Helen Lewis | The Atlantic

The Death of Millennial Feminism

2026-03-22T07:31:00-04:00

Lindy West is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation. In her pomp at Jezebel, she mastered both viral takedowns—sorry, Love Actually—and confessional writing. She embraced adjectives that were meant to demean her: loud, fat, shrill. When Lindy shouted, women listened.

That background is what makes the publication of her new memoir, Adult Braces, such a cultural moment. Adult Braces is many things: a paean to the varied landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn’t talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism—that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write “welp!” in copy.

West lived the Millennial writer’s dream. She rose from blogging for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger to a similar job at the new-media darling Jezebel, and went on to write columns for legacy outlets such as The Guardian. On the side, she published a New York Times best-selling memoir, Shrill, and turned it into a television show that ran for three seasons. She left Twitter after being bombarded with abuse but remained unbowed. Sure, #MeToo was a witch-hunt, she wrote in the Times: “I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” There was even a fairy-tale ending, with a handsome musician named Ahamefule Oluo who loved her just as she was. “My wedding was perfect,” she wrote in 2015, “and I was fat as hell the whole time.” Can women have it all? It looked like Lindy West could.

In light of this, Adult Braces makes two big claims. The first is that quite a lot of the above story—the Authorized Version of the Life of Lindy West—was a buffed-up version of the truth. Getting death threats was not character-building, not some little online brouhaha, but psychologically disturbing in a way that spilled over into her offline life. (“The trolling was so extreme that Monica Lewinsky reached out,” she writes.) She felt like an outsider on Shrill, reduced to hearing other writers discuss whether her (real) dad’s death was too much of a downer to include in the series. Her fatness wasn’t only a joyful expression of her appetites; instead she has now realized that “I am at my biggest when I am at my saddest.”

Even her relationship wasn’t all that it seemed. In her 2019 essay collection, The Witches Are Coming, she had written that she and Oluo—her “best friend” and a “once in a generation” musical talent—had a “dawn ritual” where they lay in bed talking for hours. In Adult Braces, she adds that “what I omitted was that we’d only developed that ‘ritual’ to mitigate a toxic pattern we’d been stuck in for years: I’d wake up anxious, I’d vomit my anxiety on Aham, he’d snap at me for triggering his anxiety, I’d feel alone and unsupported, I’d stare at him with tears in my eyes until he had a panic attack, he’d zone out for the rest of the day and not listen to a word I said.”

As it offers a revisionist history of West’s 2010s, Adult Braces makes another grand claim: that West is now polyamorous and lovin’ it. Yes, she might have been upset when a fan texted her with the news that Oluo was out in public kissing another woman. (Even then, she admits halfway through the book, that wasn’t the whole truth: “I told you Aham was secretly seeing one woman in 2019. He was actually seeing two.”) But really, she absolutely adores her and Oluo’s now-mutual girlfriend, Roya, to the extent that through sheer force of will, she has become bisexual. It only took driving a van from Seattle to the Florida Keys and back, while also undergoing cosmetic dentistry, to realize this.

When I read Adult Braces, my instinctive reaction was: I don’t believe you.

To me, it seemed obvious that Oluo, who is mixed race, had successfully used West’s desire to be progressive against her: “He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.” Oluo had also rebranded himself as a “non-binary he/they,” perhaps to shrug off any suggestion that he was acting like every harem-patrolling patriarch in history.

Now, I know plenty of people who have come to a different understanding of their sexuality as adults—mostly Later-Life Lesbians, or LLLs—but it seems an unlikely coincidence that the first woman West has ever been attracted to was already her husband’s girlfriend. Not least when the book includes this line: “Being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles.”

[Read: The horseshoe theory of polyamory]

The reaction to the book has been fascinating, by which I mean that basically no one else believes West’s account of her polyamorous relationship either. This discourse has become so overwhelming that in a recent Substack post, West expressed annoyance and defensiveness that anyone would question the latest version of her story: “My life isn’t subject to public audit. I already gave you what I wanted to give you.”

This might be true, although I would say again that if you don’t want people picking over your personal life, avoid writing a memoir.

Nonetheless, I do feel great sympathy for West. How was she to know that the great omertà of Millennial Feminism—that we had to take whatever people said about their life stories at face value—had broken?

Over the past half decade, our unchallenged deference to people’s own declarations about their lives has collapsed. We saw too many flimsy or obviously politicized accusations sneak under the wire of “Believe women.” Just think of Tara Reade, whose unconvincing claims of sexual assault against Joe Biden were seized on by Republicans, and who announced that she had defected to Russia in 2023. We have watched as former icons of body positivity shot themselves up with GLP-1s at the first opportunity—suggesting that they did not, in fact, feel happy and healthy at any size. Some of them, like Lizzo, maintain that they only tried GLP-1s, but have actually lost weight through “mind-over-matter.” (If you believe that, I’ve got a crystal flute to sell you.)

The debate around West’s book has focused almost exclusively on litigating the happiness of her relationship, but Adult Braces offers another example of the collapse of self-identification. At one point, her therapist, Judith, suggests that she might have ADHD. West is skeptical, but she has always been disorganized, though high-achieving, and figures: Why not get a prescription for stimulants? Sadly, her health provider has other ideas. Dr. Buzzkill tells West that she will need to speak with her mother, because (as the DSM-5 states) ADHD is a disorder that is present from childhood. “I should have said no,” West writes. “I was nearly forty years old at this point. My word on my own life should be sufficient, and under no circumstances should a medical professional need to call my mommy!”

My word on my own life should be sufficient—there it is. This, to put it bluntly, is not how medical diagnoses work, or I would have had a brain tumor 15 times so far. But it is the Millennial mantra—I am the captain of my ship, the author of my life, the protagonist of reality. Incidentally, this is the same logic that uncritically affirms young children’s assertions that they are the opposite sex. That position is also part of the progressive package endorsed by West, despite her writing this about GLP-1 prescriptions for adolescents: “Wegovy has been approved for children as young as twelve, when we don’t even know the long-term physical effects, let alone the mental ones.” Wow, sounds like we should be very careful about powerful, life-altering drugs and probably not accuse anyone who has questions about them of secretly wanting chubby kids to die.

The interesting question is why West craved an ADHD diagnosis so badly—apart, presumably, from access to the delicious fruits of Big Pharma. “When Judith introduced the notion I might have ADHD, a weight of shame I didn’t even know I carried was vaporized,” she writes. To me, this is a very telling remark about the milieu in which West has found herself. Perhaps the greatest hallmark of Millennial Feminism was how harshly it treated women. We were the ones who were supposed to give up our boundaries, rewrite our sexualities, and defenestrate our heroines. (Oh, so you admire the suffragists for passing the Nineteenth Amendment? Incorrect, they were “white feminists.”) And if we were ever fallible, we were supposed to be very, very ashamed.

This is why so many women who considered themselves left-wing—myself included—eventually parted ways with Millennial Feminism. At the beginning, the movement felt intoxicating and liberating, but it soon became clear that sticking with Millennial Feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy. After all, Lindy West essentially did. The entire ADHD passage in Adult Braces shows a naturally funny writer wrestling with the injunction that huge swaths of life are exempt from even the mildest mockery. She concedes that other people might be part of what she calls the “social media ADHD self-diagnosis boom” with behavior “that frays the edges of credibility (not everything can be because of your ADHD, babe!)”. But of course this could not apply to her. As an aside, it appears that West has learned to manage her disorganization the same way that many men do: She now has a wife. In her post defending their relationship, she notes that Roya is excellent at “watering plants,” obtaining pet insurance, and “send[ing] calendar invites.”

For me, writing conduct manuals—that is, instructing readers on the latest points of political etiquette—was no way to live, and both the style and content of my writing has changed over the past decade. One of the headiest things about Adult Braces is how West’s prose style was pickled in the mid-2010s, so her use of caps lock and exclamation marks acted on me as a powerful Proustian madeleine. Please enjoy this dispatch from Savannah, Georgia, once West discovers that the composer of “Jingle Bells” also served in the Confederate Army: “James L. Pierpont was a little bitch, and I’m GLAD he got into a drifted bank and I’m GLAD he got upsot, tbh! More like Shidnight in the Shartin’ of Poop and Peepee!!!!!!!!”

You can trace the exact moment that West decided she wanted to remain a progressive in good standing more than she wanted to take the piss. It happened right after she was brutalized by the social-media backlash to her take-no-prisoners blogging persona at Jezebel. “It turns out that having thousands of people make fun of you and threaten to rape and murder you can make you feel unsafe in certain spaces for way longer than you expect,” she writes of this period in Adult Braces. Much like the liberals driven into the arms of MAGA by a brush with cancellation, West had a taste of vicious misogynistic backlash from internet strangers and retreated into the progressive community of the Pacific Northwest. She went from comparing Hooters to a slavery-themed restaurant in 2009 to having her stand-in character in the TV series Shrill, Annie, get educated by strippers that their work was actually very empowering.

[Read: The end of Hooters]

West herself acknowledged the shift in 2016, although she attributed it to “learning to be a socially responsible person.” She added: “Yeah, please don’t read anything of mine from before 2014.”

Of course, it’s one thing to set rigid and unforgiving rules of human conduct. It’s quite another to expect anyone to live by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance.

Similarly, West’s body positivity required her to be superhuman—to be, unlike every other person on the planet, entirely unaffected by waves of strangers criticizing her weight. Her fans demanded that she be permanently fat and permanently happy, and guilt-tripped her for any deviation. “Sometimes, when I am doing better and can find the will to cook and think and move and live, I get smaller,” she writes in Adult Braces. “Once, when I posted a selfie on the far side of a particularly epic depression, I received this comment from a stranger: ‘Can we not watch another fat positive body shrink?’”

As someone with an overfamiliar relationship with the biscuit tin myself, I see 2010s fat activism as an understandable reaction by larger people to being attacked for having an (at the time) incurable metabolic disease. It’s not a betrayal to want to be cured of an illness: We don’t think statins are for the weak, or that people with high blood pressure just need to learn self-control. Yet both sides of the weight-loss debate became attached to impossibly doctrinaire positions. One side argued that no one could possibly be fat and happy, the other that no one was allowed to be unhappy about being fat. In 2017, West interviewed another icon of Millennial Feminism, Roxane Gay, and told her, “It is important to talk about the fact that weight-loss surgery is dangerous, that people die. It’s barbaric that so many people feel pressured to have this surgery that can kill them.” Gay agreed, describing the treatment as driven by fatphobia, a “surgery to completely rearrange my body for the rest of my life, and I’m going to be nutrient-deprived for the rest of my life, and I might die doing this, but that’s better than spending another day in this body in this world.” Gay had a sleeve gastrectomy in 2018.

[Read: The body-positivity movement is over]

I don’t judge her for that: Gay made a rational decision about the risks of a procedure to expand and prolong her life. But it isn’t purely fatphobia that sees doctors recommend weight-loss treatments. It isn’t social conservatism that has seen so many readers disbelieve West’s rapid-onset bisexuality. Millennial Feminism failed because it was suffocating, immiserating, and often at odds with observable facts about human nature.

Today, very few traces of it remain. Jezebel was sold off and closed. Tumblr has withered. The viral internet no longer reliably delivers traffic to epic takedowns of problematic figures, so hungry young freelancers have largely stopped pitching them. The publishing industry’s lust for jeremiads about “white feminism” is over. No one has used the word girlboss unironically in years. A key feminist legal precedent, Roe v. Wade, fell in part because Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire, a fact that makes me wince every time I remember that one of the most-lauded books of Millennial Feminism was Irin Carmon’s Notorious RBG.

In 2014, West wrote a farewell post to mark the end of her time at Jezebel, headlined, for reasons best known to herself: “My Fart Will Go On.” (Her Substack is called Butt News, so credit for sticking to a theme.) The post ended with some words of advice for her readers: “You don’t have to be the Cool Girl. You don’t have to pander. You can be funny and sharp and responsible and humane all at the same time. But don’t be afraid to defend your boundaries. Call a dick a dick. Stuff is changing. We’re winning.”

Sadly, there was no time for Millennial Feminism to get tired of all the winning. Nine months later, Donald Trump announced his run for the presidency.

Gavin Newsom’s Father Issues

2026-02-24T06:30:00-05:00

The lives of recent U.S. presidents are dominated by absent or distant fathers. Bill Clinton lost his before birth, and then grew up with an alcoholic stepfather who loved him but lacked self-control. George W. Bush grew up in H.W.’s shadow—one so strong that his brother Jeb tried to run for president, too. Barack Obama writes of being haunted by a father who had passed on nothing but his skin color, his imagined voice “untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval.” Fred Trump was cold and controlling, and vicious to Donald’s older brother, Freddy, who did not want to follow him into real estate. Inevitably, you wonder: Did these men look to voters to give them what their own father could not?

Compared with some on this roll call, Gavin Newsom’s father was practically a saint. But the California governor’s new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry—a book that doubles as table stakes for his presidential run—is dominated by Bill Newsom’s emotional distance. He leaves Gavin’s mother, Tessa Menzies, in San Francisco when her two kids are young, and moves 200 miles to Lake Tahoe. He is a great reader, whereas the young Gavin has undiagnosed dyslexia. Bill’s primary relationship is not with his family but his drinking buddies, who call themselves the “Lonely Hearts Club.” In 2018, Gavin wins the race to become California governor and fulfills his father’s dream (Bill ran twice for office, unsuccessfully). Yet his dying father, even when prompted by a caretaker, cannot tell his son that he loves him. “He would not utter those words,” Newsom writes. “And yet I had not one ounce of doubt that he loved me dearly.”

[Read: The front-runner]

In Dreams From My Father, Obama’s sense of outsiderishness comes from his skin color, which made him an oddity in Hawaii and Harvard. Young Man in a Hurry substitutes status anxiety for race. This is a memoir about growing up next to immense privilege, thanks to the Newsom family’s friendship with the oil-rich Gettys, while knowing that it could be taken away at any moment. This insecurity might be the perfect preparation for American politics, where navigating relationships with big-money donors without letting them own you is an essential skill.

The late Bill Newsom first met the petroleum heir Gordon Getty when both were students at St. Ignatius College Preparatory School in San Francisco. (The future California governor Jerry Brown was also among their friends.) For Bill, what followed was a life caught between roles: Gavin describes his father as providing the socially awkward Gordon with a bridge to the outside world, yet he was also his employee.

In one telling incident, Gavin’s older sister, Hilary, called their benefactor “Gordon” while traveling first-class on the Getty dime: “He shot back a look of reproach: ‘I’m Mr. Getty,’ he said.” Hilary, then 8 or 9, burst into tears and ran to her father for comfort. Bill said nothing. “Back then, I did not understand my father’s silence,” Newsom writes. “It appeared to me a swallowing of pride, one more abrogation of fatherly duty.” At the same time, the elder Newsom was closer and more relaxed with Gordon’s four sons than his own children: “‘Uncle Bill’ was a role that came naturally to him. Dad? Not so easy.”

Gordon Getty, who is now 92, devoted his life to composing classical music and operas, but he also controlled the family’s financial trust, ensuring that everyone else had to dance to his tune. When Gavin Newsom went into business with Gordon’s second son, Billy, they secured an investment from the older man—and called their wine shop PlumpJack, after one of his operas, in return.

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

This story is usually told as part of the “Prince Gavin” narrative that so vexes Newsom, “this perception of privilege and wealth that has dogged me—and at times infuriated, not just frustrated, me,” he told me last fall. But Young Man in a Hurry presents a less well-known coda to the PlumpJack narrative. After Billy gets married in 1999, he becomes convinced that Newsom is stiffing him and orders a forensic audit of the business. Gordon essentially takes Gavin’s side, buying out Billy, and the friendship between the two younger men never recovers. In the aftermath of this breakup, Newsom reflects that Billy had offered him a deal similar to the one Gordon offered his father: to live a “millionaire’s lifestyle” by taking Getty money—and acting as a courtier. Despite the cautionary example provided by his father, Newsom took a long time to realize that he had been on the same path.

Until his falling-out with Billy, Newsom had never considered the possibility that his “deeper entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story, a theft that would become one of the very reasons for writing this book.” Good luck with that. Without taking away from Newsom’s work ethic, this memoir cannot help underlining how much his smooth upward assent has been greased by family connections. His first proper job, selling orthotic shoe inserts, is at his uncle Paul’s company. His next one, with the real-estate titan Walter Shorenstein, is arranged by his dad. Meanwhile, he moved into the Getty mansion rent-free with Billy’s brother Andrew “in return for our keeping an eye on the contractors and handling the shipments of artwork that arrived regularly from Sotheby’s.” Then comes PlumpJack.

In his description of the Gettys, Newsom reminds me of Tom Wambsgans, of HBO’s Succession, who marries into the powerful Roy family and only narrowly dodges being made the fall guy for a corporate scandal, because a son-in-law is not as important as a son. There’s also an echo of the Prince Harry of Spare, who realizes that the British royal family will always choose to protect his brother, the future king, over him.

Spare notoriously benefited from a talented ghostwriter (J. R. Moehringer, who also co-wrote Andre Agassi’s best-selling memoir), and Newsom has made an equally good choice: the journalist Mark Arax, author of several books about California under his own name. The clean prose, self-criticism, and psychological insight give Young Man in a Hurry a reason to exist beyond legitimizing a book tour through the early-primary and swing states. As candidate memoirs go, it’s a much better read than Ron DeSantis’s 2023 offering, The Courage to Be Free, in which the only memorable anecdote has young Ron turning up at Yale in jean shorts, an incident that spurred his lifelong hatred of snooty elites.

Newsom’s first experience of public office comes when another of his father’s friends, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, appoints him as chair of the city’s parking and traffic commission. In an anecdote that could feature in the dictionary under “entitlement,” Newsom recounts that he turned up at city hall for the swearing-in ceremony thinking that Brown had appointed him to the film commission. That presumably requires a somewhat different skill set from parking, although neither of them obviously flowed from his experience as a wine merchant.

His initial entry to the city’s Board of Supervisors was also as a Brown appointee. When he makes an unwise comment in the run-up to his swearing-in, taking a different position from Brown on the relocation of a stadium, he gets a call from State Senator John Burton, “a confidant to Mayor Brown and a pal of my father,” who chides him for undermining Brown. Newsom promptly changes his position. I mean, we all know this is how politics works, but seeing it written down in a book by someone pitching to be president is quite something. With Brown placated, Newsom is sworn in as a supervisor. By his father.

Although Newsom is intermittently aware of his great privileges, the occasional unselfconscious sentence slips out. “Photography became my safe space, a place where I could both observe and create,” he writes of his childhood vacations with the Gettys. “Dad later blew up two of my pictures and sold them for four hundred dollars each at an auction to benefit his foundation to protect the California mountain lion.” I love the implicit assumption here that a “foundation to protect the California mountain lion” is simply something that fathers have. Mine has strong opinions on the urinary habits of the cat next door, but that doesn’t feel quite the same.

The dominant colors of this memoir are black and gold. Black for the Getty oil, but also the intense darkness of Newsom’s family background. His maternal grandmother was anorexic. His grandfather’s hellish experiences as a prisoner in Japanese captivity during World War II overwhelmed him, and he took his own life. Two cousins die in a house fire as children. Young Gavin and Hilary go to a toy shop with John Paul Getty III, who had recently been kidnapped and had his ear sliced off and sent to his family. (Despite their father’s injunction not to mention the ear deficit, Hilary blurts out: “Paul, how many ears do you have?”) Late in the book, Newsom makes a glancing reference to his father’s “long stretches of depression.” When Newsom meets his future second wife, Jennifer, he learns of her own tragic past: When she was 6, the golf cart she was playing in reversed over and killed her sister Stacey. As an adult, she was one of four women who testified in court in 2022 that Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted them. (Jennifer’s case ended in a mistrial.) In 2020, at the age of 46, she had an unexpected pregnancy that failed, requiring a surgical ablation of her uterus. “Thank goodness this was California,” Newsom writes, adding: “Jen received the healthcare that would very soon be denied to countless women in red-state America because of the decision of Supreme Court Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett.”

[Read: Trust is a stylish, hollow spectacle]

Gold is for the Getty money, but also the charmed life of California high society. You want celebrity name-drops? Young Man in a Hurry has got you covered. The young Gavin goes on holiday with the Gettys to meet the king and queen of Spain. Arthur Miller turns up at Thanksgiving in Barbados, because of course he does. Newsom’s aunt Cindy produced Sister Act. He gets a preview of the iPhone from Steve Jobs at a party, alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When his baby daughter won’t settle, Newsom—by then aspiring to be governor—takes her for a walk into the center of San Francisco and runs into a concert by Paul McCartney. Inevitably the Beatle ends up serenading her. The local newspaper editor who fishes around the story that Newsom might be Gordon Getty’s illegitimate son is also—why not?—Sharon Stone’s husband. His whole family has this Forrest Gump–like quality of turning up wherever exciting things are happening. Newsom’s great-grandfather Thomas Addis cured the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling of Bright’s disease. His grandmother Jean studied method acting under Stanislavski. Around page 180, I wanted to dig up my own relatives and berate them for not being more interesting.

One of the book’s most arresting scenes comes in 2018 when, as governor-elect, Newsom first meets Donald Trump in person after wildfires in California. On Marine One, Trump tells a story about how he tried to set up his daughter Ivanka with the NFL quarterback Tom Brady, only to discover that she was already dating some schmuck whose father had just got out of prison. This schmuck is Jared Kushner, who is sitting right there as his father-in-law laments what his daughter could have had. “In front of the governor and future governor of California, Trump was making his son-in-law feel two feet tall,” Newsom writes. “And Kushner just let him do it.” Trump, in Newsom’s telling, is yet another controlling patriarch whose approval is impossible to win.

Newsom is often accused of being an empty suit—all teeth and hair gel. This memoir is surprisingly open about why that might be, framing the politician as a lost soul always searching for a stable identity. (Perhaps this is an inherited trait: There are two passing references to his mother sometimes slipping into an English accent, after watching My Fair Lady in college.) The young Gavin tries on various personas. As a child, he wants to be a magician, the “Great Gavini.” As a teenager, he dresses like the rogueish TV charlatan Remington Steele, as played by Pierce Brosnan. He goes through a phase of listening to tapes of the self-improvement coach Tony Robbins on Andrew Getty’s Walkman. When he takes Jen back to his apartment for the first time, the undecorated pad reminds her of Patrick Bateman’s home in American Psycho, a book about a charming psychopath with slicked-back hair who has absolutely no idea who he really is.

[Read: Gavin Newsom’s record is a problem]

Not having a strong sense of identity means that he can get pushed around in his personal life. As the mayor of San Francisco, he poses sprawled on a carpet for Harper’s Bazaar—a picture of cringe-making arrogance that still haunts him—because his then-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and his patron Ann Getty tell him to do so. “You have a pattern of letting the women in your life dictate your movements,” Newsom recalls his sister Hilary telling him. Then she adds, with no apparent self-awareness, “Had I been there, I would have told you: ‘Get your ass off the floor. You’re the mayor of San Francisco. That is not a good look.’”

Newsom’s various constituents feature only lightly in this book—we encounter the city meter maids he fought for as parking commissioner, although his great innovation in improving their lives seems to be changing their title to parking control officer. His bold (and vindicated) decision to push for gay marriage as mayor of San Francisco is rehashed here, along with the subsequent backlash from the rest of the Democratic Party. The main section of the book ends with his election as governor in 2018, which spares us a gearchange into glossy PR for his record in that office, but also means we don’t get Newsom’s defense of his COVID record or his management of California’s budget. Immediately after a brief section on his affair with the wife of an aide, which took place when he was mayor, the book oddly backs up to discuss his grandparents. The alcohol problems on which he blamed the affair merit only a few sentences, and do not seem to be an ongoing part of his life. (He now drinks socially.) His mother’s death is movingly told, with commendable honesty about how he withdrew from her rather than face her illness. The lone unembroidered mention of “my longtime friend Kamala Harris” might be the single shadiest line in the book.

At the end, though, it all comes back to Bill. Young Man in a Hurry ends with Newsom in his study, contemplating his late father’s journal, which he glances at—“May 26, 2002: ‘Tessa died in San Francisco last week and we buried her in Dutch Flat’”—but cannot bring himself to read. Perhaps, for a man who has always lived in the shadow of distant patriarchs, the only thing worse than perpetually wondering what his father really thought would be finding out for sure.

The Former Prince Andrew Never Should Have Forwarded Those Emails

2026-02-19T12:18:18-05:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

On Tuesday, November 30, 2010, at 2:57 p.m., Prince Andrew—as he then was—received details of his upcoming trips as Britain’s official trade envoy: Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Vietnam, Singapore. At 3:02 p.m., he forwarded the entire email to Jeffrey Epstein.

At dawn today, that stupid and unethical decision—and many others like it—finally caught up with him. Police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on the morning of his 66th birthday, on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and are now searching his homes. Prosecutors have not yet released specific charges, which are thought to relate to Andrew passing on sensitive government information to Epstein. The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. His brother, King Charles III, was not officially informed in advance, but had signaled that the royal family would cooperate with any police inquiry.

Charles had already stripped Andrew of his title after the latest batch of Epstein files dropped, because the newly released emails proved beyond doubt that Andrew had lied about breaking off contact with Epstein, a convicted sex offender, in 2010. The disgraced former prince had also been evicted from his lavish residence in Windsor, just outside London, where he had lived effectively rent-free for many years. “Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” Charles wrote in his statement on the arrest, adding: “Meanwhile, my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Circles of Epstein hell]

In the United States, the Epstein affair is still seen primarily as a sex scandal. The financier was well known as a man who could easily find women—“no one over 25 and all very cute,” he told Elon Musk—to go on dates with his rich friends. (“Pro or civilian?” Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, asked about one such woman.) But here in Britain, this is a corruption scandal—and not just because Andrew sent Epstein confidential information about investment opportunities in Afghanistan. The police recently searched two addresses linked to Peter Mandelson, a former government minister and an ambassador to Washington who also lied about the extent of his friendship with Epstein.

During his time in government in the late 2000s, the files show, Mandelson forwarded market-sensitive emails to Epstein, on subjects such as the eurozone bailout of Greece, mixed in with laddish banter and discussions about how Mandelson might make money after leaving office. Mandelson has already been stripped of his seat in the House of Lords and his affiliation with the Labour Party; for a few hours, many in the press corps thought the scandal might bring down Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who had bafflingly appointed Mandelson as U.S. ambassador, despite his long record of other scandals. In the end, Starmer’s chief of staff, who had recommended Mandelson for the job, stepped down instead.

The allegations against Andrew date from a similar period, when he was a trade envoy for the British Foreign Office. That job turned out to involve flying around the world in high style—often to places run by oligarchs, dictators, and fellow royals, on the basis that they would be flattered to deal with a prince. Once there, he might also take the opportunity to watch, say, a Formula One race or have a few rounds of golf. Attractive young women seem to have been present at many of these events. Foreign intelligence services must have regarded Andrew’s appointment in 2001 as a gift from the heavens.

Everyone knew that this stank. At the time, I worked for the Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid, which ran near-weekly stories on the latest questionable Andrew news. In 2007, for example, he sold his white elephant of a mansion, Sunninghill, which his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, had given him as a wedding present. A Kazakh oligarch paid millions over the asking price, and then never moved in.

The problem for the royal family was that Andrew and his then-wife, Sarah—known in Britain as “Fergie,” after her unmarried name—had no discernible talents but extremely expensive tastes. The journalist Andrew Lownie’s book on the couple, Entitled, recounts how Sarah used to run up room-service bills in hotels and then simply walk out. “She would just breeze out of the Four Seasons and The Palace in New York as if she was too important to pay,” one source told him. The couple separated in 1992, but Sarah continued to use her title, the Duchess of York, to boost her commercial ventures. In 1995, Buckingham Palace refused to pay off any more of her debts, and issued a statement saying that “the Duchess’s financial affairs are no longer Her Majesty’s concern.”

After this, despite making millions of dollars from her series of children’s books, Fergie went crawling to Epstein for loans. She wrote in 2010: “Is there any chance I could borrow 50 or 100,000 US dollars to help get through the small bills that are pushing me over. . Had to ask.” The files also contain a particularly grim exchange after Fergie denounced Epstein following his conviction, only to email him in a panic afterward, assuring him she never used the “P word”—pedophile. Both she and Andrew were tethered to Epstein by their greed and entitlement. They wanted millionaire lifestyles. More than that, they felt that they deserved them. Why? Because of an accident of birth in one case, and a fortuitous marriage in the other. The couple have been divorced for three decades but have never really moved on, possibly because they are mirror images of each other.

Entitled also makes a compelling case that Andrew is—to put it delicately—boorish and dim. It’s entirely possible that he never questioned why Epstein would work so assiduously to maintain their friendship. One was a good chap, wasn’t one? As a trade envoy, Andrew became known for practical jokes and off-color remarks, which British diplomats had to tolerate because of his titles.

Until 2022, he also benefited from the protection of his mother. Andrew was widely perceived to be the late Queen’s favorite child: Charles was sensitive, unlike his parents, who had been raised as emotionally stunted aristocrats; Anne, a tougher, horse-mad child, was Prince Philip’s pet; Edward, like many youngest children, benefited from his parents softening with middle age. But no one really knew what to do with Andrew, who was nicknamed “Baby Grumpling” because of his temper. Like his nephew Prince Harry, he seems to have been most secure when in the tight-knit and hierarchical world of the military. Unlike Harry, though, he frequently reminded his peers of his royal status and was unable to make real friendships with people he considered below him.

[Read: What Jeffrey Epstein offered Prince Andrew]

Over the years, the late Queen had repeatedly smoothed Andrew’s way in life. But even she could not save him after his disastrous decision to give an interview to the BBC in 2019 about his connection with Epstein. He presented a portrait of blithe privilege, denying a deep connection with the financier by saying he had hosted him only for a “straightforward shooting weekend.” He claimed to have spent three days with Epstein in New York in 2010 for the sole purpose of breaking off their friendship. This was unbelievable at the time, and has now been debunked by the latest files. “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!” a 2011 email from Andrew declares. The revulsion at his appearance on the BBC prompted his mother to strip him of his ceremonial titles and retire him as a “working royal.”

Charles has gone even further—supported by his son Prince William. Both the king and his successor believe that Andrew’s actions could destroy the royal family, and they are keen to amputate him from the Windsors and cauterize the wound. None of the statements from Buckingham Palace has carried the slightest hint that they believe Andrew has been wronged by a witch hunt. The king’s last statement before today included a telling line: “Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and sympathies have been, and remain with, the victims of any and all forms of abuse.” Private companies are said to throw employees under the bus when the reputational damage gets too great. Andrew has been thrown under the state carriage.

All this presents quite a contrast with the U.S., where the fallout from contact with Epstein has largely been restricted to second-tier names—some of whom are provably guilty only of being chummy with a sex offender, which is not itself a crime. Like Andrew, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also claimed to have broken off contact with Epstein—in his case, in 2005, after seeing Epstein’s massage room in New York—but the files revealed that the association continued for many years afterward. However, Lutnick has the fortune to work for Donald Trump. The president is unlikely to request that anyone resign for being friendly with Epstein, since that would apply to him, too.

The former Prince Andrew acted as he did because he lived in a world in which someone like him never faced consequences. That isn’t true anymore. “Nobody is above the law,” Starmer said in response to the news. In Britain, at least, that might actually be true.

The Tide Goes Out on Youth Gender Medicine

2026-02-12T08:00:00-05:00

As the shaky evidence base for youth gender medicine has become better known, activists have retreated to an argument from authority. Never mind the Cass Report, whose findings resulted in the closure of Britain’s leading youth gender clinic. Never mind the study by a leading American practitioner showing that the treatments she championed did not improve minors’ mental health. Never mind reports that some adolescents were being put on a medical pathway after only a single clinic visit. For advocates, the important thing to remember was that “gender-affirming care” for minors—puberty blockers and hormones, plus surgery in rare cases—was endorsed by all of the major American medical associations.

“Doctors Agree,” proclaimed the American Civil Liberties Union: “Gender-Affirming Care Is Life-Saving Care.” GLAAD declared that “every major medical association and leading world health authority supports health care for transgender people and youth.” Fired up by the Republican “war on trans kids,” and naturally deferential to institutional authority, Democrats have tended to echo this line. At a 2023 congressional-subcommittee hearing on pediatric gender medicine, the ranking Democrat, Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, declared that “gender-affirming care is safe and effective” and “supported by every major medical association”—groups that collectively count more than 1.3 million doctors as members. “It’s not up for debate,” she said. In line with this, Joe Biden’s administration lobbied to remove age minimums from the industry’s standards of care.

Today, though, the future of medical transition for minors is up for debate. On February 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended that “surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.” The next day, the American Medical Association, the country’s largest organization representing doctors, endorsed that view: “In the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.” These statements echo what skeptics of American youth gender medicine have been saying for years: The evidence of the benefits and risks of mastectomies and other surgeries is insufficient to justify their use as treatments for gender dysphoria, and follow-up data on those who have undergone the procedures are scant.

[Helen Lewis: The liberal misinformation bubble about youth gender medicine]

More significant, the ASPS statement explicitly endorses the conclusions of the Cass Report and the evidence review commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services last year. LGBTQ groups and gender clinicians have dismissed both of these documents as fuel for right-wing attacks on care, even though Hilary Cass was a nonpartisan retired pediatrician, and most of the HHS report authors were self-described liberals and Democrats. But the ASPS references both warmly, and bases its new guidelines on the research carried out by the official British and American inquiries. “Both the Cass Review and the HHS report emphasize that the natural course of pediatric gender dysphoria remains poorly understood,” notes the ASPS statement. “Available evidence suggests that a substantial proportion of children with prepubertal onset gender dysphoria experience resolution or significant reduction of distress by the time they reach adulthood, absent medical or surgical intervention.” Put simply, that is an American doctors’ organization acknowledging that gender dysphoria frequently resolves itself without treatment—a challenge to the idea that children’s new identities should be uncritically endorsed.

I don’t want to overstate what has happened here: The ASPS has been more cautious than other groups for many months now, and its new positions are limited in scope. Gender surgeries on minors were never offered by Britain’s health service, and only a few thousand have been performed in the United States, according to a 2023 study. The ASPS statement also cites “insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio” for hormone treatments, but does not explicitly recommend against them. Yet the organization’s stance still represents a shift away from the purely affirmative model, in which saying no is never a clinician’s job. Notably, the group reminds members that “plastic surgeons cannot rely on the presence of a prior medical intervention, referral, or letter of support as a proxy for surgical indication or adolescent readiness.”

This matters, because the idea of performing mastectomies on girls as young as 13 became a powerful symbol of a clique of doctors who could not be trusted to regulate themselves. The Miami surgeon Sidhbh Gallagher became known on TikTok for her catchphrase “yeet the teet,” referring to mastectomies, and for calling herself “Dr. Teetus Deletus.” The detransitioner Chloe Cole, who has testified in favor of state bans on pediatric gender medicine, received a double mastectomy at 15. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who formerly worked at the gender clinic of the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, was the lead author on a paper recommending that mastectomies be offered based on “individual need rather than chronologic age.” She once boasted at a seminar that she did not worry about regret: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. In a recent lawsuit in New York State, a detransitioner called Fox Varian testified that she’d had her breasts removed at 16, only 11 months after first identifying as male. She had also been diagnosed with autism and had struggled with an eating disorder and anxiety. By the time of the surgery, she had changed her name twice already. Varian asserted, according to the reporter Benjamin Ryan, who attended the trial, that her doctor “served as an enabler, repeatedly assuring her that the mastectomy she desired would greatly improve her well-being.” Varian told the court that she regretted the surgery instantly, and detransitioned three years later. She was awarded $2 million in damages. The court heard that she had been left with scarring and a lack of sensation, and would be unable to breastfeed.

Varian’s lawsuit also claimed that doctors encouraged her mother to approve the surgery by invoking the specter of suicide. As I wrote last year, the idea of youth gender medicine as “lifesaving”—for the prevention of suicide—has been key to overriding parents’ understandable concerns about these treatments. But this is another activist talking point that has begun to crumble. In front of the Supreme Court, the ACLU’s Chase Strangio conceded that there was no evidence to support the assertion that transition prevents suicide, because “completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.” He argued that instead it reduced suicidal thoughts—a significant climbdown from the once-popular assertion that parents had to choose between “a dead son and a living daughter,” and vice versa. His concession helped expose this rhetoric as the emotional blackmail that it always was.

[Adam Serwer: The attack on trans rights won’t end there]

The tide is now going out on the affirmative approach to youth gender medicine as practiced in America. “I stopped the mutilation of children,” Donald Trump told a prayer breakfast on February 5. Twenty-seven states have placed restrictions on the medical pathway, while gender clinics in blue cities such as Los Angeles have shut down under Trump’s threat of funding cuts to their host institutions. Now the success of such a high-profile detransitioner lawsuit—one of more than two dozen currently under way, according to Ryan—will make the remaining affirmative clinicians nervous.

Frankly, they should be nervous. As the field has received more scrutiny, advocates have begun to stress the need for careful assessments, even though American providers in the 2010s largely rejected this essential feature of the Dutch protocol, the medical treatment for youth gender dysphoria developed in Europe in the 1990s. Today, when Democrats defend youth gender medicine, they tend to do so on the basis of individual freedom rather than the effectiveness of the treatments themselves. In 2024, a brief signed by 11 Democratic senators and 153 Democratic House members urged the Supreme Court not to uphold Tennessee’s ban on youth medical transition. The state law “intrudes on an individual’s decisions about their own medical care, made in partnership with their medical providers,” the signatories said.

All of this represents a clear retrenchment from the 2010s and early 2020s. The excesses of that era prompted a backlash that fueled the current MAGA demonization of gender nonconformity. The story of youth gender medicine is one of good intentions, arrogance, fear, and polarization. It is also an avoidable tragedy.

The YIMBY Hero Everyone Is Shouting At

2026-01-11T07:00:00-05:00

Scott Wiener has an unusual distinction in American politics: He upsets almost everybody. In the months before I met the California state senator—who is now running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat—he had been harangued at one public meeting after another. In October, pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted his campaign’s pumpkin-carving event to shout: “Wiener, Wiener, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide.” (This was not an isolated incident.) His usual response in these situations is to wait calmly and then carry on as normal.

At another event a few days later, the singer Tish Hyman, who identified herself as “the only Black lesbian here,” confronted Wiener about his far-reaching support for transgender inclusion. “What would you say to women who are seeking assurance that their safety will be protected from men who by California law can self-ID as women in women-only spaces?” asked Hyman. Wiener replied that he was committed to the safety of all women—trans women included. Video of the confrontation went viral.

In an era when many politicians try to make only the most cautious public statements, or the ones most palatable to their side of the political spectrum, Wiener is an outlier. As a gay, Jewish politician, he defends Israel in ways that get him in trouble with the left. His LGBTQ advocacy not only has made him a target of the right but also goes too far for people such as Hyman, who voted for Kamala Harris. And as a YIMBY—an acronym that stands for “Yes in My Backyard”—he’s faced down San Francisco’s powerful homeowner class, who wrap their aversion to new housing in the language of environmentalism and social justice. His successful housing legislation has attracted national attention—to get homes built in San Francisco, you have to be something close to a magician. He “works on thorny issues of policy and politics with a wonk’s focus and a jock’s tenacity,” a recent Mother Jones article declared. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein credited him for being, “for a very long time, this lonely voice trying to radically expand housing supply.”

Wiener stands athwart some of the touchiest fault lines in today’s politics, and his extreme tolerance for pushback has made him one of the most effective legislators in the country. He also might be the most shouted-at politician in America. “I have supporters in San Francisco who don’t love my housing work,” Wiener told me, “but they either don’t love it, but they understand why I’m doing it—or they don’t love it, but they tolerate it and they like me because of other issues, right?”

[Helen Lewis: The Gaza left and the gender left]

Although in other ways you couldn’t imagine two more dissimilar men, Wiener’s ferociously active spirit resembles the Bolshevik antsiness of Donald Trump. The current president is attractive to some voters who might not agree with his values, or his language, or even his policies, but who like that the president is, well, presidenting. Last year, Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House, one of the most recognizable historic sites in the United States. In Democratic cities, people demand 38 meetings and three dozen environmental assessments before tearing down a crack den to build a nursery for sad orphans. Voters, Wiener argues, want politicians who are “willing to break glass to get those things done.”

In any shot of the California legislature, Wiener is instantly recognizable—a 6-foot-7 figure in a crisp suit and tie. He studied law at Harvard, where Ketanji Brown Jackson, now a Supreme Court justice, was a classmate. He moved to San Francisco in the 1990s to take a job with a law firm, where he worked on LGBTQ issues and housing policy. “As a young attorney in the late 1990s, I represented a long-term HIV survivor facing eviction,” he wrote last year. “He told me he could either return to the South for housing and lose access to quality HIV care, or stay in San Francisco for the care he needed but become homeless.”

Wiener has competition for Pelosi’s seat, and the composition of his rivals tells an interesting story about the various currents of the modern Democratic Party. One of his opponents is Saikat Chakrabarti, a 39-year-old start-up centimillionaire who previously served as chief of staff to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Pelosi has not formally endorsed a candidate, but she has appeared at events with another contender, Connie Chan, a progressive member of the city’s Board of Supervisors who is popular with labor unions. Wiener says Chan caters to NIMBYs; her supporters call Wiener a pro-developer capitalist.

The race has now become a proxy for the California housing wars, which pit younger renters against established homeowners in neighborhoods zoned for single-family units. This summer, Wiener finally got so-called infill legislation passed, which permits denser construction near public transportation. Senate Bill 79 was the third version of the bill—the first, S.B. 827, died in committee all the way back in 2018. “When we did S.B. 827, it was like a brand-new thing, like no bill like that, even in the same universe had ever been introduced before,” Wiener told me.

After its failure, Wiener looked for compromises and championed other bills aimed at increasing housing supply. At the same time, pressure groups worked hard to get younger, more YIMBY legislators elected. “Term limits have their downsides,” he told me. “One of the upsides is you have new, fresh thinking on different issues, and this is one of them.” Less high-mindedly, when S.B. 79 ran into resistance in Sacramento, he made a deal—pledging that housing more than 85 feet tall, or on land owned by transit authorities, would use unionized labor. After making such concessions, the bill finally squeaked through.

In the wild seas of California politics, his YIMBYism has drawn attacks from the left. “There are some people in San Francisco, if you believe in making it easier to build things, then that somehow makes you a moderate,” he said. Wiener is often attacked for not being left-wing enough. As a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, he fought to ban public nudity from the Castro neighborhood outside of Pride parades and other special events. As a result, he was sharply criticized by radical nudists. “The San Francisco labels are stupid,” he told me. He considers himself “very progressive” and is more overtly sex-positive than even the typical Bay Area politician. He has posed shirtless in a leather necktie at the Folsom Street Fair, and spoken publicly about taking Truvada, a pill that dramatically reduces the chances of contracting HIV.

Since October 7, Weiner has clearly found it hard to reconcile his commitment to Israel with the mood among leftists who endorse his support for LGBTQ rights. He is the son of Conservative Jewish parents who founded a congregation near their home in rural Turnersville, New Jersey; he says he was called a “kike” and a “Christ-hater” at school. Both of his nephews were Bar Mitzvah–ed in Israel, and he still has relatives there. “It’s the home of half of all Jews on the planet,” he notes.

Wiener has described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “indefensible,” condemned the violence of West Bank settlers, and called for an end to arms sales to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. But he has also argued that Israel has a right to defend itself, and a right to exist as a Jewish state, and he does not characterize the bombing of Gaza as a genocide—a description that the San Francisco left insists upon. Both Chakrabarti and Chan had an easier time with the crowd at the candidates’ first joint appearance, on January 7, because they held up signs saying yes when the moderator asked whether Israel was committing genocide. Wiener declined to answer the question in either direction.

He links these purity tests to medieval tropes that defined “good Jews” as those who quietly obeyed the authorities and “bad Jews” as those who were too open about their identity. Today, he sees Jews being pushed out of progressive circles based on similar judgments. “If part of your Jewishness is, you know, that you support the homeland of the Jews and the home of one-half of all Jews on the planet, then that makes you a bad Jew,” he said. “If you’re not willing to use the exact language that we want you to use, then you’re a bad Jew.”

Wiener told me that since October 7, he has personally—“as a state senator who has no role in foreign policy”—experienced an increase in anti-Semitism. So have other Jewish leaders and businesspeople in San Francisco. “It’s not just about Israel,” he said. “It’s straight-up anti-Semitism.” On December 7, for example, he posted on X about California students who formed a human swastika on school football field, uploading their photo alongside a Hitler quotation about how “international financial Jews” would plunge the world into war, leading to the “annihilation of the Jewish race.”

He is regularly confronted in public by provocateurs with cameras, filming clips for social media. Wiener says he wants to stay open to those who want a genuine conversation, such as a non-Zionist Jewish friend who brought over eight people for a two-hour meeting on the subject. “We had a wonderful dialogue,” he maintains.

Talking with Wiener was my way of stepping outside my own tribe on one set of issues. His transgender-rights advocacy, in my view, ignores serious gaps in the evidence base for youth gender medicine and brushes aside women’s concerns about biological males in their sports and single-sex spaces.

The story of the woman who confronted Wiener, Tish Hyman, is that she felt unsafe changing in front of a transgender woman, Alexis Black, in a gym. Hyman confronted the gym staff, who threw her and Black out; under California law, people can use whichever locker room aligns with their gender identity. After the incident went viral, it emerged that Black, under the name Grant Freeman, had previously pleaded guilty to assault, after breaking her then-wife’s jaw. (Upon transitioning after the attack, Black took the ex-wife’s first name.) Wiener argues that transgender women face violence, too, and should not be treated as an inherent threat. “I think anyone who is harassing anyone or engaging in weird, creepy, inappropriate behavior in a locker room, in a group bathroom, something should be done about that,” Wiener tells me, “whether that is a cis man, cis woman, trans man. That should not be tolerated.” Transgender people who want to get on with their lives without harassment and abuse should not suffer because of the actions of the occasional creep, he says.

The argument isn’t about what policies he supports, he says, because he has never proposed a bill about restrooms or locker rooms specifically. “The triggering thing I said on that stage,” he said, referring to the event where Hyman and others criticized him, “is trans women are women, and they fundamentally dispute that.”

If California Governor Gavin Newsom runs for president, he will have to answer for the state’s many gender-related policies championed by Wiener, such as adding a nonbinary option to driver’s licenses. Wiener also proposed S.B. 357, which repealed California’s law criminalizing loitering with intent to commit prostitution. He has argued that this prevents young people, in many cases members of sexual or racial minorities, from being hassled by police; the Times recently reported that the new approach hampered police attempts to find underage girls working on the streets.

[Read: The front-runner]

Legislation like this has made Wiener a frequent target of MAGA influencers such as Libs of TikTok. In 2024, an account called “End Wokeness” posted a description of his voting record over the Folsom Street Fair photo, alongside another with Kamala Harris. Elon Musk, the owner of X, reposted it with the comment: “Wiener is an utter scumbag.”

Perhaps because of the nastiness of the attacks, Wiener tends toward a knee-jerk dismissal of people who disagree with him on these issues. He told me that the MAGA information universe that amplified Tish Hyman hates him as “the gay Jew from San Francisco who thinks trans kids are, like, full human beings.” I objected that there is also a liberal criticism that gender-questioning teens who might need talk therapy are being put on a medical pathway. We went back and forth. He said that all the American medical associations support puberty blockers; I noted that systematic evidence reviews, such as those commissioned for Britain’s exhaustive Cass Report, do not. He said that the Cass Report was “debunked.” I replied that one critical paper on the Yale Law School website—not peer-reviewed, and written in part by doctors who prescribe these treatments themselves—is not a debunking. He argued that gender surgeries on minors are rare (true) and that regret rates are low (we don’t know, because the institutions that made experimental gender treatments mainstream did not pause to collect systematic data).

In general, Wiener seems more patient with those who criticize him over Gaza than with people who part with him on gender. I asked him about that difference: Just as the abusive, disruptive pro-Palestinian activists might nonetheless have a fair point about Netanyahu’s policies, aren’t some of the concerns about single-sex spaces and puberty blockers worth hearing out, even if Libs of TikTok is awful to him? He didn’t bite.

Still, you don’t have to agree with him on everything to realize that he’s making a fundamentally different calculation from applause-driven careerists. One of the reasons that you can argue with Wiener—or shout at him, if your politics dictate that approach—is that he has strong beliefs and argues them bravely, even when they are unpopular. He fights, he loses, and he fights again until he wins.

The Front-Runner

2026-01-06T10:00:00-05:00

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

Gavin Newsom has a 30-page file of reasons the Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election. Bounding across his Sacramento office, he starts listing them: incumbency, inflation, interest rates, Israel—and that’s just the letter I. “Yes, too woke,” he adds. “Yes, 107 days,” referring to the short campaign after Joe Biden’s forced withdrawal. But the California governor distills his party’s problem down to one word. Weak.

Newsom slaps his hand on a marked-up hardback of Bill Clinton’s memoir, brought down from the shelf a minute earlier. “Given the choice,” he tells me, summing up a crucial Clinton insight—one many Democrats still can’t quite seem to grasp—“the American people always support strong and wrong versus weak and right.”

According to prediction markets and early polling, Newsom is the Democrats’ current front-runner for 2028. He is also one of the most visible anti-Trump forces in America. His idea of strength includes a willingness to fight dirty, going lower than Barack Obama could ever imagine, and so his social-media accounts bristle with memes about Donald Trump’s bruised hand and advancing age. “Donald has fallen asleep in his own Cabinet meeting,” he recently asserted on X. Some posts are downright cruel, such as the one about Elon Musk’s estrangement from his transgender child: “We’re sorry your daughter hates you, Elon,” it said.

He also has a high tolerance for risk. Proposition 50, a ballot measure that has redrawn California’s congressional map in favor of the Democrats, was seen as a toss-up when he first backed it last year. The new map was a blatant partisan gerrymander, a departure from the time when the Democrats used to talk up the fairness of independent commissions. Morally wrong, maybe—but do you want to win back the House or not? Prop 50 passed by a two-to-one margin.

Newsom, who is 58, has a memoir coming out next month. This is a traditional rite of passage for people running for president, which he is, even though we are supposed to pretend that he hasn’t decided yet. He has some obvious advantages over the likely competition. As a heterosexual white man from a Catholic background, nothing about his identity is electorally risky. He is tall—6 foot 3—and good-looking in a faintly sinister way: You can imagine him being played by Matthew McConaughey or the vampire dad from Twilight. In a political arena now dominated by podcasts, he can talk until he’s hoarse; as San Francisco mayor, he once uploaded a multipart “State of the City” address to YouTube that lasted more than seven hours.

As for his liabilities, well, the word smarm comes up a lot: The teeth are too white, the hair perfectly gelled. As if to compensate for his overuse of buzzwords—he told me he was “concerned about the significant expansion in the health-care space from a sustainability perspective”—man and brother are strategically deployed to seem folksy. In person, he is enormously charismatic, and is obviously performing. “He is a good communicator,” the Bay Area political strategist Alex Clemens told me. “He tries very hard to be a good communicator, and some people latch on to the trying-hard, instead of the end result.”

Newsom’s core views are also hard to ascertain. Right now, Democrats are divided into multiple camps: the can-do Abundance crew; centrists, who warn about the overreach of “The Groups,” such as the ACLU; Resistance libs, often dismissively referred to as the “wine mom” tendency; and left-wing populists, who think the party should not yield an inch on social issues, but instead focus on bashing billionaires. Newsom is trying to offer something to all four factions. His mentor, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, said last year that his protégé is a “movie star” capable of being elected president—but also that he has never asked Newsom what he believes, “for fear he doesn’t know!”

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

Newsom’s campaign tactics are similarly fluid. At the start of Trump’s second term, the governor offered him an “open hand, not a closed fist,” before casting himself as the leader of the Resistance. He attributes this change to the deployment of the National Guard to his state. “I was shaped by a different consciousness and understanding of our politics,” he told me.

And there’s another problem: California. Newsom was born and bred in a state widely associated with moonbeams, metrosexuality, and macrobiotics. He has never faced a serious challenge from the right, and has instead spent a career among left-wing interest groups whose stances on immigration, drugs, gender, and climate change seem far-out to Middle America. “If you want to see the socialist Biden/Harris future for our country, just take a look at California,” one speaker at the 2020 Republican National Convention said, with the cadences of a carnival barker warning about the apocalypse. “It is a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation, and immaculate environment, and the Democrats turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes.”

Who was that speaker? Kimberly Guilfoyle, otherwise known as Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife. Many California Democrats—and even some of Newsom’s friends—still cannot understand why he ever married Guilfoyle, who went on to have an open-casket MAGA makeover and was engaged for a time to Donald Trump Jr.

All of this brings us to the defining question: Who is Gavin Newsom, really, underneath the charm—and the smarm?

Ryan Young for The Atlantic

At the state capitol

Authors write a memoir when there’s something about themselves that they want other people to understand. So what don’t outsiders get about Gavin Newsom?

“The memoir opens up with that question,” Newsom tells me—the question of whether “I’ve become a caricature of myself and contributed to it, as it relates to this perception of privilege and wealth that has dogged me—and at times infuriated, not just frustrated, me.” I run the caricature as I understand it past him: His father was a friend of the Gettys, one of San Francisco’s wealthiest and most well-connected families, and Newsom started his first business with Getty money. “Yeah, you got it, sums it up,” he says. So how is it wrong? “Well, you gotta read the book,” he deadpans.

Newsom’s version is that he grew up between two worlds. His parents divorced when he was still a young child. His late father, Bill, was close to the oil heirs Gordon Getty and John Paul Getty Jr.—so close, in fact, that Bill became an administrator of the Getty family trust and helped deliver the ransom for the kidnapped John Paul Getty III. With the Gettys, Gavin went on safari and watched polar bears in Canada. But at home with his mother, Tessa, life was Wonder bread and mac and cheese.

At his high school in Marin County, north of San Francisco, Newsom was not a great student, but he was a talented first baseman, and he has attributed his acceptance at Santa Clara University to the fact he was “left-handed and could throw a baseball a little bit.” At times, an exaggerated version of his college record has spread, giving the incorrect impression that he played for Santa Clara and was drafted by the Texas Rangers. (A spokesperson has previously said, “He is doing his job, and he cannot spend his entire day correcting people when they make errors about him.”)

Playing baseball “helped me build confidence, got me out of my shell, and so I have deep reverence—I value sports and athletics, and also competition,” Newsom tells me. One of his two podcasts, Politickin’, is co-hosted by the former NFL star Marshawn Lynch—the legendary “Beast Mode”—and the sports agent Doug Hendrickson. The show is raucous, fratty, and frequently profane; in one episode, Lynch told their guest, Jimmy Kimmel, that “you gotta let your nuts hang.” As Kimmel observed: “This has to be the weirdest podcast ever, right?” (Newsom paused Politickin’ during the Palisades Fire crisis, but plans to revive it later this year.)

After college, the young Gavin and his childhood friend Billy Getty founded a wine store called PlumpJack, which has since grown into a restaurant-and-vineyard empire. (The word is a nickname for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and the title of an opera by Gordon Getty.) “I grew a business with a relatively modest investment from a few members of the Getty family,” Newsom says now. “There were 13 investors.” Then he adds: “I’m not naive as well; I don’t run away from a recognition of the advantages and the privileges that I did enjoy.”

These connections have led to many of Newsom’s unflattering nicknames over the years, such as “Prince Gavin.” “Everybody thinks of Gavin and a silver spoon,” Nancy Pelosi told me. “But that isn’t right.” The former House speaker is a strong supporter of Newsom and recently helped him fundraise for Prop 50. There is even a persistent MAGA folk myth that she is his aunt: In fact, Newsom’s aunt Barbara was once married to Pelosi’s brother-in-law Ron. Pelosi, who has known Newsom since birth, added, “He was a very hard worker in everything that he did, whether it was personally, professionally, and then civically.”

One source of lifelong struggle is his dyslexia. He is an obsessive note taker, a habit born of the condition. He reads a book or a briefing agonizingly slowly, then copies out the best points onto a notepad, before transferring them to yellow index cards. Because of this, he prefers to rely on interrogating nearby people or memorizing information. In the 2000s, this tendency led his staff to nickname him Rain Man. “If you notice, when he speaks, he’s never reading from notes,” Senator Alex Padilla of California, who ran Newsom’s first campaign for lieutenant governor, told me. “So he, in some ways, overcompensates through preparation.”

Steve Castillo / San Francisco Chronicle / Getty

Newsom (center) with Peter and Billy Getty at the PlumpJack wine shop’s opening party in 1992

As a result, Newsom can rattle off talking points with disorienting velocity. When I challenged him on his record as California governor, he machine-gunned me with a list of achievements: “$11 billion to reform the Medicaid system, the most significant reforms to Medicaid in the country; taking our whole-person care pilots and bringing them statewide; getting an 1115 waiver, getting a 1332 waiver from the Feds, all hard work; CalRx, not subsidizing costs, lowering costs—$11 insulin as a proof point of that. You can look down a list: $25 minimum wage for health-care workers, $20 for fast-food workers, no other state in the country, hard-fought battles; 800,000 gig workers now can organize, that was a six-year effort . . .”

I checked these numbers afterward, and although some of the claimed policy triumphs were either arguable or still pending, he was word-perfect on the figures. No wonder he’s desperate to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast, I thought. He would beast-mode Rogan with a swarm of facts.

Newsom has always, always wanted to be president. In the late ’90s, his Balboa Cafe, in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood, was a place where old and new money mixed. “Though barely out of his 20s, he already has a repertoire of politician’s gestures—placing his arm conspiratorily on a listener’s shoulder, punching the air to make a point,” The New York Times reported in 1998.

His childhood friend Lori Puccinelli Stern once organized a charity auction at Planet Hollywood with future Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. They sold off a cigar-smoking-and-chess session with the Terminator star and a date with Newsom, then one of the most eligible bachelors in town. The winners of the latter prize were an older couple in real estate, which surprised the hosts. “We were thinking maybe a young girl who had eyes for Gavin would want this,” Puccinelli Stern told me. “The couple said, ‘We want to have dinner with him and our children, because we want them to get to know someone who we think is probably going to be the president of the United States someday.’” Stern said she wanted to talk to me because too many people saw Newsom as a “cyborg politician” when he was funny and loyal, the kind of guy who, “if you’re stuck in a Turkish prison, mistakenly, he’s your phone call.”

Another close friend, the event impresario Stanlee Gatti, remembers talking with Newsom in the 1990s, when Willie Brown had just appointed his friend to the San Francisco parking commission. Newsom stopped by Gatti’s studio and saw him casting the I Ching, a traditional Chinese method of divination that uses coins or yarrow stalks. Newsom wanted to try it. “The I Ching said, If you’re thinking about running for political, public office—don’t,” Gatti told me. “It said, You are an artist and you are a creator, and you should be doing something that uses that part.”

In Gatti’s telling, Newsom didn’t demur. “I can see it so clearly, right now, him standing up there, and he goes: Okay, that’s it. I guess I’m not running for office.” But Gatti didn’t believe his friend. (I asked Gatti if he would cast the I Ching again, to predict his friend’s future once more. “I need him to throw it,” he said, mulling the idea. If Newsom was willing, Gatti said, “we can do it over the phone.” As I waited, he texted the governor. An answer pinged back in less than a minute: “Too risky.”)

Family connections quickly propelled him upward in local government. Bill Newsom once told San Francisco Weekly that a friend of his helped engineer his son’s appointment to the city’s Board of Supervisors. “Besides,” Newsom’s father said, “they needed a straight white male on the board.”

When he ran for San Francisco mayor, Newsom’s platform was moderate and pro-business, in the model of Senator Dianne Feinstein. His signature policy was “care not cash,” a program to divert welfare spending to housing for the homeless, which he touted as a compassionate answer to Rudy Giuliani’s broken-windows toughness. In the runoff, Newsom narrowly beat the Green candidate, Matt Gonzalez, who became a public defender. “I think it was a closer race than he would have hoped for,” said Padilla, who first met Newsom around this time.

But within two months of taking office, he made a huge gamble: He started issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples—effectively daring the state to strike them down. In hindsight, it’s easy to forget how provocative this was. Democrats believed that gay marriage was a losing issue, and that Newsom’s actions risked a conservative backlash for little practical gain.

Kate Kendell, then the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, remembers getting a phone call from the mayor’s office on a Friday afternoon saying it planned to start issuing licenses the following Monday. She was wary. “Things felt very perilous and tenuous, and it felt like a firecracker moment,” she told me. When Newsom’s office said it would go ahead anyway, Kendell called the lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, partners of more than 50 years. She asked if the couple, who were then 79 and 83, wanted to be the first to get a license.

Newsom decided at the last minute not to conduct the ceremony himself—“He felt like it would be too much about him,” Kendell said—and so County Assessor Mabel Teng married the couple, who had arrived in matching pantsuits, turquoise and purple. Newsom gave them a copy of the California constitution as a wedding gift. “It was pretty extraordinary,” Kendell said, “but he paid holy hell for it. He got angry calls from Dianne Feinstein. He got angry calls from Barney Frank”—an openly gay congressman—“that the Democratic establishment was not happy with him.”

Marcio Jose Sanchez / AFP / Getty

With Del Martin (left) and Phyllis Lyon at city hall in 2008, after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage

Newsom believes that he was not invited to speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention because of the backlash. When John Kerry lost the White House that year, some Democrats blamed Newsom. “I believe it did energize a very conservative vote,” Feinstein said at the time. It was “too much, too fast, too soon.”

The young politician didn’t fold, but he did brood. “I mean, come on, maybe Democrats shouldn’t have supported civil rights in the ’60s,” he told a public-radio station immediately after the election. The party, and the country, has since validated his gamble. In 2008, the California Supreme Court voted to allow gay marriages—for a brief window, before a ballot measure overturned the ruling. The second time round, Newsom personally married Phyllis and Del at city hall. “Del was much more frail now, but they wore the same pantsuits . . . It was a huge celebratory spectacle,” Kendell told me, adding: “I think public opinion had really started to shift.”

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the country. “I know change for many of our LGBT brothers and sisters must have seemed so slow for so long,” said President Obama, welcoming the ruling. “But compared to so many other issues, America’s shift has been so quick.”

For Newsom, the fallout from the gay weddings was nothing compared with the implosion of his first marriage. Newsom had married Guilfoyle, an assistant district attorney turned television host, in 2001. Her “something borrowed” was one of Ann Getty’s tiaras, and the reception for their 600 guests was held at the Getty mansion.

The marriage was short and tempestuous. Guilfoyle’s television career in New York pulled her away from the West Coast, and Newsom would spend Sunday evenings with Puccinelli Stern, her husband, and their new baby, watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and eating pizza. She told me he would turn up wearing a baseball cap, and when the lucky families saw their new home, he “would put his hat down so we didn’t see him getting emotional.”

Guilfoyle took a somewhat unorthodox approach to life as a political consort. Filling in for Newsom at a gay awards dinner, she told the crowd: “I know that many of you wanted to see my husband, and some of you had questions out there. Is he hot? Yeah. Is he hung? Yeah.” The couple infamously posed together, sprawled on a rug, for the September 2004 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, in a story headlined “The New Kennedys.” The rug, and surrounding house, belonged to Ann Getty, and the magazine’s fashion editor at the time was Jacqui Getty, who was then Ann’s daughter-in-law. Asked about Newsom’s ambitions, Guilfoyle replied: “Do I think he could be president of the United States? Absolutely. I’d gladly vote for him.”

Within months of the story’s publication, however, the couple announced their split. What followed was a dark time for Newsom: He was frequently seen with a glass in his hand at local restaurants, although a spokesperson maintained that he had no alcohol problems. The newly single 38-year-old “Mayor McHottie” had relationships with a Scientologist, a 19-year-old model, and—most damagingly—his former appointments secretary Ruby Rippey Gibney, who was married to one of his closest aides.

Days after coming clean about the last of these relationships, he announced that he would seek treatment because “I will be a better person without alcohol in my life.” For a decade, the media reported that he had been to rehab, but in 2018, The Sacramento Bee corrected this assumption. Newsom told the paper he had sought only counseling with a local therapist and later resumed drinking socially. More than one person I spoke with wondered whether Newsom had pleaded alcohol abuse at the time to avoid the charge of moral degeneracy. When the #MeToo movement brought the scandal back into the news, Rippey Gibney wrote on Facebook that she had not felt coerced into the relationship, as a “free-thinking, 33-yr old adult married woman & mother.” Around the same time, Newsom revisited the affair. “I acknowledged it. I apologized for it. I learned an enormous amount from it,’’ he said.

Michael Macor / San Francisco Chronicle / Getty

At San Francisco’s city hall in 2007, Newsom admits to an affair with his secretary, the wife of his campaign manager

By the late 2010s, Newsom had a personal reason for supporting the #MeToo movement; his second wife is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, an outspoken feminist and a sexual-assault survivor. She was involved with two films about gender roles in America: Miss Representation, about girls, in 2011, and The Mask You Live In, which tackled men’s issues, in 2015. She testified that she’d been raped by Harvey Weinstein in 2005. (The jury could not reach a verdict in her case.) In keeping with her feminist principles, Siebel Newsom is not California’s first lady, but its “first partner.”

Their relationship started with a blind date at a fundraising gala at the Yerba Buena Center in 2006, and within 18 months, Newsom had proposed with a Tiffany diamond ring. They married that summer in a field in Montana, and Stanlee Gatti did the decor. The bride rode to the aisle sidesaddle on a black stallion; the groom wore a tan suit; the theme was “Out of Africa.” The ceremony was conducted by Carol Simone, a “modern day mystic” whose website describes her as a medium, an astrologer, and a tarot practitioner. Bill Newsom arrived in Gordon Getty’s plane.

The Newsoms now have four children, ages 9 to 16: Montana, Brooklynn, Hunter, and Dutch. Gatti told me that marriage and kids had settled Newsom; he had run into his friend and his son at a museum one morning during the pandemic, and noticed how relaxed he looked. “He had his hair floppy. Some people didn’t even recognize him.” (Newsom’s hair, usually slicked back, has been a source of admiration and horror for two decades. His secret, he once told American Idol’s Ryan Seacrest, was L’Oréal Total Control Clean Gel.)

Amid all of his personal upheaval, Newsom ran for—and easily won—reelection as mayor. He was such an obvious shoo-in that the race became a kind of circus: His opponents included a performance artist, a nudist activist, and the owner of a sex club. Tellingly, both the artist, “Chicken John” Rinaldi, and the sex-club owner, Michael Powers, told me they no longer live in San Francisco. Rinaldi was priced out and lives in Isleton, an hour east of the Bay. Powers moved right politically and didn’t feel welcome in California anymore. He now lives in Nevada. “I’m definitely a tried-and-true libertarian,” Powers said. “I believe that gay guys ought to be able to protect their weed fields with assault rifles.”

After Newsom won his second term, in 2007, Gatti designed an inauguration ceremony with 2,000 yellow roses spread across two giant urns, to fill the grand scale of city hall. The very same day, Newsom attended the swearing-in of the city’s newly reelected district attorney, Kamala Harris. The two have known each other for decades, but they are not close, sharing neither friends nor a political philosophy. In her book 107 Days, Harris recounts that Newsom did not pick up when she called him to discuss Joe Biden dropping out of the race in the summer of 2024—and, by implication, her need for a running mate. Newsom has said that he did not recognize her number.

The looming end of his second term as mayor presented Newsom with a problem. The obvious next step was to run for California governor in 2010, but his candidacy faltered once the old warhorse Jerry Brown—who had already served in the position in the ’70s and ’80s—made it clear he was entering the race. Newsom settled for lieutenant governor, a largely ceremonial position that he won easily. He chafed at his lack of responsibilities, and took advantage of Brown’s absences to pull stunts such as naming the avocado the official state fruit.

[Read: Gavin Newsom can’t help himself]

Newsom essentially spent eight years treading water—or, as I put it to him in Sacramento, just vibing. “I appreciate that perspective,” he replied, a politician’s phrase meaning screw you. He has now recast these years of avocado-bothering as a “gestation period of sorts,” where he spent time “working with the Brookings Institute, working with McKinsey, working on best-practices policy, urban policy, ultimately writing the first economic plan for the state.” An unhappy Jerry Brown “tried to torpedo me on that,” Newsom told me, and refused to appoint a committee to take the plan forward. (Brown declined my interview request.) “I was literally neutered,” he added. “It was quite brilliant, looking back as a gubernatorial play. I despised it at the time. Now I appreciate it.”

To fill the time, he hosted The Gavin Newsom Show on Current TV, interviewing a pre-bonkers Elon Musk about Tesla, listening to Oliver Stone praise California’s weed, and trying on Sergey Brin’s Google Glass. He also wrote a none-more-2010s book called Citizenville—a title inspired by the game Farmville—which discussed how digital innovation could transform government.

In 2018, after Brown retired, Newsom won the governor’s race with 62 percent of the vote. He has taken up a number of fashionable liberal causes, although some of these have fared badly on contact with electoral reality. For example, he declared that the state “could finally beat Big Oil” in 2013, and signed legislation that banned fracking and restricted oil drilling near sensitive sites—then approved a law allowing 2,000 new drilling licenses in Kern County this past September, citing high gas prices.

Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty

Election Night, November 2018

The Stanford professor Keith Humphreys worked on a blue-ribbon commission to reform cannabis laws with Newsom in the 2010s. Their original vision, he told me, was one that prioritized public health and put social justice over profit. “Gavin articulated this beautifully in the press,” Humphreys said. But the legislation that ended up being drafted and approved by voters “weakened the public-good aspirations of our commission and created a more profit-driven model, and Gavin didn’t utter a word of protest. Is this because he didn’t know the details were different, or is it because he didn’t mind, because he gets a lot of campaign donations from the cannabis industry? I genuinely don’t know the answer to that even now.” Legalization meant that big producers, operating on tiny margins, moved in and actively looked for new customers.

In September, Newsom signed a bill to roll back taxes on the legal-cannabis industry, because the regulatory burden has left it struggling to compete with the black market. Doing something that is sold as socially progressive, but ends up benefiting big-money donors, and then wrapping it up in so much regulation and taxation that the policy collapses under its own weight—how dysfunctionally California is that?

But the state’s biggest challenge is the cost of living—specifically, housing. Newsom has recently started name-checking the Abundance movement, which aims to convince Democrats that overregulation and NIMBYism are holding back the growth of blue states. He has signed a series of bills meant to make housing construction easier. But these efforts have yet to bear much fruit, and the candidates to succeed him as governor—he is term-limited—are making housing affordability a centerpiece of their campaigns, too. Mid-tier home prices in California are around double the national average.

“He’s much given to—like Trump, in a way—making these grand pronouncements about how something’s the greatest ever, how this is going to be the most wonderful thing,” the veteran California journalist Jerry Roberts told me, “and then his record is littered with failures.” Still, you try to get anything passed in California, a state with strong labor unions, a cadre of well-funded lobbyists, and a masochistic addiction to requiring approval via ballot measure.

The minutiae of policy may matter less in a national election, however, than the overall sense that California is too far left—and so its governor must be, too. Newsom twice supported ballot measures to repeal the death penalty in California, boasts about providing health care to undocumented immigrants, and in 2014 was the only statewide elected official to back Proposition 47, which reclassified some nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors rather than felonies. At the time, he said that there was “a growing, rational thinking around moving in a new direction” on crime and rehabilitation that other politicians were scared to embrace. Opponents drew a direct line between those reforms and the locked plastic cases around the goods in many San Francisco stores. I brought up Prop 47 as Exhibit A in the Republican argument that Newsom is too liberal for Middle America. “California is one of the toughest felony thresholds for shoplifting in America, period,” he said, adding that the felony limit is $950, whereas in supposedly tough Texas, it is $2,500. To Newsom’s mind, the charge that he is soft on crime is “complete mythology, and makes you question the press.”

On social issues, Newsom has already acted to mitigate the weakness of being associated with Californian wokery. Two of the first guests on his interview podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, were Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, ensuring that people actually listened to the show. Kirk advised him to “run to the middle” and say “no men in female sports.” Newsom conceded the broader point—“I think it’s an issue of fairness” —before retreating to the standard Democratic talking points: Not many athletes are involved. This is a marginalized community with high suicide rates. The Republicans had been able to “weaponize the issue.” But even those tentative words were enough, Newsom told me, to cause a huge backlash within his own tent. Two members of the California legislature’s LGBTQ caucus declared that they were “profoundly sickened and frustrated” by his words.

“What’s so interesting is how painful that position is to many members of my party,” he says now. “And I’ve lost relationships and friendships because of that position.” He argues that his record of pro-LGBTQ bills gives him the ability to look for compromises; he also has a trans godson, 33-year-old Nats Getty. “I have someone I love dearly who went through a transition,” he says.

Hasn’t America been waiting for a politician who can hold this middle ground, I ask, someone who can say that we should treat everyone with respect and dignity, but also acknowledge that in some circumstances—sports, prisons—biological sex matters? “I agree,” Newsom says, before becoming uncharacteristically ineloquent. “Yeah. It’s … I … I’ve just—it’s been—it’s been really, it’s been an interesting—” He is “hesitating,” he tells me, because he has just recorded a podcast reflecting on the year, including his conversation with Kirk, who was assassinated in September.

Another reason for hesitation might be that California has other laws that must have the makers of Republican attack ads salivating with anticipation. In 2020, the state passed S.B. 132, allowing male criminals to self-identify into women’s prisons. One of those transferred, Tremaine Carroll, is awaiting trial on charges of raping two female inmates. (Carroll denies the charges.) A.B. 1955, passed in July 2024, prevents schools from having to inform parents if their children have adopted new names and pronouns. I bring up the latter example with Newsom. He reframes it, saying that the law was aimed to stop “commanding that teachers become snitches and say, You’ll be fired if you don’t snitch on a child. And it wasn’t about trans issues. It wasn’t just transitioning. It was around sexual orientation generally.” Under the Republicans’ preferred laws, he says, “if Bobby was going to dress up as a woman, you were compelled to then turn that child in.”

Heading into a general election, Newsom has a choice on how to treat his policy record: full-throated defense or brutal disownment. He could also try to reject the premise, rehabilitating the image of California as a place of innovation and dynamism, rather than the socialist dystopia conjured up by his ex-wife. Newsom is already thinking about this strategy, arguing that some people suffer from what he jokingly calls “California Derangement Syndrome.” His staff recently gave him a 1977 Time article about how the California “dream fizzled”—to add to the 1994 Time article decrying “clogged freeways, eye-stinging smog, despoiled landscapes, polluted beaches, water shortages, unaffordable housing, overcrowded schools and beleaguered industries.” His point is that people love to declare the end of the Golden State.

Pelosi too pushed back on the idea that the rest of the country hates California. “I don’t know that we attract hatred,” the former speaker told me. “We have jealousy.” Padilla also disputes the popular characterization of the state. “There’s 58 counties in California, the majority of which are Republican,” the senator told me, adding, “It’s a lot more diverse than people think.”

That might well be, but unlike Bill Clinton—who succeeded as a Democrat in conservative Arkansas—Newsom has not yet shown he can outperform his party. He won his second governor’s race, in 2022, with 59 percent of the vote. Two years later, Harris won California’s electoral college with 58 percent. Newsom’s policies on capital punishment and gun control “are very popular among the Democratic base,” Jerry Roberts told me, “but I don’t know how that’s going to sell in western Pennsylvania, or South Carolina for that matter.”

Justin Sullivan / Getty

With former President Bill Clinton in 2003

All right, let’s talk about the tweets. The redistricting fight showed one version of Newsom’s strength, as he ran an expensive anti-Trump campaign focused on the threat to democracy and civil rights. His online presence, however, demonstrates that he can also mock Trump like a mean ninth grader. This is the work of a team of young staffers, whose Sacramento-office door carries an AI-generated image of Newsom being prayed over by Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson, and Hulk Hogan (RIP). Newsom is not Michelle Obama: When they go low, Newsom’s team goes even lower. (Despite this freewheeling approach, Newsom is not an informal boss; his staff calls him Governor, not Gavin.)

On X, the governor’s account pumps out all-caps posts in a pitch-perfect imitation of the president’s style. When Fox News attacked Newsom, he released a statement that read: “FOX HATES THAT I AM AMERICA’S MOST FAVORITE GOVERNOR (‘RATINGS KING’) SAVING AMERICA – WHILE TRUMP CAN’T EVEN CONQUER THE ‘BIG’ STAIRS ON AIR FORCE ONE ANY MORE!!!” Last month, he released a fake physical from the “California Department of Peak Excellence,” claiming that he remains “the healthiest person alive and ever to live.”

These Trump parodies are aimed at journalists and activists and have already garnered headlines such as “How Gavin Newsom Trolled His Way to the Top of Social Media.” On TikTok, he pursues a more populist strategy, pumping out caustic videos steeped in meme culture. He has 2.9 million followers there, the same as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. In October, he joined a Fortnite game with the popular streamer ConnorEatsPants, as an overture to young men. (“Fifty-one percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have never asked a girl on a date,” he told me at one point, shaking his head. “Fifty-one percent. That’s just scary.”) For their dads, meanwhile, there’s the podcast with Marshawn Lynch.

Newsom has also taken his happy-if-bitchy-warrior act into hostile territory by appearing on MAGA podcasts. In July, he spent four hours talking with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and Blackwater contractor who shares Joe Rogan’s suspicion of the “deep state” and America’s “forever” wars. Newsom accepted the gift of a pistol, a Sig Sauer P365-Xmacro, saying, “I’m not anti-gun at all.” (The NRA was unimpressed, noting that Newsom wants a Twenty-Eighth Amendment to raise the age of gun ownership, institute waiting periods, and ban assault weapons.) He burnished his common-man credentials by owning up to a 960 score on the SAT—below average—and claiming not to be able to pronounce “bona fides.” He recounted a conversation where he used the word Latinx. “And then my chief of staff, who happens to be Hispanic, goes, ‘Would you shut up?’”

Newsom can handle these breezy, expletive-filled conversations because he has none of Harris’s paralyzing caution. “He can be very cautious and calculating, as any politician with a 30-year track record would probably have to be,” Alex Clemens, the political strategist, told me. “But he also, on multiple occasions, including in this moment now, has shown a remarkable boldness in being able to say: I’m going off script.” (Trump’s military operation in Venezuela was not one of those times, however. Instead of posting a spicy tweet, Newsom released an official statement about the need for “democracy, human rights, and stability” that could have come from any Democrat.)

In the Ryan interview, Newsom said he was a fan of The Joe Rogan Experience—but “he won’t have me on the show, by the way.” Rogan left California during COVID, and is still energized by annoyance at its masking and school-closure rules. The governor has turned Rogan’s snub into another running feud, in posts baiting the “snack-sized podcaster.” Newsom is apparently betting that the next presidential election will be fought based on good vibes and naked aggression. “You would have never heard Gavin do these things—like troll Trump in the way he’s doing now,” Stanlee Gatti told me. But Newsom is “smart enough to know that’s the only way you can fight an idiot like Trump.”

The instant I mention this combative social-media strategy, Newsom knows where I’m going. “We didn’t like the Marie Antoinette?” he says, joshing me. He is referring to the haunting AI-generated image that he’d circulated of Trump decked out in pearls and a towering gray wig. Appealing to his press aide Bob Salladay, sitting quietly in the corner of the room, he adds: “Did we offend her?” The Trump image, Newsom suggests, has upset my “European mindset.”

I make a face to indicate that my problem is not, in fact, that I am a French monarchist. What bothered me, I say, was a post on X addressed to the right-wing influencer Chaya Raichik, better known as Libs of TikTok. Repeating a comment that Trump had recently made to a female reporter, the post from Newsom’s official account read: “Quiet, piggy.” Is it right to bring back misogyny to public life? “That’s good feedback, Bob,” concedes Newsom, looking precisely zero percent abashed. The piggy post was, he argues, just a “play” on Trump’s own words. Newsom insists that his posts are simply holding up a “reflective mirror” to the president, trying to show America what has become normalized.

Plus, Newsom adds with a mischievous look, it’s funny to watch “the propaganda networks, the Pravda networks, Fox and others, that seemed so taken aback by it, so deeply offended by such childish behavior on my part. Wash his poor mouth with soap!” Even those who think his posts are wrong can’t deny that they demonstrate aggression and ambition. If nothing else, this iteration of Newsom is not a snowflake.

In person, Newsom showed more depth than I expected from his hey-man-wassup podcast appearances and his sassy online clapbacks. He is self-aware, and he can be self-deprecating, too. “I know you’re saying, your lying eyes,” he told me, when I looked skeptical about his claim to have reduced homelessness in the state. He has even found a way to deal with his single biggest screwup—his COVID-era decision to attend a birthday party at the French Laundry, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Yountville where the prix fixe menu starts at $425 a person. (The gathering was for his friend, the lobbyist Jason Kinney, who’d led the campaign to legalize marijuana.)

That meal might be the single worst entertainment choice in American political history since Lincoln decided to see Our American Cousin. The French Laundry incident drove support for a recall election in 2021, although Newsom won by a margin of almost two to one.

The governor has come up with an unusual approach to the scandal: unconditional apology. When Ryan told Newsom that, before their conversation, he despised many of his actions, his guest concurred. “I’d despise me for the shit I read too—I despise me for the French Laundry,” he said, pointing emphatically at Ryan. “I beat the shit out of myself for that. And everyone who criticized me is goddamn right.” The abject contrition left Ryan with nowhere to go.

The most pleasant surprise of meeting Newsom was discovering that he has thought deeply about the history and future of the Democratic Party. He has referred to himself as a “Sargent Shriver Democrat,” after the architect of the War on Poverty and the founding director of the Peace Corps. (Shriver also benefited from connections with an extremely powerful family.) The hallway outside Newsom’s office is lined with photographs taken from the train that brought Robert F. Kennedy’s body from his funeral in New York City to his grave in Arlington National Cemetery. These offer an extraordinary portrait of the United States at a particularly unsettled moment: a cool ’60s couple on a motorbike; a row of kids in height order, lined up in their underwear to pay tribute; men with their hats doffed, held against their chest.

Ryan Young for The Atlantic

Newsom in Sacramento in December

The photographs are a reminder of the decency of ordinary Americans, and a memento mori, a warning of the risks to which Newsom is exposing himself. He reveres Kennedy and frequently refers to his speeches; he used to be friendly with his son RFK Jr. until the latter went full MAGA. Even now, there’s a touch of wistfulness in how he talks about the younger Kennedy. When I bring up Newsom’s morning routine—lemon water, sit-ups, cold plunge, a regimen that reminds me of Christian Bale in American Psycho—I concede that it is healthier than my recent diet of hotel-breakfast bacon shot through with chemical preservatives. “See, this is where RFK and I agree—on ultra-processed foods,” he says.

On the day we met, Newsom had so far supplemented his lemon water with a smoothie and chicken salad. Looking at the lean figure in front of me, in a finely tailored tweed jacket, sneakers, and incongruous Millennial ankle socks, I resist the urge to ask if he tracks his macros. The outfit is Newsom’s usual style, taking him from podcast to potluck: unstuffy without being quite casual either. “I did send him a text the other day and said: Do I need to buy you a new shirt?” Gatti said. “Because it seems like he wears that blue—it looks like blue denim or something—I feel like he wears it all the time.” Newsom was indeed wearing it for our interview, having come straight from recording his end-of-year podcast. Maybe he has 90 identical ones.

[Tom Nichols: MAGA world is so close to getting it]

Several of my interviewees had likened Newsom to Bill Clinton. Newsom had retrieved his annotated copy of Clinton’s My Life from his office shelf after I told him that the title of his own memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, was oddly reminiscent of the last line of Clinton’s prologue: “Even when I wasn’t sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.” Newsom’s title actually comes from a 2009 Economist article that described his time as mayor as “a stimulus package for the conservative movement,” but he was delighted at the unintentional echo: “I have a soft spot and a bit of a bias towards President Clinton, as you may or may not know.”

The two men share some of the same strengths—personal charm, ease with all kinds of people—and the same weaknesses for rich friends, the high life, and the ladies. A dog, maybe, but an alpha dog, masculine without being macho. Newsom’s personal history has more dents in the bumper than, say, blameless Pete Buttigieg’s does, but I’m not sure that voters care anymore—better a record of wild mistakes than one of perfect, cautious tedium.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Newsom for his thoughts on a set of proposals for the next president outlined by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein: restricting the pardon power, plus a strong presumption against personal lawsuits brought by the president, or prosecuting members of the previous administration.

“I’m suing Fox,” Newsom replied. “A $787 million defamation lawsuit, so you’re talking to the wrong person.” (The legal action, over a host who accused Newsom of lying, is another piece of trolling: The governor is seeking the same amount Fox News paid to Dominion Voting Systems for airing false claims that its machines were rigged in 2020.) As for the pardons, he had a batch on his desk right now, so “it’s not an academic exercise for me.” He thought that formally restricting the pardon power was less important than electing a president who wouldn’t abuse it. “It’s about temperance. It’s about wisdom, the Stoic values. It’s about justice. You can go through all of them, all four. Character has to be represented in the person we put in that office.” But Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in the name of national unity, I said. Would blue America accept a leader who drew a line under Trumpism, rather than promising to litigate its alleged offenses?

“There’s a sort of romantic version if you’re writing the script and you’ve got a nice soundtrack in the background,” Newsom said. “At the inaugural, the next president announces that he’s turning the page—” He caught himself. “Or she is turning the page on all of this. Throngs of boos, maybe, in the audience; I don’t know. ’Cause there’s a sense of vengeance and two can play this game, fight fire with fire.” At the same time, he thought that the country was exhausted. “There is an Isaiah part of all of this: We need whoever the next president is to be a ‘repairer of the breach.’ That should be a big part of the messaging for the next president. I hope they can maybe read the serenity prayer.”

These words might sound strange coming from a man who recently posted an AI-generated video of Trump in handcuffs. But I suspect that Gavin Newsom has a two-part strategy for reaching the presidency: wrestle with MAGA until the midterms, and then pivot to the high (and center) ground with kumbaya and jobs of the future for 2028. He admires Ronald Reagan’s final address as president, he said, a paean to immigration and the flaming torch of Lady Liberty. He must be longing to give a speech like that in a presidential campaign.

Until then, though, he is fighting a dirty war, one that does not observe the political equivalent of the Geneva Convention. Rather than demand respect from Republicans who won’t give it, he is getting right down in the muck with them, blasting Musk’s parenting and posting photographs of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein. Newsom’s communications director even called the singer Nicki Minaj a “stupid hoe” for criticizing the governor. This, to Newsom, is being strong; the right are the fainthearted schoolmarms now. His merchandise store has a page touting MAGA-branded kneepads, for “all your groveling to Trump needs—now in Republican red.”

Remember: Be vulgar, be trivial, be offensive. Just don’t be weak.

Britain Should Have Read the Tweets First

2025-12-30T12:33:56-05:00

How much effort should a country expend to rescue someone who appears to hate its values? That is the question posed by the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah.

Abd el-Fattah is an Egyptian pro-democracy campaigner who has been in and out of prison since 2006 for opposing the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and for drawing attention to torture and other abuses. In 2021, he was granted British citizenship through a somewhat tenuous connection—his mother, Laila, had been born in London while her mother was studying in the United Kingdom—which gave the British government greater standing to lobby Cairo on his behalf. It pressed his case under three Conservative prime ministers (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak) and, since June 2024, under Labour’s Keir Starmer. Six months ago, a government minister said that the case had been “a top priority every week that I have been in office.”

Last week, those efforts finally paid off. Egypt lifted a travel ban on Abd el-Fattah, who had been released from jail in September, and Starmer declared that he was “delighted” that Abd el-Fattah was “back in the UK and has been reunited with his loved ones.”

That delight was short-lived. Within hours, Abd el-Fattah’s tweets from the time of the Arab Spring, when he was around 30, resurfaced on X. In these, he reportedly wished violence on “all Zionists, including civilians”—read: Jews. He also called for the murder of police officers, and sarcastically described his dislike of white people. In a 2010 discussion of the death of one of the terrorists who had tortured and killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, he declared, “My heroes have always killed colonialists.”

The populist insurgent Nigel Farage could not have scripted a better attack ad against Britain’s two established parties. At best, both Labour and the Conservatives have spent political capital on an activist who has repeatedly expressed thoughtless and hateful views in public. At worst, the government has invited in a provocateur who will continue to spread poison and incite violence. “It is unclear to me why it has been a priority for successive governments to bring this guy over here,” the rank-and-file Labour politician Tom Rutland wrote on X, adding, “His tweets are impressive in how they manage to be vile in such a variety of ways.”

[Read: How not to hand populists a weapon]

In a statement of apology, Abd el-Fattah suggested that his statements were in keeping with the prevailing ethos of early-2010s Twitter—which was full of performative, deliberately offensive left-wing posturing. His posts, he said, were the “writings of a much younger person, deeply enmeshed in antagonistic online cultures, utilising flippant, shocking and sarcastic tones in the nascent, febrile world of social media.” In his offline activism, Abd el-Fattah maintained, he was known for “publicly rejecting anti-Jewish speech in Egypt, often at risk to myself, defence of LGBTQ rights, defence of Egyptian Christians, and campaigning against police torture and brutality.” However, Abd el-Fattah also questioned why the tweets had been “republished” now with their meanings “twisted.” On Facebook, he appears to have liked a comment suggesting that it was—you guessed it—a “campaign launched by the Zionists.”

The situation is deeply embarrassing for Starmer, who welcomed Abd el-Fattah’s arrival in Britain so warmly. He now claims not to have known about the “absolutely abhorrent” tweets and is promising to “review the information failures in this case.” Apparently, despite years of campaigning for this guy, the combined might of the British civil service never thought to search his Twitter handle. If the authorities had conducted even a cursory background check, they would have found opinions such as this (now-deleted) assertion from 2012: “I’m a racist, I don’t like white people so piss off.”

Nor did civil servants enter Abd el-Fattah’s name into a search engine, which would have revealed the 2014 reports on his controversial nomination for a free-speech prize. One of these, headlined “A Dissident for Hate,” observed that “Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story.”

The British right is now arguing that Abd el-Fattah and his celebrity supporters—including Naomi Klein, Olivia Colman, and Mark Ruffalo—have made the British government look foolish. Why is Starmer loudly welcoming “back” a man who has never before spent a significant amount of time in Britain, who abhors its geopolitical alliances, and who apparently dislikes the majority of its population? Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform Party, has unsurprisingly called for Abd el-Fattah to be stripped of his British citizenship. So has Kemi Badenoch, the current leader of the Conservatives—the party in charge when Abd el-Fattah was awarded that citizenship in the first place.

[Idrees Kahloon: Political parties have disconnected from the public]

Former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has lately joined the podcast circuit, wrote on X that Abd el-Fattah’s case shows that “the human-rights/NGO industrial complex has completely captured the British state.” This is the same Liz Truss who, as foreign secretary in 2022, assured Parliament that she was “working very hard to secure his release.” Was she then unaware of his tweets? Or was she then posturing as a policy maker, whereas now she is trying to make a living as a YouTuber? (Yes, she is Dan Bongino in reverse.) The Conservatives’ shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, has also piled on Abd el-Fattah’s story, condemning the celebrities who campaigned for his release as “useful idiots.” Jenrick covets Badenoch’s job—and his plan to win it relies on outflanking her on crime and immigration.

Liberals and conservatives have politicized this story. Starmer—and the previous incarnation of Truss—treated Abd el-Fattah as a kind of mascot, a living totem of Britain’s enlightened attitudes toward political dissent in comparison with those of Middle Eastern dictatorships. Today’s version of Truss, and the rest of the populist right, are now holding him up as Exhibit A in their argument that the West needs to be tougher on Muslim immigration to Europe.

As ever, the challenge is to look beyond this ideological point-scoring and consider the case on its own merits. I was deeply unimpressed that one of Abd el-Fattah’s first public statements after his longed-for deliverance was to repost a complaint that Starmer had not publicly condemned Sisi’s dictatorship while announcing his release. Welcome to the grubby reality of international diplomacy! But if I had missed many of my child’s birthdays in detention, I might also find it hard to be gracious.

Still, British Jews have every right to question their state’s extraordinary efforts to free someone who has called for violence against them and who has recanted only in the vaguest terms. The Jewish community is under threat here: The aftermath of October 7 and the war in Gaza have led to more visible anti-Semitism in Britain, in many cases from self-declared Islamists. On Yom Kippur, a militant Islamist called Jihad Al-Shamie (in retrospect, the first name was a clue) killed one person and injured others in a stabbing attack on a synagogue in Manchester. Earlier this month, two men were convicted of plotting what authorities described as an “ISIS-inspired” atrocity in the same city. “Here in Manchester, we have the biggest Jewish community,” one of the plotters told an undercover police officer whom he believed to be a co-conspirator. “God willing we will degrade and humiliate them (in the worst way possible), and hit them where it hurts.” Social media is one of the key drivers and reinforcers of anti-Semitic extremism; tweets like Abd el-Fattah’s are not just harmless letting-off of steam.

Still, if he repeats such sentiments now that he lives in Britain, Abd el-Fattah could be subject to prosecution for incitement to violence, or hate speech. The British state has pursued people for less: See the recent prosecution against the gender-critical campaigner Graham Linehan—the case was eventually dropped—or the conviction of a woman named Lucy Connolly for posting that hotels housing asylum-seekers should be set on fire.

Taking away Abd el-Fattah’s British passport is another matter. Once granted, citizenship is citizenship, no matter how stupid or evil or thoughtless its holder turns out to be. I don’t want to live in a country where naturalized or joint citizens are treated as second-class Britons, forever on probation. Now that he has a U.K. passport, Alaa Abd el-Fattah is entitled to the protection of the British state, just like Liz Truss—or like Kemi Badenoch, for that matter, whose British citizenship rests on the coincidence of her Nigerian mother having given birth to her in London.

Yet you can take an inclusive view of British citizenship and still believe that people should be vetted before receiving it. Starmer’s post gushing about Abd el-Fattah’s arrival was catastrophically ill-judged, both in his assessment of this particular case and as a representation of his wider governing philosophy. Starmer, a former human-rights lawyer, approaches every problem with an arid obsession with process rather than outcome—as if, when people follow every dot and comma of the rules, nothing bad can happen and no one should complain.

The Abd el-Fattah decision follows this pattern. Starmer celebrated the bureaucratic machinations of this case—granting automatic citizenship by descent and then securing the end of Abd el-Fattah’s travel ban—without enough attention to the politics. Yes, he was failed by his officials and their lack of briefing. But he also suffered a personal failure of imagination: Is it such a stretch to ask whether a Middle Eastern activist raised among members of the Egyptian communist intelligentsia has any worrisome opinions on Israel or Jews? Part of Starmer’s pitch to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Labour was that his predecessor had turned a blind eye to anti-Semitism. (He eventually kicked Corbyn out of the party altogether for this offense.) But in the past two years, he has struggled to identify and police the line between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and wider animus against Jews, often camouflaged as attacks on “Zionists.”

At the same time, populists on the right have begun to insist, in more and more explicit terms, that Muslims cannot be integrated into Europe because their values are too different—the grooming-gangs scandal is offered as evidence here—and because they feel more loyalty to the ummah than to the countries to which they have immigrated. That view ignores the many followers of moderate Islam, such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who have found no contradiction between their faith and Western liberalism. But the views of Abd el-Fattah punch that bruise.

Another case like this may not arrive again—not least because Britain’s current appetite for enforcing its values abroad is low. In June, Starmer cut the foreign-aid budget, and some of what remains is spent domestically anyway, on housing asylum seekers. Starmer’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood—herself a British Muslim—has announced a drastic tightening of eligibility requirements for citizenship.

Starmer—and his Conservative predecessors—were right to call for Abd el-Fattah’s release. What was absurd, however, was to frame his arrival on British soil as an unalloyed blessing. Starmer was thinking like the procedure-obsessed human-rights lawyer he used to be, not the political and moral leader that Britain needs right now.

Mary Todd Lincoln, Taken Out of Context

2025-12-29T06:00:00-05:00

By now, you will be used to the feminist practice of finding a historical woman and rescuing her from the clutches of evil biographers who have done her dirty. What if Marie Antoinette or Typhoid Mary were a more rounded figure—more constrained by the expectations of her time, perhaps, or a victim of her circumstances and upbringing?

That is not the approach that the playwright Cole Escola has taken in Oh, Mary!, which is currently playing on Broadway and has just opened in London. Escola’s question about Mary Todd Lincoln, wife and widow of America’s 16th president, is this: What if she were an absolute monster? The idea for the show came from an email Escola sent to themselves in 2009, which read: “Write a play (maybe musical?) about Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln in which it comes out being a good thing that Abe Lincoln dies.”

To fulfill that brief, the 39-year-old playwright has taken the Mary of the historical record—a laudanum user, prone to wild mood swings and shopping sprees, eventually confined to an asylum by her own son—and made her worse. This Mary drinks paint thinner and pushes her companion, Louisa, down the stairs. Above all, she desperately wants to be a cabaret star, and believes that Abraham has thwarted her dream. Fatally, he reacts to her constant complaints by hiring a handsome actor—whose identity becomes important later in the plot—to give her lessons for the “legitimate theater.”

[Read: What the U.S. could learn from an Irish theater]

Having already seen the show on Broadway, I was curious to know how such a quintessentially American story would land in Britain. (No one here could pick Mary Todd Lincoln out of a first-lady lineup, even though this is the second play about her to open in London in 2025.) How does a show whose satirical power comes from cutting against received wisdom deal with the audience having no idea what that received wisdom is? The answer is: Training wheels and a reliance on physical comedy help, up to a point.

In London, the play begins with a straightforward exposition dump: A preshow voiceover establishes Mary Todd Lincoln as the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth. Oh, Mary!, shorn of its political resonance, falls squarely into an established populist British stage tradition: pantomime, in which unwitting 7-year-olds are corralled into a theater at Christmastime to watch well-worn favorites such as Aladdin or Dick Whittington and His Cat, a folktale in which a young man (always played by a woman) leaves home to make his fortune in London. Pantomime leans heavily on popular songs, risqué jokes, and melodrama, just like Oh, Mary!

In addition to writing the play, Escola originated the lead role, playing Mary as a 19th-century Veruca Salt, all wobbling curls and petulantly folded arms. “Mary is just me,” Escola once told NPR. “It’s all based on me and my feelings, and all of my characters are some aspect of me that I’m ashamed of or curious about.” Since then, the Marys have tended to be either queer actors or gay icons, underlining the show’s immersion in gay culture. (Mary repeatedly addresses a portrait of George Washington as “Mother,” and this Abraham Lincoln is gay, too.) The London Mary is played by the nonbinary actor Mason Alexander Park, best known for portraying Ariel in Jamie Lloyd’s truly cursed production of The Tempest.

I saw the play on Broadway with the drag queen Jinkx Monsoon, who followed Escola and others, and was herself followed by Jane Krakowski. The role does not call for subtlety. “I have to imagine that somewhere along the line someone had to have told you, ‘You’re a little too big,’” Monsoon told Krakowski in September. “I’ve been told that a billion times.”

When I saw Monsoon’s (yes, very big) performance, I did think, snobbily: Oh, look, the Americans have discovered panto. I wasn’t alone. The London reviews have been positive, but the two harshest ones described the show as “sophomoric” and “farce at its broadest” (The Guardian) and “a bit … ’70s? A little bit Airplane!, a little bit Benny Hill, maybe even a touch of Mr Bean” (Time Out). In the British context, these reviewers implied, Oh, Mary!’s humor reads as dated rather than groundbreaking. That’s largely because of the pantomime tradition. I was brought up on this genre, which also usually features a dame (always played by a man: In a production of Aladdin, Ian McKellen once gave a fantastic Widow Twankey) and volleys of double entendres for parents. The title character in Dick Whittington has a cat mostly so all the other characters can remark on his “lovely pussy.”

This is the energy that Escola has brought to Oh, Mary! Todd Lincoln, under her prim crinoline, is wearing red-and-white-striped bloomers, which is very panto. And just like a panto, the staging is deliberately lo-fi: two static sets, a wheeled-on theater box, and a bit of front-of-curtain business. On Broadway, The New York Times described it as having “the cheesy naturalism of community theater.”

What Escola has built on this foundation, however, is truly unhinged. Do you remember the end of Inglourious Basterds, when Quentin Tarantino kills off the entire Nazi Party in an exploding movie theater? Yeah, about that unhinged. Mary might be awful, but Escola makes her pathetic too, with her terrible loneliness and her deluded belief that she could have been a star. “I don’t even want to be alive,” she tells her acting teacher at the start of their first lesson. More than anything else, she is bored—a default condition for humanity before smartphones and reliable Wi-Fi. History isn’t just battles and bowers; it’s privileged people in gilded rooms waiting for death or the invention of streaming services, whichever comes first. For aristocratic women, this boredom was particularly acute, because their enforced inactivity was a status symbol. The Mitford sisters, growing up in rural Oxfordshire in the 1920s, found their lives so tedious that they invented, as one of them put it, “a contest to see who could best stand being pinched really hard.” This sounds exactly like something Escola’s Mary would inflict on her companion, Louisa.

Earlier this year, Oh, Mary! was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an award that in 2016 went to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. As it happens, I rewatched Hamilton not long ago, and its earnest paeans to diversity (“Immigrants, we get the job done”) now feel like the last gasp of the Obama era.

When Hamilton first came to Britain, I wrote that its blend of rap, classical music, and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas showed that it “speaks all the cultural languages of America, and it echoes Obama’s ability to change cadences depending on his audience.” Added to that, by offering cheap tickets in a daily street lottery alongside the usual sky-high prices of Broadway, “Miranda created a fan base that mirrors the ‘Obama coalition’ of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities.” Hamilton might have been great entertainment, but it also took seriously the idea of educating America about its history, in a spirit now continued by the popular Substack historian Heather Cox Richardson.

[Read: Watching ]Hamilton is like opening a time capsule

Like Hamilton, Oh, Mary! uses color-conscious casting, reframing white historical figures by having nonwhite actors play them. And like Hamilton, it is an improbable box-office smash: It became the first production to gross more than $1 million a week at the Lyceum Theater in New York. But otherwise, the two plays could not be more different. Instead of Obama-era earnestness, Oh, Mary! is steeped in the signature moods of the Trump era: pure camp, twisted humor, and lol nothing matters nihilism. (Think: Donald Trump dancing to “YMCA,” or the casual cruelty of all those deportation videos.) Escola did “less than no research” into Mary Todd Lincoln, to avoid the temptation of writing in-jokes. “I wanted to have the same knowledge that the audience had,” Escola told Seth Meyers. “I didn’t want to do research and then be making jokes about, like, ‘Well, that’ll get a laugh ’cause that’s where she was born.’” This artistic decision worked out well for me, a person who had no idea where Mary Todd Lincoln was born until I looked it up for this article.

The audience also learns precisely nothing about Mary’s divided loyalties—she was born in Kentucky, and several of her half-brothers fought for the Confederacy. Her real-life grief over the death of her sons Eddie and Willie is completely absent; Mary assures her acting teacher that “I never go near the children.” Even the Civil War barely gets a look-in. When Abraham complains about fighting with the South, Mary growls, “The South of what?!” His announcement of the end of the war is included only to set up a contrast with Mary’s activities that afternoon—discovering that Louisa “wants to rub ice cream on her pussy!”

In its absolute refusal to take history seriously, Oh, Mary! is basically the anti-Hamilton. But then, we are living through the mirror image of the Obama era right now. Escola’s Mary is a monster, but also a ham, a narcissist, and a born entertainer—and the audience ends up glued to her every move. I mean, you could suggest a parallel with contemporary America there. Or you could just enjoy the wigs and the gags and the spotted bloomers.

Olivia Nuzzi’s Tell-Nothing Memoir

2025-12-02T06:00:00-05:00

One of the many delights of America is that its geography is also a vocabulary. If I say “Portland, Oregon,” or “the Hamptons,” or “Appalachia,” the reader knows instantly which stereotypes are being invoked: the middle-class Maoist, the summering WASP, the hick. This shorthand allows American authors to invest their prose with extra meaning, just by using it somewhere.

The rollout for Olivia Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto, has therefore leaned heavily into the elementary turbulence of California. Nuzzi immolated her career as a political writer at New York magazine by becoming romantically entangled with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after she wrote a profile of him in 2023. Kennedy—a former heroin addict turned vaccine skeptic whom Donald Trump later installed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services—was then running for president.

When Nuzzi fled west after the affair became public, the Palisades started burning, too. “The sun boils red into the water,” she writes in American Canto, adding: “Below us, fire, above us, fire.” To promote the book, she gave an interview to The New York Times, which was accompanied by moody black-and-white photos in which Nuzzi posed on the shore of the Pacific Ocean and took the writer to her favorite rock—located, the reporter explained, “at the edge of a vertiginous cliff, where water rolled and crashed.”

[From the January 2026 issue: Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so convinced he’s right?]

American Canto is Nuzzi’s attempt to elevate a grubby affair to the status of the mythic, to transmute the base metal of Page Six sexting stories into the gold of literary reflections on the political moment. “A very, very good outcome would be if the book was received with open minds in 20 or 30 years,” she told a different Times reporter a few days ago. What better setting, then, than the land that the journalist Joan Didion chronicled so scrupulously? In the American imagination, Florida is where you go when you’ve done something wrong. California is where you go when you’ve done something wrong and want to be pretentious about it.

I understand this impulse. As I write this, I’m visiting the Golden State. Yesterday, the air in the mountains smelled of pine, whereas November in London smells like pigeons and rain. The ocean here really is as blue and fathomless as Kennedy’s eyes, and the bougainvillea as red as his face that time he did pull-ups on camera with Pete Hegseth. This morning, I went whale watching, and the guide recommended that we “keep our eyes on the horizon and look for blow.” (This is also a good way to find RFK Jr.)

But all the surf and smoke and Didionesque stylings in the world cannot disguise the central problem with American Canto: It is not honest. In the book, Nuzzi rails against those who urge her to tell all. “I do not wish to be understood,” she writes, “which no one seems to understand.” This is a very good reason not to write and publish a memoir.

What happened to Nuzzi has drawn more prurient interest than any American political sex scandal since Monica Lewinsky. In that case, the woman who had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton as a 22-year-old intern, and was covertly recorded and betrayed by one of her confidantes, has since reclaimed her own voice, dis owned her shame, and become a Vanity Fair contributor.

Nuzzi is using parts of this playbook—right down to the involvement of Vanity Fair, which hired her as its West Coast editor—but the power dynamics involved in her story are a little different. She is not an ingénue but a seasoned reporter who has courted publicity for half her lifetime. As a teenager, she released a pop single under the title “Jailbait”—sample lyric “16, will get you 20.” She then reportedly dated the former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who, according to the journalist Ryan Lizza, paid for her college and her studio apartment. (“I made an f-ton then,” Olbermann wrote in response. Nuzzi told the Times she had nothing to say about “this person.”) She worked for Anthony Weiner’s campaign for New York City mayor, sold a story to the New York Daily News on how shambolic it was, and became a correspondent for The Daily Beast at just 22. Two years later, she joined New York magazine as a Washington correspondent—a job that involved crisscrossing the country, getting close to Donald Trump and his advisers, and once walking into his campaign manager’s home without permission. By 2022, she was engaged to Lizza, who was nearly two decades her senior and had been fired from The New Yorker during the #MeToo era for unspecified offenses.

[Read: President Piggy]

Nuzzi rose through journalism quickly, which often attracts enemies. In recent years, she has become one of those writers whom readers expect to encounter as a persona within the story. “The more visible I was at any given time, the more that became an intrusion,” she writes in American Canto, “because you cannot be a fly on the wall when people would like a picture with the fly, and when the sweet older woman has a grandson in medical school who Just has the biggest crush on the fly and Actually, if the fly does not mind, she is Going to call Michael right now, this will just make his day.”

That persona was on display in her 2023 interview with Kennedy, which described traveling in his filthy car and fending off his uncontrolled dogs. Afterward, Nuzzi appears to have become obsessed with him, something to which she never quite admits in American Canto, instead framing the relationship as a reciprocated love affair with a figure referred to as “the Politician.” She has claimed that the affair was digital-only; Kennedy denies it happened at all. I see no reason to believe either of them. Kennedy is a conspiracist and a narcissist, and Nuzzi is, by her own admission, an unreliable narrator. In the book, she describes initially lying to her boss when confronted, and to a reporter who called for comment.

I also don’t care much about the precise details of the relationship. Journalists obviously shouldn’t sleep with their sources, although luckily most of us are so hideous, the subject simply doesn’t arise. (Once, an actor made a half-hearted pass at me at the end of an interview, but apart from anything else, it was 3 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, and I’m not an animal.)

The more serious allegation, made in Lizza’s Substack, is that Nuzzi wrote campaign memos for Kennedy and helped him to “catch and kill” unflattering stories. (Nuzzi didn’t reply to my interview request.) If so, then she colluded in raising Kennedy—a crank intent on acting as the enabler in chief of preventable childhood diseases—to the position of health secretary, which is far more reprehensible than an unwise attack of forbidden ardor. One of the news stories buried in this book is that Kennedy has already started to think about running for president as a Republican in 2028. God help us all.

Only by real force of will can a reader separate American Canto, the actual text Nuzzi has written, from the penumbra of gossip and schadenfreude surrounding her—or from the glamorous image she has alternately fought against and cultivated. Her photo takes up the entire back cover of my copy of American Canto, and the excerpt in Vanity Fair included yet more glamorous portraits of her by the Pacific Ocean. The magazine’s print issue features an “abstract nude portrait” of her by the artist Isabelle Brourman, who once accompanied Nuzzi to Mar-a-Lago. In the book, Nuzzi writes that bringing along Brourman while she interviewed Trump appealed to his vanity.

The excerpt’s publication ratcheted up the Nuzzi hate, because it contained several of the book’s worst sentences. “We had been born under the same kind of moon, the January waxing gibbous in Capricorn, 97 percent illumination, 39 years apart,” she says of Kennedy, adding a whiff of Deepak Chopra. Explaining the politician’s need for bodyguards, Nuzzi veers toward bathos: “I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain.”

That same day, Lizza published the first installment of his side of the story. In a Substack post, he alleged that Nuzzi had previously cheated on him with another failed presidential candidate, Mark Sanford. This prompted everyone over 30 in journalism to reminisce fondly about what a great euphemism “hiking the Appalachian trail” was—and everyone under 30 to say, “Who?” (Through a lawyer, Nuzzi told the Times that the book covered the only instance in her career of an inappropriate relationship with a source.)

Nuzzi’s ex-boyfriend held back the Sanford reveal until the last line of his post. This schlocky but effective literary device instantly put me on Team Lizza, as did the fact that his organizing metaphor for the scandal, the invasive bamboo in their garden—“like bamboo, the truth has a way of forcing itself out into the open”—was less awkward than hers, a fire that killed more than a dozen people.

But I have since defected to pure neutrality. Lizza has disputed that he also cheated on Nuzzi, as she claims in the book, reportedly writing to her publisher: “I have recordings of the conversations between me and Olivia during the relevant period in 2024… and this purported scene doesn’t exist on any recording.” So: Your assertion that your girlfriend was the toxic party in your relationship is backed up by the fact that you recorded every argument with her? Of course. This was the most self-incriminating defense since Olbermann got back in touch with the Times to clarify that he began sleeping with Nuzzi when she was 19, rather than 18. As if anyone who frowned on the latter would be mollified by the former.

Then again, the only real battle in public life today is grabbing the microphone and hanging on to it as long as possible. Most of those involved in Nuzzi’s story have undertaken that most modern of pastimes: posting through it. She wrote a book; Lizza wrote multiple blog posts, putting the dirtiest laundry behind a paywall; Olbermann wrote a tweet likening himself to Keanu Reeves dodging a bullet in The Matrix. This feels like power, but it isn’t. You can tell because the only person in this story with real power is RFK Jr., and he is—I cannot believe I am typing this sentence—maintaining a dignified silence. After a decade of Trumpism, no one is bothering to even half-heartedly suggest that he should resign his high government post. He doesn’t need to “reclaim the narrative” because he’s too busy helping kids catch measles.

American Canto is a better book than the rollout suggested. Yes, the narrative is a mishmash. Here is Britney Spears, dancing saucer-eyed for an online audience. Here are allegedly verbatim conversations with sources, and extended interviews with Trump. Here are undigested lumps of fact and awkward explanations that would not survive to a second draft: “The place reminded me of the Playboy Mansion as I had seen it depicted on a reality television show about Hugh Hefner and his three central girlfriends.” (Oh, that Playboy mansion.) And here are tortured circlings around the Kennedy business, a series of almost-confessions that play footsie with the reader.

These parts of the narrative are largely terrible. Someone else’s sexual obsession is, by default, illegible and perhaps even horrifying to outsiders. (You watched him floss?) Sentences such as “As the coyote, my heart makes itself heard. As the coyote, it cries” are not real expressions of human emotion, nor are they representative of Nuzzi’s clear, elegant prose style elsewhere. The language seems tortured by Nuzzi’s efforts to rewrite her life-upending crush into a mutual whirlwind of passion, to turn herself from Ophelia into Juliet.

The sheer desperation of her love for Kennedy is interesting, because we don’t associate this level of libidinous self-destruction with women. Nuzzi herself doesn’t look it in the face—as the novelists Elizabeth Gilbert and Miranda July have recently done—but the intensity of her emotion creeps out, as in a reference she makes to Adam selling out Eve. Nuzzi apparently delighted in telling Kennedy that she, too, was Catholic, which reads less as a declaration of faith and more like pretending to your high-school boyfriend that you also dig the Ramones.

At its best, American Canto is about a crack-up. Being a political reporter today involves spending so much time around liars—Kennedy, Trump, various MAGA chuds—that any of us might end up severed from reality. When Nuzzi asks Kennedy about the bizarre story of him picking up a dead bear cub from the side of a road in upstate New York and leaving it in Central Park, he goes quiet. “He was seldom silent, and by then I knew that when he was silent, it was because he had not yet told himself the story he would tell others.” When the scandal of their relationship breaks, she recounts, he expects her to take the fall.

According to Nuzzi, covering the White House reminded her of growing up with her alcoholic, mentally ill mother. “I developed this ability to exist on dual planes, and an ability to mitigate conflict,” she writes, in a way “that really served me in covering Trump’s rise to power, and all the people around him angling for power and proximity to power.”

Near the end of the book, Nuzzi observes that the reality-television president has “succeeded in making all political and media actors into actors.” Even those who oppose him still revolve around him, which is a form of “collusion,” Nuzzi believes. Kennedy tells her that Trump is “a novel: hundreds of lies that amount to one big truth,” a line that makes her “almost jealous.”

[Read: RFK Jr.’s cheer squad is getting restless]

These parts of the book gesture at “Insider Baseball,” Didion’s classic exposé of the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s campaign. That essay offers a caustic depiction of American politics and the soul-destroying work of reporting on it—and also reveals Didion’s steel core: She is brutal about Dukakis, with his lamely staged ball-tossing and Greek dancing, and completely dismembers the rest of the campaign press pack for its participation in this fraud. She writes like someone with no desire to be invited back in four years to do it all again.

Nuzzi, by contrast, appears to be stuck in an abusive relationship with Washington, D.C., even though she knows it could kill her. (Maybe that is why she started the relationship with Kennedy, to have the choice taken away from her?) She appears to love the sucking up and the selling out, the secrecy and the danger. To maintain an aura of insiderishness, she lightly and pointlessly disguises the identities of other political figures—the “MAGA General,” for example, is Steve Bannon—even though there has never been a less covert group of leakers in the world. (Deep Throat did not have a podcast.) To borrow her own metaphor, American Canto does not read like its author is burning her path back to Washington.

There is no real, believable regret in American Canto, not even when Nuzzi acknowledges that Kennedy used her badly and discarded her. Memoirs of temporary madness are usually written from the safe shore of sanity. But based on what’s in the book, I suspect that if RFK Jr. turned up at Nuzzi’s door tomorrow with a single rose and a hopeful smile, she would fall for it, and him, all over again.

American Canto was written too early, and too quickly. It is a first draft, hastily typed into a smartphone; a bargaining chip to gain favorable news coverage; a down payment on a post-scandal career. A tell-all memoir? Ha. This is a tell-nothing memoir. Instead, it is a portrait of losing your soul—of discovering, as Nuzzi quotes from Nietzsche, that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Prince Andrew Deserves at Least This Penalty

2025-10-25T06:00:00-04:00

When is a duke not a duke? When he’s Prince Andrew. Recently, the king’s brother has agreed not to use any of the titles and honors bestowed on him—except for “prince,” to which he is entitled by birth—because of the continuing fallout from his relationship with the pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. No longer will he call himself the Duke of York, or be a knight of the garter (KG), a personal honor given by the monarch. He had already agreed not to be addressed as “his royal highness” or “HRH.”

This is not enough. Andrew, now 65, has spent his entire life trading on his aristocratic titles, and there is one way to stop that from happening again: Britain’s Parliament should formally remove them. There is precedent for this. In 1917, the Titles Deprivation Act was passed to deal with troublesome royal cousins who sided with Germany in the First World War. Much like Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Andrew too should lose the right to put Prince on his stationery.

In 2019, Andrew told the BBC’s Emily Maitlis that he had severed his friendship with Epstein nine years earlier, after the latter’s conviction for sex offenses, during a four-day stay at Epstein’s New York townhouse. We now know this was not true.

[Read: The man who did not sweat]

Earlier this month, a leaked email revealed that Andrew had contacted Epstein in 2011, one day after the publication of a photograph of him with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused both Epstein and Andrew of having sex with her while she was a teenager. “It would seem we are in this together and will have to rise above it,” the email read. “Otherwise keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”

Andrew signed off the email: “A, HRH The Duke of York, KG.”

Ick. Who signs off a cheery solidarity email to a convicted sex offender by listing his aristocratic titles? Only someone who values those titles extremely highly. Hence, taking them away is an appropriate punishment. The Epstein story is all about people who are sufficiently rich or entitled escaping the full consequences of their actions, something that is still happening here. (Andrew paid Giuffre a multimillion-dollar settlement in 2022, without admitting wrongdoing.)

Prince Andrew has been nothing but a liability to Britain for decades; let’s see if plain old Andrew Windsor can behave any better.

Although the Epstein story has abated in the States—since Donald Trump told the MAGA faithful to drop it—its repercussions continue in Britain. The British media are currently full of suggestions that Prince William will ban Andrew from attending his coronation when he becomes king, and that Andrew should be evicted from living in an effectively rent-free mansion in Windsor.

Presumably the heir to the throne understands that his uncle’s behavior is an existential threat to the monarchy itself: A recent book, Entitled, lays out in excruciating detail how Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, freeloaded for years on money from honest British taxpayers and dubious wealthy friends. They abused their positions, refused to live within their means, and lacked the gumption to make large enough sums of money legitimately. In the 2000s, Andrew was repeatedly accused of misusing his position as a British trade envoy for his personal advantage. Ferguson accrued debts that she enlisted Epstein to pay off. After the disastrous BBC interview with Maitlis, Andrew withdrew from public life and dropped his HRH title, then became friendly with a Chinese businessman in the hope of reviving his fortune overseas. You can imagine where this is going: Yes, that Chinese businessman has since been accused of being a spy.

Another leaked email recently revealed that Ferguson, too, had stayed in contact with Epstein after publicly disowning him. The month after she described taking money from him as a “gigantic error of judgment,” she apologized to Epstein, saying she had distanced herself from him only to save her reputation. “I was instructed to act with the utmost speed,” she told him, “if I would have any chance of holding on to my career as a children’s book author and a children’s philanthropist.” Ferguson also wanted to reassure Epstein that she had never called him the “P word”—a pedophile. Neither half of this grotesque couple wanted to end their relationship with a man who had so generously enabled their lifestyles.

The source of these leaked emails is surprising. Unusually, two papers had the scoop the same day. Even more unusually, the stories in the Mail on Sunday and The Sun had the same lead author, Daphne Barak. She is one of the few people to interview Epstein’s surviving conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, from prison in the United States. Maxwell is currently seeking a pardon from Donald Trump, and in the summer, she had two meetings with Trump’s deputy attorney general. After that, she was moved from a prison in Florida to a minimum-security facility in Texas.

For Trump, the timing of the latest leaks was very helpful. Tuesday marked the publication of Nobody’s Girl, Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, which might have turned the spotlight back onto the president’s long friendship with Epstein. (The book says that Giuffre was first recruited as a “masseuse” by Maxwell when she was a teenager working in the spa at Mar-a-Lago.) Instead, the media’s focus has been entirely on Prince Andrew.

[Read: The Epstein scandal finally takes down a politician]

Having read Julie K. Brown’s excellent account of the Epstein case, I approached Nobody’s Girl with trepidation. Was I ready to lose my faith in humanity even further? And sure enough, the book offers an unremittingly bleak narrative. At one point, Giuffre apologizes to readers, writing that she would understand if they needed to take a break. The only light spots in the tale are the vignettes of life with her husband, Robbie, and their three children in Australia. But earlier this year, Giuffre accused Robbie of domestic abuse, and soon after, she died by suicide at the age of 41. Her co-writer, the journalist Amy Wallace, adds a foreword to explain these events, but the text itself is unchanged—leaving intact Giuffre’s assurances that Robbie (“part guru, part goofball”) saved her life. (“Robbie’s attorney declined to comment on Virginia’s allegations, citing ongoing court proceedings,” Wallace notes.)

Wallace has also retained other discordant notes in the narrative, such as Giuffre’s acknowledgment of her own role in recruiting and grooming even younger girls to “massage” Epstein. Giuffre takes an interest in Epstein’s own self-justifying attitude toward his crimes. He tells her that he must climax three times a day as a matter of physiological necessity, and also that he takes care to have sex only with postpubescent girls. (Hence, presumably, the apology from Ferguson for calling him a pedophile.) This propensity for mental acrobatics, alongside his immense arrogance, was how Epstein rationalized his crimes to himself. He shared those two qualities with Andrew.

My starting point when assessing allegations of huge conspiracies is that secrets become exponentially harder to keep for every extra person who knows about them. Many of the accusations in Giuffre’s book would be difficult to believe if we didn’t have photographs and other evidence (such as partial flight logs for Epstein’s plane, contemporaneous corroboration, and the testimony of other victims) to support them. But no, a single depraved millionaire really did spend years loaning out trafficked teenagers to his rich and famous friends. What is even more depressing is that Giuffre’s memoir follows the “grooming gangs” story in Britain and the Pelicot trial in France, both of which involved dozens of men colluding in organized mass rapes. Yes, people can be this evil.

At the absolute minimum, Prince Andrew and others in Epstein’s orbit showed a pathological incuriosity about the young girls who surrounded him—and that is stretching good faith to its very limit. Frankly, he is lucky never to have faced a criminal trial to adjudicate Giuffre’s claims.

And that brings me back to the question of retribution. Because Jeffrey Epstein wouldn’t have been friends with plain Andy Windsor, the appropriate penalty for the disgraced royal is obvious to me. De-Prince him, take away his taxpayer-funded 30-room mansion, and tell him to get by on the State Pension for retirees. It’s less punishment than he deserves, but it will have to do.

I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia

2025-10-16T03:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: How did I get here—sitting in Saudi Arabia, listening to Louis C.K. do jokes about Barely Legal magazine?

Honestly, I thought it would be funny. The instant I heard about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, I pleaded with the editor of this magazine to send me. Despite a series of legal reforms over the past decade, Saudi Arabia remains one of the most conservative Muslim societies in the world, while Louis C.K. is famous for his foul mouth and his record of masturbating in front of a succession of unimpressed women. A match made in heaven!

My boss suggested that I take a male chaperone, which would allow me to move more freely in a place that remains deeply segregated by sex. Sadly, my husband declined to use his precious vacation allowance on the trip, and my 80-year-old father would rather stay home in England and watch cricket. And so my long-suffering editor, Dante, stepped up instead. Our presence would be a test of how much Saudi Arabia has really changed: I’m on my second husband; Dante is on his first. Both of us have freely and sometimes enthusiastically committed what are technically capital offenses under Saudi law.

[Listen: Saudi Arabia gets the last laugh]

The editor in chief, clearly beginning to enjoy himself, urged us to stay at the Ritz-Carlton. That’s the very luxurious but also Shining-like hotel where Saudi Arabia’s crown prince imprisoned his rivals in 2017—room service was included, plus a bit of light torture—completing his ascent to absolute power. The trip would be like something out of Hunter S. Thompson, our boss said, with one difference: no drugs. Our being beheaded by sword, the usual method of execution in Saudi Arabia, would be bad publicity for The Atlantic, and leave the magazine down an editor at a time when we are already shorthanded. We had, he implied, plenty of writers to spare.

Fayez Nureldine / AFP / Getty

The Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Louis C.K. was one of dozens of prominent comedians who had agreed to play the festival. Most are Americans, and many, like C.K., have had previous encounters with left-wing cancel culture. Kevin Hart, who quit presenting the Oscars over past homophobic jokes. Aziz Ansari, the subject of one of the more unfair #MeToo incidents. Dave Chappelle, whose jokes about trans people prompted protests at Netflix. Plus a whole bunch of independent podcasters whose material would never make it onto Saturday Night Live. Louis C.K.’s co-headliner would be Jimmy Carr, who got into medium trouble in Britain for a joke about killing Gypsies and rather larger trouble for engaging in an offshore tax-avoidance scheme.

What could stand-up comedy look like in a theocracy? Would enough crude jokes about incest, pedophilia, and anal sex really usher in Western liberal democracy to Saudi Arabia? Ahead of the Riyadh event, I had already enjoyed weeks of watching comedians scramble to explain why they had agreed to perform for a brutal authoritarian regime. The podcaster Tim Dillon said on his show that he’d accepted $375,000 to “look the other way,” and, in any case, “there are so many beautiful things that have happened as a result of forced labor.” (He flashed up a picture of the pyramids, which are located in a completely different Arab country, to underline the point.) Saudi Arabia—showing an unexpected grasp of comic timing—promptly canned him from the festival. Dillon said that his manager had told him, “They heard what you said about them having slaves. They didn’t like that.”

Jim Jefferies—an Australian comic best described as a Temu Ricky Gervais—stepped on the same rake. Referring to the killing and dismemberment of the regime critic Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Jefferies told the podcaster Theo Von, “One reporter was killed by the government. Unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I’m gonna die on.” People could criticize golfers or soccer players for taking blood riyals, but not comedians. “Basically, we are freedom-of-speech machines being sent over there,” he said.

Sorry, I’m getting an update regarding freedom-of-speech machines: They will not be sent over there. Jefferies disappeared from the lineup, too.

The festival is an outgrowth of Vision 2030, the grand Saudi project to prepare for the kingdom’s post-oil future. The old Saudi brand was “austere theocracy,” but the new one is “fun, fun, fun, but still with beheading.” The Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo was lured to a Riyadh team, Al-Nassr, for about $200 million, tax free. The annual Esports World Cup, held in the city this summer, had a prize pool of $70 million. The Six Kings Slam tennis event, held this week in the city and broadcast on Netflix, offers the half-dozen players involved a potential payout of $6 million for two or three matches. A group led by the kingdom’s public investment fund just dropped $55 billion to buy Electronic Arts, the company behind FIFA and other video games. (Jared Kushner was also involved in the deal.) Entities controlled by Saudi leaders also plan to invest up to $1 billion in a Hollywood studio.

The man holding Saudi Arabia’s giant and extremely open checkbook is 40-year-old Mohammed bin Salman, universally known as MBS—a Millennial crown prince for a country where two-thirds of the population is younger than 30. MBS has undoubtedly modernized the country, allowing women to drive and standing down the hated religious police (yay!). But he has done this through a reign of terror in which his opponents have been executed, exiled, or intimidated into silence (oh).

“The comedians on that stage are performing in a gilded cage,” the exiled Saudi satirist Ghanem al-Masarir wrote before the festival, adding, “In MBS’s Saudi Arabia, the punchline is always prison.”

Maya Siddiqui / Bloomberg / Getty

Salwa Palace in the At-Turaif district of Diriyah, Saudi Arabia

Maya Anwar / Bloomberg / Getty

King Abdullah Financial Center in Riyadh

As our car crawled toward the gig, which began at 9:30 p.m. on a Monday night, the temperature had fallen to a moderate 90 degrees, and Riyadh was coming alive. During the day, the city’s shiny new high-end malls and public parks are deserted, as if some lost civilization built a dozen Dolce & Gabbana outlets and then blinked out of existence. After dusk, though, people emerge onto the streets, visiting a cinema—allowed again since 2018—or a restaurant, whether that be a Texas Roadhouse or a satellite location of Spago. American corporations abound: There is a KFC in Mecca, a short walk from the Kaaba, and the first thing you see after immigration at Riyadh airport is a Dunkin’ branch. In nearby Diriyah, a historical site that was the original stronghold of the House of Saud, the fencing outside a massive high-end development carried the legend WHERE TRADITION MEETS MODERN RETAIL. A perfect slogan for what I saw of today’s Saudi Arabia.

The Louis C.K. gig was held in Riyadh’s entertainment district, the Boulevard, a glorified parking lot that is also home to a WWE Experience, an esports arena, and numerous stores selling comic-book figurines. Last year, the district hosted a pop-up Harry Potter World, allowing Saudi Arabians to imagine they were playing Quidditch or drinking nonalcoholic Butterbeer. (It was not that long ago that the Anti-Witchcraft Unit of the Ministry of Interior had banned Harry Potter books from the kingdom.) This year, they’re getting a temporary theme park based on MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber in the world. To promote the comedy festival, the entire place was decked out with expensive faux-neon signs of ungrammatical menace—YOUR LAUGH FROM THIS WAY and HA HA HA!—and statues of the festival’s mascot, a giant smiling microphone with arms and legs. I walked past made-for-Instagram street furniture and a professional photographer taking a picture of a smiling family—dad, two kids, and mom in a full-face veil.

We entered the main venue, ANB Arena, after a hopeful dash across several lanes of traffic—sidewalks and crosswalks are no more reliable here than in America—and a short line to pass through metal detectors and bag up our phones to prevent recording. I had worried about attracting attention by taking notes during the show, and so instead of a reporter’s pad, I had brought a pastel-pink gratitude journal, which I will expense. The crowd was mostly male, just like it is at American comedy nights, and the much-shorter female security line was staffed by brisk women in niqabs. No food or drink was permitted in the arena, not even water. This pained Dante—who, as a good American, believes that hydration is next to godliness. After we took our seats, he observed that this event would be an obvious location for a terrorist atrocity. This really got me in the mood for a night of incest jokes.

The first surprise was that I knew the opening performer—the Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell. “I come from a tiny island full of alcohol,” he told the crowd. “Bahrain.” They loved that one: Bahrain is Saudi’s Cancún. Maxwell was followed by Ibraheem Alkhairallah, a Saudi comedian who is big on Arabic-language YouTube.

Alkhairallah enjoined us all to give a round of applause to the crown prince for being such a great leader of the country, a patriotic innovation that I hope makes it to New York’s Comedy Cellar in the coming Mamdani era. Everyone except Dante and me obliged with apparent enthusiasm. (God, what if this is what we get arrested for, I thought.)

Then it was on to the main attractions. Jimmy Carr bounded onstage, dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit, his face looking freshly ironed. He has a distinctive whooping laugh, like a haunted seagull. About three-quarters of Carr’s usual material is based on the premise that he is a sex offender, and this event was no exception. “I’m a little bit haram,” he said at one point. Then he swerved into a routine about how you can’t say retard and mixed-race any more—you have to say “Harry and Meghan.”

Carr is not an especially political comedian. He does jokes about stopping his girlfriend from snoring thanks to his “noise-canceling fists” and jokes about how his rape fantasy is “someone goes to jail for rape.” Nonetheless, he did push the limits of acceptable speech in Saudi Arabia. After a riff about euthanasia, he added: “We wouldn’t let a dog live like this, and yet people are allowed to go on living in what can only be described as”—here he paused for dramatic effect—“Yemen.” The audience gasped: The recent U.S.-backed Saudi war on Houthi rebels in Yemen was high on the list of things not to talk about in Riyadh.

Later on, Carr asked, “Any lesbians here tonight?” The room’s atmosphere contracted, a sudden tightening. Would anyone out themselves as gay in Saudi Arabia? He held the tension for a moment, then added: “Of course not, it’s a comedy show.” The entire crowd relaxed into laughter. Bloody lesbians! They can’t take a joke.

Fayez Nureldine / AFP / Getty

The Riyadh Comedy Festival site, photographed on October 6

The French have a brilliant phrase—esprit d’escalier, or “staircase wit,” meaning that pang of realization, as you leave a situation, that you could have unloaded an absolute zinger. This is how I feel about missing the opportunity, as Louis C.K. walked on stage in Riyadh to whoops and cheers, to shout: “Get your cock out!”

Maybe it’s better that I didn’t; the British government advises travelers to avoid “behaving in ways the Saudi authorities assess disrupt the public order.” But just imagine the celebrities solemnly promoting an Amnesty petition to free me from detention. The editor of this magazine would even hire me a lawyer.

Louis C.K. was once the titan of thoughtful American comedy—evidence of a strange recent trend of treating comics as public intellectuals, even philosopher kings, rather than entertainers whose success is measured in laughs per minute. He had a sitcom, Louie, that was loosely based on his life, and he had the admiration and envy of his peers. Then, in 2017, The New York Times published one of the most consequential stories of the #MeToo era. Onstage, Louis C.K. was doing highly praised feminist routines about how men were the No. 1 threat to women: “If you’re a guy, try to imagine that you could only date a half-bear, half-lion, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I hope this one’s nice.’” Offstage, he liked to ask female comedians if he could masturbate in front of them. “When you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them,” he wrote in his apology statement, adding: “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”

He took three years, after which he released a special called Sincerely Louis CK, with a self-pitying message: “You all have your thing,” he told the audience. “I don’t know what your thing is. You’re so fucking lucky that I don’t know what your thing is.” The title of his 2021 special, Sorry, can be read as either an apology for his behavior or a frustrated, sarcastic response to the depth of the backlash. In that routine, he joked that COVID had forced everyone to live like him—a hermit. But Sincerely Louis CK won a Grammy, and by 2023, C.K. was back to selling out Madison Square Garden. His new work hasn’t appeared on streaming services, though, and he has continued to sell his specials for $5 or $10 a pop directly from his website. When he appeared on Bill Maher’s show ahead of the Riyadh gig—comedy was “a great way to get in and start talking,” he said—it was his first television appearance in eight years.

[Sophie Gilbert: Sorry/Not Sorry and the paradox of Louis C.K.]

For someone like C.K.—or Dave Chappelle, or Kevin Hart—performing in Riyadh doubles as a middle finger to the liberal mainstream. You tried to knock me down, but I’m still making bank. To me, the audience that greeted C.K.’s entrance with a standing ovation in Sorry seemed to be brushing aside those pesky women who had tried to take away their idol from them. At the time, Chappelle had defended C.K. ringing up a woman to jerk off by saying, “Bitch, you don’t know how to hang up a phone?” My position is different: Is it too much to ask people not to ejaculate in professional settings? But, you know, people don’t want to be made to feel bad about things that they like. (Understanding this would help the left win a lot more elections.)

Louis C.K.’s material has always been morbid and self-excoriating, but his set in Riyadh was a real downer. He was old, falling apart, and, worst of all, resigned to dating women his own age. Dante told me it wouldn’t be fair to write here that he bombed, despite the incredible opportunity for bad-taste puns that would provide. But I can’t honestly say the set was rapturously received, either. When C.K. announced he was about to wrap up, a small stream of people decided to head out early to beat the traffic. The instant he stepped off the stage, the remaining crowd stampeded for the exits, rather than hoping for an encore.

The best compliment you could pay the set is that he didn’t appear to have altered it much for local sensibilities. The worst you could say about it is exactly the same thing. He joked about how much he hated jury duty (not a problem in Saudi Arabia), how much he loathed the rain (Saudis would love rain), and how disgusted he was by the elderly woman in his building who wore “little shorts and a tube top” (not relatable for the man on the Riyadh street). Only once did he acknowledge the cultural divide, when introducing a long and particularly bleak section about putting his elderly father in a care home. That scenario might not land in Arab culture, he said, because “you’re compassionate and shit.”

When C.K. launched into the bit on Barely Legal magazine, I thought: Honestly, when was the last time anyone saw a physical porn mag? There are people alive today who are fully legal who haven’t encountered one. By the end of the night, I was, somewhat unexpectedly, annoyed on behalf of the kingdom. You drop six or seven figures to fly in Louis C.K., and he won’t even write some new material? Disrespectful. Send this man to the Ritz-Carlton.

One of the questions I wanted to answer in Riyadh was this: Who is the audience for a Louis C.K. gig in Saudi Arabia? The answer turned out to be a 60–40 mix of locals and expats. The two groups were easy to distinguish, because a lot of Saudi men in the audience wore the ankle-length white thobe and a traditional headdress; most Saudi women, despite the relaxation of the modesty laws, wear niqabs in public, covering their entire face apart from the eyes. (Some have jury-rigged these out of COVID masks alongside a regular headscarf.) The Westerners, by contrast, are in pants and shirts, and sometimes even shorts; the Saudi Tourism Authority asks visitors only to cover their elbows and knees. Within a five-star hotel like the Ritz-Carlton, anything goes. I saw a man who wasn’t Louis C.K. waiting for the elevator in swim trunks and an open bathrobe.

There is another group in Saudi society—although, unsurprisingly, they were not conspicuous at the Louis C.K. show. More than 40 percent of the country’s population are migrant workers from countries such as India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, flown over to work in hotels and the construction industry. When I arrived at the airport, the immigration line was filled with the occupants of two planes that had just arrived from Dhaka and Mumbai. Every single person I saw was a man.

Fayez Nureldine / AFP / Getty

Passengers aboard the Riyadh Metro

Maya Anwar / Bloomberg / Getty

The Qasr Al-Hokm metro station in Riyadh

The Riyadh Metro, which opened in December, reflects the tripartite nature of Saudi society. The trains have three carriages: “first class,” which is filled with men in thobes; “family,” home to foreign couples and women delicately lifting their niqab to sip iced coffee; and “single,” disproportionately the preserve of African and South Asian men. The Riyadh Metro is far quieter, cleaner, and more efficient than, say, the New York subway. However, like so much Saudi luxury, it requires a supply of cheap labor last seen in English country houses of the 19th century. As we passed through Al-Urubah station, I watched a man on his hands and knees, polishing the metal rivets on the platform.

The gender balance in Saudi Arabia is deeply skewed: If you include migrants, the population has millions more men than women. This is a worry in a society that has fretted about the radical potential of alienated young men since at least 1979, when a fundamentalist militia stormed Mecca. The British novelist Hilary Mantel spent four years in Jeddah as the wife of a geologist in the 1980s, and found the experience so stifling that she wrote a novel about it. “If you left your husband’s side in the supermarket, some sad man followed you and tried to touch you up in the frozen fish,” she recalled later. “You were probably a prostitute anyway. Most European women were. Male desperation, loneliness and need, the misunderstandings they bred: these hung in the refrigerated air, permeating public spaces like dry ice.” With so much wealth sloshing about, many young Saudi men had little need to work, but they also had few Sharia-approved outlets for leisure. Hard-line clerics forbade musical performances, alcohol, and even all-you-can-eat buffets.

[From the April 2022 issue: Absolute power]

After 9/11, though, the House of Saud was becoming alarmed about what it had indulged—and exported—by giving the clerics such power. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden, the son of a well-to-do family in the construction business. In 2003, al-Qaeda stopped being other people’s problem, as some of its terrorists carried out a wave of suicide bombings in Riyadh. Potential jihadists have been deradicalized in specialist prisons through intensive lessons in correct Islam—plus money for a dowry and maybe even the gift of a Toyota. “No Saudi official will admit it on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration,” Robert Lacey wrote in his book Inside the Kingdom in 2010, “but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex during their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising if some of them channel this frustration into violence.” Bored young men in the Gulf once turned to jihad; now they have Jimmy Carr making jokes about dildos. This is called progress.

“I don’t self-censor,” Carr once said, when faced with a backlash against some of his material. “You have to be authentic and say it, and trust that the audience will get that it’s a joke.”

Luckily, there was no need to self-censor in Riyadh, because the government was happy to do that for him. The festival’s big-money offers came with puppet strings attached. In late September, the comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posted the contract that she was offered for a 90-minute gig. She could not “degrade, defame or bring into public disrepute, contempt or scandal, embarrassment or ridicule” either the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or “any religion, religious tradition, religious figure or religious practice.” (She declined the invitation.) These conditions were later confirmed by the performer Bill Burr, and by Louis C.K., who told Bill Maher: “They said there’s only two restrictions—their religion and their government. I don’t have jokes about those two things.”

The news of the restrictions prompted a minor civil war among comedians. Suddenly, on podcasts and social media, every comic in America seemed to be discussing why they were going to Riyadh, why they weren’t going to Riyadh, or how they would have gone to Riyadh if only they’d been invited. “From the folks that brought you 9/11,” Marc Maron riffed in a stand-up routine posted to Instagram. “Two weeks of laughter in the desert.” David Cross, who came up alongside Louis C.K. in the 1980s and ’90s, took a different line. “All of your bitching about ‘cancel culture’ and ‘freedom of speech’ and all that shit? Done,” he wrote in a statement. “You don’t get to talk about it ever again. By now we’ve all seen the contract you had to sign.” (“I’m glad these guys brought this stuff up,” Louis C.K. told Maher. He had “mixed feelings” about the festival, and “struggled about going once I started hearing what everyone was saying.”) Dave Chappelle went, gave no explanation, and said on stage in Riyadh that he felt freer to speak than he does in America. Jessica Kirson also went, regretted it, and said she donated the fee to a human-rights charity.

One of the main points of contention was that this wasn’t just a festival in Saudi Arabia; this was performing at the pleasure of the Saudi state. The General Entertainment Authority—essentially the government’s Ministry of State-Mandated Fun and Laughter—organized the festival and is overseen by Turki al-Sheikh, a close ally of MBS. (They bonded over their shared love of video games.) Like MBS himself, al-Sheikh is a zealous modernizer with zero tolerance for criticism; some of his critics have reportedly been locked up in jail for unflattering tweets.

So why take his money? The most common defense was not, as you might expect, the Jim Jefferies one: all that hokum about comedians as emissaries of peace and brotherly love. No, the biggest rationalization was that America does bad shit too. Dillon, for example, cited U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza as a reason not to single out Saudi Arabia for criticism. Some comics’ lack of belief in America as a moral force for good was accompanied by an ambient nihilism. On the podcast 2 Bears, 1 Cave, Stavros Halkias and Chris Distefano agonized over whether to accept invitations to perform. “All entertainment money is fucking blood money,” said Halkias. He didn’t go; Distefano did.

And so did Bill Burr. When he returned from Riyadh, Burr gushed about the experience on his podcast, Monday Morning. “My whole fucking idea of Saudi Arabia is what I’ve seen on the news,” he said. “I literally think I’m going to fucking land, you know, and everybody’s going to be screaming ‘Death to America!’ and they’re going to have like fucking machetes and want to like chop my head off, right?” However, “everybody’s just regular—like, shooting the shit.” (His next special should be called Bill Burr’s Low Bar.) How could Riyadh be an ethically troubling destination, he added, when it was full of American food brands—Starbucks, McDonald’s, Chili’s? Nowhere with a Dunkin’ could be that bad, surely. He might not have known about Deera Square, a short drive from ANB Arena. Known locally as Chop-Chop Square, it’s the traditional location of public beheadings in Riyadh. Although the Saudis executed a record 345 people last year, public beheadings are now considered declassé, having been ruined by the Islamic State. I’m sure Burr could do something funny with that.

Burr’s words reflect the bland incuriosity that accrues with wealth. As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon against the outside world. A rich person—a successful comedian, say—could glide from the business-class lounge to the front of the aircraft to an air-conditioned limo to a luxury hotel where your dinner is interrupted by five different people asking if everything is okay. Live enough days like this, and the whole world becomes your bellhop. No wonder these guys like Saudi Arabia. The way that daily life bends around rich people is that little bit more obvious here.

After several days of backlash to his naive musings, Burr returned with another thought: His critics, he told Conan O’Brien, were “sanctimonious cunts.” For me, the fairer complaint is that Western detractors were thinking about the festival the wrong way. They deemed it a PR disaster for Saudi Arabia because it exposed the regime’s hypocrisy about free speech and the performers’ cynicism. On the contrary, the festival said to middle-class Saudis: Do you need the vote if you have lots of money and Louis C.K.? That’s a trade-off that even many Americans would accept.

Burr also told O’Brien something that I fear is correct: that American society was moving toward Saudi illiberalism by “fucking grabbing moms and dads and sticking them in a van for making illegally made fucking tacos.” This, to me, was the greatest irony of the Riyadh Comedy Festival. With its Cheesecake Factory outlets and newfound interest in comedy, Saudi Arabia is becoming more American—just as America is becoming more Saudi. In the U.S., the government is stifling the media, due process is being eroded, the ruler’s relatives are sent on quasi-governmental missions, and businessmen make overt displays of loyalty. Donald Trump’s White House has given up lecturing other countries on their human-rights records and adopted a purely transactional approach to foreign affairs. Comedians are just following his lead.

Jeremy Suyker / Bloomberg / Getty

Rush-hour traffic in Riyadh

On the plane home to London I spotted Andrew Maxwell, who had warmed up for Carr and C.K. He and I have appeared on British radio together, and he was more than happy to talk about why he had taken the Riyadh gig. “I grew up in a de facto theocracy,” he told me, referring to Ireland. “You couldn’t get divorced. Abortion was illegal. Being gay was illegal. Yes, it was a democracy, but the church was everywhere. And in 10, 15 years, when I was growing up, it all changed.” He hoped that Saudi Arabia was undergoing a similar process. The country was “speedrunning” toward modernity, he said, whereas the West had taken 500 years to get there, with a lot of bloodshed.

And the Saudis are hardly the only ones limiting what comedians can say. “That list of restrictions? That is no different from a corporate event,” he told me. “Every single famous comedian you’ve ever heard of has done private events. I’m not remotely laissez-faire about freedom of speech, but you’ve got to start where people are. We tried top-down state-building in the Middle East, and it failed.” I told him this was the most sincere defense I’d heard for participating in the festival. “It’s not a defense. It’s a fact,” he said without rancor.

What about taking money from the Saudi government? “You and I have worked for the BBC,” he replied—Britain’s state-funded broadcaster. I countered that the BBC had not, to the best of my knowledge, dismembered anyone. Things weren’t the same in the Gulf states, he said. “You don’t retire like Tony Blair and run a fucking institute. It’s like Game of Thrones. You rule or you die.”

The night before the big event, Maxwell had gone with Louis C.K. to the Comedy Pod, a 180-seater stand-up club in Riyadh. Both men did their sets (in English) to an audience of local comics, who started applauding before C.K. had even said a word. “Louis got a standing ovation on, and another off,” Maxwell said. The atmosphere reminded him of the Dublin club where he came up in the 1990s—a small space where young comics gathered to workshop material and check out the competition.

Louis C.K. referenced the Riyadh club onstage, at the very end of his set, telling the audience what a great time he’d had, and asked them to applaud the Saudi comedians who perform there. The thing was, Louis C.K. said, comedy was the same everywhere, and so it could bring people together. Even though Riyadh’s comics were performing in Arabic, he went on, “it was all the same jokes. Your wife’s a pain in the ass. You can tell.”

*Illustration sources: Dante Ramos; Fayez Nuraldine / AFP / Getty; Theo Wargo / Getty.

The Gaza Left and the Gender Left

2025-09-24T06:00:00-04:00

At first, the recent collapse of Your Party—a new British grouping of socialists, progressives, and opponents of the war in Gaza—brings to mind a classic Onion headline: “Left-Wing Group Too Disorganized for FBI Agents to Infiltrate.” But Your Party’s descent into infighting and recrimination offers an insight into the challenges faced by the left on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Although the fledgling organization was designed to challenge the ruling Labour Party from the left, its troubles began even before it had a name: The sign-up page referred to “Your Party,” but journalists who referred to it as such were told that this was merely an interim description. In the best tradition of left-wing grassroots democracy, its members would decide the final name. Sadly, no one knows what this is yet.

Before its official launch, the two co-founders of Your Party fell out, with one accused of hijacking the mailing list and the other of running a “sexist boys’ club.” The future of the organization—which has claimed more than 800,000 sign-ups—is now in doubt.

Many of the party’s struggles are uniquely British. But the larger tension that has paralyzed Your Party will be familiar to watchers of American politics. In both countries, the political left has been caught flat-footed by the rise of an insurgent populist right that the center-left establishment has proved inept at resisting. As the rest of the left plots its resurgence, how big should the tent be? What matters most—foreign policy, social issues, or economic populism? Who should be prepared to compromise on their beliefs for the sake of cohesion?

In the United States, these tensions often play out within the Democratic Party, where the opinions of its most vocal supporters—predominantly white, professional liberals—frequently diverge from those of organized labor and socially conservative minority voters. In Britain, though, the parliamentary system means that smaller parties, even single-issue parties, can actually win seats and seek leverage by acting as a spoiler. With the center-left Labour government deeply unpopular—and Nigel Farage’s populist-right party, Reform, leading in the polls—the political left has sensed an opportunity. If, that is, its members can avoid falling out with one another long enough to seize it.

[Read: The left’s self-defeating Israel obsession]

Your Party exists because of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Currently, the pro-Palestine cause is one of the biggest protest movements in Britain, not least because popular opinion here—as in the United States—is well to the left of the main center-left party. Since October 2023, opposition to the war in Gaza has brought young, social-justice-minded progressives together with British Muslims, who are more socially conservative than the general population and have traditionally leaned toward voting Labour. (Muslims make up about 6 percent of the British population.) Both groups are opposed to what they see as Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. But beyond that particular issue, the alliance of “rainbow and crescent”—as the historian James Orr, a friend of J. D. Vance, has described it—is extremely fragile. Gay marriage, abortion, and transgender rights are obvious flash points, but other issues can be equally divisive. For instance, many British Muslims support fee-paying schools, which can offer students a more religious curriculum than government-run institutions. The traditional left-wing position, however, is that private schools are engines of privilege and should be abolished. Can these groups happily coexist in a left-wing movement in the long term? The experience of Your Party suggests not.

One of its two leaders is the 76-year-old Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong anti-war, anti-colonialist leftist who was unexpectedly elevated to lead Labour in 2015. Corbyn performed above expectations in the 2017 general election but flamed out spectacularly in 2019, when his Conservative opponent, Boris Johnson, managed to turn the vote into a referendum on “getting Brexit done.”

His successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, initially presented himself as part of the Corbynite tradition, but he pivoted soon after winning the leadership into attacking the party’s hard left and taking the party to the center. In 2020, Labour suspended Corbyn for refusing to acknowledge the extent of anti-Semitism within the party under his watch. He was later expelled altogether. Since then, Corbyn has sat in Parliament as an independent, and last year he began working closely with the “Gaza independents,” a group of four men elected in 2024 in constituencies with significant Muslim populations: Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan, and Iqbal Mohamed.

The other prospective co-leader of Your Party is 31-year-old Zarah Sultana, who is also a former Labour member of Parliament. Her politics are anti-austerity, pro-Palestinian, and—here comes the tricky part—socially progressive. (The closest analogue in the U.S. would be Zohran Mamdani.) “The rollback of LGBT rights—especially trans rights—is global, bankrolled by billionaires and the far-right,” she wrote on X in April. When the boxer Imane Khelif competed in the female category at the Olympics last year amid questions about her eligibility, Sultana posted a picture of Khelif on Facebook with the caption: “If you come for the Queen, you best not miss!” (Boxing authorities have instituted new requirements for sex testing, which Khelif has challenged. She has not competed professionally since they took effect.) With 490,000 followers, Sultana is said to be the second-most-followed British politician on TikTok, after Nigel Farage.

Sultana speaks for a large section of the youthful British left, for whom gay marriage is a settled issue and gender self-identification is a human right. Corbyn, on the other hand, has always cared principally about foreign policy. He vocally opposed apartheid in South Africa and George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. As Labour leader, he gamely announced his pronouns—he/him—and supported gender self-ID rules, but he never gave any sense of being deeply motivated by the issue.

Sultana was the one to announce the formation of the new party on July 3, with a post on X that implored disaffected Labour supporters to “join us.” Behind the scenes, Corbyn was reportedly furious—he did not want to be a co-leader with someone else and felt that he had been forced into a decision. The Times of London printed WhatsApp messages showing his longtime fixer, Karie Murphy, removing dissenters from the group chat organizing the new party’s launch. Corbyn eventually welcomed the creation of the new party in public, albeit grudgingly.

A month later, the split between the social progressives and those focused on foreign policy—the gender leftists and the Gaza leftists—became impossible to deny. In August, Hussain, one of the independent members of Parliament, posted an announcement for a Your Party event with Corbyn on X. A commenter who endorsed a “material analysis of sex” urged the new left-wing party not to “parrot the same neoliberal idea of gender ideology.” Hussain replied: “I agree, women’s rights and safe spaces should not be encroached upon. Safe third spaces should be an alternative option.” After all, he went on to say, trans women were “not biologically women.”

This ignited, if not a firestorm, then certainly a small but lively conflagration. Sultana gave an interview saying that it was “really important that, from the outset, we are loud and proud about the values that we have” and there was “no space for transphobia” in Your Party.

In public, the issue then simmered down for a month, until last week, when Corbyn posted a message on X warning supporters that “an unauthorised email” trying to convince them to pay a £55 annual fee to join Your Party had been sent to the mailing list. The email had come from allies of Sultana. A further statement referred to Sultana’s “unilateral launch” of the party.

That is not how Sultana saw it. She said that she launched the membership portal after being “sidelined” by Corbyn’s allies. She also attacked the “sexist boys’ club” whom she said had “refused to allow any other women with voting rights on the Working Group.” On September 19, a third faction arose, demanding that all six independents step back from leadership roles because “the people should take things forward from here.”

Again, the Onion headline comes to mind.

Those on the left who are dismayed by the turmoil inside Your Party have been consoling themselves with the fact that another left-wing party exists—the Greens. “Maybe that’s the vehicle that will take off as a result of this,” one of Corbyn’s former aides, Andrew Fisher, told the BBC.

Unfortunately, the same struggle for precedence among foreign policy, economic populism, and social justice is also present in the Greens. Ostensibly an environmentalist party, the Greens are also socially progressive and economically left wing. When the Scottish branch was a minority coalition partner in the Scottish government, its politicians pushed hard for gender self-identification; last year, a conference motion rejected the findings of the Cass report, which described the evidence for youth gender medicine as shaky.

The Greens also believe that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and the new leader of the party in England and Wales, Zack Polanski, called for Israeli President Isaac Herzog to be arrested on his visit to Britain as a “potential war criminal.” The second signatory on that statement was one of Polanski’s deputy leaders, Mothin Ali, a local councilor for a northern English suburb and a devout Muslim. (He described his election as a councilor as a “win for the people of Gaza” before shouting “God is the greatest” in Arabic.) His statement condemned the decision to let Israeli weapons manufacturers exhibit their wares at an arms fair in London.

[Read: The real reason American socialists don’t win]

On the subject of Israel, the Greens are unified. But Ali’s candidacy for the deputy leadership over the summer was nearly derailed by his refusal to sign a pro-LGBTQ pledge. (He said that he was not signing any pledges, because they can “create pressure, turn allyship into performance politics, and even exclude those who are already doing the work.”) In an interview with a transgender activist within the party, Ali was asked if he believed that “trans women are women,” and he gave a classic politician’s nonanswer. He spoke about how both Muslims and trans people, as marginalized groups, were targeted by the far right. He suggested that before colonialism, “Eastern cultures” were much more sympathetic to transgender and intersex people. Notably, he did not say “yes” or “no.” This strategic ambiguity appears to have served him well, because Ali won the deputy leadership on September 2.

Theoretically, the Greens could be the big winners from the meltdown in Your Party. If so, either Ali will have to maintain his policy of sticking to vague generalities about his social views, or his progressive comrades will have to expand the range of acceptable beliefs within the party.

The trouble here is that the British left—the part beyond the Democrats and Labour—has two shibboleths that potential leaders are required to utter. The first is that Israel is committing a genocide. The second is that “trans women are women.” But the groups that hold these two positions do not neatly overlap.

For the moment, when bombing and starvation in Gaza are regularly in the news, that doesn’t always matter. But the experience of Your Party suggests that, in the longer term, the British left and its U.S. counterpart will have to decide how broad their coalition can be. Which faction—the progressives or the moderates—will give ground in the service of an effective movement? That answer will define the fight against the ascendancy of the populist right.

A Government of All the Podcasters

2025-09-18T14:09:06-04:00

“If it weren’t for Charlie Kirk, I would not be the vice president of the United States,” J. D. Vance said as he hosted The Charlie Kirk Show on Monday. This may well be true: Kirk lobbied for Vance to get the vice-presidential nomination. It’s also a reflection of how deeply Donald Trump’s White House is intertwined with a thriving ecosystem of partisan podcasters who amplify his agenda—and help set it.

In the past decade, American public life has undergone two major transformations: The MAGA movement has swallowed the Republican Party whole. And influencers such as Kirk have elbowed aside traditional media outlets in the quest for attention. Even more important, the boundary between the movement and the influencers is nonexistent: Kirk’s campus-outreach group, Turning Point USA, was ostensibly a grassroots operation, but it was also a mouthpiece for Trumpism. Here’s Kirk talking about his voter-outreach operation during last year’s presidential race: “We’re working directly in harmony with the Trump campaign,” he announced in an archive clip aired at the start of Vance’s tribute show. “It’s been vetted, it’s been cleared, it’s been blessed,” he said of his event, adding, “We’re going to try to win this thing.”

Vance and Kirk were personally close, and the vice president was clearly moved by the shock and injustice of his friend’s assassination. He traveled to Utah to bring Kirk’s coffin home to Arizona on Air Force Two. But the vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show was also a political act. As the party’s most likely nominee for 2028, Vance must hope to inherit Kirk’s organizational infrastructure—and his audience.

[From the January 2025 issue: The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost]

Just last week, Kamala Harris was confessing that she felt sidelined as vice president, confined to unpopular policy areas by a president who didn’t want to be overshadowed. Vance has realized that podcaster in chief is a more powerful position than the one he currently holds. Imagine how strange a sitting vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show would seem to a time traveler from 20 years ago. Had Rush Limbaugh died during George W. Bush’s presidency, would Dick Cheney have hosted the radio host’s call-in show?

To those inside the MAGA movement, Kirk was not merely a friend, a young father, and a passionate advocate for conservative-Christian values—he was just like them. From the president down, this is a group of people obsessed with “owning the narrative.” The “performative utterance”—a sentence that bends reality into the speaker’s preferred form with words alone—might be a concept championed by the postmodern left, but it has been embraced by Trump and the MAGA right, who believe that saying something is 90 percent of doing it.

Trump’s White House is a government by the podcasters, for the podcasters. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, was a podcaster. His deputy, Dan Bongino, was a podcaster. Katie Miller, the wife of the immigration czar Stephen Miller, left DOGE earlier this year and started a podcast. Throughout last year’s campaign, Trump took his message to a bunch of male podcasters, who duly rewarded him with softball interviews—or, in some cases, open endorsements. At the same time, Tucker Carlson hosted a live series of conversations across the country with other podcasters (Russell Brand, Jack Posobiec, Glenn Beck) and three people who are now in the administration (Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard).

The symbiotic relationship has continued during MAGA’s return to government: Carlson was one of the guests on Vance’s tribute show. Their opening discussion was about how Kirk first contacted Vance after seeing him on Carlson’s former Fox News program. (In one of this era’s many unexpected outcomes, Carlson is now one of the more Trump-critical voices within MAGA, even though his son, Buckley, works for Vance.) Earlier this year, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tested a new briefing format in which lucky contestants competed to ask her the most sycophantic question. Can you guess who they were? Podcasters. When the Trump administration wanted to pretend it had released the Epstein files—actually some binders full of boring and mostly public information—a group of useful idiots was summoned to the White House: podcasters. Trump recently gave a personal tour of the Oval Office to three hosts of the podcast All-In. One of them is his crypto czar, David Sacks, who obligingly gushed about Trump’s redecoration of the room. “If you look at before-and-after photos, which I’m sure we’ll put on the screen, the Oval looked kinda drab before,” Sacks told his fellow hosts as they waited for the president. Now, of course, the Oval has so much gold leaf that it looks like a Vegas version of Versailles.

Some of the MAGA-aligned podcasts are organic successes; others appear to be little more than vanity projects, sustained by their proximity to the administration. Katie Miller’s podcast, for example, has 5,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her first guest was Vance; her most recent booking was Attorney General Pam Bondi, who insinuated that people should be fired for “hate speech.”

In dictatorships, the government has to spend taxpayers’ money on state media. Here in America, the land of free speech and the free market, people volunteer to be Baghdad Bob. Right-wing commentators frequently accuse their opponents of exactly the same vice—being “regime journalists” who are part of the “Cathedral.” But many traditional news organizations have strict rules forbidding their reporters from donating to candidates or attending fundraisers, let alone running a grassroots campaign to elect a president. The Republicans have a huge and flourishing podcast industry dedicated to boosting their talking points. The Democrats have Pod Save America, on a good day.

[Quinta Jurecic: The influencer FBI]

This administration is profoundly hostile to the mainstream press because there are now less bruising ways to gain attention. MAGA allies control X and the video platform Rumble, and Trump himself controls Truth Social. Trump-friendly investors have just pledged to buy out TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg appeared next to the president recently and, at Trump’s prompting, talked about how much money his company, Meta, was planning to invest in data infrastructure in the United States. Afterward, Zuckerberg was caught on a hot mic admitting apologetically that he had no idea what numbers the president had wanted him to announce. At the same time, Trump and his allies have sued newspapers and broadcasters, and the head of the Federal Communications Commission pressured TV stations to have Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show taken off the air. Yes, what Kimmel implied about Kirk’s case—that the murder suspect was right-wing—was factually wrong. But when has that ever been the standard applied to things said during late-night monologues? In any case, Trump’s Truth Social posts reveal that the existence of Kimmel’s show—“Less talent than Colbert!”—has bothered him for some time.

The right might say that it’s winning in the marketplace of ideas, but that rings hollow when it’s also trying to buy the market.

Over the past week, Elon Musk’s X, which acts as the storefront for many of these podcasts, and the place where their titans interact, has been a mirror image of Twitter immediately after George Floyd’s murder in 2020—an inchoate mass of rage and grief looking for a lightning rod. Back then, in one particularly gratuitous example, a Mexican American utility worker was fired after a photo on Twitter showed him making an ambiguous hand gesture that some people construed as a white-power salute. In the past week, Kirk’s fans and friends have similarly targeted private individuals who criticized his views, or who have spoken callously about his death. The dean of a Tennessee university was fired for saying she had “zero sympathy” for him. The managing partner of a Texas Roadhouse was fired after his wife referred to Kirk as a “Nazi.” One MAGA influencer claimed that this would make the restaurant’s staff feel “intimidated,” in an unintentional echo of the language used by New York Times staffers in 2020, when they argued that an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton endangered their lives.

For several days, a website called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” claimed to be collating the names of those who celebrated Kirk’s death. (The site now appears to be offline.) That reminded me of another left-wing mass movement, when a list purporting to expose “Shitty Media Men” circulated in private chats at the height of #MeToo. That list captured some genuine wrongdoing, I’m sure, but was also a forum for anyone with a grudge or a flimsy allegation to air it unchallenged.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s dangerous response to the Kirk assassination]

The background of the “great awokening” is being used as the justification for the MAGA purges of the past week. Many conservative podcasters who condemned the peak cancel-culture era are now arguing that their own doxxing and firing campaigns are somehow different. “There is a big difference between the left canceling people and the right canceling people,” posted the podcaster Matt Walsh, a repeat offender in this regard. “The left cancels you for saying things that are true. To the extent that the right cancels you, it is for saying things that are abhorrent and sick.” The obvious rejoinder is: Who gets to decide what is abhorrent and sick? Personally, I find references to “prowling Blacks” quite sick, or the suggestion that a 10-year-old girl should be forced to bear her rapist’s baby. But Charlie Kirk had every right to argue his positions.

Which is exactly what he did. To use his assassination to restrict free speech is an insult to what Kirk’s friends have told us repeatedly that he stood for, but that’s what you get when you have a government whose highest goal is to podcast. Many parts of American life have proved resistant to the MAGA movement’s performative utterances—the economy, for example, cannot be bullied into growing. But the podcast-industrial complex is useful for establishing new norms and taboos, and expanding the administration’s power.

The Epstein Scandal Finally Takes Down a Politician

2025-09-13T06:00:00-04:00

At last, Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book—you know, the one full of messages from boldface names wishing him many more happy years of inappropriate relationships with young girls—has destroyed a political career. Just not an American one.

Peter Mandelson, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Washington, was recalled Thursday after the extent of his friendship with the disgraced financier became impossible to deny. In a 10-page message in the now-infamous 2003 scrapbook, he called Epstein his “best pal” and included several photos of himself. Describing the financier as “mysterious,” Mandelson said that he would often be left alone with Epstein’s “interesting” friends—an assertion that appeared over a picture of an unknown young woman in her underwear.

The first thing to say is: What an awkward diplomatic situation. The British government has just fired its U.S. ambassador for writing a message in the same book that the American president reportedly contributed to. (Donald Trump steadfastly maintains that the letter attributed to him by The Wall Street Journal is a fake.)

Mandelson’s departure also adds to a sense of crisis around Britain’s Labour government, which came into power just a year ago. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, appointed Mandelson to this important diplomatic post and initially defended him in Parliament. On Wednesday, with the book’s contents already public, Starmer stood up for his weekly grilling by the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, at Prime Minister’s Questions. The Conservative used all her allotted questions to challenge whether Starmer was really going to stand behind his ambassador. Starmer confirmed that he was. Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein had been declared during the vetting process, he said, and therefore he had “confidence in the ambassador in the role that he is doing.”

[Read: You really need to see Epstein’s birthday book for yourself]

That evening, however, Bloomberg and the tabloid The Sun published a series of old emails between Mandelson and Epstein. These made clear that the former was not remotely fazed by his friend’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor. “I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened,” Mandelson wrote after Epstein reported to jail to serve his sentence, having obtained a generous plea bargain from federal prosecutors in Florida. “I can still barely understand it. It just could not happen in Britain.” (It could: Sex with underage girls is also illegal here.) There is no suggestion that Mandelson, who is gay, was involved with any of the women trafficked by Epstein. But the messages suggest that Mandelson did offer to use his contacts to help Epstein clear his name.

This was too much for the British government. “The emails show that the depth and extent of Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is materially different from that known at the time of his appointment,” the Foreign Office declared in a statement Thursday. “In particular Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein’s first conviction was wrongful and should be challenged is new information.”

The Foreign Office’s viewpoint reflects the now-established consensus on Epstein: Powerful people who associated with the financier before his 2008 conviction can plausibly deny knowing about his sexual interest in minors, and have emerged unscathed. But those who continued their relationship with Epstein, such as Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, and the JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley, cannot—and have faced career and personal penalties as a result. Donald Trump falls into the former group, even if his own birthday message (“Enigmas never age”) and other statements from the time suggest that he knew Epstein was interested in much younger women.

This is, of course, a convenient distinction. Enough messages in the birthday book reference “girls” or Epstein’s “mysterious” nature that his friends should have had some questions about his lifestyle. Instead, they demonstrated the same incuriosity that has lately swept through the MAGA movement ever since Trump declared that the Epstein saga was a nonstory. But the president’s power to decide what is and is not real does not extend to Britain, and so Starmer has not been able to limit discussion of the scandal in the way that Trump has.

The timing of Mandelson’s departure is terrible for Starmer and his team: Trump is due for a state visit this month, and Starmer is hoping to negotiate more favorable trade terms for Britain and more support for Ukraine.

By all accounts, Mandelson had made a success of his role as ambassador. The 71-year-old life peer has superb contacts and deep political knowledge, and he relishes his reputation as the “Prince of Darkness” brokering backroom deals. Still, his appointment in December was a controversial gamble by Starmer, because he had booted out the respected (and apolitical) Karen Pierce and replaced her with a serial ethics offender.

[Read: The woman keeping the ‘special relationship’ special]

Mandelson’s ouster this week is his third involuntary departure from a government position in 30 years. He first had to quit in 1998, only a year into Tony Blair’s premiership, when it was revealed that he had taken an undeclared loan from a fellow minister. He was brought back, before leaving again in 2001 over a scandal involving passports for wealthy businessmen. A few years later, Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, brought him back again—effectively as deputy prime minister—in a move that conceded Brown’s government lacked political direction and Mandelson was the best man to provide it.

Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson to the ambassadorship can be read the same way. He wanted a schmoozer and flatterer to charm Trump, and a little baggage seemed like a price worth paying for that. When an interviewer from the Financial Times raised the subject of Epstein in February, Mandelson initially said the politically astute thing: that he regretted meeting the financier and regretted the harm the sex offender had caused. Then Mandelson added, somewhat less diplomatically: “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”

Mandelson’s exit is the second political scandal for Starmer this month. Just last week, his deputy Angela Rayner resigned after failing to pay enough tax on the purchase of a second home. Even before that, though, Starmer’s government was floundering: He recently told the BBC that his government would now be entering “Phase Two”—essentially an admission that Phase One had been a bust. In just over a year in office, he has already cut loose his first chief of staff amid a controversy over her high pay and his transport minister after a long-ago fraud conviction resurfaced. He lost his homelessness minister in a housing scandal and an anti-corruption minister in an alleged corruption scandal.

Added to that, the British economy is sluggish and loaded with debt, and Starmer’s chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has no obvious options for raising revenues in her November budget, having ruled out tax hikes on working people in the election campaign. In the polls, Labour currently trails Reform UK, the right-wing anti-establishment party headed by the Brexiteer Nigel Farage. That dynamic has been helped by the unpopularity of the center-right Conservatives, who left office after 14 years last July.

Starmer’s right-wing critics suggest that he has not done enough to limit the arrival of small boats carrying immigrants across the Channel from France, or the use of hotels to house asylum seekers waiting for their claims to be processed. Left-wing critics—including members of his own party—have resisted his attempts to cut welfare spending, and argue that Britain hasn’t sufficiently criticized Israel’s war in Gaza. He is beset on all sides.

The prime minister’s problems are compounded by the growing belief that he lacks the political ability to rescue his government. Standing up in front of the House of Commons on Wednesday to back Mandelson—before firing him less than 24 hours later—was embarrassing. But Starmer can only blame himself. Appointing Mandelson was a time bomb, and the prime minister planted it.

Americans might be tempted to look at the situation in Britain and think: Consequences for misguided actions—remember them? That’s the right impulse. In the United States, the Epstein scandal has devolved into a mere political soap opera, in which the victims are largely forgotten and Trump is so far unscathed. British voters who are angry with their government might find some small consolation in the fact that on their side of the Atlantic Ocean, ethical lapses can still carry a serious political price.

The Arrest That Demonstrates Europe’s Free-Speech Problem

2025-09-02T18:20:43-04:00

The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was once known for his charming, sometimes surreal sitcoms—Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd—on British TV. These days, however, he is better known for his online crusade against transgender activism. His X feed takes the same approach as Libs of TikTok, cherry-picking videos of criminals and fetishists in a full-scale assault on “gender ideology.”

He is obsessive and offensive. But is he a criminal? The British police seem to think so. Linehan was arrested by five armed officers today on his return from the United States, where he has been working on a new sitcom, and was accused of “inciting violence.” He says this allegation relates to three posts on X. (Authorities have not contradicted him, and British news outlets are treating his account as credible.) In one of the offending posts, he wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Can criminal incitement really occur in a hypothetical situation? If so, we’re going to need a bigger holding cell.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s free-speech problem]

Assuming that Linehan’s account is correct, then his arrest is totalitarian, absurd, and a waste of police time. It is also symptomatic of a wider chill on free speech in Europe, where the selective deployment of laws over hate speech, offense, and incitement has turned the police into the enforcers of progressive values and given them enormous discretionary power.

American readers will be used to conservatives claiming censorship at the slightest provocation, even as they enjoy the First Amendment’s protection from government action. But the problem in Europe is real. In Munich this spring, Vice President J. D. Vance cited police action against a silent anti-abortion protester in Britain as well as a man who burned a Quran in Sweden to make the case that, across Europe, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

Vance’s position in the Trump administration gave skeptical audiences in Europe an excuse to ignore him. Given its illiberal treatment of anti-Israel protesters and others, the White House has all the moral authority of a fox standing next to a heap of chicken bones. Many Europeans were familiar with Elon Musk’s takeover of X, and so had seen firsthand what his version of a “free-speech absolutist” world looks like in practice: a grim parade of snuff footage, violent anti-Semitism, and monetized misinformation.

Nonetheless, Vance was correct to say that parts of Europe have, with the good intention of protecting minorities, enacted extremely illiberal hate-speech and harassment laws. The politicians who passed these laws did not seem to understand that highly disreputable people might try to use these measures to impose civil or criminal penalties on their critics and political opponents. In Germany, following the passage of gender self-identification legislation last year, a male neo-Nazi who claims to be a woman—although he’s kept his handlebar mustache—has made vexatious complaints against newspapers that have publicly disbelieved the sincerity of his transition.

Here in Britain, where I live, laws on “malicious communication” and “public order” mean the police regularly get dragged into soul-sapping online scrums between obsessives who each accuse the other of hate speech and harassment. Huge amounts of time are wasted trying to untangle the truth. The chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, an officers’ group, said last year that a deluge of hate-crime reports, and authorities’ pledge that every one would be investigated, has created “a situation where we simply cannot cope.”

[Helen Lewis: Britain rules on what a woman is]

Linehan has previously faced accusations that fall into this category, for which the best outcome would be if everyone involved logged off and got some fresh air. In May, a preliminary judgment found that he had defamed an actor with whom he was arguing online. In 2018, Linehan was given a police warning after a trans woman accused him of harassment for revealing her former male name online. (He countered that he had stepped in because she was harassing his friends.) Linehan was returning to Britain only because he faces trial on Thursday over another harassment allegation, this one following an altercation with an 18-year-old trans woman.

The deeper problem with European laws on speech and hate, however, is the widespread perception that they are selectively enforced. The most obvious example is the disproportionate prosecution of alleged hate crimes against police: In 2021, the BBC discovered that “police officers and staff were the victims in up to half of the hate crimes charged in some areas, despite making up a tiny proportion of the overall number of recorded cases.” (Back in 2006, local police in Oxford insisted on pursuing a case against a drunken student who called one of their horses “gay.”) In practice, hate-speech laws give the police a weapon against people who have annoyed them.

Overbroad legislation also gives the authorities the discretion to pursue disfavored groups and protect favored ones. In May this year, a man was convicted of a public-order offense for burning a Quran—even though England repealed its blasphemy laws in 2008. Conservative campaigners argue that authorities tiptoe around Muslim sensibilities but ignore offenses against Christianity.

Another cause célèbre on the British right has been the case of Lucy Connolly, who posted a message—later deleted—during anti-immigration riots last year, saying that she hoped someone burned down a hotel containing asylum seekers. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison for publishing material that incited racial tensions, and is now presenting herself as a free-speech martyr. Her post was offensive and inflammatory, but many people convicted of actual violent crimes receive lighter sentences. Cases like this create the perception of “two-tier justice,” a charge that is regularly leveled against the government of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. (His spokesman today criticized Linehan’s arrest.) Overzealous enforcement of speech laws creates a sense of grievance that the far right is primed to exploit.

The debate over transgender inclusion demonstrates the double standard extremely well. Both trans activists and gender-critical feminists, the latter of whom believe that people’s biological sex rather than their self-declared gender should be the basis of law and policy, have extremists in their ranks. And yet the police in Britain seem far more exercised about comments such as Linehan’s than about equally violent rhetoric on the other side—including activism aimed at so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists. In 2023, two Scottish politicians notoriously posed at a rally in front of a sign that said DECAPITATE TERFS. A police investigation was launched, but no action was taken.

That same year, a trans activist named Sarah Jane Baker—who had previously been convicted of torturing a teenager, and then attempting to murder a fellow inmate while in prison—told a pro-trans rally, “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.” A magistrate found Baker not guilty of encouraging violence, saying that Baker was not making a serious threat but “wanted the publicity.” Compare that case with Linehan’s: If Baker was not convicted, why drag the comedy writer through the legal process for a less inflammatory remark?

I don’t want to downplay the fact that Linehan has a history of involvement in petty, grubby, and wearisome internet arguments. (And I say this as a frequent target of his rage.) But free-speech martyrs are often like this: hard to sympathize with, or hard to defend. Open debate is often obnoxious, upsetting, or rude. But none of these adjectives should make it a police matter.

The Defiant Conventionality of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

2025-08-26T18:05:10-04:00

Let’s be honest: We all knew they were getting engaged when she went on his podcast. In 2025, that’s as good as a diamond ring.

Even more tellingly, when Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce sat next to each other earlier this month on the video feed of New Heights, telling the story of how they met, they looked like one of the old couples in When Harry Met Sally. They finished each other’s sentences. They gently mocked each other. They said things like “He’s a human exclamation point” (Taylor on Travis) and “I’m the luckiest man in the world” (Travis on Taylor).

That two-hour podcast interview with Travis’s brother, Jason, was ostensibly just the venue for the announcement of Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, which will be released on October 3. But it was also a rollout for something far bigger—the hard launch of Brand Tayvis. Sure enough, two weeks later, they announced their engagement on social media.

Swift is one of the best songwriters of her generation, but her other world-class talent is for storylining her own life. Over a two-decade career, Swift has turned her attempt to reclaim her master recordings into a tale of feminist revenge, and she’s granted herself the last word about every romantic relationship she’s ever had. She even won her battle with the rapper then known as Kanye West—who interrupted her MTV Video Music Awards acceptance in 2009 by gate-crashing the stage and announcing that Beyoncé had “one of the best videos of all time”—simply by continuing to make music and not praising Adolf Hitler. (The MTV confrontation has had a long afterlife: In the New Heights podcast, Travis echoed his brother describing Swift’s Eras Tour as the “most attended of all time” by repeating the words of all time, using West’s exact cadence.)

Now Swift has a new narrative. Behold Miss Americana and her Heartbreak Prince. She is molding Brand Tayvis into the beloved American archetype of the smart if uptight wife and the dumb but lovable husband—think Roseanne and Dan Conner, Marge and Homer in The Simpsons, or Lois and Peter from Family Guy. In her Instagram post today revealing their engagement, she wrote: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” The accompanying music was “So High School,” a song from Swift’s most recent album that carries the same message about their relationship: “You know how to ball / I know Aristotle.”

[Helen Lewis: Travis Kelce is another puzzle for Taylor Swift fans to crack]

The track is notable for its uncomplicated cheerfulness. She loves his dad jokes, his athletic prowess, his ability to “touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” Fans have interpreted other tracks on the same album as harsh commentary on Swift’s two previous boyfriends—the actor Joe Alwyn (allegedly a time-waster who took her youth) and the singer Matty Healy (“the smallest man who ever lived”). By contrast, “So High School” is a happily ever after in song form.

Kelce is more than happy to play his part in this narrative. One of his most attractive qualities is a Labrador-ish enthusiasm for fame. A recent GQ profile pictured him wearing a series of so-butch-it’s-camp outfits—a yellow high-visibility vest, waders, a big furry hat—in a Florida swamp, while variously holding a python, cradling an alligator, and levitating on a flyboard. His default expression was one of untrammeled glee. (In one of the pictures, his moody pose and bare chest will give anyone who remembers the Backstreet Boys a powerful surge of nostalgia.) The explicit premise of the article was that Kelce is more soulful than the “meathead jock stereotype” he embodies; his coach raves about his grasp of football tactics and how he sees openings that no one else does. Nonetheless, the joyful lunk is clearly a character whom Kelce is happy to play on television and podcasts. He once told a story on New Heights about thinking that Lewis Carroll’s most famous character was called “Alison Wonderland.”

Swifties also love Kelce because he displays no trace of resentment that his future wife is so successful. (The kind of men who have dismissed Swift as an ingenue, a mere pop star, or a flighty strumpet are a regular target of her songs.) In the GQ profile, Kelce compared her performances on the Eras Tour to his own career as tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs: Both of them are stadium-level entertainers. “I hadn’t experienced somebody in the same shoes as me, having a partner who understands the scrutiny, the ups and downs of being in front of millions,” he said. Three hours of dancing and singing on a giant, illuminated stage at a stadium in Singapore, he said, was “arguably more exhausting than how much I put in on a Sunday, and she’s doing it three, four, five days in a row.”

Despite the superficial conventionality of their relationship—the wholesome blond girl marries the jock—this very modern form of relaxed masculinity is what Swift’s female fans adore. The advances of feminism have complicated the power dynamics of many heterosexual relationships, as men have had to adapt to the possibility that their wife will want a career, and that that career might pay more than their own. Over the years, Swift has experienced an acute form of that predicament.

[James Parker: Why does Taylor Swift see herself as an albatross?]

More broadly, she also embodies the modern woman’s dilemma: Is it okay to want independence and to be swept off your feet by a traditionally masculine protector figure? For the most eye-opening proof of the continued popularity of this fantasy, I refer you to romance novels, many of which include the most conservative, traditional gender roles you can imagine while also being extremely horny. Thousands of American women come home from a tough day at the office, where they have meetings about key performance indicators and the outlook for the third quarter, and pick up a popular book like Morning Glory Milking Farm, in which a “down-on-her-luck millennial” takes up with a minotaur.

You can also see this tension, between wanting a New Man and lusting after a Neanderthal, reflected in the fact that American women still, by and large, want to date a man who is taller than them. When Swift (5 foot 10) and Kelce (6 foot 5) started dating, one of the persistent strands of commentary was Oh, good. She’ll be able to wear heels again. (On a recent episode of the podcast Not Gonna Lie, its host, Kylie Kelce, bonded with Michelle Obama over the difficulties of dating as women who are both 5 foot 11.)

The tone of New Heights is unremittingly bro-ish, as the Kelce brothers make dumb jokes, crack each other up, and discuss the perils of wearing white pants on the field when caught “in the wrong type of gut situation.” But Jason is regularly interrupted by one of his four daughters; he clearly loves being a hands-on dad. And just like Taylor Swift’s parents, who moved to Nashville to further their daughter’s career, the Kelce family is a tight-knit unit. Though divorced, Ed and Donna Kelce stayed together until Travis was in college, to give him the best chance of succeeding, and remain friendly.

A big hunk. A supportive partner. A man who is sensitive and good with kids but can also chug a beer and dance in public. A man who has reached the top of his own profession and is happy to be with a woman at the top of hers. I mean, come on. Kelce represents a romantic ideal, the idea that you don’t have to compromise. You can have someone who looks perfect on paper, someone of whom your family approves, someone who is hot but not arrogant, someone you love. A woman can have it all.

What Does ‘Genius’ Really Mean?

2025-08-14T13:25:36-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

“When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder,” J. Brownlee Brown wrote in 1864. His Atlantic article had a simple headline: “Genius.” Only seven years after the founding of this magazine, its writers were already addressing one of the greatest questions of the 19th century: How should we define genius, that everyday word we use to denote the extraordinary?

Brown’s two geniuses are largely forgotten today. Morphy was a chess wizard from New Orleans who grew tired of the game and gave up playing seriously at just 22. He reportedly died in his bath at age 47. Zerah Colburn’s story is even more tragic: As a child, he wasn’t thought to be particularly gifted until his father overheard him repeating multiplication tables after only a few weeks’ schooling. The little boy from Vermont was then dragged around Europe as a “mental calculator,” ruling on whether large numbers were primes or not, and sent to an expensive school thanks to the patronage of an earl. But like many child prodigies, his adult life was a comparative disappointment. He died of tuberculosis at 34.

While researching my new book, The Genius Myth, I spent a lot of time exploring how we tell stories of exceptional achievement, and what the changing definition of genius reveals about the history of Western thought. The word itself comes from Latin, where it was used to mean a person’s spirit—the inner essence that gave them their unique characteristics. “Every man, says the oracle, has his daemon, whom he is bound to obey; those who implicitly follow that guidance are the prophetic souls, the favorites of the gods,” Frederic Henry Hodge wrote in The Atlantic in 1868. “It is this involuntary, incalculable force that constitutes what we call genius.”

Well into the 20th century, The Atlantic used this older definition, writing about people who possessed a genius, rather than those who were one. Individuals whom this magazine has described as being or having a genius include Richard Strauss, Leo Tolstoy, George Gershwin, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, and Edith Wharton, that last accolade having been delivered by Gore Vidal. Oh, plus the 23-year-old hockey player Bobby Orr, the children’s cartoon Rugrats, and the shopping channel QVC.

This proclamation makes for great copy, because it is deeply subjective. Christopher Hitchens was prepared to call the poet Ezra Pound a genius, but not the acclaimed mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers, whose work he dismissed as “dismal pulp.” (I know whose work I would rather read.) In 1902, a female writer for this magazine airily declared that there were no great women writers to compare with Juvenal, Euripides, and Milton. “George Eliot had a vein of excellent humor, but she never shares it with her heroes,” argued Ellen Duvall, adding that Jane Austen’s male heroes were “as solemn as Minerva’s owl.”

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Something similar is true of geniuses. An earlier age would have attributed Paul Morphy and Zerah Colburn’s gifts to divine providence, but in the more secular 19th-century America, another explanation was needed. “We seek in vain for the secret of this mastery,” wrote Brown of his subjects. “It is private,—as deeply hidden from those who have as from those who have it not.”

For the genius-hunters, one encouraging source for exceptional talent was inheritance. At the time Brown was writing about Morphy and Colburn, academics throughout the Western world were wrestling with the theory of evolution by natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin only six years earlier. The study of what would later be called genetics promised new methods of understanding genius, that quicksilver quality that seemed so resistant to explanation.

The first edition of Hereditary Genius, by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, was published in America in 1870. Galton’s work aimed to classify all men into lettered bands, depending on their mental faculties and lifetime achievements. The Atlantic reviewed Hereditary Genius that year, noting that the difference between the men in the upper part of Galton’s highest band and those in his lowest band “represents the difference between Shakespeare and the most degraded idiot mentioned in medical literature.” This was a coldly rational view of genius—more scientific in appearance, but also less humane.

Galton went on to coin the term eugenics. His unpublished utopian novel, The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere, imagined a world where people were allowed to marry only after extensive tests of their fitness to reproduce, and where those who failed were shipped off to labor colonies. Thanks to the popularity of eugenics at the time, what started as an attempt to identify geniuses eventually led the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” in Buck v. Bell in 1927. Thousands of Americans were subsequently denied the right to have children—an idea that also took hold in Nazi Germany, where an estimated 400,000 people were sterilized under the Hitler regime in the name of “racial hygiene.”

From the start, Galton’s ideas about genius were presented in explicitly racial terms: He believed that Europeans were intellectually superior to Africans, and that ancient Athenians were superior to both. The Atlantic, a proudly abolitionist magazine, ran an article that contested this bigotry. In 1893, Havelock Ellis argued that many in the contemporary canon of geniuses had mixed ancestry, from what he called the “negro blood” that was “easy to trace in the face of Alexandre Dumas, in certain respects, to the Iroquois blood in Flaubert.” The popular novelist Olive Schreiner’s heritage was “German, English, and Jewish,” Ellis observed, while Thomas Hardy believed his paternal great-grandmother to have been Irish. (Neither Jews nor Irish people would have been considered white, according to popular beliefs of the time.)

Today, most modern geneticists acknowledge that intelligence is partially heritable—it can be passed down by parents—but that does not account for the making of a genius. “We can no more produce a whole race of Newtons and Shakespeares than we can produce perpetual motion,” the anonymous author of the Hereditary Genius review wrote in 1870. A “genius” can pass on some of their genes, but not their personality—nor the social conditions in which their success happened.

That matters. While talking about my book, I’ve found that acknowledging the role of luck in success makes some people nervous. They think that any discussion of broader historical forces is a covert attempt to debunk or downplay the importance of individual talent or hard work. But even 19th-century Atlantic writers could see the importance of good timing. “A given genius may come either too early or too late,” William James wrote in 1880. “Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted rifles.”

As we get closer to the present, a note of sarcasm creeps into the word’s usage: In the 2000s, the writer Megan McArdle used the recurrent headline “Sheer Genius” for columns on businesses making terrible errors. But she was far from the first Atlantic writer to use the word sardonically. One of my favorite essays on genius from the archives is a satirical squib from 1900, which masquerades as an ad for a Genius Discovery Company. “This country needs more geniuses,” the anonymous author wrote. “Everybody knows it. Everybody admits it. Everybody laments it.” The article urged any reader who wondered whether they might be a genius to write in, enclosing a five-dollar fee, “and we will tell you the truth by return mail.”

Having studied the flawed and fickle way that we award the label genius, let me say this—that’s as good a method as any other.

Finally, a Democrat Who Could Shine on Joe Rogan’s Show

2025-07-23T14:30:00-04:00

About two hours into the Gen Z influencer Andrew Callaghan’s interview with Hunter Biden, I had a moment of piercing clarity: Here is a Democrat you could put on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Joe Biden’s surviving son became MAGA world’s favorite punching bag because of his suspect business dealings in Ukraine, his infamous laptop, and his presidential pardon for tax and gun offenses. But in temperament and vocabulary, Hunter is MAGA to the core.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s interviews with Rogan, Theo Von, and Logan Paul resonated with many young men. I can imagine that same audience watching Hunter tell Callaghan about his crack addiction and thinking: Give this guy a break. One of the most upvoted comments on the YouTube video is from a poster saying that the interview prompted him to go to rehab.

Since their crushing loss in November, Democrats have wondered how they can win the battle for attention and reach voters who find them weak, remote, and passive. Their elected officials have been tiptoeing toward using the occasional cuss word in their public appearances, like teenagers cautiously puffing a joint for the first time and hoping not to cough. Hunter Biden, by contrast, went straight for line after line of the hard stuff. Donald Trump is a “fucking dictator thug,” and Democrats should fight against his deportation agenda because “we fought a fucking revolution against a king, based on two things in particular: habeas corpus and due process. And we’re so willing to give them up?”

Hunter’s cadences and mannerisms are eerily reminiscent of his father’s, except where Joe would say “malarkey,” Hunter says: “I don’t have to be fucking nice.” At times, he sounds like his father’s id, saying the things the ex-president would like to say but cannot.

Clearly, Republicans have not cornered the market in gossipy aggression, although in both their and Hunter’s cases, most of that aggression is directed toward the Democrats and the media. In the Callaghan interview, which was released on Monday, the younger Biden has no time for James Carville (“hasn’t run a race in 40 fucking years”), George Clooney (“not a fucking actor”), or CNN’s Jake Tapper (“completely irrelevant”). His greatest animus is reserved for his party’s anti–Joe Biden faction, such as the men behind Pod Save America, who are “four white millionaires that are dining out on their association with Barack Obama from 16 years ago, living in Beverly fucking Hills.” If you grew up in the pre-Trump media era, your response to this might be: Hunter, you have also made money off of your association with a president. But America has long since passed the point where allegations of hypocrisy are a useful political attack. Most voters now think that all politicians are hypocrites, but at least some of them are open about it.

[Read: Democrats have a man problem]

Everything that was bananas about Hunter’s interview by old media standards—the insults, the frank discussion of drugs, the weird segues, the desire to lean into controversy—had previously been embraced by the Trump campaign. Last year, Trump’s most human moment was talking with Theo Von about his brother’s death from alcoholism, an exchange that also featured Von, who is now sober, joking about the low quality of cocaine these days and Trump nodding solemnly, as if this were something his tariff regime might address. In the interview with Callaghan, Hunter Biden talks about how making crack requires only “a mayonnaise jar, cocaine, and baking soda.”

Then there’s the open shilling for sponsors. In Trump’s preelection interview with Logan Paul, bottles of the YouTuber’s energy drink, Prime, sat prominently on the table in front of the hosts, and Paul did an ad for them right after the section on Gaza. Callaghan pushes the self-promotion even further. He interrupts his Hunter Biden interview with inserted segments in which Callaghan faces the camera and pitches his other work, including a documentary on adult babies. (Don’t make me explain. It’s exactly what you fear.) Even more bizarrely, Callaghan surrounds these ads with questions to Hunter about their subject matter. “Some days I identify as a baby,” Hunter responds, gamely, before suggesting that his host should ask the adult baby-diaper lovers if they vote Democrat or Republican. Then he hints at the conspiracy theory that Trump wears a diaper, a cut so deep that even Callaghan doesn’t get it.

You don’t have to like it, but this is the media world now—podcast chats like this are where elections are won and lost, just as much as at the televised town hall, on the front page of the New York Post, or in the stately sitdown with 60 Minutes. The minimum bar for the next Democratic candidate for president should be the ability to react, live on camera, in a plausibly normal fashion, to the existence of adult baby-diaper lovers.

Hunter Biden is on something of an “I was right” tour. Callaghan recorded the interview last month in Delaware. The former Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison also released an interview with Hunter on Monday, covering many of the same topics. According to Original Sin, the book by Tapper and Alex Thompson on the last days of the Biden presidency, the president’s son wanted to do an interview tour to promote his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, about his grief over the death of his brother, Beau, and his drug relapse. Hunter “planned to do a book tour through South Carolina, stopping at famed Black churches to talk about his crack addiction, but Biden’s advisers pushed back,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Hunter relented.”

I now wonder whether Hunter’s instincts were correct for once. He shows Callaghan the bullish charm of the narcissist. Bad things happen to him. Bad things might also happen to those around him, but, in his telling, he isn’t really their cause.

That portrait is hard to square with the available facts. Many people manage to grieve for their brother without starting an affair with his widow, or introducing that widow to crack. Many presidents’ children have wrestled with the inevitable allegations of nepotism that their careers have created; few have so obviously traded on their father’s power as Hunter did with the Ukrainian company Burisma, for which he lobbied when his father was vice president. (His defense for this is that Burisma wasn’t a big deal, that he also worked for many charitable organizations, and that in any case the Trump sons and Jared Kushner are worse.)

He plays dumb on the criticisms of the inflated sales price of his paintings, feigning disbelief that anyone would buy one to curry favor with the president. And while constantly stressing his status as a son, brother, father, and grandfather, Hunter never mentions his treatment of Navy, the little girl whose conception he cannot remember and whom he initially refused to acknowledge or financially assist. In American Woman, a history of first ladies, the journalist Katie Rogers reports that many staff members in the Biden White House were upset by Joe and Jill Biden’s unquestioned backing of their son when he refused to support Navy without a paternity test. “Their devotion to keeping Hunter safe, people close to them said, was worth enduring the onslaught of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats,” Rogers writes.

[From the January 2025 issue: The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost]

Hunter’s perpetual refusal to be held accountable is clearly a character trait that many people are prepared to overlook. But then, when did a populist ever accept responsibility for anything? He has understood that to succeed in the modern media environment, you should throw out intimate details about your life in a way that looks like total, raw, unfiltered honesty while glossing over the raw, unfiltered details that reflect poorly on you. If you really screw up, then promise to atone in a fashion that does not inhibit your life or career—rehab, not a jail sentence. Just look at Hunter’s interviewer for more evidence that this works: In 2023, Callaghan was accused by multiple women of overstepping their sexual boundaries. He thanked his accusers for speaking out, said he had “always taken no for an answer,” pledged to attend a 12-step program, and carried on with his life.

Americans love someone who has been born again, and the younger Biden is charming enough to attribute all his past behavior to the Bad Old Hunter, while spinning a yarn about how, when he met his second wife, Melissa, she simply told him to stop smoking crack—and because of his love for her, he did.

The long podcast interview works so well for public figures—or at least, the ones able to master its idiosyncrasies—because hearing anyone’s life story usually puts you on their side. When Hunter describes his “public humiliation,” even a minimally empathetic viewer will reflect on how horrifically his privacy was invaded, and how none of us would react well to our worst moments being splashed across the internet. Incredibly, Callaghan manages to turn the laptop saga into yet another ad, cutting away to promote Incogni, a service that removes people’s information from data brokers: “So, obviously Hunter here is somebody who’s dealt with a complete lack of privacy in the past couple years, but you don’t need to be the president’s son to have your data leaked,” he tells viewers. “In fact, it’s most likely happening to you right now.”

Funnily enough, the pioneer of the endless-interview podcast, Joe Rogan, doesn’t do personalized ad reads like this. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t need to—his first Spotify deal was reportedly worth more than $200 million—but maybe it’s also that he’s 57, and remembers a world where content and ads were divided by a holy wall. In almost every other respect, though, Callaghan is one of Rogan’s children. This is not an adversarial interview; at one point, he tells Hunter, “I’m on your team.” In three hours of conversation, Callaghan barely interrupts. When Hunter wants to go off on a digression about the Dred Scott case or the anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he is allowed to do so.

The most decisive, and probably irreversible, shift in the post-Rogan American political conversation is evident in how both Callaghan and his guest talk in conspiratorial terms: the “Christofascist incel,” in Hunter’s words, who gave the laptop hard drive to Rudy Giuliani; the Mossad’s alleged intelligence about the October 7 attack before it happened. Yet Callaghan also points out how profitable online conspiracies are for everyone involved. He says that he believes that “most mainstream conspiracy theories, flat earth, chemtrails, QAnon, all that stuff is deliberate misinformation to convince dumb people that they’re doing important research and keep them away from the truth.” Callaghan goes on, “So maybe the conspiracy isn’t, you know, Russia telling people what to do and how to think. It’s just profit-incentivized content creators farming outrage through these ridiculous conspiracies.” He’s spinning out a meta–conspiracy theory. But if this argument can’t deradicalize the extremely online, nothing can.

Headlines about the interview have focused on Hunter’s dead-ender defense of his father’s candidacy. He admits that his father underperformed onstage at the catastrophic June debate, but he blames it on Biden’s staff giving him an Ambien the night before. (Oh, look: another Biden with no apparent agency over bad decisions.)

Denial is not just a river in Egypt, but the fluid coursing through Hunter’s veins. “He flew around the world, basically the mileage he could have flown around the world three times,” the younger Biden said of his father in his interview with Callaghan. “He’s 81 years old. He’s tired as shit.” So advanced age does affect someone’s ability to undertake a grueling presidential campaign? Good to know. “We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party,” Hunter told Jaime Harrison. “That’s my position.” This is a ridiculous position; voters were already worried about Biden’s age, and the debate merely allowed the elites to act on those fears. But who is going to judge a son for refusing to admit his father’s flaws?

[Helen Lewis: Finally, someone said it to Joe Rogan’s face]

So far, more than 2 million people have watched the interview with Callaghan on YouTube, and many more will consume it through extracts on social media. Maybe clips of a president’s son defending habeas corpus and mentioning a crack dealer named Bicycles is what the attention economy demands.

Perhaps the Democrats, instead of spending another $20 million on their “man problem,” should find a candidate who has less baggage than Hunter Biden, but can attack Republican policies with his level of straightforward, pummeling aggression. Maybe someone who was only addicted to one of the more genteel drugs, or only slept with their cousin’s widow. But also someone who can talk about the creepiness of Stephen Miller, and who can attack the greed of the Trump sons (“They’re selling gold telephones and sneakers and $2 billion investments in golf courses, and selling tickets to the White House for investment into their memecoin”) without fretting about being accused of hypocrisy. Maybe even one who can say that they believe in a two-state solution in the Middle East—but also that if Benjamin Netanyahu really did slow-walk the release of hostages for his political gain, that would make him a “monster.”

But don’t just take my word for it—behold the conservative activist Christopher Rufo. “Might be an unpopular opinion, but I find Hunter Biden to be an utterly compelling anti-hero,” he posted on X after watching the interview. “He is honest about his own flaws and sees right through the corruption and artifice of the elite Dem milieu.” Mike Solana, the author of the anti-woke, tech-focused Pirate Wires newsletter, agreed. “If this were a trump son he’d be a MAGA folk hero,” he wrote on X.

This is true. Personally, I would prefer that Hunter Biden show some regret for his actions and how they undermined his father’s presidency, and how that helped return Trump to office. But I would settle for Hunter going on Joe Rogan’s podcast to show MAGA-curious voters that the person at the center of so many conspiracy theories is a real person, not a shadowy villain.

MAGA Influencers Don’t Understand What Journalism Is

2025-07-18T15:55:12-04:00

Defending mainstream journalism these days is about as appealing as doing PR for syphilis. Nonetheless, here I am. Back in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what was billed as “Phase 1” of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in jail in 2019. The 15 handpicked newshounds included Jack Posobiec, promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory; Chaya Raichik, whose Libs of TikTok social-media account itemizes every single American schoolteacher with blue hair and wacky pronouns; and the comedian Chad Prather, performer of the parody song “Beat That Ass,” about the secret to good parenting. Also present was DC_Draino, whose name is a promise to unclog the sewers of the nation’s capital.

The chosen ones duly emerged bearing ring binders and smug expressions—only to discover that most of the information that the government had fed them had already been made public. Several of the influencers have since complained that the Trump administration had given them recycled information. They couldn’t seem to understand why White House officials treated them like idiots. I can help with this one. That’s because they think you are idiots.

[Read: Trump’s Epstein answers are getting worse]

The harsh but simple truth is that powerful people, including President Donald Trump, do not freely hand out information that will make them look bad. If a politician, PR flack, or government official is telling you something, assume that they’re lying to you or spinning or—at best—coincidentally telling you the truth because it will damage their enemies. “We were told that more was coming,” Posobiec complained, but professional commentators should be embarrassed about waiting for the authorities to bless them with scoops. That’s not how things work. You have to go and find things out. Reporters do not content themselves with “just asking questions”—the internet conspiracist’s favored formulation. They gather evidence, check facts, and then decide what they are confident is true. They don’t just blast out everything that lands on their desk, in a “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” kind of way.

That’s because some conspiracy theories turn out to involve actual conspiracies, and the skill is separating the imagined schemes from the real ones. Cover-ups do happen. In Britain, where I live, the public has recently learned for certain that a military source accidentally leaked an email list of hundreds of Afghans who cooperated with Western forces, possibly exposing them to blackmail or reprisals. The leak prompted our government to start spending billions to secretly relocate some of the affected Afghans and their families. All the while, British media outlets—which are subject to far greater legal restrictions on publication than their American counterparts—were barred from reporting not only the contents of the leaked list, but its very existence. Several news organizations expended significant time and money getting that judgment overturned in court.

Earlier this month, the government released a memo declaring that the Department of Justice and the FBI had determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” in the Epstein case. Since then, Trump-friendly influencers have struggled to supply their audience’s demands for more Epstein content while preserving their continued access to the White House, which wants them to stop talking about the story altogether. Because these commentators define themselves through skepticism of “approved narratives” and decry their enemies as “regime mouthpieces,” their newfound trust in the establishment has been heartwarming to see.

Some of the same people who used to cast doubts about the government’s handling of the Epstein case are now running that government. “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself,” J. D. Vance tweeted in December 2021. “What purpose do you even serve?”

I would be intrigued to hear a response to that challenge from Dinesh D’Souza, who said on July 15 that “even though there are unanswered questions about Epstein, it is in fact time to move on.” Or from Charlie Kirk, who said a day earlier: “I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” Or from Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, who wrote: “Must be some juicy and dangerous stuff in those files. But I don’t feel the need to be a backseat driver on this topic. Four leaders I trust said it’s time to let it go.” (For what it’s worth, some influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, have refused to accept the Trump administration’s official line that there’s nothing to see here. I’m not alone in thinking this reflects a desire to outflank anyone tainted by, you know, actual government experience when competing for the affections of the MAGA base in 2028.)

For all right-wing influencers’ claims of an establishment cover-up, most of the publicly known facts about the Epstein case come from major news outlets. In the late 2000s, when few people were paying attention, The New York Times faithfully chronicled Epstein’s suspiciously lenient plea deal—in which multiple accusations of sexual assault on teenage girls were reduced to lesser prostitution charges—under classically dull headlines such as “Questions of Preferential Treatment Are Raised in Florida Sex Case” and “Amid Lurid Accusations, Fund Manager Is Unruffled.” After Epstein’s second arrest, the paper reported on how successfully he had been able to rehabilitate himself from his first brush with the law, prompting awkward questions for Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, and other famous faces.

Epstein’s second arrest might not have happened at all without the work of Julie Brown of the Miami Herald. She doggedly reported on how Trump’s first-term labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, had overseen the plea deal when he was a U.S. attorney in Florida. She found 80 alleged victims—she now thinks there might have been 200—and persuaded four to speak on the record. Around the time that Epstein was wrapping up a light prison sentence in 2009, newsroom cuts at the Herald had forced Brown to take a 15 percent pay reduction. Sometimes she paid her own reporting expenses.

[Listen: The razor-thin line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy]

Over the past two decades, the decline of classified advertising, along with the rise of social media, has left America with far fewer Julie Browns and far more DC_Drainos. This does not feel like progress. The shoe-leather reporters of traditional newspapers and broadcasters have largely given way to a class of influencers who are about as useful as a marzipan hammer in the boring job of establishing facts. In May, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, scheduled a series of special influencers-only briefings, and I watched them all—surely reducing my future time in purgatory. None of the questions generated a single interesting news story.

In recent days, while MAGA influencers have muttered online about the release of camera footage from outside Epstein’s cell on the night of his death, Wired magazine found experts to review the video’s metadata, establishing that it had been edited, and a section had been removed. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal—whose conservative opinion pages make its news reporting harder for the right to dismiss—published details of a 50th-birthday message to Epstein allegedly signed by Trump in 2003. The future president reportedly included a hand-drawn picture of a naked woman and told the financier, “May every day be another wonderful secret.” (Trump has described this as a “fake story,” adding: “I never wrote a picture in my life.” In fact, Trump has donated a number of his drawings to charity auctions.)

Legacy news outlets sometimes report things that turn out not to be true: Saddam Hussein’s imaginary WMDs, the University of Virginia rape story. But that’s because they do reporting. It’s easier not to fail when you don’t even try.

We now have a ridiculous situation where influencers who bang on about the mainstream media are reduced to relying on these outlets for things to talk about. Worse, because no issue can ever be settled as a factual matter, the alternative media is a perpetual-motion machine of speculation. MAGA influencers want the truth, but ignore the means of discovering it.

At the heart of the Epstein story is a real conspiracy, as squalid and mundane as real life usually is. The staff members who enabled Epstein; the powerful friends who ignored his crimes; and the prosecutors who downgraded the charges back in the late ’00s. If the Epstein scandal teaches us anything, it is that America needs a dedicated and decently funded group of people whose job is not just to ask questions, but to find answers. Let’s call them journalists.

The Non-Exoneration of Diddy

2025-07-05T06:00:00-04:00

You think you’ve lost the ability to be shocked, and then you see supporters of Sean Combs—the rapper and producer also known as Diddy—spraying baby oil on one another outside the New York City courthouse where his trial was held.

This greasy display of militant fandom is even more bizarre once you know that the trial did not exonerate Combs. Although he was acquitted on Wednesday of racketeering and sex trafficking, he was found guilty of “transportation to engage in prostitution.” These counts relate to incidents where his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and an anonymous woman, known in court as Jane, were asked to have sex with male escorts while he watched or filmed. The fans’ jubilant tone also ignored perhaps the most salient fact of the case: In court, Combs’s own defense team conceded that he was a domestic abuser.

Now, I understand why Combs himself might be relieved by the verdict. The racketeering charges carried a potential life sentence, whereas the lesser offenses had no minimum jail penalty attached. But his lawyers had no grounds to do what they did—which was to walk out of the courtroom and stand triumphantly in front of the newly lubricated crowds, acting as if Combs had been cleared. “It’s a great victory for Sean Combs; it’s a great victory for the jury system,” Marc Agnifilo, one of his lawyers, said in the post-verdict press conference.

No. The charges on which Combs was acquitted were developed for Mafia bosses, and are an uneasy fit for a case where the alleged conspiracy is not gun-running or a protection racket, but a network of employees and enablers dedicated to one man’s sexual gratification. His acquittal on these charges should not obscure the simple fact that Combs beat up Ventura, repeatedly, over many years. That is not in dispute, not least because some of it was captured on video. Last year, CNN published a surveillance clip, recorded in a hotel in 2016, that shows a clothed Ventura attempting to call an elevator, before Combs—dressed in only a towel—chases after her, grabs her by the neck, throws her to the ground, and kicks her twice while she is on the floor. “We own the domestic violence,” Agnifilo told jurors. “We own it. I hope you guys know this.” (The judge took note of the admission when denying Combs bail.)

[Read: The disturbing implications of the Diddy verdict]

Another man might have been ashamed of kicking his girlfriend while she lay motionless on the floor. Combs let his lawyers peacock around because he didn’t also get convicted of trafficking her. Our client is innocent! (Of some of the charges.) His reputation has been restored! (Say it enough, and it might come true.)

Maybe this brazenness will work. We now live in a time when what matters is declaiming half-truths, loudly and bullishly, in the expectation that most people aren’t paying attention to the details. Combs’s entire defense had a sassy, made-for-TikTok quality, shamelessly playing to the gallery—a tactic pioneered by O. J. Simpson’s lawyers in the age of television. One of Combs’s attorneys, the 30-something Teny Geragos, went viral with TikTok clips defending the mogul before the trial. His lawyers were performing for two audiences: the jury, and the online Diddy stans. The defense declined to put Combs on the stand to explain himself, and called no witnesses. That left the spotlight squarely on his accusers. As a result, it was their testimony that was harshly scrutinized online, not his actions.

From the start, this trial was not a vindication of Combs’s life choices. Over and over again, witness accounts portrayed a character that only a mother, or a defense team, could love. (Combs’s mother, Janice, was a staple of the public gallery, along with his six older children.) His lawyers presented his “freak-off” parties, where he invited men to have sex with his girlfriends, as a mere kink, part of an unorthodox but harmless swingers’ lifestyle. When federal agents searched his home in Miami Beach, they found 25 bottles of baby oil and 31 tubes of another lubricant in one closet. In total, prosecutors said that searches uncovered more than 1,000 bottles of such products—an assertion that only enthralled Combs’s admirers.

What the glistening fans outside the courthouse ignored is that Combs’s defense team, in dodging the racketeering charges, conceded that his relationship with Ventura was marked by threats and violence. The defense had to grant that premise, because those allegations had already led to a $20 million settlement with Ventura after she filed a lawsuit in 2023. Combs paid up the day after the documents became public. (That civil suit, and others filed by women against Combs, apparently helped trigger the federal investigation that led to his trial.)

Despite this history, his lawyers performed an impressive judo move, using the very fact of the settlement against Ventura, during the four grueling days of testimony to which she was subjected. Aren’t you just a gold digger? was the heavy implication. Ventura said that she would happily give back the money if she could also undo the freak-offs. Her civil lawsuit stated that she had not pressed criminal charges because she had no confidence in obtaining justice: “She recognized that she was powerless, and that reporting Mr. Combs to the authorities would not alter Mr. Combs’s status or influence but would merely give Mr. Combs another excuse to hurt her.”

This belief has been thoroughly vindicated. Nevertheless, the idea of a mercenary motive was clearly a potent line—and one that Combs’s lawyers have also deployed in the dozen civil suits now awaiting him from other alleged victims. “We live in a world where anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason,” they said when 10 more suits emerged in February of this year, on top of several existing claims of grooming, exploitation, and abuse of minors. Combs has denied these allegations.

Although people across America had seen the video from CNN, Combs was not on trial in New York for assault, so the defense argued that the incident was irrelevant to the charges. “Domestic violence is not sex trafficking,” Geragos, one of Combs’s lawyers, said in court. Combs’s team contended that the video did not show Ventura being punished for leaving a freak-off party, as the prosecution suggested, but instead followed an argument between her and Combs over a phone.

This was an impressive sleight of hand. If someone’s partner can be that violent in an everyday argument, then surely that affects their ability to say no to anything else that happens in the relationship? Ann Olivarius, a lawyer who specializes in abuse and harassment cases in the United States and Britain, told me that following the trial was a demoralizing experience for her. “I was glued to Cassie’s testimony,” she said over instant message. “I thought she was compelling, strong, admirable and also being crucified by the Defence.” She said that the defense’s acknowledgment of Combs’s domestic violence was a way “to put it in a neat little box and say: ‘When she wasn’t beaten black and blue, she happily and freely consented every time.’”

Other witnesses testified to violent and controlling behavior by Combs. The singer Dawn Richards said she had seen him kick Ventura when she was on the floor, after attempting to hit her with a skillet when she was cooking him eggs. (While the jury was out of the room, the defense called this allegation a “drop-dead lie.”) The makeup artist Mylah Morales testified that she saw Ventura with a split lip and a swollen eye. Ventura’s former friend Kerry Morgan said that she was present when Combs tried to break into Ventura’s apartment with a hammer after the hotel assault. She also said she once saw him drag Ventura down a corridor by her hair. Ventura’s mother, Regina, told the court that Combs had threatened to release sex tapes of her daughter. Two men testified that they had been paid to have sex with Ventura, and one of them, an escort named Daniel Phillip, told the court he had overheard Combs slap Ventura until she cried in another room.

As is quite common in allegations of coercive control, the defense could produce affectionate and sexually explicit messages from Ventura that seemed to undermine her claims of victimization. The fact that the prosecution could produce footage of her literally being victimized did not, apparently, offset the effect of these messages on the jury. Nor did the fact that Combs was not just her boyfriend, but also in charge of her career: They met when she was a 19-year-old aspiring singer, and he signed her to his label.

Jane, the anonymous witness who was a recent ex-girlfriend of Combs’s, told a story of coercion much like what Ventura faced. She said she had been pressured into “hotel nights” where she had sex with male escorts hired by Combs. These were painful and often left her with infections, she added, not least because Combs became angry when she asked the men to wear condoms. But she went along with the sex sessions because she was in love with Combs and “didn’t want to indicate any negativity.”

One thing the prosecution did right was bring in an expert on coercive control to explain to the jury that in abusive and controlling relationships, the victims become quintessential people pleasers—their entire lives end up being dedicated to placating their partner. “You destroy someone’s normal,” is how a British man named Luke Hart described the situation to me, when I interviewed him for my book Difficult Women. His father, Lance, had terrorized the whole family for many years, and when Luke’s mother finally walked out in 2016, Lance tracked her down at a local swimming pool and shot her dead, along with Luke’s 19-year-old sister. Lance then killed himself.

After the murders, Luke and his brother finally realized that their childhood had been abusive—even though, to outsiders, they had looked like a normal family. An orderly and well-behaved one, in fact, because everyone had been frightened of triggering Lance’s temper. Luke described being yelled at for hours over minor infractions, until he learned to modify his behavior to avoid his father’s anger. “Every part of your life is the slow crushing of those prison bars,” he told me.

Explained like that, most people can see how someone might send loving messages to their abuser. But juries still struggle with the situation, particularly when you add in our ambient sense that rich and successful people probably do attract gold diggers and hangers-on, as well as our self-flattering belief that we wouldn’t put up with being abused and would walk straight out the door.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: Diddy’s defenders]

Feminist theorists have also come up with an explanation for why people downplay or excuse abusers’ actions. Quite simply, doing so asks less of us. If, as a Diddy fan, you believe that Ventura consented to her abuse, then you can go on listening to his music without a moral scruple. If you are a business associate of his, you can keep cashing checks with a clear conscience. Believing her instead requires something from you—setting yourself against a powerful man and all the people who will line up behind him.

In the Combs case, the women’s testimony was parsed for minor inconsistencies by social-media creators, but the rapper’s voice was heard only through the respectable tones of his lawyers. This trial-by-TikTok means Ventura leaves the court with a vague stink on her. She must have liked this weird stuff if she hung around.

The sentencing hearing, likely in the fall, will let us know whether Combs’s lawyers have failed in their main objective, of minimizing his time behind bars. But their secondary aim has always been to create a perception of martyrdom, which will preserve Brand Diddy as a moneymaking enterprise. In the final week of the trial, Combs’s son Christian released an album, under the name King Combs, that included a track called “Diddy Free.” On the same day, another son, Justin, was accused of participating in a rape alongside his father in 2017, having lured a woman to Los Angeles with the promise of a job. (Combs’s lawyers deny the accusations.)

More is at stake here than just Combs’s freedom. “Celebrity court cases are how we metabolise these questions of power, sex and men and women,” Olivarius told me. The real tragedy of the Combs case is that Ventura did not feel confident enough to file criminal charges against him for domestic abuse. If she had done so, any resulting trial would have focused on his violence and threats, rather than the more nebulous charges of trafficking and racketeering. As a result, it would have been harder for his lawyers—and his fans—to maintain that he has been vindicated.

The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine

2025-06-29T08:30:00-04:00

Allow children to transition, or they will kill themselves. For more than a decade, this has been the strongest argument in favor of youth gender medicine—a scenario so awful that it stifled any doubts or questions about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerable media articles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.”

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”

Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

Even then, his admission did not register with the liberal justices. When the court voted 6–3 to uphold the Tennessee law, Sonia Sotomayor claimed in her dissent that “access to care can be a question of life or death.” If she meant any kind of therapeutic support, that might be defensible. But claiming that this is true of medical transition specifically—the type of care being debated in the Skrmetti case—is not supported by the current research.

Advocates of the open-science movement often talk about “zombie facts”—popular sound bites that persist in public debate, even when they have been repeatedly discredited. Many common political claims made in defense of puberty blockers and hormones for gender-dysphoric minors meet this definition. These zombie facts have been flatly contradicted not just by conservatives but also by prominent advocates and practitioners of the treatment—at least when they’re speaking candidly. Many liberals are unaware of this, however, because they are stuck in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine—claims from which its elite advocates have long since retreated.

Perhaps the existence of this bubble shouldn’t be surprising. Many of the most fervent advocates of youth transition are also on record disparaging the idea that it should be debated at all. Strangio—who works for the country’s best-known free-speech organization—once tweeted that he would like to scuttle Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, a skeptical treatment of youth gender medicine. Strangio declared, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial. “There are not two sides to this issue,” she once said, according to a recent episode of The Protocol, a New York Times podcast.

Boasting about your unwillingness to listen to your opponents probably plays well in some crowds. But it left Strangio badly exposed in front of the Supreme Court, where it became clear that the conservative justices had read the most convincing critiques of hormones and blockers—and had some questions as a result.

Trans-rights activists like to accuse skeptics of youth gender medicine—and publications that dare to report their views—of fomenting a “moral panic.” But the movement has spent the past decade telling gender-nonconforming children that anyone who tries to restrict access to puberty blockers and hormones is, effectively, trying to kill them. This was false, as Strangio’s answer tacitly conceded. It was also irresponsible.

After England restricted the use of puberty blockers in 2020, the government asked an expert psychologist, Louis Appleby, to investigate whether the suicide rate for patients at the country’s youth gender clinic rose dramatically as a result. It did not: In fact, he did not find any increase in suicides at all, despite the lurid claims made online. “The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide,” Appleby reported. “One risk is that young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers.”

When red-state bans are discussed, you will also hear liberals say that conservative fears about the medical-transition pathway are overwrought—because all children get extensive, personalized assessments before being prescribed blockers or hormones. This, too, is untrue. Although the official standards of care recommend thorough assessment over several months, many American clinics say they will prescribe blockers on a first visit.

This isn’t just a matter of U.S. health providers skimping on talk therapy to keep costs down; some practitioners view long evaluations as unnecessary and even patronizing. “I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin,” Olson-Kennedy told The Atlantic in 2018. Her published research shows that she has referred girls as young as 13 for double mastectomies. And what if these children later regret their decision? “Adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned logical decision,” she once told an industry seminar, adding: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”

Perhaps the greatest piece of misinformation believed by liberals, however, is that the American standards of care in this area are strongly evidence-based. In fact, at this point, the fairest thing to say about the evidence surrounding medical transition for adolescents—the so-called Dutch protocol, as opposed to talk therapy and other support—is that it is weak and inconclusive. (A further complication is that American child gender medicine has deviated significantly from this original protocol, in terms of length of assessments and the number and demographics of minors being treated.) Yes, as activists are keen to point out, most major American medical associations support the Dutch protocol. But consensus is not the same as evidence. And that consensus is politically influenced.

Rachel Levine, President Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health and human services, successfully lobbied to have age minimums removed for most surgeries from the standards of care drawn up by WPATH. That was a deeply political decision—Levine, according to emails from her office reviewed by the Times, believed that listing any specific limits under age 18 would give opponents of youth transition hard targets to exploit.

More recently, another court case over banning blockers and hormones, this time in Alabama, has revealed that WPATH members themselves had doubts about their own guidelines.

[Read: Young trans children know who they are]

In 2022, Alabama passed a law criminalizing the prescription of hormones and blockers to patients under 19. After the Biden administration sued to block the law, the state’s Republican attorney general subpoenaed documents showing that WPATH has known for some time that the evidence base for adolescent transition is thin. “All of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in research to back up our recommendations,” Eli Coleman, the psychologist who chaired the team revising the standards of care, wrote to his colleagues in 2023. Yet the organization did not make this clear in public. Laura Edwards-Leeper—who helped bring the Dutch protocol to the U.S. but has since criticized in a Washington Post op-ed the unquestioningly gender-affirmative model—has said that the specter of red-state bans made her and her op-ed co-author reluctant to break ranks.

The Alabama litigation also confirmed that WPATH had commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence for the Dutch protocol. However, close to publication, the Johns Hopkins University researcher involved was told that her findings needed to be “scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care.” This is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. You don’t start with a treatment and then ensure that only studies that support that treatment are published. In a legal filing in the Alabama case, Coleman insisted “it is not true” that the WPATH guidelines “turned on any ideological or political considerations” and that the group’s dispute with the Johns Hopkins researcher concerned only the timing of publication. Yet the Times has reported that at least one manuscript she sought to publish “never saw the light of day.”

The Alabama disclosures are not the only example of this reluctance to acknowledge contrary evidence. Last year, Olson-Kennedy said that she had not published her own broad study on mental-health outcomes for youth with gender dysphoria, because she worried about its results being “weaponized.” That raised suspicions that she had found only sketchy evidence to support the treatments that she has been prescribing—and publicly advocating for—over many years.

Last month, her study finally appeared as a preprint, a form of scientific publication where the evidence has not yet been peer-reviewed or finalized. Its participants “demonstrated no significant changes in reported anxious/depressed, withdrawn/depressed, somatic complaints, social problems, thought problems, attention problems, aggressive behavior, internalizing problems or externalizing problems” in the two years after starting puberty blockers. (I have requested comment from Olson-Kennedy via Children’s Hospital Los Angeles but have not yet heard back.)

The reliance on elite consensus over evidence helps make sense of WPATH’s flatly hostile response to the Cass report in England, which commissioned systematic reviews and recommended extreme caution over the use of blockers and hormones. The review was a direct challenge to WPATH’s ability to position itself as the final arbiter of these treatments—something that became more obvious when the conservative justices referenced the British document in their questions and opinions in Skrmetti. One of WPATH’s main charges against Hilary Cass, the senior pediatrician who led the review, was that she was not a gender specialist—in other words, that she was not part of the charmed circle who already agreed that these treatments were beneficial.

[Read: Britain is leaving the U.S. gender-medicine debate behind]

Because of WPATH’s hostility, many on the American left now believe that the Cass review has been discredited. “Upon first reading, especially to a person with limited knowledge of the history of transgender health care, much of the report might seem reasonable,” Lydia Polgreen wrote in the Times last August. However, after “poring over the document” and “interviewing experts in gender-affirming care,” Polgreen realized that the Cass review was “fundamentally a subjective, political document.”

Advocates of youth gender medicine have reacted furiously to articles in the Times and elsewhere that take Cass’s conclusions seriously. Indeed, some people inside the information bubble appear to believe that if respectable publications would stop writing about this story, all the doubts and questions—and Republican attempts to capitalize on them electorally—would simply disappear. Whenever the Times has published a less-than-cheerleading article about youth transition, supporters of gender medicine have accused the newspaper of manufacturing a debate that otherwise would not exist. After the Skrmetti decision, Strangio was still describing media coverage of the issue as “insidious,” adding: “The New York Times, especially, has been fixated on casting the medical care as being of an insufficient quality.”

Can this misinformation bubble ever be burst? On the left, support for youth transition has been rolled together with other issues—such as police reform and climate activism—as a kind of super-saver combo deal of correct opinions. The 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has made funding gender transition, including for minors, part of his pitch to be New York’s mayor. But complicated issues deserve to be treated individually: You can criticize Israel, object to the militarization of America’s police forces, and believe that climate change is real, and yet still not support irreversible, experimental, and unproven medical treatments for children.

The polarization of this issue in America has been deeply unhelpful for getting liberals to accept the sketchiness of the evidence base. When Vice President J. D. Vance wanted to troll the left, he joined Bluesky—where skeptics of youth gender medicine are among the most blocked users—and immediately started talking about the Skrmetti judgment. Actions like that turn accepting the evidence base into a humiliating climbdown.

Acknowledging the evidence does not mean that you also have to support banning these treatments—or reject the idea that some people will be happier if they transition. Cass believes that some youngsters may indeed benefit from the medical pathway. “Whilst some young people may feel an urgency to transition, young adults looking back at their younger selves would often advise slowing down,” her report concludes. “For some, the best outcome will be transition, whereas others may resolve their distress in other ways.”

I have always argued against straightforward bans on medical transition for adolescents. In practice, the way these have been enacted in red states has been uncaring and punitive. Parents are threatened with child-abuse investigations for pursuing treatments that medical professionals have assured them are safe. Children with severe mental-health troubles suddenly lose therapeutic support. Clinics nationwide, including Olson-Kennedy’s, are now abruptly closing because of the political atmosphere. Writing about the subject in 2023, I argued that the only way out of the culture war was for the American medical associations to commission reviews and carefully consider the evidence.

[From the July/August 2018 issue: When children say they’re trans]

However, the revelations from Skrmetti and the Alabama case have made me more sympathetic to commentators such as Leor Sapir, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who supports the bans because American medicine cannot be trusted to police itself. “Are these bans the perfect solution? Probably not,” he told me in 2023. “But at the end of the day, if it’s between banning gender-affirming care and leaving it unregulated, I think we can minimize the amount of harm by banning it.” Once you know that WPATH wanted to publish a review only if it came to the group’s preferred conclusion, Sapir’s case becomes more compelling.

Despite the concerted efforts to suppress the evidence, however, the picture on youth gender medicine has become clearer over the past decade. It’s no humiliation to update our beliefs as a result: I regularly used to write that medical transition was “lifesaving,” before I saw how limited the evidence on suicide was. And it took another court case, brought by the British detransitioner Keira Bell, for me to realize fully that puberty blockers were not what they were sold as—a “safe and reversible” treatment that gave patients “time to think”—but instead a one-way ticket to full transition, with physical changes that cannot be undone.

[Read: The attack on trans rights won’t end there]

Some advocates for the Dutch protocol, as it’s applied in the United States, have staked their entire career and reputation on its safety and effectiveness. They have strong incentives not to concede the weakness of the evidence. In 2023, the advocacy group GLAAD drove a truck around the offices of The New York Times to declare that the “science is settled.” Doctors such as Olson-Kennedy and activists such as Strangio are unlikely to revise their opinions.

For everyone else, however, the choice is still open. We can support civil-rights protections for transgender people without having to endorse an experimental and unproven set of medical treatments—or having to repeat emotionally manipulative and now discredited claims about suicide.

I am not a fan of the American way of settling political disputes, by kicking them over to an escalating series of judges. But in the case of youth gender medicine, the legal system has provided clarity and disclosure that might otherwise not exist. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s oral questioning in Skrmetti and the discovery process in Alabama, we now have a clearer picture of how youth gender medicine has really been operating in the United States, and an uncomfortable insight into how advocacy groups and medical associations have tamped down their own concerns about its evidence base. Those of us who have been urging caution now know that many of our ostensible opponents had the same concerns. They just smothered them, for political reasons.

The Democrats Must Confront Their Gerontocracy

2025-06-19T06:00:00-04:00

Last week, something happened that is extremely rare in Washington, D.C., but completely normal outside of it: People openly described an octogenarian as frail and overdue for retirement. The subject of discussion was Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting congressional delegate, who turned 88 on Friday. Recently, several D.C. figures have questioned her ability to serve.

Beverly Perry, a senior adviser to Mayor Muriel Bowser, went on the record to say that it was “hard” for Holmes Norton “to navigate the political waters as she has in the past.” Holmes Norton dismissed concerns about her age and, for good measure, also said that she was planning to run for another term. “I don’t know why anybody would even ask me,” the Democrat added, to which anyone outside of American politics would surely respond: because you’re older than nylon stockings and the ballpoint pen!

[Read: Biden’s age wasn’t a cover-up. It was an observable fact.]

To a degree that seems bizarre to me as an outsider, the American party system, particularly on the Democratic side, defers to incumbents. (Since the 2022 midterm election, eight members of Congress have died in office. All of them were Democrats.) But in Holmes Norton’s case, something unusual has occurred: People close to her have continued to express concern about her ability to serve, and, even more unusually, have done so under their own names. “As her friend and someone who deeply admires her, I’ve made my peace with recommending to her that I think this is her final term,” the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told The New York Times. The candor of Perry, Brazile, and others allowed the media to report forthrightly about Holmes Norton’s decline—her forgetting names, communicating in broken sentences, and struggling to read prepared remarks or recognize long-standing colleagues.

Eventually, the delegate put out a more ambivalent statement, saying that “through thoughtful discussions with my friends, family and closest advisers, I’m still considering my options for the next election cycle.”

In fact, even a moment’s deliberation would tell Holmes Norton that her constituents would be best served by her gracious retirement—as would American democracy. People worry about seeming heartless, or disrespectful, when they note the inevitable effect of time on senior politicians, particularly those who were trailblazers in their youth. Sadly though, the decisions of elderly and sick politicians have demonstrable consequences: Last Thursday, Republican cuts to overseas aid and public broadcasters passed in the House by just two votes. Three elderly Democrats have already died in this congressional session. If your favorite NPR show disappears from the airwaves, then go ahead and blame the Republicans. But spare a moment to regret the choices of the late Gerry Connolly of Virginia, Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, and Sylvester Turner of Texas.

Why is Holmes Norton’s story prompting such frank public discussion? Two words: Joe Biden. D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinto told The Washington Post that she was going on the record because she had read Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, a painful account of former President Biden’s decision to run for reelection in 2024 despite his advanced age. “We need to speak up,” she said.

Amen, sister. After reading that book, I can see why online liberals are so keen to change the subject by complaining that relitigating the Biden age controversy was a distraction from the real abuses of Donald Trump. If I wanted people to vote for the Democrats again, I wouldn’t want them reading Original Sin either.

[Read: The congressman who saw the truth about Biden]

Yes, a few figures on the left emerge with some credit: Dean Phillips, a former member of Congress who attempted a primary challenge against Biden despite knowing he would get crushed; George Clooney, for writing an op-ed voicing what elected Dems were too chicken to say after the disastrous June 2024 debate; and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, for belatedly wielding the hatchet. But overall, the entire party comes off as stale and rotten, unable to advance its goals because it’s tiptoeing around the vanity of its politicians.

The entire premise of the Democrats’ election pitch—democracy is on the ballot; this is the most important election of our lifetimes; the United States is at one minute to midnight before an authoritarian takeover—was compromised by the fact that senior Democrats with their own presidential ambitions stayed silent in the belief they could just run in 2028 instead. Their mouths were saying: We’re heading for fascism. But their brains were calculating: I’ll just sit this one out. That selfish careerism went right to the top. At some point, Biden—or his advisers—began to see his interests and the country’s as indivisible. Only he could beat Trump. Kamala Harris wasn’t up to it. He had earned the right to run again.

A similar sentiment can be found in Holmes Norton’s response to an Axios reporter who asked her in 2023 whether she would step aside to mentor a new generation. “That never happens,” she said. “People who retire don’t go to training someone else.” This might be literally true, but it is also infinitely depressing. Where’s the sense of being part of a political movement, something larger than yourself? Where’s the sense of there being a torch to pass on, rather than you personally clinging on to power for as long as possible? This is the kind of self-aggrandizement that ends with people talking about themselves in the third person.

When the origins of America’s gerontocracy are discussed, the usual example is Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Republican senator who died in 2003 at 100 only six months after retiring from public office. But the rot really set in with the PR campaign for Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying on the Supreme Court despite her advancing age and pancreatic-cancer diagnosis. Instead of facing massive public pressure from Democrats to retire before Obama left office, the liberal justice was rewarded with cutesy interviews about her workout program and indomitable spirit. When I watched Ginsburg’s personal trainer solemnly doing push-ups by her casket in 2020, I didn’t feel moved. I felt annoyed. The mythology of the wizened, unbowed feminist icon, the Notorious RBG, came at a high cost for American women a few years later, when an emboldened 6–3 conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade. What was presented as perseverance and stamina—or even as a feminist act of judicial girlbossery—now looks like narcissism. The court needs me. No other Democratic appointee will do.

To its credit, Original Sin describes Biden’s deterioration with empathy. One of the terrible side effects of aging is the sense of the world slipping away from you, of your diminishing relevance and irresistible slide into oblivion. (As I’m writing this, Arthur Brooks’s tragic and sobering article on career peaks has returned to the top of The Atlantic’s most-read list, for the umpteenth time.) People see the denial that this decline can provoke in their parents before experiencing it themselves. Throughout Original Sin, Democratic strategists, members of Congress, and staffers confide to the authors that Biden’s memory lapses and freezes reminded them of their mom or dad, and the subsequent struggle to get them into residential care.

In politicians—most of whom thrive on attention, importance, and buzz—that defiance is magnified. No one goes gentle into that good night, when the dying of the light also means no longer getting good tables at fashionable restaurants or reporters flatteringly soliciting your thoughts. Original Sin trots through the many, many recent instances of elderly politicians whose allies hid their deterioration from outsiders. The most incredible story remains that of Kay Granger, an 81-year-old Republican from Texas, who missed six months of votes in Congress before she was eventually discovered in an assisted-living facility last December. Her family had put her there without notifying her constituents or the media. She has “dementia issues,” her son said.

Onlookers often assume that such situations are the result of a conspiracy of silence by the media. In Granger’s case, the more banal explanation is that local newspapers, which might once have covered bread-and-butter votes of local representatives, have been hollowed out or closed. No one knew where she was because almost no one was paying attention. In Biden’s case, the facts were out there for anyone who cared to look. Several outlets—notably Axios and The Wall Street Journal—did report on his decline before the summer debate. But reporters were faced by denials from Biden’s inner circle and silence from other Democrats, who feared that they would ruin their careers by publicly stating the obvious. Because no one could see a way to force him out of the race, the story went nowhere.

For months, I’ve been puzzling over the fact that Britain, where I live, does not have the same gerontocracy problem in its Parliament as the U.S. does in Congress. One answer is surely that we have a prime minister chosen from the lower house, and they can be removed from office without their party losing power. That makes regicide less costly; a British Biden would be handed his gold watch and farewell card without the issue becoming existential for his fellow party members.

Also, Britain has an appointed second chamber rather than an elected one. The average age in the House of Lords is 70, and the oldest member has reached 100. But the Lords sees itself as a revising body—by convention, it does not vote down law proposals that were contained in the governing party’s election manifesto—and has traditionally been the destination for retired politicians looking to use their expertise and wisdom, free from the constraints of campaigning and constituency work. “There’s a joke in the Lords that people here are post-ambitious,” Ayesha Hazarika, a 49-year-old who joined the chamber when she was made a baroness last year, recently told me.

[Read: An autopsy report on Biden’s in-office decline]

American politics would benefit enormously from an institution like the House of Lords—an emeritus track for those who are not vigorous enough for frontline politics anymore but not ready for a quiet retirement either. As it stands, older politicians in the U.S. face a cliff edge. Either they are still holding office, even if in name only, or they are nobody at all.

In the absence of that emeritus track, what America needs are stronger parties that are able to exert influence on their members for the greater good. The Democrat and Republican establishments are clearly now ghostly shadows of what they once were. Worn away by money and polarization, they are useless husks. The Republicans cower in the face of Trump’s bullying, and the Democrats lack the killer instinct necessary to eject frail and faltering liabilities. Just about the only person I could imagine having the skill and force to change the Democratic Party’s culture is Nancy Pelosi. She is 85.

The Settlers With Their Sights on Gaza

2025-06-13T10:42:51-04:00

As a chronicler of American subcultures, Louis Theroux is used to being in uncomfortable situations. But when he started to research his latest documentary—about Israeli settlers in the West Bank—what surprised him most was how open everyone was about their project, which violates international law. “It was just shocking and strange,” Theroux told me, “because most times, activity that feels really predatory or immoral takes place in the dark.”

Some of the outposts depicted in The Settlers are illegal even under Israeli law, Theroux says—although the country’s government just approved 22 additional settlements in the West Bank, in some cases retrospectively legalizing ones already established. Achieving such expansions has been the life’s work of Theroux’s main subject, Daniella Weiss, who is widely described as the “godmother” of the settler movement and boasts on camera about having senior politicians on speed dial. When Theroux tells the 79-year-old that moving a civilian population into a conquered territory is considered a war crime, Weiss laughs. “It’s a light felony,” she replies. Her next target is the Gaza Strip.

To Weiss, the timing seems perfect. Israel’s war on Hamas has displaced a majority of the population in Gaza at least once, according to the United Nations, and Donald Trump has spoken of turning the area into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” In America, this idea of Mar-a-Gaza has become a late-night-show punch line, but to the most hard-core Israeli settlers, retaking the Strip would be the fulfillment of a longtime dream.

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

The Settlers was broadcast in Britain, where I live, in late April. Within hours, bootlegged versions were circulating on X, where they racked up millions of views. This shouldn’t be surprising, because many online outlets, from The Joe Rogan Experience to the start-up Zeteo, have taken a more skeptical line on Israel’s war objectives than the major U.S. television networks, reflecting the views of their audiences.

Theroux, who is British-American, described himself to me as “not terrifically political,” but he has nonetheless created a damning portrait of a group of religious extremists who believe that their claim to the West Bank comes from a higher authority than any mere UN directive or international treaty.

Like many of the settlers Theroux interviews in the film, Weiss believes that the Jewish homeland is her birthright. “She embodied this emboldened settler movement, both in her outlook, the fact of how long she’d been doing it, her level of influence, the passion she projects, and her kind-of completely uninhibited quality,” he told me. Toward the end of the film, Weiss even shoves him to make a point. Were he to respond in kind, she says, people could present that clip out of context and accuse him of physically abusing a woman. The implication is that what Theroux calls “settler violence” is merely self-defense—a natural response to Palestinian provocation.

[Read: The right-wing Israeli campaign to resettle Gaza]

The documentary, which recently became officially available to watch in the United States on the streaming service BBC Select, also features a number of Americans who have moved to the region to pursue what they see as a more meaningful life. One of them, Ari Abramowitz, was born in Texas and came to live in the land he calls “Judea and Samaria” after visiting as a teenager. He now runs a farm and vacation retreat in the West Bank. “I’m so uncomfortable using the word Palestinian,” he tells Theroux of a local Arab village, “because I don’t think it exists.” Another, a man from New York who now lives in Hebron, tells Theroux: “Our right to be in this land is the Torah, is the godly promise. Where we don’t settle, terror grows.” Both men are armed with rifles when Theroux meets them.

Theroux has tackled the settlers once already, in a 2011 documentary called The Ultra Zionists, which showed a more rounded picture—both the zeal of the West Bank arrivals and the backlash they face from displaced Palestinians. (When traveling with one settler convoy, Theroux’s car was pelted with rocks; a settler house he visited was later firebombed.) This new documentary feels more polemic, focusing on the demeaning daily restrictions on Palestinian life and the intensity of the Israeli military occupation. “The architecture and infrastructure of power and domination is really interesting,” Theroux told me. “As much as the why of the psychology, or the political outlook, is fascinating—actually, if you strip that out, there’s also this extraordinary process that takes place involving walls, gates, guard towers, specially built roads. And I very much wanted to do justice to that as well.”

I’m not shocked that this documentary was made by the BBC, rather than an American network. To a degree that surprises me, many Americans treat pro-Palestinian activism as a fringe leftist pursuit, irredeemably tainted by disruptive and anti-Semitic protests on college campuses. But disillusionment and anger with Israel are widespread, among both ordinary voters and ruling politicians, in Europe and other places that are otherwise friendly to America and its allies. In a December 2023 filing in the International Court of Justice, South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. By October 2024, eight other countries, including Ireland and Turkey, had joined the case. In the latest YouGov sentiment tracker of six Western European countries, “only 13–21% in any country have a favourable opinion of Israel, compared to 63–70% who have an unfavourable view.”

[Listen: Mossad’s former chief calls the war in Gaza ‘useless’]

Although only a small minority of the surveyed Europeans believed the October 7 attacks were justified, less than a quarter of respondents agreed that Israel’s ongoing response is proportionate. These figures make uncomfortable reading for British Jews who abhor the actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government but also recognize the existence of anti-Semitism within some parts of pro-Palestinian activism. My friend Hadley Freeman, for instance, wrote an agonized column reflecting on how the “existence of anti-Jew hatred does not change the fact that thousands of people are dying on the Gaza strip.” In April, 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a group whose perspective is broadly pro-Israel, published an open letter condemning the war. “Israel’s soul is being ripped out,” they wrote.

One inevitable criticism of The Settlers is that Theroux has unfairly focused on a fringe minority of Israelis in order to demonize the entire country, which is taking military action to respond to the October 7 attacks, rescue its remaining hostages, and protect itself from future terror plots. “What could have possessed the BBC to make a documentary about the very worst Jews they could find?” Jake Wallis Simons, the former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, wrote after the initial broadcast on the BBC. By focusing on the “freak show” of the viciously contested town of Hebron and demonstrating a lack of curiosity about Palestinian violence, Wallis Simons argued, the documentary showed a “patrician, sneering perspective that in the eyes of the BBC passes for impartiality.”

Theroux has indeed made a career out of interviewing extremists, weirdos, and people living marginal lifestyles. His previous subjects include swingers, porn actors, and the Westboro Baptist Church. By focusing on the hard-core settlers, is he being unfair? Theroux counters that some of Netanyahu’s most powerful cabinet members, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, share Weiss’s outlook. Smotrich, who oversees the civilian administration of the West Bank, has repeatedly threatened to leave the ruling coalition if Israel agrees to a cease-fire in Gaza. Ben-Gvir is perhaps the most unpopular member, outside Israel, of Netanyahu’s cabinet—a man who joked at a recent appearance in the U.S. about how little food Palestinian prisoners were given. In the film, Ben-Gvir appears at a settler rally where the annexation of Gaza is openly discussed, and he urges attendees to “rebuild, settle, encourage Palestinian emigration and win.”

[Read: The two extremists driving Israel’s policy]

Here in the U.K., the documentary aired just as elite opinion soured decisively on Israel’s war in Gaza. Because Britain’s most important ally, the United States, strongly supports Israel, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s left-wing Labour Party has struggled to find a position that reconciles its supporters’ distaste for Netanyahu and the demands of realpolitik. (The toxic legacy of the previous Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who was kicked out for denying the extent of anti-Semitism that flourished among party members on his watch, has also complicated Starmer’s response.) On May 19, however, Starmer released a joint statement with Emmanuel Macron of France and Mark Carney of Canada condemning Israel’s actions, and calling for more aid to Gaza and an end to settlement expansion in the West Bank. “Israel suffered a heinous attack on October 7,” the three leaders wrote. “We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate.”

The next day—less than a month after The Settlers appeared on the BBC—the British government sanctioned Weiss, declaring that she was involved in “threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals.” (The Israeli government characterized this move, which prohibits Weiss from traveling to Britain and freezes any assets she might have in banks there, as “unjustified and regrettable.”) Theroux doesn’t know if his documentary affected this decision, but “it seems coincidental, doesn’t it?” He doubts the sanctions will make much difference to Weiss. On June 10, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were also sanctioned by Britain—as well as by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway—for what Foreign Secretary David Lammy described as their “horrendous extremist language.” In response, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that America “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.”

Like the majority of my fellow Britons, I don’t believe that Israel is currently fighting a proportionate war. Launching a new armed campaign against Iran strikes me as reckless. Netanyahu is taking advantage of the Trump presidency to prolong the Gaza conflict, keeping his extremist coalition partners in the fold and himself in power. In doing so, he is being cheered on by Ben-Gvir, Weiss, and others in the settler movement who believe that they have an uncompromisable right to disputed land, backed by God’s will and military might.

No single film can do justice to the complexity and tragedy of the Middle East. But even if Theroux has settled upon the “very worst” interviewees he could find, it’s troubling that they have support at the highest levels of Israel’s government.

The Trump Administration’s Nasty Campaign Against Trans People

2025-06-09T09:30:04-04:00

Last year, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign notoriously made transgender issues a centerpiece of its charge that Democrats were out of touch with Middle America. The Trump team focused on matters where liberal activists and politicians had taken deeply unpopular stances: They would allow biological males in women’s sports; Trump wouldn’t. They supported medical transition for minors; he didn’t.

But in office, the Trump administration has gone far beyond those positions, issuing a series of executive orders and official statements that depict trans people as innately deluded, duplicitous, or dishonorable. The cumulative effect is to portray anyone who is gender-nonconforming as a traitor. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA,” Trump posted on Truth Social when he took over the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C.

Look at the language of one of Trump’s early executive orders, which prohibits trans people from serving in the military. The “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” a January 27 order declares. (Early last month, the Supreme Court allowed the ban on transgender soldiers to stand while legal challenges against it run their course.)

More recently, the Trump confidante Laura Loomer has called for the firing of transgender government employees, including one she described on X as a “Biden holdover.” This is noteworthy because Loomer’s other personnel interventions appear to have been successful; six officials were fired from the National Security Council in April, apparently at her request. Loomer’s animus against gender nonconformity is so strong that she has clashed with other MAGA darlings. She recently challenged Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, to “condemn” her own father, Grady, for having written a children’s book about a flamboyant flamingo exploring its identity.

When I asked Loomer by text why she opposed trans people working in national-security roles, she replied: “Transgenderism is a mental disorder. It’s important that only people of sound mind work in positions of national security. It would be reckless to appoint or allow transgenders to work at the NSC, given the fact that transgenderism is body dysmorphia, which is a mental disorder.”

[Helen Lewis: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

The straightforwardly antagonistic tone in Trump’s orbit represents a big shift since his first presidential campaign, when he said that North Carolina’s so-called bathroom bill had gone too far and repulsed voters, and that Caitlyn Jenner, the Olympic champion and reality-TV star who’d publicly transitioned the year before, was welcome to use whichever bathroom she liked at Trump Tower.

In the second Trump term, however, gratuitous rudeness toward transgender Americans has become normalized. Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, has been repeatedly referred to by some of her fellow lawmakers as “the gentleman from Delaware” and “Mr. McBride.” No doubt the people doing this see it as a punkish political statement. To me, they just seem pointlessly rude.

My conclusion might strike some trans-rights advocates as incongruous. I have previously argued against the inclusion of biological males in women’s sports and expressed skepticism of poorly evidenced treatments in youth gender medicine. I don’t believe that male rapists and killers who say they are trans belong in women’s jails—as California and some other jurisdictions decree. That creates an unacceptable risk to female prisoners.

But understanding that women’s rights sometimes conflict with those of males who identify as women is not the same as thinking that a lot of ordinary Americans are innately predatory or degenerate just because they are transgender. Adults should have broad latitude to make decisions about their own body, yet Republicans in Congress are considering the withdrawal of Medicaid funding for all hormonal and surgical gender treatments, not just those for minors. If you’re skeptical of people who put their pronouns in their email signatures, feel free to roll your eyes—We could have guessed you’re a man, Steve—while understanding that the gesture might be meaningful to them. Barring federal workers from including their pronouns, as this administration has done, is just as illiberal as mandating pronoun inclusion.

Trump’s actions on trans policies reflect a pattern across the administration of chaotic executive orders, inflammatory language, and counterproductive decisions. European reviews h ave found that American child gender-medicine practices far outstrip the available evidence for their safety and efficacy. But the Trump administration isn’t helping convince the champions of puberty blockers to reconsider. When the Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a balanced, well-evidenced report suggesting caution in child gender medicine, the administration preempted its release by calling the practice “chemical and surgical mutilation.” The White House’s emotive language duly gave liberals—along with the medical associations who were criticized by the report—permission to ignore the findings.

[Adam Serwer: The attack on trans rights won’t end there]

Even policies that may be defensible in substance have been carried out with a level of haste that seems vindictive. In January, Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, and that they are fixed at birth. (Most Americans agree with these statements.) Yet the consequences of this executive order have been to throw trans Americans’ legal status into confusion: In February, the Euphoria star Hunter Schafer, a trans woman, revealed that her passport had been returned to her with the sex marker changed to “Male.” No support or explanation has been provided for people who have to navigate what this might mean for their travel abroad.

Trump has also said that any athletes who have changed their legal documents from their birth sex will not be allowed into the United States to compete in the 2028 Olympics. More than that, such athletes could receive a lifetime visa ban—even though their home country might well recognize their legal gender. “America categorically rejects transgender lunacy,” Trump said in February—hardly the kind of language that will convince liberals that his primary interest is fair competition in women’s sports.

Overall, these are the actions of an administration that wants to keep waging a polarized fight against a vilified enemy, not broker sensitive compromises that respect the dignity of a minority group. The same pattern is obvious in the scrapping of several grants by the National Institutes of Health whose abstracts used the word transgender. We need more research on gender-related medical treatments, for the simple reason that thousands of Americans have already been given them, with too little attention to their long-term outcomes. We don’t need grant refusals so haphazard that you suspect that a 20-something coder has done a keyword search and defunded entire studies as a result. If artificial hormones are dangerous, as some MAGA influencers contend, why would the government cancel grants dedicated to studying their side effects? Similarly, the only conceivable reason to scrap an LGBTQ suicide hotline is gratuitous meanness.

The most recent Pew Research Center survey shows that 77 percent of Americans believe that discrimination against trans people exists, including 63 percent of Republican-leaning people. Waging all-out war on transgender Americans is just as out of touch with popular opinion as supporting routine mastectomies for troubled teenagers.

[Helen Lewis: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

One very good reason for the Democrats to retreat from their unpopular, maximalist Joe Biden–era positions on this issue is that they could then oppose the Trump administration’s overtly cruel decisions. At the moment, the entire party is paralyzed about the topic, unwilling to go against its loudest activists while also reluctant to endorse those activists’ demands. California Governor Gavin Newsom, for example, is now on the record opposing trans athletes in girls’ sports, but the practice is still legal in his state—and drawing both grassroots protests and threats from Trump. “Many in the Democratic coalition share, if only among close and trusted friends, the sense that we are walking on eggshells,” Jonathan Cowan, of the advocacy group Third Way, wrote in Politico late last month, adding: “That silence is proving a political disaster.” As it stands, Democrats are neither being honest with voters that they went too far before nor opposing the Trump administration’s overreach in the opposite direction.

It should be possible to express concern about trans-rights groups’ most dogmatic positions without being shouted down. But that does not also mean signing up to the premise that transgender Americans are inherently unworthy of basic respect.

Under Biden, the left went too far into bad and unpopular gender-identity policies. Under Trump, the same is true of the right.

A High IQ Makes You an Outsider, Not a Genius

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

Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is 132 or 148, depending on the test, and the average IQ in the general population is 100.) Her result lay unnoticed for decades, until it turned up in The Guinness Book of World Records, which lauded her as having the highest childhood score ever. Her name, appropriately enough, was Marilyn vos Savant. And she was, by the most common yardstick, a genius.

I’ve been thinking about which people attract the genius label for the past few years, because it’s so clearly a political judgment. You can tell what a culture values by who it labels a genius—and also what it is prepared to tolerate. The Renaissance had its great artists. The Romantics lionized androgynous, tubercular poets. Today we are in thrall to tech innovators and brilliant jerks in Silicon Valley.

Vos Savant hasn’t made any scientific breakthroughs or created a masterpiece. She graduated 178th in her high-school class of 613, according to a 1989 profile in New York magazine. She married at 16, had two children by 19, became a stay-at-home mother, and was divorced in her 20s. She tried to study philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, but did not graduate. She married again and was divorced again at 35. She became a puzzle enthusiast, joined a high-IQ society, and occasionally wrote an essay or a satirical piece under a pen name for a newspaper. Mostly, she devoted herself to raising her boys.

That all changed in 1985, when The Guinness Book of World Records published her childhood IQ score. How its authors obtained the record is murky: An acquaintance once told the Financial Times that he’d urged her to submit her result as a way of making her famous.

[Read: How smart people actually talk about themselves]

Thanks to all the publicity, vos Savant met her third husband, Robert Jarvik, who had developed a pioneering model of an artificial heart. Jarvik had his own story of being overlooked: Before ultimately enrolling in medical school at the University of Utah, he had been rejected by 15 other institutions. He tracked down vos Savant after seeing her on the cover of an airline magazine, and she agreed to a date after finding a picture of him taken by Annie Leibovitz. They quickly became an item, and eventually took up residence in New York.

This article has been adapted from Helen Lewis’s new book, The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea.

At their 1987 wedding, the rings were made of gold and pyrolytic carbon, a material used in Jarvik’s artificial heart. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave away the bride. A news report has them telling their guests that they were relieved to meet each other, because they found most people difficult to talk to—the implication being that mere mortals were not on their wavelength. The honeymoon would be spent in Paris, they revealed; vos Savant would write a screenplay for a futuristic satire, and Jarvik would continue researching his “grand unification theory” of physics. Yet despite their superior brains, vos Savant’s screenplay was never made into a film, and Jarvik—who, according to a New York profile of the couple, thought the Big Bang theory was “wrong” and the theory of relativity was “probably wrong”—did not revolutionize physics.

What did happen, though, is that on the back of her anointment in Guinness, vos Savant built a career as a professional genius. She wrote books such as the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest and Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks. Billing her as “the smartest person in the world,” Parade magazine gave her an advice column, where she answered readers’ queries and published puzzles. (She didn’t respond to my attempts to contact her through the magazine.) Her specialty was logic problems—which showcase the particular type of mental ability most readily identified by IQ tests. In one column, she provided a solution for an apparently insoluble conundrum, the Monty Hall problem. Angry readers wrote in to correct her, but she stood firm.

Vos Savant’s life perfectly illustrates how genius can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. She was a housewife raising her children in total obscurity, until she was labeled a genius. And then she became one.

She embodied what I call the “genius myth,” the idea that humanity contains a special sort of person, what Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined in 1755 as “a man endowed with superiour faculties.”

Seeing yourself as such can be poisonous: Think of the public intellectuals who embarrass themselves by straying far from their area of expertise. Think of the smart people who twist logic in impressive ways to convince themselves of crankish ideas. Think of, say, a man who has had great success in business, who decides that means he must be equally good at cutting government bureaucracy. One of the cruelest things about the genius myth is that its sufferers cannot understand their failures: I’m so clever. I can’t possibly have screwed this up. I prefer to talk about moments of genius: beautiful paintings, heartbreaking novels, inspired military or political decisions, scientific breakthroughs, technological marvels.

Nowhere are the downsides of the genius myth more obvious than in ultrahigh-IQ societies. I don’t mean Mensa, which began in England after the Second World War; it asks only that members are drawn from the top 2 percent of the population. Even more rarified are groups such as the Mega Society, which was limited to people with “one-in-a-million” intelligence. Vos Savant made the cut.

The funny thing about ultrahigh-IQ groups is that they quarrel and schism with a frequency otherwise reserved for doomsday cults and fringe political movements. An exhaustive online history of the high-IQ movement, compiled by the blogger Darryl Miyaguchi in the 1990s, recounts the story of the Cincinnatus Society, which admitted only those with an IQ higher than 99.9 percent of the population. It usurped a previous group with the same criteria, called the Triple Nine Society, which was itself a breakaway faction from another group, the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.

From the start, Mega was riven by infighting. In the 1990s, it merged with another society and announced that members would have to retake the entry test. This prompted something close to a civil war, and by 2003, the various factions in the high-IQ movement were so splintered that a dispute over who could use the group’s name ended up in court.

The loser in that case, Christopher Langan, has a Facebook group where he outlines his “Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe,” as well as his belief that George W. Bush staged the 9/11 attacks to stop people from learning about Langan’s cognitive-theoretical model of the universe. In another post, he wrote that humanity was failing because “rich libtards” were “pandering like two-dollar whores to the degenerate tastes, preferences, and delusions of the genetic underclass, the future of humanity be damned.” Is Langan smart? Yes. Is he insightful about humanity, or at least fun to be around? Perhaps not.

Another onetime member of Mega was Keith Raniere, whose local paper, the Albany Times Union, claimed in 1988 that his self-administered test proved his intellect was “one in 10 million.” In 2020, he was sentenced to 120 years in prison over the abuse he perpetrated as the leader of a cult called NXIVM. This operated according to a “master and slave” hierarchy in which no one ranked higher than Raniere, who was known as “Vanguard.” Some of NXIVM’s disciples were branded with Raniere’s initials. (Prosecutors also branded the group a pyramid scheme.)

As the cult collapsed, many of Raniere’s early claims to genius came under new scrutiny. Had he really learned to read the word homogenized off a milk carton at age 2, and understood quantum physics by 4, as a news reporter had suggested in 1988—and was he also an avid juggler who needed only “two to four hours of sleep”? People began to wonder, and then noticed something potentially important: The Mega test was not supervised, could be taken at home, and had no time limit. Draw your own conclusions.

Today, because of their infighting and their members’ lack of worldly success, high-IQ groups have become kind of a joke. But their history helps illuminate why intelligence alone does not necessarily yield sublime works. In the 1980s, when some of these groups’ members were asked to propose a term for the intangible quality that distinguished them from everyone else, none chose genius, according to a contemporaneous account by Grady Towers, a stalwart of the high-IQ community. “When asked what it should be called, they produced a number of suggestions, sometimes esoteric, sometimes witty, and often remarkably vulgar,” Towers wrote in 1987. “But one term was suggested independently again and again. Many thought that the most appropriate term for people like themselves was Outsider.”

[Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk]

Towers believed that those with unusually high intelligence fell into three groups: the well-adjusted middle class, who were able to use their talents; those living marginal lives, working in manual or low-paid jobs and reading textbooks by night; and finally the dropouts, whose families had had no idea how to support their brilliant children, and might have gone so far as to treat them as a “performing animal, or even an experiment.”

The first group did not get involved with high-IQ societies, Towers thought, because their intellectual and social lives were already full. “It’s the exceptionally gifted adult who feels stifled that stands most in need of a high IQ society,” he wrote, adding that “none of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded.”

The predominance of the lonely, frustrated, and socially awkward in ultrahigh-IQ societies was enough, he wrote, “to explain the constant schisms that develop, the frequent vendettas, and the mediocre level of their publications. But those are not immutable facts; they can be changed. And the first step in doing so is to see ourselves as we are.”

Grady Towers was murdered on March 20, 2000, while investigating a break-in at the park in Arizona where he worked as a security guard. He was 55.

In 1990, The Guinness Book of World Records retired the highest-IQ category, conceding that no definitive ranking was possible, given the limitations of and the variation among the available tests. This new mood of caution means that vos Savant’s Guinness record will remain untouched. If, that is, it was a record at all—critics have been arguing about the validity of her result for decades.

Why does the superlative matter? Because vos Savant couldn’t and wouldn’t have become a “genius” without the label being pinned on her first. Attention was paid, and then more attention followed, because if people were looking, then there must have been something worth looking at, surely. That should make us wonder if the same process happens in reverse. Do children who struggle at school get the message that they aren’t “academic,” and lose interest and enthusiasm?

By thinking about IQ, I was venturing into one of the most bitter battles in 20th-century social science. In the decades following the development of standardized tests, the “IQ wars” pitted two factions against each other: the environmentalists and the hereditarians. The first believed that IQ was entirely or largely influenced by surroundings—childhood nutrition, schooling, and so on—and the second argued that IQ was largely determined by genes. In America, these became synonymous with two extreme positions: hard-left advocacy for pure blank-slatism and far-right belief in racial hierarchy.

The hereditarians were tainted by the fact that so many of them dabbled in the murky waters of race and IQ—extrapolating beyond the observed differences in average IQ scores across various countries to the suggestion that white people are innately and immutably smarter than Black people. One example would be the Nobel Prize–winning engineer William Shockley, who followed what now seems a very modern trajectory: years of real achievements, including his involvement in the invention of the transistor, followed by a second career of provocative statements and complaints about what we would now call “cancellation.” Shockley’s views on white racial superiority were coupled with his advocacy for eugenics. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he argued that people with “defective” genes should be paid not to reproduce. As he put it: “$30,000 put into a trust for a 70 IQ-moron, who might otherwise produce 20 children, might make the plan very profitable to the taxpayer.”

But the environmentalists went too far in their claims too. Most geneticists now acknowledge that IQ is partially heritable, even though progressive activists attack almost anyone who says so out loud. When the geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden began to advance the arguments she would later turn into her 2021 book, The Genetic Lottery—which argued for social equality but conceded that genes influence educational attainment—The New Yorker reported that she was subjected to “parades of arguments and counterarguments, leaked personal e-mails, and levels of sustained podcasting that were, by anyone’s standards, extreme.”

Fascinated by the dangerous allure of IQ—its promise to provide a definitive ranking of human intellectual worth—I decided to sit for an IQ test myself. At the exam site, I was one of two dozen adults, plus a couple of children. One was reading a book called Why the West Rules—For Now, which didn’t assuage my worries about the political overtones of this debate.

The question of what exactly IQ tests measure—and how accurately they can deliver judgment—is one that’s wrapped around inflammatory questions about group identity, as well as a lively policy debate about the best system of schooling. It is no accident that so many IQ researchers have ended up endorsing scientific racism or sexism. If humans can be reduced to a number, and some numbers are higher than others, it is not a long walk to decide that some humans are “better” than others too. In 2018, Christopher Langan wrote an obituary for Koko, a celebrated gorilla that he said could sign 1,000 words and therefore had an IQ between 75 and 95. “Koko’s elevated level of thought would have been all but incomprehensible to nearly half the population of Somalia (average IQ 68),” Langan wrote on Facebook, citing dubious research about that African country. “Obviously, this raises a question: Why is Western civilization not admitting gorillas? They too are from Africa, and probably have a group mean IQ at least equal to that of Somalia.”

Langan was featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which attributed his lack of academic success to his chaotic, violent upbringing and the reluctance of educational authorities to extend him the same sort of grace and understanding a middle-class child might receive. But Langan has found other answers for why he did not fulfill the glorious destiny written in his genes. He blames affirmative action and a society controlled by “globalists” and “banksters.” Inevitably, he has a Substack.

As for me, I took two IQ tests that day. The first was a test designed in 1949 to be “culture fair,” meaning that there were no language- or logic-based questions, only shape rotation. What became immediately apparent is that the test selects heavily for speed. The strict time limits mean you simply don’t have time to luxuriate over questions, turning them over in your head. Now, you could argue that quickly grasping concepts is exactly what intelligence is. But you’d also have to admit that some of history’s greatest breakthroughs came from years of careful observation and rumination.

That first test convinced me that whatever an IQ test is measuring, it can’t be genius—that label we are so keen to bestow on people with singular achievements. It doesn’t measure showing up day after day. It doesn’t measure the ego necessary to insist that you’re right and everyone else is wrong. And it doesn’t measure the ability to market yourself as the spirit of the age.

[Read: A reality check for tech oligarchs]

The second test was more recent, having been updated in 1993, and leaned heavily into verbal reasoning. What I noticed here, first, was how arguable some of these questions were. Is idle a synonym for inactive or a synonym for lazy? Both, surely—it can be used as a pure descriptor, as in “an idle engine,” or to convey a value judgment, as in “the idle rich.” My desire to argue with the test maker only increased in the analogies section, where the example given was: “Trousers are to boy as skirt is to … ?” The supervisor read this out with some embarrassment, assuring us that the language was “traditional.”

Things got worse. The logic puzzles in the final section included one about an explorer who might have been eaten by either lions or “savages.” Another question asked me to work out what my surname would be, based on clues about family relationships, and clearly rested on the assumption that women all took their husband’s name, and so would their children. Full of feminist zeal, I prissily ticked the box labeled “It is not possible to know what my surname is” and resigned myself to losing points.

What were my results? Sorry—I’m not saying; we already know I’m not a genius, but I’m not an outsider either, so they don’t matter. My time researching Langan, Raniere, and the others convinced me that IQ testing has narrow scientific uses, but it is a false god.

Vos Savant, who is now 78, made a career of being the smartest person alive, because she had a number to prove it. Once she was hailed as a genius, vos Savant was one. Nothing about her changed, but her life did. As big a brain as Stephen Hawking had little time for this kind of thinking. In a 2004 Q&A with The New York Times Magazine, the physicist was asked what his IQ was. “I have no idea,” he replied. “People who boast about their IQ are losers.”

This article was adapted from The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, which will be published in the United States on June 17.