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In the three years since Google Brain began making smart recommendations, watch time from the YouTube home page has grown 20-fold. More than 70 percent of the time people spend watching videos on YouTube, they spend watching videos suggested by Google Brain.

The more videos that are watched, the more ads that are seen, and the more money Google makes.

“We also wanted to serve the needs of people when they didn’t necessarily know what they wanted to look for.”

Last week, The New York Times reported that YouTube’s algorithm was encouraging pedophiles to watch videos of partially-clothed children, often after they watched sexual content.

o YouTube’s nuance-blind algorithm — trained to think with simple logic — serving up more videos to sate a sadist’s appetite is a job well done.

The result? The algorithm — and, consequently, YouTube — incentivizes bad behavior in viewers.

the algorithm relies on snapshots of visual content, rather than actions. If you (or your child) watch one Peppa Pig video, you’ll likely want another. And as long as it’s Peppa Pig in the frame, it doesn’t matter what the character does in the skit.

it didn’t take long for inappropriate videos to show up in YouTube Kids’ ‘Now playing’ feeds

Using cheap, widely available technology, animators created original video content featuring some of Hollywood’s best-loved characters. While an official Disney Mickey Mouse would never swear or act violently, in these videos Mickey and other children’s characters were sexual or violent

there’s a 3.5 percent chance of a child coming across inappropriate footage within 10 clicks of a child-friendly video.

Just four in 10 parents always monitor their child’s YouTube usage — and one in 20 children aged 4-to-12 say their parents never check what they’re watching.

At the height of the panic around Mr. Crowder’s videos, YouTube’s public policy on hate speech and harassment appeared to shift four times in a 24-hour period as the company sought to clarify what the new normal was.

One possible solution that would address both problems would be to strip out YouTube’s recommendation altogether. But it is highly unlikely that YouTube would ever do such a thing: that algorithm drives vast swaths of YouTube’s views, and to take it away would reduce the time viewers spend watching its videos, as well as reduce Google’s ad revenue.

it must, at the very least, make significant changes, and have greater human involvement in the recommendation process. The platform has some human moderators looking at so-called “borderline” content to train its algorithms, but more humanity is needed in the entire process.

Currently, the recommendation engine cannot understand why it shouldn’t recommend videos of children to pedophiles, and it cannot understand why it shouldn’t suggest sexually explicit videos to children. It cannot understand, because the incentives are twisted: every new video view, regardless of who the viewer is and what the viewer’s motives may be, is considered a success.

You might as well ask a novelist why she writes things that aren’t true. She’d be equally befuddled by the question.

If you’ve worked in business a certain kind of salesman is like this. You size up the customer, find out what they want, what they feel they need and then tell them a story to make the sale. Is it lying? Well, not to them. Not exactly. It’s selling

Qanon is a violent terroristic political movement with strong fascistic facets the upshot of which, in every storyline, is a final violent reckoning in which Trump’s political enemies are rounded up and murdered.

That’s what it’s about. The fables are just getting people primed and ready for that moment.

One man, speaking about one of his favorite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”

Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations. 

Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies. 

Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate. 

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.

Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live. 

The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modeling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers. 

Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.

While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. 

Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.

The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.

The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why. 

“There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”

The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments. “In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said. 

Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.

he mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.

The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterized the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.

an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.

Still, the mom realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult. “Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”

Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.

The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualizing material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualizegirls and #tweenmodel. 

The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.

In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modeling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines. 

The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.

In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.

The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.

The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how. 

Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts. 

And if you want to understand the ferocity of the opposition to him on the Catholic right, this is the key. His most determined opponents are far-right closet cases, living in palaces, leading completely double lives, backed by the most vicious of reactionaries and bigots on the European and American far right

As a secular gay journalist, not hostile to the church, he walked into the Vatican and was simply staggered by its obvious gayness.

(Lepore hazards a guess that 80 percent of the Vatican’s population is gay.

as Martel probes deeper and deeper, one theme emerges very powerfully: “Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.”

it’s highly predictable that John Paul II’s pontificate, which launched a new war on homosexuals, turns out to be the gayest of them all — and the one most resistant to any inquiry into stories of sex abuse

Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI) personally received notification of every claim of sex abuse in the church under John Paul II, ignoring most, and made the stigmatization and persecution of sane, adjusted non-abusive gay people across the globe his mission instead. There wasn’t a theological dissident he didn’t notice and punish, but barely a single pedophile he found reason to expose

Martel explains how two of John Paul II’s favorite cardinals — whose nicknames within the Vatican are Platinette (after a drag queen) and La Mongolfiera — set up an elaborate and elite prostitution service that continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI, and was financed from the Vatican coffers.

He notices simple things that some might call innuendo, but any gay man will instantly recognize, like the fabulous interiors of the gay cardinals’ palaces, always with their “assistants” or young “relative” on hand

take Martel’s interaction with the Swiss Guards, one of whom vents: “The harassment is so insistent that I said to myself that I was going straight home. Many of us are exasperated by the usually rather indiscreet advances of the cardinals and bishops.”

Or the prostitutes who keep elaborate records of their clients, and have already caused huge scandals in Italy.

Or a confessor-priest in Saint Peter’s who guides Martel into the Vatican with the words: “Welcome to Sodoma.”

If you want to find a figure who crystallizes all this hypocrisy in the narrative, it would be the late Colombian cardinal, Alfonso López Trujillo, tasked by John Paul II in the 1970s to rid Latin America of liberation theology, and then to launch a global crusade against homosexuality and the use of condoms

Trujillo’s own master of ceremonies on these trips tells us: “López Trujillo travelled with members of the paramilitary groups … He pointed out the priests who were carrying out social actions in the barrios and the poorer districts. The paramilitaries identified them and sometimes went back to murder them. Often they had to leave the region or the country.”

“López Trujillo beat prostitutes; that was his relationship with sexuality. He paid them, but they had to accept his blows in return. It always happened at the end, not during the physical act. He finished his sexual relations by beating them, out of pure sadism.”

if the Catholic right wants to weaponize the book, they’ll have to take on their own icons, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a whole range of their closest allies in the church.

what was Trujillo’s task in Rome? You guessed it: president of the Pontifical Council for the Family! This was the figure who spearheaded the war on gays in the 1980s and 1990s, who forbade the use of condoms, who spread the lie that condoms don’t protect anyone from HIV. And yet when he died, Benedict XVI gave the homily at the funeral mass.

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try:

And the core thesis of the book — which is that it is the hypocrisy of the closet that is the real problem — is not one the right will be able easily to absorb.

Critically, Martel reaches the same conclusion I did recently — the omertà of the closet was a core reason for sex abuse

Gay priests felt unable to report pedophiles or abusers or hypocrites because they too could be outed by the abusers and forced out

When Trujillo was promoted to Rome, the reckless excesses went into overdrive. A Curia source tells Martel: “Everyone knew that he was homosexual. He lived with us, here, on the fourth floor of the Palazzo di San Calisto, in a 900-square-metre apartment, and he had several cars! Ferraris! He led a highly unusual life.”

There can be no meaningful reform until this closet is ended, and the whole sick, twisted syndrome is unwound.

only a radical change will help. Ending mandatory celibacy is no longer an option

Women need to be brought in to the full sacramental life of the church. Gay men need to be embraced not as some manifestation of “intrinsic moral evil” but as human beings made in the image of God

Francis is nudging the church toward this more humane and Christian future, but the more he does so, the more fervently this nest of self-haters and bigots will try to destroy him.

Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters.

the last drops of moral authority the Vatican might hope to have evaporate with this book. It is difficult to express the heartbroken rage so many of us in the pews now feel.

It tells you a lot about the LGBTQIA++ movement that it’s now lost Martina Navratilova.

A pioneering open lesbian who had an openly transgender coach in her glory years, who did more for gay visibility than any gay group ever has, is now being disowned by Athlete Ally, a New York–based organization that supports LGBT athletes

She argued in an op-ed that a trans woman who started out in life as male has an unfair advantage in sports over women who have never biologically male. For this, her comments have been condemned as “transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.”

The truth, of course, is that the science is firmly behind Navratilova.

If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt

denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people

if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.

There is no “gay lobby.” There is a “honeycomb of closets,” often insulated from each other, built on deception and self-hatred, that amounts to a system where protecting the image of the church became far more important than saving children from rapists.

Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

Smollett was dumb and incompetent in his elaborate hoax. But he was smart about one thing. The most noble thing in our current culture is victimhood

Smollett aimed for the jackpot — physically attacked for being gay and black by Trump supporters

so all good liberals instinctively and with good intentions believed him, embraced him

His identity as gay and black rendered him instantly innocent, just as the Covington boys’ whiteness rendered them instantly guilty.

Booker, Harris, Pelosi: They’ll never apologize for their rush to judgment. This may not have been “precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” you see, but it was morally true.

Believe Jussie. Just believe. He may have made up an entire story, but “he’s not lying.”

There was DNA evidence that connected McHugh to the girl, former prosecutor Todd Kuhnen told CNN. The victim was 14 years old and McHugh was 23 when the crime occurred, Kuhnen said. The victim also alleged that she was intoxicated when the incident occurred.

McHugh has been charged with eight federal crimes tied to the Capitol insurrection, including trespassing charges and the more serious counts of obstructing congressional proceedings and assaulting police officers with a dangerous weapon. He hasn't yet entered a plea in court.

He has been in jail since his May 27 arrest, a federal judge in the Eastern District of California ruled Tuesday that he should be detained before trial because he poses a threat to the public. His lawyers said in a court filing Thursday that they'll try again to secure his release.

At the time of the riot, McHugh was on probation for misdemeanor convictions for driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license, according to federal court documents.

McHugh has a long rap sheet of misdemeanor convictions, including multiple DUIs and trespassing offenses, according to Negin and a CNN review of California state court records. He is one of many rioters with criminal records, and he is one of a few rioters who were on probation or parole for other unrelated crimes when they went to the Capitol on January 6.

This undercuts recent false claims from some Republicans, who have whitewashed the violent attack and claimed that the rioters were well-meaning patriotic Americans with clean records. Republicans pushed this lie at a recent House hearing about Capitol security failures. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar complained that "the FBI is fishing through homes of veterans and citizens with no criminal records" and claimed "law-abiding citizens" were being targeted.

“You have [U.S. Republican senator] Lindsey Graham talking about the deep state; you could argue the President was elected around conspiracy theories. So Kennedy’s well placed to fit into that trend. He appeals to the notion that there are dark forces working against us.”

Larry Sabato, one of America’s leading political scientists, believes the confusion created by the President will find its denouement on Nov. 3, presidential election day, when “we’ll find out whether the truth matters in American politics.” Mr. Sabato said: “What is disturbing is that for tens of millions, it doesn’t matter anymore. We are in the postfactual era, not just in America, but around the world.

“Almost all of these theories are pretty, pretty darn boring. And I hate to complain about my job. It’s the same crap over and over again. Same theories, different nouns. There’s nothing to even QAnon, which people look at and say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so wacky.’ Well, the idea of a pedophile deep state working against the president is the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie that came out 30 years ago. ... The idea that your enemies are pedophiles and Satanists and sex traffickers goes back millennia. So there’s really even nothing new there.”

Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s siblings Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and former congressman Joseph Kennedy, as well as niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, published an excoriating article in Politico claiming that “he has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."

“We love Bobby,” they said, and praised his record on environmental issues. “However, on vaccines he is wrong.”

that a coming storm will sweep elites from power

and that violence might be necessary to save the country.

In October 2021, 17 percent of Americans believed in the conspiracy theory, up from 14 percent in March

the percentage of people who rejected QAnon falsehoods shrank to 34 percent in October from 40 percent in March

After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, QAnon was expected to be hobbled without him. But it has persisted despite that and despite efforts by tech platforms to staunch its spread. Forensic linguists have also tried to unmask and defang the anonymous author who signed online messages as Q.

Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of the research group and a social science researcher with decades of experience, said he never expected to be dealing with serious survey questions about whether powerful American institutions were controlled by devil-worshiping, sex-trafficking pedophiles. To have so many Americans agree with such a question, he said, was “stunning.”

Believers are “racially, religiously and politically diverse,”

Among Republicans, 25 percent found QAnon to be valid, compared with 14 percent of independents and 9 percent of Democrats.

Media preferences were a major predictor of QAnon susceptibility, with people who trust far-right news sources such as One America News Network and Newsmax nearly five times more likely to be believers than those who trust mainstream news

Fox News viewers were twice as likely to back QAnon ideas

Most QAnon believers associated Christianity with being American and said that the United States risked losing its culture and identity and must be protected from foreign influence

seven in 10 believers agreed with the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

More than half of QAnon supporters are white, while 20 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent are Black.

They were most likely to have household incomes of less than $50,000 a year, hold at most a high school degree, hail from the South and reside in a suburb.

“At that point,” he said, “we pulled him out the house and said, ‘You can’t be here.’”

“He’s a child preying on a child,” Jim Bob Duggar said.

Kelly said that officer has since been convicted of child pornography charges and is incarcerated.“We had no idea” that the officer was involved in anything wrong, Jim Bob Duggar replied.

The scandal ignited on social media, where many expressed anger and disappointment toward the Arkansas family using the hashtags #CancelTheDuggars, #DitchTheDuggars and #BoycottTLC.

There’s little known about Nader’s recent visits to the White House. The Times reported that Nader has been questioned about his meetings there with Kushner and Stephen Bannon, a former Trump adviser. Bannon did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The government argued that the search was justified because Nader, “a suspected pedophile, was likely to seek to contact children.” But, 18 months later, the court ruled that the latter part of the warrant was impermissibly general, and threw out additional evidence that had been seized from his home. The evidence that was discarded included material that was described in the court ruling as obscene.

“They were the ones that floated March 4,” she said. “They were also the ones in the last two weeks saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s a false flag. It’s not QAnon that’s going to do anything on March 4. It’s a false-flag operation by antifa to make us look bad.’”

“And it’s a community in which there’s an idea, rather like an improv group, to say, ‘Yes, and’ — not, ‘No, but,’” Kleinfeld said. “If someone throws out an idea, others are encouraged to build on it. That suggests a long life, a durability.”

While fully embracing QAnon talking points remains a minority position within the GOP, denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election has become the mainstream position inside the party.Read More

Beyond partisanship, belief in QAnon conspiracy theories is also strongly associated with consumption of far-right media, the report finds.

Republicans also say, 54% to 30%, that they agree with the myth that the January 6 riot at the US Capitol "was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad."

In a new Quinnipiac survey, 74% of Republicans say that "too much is being made of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and it is time to move on," compared with just 18% who say that it was an "attack on democracy that should never be forgotten."

A 64% majority of registered voters, including similar shares in both parties, think that political divisions pose a major threat to the United States, per a new Fox News poll.

Americans who said they consume far-right news sources reported the highest rates of conspiracy theory acceptance; close to half said they believe in the tenets of QAnon

People without college degrees who responded to the survey were three times more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than Americans who had completed college.

"This stuff has always been part of the stew," said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist in Washington. "Trump just turned up the heat and brought it to the surface.

"You can't just push QAnon followers away," said Rothschild. "We've seen, certainly in the Georgia runoff, where these margins are thin, you can't piss off 1 or 2% of your constituents."

"If leadership doesn't hold certain members accountable, there's going to be a real problem," one Republican House member told CNN this week.

"It's like Trump looked for the most gullible members, found the Freedom Caucus, and decided even they weren't up for the job so he cooked up this mutated QAnon caucus," said one GOP operative.

So far, there's been close to zero pushback against QAnon candidates from national party leaders -- no denial of campaign funding or threats to revoke committee assignments.

QAnon devotion will linger within the GOP long after Trump leaves office.

There are plenty of Republicans in the conference disturbed by the prominence of "fellow travelers" of these conspiracy theorists and the long-term impact this will have on the party.

The centrality of Trump to the QAnon theory cannot be overstated, which is why it's an open question as to the movement's staying power. As long as he was the President, however, party leaders have essentially welcomed conspiracy theorists into the coalition.

Across the GOP, the emergence of QAnon candidates was either gently condemned or tolerated.

Whether the conspiracy survives in the next few years as a force in the party depends in part on how much Trump remains on the scene. For years, the President has been a crucial actor in the narrative of QAnon, and experts say it's not certain how believers will factor him in once he's no longer President.

By the time the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, QAnon had absorbed much of the far-right conspiracy theories and concerns, says Rothschild."With the pandemic, everything became about everything," he told CNN. "It turns into Bill Gates, it turns into China, it turns into 5G. This all sort of mushes together and it becomes impossible to separate."

Once Trump began ramping up in his own false conspiracy theorizing about a "stolen election," there was a ready and willing community of people online ready to subsume those lies and act on them.

But the January 6 assault on the Capitol showed Republicans and the country the consequences of tolerating conspiracy theories without fully understanding them or justifying the threat of danger from them. For some, it was a wake-up call that the contagion had spread and could not be contained.

"To the extent it shows up in Congress, it's mostly in the form of 'just asking questions' or 'providing a voice' on behalf of constituents," said Donovan. "For those where this is a vocal constituency there's little incentive to confront the people who are voting for you. So I suspect it will be laissez-faire in most cases until another instance where it rears its head and can't be ignored."

In fact, “unity” turned out to be the wrong goal to pursue. What mattered was defending the republic’s values, a defense never made forcefully enough.

As a historian of modern France, I’ve followed with great interest the innumerable comparisons drawn between Trumpism and Nazism that began even before Trump took office: the endless debate over whether Trump can be called a “fascist” (I would say yes), whether American society today resembles Weimar Germany before it fell to the Nazis (I would say no), and if we can really say that the Republican Party is just a confederation of “collaborators” (of course we can).

All historical analogies are flawed, and they might not mean much at all. Even if they underscore the gravity of the moment, they often obscure its causes and might, in fact, prevent us from seeing them.

In seeking to understand Trump, and Trumpism, we have preferred to tell ourselves stories about violent rupture and hostile takeovers—of Hitler’s rise, of Nazism’s threat, of the perils of collaboration—but not so much about the valorization of falsehood and a republic that ignores, and even embraces, its own terminal impotence. That is the story of France’s Third Republic and its defining psychodrama.

What is most important to remember about the Third Republic is that, as long-lasting as it might have been, it was a parliamentary system constantly stalled in political gridlock

much like in America today, there was a self-absorbed intellectual establishment obsessed with decline and the mysterious disease of “decadence,” which was spoken of in the same pompous outrage that our own pundits use to decry what happens on Ivy League campuses or in major newsrooms.

In the end, the opportunism and the cynicism of political elites earned them the distrust of both ordinary voters and the bureaucrats left to run things when they themselves would not. What emerged was a “politics of resentment,”

The spectacular crash of the Union Générale bank in 1882 triggered an economic downturn that would take years to overcome; this, and the corruption of the Panama scandal just four years later, might be seen as19th-century versions of 2008, economic crises whose root causes were similarly ignored by the elite and, among the masses, blamed on the Jews.

there were multiple Trumpian moments and characters in the Third Republic as well, most notably Georges Boulanger, the swashbuckling, garish hard-line nationalist general who seemed to emerge from nowhere and launched a populist movement of mass appeal, an anti-republican crusade that nearly toppled the republic in 1889. Boulangism did not last politically, but it represented a new fault line in French society: a powerful right-wing bloc that united some in the working class along with conservative Catholics and the remnants of the old nobility. It only radicalized from there a few years later, and the Dreyfus affair was the moment when what was left of the social fabric definitively unraveled.

What is especially useful to remember about the Dreyfus affair now is the point of no return it represented, the repugnant embrace of lies by one half of society, educated people who were not ignorant but who had simply ceased to care. For them, the truth was irrelevant; what mattered was preserving their vision of the nation, regardless of the facts.

From start to finish, the Dreyfus affair was a seemingly endless social drama. Much like the Trump presidency, it was an all-consuming, emotional experience that left no aspect of public or even private life untouched. It would be hard to overstate the polarization it triggered in France, which found its population split over the fate of an obscure officer hardly anyone had heard of before the episode began.

In some ways, the Dreyfus affair was the culmination of an age-old clash begun by the French Revolution: On one side were the defenders of the republic and its “universal” values, on the other the anti-republican faction that preferred the grandeur of the monarchy, the sanctity of the Church, and the prestige of the military.

Then, as now, these people had undertaken a deliberate embrace of irrationality, an almost primal flaunting of decency and civilized norms, merely because that was possible, and because there were never any real consequences.

this might not solve the deeper problem, which is that so many in Trump’s mob—like so many of his supporters in general—remain comfortably ensconced in the mansion of lies their champion has built. As we have seen for years on end, any attempt to expose those lies with facts or evidence of any kind is a fool’s errand. These people deliberately inhabit an alternate universe because it makes them feel powerful, because it frustrates their enemies, and, in the end, because they can.

he line among certain Democrats has been that there can be “no healing without accountability.” But this is naïve. There can be no accountability for those who engage in surreality, the dark province in which the world is apparently run by a cabal of prominent pedophiles and where Trump somehow retained the White House in a landslide. As long as the president’s supporters insult the notion of objective truth, coddled by conspiracy theories and social-media networks that simulate a sense of community, there will be no common ground to seek, no “America” to reclaim

if the past rarely offers lessons, sometimes it offers warnings.

“I made it like a foot inside and they pushed me out and they maced me!” she cries. When Walker asks her why she wanted to go in, she’s exasperated at his ignorance. “We’re storming the Capitol, it’s a revolution!”

But even after seeing his friend walked on by Trump’s supporters, Winchell could not see how Trump was to blame. He was shocked when the TV reporter asked him if the president “has blood on his hands.”

Participants tend to revere Mr. Trump and believe he’ll end the crisis outlined by Q: that the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles who operate a sex-trafficking ring, among other crimes. While the chat room group is relatively small, with only about 900 subscribers, it offers a glimpse into a worrying sect of Trump supporters. Some conspiracists like them have turned to violent language in the wake of Mr. Trump’s electoral loss.

Listening to the conspiracists — unfiltered and in their own voices — makes that digital conversation disturbingly real.

“I just read somewhere that Biden just lowered the age of consent to age 8. Has anybody heard anything about that?”

Sometimes the chat is lighthearted, like when supporters swap details about grocery runs or wish one other happy birthday. But the conversation can also turn dark, like when they speak longingly about “brutal” televised executions or simply ask, “Can the people declare war inside the country if they wanted to?”

They believed Mr. Trump would use his Washington rally to announce mass arrests and release long-awaited evidence supporting Q’s theories. None of that happened.

As the rally began, participants uploaded dispatches from the ground. The mood was positive, even emotional. In the chat, they shared their real-time reactions as Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol.

Mr. Trump needed to allow the vote to be certified to spot his enemies. He could use the Insurrection Act at any moment, putting America under martial law and using the military to seize control of the government.

They had been through this cycle so many times before, with promises of lawsuits that could overturn the election or a Supreme Court intervention that Mr. Trump had planned for months. None of it came to pass. Still, they had hope.

“We know not to watch CNN. We know not to watch these people. But when we have people that we trust on the right, and we’re pushing that information out — because we don’t have many media sources, so the ones that come out, they need to be pretty damn good. And for them to take advantage of people’s hope? We cannot have that.”

Rather than re-evaluate their approach in the wake of Q’s failures, many doubled down. The problem wasn’t that the whole worldview was false, just that they had been led astray by inaccurate reports and misinterpretations. Their response was to improve their process. They would develop a list of sources, vet credentials, link to original material, and view unconfirmed information skeptically. They were, in a sense, inventing journalism.

Theories spread that Q was actually part of a deep state plot to keep Mr. Trump’s supporters complacent

After the inauguration, Ron Watkins, one of the main pushers of QAnon’s theories, whom some suspect is actually Q, seemed to signal the end of the movement. In a message to followers, he focused on the strength of the community, writing, “As we enter into the next administration please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”

I don’t want to treat our fellow citizens with open contempt, or to confront and berate them

Rather, I am arguing for silence. The Trump loyalists who still cling to conspiracy theories and who remain part of a cult of personality should be deprived of the attention they seek, shunned for their antidemocratic lunacy, and then outvoted at the ballot box.

Perhaps most important, much of our own sense of well-being will be lost if we continue to engage with people who believe that millions of votes were falsified from coast to coast, that the military should move into the swing states and hold new elections, or even that thousands of Chinese troops were bombed into submission on the border of Maine.

No content anchors it; no program or policy comes from it. No motivating ideology stands behind it, unless we think of general grievance and a hatred of cultural and intellectual elites as an “idea.

when views are incoherent and beliefs are rooted in fantasies, compromise is impossible. Further engagement is not only unwarranted, but it can also become counterproductive.

We already understand: Trump tapped into traditions of ethnic and regional grievances and social resentments that are present in every democracy and wedded them to bizarre theories and conspiracies.

If we’ve learned one thing about “Trumpism,” it is that there is no such thing as “Trumpism.”

Ordinary people should tune out the noise. No one needs to think one more minute about why a woman from New York would speed along in her car while ranting into her phone about stolen elections when she ought to have been watching the road.

And the media have a particular obligation to end their fascination with these Trump voters. We don’t need yet another pilgrimage to diners and gas stations to hear from people whose only sources of information are cable-news hosts plumping fantasies about Venezuelan voting machines.

the rest of us no longer need to participate in long chin-pulling exercises about “what they really want” or why they cannot grasp reality.

Nobody knew exactly how that belief would manifest itself; I certainly never expected to see platoons of insurrectionists scaling the walls of the U.S. Capitol and sacking the place in broad daylight. Still, shocking as this was, it wasn’t a bit surprising. The attempted coup d'état had been unfolding in slow motion over the previous nine weeks. Anyone who couldn’t see this coming chose not to see it coming. And that goes for much of the Republican Party.

there’s one conclusion of which I’m certain: The “fringe” of our politics no longer exists. Between the democratization of information and the diminished confidence in establishment politicians and institutions ranging from the media to corporate America, particularly on the right, there is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics.

The first time I heard someone casually suggest an “imminent civil war,” on a reporting trip in January 2020, I shrugged it off. But then I heard it again. And again. Before long, it was perfectly routine. Everywhere I went, I heard people talk about stocking up on artillery. I heard people talk about hunting down cabals of politically connected pedophiles. I heard people talk about the irreconcilable differences that now divide this country. I heard people talk about the president, their president, being sabotaged by a “deep state” of evil Beltway bureaucrats who want to end their way of life. I heard people talk about a time approaching when they would need to take matters into their own hands.

All of that was before the president alleged the greatest conspiracy in American history.

More than a few told me I was being “hysterical,” at which point things got heated, as I would plead with them to consider the consequences if even a fractional number of the president’s most fervent supporters took his allegations, and his calls to action, at face value. When I submitted that violence was a real possibility, they would snicker. Riots? Looting? That’s what Democrats do!

So convinced were the president’s allies that his rhetoric was harmless that many not only rationalized it, but actually dialed it up. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once skewered Trump’s dishonesty, promised “earth-shattering” evidence to support his former rival’s claims of a rigged election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that “President Trump won this election,” told of a plot to cheat him and alerted the viewers watching him on Fox News, “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who famously called Trump “a pathological liar,” himself lied so frequently and so shamelessly it became difficult to keep up. Dozens of other congressional Republicans leveled sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, some of them promoting the #stopthesteal campaign online.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich floated the arrest of election workers. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host, urged Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the results of their state elections and send pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College. Right-wing propaganda outlets like The Federalist and One America News churned out deceptive content framing the election as inherently and obviously corrupt. The RNC hosted disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell for a sanctioned news conference that bordered on clinically insane, parts of which were tweeted by the @GOP account. The president’s lawyers and surrogates screamed about hacked voting machines and international treachery and Biden-logoed vans full of ballots. One conservative group paid a former police captain a quarter-million dollars to investigate voter fraud; he performed an armed hijacking of an air-conditioning repair truck, only to discover there were no fake ballots inside.

As the Electoral College meeting drew closer, hundreds of Republican members of Congress signed on to a publicity-stunt lawsuit aimed at invalidating tens of millions of votes for Biden. When it failed, the legislatures in several states closed public proceedings in response to actionable threats

The president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, urged him to invoke martial law. The Texas Republican Party suggested seceding from the union. The Arizona Republican Party endorsed martyrdom. Eric Metaxas, the pseudo-evangelical leader with a devoted following on the right, followed suit. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told the president during a radio interview. “This is a fight for everything. God is with us.”

Despite all of these arrows pointing toward disaster — and despite Trump encouraging his followers to descend on Washington come January 6, to agitate against certification of Biden’s victory — not a single Republican I’d spoken with in recent weeks sounded anxious

The notion of real troublemaking simply didn’t compute. Many of these Republicans have kept so blissfully ensconced in the MAGA embrace that they’ve chosen not to see its ugly side.

it has long been canon on the right that leftists — and only leftists — cause mayhem and destruction. Democrats are the party of charred cities and Defund the Police; Republicans are the party of law and order and Back the Blue. As Republicans have reminded us a million times, the Tea Party never held a rally without picking up its trash and leaving the area cleaner than they found it.

And yet, the right has changed dramatically over the past decade. It has radicalized from the ground up, in substance and in style. It has grown noticeably militant.

Trump once told me, “The Tea Party still exists — except now it’s called Make America Great Again.” But that’s not quite accurate. The core of the Tea Party was senior citizens in lawn chairs waving miniature flags and handing out literature; the only people in costumes wore ruffled shirts and tri-corner hats. The core of the MAGA movement is edgier, more aggressive and less friendly; its adherents would rather cosplay the Sons of Anarchy than the Sons of Liberty.

There is one thing that connects these movements: Both were born out of deception

Republican leaders convinced the grassroots of 2009 and 2010 that they could freeze government spending and reform entitlement programs and repeal Obamacare

Trump convinced the grassroots of 2015 and 2016 that he, too, could repeal Obamacare, while also making Mexico pay for a border wall and overhauling the nation’s infrastructure

The key difference is that the Tea Party slowly faded into obscurity as voters realized these promises politicians made were a scam, whereas the MAGA movement has only grown more intensely committed with each new con dangled in front of them.

Make no mistake: Plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really, truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years; that Vice President Mike Pence had unilateral power to revise the election results; that their takeover of the building could change the course of history

the point remains: They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lies, believing it couldn’t hurt to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base.

For the past nine weeks, I’ve had a lot of highly unusual conversations with administration officials, Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures.

Based on my reporting, it seemed obvious the president was leading the country down a dangerous and uncharted road. I hoped they could see that. I hoped they would do something — anything.

From party headquarters, the Republican National Committee’s chairwoman flung reckless insinuations left and right as her top staffers peddled a catalogue of factually inaccurate claims. The two Republican senators from Georgia, desperate to keep in Trump’s good graces ahead of their runoff elections, demanded the resignation of the Republican secretary of state for no reason other than the president’s broad assertions of corruption, none of which stood up to multiple recounts and investigations by GOP officials statewide

Local lawmakers in states like Michigan and Wisconsin told Republicans they’d been cheated, citing the suspicious late-night counting of mail ballots, when they were the ones who had refused to allow those ballots to be counted earlier,