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If we don’t draw some lines now, legions of citizens could be manipulated, disenfranchised or lose faith in the whole system — opening doors to foreign adversaries who want to do the same. AI might break us in 2024.

“The ability of AI to interfere with our elections, to spread misinformation that’s extremely believable is one of the things that’s preoccupying us,” Schumer said, after watching me so easily create a deepfake of him. “Lots of people in the Congress are examining this.”

Of course, fibbing politicians are nothing new, but examples keep multiplying of how AI supercharges misinformation in ways we haven’t seen before. Two examples: The presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) shared an AI-generated image of former president Donald Trump embracing Anthony S. Fauci. That hug never happened. In Chicago’s mayoral primary, someone used AI to clone the voice of candidate Paul Vallas in a fake news report, making it look like he approved of police brutality.

But what will happen when a shocking image or audio clip goes viral in a battleground state shortly before an election? What kind of chaos will ensue when someone uses a bot to send out individually tailored lies to millions of different voters?

A wide 85 percent of U.S. citizens said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the spread of misleading AI video and audio, in an August survey by YouGov. And 78 percent were concerned about AI contributing to the spread of political propaganda.

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. AI is already embedded in tech tool campaigns that all of us use every day. AI creates our Facebook feeds and picks what ads we see. AI built into our phone cameras brightens faces and smooths skin.

What’s more, there are many political uses for AI that are unobjectionable, and even empowering for candidates with fewer resources. Politicians can use AI to manage the grunt work of sorting through databases and responding to constituents. Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson has an AI chatbot trained to answer questions like him. (I’m not sure politician bots are very helpful, but fine, give it a try.)

Clarke’s solution, included in a bill she introduced on political ads: Candidates should disclose when they use AI to create communications. You know the “I approve this message” notice? Now add, “I used AI to make this message.”

But labels aren’t enough. If AI disclosures become commonplace, we may become blind to them, like so much other fine print.

The bigger ask: We want candidates and their supporting parties and committees not to use AI to deceive us.

So what’s the difference between a dangerous deepfake and an AI facetune that makes an octogenarian candidate look a little less octogenarian?

“The core definition is showing a candidate doing or saying something they didn’t do or say,”

Sure, give Biden or Trump a facetune, or even show them shaking hands with Abraham Lincoln. But don’t use AI to show your competitor hugging an enemy or fake their voice commenting on current issues.

The pledge also includes not using AI to suppress voting, such as using an authoritative voice or image to tell people a polling place has been closed. That is already illegal in many states, but it’s still concerning how believable AI might make these efforts seem.

Don’t deepfake yourself. Making yourself or your favorite candidate appear more knowledgeable, experienced or culturally capable is also a form of deception.

(Pressed on the ethics of his use of AI, Adams just proved my point that we desperately need some ground rules. “These are part of the broader conversations that the philosophical people will have to sit down and figure out, ‘Is this ethically right or wrong?’ I’ve got one thing: I’ve got to run the city,” he said.)

The golden rule in my pledge — don’t use AI to be materially deceptive — is similar to the one in an AI regulation proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers

Such proposals have faced resistance in Washington on First Amendment grounds. The free speech of politicians is important. It’s not against the law for politicians to lie, whether they’re using AI or not. An effort to get the Federal Election Commission to count AI deepfakes as “fraudulent misrepresentation” under its existing authority has faced similar pushback.

But a pledge like the one I outline here isn’t a law restraining speech. It’s asking politicians to take a principled stand on their own use of AI

Schumer said he thinks my pledge is just a start of what’s needed. “Maybe most candidates will make that pledge. But the ones that won’t will drive us to a lower common denominator, and that’s true throughout AI,” he said. “If we don’t have government-imposed guardrails, the lowest common denominator will prevail.”

it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.

The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist, He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current, of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.

Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives.

Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and fell, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.

known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written.

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened

Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but clearly it is likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.

The friends of totalitarianism in England usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modem physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism.

— giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.

The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024.

The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.

If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.

Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.

Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”

The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.

Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.

in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.

It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.

Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”

he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)

Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.

Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”

Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny

the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”

Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.”

“Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.

Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.

Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.

In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace i

in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianit

He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.

The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.

Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.

He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.

All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)

But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”

Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us.

“Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”

In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”

Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.

These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.

In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.

These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?”

Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.

It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.

The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.

In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.

economic output must flow either to owners of capital, in the form of profits, dividends and rents, or to labour, as wages, salaries and perks. Economists refer to this as the “capital” or “labour” share of GDP. Who has the upper hand in the post-lockdown economy?

First we calculate a high-frequency measure of the capital-labour share across 30 mostly rich countries.

In 2020 the aggregate labour share across this group soared (see chart 1). This was largely because firms continued to pay people’s wages—helped, in large part, by government-stimulus programmes—even as GDP collapsed. Advantage, labour.

More recently, however, the battle seems to have shifted in favour of capital.

most economists anyway argue that labour’s share is not a perfect gauge of economic fairness, since it is so hard to measure.

In the first camp is Britain. There, underlying wage growth is in the region of 5% a year, unusually fast by rich-world standards.

But corporations seem not to have much pricing power, meaning that they are struggling to fully offset higher costs in the form of higher prices.

Labour seems to be winning out at the expense of capital.

The second group consists of most other rich countries outside America.

There, neither labour nor capital seems able to triumph. After correcting for pandemic-related distortions Japan’s pay growth appears to be slowing to below 1% a year

Pay settlements in Italy and Spain are treading water, while wage growth in Australia, France and Germany remains well below where it was before the pandemic. Workers in these places are not really joining in with the inflationary party.

In Europe pre-tax profit margins, as measured in the national accounts, have risen in recent months but remain below where they were just before the pandemic.

In Japan the “recurring” profits before tax of large and medium-sized firms recently returned to pre-pandemic levels. The profits of smaller firms remain well below, however.

A series of unusually large stimulus payments may mean that households are able to absorb the higher prices that companies impose.

Wages are rising, but nonetheless markups are responsible for more than 70% of inflation since late 2019,

In a recent report, analysts at Bank of America argue that greater pricing power helps explain why American equities have a higher price-earnings ratio than European ones.

Some economists wonder if workers will before long demand even higher wages to compensate for higher shop prices.

It produces economic distortions as high IQ types get jobs as “money butlers.” (Chuck Collins, the author of “The Wealth Hoarders,” estimates that at least 90,000 people are employed in what he calls the “wealth defense industry.”)

Today the educated are losing their faith in upward mobility.

he started receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that “sooner or later your punishment will arrive” and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.

Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab in Paris in 1983; the career that followed involved creating a start-up, meeting the Dalai Lama and being named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spanned many fields — automotive, medical, nuclear, military, even home goods.

Many of the recent threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 such scientists who had given media interviews, the journal Nature found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats

Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a vocal supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats died by suicide.

increasingly, even professors and researchers without much of a public persona have faced intimidation from extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” into his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities.

The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So-called low-traffic neighborhoods, or LTNs, have been set up in several British cities over the past few decades.

Critics of 15-minute cities have been outspoken, arguing that a concept developed in Europe may not translate well to highly segregated American cities. A Harvard economist wrote in a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 that the concept was a “dead end” that would exacerbate “enormous inequalities in cities” by subdividing without connecting them.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with four million Twitter followers, suggested that 15-minute cities were “perhaps the worst imaginable perversion” of the idea of walkable neighborhoods. He linked to a post about the “Great Reset,” an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum that has spawned hordes of rumors about a pandemic-fueled plot to destroy capitalism.

A member of Britain’s Parliament said that 15-minute cities were “an international socialist concept” that would “cost us our personal freedoms.” QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities.

“Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, Covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life,” Mr. Moreno said. “This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.”

The multipronged conspiracy theory quickly became “turbocharged” after the Oxford protest, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

“You have this snowball effect of a policy, which in principle was only going to affect a small urban population, getting extrapolated and becoming this crucible where far-right groups, industry-sponsored lobbying groups, conspiracist movements, anti-lockdown groups and more saw an opportunity to insert their worldview into the mainstream and to piggyback on the news cycle,”

The vitriol currently directed at Mr. Moreno and researchers like him mirrors “the broader erosion of trust in experts and institutions,”

Modern conspiracy theorists and extremists turn the people they disagree with into scapegoats for a vast array of societal ills, blaming them personally for causing the high cost of living or various health crises and creating an “us-versus-them” environment, she said.

“I am not a politician, I am not a candidate for anything — as a researcher, my duty is to explore and deepen my ideas with scientific methodology,” he said. “It is totally unbelievable that we could receive a death threat just for working as scientists.”

Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.

Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 

Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 

often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern

in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 

The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 

Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.

who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 

then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.

inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 

here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 

That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable

When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 

The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.

The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 

I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown

remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 

since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end

The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai

If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.

the opposite message seems to be true

Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.

It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good

It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good. 

Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety

yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room

Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”

El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model

As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity

Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.

As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites

Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.

At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.

How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask

Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.

The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho

od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.

That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways.

In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains due to inflation and externalize the losses. These different processes yield different emotional responses.

Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.

younger folks — anyone under 60 — had never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.

Even though wages tend to rise hand-in-hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage rises we get have nothing to do with price rises that cause them.

But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment

Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.

The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage rises that actually restore it.

in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.

While older Americans understood that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.

Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.

More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “silent depression,” and those who want to make American great again are certain it was once so much better.

in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history

And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.

The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.

Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.

Reading their books, he tells us, can be as exciting as reading a great novel or poem. In particular, Krishnan emphasizes the virtues they embodied in themselves and their work. “Some of these virtues were, by any reckoning, moral ones: humility, self-awareness, collegiality, restraint. Others are better thought aesthetic: elegance, concision, directness.”

Consider Gilbert Ryle. As the Waynflete professor of metaphysics, he was asked if he ever read novels, to which he replied, “All six of them, once a year.” Jane Austen’s, of course.

Another time, an American visitor wondered if it was true that Ryle, as editor of the journal Mind, would “accept or reject an article on the basis of reading just the first paragraph.” “That used to be true at one time,” Ryle supposedly answered. “I had a lot more time in those days.”

J.L. Austin gradually emerges as the central figure. “He listened, he understood, and when he started to speak, with the piercing clarity he brought to all things, philosophical or not, it ‘made one’s thoughts race.’”

Oxford discussion groups and tutorials tried to avoid those “cheap rhetorical ploys” that aim “at victory and humiliation rather than truth.” Instead their unofficial motto stressed intellectual fraternity: “Let no one join this conversation who is unwilling to be vulnerable.”

their meetings continually resounded with “short, punchy interrogations” that aimed “to clarify positions, pose objections and expose inconsistencies.”

Austin “wanted to be, all he wanted other people to be, was rational.” His highest praise was to call someone “sensible.”

When Oxford announced plans to award Truman an honorary degree, Anscombe objected. She wasn’t protesting against nuclear weapons per se (as was Bertrand Russell) but simply standing up for what she regarded as an inviolable principle: “Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder.” End of argument. Anscombe’s was a lonely voice, however, except for the support of her philosopher friend, Philippa Foot, whose imposing manner Krishnan brilliantly captures: “She looked like the sort of young woman who knew how to get a boisterous dog to sit.”

Despite the sheer entertainment available in “A Terribly Serious Adventure,” readers will want to slow down for its denser pages outlining erudite theories or explaining category mistakes and other specialized terms

All these philosophers, as well as a half-dozen others I haven’t been able to mention, come across as both daunting and charismatic

the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray

The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock.

In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds.

It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.

Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires

When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.

If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized.

When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved.

allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”

You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.

ask why people are checking out, and one reason is that partisans make it so very difficult to engage.

The problem is most pronounced (and often overtly threatening) on the MAGA right, but it’s endemic to our partisan wings

as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side.

If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?

I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses.

Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books.

when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.

when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence

A closer look, however, would have revealed that individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT.

How easily the site and its mistakes entered the ecosystem for legitimate news highlights a growing concern: A.I.-generated content is upending, and often poisoning, the online information supply.

The websites, which seem to operate with little to no human supervision, often have generic names — such as iBusiness Day and Ireland Top News — that are modeled after actual news outlets. They crank out material in more than a dozen languages, much of which is not clearly disclosed as being artificially generated, but could easily be mistaken as being created by human writers.

Now, experts say, A.I. could turbocharge the threat, easily ripping off the work of journalists and enabling error-ridden counterfeits to circulate even more widely — as has already happened with travel guidebooks, celebrity biographies and obituaries.

The result is a machine-powered ouroboros that could squeeze out sustainable, trustworthy journalism. Even though A.I.-generated stories are often poorly constructed, they can still outrank their source material on search engines and social platforms, which often use A.I. to help position content. The artificially elevated stories can then divert advertising spending, which is increasingly assigned by automated auctions without human oversight.

NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation, identified more than 800 websites that use A.I. to produce unreliable news content.

Low-paid freelancers and algorithms have churned out much of the faux-news content, prizing speed and volume over accuracy.

Former employees said they thought they were joining a legitimate news operation; one had mistaken it for BNN Bloomberg, a Canadian business news channel. BNN’s website insisted that “accuracy is nonnegotiable” and that “every piece of information underwent rigorous checks, ensuring our news remains an undeniable source of truth.”

this was not a traditional journalism outlet. While the journalists could occasionally report and write original articles, they were asked to primarily use a generative A.I. tool to compose stories, said Ms. Chakraborty and Hemin Bakir, a journalist based in Iraq who worked for BNN for almost a year. They said they had uploaded articles from other news outlets to the generative A.I. tool to create paraphrased versions for BNN to publish.

Mr. Chahal’s evangelism carried weight with his employees because of his wealth and seemingly impressive track record, they said. Born in India and raised in Northern California, Mr. Chahal made millions in the online advertising business in the early 2000s and wrote a how-to book about his rags-to-riches story that landed him an interview with Oprah Winfrey.

Mr. Chahal told Mr. Bakir to focus on checking stories that had a significant number of readers, such as those republished by MSN.com.Employees did not want their bylines on stories generated purely by A.I., but Mr. Chahal insisted on this. Soon, the tool randomly assigned their names to stories.

This crossed a line for some BNN employees, according to screenshots of WhatsApp conversations reviewed by The Times, in which they told Mr. Chahal that they were receiving complaints about stories they didn’t realize had been published under their names.

According to three journalists who worked at BNN and screenshots of WhatsApp conversations reviewed by The Times, Mr. Chahal regularly directed profanities at employees and called them idiots and morons. When employees said purely A.I.-generated news, such as the Fanning story, should be published under the generic “BNN Newsroom” byline, Mr. Chahal was dismissive.“When I do this, I won’t have a need for any of you,” he wrote on WhatsApp.Mr. Bakir replied to Mr. Chahal that assigning journalists’ bylines to A.I.-generated stories was putting their integrity and careers in “jeopardy.”

This was a strategy that Mr. Chahal favored, according to former BNN employees. He used his news service to exercise grudges, publishing slanted stories about a politician from San Francisco he disliked, Wikipedia after it published a negative entry about BNN Breaking and Elon Musk after accounts belonging to Mr. Chahal, his wife and his companies were suspended o

The increasing popularity of programmatic advertising — which uses algorithms to automatically place ads across the internet — allows A.I.-powered news sites to generate revenue by mass-producing low-quality clickbait content

Experts are nervous about how A.I.-fueled news could overwhelm accurate reporting with a deluge of junk content distorted by machine-powered repetition. A particular worry is that A.I. aggregators could chip away even further at the viability of local journalism, siphoning away its revenue and damaging its credibility by contaminating the information ecosystem.