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Mr. Gensler’s central claim is simple: For all their novel attributes, most cryptocurrencies are securities, like stocks or other investment products. That means the developers who issue cryptocurrencies must register with the U.S. government and disclose information about their plans.

Even before FTX’s collapse, the debate was reaching an inflection point: A federal judge is expected to rule in the coming months in a lawsuit brought by the S.E.C. that charges the cryptocurrency issuer Ripple with offering unregistered securities. A victory for the government would strengthen Mr. Gensler’s hand, establishing a precedent that could pave the way for more lawsuits against crypto companies.

A former Goldman Sachs partner, Mr. Gensler became one of the most aggressive financial regulators in Washington after the 2008 recession. As chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an agency that regulates the financial markets, he helped carry out the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which aimed to protect consumers and rein in Wall Street.

when Mr. Gensler took over the S.E.C., the crypto industry hailed him as an enthusiast who understood the technology’s potential. Bitcoin “is in good hands,” one venture investor tweeted.

But it soon became clear that Mr. Gensler would take a hard-line approach. In July 2021, he met with a group of industry representatives, including the leader of the Blockchain Association, a prominent crypto trade group. He bluntly informed her that most of the organization’s members were probably violating federal rules, two people familiar with the meeting said.

Rather than devise new rules for crypto, Mr. Gensler has focused on enforcing the current ones as broadly as possible.

A few days later, Mr. Gensler called crypto “the Wild West” while speaking at a national security conference in Washington.

Behind closed doors, Mr. Gensler has been equally aggressive. “I’ve heard about other groups going in and getting in arguments,” said Perianne Boring, the founder of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a crypto advocacy group. “You want to have a fight, you can have one.”

In crypto circles, mentioning Mr. Gensler’s name elicits quivers of fury. A Twitter account for the crypto company LBRY once called him “a demon wearing human flesh.”

The basis for Mr. Gensler’s claim that cryptocurrencies are securities is a legal analysis known as the Howey Test, which the Supreme Court outlined in 1946. Under the framework, a financial product is deemed a security when it offers the chance to invest in a “common enterprise” with the expectation of profiting from the efforts of others.

FTX’s collapse has unleashed a new level of scrutiny. Screenshots of Mr. Gensler’s public meeting schedule, which show multiple sessions with Mr. Bankman-Fried, have circulated on Twitter, where crypto fans who once said Mr. Gensler was overly aggressive have now accused him of cozying up to a criminal.

“If you don’t like him, you don’t like the current S.E.C., then of course you’re just going to blame him, regardless of the facts,” Mr. Reiners said. “If Sam Bankman-Fried tried to get a meeting with the S.E.C., and Gary Gensler said absolutely not, I’ll never talk to you, the Republicans would’ve gone ballistic prior to the collapse.”

“Why we often separate these things out is so that the public is better protected about the inherent conflicts,” he said. “It’s really important to make sure that this field comes in, gets registered, gets regulated.”

In public remarks shortly after FTX imploded, Mr. Gensler argued that too many crypto companies performed multiple financial roles at the same time — like running an exchange and making trades, an apparent reference to the close relationship between FTX and Alameda.

The outcome will also draw attention in Congress, where a slate of crypto-related bills was introduced this year. When Mr. Gensler testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee in September, he was grilled by Republican senators, who said the S.E.C. was offering insufficient legal guidance to crypto companies that wanted to comply with federal law.“Not liking the answer from the S.E.C.,” he shot back, “doesn’t mean there isn’t guidance.”

These issues may be secondary compared with the life-or-death question of abortion itself, but they are essential to the holistic aspects of political and ideological debate. In any great controversy, people are swayed to one side or another not just by the rightness of a particular position, but by whether that position is embedded in a social vision that seems generally attractive, desirable, worth siding with and fighting for.

Here some of the pathologies of right-wing governance could pave a path to failure for the pro-life movement. You can imagine a future in which anti-abortion laws are permanently linked to a punitive and stingy politics, in which women in difficulties can face police scrutiny for a suspicious miscarriage but receive little in the way of prenatal guidance or postnatal support.

“Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn. She said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that Zatko “now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.” Hahn said that Twitter fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.” Attorneys for Zatko confirmed he was fired but denied it was for performance or leadership.

the whistleblower document alleges the company prioritized user growth over reducing spam, though unwanted content made the user experience worse. Executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, the complaint asserts, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.

Chief executive Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he tweeted in May that the company was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can,” the complaint alleges.

Zatko described his decision to go public as an extension of his previous work exposing flaws in specific pieces of software and broader systemic failings in cybersecurity. He was hired at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 after a major hack of the company’s systems.

“I felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take,” said Zatko, who was fired by Agrawal in January. He declined to discuss what happened at Twitter, except to stand by the formal complaint. Under SEC whistleblower rules, he is entitled to legal protection against retaliation, as well as potential monetary rewards.

A person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit. Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.

In 1998, Zatko had testified to Congress that the internet was so fragile that he and others could take it down with a half-hour of concentrated effort. He later served as the head of cyber grants at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon innovation unit that had backed the internet’s invention.

Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint, “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”

Zatko’s complaint says strong security should have been much more important to Twitter, which holds vast amounts of sensitive personal data about users. Twitter has the email addresses and phone numbers of many public figures, as well as dissidents who communicate over the service at great personal risk.

This month, an ex-Twitter employee was convicted of using his position at the company to spy on Saudi dissidents and government critics, passing their information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for cash and gifts.

Zatko’s complaint says he believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country. The complaint said supporting information for that claim has gone to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.

“Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee,

Many government leaders and other trusted voices use Twitter to spread important messages quickly, so a hijacked account could drive panic or violence. In 2013, a captured Associated Press handle falsely tweeted about explosions at the White House, sending the Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunging more than 140 points.

After a teenager managed to hijack the verified accounts of Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden, Musk and others in 2020, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, Jack Dorsey, asked Zatko to join him, saying that he could help the world by fixing Twitter’s security and improving the public conversation, Zatko asserts in the complaint.

The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

But at Twitter Zatko encountered problems more widespread than he realized and leadership that didn’t act on his concerns, according to the complaint.

Twitter’s difficulties with weak security stretches back more than a decade before Zatko’s arrival at the company in November 2020. In a pair of 2009 incidents, hackers gained administrative control of the social network, allowing them to reset passwords and access user data. In the first, beginning around January of that year, hackers sent tweets from the accounts of high-profile users, including Fox News and Obama.

Several months later, a hacker was able to guess an employee’s administrative password after gaining access to similar passwords in their personal email account. That hacker was able to reset at least one user’s password and obtain private information about any Twitter user.

Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts. Twitter then said it put additional safeguards in place.

This year, the Justice Department accused Twitter of asking users for their phone numbers in the name of increased security, then using the numbers for marketing. Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine for allegedly breaking the 2011 order, which barred the company from making misrepresentations about the security of personal data.

After Zatko joined the company, he found it had made little progress since the 2011 settlement, the complaint says. The complaint alleges that he was able to reduce the backlog of safety cases, including harassment and threats, from 1 million to 200,000, add staff and push to measure results.

But Zatko saw major gaps in what the company was doing to satisfy its obligations to the FTC, according to the complaint. In Zatko’s interpretation, according to the complaint, the 2011 order required Twitter to implement a Software Development Life Cycle program, a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs. The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and the FTC that they were making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter’s systems. But Zatko alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to only a tenth of the company’s projects, and even then treated as optional.

“If all of that is true, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are order violations,” Vladeck, who is now a Georgetown Law professor, said in an interview. “It is possible that the kinds of problems that Twitter faced eleven years ago are still running through the company.”

“Agrawal’s Tweets and Twitter’s previous blog posts misleadingly imply that Twitter employs proactive, sophisticated systems to measure and block spam bots,” the complaint says. “The reality: mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed, and reactive human teams.”

One current and one former employee recalled that incident, when failures at two Twitter data centers drove concerns that the service could have collapsed for an extended period. “I wondered if the company would exist in a few days,” one of them said.

The current and former employees also agreed with the complaint’s assertion that past reports to various privacy regulators were “misleading at best.”

For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users who asked, but the material had spread so widely inside Twitter’s networks, it was impossible to know for sure

As the head of security, Zatko says he also was in charge of a division that investigated users’ complaints about accounts, which meant that he oversaw the removal of some bots, according to the complaint. Spam bots — computer programs that tweet automatically — have long vexed Twitter. Unlike its social media counterparts, Twitter allows users to program bots to be used on its service: For example, the Twitter account @big_ben_clock is programmed to tweet “Bong Bong Bong” every hour in time with Big Ben in London. Twitter also allows people to create accounts without using their real identities, making it harder for the company to distinguish between authentic, duplicate and automated accounts.

In the complaint, Zatko alleges he could not get a straight answer when he sought what he viewed as an important data point: the prevalence of spam and bots across all of Twitter, not just among monetizable users.

Zatko cites a “sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.

The complaint also alleges that Zatko warned the board early in his tenure that overlapping outages in the company’s data centers could leave it unable to correctly restart its servers. That could have left the service down for months, or even have caused all of its data to be lost. That came close to happening in 2021, when an “impending catastrophic” crisis threatened the platform’s survival before engineers were able to save the day, the complaint says, without providing further details.

The four people familiar with Twitter’s spam and bot efforts said the engineering and integrity teams run software that samples thousands of tweets per day, and 100 accounts are sampled manually.

Some employees charged with executing the fight agreed that they had been short of staff. One said top executives showed “apathy” toward the issue.

Zatko’s complaint likewise depicts leadership dysfunction, starting with the CEO. Dorsey was largely absent during the pandemic, which made it hard for Zatko to get rulings on who should be in charge of what in areas of overlap and easier for rival executives to avoid collaborating, three current and former employees said.

For example, Zatko would encounter disinformation as part of his mandate to handle complaints, according to the complaint. To that end, he commissioned an outside report that found one of the disinformation teams had unfilled positions, yawning language deficiencies, and a lack of technical tools or the engineers to craft them. The authors said Twitter had no effective means of dealing with consistent spreaders of falsehoods.

Dorsey made little effort to integrate Zatko at the company, according to the three employees as well as two others familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. In 12 months, Zatko could manage only six one-on-one calls, all less than 30 minutes, with his direct boss Dorsey, who also served as CEO of payments company Square, now known as Block, according to the complaint. Zatko allegedly did almost all of the talking, and Dorsey said perhaps 50 words in the entire year to him. “A couple dozen text messages” rounded out their electronic communication, the complaint alleges.

Faced with such inertia, Zatko asserts that he was unable to solve some of the most serious issues, according to the complaint.

Some 30 percent of company laptops blocked automatic software updates carrying security fixes, and thousands of laptops had complete copies of Twitter’s source code, making them a rich target for hackers, it alleges.

A successful hacker takeover of one of those machines would have been able to sabotage the product with relative ease, because the engineers pushed out changes without being forced to test them first in a simulated environment, current and former employees said.

“It’s near-incredible that for something of that scale there would not be a development test environment separate from production and there would not be a more controlled source-code management process,” said Tony Sager, former chief operating officer at the cyberdefense wing of the National Security Agency, the Information Assurance divisio

Sager is currently senior vice president at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, where he leads a consensus effort to establish best security practices.

The complaint says that about half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 full-time employees had wide access to the company’s internal software and that access was not closely monitored, giving them the ability to tap into sensitive data and alter how the service worked. Three current and former employees agreed that these were issues.

“A best practice is that you should only be authorized to see and access what you need to do your job, and nothing else,” said former U.S. chief information security officer Gregory Touhill. “If half the company has access to and can make configuration changes to the production environment, that exposes the company and its customers to significant risk.”

The complaint says Dorsey never encouraged anyone to mislead the board about the shortcomings, but that others deliberately left out bad news.

When Dorsey left in November 2021, a difficult situation worsened under Agrawal, who had been responsible for security decisions as chief technology officer before Zatko’s hiring, the complaint says.

An unnamed executive had prepared a presentation for the new CEO’s first full board meeting, according to the complaint. Zatko’s complaint calls the presentation deeply misleading.

The presentation showed that 92 percent of employee computers had security software installed — without mentioning that those installations determined that a third of the machines were insecure, according to the complaint.

Another graphic implied a downward trend in the number of people with overly broad access, based on the small subset of people who had access to the highest administrative powers, known internally as “God mode.” That number was in the hundreds. But the number of people with broad access to core systems, which Zatko had called out as a big problem after joining, had actually grown slightly and remained in the thousands.

The presentation included only a subset of serious intrusions or other security incidents, from a total Zatko estimated as one per week, and it said that the uncontrolled internal access to core systems was responsible for just 7 percent of incidents, when Zatko calculated the real proportion as 60 percent.

Zatko stopped the material from being presented at the Dec. 9, 2021 meeting, the complaint said. But over his continued objections, Agrawal let it go to the board’s smaller Risk Committee a week later.

Agrawal didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email to employees after publication of this article, obtained by The Post, he said that privacy and security continues to be a top priority for the company, and he added that the narrative is “riddled with inconsistences” and “presented without important context.”

On Jan. 4, Zatko reported internally that the Risk Committee meeting might have been fraudulent, which triggered an Audit Committee investigation.

Agarwal fired him two weeks later. But Zatko complied with the company’s request to spell out his concerns in writing, even without access to his work email and documents, according to the complaint.

Since Zatko’s departure, Twitter has plunged further into chaos with Musk’s takeover, which the two parties agreed to in May. The stock price has fallen, many employees have quit, and Agrawal has dismissed executives and frozen big projects.

Zatko said he hoped that by bringing new scrutiny and accountability, he could improve the company from the outside.

“I still believe that this is a tremendous platform, and there is huge value and huge risk, and I hope that looking back at this, the world will be a better place, in part because of this.”

Universities have been ordered to emphasize the study of Marxism and the writings of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. In 2015, Yuan Guiren, China’s education minister, ordered a closer examination of foreign textbooks and said that those that promote Western values should be banned from classrooms.

He called not just for corrections and apologies, but also for an investigation and for those responsible to be held accountable.

“Primary school textbooks are the foundation of the country and the nation, and an important guarantee for the formation of children’s outlook on life and values,” he wrote. “It is impossible to overstate their importance.”

The illustrations were approved in 2013 for students in first to sixth grades, the reports said. Just how the problematic drawings evaded scrutiny all these years is unclear. Some social media users highlighted the images last week, prompting parents and educators to voice their outrage.

Some of the drawings are odd or silly, like children sticking out their tongues. But others show children appearing to grope classmates on a playground. Another showed a schoolgirl with her underwear exposed as she played a game. Many critics said the drawings made the children look ugly, with wide-set, droopy eyes.

Others argued that the schoolbooks also had anti-China messages, such as an incorrectly rendered Chinese flag. Still some found allegedly pro-foreign images, like a boy flying in a biplane similar to Japanese and American planes. Some even pointed to images of children wearing clothes with what looked like stars and stripes in the colors of the American flag.

There is no small thing when it comes to children; it affects our future.”

“We have carried out serious reflection, and feel deep self-blame and guilt, and hereby express our deepest apologies,” it said, adding that it would find a new team of illustrators to redraw the math textbooks.

“You basically have Republican primary candidates trying to explain to Republican primary voters that they are going to be on their side when it comes to the cultural cold civil war that’s being fought right now,”

Within hours after the Texas shooting, shaken Democrats in Washington vowed to try again to pursue a compromise with Republicans on gun legislation that could move through the divided Senate. But the challenges were immediately evident, and Democratic outrage and frustration were palpable.

How or whether the Texas school shooting, the deadliest since Sandy Hook, will change the midterm election landscape remains unclear.

Ads for Josh Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer who lost the Republican primary for Senate, used the tagline “Pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.”

“Babies, borders, bullets”

In New York, Representative Thomas Suozzi, who is waging a long-shot primary campaign against Gov. Kathy Hochul, is highlighting her support years ago from the National Rifle Association. For her part, a Hochul ad cites her work “cracking down on illegal guns to make our neighborhoods safer.”

On the campaign trail, though, Mr. Fetterman has faced scrutiny over a 2013 incident in which, as mayor of Braddock, Pa., he brandished a shotgun to stop and detain an unarmed Black jogger, telling police he had heard gunshots. He has declined to apologize or say he did anything wrong.

“We are exhausted,” she continued, “because we cannot continue to be the only country in the world where we let this happen again and again and again.”

They were offering nearly unlimited cheap debt to keep the wheels of finance turning, and when that didn’t help, the Fed began purchasing massive quantities of government debt outright.

Investors dumped whatever they could, including ostensibly “risk-free” U.S. Treasury securities. As a global dash for dollars unfolded, Treasurys were no longer serving as the market’s traditional shock absorbers, amplifying extreme turmoil on Wall Street.

By week’s end, the Dow had plunged more than 10,000 points since mid-February as investors struggled to get their arms around what a halt to global commerce would mean for businesses that would soon have no revenue.

“It was sheer, unadulterated panic, of a magnitude that was far worse than in 2008 and 2009. Far worse,”

The idea of shutting down markets was especially discouraging: “It was a profoundly un-American thing to contemplate, to just shut everything down, and almost fatalistic—that we’re not going to get out of this.”

nearly two years later, most agree that the Fed’s actions helped to save the economy from going into a pandemic-induced tailspin.

“My thought was—I remember this very clearly—‘O.K. We have a four-or-five-day chance to really get our act together and get ahead of this. We’re gonna try to get ahead of this,’” Mr. Powell recalled later. “And we were going to do that by just announcing a ton of stuff on Monday morning.”

It worked. The Fed’s pledges to backstop an array of lending, announced on Monday, March 23, would unleash a torrent of private borrowing based on the mere promise of central bank action—together with a massive assist by Congress, which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars that would cover any losses.

If the hardest-hit companies like Carnival, with its fleet of 104 ships docked indefinitely, could raise money in capital markets, who couldn’t?

on April 9, where he shed an earlier reluctance to express an opinion about government spending policies, which are set by elected officials and not the Fed. He spoke in unusually moral terms. “All of us are affected,” he said. “But the burdens are falling most heavily on those least able to carry them…. They didn’t cause this. Their business isn’t closed because of anything they did wrong. This is what the great fiscal power of the United States is for—to protect these people as best we can from the hardships they are facing.”

They were extraordinary words from a Fed chair who during earlier, hot-button policy debates said the central bank needed to “stay in its lane” and avoid providing specific advice.

To avoid a widening rift between the market haves (who had been given access to Fed backstops) and the market have-nots (who had been left out because their debt was deemed too risky), Mr. Powell had supported a decision to extend the Fed’s lending to include companies that were being downgraded to “junk” status in the days after it agreed to backstop their bonds.

Most controversially, Mr. Powell recommended that the Fed purchase investment vehicles known as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest in junk debt. He and his colleagues feared that these “high-yield” bonds might buckle, creating a wave of bankruptcies that would cause long-term scarring in the economy.

Mr. Powell decided that it was better to err on the side of doing too much than not doing enough.

, Paul Singer, who runs the hedge-fund firm Elliott Management, warned that the Fed was sowing the seeds of a bigger crisis by absolving markets of any discipline. “Sadly, when people (including those who should know better) do something stupid and reckless and are not punished,” he wrote, “it is human nature that, far from thinking that they were lucky to have gotten away with something, they are encouraged to keep doing the stupid thing.”

The breathtaking speed with which the Fed moved and with which Wall Street rallied after the Fed’s announcements infuriated Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and high-ranking Senate aide who runs Better Markets, an advocacy group lobbying for tighter financial regulations.

This is a ridiculous discussion no matter how heartfelt Powell is about ‘we can’t pick winners and losers’—to which my answer is, ‘So instead you just make them all winners?’”

“Literally, not only has no one in finance lost money, but they’ve all made more money than they could have dreamed,” said Mr. Kelleher. “It just can’t be the case that the only thing the Fed can do is open the fire hydrants wide for everybody

Mr. Powell later defended his decision to purchase ETFs that had invested in junk debt. “We wanted to find a surgical way to get in and support that market because it’s a huge market, and it’s a lot of people’s jobs… What were we supposed to do? Just let them die and lose all those jobs?” he said. “If that’s the biggest mistake we made, stipulating it as a mistake, I’m fine with that. It wasn’t time to be making finely crafted judgments,” Mr. Powell said. He hesitated for a moment before concluding. “Do I regret it? I don’t—not really.”

“We didn’t know there was a vaccine coming. The pandemic is just raging. And we don’t have a plan,” said Mr. Powell. “Nobody in the world has a plan. And in hindsight, the worry was, ‘What if we can’t really fully open the economy for a long time because the pandemic is just out there killing people?’”

Mr. Powell never saw this as a particularly likely outcome, “but it was around the edges of the conversation, and we were very eager to do everything we could to avoid that outcome,”

The Fed’s initial response in 2020 received mostly high marks—a notable contrast with the populist ire that greeted Wall Street bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, gave Mr. Powell an “A-plus for 2020,” he said. “On a one-to-10 scale? It was an 11. He gets the highest, highest marks, and deserves them. The Fed as an institution deserves them.”

The pandemic was the most severe disruption of the U.S. economy since the Great Depression. Economists, financial-market professionals and historians are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of the aggressive response by fiscal and monetary policy makers.

Altogether, Congress approved nearly $5.9 trillion in spending in 2020 and 2021. Adjusted for inflation, that compares with approximately $1.8 trillion in 2008 and 2009.

By late 2021, it was clear that many private-sector forecasters and economists at the Fed had misjudged both the speed of the recovery and the ways in which the crisis had upset the economy’s equilibrium. Washington soon faced a different problem. Disoriented supply chains and strong demand—boosted by government stimulus—had produced inflation running above 7%.

because the pandemic shock was akin to a natural disaster, it allowed Mr. Powell and the Fed to sidestep concerns about moral hazard—that is, the possibility that their policies would encourage people to take greater risks knowing that they were protected against larger losses. If a future crisis is caused instead by greed or carelessness, the Fed would have to take such concerns more seriously.

The high inflation that followed in 2021 might have been worse if the U.S. had seen more widespread bankruptcies or permanent job losses in the early months of the pandemic.

an additional burst of stimulus spending in 2021, as vaccines hastened the reopening of the economy, raised the risk that monetary and fiscal policy together would flood the economy with money and further fuel inflation.

The surge in federal borrowing since 2020 creates other risks. It is manageable for now but could become very expensive if the Fed has to lift interest rates aggressively to cool the economy and reduce high inflation.

The Congressional Budget Office forecast in December 2020 that if rates rose by just 0.1 percentage point more than projected in each year of the decade, debt-service costs in 2030 would rise by $235 billion—more than the Pentagon had requested to spend in 2022 on the Navy.

its low-rate policies have coincided with—and critics say it has contributed to—a longer-running widening of wealth inequality.

In 2008, household wealth fell by $8 trillion. It rose by $13.5 trillion in 2020, and in the process, spotlighted the unequal distribution of wealth-building assets such as houses and stocks.

Without heavy spending from Washington, focused on the needs of the least well-off, these disparities might have attracted more negative scrutiny.

Finally, the Fed is a technocratic body that can move quickly because it operates under few political constraints. Turning to it as the first line of defense in this and future crises could compromise its institutional independence.

Step one, he said, was to get in the fight and try to win. Figuring out how to exit would be a better problem to have, because it would mean they had succeeded.

“We have a recovery that looks completely unlike other recoveries that we’ve had because we’ve put so much support behind the recovery,” Mr. Powell said last month. “Was it too much? I’m going to leave that to the historians.”

The final verdict on the 2020 crisis response may turn on whether Mr. Powell is able to bring inflation under control without a painful recession—either as sharp price increases from 2021 reverse on their own accord, as officials initially anticipated, or because the Fed cools down the economy by raising interest rates.

his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.

Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.

A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.

Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulović for running a pump-and-dump scheme.

One of Radulović’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šarić.

Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.

The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.

After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.

However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.

The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.

A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”

One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.

Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.

The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.

One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”

The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.

Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.

The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.

By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.

Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”

Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.

More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.

This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.

“This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.

“I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”

Most of the 3.2m podcasters on Spotify are not like Mr Rogan, who sold his show to the company in 2020 for a reported $100m. The vast majority are amateurs,

The vaccines bust-up is their first taste of an argument that other social networks have grappled with for years and which is now coming to audio.

Apple, the next-biggest streamer, has content guidelines for podcasts but a rough style guide for music. Amazon, the third-largest, has published even less in the way of rules. And whereas Facebook and co release regular reports on what content they have taken down and why, the audio streamers are opaque.

The social networks are far from perfect, but rules that are open to public scrutiny can gradually be improved on.

Many popular TikTok videos of the invasion — including of Ukrainians livestreaming from their bunkers — offer real accounts of the action, according to researchers who study the platform. But other videos have been impossible to authenticate and substantiate. Some simply appear to be exploiting the interest in the invasion for views, the researchers said.

The clip was then used in many TikTok videos, some of which included a note stating that all 13 soldiers had died. Ukrainian officials later said in a Facebook post that the men were alive and had been taken prisoner, but the TikTok videos have not been corrected.

“People trust it. The result is that a lot of people are seeing false information about Ukraine and believing it.”

TikTok and other social media platforms are also under pressure from U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to curb Russian misinformation about the war, especially from state-backed media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik.

For years, TikTok largely escaped sustained scrutiny about its content. Unlike Facebook, which has been around since 2004, and YouTube, which was founded in 2005, TikTok only became widely used in the past five years.

The app has navigated some controversies in the past. It has faced questions over harmful fads that appeared to originate on its platform, as well as whether it allows underage users and adequately protects their privacy.

That includes TikTok’s algorithm for its “For You” page, which suggests videos based on what people have previously seen, liked or shared. Viewing one video with misinformation likely leads to more videos with misinformation being shown, Ms. Richards said.

But audio can be misused and taken out of context, Ms. Richards said.

“Video is the hardest format to moderate for all platforms,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook. “When combined with the fact that TikTok’s algorithm is the primary factor for what content a user sees, as opposed to friendships or follows on the big U.S. platforms, this makes TikTok a uniquely potent platform for viral propaganda.”

“I feel like lately, the videos I’m seeing are designed to get me riled up, or to emotionally manipulate me,” she said. “I get worried so now, sometimes, I find myself Googling something or checking the comments to see if it is real before I trust it.”

“I guess I don’t really know what war looks like,” she said. “But we go to TikTok to learn about everything, so it makes sense we would trust it about this too.”

Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement—the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.

“Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem

“The battle lines have been drawn,” Bolin told me, sitting in the back of his darkened sanctuary. “If you’re not taking a side, you’re on the wrong side.”

It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.

“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.

For much of my lifetime, however, American Christians have done the opposite. Beginning in the 1980s, white evangelicals imposed themselves to an unprecedented degree on the government and the country’s core institutions

Once left to cry jeremiads about civilizational decline—having lost fights over sex and sexuality, drugs, abortion, pornography, standards in media and education, prayer in public schools—conservative Christians organized their churches, marshaled their resources, and leveraged their numbers,

Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.

When Trump was elected thanks to a historic showing among white evangelicals—81 percent voted for him over Hillary Clinton—the victory was rightly viewed as the apex of the movement’s power. But this was, in many ways, also the beginning of its unraveling.

what’s notable about the realignment inside the white evangelical Church is its asymmetry. Pastors report losing an occasional liberal member because of their refusal to speak on Sunday mornings about bigotry or poverty or social injustice. But these same pastors report having lost—in the past few years alone—a significant portion of their congregation because of complaints that they and their staff did not advance right-wing political doctrines

Substantial numbers of evangelicals are fleeing their churches, and most of them are moving to ones further to the right.

Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life

Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church.

to Jeff and Deidre, Jenkinson’s stance amounted to cowardice. “I realize these are hard conversations, but the reason we left Milford is they were never willing to have the conversation,” Jeff said. “They were just trying to keep everybody happy. Paul is a conservative, but his conservatism has no teeth.”

a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.

“A pastor asked me the other day, ‘What percentage of churches would you say are grappling with these issues?’ And I said, ‘One hundred percent. All of them,’ ”

“It may sound like Chicken Little. But I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this ‘two countries’ talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.”

More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice.

The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.

“Back when I believed there was an honorable alliance between Republicans and evangelicals, it was because I believed that our values would ultimately prevail, come what may on this Earth, whether we win or lose some election,” Brown said. “But over time, there was a shift. Losing was no longer an option. It became all about winning.”

And then,” Brown said, “came Barack Obama.”It felt silly at first—jokes about Obama’s birth certificate, comments about his faith. But over time, the discourse inside the church became more worrisome.

The cultural climate was getting chilly for evangelicals; the Great Recession was squeezing his blue-collar congregation. But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and Fox News had them every single night.”

Brown kept reminding his people that scripture’s most cited command is “Fear not.” But he couldn’t break through. Looking back, he understands why.

“Biblically, fear is primarily reverence and awe. We revere God; we hold him in awe,” Brown told me. “You can also have reverence and awe for other things—really, anything you put great value on. I think, in conservative-Christian circles, we place a lot of value on the life we’ve known. The earthly life we have known. The American life we’ve known …

If we see threats to something we value, we fear—that is, we revere, we hold in inappropriate awe—those who can take it away. That’s Barack Obama. That’s the left.”

For white evangelicals, the only thing more galvanizing than perceptions of their idealized nation slipping away was the conviction that their favored political party was unwilling to fight for the country’s survival.

“There was this sense that America is under siege, that the barbarians were at the gates,” Brown said. “Then along comes Donald Trump, who says he can make America great again. And for evangelicals, it was time to play for keeps.”

The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation.

Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to act with desperation and embrace what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.

This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.

Tony DeFelice is another new arrival at FloodGate—and another Christian who got tired of his pastor lacking teeth. At his previous church, in the Democratic-leaning Detroit suburb of Plymouth, “they did not speak a single word about politics. Not on a single issue,” he told me. “When we got to FloodGate, it confirmed for us what we’d been missing.”

“We didn’t leave the church. The church left us,” Tony told me. “COVID, the whole thing, is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity that we’re ever going to see in our lifetime. And they fell for it.”

Tony and Linda say FloodGate’s style—and Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud—has changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said.

With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, Tony no longer distinguishes between the political and the spiritual. An attack on Donald Trump is an attack on Christians. He believes the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he’s confident that righteousness will prevail: States are going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he says, and Trump will be returned to office.

He is just as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, he said, as he is that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago.

Most evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. The pastor has suggested that autistic children are oppressed by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He has called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”

Not long ago, Locke was a small-time Tennessee preacher. Then, in 2016, he went viral with a selfie video, shot outside his local Target, skewering the company’s policies on bathrooms and gender identity. The video has collected 18 million views, and it launched Locke as a distinct evangelical brand. He cast himself on social media as a lone voice of courage within Christendom. He aligned himself with figures like Dinesh D’Souza and Charlie Kirk to gain clout as one of the Christian right’s staunchest Trump supporters. All the while, his congregation swelled—moving from their old church building, which seated 250, into a large outdoor tent, then into an even bigger tent, and eventually into the current colossus. The tent holds 3,000 people and would be the envy of Barnum & Bailey.

“We are born for such a time as this. God is calling you to do something,” Schneider says. “We have a country to get back. And if that fails, we have a country—yes, I’ll say it—to take back.”

“I really don’t. No. Not too much. I don’t,” Bolin says, shaking his head. “Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating—like in a post like that.”

How many pastors at smaller right-wing churches—pastors like Bolin—would have felt uneasy sitting inside this tent? The answer, I suspect, is very few. Global Vision and FloodGate may be different in degree, but they are not different in kind.

his mission creep inside evangelicalism is why some churches have taken an absolutist approach: no preaching on elections, no sermons about current events.

“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.”

At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.

“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)

Doesn’t he worry that if people see him getting the easy things wrong, they might suspect he’s also getting the hard things wrong? Things like sanctity and salvation?

Let’s be clear: Locke belongs to a category of his own. He recently accused multiple women at his church of being witches (his source: a demon he encountered during an exorcism). That makes it easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own church and ponder its logical end point. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been dismissed as a blip on Christianity’s radar. These days, Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and has posed for photos with Franklin Graham at the White House.

Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.

a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.

Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.

“We wanted this course to be adopted by 50 states, and we wanted as many students and teachers as possible to be able to experience it,” Manoharan said. His acknowledgment underscored the inherent politics behind promoting a course that deals so squarely with race in America.

John K. Thornton, a professor of African American studies and history at Boston University, who contributed to the planning, said he was pleased the course opens with five weeks on early Africa. But he lamented that reparations and Black Lives Matter ended up only as optional research topics. “It did upset me a little bit,” he said. “Those things obviously feel very much a part of what a college course is about.”

DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, has accused the course architects of promoting “a political agenda.” He also criticized an early course plan’s references to Black queer studies and “intersectionality,” a concept that helps explain overlapping forms of discrimination that affect Black women and others.

Teresa Reed, dean of music at the University of Louisville, said her work as one of 13 members of the AP African American studies committee resembled similar assignments she has undertaken for other AP courses. Reed supports the African American studies course plan and said it will continue to be revised as pilot teachers give feedback. She said she saw no evidence of political meddling in the course design. “That was absolutely not my experience,”

Two luminaries in the field, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, both of Harvard University and both of whom advised the College Board, also issued statements vouching for the course.

The first 81-page draft of the course plan, in February 2022, drew topics and sources from the syllabi of introductory classes at historically Black universities, Ivy League schools and other prominent institutions. The College Board said it was produced as a preview for 200 college professors at a March 2022 symposium. Faculty recommended cutting 20 percent to 25 percent of the proposed topics, the College Board said, and as much as half of suggested readings.

The April version, 299 pages, was the pilot course guide, a road map for teachers before classes began in the fall. It included much more detail on goals, essential knowledge and potential source material. It also made an important switch on contemporary issues: Certain lessons on reparations, incarceration and movements for Black lives became optional and would not be covered on the AP exam. At this stage, the guide included a week of instruction on Black feminism, womanism and intersectionality, and it used the word “systemic” nine times.

One of the most consequential decisions made last year was to set aside significant time — ultimately, three weeks — near the end of the course for a research paper of up to 1,500 words on a topic students would choose. The project will count for 20 percent of the AP score for those who seek college credit.

Among 40 sample topics in the official plan are Black Lives Matter; intersectionality; reparations debates; gay life and expression in Black communities; and Black conservatism.

College Board officials point to the development of an extensive digital library for the course — including a 1991 text on intersectionality from Crenshaw — as evidence that they are not censoring writers or voices. Crenshaw teachers, they say, use the course framework as a starting point to design their own syllabi of readings and assignments.

the platforms “should be required to prioritize and ensure” the safety and health of young people, including when they make design choices for their product, according to a fact sheet. And he will call for more research into how social media affects mental health and new scrutiny of the algorithms that often determine what someone sees online.

One of the guests joining the first lady, Jill Biden, for the speech will be Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who leaked documents that, among other things, showed that some teenagers said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves.

But the United States lags behind many of its allies in taking concrete steps to shield children from extreme posts, addicting content and data collection online. Last year, new guidelines took effect in the United Kingdom that push platforms to limit the data they gather on young people, prompting several companies to implement more child safety features.

I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.

the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections

If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.

skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.

This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person

dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.

It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color.

the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.

Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.

That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason

People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.

the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.

Researchers call this effect “the liar’s dividend,” and politicians have already tried to cast off unfavorable clips as AI-generated: Last month, Donald Trump falsely claimed that an attack ad had used AI to make him look bad.

“Deepfake” could become the “fake news” of 2024, an infrequent but genuine phenomenon that gets co-opted as a means of discrediting the truth

Steve Bannon’s infamous assertion that the way to discredit the media is to “flood the zone with shit.”

AI is less likely to create new dynamics than to amplify existing ones. Presidential campaigns, with their bottomless coffers and sprawling staff, have long had the ability to target specific groups of voters with tailored messaging

They might have thousands of data points about who you are, obtained by gathering information from public records, social-media profiles, and commercial brokers

“It is now so cheap to engage in this mass personalization,” Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University who studies misinformation and disinformation, told me. “It’s going to make this content easier to create, cheaper to create, and put more communities within the reach of it.”

That sheer ease could overwhelm democracies’ already-vulnerable election infrastructure. Local- and state-election workers have been under attack since 2020, and AI could make things worse.

Those officials have also expressed the worry, he said, that generative AI will turbocharge the harassment they face, by making the act of writing and sending hate mail virtually effortless. (The consequences may be particularly severe for women.)

past attacks—most notably the Russian hack of John Podesta’s email, in 2016—have wrought utter havoc. But now pretty much anyone—whatever language they speak and whatever their writing ability—can send out hundreds of phishing emails in fluent English prose. “The cybersecurity implications of AI for elections and electoral integrity probably aren’t getting nearly the focus that they should,”

Just last week, AI-generated audio surfaced of one Harlem politician criticizing another. New York City has perhaps the most robust local-news ecosystem of any city in America, but elsewhere, in communities without the media scrutiny and fact-checking apparatuses that exist at the national level, audio like this could cause greater chaos.

In countries that speak languages with less online text for LLMs to gobble up, AI tools may be less sophisticated. But those same countries are likely the ones where tech platforms will pay the least attention to the spread of deepfakes and other disinformation, Edelson told me. India, Russia, the U.S., the EU—this is where platforms will focus. “Everything else”—Namibia, Uzbekistan, Uruguay—“is going to be an afterthought,”

Most of us tend to fret about the potential fake video that deceives half of the nation, not about the flood of FOIA requests already burying election officials. If there is a cost to that way of thinking, the world may pay it this year at the polls.

Postolnikov has been under increasing scrutiny in the criminal investigation into the Trump Media merger. Most recently, he has been listed on search warrant affidavits alongside several associates – one of whom was indicted last month for money laundering on top of earlier insider-trading charges.

Trump Media then received the loans from ES Family Trust: $2m on 23 December 2021, and $6m on 17 February 2022.

Part of the problem was that Trump Media struggled to get financing because traditional banks were reluctant to lend millions to Trump’s social media company in the wake of the January 6 Capitol attack, Wilkerson said.Trump Media eventually found some lenders, including ES Family Trust, but the sequence of events was curious.

S Family Trust was established on 18 May 2021, its creation papers show. Postolnikov’s “user” access to the account was “verified” on 30 November 2021 by a Paxum Bank manager in Dominica. The trust was funded for the first time on 2 December 2021

In late 2021, Trump Media was facing financial trouble after the original planned merger with Digital World was delayed indefinitely when the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the merger, Trump Media’s since-ousted co-founder-turned-whistleblower Will Wilkerson recounted in an interview.

The loans came in the form of convertible promissory notes, meaning ES Family Trust would gain a major stake in Trump Media because it was offering the money in exchange for Trump Media agreeing to convert the loan principal into “shares of Company Stock”.

Oddly, the notes were never signed. But the investment in Trump Media proved to be huge: while precise figures can only be known by Trump Media, ES Family Trust’s stake in Trump Media is worth between $20m and $40m even after the sharp decline of the company’s share price in the wake of a poor earnings report

The ES Family Trust account also appears to have benefited Postolnikov personally. As the criminal investigation into the Trump Media deal intensified towards the end of last year, the trust recorded several transfers to Postolnikov with the subject line “Partial Loan Return”.In total, the documents showed that the trust transferred $4.8m to Postolnikov’s account, although $3m was inexplicably “reversed”.

The reason for the trust’s creation remains unknown. Aside from the money that went to Trump Media, the trust’s statements show the trust has directly invested money with only two other companies: $10.8m to Eleven Ventures LLC, a venture capital firm, and $1m to Wedbush Securities, a wealth management firm.

The creation papers also contained something notable: a declaration that, if the original trustee – a Paxum employee named Angel Pacheco – stepped down from the role, his successor would be a certain individual named Michael Shvartsman.

Last month, federal prosecutors charged Michael Shvartsman, a close associate of Postolnikov, with money laundering in a superseding indictment after previously charging him and two others in July with insider-trading Digital World shares. Shvartsman and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty.

nformant for the DHS, court filings show: in one March 2023 meeting with the informant and an associate, Shvartsman mentioned a friend who owned a bank in Dominica and made bridge loans to Trump Media.

“[Shvartsman’s associate] told the [confidential informant] that he does not think the SEC would be able to go after [Shvartsman] for his part in the investment but mentioned that [Shvartsman] essentially provided ‘bridge financing’ for the firm behind the Truth Social media platform,” it said.

The investigation into potential money laundering appears to have started after Wilkerson’s lawyers Phil Brewster, Stephen Bell and Patrick Mincey alerted the US attorney’s office in the southern district of New York to the ES Family Trust loans in October 2022.

Months later, in June 2023, the FBI expanded its investigation to work jointly with the Department of Homeland Security’s El Dorado taskforce, which specializes in money laundering, and its Illicit Proceeds and Foreign Corruption group, which targets corrupt foreign officials who use US entities to launder illicit funds.

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”