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Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.

The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.

One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.

This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.

fill the vacancy at the top of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which has been without a director for six years.

make gun trafficking a felony. Gun rights advocates agree that penalties for illegal use and possession of guns should be stiffened -- and so should penalties on those who are engaged in gun trafficking.

requires the federal government to compel states to submit all necessary records on felons, domestic abusers, the seriously mentally ill and others to the background check system.

step up its prosecution of gun criminals who try to buy guns. In 2009, 71,000 people who had been convicted of gun crimes tried to buy guns by lying on their background checks. Yet the federal government prosecuted only 77 of those cases.

crack down on rogue gun dealers.

. If President Obama and Congress fail to lead, 48,000 Americans will be killed with guns over the next four years.

When a man shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun sales did not set records until five days later, after President Obama called for banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.

“It would be like you’ve never owned a toaster, you don’t really want a toaster, but the federal government says they’re going to ban toasters,” Mr. Ruttenbur said. “So you go out and buy a toaster.”

Gun sales rose in New Jersey in 2013 after Gov. Chris Christie proposed measures that included expanding background checks and banning certain rifles. (Mr. Christie later vetoed one of the most stringent parts

Catch-22 for gun control proponents: Pushing for new restrictions can lead to an influx of new guns.

Maryland approved one of the nation’s strictest gun-control measures in May 2013, gun sales jumped as buyers tried to beat the October deadline specified in the measure

after Hurricane Katrina, legally registered guns were confiscated from civilians. The confiscations outraged gun owners and prompted an increase in gun sales in the area. Conservatives responded by pushing for a federal law prohibiting the seizure of firearms from civilians during an emergency

Gun sales have more than doubled in a decade, to about 15 million in 2013 from about seven million in 2002. More firearms are sold to residents in the United States than in any other country

These estimates undercount total sales because they omit some purchases in states that do not require background checks for private sales. They also exclude permits that allow people in some states to buy multiple guns with a single background check.

The increase is mostly due to higher sales of handguns, which are typically bought for self-defense. Two of the fastest-growing segments of the market are women and gun owners with concealed carry permits.

When Missouri repealed a requirement that gun buyers obtain a permit to buy a handgun in 2007, estimated gun sales went up and stayed up, by roughly 9,000 additional guns per month. The influx shifted gun-trafficking patterns, reducing the number of guns used in crimes that had been brought in from neighboring states.

Supreme Court invalidated a ban on handguns in Washington, estimated handgun sales in the city went from near-zero to about 40 every month.

In the U.S., people often reach for more guns as a response to mass shootings and in anticipation of needing a method of home protection, but also — as we saw in 2020 and into 2021 — in response to presidential elections, political unrest and mass-scale infectious disease.

Gun violence entails immediate physical trauma, but it also elicits forms of trauma that can ricochet far beyond its initial target

If we understand trauma as social, psychological and physical responses to experiences that cannot be assimilated into an individual’s existing understandings of themselves and the world around them, then gun trauma goes far beyond

Having someone taken through gun violence, surviving gun violence oneself, even hearing gunshots tears at our basic sense of safety, of security and of self

Research has found that surviving or being exposed to gun violence survival is associated with an increased risk of symptoms linked with PTSD (including anxiety and depression) in both urban and rural contexts, short-term decreases in reading ability, vocabulary, and impulse control, unemployment and substance use and even shifts in friendship formation

While gun trauma most certainly shapes the aftermath of shootings, it also shapes our day-to-day decisions and sensibilities far beyond specific acts of gun violence

Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools, or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.

This trauma-violence cycle cannot break itself — but certainly has the power to break us.

Gun trauma is implicated in how guns harm us, why we turn to guns, and — to the extent that we depend on punitive criminal justice approaches to address it — how we attempt to solve the problem of gun violence.

We must dismantle this trauma-violence cycle, and the first step is centering gun trauma within the gun debate and addressing gun violence

what this might look like: the Community Justice Action Fund and Revolve Impact’s By Design campaign, which aims to “change the conversation” on gun violence by elevating leaders of color to “interrupt systems of violence and ultimately build power for communities most impacted by gun violence”

Approaching guns from the perspective of trauma will require some imagination — and some courage

In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.

Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.

The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.

It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.

But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.

The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.

When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”

When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.

Given our decentralized system of government, I could reduce the number of dangerous firearms only by persuading the states to enact uniform laws totally prohibiting the ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons while the national government banned the importation of such weapons.

The fundamental problem was the ready availability of high-powered weapons, which enabled people to convert their murderous impulses into mass killing.

I made clear that my government was willing to hold a nationwide referendum to alter the Australian Constitution and give the federal government constitutional power over guns. Such a referendum would have been expensive and divisive, but it would have passed. And all state governments knew this.

today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate. The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996. The American Journal of Law and Economics found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996. Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control.

This means that, even under the best circumstances, scientists can’t directly test what the results of a given gun policy are. The best you can do is to compare what was happening in a state before and after a policy was enacted, or to compare two different states, one that has the policy and one that doesn’t. And that’s a pretty inexact way of working.

Add in enough assumptions, and you can eventually come up with an estimate. But is the estimate correct? Is it even close to reality? That’s a hard question to answer, because the assumptions you made—the correlations you drew between cause and effect, what you know and what you assume to be true because of that—might be totally wrong.

It’s hard to tease apart the effect of one specific change, compared to the effects of other things that could be happening at the same time.

This process of taking the observational data we do have and then running it through a filter of assumptions plays out in the real world in the form of statistical modeling. When the NAS report says that nobody yet knows whether more guns lead to more crime, or less crime, what they mean is that the models and the assumptions built into those models are all still proving to be pretty weak.

From either side of the debate, he said, scientists continue to produce wildly different conclusions using the same data. On either side, small shifts in the assumptions lead the models to produce different results. Both factions continue to choose sets of assumptions that aren’t terribly logical. It’s as if you decided that anybody with blue shoes probably had a belly-button piercing. There’s not really a good reason for making that correlation. And if you change the assumption—actually, belly-button piercings are more common in people who wear green shoes—you end up with completely different results.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces these big reports periodically, which analyze lots of individual papers. In essence, they’re looking at lots of trees and trying to paint you a picture of the forest. IPCC reports are available for free online, you can go and read them yourself. When you do, you’ll notice something interesting about the way that the reports present results. The IPCC never says, “Because we burned fossil fuels and emitted carbon dioxide into the atmosphere then the Earth will warm by x degrees.” Instead, those reports present a range of possible outcomes … for everything. Depending on the different models used, different scenarios presented, and the different assumptions made, the temperature of the Earth might increase by anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius.

What you’re left with is an environment where it’s really easy to prove that your colleague’s results are probably wrong, and it’s easy for him to prove that yours are probably wrong. But it’s not easy for either of you to make a compelling case for why you’re right.

Statistical modeling isn’t unique to gun research. It just happens to be particularly messy in this field. Scientists who study other topics have done a better job of using stronger assumptions and of building models that can’t be upended by changing one small, seemingly randomly chosen detail. It’s not that, in these other fields, there’s only one model being used, or even that all the different models produce the exact same results. But the models are stronger and, more importantly, the scientists do a better job of presenting the differences between models and drawing meaning from them.

“Climate change is one of the rare scientific literatures that has actually faced up to this,” Charles Manski said. What he means is that, when scientists model climate change, they don’t expect to produce exact, to-the-decimal-point answers.

“It’s been a complete waste of time, because we can’t validate one model versus another,” Pepper said. Most likely, he thinks that all of them are wrong. For instance, all the models he’s seen assume that a law will affect every state in the same way, and every person within that state in the same way. “But if you think about it, that’s just nonsensical,” he said.

On the one hand, that leaves politicians in a bit of a lurch. The response you might mount to counteract a 1.5 degree increase in global average temperature is pretty different from the response you’d have to 4.5 degrees. On the other hand, the range does tell us something valuable: the temperature is increasing.

The problem with this is that it flies in the face of what most of us expect science to do for public policy. Politics is inherently biased, right? The solutions that people come up with are driven by their ideologies. Science is supposed to cut that Gordian Knot. It’s supposed to lay the evidence down on the table and impartially determine who is right and who is wrong.

Manski and Pepper say that this is where we need to rethink what we expect science to do. Science, they say, isn’t here to stop all political debate in its tracks. In a situation like this, it simply can’t provide a detailed enough answer to do that—not unless you’re comfortable with detailed answers that are easily called into question and disproven by somebody else with a detailed answer.

Instead, science can reliably produce a range of possible outcomes, but it’s still up to the politicians (and, by extension, up to us) to hash out compromises between wildly differing values on controversial subjects. When it comes to complex social issues like gun ownership and gun violence, science doesn’t mean you get to blow off your political opponents and stake a claim on truth. Chances are, the closest we can get to the truth is a range that encompasses the beliefs of many different groups.

"I can't tell you how many senior executives at firearms companies, over a beer when no one's watching, will say, 'You do know we realize that, of course, at least a third of our customers shouldn't be let within five miles of a gun."

To what extent is the gun debate actually about guns? Brownstein asked, citing that only 28 percent of people in urban areas live in a home with a gun, but 59 percent in rural areas do. White people are twice as likely as black people to live in a home with a gun. Evangelical Christians are much more likely to own guns than are secular people.

"We know that gun ownership tracks a lot of other cultural divides that shape the partisan and ideological standoff in America," Brownstein said. "Is all the passion about guns a broader statement about who defines what America values?"

Senate Republicans have for years blocked progress on any gun safety legislation. They opposed efforts to tighten gun regulations both when they held the majority, and even now when they can threaten an indefinite filibuster if Democrats can’t come up with the 60 votes required to circumvent the stalling tactic.

“It’s much easier to scream about guns than it is to demand answer about where our culture is failing,” Cruz added in a separate social media post on Saturday.

Disapproval from Cruz and other Senate Republicans will likely doom any legislation Nadler and other House Democrats manage to pass.

Democrats dispute the claim that lawmakers need to target mental illness more so than the availability of guns to reduce shooting violence in the U.S. They say that similar rates of mental illness in other developed nations across the globe prove that mental illness alone cannot fully explain the prevalence of mass shootings in the U.S.

A bill to ban bump-stocks was submitted to the US Senate on Wednesday by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

He said there was growing bipartisan consensus and that his office had been "flooded" with calls from other lawmakers interested in the bill.

They criticised politicians who are calling for gun control, writing that "banning guns from law-abiding Americans based on the criminal act of a madman will do nothing to prevent future attacks".

Bump-fire stocks, also called bump-stocks and slide-fire adapters, allow semi-automatic rifles to fire at a high rate, similar to a machine gun.But they can be obtained without the extensive background checks required of automatic weapons.

she added that she did not understand why anyone needed to own an assault rifle.

There is some support among survivors for banning bump-stocks but there is also a realisation that doing so does not amount to serious gun control.And all the while the killing continues. Fifty-nine people died here on Sunday.By Thursday afternoon at least 87 more people had been shot and killed across the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That's a Las Vegas massacre every three days.

Bump-stocks typically cost less than $200 (£150) and allow nearly 100 high-velocity bullets to be fired in just seven seconds, according to one company advert.

gives law enforcement an immediate vehicle with which they can seek to seize a person's guns once a court has determined that the individual presents a danger to themselves or others.

provides for longer-term prohibition of a person's access to firearms.

combines the two approaches and would authorize the courts to more quickly issue a prohibition on a person's right to possess firearms

The department said it was not endorsing any specific implementation of an ERPO law, but the Monday guidelines were instead meant to provide a framework

they enable a person's loved ones to reach out to law enforcement and report dangerous behavior before a gun owner is able to endanger themselves or others.

the rules are too arbitrary and can be weaponized against gun owners during personal disputes.

"By allowing family members or law enforcement to intervene and to petition for these orders before warning signs turn into tragedy, 'extreme risk protection orders' can save lives,"

a proposal that would strengthen restrictions on individuals' ability to convert pistols into "short-barreled rifles,"

In April, Biden unveiled a series of executive actions, aimed at what he called the nation's "international embarrassment" of gun violence.

the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom

That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers.

“Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well.

Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous”

If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment,

As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution.

The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”

The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.

a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality.

Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.

It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust.

a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions.

when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side

The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).

The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.

When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children.

Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country

The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further.

young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached.

he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. I

The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right.

Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

fter Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.

Politics After Babel

“Politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.

The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party.

So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor.

What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet

from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.

“devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population.

the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.

First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens.

a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so.

Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums,

Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.

Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.

The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors.

Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds

The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.

they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes.

likely a result of thought-policing on social media:

political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.

Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes.

Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide

we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.

Since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs

search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theorie

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.

In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals

English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury.

Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking.

Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.

Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history

But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.”

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted

it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight

Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.

The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values.

The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors.

they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.

The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.”

Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives

The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality.

The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress.

The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win.

The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled:

Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding.

It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.

when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders.

Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group.

The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.

anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization.

This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations

The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.

In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry.

artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence.

Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)

American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too.

In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together.

In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.

What changes are needed?

I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era.

We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

Harden Democratic Institutions

we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.

Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district.

One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting

A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections

These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way.

Reform Social Media

Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.

it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”

the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.

One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

Prepare the Next Generation

Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people

Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.

The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.

et them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision

while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms.

What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.

In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.

when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.

I discovered that thoughtful progressives and thoughtful conservatives each suffered from different, deep fears about our political future. Progressives feared minoritarian rule. Conservatives feared majoritarian domination. Ending the filibuster, perversely enough, makes both fears more real.

The Republican Party has won exactly one popular vote for president since 1988, George W. Bush’s narrow 2.4 percent edge over John Kerry in 2004. Yet it won three presidential elections in that span of time

Republicans not only have a present electoral college advantage over Democrats, they also have inherent advantages in both the House and the Senate.

Do away with the filibuster, and it’s entirely possible that the next Republican government could enjoy immense legislative power without a majority of the popular vote. In fact, they could lose voters by margins numbering in the millions, yet still exercise decisive control over the government.

The Democratic Party is seeking to pass laws that would introduce dramatic changes in American elections, transform free speech doctrine, and potentially limit religious liberty.

The GOP, for example, is currently in the grips of a Trumpist base that prioritizes angry opposition over compromise. The party largely lacks a positive agenda, so (with some notable exceptions) its priority is clear: No compromise, even when compromise might be prudent. Stop the Democrats. Some Republicans have gone further, descending into a fantasy world of dark conspiracies.

Yes, through decentralization, de-escalation, and strategic moderation.

That means most Americans live in jurisdictions where, for example, election rules, civil rights laws, gun laws, and a wide variety of economic and social policies are within their partisan control.

Gridlock in Washington does not have to mean gridlock in government,

Research demonstrates that a majority of Americans are exhausted by partisan politics. Motivated minorities drive most American polarization.

A combination of redistricting reform and voting reforms like ranked-choice voting can limit the powers of partisan extremists. Ranked-choice voting—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—most notably can reduce the chances of highly-partisan pluralities dominating political primaries.

The answer to polarization and gridlock is not partisan escalation. Ending the filibuster would only ramp up partisan acrimony and increase the level of fear and anxiety around American elections. There are better paths through American division. We should try those before we enable drastic measures like majoritarian dominance or minoritarian control.

Weapons research produces in the first place not guns, bombs, bullets and planes and the various command, control and communications hardware and software needed to use these things, but plans, blueprints and designs – knowledge and know-how. Unless these useful plans are lost or destroyed, they can be implemented or instantiated many times over, and thus project unforeseen into the future.

If any one person invented the atomic bomb, it was Leo Szilard. It seems he had the idea, and he made great efforts from 1935 until 1942, when the Manhattan Project was set up, to get the research done that would show whether an atomic bomb was possible; how to make one; and if need be, to provide the basis for actually making one.

This perception was greatly strengthened when Hahn and Strassmann discovered nuclear fission in Berlin in 1938. So Szilard, worried about the Nazis getting an atomic bomb, thought that the Allies should do the research to see if and how one could be made, in order to deter or otherwise prevent the Nazis from using one.

One way out of the dilemma is to refuse to do war research under any circumstances. I’d like to endorse this option, especially as it does not imply that we should judge Kalashnikov, Szilard, Watson-Watt and other well-intentioned researchers harshly, since we can argue that the dilemma has only become evident recently.

The point of this example is to show how scientists lose control of their work when they take part in weapons research – they lose control of it in other settings besides, but this case is the most problematic.

As far as Szilard and a good number of other atomic scientists were concerned there was no longer a rationale for the bomb project. Szilard, Philip Franck and others wrote The Franck Report in June 1945, which among other things advocated a demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb by dropping one on an uninhabited island. The Franck Report was ignored.The project was not abandoned, of course, and two of its products were used on Japanese cities, to kill mostly Japanese civilians.

Another possibility is to deny that weapons research must take place within history, as a good Marxist might put it. That is, as I would put it: Perhaps weapons research is not an activity that must take account of historical contingencies.

We must acknowledge that there is no such thing as an inherently defensive weapon, something that can only be used for the morally acceptable purpose of responding against an aggressor. Doing weapons research for defensive systems is therefore not morally acceptable, as any weapons might feasibly be used as part of an unjust war of aggression.

Kalashnikov’s preferred description of what he did when he designed the AK 47 is something like “providing the means for liberation,” or “defending my country,” not “providing the means to kill innocents.” However, he acknowledges that the latter description applies to his situation equally well. Nevertheless, J might try to portray her actions as something like “provide the means for deterrence,” the idea being that what she is helping to create is intended to deter, and hence prevent harm rather than cause it.

You might say that this is utopian, and it would never work, but then it might console Kalashnikov, who, after all, was a Marxist, and perhaps also a utopian.

Tuesday's shootings took place at two spas in Atlanta and another in Acworth, about 10 miles west of Woodstock -- which left eight people, at least four of them Asian women, dead.

Authorities located Long about 150 miles south of Atlanta in Crisp County. State troopers took him into custody after using a special pursuit maneuver to spin his car out of control.

Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County, where the Acworth shootings took place, told reporters Long "made indicators that he has some issues -- potentially sexual addiction -- and may have frequented some of these places in the past."Reynolds said those issues could be the motivation behind the shooting.

A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.

Gun was purchased legally

Long purchased his gun legally at a local gun store, Big Woods Goods in Holly Springs, Georgia, an attorney for the company confirmed to CNN.

Little kids were new casualties in our country’s ongoing struggle to define itself. Its endless argument over guns appeared to be a symptom of a national identity crisis between political polar opposites – two parties so ideologically opposed that even the needless deaths of tiny innocents couldn’t bridge the divide between them.

What sickened me most, though, wasn’t our government’s failure to prioritize people over partisanship. It was knowing that there were parents who took their kids to school and returned home eternally empty-handed.

Survivors of school shootings like me are now raising kids of their own, worrying they will suffer similar fates. Although the psychological effects of school shootings on parents may not yet be fully known or understood, research suggests that those with loved ones who have been exposed to “assaultive violence” have a higher risk of mental health disorders.

School shootings don’t just deprive children of their lives and innocence; they deprive parents of a sense of safety and security their parents and grandparents took for granted.

This reality is a painful part of our collective consciousness. We send our kids to school, hoping the horror of gun violence won’t happen there, but knowing no child or school is immune.

Both sides seem content to debate the second amendment and the founders’ intent until they run out of breath. But in the meantime, Congress must come together, in earnest, to find common ground and common-sense solutions to stop this bleeding. The consequences of inaction have become too high – and our kids are counting on them.

You can’t have a blood family of 300 million, nor even a large enough one to do things like build an agrarian society

In order to have large cities built on agrarianism it was necessary not only to innovate technology, but to transform our very consciousness as it related to how we defined what a person was, both ourselves and others

Instead of needing to have real, flowing blood with common DNA from birth, it was merely necessary to be among the same abstract family organized under a king of some kind — a kind of stand in for the father or patriarch. We developed law and law enforcement as abstract disembodied voices of the father. This allowed total strangers without any family ties to interact in the same society in a constructive and organized way. Thus: civilization as we know it

Those ancient polities have developed finally into the Nation, a kind of tribe so fully abstracted that you can be of any blood and language and religion and still function within it.

So, too, are all other forms of human separation — and the opposition and conflicts they spawn — illusory in nature. We moved beyond blood, but then it was language or religion or fealty that made it impossible to work together, and we warred over that

we’re told these borders mean everything, that they are real and urgent and demand constant sacrifice to maintain.

why is that border there? Why borders?

We’re stuck in a mode of thinking that’s no longer sensible. There isn’t a reason for borders. There never really was, but now more than ever we have no utility for them, no need for them

What humanity has to do is wake up to the reality of post-tribalism. This means seeing through all these invented borders to the truth that we are all people, we are all fundamentally the same, and we can all learn to live with one another.

It was the idea of necessary conflict based on blood that preceded the fights that appeared to justify the belief in that blood-based conflict.

Nations have saturated the entire globe. There are no more frontiers. It’s all Nations butting up against one another.

We are all people of a similar nature and we do have the option to relate to one another as people for the sake of saving our shared homes and futures. We all hunger and thirst and become lonely, we all laugh and weep in the same language. Stripped of confounding symbols we are undivided.

There are a lot of people upset about the illusion of borders. They want a different reality, one in which there are Good Tribes (their tribe) and Bad Tribes (all the other ones).

but the world is already so mixed together they can’t draw those borders anymore. Hence: fascism.

There are no firm foundations for defining this tribe, however, so he’s left to cobble together some kind of ad hoc notion of in- and out-group. Like a magpie he collects ways of dividing people as appeals to his caprice: race, sex, Nation, etc., but there’s no greater sense to it, so it’s all arbitrary, all a mess.

No amount of magical thinking from conservatives can change the reality of globalism, however; what one Nation does to pollute will affect us all, and that is according to the laws of physics. No political movement can change those physics. We have to adapt or perish.

a key part of it is a simple lack of imagination. He just doesn’t realize there’s an option to not have borders, because his entire consciousness is married to the idea of of-me and not-of-me, Us and Them, and if there is no Them there can’t be an Us, and therefore life stops making sense

What has to be true if there are no tribes? We have no need to discriminate among who we may love. Loving and caring for all people as if they were blood family is the path forward

There needs to be a new story for us to share. It’s not enough to stop believing in the old way of borders, we have to actively seek out a new way of thinking and speaking and living that reflects the world as it is and as it can be.

there are others who have more tangible investments in borders: Those who have grown fat off the conflicts driven by these invented borders don’t want us to see how pointless it all is. These billionaires and presidents and kings want us to keep fighting against one another over the borders they so lazily define because it gives them a means of power and control.

We have to be ready for their opposition, however. They’ll do what they can to force us to act as if their borders are real. We don’t need to listen, though we do need to be ready to sacrifice.

Without a globally-coordinated response we can’t resolve a globally-driven problem such as climate change. If we can grant the humanity of all people we can start to imagine ways of relating to one another that aren’t opposed and antagonistic, but which are cooperative and aimed at harmony.

This transformation of consciousness must happen in our own hearts and minds before it can happen in concert.

the Nation has already been shown to be unnecessary because of social globalism. Pick a major city on earth and you’ll find every kind of person living together in peace! Not perfect peace, but not constant and unavoidable war, and that is what counts.

We can’t keep pretending as if borders matter when we can so clearly see that they don’t, but we can’t just have no story at all, there must be a way of contextualizing a future without borders. I don’t know what that story is, exactly, but I believe it is something like love writ large. Once we’re ready to start telling it we can start living it.

you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.