John Hendrickson | The Atlantic

How the Grateful Dead Nearly Solved the Problem With Live Music

2025-07-10T09:30:00-04:00

Picture yourself at a concert. If you’re standing by the soundboard, usually near the rear center of the venue, you’ll enjoy the best possible version of the band’s performance—what the “sound guy,” whose job it is to make everything coalesce inside the room, hears. But if you step away to grab a beer and end up watching from a different place, you’ll hear something else. At an outdoor show, the experience is even more varied, because of the open acoustics and elements such as wind, which break up sound waves. Far too often, the song you’ve waited all night for may finally reach your ears as a distorted puddle.

How does a band ensure that it sounds like the most pristine version of itself, no matter where the show takes place or where the audience listens? In the early 1970s, the Grateful Dead tried to solve this dilemma with the help of their on-again, off-again sound engineer, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, who conceptualized one of the boldest innovations in music history: a literal “wall of sound.” On hits such as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the music producer Phil Spector had famously created a figurative wall of sound by layering instruments and orchestral sweeps. But the Dead’s wall was essentially a behemoth sound system, a hulking electrical mess of amps, speakers, wires—like the menacing heavy-metal rig in Mad Max: Fury Road, but far larger, louder, and, perhaps, more ludicrous. The grand idea was both utopian and egalitarian: The wall placed virtually every piece of technology needed for a live show behind the group, allowing the crowd to hear precisely what the Dead heard as they played.

The wall, the journalist Brian Anderson writes in his new book, Loud and Clear, “weighed as much as a dozen full-grown elephants” and “stretched the length of a regulation basketball court.” At each tour stop, roadies would assemble the nearly 600 speakers that, when operable, stood at about the height of a small apartment building and sounded “as loud as a jet engine at close range.” During outdoor shows, fans could be up to a quarter mile from the stage and still hear Jerry Garcia’s guitar runs with depth and clarity. But a relatively short time after its creation, the complexity and expense of maintaining the wall catalyzed the band’s first serious brush with burnout—and, Anderson argues, played a factor in its hiatus.

In trying to shorten the pathway from instrument to eardrum, the Dead’s wall had simultaneously created a host of previously nonexistent issues. On paper, the wall was a tool to expand the scope of their sky-reaching jams; more than any of their rock contemporaries, the Dead were known for extended, full-band improvisation. But relying on engineering in order to achieve a perfect sound brought a new set of anxieties: Because there was frequently some glitch with the wall, the band was often held back from reliably playing at its best. Stanley helped the Dead reach a new stratosphere of live performance, but he also established an impossible standard—one the band couldn’t measure up to.

Grateful Dead fandom invites—and thrives on—obsession. Though the Dead’s jam-band sound is undoubtedly groovy, many of its songs concern heavy themes such as life and death. There’s a deceptive weight to their songs, even when the tunes feel bright; the music is an ongoing search to unlock something hidden in the recesses of your mind. Though the band has a wonderful collection of studio recordings, the real juice is in the live stuff: the thousands of concerts performed over dozens of years, with a different set list every night.

There’s a lot to get lost in, and from their early days as a touring band, the Dead won legions of stoned and tripping devotees. Anderson’s book, though, is dizzying in a different way: It’s a detailed, almost show-by-show breakdown of the band’s live performances across its first decade (roughly 1965 to 1974), augmented by insider stories. Readers meet not only Stanley but also other engineers, roadies, and crew members who worked long hours under difficult conditions to help the Dead put on incomparable shows. (Many of the roadies also relied on, according to one band member, “mountains of blow.”)

But undergirding this occasionally exhausting narrative effort is a tale about the tension between innovation and hubris. The wall was, in a sense, a physical manifestation of a brainiac’s acid trip; after Stanley took LSD at a legendary Dead show at an upstate–New York speedway, Anderson writes, he believed that he could weave an unbreakable connection between the wall, the band, and the crowd. His acid-tinged goal with the wall was “hooking it up to a whole sea of people like one mind,” he said. For years, most other bands had played the same way in concert: with instruments connected to amps, and amps and vocals running through the house PA. Even when traveling with their own sound guy, they’d still be beholden to each venue’s setup—unless they toted all of their own gear, which just wasn’t realistic.

The wall, in theory, allowed for both top-notch sound and show-by-show consistency. In practice, though, it was an unwieldy nightmare. Speakers often blew out or failed mid-show. Stanley drifted in and out of the band’s orbit; other engineers and roadies expanded on his original visions. All the while, maintaining the rig became more convoluted: The band kept booking larger venues, thus requiring more sonic power, more crew members, and more attention to detail. Peak functionality was far from guaranteed, and Anderson convincingly makes the case that many early versions of the wall sounded better than the “official” wall shows in 1974, because the smaller scale allowed for relatively more control (though it was far from an efficient process; early iterations could still take five hours to set up and another five to break down).

[Read: What the band eats]

Within the band itself, the wall was divisive. Bassist Phil Lesh called the wall “apocalyptic,” but also compared it to the “voice of God.” For him, the wall allowed for “the most generally satisfying performance experience of my life with the band.” Bob Weir, who sang and played guitar, called the wall “insane” and “a logistical near impossibility.” Drummer Bill Kreutzmann, according to Anderson, said it was a “creature that was supercool to look at, but impossible to tame.” And Garcia, it seems, would have been fine keeping things a little more down-to-earth. At the wall’s official debut, on March 23, 1974, technical difficulties led to Garcia’s guitar volume plunging moments into the first song. When you listen to this show today, the beginning sounds, well, kind of crappy.

In the end, the Dead played only a few dozen shows with the fully built-up wall, as the cost and draining elaborateness of touring with the device eventually became too much. At the end of 1974, the Dead downsized its crew and, in Garcia’s words, “dumped” the structure. When they hit the road again almost two years later, their sound setup was more practical—in essence, sacrificing the perfect for the sustainable. They remained road dogs until Garcia’s death in 1995, and have kept offshoots of the band rolling along since.

Though I never saw the band perform with Garcia—I was 7 years old when he died of a heart attack—I’ve seen its different configurations over the years. Last summer I saw Dead & Company play as part of their residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. That night demonstrated the clearest and most all-encompassing live sound I’d ever experienced. Most people have heard about the Sphere’s mind-bending visuals and mondo LED screens; fewer may realize that it also contains 167,000 individual speakers (including in each seat).

Though I was able to lose myself in the show, a very real part of me almost would have preferred hearing these same songs outside in the sun, in an uncontrolled setting, where any number of variables—the breeze, a storm, air pressure—might have affected the sound. Imperfection can feel just as right, in a different way, as technical perfection. It’s freeing to accept that something might always be a little off, no matter the herculean effort; the Dead seemed to accept this too. Anderson’s book makes a compelling argument that reaching for total audio domination was—and is—a noble endeavor, albeit one rife with pitfalls. But even the most advanced rig in the world doesn’t necessarily make the songs any good. That much is up to the band.

Another Side of Modern Fatherhood

2025-06-14T09:00:00-04:00

Much of what you’ve heard lately about men has probably been negative. Young guys, we’re told, are being radicalized and sucked into the manosphere; adult men are toxic, or victims of a loneliness epidemic. We may have become so used to crisis narratives about men, masculinity, and fatherhood that we’re failing to see the ways in which men are progressing. One omnipresent parenting influencer, Becky Kennedy, thinks that, when it comes to fatherhood in particular, a lot of dads are doing just fine, and that should be celebrated.

“I asked a group of dads the other day, ‘What is something you do that your own dad never did?’” Kennedy, who goes by “Dr. Becky,” told me earlier this week. “It brought tears to a lot of their eyes to be able to say, ‘Maybe not even 50 percent of the nights, but maybe 30, I put my kids to sleep even if they’re screaming for their mom every time. My dad never put me to sleep.’ I could cry, John.”

Kennedy has found a large, eager market for her views. Four years ago, Time magazine dubbed her “the Millennial Parenting Whisperer,” and her reach continues to grow. She’s the author of a No. 1 New York Times best-selling book, a podcast host, and the proprietor of a parenting-education program—all branded under the banner “Good Inside,” her “app-based membership” platform. On Instagram, she has more than 3 million followers. She makes part of her living on the speaking circuit; at times, the charge for a virtual Dr. Becky appearance has run to as much as $200,000. Her detractors say she’s more a shrewd businesswoman than a benevolent force, but thousands of parents have come to see her as some sort of healer. Kennedy, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, leans more on anecdotal evidence than on hard research, presenting herself less as an expert and more as a confidante.

At the recent “Future of Fatherhood Summit” in Midtown Manhattan, Kennedy was among the speakers discussing topics such as caregiving, paid leave, and “inclusive masculinity.” Most of the voices were male—Jonathan Haidt, Chasten Buttigieg, and Representative Jimmy Gomez of the Congressional Dads Caucus among them. Kennedy’s upbeat presentation stood out amid no small amount of pontificating. Kennedy offers a centrist perspective: She rejects the expectation that men are breadwinners and nothing more; she also rejects the idea that dads “need to be made into moms” or that successful parenting requires 50–50 sharing of household tasks.

Listening to her there, and during a follow-up interview, I thought about one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. In the frame, a slump-shouldered middle-aged man is holding a vacuum cleaner and daydreaming about a wild celebration—confetti, people cheering, and a banner that reads NED HELPED OUT. Kennedy’s glass-half-full mentality is undoubtedly a form of positive reinforcement for guys who feel like they can’t do anything right.

Kennedy is often associated with the “gentle parenting” movement, but her overall philosophy boils down to what she calls “sturdy parenting,” an even-keeled approach that is, in some ways, a welcome alternative to “helicopter parenting.” She likes to talk about what she calls “deeply feeling kids,” or “DFKs” for short, and her defense of the modern dad is almost a continuation of her child-care approach—You’re doing great, sweetie. Like many figures in the wellness and self-improvement space, Kennedy occasionally falls back on platitudes—fathers are looking for a “dad journey,” not just “dad duty,” she maintains. And the resetting of expectations that she proposes also runs the risk of stalling progress. At what point does affirmation for dads become nothing more than handing out participation trophies?

Kennedy feels confident that fathers are hungry to better their domestic lives. “We’ve had this drumbeat of ‘parenting is a skill,’ which I think means anyone can learn it,” Kennedy told me. But she’s found that today’s dads actually have “less shame” than moms around confronting the hard truth that they may not know everything from the moment their child is born. She believes that this is partly because society doesn’t home in on the phrase paternal instinct, whereas an innate “maternal instinct” is widely expected. In lieu of male pride or obstinacy, she’s found modern dads to be genuinely curious. “They know they don’t have the skills,” she said. “They’re like, ‘Someone just teach me.’”

In the end, Kennedy believes that today’s dads, to varying degrees, want “repair” with their kids, and to be “cycle-breakers”—making up for all those nights they went to bed without their own dad tucking them in. Rather than raising boys who will end up in the manosphere, they want to teach their kids how to deal with their feelings. In a time of wall-to-wall negativity, Kennedy’s optimism is refreshing. Whether or not the proper prescription for modern parenting partnerships lies in patting dads on the back for performing seemingly basic tasks, Kennedy’s pragmatism about making men feel capable of the job of raising children seems a worthwhile place to start.

The Democrats Have an Authenticity Gap

2025-06-09T07:30:00-04:00

Since President Donald Trump’s victory last fall, Democrats have been trying to reengage with male voters, find a “Joe Rogan of the left,” and even fund a whole left-leaning “manosphere.” Young men—Rogan’s core audience—were among the voting blocs that definitively moved toward the GOP in 2024, as a comprehensive postmortem by the data firm Catalist recently illustrated. In response, many powerful liberal figures have obsessively returned to the same idea: If we can’t compete with their influential manosphere, why not construct our own?

One high-profile progressive group, the Speaking With American Men project, is embarking on a two-year, $20 million mission to build “year-round engagement in online and offline spaces Democrats have long ignored—investing in creators, trusted messengers, and upstream cultural content,” though its leaders say they’re not looking for a liberal Rogan. Another effort, AND Media (AND being an acronym for “Achieve Narrative Dominance”), has raised $7 million and, according to The New York Times, is looking to amass many times that amount over the next four years to back voices that will break with “the current didactic, hall monitor style of Democratic politics that turns off younger audiences.”

But in recent conversations with people in all corners of Democratic politics—far-left Bernie bros, seasoned centrists of the D.C. establishment, and rising new voices in progressive media—I came away with the sense that Democrats don’t have simply a podcast-dude issue, one that could be solved with fresh money, new YouTube channels, and a bunch of studio mics. The party has struggled to capitalize on Trump’s second-term missteps. It has yet to settle on a unifying message or vision of the future. Given this absence, such a tactical, top-down fix as deputizing a liberal Rogan looks tempting. The big problem is: That fix is both improbable and illogical.

[Read: Democrats have a man problem]

The party’s “podcast problem” is a microcosm of a much larger likability issue.

“We are a little bit, you know, too front-of-the-classroom,” Jon Lovett, a former Obama speechwriter and a co-host of Pod Save America, told me. In a sense, the show’s production company, Crooked Media, already tested the “make your own media ecosystem” proposition: Five years after its independent founding in 2017, Crooked announced that it had received funding from an investment firm run by the Democratic megadonor George Soros. Lovett seemed less skeptical of the new initiatives than other Democrats I interviewed, but also acknowledged some limitations. “We believe how important it is to invest in progressive media,” Lovett told me. “But in the same way you can’t strategize ways to be authentic, you can’t buy organic support.”

The limits of this approach have already become clear. “If you’re trying to identify and cultivate and create this idea of a ‘liberal Joe Rogan,’ by definition, you’re manufacturing something that’s not authentic,” Brendan McPhillips, who served as campaign manager during John Fetterman’s successful Pennsylvania Senate bid in 2022, told me. “This fucking insane goose chase that these elite donors want to pursue to create some liberal oasis of new media is just really harebrained and misguided.”

Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and other prominent voices in the existing manosphere are not inherently political and, even when they do touch politics, don’t adhere to GOP or conservative orthodoxy. Although Rogan and Von did attend Trump’s second inauguration, both have also been enamored with Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont; and recently, Von delivered an emotional monologue about the destruction in Gaza, drawing ire from many of his listeners on the right. In short, these guys are guided not by ideology, but by their own curiosity and gut instinct. Fluidity in belief is central to their appeal, and helps explain their cross-party success. Their audiences also blossomed over time, not after the stroke of a donor’s pen.

Throughout my interviews, I heard constant lamentations over the inescapable “D.C. speak” in both Democratic politics and the left-leaning press. “Normal people aren’t out here talking about and paying attention to the kind of things that tie senior Democratic strategists up in knots,” McPhillips, who lives in Philadelphia, told me. You can’t read white papers and study what goes on in the states from afar, he argued; you have to be there at eye level, living among real people, talking like a real person.

What politicians have been advised to do for decades—stick to short cable-news hits, repeat the same few points over and over—are habits that today’s voters find, in the words of a senior official who worked both in the Joe Biden White House and on the Kamala Harris campaign, “repulsive.” Although this person, who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely about party strategy, discounted the premise of finding a “Rogan of the left” as a fool’s errand, they did say that, from now through 2028, Democrats should try to infiltrate sports-focused podcasts, paying particular attention to YouTube.

This operative has come to view the current moment less as center-left versus center-right, and more as a larger battle of institutionalists versus anti-institutionalists: “The psyche of a liberal in this moment is institution defense.” Also: fear. Too many Democrats, they believe, approach every public conversation and media interview with a level of trepidation about what they’re saying—not in fear of Trump, but in fear of the wrath of their own potential voters. During her 2024 campaign, Harris reportedly feared the potential blowback within her own team from sitting down with Rogan. “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on” his show, Jennifer Palmieri, who advised the second gentleman Doug Emhoff, said a week after the election. (Palmieri later revised her comments.)

This year, some progressives have found a way to break through. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who’s proved capable of acing a hostile Fox News interview, has now grown facial scruff and has been popping up on the podcast circuit. Several Democrats I spoke with praised both Buttigieg’s recent media tour—his appearance on the brash bro show Flagrant was singled out—and Sanders’s ability to win over certain manosphere hosts. “They’re able to do that because they have the confidence and the skill to go on a program like that and just be themselves, and people believe what they say because they’re being honest,” McPhillips told me.

On the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, and in his frequent podcast appearances, Sanders has positioned himself as an accessible and righteously angry force. Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s 2020 campaign manager and now an adviser to the senator, told me that Democrats “are too far removed from organic and interesting conversations that people want to hear about, and have become too reliant on a one-way push at people about the things we want to tell them,” rather than actually listening to voters. Although he himself is a Harvard alumnus who lives and works in D.C., Shakir criticized the Democratic Party’s perpetually buttoned-up ethos, the opposite of an unstructured podcast hang.

He spoke about the power of anger—the defining emotion of the past political decade—as something that many Democrats don’t know how to wield effectively. “If you’re angry, you’re uncouth,” Shakir said. “Calm down! That’s not professional!” Unless Democrats stop worrying about politely conforming to pre-Trump communication mores, he believes the chasm with voters will continue to exist, hypothetical new-media ecosystem be damned.

[John Hendrickson: Jake and Logan Paul hit the limits of the manosphere]

Two things can be true at the same time: Many centrist Democrats may be too timid or genteel, and lack the moxie to speak with the anger that resonates with voters. But the cause of men’s alienation from liberal politics cannot be distilled simply into perceptions of gentility. Nor is voicing rage a plausible way to hack the manosphere. When it comes to podcasts—the medium of the moment—a different emotion reigns: curiosity.

Hosts such as Rogan and Von succeed across party lines not because they’re indignant, but because they’re inquisitive and, crucially, persuadable. Their talent is to seem real and relatable without trying. Throughout my conversations, I asked why liberals have not organically produced a figure of Rogan’s magnitude and influence. No one really had an answer. But one thing became abundantly clear: No amount of strategic parsing will let Democrats fake their way through this moment. You can’t buy authentic communication.

A Striking Moment in American Activism

2025-05-23T09:00:00-04:00

They chained the campus gates, occupied buildings, and burned effigies. They pounded on car hoods, waved hand-drawn signs, roared in rage. In the spring of 1988, students at Gallaudet University, a school for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., staged a week-long protest that drew international attention. That year, Gallaudet was on the cusp of finally appointing a Deaf president for the first time in its 104-year history, but the non-Deaf board of trustees balked, choosing a hearing person over two Deaf candidates. Though she later denied it, Jane Bassett Spilman, the board’s chair, reportedly said, “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.”

Incensed, the students revolted, demanding representation. Beyond lively protests, they also organized their messaging and communicated passionately to the press. What was at first written off as mere youthful rebellion, destined to fizzle out, ultimately yielded the appointment of a Deaf president, and helped galvanize the greater movement that led to the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The new Apple TV+ documentary Deaf President Now! chronicles the students’ actions, which amounted to one of the most effective campus protests of the modern era. Co-directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) and the Deaf activist, actor, and author Nyle DiMarco, the film unearths a particular period in American activism and a hinge point in Gallaudet’s history, but it also doubles as an argument for thinking differently about Deafness, and disability, in general. (Guggenheim’s production company, Concordia Studio, is funded by Laurene Powell Jobs and Emerson Collective, which also owns The Atlantic.) At a time when college campuses, corporations, and the U.S. government are diminishing—or even overturning—DEI initiatives, the movie’s message feels especially resonant.

Deaf President Now! is by no means scolding or preachy, but it asks those who can hear to contemplate the many layers of life as a Deaf or disabled person. Layers, not Deaf, is the operative word in that sentence. The film compels viewers to reckon with what all people are owed, regardless of their bodily traits or circumstance. As its story illustrates, the disabled experience is far from cookie-cutter or one-dimensional. Deaf people want the same things that hearing people want: to be treated as full citizens, to be respected, to live their life with dignity, to have their needs understood by those in power. The week-long protest was so significant because, at its core, it demanded that hearing people see (and hear) Deaf people in an unmediated way.

“What’s the microphone for?”

It’s a simple, profound query that one of the protest leaders poses during the present-day interviews that are interspliced with archival footage. The question is valid, given that the former Gallaudet student organizers, now nearing retirement age, address the camera by using American Sign Language. They’re lively and expressive, signing with their whole body, retaining the fiery, opinionated vibe from their undergraduate days. Frequently in Hollywood, sign language is accompanied by captions, but the directors of Deaf President Now! opted to use voice-overs when the Deaf interviewees are on set. Some audience members might view this as a curious choice. A day after watching the film, I came to see it as a compelling inversion: ASL is its own language, and, for those who don’t understand it—likely the overwhelming percentage of hearing people—the directors had introduced an accommodation.

Watching the film, I was also struck by the sound design, which shrewdly oscillates between hearing and Deaf perspectives. There are, in the movie’s opening minutes, the sonic minutiae of daily life: police sirens, a plane landing, a subway car pulling into a station, the pfffft when popping open a bottle. At other points, you see leaves rustling on campus but don’t hear them scrape against the ground; when someone pulls a fire alarm, lights flash, but no sound is emitted. Crucially, though, the directors work to show that everyone inhabits the same world, just with different experiences.

[Read: A disability film unlike any other]

Deafness, like all disabilities, exists on a spectrum. Some people are born Deaf; others become Deaf later in life. Those who have diminished hearing may also consider themselves part of the Deaf community. Though this movie is not a history or topography of Deafness, it does examine the nuances of Deaf culture by showcasing the varied (and even contradictory) stories of how the student leaders came of age. Specifically, the film illustrates the battle between the medical and social models of disability. Under the former, Deafness would be considered an affliction to be “cured” or “fixed” with tools and interventions to enable a Deaf person to conform to the expectations of a hearing world. (One of the student activists, for example, recalls being pulled out of class as a kid to go to speech therapy, where he would place his hand on a teacher’s nose to understand a hearing person’s breath flow as they spoke certain words.) But under the social model, which has grown in prevalence in recent decades, disability is just another aspect of human existence, like someone’s hair or eye color. This tension in perspective primacy permeates the film; in 1988, it undergirded the Gallaudet board’s initial decision to select yet another hearing person as president. The person they chose, Elisabeth Zinser, did not know sign language.

In the end, the protest arguably reached its apex not on the grounds of the school but on national television. One of the student leaders, Greg Hlibok, appeared on ABC’s Nightline, opposite Zinser. Along with the Deaf actor Marlee Matlin, he made his case to the host, Ted Koppel, but also to the millions watching at home. Seeing Hlibok on-screen is especially affecting: He is young, inexperienced, and finding his way to his message in real time. He demands respect for himself and his classmates. He gets it. Zinser withdraws, and a Deaf member of the faculty, Irving King Jordan, is appointed.

In some ways, it may be hard to believe that Gallaudet went so long—well more than a century—without a Deaf president, a leader who could intrinsically understand the needs and lives of the students. Although other schools for the Deaf exist, Gallaudet is unique: It draws Deaf people from all over the world and is seen as an oasis where disabled people aren’t othered. I grew up several miles away from the campus, and I’m a hearing person, but I recall as a kid once having a Deaf counselor at basketball camp, someone who hooped at Gallaudet. He was smooth, fast, and confident on the court; I was young, and I remember wondering, sheepishly, how he could play the game at all if he couldn’t hear the whistle. It was a question that didn’t need asking; he managed just fine, and was better than other players his age.

That admittedly basic concept—that Deaf people don’t need hearing people worrying about or patronizing them—is one of the key themes of the film. DiMarco, the documentary’s Deaf co-director, told me over Zoom that, in his first conversation with Guggenheim, he made clear that he didn’t want this project “to be framed as a story of pity.” (DiMarco signed his answers and we communicated through an interpreter.) Guggenheim didn’t need convincing. He had taken a similar approach for his 2023 film Still, which follows Michael J. Fox’s journey with Parkinson’s disease. When making that movie, Fox told Guggenheim “no violins”—meaning no smarm, no Hallmark Channel vibes.

[Read: What Michael J. Fox figured out]

Though the ’88 protest happened before DiMarco was born, he knew its legacy as a child and went on to graduate from Gallaudet himself. In his adult years, he became somewhat of a familiar face after winning a season of America’s Next Top Model and competing on Dancing With the Stars. Growing up, DiMarco told me, none of the Deaf characters he saw on-screen resonated with him. “I often wondered why they couldn’t get it right,” he said. “I’ve really learned that the key to success in telling authentic stories is having Deaf people behind the camera.” He told me he has more than 25 extended family members who are Deaf and that no one in his family uses the term hearing-impaired, which is often deemed ableist. “I’d say probably the most prevalent misconception is that Deaf people don’t carry any sense of pride,” he said. “I think a lot of hearing people are very shocked when I say I love being Deaf,” he continued. “I have culture, language, our community, our history. I think that’s a very, very big misconception that I’m working every day to correct.”

Beyond helping audiences understand some of the Deaf experience, DiMarco told me he hopes this film will resonate because of the civil disobedience at its center. Though he and Guggenheim started making the film six years ago, it’s being released amid a wave of attacks against DEI initiatives. The present environment is not lost on him. “I think today we’ve really forgotten how to protest,” he said. He acknowledged that he’s not sure if, were the same demonstration to occur today, it would have the same outcome. But that possibility doesn’t mean the fight for disabled dignity—the fight for dignity of all kinds—is any less salient.

What the Democratic Infighting Reveals

2025-04-22T18:46:31-04:00

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The phrase in disarray has dogged the Democratic Party for years, but what’s happening now is something more profound and consequential. As Donald Trump approaches the 100th day of his second term, Democrats appear to lack a shared understanding of the depth of their situation—never mind how to address it.

Today’s Democratic infighting isn’t merely about how to win in 2026 or 2028. Rather, it’s an asymmetrical conversation about priorities. Should Democrats focus on fighting Trump’s autocratic actions and on pushing harder than ever to ensure the rights of vulnerable communities? Or should they tack to the middle to woo disillusioned Trump voters? Meanwhile, Democrats also need to figure out how to serve voters in their own base who are fed up with the party’s ineffectiveness. A recent Gallup poll was, in a word, abysmal, finding that only 25 percent of respondents had confidence in Democratic congressional leaders—an all-time low.

Some Democrats, regardless of age or where they fall on the center-to-left spectrum, have stepped up to address the stakes of Trump’s current assault on the federal bureaucracy and the rule of law. Last night, former Vice President Al Gore compared Trump’s second presidential term to Nazi Germany. “I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” Gore said during a Climate Week speech in San Francisco. He nonetheless did so, characterizing Team Trump’s messaging as a clear echo of the Nazis. “The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” he warned.

Gore is perhaps the embodiment of a moderate Democrat, but those comments placed him squarely in the Trump 2.0–resistor coalition, alongside leaders such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. That duo has been staging large-scale rallies across the country under the stated objective of “fighting oligarchy,” turning out tens of thousands of activists, radicals, and old-school Democrats alike. Other leaders, such as Senator Chris Van Hollen and several other elected officials, have traveled to El Salvador to bring attention to the plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant at the center of the Trump administration’s standoff with the Supreme Court. (The Court called for the White House to “facilitate” Garcia’s return to Maryland; the administration has yet to comply.) Though all of these public-facing actions may be disparate, they share the goal of telegraphing that greater action is necessary—not just from politicians, but from citizens.

Many other Democrats, though, are simply stuck in place trying to figure out how to win back their own voters. While Trump keeps rolling back LGBTQ rights, certain Democrats appear to view the fight for transgender liberties, for example, as merely a losing campaign issue and relic of the mid-2010s culture war. In the eyes of some Democrats, the obligation to push back against Trumpism seems sublimated to the more practical goals of winning elections and securing majorities. But in trying to woo disaffected Trump voters, they may be disaffecting loyal Democratic voters who fear the party is abandoning important issues.

Even those focused squarely on electoral contests are in profound disagreement. Certain emerging leaders, such as David Hogg, the 25-year-old Parkland-shooting survivor and a current vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, believe that staging a real challenge to Trumpism means replenishing the ranks with fresh faces. Hogg’s pledge to spend $20 million to help young Democrats primary their older counterparts caught the ire of, among others, the 80-year-old Democratic strategist James Carville last week. “I’m not part of the hip generation. I’m not very au courant. But I actually thought our job was to beat Republicans,” Carville said on CNN, scoffing at Hogg’s plan.

Last week, in a separate instance, Carville lambasted “pronoun politics” and went so far as to suggest an “amicable split” between progressive Democrats and what he framed as coalition-minded Democrats such as himself. Although splitting off from more radical members of the party might seem to make sense to certain big-tent Democrats, it would ignore the fact that those drawing tens of thousands of people into the tent right now—namely, Sanders and AOC—are unapologetic progressives. It might be time for coalition-minded Democrats to expand what they think of when they think of their coalition.

What all this Democratic infighting has ultimately revealed is that the party has entered its “post” era. Democrats are post-Biden, post-Harris, post-Obama. Some would like to believe that the party is alternatively post-Sanders or post-Carville. But another way to look at it is that Democrats have entered a “pre” era. The lack of clear direction may not instill much confidence among Democratic voters, but open-endedness could be an opportunity for the party. The next leader may soon step up. But for that leader to rise, everyone needs to get out of one another’s way.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed a plan to substantially reorganize the State Department. The department would aim to eliminate U.S.-based workers by 15 percent, according to The Washington Post.
The Supreme Court signaled support for Maryland parents who want to remove their children from classes teaching books with LGBTQ characters.
The Department of Education will restart collecting federal student loans in default on May 5.

Evening Read

Illustration by Brian Scagnelli

The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy

By Lila Shroff

Finals season looks different this year. Across college campuses, students are slogging their way through exams with all-nighters and lots of caffeine, just as they always have. But they’re also getting more help from AI than ever before. Through the end of May, OpenAI is offering students two months of free access to ChatGPT Plus, which normally costs $20 a month. It’s a compelling deal for students who want help cramming—or cheating—their way through finals: Rather than firing up the free version of ChatGPT to outsource essay writing or work through a practice chemistry exam, students are now able to access the company’s most advanced models.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by Vivian Dehning. Source: John Bryson / Getty.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

Can You Really Fight Populism With Populism?

2025-04-14T13:16:00-04:00

Photographs by Philip Cheung

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Liberals are fed up. Although people on the left tend to blame President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for America’s downward spiral, plenty of even lifelong blue voters are frustrated with a Democratic Party they see as complacent. This much was clear from Saturday’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in downtown Los Angeles, where an estimated 36,000 people joined Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in attacking apathy—even, or especially, if that meant targeting timid Democrats.

“This isn’t just about the Republican attacks on working people, L.A.; we need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us too,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd. “I want you to look at every level of office around and support Democrats who actually fight, because those are the ones who can actually defeat Republicans.”

Sanders and AOC are on the very long list of liberal politicians who are mad as hell, but on the very short list of those who aren’t going to take it anymore. A year and a half before the midterm elections, the pair is crisscrossing the country, trying to channel their rage into productive populism; they were in Utah yesterday and are scheduled to swing through Idaho, Montana, and Northern California this week.

In many ways, the Fighting Oligarchy tour is a continuation of Sanders’s first presidential campaign. He’s positioning himself not as one of the chosen few inside the Beltway but as one of many Americans rising up against creeping authoritarianism. For Sanders and AOC, that means fighting back against Trump and Musk, and recognizing that many prominent Democrats are upholding the very system that enabled Trump’s rise to power. The duo is offering voters a place to gather, scream, and feel a little less helpless, if only for a day.

[Jonathan Chait: The Democrats won’t acknowledge the scale of Trump’s tariff mess]

Saturday’s rally was Sanders’s largest ever, according to a spokesperson—bigger even than his presidential-campaign events in 2016 and 2020. If one primary emotion predominated, it was anger, something usually missing from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed run against Trump last fall. Harris lives about half an hour away from the rally site, with her husband, Doug Emhoff, in affluent Brentwood. Reportedly, she’s considering a run for California governor, but on Saturday, she was nowhere in sight. Equally absent was any trace of the party’s most recent leader, former President Joe Biden, save for a rejoinder to the anti-Biden meme “Let’s Go Brandon”—a slogan on a T-shirt that read FOXTROT DELTA TANGO, code for “Fuck Donald Trump.”

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

If you followed the trail of floppy sun hats making their way down the hill from Walt Disney Concert Hall toward Grand Park, where the rally was held, you’d pass anti-fascism banners, Gen Zers hawking Communist newspapers, pro-Palestinian protesters, pro-Cuban activists, and various calls to revolutionary action through tinny megaphones. You could buy black-and-white screen-printed shirts with the words RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE surrounding Sanders’s face. Hasan Piker, the Twitch streamer whom many pundits have floated as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan, was among the influencers inside the park posting selfies and amplifying the event to his followers. (An entire “New Media” section had been designated for content creators.) The day had an anti-consultant ethos: nothing slick, nothing polished, not to mention nothing subtle. Near the metal detectors, several activists erected a giant photo illustration of Trump in a Klan hood with a Hitler mustache beneath block text reading MEIN TRUMPF.

Sanders, now 83, has been haranguing the 1 percent for years—Bill-ion-AIRES!—but his rhetoric has never been more resonant. Although the Fighting Oligarchy road show has the trappings of a presidential campaign, Saturday’s production was something closer to a music festival. Maggie Rogers, one of Sanders’s opening acts, called the L.A. event “Berniechella.” (Later that day, Sanders would make a surprise appearance at the actual Coachella festival a few hours away.) Another warm-up act, Joan Baez, quipped that Sanders’s gathering had “a much more meaningful goal than we had at Woodstock.” The musical headliner, Neil Young, blew his harmonica, strummed distorted riffs on electric guitar, and, as he played an extended rendition of his hit “Rockin’ in the Free World,” led the crowd in chants of “Take America back!” The afternoon sought to channel 1960s activism—Sanders spoke of attending Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and the musical nostalgia was, at times, heavy-handed. But instead of looking back on some imagined golden age, the theme of the day was about fighting for America’s small-d democratic future, and beating back autocracy. All of this, mind you, with fun.

“We’re gonna make our revolution with joy,” Sanders proclaimed.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

The Harris campaign had tried a similar strategy against Trump, bringing out Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and other celebrities (including Rogers as well) at rallies. But those events were glossier, more sanitized. Last summer and fall, I watched Harris campaign in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, and none of those gatherings had the electricity of the Fighting Oligarchy tour. Sanders, more than any of his allies in the Democratic Party, has figured out an authentic populism—maybe because he’s delivered the same message for so many decades. As he took the stage, a gospel choir sang “Power to the People.” After a “Ber-nie!” chant broke out, he was quick to correct the audience: “Not ‘Bernie,’ it is YOU!”

Countless 2024 postmortems have argued that Democrats lost voters to Trumpism because they’ve become the party of elites that has lost touch with regular Americans who feel they have little stake in the system. Perhaps Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, connects with grassroots supporters because they trust that he really believes what he’s saying; his talking points do not come from a focus group. But he’s also, more simply, one of the few leaders who is filling the void of opposition. “Your presence here today is making Donald Trump and Elon Musk very nervous,” Sanders told the crowd. He scoffed at the image of the three wealthiest Americans—Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—assembled behind the president at his January inauguration. Those three tech titans, Sanders reminded everyone, have more wealth than the bottom half of society, some 170 million people, combined.

“When we talk about oligarchy, it is not just economics. I trust that all of you know that you are living under a corrupt campaign-finance system, which allows billionaires to buy elections,” Sanders said. “Don’t tell me about democracy when Musk himself can put $270 million to elect Donald Trump and then get rewarded with the most important position in government. But it’s not just Musk and Republicans; it’s the Democratic Party as well. Their billionaires tell candidates, ‘Don’t stand up to the powerful special interests,’ and too many Democrats are listening to them.”

Sanders would be 87 in 2028—almost certainly too old to run for president a third time. Many view Ocasio-Cortez, 35, as the natural heir to his movement. Before she was elected to Congress, she worked on Sanders’s first presidential campaign. Now serving as his partner on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, AOC has her own cult following: As she spoke, a hush fell over the crowd. One attendee wore a homemade replica of Ocasio-Cortez’s infamous Met Gala gown with the phrase TAX THE RICH affixed to the back. Like Sanders, the congresswoman leaned heavily into populism. “It will always be the people, the masses, who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedom,” she said. And, like Sanders, she lambasted the role of money in politics. She called Trump the “logical, inevitable conclusion of an American political system dominated by corporate and dark money,” and spoke of the shock she felt upon entering Congress and learning how beholden her peers were to special interests. “This movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests,” she said. “But it’s about class solidarity.”

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

[Gal Beckerman: Protest in Trump 2.0 looks different]

In my conversations with attendees throughout the day, I asked people to articulate the principal emotion they’ve felt throughout 2025. “Shock,” said Rochelle Dawes, a 47-year-old educator who had just moved to California from Illinois. “Frustration,” said 62-year-old Scott Logan, “that there’s no reins being put on Trump within the government, within the Senate and the House—that’s my problem.” Logan’s wife, Bonnie McFarline, said elected officials are not doing their job. “They’re cowards,” she said flatly. Sasha Treadup, a 37-year-old from San Diego who was dressed in a Statue of Liberty costume, told me that she had come to the event, and participated in the recent “Hands Off!” day of protests, to combat her own feelings of resignation. She became fed up with the Democratic Party after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer supported a Republican plan to avert a government shutdown. “I’m going to vote third party this time,” Treadup told me. “I feel like the two-party system just doesn’t represent my values anymore. It hasn’t for a long time.”

Democrats all over the country will be forced to contend with the reality that millions of working Americans whom they once regarded as their natural base have lost faith in the party. Sanders may be nearing the end of his career, but Ocasio-Cortez appears to be entering her prime. Many on the left are already hoping that she runs for president or, at the very least, stages a challenge to Schumer for his Senate seat. What Sanders and AOC are addressing is that people want a vehicle for their anger—something Trump and RFK Jr. effectively exploited in the last cycle. Above all, they want leaders who speak bluntly. “Donald Trump is a criminal,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

Musk Is Still Paying for Political Influence

2025-03-31T17:46:00-04:00

Elon Musk is averse to understatement. Last night, at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the world’s richest man bounded onstage in a cheesehead and handed out a pair of oversize checks worth $1 million apiece. The payouts went to two signatories of a petition against “activist judges,” though it’s clear that Musk’s aim was to support a judge who might tip the balance of Wisconsin’s state supreme court. The billionaire knows that his fortune helped propel Donald Trump to the White House last fall, and now he’s seeing what else money can buy.

Musk and Trump are supporting Brad Schimel, a conservative judge from Waukesha County who trails in the polls behind his liberal opponent, Judge Susan Crawford of Dane County. So far, Musk has personally donated $3 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party, and two Musk-linked PACs have spent much more. The state court’s makeup is 4–3 in the liberals’ favor, and the judges are poised to issue rulings on a variety of topics, including voting regulations, abortion rights, and the redrawing of congressional maps to combat Republican gerrymandering, which could chip away at Republicans’ narrow House majority. Democrats tried and failed to block Musk’s million-dollar gambit, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court allowed Musk to proceed. This morning, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler warned that the race could determine “whether Elon Musk can buy courts.”

In the pre-Trump era, tomorrow’s contest may have been something of a run-of-the-mill state election. Instead, this race has exploded into a national spectacle. Wisconsin has significantly loosened its campaign-finance restrictions in recent years, and with a reported $90 million pouring in from both sides, it’s the most expensive judicial election ever. But as Musk knows, the whole ordeal is bigger than deciding the composition of one state court. In many ways, tomorrow’s election is also a potential validation—or referendum—on the profound upheaval that Trump and Musk have wrought on the United States over the past nine weeks.

Last night, Musk tried to convey the gravitas of the situation. As he often does, the billionaire went a bit hyperbolic. “What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives,” Musk told the room, in reference to the redistricting. “Whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization.” No pressure!

Musk was occasionally interrupted by protesters, whom he scoffed were operatives hired by the left-leaning billionaire George Soros to disrupt his event. Soros and another billionaire, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, are among those who have donated to the Democrats as a means of helping Crawford, but no one has been as audacious as Musk in wooing potential voters using the reliable lever of cold hard cash. Beyond awarding two attendees the million-dollar checks, Musk’s PAC also promised $100 to anyone who signs the same petition, and $20 to anyone who posts a photo of someone holding a picture of Schimel and flashing a thumbs-up (in addition to various payouts for those who “recruit” Wisconsin voters to do the same, even people, such as himself, who live outside of the state). If Musk and his PAC’s collective efforts prove successful tomorrow, he’ll likely keep seeing what else he can buy as he seeks to expand his sphere of influence.

Until about a decade ago, dark money was the most apt phrase to discuss a range of shady, financially motivated political tactics. But Musk is carrying out his plans in broad daylight. His bold flouting of norms is a point of pride for him, not a secret. His PAC ran similar lotteries in swing states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, last year, and so far, state courts have yet to rule that he’s breaking election law. And in Wisconsin’s case, by helping mold the court, he also seems to be ensuring his own future success. As CNN noted, Musk’s beleaguered electric-vehicle company Tesla happens to be fighting a Wisconsin law that would keep car manufacturers from running company-owned dealerships in the state.

“It’s a super big deal,” Musk said last night. “I’m not phoning it in.” Standing in front of a giant American flag, he whipped out a magic marker and appeared to autograph his cheesehead before flinging it out into the crowd like a Frisbee. So far, Musk’s move-fast-and-break-things approach to navigating the contours of the American government has created chaos in federal agencies and diminished his personal fortune. But his very simple election strategy—give people money—has worked. Musk may be failing at some things, but having a lot of money is not one of them.

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Today’s News

Donald Trump said that he is weighing running for a third term, which is banned by the Constitution.
The U.S. military has recovered the bodies of three soldiers who died in Lithuania after their vehicle was trapped in a bog. Search-and-rescue efforts are still ongoing for the fourth soldier.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of a far-right French political party, was found guilty of embezzlement and barred from seeking public office for five years.

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Evening Read

My Day Inside America’s Most Hated Car

By Saahil Desai

On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty

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Jake and Logan Paul Hit the Limits of the Manosphere

2025-03-27T09:00:00-04:00

In the opening minutes of the new reality show Paul American, Jake Paul torches a fat wad of $100 bills. The jacked and tatted YouTuber turned boxer flirts with the camera as he shoots promos for, in a meta twist, the show you’re already watching. (The money is fake.) Jake and his older brother, Logan, a YouTuber turned pro wrestler, are the stars and executive producers of the cocksure Max series chronicling their family’s exploits. “Like if the Kardashians were combat fighters—that’s really what we have here,” is how Jake puts it during a pitch meeting. Against a backdrop of podcasts, private jets, McMansions, and shameless shilling (body spray and energy drinks), the brothers steamroll their way through daily life.

The series is a slick attempt by two giants of the so-called manosphere—the loose network of podcasts and YouTube channels by, for, and about testosterone-laced males—to conquer the cultural mainstream. And yet, in setting out to build their macho fantasy, the Pauls may have also revealed the manosphere’s intellectual limits. Paul American shows Jake, 28, and Logan, 29, discovering that a crucial part of a hetero male’s existence is learning to live with his female equal.

Logan’s fiancée is the Danish supermodel Nina Agdal, and Jake recently proposed to Jutta Leerdam, a Dutch Olympic speed skater. In capturing their relationship dynamics on camera, the show demonstrates that not even the most successful “alpha male” self-promoters can live in a world entirely of their own making. So much of today’s manosphere revolves around the repellent misogyny of influencers such as Andrew Tate, but the first four episodes of Paul American may unwittingly leave viewers with the idea that having a strong, freethinking woman in your life is the best thing that can happen to you.

The Pauls, who have 150 million online followers across all their platforms, have spent the bulk of their lives on a never-ending quest for virality. Last year, Donald Trump was a guest on Logan’s podcast, Impaulsive—months before Trump went on Joe Rogan’s and Theo Von’s shows—and both brothers attended the president’s inauguration. The internet-culture writer Taylor Lorenz, who has chronicled the Pauls’ rise to fame, told me that a decade ago, they seemed like “silly, young frat-bro-type guys” but that they have since been “radicalized to the right” and embraced by “the Trump movement.” The first episode of the Max show contains a clip from last year in which the president hands Logan an autographed red TRUMP hat.

Most of the time, though, the politics are merely implicit: The Pauls come off as content creators first, athletes second, ideologues a distant third. Jake is a new boxer who last fall fought Mike Tyson, a former champ now in his late 50s; Logan is beholden to the scripted outcomes of World Wrestling Entertainment. But those gigs feel more like side hustles, even if their reality show would like you to believe otherwise. The Pauls are the heirs to MTV’s Jackass, and they built their influence empire by filming their antics for their YouTube channels. One such stunt was Logan setting a mattress ablaze and chucking it into a swimming pool; more disturbing was his infamous journey into Japan’s “suicide forest,” in which he filmed a dead body and received widespread condemnation.

Like Trump, though, the Pauls have muscled through every controversy—bravado they seem to have inherited from their father, Greg. “Cancel culture can suck my ass,” Greg tells the camera, while flashing the middle finger with both hands.

As children of divorce, the brothers sometimes tiptoe around their short-fused father. Jake occasionally speaks of unspecified traumas. Logan is more direct: “Yeah, man, my dad was physical with us.” (“I think I was a great dad,” Greg responds in the next clip.) In one episode, during a family meeting, Logan refers to his dad as a liability for the show; Greg, incensed, tells his son to “shut the fuck up” and “jokes” about punching him in the face. Some of these moments are uncomfortable, while others feel like pro-wrestling kayfabe. (“We’re gonna have to manufacture some drama for sure,” Logan tells Jake after their show is green-lit.)

[Helen Lewis: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Their mother, Pam, is generally portrayed in a more sympathetic light but can seem overwhelmed by her sons’ celebrity. “Why would they listen to me?” Pam asks at one point. “They’re making lots more money than I ever made. What am I gonna do?” Still, she never doubted that her boys’ natural athleticism would lead them to lives of distinction; she once believed that Jake, for example, would go into the NFL or become a Navy SEAL. Greg, in contrast, scoffed that if his sons couldn’t become mainstream entertainers, they’d end up doing porn. The sons still act as if they crave his approval.

In this absence of model parenting, Jake and Logan’s significant others, Jutta and Nina, come to resemble surrogate moms. Each woman keeps her respective Paul in check, even challenges him. In one memorable scene, aboard a private jet, Jutta implores Jake to be his “real” self. “Remember how that was?” she asks pointedly. She’s the most blunt family member at the aforementioned meeting. She won’t uproot her life—she lives and trains in the Netherlands, while he does so in Puerto Rico—and steadfastly refuses to act as Jake’s arm candy. And Jake is visibly his best self around her.

Even the distinctly conservative world of the Pauls has to make room for women’s agency. “The trad wife is not the only model of right-wing femininity,” the feminist writer Jill Filipovic told me. Each brother’s partner telegraphs that she’d be just fine if she had never ventured into the Paul mediaverse.

Nina, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, had previously made cameos in fast-food commercials and on HBO’s bro-fantasy comedy Entourage, but, it seems, she had no plan to become a reality-TV star. In a poignant scene, Nina talks about the cyberbullying and online sexual harassment she’s received from one of Logan’s rivals, an experience that seems to have both shaken and awakened her. The season turns on Nina’s becoming pregnant with her and Logan’s first child—and her ambivalence over turning their baby into content, after her experience of online abuse. He wanted a boy, but Nina’s carrying a girl. In a moment of reflection, Logan admits, “It almost felt maybe like life karma for the way I’ve treated women.”

At times, Paul American reminds me of The Osbournes—the classic MTV reality series about how fame and fortune unbalance a family—except with blond 20-somethings at the center, instead of an aging British heavy-metal god. That show, from the early 2000s, was fundamentally wholesome; the members of the Osbourne family all appeared to love one another despite profanity flying around the house all day. If there’s any comparably wholesome side to Paul American, it’s that even two man-children can stumble into understanding how their own self-aggrandizement affects the women around them.

Democrats Have a Man Problem

2025-03-14T05:58:00-04:00

Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30.

I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow.

These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it?

[Jonathan Chait: Democrats show why they lost]

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

Even as he disavowed the idea that solving the guy problem should involve some promotion of testosterone-laced pandering, Auchincloss suggested that the party ought to find its way to a more positive, inspirational message. “We need to embrace a culture of heroism, not a culture of victimhood. Young men need models for their ambition,” he said.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut also notes liberal squeamishness about masculine themes; he says the party is losing male voters in part because even talking about the need to improve the lives of men could run afoul of what he calls the “word police” on the left. Murphy told me, “There’s a worry that when you start talking about gender differences and masculinity, that you’re going to very quickly get in trouble.” The Democratic Party, he thinks, has not been purposeful enough in opening up a conversation with men in general and young men specifically. “There is a reluctance inside the progressive movement to squarely acknowledge gender differences, and that has really put us on the back foot.”

For Murphy, the right message might come from an earlier era—a notion that could seem antithetical to the very idea of progressivism. “We cannot and shouldn’t abandon some of the traditional ways that men find value and meaning: in providing protection, in taking high levels of risk, in taking pride in physical work,” he told me. “There’s a lot of worry that all of those traditional male characteristics are somehow illegitimate.”

So far, the GOP seems to be doing a far more effective job of engaging male voters in ways that reflect the reality of today’s popular culture. Trump has embraced UFC’s Dana White, and has made grand entrances at MMA fights. (Years before he ran for president, Trump would appear at pro-wrestling events, and he is a member of the WWE hall of fame.) “We have to go where people are consuming culture and sports and entertainment,” Auchincloss told me, “and talk about issues of the day in a way that is coded for political orientation but that is more broadly accessible and interesting.”

Last fall, now-Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona tried this Go where the men are concept. “We should do anything to reach out to voters,” he told me. “And that means men.” Gallego argues that Democrats have been too hesitant to directly address men’s everyday reality, and that this is a grave mistake. “Black, Latino, and white men are not doing well in this country. They’re not obtaining college degrees,” Gallego said. “If we were to look at the numbers and just take out the gender, we would say, Wow, that group of Americans needs some attention. But all of a sudden, if you add the little m next to that, it’s somehow something that we shouldn’t be worried about—and I reject that.”

Gallego’s Senate-campaign stops included boxing gyms, soccer watch parties, and Mexican rodeos. Trump won the state at the presidential level by more than five percentage points, but Gallego defeated his Republican challenger, Kari Lake, in the Senate battle with a 2.4 percent margin. “I think the voters, the male voters, understood that I understood them and what they were going through,” he said.

The conundrum for Democrats that Murphy identifies is that they are ill-equipped to compete with Republicans for a jacked-up version of manhood because doing so would cut against the interests and rights of a crucial bloc of their coalition: women. “Now the right is offering a really irresponsible antidote, which is to just roll all the progress back and return to an era in which men were dominant politically and economically,” Murphy said. But as cartoonish as MAGA hypermasculinity is, it sends out a signal that “matters to a lot of men—that only the right really cares about the way in which they’re feeling pretty shitty.”

No one I spoke with suggested that the Democratic Party would (or should) ever abandon its positions on women’s rights. “I don’t think you have to move away from anything to be inclusive of other things,” Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina told me. One possible Democratic plan, so far as I could discern it, was to keep expanding the parameters of acceptable discourse and opinions, rather than box themselves in. Clyburn said he was surprised to see so many young men break for Trump in November. He believes that his party has gotten itself into a quagmire. “We’ve set ourselves up for this messaging war that we’re losing,” Clyburn told me. “In the last election,” he said, “sound bites that developed around gender inequity caused serious problems. And they’re still causing problems.”

[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]

Or maybe sound bites are not the problem.

Last fall, the Democratic strategist James Carville was “certain” that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump. If Carville had adhered to his own maxim—It’s the economy, stupid—he might have seen Trump’s victory coming. One lesson of 2024, some of the elected officials I spoke with said, was that Democratic power brokers were woefully oblivious of the economic struggles of working-class Americans. They also suggested that the project of winning back the working class and the project of winning back men were one and the same.

Voters, the admittedly simple theory goes, will support the candidate and party that they believe will improve their daily lives. The MAGA movement has done a keen job of tapping into the discontent and resentment that many men feel over declining job prospects. Democrats need to compete by offering a material path out of despair.

“The young men that I’m talking to are not in love with politics, period,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia told me. “They want their lives to work. And it’s important that people feel you walking with them and hearing them.” Warnock was adamant that, contrary to certain media narratives, Trump did not triumph in a landslide victory. “He won by the margin of people’s disengagement, because they feel the ways in which the democracy is becoming increasingly undemocratic,” he said. “And my job is not for them to hear my voice; it is to give the people their voice.”

The crucial way to reengage disaffected men, multiple Democrats told me, is to champion an economy that “works like Legos, not Monopoly,” as Auchincloss put it. “An economy where we are building more technical vocational high schools, and we are celebrating the craftsmanship of the trades so that young men have a sense of autonomy and being a provider.” Murphy said that his party should aim to build the sort of middle-class prosperity that enables one breadwinner to support a family of four, allowing one parent to choose to be a homemaker.

But if Democrats believe that Lego economic policies could be popular, they also know that many voters associate the party with government handouts and top-down programs, which, on the whole, are not very popular. This is something the MAGA movement has figured out, painting all Democrats as out-of-touch, coastal elites.

For Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, the party’s primary political problem is undoubtedly class—which is not something that a change of messaging from “the consultant-industrial complex” can fix, she told me. Rather, authenticity is the only way to make true connections. Voters don’t want to be humored, she believes; they want to be heard. “People who are trying to signal some kind of an alignment with the working class are just undermining themselves,” she said. “The donor class needs to pay more attention to how rooted a candidate is in their community, and less about whether or not a candidate ticks every ideological or policy box.”

She stressed the importance of people knowing that their representatives “are actually living in the same reality” as they are—and that a white-collar professional is not always the best fit. She believes that people want to see themselves in their representatives. “There are so many nonpolitical ways to communicate your values that haven’t been respected or exercised,” she told me. Gluesenkamp Perez has gained a national profile for the way she aims to speak for the sort of blue-collar America that many Democrats realize they’ve become disconnected from. She and her husband own an auto repair shop in the Pacific Northwest, and she won reelection in a Republican district that’s supported Trump in the past three elections. “Being able to make a clutch last for 500,000 miles—that’s really cool to a lot of people,” she told me.

“I think about all the ways that I’ve seen this sort of unconscious disrespect for people in the trades,” she said. “I’ll hear people say, ‘Well, you know, my dad was just a janitor, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ and I’m like, What does that sound like to everyone in the room who didn’t go to college? That you think you’re better than them.”

What became clear from my conversations was that Democrats want to get back to eye level with their potential voters, particularly men. But, as Clyburn and others acknowledged, the party’s progressive social agenda can be an obstacle to its moderate wing. At her town halls, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she has found her constituents especially fired up over the rules about trans women in sports—an issue that Trump has inflamed.

“What I saw was that those people were mostly people that had been driving their girls to sports practice for 12 years, and their kids’ best shot at going to college was a scholarship,” she told me. “This was an argument about resource access, not about morality.” Gluesenkamp Perez has sometimes crossed over to side with the GOP, but she recently voted against Republican-sponsored legislation to keep transgender women and girls out of school sports.

She also told me that having a real values discussion is impossible until voters feel respected, and that a candidate is listening to them. A genuine curiosity about the lives of the people who send you to Congress is not a mere nicety but an essential quality for Democrats who seem remote to the people they represent. “A lot of my colleagues just go out there and try to explain stuff to people all the time,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “A lot of us don’t really have confidence that the spreadsheets they’re pointing to are the full picture.”

Just being real could help Democrats appeal to voters of all stripes, but they have to hope that it will resonate with disaffected men—particularly young men—who may have turned toward Trump. Democrats may not have to bend their values completely out of shape to suit the political environment, but they can’t afford to write anyone off.

What Is Hims Actually Selling?

2025-02-09T12:33:00-05:00

The ad that Hims & Hers Health plans to air during the Super Bowl comes at you with rapid-fire visual overload—a giant jiggling belly, bare feet on scales, X-ray results, sugary sodas, a pie in the oven, a measuring tape snug around a waistline—all set to the frenetic hip-hop beat of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A disembodied voice warns: “This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck.” The Super Bowl spot is a strikingly dark, politicized way of getting at the company’s latest initiative: selling weight-loss drugs to both women and men. The ad also marks a pivot for the telehealth company colloquially known as Hims, which rose to prominence just under a decade ago, slickly marketing hair-loss treatments and erectile-dysfunction drugs to men.

Since Hims’s founding in 2017, the company has been pointing toward a very particular future, one in which the word patient is interchangeable with customer. The Hims brand has primed people to view both their everyday health and the natural-aging processes as problems that can be tweaked and optimized—as if it were peddling operating-system updates for the human body. Now, as the national mood and the business environment shift, Hims’s message is undergoing its own reboot.

Catering to male anxiety can carry a company a long way: If you’re a man in your 30s, as I am, ads featuring Hims’s signature branding—a hip font on a bright background—have become inescapable across Instagram and Facebook. Hims sells all manner of pills, supplements, shampoos, sprays, and serums. Central to the Hims pitch is the fact that many people, especially younger men, avoid regularly going to the doctor; a recent Cleveland Clinic survey found that less than a third of Millennial and Gen Z men receive annual physicals. Hims markets the telehealth experience as a welcome alternative. After filling out an online intake form and communicating with a licensed provider from its partner group about hair loss, for example, you might be prescribed a Hims-branded chewable. One such offering, advertised at $35 or more a month, contains minoxidil, a medication that first hit the market in the 1980s as Rogaine, combined with finasteride, which most people know as Propecia, plus supplements.

On platforms such as Instagram, under the logic of targeted advertising, if you linger over an ad for one hair-growth supplement, similar ads will follow. In my daily tapping and scrolling through the app, Hims ads began to appear everywhere—and eventually got in my head. Some time last year, my self-interrogation started: How long has my hairline had that peak? Was my forehead always that … giant?

“The job of marketing is to influence behavior, and sometimes that means identifying problems that you may not know that you have, or underlying insecurities that may prevent you from losing social currency down the road,” Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, told me. A former advertising executive, Collins said that he, too, had been bombarded by Hims ads. He could see how Hims was trying to “elevate itself from being a shortcut that represents a hair-loss solution to being a solution for masculinity, to being an outlet for him, for what it means for manliness.”

In December, after my dermatologist examined my scalp during an annual skin screening, I sheepishly asked her about Hims. She rolled her eyes. When we moved to discussing treatment options, she also warned me that a potential side effect of using oral finasteride for hair growth is decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, or both.

After a few minutes of discussion, a topical solution seemed like a better bet than the pill. But there is nothing special about Hims itself. “If you want, I can just call in a minoxidil-finasteride solution to your pharmacy,” my doctor said. “It’ll be cheaper.” She saw me as her patient, not an e-commerce shopper. Still, the fact that I asked about Hims at all made me feel like the company’s pervasive marketing was working on me. One minute, I was reporting, checking out Hims-branded biotin gummies; the next minute, I was practically at the checkout, ordering some myself.

When I spoke with Mike Chi, Hims’s chief commercial officer, he leaned hard into words such as normalization and empower. I told him that the constant barrage of Hims ads had made me feel almost bullied into doing something about my hair. Chi disagreed with my characterization but acknowledged the high volume of the company’s ads. The goal of its campaigns, though, was “to create an emotional connection with a customer,” he said. “And to create that personal connection with a customer, we often have to have varied messaging to find the way in that connects with them.”

Even though Hims’s ubiquitous stuff-for-dudes marketing campaign has proved effective at tapping into male insecurity, treating masculine vulnerabilities with generic drugs has its commercial limits, and Hims faces growing competition in the space. A company called Ro (formerly Roman) has a model similar to Hims’s; Amazon has an online pharmacy and telehealth business. In the past several years, Hims has steadily expanded its business into a broader array of treatments for both men and women: antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication—and, as the Super Bowl spot indicates, weight-loss drugs that include a version of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy. Semaglutide is currently on the FDA drug-shortage list, a status that allows Hims and other companies to sell their own compounded versions. (The makers of Ozempic are urging the FDA to declare an end to the semaglutide shortage.) Going down the compounded glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) path is a bold gambit for Hims. The market for a monthly supply of hair-growth or erectile-dysfunction pills is limited to men in certain age brackets, but the perpetual quest for thinness and hotness transcends demographics.

By some measures, Hims’s expansion has been successful. The company has accumulated more than 2 million regular customers and achieved a market cap of $9 billion. Last February, the company announced its first profitable quarter. Marketing accounted for 45 percent of Hims’s operating expenses during last year’s third quarter. Peter Fader, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me that such a percentage is “absolutely high” when it comes to typical marketing costs in a successful operation. “And it’s not sustainable, either,” he added. “A lot of people do question [the company’s] long-term viability,” he said, but he also commended Hims for “rolling with the times.”

Although Hims’s stock has gone up 65 percent in the past month, investment experts seem split over the reason. Some appear confident in the value of the company’s prospects. Others, such as the CNBC host Jim Cramer, suspect that Hims’s surging stock price is the effect of a “short squeeze,” in which speculators’ bet on a future steep decline temporarily boosts the share price.

Even the Super Bowl ad carries pitfalls for Hims. On Friday, Senators Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and Roger Marshall, a Republican, sent a letter to acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner stating that Hims’s “Sick of the System” commercial “risks misleading patients by omitting any safety or side effect information” about an injectable weight-loss medication that appears in the ad. In response, a Hims spokesperson told me in an email, “We are complying with existing law and are looking forward to continuing working with Congress and the new Administration to fix the broken health system.” The person went on to imply that the company’s critics are defending the status quo. “The ad calls out industries that are part of a system that fails to prioritize the health of Americans,” the spokesperson said. “And now these industries are asking to shut the ad down.”

Hims is now doing business in a world where a concept such as “Make America healthy again” has rapidly migrated from a fringe political movement to the center of government. And although MAHA purists might shun pharmaceutical solutions, some potential customers might be sympathetic to Hims’s claim of being an ally against “the system.” The one-note, full-volume message in the Hims Super Bowl spot is that everything is rigged against you—keeping you overweight, making you unhealthy—and that you’re right to be mad about that.

The company could be betting that in a political moment when talk of needing more “masculine energy” is playing an outsize part, this vibe shift in its marketing strategy will help it reach an even bigger audience. Hims has done well selling its own recipes for masculine energy; now it figures it can do even better pushing remedies to help you take back control from the elites and make you feel great again. It’s audacious, possibly cynical, and probably very effective.

The January 6er Who Left Trumpism

2025-01-25T08:00:00-05:00

“I was okay with being a convict,” Jason Riddle told me this week, not long after learning that he was among the roughly 1,500 recipients of sweeping presidential pardons. Some Americans, including President Donald Trump, believe that Riddle and others who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were unjustly persecuted and thus deserving of clemency—if not celebration. Riddle, a 36-year-old New Hampshire resident, rejects this framing. “I’m not a patriot or a hero just because the guy who started the riot says it’s okay,” he told me.

On Thursday, after consulting with his public defender, Riddle sent a pithy email to the Department of Justice:

To whom it may concern,

I’d like to reject my pardon please.

Sincerely,
Jason Riddle

Sent from my iPhone

Declining the pardon falls within Riddle’s legal rights. Many other January 6ers are holding out their hands for the president’s gift. “I can’t look myself in the mirror and do that,” Riddle said. Rather than whitewash his unsavory past, he feels called to own his behavior, even his most shameful moments—a tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous, which he says has saved him.

Some insurrectionists stormed the Capitol as true ideological warriors. Enrique Tarrio, a former leader of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, for example, were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States (and both men are now free). But many others who participated in the violence and destruction that day were similar to Riddle—people with ordinary lives and ordinary problems who found community and catharsis in the MAGA movement.

None of the above is an excuse for taking part in one of the ugliest moments in American history. But actively planning to carry out violence is arguably different from getting swept up in a mob. Today, Riddle doesn’t shirk his complicity. But the path that led him to the Capitol sheds light on how someone without much direction suddenly found it in a day of rage and mayhem. His story also raises an intriguing possibility: A person who stumbled into the darker corners of Trumpism can also stumble out.

For Riddle, the road to January 6 began after he graduated from high school, years before Trump’s first campaign. He served in the Navy and, according to his sentencing memo, “was honorably released from active duty to the naval reserves in light of reocurring [sic] struggles with alcohol use.” In college, at Southern Connecticut State University, as an older student, he decided to major in political science. On campus, he recalls feeling surrounded by younger Bernie Sanders supporters, while he took a liking to Trump. He described himself and another early Trump-supporting buddy as “obnoxious,” noting that they’d frequently drink in class. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, Riddle drove to rallies all over the country. At first he told himself that, as a poli-sci major, he was making anthropological field trips. In truth, he was becoming swept up in MAGA world.

He liked the excitement and controversy that surrounded Trump. “There was this aggression. I think I really enjoyed it,” he said. He’d pregame before the rallies, then join the crowds listening to the future president rant. “You go, you know, bond with these strangers,” he said. At that time in his life, Riddle remembers having barely any other interests or hobbies. He didn’t watch sports or exercise. He’d sit at home, drinking and trolling. “I spent all my time in those comments [sections] on social media, arguing with strangers,” Riddle said. “It was all about proving someone wrong. That would make me feel good about myself.”

After college, he struggled to hold down a job. Eventually, he found work as a mail carrier for the Postal Service. On his route, he’d ruminate. He’d carry on long conversations with a drinking buddy. “I would just be on the phone with my Bluetooth in, talking to another maniac who thinks like me, while just slowly going crazy,” Riddle said.

Radicalization can be a gradual process. He described himself as more of a libertarian than a MAGA Republican. In Trumpism, though, Riddle found an always-there outlet for his pent-up dissatisfaction with how his life was unfolding. But Trump’s time in office was running out. As he plotted to cling to power by desperate means, the president and his allies were spreading conspiracy theories about alleged voter fraud, including lies about mail-in ballots. “So I’m, like, literally working at the mail, which is what I believed to be part of the problem with the election,” Riddle said. In the weeks before the insurrection, he told me, he was drinking more heavily than ever. Sometimes, he’d stash additional booze in the mailbag he carried for the day’s rounds.

One day, drunk on the job, he abruptly quit, leaving piles of mail in his truck. Soon, he and two friends were driving from New Hampshire to Washington, D.C. One was a Trump supporter; the other, Riddle now thinks, was just along for the ride. Riddle’s own commitment to the “Stop the Steal” narrative involved some doublethink. “I know I’m wrong,” Riddle recalls telling himself. “Fuck it; I’m going down anyways.”

He recalls very clearly when he stepped over a barrier and marched into the Capitol. His friends stopped following him. “I remember actually seeing politicians from where I was standing,” he told me. “I could tell they were scared. I do remember enjoying that.”

Images of some of the other Capitol invaders soon spread on social media: the Viking-helmeted QAnon Shaman, the man with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, the guy carrying the speaker’s lectern. Riddle, too, achieved a kind of immortality: He was the insurrectionist hoisting a bottle of wine. In the immediate aftermath of the event, Riddle felt no remorse, or shame, or need to hide. He bragged about his exploits on a local newscast, and briefly enjoyed his newfound virality. He soon received a visit from the FBI.

In addition to pilfering booze from the Senate parliamentarian’s office, Riddle had stolen a leather-bound book labeled Senate Procedure, and quickly hawked it to a fellow rioter for $40. On April 4, 2022, at federal court in Washington, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison. “Three months for trying to stop the steal, one sip of wine at a time?” Riddle bragged to a New Hampshire newspaper. “Totally worth it.”

Even in prison, he still had his fame—or infamy. He remembers a correctional officer muttering “Let’s go, Brandon” to him on his first day, he told me, and that his fellow inmates nicknamed him “Trump.” But unlike some January 6ers, Riddle wasn’t further radicalized in prison, where he spent the summer of 2022. But neither did his conviction immediately lead him to repudiate the cause that had taken him to the Capitol. Riddle talked about running for Congress, leveraging what remained of his fleeting celebrity. He once filed paperwork, but never got any campaign off the ground.

Riddle thought he’d be able to manage his drinking after his release. But he struggled, and soon began attending daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He has relapsed a few times, but thanks largely to what he calls the “forced intervention” of his encounter with the criminal-justice system, he’s been living his “new life” for a little more than two years. Although sobriety remains a daily project, he feels he has finally gained insight into the reckless and self-destructive behavior that led him to the January 6 insurrection.

These days, he’s working at a restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire. He told me he feels comfortable in chaotic environments, and he’s thinking about looking for a job at a hospital or in mental-health services. Sobriety has changed his political perspective, too. Whereas he once viewed Trump as a bold truth teller, raw and unvarnished, he now sees the president as self-serving. When Trump called for public protests around the time of his indictments, Riddle felt especially played. “And I remember thinking, like, why would he do that? People died at the Capitol riot,” Riddle said. “That was the ‘duh’ moment I had with myself: Well, obviously because he doesn’t care about anybody other than himself, and you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise.”

Last fall, he donated to the Kamala Harris campaign, and voted for her in the election. An irony for him, after Trump’s reelection, is that he could be reliving his 2021 viral popularity—if he were still willing to exchange his version of reality for Trump’s. “One common thing I always hear is, like, ‘Good for you for going down there and expressing your views,’” he told me. “People who say that obviously don’t understand what they’re saying.”

The frustration in his voice was audible. “If I accept this pardon, if I agree to this pardon,” Riddle told me, “that means I disagree with that forced intervention.” Truth has finally collided with the president’s lies. Riddle may be enjoying one last hit of attention over his refusal of a pardon, but after the experience this week of seeing the insurrection’s ringleaders walk free, unrepentant, he is choosing a different path.

The End of the DEI Era

2025-01-16T19:03:00-05:00

It’s often hard to discern, definitively, when one societal trend ends and a new one begins. But right now across the United States, one change couldn’t be clearer: Many DEI programs are sputtering or dying, and the anti-DEI movement is ascendant.

Some people, especially but not limited to those on the right, have long viewed contemporary efforts to strengthen DEI practices as performative, meddlesome, or ineffective. In the past several weeks, though, with Donald Trump’s return drawing closer, the DEI opposition has been growing louder. What’s more, this newly emboldened anti-DEI bloc has also gained powerful allies.

Many Americans might not have even been familiar with the concept of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) until the latter half of 2020, when, following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, many corporations and universities scrambled to bolster their diversity efforts. DEI programs can involve hiring practices, but they also refer to company culture and everyday corporate decisions about how an organization is run. During the final months of the first Trump administration, some people in mainstream circles saw attacking DEI as akin to publicly displaying prejudice. Now, not even five years later, for a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination of bureaucracy, overreach, or mediocrity.

Last week, Trump’s current right-hand man, Elon Musk, blamed the historically destructive Southern California wildfires on DEI practices within the Los Angeles Fire Department. “They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” Musk wrote on X, reposting a document related to the LAFD’s “racial equity action plan” for fiscal year 2020–21. The former Fox host Megyn Kelly likewise went after the LAFD, zeroing in on the organization’s female leadership and its first openly LGBTQ fire chief, Kristin Crowley, who is a 22-year veteran of the department: “Who takes comfort [in] ‘I’m going to die, but it’s in the presence of an obese lesbian’? This is ridiculous,” Kelly said on her podcast.

The actor James Woods, who for a time thought he had lost his home in the Palisades fire, also brought up DEI while attacking Crowley. In a post on X, he highlighted a paragraph from her official bio on the department’s website regarding her commitment to “creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Those three words were all Woods needed to pounce: “Refilling the water reservoirs would have been a welcome priority, too, but I guess she had too much on her plate promoting diversity,” he wrote.

In his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg awkwardly praised “masculine energy” and lamented that “a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered.” His company, Meta, just confirmed that it intends to scuttle certain DEI programs. Zuckerberg’s Rogan interview, like his cozying up to Trump, is part of a careful calibration, one in which the issue of DEI is top of mind. Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, reportedly told Zuckerberg late last year that the 47th president is intent on going to war against DEI culture in corporate America. Zuckerberg apparently got the message. In an internal memo obtained by Axios, Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, explicitly said that “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”

Whether or not you agree with Meta’s decisions about how to run the company, Gale is correct that the landscape is shifting. At the start of the year, McDonald’s announced that it was scrapping its “aspirational representational goals.” Shortly after Trump’s electoral victory, Walmart said that it planned to end its racial-equity training programs for staff and was reevaluating DEI goals around suppliers. But it’s not just the tech bros or corporate behemoths. Last month, the University of Michigan announced that it would end the practice of requiring diversity statements as a component of faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. The change came following an extensive New York Times Magazine investigation that argued that the school’s costly investment (roughly a quarter of a billion dollars) in DEI initiatives had all but failed.

The battle over DEI will likely get uglier. Hasty policy changes in either direction are unlikely to yield the best results. But one thing that’s obvious is that the onset of post-DEI culture has already taken hold in certain realms. A recent Financial Times story cited an unnamed “top banker” who felt “liberated” and excited at the prospect of no longer having to self-censor. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled,” the banker said. “It’s a new dawn.”

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Israel’s cabinet is not expected to vote until at least tomorrow on the cease-fire deal with Hamas, which would include a hostage and prisoner exchange, according to Israeli officials.
Senate confirmation hearings were held today for some of Donald Trump’s nominees, including Doug Burgum for secretary of interior and Scott Bessent for secretary of the Treasury.
In President Joe Biden’s farewell address last night, he warned against an “oligarchy taking shape in America” and the threat it poses to democracy.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The endless plastic in American homes makes modern house fires burn hotter, faster, and more toxic than their predecessors, Zoë Schlanger reports.
Time-Travel Thursdays: The raw-milk debate is but one flash point in the nation’s ongoing dairy drama, Yasmin Tayag writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Shutterstock.

Is Moderate Drinking Okay?

By Derek Thompson

Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.

But, like most people, I understand that booze isn’t medicine.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Vartika Sharma

Read. Pagan Kennedy’s new book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit, doubles as an account of the largely unknown history of the rape kit’s real inventor, Sheila McClear writes.

Examine. Many Americans used to think that getting married and having children were essential to living “happily ever after.” But that calculus has shifted, Stephanie H. Murray reports.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Trump’s Rule-Breaking Keeps Working

2025-01-06T19:14:00-05:00

This afternoon, after Kamala Harris certified Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral victory, the vice president had a curious choice of words: “Today, America’s democracy stood.” Although such a statement is meant to portray the durability of institutions, in reality, it showcased how volatile and fragile the American experiment has become.

This time around, no one is arguing over who won. Trump finished with 312 Electoral College votes, well over the 270 threshold needed to become president. (And unlike in 2016, he also triumphed in the popular vote.) Thus, today, amid a snowstorm, Harris and other officials entered the Capitol and carried out their constitutional duty, affirming those results and initiating the peaceful transfer of power. Like former Vice President Al Gore did 24 years ago, Harris personally confirmed the victory of the man who’d defeated her. For a moment, Congress was operating under a shared reality, one in which vote totals mattered, free and fair elections mattered, facts mattered.

In the weeks, months, and years after January 6, 2021, though, none of the above has mattered—not enough. You may recall that, after trying to overthrow the government, Trump was impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate, which allowed for the possibility of his return. He embarked on a vengeance tour, vanquishing his GOP rivals in primaries and silencing virtually all dissenters into submission (or retirement). Democracy stood, as Harris put it, because democracy is a series of systems, and all systems can be shaped, bent, and exploited by human beings.

Trump had help with his attempt to illegitimately stay in power last time around. In 2021, 147 members of the GOP voted to overturn the recent presidential-election results. But after nightfall on January 6, Senator Mitch McConnell could theoretically have whipped his fellow Republicans into an anti-Trump bloc that might have persisted from that day forward. He didn’t. Senator Lindsey Graham, who, hours after the mob seized the Capitol, declared “Enough is enough,” has likewise decided that, in fact, he hasn’t had enough, and is among the many erstwhile Trump critics who have fallen back in line. J. D. Vance, who in an essay for this magazine once called Trump “cultural heroin,” will resign his Senate seat in order to serve as Trump’s vice president.

Trump’s historic comeback can be attributed to many things—inflation, immigration, the economy, grievance politics, his own charisma, his weak Democratic opponent(s)—but perhaps nothing has mattered more than his keen understanding of the nebulous nature of rules.

Decades ago, people in Trump’s orbit, such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, taught him that rules are malleable, that winning is all that matters. Democrats, however, are by and large a party of rule followers. Despite being forced out of the race by his own party, President Joe Biden is still an institutionalist. There he was, smiling next to Trump, the man whom he had characterized as an “existential threat.” Biden’s courtesies, his adherence to norms, extend all the way down. Susie Wiles, Trump’s former co–campaign manager, said that Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, has been “very helpful” to her, and that he has gone so far as to host a dinner for her and others at his home.

Opposition party this is not. The Democrats are playing one game, and Trump is playing another. Trump is winning.

“Today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” Harris said this afternoon. As was the case with Mike Pence four years ago, there’s no compelling argument for why she should have done otherwise. She had a job to do, and she did it.

Harris and everyone else in the Capitol today were supporting and defending a system that Trump has bent to his will—and all but broken. Trump takes his own oath two weeks from today. In his second term, he’s poised to remake the existing systems in his own image. Nobody quite knows what comes after that.

Related:

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Today’s News

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he will resign as both prime minister and Liberal Party head once the country selects a new leader.
At least six people have died as Winter Storm Blair has hit several states across the United States.
President Joe Biden announced an executive action that will ban future offshore oil and gas drilling in more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters.

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The Wonder Reader: Reading, puzzles, and physical activity strengthen the mind in different ways, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Americans Need to Party More

By Ellen Cushing

What if there were a way to smush all your friends together in one place—maybe one with drinks and snacks and chairs? What if you could see your work friends and your childhood friends and the people you’ve chatted amiably with at school drop-off all at once instead of scheduling several different dates? What if you could introduce your pals and set them loose to flirt with one another, no apps required? What if you could create your own Elks Lodge, even for just a night?

I’m being annoying, obviously—there is a way! It’s parties, and we need more of them.

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Illustration by Stephan Dybus

Watch. Nikki Glaser hosted the Golden Globes last night (streaming on Paramount+)—and the roastmaster came prepared, Shirley Li writes.

Debate. Why don’t men text other men back? Maybe they’d have more friends if they did, Matthew Schnipper writes.

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The Ideal Mental-Reset Movie

2024-12-27T17:00:00-05:00

Time is weird right now. During the “dead week” between Christmas and New Year’s, minutes, hours, and days may feel as though they’re either speeding up or slowing down, leaving you feeling refreshed and anchored or, alternately, anxious and adrift. If you’re looking for a mental reset, I recommend watching Perfect Days.

The film, which premiered last year and was released across the U.S. in February, follows the rhythmic routines of a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. Although that premise might sound limiting, trust me when I say that Perfect Days is one of the most enthralling movies I’ve seen this year—one that made me pause and reflect on how I spend the in-between moments of my life.

Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker behind the similarly meditative Paris, Texas, co-wrote and directed Perfect Days. Its star, Kōji Yakusho, won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Hirayama, the meek and semi-mysterious custodian at the story’s center. Hirayama leads something of a monastic existence. He sleeps on a thin mattress on the floor of his modest apartment, where, each day, he rises around dawn, waters his plants, pauses to consider the sky, then hops in his van to drive to his first toilet. Hirayama is more than an introvert; he hardly ever speaks. Off the clock, though, he’s a Renaissance man—a voracious reader, a nature photographer, a music fiend. His cassette-tape collection comprises the movie’s killer soundtrack: Otis Redding, Patti Smith, the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and Nina Simone are among the artists that blare through his van’s speakers as he cruises the city.

What’s so remarkable about this film is that it demands your full attention in a way that many modern movies do not. If you doomscroll, even for a minute, you’ll miss an ocean of tiny details. Many scenes unfold in soft, natural light, and dozens of subtle sounds crackle and pop: mustache-trimming, toothbrushing, keys jingling. Although the film is set in the present day, Hirayama doesn’t use a smartphone or, it would seem, have any relationship with the internet. Thus, unlike the rest of us, his attention span is unfractured. Whenever someone interrupts his cleaning regimen to use the bathroom, he kindly steps outside and, rather than mindlessly thumb through his phone, looks at the flickering shadows. When he eats his lunch in a park, he watches the wind pass through the leaves of the trees. At night, he reads before bed, then dreams about his day. His life may appear lonely, but it also looks far more interesting than whatever millions of others are performatively doing on Instagram.

Rest assured, actual plot and tension eventually work their way into the movie. (We gradually learn that Hirayama’s life is far from just zen, and that there are people who do want to engage with him.) However, at its core, Perfect Days remains a refreshingly small movie about practically nothing, one that raises some very big questions: How are we to find meaning in everyday life? How do we square fear of the unknown with our knowledge that everything will change? For that matter, how much are we supposed to worry about the above truths versus simply waking up each day and living? Some of the answers, or at least some of the clues, seem to be hiding in the lyrics of Hirayama’s song choices.

This week is an ideal time to take stock of what you really need for contentment. Sometimes that requires a pause, a step back, a huge breath. Other times you can find the clarity you’re seeking in a book, song, or movie. Perfect Days is a vehicle for all of the above. It’s also just a fantastic way to spend two hours. “Next time is next time,” Hirayama tells a visiting family member when they’re out for a bike ride. “Now is now.”

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The People Who Quit Dating

By Faith Hill

Karen Lewis, a therapist in Washington, D.C., talks with a lot of frustrated single people—and she likes to propose that they try a thought exercise.

Imagine you look into a crystal ball. You see that you’ll find your dream partner in, say, 10 years—but not before then. What would you do with that intervening time, freed of the onus to look for love?

I’d finally be able to relax, she often hears. I’d do all the things I’ve been waiting to do. One woman had always wanted a patterned dish set—the kind she’d put on her wedding registry, if that day ever came. So Lewis asked her, Why not just get it now? After their conversation, the woman told her friends and family: I want those dishes for my next birthday, damn it.

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A Nonreligious Holiday Ritual

2024-12-19T12:47:00-05:00

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

Updated at 4:22 p.m. ET on December 19, 2024.

Low winter sun casts slanted light, a specific hue that’s at once happy and sad—highly fitting for this time of year. Nearly every city-dweller I know clings to the fleeting moments of gratifying glow during the final dark days of the calendar.

This year, the winter solstice will arrive at 4:20 a.m. ET on Saturday, December 21. Because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will find ourselves tipped away from the sun. A day later, we’ll begin inching back toward it. Whereas the summer solstice is built for revelry—short sleeves, sizzling barbecues, the thunk of an icy cooler—the winter solstice is a quieter, more reflective time. Maybe you have no plans to mark the solstice beyond staying inside and letting the short day skate by (understandable). But for anyone inclined to venture outside, the solstice is a pristine time for the simple act of noticing.

In 1894, the poet Edith M. Thomas published an essay in The Atlantic titled “From Winter Solstice to Vernal Equinox.” The opening sentence is particularly evocative. “My first glimpse of the morning was through a loophole of the frosted window pane,” Thomas writes. “I saw the morning star and a light at a neighbor’s, both of which struck out a thousand sparkles on the frosted glass. I was reminded of saline flakes and spars in a white cavern suddenly illuminated by a torch.” Thomas keeps her senses dialed into the present, heightening her powers of observation: “Looking off to the distant woods, my attention was attracted by the mysterious play of two wind-blown smoke-plumes proceeding from farmhouse chimneys.”

Commemorating the solstice is an ideal ritual for those of us who feel pulled toward upholding seasonal traditions even if we’re ambivalent about organized religion. In December 1930, an unnamed Atlantic contributor wrote: “Our Christmas puddings and cake, like our gaudy tree, our holly wreaths and mistletoe, are part of the symbolism that unites us not only to our living fellows, but to all the human beings who have celebrated the winter solstice with feasting and mirth.” The writer affectionately refers to themselves as a “heathen,” given that they attend mass only once a year—a midnight service on Christmas Eve—and do not subscribe to an established religion. Of course, even without any religious institution, nodding at the solstice can be a way to tap into your spiritual side.

Nearly 100 years later, in an Atlantic section called The Conversation, two readers, Ruth Langstraat and Roxanne WhiteLight, shared their tradition of exchanging writing as a gift: “Several years ago, my wife and I felt we needed a better way to celebrate or mark the winter season of change. We had become so tired of the materialistic push that feels like such a part of that time. We now celebrate ‘Turning’ during the 12 days from the solstice until the new year. Each year, we decide on a theme and 12 elements of that theme … Then we each write a poem following the simplest form of a cinquain, a five-line stanza. And we read those poems to each other.”

Winter is the perfect time to find a comforting lamp and put pen to paper, but there’s no mandate that what you write has to be joyful. The poet Louise Glück captured the stark Northeast essence of this time of year with just a few simple phrases—“spiked sun,” “bone-pale”—in her 1967 poem “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson,” published in The Atlantic. In the poem, Glück describes the sight of a recent snow fastened “like fur to the river.” Tragically, as my colleague Zoë Schlanger recently reported, snow this time of year is now an anomaly for millions of Americans: Our winters are getting warmer and wetter.

But they’re still dark as ever. Perhaps with so much dismal winter(ish) reality to contend with, it’s time to seriously consider my colleague Charlie Warzel’s argument that we should leave our Christmas trees up until March. In 2022, Charlie wrote of the January emptiness symbolized by his recently kicked-to-the-curb tree: “When I stare at this hole, I begin to feel as if a light has gone out in the world.” He went on: “There is no reason to embrace the new year in darkness. It is time we institute a new practice of keeping up our trees and our lights while we ride out the winter months. Normalize prolonged festivity!”

Fighting that darkness with light is really what choosing to recognize the solstice is all about. In addition to all of the usual Christmas songs, I make a point of listening to “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” by Purple Mountains, from the final project of David Berman. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote in one of two tributes to the songwriter after he died in 2019, “Berman sketched a winter evening in New York City as a beautiful apocalypse.” Such a stark juxtaposition—beginning and end, up and down, happy and sad, light and dark—is part of the spirit of December 21. As Berman sings:

Snow is falling in Manhattan
Inside I’ve got a fire crackling
And on the couch, beneath an afghan
You’re the old friend I just took in.

This article originally stated that the solstice is related to the Earth’s distance from the sun; in fact, it is caused by the tilt of the planet’s axis.

12 Years Later, Two Different Tales of Grief for Sandy Hook Parents

2024-12-14T07:30:00-05:00

On the night of his daughter’s death, Robbie Parker remembered the Christmas cards. Back at home, hours after his 6-year-old had been murdered in her classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary, he thought about the portrait: he and his wife Alissa, posing with their three little girls, Madeline, Samantha, and Emilie. Alissa had mailed all the cards the day before.

Amid the shock and chaos, Robbie couldn’t stand the thought of their friends and family opening the envelopes and seeing Emilie, his deceased first grader. He didn’t want to inflict his suffering on anyone. That was how he operated after the shooting: focus on others, never on himself. “I felt so hollow,” Parker told me last week, reflecting on that first Christmas after Emilie died. “And I felt like a fraud to my kids, because I was feeling so much pain.”

He began living each day on high alert. In addition to losing his daughter, Parker became a target of Alex Jones and other conspiracists, who spent years peddling the lie that the pile of bodies inside Sandy Hook wasn’t real; that Parker and others were crisis actors, that Emilie and her friends hadn’t been slaughtered by a gunman.

Last year, some 2,000 miles away from Newtown, Connecticut, Parker saw his 2012 Christmas card hanging on the side of a refrigerator. He was in Utah, where he and Alissa grew up, and he was chatting with the mom of an old high-school friend. As he stood in her kitchen, he could hardly believe that someone outside his family had kept that photo for so long—and that they had chosen to display it. “Sandy Hook is such a deep, personal thing for me,” he said. “I really lacked an understanding of how strongly it touched other people.”

[Read: What it feels like to lose your child in a mass shooting]

I recently spoke with Parker and another Sandy Hook parent, Scarlett Lewis, about how they made sense of what happened, and how their grief has changed over time. Lewis told me that, inspired by her religious faith, she quickly forgave the shooter, Adam Lanza, and was determined to celebrate her son Jesse’s life through community advocacy. For Parker, the process was slower and more complicated. After years of living in fear, he eventually found his strength in standing up directly to Jones and bonding with other Sandy Hook parents in court. Parker and Lewis have walked different paths, but, 12 years after the worst day of their lives, they both refuse to let themselves be casualties of this tragedy.

Like Emilie Parker, Jesse Lewis was 6 years old when he was killed at Sandy Hook. All these years later, his mother remains passionate and emphatic when speaking about her son. Scarlett was out driving with her own mom when she and I spoke by phone earlier this week. She told me that she takes responsibility for what happened to Jesse. “It was in his school, in my community,” she said. This attitude has surprised people, including her mother. “I’m not saying it’s my fault,” Lewis added. “I’m saying I take my part of the responsibility for what goes on in my community.”

Lewis never knows how she’s going to feel when she wakes up on December 14. Most years, her mom will go out and buy a cake and balloons to mark the day. From the beginning, Lewis has tried to remember her son in joyful ways. Before Jesse’s funeral, she asked her mom to pick up a case of champagne. “It’s not that I’m not sad every day, because I am. It’s not that I don’t cry, because I do,” she told me. “I honor the feelings that I have, but my focus, I want to be on celebration.”

Her particular path toward peace and acceptance has been rooted in the practice of mercy. She described to me how she made the conscious choice to forgive Lanza shortly after the massacre.

“There are only two kinds of people in the world,” she said: good people, and “good people in pain.” This became her life philosophy, inspired by her faith in God. “I think we need to give love to those we feel deserve it the least,” she said. She told me that she feels genuine compassion for Lanza, who reportedly had untreated mental illness and developmental disabilities. “Adam must have been in a tremendous amount of pain,” she said. She realized she could go about the rest of her life angry, or she could lean into love. One choice seemed easier. The other choice seemed healthier.

Like Parker, Lewis knew that her actions after Newtown would affect her family members, particularly Jesse’s brother, who was 12 years old at the time of the shooting. “I really kind of thought about how I wanted him to handle difficulty, and then I was that person,” she said. Lewis recognized that pain was inevitable, but that suffering could be a choice.

Living this way requires constant, daily reminders. “Obviously, I would never have chosen to have my son murdered,” she said. “However, I can choose how I respond—that’s how I take my personal power back.”

Lewis was not one of the plaintiffs in the nearly $1 billion Connecticut lawsuit against Jones, but she and Jesse’s father successfully sued him in a separate case in Texas and were awarded $49 million. She told me that she was not out to “take down” Infowars, his company, or to destroy Jones himself. He, too, she feels, is someone worthy of her compassion and forgiveness. As the 12th anniversary of Sandy Hook arrives, Jones, somehow, is still inescapable. Earlier this week, a judge blocked the sale of Infowars to The Onion, which had coordinated its bid with the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety and a collection of Newtown parents.

In Lewis’s view, a horrific act such as mass murder is the end result of a much larger and longer-term societal problem. While some Sandy Hook parents have focused their energy on trying to reform gun laws, Lewis has dedicated the past decade-plus of her life to addressing what she calls the “grievance end” of the pathway to violence. Her campaign, Choose Love, aims to promote character development in schools.

“We’re kind of wired to be angry and blame somebody else: Ah, it’s those guns. It’s the people that don’t vote for gun control. It’s your fault,” she said. “It has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with choosing love and doing the right thing for our kids, providing for their needs—what they need right now—and that is the essential life skills to deal with the complications and complexities of life today, and the courage to face the pain, learn from it, grow through it, and be strengthened by it.”

[Read: My life since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting: Scarlett Lewis’s story]

Lewis told me she refuses to fault others for what happened to her son. “When you blame other people, you give your personal power away, and you’re a victim,” she said. “And I did not want to be a victim. I did not want to be another victim of Adam Lanza.”

Parker told me that, for a while after the shooting, he struggled to process his new reality. His daughter was dead and strangers were harassing him, claiming he was complicit in an elaborate hoax. Eventually, he began typing out his feelings. The original document wasn’t meant for public consumption, but as he began sending it to friends, they encouraged him to share it widely. Last month, he published A Father’s Fight: Taking On Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook. For Parker, completing the project was cathartic. He viscerally explores the layers of Emilie’s death, Jones’s lies, and his grief. “My story is so bizarre, right? Like, it’s unfathomable,” he said. “People don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I’m writing the book going, Did this all really happen to me?”

Emilie would have turned 18 this year. Parker told me that the anniversaries have gotten harder, not easier. He wonders what she would be like now—a young woman off to college, someone old enough to vote. He told me he’s struggling to figure out how he can keep honoring his daughter’s spirit in a way that feels true to who she’d actually be today, rather than freezing her in time as a little girl.

Emilie’s sisters, Madeline and Samantha, are now 16 and 15 years old. Perhaps Parker’s toughest challenge has been raising them while traumatized. “I kind of thought that this moment would turn me into the best dad ever, and I’m laughing at just how naive I was,” he said. For a while, he parented from a place of anger and fear. He was worried that his daughters would be harmed like their sister, or that they’d be exposed to the lies and harassment of Jones and other conspiracists.

The family moved away from Newtown. Parker would often be out in public and think that someone was looking at him strangely, and instinctively position his body in front of his kids to protect them. “I knew that it was changing me as a person,” he said. “And I didn’t know where it was going to go.” He and his wife objected, for instance, when their daughters went to post photos from school activities on social media. “We didn’t want people to make those connections, and figure out what school they were at, and triangulate where we were,” Parker said. Even today, his daughters tend to hide their faces in pictures.

Parker’s decision to join the Connecticut lawsuit against Jones in 2018—to fight back against his tormenter—helped steer him toward a place of peace. As he took the stand to testify, he felt that he was finally able to reclaim his power from Jones.

“I thought things were being taken from me. Emilie was killed. Alex Jones was taking a lot from me. And I realized at one point that I had been giving this up because I wasn’t fighting back,” he said. “It was never his to begin with. I essentially let him have it.” The first day he saw Jones walk into the courtroom, he was shocked. “He’s really just a very sad, pathetic, shriveled man,” Parker said. “I felt pity for him, actually, when I saw him, and I was shocked and surprised that that’s the emotion that came up for me. It went away when he started talking.”

Sitting in court alongside other Sandy Hook parents also gave him strength and courage. “They’re the only people that get you on a very, very deep level,” he said. “But then you also realize, I don’t know these people at all. I didn’t know any of these families before the shooting; we had only lived in Sandy Hook for eight months. Going through the trial and being able to spend time with them every single day and eating lunch with them during the lunch break—I finally got to know who they were.” He now keeps the other Sandy Hook kids’ birthdays on his calendar and might text a fellow dad something as simple as a heart emoji when that day arrives.

It’s the act of acknowledgment, instead of suppression, that he believes has allowed him to prioritize essential truths: His daughter was real, her death was real, his pain is real, and his gradual healing has also been real. “I’m 42 now. She’s teaching me 12 years after she died how I can connect to my emotion and share it with somebody,” he said. “It’s pretty amazing.”

What’s Going On With Those Drones Over New Jersey?

2024-12-13T18:34:00-05:00

Recent mysterious sightings in our night sky cannot be written off as hallucinations, mass delusions, or hoaxes. Something is indeed happening. But what? For weeks, objects that appear to be drones have been spotted up and down the East Coast, primarily in New Jersey but also in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Nearly every morning brings new photographic and video evidence of odd occurrences, in addition to fresh eyewitness testimony.

Here are the facts in their simplest form: Night after night, people are reportedly seeing large aerial machines moving slowly across the sky. Some of these aircraft appear to be as big as cars. Often, they fly solo; other times, they glide in pairs or in groups. They have reportedly hovered for up to six hours at a time. They also frequently fly at lower altitudes than small airplanes. Many videos appear to show a rhythmic, steady blinking—white, red, and green flashes. And then, just like that, the lights may vanish—especially if detected.

This is not the stuff of urban legend or internet conspiracy. Even government officials are demanding answers. Last night, Andy Kim, the Democratic senator-elect from New Jersey, ventured out to a reservoir with a local police officer, who had reportedly been spotting the drones nightly. Kim returned with his own video evidence, and shared multiple clips in a thread on X. “We often saw about 5-7 lights at a time that were low and not associated with aircraft we could see on the [flight] tracker app. Some hovered while others moved across the horizon,” Kim wrote. “We clearly saw several that would move horizontally and then immediately switch back in the opposite direction in maneuvers that plane can’t do.”

Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland, had a similar experience last night. “I personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland (25 miles from our nation’s capital),” Hogan wrote on X. He, too, shared visuals—and he articulated another knotty truth: “The public is growing increasingly concerned and frustrated with the complete lack of transparency and the dismissive attitude of the federal government.”

Earlier this week, Brian Bergen, a New Jersey state representative, walked out of a Department of Homeland Security briefing about the issue. “It was worthless,” he told a cable-news reporter. “It was the biggest amateur-hour presentation I’ve ever seen about anything. It was ridiculous. There were no answers.” Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey went so far as to send a letter to President Joe Biden about the issue: “I write with growing concern about reports of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in and around New Jersey airspace,” he said. “New Jersey residents deserve more concrete information about these UAS sightings and what is causing them.” Governor Kathy Hochul of New York said on X that her office is working with federal partners to investigate the sightings.

Yesterday, the DHS and the FBI released a joint statement specifically about the Jersey sightings: “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public-safety threat or have a foreign nexus.” The statement went on to say that, contrary to reports, many of the reported sightings are of manned aircraft, and that there have been no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace.

These recent events are strikingly similar to other sightings earlier this year. As the independent journalist Matt Laslo has reported, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was briefed in February on classified intelligence about unidentified craft near U.S.-military sites in Nevada, and in April, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona spoke about similar incidents at an Air Force outpost in his state. But those instances pale in comparison with the sustained presence of aerial oddities over Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, last December—a development with profound defense implications, given the base’s proximity to the U.S. Capitol.

Notably, these crafts seem markedly different from the ones in the infamous videos from 2015. Those objects, which were spotted by Navy pilots, darted about with unbelievable speed and maneuvers that almost suggested an unknown technology or propulsion mechanism. The ones seen over the past few weeks seem more quotidian. One possibility is that all of these sightings can be traced back to drone hobbyists, though that’s far from guaranteed.

This morning, I spoke with my colleague Shane Harris, who covers national-security affairs and has written about unexplained aerial phenomena for years. He was struck by how many of these sightings have taken place in densely populated areas (the Northeast Corridor includes the highest concentrations of people in the United States) and noted that, accordingly, we are more likely to have a plethora of evidence, given that so many people have recording devices on them at all times. “That has led to an abundance of data—which is not to say it’s all good data,” Shane said. “The videos may be fuzzy, and it might not be clear exactly where they were shot.”

He told me that he interpreted the relative vagueness of the FBI and DHS comments to mean that they might actually not know what these things are. “They’re only going to say as much as they can stand behind, and they’re not going to try to wade too far into speculation, because they know where that leads,” he said. But the fact that government officials such as Kim and Hogan have explored the issue speaks to the growing fascination with this subject.

In an earlier era, if you were a “serious” person asking questions about strange happenings in the sky, you’d likely be mocked. The late Senator Harry Reid made a sustained effort to legitimize the broader topic of unidentified aerial phenomena, even after he retired. But at this point, curiosity about increased sightings is a logical reaction. Nobody is saying that the New Jersey drones are the products of aliens or our geopolitical enemies. The objects are simply unidentified. In other words: The truth is out there, and for now, we’re still waiting for it.

Related:

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Today’s News

French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he has appointed his centrist ally François Bayrou as the next prime minister.
Representative Nancy Pelosi was injured and hospitalized while abroad in Luxembourg with a congressional delegation.
McKinsey & Company will pay $650 million to settle with the Justice Department over its work on opioids. A former senior partner has agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for destroying internal company documents.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Environmental internationalism is in its flop era, Zoë Schlanger writes. Every major international negotiation this year—over biodiversity, plastics, and climate—failed to meet its goals.
Atlantic Intelligence: Remember Sora? OpenAI’s most hyped bot since ChatGPT risks coming up short, Matteo Wong writes.
The Books Briefing: Solvej Balle’s series of novels brings up questions about physics, sustainability, and, yes, the meaning of life, Boris Kachka writes.

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Read These Six Books—Just Trust Us

By Tajja Isen

Books are, despite the common adage, often intended to be judged by their covers. Their jacket flaps include marketing copy designed to entice a browser to buy (and, ideally, read) them, teasing the details of their plot, their mood, or the flavor of their prose. But these polished descriptions, like many attempts to summarize compelling stories, rarely convey the excitement of reading a book that genuinely surprises you. Perhaps a better introduction to a title is no introduction—a friend saying “trust me.”

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Behind the Brain Rot

2024-12-03T19:02:00-05:00

The image is black-and-white, lending it an air of “historical artifact”: A modern-day Donald Trump standing next to Elvis Presley. The president-elect posted the picture on Truth Social last night. Presley is strumming a guitar; Trump is idling in the frame. Of course, this scene is impossible, and it’s not a real photograph. Elvis died in 1977, when Trump was 31 years old. Nevertheless, here’s Trump, side by side with the King, not smiling, not singing, just … hanging out. There is no punch line, or even a semblance of a joke. It is literally just something to look at.

Amid a string of recent Cabinet-nomination announcements, the incoming president chose to share this image with his millions of social-media followers. The people responding in the comments loved it, and some replied with similar images, most of which appeared to be AI-generated. You could say that this is harmless. But what is it adding to the world? How is this even entertainment?

The heavy sigh and slightly hungover feeling this type of content elicits might best be described as brain rot—Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year.

Brain rot is marked by a “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” It has a symbiotic relationship with internet garbage, or, as shoddily made AI-generated content has been deemed, slop, some of which is created by spammers who find financial incentive in flooding social platforms. Brain rot is the symptom, not the disease: It stems from this daily avalanche of meaningless images and videos, all those little tumbling content particles that do not stir the soul.

And yet these ephemera nonetheless seep into our skulls. Slop has a way of taking up valuable space while simultaneously shortening our attention span, making it harder to do things like read books or other activities that might actually fulfill us. Brain rot doesn’t hurt; it’s dulling, numbing, something more like a steady drip. You know you have it when you have consumed but you are most certainly not filled up. And the deluge of disposable digital stuff often feels like a self-fulfilling, self-deadening prophecy: Rotting brains crave more slop.

The Trump era, and especially the current phase in which we find ourselves, is likewise the era of brain rot, of junk, of exhaustion. My colleague Charlie Warzel argued over the summer that the MAGA aesthetic, in a word, is slop: “The high-resolution, low-budget look of generative-AI images appears to be fusing with the meme-loving aesthetic of the MAGA movement,” he wrote. He’s right, though it’s important to acknowledge that slop (and its attendant brain rot) transcend politics. Even if you tune out the news, you’re still bound to deal with the never-ending stream of meaningless digital debris. Take, for example, the slate of popular Netflix reality shows, which often feel designed to watch while you’re looking at something else on your phone. These programs are like a televised Yule Log, flickering in the background for comfort but not actually providing much of anything.

Though it seems highly modern, brain rot, as a phrase, dates back to Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of this magazine.

As Oxford University Press notes on its website:

The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Today, Walden Pond, outside of Boston, is one of the surest places one can visit to alleviate brain rot. You can swim in the cool reflective water, stare at the swaying trees, wander along the muddy shore. I went a few summers ago and felt more offline than I had in a while.

Oxford itself has received flack for being too online in its Word of the Year choices: Last year was the comparatively peppy rizz, while the year before was something more of a brain rot brethren: goblin mode. But getting mad at words is like getting mad at the weather. For better or worse (almost certainly worse), the distinction between our online and offline lives has been vanishing for years, and the line is now all but gone. The best thing we can do is see it all as life itself, and know that whatever feeling we are dealing with is a version of what Thoreau dealt with 170 years ago. Only slightly more stupid.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic.

Today’s News

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced that he would lift the emergency martial law he imposed earlier today after the National Assembly unanimously voted to end it.
A judge dismissed the federal gun case against Hunter Biden, who was scheduled to be sentenced next week, after President Joe Biden pardoned his son.
The United States will send Ukraine an additional $725 million military-aid package, which includes missiles, ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, and counter-drone systems, according to a State Department announcement yesterday.

Evening Read

Photo Media / ClassicStock / Getty

It’s Never Too Late to Learn an Instrument

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

The recorder used to be an instrument people wanted to hear. As a 1946 article in The Atlantic explained, it gets mentioned lovingly in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Paradise Lost …

But by 1946, recorders were already commonly associated with terrible screeching noises, most often made by children. And today, few adults play them. In fact, they don’t really play instruments at all.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Netflix; Martha Stewart / Courte.

Watch. Martha, a new Netflix documentary, explores the cost of Martha Stewart’s chase for domestic perfection.

Read. Check out these seven books that can be read by a family, featuring titles that speak to a wide array of ages and tastes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Why Oz Is the Doctor Trump Ordered

2024-11-20T19:06:00-05:00

Donald Trump appears to experience the world through the glow of a television screen. He has long placed a premium on those who look the part in front of the camera. Paging Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Trump has picked Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS, as the agency is known, falls under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Last week, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as HHS secretary. As you may have guessed, Kennedy and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

In the pre-Trump era, it might have been a stretch to describe CMS administrator as an overtly political position. But Oz’s objective under Trump couldn’t be clearer. In a statement, Trump, using his reliably perplexing capitalization, telegraphed that Oz will bring a certain ethos to the job—a little MAGA, a little MAHA. Oz, Trump promised, will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” And, because he’s Trump, he mentioned Oz’s nine daytime Emmy Awards.

Some 150 million Americans currently rely on the agency’s insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. Oz has been a proponent of Medicare Advantage for All. Though that sounds like the Medicare for All initiative championed by progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the two programs are quite different. At its core, Medicare for All would set the U.S. on a path toward nationalizing health care. Trump would never go for that. But Medicare Advantage already exists within America’s patchwork private/public system, and Oz might push to strengthen it. He could also face budgetary pressure to weaken it. Oz’s own health-care views haven’t remained consistent. Though he once praised the mandatory universal models of Germany and Switzerland, as a Republican politician he threw his support behind privatized Medicare.

When asked about Oz’s nomination, Fetterman, his former opponent, told CNN: “As long as he’s willing to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m voting for the dude.” Some people were pissed. Victoria Perrone, who served as the director of operations on Fetterman’s Senate campaign, called out her old boss on social media: “Dr. Oz broke his pledge to ‘do no harm’ when he said red onions prevent ovarian cancer. My sis died of OC in 6/2022. This is a huge personal betrayal to me. We know he won’t protect the Medicaid that paid for her treatments,” Perrone posted on X. “I feel like I’ve been duped and 2 years of working on your campaign was a waste,” she added.

The above argument is illustrative of another reality Trump acknowledged in announcing his pick: “Make America Healthy Again” keeps growing. Oz, Trump declared, “will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He went a step further, promising that Oz will bring “a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.” Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill. Senator Claire McCaskill read three statements that Oz had made on his eponymous show:

“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”

“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”

“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

Oz’s defense that day was that his job was to be a “cheerleader” for the Dr. Oz audience. “I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them. I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family,” he testified.

He emerged from that hearing largely unscathed. Two years later, Oz would go on to read what he claimed were Trump’s medical records on that same show. He famously praised Trump’s testosterone levels and supposed all-around health. Four years after that, once Trump was president, Oz sent emails to White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushing them to rush patient trials for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID.

In the next Trump administration, those are the sorts of exchanges Oz could be having with Kennedy—or with Trump himself. How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

Related:

Trump is coming for Obamacare again. (From January)
Why is Dr. Oz so bad at Twitter? (From 2022)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Republican members of the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of the investigation into the sexual-misconduct and drug-use allegations against former Representative Matt Gaetz.
Jose Ibarra, who was found guilty of killing Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Trump tapped former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who previously led the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, to be the secretary of education.

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The Weekly Planet: Drought is an immigration issue, and Trump’s climate policies are designed to ignore that, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Evening Read

Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Archive Films / Getty; Internet Archive; Prelinger Associates / Getty.

Put Down the Vacuum

By Annie Lowrey

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.

I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.

Read the full article.

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RFK Jr. Collects His Reward

2024-11-15T15:40:00-05:00

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s movement has repeatedly been written off as a farce, a stunt, a distraction. Now Donald Trump has nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where, if confirmed, he’ll oversee a life-and-death corner of the federal government.

RFK Jr.’s operation had been building toward this moment for months. On August 23, Kennedy suspended his independent presidential bid and endorsed Trump after what he described as “a series of long, intense discussions” that proved the two were ideologically aligned. Almost immediately, the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement was born, as was a super PAC of the same name.

The group’s near-term goal was simple: persuade Kennedy’s coalition to vote for Trump. His former national field director, Jeff Hutt, became one of the MAHA PAC’s leaders, and throughout the fall, in his phone calls and meetings with Kennedy supporters, he kept hearing the same message: If RFK Jr. couldn’t become president, he should zero in on health reforms.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

“HHS is the place where they wanted Mr. Kennedy to be,” Hutt told me last night. He fully expects Kennedy to be confirmed. Hutt and his team have set up a “war room” and are identifying which senators will support the HHS nomination, and which will need coaxing. Either through standard procedure or via a recess appointment (an idea Trump has teased), Hutt said he was confident that Kennedy will land the job.

Kennedy was offered such a significant position—and will have such a “big rein,” as Hutt put it—because Trump returns favors. In 2016, Trump courted Christian voters by dangling the prospect of appointing conservative judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. This year, Trump spent the final months of the election wooing the MAHA bros. How many Kennedy supporters actually voted for Trump is unclear, but Hutt and others I spoke with believe that Trump’s victory is partially on account of the RFK Jr. brigade showing up. “He got behind them, and he got elected,” Hutt said of Trump.

Kennedy’s acolytes are elated that he will have such a prominent position in the administration. In my conversations with former Kennedy volunteers and others in his orbit this week, I heard some skepticism as to whether he’ll actually be able to accomplish a revolution inside a sprawling government bureaucracy. But for now, Kennedy’s champions are hopeful that he’ll catalyze policy changes that would lead to a “healthier” society—even if they don’t all agree on what that means.

In late September, at a festival of “free thinkers” in Washington, D.C., where RFK Jr. was the star attraction, Mike Patton, a former campaign volunteer who lives in Florida, told me he was unsure about whether he could bring himself to vote for Trump after all the work he’d done for Kennedy.

This week, Patton told me that, in the end, he and his wife each wrote in Kennedy’s name on their ballot. He is happy that Kennedy is ascending to a place of power, and excited that Trump has promised to give Kennedy authority over health matters, but he’s dismayed that Trump apparently wants to keep him away from areas involving fossil fuels and renewable energy. Patton isn’t sure what Kennedy might be able to accomplish within Trump’s administration. The idea of fighting all manner of chronic diseases with cleaner food and water is a pillar of the MAHA movement. But this will be an uphill battle. “Even when he was campaigning, he was saying he was going to make a drastic reduction in chronic disease in his four years, and I can’t wrap my head around how you can make a measurable difference [that quickly],” Patton told me. “But he seems confident, and Bobby seemed confident before. So, pop some popcorn.”

Another Kennedy supporter, Jennifer Swayne, who served as his campaign’s Florida volunteer coordinator, told me she somewhat reluctantly voted for Trump. Swayne is the mother of a child with autism, and she believes that mothers like herself are searching for answers—that’s partly what drew her to Kennedy. “We want to know what's causing this,” she said of autism. “We want to prevent other moms from having to go through this.” She said she would define success for Kennedy’s HHS tenure as removing “dangerous products off the market” and holding drug manufacturers accountable for adverse effects and chemical dependency.

[Yasmin Tayag: ‘Make America healthy again’ sounds good until you start asking questions]

When I asked Hutt how he’d gauge Kennedy’s success, he had a range of ideas. “The amount of money flowing through government into corporations would be dramatically reduced. Government would be out of a lot of things, like health care. We would take the middleman out of a lot of things. We would have government agencies whose sole purpose is to publish and report facts and numbers in ways that educate the American people, not to convince them one way or the other of something,” he said. He envisioned Kennedy ushering in an era of more family farms, of citizens gardening and growing their own food. “I guess that's really what it looks like: sort of a health revolution, in a sense,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked me that question before.”

In announcing the nomination, Trump echoed Kennedy’s core campaign messaging: “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and one of the key people behind Project 2025, said in a statement that Kennedy’s nomination “sends a clear message to our failed public health establishment,” and that under Trump and Kennedy, “Americans will be in control of their health, not the commissars of three-letter health agencies.”

Many questions surround the HHS nomination, none more significant than whether Kennedy would use his authority to block or recall certain vaccines. Kennedy has spent years sowing doubt about their safety. In the early 2000s, he helped popularize the unproven theory of a link between vaccines and autism. More recently, he was an influential opponent of the COVID vaccines and accompanying mandates. Now he’s poised to inform drug policy at the highest level.

Kennedy’s spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment last night as to whether, as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would move to outlaw any existing vaccines, and referred me to his victory-lap post on X, which did not mention the topic. Tony Lyons, who founded a different Kennedy super PAC, American Values 2024, said in a text message: “Bobby has said very clearly that he’s not going to take away anyone’s vaccines.” If, hypothetically, we faced another pandemic during Trump’s second term, I asked Lyons, would Kennedy stand in the way of a vaccine-development project such as Operation Warp Speed? Lyons didn’t offer a clear answer. “[Kennedy] believes in robust, transparent and independent science, rather than corporate science propped up by censorship and propaganda,” he wrote.

In my conversations with Kennedy’s supporters, I heard a lot about “medical freedom” and “personal choice,” but no one mentioned the word ban. Kennedy stiff-arms the “anti-vax” label, and his allies steadfastly maintain that he’ll use his position to scrutinize vaccine science—but not to institute a vaccine moratorium for the greater population.

[Benjamin Mazer: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Perhaps the clearest way to understand Kennedy’s HHS aim is to listen to his musings on “corporate capture”: the idea that government agencies are overly influenced by the companies within the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. This is a long-standing liberal complaint, which Kennedy has built up to the status of a conspiracy theory. (Anthony Fauci, for instance, has not personally profited off of vaccines, as Kennedy has claimed.) His top-line goal is to sever the relationships between corporations and the federal government, but he has yet to explicitly state how he’ll do that. Reforming fast food may be his biggest source of tension with Trump. The future 47th president didn’t just serve fries at a (closed) McDonald’s as a campaign stunt; he seems to genuinely love Mickey D’s, while Kennedy sees it as a scourge—the antithesis of MAHA. But that’s just one company. Hutt conceded that his team faces a challenge in persuading senators from agricultural-heavy states to support the sort of reforms Kennedy is promising: fewer food chemicals, an emphasis on regenerative soil.

And some of what Kennedy speaks of accomplishing is well beyond his reach. For instance, he has called for removing fluoride from our drinking water—something even Republican dentists oppose. But such a change could occur only at the local level, not the federal level. In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has said he will follow the fluoridation recommendations of city and state health departments.

As Trump prepares to take office again, Kennedy remains a confounding presence: He’s a dreamer, but he’s destructive. Kennedy was never going to win the White House, but he’s now, at last, on his way to Washington. And we all have to live with it.

Taxonomy of the Trump Bro

2024-11-08T18:42:00-05:00

The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Related:

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Today’s News

A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory.
The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump.
Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

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Atlantic Intelligence: AI-powered search is killing the internet’s curiosity, Matteo Wong writes.
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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

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Matt Wilson / Paramount

Analyze. The comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline has muddled the genre of political comedy, Shirley Li writes.

Read. In Miss Kim Knows, Cho Nam-Joo captures both the universality of sexism and the specificity of women’s experiences, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Watching It All Fall Apart in Pennsylvania

2024-11-06T16:49:00-05:00

Photographs by Ross Mantle

Updated at 4:18 p.m. ET on November 8, 2024

Maybe the tell was when the mayor of Philadelphia didn’t say Kamala Harris’s name. Cherelle Parker looked out at her fellow Democrats inside a private club just northeast of Center City last night. Onstage, she beamed with pride about how, despite Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims on social media, Election Day had unfolded freely and fairly across her city. But Parker did not—could not—telegraph victory for her party. “You’ve heard us say from the very beginning that we knew that the path to the White House had to come through our keystone state. And to get through the keystone state, you had to contend with our city of Philadelphia. And I want to thank each and every Philadelphian who participated in democracy in action,” she said. Her remarks were bland, vague, safe. Soon, the mayor slipped out of the venue.

The watch party trudged along. Four ceiling fans blew hot air. Stacks of grease-stained Del Rossi’s pizza boxes filled a rear table. Anxious Philadelphians sipped $5 bottles of Yuengling from the cash bar. But no single word or phrase could encompass the swirl of emotion: anticipation, dread, denial, despair. Across two floors of what might technically be considered “partying,” attendees peered up at projection screens that showed MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki pacing and pointing. His big map was glowing red. The revelers were blue.

Early on, many partygoers were still clinging to fleeting moments of zen. Around 9 p.m., after Rachel Maddow declared Michigan “too early to call,” the venue erupted in earnest applause. The hooting grew even louder when, shortly thereafter, Maddow announced that Pennsylvania, the place that most of these voters called home, was also in toss-up territory. But by 9:30, when Kornacki showed Trump comfortably up in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, enough people could grasp that the “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—which Harris had been counting on to win the White House—was now crumbling, brick by brick, county by county.

[Read: This was the second COVID election]

I saw genuine fear in people’s eyes when, just after 9:50, zooming in on the Pennsylvania map, Kornacki mentioned Trump and Lackawanna County. A union leader named Sam Williamson told me about all the door-knocking he’d done. He had been “really confident” Harris would win Pennsylvania. But by 10:30 or so, even the formerly blue Centre County, where Penn State University is located, appeared to flip red. Was this actually happening? Hardly anyone even murmured when Kornacki spoke of Harris’s success right there in Philadelphia. People were pissed. Demoralized. Many began to filter out. Democrats had spent this twisty, complex presidential campaign with a narrow path to victory, and now that path was narrowing to a close.

People gather for an election night watch party at the Ruba Club in Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

Each voter I spoke with processed the night a little differently. A 38-year-old nurse named Abena Bempah conceded, somewhat sheepishly, that she had tuned out this election until late June, when President Joe Biden had his disastrous debate against former (and future) President Donald Trump. After that night, Bempah had an awakening: “It actually reminded me that I need to be an engaged citizen throughout a candidate’s entire term.” So she spent the summer and fall volunteering with the Philadelphia Democrats. She told me that to preserve democracy, people need to do so much more than vote—they need to voice their concerns to elected officials. “I think that Republicans are planning on Democrats to rest on our laurels and not be as active,” she said.

Near a billiards table, I met a father and son, Shamai and Liv Leibowitz, who live in Silver Spring, Maryland, and had driven up to Pennsylvania to volunteer. Liv, who is 21, is taking a year off from school, and had recently been canvassing in nearby Bucks County and Chester County. He wore a baseball hat with Representative Jamie Raskin’s name on the dome. “I was here for the past two weeks,” he told me with a smile. Half of the undecided voters he’d met felt that they didn’t know enough about Harris and her positions. But many, he said, were staying home because of her support of Israel.

Liv’s father, Shamai, told me that he had the gut feeling that Trump would win. Shamai had grown up in Israel, and he moved to the United States in the early 2000s. He believed that Harris was doomed in this election because she wouldn’t substantively deviate from Biden’s Middle East policy. “I’m worried right now because she didn’t come out forcefully for a weapons embargo, or even hint at a weapons embargo. We met people canvassing who told us, ‘We’re voting Green Party’; ‘We’re staying home,’” he said. Shamai knew it would have been politically risky for her to criticize Israel, but, he told me, in the end, not changing course was hurting her more.

Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

I also spoke with two people who might be considered interlopers. One was a 27-year-old Swede named Gabriel Gunnarsson, who had flown to Philadelphia from his home in Stockholm just to witness the U.S. election with his own eyes. As he nursed a beer, he told me that everyone he knew in Sweden had been following our election particularly closely this year. “I’m feeling bad,” he told me. “I’m sort of dystopic about the future, I think, and just seeing this, it’s a horrible result for the world.” I asked him if he recalled one of Trump’s more vile comments from his first term in office: He’d said that America was bringing in people only from “shithole countries,” and he’d lamented that we don’t have more immigrants from places like Norway. Gunnarsson laughed and shook his head. “He did this when he was president as well: He just randomly said, ‘Look at what’s happening in Sweden!’” Gunnarsson recalled. “And we were all like, ‘What did happen?’”

[Read: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Finally, as the evening was winding down, I met a man named Tim Brogan, who very quietly told me he was an independent, not a Democrat. Would you care to share whom you voted for today? I asked. Brogan looked down at his feet, then off to the corner, then back at me. “I voted for the other party,” he said. “I did in fact vote for Trump, yes.”

He had come out to this particular event because he lives in the neighborhood and wanted to be around some friends. He told me he works in real estate, and as a lifelong Philadelphian, he was distressed to see inflation and more crime in the city. This was, in fact, Brogan’s third consecutive time voting for Trump, even though he had previously voted for Barack Obama. He earnestly believed that Trump was the only person who could set America back on the right path. “There’s just so many things that we missed—and we’re allowing—with the Democratic Party,” he said. “I think my choice was a good direction for my beliefs.”

I asked him how he talks about politics with his friends, family, and neighbors.

“Simple,” he said. “We don’t like to get into it.”

This article originally stated that Centre County flipped red. While the county was called for Trump on election night, it was later determined that Harris won the county.

When the Show Is Over

2024-11-05T17:59:00-05:00

How do you transform something so big, so existential, into something people can grasp? Last night, Oprah Winfrey gave it a shot as the penultimate speaker at Kamala Harris’s grand-finale rally in Philadelphia: “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

Every presidential election is the biggest ever, but this one lacks an adequate superlative. Throughout 2024, both parties have leaned on the imagery and messaging of our Founding Fathers. The Donald Trump acolyte and former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy frequently says that we’re living in a “1776 moment.” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s democratic governor, last night invoked Benjamin Franklin’s warning about our still-young country: “a republic, if you can keep it.” It’s an oft-repeated line, but that “if” lingered in a way I’d never felt before.

Shapiro was peering out at the tens of thousands of people standing shoulder to shoulder along Benjamin Franklin Parkway at the chilly election-eve gathering. Many attendees had been there for hours, and more than a few had grown visibly restless. Each emotion, both on the stage and in the crowd, was turned up to 11—fear, hope, promise, peril. At the lectern, Shapiro’s inflection mirrored that of former President Barack Obama. So much of Harris’s campaign send-off had the feel of Obama’s 2008 celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. Will.i.am came ready with a song (a sequel to his Obama ’08 anthem, “Yes We Can”) titled—what else?—“Yes She Can.”

Around 11:30 p.m., Harris finally appeared at the base of the Rocky Steps to make her final pitch. Beyond the symbolic proximity to the Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall, this particular setting was a visual metaphor for, as Harris put it, those who “start as the underdog and climb to victory.” (Sadly, no one in the A/V booth thought to blast the Rocky horns as she walked up.) The truth is, it’s a bit of a stretch to call Harris the underdog. She is, after all, the quasi-incumbent, and polls suggest that the race is tied. Still, you sort of knew what she was getting at with the Rocky thing.

For the past nine years, the whole political world, and much of American life, has revolved around Donald Trump. He is an inescapable force, a fiery orange sun that promises to keep you safe, happy, and warm but, in the end, will burn you. Harris is running on preserving freedom and democracy, but she’s really just running against Trump. In surveys and interviews, many Americans say that they, too, are voting against Trump rather than for Harris. The election is about the future of America, but in a real sense, it’s about fear of one person.

Harris had already been in Scranton, Allentown, and Pittsburgh yesterday. But now her campaign had reached its finish line, in Philadelphia, and though I heard cautious optimism, none of the Harris campaign staffers I spoke with last night dared offer any sort of prediction. The closest I got was that some believe they’ll have enough internal data to know which states are actually in their column by late tonight, and that they expect the race might be called tomorrow morning or afternoon.

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, wrapped up in an expectedly apocalyptic and campy manner. The truth is, some of his chaos worked—he never lost our attention. Consider the weeklong national conversation about the word garbage. A comedian’s stupid joke deeming Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” might end up being a determining factor in a Trump defeat, but President Joe Biden’s comment likening Trump supporters to garbage also proved a pivotal moment for the MAGA movement. In response to Biden, Trump appeared in a bright-orange safety vest as a way of owning the insult—a billionaire showing solidarity with the working class. In a similar late-campaign moment, Trump donned an apron and served fries at a (closed) McDonald’s. It wasn’t the work wear so much as the contrast that told the story: In both instances, Trump kept his shirt and tie on. These theatrical juxtapositions, however inane, have a way of sticking in your brain.

But not everyone gets the reality-TV component of his act. Many of his supporters take his every utterance as gospel. At Trump’s final rallies, some showed up in their own safety vests or plastic trash bags. Trump’s movement had quite literally entered its garbage phase. In his closing argument last night, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, called Harris “trash.” And Trump, days after miming oral sex onstage, kept the grossness going, mouthing that House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is a “bitch.”

Trump’s campaign was much longer than Harris’s, and for that reason, I spoke with far more Republicans than Democrats at campaign events this year. Across different cities and states, it was clear that people stood for hours at Trump rallies because they still obsess over Trump the man, and because Trumpism has become something like a religion. Trump makes a significant portion of the country feel good, either by stoking their resentments or simply making them believe he hears their concerns. In the end, though, he’s also the one feeding their fears.

It can be easy to write off American politics as a stadium-size spectacle that’s grown only cringier and uglier over the past decade. But last night, in my conversations with Philadelphians who’d braved the chill to see Harris, it became clear that the show was just the show, and that they had other priorities. Sure, they’d get to see Ricky Martin perform “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and hear Lady Gaga sing “God Bless America,” but all of that was extra. A trio of 20-year-old Temple University students—two of whom wore Brat-green Kamala beanies, one of whom wore a camo Harris Walz trucker hat—told me about their hometowns. One had come from nearby Bucks County, which he’d watched grow Trumpy over his teen years. Another was from the Jersey Shore and said she believed that people would egg her house if she put a Harris sign in the front yard. Another, who was from Texas, summed up the risks posed by Trump more succinctly than almost anyone I’ve spoken with over the past two years of covering the campaign: “He’ll let people get away with promoting hate and violence in our country, and I think that is my biggest fear.”

This election has been an elaborate traveling circus, with performers playing into all manner of dreams and nightmares. Trump has long relied on the allure of the show, and the preponderance of celebrity cameos at Harris’s recent rallies proves that she, too, understands the importance of star power. But now that all of the swing states have been barnstormed, and the billions of dollars have been spent, what’s left? The pageantry has entered its final hours. Tomorrow (or the next day … or the next day), a new iteration of American life begins. We won’t be watching it; we’ll be living it.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

A federal judge ruled against state and national Republicans who tried to invalidate roughly 2,000 absentee ballots returned by hand over the weekend and yesterday in some of Georgia’s Democratic-leaning counties.
The FBI said that many of the bomb threats made to polling locations in several states “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” Officials in Georgia and Michigan reported that their states received bomb threats linked to Russia.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over their differences on how the war in Gaza should be conducted. Gallant, who was seen as a more moderate voice in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, will be replaced by Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz.

Evening Read

Justin Sullivan / Getty

The Right’s New Kingmaker

By Ali Breland

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove Me Wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates …

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the core of the conservative movement.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Culture Break

Illustration by Anthony Gerace. Sources: Hulton Archive; Joe Vella / Alamy.

Read. The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, “probably saved my life,” George Packer writes. And the book’s vision remains startlingly relevant today.

Commemorate. The late producer Quincy Jones came from hardship and knew his history, which allowed him to see—and invent—the future of music, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Arizona’s Election Tipping Point

2024-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

Strange things can happen in the desert. On Wednesday morning in San Tan Valley, Arizona, I watched Kari Lake, the Republican Senate candidate, come within a few feet of violating a fundamental election law.

Lake’s campaign bus had just rolled up to an early-voting site roughly an hour southeast of Phoenix. Along the path leading to the precinct’s entrance was a yellow sign that read 75 FOOT LIMIT. The post warned that electioneering beyond that threshold would constitute a Class 2 misdemeanor. Lake, as is her proclivity, waltzed right up to the line with a knowing smile.

I stood nearby, watching Lake glad-hand and pose for selfies with voters, who seemed surprised to see her. I heard her ask a man if he’d voted for Donald Trump. Amid the campaigning, she found time to attack the media. When I told her I was reporting for The Atlantic, she replied, “Oh, is that that really, really, really biased outlet?” (Three reallys.) Lake appeared to be performing for the cameras, but at that stop, there were none, save for those of her own campaign. It was just me and three other journalists with notebooks. No matter: This was, after all, Kari Lake. Bombast is her brand.

Lake may be the most MAGA-fied downballot candidate in the country. (The phrase MAKE ARIZONA GRAND AGAIN is splayed across the side of her bus next to a giant image of her head.) A former local-TV news anchor, Lake first gained national attention by promoting Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories about Arizona’s 2020 election results. When she ran for Arizona governor in 2022, she refused to accept her defeat. Most candidates make their name on a particular issue; election denialism, more than anything, has come to define Lake.

Once seen as Trump’s potential 2024 running mate, Lake is now battling the Democrat Ruben Gallego for the Arizona Senate seat soon to be vacated by Kyrsten Sinema. The RealClearPolitics polling average suggests that she could be on the verge of another loss. Trump, meanwhile, appears poised to retake the state at the top of the ticket. Although no outcome is guaranteed, on Tuesday, in a border state plagued by division and extremism, both a Democrat and a Republican might emerge victorious.

Such a result would come as a shock to many. It might particularly rankle conspiracists and those who have spent years casting doubt on the validity of America’s electoral systems. People, in other words, such as Kari Lake.

[Read: In Kari Lake, Trumpism has found its leading lady]

That morning, she took questions from the three other reporters, but looked at me and said, “I’m not talking to your outlet.” So I instead approached one of her surrogates, Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and later as the acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, too, had antagonized The Atlantic alongside Lake just minutes before. (Just as Trump did in a recent rally, Grenell claimed without evidence that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had “made up a lot of stuff.”) But now, in a quieter setting off to the side of the scene, he was willing to speak with me.

I informed Grenell that I had planned to ask Lake a straightforward question: Would she commit to accepting next week’s election results? He scoffed at the premise.

“It’s a dumb question to be like, ‘Do you accept the results of an election?’” Grenell told me. He said that “of course” she would accept the outcome if it were a free and fair election. “Let me ask you this question,” he said. “Do you think there’s no fraud in the election? Zero fraud?”

Lake saw me speaking with Grenell, and as she was heading back to her bus, she and I made eye contact. The crowd was smaller now, and Lake was chatting in a slightly dialed-down register. Professional wrestlers have a term to describe the performative antagonization of an opponent: kayfabe. Based on what I had seen of Lake prior to that moment, though, I didn’t think she ever snapped out of her combative persona when dealing with the media. As we briefly spoke one-on-one, Lake wasn’t exactly friendly, but she was at least willing to let me finish a sentence. I asked her if she’d accept the election results.

“A legally run election? Yes, absolutely,” she said. “One hundred percent.”

But how do you define that?

Suddenly her switch flipped. With a bright smile and sarcasm in her voice, Lake said, “I will accept the results of the election, absolutely!” Then she swiftly got back on the bus.

[George Packer: What will become of American civilization?]

Later that afternoon, I drove to a strip mall in Maryvale, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in metro Phoenix, to meet Gallego, Lake’s challenger. Between a barber shop and a check-cashing place, Arizona Democrats had set up a bustling field office. Inside the room, papel picado banners hung from the drop ceiling, the walls were plastered with posters—Latinos Con Harriz Walz, Democratas Protegen El Aborto—and, on the far side of the room, someone had handwritten a slew of motivational quotes (“If you have an opportunity to make things better and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.” — Roberto Clemente). When I turned around, I spotted Gallego chatting with that day’s volunteers. He was dressed casually in a short-sleeve button-down and jeans, and he wasn’t surrounded by a large entourage, as Lake had been. He and I found a quiet corner, and I asked him the same question I had asked Lake: Would he commit to accepting the election results? He didn’t hesitate.

“I trust the Arizona election system. I trust the Republicans and Democrats that have been running the state, and I will trust the results of the election, win or lose,” Gallego said.

Right now, the 44-year-old is in a rare position: He knows he stands a chance of winning over Lake-wary Republicans. He’s a Democrat, but, as a former Marine who has spoken out on culture-war issues, such as against the use of Latinx, he may appeal to some centrists and independents as well. Above all, he’s positioned to woo some of the most sought-after persuadable voters in the region: Latinos. He sometimes tells a story about how he grew up sleeping on the floor and didn’t have a bed until he got to college. On the stump, he often delivers remarks in both Spanish and English.

What Gallego is not doing is running a straight Democratic-party-line campaign. When I asked him how he felt about Joe Biden’s comments that Trump supporters are “garbage,” he didn’t rush to unequivocally defend the president. “No matter what, we shouldn’t be castigating people for how they vote,” he said. I also asked him if he anticipated civil unrest next week, given the chaos that had unfolded in Arizona in previous elections. “I really have faith in the voters of Arizona—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—that they’re going to go vote, and they’re going to keep it civil,” Gallego said. “I hope that the politicians would actually keep it civil and not try to bring election denialism into it, like Kari Lake has. That’s where the danger has happened.”

Gallego had stopped by that office to rev up volunteers for a canvassing operation. Joining him was Senator Mark Kelly and his wife, former Representative Gabby Giffords. That afternoon, I asked Kelly what sort of challenges he and his fellow Arizona Democrats were anticipating after Election Day, and whether he believed that Lake (and Trump, for that matter) would accept the election’s outcome. “They should,” Kelly said cautiously. “I mean, I don’t expect their behavior to be much different than it was in the 2020 and 2022 election, though. I mean, I have no reason to expect that. But you know, you can always dream that maybe they’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “Kari Lake certainly should have learned her lesson.”

What Trump Sees Coming

2024-11-01T18:24:00-04:00

Maybe it was always building to this: thousands of people singing and dancing to “Macho Man,” some sporting neon safety vests, others in actual trash bags, a symbolic expression of solidarity with their authoritarian hero whose final week on the campaign trail has revolved around the word garbage.

Where will the MAGA movement go from here? Trump had an answer last night, at least for the short term. He wasn’t telegraphing an Election Day victory—he was preparing, once again, to label his opponents “cheaters” and to challenge a potential defeat.

The evening’s host, Tucker Carlson, said that for most of his life as a journalist, he’d imagined that one would have to be “bereft of a soul” to stand onstage and support a politician. “And here I am with a full-throated, utterly sincere endorsement of Donald Trump.”

On with the show.

As I wandered around Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, last night, this iteration of Trumpism felt slightly different, if not wholly novel. Nine years ago, Trump held one of his first MAGA rallies not far from this venue. “Donald Trump Defiantly Rallies a New ‘Silent Majority’ in a Visit to Arizona” read a New York Times headline from July 11, 2015. Charlie Kirk, one of last night’s warm-up speakers, put it thusly: “This state helped launch the movement that has swept the globe.” All of the elements Trump needed to stoke the fire back then were still here last night: the Mexican border debate, inflamed racial tensions, metastasizing political extremism. Trump’s movement has grown, and his red MAGA hat has become a cultural touchstone. As the Arizona sun set, though, his nearly decade-long campaign of fear and despotism also had a surprising air of denouement.

Trump told Carlson he doesn’t like to look back. But last night, as he rambled (and rambled), he was sporadically reflective about all that had led to this point in his life. Trump sat in a leather chair with just a handheld mic—no teleprompter, no notes. He mostly ignored Carlson’s questions and instead tossed out ideas at random—what he calls “the weave.” In reality, it’s less lucid than he believes; more of a zigzag across years of personal triumphs and troubles. Remember “Russia, Russia, Russia”? Remember the “China virus”? Remember the time he courageously pardoned Scooter Libby? Remember how good he used to be at firing people on The Apprentice? Remember the crowd at that one Alabama rally? All of this, in his mind, amounted to something akin to a closing argument.

The event was a hurricane-relief benefit billed as Tucker Carlson Live With Special Guest Donald J. Trump. But Carlson barely spoke. Instead, he sat back in his own chair, occasionally picking at his fingers, looking somewhat mystified that this was where he’d ended up in his career, hosting Inside the Authoritarian’s Studio. He had taken the stage to the sounds of Kid Rock, but he looked as preppy as ever in a navy blazer, a gingham shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He insisted, twice, that he had bent the knee to Donald Trump without shame. Trump, he marveled, had shown him what a sham D.C. was. He lamented how those inside the Beltway treated Trump “like he was a dangerous freak, like he’d just escaped from the state mental institution.”

Carlson has grown more radical since Fox News fired him. Last night, he claimed, for instance, that the CIA and the FBI have been working with the Democratic Party to take Trump down. He implied that funding for Ukraine isn’t going to the military but is instead lining the pockets of the Washington elite: “Have you been to McLean recently?”

The man he unabashedly endorsed, meanwhile, again spoke of “the enemy within,” and attacked the enemy of the people (the media). Trump once again demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He claimed that members of the January 6 “unselect committee” had burned, destroyed, and deleted all the evidence it had collected because, in the end, they found out that Nancy Pelosi was at fault (this bit was especially hard to follow). He called for enlisting the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney into combat: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Trump blew some of his usual autocratic dog whistles, saying, for instance, that anyone who burns an American flag should be sentenced to a year in prison. He suggested that loyalists and extremists will fill his next administration, should it exist. He implied that he’d bring in Elon Musk to find ways to slash the federal budget, and let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist, examine public-health matters. “He can do anything he wants,” Trump said of Kennedy.

But perhaps the most meaningful moment of the night was when Trump said matter-of-factly that he won’t run for president again. He instead hinted that his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, will be a top 2028 contender. Win or lose, this was it, his last dystopian rodeo. Trump spoke almost wistfully about suddenly approaching the end of his never-ending rally tour. He sounded like a kid moving to a new neighborhood and a new middle school. He told his friends he’d miss them. “We’ll meet, but it’ll be different,” he said. He was in no rush to leave the stage.

The big question going into Tuesday’s election is whether the MAGA movement will fizzle out should Trump lose. Although Trump himself seems more exhausted than usual these days, his supporters are as fired up as ever. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants— a reference to Trump’s now-infamous response to the July attempt on his life—broke out among the crowd as people waited to pass through Secret Service checkpoints. I passed a man in a brown wig, a pink blazer, and a green top that read Kamala Toe, the words gesturing toward his crotch. I saw a woman wearing gold Trump-branded sneakers, and many people with Musk’s Dark MAGA hat. The latter seemed particularly notable: In addition to getting behind Vance, Trump might be inclined to pass the torch to another nonpolitician—namely, someone like Musk.

For now, though, Trump is returning to his conspiratorial election denialism. Four years ago, he tried to undermine the results in Arizona, Georgia, and other states. Last night, he singled out Pennsylvania. (A day earlier, his campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state, alleging voter suppression.) “It’s hard to believe I’m winning, it seems by a lot, if they don’t cheat too much,” he said, alleging malfeasance in York and Lancaster counties. Whether he succeeds or fails, the detritus that Trump has left behind will likely linger. “Look around, Mr. President, because there’s a lot of garbage here!” Charlie Kirk said earlier in the night. “Go to the polls on Tuesday and make sure that we all ride that big garbage truck to Washington, D.C.,” Kennedy, who was one of the warm-up speakers, implored.

Trump, though, opined with uncharacteristic nostalgia: “When I was a young guy, I loved—I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history and all of the things that can happen.” He sounded fleetingly earnest. He has undoubtedly cemented his place in history. Or, as Carlson put it earlier in the night: “Almost 10 years later, he has completely transformed the country and the world.”

Related:

Today’s News

The White House altered its transcript of President Joe Biden’s call with Latino activists, during which official stenographers recorded that Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” according to the Associated Press. The White House denied that Biden had been referring to Trump voters.
During a meeting in Moscow, North Korea’s foreign minister pledged to support Russia until it wins the war against Ukraine.
The price of Donald Trump’s social-media stock fell another 14 percent today, amounting to a loss of more than 40 percent over three days.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Although AI regulation is the rare issue that Trump and Harris actually agree on, partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, Damon Beres writes.
The Books Briefing: These books are must-reads for Americans before Election Day, Boris Kachka writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Katie Martin

This Might Be a Turning Point for Child-Free Voters

By Faith Hill

When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.”

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu

Watch. Rivals (streaming on Hulu) is the silliest, sexiest show of the year, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Listen. We Live Here Now, a podcast by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin, who found out that their new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

Play our daily crossword.

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