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That’s still well below the national median, but the conditions of the White population are dismal: a median household income of $24,800, only 41% with any post-high school education, and 30% living in poverty.

In a growing nationwide trend, the median household incomes of people of color, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, now exceed those of White people in nearly 200 of the 1,500 Republican-trifecta counties—those in which the party controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers of state government (see Figure 1)

In the most telling statistics, White people in Antlers are nearly twice as likely to die by guns as Native Americans (see Figure 2). Compared with Whites nationally, Antlers Whites suffer excessive death rates from drugs and alcohol (1.3 times the national average), suicide (1.5 times), all violent deaths (1.8 times), homicide (2.5 times), and gunfire (2.6 times).

When I was growing up in Antlers 60 years ago and visited it 20 years ago, my family’s old block consisted of well-kept middle-class homes fronting yards for chickens and horses. On my latest visit in January 2022, I found the houses all boarded up or blowing open in the wind (see photo at top). There are hundreds of abandoned dwellings with collapsing roofs and walls and junk-filled empty lots alongside barely intact, yet still occupied, houses.

Antlers is not all devastation, however. It sports a gleaming Choctaw-built travel center financed by casino revenues, which are also invested in local Native Americans’ well-being.

Across America, the partisan gap in gross domestic product per capita is also huge and growing: $77,900 in Democratic-voting areas, compared with $46,600 in Republican-voting areas

444 Republican counties have a GDP per capita of under $30,000, and 10 times as many people live in those counties than in the seven similarly low-GDP Democratic counties.

Whites in about 40% of all Republican counties lost income over the past two decades. And Trump’s administration was no help to his base. During his presidency, the overall Democrat–Republican GDP per capita gap widened by another $1,800.

For the largest urbanized states, the three with Democratic control of all branches of government (California, New York, and Illinois) had GDPs per capita vastly higher than the three biggest Republican-controlled states (Texas, Florida, and Ohio).

The right-wing canard that hardworking White people subsidize welfare-grubbing cities is backward. Democrat-voting counties, with 60% of America’s population, generate 67% of the nation’s personal income, 70% of the nation’s GDP, 71% of federal taxes, 73% of charitable contributions, and 75% of state and local taxes.

Mirroring Antlers, White Republican America also suffers violent death rates, including from suicide, homicide, firearms, and drunken driving crashes, far higher than Whites in Democratic America and higher than non-White people everywhere.

To top it off, Republican-governed Americans are substantially more likely to die from COVID-19.

As the death gap between Republican and Democratic areas widens over time, the life expectancy for Whites in Republican-voting areas (77.6 years) is now three years shorter than that of Whites in Democratic areas (80.6 years), shorter than those of Asians and Latino people everywhere, and only a few months longer than Black and Native Americans in Democratic areas.

That White people are falling behind across key economic, health, and safety indexes is not due to victimization by immigrants and liberal conspiracies, however, but to victimization by other Whites and self-inflicted alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide.

Aside from the problem that Republican members of congress (and two recalcitrant Democrats) have sabotaged beneficial initiatives, former President Barack Obama already tried that. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration’s economic recovery measures fostered millions of new jobs and thousands of dollars in real median income growth for Whites in urban and most rural areas alike, reversing the recession under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.

Is the solution to undividing America massive federal programs to improve Republican America’s struggling economies and troubled social conditions, then?

It certainly informed his libertarianism, which inclined in the direction of an Ayn Rand-inspired valorization of entrepreneurial superman-geniuses whose great acts of capitalistic creativity benefit all of mankind. Thiel also tended to follow Rand in viewing the masses as moochers who empower Big Government to crush these superman-geniuses.

Thiel became something of an opportunistic populist inclined to view liberal elites and institutions as posing the greatest obstacle to building an economy and culture of dynamistic creativity—and eager to mobilize the anger and resentment of “the people” as a wrecking ball to knock them down. 

the failure of the Trump administration to break more decisively from the political status quo left Thiel uninterested in playing a big role in the 2020 election cycle.

Does Thiel personally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump? I doubt it. It’s far more likely he supports the disruptive potential of encouraging election-denying candidates to run and helping them to win.

Thiel is moved to indignation by the fact that since 1958 no commercial aircraft (besides the long-decommissioned Concorde) has been developed that can fly faster than 977 kilometers per hou

Thiel is, first and foremost, a dynamist—someone who cares above all about fostering innovation, exploration, growth, and discovery.

the present looks and feels pretty much the same as 1969, only “with faster computers and uglier cars.” 

Thiel’s approach to the problem is distinctive in that he sees the shortfall as evidence of a deeper and more profound moral, aesthetic, and even theological failure. Human beings are capable of great creativity and invention, and we once aspired to achieve it in every realm. But now that aspiration has been smothered by layer upon layer of regulation and risk-aversion. “Legal sclerosis,” Thiel claimed in that same book review, “is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem.”

Progress in science and technology isn’t innate to human beings, Thiel believes. It’s an expression of a specific cultural or civilizational impulse that has its roots in Christianity and reached a high point during the Victorian era of Western imperialism

Thiel aims to undermine the progressive liberalism that dominates the mainstream media, the federal bureaucracy, the Justice Department, and the commanding heights of culture (in universities, think tanks, and other nonprofits).

In Thiel’s view, recapturing civilizational greatness through scientific and technological achievement requires fostering a revival of a kind of Christian Prometheanism (a monotheistic variation on the rebellious creativity and innovation pursued by the demigod Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology)

Against those who portray modern scientific and technological progress as a rebellion against medieval Christianity, Thiel insists it is Christianity that encourages a metaphysical optimism about transforming and perfecting the world, with the ultimate goal of turning it into “a place where no accidents can happen” and the achievement of “personal immortality” becomes possible

All that’s required to reach this transhuman end is that we “remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.” 

As Thiel put it last summer in a wide-ranging interview with the British website UnHerd, the Christian world “felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology—a Christian vision of history.”

JD Vance is quoted on the subject of what this political disruption might look like during a Trump presidential restoration in 2025. Vance suggests that Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop [him], stand before the country, and say, ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Another Thiel friend and confidante discussed at length in Vanity Fair, neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, takes the idea of disrupting the liberal order even further, suggesting various ways a future right-wing president (Trump or someone else) could shake things up, shredding the smothering blanket of liberal moralism, conformity, rules, and regulations, thereby encouraging the creation of something approaching a scientific-technological wild west, where innovation and experimentation rule the day. Yarvin’s preferred path to tearing down what he calls the liberal “Cathedral,” laid out in detail on a two-hour Claremont Institute podcast from May 2021, involves a Trump-like figure seizing dictatorial power in part by using a specially designed phone app to direct throngs of staunch supporters (Jan. 6-style) to overpower law enforcement at key locations around the nation’s capital.  

this isn’t just an example of guilt-by-association. These are members of Thiel’s inner circle, speaking publicly about ways of achieving shared goals. Thiel funded Vance’s Senate campaign to the tune of at least $15 million. Is it likely the candidate veered into right-wing radicalism with a Vanity Fair reporter in defiance of his campaign’s most crucial donor?

As for Yarvin, Thiel continued to back his tech start up (Urbit) after it became widely known he was the pseudonymous author behind the far-right blog “Unqualified Reservations,” and as others have shown, the political thinking of the two men has long overlapped in numerous other ways. 

He’s deploying his considerable resources to empower as many people and groups as he can, first, to win elections by leveraging popular disgust at corrupt institutions—and second, to use the power they acquire to dismantle or even topple those institutions, hopefully allowing a revived culture of Christian scientific-technological dynamism to arise from out of the ruins.  

Far more than most big political donors, Thiel appears to care only about the extra-political goal of his spending. How we get to a world of greater dynamism—whether it will merely require selective acts of troublemaking disruption, or whether, instead, it will ultimately involve smashing the political order of the United States to bits—doesn’t really concern him. Democratic politics itself—the effort of people with competing interests and clashing outlooks to share rule for the sake of stability and common flourishing—almost seems like an irritant and an afterthought to Peter Thiel.

What we do have is the opportunity to enlighten ourselves about what these would-be Masters of the Universe hope to accomplish—and to organize politically to prevent them from making a complete mess of things in the process.

But to understand why Republicans have died at higher rates, you can’t look at vaccine status alone. Congressional districts controlled by a trifecta of Republican leaders—state governor, Senate, and House—had an 11 percent higher death rate, according to the Lancet study. A likely explanation, the authors write, could be that in the post-vaccine era, those leaders chose policies and conveyed public-health messages that made their constituents more likely to die. Although we still can’t say these decisions led to higher death rates, the association alone is jarring.

One of the most compelling studies comes from researchers at Yale, who published their findings as a working paper in November. They link political party and excess-death rate—the percent increase in deaths above pre-COVID levels—among those registered as either Democrats or Republicans, providing a more granular view. They chose to analyze data from Florida and Ohio from before and after vaccines were available. Looking at the period before the vaccine,  researchers found a 1.6 percentage-point difference in excess death rate among Republicans and Democrats, with a higher rate among Republicans. But after vaccines became available, that gap widened dramatically to 10.4 percentage points, again with a higher Republican excess death rate. “When we compare individuals who are of the same age, who live in the same county in the same month of the pandemic, there are differences correlated with your political-party affiliation that emerge after vaccines are available,”

What’s most concerning about all of this is that partisan disparities in death rates were also apparent before COVID. People living in Republican jurisdictions have been at a health disadvantage for more than 20 years. From 2001 to 2019, the death rate in Democratic counties decreased by 22 percent, according to a recent study; in Republican counties, it declined by only 11 percent. In the same time period, the political gap in death rates increased sixfold.

over the decades, state policy decisions on health issues such as Medicaid, gun legislation, tobacco taxes, and, indeed, vaccines have likely had a stronger impact on state health trajectories than other factors

the long-term decline of health in red states indicates that there is an ongoing problem at a high level in Republican-led places, and that something has gone awry. “If you happen to live in certain states, your chances for living a long life are going to be much higher than if you’re an American living in a different state,”

o acknowledge how many Republicans didn’t have to die would mean giving credence to scientific and medical expertise. So long as America remains locked in a poisonous partisan battle in which science is wrongly dismissed as being associated with the left, the death toll will only rise.

Republican politicians, sensing momentum, called on other firms to follow suit.

“This was always cosmetic,” said Shivaram Rajgopal, a professor at Columbia Business School. “If signing a piece of paper was getting these companies into trouble, it’s no surprise they’re getting the hell out.

American asset managers have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of their clients, and the financial firms were worried that a new strategy by Climate Action 100+ could expose them to legal risks.

Since its founding in 2017, the group focused on getting publicly traded companies to increase how much information they shared about their emissions and identify climate-related risks to their businesses.

In addition to the risk that some clients might disapprove, and potentially sue, there were other concerns. Among them: that acting in concert to shape the behaviors of other companies could fall afoul of antitrust regulations.

The new plan called on asset-management firms to begin pressuring companies like Exxon Mobil and Walmart to adopt policies that could entail, for example, using fewer fossil fuels

last year, Climate Action 100+ said it would shift its focus toward getting companies to reduce emissions with what it called phase two of its strategy

BlackRock also said that one of its subsidiaries, BlackRock International, would continue to participate in the group — a tacit acknowledgment of the different regulatory environment in Europe. BlackRock also said it was initiating new features that would let clients choose if they wanted to pressure companies to reduce their emissions.

Pimco, another big asset manager, followed suit. “We have concluded that our Climate Action 100+ participation is no longer aligned with PIMCO’s approach to sustainability,” a firm spokesman said in a statement.

JPMorgan said it was pulling out of the group in recognition of the fact that, over the past few years, the firm had developed its own framework for engaging on climate risk

The fracturing of Climate Action 100+ was a victory for Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who has led a campaign against companies pursuing E.S.G. goals, shorthand for environmental, social and governance factors.

Embracing E.S.G. principles and speaking up on climate issues has become commonplace across corporate America in recent years. Chief executives warned about the dangers of climate change. Banks and asset managers formed alliances to phase out fossil fuels. Trillions of dollars were allocated for sustainable investing.

“Phase two is not that different,” she said. “It’s basically investors working with companies and saying: ‘OK, you’ve disclosed the risk. We just want to know how you’re going to address it.’ Because that’s what the investors want. How are you dealing with risk?”

Mindy Lubber, the chief executive of Ceres and a member of the steering committee of Climate Action 100+, disputed the notion that the new strategy represented a change from the focus on enhanced disclosure.

“The political cost has heightened, the legal risk has heightened,” he said. “That said, these corporations are not doing U-turns,” he added. “They continue to consider climate. That’s not going away. It’s adapting to the current environment.”

Aron Cramer, chief executive for BSR, a sustainable-business consultancy, said the Wall Street firms were responding to political pressure, but not abandoning their climate commitments altogether.

Several of the firms that backed out of Climate Action 100+ said they remained committed to the issue. JPMorgan said that it had a team of 40 people working on sustainable investing and that it believed “climate change continues to present material economic risks and opportunities to our clients.”

Brown University professor Claire Wardle said the Observatory had created innovative methodology and trained the next generation of experts.

“Closing down a lab like this would always be a huge loss, but doing so now, during a year of global elections, makes absolutely no sense,” said Wardle, who previously led research at anti-misinformation nonprofit First Draft. “We need universities to use their resources and standing in the community to stand up to criticism and headlines.”

The study of misinformation has become increasingly controversial, and Stamos, DiResta and Starbird have been besieged by lawsuits, document requests and threats of physical harm. Leading the charge has been Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose House subcommittee alleges the Observatory improperly worked with federal officials and social media companies to violate the free-speech rights of conservatives.

In a joint statement, Stamos and DiResta said their work involved much more than elections, and that they had been unfairly maligned.

“The politically motivated attacks against our research on elections and vaccines have no merit, and the attempts by partisan House committee chairs to suppress First Amendment-protected research are a quintessential example of the weaponization of government,” they said.

Stamos founded the Observatory after publicizing that Russia has attempted to influence the 2016 election by sowing division on Facebook, causing a clash with the company’s top executives. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III later cited the Facebook operation in indicting a Kremlin contractor. At Stanford, Stamos and his team deepened his study of influence operations from around the world, including one it traced to the Pentagon.

Stamos told associates he stepped back from leading the Observatory last year in part because the political pressure had taken a toll. Stamos had raised most of the money for the project, and the remaining faculty have not been able to replicate his success, as many philanthropic groups shift their focus on artificial intelligence and other, fresher topics.

In supporting the project further, the university would have risked alienating conservative donors, Silicon Valley figures, and members of Congress, who have threatened to stop all federal funding for disinformation research or cut back general support.

The Observatory’s non-election work has included developing curriculum for teaching college students about how to handle trust and safety issues on social media platforms and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to that field. It has also investigated rings publishing child sexual exploitation material online and flaws in the U.S. system for reporting it, helping to prepare platforms to handle an influx of computer-generated material.