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Jansen's fascination with medicine began at a young age, thanks to her father's ability to cure her frequent throat infections and coughs. "You're a small person, and you have this violent cough, and you feel sick as a dog," she recalls. "And then you get this drug. And it makes you feel better."

A few years after earning her Ph.D. in 1984, Jansen accepted a job at Merck's vaccine division. Her first challenge was to create a vaccine for the human papillomavirus, which was believed to cause cervical cancer in the 1980s. Jansen faced significant opposition, both from researchers — who thought the vaccine would not work— and Merck's finance gurus — who believed it would not be profitable. But she persisted. The Gardasil vaccine, approved in 2006, now earns Merck billions of dollars annually.

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.

his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”

Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”

We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.

“The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years

a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010

The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.

Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.

The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.

the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.

We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”

These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,

By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.

Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure

“We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”

teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.

the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.

Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.

How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.

policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.

The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.

The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.

“On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”

Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”

These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”

In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364

Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress

Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.

White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.

and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar

A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint

Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?

Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.

Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.

Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.

Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.

The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.

These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.

State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years

Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century

Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?

the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low

Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years

The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.

Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.

The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color

We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions

We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.

In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.

If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.

a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.

They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition

The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.

ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment

The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.

Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”

A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat

The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?

Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.

Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor

This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.

In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions

the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism

A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019

Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study

There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution

His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.

Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.

With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.

He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.

All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”

While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.

“The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”

Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech

Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.

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

Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital

in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital

bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.

We want community, and yet there’s something that takes us away from community. Why?

The first answer is we’re busy. And you might think therefore busy people are going to be more online and less face to face.

the fact is busy people are more connected with the rest of the world. If you’re asking, “Why do we have people no longer connecting face to face,” it absolutely is not because we’re too busy.

. All they needed was some cheap land and some cheap labor, and a railroad or highway to sell their products to the big cities and beyond, and they were good to go. The cheap labor was often immigrant labor from Europe.

Another big reason is job opportunities. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American industry dispersed out of the big cities, aided by new highways and railroads. Factories plunked themselves down in small towns all across the heartland of America, and small cities grew up around them. Most of these factories were in pretty simple, labor-intensive industries — food processing, lumber processing, metals manufacturing

So why do a bunch of immigrants suddenly decide to descend on one American town or another? One is just word of mouth through ethnic networks — if one or two Somali families move to a town in Maine and find it’s quite nice, they may tell all of their Somali friends

If you’re a poor immigrant from a low-income country like Honduras, or Somalia, or Haiti, or Laos, or even the poorer parts of Mexico, the chance to live in a first-world country like America and work in a relatively clean, relatively safe factory for $14 an hour is the chance of a lifetime. You’ve really made it, if you can do that

That left the small-town factories without anyone to hire. Without labor, a labor-intensive business just goes bust. So they had basically two choices — go out of business, or find someone who was willing to work hard, day in and day out, at what most young Americans would consider a soul-crushing dead-end job

And of course there’s only one kind of person in America who will show up at a meatpacking plant or metal factory in a small midwestern town and treat it as if it’s the greatest opportunity in the world: an immigrant, without much education, usually from a low-income country.

But in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Americans — especially younger Americans — started to move away from these towns. Whose American dream is to stay in their small Midwestern town and work in the local meatpacking plant? Young people with even a modicum of talent, ambition, and wanderlust packed up and moved to New York City, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, etc.

If you think immigrants get “dumped” on small midwestern towns, you probably need to adjust your mental image. It’s not the government causing a bunch of Somalis to move to Lewiston or a bunch of Haitians to move to Springfield

it’s simply America’s freedom of movement and free enterprise at work. The people of an immigrant group decided to move to a town — usually from elsewhere in the U.S. — and local businesses decided to hire and recruit them. It’s all just the private sector and individual freedom at work here — the furthest possible thing from communism or socialism.

In fact, the only way you could prevent this sort of mass “flooding” or “dumping” of low-skilled immigrants into small heartland towns would be to either A) keep them from coming into the country at all, or B) institute some kind of communist-style internal mobility restrictions.

because immigrants tend to concentrate in specific locations — mainly to be around people who speak the same language — you’d have to essentially cut off most or all low-skilled immigration in order to make sure that no towns in America got “flooded” with immigrants. Again, this is exactly what the MAGA people want to do.

Would this be worth it? After all, these “floods” of immigration are just about the only thing that can save a small town in the American heartland.

You can see that the number of declining places has accelerated in recent years. It now includes big swathes of the Great Plains, the Midwest, the Deep South, and the interior of the Northeast. This is due to a combination of factors, but fertility decline and a greater desire for city living are the main ones

some argue that the remaining townspeople should just bite the bullet and move to someplace better. But many lack the money, the human networks, and the simple initiative and bravery to start again in a new place. You can’t get everyone to move out of a dying town — instead what happens is that half move out and half stay, and the half who stay have a bad time of it.

Meanwhile, a smaller customer base can’t support all the businesses that used to flourish in the town, so lots of commercial spaces get boarded up and vacated. Drug people move into those spaces, and they become urban ruins. A pall of despair settles over the whole town.

When a small town or a small city declines in population, bad things happen. A city has a built infrastructure — roads, a sewage system, an electrical grid — that takes a lot of tax money to maintain. When the tax base shrinks, it becomes hard to pay for infrastructure that was built for a much bigger population. Things begin to decay and fall apart

So if we care about the Americans who stay in all these declining places, what can we do? A lot of people thought very hard about this in the late 2010

My general answer was that we should build new colleges and new branch campuses in the middle of declining regions — the “eds” in the “eds and meds” — in order to consolidate rural areas into urban agglomerations centered around universities.

College in America is on the decline, due to a shortage of young people and a reduced tolerance for high tuition and student debt. That’s going to be a long-term sectoral trend

You can call for more skilled immigration, but people with college educations and professional skills are going to move to big cities and university towns — the same place their skilled native-born peers want to live.

That pretty much leaves just one option: mass low-skilled immigration. We know from experience that mass low-skilled immigration can and often does restore a declining heartland town to growth.

The stories of other small towns that have received a bunch of immigrants in recent years all sound the same. At first the newcomers are met with suspicion and apprehension, and schools struggle to deal with a sudden huge influx of ESL kids. But as time goes on, the small-town residents experience the optimism of the return of local growth, and most of them warm to the newcomers. The town gains a local ethnic flavor, and in general most people are either happy about the change, or at least accepting of it.

In fact, we have systematic evidence showing that this is the standard pattern. J. Celeste Lay, a political scientist at Tulane, wrote an excellent short book called A Midwestern Mosaic

She finds the same old American story: initial wariness and even some hostility to the newcomers, followed by broad acceptance and tolerance as locals get to know the newcomers. The Contact Hypothesis wins again, and the American mosaic becomes more colorful, etc. etc.

So if this research is right, why have we seen an upsurge in anti-immigration attitudes in America since 2021

There are two clear answers here. First, people get temporarily upset when there’s a flood of new immigrants, as there was from 2021 to 2023

Second, a lot of people are upset about the immigration they read about in the news, rather than the immigration happening in their own cities and neighborhoods. It’s a lot easier to fear people when you don’t meet them.

if you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions?

What’s your alternative plan? Because I honestly don’t see any other way those places are going to get saved.

“This type of content is disseminating redpills at lightning speed to massive audiences,” the American Futurist, a website identifying as fascist, posted on its public Telegram channel on Sept. 17, using a phrase that describes dramatically reshaping someone’s worldview. “In terms of propaganda it’s unmatched.”

The propaganda — documented in videos, chat forum messages and screen recordings of neo-Nazi activity shared exclusively with The Washington Post by the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the SITE Intelligence Group — is helping to fuel a resurgence in online interest in Hitler on the American right, experts say

content glorifying, excusing or translating Hitler’s speeches into English has racked up some 25 million views across X, TikTok and Instagram since Aug. 13.

The videos are gaining traction as former president Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have advanced conspiracy theories popular among online neo-Nazi communities, including baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets.

Experts say the latest generation of AI tools, which can conjure lifelike pictures, voices and videos in seconds, allow fringe groups to breathe fresh life into abhorred ideologies, presenting opportunities for radicalization — and moderation challenges for social media companies.

One user hosted a livestream on the video-sharing site Odysee last year teaching people to use an AI voice cloning tool from ElevenLabs and video software to make Hitler videos. In roughly five minutes, he created an AI voice clone of Hitler appearing to deliver a speech in English, railing about Jews profiting from a capitalist system.

The user, who uses the handle OMGITSFLOOD and is identified as a “prominent neo-Nazi content creator” by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks white supremacist and jihadist activity online, said on the livestream that Hitler is “one of the best f — king leaders that ever lived.” The user added that he hoped to inspire a future leader like Hitler out there who may be “voting for Trump” but “just hasn’t been pilled.”

Creating the video required only a few-second sample of Hitler’s speech taken from YouTube. Without AI, the spoofing would have demanded advanced programming capabilities. Some misinformation and hate speech experts say that the ease of AI is turbocharging the spread of antisemitic content online.

“Now it’s so much easier to pump this stuff out,” said Abbie Richards, a misinformation researcher at the left-leaning nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America. “The more that you’re posting, the more likely the chances you have for this to reach way more eyes than it ever would.”

“These disguised Hitler AI videos ... grab users with a bit of curiosity and then get them to listen to a genocidal monster

On TikTok, X and Instagram, the AI-generated speeches of Hitler don’t often bear hallmarks of Nazi propaganda. A video posted on TikTok in September depicted a silhouette of a man who seemed to resemble Hitler, with the words: “Just listen.”

Over a slow instrumental beat, an AI-generated voice of Hitler speaks English in his hallmark cadence, reciting excerpts of his 1942 speech commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi coup in 1923 that vaulted Hitler to prominence. The video, which is no longer online, got more than 1 million views and 120,000 likes, according to Media Matters for America.

“There’s a big difference between reading a German translation of Hitler speeches versus hearing him say it in a very emotive way in English,” she said.

Frances-Wright compared them with videos that went viral on TikTok last year in which content creators read excerpts of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” manifesto, drawing replies from young Americans such as, “OMG, were we the baddies?”

On TikTok, users can easily share and build on the videos using the app’s “duet” features, which allow people to post the original video alongside video of themselves reacting to it, Richards said. Because the videos contain no overt terrorist or extremist logos, they are “extremely difficult” for tech companies to police, Katz added.

Jack Malon, a spokesperson at YouTube, said the site’s community guidelines “prohibit content that glorifies hateful ideologies such as Nazism, and we removed content flagged to us by The Washington Post.”

ISD’s report noted that pro-Hitler content in its dataset reached the largest audiences on X, where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm. X did not return a request for comment.

that doesn’t mean Nazism is on the decline, said Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the center. Right-wing extremists are turning to online forums, rather than official groups, to organize and generate content, using mainstream social media platforms to reach a wider audience and recruit new adherents.

The number of active neo-Nazi groups in America has declined since 2017, according to annual reports by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, partly as a result of crackdowns by law enforcement following that year’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

While it’s impossible to quantify the real-world impact of far-right online propaganda, Gais said, you can see evidence of its influence when prominent figures such as conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, billionaire Elon Musk and Trump adviser Stephen Miller espouse elements of the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory, or when mass shooters in Buffalo, El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand, cite it as inspiration.

posts glorifying or defending Hitler surged on X this month after Carlson posted an interview with Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper, which Musk reposted and called “worth watching.” (Musk later deleted his post.)

the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Dominick McGee posted to X an English-language AI audio recreation of Hitler’s 1939 Reichstag speech, which garnered 13,000 retweets, 56,000 likes and more than 10 million views, according to X’s metrics.

extremists are often among the first groups to exploit emerging technologies, which often allow them to maneuver barriers blocking such materials on established platforms.

“But in the broader scheme of politics, it can have a desensitizing or normalizing effect if people are encountering this content over and over again,” he said.

The failure to hold the Feb. 6 insurrectionists to account also helped legitimize their ideas

Mainstream French conservatives began to embrace the view — once confined to extremist circles — that their democracy was hopelessly corrupt, dysfunctional and infiltrated by Communists and Jews

Historically, French conservatives had been nationalist and staunchly anti-German. But by 1936, many of them so despised the Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, that they embraced the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” Four years later, they acquiesced to Nazi rule.

It is semi-loyalists’ very respectability that makes them so dangerous. As members of the establishment, semi-loyalists can use their positions of authority to normalize antidemocratic extremists, protect them against efforts to hold them legally accountable and empower them by opening doors to the mainstream media, campaign donors and other resources.

It is this subtle enabling of extremist forces that can fatally weaken democracies.

Rather than sever ties to antidemocratic extremists, semi-loyalists tolerate and accommodate them

Rather than condemn and seek accountability for antidemocratic acts committed by ideological allies, semi-loyalists turn a blind eye, denying, downplaying and even justifying those acts — often via what is today called whataboutism

Or they simply remain silent.

when they are faced with a choice between joining forces with partisan rivals to defend democracy or preserving their relationship with antidemocratic allies, semi-loyalists opt for their allies.

hen we look closely at the histories of democratic breakdowns, from Europe in the interwar period to Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s to Venezuela in the early 2000s, we see a clear pattern: Semi-loyal politicians play a pivotal role in enabling authoritarians.

too often politicians become what Mr. Linz called semi-loyal democrats. At first glance, semi-loyalists look like loyal democrats. They are respectable political insiders and part of the establishment. They dress in suits rather than military camouflage, profess a commitment to democracy and ostensibly play by its rules.

politicians may act as loyal democrats, prioritizing democracy over their short-term ambitions. Loyal democrats publicly condemn authoritarian behavior and work to hold its perpetrators accountable, even when they are ideological allies. Loyal democrats expel antidemocratic extremists from their ranks, refuse to endorse their candidacies, eschew all collaboration with them and, when necessary, join forces with ideological rivals to isolate and defeat them

they do this even when extremists are popular among the party base. The result, history tells us, is a political firewall that can help a democracy survive periods of intense polarization and crisis.

The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz wrote that when mainstream politicians face this sort of predicament, they can proceed in one of two ways.

in much of South America in the polarized 1960s and ’70s, mainstream parties found that many of their members sympathized with either leftist guerrillas seeking armed revolution or rightist paramilitary groups pushing for military rule.

In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream center-left and center-right parties had to navigate a political world in which antidemocratic extremists on the Communist left and the fascist right enjoyed mass appeal.

The problem facing Republican leaders today — the emergence of a popular authoritarian threat in their own ideological camp — is hardly new

As a young State Department policy planner in the 2000s, she was a lonely voice in Washington raising the alarm about the rise of China. She pushed for tariffs and against trade agreements before it was cool, and was an author of a book called “War by Other Means” about how blind faith in free markets put the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage. For years, she felt like an oddball in Washington, where both parties were still in thrall to neoliberalism.

The Hewlett Foundation hired her as the head of an initiative that has given away $140 million so far to people who are devising a new economic philosophy. Then she served a stint in the White House. Today, she’s an intellectual leader of a growing, bipartisan consensus

She fell in love with economics and studied it at Wake Forest. After she joined a student delegation to a NATO summit in Prague in 2002, a faculty adviser on that trip offered her a job in Washington working at the National Intelligence Council. In those early years, she believed what everyone else in Washington believed about the economy — that governments ought not meddle with it.

if Mr. Trump correctly identified a problem — “China is eating our lunch” — he did not solve it, beyond putting tariffs on Chinese products. His tax cut for the rich hurt rather than helped matters.

It’s the Biden administration that came in with a plan to build an economy that was good for workers, not just shareholders, using some strategies Ms. Harris had been talking about for years.

The thinking behind it goes like this: Unquestioning belief in the free market created a globalism that funneled money to the 1 percent, which has used its wealth to amass political power at the expense of everyone else. It produced free trade agreements that sent too many U.S. factories to China and rescue plans after the 2008 financial crisis that bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street.

It was her job to track China’s use of subsidies, industrial espionage and currency manipulation to fuel its rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. Ms. Harris argued that tariffs on China were a necessary defense. Nobody agreed. “I was kind of just banging my head against this wall,” she told me. “The wall was a foreign policy establishment that saw markets as sacrosanct.”

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to renegotiate NAFTA, but he struck up a new trade deal instead — the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ms. Harris argued against it. “We didn’t have the foggiest idea” of what it would do to our economy, she told me. Nobody listened.

it sent Democrats back to the intellectual drawing board. Larry Kramer, then the president of the Hewlett Foundation, recruited her in 2018 to promote alternatives to ideas that had guided U.S. policy for decades. He hoped she could do for free-market skepticism what Milton Friedman and his allies had done for free-market fundamentalism, which became policy under the Reagan administration and eventually was embraced by both parties as truth.

She has since rejoined the Hewlett Foundation, where she funds people who are proposing new solutions to economic problems. One grantee, the conservative think tank American Compass, promotes the idea of a domestic development bank to fund infrastructure — an idea with bipartisan appeal.

But the work that Ms. Harris and others in the Biden administration have done is unfinished, and poorly understood. The terms “Bidenomics” and “Build Back Better” don’t seem to resonate

Ms. Harris acknowledges that these ideas haven’t yet taken hold in the broader electorate, and that high interest rates overshadow the progress that’s been made. It’s too early for voters to feel it, she told me: “The investments Biden has pushed through aren’t going to be felt in a month, a year, two years.”

she celebrates the fact that leaders across the political spectrum are embracing the idea that Americans need to “get back to building things in this country.” This election has no candidates blindly promoting the free market. The last one didn’t either. In the battle of ideas, she has already won.

“Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022,” LeCun responded. “What about you?”

To which Musk posted: “That’s nothing, you’re going soft. Try harder!

At stake are the hearts and minds of AI experts—academic and otherwise—needed to usher in the technology

“Join xAI,” LeCun wrote, “if you can stand a boss who:– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).– claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”

Some read Musk’s “science” dig as dismissing the role research has played for a generation of AI experts. For years, the Metas and Googles of the world have hired the top minds in AI from universities, indulging their desires to keep a foot in both worlds by allowing them to release their research publicly, while also trying to deploy products. 

For an academic such as LeCun, published research, whether peer-reviewed or not, allowed ideas to flourish and reputations to be built, which in turn helped build stars in the system.

LeCun has been at Meta since 2013 while serving as an NYU professor since 2003. His tweets suggest he subscribes to the philosophy that one’s work needs to be published—put through the rigors of being shown to be correct and reproducible—to really be considered science. 

“If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not Science,” he posted in a lengthy tweet Tuesday rebutting Musk. “If you never published your research but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich,” he concluded. “But you’ll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten.” 

After pushback, he later clarified in another post: “What I *AM* saying is that science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements. If you don’t publish your research *in some way* your research will likely have no impact.”

The spat inspired debate throughout the scientific community. “What is science?” Nature, a scientific journal, asked in a headline about the dust-up.

Others, such as Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook executive and founder of Anduril Industries, a defense startup, took issue with LeCun’s definition of science. “The extreme arrogance and elitism is what people have a problem with,” he tweeted.

For Musk, who prides himself on his physics-based viewpoint and likes to tout how he once aspired to work at a particle accelerator in pursuit of the universe’s big questions, LeCun’s definition of science might sound too ivory-tower. 

Musk has blamed universities for helping promote what he sees as overly liberal thinking and other symptoms of what he calls the Woke Mind Virus. 

Over the years, an appeal of working for Musk has been the impression that his companies move quickly, filled with engineers attracted to tackling hard problems and seeing their ideas put into practice.

“I’ve teamed up with Elon to see if we can actually apply these new technologies to really make a dent in our understanding of the universe,” Igor Babuschkin, an AI expert who worked at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, said last year as part of announcing xAI’s mission. 

The creation of xAI quickly sent ripples through the AI labor market, with one rival complaining it was hard to compete for potential candidates attracted to Musk and his reputation for creating value

that was before xAI’s latest round raised billions of dollars, putting its valuation at $24 billion, kicking off a new recruiting drive. 

It was already a seller’s market for AI talent, with estimates that there might be only a couple hundred people out there qualified to deal with certain pressing challenges in the industry and that top candidates can easily earn compensation packages worth $1 million or more

Since the launch, Musk has been quick to criticize competitors for what he perceived as liberal biases in rival AI chatbots. His pitch of xAI being the anti-woke bastion seems to have worked to attract some like-minded engineers.

As for Musk’s final response to LeCun’s defense of research, he posted a meme featuring Pepé Le Pew that read: “my honest reaction.”