person with Down syndrome, for example, would be welcomed with open arms. The techies aren’t necessarily committed to having traditional families (see, for example, Elon Musk, the somewhat absent father of at least 14 children); the trads view the institution of family as the key to resolving the birth-rate crisis. These differences were on display at the conference: One speaker, the geneticist Razib Khan, suggested that the techies literally depart for space, perhaps to a Muskian Mars colony, and let the trads inherit the Earth.

However its components ultimately relate to one another, this new coalition is part of a broader political realignment taking shape along axes defined by Trump. It isn’t any secret that most of the energy and dynamism in contemporary politics now belongs to the right; the Natal Conference alone was teeming with policy ideas and theories of society, while liberals remain scattered in a defensive crouch, with elected Democrats tripping over themselves to disavow a toxic party brand. The right’s profusion of resources, followers, and thought is perhaps partially why it’s dominating the discourse around an issue that isn’t inherently conservative. But maybe the greater reason is that liberals seem almost uniformly unwilling to address the subject of population decline whatsoever—a stance that warrants reconsideration.

“Liberals are reluctant to wade into these matters—talking about families may imply a critique of other people’s choices,” Alice Evans, a senior lecturer in international development at King’s College London, recently told me. Some may believe (mistakenly, in my opinion) that conceding that having children is good and ought to be encouraged requires conceding that not having children is bad and ought to be punished, a kind of discrimination. And others may be repelled by the growing association between the subject of birth rates and the political right, forming a kind of feedback loop in which liberals avoid the topic, because it seems like a right-wing fixation, and thereby strengthen the existing association further. Whatever the source of liberal inattention, yielding to the far right the notion that humanity ought to persist on this Earth strikes me as absurd.

One doesn’t have to maintain, as I do, that humankind is excellent—the paragon of animals—in order to affirm the importance of bringing children into the world; much more rational, empirical reasons place political importance on strategies that enable families to welcome children. A society in which the elderly greatly outnumber the young will encounter a multitude of hurdles to flourishing: “As populations age, a shrinking workforce will support more elderly dependents,” Evans said. “Older people usually work at lower rates, while being less innovative and less entrepreneurial. The entire economy becomes a bit sluggish. Costs will also rise—to pay for elderly health care and pensions.”

Countries experiencing precipitous birth-rate declines, such as South Korea, are already undergoing ominous changes. “A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly,” the author Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote of South Korea in a New Yorker feature earlier this year. “About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary.” For rapidly aging countries, immigration may function as a short-term stopgap measure, but sourcing young people from other countries shifts the burden of aging populations on to immigrants’ countries of origin.

What to do about falling birth rates depends on what’s driving them down, and figuring out what those forces may be was a pervasive theme of the conference. Speakers and attendees presented a number of potential reasons, identifying fallout from the sexual revolution, harmful chemicals in food and water supplies, and the proliferation of porn, gambling, weed, and technology. One can imagine a number of extreme and quixotic responses to that constellation of possible causes—a Unabomber-esque rejection of modern technology, for instance, or an acceleration of technological approaches to reproduction. This year, Trump issued an order that would expand access to IVF, dubbing himself the “fertilization president” at a Women’s History Month event last March. Other strategies proposed at the conference included deregulating day cares or banning urban-growth limits in order to build huge quantities of single-family housing, along the same lines as my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s buzzy new book, Abundance.

[Derek Thompson: The political fight of the century]

But perhaps the more obvious approach is essentially a leftist one: Just give families money.

Many young people considering childbirth today are discouraged by the high costs of raising kids, including exorbitant child-care fees and income loss associated with time off work to take care of children. Sitting at a conference table sharing cups of Cheez-Its and gummy bears from the kids’ buffet table, my mother (whom I had brought to the conference because she was curious about the subject, and because it provided a convenient excuse to visit our home state) leaned over to admit that she would’ve had “a whole houseful of kids, if we could’ve afforded it.” I had never before known that I might have been one of many as opposed to only two, but if people dealing with the much lower child-care and education costs of the 1980s and ’90s were financially dissuaded from raising the number of children they wanted, it would follow that the same problem has worsened for today’s would-be parents. This perhaps partially explains why America’s fertility gap, or the difference between the number of children the average woman has and the number of children she says she would prefer, is the highest it has been in 40 years.

And so it makes sense that people hoping to help couples bring children into the world should support setting the marginal cost of having a child at zero, which some involved in the pronatalist movement have already discerned. Stone, the policy expert who spoke at the conference, has written that “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies. Anybody saying otherwise is mischaracterizing the research. But it takes a lot of money.” Policies aimed at closing the fertility gap include making birth free, sending new parents “baby boxes” with all of the essentials for welcoming a newborn, offering free child care and pre-K, covering all of children’s health-care expenses, and paying families a monthly cash allowance to offset other kid-related costs, all of which could have the pronatal effect of closing the fertility gap. These kinds of proposals are typically made by the left, but the right has lately begun to rethink its typical approach to welfare programs—or at least members of the right say they have. J. D. Vance, for example, has in the past supported a $5,000 child tax credit, thousands more than the current CTC, and has said that the government should “make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that we know they are.” And why not? The right now has control of the federal government, and the attention of an entire nation. It’s free to institute pro-family policies at any time, something several conference speakers noted. What those efforts may look like largely depends on which faction in the pronatalist coalition claims victory over the others, and that is anyone’s guess.

Can Silicon Valley Find Christianity?

2025-03-27T07:00:00-04:00

Silicon Valley, it seems, is coming to Jesus. There are no bad conversions, in my book; I was born and raised a Christian and remain one, and it’s good, from that standpoint, to see erstwhile nonbelievers take an interest in the faith, whatever the reason.

Thus, I was cautiously optimistic as I read a recent Vanity Fair feature, by the writer Zoë Bernard, on emerging tech-world Christianity. “It was a time not so very long ago, mostly in the 2010s, when Silicon Valley cultivated a stance of pointed hostility not only toward conservatism but to the Protestant doctrines that underpin much of American life,” Bernard writes. But no more. Christianity is now an object of fascination to the libertarian capitalists of the tech world.

In the faith, Bernard writes, the converts of Silicon Valley see a great deal of utility: a source of community and, therefore, professional networking; an index of ethics capable of checking some of the libertine excesses of their world; a signal of self-disciplined seriousness versus the flip-flop-wearing whiz-kid archetype popular in this same universe a mere decade ago. Christianity has become a potential path to fortune.

Bernard’s article makes clear that some converts are cynical characters merely pretending at Christianity. “I guarantee you there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel,” one entrepreneur told Bernard. But even if a significant proportion of the new believers are entirely sincere, that doesn’t mean their theology is copacetic. Christianity, they ought to know, is not a life hack: It’s a life-upending surrender to the fact of divine love.

[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

American Christianity has a tendency to produce forms of belief and practice that are facially antithetical to Christian teaching. Consider, for example, the purveyors of the prosperity gospel, who promise worldly riches as a reward for moral uprightness. (One adherent has now been appointed the head of a new faith office created by Donald Trump.) Although the prosperity preachers still teach certain core Christian concepts—such as the resurrection of Christ—the overall drift strikes me as self-serving, devoted to money: decidedly unchristian. The emerging variety of techno-libertarian Christianity appears to have faults of a similar type.

Based on Bernard’s report, Christianity is gaining ground in Silicon Valley partially because it encourages a kind of orderly behavior that secular liberalism fails to enforce. “No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,” the same venture-capital executive told Bernard. “You want hard workers. People who are like, ‘I learned that at West Point.’ We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that seems focused. We’ll take that.’” Religious faith is a tool for keeping people productive, in other words, a private code of ethics that enforces the kind of activity that lends itself to producing wealth.

In that sense, Silicon Valley Christians perhaps see Christianity as a kind of technology, which is to say a product used to accomplish human purposes. Granted, Christianity promises certain benefits to its adherents, such as inner peace, eternal salvation, the comfort of community, and prosocial ethics. That said, Christianity at its core is not a religion that can reliably deliver socially desirable outcomes, nor is it intended to be. In Matthew 19:21, a disciple asks Jesus how to live as a model Christian, to which “Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’” Christianity disrupts life as we know it rather than reinforcing a self-serving status quo. It venerates generations of Christian martyrs whose examples are prized precisely because they placed obedience to God before more advantageous beliefs or activities. The formation of their faith was contingent not on temporal success, but rather on another principle altogether: that Christianity is worth following not because it has the potential to improve one’s life, though it can, but rather because it is true.

[Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska: Why Silicon Valley lost its patriotism]

This is key, because if Christianity is true—if we really were created to love God and one another and were then rescued from our sins by the sacrificial intervention of Christ—then everything else one believes must flow downstream of that essential reality. Believers’ personal philosophies, practices, and politics are all answerable to the Christian religion: There is no domain of life outside God’s interest, and he requires that all things be brought in accordance with his will. This means that economics is God’s business, which is bad news for techno-libertarians, because Christ’s teachings decidedly militate against the rapacious acquisition of wealth. “No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other,” Jesus says. “You cannot serve God and money.”

There always have been and always will be rival interpretations of what exactly the Christian faith demands of its followers, motivated in many cases by prior commitments. In that sense, the tendency of American Christianity to result in philosophies that advance worldly aims is nothing new. But much of the faith’s central traditions run counter to the aspirations of this new Christ-curious class. Christianity is about moving fast and breaking things, but not in the direction the tech Christians seem to have in mind.