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The trove of emails, obtained through legal requests, contain no single smoking gun. Instead they illustrate ongoing pressure from officials at various US government agencies to pressure YouTube, Twitter, and – in particular – Facebook parent Meta to act faster and more aggressively on anti-vaccine posts, conspiracy theories and the lab-leak theory.

Despite the occasional resistance from Facebook, emails published as part of the lawsuit often showed White House officials berating social media companies, who were deferential in response. “We think there is considerably more we can do in ‘partnership’ with you and your team to drive behaviour,” one executive wrote.

Officials were also active in encouraging Twitter and YouTube to remove content, according to the order. In the early weeks of the administration, Flaherty emailed Twitter asking them to remove a parody account linked to Biden’s granddaughter, writing: “Please remove this account immediately.” It was gone 45 minutes later.

as the lawsuit argues, the conversations were not taking place in a vacuum. They came as debates raged across Congress about whether to remove “Section 230” protections enjoyed by social media companies that limit responsibility for what their users post, and as the US government pursued lawsuits against Facebook and Google seeking to break the companies up.

After reporting by The Telegraph, the UK Government is under pressure to shut down its own Counter Disinformation Unit, which passed information to social media companies to encourage them to take down posts. And Elon Musk, a champion of conservative voices, now owns Twitter.

In his conclusion, the judge quoted the late Democrat president Harry Truman: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one place to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

That move, along with nearly a dozen proposed state constitutional amendments on ballots, made same-sex marriage a powerful wedge issue in 2004. And just as Rove wanted, that issue, along with others on which Bush staked out social conservative positions, helped ensure that he did not lose his conservative base in 2004, as his father had in the strange election of 1992.

He did little to attract young people to become Republicans. Nobody who’s come of age during the Bush era will stand up and say, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a Bush Republican.’”

Operating under the theory that Bush Sr. lost because he was too liberal-leaning on a range of topics, particularly cultural issues, Rove moved Bush to the right—most notably, as the 2004 campaign season was getting underway, having him propose a constitutional amendment opposing same-sex marriage.

these maneuvers also meant that, once Bush left office in 2009, deeply unpopular thanks especially to the wars, there was no clear next step for the GOP, no one positioned to inherit the mantle of leadership. Rather, the party faced an intellectual and leadership vacuum that left it vulnerable to the right-wing populism of the Tea Party, a movement that got underway just weeks after Bush left office, which led a few years later to the House Freedom Caucus, whose inaugural meeting in January 2015 was described by Mick Mulvaney as being “the first time we . . . decided we were a group, and not just a bunch of pissed-off guys.”

Such “pissed-off” people would mostly have been outsiders in the political world of Bush Sr.; these days, however, under the weak speakership of Kevin McCarthy, for all intents and purposes it is the pissed-off Trump acolytes who more or less run the House, an indication of how far the hardliners have come since Rove opened the door to them.

anyone who leaves Rove out cannot understand the story of the rise of Trump and the remaking of the party he has come to dominate.

Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall

In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners — a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960.

women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner.

Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.

In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: “Stand up straight,” “delay gratification.” His evolutionary-biology-informed takes ranged from amusingly weird to mildly insulting.

Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven’t been fully accounted for or rectified. Are we really worrying that men feel a little emasculated because their female classmates are doing well?

But millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.

It seems like there’s been a breakdown, right? But there’s a very real way in which, at this moment, a lot of guys don’t know — they have no sense of what it means to be them, particularly. They have no idea what it means to be a man.”

Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit

Only one group seems to have no such doubts about offering men a plan.

an entire academic discipline emerged to theorize about gender and excavate women’s history — there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, less defined.

went to that 2018 Peterson appearance as a skeptic. But his appeal — along with that of his fellow “manfluencers” — has become clearer since

Technically, men are slightly in the minority in the United States. But apart from that, Bray had a point — and what he said explained a lot about why the left and the mainstream are losing men.

What’s notable, first, is their empathy. For all Peterson’s barking and, lately, unhinged tweeting, he’s clearly on young men’s side.

This is especially compelling in a moment when many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don’t feel part of. For young men in particular, the assumption of a world built to serve their sex doesn’t align with their lived experience, where girls out-achieve them from pre-K to post-graduate studies and “men are trash” is an acceptable joke.

Then there’s the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow — hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts — in a moment when uncertainty abounds

if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.

As one therapist told me: “I have used Jordan Peterson to turn a boy into a man. I used him to turn this guy without a strong father figure into someone who, yes, makes his bed and stands up straight and now is successful.” The books, she said, “do provide a structure that was clearly missing.”

It’s also important that the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational. The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as “toxic” or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at al

the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. “Jordan Peterson,” he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, “taught me how to live.”

the fact that they’re willing to define it outright feels bravely countercultural.

A baby-faced, 19-year-old University of Florida freshman with short, white-blond hair, Bray was wearing a hoodie despite the heat. (He grew up in Sarasota, so he was used to it.) He had agreed to talk to me about how he saw uncertainties about masculinity playing out on his campus.

First, he laid out his liberal, Gen Z bona fides — he’s in a fraternity, but many of his close friends are LGBTQ+. He feels that old versions of masculinity might be dissolving for the better.

But then he got candid. He doesn’t really identify with the manosphere, he told me, but can understand why others might. “I feel like there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there’s not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine.”

Men were constantly told to be “better” and less “toxic,” he said, but what that “better” might look like seemed hard to pin down. “You pretty much have to figure it out yourself. But yet society still has the expectation that, you know, you have to be a certain way.

Then he turned wistful. “I don’t feel like men in general have the same types of role models that women do, even in their own personal lives. … Just because you’re in the majority doesn’t mean you don’t need support.”

At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making “masculinity” out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honorable and desirable

Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.

In the conversations I had with men for this essay, I kept hearing that many would still find some kind of normative standard of masculinity meaningful and useful, if only to give them a starting point from which to expand.

The strategist described his party as having almost an allergy to admitting that some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid

when you strip out the specificity, people feel less seen,” he said. “There’s less of a resonance. If the question is what scripts we have for men, how are we appealing to men, then being willing and able to talk about men is a pretty key component of that.”

To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Take Richard Reeves’s book “Of Boys and Men,” omnipresent in the discourse since its 2022 release.

even he acknowledges he has felt pressure to shy away from some of the harder questions his subject matter raises.

Reeves told me that in his writing, he tried to stay descriptive, only going so far as saying there are some differences between the sexes that need to be taken into account to create the most viable solutions. He frames the biological differences between the sexes not as a binary but as overlapping distributions of traits — aggression, risk appetite, sex drive — with clusters of one sex or the other at the extremes.

But when it came to writing any kind of script for how men should be, the self-possessed expert scholar faltered.

“That’s a question I basically dodged in the book,” Reeves told me. “Because, candidly, it’s outside of my comfort zone. It’s more personal. It’s harder to empirically justify. There are no charts I can brandish.” After all, as he said, he’s a think-tank guy, a wonk.

“But I think I’m now trying to articulate more prescriptively, less descriptively, some of these discussions about masculinity and trying to send some messages around it” — here, his speech became emphatic — “because, honestly, nobody else is f---ing doing it except the right.”

“As soon as you start articulating virtues, advantages, good things about being male … then you’ve just dialed up the risk factor of the conversation,” he said. “But I’m also acutely aware that the risk of not doing it is much greater. Because without it, there’s a vacuum. And along comes Andrew Tate to make Jordan Peterson look like a cuddly old uncle.”

many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be

As a result, there’s a temptation to minimize men’s problems or erase references to masculinity altogether.

“I mean, there are certain attributes around masculinity that we should embrace. Men think about sex more than women. Use that as motivation to be successful and meet women. Men are more impulsive. Men will run out into a field and get shot up to think they’re saving their buddies.”

He was careful to point out that he doesn’t believe that women wouldn’t do as much but that the distributions are different.

“Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

so men should think, ‘I want to take advantage of my maleness. I want to be aggressive, I want to set goals, go hard at it. I want to be physically really strong. I want to take care of myself.’”

“My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people.

Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtl

His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast

many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.

Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.

in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology — all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It’s not an excuse for “boys will be boys”-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed

despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes.

“Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define,” Galloway concluded. “They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media.”

What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.

more than 20 years ago, anthropologist David D. Gilmore published “Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity,” a cross-cultural study of manliness around the world. He found that almost all societies had a concept of “real,” “true” or “adult” manhood that was seen as a valuable and indispensable ideal. But masculinity had to be earned — and proved

Men achieved it by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating

all three of these goals seem less celebrated and further from reach. Young men who disappear into online forums, video games or pornography see none of the social or personal rewards of meeting these goals, and their loneliness and despair suggest how painful it has been to lose track of this ideal.

The other feature of Gilmore’s findings was that boys generally had to be ushered into manhood and masculinity by other men. And that seems to be a key link missing today.

“When I talk to my friends, I can literally count on one hand the number of friends I have who have a good relationship with their dad and actually have learned things from him,

Many of the young men I talked to for this essay told me they had troubled relationships with their fathers, or no father figure in their lives at all. The data bear this out: Since 1960, the percentage of boys living apart from their biological fathers has nearly doubled, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

“If you’re growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there’s a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later. Not your doctor, not your teachers. No one else around you. What does that feel like?”

In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys.

those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present — even if not their own — had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.

“Ultimately,” Reynolds mused, “it’s about relationships and finding older men who, you know — they’re not flashy, they’re not ‘important,’ necessarily, but they actually are living virtuous lives as men. And then being able to then learn from them.”

fostering positive representations of manhood requires relationships and mentorship on an individual level in a way that can’t be mandated.

nearly every thinker on the masculinity problem advocates getting more men into classrooms, from kindergarten up — not just for their effects as teachers but also because they’re more likely to serve as coaches, especially of boys’ sports.

the change will need to come from the bottom up — from everyday men who notice the crisis of identity hitting their younger counterparts and can put themselves forward to help. “Ninety percent of this, if not 95, is on us, is on older men, is on society,”

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

For the left, there’s room to elaborate on visions of these qualities that are expansive, not reductive, that allow for many varieties of masculinity and don’t deny female value and agency.

In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn’t denigrate women to do so. It’s a vision of gender that’s not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character, not just biology

it acknowledges that certain themes — protector, provider, even procreator — still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.

it will be slow. A new masculinity will be a norm shift, and that takes time.

empathy will be required, as grating as that might feel.

Carlson was a key in answering the question; he helped drive the G.O.P. to be just as cruel, just as dishonest and sometimes even more populist than Donald Trump himself.

Initially, there were good reasons for confusion about Trump and the G.O.P. During the campaign, he was all over the map ideologically

And if personnel is policy, then it was difficult to define his early administration as well

Moreover, many of his early moves were straight out of the standard Republican playbook

When Trump was elected, friends and colleagues told me that his populism could be moderated and his cruelty and dishonesty were aberrations.

Trump could be contained. He could be channeled. His political appointees would keep him sane.

He helped mold the G.O.P. in his race-obsessed, conspiracy-addled image, helped perpetuate a culture of cruel and punitive Republican communication and helped build an infrastructure of new-right voices who copy his substance and style.

We knew Trump was more populist, more dishonest and more cruel than the typical Republican. But we did not know whether the G.O.P. would become more like the man or if the man would become more like the G.O.P.

In fact, Trumpism was never truly about ideas. It was a vague amalgam of Trump’s ethics, attitudes and grievances — and Carlson imitated them, adopted them and broadcast them to his millions of viewers.

Carlson put the lie to the idea that Trump’s cruelty was an aberration, that it was somehow alien to the Republican character, to be tolerated only because the greater good of defeating Clinton had demanded it. In Trump’s cruelty, there was again, opportunity. There were millions who would thrill to his most crude and personal attacks.

On Tucker’s program truth was optional, insults were mandatory, and racism was all but explicit.

The narrative was consistent: “They” were after “you.” “They” were lying to “you.” And “they” were terrible, horrible people.

it’s typical of both Trump and Tucker: invent a partisan grievance, mislead the audience and cap off the conversation with a direct insult.

Tucker’s influence went beyond substance and style. He gave a platform to a number of the Trump right’s most notorious and most fringe voices

He was known, however, as an opportunist. And for enterprising and dishonest members of the infotainment right, the Trump era was a cornucopia of opportunity. Trump’s ideological incoherence wasn’t a problem. It was a vacuum that could be filled with ideas that identified and fed his resentments.

If all that is true, then what could possibly be unimportant about Carlson? The fact is that at the end of the day, he was not bigger than Fox. The secret of Tucker’s fame is that it was always rooted far more in his Fox News time slot than in his (or his ideas’) inherent appea

while Carlson’s ratings were impressive, they were comparable to those of his predecessor Bill O’Reilly. Which raises the question: To what extent was Tucker popular and influential because of his distinct voice, and to what extent was it because he occupied the most coveted time slot on the most popular cable news channel in the United States?

I’ve written before about the network’s singular place in the culture of red America. Without the power of Fox, Carlson’s ability to influence the right will likely be permanently diminished.

Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.

Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.

For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.

Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”

Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.

“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.

He admits now that it was a bad bet.

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment

Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.

“Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.

he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.

He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.

Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied

on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”

Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.

He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine

He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity

Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?

He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.

More than anything, he longs to live forever.

Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”

Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.

But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.

How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.

Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach

But something changed for Thiel in 2009

he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape

The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).

Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution

His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics

It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.

“There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)

As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz

Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.

When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”

You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias

He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.

Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200

The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”

This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.

He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”

“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”

Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.

In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)

Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”

he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”

“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.

He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”

Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian

he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”

Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”

Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.

“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.

ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.

A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.

“I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”

Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.

“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc

He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.

there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss

Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic

Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.

He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”

He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”

he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”

“the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”

Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests

“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”

About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?

Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them

He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”

besides, a different cause moves him far more.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.

Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?

“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”

Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.

. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”

You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”

No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.

“The attacks by Hamas didn’t happen in a vacuum,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, citing the 56-year Israeli occupation. Both sides are responsible, added former president Barack Obama, urging us to “take in the whole truth” of the conflict.

This is not a political conflict, we remind the world, but an outbreak of evil. Just like ISIS, we note, recalling the terrible devastation caused by the necessary American assault in Mosul and Raqqa. 

No, we patiently explain, the massacre was not in response to anything Israel does but to what Israel is

yes, the suffering of innocent Gazans deserves the world’s urgent humanitarian attention, but not at the expense of moral clarity about the justness of this war.

Yes, many Jews readily acknowledge, Israel bears its share of the blame for this hundred-year conflict. So do Palestinian leaders, who rejected every peace offer ever put on the table. 

What may well be the most horrific massacre of our time, outdoing even the atrocities of ISIS, has resulted in the unprecedented popularity of the Palestinian cause.

increasingly, we sense that we are talking to ourselves. The post-religious West, which substitutes the ideological rhetoric of academia for a genuine language for evil, doesn’t understand the old Jewish language we are speaking.

No, Israel is not a paragon of virtue. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have spent this last year protesting every week against the anti-democratic Netanyahu government

To leave a genocidal regime on our border would be a betrayal of the founding ethos of Israel as a safe refuge for the Jewish people. It would be the beginning of our unraveling.

Over and over we repeat what we’d assumed was self-evident: One side seeks to maximize civilian casualties, the other side to minimize them.

Harnevo mocked Cosgrave for tweeting, on the day of the massacre, a chart comparing the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed over the last 15 years. “You see Paddy, what happened on October 7 was not another data point on your f*king charts. It was something else, unbearable.” 

there are moments when we must risk going alone. We know that the longer the fighting in Gaza lasts, even our friends will begin to pressure us to relent. We must resist that pressure and not fear the consequences. 

During the Second Intifada, when the IDF fought suicide bombers in Palestinian towns and villages, an exasperated Kofi Anan, then secretary-general of the UN, demanded: “Can the whole world be wrong and only Israel is right?” Israelis unhesitatingly replied: Absolutely.

Speaking at the gravesite, Yonadav’s brother called on the government to resist world pressure and persevere. He invoked Israel’s first prime minister: “David Ben-Gurion said that it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.”

Israelis across the political spectrum agree that the regime of Oct. 7 must be destroyed. Like Ben-Gurion, we are willing to pay the bitter price of being alone.

The eerily humanlike chatbot, which went viral last year by generating its own answers to prompts, blindsided E.U. policymakers. The type of A.I. that powered ChatGPT was not mentioned in the draft law and was not a major focus of discussions about the policy. Lawmakers and their aides peppered one another with calls and texts to address the gap, as tech executives warned that overly aggressive regulations could put Europe at an economic disadvantage.

Even now, E.U. lawmakers are arguing over what to do, putting the law at risk. “We will always be lagging behind the speed of technology,” said Svenja Hahn, a member of the European Parliament who was involved in writing the A.I. law.

Lawmakers and regulators in Brussels, in Washington and elsewhere are losing a battle to regulate A.I. and are racing to catch up, as concerns grow that the powerful technology will automate away jobs, turbocharge the spread of disinformation and eventually develop its own kind of intelligence.

Nations have moved swiftly to tackle A.I.’s potential perils, but European officials have been caught off guard by the technology’s evolution, while U.S. lawmakers openly concede that they barely understand how it works.

The absence of rules has left a vacuum. Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, have been left to police themselves as they race to create and profit from advanced A.I. systems

At the root of the fragmented actions is a fundamental mismatch. A.I. systems are advancing so rapidly and unpredictably that lawmakers and regulators can’t keep pace

That gap has been compounded by an A.I. knowledge deficit in governments, labyrinthine bureaucracies and fears that too many rules may inadvertently limit the technology’s benefits.

Even in Europe, perhaps the world’s most aggressive tech regulator, A.I. has befuddled policymakers.

The European Union has plowed ahead with its new law, the A.I. Act, despite disputes over how to handle the makers of the latest A.I. systems.

A final agreement, expected as soon as Wednesday, could restrict certain risky uses of the technology and create transparency requirements about how the underlying systems work. But even if it passes, it is not expected to take effect for at least 18 months — a lifetime in A.I. development — and how it will be enforced is unclear.

The result has been a sprawl of responses. President Biden issued an executive order in October about A.I.’s national security effects as lawmakers debate what, if any, measures to pass. Japan is drafting nonbinding guidelines for the technology, while China has imposed restrictions on certain types of A.I. Britain has said existing laws are adequate for regulating the technology. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are pouring government money into A.I. research.

Many companies, preferring nonbinding codes of conduct that provide latitude to speed up development, are lobbying to soften proposed regulations and pitting governments against one another.

“No one, not even the creators of these systems, know what they will be able to do,” said Matt Clifford, an adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, who presided over an A.I. Safety Summit last month with 28 countries. “The urgency comes from there being a real question of whether governments are equipped to deal with and mitigate the risks.”

Europe takes the lead

In mid-2018, 52 academics, computer scientists and lawyers met at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Brussels to discuss artificial intelligence. E.U. officials had selected them to provide advice about the technology, which was drawing attention for powering driverless cars and facial recognition systems.

as they discussed A.I.’s possible effects — including the threat of facial recognition technology to people’s privacy — they recognized “there were all these legal gaps, and what happens if people don’t follow those guidelines?”

In 2019, the group published a 52-page report with 33 recommendations, including more oversight of A.I. tools that could harm individuals and society.

By October, the governments of France, Germany and Italy, the three largest E.U. economies, had come out against strict regulation of general purpose A.I. models for fear of hindering their domestic tech start-ups. Others in the European Parliament said the law would be toothless without addressing the technology. Divisions over the use of facial recognition technology also persisted.

So when the A.I. Act was unveiled in 2021, it concentrated on “high risk” uses of the technology, including in law enforcement, school admissions and hiring. It largely avoided regulating the A.I. models that powered them unless listed as dangerous

“They sent me a draft, and I sent them back 20 pages of comments,” said Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who advised the European Commission. “Anything not on their list of high-risk applications would not count, and the list excluded ChatGPT and most A.I. systems.”

E.U. leaders were undeterred.“Europe may not have been the leader in the last wave of digitalization, but it has it all to lead the next one,” Ms. Vestager said when she introduced the policy at a news conference in Brussels.

Nineteen months later, ChatGPT arrived.

In 2020, European policymakers decided that the best approach was to focus on how A.I. was used and not the underlying technology. A.I. was not inherently good or bad, they said — it depended on how it was applied.

The Washington game

Lacking tech expertise, lawmakers are increasingly relying on Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and other A.I. makers to explain how it works and to help create rules.

“We’re not experts,” said Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, who hosted Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, and more than 50 lawmakers at a dinner in Washington in May. “It’s important to be humble.”

Tech companies have seized their advantage. In the first half of the year, many of Microsoft’s and Google’s combined 169 lobbyists met with lawmakers and the White House to discuss A.I. legislation, according to lobbying disclosures. OpenAI registered its first three lobbyists and a tech lobbying group unveiled a $25 million campaign to promote A.I.’s benefits this year.

In that same period, Mr. Altman met with more than 100 members of Congress, including former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, and the Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York. After testifying in Congress in May, Mr. Altman embarked on a 17-city global tour, meeting world leaders including President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Sunak and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

, the White House announced that the four companies had agreed to voluntary commitments on A.I. safety, including testing their systems through third-party overseers — which most of the companies were already doing.

“It was brilliant,” Mr. Smith said. “Instead of people in government coming up with ideas that might have been impractical, they said, ‘Show us what you think you can do and we’ll push you to do more.’”

In a statement, Ms. Raimondo said the federal government would keep working with companies so “America continues to lead the world in responsible A.I. innovation.”

Over the summer, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into OpenAI and how it handles user data. Lawmakers continued welcoming tech executives.

In September, Mr. Schumer was the host of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Mr. Altman at a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in Washington to discuss A.I. rules. Mr. Musk warned of A.I.’s “civilizational” risks, while Mr. Altman proclaimed that A.I. could solve global problems such as poverty.

A.I. companies are playing governments off one another. In Europe, industry groups have warned that regulations could put the European Union behind the United States. In Washington, tech companies have cautioned that China might pull ahead.

“China is way better at this stuff than you imagine,” Mr. Clark of Anthropic told members of Congress in January.

In May, Ms. Vestager, Ms. Raimondo and Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, met in Lulea, Sweden, to discuss cooperating on digital policy.

After two days of talks, Ms. Vestager announced that Europe and the United States would release a shared code of conduct for safeguarding A.I. “within weeks.” She messaged colleagues in Brussels asking them to share her social media post about the pact, which she called a “huge step in a race we can’t afford to lose.”

Months later, no shared code of conduct had appeared. The United States instead announced A.I. guidelines of its own.

Little progress has been made internationally on A.I. With countries mired in economic competition and geopolitical distrust, many are setting their own rules for the borderless technology.

Yet “weak regulation in another country will affect you,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s technology minister, noting that a lack of rules around American social media companies led to a wave of global disinformation.

“Most of the countries impacted by those technologies were never at the table when policies were set,” he said. “A.I will be several factors more difficult to manage.”

Even among allies, the issue has been divisive. At the meeting in Sweden between E.U. and U.S. officials, Mr. Blinken criticized Europe for moving forward with A.I. regulations that could harm American companies, one attendee said. Thierry Breton, a European commissioner, shot back that the United States could not dictate European policy, the person said.

Some policymakers said they hoped for progress at an A.I. safety summit that Britain held last month at Bletchley Park, where the mathematician Alan Turing helped crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis. The gathering featured Vice President Kamala Harris; Wu Zhaohui, China’s vice minister of science and technology; Mr. Musk; and others.

The upshot was a 12-paragraph statement describing A.I.’s “transformative” potential and “catastrophic” risk of misuse. Attendees agreed to meet again next year.

The talks, in the end, produced a deal to keep talking.

Since then, it has struggled to assert itself as a credible vehicle for truly mass mobilisation.

Many significant organisations and movements have emerged in its wake. The most attention-grabbing have been from the recent, even more radical flank of the UK’s climate movement – first Insulate Britain and then Just Stop Oil – who have blocked the M25, stopped test matches and much more.

many in the broader climate movement now feel that action that disrupts the general public has become counterproductive – as XR came to learn

Citizens already feel the alarm has been raised. Right now, they don’t need further reminders: they need a journey into positive, effective action that they feel includes them.

I moved on from XR in 2020, judging it likely that it had achieved most of what it was capable of achieving (a huge raising of climate consciousness – not to mention a parliamentary declaration of climate and environment emergency, a net zero law, and a parliament-backed citizens’ assembly on climate).

what is now plainly obvious is that the most important achievement of XR may turn out to be the space it opened up for a new, moderate flank in the climate movement to emerge.

XR successfully dragged the whole eco-agenda into the light of day

this has made it both necessary and possible for a wave of novel organisations and initiatives to fill the vacuum; groups such as Wild Card, Community Climate Action, Lawyers for Net Zero, Purpose Disruptors and Zero Hour.

many of the successes of historical movements that inspired XR (the Suffragettes, for instance) followed a similar pattern: an agenda-shift prompted by radical-flank initiatives paving the way for actual political success by more moderate agents of change.

in order to make any real impact on the desperate situation we are slipping into, movements must now unite people in campaigns that they can actually get on board with. That means acting with others where they live, or work or pray – and within the law.

XR itself knows this is the way forward, and seems to have learned from past mistakes. As of 2023, it will no longer disrupt the public

XR’s new strategy, optimistically titled “Here comes everyone”, plans to build on the clearest success of the movement so far. In April, it mobilised about 60,000 people – considerably more than at any previous moment in its history – in a peaceful march on the climate crisis

If there is to be any chance of achieving a transformative adaptation to the self-imposed threat of ecological collapse, it’s going to require not just a minority, but most of us, to step up.

In decades to come, the only question our children will have any real interest in is: now that it’s becoming clearer what can effectively achieve change, how will you act? And once you knew, what did you do?

“What is different with systemic corruption is that it’s the expected behavior,”

“These expectations make it very difficult for all individuals, actually, to stand against corruption, because it’s very costly in all different ways to resist that kind of system.”

Those who refuse to participate in the parallel economy of favors and bribes get passed over for promotion, cut off from benefits, and frozen out of power.

The result is a system where power and wealth accrue to those willing to play the corruption game, and those who are not get left behind.

Corruption “serves as a regressive tax, it’s like Robin Hood in reverse,” Persson told me. “All the resources are moved to the top of the system, to the great cost of the majority of the population.”

But why did corruption in Russia get that bad? The answer, and maybe a counterintuitive one, is in democratization.

There was corruption in the Soviet Union. But after its dissolution in 1991, the sudden explosive growth of freedom of expression and freedom of association in Russia and the other former Soviet countries and satellites brought new opportunities, not just for political and economic development, but for crime and corruption.

“Freedoms of expression and association don’t only have to be used for good things, they can be used for illegal activities, too,” McMann said. “When people can more easily get together and talk, that enables them to actually plan corrupt activity.”

That wouldn’t have been so bad if democratization had also brought in checks on executive power, an independent judiciary to investigate and prosecute crimes. “In order to have capitalism have functioning markets, you also need to build institutions. You need banks that can provide credit, you need a strong legal system that will protect property.”

Estonia followed that path. After the Soviet Union fell, Estonia’s new, democratically elected parliament strengthened the judiciary and introduced new checks on executive power. There, corruption fell.

But in Russia, the government heeded Western advisers’ urging to get the state out of the economy as much as possible in order to let free markets flourish. Institutions and constraints fell by the wayside. In that vacuum, the parallel structures of corruption flourished, crowding honest politicians out of government and honest businesses out of the market.

By the late 1990s, official corruption had flourished at every level of the government. In 1999, as President Boris Yeltsin’s presidency began to weaken, elites pressured him to leave office on their terms. If Yeltsin would anoint their handpicked successor, they would ensure that he and his family did not face prosecution for misappropriation of government funds.

The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s.

Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.

Following the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal presence in the South was finally robust. So was the spirit of local defiance. In post-bellum Barbour County, Cowie writes, “peace only prevailed for freed people when federal troops were in town” — and then only barely

White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie’s account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered, whether familiar figures like Andrew Jackson or mostly forgotten magnates like J.W. Comer, a plantation owner who became, in the late 19th century, the architect of a vast, sadistic and extremely lucrative system of convict labor

Thus were white men, in the words of the scholar Orlando Patterson, whom Cowie quotes, “free to brutalize.” Thus were they free “to plunder and lay waste and call it peace, to rape and humiliate, to invade, conquer, uproot and degrade.”

the chaos in Alabama offended Jackson’s sense of discipline and made a mockery of his treaties with the Creeks. Beginning in 1832, and in fits and starts over the following year, federal troops looked to turn back or at least contain the white wave. Instead, their presence touched off a series of violent reprisals, created a cast of martyrs and folk heroes, and gave rise to the mythology of white victimization. Self-rule and local authority — rhetorical wrapping for this will to power — had become articles of faith, fervid as any religious belief.

The federal government is a character here, too — sometimes in a central role, sometimes remote to the point of irrelevance, and all too often feckless in the defense of a more inclusive, affirmative model of freedom.

When Grant stepped up the enforcement of voting rights, whites in Eufaula, Barbour County’s largest town, massacred Black citizens and engaged in furious efforts to manipulate or overturn elections. As in the 1830s, the federal government showed little stamina for the struggle. Republican losses in 1874 augured another retreat, this time for the better part of a century. In the vacuum, Cowie explains, emerged “the neoslavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping and the official disenfranchisement of Blacks” under Jim Crow.

Wallace, as Cowie makes clear, had bigger ambitions. Instinctively, he knew that his brand of politics had an audience anywhere that white Americans were under strain and looking for someone to blame. Wallace became the sneering face of the backlash against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, against any law or court ruling or social program that aimed to include Black Americans more fully in our national life. Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.”

That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.

In explaining how we got here, “Freedom’s Dominion” emphasizes race above economics, but this seems fitting. The fixation on the free market, so long a defining feature of the Republican Party, has loosened its hold; taxes and regulations do not boil the blood as they once did. In their place is a stew of resentments as raw as any since George Wallace stirred the pot.

A lot of the news, however, is bad.

The bad news includes examples of people who reacted to Saturday’s events by glorifying violence, or by mocking its victims

The abject tactical failures of the Secret Service pose structural questions that urgently need to be answered.

The first conspiracies came from Trump’s detractors. As soon as the first pictures of his injury emerged, some influential Democratic activists and advisors suggested that this was a false flag operation, designed to strengthen his appeal.

Biden has, for example, repeatedly claimed that he decided to enter the 2020 presidential race after hearing Trump referring to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who assembled for a deadly rally in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.” But while Trump was characteristically meandering and irresponsible in his remarks after that rally, he explicitly stated that “I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Parts of the left have justified some forms of violence in the last years. Movements like Antifa explicitly glorify political violence, reserving for themselves both the right to take action against anyone they consider fascist, and the right to determine who should be included in that category

All of this is shameful. It must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading. But it also shouldn’t be inflated to imply that the Democratic establishment or the mainstream media has in general started to glorify violence.

Conversely, there is no doubt that parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement have glorified political violence in the last years.

All of this is shameful, all the more so for coming from the most senior officials within the Republican Party. All of this must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading, something that the conservative media ecosystem have notably failed to do.

no excuse for overstating the extent to which the other side embraces political violence. And that is something that the most senior Democrats, from Joe Biden on down, have consistently done.

But the extent of conspiracism was much worse on the right.

he question of the day has come to be whether it is appropriate to portray Trump as an existential threat to democracy.

If it was appropriate to resist Hitler by violent means, and Trump is his modern-day equivalent, then (so goes the tacit implication of the New Republic’s cover), why shouldn’t it be legitimate to resist Trump by violent means?

Depressingly often, in American politics, both sides are badly wrong. In this particular case, it seems to me that both sides are mostly right.

It is perfectly appropriate—even in the aftermath of Saturday’s unconscionable attack on Trump—to warn about what his presidency may mean for America’s democracy. But there is never an excuse—even and especially when the stakes are truly high—for fear-mongering that distorts the exact nature of that threat.

if moments of tragedy and upheaval reveal the true state of a country, the first draft of America’s report card puts it in danger of failing. Most Americans continue to abhor violence. Our mutual hatred still knows limits. And yet the mix of institutional failure, conspiracist thinking, and partisan fear-mongering is very potent. The risk that it may yet set in motion dynamics which overwhelm the decent instincts of most ordinary Americans remains very real

As a history teacher in a large, diverse suburban high school, I have spent more and more time in recent years trying (with mixed results) to "win back" white boys falling down dark internet rabbit holes of racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, etc. Most of these boys of course do not end up as shooters (when I suspect that might be the case I go right to administration), but they do end up holding horrifying views that bode ill for the future of our polity.

What defies the typical "shooter" stereotype among most in this larger universe of white boys getting radicalized online is that most, though not all, of the latter (in my experience) are among my most intellectually curious, thoughtful and sensitive students. But, to use Professor Henderson's phraseology, they are not "alphas." Some have friends, even girlfriends, but none of them are part of the "popular" crowd. They are bright, but not "good at school" like the students who end up in your Ivy League courses. At 15 or 16 or 17, they feel (correctly) that they have something to offer the world, but feel they have been locked out of all the paths to success in their narrow world: They'll never be star athletes, or valedictorian, or one of the popular kids.

They feel like the message we as a society (schools, YA literature, "mainstream media") are sending them is that "You are privileged; you are the oppressor, you are the cause and beneficiary of all the world's injustices." The complexities of graduate level political theory are generally lost on a teenage boy who feels like the whole world is against him. The irony is these are the boys who actually care about issues of justice. The quarterback and the debate champion don't care if you throw their privilege in their face. They know their worth and are too busy to care.

I am sharing this comment not so much to identify what motivates shooters - I have no expertise in criminal pathology - but more in terms of the educational vacuum creating a generation of disaffected young men open to believe conspiracy theories because we are no longer offering them an alternative narrative of Americanism that speak to them as powerfully as those of the conspiracy theorists, the White Nationalists, and the miraculously save man who will be their retribution.