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2024 election violence is already happening Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Brent Stirton/Getty Images Political violence has reached alarming levels in the US over the last few years. The January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, the attack on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and multiple assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump are all examples of America’s increasingly polarized and perilous environment. Now, the 2024 election could cause another flare-up, especially if Trump loses. Discussion of violence among right-wing extremists has already spiked online, and unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump has refused to say that he would concede. The polls show a tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting that this time, as in 2020, the results may be decided by narrow margins in a few battleground states. Trump has been priming Republican voters to reject the results if he comes up short, making unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in Pennsylvania and noncitizens voting on a widespread basis. Billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk has also set up a platform on his social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, for users to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” Those tactics seem to be working. If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll. That may include resorting to violence. Among Republicans who don’t believe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate, almost one-third said in an August poll by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University that they expected “a lot” or “a great deal” of political violence after the November election. More recent polls have found similar results, including an October AP-NORC poll that found 27 percent of Republicans, and 42 percent of voters overall, “extremely” or “very” worried about post-election violence. All of this has put law enforcement and national security officials on high alert about political violence in the days before and after the election. Earlier this month, a joint Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI intelligence bulletin said that domestic extremists “pose a threat of violence to a range of targets directly and indirectly associated with elections through at least the presidential inauguration” on January 20. What kind of political violence might break out? Some incidents of political violence have already been recorded in the runup to Election Day. Ballots in mailboxes and drop boxes in Massachusetts, Arizona, Washington, and Oregon have been damaged in suspected arson. DHS warned this might happen, based on its monitoring of comments made online in domestic violent extremist circles. In a series of security bulletins in the last few months, the agency noted, “Some threat actors may perceive ballot drop boxes as ‘soft targets’ because they are more accessible” and that some of these actors had discussed a variety of methods for damaging them. A man was also indicted on terrorism and gun charges for allegedly shooting at the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Phoenix on three occasions since September. Things might only get worse from here. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has warned that the US is “facing an unprecedented level of, and increase in, threats of violence against public officials.” According to the DHS bulletins, there is a “heightened risk” that domestic violent extremists could “attempt to initiate civil war.” That kind of chatter has become increasingly common in online spaces frequented by right-wing extremist groups. That said, the DHS noted that the prosecutions of those involved in the January 6 insurrection and hesitation about potential false flag operations designed to entrap them could serve as deterrents. Law enforcement officials across the country are bracing for the possibility of escalation, particularly in Democratic population centers. For instance, Detroit’s election headquarters have reportedly been reinforced with bulletproof glass and will be protected by armed guards after Trump supporters tried to interrupt ballot counting by chanting “Stop the count” and banging on the windows in 2020. Philadelphia election staff will count ballots in a warehouse encircled by a fence with barbed wire, miles from the downtown area where protesters gathered in 2020. Ultimately, however, these preparations might not be enough to quell domestic violent extremist activity when Republican leaders are encouraging skepticism about the integrity of the election and are reportedly making secret plans to assure a second Trump term. “Being aware of the potential for violence and damage to the institutions we rely upon is important,” retired Gen. Joseph Votel, an executive board member of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “But it is insufficient in the face of legislative acts that are open to broad interpretation, strong political rhetoric that dominates the public information space, and imperfect individuals acting in accordance with their oaths.”

4 h

vox.com

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Brent Stirton/Getty Images Political violence has reached alarming levels in the US over the last few years. The January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, the attack on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and multiple assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump are all examples of America’s increasingly polarized and perilous environment. Now, the 2024 election could cause another flare-up, especially if Trump loses. Discussion of violence among right-wing extremists has already spiked online, and unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump has refused to say that he would concede. The polls show a tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting that this time, as in 2020, the results may be decided by narrow margins in a few battleground states. Trump has been priming Republican voters to reject the results if he comes up short, making unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in Pennsylvania and noncitizens voting on a widespread basis. Billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk has also set up a platform on his social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, for users to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” Those tactics seem to be working. If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll. That may include resorting to violence. Among Republicans who don’t believe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate, almost one-third said in an August poll by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University that they expected “a lot” or “a great deal” of political violence after the November election. More recent polls have found similar results, including an October AP-NORC poll that found 27 percent of Republicans, and 42 percent of voters overall, “extremely” or “very” worried about post-election violence. All of this has put law enforcement and national security officials on high alert about political violence in the days before and after the election. Earlier this month, a joint Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI intelligence bulletin said that domestic extremists “pose a threat of violence to a range of targets directly and indirectly associated with elections through at least the presidential inauguration” on January 20. What kind of political violence might break out? Some incidents of political violence have already been recorded in the runup to Election Day. Ballots in mailboxes and drop boxes in Massachusetts, Arizona, Washington, and Oregon have been damaged in suspected arson. DHS warned this might happen, based on its monitoring of comments made online in domestic violent extremist circles. In a series of security bulletins in the last few months, the agency noted, “Some threat actors may perceive ballot drop boxes as ‘soft targets’ because they are more accessible” and that some of these actors had discussed a variety of methods for damaging them. A man was also indicted on terrorism and gun charges for allegedly shooting at the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Phoenix on three occasions since September. Things might only get worse from here. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has warned that the US is “facing an unprecedented level of, and increase in, threats of violence against public officials.” According to the DHS bulletins, there is a “heightened risk” that domestic violent extremists could “attempt to initiate civil war.” That kind of chatter has become increasingly common in online spaces frequented by right-wing extremist groups. That said, the DHS noted that the prosecutions of those involved in the January 6 insurrection and hesitation about potential false flag operations designed to entrap them could serve as deterrents. Law enforcement officials across the country are bracing for the possibility of escalation, particularly in Democratic population centers. For instance, Detroit’s election headquarters have reportedly been reinforced with bulletproof glass and will be protected by armed guards after Trump supporters tried to interrupt ballot counting by chanting “Stop the count” and banging on the windows in 2020. Philadelphia election staff will count ballots in a warehouse encircled by a fence with barbed wire, miles from the downtown area where protesters gathered in 2020. Ultimately, however, these preparations might not be enough to quell domestic violent extremist activity when Republican leaders are encouraging skepticism about the integrity of the election and are reportedly making secret plans to assure a second Trump term. “Being aware of the potential for violence and damage to the institutions we rely upon is important,” retired Gen. Joseph Votel, an executive board member of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “But it is insufficient in the face of legislative acts that are open to broad interpretation, strong political rhetoric that dominates the public information space, and imperfect individuals acting in accordance with their oaths.”

Republicans are serious about cutting people’s health care House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans would pursue “massive” health care reform if Donald Trump is elected president in 2024. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images If you’re confused, it’s not an accident. Republicans are trying to have it both ways on health care during the 2024 campaign. They boast that they want to deregulate insurance and massively cut government spending, yet they also claim that they would never do anything to endanger people’s coverage. That two-step keeps getting them into trouble. House Speaker Mike Johnson was recently caught on a tape promising to take “a blow torch to the regulatory state.” Donald Trump, Johnson said, would want to “go big” in his second term because he can’t run for a third one, the speaker told a group of Republican voters in Pennsylvania. And health care, Johnson said, would be “a big part” of the GOP’s agenda. One attendee directly asked Johnson: No Obamacare? “No Obamacare,” Johnson said. “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work. We’ve got a lot of ideas,” the House speaker added. He wasn’t more specific than that. Kamala Harris’s campaign quickly flagged Johnson’s comments, and Republicans backtracked. The Donald Trump campaign said that was “not President Trump’s policy position.” Johnson insisted he had not actually promised to repeal Obamacare by emphasizing his comment that the 2010 law was “ingrained” while ignoring his subsequent promise of “massive reform.” Trump himself has alluded to having only “concepts of a plan” for American health care. That has left other Republicans to fill in the gaps and the party’s specific proposals remain poorly defined. But if there are a lot of details still to be filled in, the theme of the GOP’s health care agenda is clear: cuts. Cutting regulations. Cutting spending. Johnson’s comments were not an isolated incident. Just last month, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, hinted at “a deregulatory agenda so that people can pick a health care plan that fits them.” If you actually parse his words about health insurance risk pools, it would be a return to a world where people could be charged more for coverage if they have preexisting medical conditions, the world before Obamacare. It was the same promise Johnson was making. That is the reality: Should they win control of the White House and Congress this election, Republicans will attempt to cut people’s health care. Republicans still want to make big health care cuts When Obamacare repeal died in 2017, it might have been tempting to think that a chapter had come to a close. Instead, the fight over the future of US health care had entered a new era. Make no mistake: Republican leaders still want to slash health care spending and unwind health insurance regulations. And Trump, whatever he might say, has proven before to be malleable to conventional conservative health policy. His people continue to put health care in the crosshairs, sometimes in ways that may not be as obvious. Elon Musk, who sometimes appears to be campaigning to be shadow president of the United States, has pledged to cut $2 trillion from the federal government’s $6.8 trillion budget. He has acknowledged that the cuts would result in “temporary” hardship, but insisted they would be to the long-term benefit of the country. About $1 in every $5 in the federal budget goes to health care. Barring a severe cut to the US military (unlikely), such a plan would require massive cuts to the health care programs. Trump has often said he will protect Medicare, which covers seniors, but he has in the past endorsed enormous cuts to Medicaid, the program for low-income people that insures 73 million Americans, as part of the 2017 ACA repeal-and-replace bills. The main Republican bill to repeal and replace the ACA that nearly passed in 2017 was in fact as much about making massive Medicaid cuts by capping the program’s funding as it was about loosening health insurance regulations or repealing the individual mandate. Republicans could try to pass another Obamacare repeal bill with a comprehensive Medicaid overhaul. Or they could chip away at health care in incremental ways, as we saw during the first Trump term after the Obamacare repeal bill failed. Trump cut funding for enrollment outreach for the ACA markets while rolling back rules for noncomprehensive plans, which resulted in catastrophic results for some patients who didn’t know what they were signing up for. Over Trump’s four years in office, the number of people covered by the ACA fell by more than 1 million, to 11.4 million. Since Joe Biden became president, and Democrats expanded the law’s insurance subsidies as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the number of people covered by marketplace plans has nearly doubled to 21.4 million. If Trump takes office again, a repeat of that previous sabotage seems likely even if a bigger repeal effort fails to materialize. Republicans could cut outreach funding again. They could make subtler tweaks to the health insurance rules, such as increasing the premiums that older people can be charged compared to younger people or giving insurers more leniency in restricting benefits, networks, and other aspects of a person’s health coverage. They could make more targeted cuts to Medicaid or permit states to set up Medicaid work requirements again, as they did in the first Trump term only to be obstructed by the courts. Why Republicans can’t be honest about their health care plan The failure of Obamacare repeal is the reason Republicans keep insisting that their health care agenda is not what it plainly is whenever they accidentally reveal their intentions too clearly. It’s easy to forget now, but Obamacare was a winning issue for Republicans at first. They stormed to historic congressional wins in the 2010 midterms by rallying voters against the new health care law. They then took dozens of votes to repeal all or parts of it while Barack Obama still held the veto pen. For most of its first decade, the ACA was deeply unpopular. Then Trump won the presidency and the Republicans had to deliver on their promises to repeal and replace the law. GOP leaders did get the new president on board with a pretty conservative plan: It would have left the skeleton of the ACA, but pared back its rules and financial aid, while making those huge cuts to Medicaid. Then something changed. As the repeal plan started to move through Congress, and projections of millions of Americans losing health insurance dominated news coverage, the politics of health care flipped. The law had quietly grown to cover a sizable chunk of people — more than 25 million — and, as importantly, it had started to change Americans’ minds about the government’s role in providing health care. “Preexisting conditions” became a loaded term, and when people understood that the GOP wanted to unwind the ACA’s health insurance rules, they loudly objected. Medicaid also flexed a political salience not seen before, with disability advocates in particular fearful of what cuts to that program would mean for them and drawing widespread coverage for their protests. Senate Republicans from states that expanded Medicaid through the health care law were ultimately responsible for stopping the repeal effort. By the 2018 midterms, Democrats were hammering Republicans over health care and scoring surprising electoral wins. Today, the ACA is as popular as it’s ever been and US voters say they trust Democrats more on health care than the GOP. This series of events has left Republicans in a bind. The relative success of the ACA has expanded the welfare state and influenced Americans’ perceptions of the role of government in ways that are antithetical to conservative economic thinking. They want to claw back some of those progressive wins. But they also have to be mindful of the changed politics of health care. Once in a while, particularly in “safe” conservative spaces, they slip up, admit they want to unwind the ACA, and then have to backtrack. Mike Johnson’s only mistake was being candid.

5 h

vox.com

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans would pursue “massive” health care reform if Donald Trump is elected president in 2024. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images If you’re confused, it’s not an accident. Republicans are trying to have it both ways on health care during the 2024 campaign. They boast that they want to deregulate insurance and massively cut government spending, yet they also claim that they would never do anything to endanger people’s coverage. That two-step keeps getting them into trouble. House Speaker Mike Johnson was recently caught on a tape promising to take “a blow torch to the regulatory state.” Donald Trump, Johnson said, would want to “go big” in his second term because he can’t run for a third one, the speaker told a group of Republican voters in Pennsylvania. And health care, Johnson said, would be “a big part” of the GOP’s agenda. One attendee directly asked Johnson: No Obamacare? “No Obamacare,” Johnson said. “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work. We’ve got a lot of ideas,” the House speaker added. He wasn’t more specific than that. Kamala Harris’s campaign quickly flagged Johnson’s comments, and Republicans backtracked. The Donald Trump campaign said that was “not President Trump’s policy position.” Johnson insisted he had not actually promised to repeal Obamacare by emphasizing his comment that the 2010 law was “ingrained” while ignoring his subsequent promise of “massive reform.” Trump himself has alluded to having only “concepts of a plan” for American health care. That has left other Republicans to fill in the gaps and the party’s specific proposals remain poorly defined. But if there are a lot of details still to be filled in, the theme of the GOP’s health care agenda is clear: cuts. Cutting regulations. Cutting spending. Johnson’s comments were not an isolated incident. Just last month, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, hinted at “a deregulatory agenda so that people can pick a health care plan that fits them.” If you actually parse his words about health insurance risk pools, it would be a return to a world where people could be charged more for coverage if they have preexisting medical conditions, the world before Obamacare. It was the same promise Johnson was making. That is the reality: Should they win control of the White House and Congress this election, Republicans will attempt to cut people’s health care. Republicans still want to make big health care cuts When Obamacare repeal died in 2017, it might have been tempting to think that a chapter had come to a close. Instead, the fight over the future of US health care had entered a new era. Make no mistake: Republican leaders still want to slash health care spending and unwind health insurance regulations. And Trump, whatever he might say, has proven before to be malleable to conventional conservative health policy. His people continue to put health care in the crosshairs, sometimes in ways that may not be as obvious. Elon Musk, who sometimes appears to be campaigning to be shadow president of the United States, has pledged to cut $2 trillion from the federal government’s $6.8 trillion budget. He has acknowledged that the cuts would result in “temporary” hardship, but insisted they would be to the long-term benefit of the country. About $1 in every $5 in the federal budget goes to health care. Barring a severe cut to the US military (unlikely), such a plan would require massive cuts to the health care programs. Trump has often said he will protect Medicare, which covers seniors, but he has in the past endorsed enormous cuts to Medicaid, the program for low-income people that insures 73 million Americans, as part of the 2017 ACA repeal-and-replace bills. The main Republican bill to repeal and replace the ACA that nearly passed in 2017 was in fact as much about making massive Medicaid cuts by capping the program’s funding as it was about loosening health insurance regulations or repealing the individual mandate. Republicans could try to pass another Obamacare repeal bill with a comprehensive Medicaid overhaul. Or they could chip away at health care in incremental ways, as we saw during the first Trump term after the Obamacare repeal bill failed. Trump cut funding for enrollment outreach for the ACA markets while rolling back rules for noncomprehensive plans, which resulted in catastrophic results for some patients who didn’t know what they were signing up for. Over Trump’s four years in office, the number of people covered by the ACA fell by more than 1 million, to 11.4 million. Since Joe Biden became president, and Democrats expanded the law’s insurance subsidies as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the number of people covered by marketplace plans has nearly doubled to 21.4 million. If Trump takes office again, a repeat of that previous sabotage seems likely even if a bigger repeal effort fails to materialize. Republicans could cut outreach funding again. They could make subtler tweaks to the health insurance rules, such as increasing the premiums that older people can be charged compared to younger people or giving insurers more leniency in restricting benefits, networks, and other aspects of a person’s health coverage. They could make more targeted cuts to Medicaid or permit states to set up Medicaid work requirements again, as they did in the first Trump term only to be obstructed by the courts. Why Republicans can’t be honest about their health care plan The failure of Obamacare repeal is the reason Republicans keep insisting that their health care agenda is not what it plainly is whenever they accidentally reveal their intentions too clearly. It’s easy to forget now, but Obamacare was a winning issue for Republicans at first. They stormed to historic congressional wins in the 2010 midterms by rallying voters against the new health care law. They then took dozens of votes to repeal all or parts of it while Barack Obama still held the veto pen. For most of its first decade, the ACA was deeply unpopular. Then Trump won the presidency and the Republicans had to deliver on their promises to repeal and replace the law. GOP leaders did get the new president on board with a pretty conservative plan: It would have left the skeleton of the ACA, but pared back its rules and financial aid, while making those huge cuts to Medicaid. Then something changed. As the repeal plan started to move through Congress, and projections of millions of Americans losing health insurance dominated news coverage, the politics of health care flipped. The law had quietly grown to cover a sizable chunk of people — more than 25 million — and, as importantly, it had started to change Americans’ minds about the government’s role in providing health care. “Preexisting conditions” became a loaded term, and when people understood that the GOP wanted to unwind the ACA’s health insurance rules, they loudly objected. Medicaid also flexed a political salience not seen before, with disability advocates in particular fearful of what cuts to that program would mean for them and drawing widespread coverage for their protests. Senate Republicans from states that expanded Medicaid through the health care law were ultimately responsible for stopping the repeal effort. By the 2018 midterms, Democrats were hammering Republicans over health care and scoring surprising electoral wins. Today, the ACA is as popular as it’s ever been and US voters say they trust Democrats more on health care than the GOP. This series of events has left Republicans in a bind. The relative success of the ACA has expanded the welfare state and influenced Americans’ perceptions of the role of government in ways that are antithetical to conservative economic thinking. They want to claw back some of those progressive wins. But they also have to be mindful of the changed politics of health care. Once in a while, particularly in “safe” conservative spaces, they slip up, admit they want to unwind the ACA, and then have to backtrack. Mike Johnson’s only mistake was being candid.

Trump really could empower RFK Jr. to wreck public health Trump welcomes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the stage at a Turning Point Action campaign rally at the Gas South Arena on October 23, 2024, in Duluth, Georgia. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images For the most part, Donald Trump has been mum on who he’d appoint to his administration if he wins. But he has made one pretty clear promise: Trump has said he’ll let conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health, food, and drug regulation. That could have massive consequences for public health and vaccine policy in America. If RFK were to completely get his way and deter vaccination, vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and polio could make a comeback. Kennedy, who ended his third-party presidential run to endorse Trump in August, expects big things. He told supporters at a recent virtual event that Trump “promised” him “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others,” as well as the Department of Agriculture. Kennedy has also said he’d be “deeply involved in helping to choose the people” heading those agencies. Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick said on CNN Wednesday that Kennedy is “not getting a job” at HHS, but Lutnick voiced complete sympathy with Kennedy’s beliefs that vaccines cause autism. “I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr., and it was the most extraordinary thing,” Lutnick said, proceeding to say he believes in the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. Though Trump has a muddled stance on the Covid vaccines his administration approved, he’s long been a believer that childhood vaccines cause autism. He reiterated that belief in a call seeking Kennedy’s endorsement this summer (which was recorded and posted publicly by Kennedy’s son): Trump complained that babies now get too many vaccines and then “change radically.” He added: “I’ve seen it too many times.” It’s hard to make it clearer that Kennedy’s views would have deep sympathy at the top of Trump’s administration. In Trump’s first term, experts, scientists, and professionals remained in charge of such issues — hence the Covid vaccine development. But given the right-wing backlash against such experts that the pandemic brought, Trump’s second term could well be quite different. The risk that Kennedy would take a wrecking ball to public health regulation and especially vaccine policy is very real. Tucker Carlson, appearing at an event with Kennedy this week, was positively gleeful about that prospect. “Can you imagine if you’re at FDA or NIH and Bobby Kennedy all of a sudden” came in, Carlson said, breaking off in laughter. “I mean, they must be dying!” RFK probably couldn’t be confirmed by the Senate. He could exercise vast influence anyway. Public health leaders, including some former GOP and Trump appointees, have been quite alarmed at the prospect of giving RFK sway over public health policy. Jerome Adams, who was Trump’s surgeon general in his first term, said Monday this “could further erode people’s willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines” and that he was “worried” about the impact on Americans’ health. Others have reacted with skepticism to the prospect of Kennedy getting a top agency job, pointing out that a post like HHS Secretary requires Senate confirmation, a prospect that would seem unlikely even if the GOP regains control of the chamber. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the two most moderate Republican senators, serve on the committee that would consider that nomination. Yet there is a model for how Kennedy could serve in government and exercise vast influence despite not being Senate-confirmed. Call it the Stephen Miller model. Miller, an extreme anti-immigration ideologue, served as a White House senior adviser (a job that doesn’t require Senate confirmation). But he exercised vast influence at federal agencies that handled immigration policy so much that he became dubbed “the president of immigration.” He berated agency officials to carry out his preferred policies and, when he felt some Trump appointees weren’t getting the job done, he engineered their ouster. It is entirely possible that Trump could appoint Kennedy to a similar role if he wanted one. It’s far from clear whether Kennedy would prove as effective a bureaucratic operator as Miller, but he certainly matches Miller in obsessive monomania over his particular issue, having argued for two decades that vaccines cause autism, as a writer, an activist, and then as a political candidate. Another reason Miller had such influence is that it was believed throughout the administration that he was speaking for President Trump, that they had a “mind-meld” on immigration. And Trump’s comments have long made it clear he agrees with Kennedy on childhood vaccinations. Even if Kennedy does not officially join the government, he could still have a major impact on policy. If accurate, his claim that he’ll be “deeply involved” in Trump’s public health appointment decisions means he could choose like-minded allies to try and overhaul public health agencies. The real question is whether Trump would stake political capital on what would surely be an intensely controversial overhaul of US vaccine policies. Despite his belief in the autism link, Trump simply didn’t choose to really do anything about it in his first term. If he were to win a second term, though, he would owe Kennedy for his support, and anti-vaccine sentiment has been rising on the right. Perhaps the biggest mystery hanging over a potential Trump second term is just how out of control Trump has gotten since he left office. The Republican establishment would like to believe that, in practice, Trump will still heavily rely on them and appoint capable people rather than kooks to top posts. But perhaps Trump will feel less beholden to that establishment than ever and more willing to reward his extreme supporters. That’s certainly what Kennedy is betting on.

6 h

vox.com

Trump welcomes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the stage at a Turning Point Action campaign rally at the Gas South Arena on October 23, 2024, in Duluth, Georgia. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images For the most part, Donald Trump has been mum on who he’d appoint to his administration if he wins. But he has made one pretty clear promise: Trump has said he’ll let conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health, food, and drug regulation. That could have massive consequences for public health and vaccine policy in America. If RFK were to completely get his way and deter vaccination, vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and polio could make a comeback. Kennedy, who ended his third-party presidential run to endorse Trump in August, expects big things. He told supporters at a recent virtual event that Trump “promised” him “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others,” as well as the Department of Agriculture. Kennedy has also said he’d be “deeply involved in helping to choose the people” heading those agencies. Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick said on CNN Wednesday that Kennedy is “not getting a job” at HHS, but Lutnick voiced complete sympathy with Kennedy’s beliefs that vaccines cause autism. “I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr., and it was the most extraordinary thing,” Lutnick said, proceeding to say he believes in the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. Though Trump has a muddled stance on the Covid vaccines his administration approved, he’s long been a believer that childhood vaccines cause autism. He reiterated that belief in a call seeking Kennedy’s endorsement this summer (which was recorded and posted publicly by Kennedy’s son): Trump complained that babies now get too many vaccines and then “change radically.” He added: “I’ve seen it too many times.” It’s hard to make it clearer that Kennedy’s views would have deep sympathy at the top of Trump’s administration. In Trump’s first term, experts, scientists, and professionals remained in charge of such issues — hence the Covid vaccine development. But given the right-wing backlash against such experts that the pandemic brought, Trump’s second term could well be quite different. The risk that Kennedy would take a wrecking ball to public health regulation and especially vaccine policy is very real. Tucker Carlson, appearing at an event with Kennedy this week, was positively gleeful about that prospect. “Can you imagine if you’re at FDA or NIH and Bobby Kennedy all of a sudden” came in, Carlson said, breaking off in laughter. “I mean, they must be dying!” RFK probably couldn’t be confirmed by the Senate. He could exercise vast influence anyway. Public health leaders, including some former GOP and Trump appointees, have been quite alarmed at the prospect of giving RFK sway over public health policy. Jerome Adams, who was Trump’s surgeon general in his first term, said Monday this “could further erode people’s willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines” and that he was “worried” about the impact on Americans’ health. Others have reacted with skepticism to the prospect of Kennedy getting a top agency job, pointing out that a post like HHS Secretary requires Senate confirmation, a prospect that would seem unlikely even if the GOP regains control of the chamber. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the two most moderate Republican senators, serve on the committee that would consider that nomination. Yet there is a model for how Kennedy could serve in government and exercise vast influence despite not being Senate-confirmed. Call it the Stephen Miller model. Miller, an extreme anti-immigration ideologue, served as a White House senior adviser (a job that doesn’t require Senate confirmation). But he exercised vast influence at federal agencies that handled immigration policy so much that he became dubbed “the president of immigration.” He berated agency officials to carry out his preferred policies and, when he felt some Trump appointees weren’t getting the job done, he engineered their ouster. It is entirely possible that Trump could appoint Kennedy to a similar role if he wanted one. It’s far from clear whether Kennedy would prove as effective a bureaucratic operator as Miller, but he certainly matches Miller in obsessive monomania over his particular issue, having argued for two decades that vaccines cause autism, as a writer, an activist, and then as a political candidate. Another reason Miller had such influence is that it was believed throughout the administration that he was speaking for President Trump, that they had a “mind-meld” on immigration. And Trump’s comments have long made it clear he agrees with Kennedy on childhood vaccinations. Even if Kennedy does not officially join the government, he could still have a major impact on policy. If accurate, his claim that he’ll be “deeply involved” in Trump’s public health appointment decisions means he could choose like-minded allies to try and overhaul public health agencies. The real question is whether Trump would stake political capital on what would surely be an intensely controversial overhaul of US vaccine policies. Despite his belief in the autism link, Trump simply didn’t choose to really do anything about it in his first term. If he were to win a second term, though, he would owe Kennedy for his support, and anti-vaccine sentiment has been rising on the right. Perhaps the biggest mystery hanging over a potential Trump second term is just how out of control Trump has gotten since he left office. The Republican establishment would like to believe that, in practice, Trump will still heavily rely on them and appoint capable people rather than kooks to top posts. But perhaps Trump will feel less beholden to that establishment than ever and more willing to reward his extreme supporters. That’s certainly what Kennedy is betting on.

Is Google a bigger threat to democracy than Trump? A debate. Signage at the the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, on October 10, 2024. The Biden era has witnessed a revolution in the Democratic Party’s approach to policing large corporations. Under the leadership of chair Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission has grown markedly more aggressive in blocking mergers and cracking down on big business’s exploitative practices. This has earned Khan’s FTC plaudits from critics of corporate power. But Khan’s policies have also attracted the indignation of the Democratic Party’s supporters in Silicon Valley, as well as concerns from some longtime civil servants at the FTC, who question the strategic and substantive wisdom of Khan’s approach to antitrust enforcement. Both these factions are now bitterly fighting for presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s favor. In a cover story for Harper’s Magazine this month, Barry Lynn makes the case for the “antitrust revolution.” Lynn is the intellectual godfather of the modern antimonopoly movement. Once a business reporter, he has spent the better part of two decades chronicling the evils of corporate concentration. His antimonopoly think tank, the Open Markets Institute, employed Khan as its legal director before she entered government. In his Harper’s essay, Lynn frames the fight against Big Tech in apocalyptic terms. He argues that the power of Google and Amazon today is analogous to that of absolute monarchs in the 17th century — and that such corporate titans pose an even more pressing threat to American democracy than Donald Trump. I sympathize with many of Lynn’s concerns and think that Khan’s FTC has done a lot of good. But I also found parts of Lynn’s Harper’s piece hyperbolic and unconvincing. So I spoke with him about my objections, the impact of Big Tech on journalism and publishing, the political power of small business, whether monopolies have made America more racist, and other topics. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity. In your Harper’s essay, you suggested that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple wield power analogous to that of absolute monarchs, and that together they constitute a greater threat to political liberty in the United States than Donald Trump. But is there not a categorical difference between wielding a lot of influence over commerce and controlling a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, as monarchs and, to an extent, presidents do? Google doesn’t have the power to selectively prosecute and imprison public officials it does not like. But an authoritarian president plausibly could. So why do you think Big Tech is ultimately the bigger threat? I think the clear point I was trying to make is that these are both really disturbing, terrifying concentrations of power. In the case of Trump, the White House, even after the recent decision in the Supreme Court, there’s still an immense number of restraints on the presidency. What you’re talking about — we’re not there yet. And whatever Trump has said, it’s going to take him a few steps at least to get there. Whereas what we’re talking about right now with big tech is where we are now. This is not theoretical. This is the power they have now, so that’s a really key thing to keep in mind. But would you agree that there are constraints on the power of these companies in the current context? I think even before the recent revival of aggressive enforcement at the FTC, the government sussed out collusion in terms of hiring practices among these big tech companies. So are there not limits that these companies need to operate within, just as the president currently does? In that case, what you had is, some tens of thousands of employees who were being restricted in their ability to go from one company to another through no-poach agreements. Yes, they did win that case. But I think it was like a $5 million fine, and a little pretend slap on the wrist, don’t do it again. [Editor’s note: The companies paid $415 million to settle a civil suit over the no-poach agreements.] That was affecting the lives of a lot of people, and they got a little slap on the wrist. I don’t think that that case in itself had very much effect on their sense of the power of the government. When I’m talking about their power, it’s not just the power over their workers. I first got into this work, not through Google, but through Amazon. When I published my book, Cornered, it was 2010. And in the process of writing that book, I had really spent a lot of time talking to my editor, to my agent, and then, to other people who were writing books and to their editors. And I realized that American publishers with Amazon were facing a situation in which you had a company that controlled the gate to the marketplace — and was unconstrained by any traditional laws requiring them to keep the gate open equally for all comers. They had the ability to open and close the gate arbitrarily to the marketplace. Were there any examples of them doing that in an egregious way that illustrates the danger of that kind of power? Oh, yes. I spent a lot of time talking to CEOs and publishers back then, David Young at Hachette USA. I spoke to Drake McFeely at Norton. These are one-on-one meetings. And the basic thing was: When the door was open, they would say, “Amazon is our absolute best customer.” When the door was closed, they’d say “Amazon is a dictator that was entirely interfering in our business in arbitrary ways. We don’t have access to the marketplace. We don’t connect with the reader, the buyer, because Amazon’s determining how we’re connecting.” And that’s only gotten worse over the last 15 years. [Editor’s note: Young neither confirmed nor denied this account, saying he did not remember meeting Lynn, as it would have been more than 15 years ago. McFeely could not be reached for comment.] In February 2010, Amazon shut off the buy buttons for McMillan. McMillan was complaining [that Amazon was devaluing its authors’ work by charging only $9.99 for ebooks]. What Amazon did is they just said no more “buy” buttons. It’s like: You’re not selling on Amazon. Back then, Amazon was probably responsible for 40, 50 percent of their book sales in the United States. It’s now higher, much higher. But even if it’s only 40, 50 percent, you can’t stand to lose that much of your capacity for sales, so they gave up. Were any of the conflicts between publishers and Amazon explicitly about the content of work, as opposed to terms of compensation for ebooks? About the content? There was some point at which, I think it was Tom Cotton or somebody who was on TV or Fox — a politician who was having a fit about how they’re being suppressed. But let’s just say there is no evidence of Amazon ever trying to suppress a particular viewpoint, right? But, there’s two things. One is, when you either suppress a particular publisher because they don’t have the money to pay you the extortionary rates of advertising, then you’re less likely to be found. You have less opportunity to make your way to the market. Two, when you promote one book, you suppress every other book in the marketplace. There’s a two-way amplification of a book — amplification of a publisher — so that there’s de facto suppression of all the books, de facto suppression of all other publishers. You can have very large effects on what books are being published, how they’re being sold, what ideas people are connecting with. The effects can be a byproduct of a business model, a byproduct of unconscious decisions that were somewhat automated that have no political intent in and of themselves. But they have a political effect. I imagine there’s an analogy there to your view of the role that algorithms on social media play, in terms of amplifying. Maybe it’s a completely neutral algorithm that is just amplifying whatever gets the most engagement. But that has implications for what content ultimately gets the most attention. Yeah. But the thing is that as these middlemen — who are in between the people who are speaking and the people who are listening, in between the author and the readers, the author and the voter, in between the creator and the buyer, the seller and the buyer — as these masters in the middle gather more and more and more information about each individual person, and about each individual company, they use that information to manipulate both sides of the market. More and more perfectly, they use it to push you as a reader: Oh, you liked a book about this battle in World War II. Well, you’re going to like another book about this battle in World War II, and you’re going to like this third book about this battle in World War II. And then, you know what, there’s this guy who’s used an analogy to that battle in World War II to talk about Trump politics, maybe you’ll like him too. So you can see how a couple of things happen when you have this kind of a system, which is that as they feed off their knowledge of you, they drag you more and more to what we used to call filter bubbles. I feel like there’s an argument that what you’re describing isn’t that different from organic processes of knowledge acquisition, which existed before the internet. Like, say you are a left wing-minded person, and you read a book by Tom Frank in the early 2000s or something. And that gets you interested in other books that he’s written, and authors that he cites, and you start subscribing to certain magazines, and that self-reinforcing kind of interest or ideology is a natural process that humans engage in when learning about the world, and developing interests, and that this isn’t necessarily such an insidious— Yeah, absolutely. You’re absolutely right, and that’s a good thing. That’s how we educate ourselves. But, there’s a huge difference between when Tom Frank wrote What’s the Matter With Kansas? and then that leads you to a review of it in the Nation; I started reading the Nation. I had to take out a subscription to the Nation, maybe. I take out a subscription to Mother Jones. But maybe, I learned that there’s actually a left-wing bookstore in Chicago, and I go to that bookstore, and I find a whole bunch of other books. And so, then suddenly, it’s like I found a bunch of work, and a bunch of people that helped me answer the questions that I’ve been asking. And so, that’s fantastic, and I certainly live that life. But, when you have fewer and fewer, and fewer places that you’re interacting with, when you get down to one major place where you’re going to buy books online, when you get down to one major place or two major places — if you’re getting most of your news off of TikTok or you get it off of Facebook — you’re not going to read the New York Times, and that’s going to make it very hard for you to link out to the New York Times site. You’re getting most of your news off the platform. At that point, exploration is not something you control. You have then actually lost your sovereignty. You’ve lost your ability to control your own destiny in this process, and you go where they take you. Now, you went to a really good college; you know how to protect yourself against some of this bullshit. But I bet that sometimes you find yourself getting suckered in on it. But a lot of folks don’t know how to protect themselves. To get to a separate claim in your Harper’s piece: You write that monopolists are a leading driver of “the surge in racism and homophobia” and “the attacks on reproductive choice” in the United States. I was wondering what you were thinking about specifically here. To me, it is not clear that there has even been a surge in racism and anti-gay bigotry in the United States; support for marriage for same-sex and interracial couples remains near record highs in Gallup’s polling. And in any case, certainly America has grown more progressive on race and gender since 1981 — the year that you believe that antitrust policy changed for the worse. So what’s your timeline here? I mean, you gotta separate out the different things. Okay? It’s like, yeah, okay, in 1981, Reagan makes it easier for General Electric to roll up control over televisions, or he makes it easier for Walmart to roll up control over retail. So at that point, you’re not actually dealing with communications platforms. So there’s a revolutionary change in how we do competition policy, which is applied initially to industrial and retail firms. So it didn’t happen all at once. Reagan starts the process. Clinton then extends it to banking, to the defense industrial base, to oil and gas, to telecommunications. And then what you have over time with telecommunications, you have a shift in business models, which takes place around 15 years ago — 10 to 15 years ago — from relatively unobtrusive forms of manipulation, to manipulation as the foundation of the business model. So to say that, well, between 1981 and 2011, racism and homophobia went down in the United States, and then even though it has increased radically in the years since, that my thesis is somehow wrong, I don’t follow. Well, I think it’s an open question to me whether they’ve increased radically since then versus becoming more visible because of the way these platforms amplify certain speech. You’re taking parts of the thesis out and you’re saying, “Well, I’m not sure that it works.” So it’s like, if you take the thesis apart, then yeah, then maybe things start to fall apart. But the thesis is that the reason that these people have these abilities is because we fail to apply traditional anti-monopoly laws. Yeah, I agree that that’s the overarching thesis.Yeah. Okay. So what’s the issue then? So I also wanted to touch on the claim about reproductive choice. I agree that large businesses are involved in the Federalist Society, and the right’s project there is both to empower big business and to restrict abortion rights. At the same time, when I look at FEC filings, the large tech monopolists of our age throughout the past 10 years have generally given a lot more money to the Democratic Party — the pro-choice party — then to the pro-life party. If their money determined these elections, then Dobbs wouldn’t have happened. And there’s lots of small businesses and regional businesses that fund the American right. Eric, corporations are complicated things. They do a lot of different things at the same time. They curry favor on both sides. Look at Mr. Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz, right? Two months ago, he was all in for Trump. Now it looks like his friend, Harris, may win. So suddenly, he’s like, “Oh, poor Harris.” Andreessen is still out there, totally 100% in. Crazy-ass Andreessen is still out there 100% in for Trump. Musk is leaping up and down like a maniac on the stage in Pennsylvania. So really, you’re going to say because Google threw some money behind some Democrats — and even then, it’s like, was it Google or is it the individuals in the corporation? Corporations, they do with their money what makes sense for them politically. Do you think that small- and regional-sized businesses are any different in that respect? Small- and medium-sized business, they’re different because they’re less politically powerful. But can’t small business interests pool together in the Chamber of Commerce, in various other systems to … Yeah, of course, that’s their right. But it’s very different. A Chamber of Commerce is generally much less powerful as an organization than a large corporation. You got a whole bunch of different people who are working through an issue. There’s a lot of things they’re going to agree on. There’s a lot of things they’re going to disagree on. So the things they disagree on, they tend not to take political positions. So it’s just a basic rule of democracy that dividing power is going to make it less likely that an actor is going to rise up and threaten the democratic system. To play devil’s advocate, what do you make of the idea that actually, small businesses — precisely because in this country, we have this deep-seated yeoman farmer ideal, and the small proprietor has cultural cache — that this actually gives them pretty significant power over politics. Oh my god, you’re repeating to me ancient libertarian truisms. Well, but there are lots of federal regulations — labor regulations — that small businesses are exempt from while large businesses have to abide by them. And so there are these ways in which arguably, the government shows some degree of affection for small businesses that maybe is not extended to large corporations. I have no understanding of how you could actually come to that conclusion. I mean, it’s like the affection for small business is just some little crumbs that Congress tosses to the little people once every four years or once every two years. And almost any one of these, they’re recent. Go do your homework, go actually look at how the SBA operates. Look at how every one of these laws that’s designed for farming support, where that money goes to. Very little of it goes to the small actor. It’s just enough to shut them up. Other than, say, Vance and Hawley, and Warren and Klobuchar, who’s really making their business taking on big corporations? So where is this imaginary world in which the government is favoring small business over big business? Well, I guess I’m just referring specifically to both proposed legislation and actual laws that exempt companies with, say, less than 25 employees from this or that federal regulation. There seems to be a sensitivity— Wait, wait, wait, listen. The point of this conversation is not to go in and re-litigate antiquated conversations that the libertarians put together in the 1970s. If you want to have this, you go read my book. You can read my first book, you can read my second book, you can read my third book. You can read all kinds of other work that’s out there. We don’t have to waste our time — while I’m driving down the highway — having these arguments. Go do some reading. Well, I mean, I’m partially speaking for readers who haven’t necessarily done all that reading and would like to know what— No, no, this is your job. You can go read and you can explain it. Like I said, go read Cornered. Go read Liberty From All Masters. Go read Sally Hubbard’s or Jasper T. Scott’s books. There’s a lot of books that get it just from different levels, different angles. There’s all kinds of articles you can read up on. There’s been just a broad destruction of independent business across America over the last 40 years. If you want to learn some of the math, you can go get a copy of Liberty From All Masters. I do the math about Walmart. Retail was designed in the old days to serve everybody. The business was regulated to ensure that any family with some wherewithal could get into it, go out and start a business, to start a grocery. And these weren’t little rinky-dink groceries. They’re family-owned supermarkets. For a long period of time, all of the great technological advances that were made in groceries were made by independent people trying to get ahead of their rival down the street. Now, if you are Walmart and your rival down the street is Walmart, and down the next town, the rival is Walmart, you don’t have to do a damn thing. Isn’t Walmart under competitive pressure from Amazon? Oh my god. Yeah, of course, they’re under a little bit of competitive pressure from Amazon. And Google’s under a little bit of competitive pressure on certain lines of business from Apple. Right? But it doesn’t mean that this is an open and democratic system. It doesn’t mean that it’s a system that is designed to prevent fascism and the absolute concentration of power over. Again, Eric, you got to do your homework. If you wanted to have a conversation, you want to be the devil’s advocate, come at me with something that’s worthwhile. Great. I will ask you a question that maybe you’ll like better. So, the other thing I wanted to ask about from your Harper’s piece: You discussed the Supreme Court’s decision in Moody versus NetChoice. A colleague of mine wrote about it as well. At issue in that case was whether the governments of Florida and Texas could prohibit social media platforms from taking down posts based on the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression. Justice Elena Kagan argued that Texas’s proposed restrictions on content moderation would effectively compel Facebook to tolerate neo-Nazi and pro-teen suicide content on their platforms and this would constitute a violation of those firms’ rights of free speech. You suggested that by making this ruling, the liberal justices mounted as “outriders for autocracy,” and you argued that giving social media platforms the right to moderate content at their own whim was as antithetical to democracy as giving the president criminal immunity from official acts. And so, what would you say to a liberal, like my colleague, Ian Millhiser, who believes that allowing major platforms to bar pro-anorexia and pro-genocide content is actually in the public interest, and that enabling right-wing state governments to dictate which points of view private companies must platform would itself put us on a slippery slope to authoritarianism? If you go read the decision, a corporation has First Amendment rights as a corporation. Publishers have First Amendment rights as publishers. The case that we are making and what many other people are making — and this can give you a misunderstanding — is that these are platforms, not publishers. Platforms are curators. And so platforms are places where people come together to communicate with each other, where publishers come to gather with readers to share information with each other. And if you allow the master in the middle, the middle man, to manipulate that, then you have grossly interfered with the rights of the 330 million people in America — I guess, some of them are babies, so they’re not necessarily using these platforms — but every American youth relies on these platforms to communicate with other Americans. So I’d say that Kagan’s thinking is that she’s basically advocating for the suppression of the First Amendment rights of every citizen of the United States who relies on these platforms. As for the idea that Florida and Texas and Ohio are going to force these platforms to carry what the states want them to, no. It’s like there’s a missing part of this conversation, and it’s called the terms of service. All these people have a right to publish terms of service. And under terms of service, they can say, “We’re not going to carry racist material.” We can say, “We’re not going to carry stuff that we believe is harmful to kids, that seems to promote eating disorders or suicide.” So then, once you publish your terms of service, you can say, “We’re not going to publish anything that seems to advocate violence.” And it’s like, as long as you apply the terms of service equally without favor to all of your users, then you can shut down whatever you want. But is there any principle that binds what they can put into a terms of service? It seems to me that, by this logic, if the social media company establishes a politically biased term of service, then that could result in what you’re concerned about — and I’m concerned about as well — in terms of deplatforming legitimate points of view. So what legally binds a company from just crafting the terms of service so they can discriminate against whichever point of view they want to suppress? Well, the thing is that at a certain point, the Essential Facilities Doctrine, traditional American communications doctrine, is once you get to a certain size, that would be discriminatory. Political discrimination is illegal. I just want to clarify the principles here. It seems to me there’s no way to permit all political speech regardless of its perspective on social media platforms and prohibit racist speech from them (since there is a lot of racist, political speech). So I guess, how do you see resolving that? I took you as saying that basically: We should have a situation where you can express any viewpoint on these platforms — no matter how vile — if it isn’t direct harassment or a direct violent threat, but that the platform shouldn’t be amplifying that speech. Is that correct? Or what is your view? People can go to the branded publications, right? If you wanted to hear a certain kind of speech — if your morning’s not going to be complete without a big plate of racism along with your eggs and your coffee — then you can have a racist publication. You can have a Nazi publication. And the people who need that, they can go sit on the website of the publication and get what they want. That’s the beauty of America, is that you don’t need the middleman to boost it. And you can still get it, you can still go find it. Great. Well, there are a few other questions I had, but you’re running close to time, right? Yeah. I appreciate you trying to be a devil’s advocate, but I just encourage you, as you’re working through this — because you’re smart, you’re clearly asking a lot of the right questions — is just continue to do your research. Don’t react. And whenever you’re starting to see stuff that is reacting against the kind of stuff that we’re doing, just question, “Who is paying for that?” Just question who it is. Because almost every single person who’s coming at us, someone is paying for that person to come at us.

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Signage at the the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, on October 10, 2024. The Biden era has witnessed a revolution in the Democratic Party’s approach to policing large corporations. Under the leadership of chair Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission has grown markedly more aggressive in blocking mergers and cracking down on big business’s exploitative practices. This has earned Khan’s FTC plaudits from critics of corporate power. But Khan’s policies have also attracted the indignation of the Democratic Party’s supporters in Silicon Valley, as well as concerns from some longtime civil servants at the FTC, who question the strategic and substantive wisdom of Khan’s approach to antitrust enforcement. Both these factions are now bitterly fighting for presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s favor. In a cover story for Harper’s Magazine this month, Barry Lynn makes the case for the “antitrust revolution.” Lynn is the intellectual godfather of the modern antimonopoly movement. Once a business reporter, he has spent the better part of two decades chronicling the evils of corporate concentration. His antimonopoly think tank, the Open Markets Institute, employed Khan as its legal director before she entered government. In his Harper’s essay, Lynn frames the fight against Big Tech in apocalyptic terms. He argues that the power of Google and Amazon today is analogous to that of absolute monarchs in the 17th century — and that such corporate titans pose an even more pressing threat to American democracy than Donald Trump. I sympathize with many of Lynn’s concerns and think that Khan’s FTC has done a lot of good. But I also found parts of Lynn’s Harper’s piece hyperbolic and unconvincing. So I spoke with him about my objections, the impact of Big Tech on journalism and publishing, the political power of small business, whether monopolies have made America more racist, and other topics. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity. In your Harper’s essay, you suggested that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple wield power analogous to that of absolute monarchs, and that together they constitute a greater threat to political liberty in the United States than Donald Trump. But is there not a categorical difference between wielding a lot of influence over commerce and controlling a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, as monarchs and, to an extent, presidents do? Google doesn’t have the power to selectively prosecute and imprison public officials it does not like. But an authoritarian president plausibly could. So why do you think Big Tech is ultimately the bigger threat? I think the clear point I was trying to make is that these are both really disturbing, terrifying concentrations of power. In the case of Trump, the White House, even after the recent decision in the Supreme Court, there’s still an immense number of restraints on the presidency. What you’re talking about — we’re not there yet. And whatever Trump has said, it’s going to take him a few steps at least to get there. Whereas what we’re talking about right now with big tech is where we are now. This is not theoretical. This is the power they have now, so that’s a really key thing to keep in mind. But would you agree that there are constraints on the power of these companies in the current context? I think even before the recent revival of aggressive enforcement at the FTC, the government sussed out collusion in terms of hiring practices among these big tech companies. So are there not limits that these companies need to operate within, just as the president currently does? In that case, what you had is, some tens of thousands of employees who were being restricted in their ability to go from one company to another through no-poach agreements. Yes, they did win that case. But I think it was like a $5 million fine, and a little pretend slap on the wrist, don’t do it again. [Editor’s note: The companies paid $415 million to settle a civil suit over the no-poach agreements.] That was affecting the lives of a lot of people, and they got a little slap on the wrist. I don’t think that that case in itself had very much effect on their sense of the power of the government. When I’m talking about their power, it’s not just the power over their workers. I first got into this work, not through Google, but through Amazon. When I published my book, Cornered, it was 2010. And in the process of writing that book, I had really spent a lot of time talking to my editor, to my agent, and then, to other people who were writing books and to their editors. And I realized that American publishers with Amazon were facing a situation in which you had a company that controlled the gate to the marketplace — and was unconstrained by any traditional laws requiring them to keep the gate open equally for all comers. They had the ability to open and close the gate arbitrarily to the marketplace. Were there any examples of them doing that in an egregious way that illustrates the danger of that kind of power? Oh, yes. I spent a lot of time talking to CEOs and publishers back then, David Young at Hachette USA. I spoke to Drake McFeely at Norton. These are one-on-one meetings. And the basic thing was: When the door was open, they would say, “Amazon is our absolute best customer.” When the door was closed, they’d say “Amazon is a dictator that was entirely interfering in our business in arbitrary ways. We don’t have access to the marketplace. We don’t connect with the reader, the buyer, because Amazon’s determining how we’re connecting.” And that’s only gotten worse over the last 15 years. [Editor’s note: Young neither confirmed nor denied this account, saying he did not remember meeting Lynn, as it would have been more than 15 years ago. McFeely could not be reached for comment.] In February 2010, Amazon shut off the buy buttons for McMillan. McMillan was complaining [that Amazon was devaluing its authors’ work by charging only $9.99 for ebooks]. What Amazon did is they just said no more “buy” buttons. It’s like: You’re not selling on Amazon. Back then, Amazon was probably responsible for 40, 50 percent of their book sales in the United States. It’s now higher, much higher. But even if it’s only 40, 50 percent, you can’t stand to lose that much of your capacity for sales, so they gave up. Were any of the conflicts between publishers and Amazon explicitly about the content of work, as opposed to terms of compensation for ebooks? About the content? There was some point at which, I think it was Tom Cotton or somebody who was on TV or Fox — a politician who was having a fit about how they’re being suppressed. But let’s just say there is no evidence of Amazon ever trying to suppress a particular viewpoint, right? But, there’s two things. One is, when you either suppress a particular publisher because they don’t have the money to pay you the extortionary rates of advertising, then you’re less likely to be found. You have less opportunity to make your way to the market. Two, when you promote one book, you suppress every other book in the marketplace. There’s a two-way amplification of a book — amplification of a publisher — so that there’s de facto suppression of all the books, de facto suppression of all other publishers. You can have very large effects on what books are being published, how they’re being sold, what ideas people are connecting with. The effects can be a byproduct of a business model, a byproduct of unconscious decisions that were somewhat automated that have no political intent in and of themselves. But they have a political effect. I imagine there’s an analogy there to your view of the role that algorithms on social media play, in terms of amplifying. Maybe it’s a completely neutral algorithm that is just amplifying whatever gets the most engagement. But that has implications for what content ultimately gets the most attention. Yeah. But the thing is that as these middlemen — who are in between the people who are speaking and the people who are listening, in between the author and the readers, the author and the voter, in between the creator and the buyer, the seller and the buyer — as these masters in the middle gather more and more and more information about each individual person, and about each individual company, they use that information to manipulate both sides of the market. More and more perfectly, they use it to push you as a reader: Oh, you liked a book about this battle in World War II. Well, you’re going to like another book about this battle in World War II, and you’re going to like this third book about this battle in World War II. And then, you know what, there’s this guy who’s used an analogy to that battle in World War II to talk about Trump politics, maybe you’ll like him too. So you can see how a couple of things happen when you have this kind of a system, which is that as they feed off their knowledge of you, they drag you more and more to what we used to call filter bubbles. I feel like there’s an argument that what you’re describing isn’t that different from organic processes of knowledge acquisition, which existed before the internet. Like, say you are a left wing-minded person, and you read a book by Tom Frank in the early 2000s or something. And that gets you interested in other books that he’s written, and authors that he cites, and you start subscribing to certain magazines, and that self-reinforcing kind of interest or ideology is a natural process that humans engage in when learning about the world, and developing interests, and that this isn’t necessarily such an insidious— Yeah, absolutely. You’re absolutely right, and that’s a good thing. That’s how we educate ourselves. But, there’s a huge difference between when Tom Frank wrote What’s the Matter With Kansas? and then that leads you to a review of it in the Nation; I started reading the Nation. I had to take out a subscription to the Nation, maybe. I take out a subscription to Mother Jones. But maybe, I learned that there’s actually a left-wing bookstore in Chicago, and I go to that bookstore, and I find a whole bunch of other books. And so, then suddenly, it’s like I found a bunch of work, and a bunch of people that helped me answer the questions that I’ve been asking. And so, that’s fantastic, and I certainly live that life. But, when you have fewer and fewer, and fewer places that you’re interacting with, when you get down to one major place where you’re going to buy books online, when you get down to one major place or two major places — if you’re getting most of your news off of TikTok or you get it off of Facebook — you’re not going to read the New York Times, and that’s going to make it very hard for you to link out to the New York Times site. You’re getting most of your news off the platform. At that point, exploration is not something you control. You have then actually lost your sovereignty. You’ve lost your ability to control your own destiny in this process, and you go where they take you. Now, you went to a really good college; you know how to protect yourself against some of this bullshit. But I bet that sometimes you find yourself getting suckered in on it. But a lot of folks don’t know how to protect themselves. To get to a separate claim in your Harper’s piece: You write that monopolists are a leading driver of “the surge in racism and homophobia” and “the attacks on reproductive choice” in the United States. I was wondering what you were thinking about specifically here. To me, it is not clear that there has even been a surge in racism and anti-gay bigotry in the United States; support for marriage for same-sex and interracial couples remains near record highs in Gallup’s polling. And in any case, certainly America has grown more progressive on race and gender since 1981 — the year that you believe that antitrust policy changed for the worse. So what’s your timeline here? I mean, you gotta separate out the different things. Okay? It’s like, yeah, okay, in 1981, Reagan makes it easier for General Electric to roll up control over televisions, or he makes it easier for Walmart to roll up control over retail. So at that point, you’re not actually dealing with communications platforms. So there’s a revolutionary change in how we do competition policy, which is applied initially to industrial and retail firms. So it didn’t happen all at once. Reagan starts the process. Clinton then extends it to banking, to the defense industrial base, to oil and gas, to telecommunications. And then what you have over time with telecommunications, you have a shift in business models, which takes place around 15 years ago — 10 to 15 years ago — from relatively unobtrusive forms of manipulation, to manipulation as the foundation of the business model. So to say that, well, between 1981 and 2011, racism and homophobia went down in the United States, and then even though it has increased radically in the years since, that my thesis is somehow wrong, I don’t follow. Well, I think it’s an open question to me whether they’ve increased radically since then versus becoming more visible because of the way these platforms amplify certain speech. You’re taking parts of the thesis out and you’re saying, “Well, I’m not sure that it works.” So it’s like, if you take the thesis apart, then yeah, then maybe things start to fall apart. But the thesis is that the reason that these people have these abilities is because we fail to apply traditional anti-monopoly laws. Yeah, I agree that that’s the overarching thesis.Yeah. Okay. So what’s the issue then? So I also wanted to touch on the claim about reproductive choice. I agree that large businesses are involved in the Federalist Society, and the right’s project there is both to empower big business and to restrict abortion rights. At the same time, when I look at FEC filings, the large tech monopolists of our age throughout the past 10 years have generally given a lot more money to the Democratic Party — the pro-choice party — then to the pro-life party. If their money determined these elections, then Dobbs wouldn’t have happened. And there’s lots of small businesses and regional businesses that fund the American right. Eric, corporations are complicated things. They do a lot of different things at the same time. They curry favor on both sides. Look at Mr. Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz, right? Two months ago, he was all in for Trump. Now it looks like his friend, Harris, may win. So suddenly, he’s like, “Oh, poor Harris.” Andreessen is still out there, totally 100% in. Crazy-ass Andreessen is still out there 100% in for Trump. Musk is leaping up and down like a maniac on the stage in Pennsylvania. So really, you’re going to say because Google threw some money behind some Democrats — and even then, it’s like, was it Google or is it the individuals in the corporation? Corporations, they do with their money what makes sense for them politically. Do you think that small- and regional-sized businesses are any different in that respect? Small- and medium-sized business, they’re different because they’re less politically powerful. But can’t small business interests pool together in the Chamber of Commerce, in various other systems to … Yeah, of course, that’s their right. But it’s very different. A Chamber of Commerce is generally much less powerful as an organization than a large corporation. You got a whole bunch of different people who are working through an issue. There’s a lot of things they’re going to agree on. There’s a lot of things they’re going to disagree on. So the things they disagree on, they tend not to take political positions. So it’s just a basic rule of democracy that dividing power is going to make it less likely that an actor is going to rise up and threaten the democratic system. To play devil’s advocate, what do you make of the idea that actually, small businesses — precisely because in this country, we have this deep-seated yeoman farmer ideal, and the small proprietor has cultural cache — that this actually gives them pretty significant power over politics. Oh my god, you’re repeating to me ancient libertarian truisms. Well, but there are lots of federal regulations — labor regulations — that small businesses are exempt from while large businesses have to abide by them. And so there are these ways in which arguably, the government shows some degree of affection for small businesses that maybe is not extended to large corporations. I have no understanding of how you could actually come to that conclusion. I mean, it’s like the affection for small business is just some little crumbs that Congress tosses to the little people once every four years or once every two years. And almost any one of these, they’re recent. Go do your homework, go actually look at how the SBA operates. Look at how every one of these laws that’s designed for farming support, where that money goes to. Very little of it goes to the small actor. It’s just enough to shut them up. Other than, say, Vance and Hawley, and Warren and Klobuchar, who’s really making their business taking on big corporations? So where is this imaginary world in which the government is favoring small business over big business? Well, I guess I’m just referring specifically to both proposed legislation and actual laws that exempt companies with, say, less than 25 employees from this or that federal regulation. There seems to be a sensitivity— Wait, wait, wait, listen. The point of this conversation is not to go in and re-litigate antiquated conversations that the libertarians put together in the 1970s. If you want to have this, you go read my book. You can read my first book, you can read my second book, you can read my third book. You can read all kinds of other work that’s out there. We don’t have to waste our time — while I’m driving down the highway — having these arguments. Go do some reading. Well, I mean, I’m partially speaking for readers who haven’t necessarily done all that reading and would like to know what— No, no, this is your job. You can go read and you can explain it. Like I said, go read Cornered. Go read Liberty From All Masters. Go read Sally Hubbard’s or Jasper T. Scott’s books. There’s a lot of books that get it just from different levels, different angles. There’s all kinds of articles you can read up on. There’s been just a broad destruction of independent business across America over the last 40 years. If you want to learn some of the math, you can go get a copy of Liberty From All Masters. I do the math about Walmart. Retail was designed in the old days to serve everybody. The business was regulated to ensure that any family with some wherewithal could get into it, go out and start a business, to start a grocery. And these weren’t little rinky-dink groceries. They’re family-owned supermarkets. For a long period of time, all of the great technological advances that were made in groceries were made by independent people trying to get ahead of their rival down the street. Now, if you are Walmart and your rival down the street is Walmart, and down the next town, the rival is Walmart, you don’t have to do a damn thing. Isn’t Walmart under competitive pressure from Amazon? Oh my god. Yeah, of course, they’re under a little bit of competitive pressure from Amazon. And Google’s under a little bit of competitive pressure on certain lines of business from Apple. Right? But it doesn’t mean that this is an open and democratic system. It doesn’t mean that it’s a system that is designed to prevent fascism and the absolute concentration of power over. Again, Eric, you got to do your homework. If you wanted to have a conversation, you want to be the devil’s advocate, come at me with something that’s worthwhile. Great. I will ask you a question that maybe you’ll like better. So, the other thing I wanted to ask about from your Harper’s piece: You discussed the Supreme Court’s decision in Moody versus NetChoice. A colleague of mine wrote about it as well. At issue in that case was whether the governments of Florida and Texas could prohibit social media platforms from taking down posts based on the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression. Justice Elena Kagan argued that Texas’s proposed restrictions on content moderation would effectively compel Facebook to tolerate neo-Nazi and pro-teen suicide content on their platforms and this would constitute a violation of those firms’ rights of free speech. You suggested that by making this ruling, the liberal justices mounted as “outriders for autocracy,” and you argued that giving social media platforms the right to moderate content at their own whim was as antithetical to democracy as giving the president criminal immunity from official acts. And so, what would you say to a liberal, like my colleague, Ian Millhiser, who believes that allowing major platforms to bar pro-anorexia and pro-genocide content is actually in the public interest, and that enabling right-wing state governments to dictate which points of view private companies must platform would itself put us on a slippery slope to authoritarianism? If you go read the decision, a corporation has First Amendment rights as a corporation. Publishers have First Amendment rights as publishers. The case that we are making and what many other people are making — and this can give you a misunderstanding — is that these are platforms, not publishers. Platforms are curators. And so platforms are places where people come together to communicate with each other, where publishers come to gather with readers to share information with each other. And if you allow the master in the middle, the middle man, to manipulate that, then you have grossly interfered with the rights of the 330 million people in America — I guess, some of them are babies, so they’re not necessarily using these platforms — but every American youth relies on these platforms to communicate with other Americans. So I’d say that Kagan’s thinking is that she’s basically advocating for the suppression of the First Amendment rights of every citizen of the United States who relies on these platforms. As for the idea that Florida and Texas and Ohio are going to force these platforms to carry what the states want them to, no. It’s like there’s a missing part of this conversation, and it’s called the terms of service. All these people have a right to publish terms of service. And under terms of service, they can say, “We’re not going to carry racist material.” We can say, “We’re not going to carry stuff that we believe is harmful to kids, that seems to promote eating disorders or suicide.” So then, once you publish your terms of service, you can say, “We’re not going to publish anything that seems to advocate violence.” And it’s like, as long as you apply the terms of service equally without favor to all of your users, then you can shut down whatever you want. But is there any principle that binds what they can put into a terms of service? It seems to me that, by this logic, if the social media company establishes a politically biased term of service, then that could result in what you’re concerned about — and I’m concerned about as well — in terms of deplatforming legitimate points of view. So what legally binds a company from just crafting the terms of service so they can discriminate against whichever point of view they want to suppress? Well, the thing is that at a certain point, the Essential Facilities Doctrine, traditional American communications doctrine, is once you get to a certain size, that would be discriminatory. Political discrimination is illegal. I just want to clarify the principles here. It seems to me there’s no way to permit all political speech regardless of its perspective on social media platforms and prohibit racist speech from them (since there is a lot of racist, political speech). So I guess, how do you see resolving that? I took you as saying that basically: We should have a situation where you can express any viewpoint on these platforms — no matter how vile — if it isn’t direct harassment or a direct violent threat, but that the platform shouldn’t be amplifying that speech. Is that correct? Or what is your view? People can go to the branded publications, right? If you wanted to hear a certain kind of speech — if your morning’s not going to be complete without a big plate of racism along with your eggs and your coffee — then you can have a racist publication. You can have a Nazi publication. And the people who need that, they can go sit on the website of the publication and get what they want. That’s the beauty of America, is that you don’t need the middleman to boost it. And you can still get it, you can still go find it. Great. Well, there are a few other questions I had, but you’re running close to time, right? Yeah. I appreciate you trying to be a devil’s advocate, but I just encourage you, as you’re working through this — because you’re smart, you’re clearly asking a lot of the right questions — is just continue to do your research. Don’t react. And whenever you’re starting to see stuff that is reacting against the kind of stuff that we’re doing, just question, “Who is paying for that?” Just question who it is. Because almost every single person who’s coming at us, someone is paying for that person to come at us.

Is Halloween less scary than it used to be? A child wearing a costume goes trick or treating. | Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. I remember the first time I encountered Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It was second grade, and another kid had smuggled a copy of the Alvin Schwartz horror collection out to the playground during recess. We gathered around, repulsed yet compelled by the ghoulish illustrations, unaware that what we read next would form the script of our nightmares for the next 30 years. Scary Stories, first released in 1981 but still ubiquitous at sleepovers and back-of-the-bus scare sessions throughout the ’90s, is famous among millennials for inducing utter terror. The one that haunts me to this day is “The Dead Hand,” about a devil-may-care young lad who goes walking in a swamp at night, only to be attacked by a disembodied arm that yanks the boy’s own hand off, leaving nothing but a bloody stump. The story, with its accompanying illustration of a howling, gap-toothed corpse head rising from a bog, kept me awake for at least a week. I still remember huddling in my bed with eyes peeled, absolutely certain that an oozing hand was about to float through my bedroom door. As Halloween approached this year, I started wondering if Scary Stories was still popular, or if my children would have their own equivalent — a horror tale so powerful it could leave a mark on a generation’s subconscious. So I reached out to booksellers, librarians, and my older kid’s favorite horror author to find out what’s scaring kids these days and what role, if any, spooky stories play in their lives. I thought the children of Gen Alpha, obsessed with the frenetic doomsday fantasy Skibidi Toilet, might be too jaded to be scared. In fact, experts told me the opposite — that popular titles today, like Michael Dahl’s Really Scary Stories or the Five Nights at Freddy’s series — are a little tamer than the ones I read as a kid. “We had serious, gripping fear that kept you up at night,” Jean Darnell, the director of library science for the Philadelphia School District and a lifelong horror reader, told me. “The psychological fear was a little bit more in-depth.” There’s something to be said for a lighter touch in children’s horror. As much as I now consider Scary Stories part of my education as a writer and horror fan, I don’t actually want my kids to lie awake night after night, terrified of being attacked by a disembodied limb. But the differences between my kids’ horror landscape and my own have me thinking about what kids really get out of scary stories, and the value of such tales in a legitimately scary world. The taming of scary stories I didn’t know it at the time, but I came of age during a children’s horror boom. Scary Stories, which eventually grew to three volumes, kicked off the trend, with authors Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine soon following suit, according to Mental Floss. The latter wrote the iconic Goosebumps series, which, with its accompanying mid-’90s TV series, still looms large in the imagination of many millennials. While some were silly or bizarre, many were legitimately terrifying. The one that sticks in my mind is Welcome to Camp Nightmare, in which a boy arrives at sleepaway camp only to be menaced and gaslit by weird counselors and ultimately pressured to hunt his fellow campers with a tranquilizer gun. Though wildly popular, the Goosebumps books became a victim of their own success, with a saturated market and declining sales. By the 2000s, horror had taken a back seat to fantasy, most notably the Harry Potter series. But like a zombie, the genre has risen from the grave in recent years, even as book sales for elementary- and middle-schoolers struggle overall. Anna Hersh, co-owner of Wild Rumpus Bookstore, a children’s bookshop in Minneapolis, told me that horror books are selling well, enough to keep the store’s dedicated “Spooky Shed” stocked year-round. Popular titles include Tales From Cabin 23, an anthology series with each installment written by a different bestselling author, and Monsterious, whose monster-of-the-week vibe makes it the most obvious contemporary successor to Goosebumps, Hersh said. These are aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds, but younger readers enjoy the Creepy Tales picture books, about everyday objects and foodstuffs (underwear, carrots) that come alive and stalk Jasper, an unsuspecting rabbit. Also popular, according to Hersh, is Gustavo the Shy Ghost, a 2020 bestseller (and a favorite in my house) about a sweet ghost who struggles to connect with his fellow paranormal beings. Gustavo and its sequels are more heartwarming than scary, but they take place in a world in which werewolves, calavera-style skeletons, and invisible girls with floating eyeglasses are simply the norm. As for the classics of my youth, Wild Rumpus still stocks some Goosebumps titles, but they’re mostly graphic novel adaptations released in the 2010s. Some of the original Goosebumps plots feel dated today — Gen Alpha readers might wonder why some of the terrified protagonists didn’t just “use their cellphone and call their mom,” Hersh said. Today’s spooky stories are more likely to include heroes doing online research into the monsters and ghouls plaguing them, or they take place in fantasy worlds where such technology doesn’t exist, Hersh said. Scary stories are also just less scary than they were in the ’80s and ’90s, said Darnell, the library science director, who added that the horror simply “feels watered down.” Grown-ups are more concerned about age-appropriate subject matter than they once were, and school organizations and psychologists would be up in arms if kids’ authors today delved too deep into psychological horror, Darnell said. Young readers today are also “sort of more conservative in many ways” than kids in decades past, said Max Brallier, author (under the pen name Jack Chabert) of the Eerie Elementary books and several other spooky series. While ’90s kids were drawn in by the frightening Scary Stories covers, today’s young people might be more put off. In fact, a 2011 re-release of the books featured much less disturbing art (although fan backlash eventually led to a restoration of the original images). What spooky tales do for kids There’s nothing wrong with a little concern over children’s mental health and ability to sleep at night. After all, there’s always been a fine line between a fun scare and a traumatic memory. After Brallier saw Jaws as a child, he recalls, “The ocean and the lake and the swimming pool were ruined for me for, like, 15 years.” And as an author, he said, “You don’t want to really screw someone up.” Some adult efforts to scare children do just feel sadistic in retrospect. I had a neighbor growing up who used to answer the door on Halloween wearing a very scary werewolf mask with glowing red eyes. I do not remember this with any fondness, and I think it’s fine that such costumes for adults seem less common during trick-or-treating today. At the same time, Kathryn Jezer-Morton of the Cut recalls a complex parental stunt from her youth, complete with a cemetery, a chainsaw, and a disembodied voice coming from beneath fallen leaves. “It was an ecstatic moment of terror alongside the delicious relief of safety,” Jezer-Morton writes, and she worries that kids today are missing “the feeling of a thinning veil between worlds that is hard to describe in words but vividly conjured in memories.” For Darnell, meanwhile, scary stories are about learning to live in this world, with all its horrors. “When I’m reading a scary story, I’m looking at how that main character strategizes,” she said. Fear “forces you to problem-solve with the resources around you,” Darnell said. “I think that’s a skill that kids need.” I don’t want my kids to be psychologically scarred by the books they read — after all, the realities of a warming planet and widespread democratic backsliding are scary enough. What I want them to get from scary stories is a sense of a universe charged with mystery, the unknown always sneaking up behind us, its cold breath raising goosebumps on the backs of our necks. Or maybe that’s just what I got from scary stories. Today’s young readers will have their own relationships to horror and their own ways of seeking out what they want to feel. Even in this post-Goosebumps era, Hersh says she still encounters readers who love to be scared. “It’ll be this kid who comes in who’s just like, in the cutest little outfit, and so well-mannered, and is like, ‘What is your scariest book?’” she said. “Some people just kind of have it in them.” What I’m reading Olympian Allyson Felix is partnering with the nonprofit Chamber of Mothers to cover the cost of child care while parents vote (the program is available in North Carolina, New York, and Los Angeles). One Las Vegas high school made the decision to give students the day off on Election Day — and many will be volunteering at the polls. Do kids need “boo baskets?” Probably no. My older kid and I are reading Season of the Witch: A Spellbinding History of Witches and Other Magical Folk, a library find. It is not scary, but it does include a lot of cool spells. From my inbox Last week, I asked for your experiences with apps that track kids’ grades and assignments in school. “My sons all struggled with keeping track of assignments and turning them in,” one reader wrote. “For us, the ability to see which assignments had 0’s has been the major benefit of the grade-tracking apps. I check their grades daily and can tell them when they need to check their own grades. Then they can figure out how to rectify the omissions.” “For kids with better executive functioning issues, this might be a non-issue,” she wrote. “But my very bright kids would probably have ended up with a lot of failing grades if we weren’t checking the apps!” Next Tuesday, as you, um, may be aware, is Election Day in the US. Have you ever taken the kids in your life to vote with you? If so, what did they think of the experience? Also, if you’re a young person voting for the first time this year, please write in and tell me how it felt! You can get in touch at anna.north@vox.com.

12 h

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A child wearing a costume goes trick or treating. | Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. I remember the first time I encountered Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It was second grade, and another kid had smuggled a copy of the Alvin Schwartz horror collection out to the playground during recess. We gathered around, repulsed yet compelled by the ghoulish illustrations, unaware that what we read next would form the script of our nightmares for the next 30 years. Scary Stories, first released in 1981 but still ubiquitous at sleepovers and back-of-the-bus scare sessions throughout the ’90s, is famous among millennials for inducing utter terror. The one that haunts me to this day is “The Dead Hand,” about a devil-may-care young lad who goes walking in a swamp at night, only to be attacked by a disembodied arm that yanks the boy’s own hand off, leaving nothing but a bloody stump. The story, with its accompanying illustration of a howling, gap-toothed corpse head rising from a bog, kept me awake for at least a week. I still remember huddling in my bed with eyes peeled, absolutely certain that an oozing hand was about to float through my bedroom door. As Halloween approached this year, I started wondering if Scary Stories was still popular, or if my children would have their own equivalent — a horror tale so powerful it could leave a mark on a generation’s subconscious. So I reached out to booksellers, librarians, and my older kid’s favorite horror author to find out what’s scaring kids these days and what role, if any, spooky stories play in their lives. I thought the children of Gen Alpha, obsessed with the frenetic doomsday fantasy Skibidi Toilet, might be too jaded to be scared. In fact, experts told me the opposite — that popular titles today, like Michael Dahl’s Really Scary Stories or the Five Nights at Freddy’s series — are a little tamer than the ones I read as a kid. “We had serious, gripping fear that kept you up at night,” Jean Darnell, the director of library science for the Philadelphia School District and a lifelong horror reader, told me. “The psychological fear was a little bit more in-depth.” There’s something to be said for a lighter touch in children’s horror. As much as I now consider Scary Stories part of my education as a writer and horror fan, I don’t actually want my kids to lie awake night after night, terrified of being attacked by a disembodied limb. But the differences between my kids’ horror landscape and my own have me thinking about what kids really get out of scary stories, and the value of such tales in a legitimately scary world. The taming of scary stories I didn’t know it at the time, but I came of age during a children’s horror boom. Scary Stories, which eventually grew to three volumes, kicked off the trend, with authors Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine soon following suit, according to Mental Floss. The latter wrote the iconic Goosebumps series, which, with its accompanying mid-’90s TV series, still looms large in the imagination of many millennials. While some were silly or bizarre, many were legitimately terrifying. The one that sticks in my mind is Welcome to Camp Nightmare, in which a boy arrives at sleepaway camp only to be menaced and gaslit by weird counselors and ultimately pressured to hunt his fellow campers with a tranquilizer gun. Though wildly popular, the Goosebumps books became a victim of their own success, with a saturated market and declining sales. By the 2000s, horror had taken a back seat to fantasy, most notably the Harry Potter series. But like a zombie, the genre has risen from the grave in recent years, even as book sales for elementary- and middle-schoolers struggle overall. Anna Hersh, co-owner of Wild Rumpus Bookstore, a children’s bookshop in Minneapolis, told me that horror books are selling well, enough to keep the store’s dedicated “Spooky Shed” stocked year-round. Popular titles include Tales From Cabin 23, an anthology series with each installment written by a different bestselling author, and Monsterious, whose monster-of-the-week vibe makes it the most obvious contemporary successor to Goosebumps, Hersh said. These are aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds, but younger readers enjoy the Creepy Tales picture books, about everyday objects and foodstuffs (underwear, carrots) that come alive and stalk Jasper, an unsuspecting rabbit. Also popular, according to Hersh, is Gustavo the Shy Ghost, a 2020 bestseller (and a favorite in my house) about a sweet ghost who struggles to connect with his fellow paranormal beings. Gustavo and its sequels are more heartwarming than scary, but they take place in a world in which werewolves, calavera-style skeletons, and invisible girls with floating eyeglasses are simply the norm. As for the classics of my youth, Wild Rumpus still stocks some Goosebumps titles, but they’re mostly graphic novel adaptations released in the 2010s. Some of the original Goosebumps plots feel dated today — Gen Alpha readers might wonder why some of the terrified protagonists didn’t just “use their cellphone and call their mom,” Hersh said. Today’s spooky stories are more likely to include heroes doing online research into the monsters and ghouls plaguing them, or they take place in fantasy worlds where such technology doesn’t exist, Hersh said. Scary stories are also just less scary than they were in the ’80s and ’90s, said Darnell, the library science director, who added that the horror simply “feels watered down.” Grown-ups are more concerned about age-appropriate subject matter than they once were, and school organizations and psychologists would be up in arms if kids’ authors today delved too deep into psychological horror, Darnell said. Young readers today are also “sort of more conservative in many ways” than kids in decades past, said Max Brallier, author (under the pen name Jack Chabert) of the Eerie Elementary books and several other spooky series. While ’90s kids were drawn in by the frightening Scary Stories covers, today’s young people might be more put off. In fact, a 2011 re-release of the books featured much less disturbing art (although fan backlash eventually led to a restoration of the original images). What spooky tales do for kids There’s nothing wrong with a little concern over children’s mental health and ability to sleep at night. After all, there’s always been a fine line between a fun scare and a traumatic memory. After Brallier saw Jaws as a child, he recalls, “The ocean and the lake and the swimming pool were ruined for me for, like, 15 years.” And as an author, he said, “You don’t want to really screw someone up.” Some adult efforts to scare children do just feel sadistic in retrospect. I had a neighbor growing up who used to answer the door on Halloween wearing a very scary werewolf mask with glowing red eyes. I do not remember this with any fondness, and I think it’s fine that such costumes for adults seem less common during trick-or-treating today. At the same time, Kathryn Jezer-Morton of the Cut recalls a complex parental stunt from her youth, complete with a cemetery, a chainsaw, and a disembodied voice coming from beneath fallen leaves. “It was an ecstatic moment of terror alongside the delicious relief of safety,” Jezer-Morton writes, and she worries that kids today are missing “the feeling of a thinning veil between worlds that is hard to describe in words but vividly conjured in memories.” For Darnell, meanwhile, scary stories are about learning to live in this world, with all its horrors. “When I’m reading a scary story, I’m looking at how that main character strategizes,” she said. Fear “forces you to problem-solve with the resources around you,” Darnell said. “I think that’s a skill that kids need.” I don’t want my kids to be psychologically scarred by the books they read — after all, the realities of a warming planet and widespread democratic backsliding are scary enough. What I want them to get from scary stories is a sense of a universe charged with mystery, the unknown always sneaking up behind us, its cold breath raising goosebumps on the backs of our necks. Or maybe that’s just what I got from scary stories. Today’s young readers will have their own relationships to horror and their own ways of seeking out what they want to feel. Even in this post-Goosebumps era, Hersh says she still encounters readers who love to be scared. “It’ll be this kid who comes in who’s just like, in the cutest little outfit, and so well-mannered, and is like, ‘What is your scariest book?’” she said. “Some people just kind of have it in them.” What I’m reading Olympian Allyson Felix is partnering with the nonprofit Chamber of Mothers to cover the cost of child care while parents vote (the program is available in North Carolina, New York, and Los Angeles). One Las Vegas high school made the decision to give students the day off on Election Day — and many will be volunteering at the polls. Do kids need “boo baskets?” Probably no. My older kid and I are reading Season of the Witch: A Spellbinding History of Witches and Other Magical Folk, a library find. It is not scary, but it does include a lot of cool spells. From my inbox Last week, I asked for your experiences with apps that track kids’ grades and assignments in school. “My sons all struggled with keeping track of assignments and turning them in,” one reader wrote. “For us, the ability to see which assignments had 0’s has been the major benefit of the grade-tracking apps. I check their grades daily and can tell them when they need to check their own grades. Then they can figure out how to rectify the omissions.” “For kids with better executive functioning issues, this might be a non-issue,” she wrote. “But my very bright kids would probably have ended up with a lot of failing grades if we weren’t checking the apps!” Next Tuesday, as you, um, may be aware, is Election Day in the US. Have you ever taken the kids in your life to vote with you? If so, what did they think of the experience? Also, if you’re a young person voting for the first time this year, please write in and tell me how it felt! You can get in touch at anna.north@vox.com.

Diddy was hiding in plain sight Sean Combs a.k.a Puff Daddy performing at the World Music Awards in 1998 in Monaco. | David Lefranc/Kipa/Sygma via Getty Images Video vixens posing by a pool. Celebrities and socialites crammed together on couches. Endless bottles of high-end champagne. These are just some of the indelible images that emerged from Sean “Diddy” Combs’s annual White Parties from the late ’90s to the late 2000s. Splashed across magazines and gossip columns, they cemented him as hip-hop’s foremost party boy. Out of all his roles as a public figure — producer, rapper, fashion designer, actor, media mogul — hip-hop’s Dionysus might be proving to be Combs’s most crucial and damaging one. Nearly a year after his ex-partner Cassie Ventura accused him of physical and sexual abuse, Combs has been hit with a barrage of disturbing allegations and lawsuits. He currently sits in jail without bond on federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. What were once portraits of Black wealth and excellence at his illustrious parties have now become sites for scrutiny and criminal inspection. Online sleuths have spent the past year examining photos from Combs’s Labor Day bashes and other lavish events with the same intensity applied to Jeffrey Epstein’s plane logs. It’s nearly impossible to scroll through X or TikTok without seeing posts of Diddy cuddled up with various celebrities with some unspoken implication that they were involved with his alleged misdeeds. Regrettably, this online game of “who knew what?” has fully veered into QAnon-esque territory, overshadowing legitimate concerns of complicity among Combs’s closest peers. However, the public’s obsession with Combs’s relationships underscores something difficult to grapple with: How did someone who now appears so monstrous attract so many different people into his orbit? The story of Combs’s rise and fall exposes the many fractures in a legacy that pop culture was always eager to exalt. Was Combs actually a groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind genius, or just a crafty predator? Was he a charitable force in Black culture, or someone who took credit for other people’s contributions? These questions give hip-hop fans another thing to reckon with, in addition to all of the upsetting claims against Combs. Most of all, they highlight the way society has idolized the Black entrepreneur at the expense of Black artists and the people below him. The making of an unstoppable mogul Combs proved to be a master of myth-making throughout his career, starting with his upbringing. Combs was born in Harlem in 1969 to a notorious drug dealer, who was shot and killed when Sean was 3 years old, and a mother who juggled multiple jobs to provide for Combs and his sister. While Combs often painted a completely hard-knocks portrait of his childhood — in one viral anecdote, he claimed he woke up one morning with “15 roaches on his face” — he spent a good part of his adolescence in a relatively safe, middle-class environment in Mount Vernon, New York, attending Catholic schools. In high school, Combs was swindling his classmates out of their spare change, in addition to creating other hustles for himself. He was also developing a love for the emerging genre of hip-hop. At Howard University in the late ’80s, he became a successful party-thrower on campus, eventually luring hip-hop luminaries like Heavy D, Doug E. Fresh, and Slick Rick. He would get his first industry bona fides at Uptown Records under the tutelage of founder Andre Harrell. There, he made the jump from an unpaid intern to a talent director, helping to develop artists like the all-male R&B group Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. His stint at Uptown was also where he experienced his first of several PR catastrophes. In 1991, he co-hosted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D at the City College of New York that was grossly oversold and resulted in a stampede that killed nine people. While this hardly stopped Combs’s momentum, this event can be viewed as a part of a pattern of collateral damage that Diddy was willing to leave behind on his path to industry dominance. By 1993, Combs had established his own label with the help of Clive Davis called Bad Boy Records, and his reputation as a hungry — and exploitative — executive was cementing. He recruited Bronx rapper Craig Mack and Uptown signee The Notorious B.I.G. (otherwise known as Biggie Smalls, or Christopher Wallace). It was Mack who put Bad Boy on the map with his 1994 hit “Flava In Ya Ear.” However, Combs quickly neglected Mack, focusing his promotional efforts on Smalls. In what was viewed as a controversial and cruel move, Bad Boy released Smalls’s Ready To Die just a week after Mack’s debut album Project: Funk da World, overshadowing his grand introduction onto the scene. Despite Combs’s promise of a second Mack record, Mack left the label in 1996 with one album under his belt. Combs continued to round out Bad Boy’s all-star roster throughout the mid-’90s, adding the girl group Total, the all-male group 112, powerhouse vocalist Faith Evans, rapper Mase, and the Yonkers trio The Lox. As a hit factory, Bad Boy stood out sonically. Combs and his production team, The Hitmen, were masters at blending rap with R&B hooks and splashy samples, creating the sound largely associated with ’90s cool. In its first three years, Bad Boy had made $75 million in album sales. Still, it was questionable how much Bad Boy’s artists benefited from these gains. Multiple Bad Boy signees, including rapper Mark Curry and The Lox member Lil Cease, have claimed that Smalls was forced by Diddy into signing a bad contract and was broke throughout his mainstream success. Whatever Smalls actually earned, this did not stop Combs’s marketing Bad Boy and its artists as symbols of luxury and aspirational living for struggling Black youth. Along with B.I.G., Combs had cribbed the “ghetto fabulous” ethos Harrell applied at Uptown Records. In a New Yorker interview with Harrell, journalist Danyel Smith describes the “ghetto fabulous” lifestyle as “buying your way up and out” of a lower-class economic status “even if, mentally or physically, you still live there.” While this hardly stopped Combs’s momentum, this event can be viewed as a part of a pattern of collateral damage that Diddy was willing to leave behind on his path to industry dominance. Combs made his penchant for luxury outwardly known — big chains, mink coats, monochromatic suits. He was also known for making average nightclubs feel exclusive, further popularizing the roped-off VIP section. The tough, gangsta image that defined late ’80s and early ’90s hip-hop had now been sanded down into something more aspirational and decidedly capitalist. In an oral history for GQ, Janelle Monae, who joined Bad Boy in 2008, said the label “was proof that the American dream was real for young Black artists.” “They really glitzed up hip-hop, which was pretty removed from the genre’s raw and street roots,” says Alphonse Pierre, a staff writer at Pitchfork. “It would quickly face a lot of backlash for accelerating the commodification of the genre, which was already in motion.” Indeed, the commercialization of hip-hop was already in full swing in the first half of the ’90s, with rappers proving to be worthy rivals to pop acts on the charts and permeating other areas of pop culture. In the late ’90s, hip-hop would get an even bigger stage following the fatal shootings of Smalls and rival Tupac Shakur. Although both cases remain unsolved, they’re largely attributed to the simmering rivalry between West Coast and East Coast rappers, specifically Bad Boy and Los Angeles’s Death Row Records, where Shakur was signed. In the following years and even now, as beef remains a fulcrum of rap, Pierre says their deaths “weighed on everything.” “If you read any interview or go back and trace any rap beef of the moment, those tragedies were on [rappers’] minds,” said Pierre. “I don’t think rap would ever go back to ‘normal.’ The fear is baked into the genre to this day.” Opportunism in the wake of tragedy and legal woes Despite whatever personal devastation he may have experienced, the hypervisibility and collective pain of this era of hip-hop ultimately worked to Combs’s advantage. The year of Smalls’s and Shakur’s deaths, Combs was working on his first album as a rapper, under the name Puff Daddy, called No Way Out, which was released in 1997. The first single, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” featuring Mase became a weeks-long No. 1 hit and a proclamation about the durability of his career post-Biggie. As journalist Shea Serrano wrote, “When Biggie was gunned down, most assumed Puff’s career was going to shrivel up and die right along with him.” The assumption would ring false, as No Way Out debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. A Rolling Stone cover story that year declared him “the new king of hip-hop.” For obvious reasons, Combs’s tribute to Smalls, “I’ll Be Missing You” featuring the rapper’s estranged wife Faith Evans, became the album’s signature single. Additionally, his performance of the song at the 1997 Video Music Awards marked the most profound moment in his career at that point. Joined by Evans, Mase, 112, and The Police frontman Sting, whose song “Every Breath You Take” is heavily sampled on the track, Combs moved an auditorium of musicians and celebrities to their feet for a unified moment of mourning and hope for a more positive future for hip-hop. Combs was more than just a symbol of a prickly genre; he had become a trusted ambassador. One of Combs’s first orders of business was his highly exclusive White Parties, initiated in 1998. Combs described the annual bash as an effort to break down “racial” and “generation” barriers. As Amy Dubois Barnett wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, “Not only did the White Parties open up the previously unwelcoming Hamptons for hip-hop and Black people, they made the Hamptons cool for everyone.” Likewise, he blended the stereotypically stuffy, white East Hamptons crowd that included Martha Stewart and Anna Wintour, Hollywood hotshots like Ashton Kutcher and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Black celebrities and video vixens, creating a welcome cultural exchange. White stars could brag about their proximity to an undeniably cool Black mogul — as they often did— while Combs proved his ability to transcend the Hollywood-imposed limits of Black celebrity. Combs was more than just a symbol of a prickly genre; he had become a trusted ambassador. In hindsight, clips of guests and Combs himself discussing his parties are, indeed, damning and unsettling to watch. Following Combs’s federal indictment, a video of Kutcher, who co-hosted the last White Party in 2009, refraining from sharing details about the event on an episode of Hot Ones has raised questions about the possibly criminal acts Combs’s guests may have witnessed over the years. Despite his illustrious White Parties, the late ’90s and early aughts presented several challenges for Combs. In 1999, Combs and two associates were arrested for beating music executive Steve Stoute at Interscope Records with a telephone and a champagne bottle. (Combs paid Stoute a fine and took a one-day anger-management course.) Later that year, Combs was involved in a shooting incident at a Manhattan nightclub he attended with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and Bad Boy artist Shyne Barrow. He was arrested and charged with gun possession and attempting to bribe his driver into taking the fall for him. The trial in 2001 was its own media spectacle, with the verdict broadcast on live television. In what became another shocking tale of luck, Combs was ultimately acquitted on all charges. Meanwhile, Barrow, who claims he was set up by Diddy, spent nine years in prison for gun possession before being deported to his home country of Belize. With the weight of public scrutiny, Diddy made another identity shift from Puff Daddy to “P. Diddy,” a name that Wallace had given him, in 2001. It was just one of many attempts to shake off his hard-core kingpin image. He focused on his fashion label Sean John and entered the movie business, co-starring in films Monster’s Ball and Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power. In 2004, he founded the political organization Citizen Change, most known for its Vote or Die! campaign. His relationship with MTV in the 2000s also proved to be a fruitful avenue. On his hit reality show Making The Band 2, he gave the world an inside glimpse into his role as a businessman, as he selected and trained new artists for Bad Boy. As Sheridan Singleton wrote for Collider, the series was an “exercise in masochism,” with Combs often pushing the show’s hungry musicians to sadistic limits. In the series’ most controversial moment, he makes several trainees walk almost five miles to get him a piece of cheesecake from the restaurant Junior’s, barring them from using a taxi or public transportation. These antics only cemented his power as an intimidating, macho figure and added to the shock value of the show. Recent lawsuits against Combs allege that Combs sexually assaulted two minors during auditions for the show, which his representatives have denied. The power of Diddy’s billionaire status In the 2010s, Combs dropped the P in P. Diddy, signaling another era of reinvention and unrivaled success. He formed a trio with Danity Kane member Dawn Richard and singer Kalenna Harper known as Diddy – Dirty Money and released the well-performing and critically lauded album Last Train to Paris. In 2014, Forbes named Combs the wealthiest hip-hop mogul, with an estimated net worth of $820 million, in part due to his successful partnership with the vodka brand Ciroc and his purchase of DeLeón Tequila. By the mid-2010s, Combs was fully reveling in his role as an elder statesman of rap. A star-studded tribute to Bad Boy Records at the 2015 BET Awards and subsequent reunion tour brought more attention to his cultural contributions. From then on, reminders of Combs’s impact on the music industry never really stopped: In 2022, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the BET Awards. He received the Global Icon Award at the 2023 Video Music Awards. That same month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave him the key to the city. In one of his last profiles before the ongoing legal saga, Diddy reflected on the impact of success and how he planned to utilize all the power he had accumulated in the service of others. “It clicked in and went from me to we,” he told Vanity Fair. “I was sent here not to just do those things that are kind of rooted in personal success.” Combs would go on to throw some of his money at good causes and reassign publishing rights to some of Bad Boy’s artists. But for many of his critics, his legacy as a self-promoting billionaire had already been cemented. There were the decades of damage Combs has caused to his artists and others but, more broadly, the harmful ways he influenced hip-hop as a culture. Jared Ball, author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, says that Combs “represented the increasing success of the corporate world to colonize the already-colonized Black community.” “When hip-hop emerged, it had everything,” Ball says. “You had some radical and Black nationalist messages. But he was able to take advantage of a broader desire to politically weaken and undermine this emerging cultural expression. He oversaw the rise of the most material and capitalist form of the art.” Combs was like many Black entrepreneurs who frame their material success as revolutionary while preaching about Black excellence. These statements have long been called into question, according to Ball. However, in wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, hip-hop fans on social media have taken these billionaires to task for their capitalist-driven approaches to activism and questionable ways of earning their wealth. Jay-Z and Beyoncé have received large amounts of criticism over the past decade for advocating for personal wealth as a route to Black liberation. Pharrell Williams is another Black music mogul who’s been accused of signing young artists into bad deals and stealing money from colleagues, although his representatives pushed back on the latter characterization. Despite all of this, they’re still widely celebrated as businessmen and showered with awards and tributes for their impact on the Black community. This tendency to uplift wealthy Black moguls continues to shield these men (and the occasional woman) from accountability, particularly when they’re exposed for harming women. Another hip-hop mogul, Dr. Dre — who has a well-recorded history of allegations of physical abuse against Black women — had a lifetime achievement award named after him at the Grammys just last year. Despite a slew of sexual misconduct allegations and lawsuits that emerged during the #MeToo movement, Russell Simmons has maintained relationships with Black media, including — maybe not ironically — Revolt TV, formerly owned by Combs. Needless to say, it was a gross amount of wealth that afforded Combs the ability to allegedly run an extensive criminal enterprise and coerce his accusers into silence for decades. With these grim circumstances in mind, it’s not surprising Combs’s behavior was hip-hop’s best-kept secret for so long. It turns out his true dilemma was never a matter of anyone holding him down, but the industry allowing him to carry on.

13 h

vox.com

Sean Combs a.k.a Puff Daddy performing at the World Music Awards in 1998 in Monaco. | David Lefranc/Kipa/Sygma via Getty Images Video vixens posing by a pool. Celebrities and socialites crammed together on couches. Endless bottles of high-end champagne. These are just some of the indelible images that emerged from Sean “Diddy” Combs’s annual White Parties from the late ’90s to the late 2000s. Splashed across magazines and gossip columns, they cemented him as hip-hop’s foremost party boy. Out of all his roles as a public figure — producer, rapper, fashion designer, actor, media mogul — hip-hop’s Dionysus might be proving to be Combs’s most crucial and damaging one. Nearly a year after his ex-partner Cassie Ventura accused him of physical and sexual abuse, Combs has been hit with a barrage of disturbing allegations and lawsuits. He currently sits in jail without bond on federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering. What were once portraits of Black wealth and excellence at his illustrious parties have now become sites for scrutiny and criminal inspection. Online sleuths have spent the past year examining photos from Combs’s Labor Day bashes and other lavish events with the same intensity applied to Jeffrey Epstein’s plane logs. It’s nearly impossible to scroll through X or TikTok without seeing posts of Diddy cuddled up with various celebrities with some unspoken implication that they were involved with his alleged misdeeds. Regrettably, this online game of “who knew what?” has fully veered into QAnon-esque territory, overshadowing legitimate concerns of complicity among Combs’s closest peers. However, the public’s obsession with Combs’s relationships underscores something difficult to grapple with: How did someone who now appears so monstrous attract so many different people into his orbit? The story of Combs’s rise and fall exposes the many fractures in a legacy that pop culture was always eager to exalt. Was Combs actually a groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind genius, or just a crafty predator? Was he a charitable force in Black culture, or someone who took credit for other people’s contributions? These questions give hip-hop fans another thing to reckon with, in addition to all of the upsetting claims against Combs. Most of all, they highlight the way society has idolized the Black entrepreneur at the expense of Black artists and the people below him. The making of an unstoppable mogul Combs proved to be a master of myth-making throughout his career, starting with his upbringing. Combs was born in Harlem in 1969 to a notorious drug dealer, who was shot and killed when Sean was 3 years old, and a mother who juggled multiple jobs to provide for Combs and his sister. While Combs often painted a completely hard-knocks portrait of his childhood — in one viral anecdote, he claimed he woke up one morning with “15 roaches on his face” — he spent a good part of his adolescence in a relatively safe, middle-class environment in Mount Vernon, New York, attending Catholic schools. In high school, Combs was swindling his classmates out of their spare change, in addition to creating other hustles for himself. He was also developing a love for the emerging genre of hip-hop. At Howard University in the late ’80s, he became a successful party-thrower on campus, eventually luring hip-hop luminaries like Heavy D, Doug E. Fresh, and Slick Rick. He would get his first industry bona fides at Uptown Records under the tutelage of founder Andre Harrell. There, he made the jump from an unpaid intern to a talent director, helping to develop artists like the all-male R&B group Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. His stint at Uptown was also where he experienced his first of several PR catastrophes. In 1991, he co-hosted an AIDS fundraiser with Heavy D at the City College of New York that was grossly oversold and resulted in a stampede that killed nine people. While this hardly stopped Combs’s momentum, this event can be viewed as a part of a pattern of collateral damage that Diddy was willing to leave behind on his path to industry dominance. By 1993, Combs had established his own label with the help of Clive Davis called Bad Boy Records, and his reputation as a hungry — and exploitative — executive was cementing. He recruited Bronx rapper Craig Mack and Uptown signee The Notorious B.I.G. (otherwise known as Biggie Smalls, or Christopher Wallace). It was Mack who put Bad Boy on the map with his 1994 hit “Flava In Ya Ear.” However, Combs quickly neglected Mack, focusing his promotional efforts on Smalls. In what was viewed as a controversial and cruel move, Bad Boy released Smalls’s Ready To Die just a week after Mack’s debut album Project: Funk da World, overshadowing his grand introduction onto the scene. Despite Combs’s promise of a second Mack record, Mack left the label in 1996 with one album under his belt. Combs continued to round out Bad Boy’s all-star roster throughout the mid-’90s, adding the girl group Total, the all-male group 112, powerhouse vocalist Faith Evans, rapper Mase, and the Yonkers trio The Lox. As a hit factory, Bad Boy stood out sonically. Combs and his production team, The Hitmen, were masters at blending rap with R&B hooks and splashy samples, creating the sound largely associated with ’90s cool. In its first three years, Bad Boy had made $75 million in album sales. Still, it was questionable how much Bad Boy’s artists benefited from these gains. Multiple Bad Boy signees, including rapper Mark Curry and The Lox member Lil Cease, have claimed that Smalls was forced by Diddy into signing a bad contract and was broke throughout his mainstream success. Whatever Smalls actually earned, this did not stop Combs’s marketing Bad Boy and its artists as symbols of luxury and aspirational living for struggling Black youth. Along with B.I.G., Combs had cribbed the “ghetto fabulous” ethos Harrell applied at Uptown Records. In a New Yorker interview with Harrell, journalist Danyel Smith describes the “ghetto fabulous” lifestyle as “buying your way up and out” of a lower-class economic status “even if, mentally or physically, you still live there.” While this hardly stopped Combs’s momentum, this event can be viewed as a part of a pattern of collateral damage that Diddy was willing to leave behind on his path to industry dominance. Combs made his penchant for luxury outwardly known — big chains, mink coats, monochromatic suits. He was also known for making average nightclubs feel exclusive, further popularizing the roped-off VIP section. The tough, gangsta image that defined late ’80s and early ’90s hip-hop had now been sanded down into something more aspirational and decidedly capitalist. In an oral history for GQ, Janelle Monae, who joined Bad Boy in 2008, said the label “was proof that the American dream was real for young Black artists.” “They really glitzed up hip-hop, which was pretty removed from the genre’s raw and street roots,” says Alphonse Pierre, a staff writer at Pitchfork. “It would quickly face a lot of backlash for accelerating the commodification of the genre, which was already in motion.” Indeed, the commercialization of hip-hop was already in full swing in the first half of the ’90s, with rappers proving to be worthy rivals to pop acts on the charts and permeating other areas of pop culture. In the late ’90s, hip-hop would get an even bigger stage following the fatal shootings of Smalls and rival Tupac Shakur. Although both cases remain unsolved, they’re largely attributed to the simmering rivalry between West Coast and East Coast rappers, specifically Bad Boy and Los Angeles’s Death Row Records, where Shakur was signed. In the following years and even now, as beef remains a fulcrum of rap, Pierre says their deaths “weighed on everything.” “If you read any interview or go back and trace any rap beef of the moment, those tragedies were on [rappers’] minds,” said Pierre. “I don’t think rap would ever go back to ‘normal.’ The fear is baked into the genre to this day.” Opportunism in the wake of tragedy and legal woes Despite whatever personal devastation he may have experienced, the hypervisibility and collective pain of this era of hip-hop ultimately worked to Combs’s advantage. The year of Smalls’s and Shakur’s deaths, Combs was working on his first album as a rapper, under the name Puff Daddy, called No Way Out, which was released in 1997. The first single, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down,” featuring Mase became a weeks-long No. 1 hit and a proclamation about the durability of his career post-Biggie. As journalist Shea Serrano wrote, “When Biggie was gunned down, most assumed Puff’s career was going to shrivel up and die right along with him.” The assumption would ring false, as No Way Out debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. A Rolling Stone cover story that year declared him “the new king of hip-hop.” For obvious reasons, Combs’s tribute to Smalls, “I’ll Be Missing You” featuring the rapper’s estranged wife Faith Evans, became the album’s signature single. Additionally, his performance of the song at the 1997 Video Music Awards marked the most profound moment in his career at that point. Joined by Evans, Mase, 112, and The Police frontman Sting, whose song “Every Breath You Take” is heavily sampled on the track, Combs moved an auditorium of musicians and celebrities to their feet for a unified moment of mourning and hope for a more positive future for hip-hop. Combs was more than just a symbol of a prickly genre; he had become a trusted ambassador. One of Combs’s first orders of business was his highly exclusive White Parties, initiated in 1998. Combs described the annual bash as an effort to break down “racial” and “generation” barriers. As Amy Dubois Barnett wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, “Not only did the White Parties open up the previously unwelcoming Hamptons for hip-hop and Black people, they made the Hamptons cool for everyone.” Likewise, he blended the stereotypically stuffy, white East Hamptons crowd that included Martha Stewart and Anna Wintour, Hollywood hotshots like Ashton Kutcher and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Black celebrities and video vixens, creating a welcome cultural exchange. White stars could brag about their proximity to an undeniably cool Black mogul — as they often did— while Combs proved his ability to transcend the Hollywood-imposed limits of Black celebrity. Combs was more than just a symbol of a prickly genre; he had become a trusted ambassador. In hindsight, clips of guests and Combs himself discussing his parties are, indeed, damning and unsettling to watch. Following Combs’s federal indictment, a video of Kutcher, who co-hosted the last White Party in 2009, refraining from sharing details about the event on an episode of Hot Ones has raised questions about the possibly criminal acts Combs’s guests may have witnessed over the years. Despite his illustrious White Parties, the late ’90s and early aughts presented several challenges for Combs. In 1999, Combs and two associates were arrested for beating music executive Steve Stoute at Interscope Records with a telephone and a champagne bottle. (Combs paid Stoute a fine and took a one-day anger-management course.) Later that year, Combs was involved in a shooting incident at a Manhattan nightclub he attended with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and Bad Boy artist Shyne Barrow. He was arrested and charged with gun possession and attempting to bribe his driver into taking the fall for him. The trial in 2001 was its own media spectacle, with the verdict broadcast on live television. In what became another shocking tale of luck, Combs was ultimately acquitted on all charges. Meanwhile, Barrow, who claims he was set up by Diddy, spent nine years in prison for gun possession before being deported to his home country of Belize. With the weight of public scrutiny, Diddy made another identity shift from Puff Daddy to “P. Diddy,” a name that Wallace had given him, in 2001. It was just one of many attempts to shake off his hard-core kingpin image. He focused on his fashion label Sean John and entered the movie business, co-starring in films Monster’s Ball and Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power. In 2004, he founded the political organization Citizen Change, most known for its Vote or Die! campaign. His relationship with MTV in the 2000s also proved to be a fruitful avenue. On his hit reality show Making The Band 2, he gave the world an inside glimpse into his role as a businessman, as he selected and trained new artists for Bad Boy. As Sheridan Singleton wrote for Collider, the series was an “exercise in masochism,” with Combs often pushing the show’s hungry musicians to sadistic limits. In the series’ most controversial moment, he makes several trainees walk almost five miles to get him a piece of cheesecake from the restaurant Junior’s, barring them from using a taxi or public transportation. These antics only cemented his power as an intimidating, macho figure and added to the shock value of the show. Recent lawsuits against Combs allege that Combs sexually assaulted two minors during auditions for the show, which his representatives have denied. The power of Diddy’s billionaire status In the 2010s, Combs dropped the P in P. Diddy, signaling another era of reinvention and unrivaled success. He formed a trio with Danity Kane member Dawn Richard and singer Kalenna Harper known as Diddy – Dirty Money and released the well-performing and critically lauded album Last Train to Paris. In 2014, Forbes named Combs the wealthiest hip-hop mogul, with an estimated net worth of $820 million, in part due to his successful partnership with the vodka brand Ciroc and his purchase of DeLeón Tequila. By the mid-2010s, Combs was fully reveling in his role as an elder statesman of rap. A star-studded tribute to Bad Boy Records at the 2015 BET Awards and subsequent reunion tour brought more attention to his cultural contributions. From then on, reminders of Combs’s impact on the music industry never really stopped: In 2022, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the BET Awards. He received the Global Icon Award at the 2023 Video Music Awards. That same month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave him the key to the city. In one of his last profiles before the ongoing legal saga, Diddy reflected on the impact of success and how he planned to utilize all the power he had accumulated in the service of others. “It clicked in and went from me to we,” he told Vanity Fair. “I was sent here not to just do those things that are kind of rooted in personal success.” Combs would go on to throw some of his money at good causes and reassign publishing rights to some of Bad Boy’s artists. But for many of his critics, his legacy as a self-promoting billionaire had already been cemented. There were the decades of damage Combs has caused to his artists and others but, more broadly, the harmful ways he influenced hip-hop as a culture. Jared Ball, author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, says that Combs “represented the increasing success of the corporate world to colonize the already-colonized Black community.” “When hip-hop emerged, it had everything,” Ball says. “You had some radical and Black nationalist messages. But he was able to take advantage of a broader desire to politically weaken and undermine this emerging cultural expression. He oversaw the rise of the most material and capitalist form of the art.” Combs was like many Black entrepreneurs who frame their material success as revolutionary while preaching about Black excellence. These statements have long been called into question, according to Ball. However, in wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, hip-hop fans on social media have taken these billionaires to task for their capitalist-driven approaches to activism and questionable ways of earning their wealth. Jay-Z and Beyoncé have received large amounts of criticism over the past decade for advocating for personal wealth as a route to Black liberation. Pharrell Williams is another Black music mogul who’s been accused of signing young artists into bad deals and stealing money from colleagues, although his representatives pushed back on the latter characterization. Despite all of this, they’re still widely celebrated as businessmen and showered with awards and tributes for their impact on the Black community. This tendency to uplift wealthy Black moguls continues to shield these men (and the occasional woman) from accountability, particularly when they’re exposed for harming women. Another hip-hop mogul, Dr. Dre — who has a well-recorded history of allegations of physical abuse against Black women — had a lifetime achievement award named after him at the Grammys just last year. Despite a slew of sexual misconduct allegations and lawsuits that emerged during the #MeToo movement, Russell Simmons has maintained relationships with Black media, including — maybe not ironically — Revolt TV, formerly owned by Combs. Needless to say, it was a gross amount of wealth that afforded Combs the ability to allegedly run an extensive criminal enterprise and coerce his accusers into silence for decades. With these grim circumstances in mind, it’s not surprising Combs’s behavior was hip-hop’s best-kept secret for so long. It turns out his true dilemma was never a matter of anyone holding him down, but the industry allowing him to carry on.

Your AI-powered iPhone comes with a questionable carbon footprint The Apple Store in New York City glows like the new Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence, ahead of the iPhone 16 launch in September. | Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images Apple just put AI in millions of people’s pockets. The company is rolling out what it calls Apple Intelligence this week, bringing some basic text generation and image editing features to iPhone, iPad, and Mac users who opt in. I’ve been testing these tools through the developer beta version of the software for a couple months now, and they’re pretty mediocre. But this is only the beginning. Generative AI, once a parlor trick for the tech-obsessed, is fast becoming the main event for major software releases. As Apple pushes its version of the technology, Google is building AI into its Android operating system and forcing everyone to look at AI Overviews at the top of virtually every Google Search. OpenAI and Meta are building their own AI-powered search engines, while the startup Perplexity already has one. Microsoft and Anthropic recently announced new, super-powerful AI agents that can complete complex tasks much like humans would. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) While some companies have had generative AI products out in the wild for over a year, the arrival of Apple Intelligence marks an inflection point for the mainstreaming of the technology. Apple Intelligence is only available on the latest Apple devices, but over half the phones in the United States are iPhones. As people upgrade, millions more can tap into the new technology. If you’re not already using AI, you probably will be soon — whether you like it or not. “We’re getting AI, especially generative AI, shoved down our throats with little to no transparency, and honestly, the opt-out mechanisms are either nonexistent or complicated,” said Sasha Luccioni, AI researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face, a platform for sharing AI and machine learning tools If that fills you with dread, it’s understandable. Maybe you feel bad participating in the race to build a superintelligent AI nobody asked for. You may feel complicit for using AI models trained on copyrighted material without paying the creators. You probably feel just plain bad about the flood of AI slop that’s ruining the internet even if you did not personally create the slop. Then there’s the climate consequences of it all. AI, in its many shapes and forms, requires a lot of energy and water to work. A lot. That might make you feel downright guilty about using AI. AI’s big energy appetite There’s a chance Apple Intelligence is more guilt-free than the other big AI options as far as energy is concerned. Apple says it keeps the processing for certain AI features, like GenMoji and Image Playground, entirely on your device. That means less reliance on energy-intensive data centers. We don’t know exactly how much energy AI uses at these data centers. Using data from a recent Microsoft Research study, Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at the University of California Riverside, came up with this: Asking ChatGPT to write two 200-word emails uses roughly the same amount of energy as a Tesla Model 3 would need to drive one mile. Because they generate so much heat, the processors that generated those emails would also require about four half-liter bottles of water to cool down. The consequences of such energy profligacy become clearer if you scale up. The amount of electricity used by data centers, where AI processing largely takes place, is predicted to grow by 160 percent by the end of the decade, and carbon dioxide emissions could more than double as a result, according to Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, the amount of water needed will also spike, so much so that by 2027, AI’s thirst could be equal to half the annual water withdrawal of the United Kingdom. These are all estimates based on limited data because the tech companies building AI systems, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, do not share exactly how much energy or water their models use. “We’re just looking at the black box because we have absolutely no idea of the energy consumption for interacting with the large language models,” Ren explained. He compared the situation to searching for flights on Google and being able to see the carbon emissions for each leg. “But when it comes to these large language models, there’s absolutely none, zero, no information.” The lack of transparency about AI’s energy demands also runs counter to these tech companies’ sustainability promises. There’s good reason to believe that AI is leading directly to those promises being broken. Due to increases in data center energy usage, Google saw its greenhouse gas emissions increase by 48 percent from 2019 to 2023, despite a pledge to cut emissions by 50 percent from its 2019 levels by 2030. The company no longer claims to be carbon neutral. Microsoft similarly saw a 29 percent jump in emissions from 2020 to 2023. While Microsoft has promised to be carbon negative by 2030, it is now openly struggling with ways to make that happen while keeping pace with AI innovation. What the AI dealers aren’t telling us This is what an arms race looks like. It’s worth pointing out here that all energy usages started to spike around the time that OpenAI knocked the world’s socks off with its surprise release of ChatGPT in November 2022. The chatbot became the fastest-growing app ever, capturing a hundred million users in two months and kick-starting the AI gold rush in Silicon Valley. Now, 40 percent of all venture capital money in cloud computing goes to generative AI companies. OpenAI itself announced a $6.6 billion funding round in early October — the largest venture capital round of all time — giving it a $157 billion valuation. With such staggering amounts of money at play, it’s perhaps no surprise that energy efficiency takes a back seat to growth and innovation. Companies like OpenAI want the models that power their AI technology to get bigger so they can get better and outperform competitors. And the bigger the model, the greater the energy demand — at least for now. Over time, it’s likely that performance will get more efficient thanks to advances in chip technology, data center cooling, and engineering. “Because the innovation happened so quickly around when ChatGPT burst onto the scene, you would expect, initially, for the efficiency to be at its lowest point,” Josh Parker, head of sustainability at chipmaker Nvidia, told me. Still, the most energy-intensive products are now what companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are pushing the hardest. Those include real-time chatbots, voice assistants, and search engines. These features enlist larger models and require more advanced chips to work at the same time to reduce latency, or lag. Put simply, they have to do a lot of hard math problems all at once and very quickly. That’s why it takes as much electricity as it does to run a Tesla. Apple, however, seems to present itself as an exception. As part of its promise to protect user privacy, the company says it handles as many Apple Intelligence tasks as it can on your device without sending queries to data centers. That means when you opt in to Apple Intelligence, you download a small generative AI model that can handle pretty simple tasks on your phone. Your iPhone battery, unlike a grid-connected cloud data center, has a limited amount of power, which forces Apple Intelligence to handle these tasks with some efficiency. Maybe on-device AI is the guilt-free version of the future after all. The problem, of course, is that we don’t know exactly how Apple Intelligence works. We don’t know which tasks are handled on the device, which are sent to energy-hungry Apple servers, or how much energy it all requires. I asked Apple about this, but the company did not provide specifics. Then again, not providing specifics is a bit of a theme when it comes to big tech companies explaining their AI offerings. So again, if you’re feeling dread or guilt about AI in your life, that’s understandable. It is very clear that this technology, in its current state, consumes vast and increasing amounts of energy, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and worsening human-caused climate change. It is also true that you might not have a choice, as big tech companies make generative AI more foundational to their products. You can opt out of Apple Intelligence or never opt in. But you’ll find it’s more difficult, if not impossible, to opt out of AI products from Google, Meta, and Microsoft. (If you want to try, here’s a helpful guide.) “I don’t think there’s a reason to feel guilty,” said Luccioni. “But I do think there’s a reason — as with climate change in general — to ask for more information, to ask for accountability on behalf of the companies that are selling us this stuff.” If AI is supposed to solve all our problems or destroy us all or both, it would be nice to know the details. We could ask ChatGPT, but that might be a huge waste of energy. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

13 h

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The Apple Store in New York City glows like the new Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence, ahead of the iPhone 16 launch in September. | Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images Apple just put AI in millions of people’s pockets. The company is rolling out what it calls Apple Intelligence this week, bringing some basic text generation and image editing features to iPhone, iPad, and Mac users who opt in. I’ve been testing these tools through the developer beta version of the software for a couple months now, and they’re pretty mediocre. But this is only the beginning. Generative AI, once a parlor trick for the tech-obsessed, is fast becoming the main event for major software releases. As Apple pushes its version of the technology, Google is building AI into its Android operating system and forcing everyone to look at AI Overviews at the top of virtually every Google Search. OpenAI and Meta are building their own AI-powered search engines, while the startup Perplexity already has one. Microsoft and Anthropic recently announced new, super-powerful AI agents that can complete complex tasks much like humans would. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) While some companies have had generative AI products out in the wild for over a year, the arrival of Apple Intelligence marks an inflection point for the mainstreaming of the technology. Apple Intelligence is only available on the latest Apple devices, but over half the phones in the United States are iPhones. As people upgrade, millions more can tap into the new technology. If you’re not already using AI, you probably will be soon — whether you like it or not. “We’re getting AI, especially generative AI, shoved down our throats with little to no transparency, and honestly, the opt-out mechanisms are either nonexistent or complicated,” said Sasha Luccioni, AI researcher and climate lead at Hugging Face, a platform for sharing AI and machine learning tools If that fills you with dread, it’s understandable. Maybe you feel bad participating in the race to build a superintelligent AI nobody asked for. You may feel complicit for using AI models trained on copyrighted material without paying the creators. You probably feel just plain bad about the flood of AI slop that’s ruining the internet even if you did not personally create the slop. Then there’s the climate consequences of it all. AI, in its many shapes and forms, requires a lot of energy and water to work. A lot. That might make you feel downright guilty about using AI. AI’s big energy appetite There’s a chance Apple Intelligence is more guilt-free than the other big AI options as far as energy is concerned. Apple says it keeps the processing for certain AI features, like GenMoji and Image Playground, entirely on your device. That means less reliance on energy-intensive data centers. We don’t know exactly how much energy AI uses at these data centers. Using data from a recent Microsoft Research study, Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at the University of California Riverside, came up with this: Asking ChatGPT to write two 200-word emails uses roughly the same amount of energy as a Tesla Model 3 would need to drive one mile. Because they generate so much heat, the processors that generated those emails would also require about four half-liter bottles of water to cool down. The consequences of such energy profligacy become clearer if you scale up. The amount of electricity used by data centers, where AI processing largely takes place, is predicted to grow by 160 percent by the end of the decade, and carbon dioxide emissions could more than double as a result, according to Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, the amount of water needed will also spike, so much so that by 2027, AI’s thirst could be equal to half the annual water withdrawal of the United Kingdom. These are all estimates based on limited data because the tech companies building AI systems, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, do not share exactly how much energy or water their models use. “We’re just looking at the black box because we have absolutely no idea of the energy consumption for interacting with the large language models,” Ren explained. He compared the situation to searching for flights on Google and being able to see the carbon emissions for each leg. “But when it comes to these large language models, there’s absolutely none, zero, no information.” The lack of transparency about AI’s energy demands also runs counter to these tech companies’ sustainability promises. There’s good reason to believe that AI is leading directly to those promises being broken. Due to increases in data center energy usage, Google saw its greenhouse gas emissions increase by 48 percent from 2019 to 2023, despite a pledge to cut emissions by 50 percent from its 2019 levels by 2030. The company no longer claims to be carbon neutral. Microsoft similarly saw a 29 percent jump in emissions from 2020 to 2023. While Microsoft has promised to be carbon negative by 2030, it is now openly struggling with ways to make that happen while keeping pace with AI innovation. What the AI dealers aren’t telling us This is what an arms race looks like. It’s worth pointing out here that all energy usages started to spike around the time that OpenAI knocked the world’s socks off with its surprise release of ChatGPT in November 2022. The chatbot became the fastest-growing app ever, capturing a hundred million users in two months and kick-starting the AI gold rush in Silicon Valley. Now, 40 percent of all venture capital money in cloud computing goes to generative AI companies. OpenAI itself announced a $6.6 billion funding round in early October — the largest venture capital round of all time — giving it a $157 billion valuation. With such staggering amounts of money at play, it’s perhaps no surprise that energy efficiency takes a back seat to growth and innovation. Companies like OpenAI want the models that power their AI technology to get bigger so they can get better and outperform competitors. And the bigger the model, the greater the energy demand — at least for now. Over time, it’s likely that performance will get more efficient thanks to advances in chip technology, data center cooling, and engineering. “Because the innovation happened so quickly around when ChatGPT burst onto the scene, you would expect, initially, for the efficiency to be at its lowest point,” Josh Parker, head of sustainability at chipmaker Nvidia, told me. Still, the most energy-intensive products are now what companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are pushing the hardest. Those include real-time chatbots, voice assistants, and search engines. These features enlist larger models and require more advanced chips to work at the same time to reduce latency, or lag. Put simply, they have to do a lot of hard math problems all at once and very quickly. That’s why it takes as much electricity as it does to run a Tesla. Apple, however, seems to present itself as an exception. As part of its promise to protect user privacy, the company says it handles as many Apple Intelligence tasks as it can on your device without sending queries to data centers. That means when you opt in to Apple Intelligence, you download a small generative AI model that can handle pretty simple tasks on your phone. Your iPhone battery, unlike a grid-connected cloud data center, has a limited amount of power, which forces Apple Intelligence to handle these tasks with some efficiency. Maybe on-device AI is the guilt-free version of the future after all. The problem, of course, is that we don’t know exactly how Apple Intelligence works. We don’t know which tasks are handled on the device, which are sent to energy-hungry Apple servers, or how much energy it all requires. I asked Apple about this, but the company did not provide specifics. Then again, not providing specifics is a bit of a theme when it comes to big tech companies explaining their AI offerings. So again, if you’re feeling dread or guilt about AI in your life, that’s understandable. It is very clear that this technology, in its current state, consumes vast and increasing amounts of energy, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and worsening human-caused climate change. It is also true that you might not have a choice, as big tech companies make generative AI more foundational to their products. You can opt out of Apple Intelligence or never opt in. But you’ll find it’s more difficult, if not impossible, to opt out of AI products from Google, Meta, and Microsoft. (If you want to try, here’s a helpful guide.) “I don’t think there’s a reason to feel guilty,” said Luccioni. “But I do think there’s a reason — as with climate change in general — to ask for more information, to ask for accountability on behalf of the companies that are selling us this stuff.” If AI is supposed to solve all our problems or destroy us all or both, it would be nice to know the details. We could ask ChatGPT, but that might be a huge waste of energy. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Inside Trump’s ominous plan to turn civil rights law against vulnerable Americans In 2016, Christy Lopez was living her dream. She was an attorney at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division working on policing where, among other things, she led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown. Lopez believes that her work spurred meaningful policing reforms, both in Ferguson and nationwide. But when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Lopez quit. Trump, she thought, would block her team from doing any kind of worthwhile investigation into police use of force. Lopez was right. In Trump’s first year in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sharply restricted the use of consent decrees — the legal tool Lopez and her colleagues used to force change in Ferguson. Today, she is sounding the alarm: Whatever the dangers of a first Trump term were, the risks of a second dwarf them. “If Trump is elected, I would like to look back five years from now and say, ‘Oh, we were really alarmist,’” Lopez, now a law professor at Georgetown, told me. “But I do worry that it’s actually going to be far worse.” Many, many people have warned that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Many others have argued that these warnings are politically inert, that focusing on abstract concepts like “democracy” and “the rule of law” removes political debate from the concrete concerns people want addressed by government. Do people struggling to pay the bills have time to care about such matters of principle? Yet in reality, the two things are inseparable. Trump’s plan to turn the government into a tool of his own personal will would have extraordinary consequences for Americans’ everyday lives. It would disrupt, or potentially even devastate, core functions of government that we’ve long taken for granted. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a case in point. Founded by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Division is tasked with enforcing federal law regarding anti-discrimination and civil equality. This is a mammoth responsibility, covering areas of law that shape the fundamental experience of American democracy. Its attorneys launch hate crimes prosecutions, investigate discrimination in employment and housing, and sue states when their voting rules run afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Were Trump to return to power, the department could easily be turned from a tool for protecting civil rights into a means of undoing them. Trump and his allies have laid out fairly specific plans for doing just that — plans that, if enacted, would mean a far more radical and methodical transformation of the federal rights civil apparatus than what we saw in Trump’s shambolic first term. The department’s Voting Section — which played a critical role in defending the integrity of the 2020 election — would be twisted, its attorneys replaced with cronies working to validate Trump’s lies and shield Republican-controlled states from federal scrutiny. Its anti-discrimination litigators would be tasked with investigating “anti-white” discrimination, effectively turning the Civil Rights Act on the minority citizens it was written to defend. And Lopez’s former colleagues working on policing would not only let abusive cops skate, but potentially even investigate local law enforcement Trump believed weren’t aggressive enough toward alleged criminals. We can see here that a second Trump administration would likely mean the inversion of the traditional purpose of federal civil rights law. Its guardrails against authoritarianism, discrimination, and abuse of power will be twisted toward advancing them. And it’s just one of many ways in which Trump’s pursuit of power at any cost would have tangible and direct consequences for ordinary Americans’ lives. Trump’s plan to invert the Civil Rights Division, explained Donald Trump has vowed to use a second term to enact “retribution” against his enemies. The Justice Department, and specifically the current Civil Rights Division staff, are at the very top of the list. At the end of Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for civil service jobs — called Schedule F — that would have allowed him to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with handpicked allies. While Trump left office before his team could implement Schedule F, Trump has promised to re-issue the order “immediately” upon returning to office. In anticipation, his allies have compiled long lists of civil servants they’d like to fire and loyalists they’d like to put in their place — preparations that have led one expert on federal administration to conclude that 50,000 firings is now “probably a floor rather than a ceiling.” Trump’s allies have focused on the Civil Rights Division as one of their chief targets for Schedule F and other power grabs. Project 2025 — widely seen as the chief planning document for a Trump second term despite the campaign’s disavowals — has an explicit, detailed plan for taking it over. The document calls on the next Republican president to “reorganize and refocus” the division, aiming to make it into “the vanguard” of the administration’s crusade against “an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left.” It is one of three DOJ divisions singled out in the document’s call for “a vast expansion of the number of [political] appointees” overseeing and directing its conduct. This is all part of a broader plan for eroding the Justice Department’s traditional independence. While the attorney general is appointed by the president, their staff is given wide leeway to follow the law rather than the president’s dictates. Political personnel are strictly prohibited from interfering with specific investigations and cases. That’s why the current Justice Department could pursue a case against Hunter Biden with no fear of retaliation from his father. Trump and top deputies have declared their intent to change this. “The notion of an independent agency — whether that’s a flat-out independent agency like the FCC or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice — we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Russ Vought, a key second-term Trump planner, said in a 2023 interview. When you put these three proposals together — seeding the Civil Rights Division with Trump political appointees, using Schedule F to replace career prosecutors with ideological allies, and ending department independence — the full picture becomes clear. If Trump has his way, a second term means a Civil Rights Division operating not as a (relatively) neutral division dedicated to enforcing civil rights law, but as a tool of the Trump agenda in all the areas it covers. This is very threatening for government employees and obviously offensive to the notion of a neutral civil service. But what would this mean for most Americans in practice? What does it matter, really, if one bureaucrat is swapped out for another? Election law politicized On November 9, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Justice Department to investigate President Donald Trump’s allegations of fraud in the just-concluded presidential election. The probe, announced after the election had been called for Joe Biden, was controversial inside the Department. It raised fears that Barr, no stranger to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, was trying to validate Trump’s claims of a stolen election. Yet the professional probe, staffed by veteran investigators in the Civil Rights Division and elsewhere, found no evidence of mass fraud. On November 23, Barr told Trump the investigation was “not panning out.” The neutral, competent investigation gave the attorney general the ammunition he needed to stand up to the president. Now imagine if things were different, if these career investigators had been Schedule F’d out, replaced instead with Trump-aligned attorneys. What if they had come to Barr and said that, actually, the bogus statistical arguments that the election was stolen had merit? What would he have done then? How would reports of such findings, however bogus, influence the rest of the country — including Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress? It’s an example that illustrates just how important the Civil Rights Division’s work is. The American system is unusual, in global terms, by granting most power over election administration to state and local authorities. While this system makes it hard for the federal government to rig elections, it makes it comparatively easy for state-level officials to cheat and discriminate (Jim Crow being the signature example). The Civil Rights Division’s election work is one of the primary checks on such abuses. It protects the right to vote, enforcing laws like the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It also works to protect the sanctity of the results after elections, identifying and investigating allegations of illegal conduct by state and local administrators during the voting process. Its main area of responsibility is allegations of discrimination, but it also regularly cooperates with other divisions in investigating other kinds of allegations like voting fraud (as happened in November 2020). While the Supreme Court has significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division is still able to bring cases that matter. In a second Trump term, this work could be turned on its head. Instead of trying to stop abuses at the state and local level, they might at best ignore them — and at worst try to force local officials to engage in them. The chapter of Project 2025 on the Justice Department, authored by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton, sketches out how this would work in detail. It argues that Kathy Boockvar, who was Pennsylvania Secretary of State in 2020, “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” under a post-Civil War law called the Klan Act — designed, as you might guess, to break the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Boockvar’s crime, per Hamilton, was issuing a legal interpretation designed to address the unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots during the pandemic. The Secretary issued guidance to counties that if a provisional mail-in ballot were “spoiled” — meaning rendered defective through, for example, damage during the shipping process — that voters would have an opportunity to correct them. Hamilton calls this a “conspiracy against rights,” a crime laid out in the Klan Act. When I spoke to Justin Levitt, an election law expert and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, he told me that “it’s difficult to convey how crazy” such a case would be. The Pennsylvania rule is, in his mind, a very reasonable interpretation of a constitutional obligation to avoid disenfranchising people over minor ballot issues. Even if Boockvar’s interpretation were dubious, nothing in the Klan Act suggests that the Department of Justice would be empowered to prosecute her for it (as the law simply doesn’t cover good-faith mistakes by elected officials trying to count more ballots). “I know an awful lot of federal prosecutors [and] I don’t know one who would bring this case,” he tells me. Hence why Schedule F is so important. It’s almost certain that no experienced Justice Department prosecutor would bring this case, be they Democrat or Republican, because they would recognize that it’s an absurd reading of the law. But if Trump can put the Division under his thumb, inserting cronies in oversight positions and firing a huge swath of the career staff, he can get people like Hamilton in a position to do what they want. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist who studies state-level voting laws, tells me that such politically motivated prosecutions of state officials is “the most dangerous thing [the Justice Department] can do.” Even the threat of a civil rights investigation can scare state-level administrators into compliance with what the feds want. A weaponized Justice Department would mean these officials would feel significant pressure to twist their election administration systems into whatever contorted shape Trump was calling for at the moment — with potentially devastating consequences for electoral fairness. Civil wrongs While voting rights law is an especially significant area of the Civil Rights Division’s work, it’s far from the only one. The Civil Rights Division’s raison d’etre, the entire point of it being a separate and distinct component of the federal government, is to enforce the modern consensus that discrimination on the basis of identity is a pervasive and systematic problem that requires significant federal resources to address. Trump and his closest allies believe something more like the opposite, that federal civil rights law isn’t a solution to the problem of discrimination against minorities but an agent of discrimination against whites, men, and Christians. As such, they aim to flip the entire civil rights code on its head by using the Civil Rights Division as “the vanguard,” in Gene Hamilton’s language. “Anything [in law] can be weaponized,” says Kristy Parker, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who worked on policing. “That’s the problem.” Since the last Trump administration ended, top Trump aide Stephen Miller has worked with Hamilton at a new law firm — America First Legal — that focuses on “anti-white” discrimination in employment. America First filed a suit that successfully blocked a pandemic-era program to distribute financial aid to minority- and woman-owned restaurants. It sued the NFL over the Rooney Rule, which requires that teams interview at least one nonwhite candidate for high-level coaching vacancies, and it went after Northwestern University for allegedly prioritizing hires of minority and non-male faculty members. In April, Axios’ Alex Thompson reported that America First was “laying legal groundwork” for a full-court press against “anti-white racism” in the event that Trump retakes control of the Civil Rights Division. This is something that Hamilton explicitly calls for in his Project 2025 chapter. “The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” he writes. In reality, what Hamilton calls “discrimination” are actually efforts to address discrimination. There is overwhelming evidence that American society continues to allocate resources unfairly on the basis of race. Without affirmative steps to rectify this situation, entrenched inequalities like the racial gap will never disappear. What Trump and his team call “anti-white discrimination” are efforts to close gaps between groups, not open them. The Trump team aims to invert federal oversight over local prosecutors in a similar fashion. In 2023, the campaign released a policy video in which the former president vows to task the Civil Rights Division with investigating “progressive prosecutors.” The basic argument is that these prosecutors, who see part of their mission as reducing the effects of mass incarceration on the Black community, are effectively engaging in race-based discrimination in favor of Black offenders. “I will direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical left prosecutor’s offices, such as those in Chicago, LA, and San Francisco, to determine whether they have illegally engaged in race-based enforcement of the law,” Trump said. Much like the attempt to prosecute Kathy Boockvar, trying to jail “progressive prosecutors” is not something the department’s professional staff would ordinarily contemplate doing. Even if Trump succeeded in replacing them via Schedule F, it’s hard to imagine any such investigation yielding charges that could stand up in court. But the fact that such investigations would almost certainly fail to yield charges does not make them harmless. Even spurious investigations entail coercive measures — like subpoenas, searches, and audits — that can make it very difficult for “progressive prosecutors” to do their jobs. There’s also a political aspect to the threat, as many of Trump’s proposed targets are in elected posts. Elected officials are generally responsive to threats to their reelection chances, and being a target of a Department of Justice civil rights probe looks really bad to prospective voters. Consent decrees, the mechanism Christy Lopez used to deal with bias in Ferguson, are one of the most powerful tools available to federal prosecutors for addressing bias in policing — and another target in a second Trump term. The process begins with a fact-finding investigation, uncovering evidence of systematic use-of-force problems and/or racial discrimination. The next stage involves lengthy negotiations with police departments that culminate in a tangible and enforceable set of reform benchmarks for the department. If the benchmarks aren’t being met to the Civil Rights Division’s satisfaction, its attorneys can haul cops in front of a judge and demand answers. The previous Trump administration limited their use going forward, but a second one might roll them back. The Obama administration negotiated a historic number of consent decrees, but these are approaching their negotiated sunset dates. The Biden administration has tried to bargain with departments for extensions, as well as implement new ones, but police departments have been dragging their feet. Lopez believes they are anticipating the possibility of a Trump victory. “Almost any jurisdiction that is currently negotiating a consent decree is going to wait to see what happens in November,” she says. If this delaying tactic works and Trump’s Civil Rights Division vacates consent decrees across the board, Lopez warns of aggressive police being unleashed across the country. Trump’s wild rhetoric about policing — his recent statement that cops should be permitted “one really violent day” to combat crime — would further encourage abuse. The attorneys tasked with limiting police abuses would, in a second Trump administration, be responsible for encouraging them. A government “for the people” — for now As important as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is, it is far from the totality of government work. The Justice Department has eight other litigating departments beyond the Civil Rights Division, where attorneys prosecute everyone from terrorists to tax cheats. It has five separate police agencies, including the FBI and US Marshals Service. It oversees all federal prisons and studies federal criminal convictions to see if any merit presidential pardons. It has nine separate grantmaking authorities, which provide funding for local authorities supporting everything from assisting sex trafficking victims to encouraging innovation in local alternatives to policing. The Department of Justice is one of 15 federal departments, each of which has its own diverse and important set of responsibilities. There are also important agencies separate from the department structure, like the CIA and the EPA. All of them perform critical work that contributes to the standard of living Americans have come to take for granted. This work depends on experienced, dedicated civil servants who know how to do the job, and all of it could be disrupted by Trump’s plans to give their jobs to partisan hacks. Every day, the EPA works to monitor and address pollution poisoning our rivers and drinkable water. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is churning out job numbers and other reports that the Fed and other places depend on to make good economic policy. US Citizenship and Immigration Services helps keep families together, approving permanent residency and citizenship applications for foreign spouses of American citizens. The Department of Energy manages America’s nuclear weapons and power plants, making sure we don’t experience a Fukushima or Chernobyl-level disaster. Now imagine the people who know how to do this routine stuff are either thrown out of office or put under the thumbs of political commissars. That’s the danger here. Trump and his team have laid out their plans in detail, in official statements proposing a revival of Schedule F and semi-official documents like Project 2025. Even if you agree with many of their policy ideas, they need to be implemented competently and lawfully in order to work. Throughout history, in the United States and elsewhere, the imposition of political control on a civil service has been a recipe for incompetence and anti-democratic abuse. The United States has a democratic government: a deeply flawed one, but one by the people and for the people. Trump’s plan is to make it for him and his alone, and he has a decent chance of succeeding if elected. We often take our relatively novel form of government for granted; if we lose it, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

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vox.com

In 2016, Christy Lopez was living her dream. She was an attorney at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division working on policing where, among other things, she led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown. Lopez believes that her work spurred meaningful policing reforms, both in Ferguson and nationwide. But when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Lopez quit. Trump, she thought, would block her team from doing any kind of worthwhile investigation into police use of force. Lopez was right. In Trump’s first year in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sharply restricted the use of consent decrees — the legal tool Lopez and her colleagues used to force change in Ferguson. Today, she is sounding the alarm: Whatever the dangers of a first Trump term were, the risks of a second dwarf them. “If Trump is elected, I would like to look back five years from now and say, ‘Oh, we were really alarmist,’” Lopez, now a law professor at Georgetown, told me. “But I do worry that it’s actually going to be far worse.” Many, many people have warned that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Many others have argued that these warnings are politically inert, that focusing on abstract concepts like “democracy” and “the rule of law” removes political debate from the concrete concerns people want addressed by government. Do people struggling to pay the bills have time to care about such matters of principle? Yet in reality, the two things are inseparable. Trump’s plan to turn the government into a tool of his own personal will would have extraordinary consequences for Americans’ everyday lives. It would disrupt, or potentially even devastate, core functions of government that we’ve long taken for granted. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a case in point. Founded by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Division is tasked with enforcing federal law regarding anti-discrimination and civil equality. This is a mammoth responsibility, covering areas of law that shape the fundamental experience of American democracy. Its attorneys launch hate crimes prosecutions, investigate discrimination in employment and housing, and sue states when their voting rules run afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Were Trump to return to power, the department could easily be turned from a tool for protecting civil rights into a means of undoing them. Trump and his allies have laid out fairly specific plans for doing just that — plans that, if enacted, would mean a far more radical and methodical transformation of the federal rights civil apparatus than what we saw in Trump’s shambolic first term. The department’s Voting Section — which played a critical role in defending the integrity of the 2020 election — would be twisted, its attorneys replaced with cronies working to validate Trump’s lies and shield Republican-controlled states from federal scrutiny. Its anti-discrimination litigators would be tasked with investigating “anti-white” discrimination, effectively turning the Civil Rights Act on the minority citizens it was written to defend. And Lopez’s former colleagues working on policing would not only let abusive cops skate, but potentially even investigate local law enforcement Trump believed weren’t aggressive enough toward alleged criminals. We can see here that a second Trump administration would likely mean the inversion of the traditional purpose of federal civil rights law. Its guardrails against authoritarianism, discrimination, and abuse of power will be twisted toward advancing them. And it’s just one of many ways in which Trump’s pursuit of power at any cost would have tangible and direct consequences for ordinary Americans’ lives. Trump’s plan to invert the Civil Rights Division, explained Donald Trump has vowed to use a second term to enact “retribution” against his enemies. The Justice Department, and specifically the current Civil Rights Division staff, are at the very top of the list. At the end of Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for civil service jobs — called Schedule F — that would have allowed him to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with handpicked allies. While Trump left office before his team could implement Schedule F, Trump has promised to re-issue the order “immediately” upon returning to office. In anticipation, his allies have compiled long lists of civil servants they’d like to fire and loyalists they’d like to put in their place — preparations that have led one expert on federal administration to conclude that 50,000 firings is now “probably a floor rather than a ceiling.” Trump’s allies have focused on the Civil Rights Division as one of their chief targets for Schedule F and other power grabs. Project 2025 — widely seen as the chief planning document for a Trump second term despite the campaign’s disavowals — has an explicit, detailed plan for taking it over. The document calls on the next Republican president to “reorganize and refocus” the division, aiming to make it into “the vanguard” of the administration’s crusade against “an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left.” It is one of three DOJ divisions singled out in the document’s call for “a vast expansion of the number of [political] appointees” overseeing and directing its conduct. This is all part of a broader plan for eroding the Justice Department’s traditional independence. While the attorney general is appointed by the president, their staff is given wide leeway to follow the law rather than the president’s dictates. Political personnel are strictly prohibited from interfering with specific investigations and cases. That’s why the current Justice Department could pursue a case against Hunter Biden with no fear of retaliation from his father. Trump and top deputies have declared their intent to change this. “The notion of an independent agency — whether that’s a flat-out independent agency like the FCC or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice — we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Russ Vought, a key second-term Trump planner, said in a 2023 interview. When you put these three proposals together — seeding the Civil Rights Division with Trump political appointees, using Schedule F to replace career prosecutors with ideological allies, and ending department independence — the full picture becomes clear. If Trump has his way, a second term means a Civil Rights Division operating not as a (relatively) neutral division dedicated to enforcing civil rights law, but as a tool of the Trump agenda in all the areas it covers. This is very threatening for government employees and obviously offensive to the notion of a neutral civil service. But what would this mean for most Americans in practice? What does it matter, really, if one bureaucrat is swapped out for another? Election law politicized On November 9, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Justice Department to investigate President Donald Trump’s allegations of fraud in the just-concluded presidential election. The probe, announced after the election had been called for Joe Biden, was controversial inside the Department. It raised fears that Barr, no stranger to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, was trying to validate Trump’s claims of a stolen election. Yet the professional probe, staffed by veteran investigators in the Civil Rights Division and elsewhere, found no evidence of mass fraud. On November 23, Barr told Trump the investigation was “not panning out.” The neutral, competent investigation gave the attorney general the ammunition he needed to stand up to the president. Now imagine if things were different, if these career investigators had been Schedule F’d out, replaced instead with Trump-aligned attorneys. What if they had come to Barr and said that, actually, the bogus statistical arguments that the election was stolen had merit? What would he have done then? How would reports of such findings, however bogus, influence the rest of the country — including Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress? It’s an example that illustrates just how important the Civil Rights Division’s work is. The American system is unusual, in global terms, by granting most power over election administration to state and local authorities. While this system makes it hard for the federal government to rig elections, it makes it comparatively easy for state-level officials to cheat and discriminate (Jim Crow being the signature example). The Civil Rights Division’s election work is one of the primary checks on such abuses. It protects the right to vote, enforcing laws like the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It also works to protect the sanctity of the results after elections, identifying and investigating allegations of illegal conduct by state and local administrators during the voting process. Its main area of responsibility is allegations of discrimination, but it also regularly cooperates with other divisions in investigating other kinds of allegations like voting fraud (as happened in November 2020). While the Supreme Court has significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division is still able to bring cases that matter. In a second Trump term, this work could be turned on its head. Instead of trying to stop abuses at the state and local level, they might at best ignore them — and at worst try to force local officials to engage in them. The chapter of Project 2025 on the Justice Department, authored by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton, sketches out how this would work in detail. It argues that Kathy Boockvar, who was Pennsylvania Secretary of State in 2020, “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” under a post-Civil War law called the Klan Act — designed, as you might guess, to break the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Boockvar’s crime, per Hamilton, was issuing a legal interpretation designed to address the unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots during the pandemic. The Secretary issued guidance to counties that if a provisional mail-in ballot were “spoiled” — meaning rendered defective through, for example, damage during the shipping process — that voters would have an opportunity to correct them. Hamilton calls this a “conspiracy against rights,” a crime laid out in the Klan Act. When I spoke to Justin Levitt, an election law expert and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, he told me that “it’s difficult to convey how crazy” such a case would be. The Pennsylvania rule is, in his mind, a very reasonable interpretation of a constitutional obligation to avoid disenfranchising people over minor ballot issues. Even if Boockvar’s interpretation were dubious, nothing in the Klan Act suggests that the Department of Justice would be empowered to prosecute her for it (as the law simply doesn’t cover good-faith mistakes by elected officials trying to count more ballots). “I know an awful lot of federal prosecutors [and] I don’t know one who would bring this case,” he tells me. Hence why Schedule F is so important. It’s almost certain that no experienced Justice Department prosecutor would bring this case, be they Democrat or Republican, because they would recognize that it’s an absurd reading of the law. But if Trump can put the Division under his thumb, inserting cronies in oversight positions and firing a huge swath of the career staff, he can get people like Hamilton in a position to do what they want. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist who studies state-level voting laws, tells me that such politically motivated prosecutions of state officials is “the most dangerous thing [the Justice Department] can do.” Even the threat of a civil rights investigation can scare state-level administrators into compliance with what the feds want. A weaponized Justice Department would mean these officials would feel significant pressure to twist their election administration systems into whatever contorted shape Trump was calling for at the moment — with potentially devastating consequences for electoral fairness. Civil wrongs While voting rights law is an especially significant area of the Civil Rights Division’s work, it’s far from the only one. The Civil Rights Division’s raison d’etre, the entire point of it being a separate and distinct component of the federal government, is to enforce the modern consensus that discrimination on the basis of identity is a pervasive and systematic problem that requires significant federal resources to address. Trump and his closest allies believe something more like the opposite, that federal civil rights law isn’t a solution to the problem of discrimination against minorities but an agent of discrimination against whites, men, and Christians. As such, they aim to flip the entire civil rights code on its head by using the Civil Rights Division as “the vanguard,” in Gene Hamilton’s language. “Anything [in law] can be weaponized,” says Kristy Parker, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who worked on policing. “That’s the problem.” Since the last Trump administration ended, top Trump aide Stephen Miller has worked with Hamilton at a new law firm — America First Legal — that focuses on “anti-white” discrimination in employment. America First filed a suit that successfully blocked a pandemic-era program to distribute financial aid to minority- and woman-owned restaurants. It sued the NFL over the Rooney Rule, which requires that teams interview at least one nonwhite candidate for high-level coaching vacancies, and it went after Northwestern University for allegedly prioritizing hires of minority and non-male faculty members. In April, Axios’ Alex Thompson reported that America First was “laying legal groundwork” for a full-court press against “anti-white racism” in the event that Trump retakes control of the Civil Rights Division. This is something that Hamilton explicitly calls for in his Project 2025 chapter. “The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” he writes. In reality, what Hamilton calls “discrimination” are actually efforts to address discrimination. There is overwhelming evidence that American society continues to allocate resources unfairly on the basis of race. Without affirmative steps to rectify this situation, entrenched inequalities like the racial gap will never disappear. What Trump and his team call “anti-white discrimination” are efforts to close gaps between groups, not open them. The Trump team aims to invert federal oversight over local prosecutors in a similar fashion. In 2023, the campaign released a policy video in which the former president vows to task the Civil Rights Division with investigating “progressive prosecutors.” The basic argument is that these prosecutors, who see part of their mission as reducing the effects of mass incarceration on the Black community, are effectively engaging in race-based discrimination in favor of Black offenders. “I will direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical left prosecutor’s offices, such as those in Chicago, LA, and San Francisco, to determine whether they have illegally engaged in race-based enforcement of the law,” Trump said. Much like the attempt to prosecute Kathy Boockvar, trying to jail “progressive prosecutors” is not something the department’s professional staff would ordinarily contemplate doing. Even if Trump succeeded in replacing them via Schedule F, it’s hard to imagine any such investigation yielding charges that could stand up in court. But the fact that such investigations would almost certainly fail to yield charges does not make them harmless. Even spurious investigations entail coercive measures — like subpoenas, searches, and audits — that can make it very difficult for “progressive prosecutors” to do their jobs. There’s also a political aspect to the threat, as many of Trump’s proposed targets are in elected posts. Elected officials are generally responsive to threats to their reelection chances, and being a target of a Department of Justice civil rights probe looks really bad to prospective voters. Consent decrees, the mechanism Christy Lopez used to deal with bias in Ferguson, are one of the most powerful tools available to federal prosecutors for addressing bias in policing — and another target in a second Trump term. The process begins with a fact-finding investigation, uncovering evidence of systematic use-of-force problems and/or racial discrimination. The next stage involves lengthy negotiations with police departments that culminate in a tangible and enforceable set of reform benchmarks for the department. If the benchmarks aren’t being met to the Civil Rights Division’s satisfaction, its attorneys can haul cops in front of a judge and demand answers. The previous Trump administration limited their use going forward, but a second one might roll them back. The Obama administration negotiated a historic number of consent decrees, but these are approaching their negotiated sunset dates. The Biden administration has tried to bargain with departments for extensions, as well as implement new ones, but police departments have been dragging their feet. Lopez believes they are anticipating the possibility of a Trump victory. “Almost any jurisdiction that is currently negotiating a consent decree is going to wait to see what happens in November,” she says. If this delaying tactic works and Trump’s Civil Rights Division vacates consent decrees across the board, Lopez warns of aggressive police being unleashed across the country. Trump’s wild rhetoric about policing — his recent statement that cops should be permitted “one really violent day” to combat crime — would further encourage abuse. The attorneys tasked with limiting police abuses would, in a second Trump administration, be responsible for encouraging them. A government “for the people” — for now As important as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is, it is far from the totality of government work. The Justice Department has eight other litigating departments beyond the Civil Rights Division, where attorneys prosecute everyone from terrorists to tax cheats. It has five separate police agencies, including the FBI and US Marshals Service. It oversees all federal prisons and studies federal criminal convictions to see if any merit presidential pardons. It has nine separate grantmaking authorities, which provide funding for local authorities supporting everything from assisting sex trafficking victims to encouraging innovation in local alternatives to policing. The Department of Justice is one of 15 federal departments, each of which has its own diverse and important set of responsibilities. There are also important agencies separate from the department structure, like the CIA and the EPA. All of them perform critical work that contributes to the standard of living Americans have come to take for granted. This work depends on experienced, dedicated civil servants who know how to do the job, and all of it could be disrupted by Trump’s plans to give their jobs to partisan hacks. Every day, the EPA works to monitor and address pollution poisoning our rivers and drinkable water. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is churning out job numbers and other reports that the Fed and other places depend on to make good economic policy. US Citizenship and Immigration Services helps keep families together, approving permanent residency and citizenship applications for foreign spouses of American citizens. The Department of Energy manages America’s nuclear weapons and power plants, making sure we don’t experience a Fukushima or Chernobyl-level disaster. Now imagine the people who know how to do this routine stuff are either thrown out of office or put under the thumbs of political commissars. That’s the danger here. Trump and his team have laid out their plans in detail, in official statements proposing a revival of Schedule F and semi-official documents like Project 2025. Even if you agree with many of their policy ideas, they need to be implemented competently and lawfully in order to work. Throughout history, in the United States and elsewhere, the imposition of political control on a civil service has been a recipe for incompetence and anti-democratic abuse. The United States has a democratic government: a deeply flawed one, but one by the people and for the people. Trump’s plan is to make it for him and his alone, and he has a decent chance of succeeding if elected. We often take our relatively novel form of government for granted; if we lose it, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Gen Z is shocked by Trump’s Access Hollywood video. We should be, too. Former President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, October 27, 2024. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images In 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected president, today’s 18-year-olds were only 10. So when footage leaked of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women in that year’s truly horrifying October surprise, they didn’t fully understand what the tape meant or know what to make of it, if they were even aware of it at all. Now, Gen Z’s new voters are rediscovering the infamous Access Hollywood tape, with some hearing it in full for the first time. Young TikTokers are making videos reacting with somber faces to the audio of Trump’s tape, grimacing as he gets to the infamous line, “Grab ’em by the pussy.” The most popular one has nearly 1 million views. @katesullivan129 Not even sure how you can look your daughter in the eye and say you’re voting for trump hearing the way he speaks about women @Kamala HQ ♬ original sound – RepublicanVotersAgainstTrump “This is actually soooo crazyyy,” marvels a commenter on one such video. Adds another, “why is this not blown up more?!” Another: “I can’t even process this.” Dozens and dozens of them say: “Boost.” You can tell that the legions of new viewers and commenters think the tape is important and they want more people to see it, because it’s one of those Trump things the rest of us have mostly stopped talking about. It’s become a truism among adults — particularly older, embittered Democrats — who have lived through the Trump era that “lol nothing matters.” No matter how depraved Trump’s words and actions are, it seems that nothing will stop his relentless, exhausting political momentum. That is the power of his countless scandals: so many of them are so far beyond where we naively thought the line of acceptable behavior was that it’s easy to become numb. It’s easy to allow yourself to forget Donald Trump’s multitude of sins. Watching Gen Z absorb this particular Trump scandal anew for the first time, though, is a reminder that Trump’s misdeeds, particularly his decades of brazen, unapologetic sexual misconduct, still can and should shock. It’s worth remembering the specifics before we enter the voting booth in 2024, in an election that will almost certainly see millions of people voting for a known sexual abuser, and may well end with him back in the White House. So let’s not forget. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump bragged on a hot mic about sexually assaulting women, boasting, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Let’s not forget that Trump was found civilly liable just last year of sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll, with a jury concluding that a preponderance of evidence shows that he violently and nonconsensually forced himself on her. Let’s not forget that Trump has been accused of sexual assault by at least 21 other women. Let’s not forget that one of Trump’s accusers was his ex-wife Ivana, who said under oath that he violently and vindictively raped her. (She later said that she didn’t want her words to be taken in “a literal or criminal sense.”) Let’s not forget that Donald Trump put a judge on the Supreme Court who had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump selected that justice and two others for the Court with the express purpose of demolishing a woman’s right to reproductive freedom. Let’s not forget that his Supreme Court did what it was designed to do and got rid of abortion’s legal protections. Let’s not forget that after the Court demolished this right, Trump bragged that their decision was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. It was my great honor to do so!” That’s just some of what Trump’s done to women. There’s much more to remember. One of the values of a fresh generation of political actors coming of age is that they can help the rest of us see tired old atrocities clearly and cleanly once again. The moral clarity of youth can be powerful; when the country is on the verge of re-electing a sexual offender, it becomes invaluable. Maybe lol nothing matters. But let’s at least not forget any of it.

1 d

vox.com

Former President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, October 27, 2024. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images In 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected president, today’s 18-year-olds were only 10. So when footage leaked of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women in that year’s truly horrifying October surprise, they didn’t fully understand what the tape meant or know what to make of it, if they were even aware of it at all. Now, Gen Z’s new voters are rediscovering the infamous Access Hollywood tape, with some hearing it in full for the first time. Young TikTokers are making videos reacting with somber faces to the audio of Trump’s tape, grimacing as he gets to the infamous line, “Grab ’em by the pussy.” The most popular one has nearly 1 million views. @katesullivan129 Not even sure how you can look your daughter in the eye and say you’re voting for trump hearing the way he speaks about women @Kamala HQ ♬ original sound – RepublicanVotersAgainstTrump “This is actually soooo crazyyy,” marvels a commenter on one such video. Adds another, “why is this not blown up more?!” Another: “I can’t even process this.” Dozens and dozens of them say: “Boost.” You can tell that the legions of new viewers and commenters think the tape is important and they want more people to see it, because it’s one of those Trump things the rest of us have mostly stopped talking about. It’s become a truism among adults — particularly older, embittered Democrats — who have lived through the Trump era that “lol nothing matters.” No matter how depraved Trump’s words and actions are, it seems that nothing will stop his relentless, exhausting political momentum. That is the power of his countless scandals: so many of them are so far beyond where we naively thought the line of acceptable behavior was that it’s easy to become numb. It’s easy to allow yourself to forget Donald Trump’s multitude of sins. Watching Gen Z absorb this particular Trump scandal anew for the first time, though, is a reminder that Trump’s misdeeds, particularly his decades of brazen, unapologetic sexual misconduct, still can and should shock. It’s worth remembering the specifics before we enter the voting booth in 2024, in an election that will almost certainly see millions of people voting for a known sexual abuser, and may well end with him back in the White House. So let’s not forget. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump bragged on a hot mic about sexually assaulting women, boasting, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Let’s not forget that Trump was found civilly liable just last year of sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll, with a jury concluding that a preponderance of evidence shows that he violently and nonconsensually forced himself on her. Let’s not forget that Trump has been accused of sexual assault by at least 21 other women. Let’s not forget that one of Trump’s accusers was his ex-wife Ivana, who said under oath that he violently and vindictively raped her. (She later said that she didn’t want her words to be taken in “a literal or criminal sense.”) Let’s not forget that Donald Trump put a judge on the Supreme Court who had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump selected that justice and two others for the Court with the express purpose of demolishing a woman’s right to reproductive freedom. Let’s not forget that his Supreme Court did what it was designed to do and got rid of abortion’s legal protections. Let’s not forget that after the Court demolished this right, Trump bragged that their decision was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. It was my great honor to do so!” That’s just some of what Trump’s done to women. There’s much more to remember. One of the values of a fresh generation of political actors coming of age is that they can help the rest of us see tired old atrocities clearly and cleanly once again. The moral clarity of youth can be powerful; when the country is on the verge of re-electing a sexual offender, it becomes invaluable. Maybe lol nothing matters. But let’s at least not forget any of it.

The big lie behind Biden’s “garbage” gaffe scandal Joe Biden during a meeting with Nikos Christodoulides, Cyprus’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House on October 30, 2024. Joe Biden is no longer competent at speaking in public. This makes him a poor surrogate for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is also the president, and therefore an extremely prominent surrogate for the Democratic nominee. This generated a problem for Harris Tuesday night when Biden set out to criticize dehumanizing rhetoric at a recent Trump rally and ended up spouting a garbled stream of words that may or may not have dehumanized all Trump supporters as “garbage.” Conservatives have thus expressed their collective horror at the spectacle of a US president disparaging Americans whose only sin was disagreeing with him politically. But even if one stipulates that Republicans’ tendentious reading of Biden is correct, their professed outrage is not merely hypocritical but perniciously misleading. At worst, the president disparaged conservative voters momentarily, before disavowing that sentiment in his very next breath. During his time in office, meanwhile, Biden has showered federal resources on heavily Republican parts of the country. Trump, by contrast, derides progressives and immigrants as “enemies” and “vermin” without apology, and reportedly sought to block disaster aid to Democratic strongholds. There is one candidate in the 2024 race who sees wide swaths of the American public as less than human, and it is not Kamala Harris. The furor over Biden’s disjointed remarks serves to obscure this reality. Trump dehumanizes his political adversaries without apology or equivocation. Biden does not. On Sunday, at a rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” During a video call with Latino supporters Tuesday night, Biden said of the incident: And just the other day, a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something. I don’t — I — I don’t know the Puerto Rican that — that I know — or a Puerto Rico, where I’m fr— in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people.The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been. That is the official White House transcript of the remarks, at least. Republicans argue that what Biden actually said was, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [i.e., Trump’s] supporters.” In other words, Biden says he was calling Hinchcliffe’s demonization of Puerto Rico garbage, while Republicans say he was calling all Trump supporters trash. It is impossible to distinguish “supporter’s” from “supporters” by ear. So, it cannot be known with certainty what Biden intended in the moment that those words escaped his lips. The surrounding context, however, undercuts the GOP’s interpretation. Immediately after uttering his controversial statement, the president said the following: Now, Trump has di— tried to divide the country based on race, ethnicity, anything that does harm, to take their eye off the ball about what the terrible things he’s done and will do. But Kamala Harris has fought for all Americans and will be a president for all of America. It is possible that Biden intended to 1) deride all Trump supporters as “garbage,” and then 2) immediately tout Harris’s commitment to fighting for human trash. But that strikes me as unlikely, particularly since the president has never said anything like that before during his half-century in public life. Whatever Biden intended though, it is indisputable that his very next sentences disavowed the idea that Republican voters are “garbage” whose interests should be ignored. And after his event was over, Biden insisted that his intention had merely been to describe Hinchcliffe’s rhetoric as “garbage.” Trump, meanwhile, is unequivocal in his belief that Democrats constitute “enemies from within” who must be vanquished. On Fox News last weekend, Howard Kurtz told Trump that “enemies from within” is “a pretty ominous phrase, if you’re talking about other Americans.” “I think it’s accurate,” Trump replied. The Republican nominee has also suggested that some of these enemies might need to be “handled” by “the military,” likened his political opponents to “vermin,” and claimed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Just last week, Trump described America as “a garbage can for the world,” arguing that other nations deposit their human refuse into the United States through immigration. Notably, Trump’s demonization of immigrants is not confined to those who lack legal status or even citizenship. He has baselessly accused legal US residents from Haiti of eating people’s pets and vowed to deport them. And he has described American citizens who came to this country through the diversity visa lottery as “horrendous” and “the worst of the worst.” Trump did not feel compelled to disavow any of these statements after making them, nor to reassure the country that he wants to fight for every American. To the contrary, he is unabashedly committed to directing the power of the federal government against his political opponents and the millions of US residents whose presence in this country he abhors. There isn’t the slightest equivalence between Biden’s rhetorical posture toward Republican voters and Trump’s toward Democrats and immigrants. And a similar gap surfaces when one examines each president’s actual governance. Trump doesn’t just compare Americans he dislikes to garbage — he tries to treat them like it During his time in office, Trump explicitly sought to aid Americans who’d voted for him while spurning those who dared to oppose him, multiple administration officials told Politico’s E&E News. As deadly wildfires ripped through California, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid because the state had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, according to Mark Harvey, his administration’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. Harvey says that Trump only changed his mind after being shown vote totals demonstrating that there were more Trump supporters in Orange County, California, than in Iowa. Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll, former homeland security officials in the Trump administration, both back up Harvey’s story. “Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics — because they didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told The Guardian earlier this month. Carroll went on to say that his former boss, then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release federal funding to those areas following the wildfires and Hurricane Maria, respectively. Trump also withheld millions in wildfire aid from Washington in September 2020 because the state’s governor had criticized him, and the aid ultimately was not approved until Biden took office. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s memoir lends further credence to these claims. In 2019, after Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle, DeSantis asked then-President Trump to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay 100 percent of the state’s recovery costs, instead of 75 percent, as was customary. According to DeSantis’s book, Trump replied, “They love me in the Panhandle. I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Trump proceeded to order FEMA to pay 100 percent of Florida’s recovery costs. And yet, just two months earlier, he threatened to veto legislation that would have extended the same courtesy to Puerto Rico. And his administration proceeded to withhold $20 billion in hurricane relief from the island for a protracted period of time, while Trump reportedly told Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a “single dollar going to Puerto Rico.” The Biden administration has shown no comparable favoritism. To the contrary, its response to Hurricane Helene — which ravaged many conservative communities on the East Coast — has earned plaudits from Republican officials. Meanwhile, Biden’s signature piece of legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — has actually directed disproportionate funds to red states. And Biden has also directed considerable federal funds toward improving infrastructure in conservative-leaning rural areas. Trump supporters who profess outrage at Biden’s words are guilty of more than hypocrisy In sum, one presidential candidate is associated with a man who might have once referred to Republican voters as garbage momentarily — before immediately disavowing that idea, and after dutifully advancing the interests of conservative regions during his time as president. That candidate herself, meanwhile, has said, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for” and “I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not.” The other presidential candidate has personally likened large swaths of the American public to “vermin” and “garbage” — repeatedly, and without apology — after seeking to choke off federal aid to Democratic victims of wildfires, and pledging to prosecute his political opponents the next chance he gets. Any public official who condemns Harris for somehow abetting the dehumanization of ordinary Americans is not merely guilty of hypocrisy, but of wildly misleading voters about an issue of vital importance: which presidential hopeful would — and would not — treat their least favorite segments of the American public like trash.

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Joe Biden during a meeting with Nikos Christodoulides, Cyprus’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House on October 30, 2024. Joe Biden is no longer competent at speaking in public. This makes him a poor surrogate for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is also the president, and therefore an extremely prominent surrogate for the Democratic nominee. This generated a problem for Harris Tuesday night when Biden set out to criticize dehumanizing rhetoric at a recent Trump rally and ended up spouting a garbled stream of words that may or may not have dehumanized all Trump supporters as “garbage.” Conservatives have thus expressed their collective horror at the spectacle of a US president disparaging Americans whose only sin was disagreeing with him politically. But even if one stipulates that Republicans’ tendentious reading of Biden is correct, their professed outrage is not merely hypocritical but perniciously misleading. At worst, the president disparaged conservative voters momentarily, before disavowing that sentiment in his very next breath. During his time in office, meanwhile, Biden has showered federal resources on heavily Republican parts of the country. Trump, by contrast, derides progressives and immigrants as “enemies” and “vermin” without apology, and reportedly sought to block disaster aid to Democratic strongholds. There is one candidate in the 2024 race who sees wide swaths of the American public as less than human, and it is not Kamala Harris. The furor over Biden’s disjointed remarks serves to obscure this reality. Trump dehumanizes his political adversaries without apology or equivocation. Biden does not. On Sunday, at a rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” During a video call with Latino supporters Tuesday night, Biden said of the incident: And just the other day, a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something. I don’t — I — I don’t know the Puerto Rican that — that I know — or a Puerto Rico, where I’m fr— in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people.The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been. That is the official White House transcript of the remarks, at least. Republicans argue that what Biden actually said was, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [i.e., Trump’s] supporters.” In other words, Biden says he was calling Hinchcliffe’s demonization of Puerto Rico garbage, while Republicans say he was calling all Trump supporters trash. It is impossible to distinguish “supporter’s” from “supporters” by ear. So, it cannot be known with certainty what Biden intended in the moment that those words escaped his lips. The surrounding context, however, undercuts the GOP’s interpretation. Immediately after uttering his controversial statement, the president said the following: Now, Trump has di— tried to divide the country based on race, ethnicity, anything that does harm, to take their eye off the ball about what the terrible things he’s done and will do. But Kamala Harris has fought for all Americans and will be a president for all of America. It is possible that Biden intended to 1) deride all Trump supporters as “garbage,” and then 2) immediately tout Harris’s commitment to fighting for human trash. But that strikes me as unlikely, particularly since the president has never said anything like that before during his half-century in public life. Whatever Biden intended though, it is indisputable that his very next sentences disavowed the idea that Republican voters are “garbage” whose interests should be ignored. And after his event was over, Biden insisted that his intention had merely been to describe Hinchcliffe’s rhetoric as “garbage.” Trump, meanwhile, is unequivocal in his belief that Democrats constitute “enemies from within” who must be vanquished. On Fox News last weekend, Howard Kurtz told Trump that “enemies from within” is “a pretty ominous phrase, if you’re talking about other Americans.” “I think it’s accurate,” Trump replied. The Republican nominee has also suggested that some of these enemies might need to be “handled” by “the military,” likened his political opponents to “vermin,” and claimed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Just last week, Trump described America as “a garbage can for the world,” arguing that other nations deposit their human refuse into the United States through immigration. Notably, Trump’s demonization of immigrants is not confined to those who lack legal status or even citizenship. He has baselessly accused legal US residents from Haiti of eating people’s pets and vowed to deport them. And he has described American citizens who came to this country through the diversity visa lottery as “horrendous” and “the worst of the worst.” Trump did not feel compelled to disavow any of these statements after making them, nor to reassure the country that he wants to fight for every American. To the contrary, he is unabashedly committed to directing the power of the federal government against his political opponents and the millions of US residents whose presence in this country he abhors. There isn’t the slightest equivalence between Biden’s rhetorical posture toward Republican voters and Trump’s toward Democrats and immigrants. And a similar gap surfaces when one examines each president’s actual governance. Trump doesn’t just compare Americans he dislikes to garbage — he tries to treat them like it During his time in office, Trump explicitly sought to aid Americans who’d voted for him while spurning those who dared to oppose him, multiple administration officials told Politico’s E&E News. As deadly wildfires ripped through California, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid because the state had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, according to Mark Harvey, his administration’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. Harvey says that Trump only changed his mind after being shown vote totals demonstrating that there were more Trump supporters in Orange County, California, than in Iowa. Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll, former homeland security officials in the Trump administration, both back up Harvey’s story. “Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics — because they didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told The Guardian earlier this month. Carroll went on to say that his former boss, then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release federal funding to those areas following the wildfires and Hurricane Maria, respectively. Trump also withheld millions in wildfire aid from Washington in September 2020 because the state’s governor had criticized him, and the aid ultimately was not approved until Biden took office. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s memoir lends further credence to these claims. In 2019, after Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle, DeSantis asked then-President Trump to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay 100 percent of the state’s recovery costs, instead of 75 percent, as was customary. According to DeSantis’s book, Trump replied, “They love me in the Panhandle. I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Trump proceeded to order FEMA to pay 100 percent of Florida’s recovery costs. And yet, just two months earlier, he threatened to veto legislation that would have extended the same courtesy to Puerto Rico. And his administration proceeded to withhold $20 billion in hurricane relief from the island for a protracted period of time, while Trump reportedly told Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a “single dollar going to Puerto Rico.” The Biden administration has shown no comparable favoritism. To the contrary, its response to Hurricane Helene — which ravaged many conservative communities on the East Coast — has earned plaudits from Republican officials. Meanwhile, Biden’s signature piece of legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — has actually directed disproportionate funds to red states. And Biden has also directed considerable federal funds toward improving infrastructure in conservative-leaning rural areas. Trump supporters who profess outrage at Biden’s words are guilty of more than hypocrisy In sum, one presidential candidate is associated with a man who might have once referred to Republican voters as garbage momentarily — before immediately disavowing that idea, and after dutifully advancing the interests of conservative regions during his time as president. That candidate herself, meanwhile, has said, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for” and “I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not.” The other presidential candidate has personally likened large swaths of the American public to “vermin” and “garbage” — repeatedly, and without apology — after seeking to choke off federal aid to Democratic victims of wildfires, and pledging to prosecute his political opponents the next chance he gets. Any public official who condemns Harris for somehow abetting the dehumanization of ordinary Americans is not merely guilty of hypocrisy, but of wildly misleading voters about an issue of vital importance: which presidential hopeful would — and would not — treat their least favorite segments of the American public like trash.

Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation. Will a new Israeli law make it worse? Palestinian children queue for food distributed by charities in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on October 28, 2024. | Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images Israel’s parliament voted to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA) on Monday, a decision that could further impede the delivery of critical aid to Gaza as Israel continues its brutal assault there. For over 70 years, UNRWA has provided assistance and services — schools, clinics, food and cash assistance, and shelter — to the Palestinian population in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. It has continued its operations in increasingly challenging conditions throughout the war, orchestrating the distribution of humanitarian aid despite Israeli obstruction and funding shortfalls. Palestinians seeking medical care and facing crisis levels of hunger and disease have become increasingly reliant on UNWRA’s aid amid Israel’s bombardment, which has left Gaza in ruins. It’s hard to imagine Gaza’s humanitarian crisis worsening, but that is likely to happen with the UNRWA ban. UNRWA itself has provided food to more than 215,000 families in Gaza since the start of the war, but it has also coordinated the entry of more than 18,500 aid trucks into Gaza, including those operated by other nonprofit groups. The ban will shutter UNRWA’s offices in East Jerusalem, stop legal immunity for the agency’s staff in the Israeli justice system, and criminalize coordination between the Israeli military and the agency. The new regulations are the result of two new laws, both of which passed by a wide majority. Set to take effect over the next three months, the ban is part of an effort by Israeli officials to dismantle it following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. Israel accused 19 UNRWA workers of involvement in the attacks; a UN investigation concluded that 10 may have been involved and fired those individuals, but did not find evidence supporting the other cases. In the wake of those allegations, UNRWA was defunded by the US and other major donor countries. US funding hasn’t resumed, despite the firings, and Israel maintains that Hamas is deeply embedded in the agency’s Gaza operations. That leaves Palestinians who rely on UNRWA in an even more vulnerable position. “UNRWA is a lifeline for Palestinians,” said Christopher Lockyear, secretary general of the aid group Doctors Without Borders. “If implemented, the ban on UNRWA’s activities would have catastrophic implications on the dire humanitarian situation of Palestinians living in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, now and for generations to come.” What Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA means for Gaza Gaza is already experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe. The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000, though there are likely many more unreported dead under the rubble. Israeli attacks have displaced more than 2 million people, many of them multiple times. Most are living in tent encampments because housing has been destroyed on a level not seen anywhere in the world since World War II, according to the United Nations. A September report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide, found that the entire Gaza Strip is facing emergency levels of food insecurity. More than 133,000 are experiencing famine. Malnutrition has made the population more vulnerable to disease, including waterborne illnesses like polio. If the fighting goes on and humanitarian aid continues to be restricted, the IPC projects a widespread risk of famine heading into the winter months. Few humanitarian aid shipments have made it into Gaza in recent months: According to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), September marked the lowest volume of deliveries since March, when half the population was at critical and imminent risk of famine. This is not because aid isn’t available. The WFP has enough food to feed 1 million people for four months ready to go into Gaza, but the organization says it needs Israel to open up more border crossings in order to make those deliveries. Recent Israeli evacuation orders have also made it even more difficult for aid workers to operate within Gaza. The lack of available border crossings and the recent UNWRA ban all appear to contravene an International Court of Justice ruling in January demanding that Israel take steps to facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza. According to Doctors Without Borders, UNRWA currently serves as Gaza’s largest health provider, providing over 15,000 consultations daily across the Strip, and its absence would lead to more preventable deaths. NGOs also rely on UNRWA to coordinate aid deliveries and inform the Israeli military about the movements of humanitarian workers. Doctors Without Borders, for instance, anticipates that coordinating those movements with Israeli authorities will become harder and entrance permits to Gaza are more likely to be denied as a result of the decision. That could further endanger aid workers and lead to less aid getting into Gaza. The International Rescue Committee said in a statement that other NGOs cannot fill the critical role UNRWA has played in Gaza, which has well-established infrastructure and the trust of the community: “The Bill passed in the Israeli Parliament is an unprecedented attack on a UN agency and, if implemented, would only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe.” Will the US withhold weapons? Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA could potentially trigger a reaction from the US, Israel’s primary security partner, which has supplied more than $17 billion in military aid to Israel over the past year, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The US State Department and the Department of Defense had already warned Israel earlier this month that some US aid could be curtailed if the humanitarian situation in Gaza did not significantly improve within 30 days. During a press briefing Monday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the department was “concerned” about the legislation banning UNRWA and warned that “the passage of this legislation could have implications under US law and US policy.” The laws in question could include the Leahy Law, which prevents military aid to specific units suspected of gross violations of human rights, and other federal provisions that prevent military transfers to governments that block US humanitarian aid. Over the course of the past year, both Hamas and the Israeli military have been repeatedly accused of war crimes by the UN and other human rights experts. The scale of Israel’s alleged crimes amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people, according to South Africa and at least 12 other countries, as well as a number of experts. The International Court of Justice has also determined that Israel is, at the very least, not doing enough to prevent it in its prosecution of the war in Gaza. Those accusations have not been enough for the US to change its stance on aid to Israel. The Biden administration did impose a “red line” at a major military operation in Rafah in southern Gaza, but insisted that Israel’s military actions there did not meet that criteria. It’s unclear whether Israel’s UNRWA ban will result in any shifts in the US’s position, but Jesse Marks, senior advocate for the Middle East at Refugees International, said there is reason to believe that is unlikely. “The White House can draw red lines, and the Israelis can blow past those red lines with impunity,” he said. “There’s a sincere degree of skepticism of the potential that the Biden administration would push back against the Israelis in any meaningful way if the measures around UNRWA move forward.”

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Palestinian children queue for food distributed by charities in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on October 28, 2024. | Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images Israel’s parliament voted to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA) on Monday, a decision that could further impede the delivery of critical aid to Gaza as Israel continues its brutal assault there. For over 70 years, UNRWA has provided assistance and services — schools, clinics, food and cash assistance, and shelter — to the Palestinian population in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. It has continued its operations in increasingly challenging conditions throughout the war, orchestrating the distribution of humanitarian aid despite Israeli obstruction and funding shortfalls. Palestinians seeking medical care and facing crisis levels of hunger and disease have become increasingly reliant on UNWRA’s aid amid Israel’s bombardment, which has left Gaza in ruins. It’s hard to imagine Gaza’s humanitarian crisis worsening, but that is likely to happen with the UNRWA ban. UNRWA itself has provided food to more than 215,000 families in Gaza since the start of the war, but it has also coordinated the entry of more than 18,500 aid trucks into Gaza, including those operated by other nonprofit groups. The ban will shutter UNRWA’s offices in East Jerusalem, stop legal immunity for the agency’s staff in the Israeli justice system, and criminalize coordination between the Israeli military and the agency. The new regulations are the result of two new laws, both of which passed by a wide majority. Set to take effect over the next three months, the ban is part of an effort by Israeli officials to dismantle it following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. Israel accused 19 UNRWA workers of involvement in the attacks; a UN investigation concluded that 10 may have been involved and fired those individuals, but did not find evidence supporting the other cases. In the wake of those allegations, UNRWA was defunded by the US and other major donor countries. US funding hasn’t resumed, despite the firings, and Israel maintains that Hamas is deeply embedded in the agency’s Gaza operations. That leaves Palestinians who rely on UNRWA in an even more vulnerable position. “UNRWA is a lifeline for Palestinians,” said Christopher Lockyear, secretary general of the aid group Doctors Without Borders. “If implemented, the ban on UNRWA’s activities would have catastrophic implications on the dire humanitarian situation of Palestinians living in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, now and for generations to come.” What Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA means for Gaza Gaza is already experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe. The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000, though there are likely many more unreported dead under the rubble. Israeli attacks have displaced more than 2 million people, many of them multiple times. Most are living in tent encampments because housing has been destroyed on a level not seen anywhere in the world since World War II, according to the United Nations. A September report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide, found that the entire Gaza Strip is facing emergency levels of food insecurity. More than 133,000 are experiencing famine. Malnutrition has made the population more vulnerable to disease, including waterborne illnesses like polio. If the fighting goes on and humanitarian aid continues to be restricted, the IPC projects a widespread risk of famine heading into the winter months. Few humanitarian aid shipments have made it into Gaza in recent months: According to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), September marked the lowest volume of deliveries since March, when half the population was at critical and imminent risk of famine. This is not because aid isn’t available. The WFP has enough food to feed 1 million people for four months ready to go into Gaza, but the organization says it needs Israel to open up more border crossings in order to make those deliveries. Recent Israeli evacuation orders have also made it even more difficult for aid workers to operate within Gaza. The lack of available border crossings and the recent UNWRA ban all appear to contravene an International Court of Justice ruling in January demanding that Israel take steps to facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza. According to Doctors Without Borders, UNRWA currently serves as Gaza’s largest health provider, providing over 15,000 consultations daily across the Strip, and its absence would lead to more preventable deaths. NGOs also rely on UNRWA to coordinate aid deliveries and inform the Israeli military about the movements of humanitarian workers. Doctors Without Borders, for instance, anticipates that coordinating those movements with Israeli authorities will become harder and entrance permits to Gaza are more likely to be denied as a result of the decision. That could further endanger aid workers and lead to less aid getting into Gaza. The International Rescue Committee said in a statement that other NGOs cannot fill the critical role UNRWA has played in Gaza, which has well-established infrastructure and the trust of the community: “The Bill passed in the Israeli Parliament is an unprecedented attack on a UN agency and, if implemented, would only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe.” Will the US withhold weapons? Israel’s decision to ban UNRWA could potentially trigger a reaction from the US, Israel’s primary security partner, which has supplied more than $17 billion in military aid to Israel over the past year, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. The US State Department and the Department of Defense had already warned Israel earlier this month that some US aid could be curtailed if the humanitarian situation in Gaza did not significantly improve within 30 days. During a press briefing Monday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the department was “concerned” about the legislation banning UNRWA and warned that “the passage of this legislation could have implications under US law and US policy.” The laws in question could include the Leahy Law, which prevents military aid to specific units suspected of gross violations of human rights, and other federal provisions that prevent military transfers to governments that block US humanitarian aid. Over the course of the past year, both Hamas and the Israeli military have been repeatedly accused of war crimes by the UN and other human rights experts. The scale of Israel’s alleged crimes amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people, according to South Africa and at least 12 other countries, as well as a number of experts. The International Court of Justice has also determined that Israel is, at the very least, not doing enough to prevent it in its prosecution of the war in Gaza. Those accusations have not been enough for the US to change its stance on aid to Israel. The Biden administration did impose a “red line” at a major military operation in Rafah in southern Gaza, but insisted that Israel’s military actions there did not meet that criteria. It’s unclear whether Israel’s UNRWA ban will result in any shifts in the US’s position, but Jesse Marks, senior advocate for the Middle East at Refugees International, said there is reason to believe that is unlikely. “The White House can draw red lines, and the Israelis can blow past those red lines with impunity,” he said. “There’s a sincere degree of skepticism of the potential that the Biden administration would push back against the Israelis in any meaningful way if the measures around UNRWA move forward.”

Why Red 3 is still in your candy In 1990, the FDA banned the use of Red No. 3 in topical drugs and cosmetics. Its cited reasoning was that the color additive was “not shown to be safe,” because when fed to rats, Red No. 3 was found to slightly increase the risk of thyroid cancer. Today, that same dye is still found in candy corn, ring pops, Pez, and nearly 3,000 other foods that we eat, which raises the question: If it’s not safe to put on our skin … is it really safe to ingest? Many researchers, advocates, and now state lawmakers say no. Last year, California passed a bill formally banning Red No. 3 and several other additives from food in the state. The bill gives the food industry until 2027 to remove the additives from its products, and the industry is already responding, with companies like Pediasure quickly removing the dye from its shakes. The question remains, though: Where is the federal ban on Red No. 3 in food if the FDA deemed it unsafe for topical uses over 30 years ago? Vox’s podcast Explain It to Me put out an episode about dyes, too. You can check it out here.

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Who came out looking the worst on Love Is Blind Season 7 Hannah and Nick, one of Love is Blind S7’s worst couples. Behold their absolute incompatibility. | Courtesy of Netflix Another season of Love Is Blind has come and gone, and in its wake we were left with two marriages, five breakups, a villain who bullies, a gold-digging hero, and at least one secret father who never mentioned his children to his partner. Initially, season seven didn’t look like it was ever going to peak — a mini letdown since it was shot in DC and DC is notoriously one of the more annoying places to date. But it eventually ramped into one of the more memorable seasons of Love Is Blind. Mess, drama, dysfunction — this season had it all. This season’s slow build, the shenanigans that later ensued, and the attention and discourse it eventually generated bring up a question inherent to the existence of the show: What does it mean when we say Love Is Blind had a “good” season? Contrary to the show’s mission, a good season doesn’t mean that couples found love, it means people found strangers to break up with. The more outrageous and awful the breakups, the more viewers watch and keep the show in conversations. Higher ratings for Netflix are negatively correlated with marital bliss for anyone on the show. Love Is Blind has never really been about love being blind; it’s just a window for viewers to get a glimpse into some regrettable relationships. Now, in season seven, we’re getting pure chaos, the real, unfiltered stuff. But while romantic success might not be on the table, it’s still possible to win the show, in a sense. And it’s certainly possible to lose. With that in mind, here’s who came out on top, who came out looking awful, who found love, and all those who didn’t on season seven of Love Is Blind. Loser: For the 7th season running, the experiment to see if love is indeed blind Since its inception, Love Is Blind has purported to be an “experiment” to see if true love is a real thing that can transcend the superficiality of physical attraction. Also since its inception, Love Is Blind has never really been about what it says it’s about. The hit Netflix series has always had an eye for mess, and with each season, it has allowed more and more messiness to bloom. In this seventh installment, several of the participants appear to have been chosen because of their potential for drama rather than their earnest desire to be loved. From men who claim to be insecure about having so much money, to women who talk about their relationships in corporate HR speak, to trophy wives and men who live in their parents’ basement, it seems as though the casting department went out of their way to find a group of people who would yield the most incompatible couples and messiest breakups possible. That’s fine — and it makes wonderful television — but we’re still rooting a little for the scientists. Winner: Netflix At the end of the season, there were two weddings. Both couples — Garrett and Taylor, Tyler and Ashley — got married. Going by the show’s body count of people getting rejected at the ceremony, that’s a successful end-of-season! No one was dumped in front of their family, and everyone seemed so happy at the end. What’s unclear, however, is whether Ashley and Tyler will stay together. In the show, post-pods, Tyler finally told Ashley he donated his sperm to a same-sex couple. While the show was airing, tabloids reported that the relationship between Tyler, his children, and their mother was more involved than Tyler let on. Now, in the post-show post-tabloids phase, it’s unclear whether these new revelations will affect their marriage. But the engine of the show is mess. Sure, there were two happy endings, but there were seven couples to begin with. That means five relationships went up in flames. That’s very good for Netflix! Here’s how they all ended: Stephen texted a random internet woman behind Monica’s back and tried to excuse it as being drunk at a sleep study Ramses told Marissa he didn’t vibe with her energy after living with her for a couple of weeks Hannah finally cut it off with Nick after berating him for weeks about being a child Tim told Alex she was disrespectful to his parents because she was sleepy, even after he promised her dad, who has MS, that he would take care of his daughter Brittany and Leo never even made it to Mexico! These love implosions are far more watchable than the happy endings, and they keep viewers interested in the show. Maybe they’re tuning in to see Hannah reckon with the person she was during the season or to figure out what really happened between Brittany and Leo, but everyone wants to know the gritty details of why things didn’t work out and what really happens to the show’s losers. And of course, that’s why Netflix has a reunion special (and has its participants signed to contracts). Winners: Immature men To be clear: Reality TV shows are heavily edited. There have been a few seasons of the show in which men (see: season 5 Cole) are portrayed as innocent but good-hearted idiots and women as harsh shrews. Further, one of the long-running criticisms of Love Is Blind and other dating shows is that producers and editors are harsher on women than they are on men. Season seven, in all its turbulent glory, followed that pattern. Nick, Tim, and Stephen all were too immature to be in relationships. Whether it was the inability to talk about a problem, not telling your partner about the children you fathered, or sending lewd texts to a random woman from the internet, the men this season were not a prize bunch. The bar for Love Is Blind men is subterranean, yet they managed to scoot under it. Still, there was also a lot of focus on how the women in their lives were extremely scoldy, if not bullies. Hannah seemed to delight in being mean to Nick instead of dumping him. Alex, Tim’s partner, got into an off-camera fight with him in which she allegedly covered his mouth with her hand. Monica, Stephen’s partner, got mad at him for talking too much and brought up not buying her flowers (multiple times) that he had promised in the pod. While only the two people in these relationships know the entire truth about the ups and downs of their courtship, it seemed as though the show spent more time portraying the women being harsher and more severe than the immature men they were with. A lot of that has to do with how easy it is to capture the women’s active confrontations and complaints on camera versus the passive, less-visible behavior from men — like being inattentive or lacking initiative. The takeaway is that it felt as though being an unserious goof was better than being an overly serious scold, with some of the men coming away from the show looking less culpable. Not Stephen or Tyler, though; those guys were still at fault. Loser: Hannah Every season of Love Is Blind has a villain, and this series that title belongs to Hannah. The 26-year-old quit her “dream” job as a medical device sales associate to be on the show, and it was worth it because she gave us a show. After rolling through the pods — where she strategically gave hints about how good-looking she was (e.g. telling men she was a cheerleader who dates athletes, that she didn’t want to be seen just as someone who was “hot,” etc.) — she paired up with Nick, a real estate agent and ex-football player. To be fair, he also embellished about his appearance (Nick claimed to look like a “less buff” Henry Cavill). Calling this coupling a disaster is an understatement and unfair to disasters. So why is Hannah the bad guy? Yes, Nick is an adult baby and shouldn’t be in a relationship. Still, watching Hannah scold him about everything, from 401(k)s to boiling water to phone bills, from ordering him to walk a dog that doesn’t belong to him to telling him that riding hotel pool furniture would give her the ick, was painful. After being icked one evening, Hannah leaves a cryptic, bulleted note of eight or so mantras for Nick to find, with each bullet representing one thing she hates about him. At one point, she tells him that she won’t address him as an equal because she doesn’t see him as an equal. What Hannah was doing wasn’t like the one or two aforementioned instances in which some of the show’s women called out their partners for dropping the ball. It seemed like every segment that focused on the two featured Hannah haranguing Nick. Again, this could all be part of an edit, but Hannah sure gave them a lot of material. The longer this season went on, the more I wondered why Hannah — who kept talking about how unhappy she was and reminding her partner that he was inadequate — didn’t call the whole thing off sooner. The thing is, Nick has the opportunity to learn how to boil water and contribute 15 percent to his retirement. And it seems like he’d be able to learn that faster than Hannah could unlearn some of the unpleasant behavior she showed on TV. Winner: Brittany, the trophy wife On a show full of deceit (see: Tyler), it’s nice to know there are participants like Brittany who state, plainly and honestly, that they’re there for all the wrong reasons. When we first meet Brittany, we find out that she wants to be a trophy wife and that she has only dated high-profile, very successful wealthy men. Brittany does not care about finding love or meeting her soulmate. Brittany wants a man who will take care of her and let her live a life of leisure, shopping, and unlimited group fitness classes. Luckily for Brittany, she made a connection with Leo. Leo’s main storyline was that he felt insecure about inheriting tons and tons of money from his family’s art dealing business. In Brittany, he found someone who would listen to these concerns. He was so happy that someone would finally be supportive of the hardships in his life! Granted, Brittany was probably trying to figure out just how rich Leo was, but she was very invested in each conversation. Even though the two eventually picked each other for marriage, producers said cameras would no longer be following the couple — a true loss for the show and viewers at home. Winners: That one argument Ramses and Marissa had over politics If there was one moment of the show that felt genuine and important, it was the fight Marissa and Ramses had over her military service. The gist: Ramses vocally condemned the actions of the American military, specifically in destabilizing less-powerful countries and inflicting violence on people living in said countries. Marissa served in the Navy and is proud of her service, even though she said there were moments that she regretted “pushing a button” (e.g. performing military acts that caused harm to civilians). He said he wouldn’t want his child to enlist, and she disagreed. She said she felt like he was judgmental of her military tenure, he said he empathized with her because she voiced her concerns about her participation. While Marissa and Ramses eventually moved forward with their relationship, the conflict seemed to simmer beneath the surface of all of their problems. Ramses, who said he didn’t vibe with Marissa’s energy after living with her for a couple of weeks, called off the relationship before the wedding. Though they didn’t end up together, Marissa and Ramses thoughtfully articulated the politics of a serious and complicated topic. Their disagreement is the type of stuff Love Is Blind says it wants to be about — being able to fall in love or not with a person based on who they are, what they believe in, and shared values. And sometimes, just like in real life, there are some deal-breakers that you just can’t get past, no matter how much you love a person.

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Hannah and Nick, one of Love is Blind S7’s worst couples. Behold their absolute incompatibility. | Courtesy of Netflix Another season of Love Is Blind has come and gone, and in its wake we were left with two marriages, five breakups, a villain who bullies, a gold-digging hero, and at least one secret father who never mentioned his children to his partner. Initially, season seven didn’t look like it was ever going to peak — a mini letdown since it was shot in DC and DC is notoriously one of the more annoying places to date. But it eventually ramped into one of the more memorable seasons of Love Is Blind. Mess, drama, dysfunction — this season had it all. This season’s slow build, the shenanigans that later ensued, and the attention and discourse it eventually generated bring up a question inherent to the existence of the show: What does it mean when we say Love Is Blind had a “good” season? Contrary to the show’s mission, a good season doesn’t mean that couples found love, it means people found strangers to break up with. The more outrageous and awful the breakups, the more viewers watch and keep the show in conversations. Higher ratings for Netflix are negatively correlated with marital bliss for anyone on the show. Love Is Blind has never really been about love being blind; it’s just a window for viewers to get a glimpse into some regrettable relationships. Now, in season seven, we’re getting pure chaos, the real, unfiltered stuff. But while romantic success might not be on the table, it’s still possible to win the show, in a sense. And it’s certainly possible to lose. With that in mind, here’s who came out on top, who came out looking awful, who found love, and all those who didn’t on season seven of Love Is Blind. Loser: For the 7th season running, the experiment to see if love is indeed blind Since its inception, Love Is Blind has purported to be an “experiment” to see if true love is a real thing that can transcend the superficiality of physical attraction. Also since its inception, Love Is Blind has never really been about what it says it’s about. The hit Netflix series has always had an eye for mess, and with each season, it has allowed more and more messiness to bloom. In this seventh installment, several of the participants appear to have been chosen because of their potential for drama rather than their earnest desire to be loved. From men who claim to be insecure about having so much money, to women who talk about their relationships in corporate HR speak, to trophy wives and men who live in their parents’ basement, it seems as though the casting department went out of their way to find a group of people who would yield the most incompatible couples and messiest breakups possible. That’s fine — and it makes wonderful television — but we’re still rooting a little for the scientists. Winner: Netflix At the end of the season, there were two weddings. Both couples — Garrett and Taylor, Tyler and Ashley — got married. Going by the show’s body count of people getting rejected at the ceremony, that’s a successful end-of-season! No one was dumped in front of their family, and everyone seemed so happy at the end. What’s unclear, however, is whether Ashley and Tyler will stay together. In the show, post-pods, Tyler finally told Ashley he donated his sperm to a same-sex couple. While the show was airing, tabloids reported that the relationship between Tyler, his children, and their mother was more involved than Tyler let on. Now, in the post-show post-tabloids phase, it’s unclear whether these new revelations will affect their marriage. But the engine of the show is mess. Sure, there were two happy endings, but there were seven couples to begin with. That means five relationships went up in flames. That’s very good for Netflix! Here’s how they all ended: Stephen texted a random internet woman behind Monica’s back and tried to excuse it as being drunk at a sleep study Ramses told Marissa he didn’t vibe with her energy after living with her for a couple of weeks Hannah finally cut it off with Nick after berating him for weeks about being a child Tim told Alex she was disrespectful to his parents because she was sleepy, even after he promised her dad, who has MS, that he would take care of his daughter Brittany and Leo never even made it to Mexico! These love implosions are far more watchable than the happy endings, and they keep viewers interested in the show. Maybe they’re tuning in to see Hannah reckon with the person she was during the season or to figure out what really happened between Brittany and Leo, but everyone wants to know the gritty details of why things didn’t work out and what really happens to the show’s losers. And of course, that’s why Netflix has a reunion special (and has its participants signed to contracts). Winners: Immature men To be clear: Reality TV shows are heavily edited. There have been a few seasons of the show in which men (see: season 5 Cole) are portrayed as innocent but good-hearted idiots and women as harsh shrews. Further, one of the long-running criticisms of Love Is Blind and other dating shows is that producers and editors are harsher on women than they are on men. Season seven, in all its turbulent glory, followed that pattern. Nick, Tim, and Stephen all were too immature to be in relationships. Whether it was the inability to talk about a problem, not telling your partner about the children you fathered, or sending lewd texts to a random woman from the internet, the men this season were not a prize bunch. The bar for Love Is Blind men is subterranean, yet they managed to scoot under it. Still, there was also a lot of focus on how the women in their lives were extremely scoldy, if not bullies. Hannah seemed to delight in being mean to Nick instead of dumping him. Alex, Tim’s partner, got into an off-camera fight with him in which she allegedly covered his mouth with her hand. Monica, Stephen’s partner, got mad at him for talking too much and brought up not buying her flowers (multiple times) that he had promised in the pod. While only the two people in these relationships know the entire truth about the ups and downs of their courtship, it seemed as though the show spent more time portraying the women being harsher and more severe than the immature men they were with. A lot of that has to do with how easy it is to capture the women’s active confrontations and complaints on camera versus the passive, less-visible behavior from men — like being inattentive or lacking initiative. The takeaway is that it felt as though being an unserious goof was better than being an overly serious scold, with some of the men coming away from the show looking less culpable. Not Stephen or Tyler, though; those guys were still at fault. Loser: Hannah Every season of Love Is Blind has a villain, and this series that title belongs to Hannah. The 26-year-old quit her “dream” job as a medical device sales associate to be on the show, and it was worth it because she gave us a show. After rolling through the pods — where she strategically gave hints about how good-looking she was (e.g. telling men she was a cheerleader who dates athletes, that she didn’t want to be seen just as someone who was “hot,” etc.) — she paired up with Nick, a real estate agent and ex-football player. To be fair, he also embellished about his appearance (Nick claimed to look like a “less buff” Henry Cavill). Calling this coupling a disaster is an understatement and unfair to disasters. So why is Hannah the bad guy? Yes, Nick is an adult baby and shouldn’t be in a relationship. Still, watching Hannah scold him about everything, from 401(k)s to boiling water to phone bills, from ordering him to walk a dog that doesn’t belong to him to telling him that riding hotel pool furniture would give her the ick, was painful. After being icked one evening, Hannah leaves a cryptic, bulleted note of eight or so mantras for Nick to find, with each bullet representing one thing she hates about him. At one point, she tells him that she won’t address him as an equal because she doesn’t see him as an equal. What Hannah was doing wasn’t like the one or two aforementioned instances in which some of the show’s women called out their partners for dropping the ball. It seemed like every segment that focused on the two featured Hannah haranguing Nick. Again, this could all be part of an edit, but Hannah sure gave them a lot of material. The longer this season went on, the more I wondered why Hannah — who kept talking about how unhappy she was and reminding her partner that he was inadequate — didn’t call the whole thing off sooner. The thing is, Nick has the opportunity to learn how to boil water and contribute 15 percent to his retirement. And it seems like he’d be able to learn that faster than Hannah could unlearn some of the unpleasant behavior she showed on TV. Winner: Brittany, the trophy wife On a show full of deceit (see: Tyler), it’s nice to know there are participants like Brittany who state, plainly and honestly, that they’re there for all the wrong reasons. When we first meet Brittany, we find out that she wants to be a trophy wife and that she has only dated high-profile, very successful wealthy men. Brittany does not care about finding love or meeting her soulmate. Brittany wants a man who will take care of her and let her live a life of leisure, shopping, and unlimited group fitness classes. Luckily for Brittany, she made a connection with Leo. Leo’s main storyline was that he felt insecure about inheriting tons and tons of money from his family’s art dealing business. In Brittany, he found someone who would listen to these concerns. He was so happy that someone would finally be supportive of the hardships in his life! Granted, Brittany was probably trying to figure out just how rich Leo was, but she was very invested in each conversation. Even though the two eventually picked each other for marriage, producers said cameras would no longer be following the couple — a true loss for the show and viewers at home. Winners: That one argument Ramses and Marissa had over politics If there was one moment of the show that felt genuine and important, it was the fight Marissa and Ramses had over her military service. The gist: Ramses vocally condemned the actions of the American military, specifically in destabilizing less-powerful countries and inflicting violence on people living in said countries. Marissa served in the Navy and is proud of her service, even though she said there were moments that she regretted “pushing a button” (e.g. performing military acts that caused harm to civilians). He said he wouldn’t want his child to enlist, and she disagreed. She said she felt like he was judgmental of her military tenure, he said he empathized with her because she voiced her concerns about her participation. While Marissa and Ramses eventually moved forward with their relationship, the conflict seemed to simmer beneath the surface of all of their problems. Ramses, who said he didn’t vibe with Marissa’s energy after living with her for a couple of weeks, called off the relationship before the wedding. Though they didn’t end up together, Marissa and Ramses thoughtfully articulated the politics of a serious and complicated topic. Their disagreement is the type of stuff Love Is Blind says it wants to be about — being able to fall in love or not with a person based on who they are, what they believe in, and shared values. And sometimes, just like in real life, there are some deal-breakers that you just can’t get past, no matter how much you love a person.

The existential campaign issue no one is discussing Donald Trump undermined public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. What would he do in a future health emergency? | Win McNamee/Getty Images The 2024 presidential campaign has passed with the candidates barely being pressed about one of their core responsibilities: What would they do in the event of another pandemic? That’s not usually a top question for voters. But it should be. During Donald Trump’s first term, we saw the damaging consequences of a leader who is disinterested in science and unwilling to tell uncomfortable truths to his political base. The Covid-19 pandemic would have challenged any president, but evidence suggests that Trump’s leadership contributed to unnecessary deaths: as many as 40 percent of American lives lost in the first year of the pandemic, according to one estimate. Now we are staring down the threat of H5N1, or bird flu, which continues to spread through America’s dairy herds and infect an increasing number of humans. If bird flu were to spiral into a pandemic, we would look back at this as a critical time to prepare. But while the Biden-Harris administration’s response has certainly been lax in some respects, Trump is on the campaign trail threatening to defund schools that require their students to be vaccinated and pledging to install anti-public health establishment crusaders into senior roles in his White House. Trump could ascend to the presidency again even as another pandemic threat is lurking. If the worst came to pass, would the sequel be any better? Probably not, experts told me. I started reporting this story with a smidge of optimism: While Trump had clearly been a problematic communicator during Covid-19, his administration was responsible for Operation Warp Speed, which delivered effective vaccines in record-setting time and likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives. That was a major, unexpected accomplishment for which the Trump administration deserves credit. But rather than lay claim to such a big, beautiful success, Trump has mostly shunned it. Instead, he has embraced America’s most notorious vaccine skeptic, Robert F Kennedy Jr., and promised him a prominent place in the White House. That is probably a better signal of what would happen in Trump’s next term. In a future emergency, Trump “would make a political calculation, and not one based on what needed to be done,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “Infectious disease in general has been completely subsumed by a tribal lens, and the tribe that is supportive of him is antagonistic to a proactive approach to public health.” What an H5N1 response might look like under Donald Trump Let’s establish a couple of things. First, while there has been sustained concern among infectious disease experts this year about H5N1 due to a steady drip of human infections, the virus has not yet ignited a pandemic. Maybe it never will. H5N1 has been infecting humans off and on for more than 20 years. Whether it’s bird flu or something else, new diseases have been emerging more often in the 20th and 21st centuries, and many scientists expect the frequency of pandemics to only increase as climate change and globalization create more opportunities for diseases to cross over in humans and spread among them. It’s inevitable that we’ll face another pandemic. The question is only what will cause the next one, and when. For now, H5N1 is the suspect drawing the most attention. Second, the Biden administration’s response to H5N1 has been very flawed. Vanity Fair recently investigated the inaction of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has taken primary responsibility for the H5N1 response so far because most of the cases have been in livestock animals: chickens, turkeys, and now dairy cows. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Experts say the federal agency has been overly accommodating of agricultural industry interests, which has allowed the virus to continue escaping containment and tear through dairy farms across the country. The USDA has largely deferred to states to take the lead on H5N1, and state agricultural officials, especially in big farm states, are typically even more deferential to agribusiness than the federal government. In Missouri, state officials have been slow to act after the discovery of a human case with no obvious connection to farm animals. “They are overtly evading the fact that dairy cattle in Missouri are infected. They don’t want to find them,” Adalja told me. Adalja said he saw little reason to expect a Kamala Harris administration to take a substantially different approach; her public health record is essentially her record as Biden’s vice president. But Trump, if he were to take over, would actively weaken the federal government’s ability to respond to a pandemic threat. He has said he would “probably” shutter the White House pandemic office, tasked with coordinating a response across the government in a future crisis. He has threatened to cut off federal funding for schools that institute vaccine or mask mandates. He has also pledged to slash the government budget and singled out the CDC as a candidate for cuts. And while the bird flu response under Biden has been dysfunctional, there has at least been some attempt to centralize a response. The current administration has offered nearly $100 million for dairy farms to take preventive measures and has also signed a deal with Moderna to develop a new H5N1 vaccine, while adding to the stockpiles of existing flu vaccine prototypes. But in another Trump presidency, the states would probably be empowered to take an even more relaxed approach to public health, and leaders in Republican-controlled states would be motivated by the same public health skepticism as their conservative voters. The political environment would be ripe for a free-for-all in state-level responses, amplifying the divergences we saw during Covid-19, when some states allowed businesses and schools to reopen months before others did and even banned cities from setting mask or vaccine requirements. A second Trump administration would likely also be staffed by people who are even more skeptical of public health interventions than we saw in his first term. In 2020, Trump still had credible infectious disease experts on his team, like Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Deborah Birx, who served as the White House Covid response coordinator, even if he frequently undermined them. Next time, it’s unlikely there would be any such voices in the room. The internal deliberations would instead be dominated by the likes of RFK Jr. or Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado, another vaccine skeptic who has been floated as a possible Trump appointee. To lead the USDA, Trump is reportedly eyeing Texas agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, who told Vanity Fair that bird flu is “not a big deal. It’s not even a little deal.” He has refused to cooperate with the CDC on testing farm workers in his state. “Those types of people are all that’s left” to serve in a Trump administration, Adalja said. “People with expertise are not going to want to be part of it or be selected.” It’s a frightening scenario to contemplate, and it illustrates our collective difficulty planning for unlikely but potentially catastrophic events. We all just lived through an experiment in what happens when the government struggles to respond to a health crisis. Yet even at the beginning of Covid, I heard from public health experts who worried we would not internalize the pandemic’s lessons, that public health would be shunted to the side after the urgency had passed. They’ve mostly been proven right. To be clear, the failure to learn from the example of Covid and prepare now for future pandemics with smart policies — many of which you can read about in Future Perfect’s Pandemic-Proof package — is bipartisan. There has been a stark absence of public health plans from the 2024 campaign, even having endured a pandemic so recently and staring down the possibility of another one so soon. We may end up worse off as a result.

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vox.com

Donald Trump undermined public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. What would he do in a future health emergency? | Win McNamee/Getty Images The 2024 presidential campaign has passed with the candidates barely being pressed about one of their core responsibilities: What would they do in the event of another pandemic? That’s not usually a top question for voters. But it should be. During Donald Trump’s first term, we saw the damaging consequences of a leader who is disinterested in science and unwilling to tell uncomfortable truths to his political base. The Covid-19 pandemic would have challenged any president, but evidence suggests that Trump’s leadership contributed to unnecessary deaths: as many as 40 percent of American lives lost in the first year of the pandemic, according to one estimate. Now we are staring down the threat of H5N1, or bird flu, which continues to spread through America’s dairy herds and infect an increasing number of humans. If bird flu were to spiral into a pandemic, we would look back at this as a critical time to prepare. But while the Biden-Harris administration’s response has certainly been lax in some respects, Trump is on the campaign trail threatening to defund schools that require their students to be vaccinated and pledging to install anti-public health establishment crusaders into senior roles in his White House. Trump could ascend to the presidency again even as another pandemic threat is lurking. If the worst came to pass, would the sequel be any better? Probably not, experts told me. I started reporting this story with a smidge of optimism: While Trump had clearly been a problematic communicator during Covid-19, his administration was responsible for Operation Warp Speed, which delivered effective vaccines in record-setting time and likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives. That was a major, unexpected accomplishment for which the Trump administration deserves credit. But rather than lay claim to such a big, beautiful success, Trump has mostly shunned it. Instead, he has embraced America’s most notorious vaccine skeptic, Robert F Kennedy Jr., and promised him a prominent place in the White House. That is probably a better signal of what would happen in Trump’s next term. In a future emergency, Trump “would make a political calculation, and not one based on what needed to be done,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “Infectious disease in general has been completely subsumed by a tribal lens, and the tribe that is supportive of him is antagonistic to a proactive approach to public health.” What an H5N1 response might look like under Donald Trump Let’s establish a couple of things. First, while there has been sustained concern among infectious disease experts this year about H5N1 due to a steady drip of human infections, the virus has not yet ignited a pandemic. Maybe it never will. H5N1 has been infecting humans off and on for more than 20 years. Whether it’s bird flu or something else, new diseases have been emerging more often in the 20th and 21st centuries, and many scientists expect the frequency of pandemics to only increase as climate change and globalization create more opportunities for diseases to cross over in humans and spread among them. It’s inevitable that we’ll face another pandemic. The question is only what will cause the next one, and when. For now, H5N1 is the suspect drawing the most attention. Second, the Biden administration’s response to H5N1 has been very flawed. Vanity Fair recently investigated the inaction of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has taken primary responsibility for the H5N1 response so far because most of the cases have been in livestock animals: chickens, turkeys, and now dairy cows. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Experts say the federal agency has been overly accommodating of agricultural industry interests, which has allowed the virus to continue escaping containment and tear through dairy farms across the country. The USDA has largely deferred to states to take the lead on H5N1, and state agricultural officials, especially in big farm states, are typically even more deferential to agribusiness than the federal government. In Missouri, state officials have been slow to act after the discovery of a human case with no obvious connection to farm animals. “They are overtly evading the fact that dairy cattle in Missouri are infected. They don’t want to find them,” Adalja told me. Adalja said he saw little reason to expect a Kamala Harris administration to take a substantially different approach; her public health record is essentially her record as Biden’s vice president. But Trump, if he were to take over, would actively weaken the federal government’s ability to respond to a pandemic threat. He has said he would “probably” shutter the White House pandemic office, tasked with coordinating a response across the government in a future crisis. He has threatened to cut off federal funding for schools that institute vaccine or mask mandates. He has also pledged to slash the government budget and singled out the CDC as a candidate for cuts. And while the bird flu response under Biden has been dysfunctional, there has at least been some attempt to centralize a response. The current administration has offered nearly $100 million for dairy farms to take preventive measures and has also signed a deal with Moderna to develop a new H5N1 vaccine, while adding to the stockpiles of existing flu vaccine prototypes. But in another Trump presidency, the states would probably be empowered to take an even more relaxed approach to public health, and leaders in Republican-controlled states would be motivated by the same public health skepticism as their conservative voters. The political environment would be ripe for a free-for-all in state-level responses, amplifying the divergences we saw during Covid-19, when some states allowed businesses and schools to reopen months before others did and even banned cities from setting mask or vaccine requirements. A second Trump administration would likely also be staffed by people who are even more skeptical of public health interventions than we saw in his first term. In 2020, Trump still had credible infectious disease experts on his team, like Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Deborah Birx, who served as the White House Covid response coordinator, even if he frequently undermined them. Next time, it’s unlikely there would be any such voices in the room. The internal deliberations would instead be dominated by the likes of RFK Jr. or Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado, another vaccine skeptic who has been floated as a possible Trump appointee. To lead the USDA, Trump is reportedly eyeing Texas agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, who told Vanity Fair that bird flu is “not a big deal. It’s not even a little deal.” He has refused to cooperate with the CDC on testing farm workers in his state. “Those types of people are all that’s left” to serve in a Trump administration, Adalja said. “People with expertise are not going to want to be part of it or be selected.” It’s a frightening scenario to contemplate, and it illustrates our collective difficulty planning for unlikely but potentially catastrophic events. We all just lived through an experiment in what happens when the government struggles to respond to a health crisis. Yet even at the beginning of Covid, I heard from public health experts who worried we would not internalize the pandemic’s lessons, that public health would be shunted to the side after the urgency had passed. They’ve mostly been proven right. To be clear, the failure to learn from the example of Covid and prepare now for future pandemics with smart policies — many of which you can read about in Future Perfect’s Pandemic-Proof package — is bipartisan. There has been a stark absence of public health plans from the 2024 campaign, even having endured a pandemic so recently and staring down the possibility of another one so soon. We may end up worse off as a result.

The Republican Supreme Court just blessed an illegal voter purge From left, former President Donald Trump, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and Eric Trump during the Republican National Convention in July. | Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Supreme Court issued a surprising order on Wednesday morning that allows Virginia’s Republican governor to openly defy a federal voting rights law. Though the Court didn’t announce how every justice voted in Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, only its three Democrats publicly dissented. The GOP-controlled Court’s order is surprising because the federal law at issue in Beals, known as the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), is so clearly written. It prohibits states from “systematically” removing “the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” within 90 days of a primary, or general election for federal offices. Virginia began a purge of about 1,600 voters, who its top Republican officials claim are noncitizens, exactly 90 days before the upcoming election. (A federal court later determined that some of the purged voters were, in fact, citizens.) Realistically, this purge is unlikely to change the result of any races this election. Virginia has consistently voted for Democrats at the presidential level since 2008, and it’s not even clear how many of the people caught in this purge are lawful voters who intended to cast a ballot. But the Court’s decision to back the purge could have tremendous national implications because it suggests that the justices will allow states to ignore the NVRA. Previously, two lower federal courts ordered Virginia to abandon the purge, at least until after the election, and to restore the purged names to the state’s voter rolls. Wednesday’s order does not explain why the justices decided to reinstate this purge. One reason why the case is worrisome, however, is that Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares made several arguments in defense of the purge that would effectively neutralize the NVRA’s 90-day pause on voter purges altogether. Because the Supreme Court did not explain its order in Beals, it is impossible to know whether a majority of the justices accepted Miyares’s most aggressive arguments. It is likely, however, that the Court will return to this case at a future date — the order in Beals is temporary and will likely only leave this purge in place during the current election cycle — and when the Court does so, it could potentially repeal an important voting rights law. Virginia’s legal arguments would effectively repeal the ban on voter purges close to an election Miyares made several arguments to justify reinstating the purge, some of which are less consequential than others. He claimed, for example, that the plaintiffs’ in this case — the Justice Department and an immigrants rights group — waited too long to file the lawsuit. This argument isn’t particularly persuasive, but it would at least leave the NVRA intact if the Court ruled in the Virginia GOP’s favor on this narrow procedural ground. At least two of Miyares’s arguments, however, essentially asked the Supreme Court to repeal the ban on purges close to an election — or, at least, to render it unenforceable. First, Miyares claimed that, by blocking Virginia’s purge, the lower federal courts that heard this case violated the Supreme Court’s decision in Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), a vague opinion warning federal judges to be cautious about altering a state’s election procedures close to an election. But as the trial judge who heard the Beals case explained, court decisions enforcing the federal ban on last-minute alterations to voter rolls “are always going to be close to elections” because disputes will only arise if changes are made in the three months immediately preceding Election Day. Indeed, a federal court cannot halt a purge that takes place outside of the 90-day window because such purges are lawful (provided they comply with all other provisions of federal law). Purcell’s warning against altering election rules close to an election, moreover, does not derive from the Constitution or any statute. It is, instead, a pragmatic rule that the Supreme Court invented due to concerns that late-breaking changes to a state’s election law could “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” That matters because the Court held in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative (2001) that these kinds of rootless, judge-made legal rules cannot overcome a federal statute. Courts, according to the decision, “cannot ‘ignore the judgment of Congress, deliberately expressed in legislation.’” So Congress’s decision to enact a ban that can only be enforced during the 90 days before an election should override the principles that drove the Court’s Purcell decision. Additionally, Miyares claimed that the 90-day ban on voter purges does not apply to noncitizens. But this argument has no basis in statutory text. The NVRA applies that ban to any “systematic” attempt to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” Noncitizens are ineligible to vote, and therefore count as “ineligible voters.” There’s really no other plausible way to read this statute. Nevertheless, Miyares did attempt to make a textual argument for why noncitizens are exempted from the statute, but that argument is difficult to parse. In his brief, Miyares pointed to an entirely different provision of the NVRA, which applies to voter “registrants.” He then argued that noncitizens do not qualify as “registrants.” Having made this seemingly irrelevant argument, Miyares then made the logical leap that noncitizens do not count as “ineligible voters” because “only a ‘registrant’ can become a ‘voter’ in the first place.” But no one claims that noncitizens can become voters. Everyone agrees that noncitizens are ineligible to vote. That’s why they qualify as “ineligible voters.” In any event, if the Supreme Court fully embraces this argument, it would also effectively neutralize the 90-day ban. Under Miyares’s approach, all a state would have to do to evade the 90-day ban is to claim that the voters it seeks to purge are noncitizens. If those voters turn out to be citizens, they may eventually restore their voting rights, but potentially not until the election has already passed. Since the justices didn’t explain their initial decision in Beals, we will have to wait until a later date to find out if the Court’s Republican majority wants to kill the 90-day ban on voter purges entirely, or if they just wanted to protect Virginia’s purge during this one election cycle.

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From left, former President Donald Trump, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and Eric Trump during the Republican National Convention in July. | Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Supreme Court issued a surprising order on Wednesday morning that allows Virginia’s Republican governor to openly defy a federal voting rights law. Though the Court didn’t announce how every justice voted in Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, only its three Democrats publicly dissented. The GOP-controlled Court’s order is surprising because the federal law at issue in Beals, known as the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), is so clearly written. It prohibits states from “systematically” removing “the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” within 90 days of a primary, or general election for federal offices. Virginia began a purge of about 1,600 voters, who its top Republican officials claim are noncitizens, exactly 90 days before the upcoming election. (A federal court later determined that some of the purged voters were, in fact, citizens.) Realistically, this purge is unlikely to change the result of any races this election. Virginia has consistently voted for Democrats at the presidential level since 2008, and it’s not even clear how many of the people caught in this purge are lawful voters who intended to cast a ballot. But the Court’s decision to back the purge could have tremendous national implications because it suggests that the justices will allow states to ignore the NVRA. Previously, two lower federal courts ordered Virginia to abandon the purge, at least until after the election, and to restore the purged names to the state’s voter rolls. Wednesday’s order does not explain why the justices decided to reinstate this purge. One reason why the case is worrisome, however, is that Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares made several arguments in defense of the purge that would effectively neutralize the NVRA’s 90-day pause on voter purges altogether. Because the Supreme Court did not explain its order in Beals, it is impossible to know whether a majority of the justices accepted Miyares’s most aggressive arguments. It is likely, however, that the Court will return to this case at a future date — the order in Beals is temporary and will likely only leave this purge in place during the current election cycle — and when the Court does so, it could potentially repeal an important voting rights law. Virginia’s legal arguments would effectively repeal the ban on voter purges close to an election Miyares made several arguments to justify reinstating the purge, some of which are less consequential than others. He claimed, for example, that the plaintiffs’ in this case — the Justice Department and an immigrants rights group — waited too long to file the lawsuit. This argument isn’t particularly persuasive, but it would at least leave the NVRA intact if the Court ruled in the Virginia GOP’s favor on this narrow procedural ground. At least two of Miyares’s arguments, however, essentially asked the Supreme Court to repeal the ban on purges close to an election — or, at least, to render it unenforceable. First, Miyares claimed that, by blocking Virginia’s purge, the lower federal courts that heard this case violated the Supreme Court’s decision in Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), a vague opinion warning federal judges to be cautious about altering a state’s election procedures close to an election. But as the trial judge who heard the Beals case explained, court decisions enforcing the federal ban on last-minute alterations to voter rolls “are always going to be close to elections” because disputes will only arise if changes are made in the three months immediately preceding Election Day. Indeed, a federal court cannot halt a purge that takes place outside of the 90-day window because such purges are lawful (provided they comply with all other provisions of federal law). Purcell’s warning against altering election rules close to an election, moreover, does not derive from the Constitution or any statute. It is, instead, a pragmatic rule that the Supreme Court invented due to concerns that late-breaking changes to a state’s election law could “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” That matters because the Court held in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative (2001) that these kinds of rootless, judge-made legal rules cannot overcome a federal statute. Courts, according to the decision, “cannot ‘ignore the judgment of Congress, deliberately expressed in legislation.’” So Congress’s decision to enact a ban that can only be enforced during the 90 days before an election should override the principles that drove the Court’s Purcell decision. Additionally, Miyares claimed that the 90-day ban on voter purges does not apply to noncitizens. But this argument has no basis in statutory text. The NVRA applies that ban to any “systematic” attempt to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” Noncitizens are ineligible to vote, and therefore count as “ineligible voters.” There’s really no other plausible way to read this statute. Nevertheless, Miyares did attempt to make a textual argument for why noncitizens are exempted from the statute, but that argument is difficult to parse. In his brief, Miyares pointed to an entirely different provision of the NVRA, which applies to voter “registrants.” He then argued that noncitizens do not qualify as “registrants.” Having made this seemingly irrelevant argument, Miyares then made the logical leap that noncitizens do not count as “ineligible voters” because “only a ‘registrant’ can become a ‘voter’ in the first place.” But no one claims that noncitizens can become voters. Everyone agrees that noncitizens are ineligible to vote. That’s why they qualify as “ineligible voters.” In any event, if the Supreme Court fully embraces this argument, it would also effectively neutralize the 90-day ban. Under Miyares’s approach, all a state would have to do to evade the 90-day ban is to claim that the voters it seeks to purge are noncitizens. If those voters turn out to be citizens, they may eventually restore their voting rights, but potentially not until the election has already passed. Since the justices didn’t explain their initial decision in Beals, we will have to wait until a later date to find out if the Court’s Republican majority wants to kill the 90-day ban on voter purges entirely, or if they just wanted to protect Virginia’s purge during this one election cycle.

The ugly truth behind the Trump rally’s Puerto Rico “joke” The Trump campaign insists comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s line about Puerto Rico at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City was ad-libbed. In the days since comedian Tony Hinchcliffe insulted Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City on Sunday by calling it “a floating island of garbage,” there’s been mounting evidence that this might be the rare gaffe that actually matters. The Puerto Rican community around the country is furious — and they happen to make up a huge chunk of the electorate in all-important Pennsylvania. All of which raises a question: What was the Trump team thinking? Why, why would they give an insult comic a platform to take shots at Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, and Black people? The obvious answer is that the kind of people who run Trump’s campaign find this kind of “edgy” humor funny. Trump’s team reviewed and approved most of his set beforehand, cutting a joke they thought was too much (calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “c*nt.”) Though they insist the Puerto Rico line was ad-libbed, the fact remains that they knew who Hinchcliffe was when they put him up there. But there’s a deeper truth here. The rising tolerance of outright racism in the GOP — often dressed up as a “joke” — reflects the influence of an energized and transgressive far-right youth movement in the party. And while that movement lends the Trumpified right a certain vitality, it also works to render it (even more) toxic to ordinary Americans. Historian David Austin Walsh recently coined a memorable term to describe this group’s rising influence: “the groyperfication of the GOP.” The term refers to the so-called Groyper movement, a loose group of young neo-Nazi internet trolls led by pundit Nick Fuentes. Groypers, the heirs to the alt-right of the 2010s, aim to push the boundaries of mainstream discourse rightward one racist meme at a time. They are obsessed with allegedly prohibited topics, like Holocaust denial or the purported link between race and IQ, which it seeks to make part of mainstream Republican discourse. Walsh notes that these groyper-adjacent ideas have real pull among both young Republican staffers and the conservative movement’s intellectual elite. At this point, there’s little doubt that this is the case: Fuentes famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022; since then, has been linked to Republican Hill staffers and megadonors. Elon Musk personally reinstated Fuentes’ previously banned account on X/Twitter, where he currently has over 400,000 followers. There’s a certain joy in transgression — a thrill in feeling countercultural — that powers the online right’s pro-Trump activism. Yet the ways in which they transgress are toxic (and rightfully so). Exploring groyperesque ideas about, say, Black genetic inferiority only feels like an exciting transgression for, as Walsh puts it, a small group of “college-educated men with intellectual pretensions.” What these young white righties find smart or funny, most other Americans find abhorrent — leading them to miss how someone like Hinchcliffe would play among normies. Walsh compares this to the left’s well-documented “Latinx problem.” The term, widely used by elite Democrats until very recently, was an attempt to bend the Spanish language into gender neutrality. According to one study, some Latinos found “Latinx” so alienating its spread may very well have driven some into Trump’s arms — reflecting a disconnect between the ideological aims of elite Democrats, including elite Latinos, and how ordinary voters see the world. But I’d argue the so-called “dirtbag left” of the late 2010s is an even more direct comparison. Much like the Groypers, dirtbag socialists aimed to make social change through provocative humor and online aggression bordering on harassment. The “posting-to-praxis pipeline,” as they called it, indeed helped raise the prominence of socialism in American politics — winning converts among Brooklyn progressives and quite a few young professional Democrats. Except when the dirtbag left tried to throw its weight around politically, campaigning aggressively for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, they turned into a liability — seemingly costing him support at both the elite and grassroots voter level. Today, the dirtbag faction has minimal influence on either the Democratic Party or American politics more broadly. After October 7, 2023, some of the media personalities in the dirtbag universe could be found apologizing for and even outright endorsing Hamas’s violence — a position with almost no support among the general American population and one condemned by even the most left-wing elected Democrats. In both cases, the Groypers and the dirtbag left, you had an energized and radical youth-led faction that managed to be wildly successful within its own niche — but one that proved a political liability outside of its insular niche. Yet the two parties handled the two factions very differently. The Democrats’ extremist flank are, in fact, extremists: They only speak for a fringe of relevant party actors. As a consequence, the dirtbag-types faced real backlash when they tried to establish themselves as a major player in a party primary. But in the Republican Party, the extreme is now the mainstream. Trump is the unquestioned party leader, and groyper-esque Tucker Carlson is its chief ideologue. There is no internal pushback against the ideological extremism among the party’s up-and-coming youth, because said extremism has already won the day. What’s popular among the party’s radicals is, increasingly, what the party chooses to do. No one is capable of telling young righties that what they find thrilling is electoral poison; that making tasteless jokes isn’t punkish transgression, but creepy, off-putting anti-social behavior. In fact, racist comedy is so normalized that it’s now given top billing at a closing-argument rally. And if the warning signs about Puerto Rican voters prove real, the end consequence of this radicalization could be electoral defeat. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

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The Trump campaign insists comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s line about Puerto Rico at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City was ad-libbed. In the days since comedian Tony Hinchcliffe insulted Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City on Sunday by calling it “a floating island of garbage,” there’s been mounting evidence that this might be the rare gaffe that actually matters. The Puerto Rican community around the country is furious — and they happen to make up a huge chunk of the electorate in all-important Pennsylvania. All of which raises a question: What was the Trump team thinking? Why, why would they give an insult comic a platform to take shots at Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, and Black people? The obvious answer is that the kind of people who run Trump’s campaign find this kind of “edgy” humor funny. Trump’s team reviewed and approved most of his set beforehand, cutting a joke they thought was too much (calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “c*nt.”) Though they insist the Puerto Rico line was ad-libbed, the fact remains that they knew who Hinchcliffe was when they put him up there. But there’s a deeper truth here. The rising tolerance of outright racism in the GOP — often dressed up as a “joke” — reflects the influence of an energized and transgressive far-right youth movement in the party. And while that movement lends the Trumpified right a certain vitality, it also works to render it (even more) toxic to ordinary Americans. Historian David Austin Walsh recently coined a memorable term to describe this group’s rising influence: “the groyperfication of the GOP.” The term refers to the so-called Groyper movement, a loose group of young neo-Nazi internet trolls led by pundit Nick Fuentes. Groypers, the heirs to the alt-right of the 2010s, aim to push the boundaries of mainstream discourse rightward one racist meme at a time. They are obsessed with allegedly prohibited topics, like Holocaust denial or the purported link between race and IQ, which it seeks to make part of mainstream Republican discourse. Walsh notes that these groyper-adjacent ideas have real pull among both young Republican staffers and the conservative movement’s intellectual elite. At this point, there’s little doubt that this is the case: Fuentes famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022; since then, has been linked to Republican Hill staffers and megadonors. Elon Musk personally reinstated Fuentes’ previously banned account on X/Twitter, where he currently has over 400,000 followers. There’s a certain joy in transgression — a thrill in feeling countercultural — that powers the online right’s pro-Trump activism. Yet the ways in which they transgress are toxic (and rightfully so). Exploring groyperesque ideas about, say, Black genetic inferiority only feels like an exciting transgression for, as Walsh puts it, a small group of “college-educated men with intellectual pretensions.” What these young white righties find smart or funny, most other Americans find abhorrent — leading them to miss how someone like Hinchcliffe would play among normies. Walsh compares this to the left’s well-documented “Latinx problem.” The term, widely used by elite Democrats until very recently, was an attempt to bend the Spanish language into gender neutrality. According to one study, some Latinos found “Latinx” so alienating its spread may very well have driven some into Trump’s arms — reflecting a disconnect between the ideological aims of elite Democrats, including elite Latinos, and how ordinary voters see the world. But I’d argue the so-called “dirtbag left” of the late 2010s is an even more direct comparison. Much like the Groypers, dirtbag socialists aimed to make social change through provocative humor and online aggression bordering on harassment. The “posting-to-praxis pipeline,” as they called it, indeed helped raise the prominence of socialism in American politics — winning converts among Brooklyn progressives and quite a few young professional Democrats. Except when the dirtbag left tried to throw its weight around politically, campaigning aggressively for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary, they turned into a liability — seemingly costing him support at both the elite and grassroots voter level. Today, the dirtbag faction has minimal influence on either the Democratic Party or American politics more broadly. After October 7, 2023, some of the media personalities in the dirtbag universe could be found apologizing for and even outright endorsing Hamas’s violence — a position with almost no support among the general American population and one condemned by even the most left-wing elected Democrats. In both cases, the Groypers and the dirtbag left, you had an energized and radical youth-led faction that managed to be wildly successful within its own niche — but one that proved a political liability outside of its insular niche. Yet the two parties handled the two factions very differently. The Democrats’ extremist flank are, in fact, extremists: They only speak for a fringe of relevant party actors. As a consequence, the dirtbag-types faced real backlash when they tried to establish themselves as a major player in a party primary. But in the Republican Party, the extreme is now the mainstream. Trump is the unquestioned party leader, and groyper-esque Tucker Carlson is its chief ideologue. There is no internal pushback against the ideological extremism among the party’s up-and-coming youth, because said extremism has already won the day. What’s popular among the party’s radicals is, increasingly, what the party chooses to do. No one is capable of telling young righties that what they find thrilling is electoral poison; that making tasteless jokes isn’t punkish transgression, but creepy, off-putting anti-social behavior. In fact, racist comedy is so normalized that it’s now given top billing at a closing-argument rally. And if the warning signs about Puerto Rican voters prove real, the end consequence of this radicalization could be electoral defeat. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

How safe is your vote from MAGA manipulation? Voters make selections at their voting booths inside an early voting site on October 17, 2024, in Hendersonville, North Carolina. | Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images Vox reader Jason Taylor writes: Should voters be concerned about the possibility of Trump election deniers being in positions of power to count votes in Trump’s favor that he did not receive in the upcoming election? Thank you for your time and consideration of my question. One of the defining — and troubling — facts of our current political era is that the loser of the previous election maintains he didn’t lose it at all. To this day, Donald Trump refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a stance that many of his followers have gotten in line behind, including some who’ll hold positions of power in this November’s contest. That has understandably spurred concerns like the ones you’ve raised about the current cycle. Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. Despite these troubling developments, however, election law experts say that voters should know ample protections are in place to bar election deniers from messing with the vote count or its eventual certification. “There are multiple safeguards built into the process to prevent that kind of thing from happening,” says Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to voting rights. What safeguards are in place for ballot counting? Let’s start with the process of counting ballots. “The count involves so many steps, so many layers of double-checking and supervision, that it would be virtually impossible to fake even a single ballot,” Evelyn Smith, an election worker in Michigan, told the Washington Post in 2020. These safeguards include the presence of independent observers at ballot counts, post-election audits to verify the results, and rigorous record-keeping to keep tabs on voter participation. This all starts with the submission of ballots. When people vote in person, poll workers keep a clear tally of how many people have voted, which is later checked against the number of ballots coming from each precinct. Similarly, when people vote by mail, election workers confirm that each ballot corresponds to a real person and keep track of how many ballots are coming in. In most cases, the ballots are counted by machines, and those have to undergo their own rigorous “logic and accuracy” tests by election officials before they can ever be used. Ballots cast in person are often tabulated on location at the precinct, and that information is printed out on a physical receipt and stored on a memory card. Typically, these results are recorded at the precinct, and both the receipt and memory card are also transmitted in a secure box to a central location. Mail-in ballots are also tabulated at either a polling station or central location after being verified. In rare instances — usually in much smaller counties and towns — ballots are counted by hand, a practice that’s increasingly less common because it’s prone to errors and delays. When hand counting is used, it’s usually done in teams to reduce mistakes. Regardless of whether ballots are counted by machine or by hand, independent observers, or members of both parties, are able to watch as votes are submitted and tallied, adding another layer of security. (These policies vary by state but most places allow some transparency into different steps of the process.) Such protocols make it difficult for potential bad actors to manipulate the count. Many states have post-election audits as well to catch if something is amiss with the vote tally. In these audits, state or county officials will hand count a sample of the ballots in each precinct to spot-check for discrepancies. “Audits would find out if bogus votes were added to the real vote totals,” says Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Stetson University law professor and elections expert. Candidates, as well as the two parties, are also able to lodge a complaint or mount a legal challenge if they believe there have been any irregularities. What about election certification? In recent elections, certification of the results has been another point in the process when some officials have caused delays or questioned the outcome. Typically, certification is a routine part of any election and basically just involves county and state election boards verifying the results after they’ve been tallied. In 2020 and 2022, however, there were examples of officials and federal lawmakers refusing to do so. In 2020, the Wayne County, Michigan, Board of Canvassers initially deadlocked 2–2 when two Republican commissioners refused to declare Biden the winner. Following significant backlash, they eventually changed their votes. Shortly after that, 147 federal Republican lawmakers infamously voted to challenge the election results during Congress’s certification process on January 6, 2021. Despite their objections, the certification was completed, and since then, Congress has passed updates to the Electoral Count Act to make the threshold for challenging the results much higher. In 2022, the Republican-led election commission in Otero County, New Mexico, also refused to certify primary results due to their alleged distrust in Dominion voting machines. The New Mexico secretary of state ultimately obtained a state Supreme Court order requiring the commission to certify, and they later did. In past instances, local officials either relented or were ordered by a court or state officials to move forward with the certification of the results. Experts note that the same is likely to occur this time around if there are more attempts to delay or deny certification. If state-level officials like the secretary of state tried to block a legitimate outcome from moving forward, the candidates and parties could similarly take the issue to court. Experts note that they aren’t especially concerned that efforts to stymie certification would be successful, though they do note that bad actors could cause delays and confusion that might fuel misinformation. “There is a potential for there to be uncertainty,” says UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen. So, what should we be worried about this election? The experts I spoke to broadly emphasized that they have faith in the election system. Despite this, Trump could still foment distrust much like he did in 2020 and gin up violence or unrest as a result. That possibility, and a potential reprisal of the January 6 insurrection, is unfortunately its own concern. “When people hear this kind of disinformation over and over and over again, it does lead to real harmful consequences,” Ramachandran told Vox. All this is to say that one of the largest threats this election faces is many voters’ lack of confidence in the legitimacy of the outcome, even if counting and certification all go according to plan. This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

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Voters make selections at their voting booths inside an early voting site on October 17, 2024, in Hendersonville, North Carolina. | Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images Vox reader Jason Taylor writes: Should voters be concerned about the possibility of Trump election deniers being in positions of power to count votes in Trump’s favor that he did not receive in the upcoming election? Thank you for your time and consideration of my question. One of the defining — and troubling — facts of our current political era is that the loser of the previous election maintains he didn’t lose it at all. To this day, Donald Trump refuses to admit he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a stance that many of his followers have gotten in line behind, including some who’ll hold positions of power in this November’s contest. That has understandably spurred concerns like the ones you’ve raised about the current cycle. Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. Despite these troubling developments, however, election law experts say that voters should know ample protections are in place to bar election deniers from messing with the vote count or its eventual certification. “There are multiple safeguards built into the process to prevent that kind of thing from happening,” says Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to voting rights. What safeguards are in place for ballot counting? Let’s start with the process of counting ballots. “The count involves so many steps, so many layers of double-checking and supervision, that it would be virtually impossible to fake even a single ballot,” Evelyn Smith, an election worker in Michigan, told the Washington Post in 2020. These safeguards include the presence of independent observers at ballot counts, post-election audits to verify the results, and rigorous record-keeping to keep tabs on voter participation. This all starts with the submission of ballots. When people vote in person, poll workers keep a clear tally of how many people have voted, which is later checked against the number of ballots coming from each precinct. Similarly, when people vote by mail, election workers confirm that each ballot corresponds to a real person and keep track of how many ballots are coming in. In most cases, the ballots are counted by machines, and those have to undergo their own rigorous “logic and accuracy” tests by election officials before they can ever be used. Ballots cast in person are often tabulated on location at the precinct, and that information is printed out on a physical receipt and stored on a memory card. Typically, these results are recorded at the precinct, and both the receipt and memory card are also transmitted in a secure box to a central location. Mail-in ballots are also tabulated at either a polling station or central location after being verified. In rare instances — usually in much smaller counties and towns — ballots are counted by hand, a practice that’s increasingly less common because it’s prone to errors and delays. When hand counting is used, it’s usually done in teams to reduce mistakes. Regardless of whether ballots are counted by machine or by hand, independent observers, or members of both parties, are able to watch as votes are submitted and tallied, adding another layer of security. (These policies vary by state but most places allow some transparency into different steps of the process.) Such protocols make it difficult for potential bad actors to manipulate the count. Many states have post-election audits as well to catch if something is amiss with the vote tally. In these audits, state or county officials will hand count a sample of the ballots in each precinct to spot-check for discrepancies. “Audits would find out if bogus votes were added to the real vote totals,” says Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Stetson University law professor and elections expert. Candidates, as well as the two parties, are also able to lodge a complaint or mount a legal challenge if they believe there have been any irregularities. What about election certification? In recent elections, certification of the results has been another point in the process when some officials have caused delays or questioned the outcome. Typically, certification is a routine part of any election and basically just involves county and state election boards verifying the results after they’ve been tallied. In 2020 and 2022, however, there were examples of officials and federal lawmakers refusing to do so. In 2020, the Wayne County, Michigan, Board of Canvassers initially deadlocked 2–2 when two Republican commissioners refused to declare Biden the winner. Following significant backlash, they eventually changed their votes. Shortly after that, 147 federal Republican lawmakers infamously voted to challenge the election results during Congress’s certification process on January 6, 2021. Despite their objections, the certification was completed, and since then, Congress has passed updates to the Electoral Count Act to make the threshold for challenging the results much higher. In 2022, the Republican-led election commission in Otero County, New Mexico, also refused to certify primary results due to their alleged distrust in Dominion voting machines. The New Mexico secretary of state ultimately obtained a state Supreme Court order requiring the commission to certify, and they later did. In past instances, local officials either relented or were ordered by a court or state officials to move forward with the certification of the results. Experts note that the same is likely to occur this time around if there are more attempts to delay or deny certification. If state-level officials like the secretary of state tried to block a legitimate outcome from moving forward, the candidates and parties could similarly take the issue to court. Experts note that they aren’t especially concerned that efforts to stymie certification would be successful, though they do note that bad actors could cause delays and confusion that might fuel misinformation. “There is a potential for there to be uncertainty,” says UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen. So, what should we be worried about this election? The experts I spoke to broadly emphasized that they have faith in the election system. Despite this, Trump could still foment distrust much like he did in 2020 and gin up violence or unrest as a result. That possibility, and a potential reprisal of the January 6 insurrection, is unfortunately its own concern. “When people hear this kind of disinformation over and over and over again, it does lead to real harmful consequences,” Ramachandran told Vox. All this is to say that one of the largest threats this election faces is many voters’ lack of confidence in the legitimacy of the outcome, even if counting and certification all go according to plan. This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

The cruel truth behind Trump’s new attacks on trans people A person wears a vest with a trans flag on the back with the words Not afraid during a memorial honoring trans individuals killed by gun violence held by Gays Against Guns on November 20, 2022, in New York City. | Alex Kent/Getty Images With mere days left on the 2024 political campaign trail, you might have noticed the Trump camp has increasingly turned to scapegoating familiar targets, including immigrants, the press, and women. It has also increasingly doubled down on attacks on trans people. A recent report by ABC News revealed that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, per ABC’s report — for television advertising has been spent on transphobic messaging from the Trump campaign and various conservative political groups. The independent journalist collective the Bulwark pushed the total even higher, to $40 million poured into transphobic advertising within the last five weeks. The ads, paid for by the Trump campaign, use a litany of transphobic coding, including photoshopping Kamala Harris to appear as though she’s posing beside a nonbinary person in a mustache and a dress, despite plenty of evidence that this strategy is a turn-off for voters. “Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” one ad declares. All three ads attack Harris for supporting gender-affirmative care for trans prisoners, including surgery where medically necessary. “Kamala is for they/them,” each ad concludes. “President Trump is for you.” Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two different media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.” So then why do them? Well, there’s “winning” in terms of appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in terms of determining the conversation. Keeping the focus on trans people — Harris’s actual policy proposals do almost nothing to advance the status of trans citizens — fires up a certain base and crowds out other discussion. But the fallout here isn’t voters distracted from the real issues. The fallout instead comes in an important detail from one of those aforementioned studies. Ground Media found that while the negative messaging didn’t change viewers’ minds about Kamala Harris, it did significantly increase viewers’ negativity about trans and nonbinary people across all demographics. In other words, these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people. The willingness of Trump and his supporters to invest in these ads arguably indicates that even if Harris wins the election, marginalized communities in red states will still be under threat from Trump supporters and from growing legal restrictions on those regions. But trans people aren’t isolated targets. They are scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the US. That puts all of us in danger. Trump centering transphobia in his campaign strategy is not new. It’s the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse what was a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality. In 2013, in a landmark move, the American Psychiatric Association reclassified gender dysphoria — the feeling of not being aligned with your presumed-at-birth gender — so that it was no longer classified as a mental disorder, thereby setting the stage for a much-needed societal shift toward accepting and understanding trans people. The following year, Time magazine placed Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox on its cover, declaring that trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.” The backlash was almost instantaneous. A month later, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant religious group in the country, passed a resolution singling out trans people and stating, “[W]e oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity.” As the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups turned away from targeting queer people to instead target trans people in a “divide and conquer” strategy, as a conservative organizer named Meg Kilgannon summarized in a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told the assembly. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.” To do this, conservatives joined forces with unlikely allies, including “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” to drum up antagonistic sentiments against trans people. Right-wingers spread alarmism, rolling out dozens of anti-trans bathroom laws across the nation, then using them to introduce other transphobic ideas into local conservative platforms, all of them coming straight out of the moral panic playbook. These tactics didn’t directly address the sociocultural progress that trans people were making; instead, they cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and alarmism about trans people themselves. And the propaganda has only gotten more effective over time. Where transphobic bathroom bills mostly failed a decade ago, they’re now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, passed a bathroom bill that offers a $10,000 bounty paid to anyone who spies a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom. The core elements we see used to attack and oppress trans people in the US in 2024 aren’t really about trans people; we’ve seen these same fearmongering tropes weaponized against numerous marginalized groups throughout history. They serve a greater political purpose — not just to demonize one specific group of people but to reinforce an in-group mentality that can then be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are a political cudgel. This strategy harks back to another era of fascism. It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women. The strategy at work deploys moral hysteria, a culture-wide “othering” of marginalized groups, and most importantly a push for a government response to the perceived problem of these outlying groups. By unifying around the public’s negative perceptions of these groups, the Republican Party amasses power and control at all levels of government. Trump has threatened repeatedly to wield that amassed power against his political opponents if he is reelected. And this, ultimately, is the real threat — not just to trans people, but to everyone.

2 d

vox.com

A person wears a vest with a trans flag on the back with the words Not afraid during a memorial honoring trans individuals killed by gun violence held by Gays Against Guns on November 20, 2022, in New York City. | Alex Kent/Getty Images With mere days left on the 2024 political campaign trail, you might have noticed the Trump camp has increasingly turned to scapegoating familiar targets, including immigrants, the press, and women. It has also increasingly doubled down on attacks on trans people. A recent report by ABC News revealed that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, per ABC’s report — for television advertising has been spent on transphobic messaging from the Trump campaign and various conservative political groups. The independent journalist collective the Bulwark pushed the total even higher, to $40 million poured into transphobic advertising within the last five weeks. The ads, paid for by the Trump campaign, use a litany of transphobic coding, including photoshopping Kamala Harris to appear as though she’s posing beside a nonbinary person in a mustache and a dress, despite plenty of evidence that this strategy is a turn-off for voters. “Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” one ad declares. All three ads attack Harris for supporting gender-affirmative care for trans prisoners, including surgery where medically necessary. “Kamala is for they/them,” each ad concludes. “President Trump is for you.” Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two different media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.” So then why do them? Well, there’s “winning” in terms of appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in terms of determining the conversation. Keeping the focus on trans people — Harris’s actual policy proposals do almost nothing to advance the status of trans citizens — fires up a certain base and crowds out other discussion. But the fallout here isn’t voters distracted from the real issues. The fallout instead comes in an important detail from one of those aforementioned studies. Ground Media found that while the negative messaging didn’t change viewers’ minds about Kamala Harris, it did significantly increase viewers’ negativity about trans and nonbinary people across all demographics. In other words, these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people. The willingness of Trump and his supporters to invest in these ads arguably indicates that even if Harris wins the election, marginalized communities in red states will still be under threat from Trump supporters and from growing legal restrictions on those regions. But trans people aren’t isolated targets. They are scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the US. That puts all of us in danger. Trump centering transphobia in his campaign strategy is not new. It’s the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse what was a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality. In 2013, in a landmark move, the American Psychiatric Association reclassified gender dysphoria — the feeling of not being aligned with your presumed-at-birth gender — so that it was no longer classified as a mental disorder, thereby setting the stage for a much-needed societal shift toward accepting and understanding trans people. The following year, Time magazine placed Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox on its cover, declaring that trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.” The backlash was almost instantaneous. A month later, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant religious group in the country, passed a resolution singling out trans people and stating, “[W]e oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity.” As the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups turned away from targeting queer people to instead target trans people in a “divide and conquer” strategy, as a conservative organizer named Meg Kilgannon summarized in a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told the assembly. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.” To do this, conservatives joined forces with unlikely allies, including “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” to drum up antagonistic sentiments against trans people. Right-wingers spread alarmism, rolling out dozens of anti-trans bathroom laws across the nation, then using them to introduce other transphobic ideas into local conservative platforms, all of them coming straight out of the moral panic playbook. These tactics didn’t directly address the sociocultural progress that trans people were making; instead, they cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and alarmism about trans people themselves. And the propaganda has only gotten more effective over time. Where transphobic bathroom bills mostly failed a decade ago, they’re now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, passed a bathroom bill that offers a $10,000 bounty paid to anyone who spies a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom. The core elements we see used to attack and oppress trans people in the US in 2024 aren’t really about trans people; we’ve seen these same fearmongering tropes weaponized against numerous marginalized groups throughout history. They serve a greater political purpose — not just to demonize one specific group of people but to reinforce an in-group mentality that can then be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are a political cudgel. This strategy harks back to another era of fascism. It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women. The strategy at work deploys moral hysteria, a culture-wide “othering” of marginalized groups, and most importantly a push for a government response to the perceived problem of these outlying groups. By unifying around the public’s negative perceptions of these groups, the Republican Party amasses power and control at all levels of government. Trump has threatened repeatedly to wield that amassed power against his political opponents if he is reelected. And this, ultimately, is the real threat — not just to trans people, but to everyone.

The crisis that could ensue if Harris wins narrowly Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024 in New York City. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty As Election Day approaches, anxiety is naturally rising over whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win. But there’s reason to be anxious about another prospect, too: just what Trump and his supporters will do if Harris wins narrowly. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the only way he could lose is if Democrats cheat. It seems clear he will try to deem any Harris victory illegitimate. Many expect he will reprise in some form his shocking behavior after the 2020 election, when he tried to overturn Biden’s win — and that his supporters may try in some way to help him. There are a number of new safeguards in place this time around making any such election-stealing effort by Trump less likely to succeed, as Barton Gellman wrote in Time last week. A 2022 law reformed the vote-certification process, which may make it more difficult for Trump to procedurally overturn any results. Trump is no longer the incumbent president and can’t use the powers of the executive branch. And authorities are more thoroughly preparing to preempt a January 6-esque mob action. Yet though it may be procedurally more difficult for Trump to challenge the outcome this year, the risk is that procedure and legality will end up mattering less this time around — that, instead, Trump will bring us into a world where force and partisanship and the naked drive for power could well triumph over any remaining norms. Even an attempt at this could bring the country to a more dangerous and chaotic place — but it’s also possible, particularly in the event of a close race and a narrow Harris win, that it could succeed in restoring Trump to the White House, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney has written. For one, the Republican Party has become more MAGA-fied since 2020, and has largely made its peace with defending the indefensible: Trump’s election denialism. The 2020 GOP was deeply conflicted about Trump’s election-stealing scheme; almost all key GOP officials with positions giving them responsibility over the results — governors, statewide election officials, state legislatures, and Vice President Mike Pence — declined to help carry it out. Since then, many critics have been purged from the party, while others have made their peace with Trump. Additionally, Trump’s team, along with a supporting web of Republican activists, has had four years to prepare to challenge the results again. Last time around, their effort was shambolic and improvised; this time, they likely understand far better where the pressure points are. For instance, if Republicans hold the House, Speaker Mike Johnson could try to interfere with certifying the results – a fear intensified among Democrats by Trump’s recent public statement that he and Johnson have “a little secret.” But perhaps the most ominous threat is that, this time around, there’s a widespread expectation in the MAGA world that Trump is sure to win (even though the polls clearly point to a very close race that could go either way). “Donald Trump’s surrogates, allies and foot soldiers appear supremely confident he’ll be re-elected president next week,” Zachary Basu of Axios reports, adding that this “is setting the stage for a wholesale rejection of a potential Harris victory by Trump supporters.” If a Trump win fails to materialize despite the right’s expectations, the fury and outrage among his supporters could prove far more intense than in 2020 — particularly given Trump’s ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to Election Day. His supporters, already primed to believe in voter fraud, could mobilize more quickly and seriously around the belief that the election was stolen from Trump and that something must be done about it. That means, unless Trump chooses to back down — unlikely, given his past conduct — the country could be headed to an even more dangerous place. Fears of an enraged MAGA base Here’s one way to think about the risks ahead: Last time, 74 million people voted for Trump. But very few of them lifted a finger to try and help him steal the election. Trump’s 2020 election theft effort gained steam slowly and focused initially on legal and procedural efforts to overturn the results. Pro-Trump protesters, including far-right groups like the Proud Boys, began to pop up more in the closing months of 2020, in Washington, DC, and in state capitals, but scattered violence and intimidation tactics did little to impact the process of certifying the election. Then, on December 19, 2020, Trump tweeted that there would be a “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” adding, “Be there, will be wild!” That proved sufficient to mobilize a little over 50,000 people, of whom about 10,000 came onto the Capitol grounds; of those, 2,000 or so made it inside the building. It was a traumatic day for the country — and yet it is worth noting that only a relative handful of the vast US population were involved. This time around, Trump falsely claiming victory and leveling fresh accusations of fraud could prove even more effective at mobilizing his base’s resentment, using their fury as a de facto weapon to intimidate Republicans and election officials into embracing his lies. The conditions are there: Four years have passed in which “the election was stolen from Trump” has become Republican conventional wisdom — which means this year’s message would be, “Are you really going to let them steal it again?” Harris outperforming her polls would be treated as immediate, damning proof of a rigged election. Trump also has a clear set of enemies at which to point his supporters, should he lose and refuse to accept that loss. In 2020, defining exactly who was stealing the election from him was more challenging — he was president, after all. This time around, he can blame the Biden-Harris administration and feed conspiratorial fears that “they” are stealing the election to keep her in power. Elon Musk’s ownership of X could help Trump better spread misinformation about supposed voter fraud. Dangerous lone wolves could be radicalized to violent action. The political context of the current Trump-dominated GOP may spur the party to depart further from the law or procedural norms, which would raise the chances both of system breakdown and violence. The sympathies for Trump among much of law enforcement and the military are also concerning in such scenarios — if the MAGA base really rises up, would law enforcement restore order? Such scenarios may sound like absurd fear-mongering, more fit for a less stable democracy, but Trump’s utter lack of restraint and willingness to shatter democratic norms for power may mean those other countries have relevant lessons for us. The scenarios most likely to actually change the outcome are probably less about violence, and more that Trump will triumph in the procedural struggle — that he will get some Republican officials in the states or Congress, or conservative judges, to throw out state results showing a Harris win under bogus pretenses. This would lead the country into uncharted territory. Would Congress pick a winner? Would Biden step aside and recognize its verdict, if it did? How such a crisis would be resolved is impossible to foresee. American democracy in the balance? There is, of course, still reason to hope it won’t get anywhere near that bad. Despite many predictions in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, that event was not in fact followed by a new wave of far-right violence during the Biden years. The memory of aggressive federal arrests and prosecutions of the January 6 rioters — and state-level prosecutions of members of Trump’s own team — made clear that such behavior came with consequences, and memory of those consequences could deter future unrest (including from Trump himself, who would face renewed legal jeopardy in the event of an election loss). Perhaps the American public, including the right, simply isn’t that engaged or fired up about politics and they just won’t care too much if Trump whines that the election was stolen. Or perhaps Trump supporters will simply not prove as likely to descend into political violence as liberals fear. This month, the Washington Post asked dozens of Trump fans at rallies how they’d interpret and respond to a Trump defeat. Nearly everyone they interviewed believed the 2020 election was stolen from him and the 2024 election might be stolen too. But, per the Post, these Trump fans “notably did not express interest in a repeat of the heated rhetoric that led to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.” Instead, they suggested they’d respond to Trump’s defeat with resignation. The risk, though, is that Trump and the most hardcore MAGA believers will push for something different — that he’ll use every tool at his disposal to try to get back into power. And if they can convince millions of Trump’s voters to join him in that effort, the danger will be very real.

2 d

vox.com

Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024 in New York City. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty As Election Day approaches, anxiety is naturally rising over whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win. But there’s reason to be anxious about another prospect, too: just what Trump and his supporters will do if Harris wins narrowly. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the only way he could lose is if Democrats cheat. It seems clear he will try to deem any Harris victory illegitimate. Many expect he will reprise in some form his shocking behavior after the 2020 election, when he tried to overturn Biden’s win — and that his supporters may try in some way to help him. There are a number of new safeguards in place this time around making any such election-stealing effort by Trump less likely to succeed, as Barton Gellman wrote in Time last week. A 2022 law reformed the vote-certification process, which may make it more difficult for Trump to procedurally overturn any results. Trump is no longer the incumbent president and can’t use the powers of the executive branch. And authorities are more thoroughly preparing to preempt a January 6-esque mob action. Yet though it may be procedurally more difficult for Trump to challenge the outcome this year, the risk is that procedure and legality will end up mattering less this time around — that, instead, Trump will bring us into a world where force and partisanship and the naked drive for power could well triumph over any remaining norms. Even an attempt at this could bring the country to a more dangerous and chaotic place — but it’s also possible, particularly in the event of a close race and a narrow Harris win, that it could succeed in restoring Trump to the White House, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney has written. For one, the Republican Party has become more MAGA-fied since 2020, and has largely made its peace with defending the indefensible: Trump’s election denialism. The 2020 GOP was deeply conflicted about Trump’s election-stealing scheme; almost all key GOP officials with positions giving them responsibility over the results — governors, statewide election officials, state legislatures, and Vice President Mike Pence — declined to help carry it out. Since then, many critics have been purged from the party, while others have made their peace with Trump. Additionally, Trump’s team, along with a supporting web of Republican activists, has had four years to prepare to challenge the results again. Last time around, their effort was shambolic and improvised; this time, they likely understand far better where the pressure points are. For instance, if Republicans hold the House, Speaker Mike Johnson could try to interfere with certifying the results – a fear intensified among Democrats by Trump’s recent public statement that he and Johnson have “a little secret.” But perhaps the most ominous threat is that, this time around, there’s a widespread expectation in the MAGA world that Trump is sure to win (even though the polls clearly point to a very close race that could go either way). “Donald Trump’s surrogates, allies and foot soldiers appear supremely confident he’ll be re-elected president next week,” Zachary Basu of Axios reports, adding that this “is setting the stage for a wholesale rejection of a potential Harris victory by Trump supporters.” If a Trump win fails to materialize despite the right’s expectations, the fury and outrage among his supporters could prove far more intense than in 2020 — particularly given Trump’s ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to Election Day. His supporters, already primed to believe in voter fraud, could mobilize more quickly and seriously around the belief that the election was stolen from Trump and that something must be done about it. That means, unless Trump chooses to back down — unlikely, given his past conduct — the country could be headed to an even more dangerous place. Fears of an enraged MAGA base Here’s one way to think about the risks ahead: Last time, 74 million people voted for Trump. But very few of them lifted a finger to try and help him steal the election. Trump’s 2020 election theft effort gained steam slowly and focused initially on legal and procedural efforts to overturn the results. Pro-Trump protesters, including far-right groups like the Proud Boys, began to pop up more in the closing months of 2020, in Washington, DC, and in state capitals, but scattered violence and intimidation tactics did little to impact the process of certifying the election. Then, on December 19, 2020, Trump tweeted that there would be a “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” adding, “Be there, will be wild!” That proved sufficient to mobilize a little over 50,000 people, of whom about 10,000 came onto the Capitol grounds; of those, 2,000 or so made it inside the building. It was a traumatic day for the country — and yet it is worth noting that only a relative handful of the vast US population were involved. This time around, Trump falsely claiming victory and leveling fresh accusations of fraud could prove even more effective at mobilizing his base’s resentment, using their fury as a de facto weapon to intimidate Republicans and election officials into embracing his lies. The conditions are there: Four years have passed in which “the election was stolen from Trump” has become Republican conventional wisdom — which means this year’s message would be, “Are you really going to let them steal it again?” Harris outperforming her polls would be treated as immediate, damning proof of a rigged election. Trump also has a clear set of enemies at which to point his supporters, should he lose and refuse to accept that loss. In 2020, defining exactly who was stealing the election from him was more challenging — he was president, after all. This time around, he can blame the Biden-Harris administration and feed conspiratorial fears that “they” are stealing the election to keep her in power. Elon Musk’s ownership of X could help Trump better spread misinformation about supposed voter fraud. Dangerous lone wolves could be radicalized to violent action. The political context of the current Trump-dominated GOP may spur the party to depart further from the law or procedural norms, which would raise the chances both of system breakdown and violence. The sympathies for Trump among much of law enforcement and the military are also concerning in such scenarios — if the MAGA base really rises up, would law enforcement restore order? Such scenarios may sound like absurd fear-mongering, more fit for a less stable democracy, but Trump’s utter lack of restraint and willingness to shatter democratic norms for power may mean those other countries have relevant lessons for us. The scenarios most likely to actually change the outcome are probably less about violence, and more that Trump will triumph in the procedural struggle — that he will get some Republican officials in the states or Congress, or conservative judges, to throw out state results showing a Harris win under bogus pretenses. This would lead the country into uncharted territory. Would Congress pick a winner? Would Biden step aside and recognize its verdict, if it did? How such a crisis would be resolved is impossible to foresee. American democracy in the balance? There is, of course, still reason to hope it won’t get anywhere near that bad. Despite many predictions in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, that event was not in fact followed by a new wave of far-right violence during the Biden years. The memory of aggressive federal arrests and prosecutions of the January 6 rioters — and state-level prosecutions of members of Trump’s own team — made clear that such behavior came with consequences, and memory of those consequences could deter future unrest (including from Trump himself, who would face renewed legal jeopardy in the event of an election loss). Perhaps the American public, including the right, simply isn’t that engaged or fired up about politics and they just won’t care too much if Trump whines that the election was stolen. Or perhaps Trump supporters will simply not prove as likely to descend into political violence as liberals fear. This month, the Washington Post asked dozens of Trump fans at rallies how they’d interpret and respond to a Trump defeat. Nearly everyone they interviewed believed the 2020 election was stolen from him and the 2024 election might be stolen too. But, per the Post, these Trump fans “notably did not express interest in a repeat of the heated rhetoric that led to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.” Instead, they suggested they’d respond to Trump’s defeat with resignation. The risk, though, is that Trump and the most hardcore MAGA believers will push for something different — that he’ll use every tool at his disposal to try to get back into power. And if they can convince millions of Trump’s voters to join him in that effort, the danger will be very real.

In a historic election, no one’s talking about feminism Two girls with pink pussy hats watch hundreds of thousands gather on Pennsylvania Avenue in the March for Our Lives Rally and Protest, Washington, DC, 2018. | Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Kamala Harris’s campaign for president is in many ways among the most feminist campaigns in history. Just don’t mention the f-word. Harris has pointedly avoided talking about her status as the potential first woman president, much less embraced a feminist label. It’s a marked departure from the suffragist-white pantsuit symbolism touted by Hillary Clinton during her own historic 2016 campaign. At this summer’s Democratic National Convention, only a single speech from Clinton focused on Harris’s trailblazing place in history, with Clinton referring to the central metaphor of her failed bid: that stubbornly unshattered glass ceiling. At the same time, Harris has championed undeniably feminist policy goals. She’s kept reproductive freedom central to her campaign, is the first sitting vice president to ever visit an abortion provider (no sitting president ever has, either), and advocated for child care policies as a core part of her economic message. As much as she doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that Harris is the first woman of color and the second woman ever to be the nominee of a major party. Harris may not be embracing a label of feminism, but if we define feminism as seeking the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes, her candidacy by its very existence fits the bill. Political observers have read Harris’s decision not to lean into her race and gender identity as savvy, mostly because of the trauma of what happened to Clinton after she went all-in on feminism. But it also speaks volumes about the place feminism, as a movement and an ideology, holds in popular culture in 2024 — one very different from the place it enjoyed in 2016. Feminist policies are still popular. People like abortion rights. They like the idea of child care reform. But feminism as a label is far less galvanizing. Instead, it seems to be in the odd position of appearing too dull, compromised, and centrist to be of interest to the left and too dangerous and radical to be embraced by the right. Its repositioning might be best understood as a feminist vibe shift: It just feels different now than it did the last time around. The girlboss has been canceled. Pantsuit Nation shut itself down last March and then resurrected itself in support of Harris in July, but it’s no longer the spiritual home of a presidential candidate’s most ardent fans. The iconic pussy hat was foresworn by 2019 as being too racist and transphobic to be truly feminist. There’s a sense that feminism is less essential to mainstream Democrats now than it was a few election cycles ago. That may in part be a reaction to the hard-fought Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020, when leftists argued bitterly over whether or not women voting against Bernie Sanders and for Hillary Clinton (in 2016) or Elizabeth Warren (in 2020) were “voting with their vaginas.” In the rhetoric of some of Sanders’s most vocal and inflammatory supporters in those primaries, wanting a woman to be president became something intellectually unserious, insufficiently progressive, a little gauche, a little uncool. It meant that you were prioritizing gender solidarity over class solidarity. It centers on how meaningless the symbolism of a woman president is and how silly it might be for women to care about it Sanders himself occasionally appeared to echo this sentiment in a softer form. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me,’” he said in 2016. In 2020, Warren said that he had told her a woman could not win the presidency (Sanders denied it). Sanders didn’t win either primary, but the recurring debate each election cycle helped create and standardize a set of derisive talking points that remains popular today. It centers on how meaningless the symbolism of a woman president is and how silly it might be for women to care about it. You see this strain of attack rearing its head when Harris’s detractors say that in her ambiguous stance on Gaza, she is simply gaslight gatekeep girlboss genociding, a taunt that pokes at her gender. Why worry about representation and identity politics, the thinking goes, when you should be focused on policy. On the center-right, the issue with feminism isn’t that it’s too centrist but that it’s too extremist and alienating. It remains the subtext of one of the central differences between Republicans and Democrats this election, despite the vibe shift. Democrats overwhelmingly favor gender egalitarianism while Republicans want more traditional gender hierarchies. That difference offers a potential explanation for the highly discussed political gender divide of Gen Z men and women. Post Me Too, young women seem to be breaking left while young men appear to be either staying constant with previous generational trends or tilting right. (The data here, it’s worth noting, is pretty inconsistent.) The Survey Center on American Life, a nonpartisan organization run by the right-wing American Enterprise think tank, found that though young men and women had similar political views for most of the past two decades, in 2021, 44 percent of young women identified as liberal, while only 25 percent of young men did the same. Moreover, in a 2023 survey, 43 percent of Gen Z men said they generally think of themselves as feminists, compared to 52 percent of millennial men. Not all Gen Z men are turning right. Yet for those who are, feminism offers a convenient scapegoat. Gen Z men “feel that rapidly changing gender roles have left them behind socially and economically,” reported the New York Times in August, “and see former President Donald J. Trump as a champion of traditional manhood.” “For a growing number” of young men, writes Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, in an article for Business Insider, “feminism has less to do with promoting gender equality and more to do with simply attacking men.” Cox argues that as young men see the outcomes of their education, professional lives, and mental health go off a statistical cliff, they grow increasingly resentful of the political solidarity they see their peers find in feminism. “Out of a sense of increased insecurity, more young men are adopting a zero-sum view of gender equality,” Cox writes. “If women gain, men will inevitably lose.” As the right positions itself as a safe haven for these men alienated by feminism, Democrats find themselves faced with the question of whether feminism is a liability if it’s losing them potential young voters. “If the Democrats are the ‘women’s party,’ as one party strategist claimed, it might not be surprising that men are looking in another direction,” says a recent article in Politico. The rightward turn of young men and the disenchantment of leftists and liberals all play a part here. But to be honest, I think what is most at work in feminism’s disappearance is not so much politics as it is pop culture. The publicity cycle that feminism is going through right now feels eerily familiar to me as a feminist writer who covers women in pop culture. It’s the same one every female star on the rise experiences: at first she’s beloved, and then she gets overhyped and overexposed. After the regressive misogyny of the Bush era, feminism began trending upward as the country embraced Barack Obama. In the early 2010s, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift alike declared themselves feminists, and trendy new direct-to-consumer corporations adopted feminist mission statements as swiftly as they adopted chic sans-serif millennial pink logos. After the dual traumas of the Trump election and the explosion of Me Too, feminism roared into focus as one of the central concerns of the nation. It felt vital and serious and important because it was. It was also already commodified, and about to get more so. The pussy hat is the most illustrative feminist icon of those years. After its arrival in 2017, it appeared on runway shows, magazine covers, and the short-lived Will and Grace revival (Grace uses hers to sneak candy into movies). Every time it showed up, it seemed to lose a little more edge. We had a decade of corporate-friendly, easy, mainstream feminism being very, very popular in ways that were of use to the salesmen of major corporations and electoral politics alike The same thing kept happening over and over again with all the most popular feminist commodities and archetypes of those years. Hollywood released dozens of pop culture revivals and reboots and sequels that tried to justify their existence via their feminism, and then they turned out to be not very good. The famous girlbosses turned out to be scammers and bullies. We had a decade of corporate-friendly, easy, mainstream feminism being very, very popular in ways that were of use to the salesmen of major corporations and electoral politics alike. It got defanged and then it got boring. Now it’s out of fashion. The good news is that what’s going out of fashion is simply the decade-old signifiers of feminism, not its substance. Reproductive freedom is incredibly politically popular. The past decade of mainstream feminism has left the movement with dozens of powerful activists and networks ready to activate. A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it. On the other hand, if Harris loses even after being so careful about the f-word and all the baggage that comes with it; if we learn that America would rather reelect the man who overthrew Roe and was found criminally liable of sexual assault than grant the office to yet another perfectly capable woman, no matter how neatly she sidesteps identifying as a feminist — well, if that happens, we’ll have learned a lot about what this country really thinks about women and the project of their political and social equality.

2 d

vox.com

Two girls with pink pussy hats watch hundreds of thousands gather on Pennsylvania Avenue in the March for Our Lives Rally and Protest, Washington, DC, 2018. | Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Kamala Harris’s campaign for president is in many ways among the most feminist campaigns in history. Just don’t mention the f-word. Harris has pointedly avoided talking about her status as the potential first woman president, much less embraced a feminist label. It’s a marked departure from the suffragist-white pantsuit symbolism touted by Hillary Clinton during her own historic 2016 campaign. At this summer’s Democratic National Convention, only a single speech from Clinton focused on Harris’s trailblazing place in history, with Clinton referring to the central metaphor of her failed bid: that stubbornly unshattered glass ceiling. At the same time, Harris has championed undeniably feminist policy goals. She’s kept reproductive freedom central to her campaign, is the first sitting vice president to ever visit an abortion provider (no sitting president ever has, either), and advocated for child care policies as a core part of her economic message. As much as she doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that Harris is the first woman of color and the second woman ever to be the nominee of a major party. Harris may not be embracing a label of feminism, but if we define feminism as seeking the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes, her candidacy by its very existence fits the bill. Political observers have read Harris’s decision not to lean into her race and gender identity as savvy, mostly because of the trauma of what happened to Clinton after she went all-in on feminism. But it also speaks volumes about the place feminism, as a movement and an ideology, holds in popular culture in 2024 — one very different from the place it enjoyed in 2016. Feminist policies are still popular. People like abortion rights. They like the idea of child care reform. But feminism as a label is far less galvanizing. Instead, it seems to be in the odd position of appearing too dull, compromised, and centrist to be of interest to the left and too dangerous and radical to be embraced by the right. Its repositioning might be best understood as a feminist vibe shift: It just feels different now than it did the last time around. The girlboss has been canceled. Pantsuit Nation shut itself down last March and then resurrected itself in support of Harris in July, but it’s no longer the spiritual home of a presidential candidate’s most ardent fans. The iconic pussy hat was foresworn by 2019 as being too racist and transphobic to be truly feminist. There’s a sense that feminism is less essential to mainstream Democrats now than it was a few election cycles ago. That may in part be a reaction to the hard-fought Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020, when leftists argued bitterly over whether or not women voting against Bernie Sanders and for Hillary Clinton (in 2016) or Elizabeth Warren (in 2020) were “voting with their vaginas.” In the rhetoric of some of Sanders’s most vocal and inflammatory supporters in those primaries, wanting a woman to be president became something intellectually unserious, insufficiently progressive, a little gauche, a little uncool. It meant that you were prioritizing gender solidarity over class solidarity. It centers on how meaningless the symbolism of a woman president is and how silly it might be for women to care about it Sanders himself occasionally appeared to echo this sentiment in a softer form. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me,’” he said in 2016. In 2020, Warren said that he had told her a woman could not win the presidency (Sanders denied it). Sanders didn’t win either primary, but the recurring debate each election cycle helped create and standardize a set of derisive talking points that remains popular today. It centers on how meaningless the symbolism of a woman president is and how silly it might be for women to care about it. You see this strain of attack rearing its head when Harris’s detractors say that in her ambiguous stance on Gaza, she is simply gaslight gatekeep girlboss genociding, a taunt that pokes at her gender. Why worry about representation and identity politics, the thinking goes, when you should be focused on policy. On the center-right, the issue with feminism isn’t that it’s too centrist but that it’s too extremist and alienating. It remains the subtext of one of the central differences between Republicans and Democrats this election, despite the vibe shift. Democrats overwhelmingly favor gender egalitarianism while Republicans want more traditional gender hierarchies. That difference offers a potential explanation for the highly discussed political gender divide of Gen Z men and women. Post Me Too, young women seem to be breaking left while young men appear to be either staying constant with previous generational trends or tilting right. (The data here, it’s worth noting, is pretty inconsistent.) The Survey Center on American Life, a nonpartisan organization run by the right-wing American Enterprise think tank, found that though young men and women had similar political views for most of the past two decades, in 2021, 44 percent of young women identified as liberal, while only 25 percent of young men did the same. Moreover, in a 2023 survey, 43 percent of Gen Z men said they generally think of themselves as feminists, compared to 52 percent of millennial men. Not all Gen Z men are turning right. Yet for those who are, feminism offers a convenient scapegoat. Gen Z men “feel that rapidly changing gender roles have left them behind socially and economically,” reported the New York Times in August, “and see former President Donald J. Trump as a champion of traditional manhood.” “For a growing number” of young men, writes Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, in an article for Business Insider, “feminism has less to do with promoting gender equality and more to do with simply attacking men.” Cox argues that as young men see the outcomes of their education, professional lives, and mental health go off a statistical cliff, they grow increasingly resentful of the political solidarity they see their peers find in feminism. “Out of a sense of increased insecurity, more young men are adopting a zero-sum view of gender equality,” Cox writes. “If women gain, men will inevitably lose.” As the right positions itself as a safe haven for these men alienated by feminism, Democrats find themselves faced with the question of whether feminism is a liability if it’s losing them potential young voters. “If the Democrats are the ‘women’s party,’ as one party strategist claimed, it might not be surprising that men are looking in another direction,” says a recent article in Politico. The rightward turn of young men and the disenchantment of leftists and liberals all play a part here. But to be honest, I think what is most at work in feminism’s disappearance is not so much politics as it is pop culture. The publicity cycle that feminism is going through right now feels eerily familiar to me as a feminist writer who covers women in pop culture. It’s the same one every female star on the rise experiences: at first she’s beloved, and then she gets overhyped and overexposed. After the regressive misogyny of the Bush era, feminism began trending upward as the country embraced Barack Obama. In the early 2010s, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift alike declared themselves feminists, and trendy new direct-to-consumer corporations adopted feminist mission statements as swiftly as they adopted chic sans-serif millennial pink logos. After the dual traumas of the Trump election and the explosion of Me Too, feminism roared into focus as one of the central concerns of the nation. It felt vital and serious and important because it was. It was also already commodified, and about to get more so. The pussy hat is the most illustrative feminist icon of those years. After its arrival in 2017, it appeared on runway shows, magazine covers, and the short-lived Will and Grace revival (Grace uses hers to sneak candy into movies). Every time it showed up, it seemed to lose a little more edge. We had a decade of corporate-friendly, easy, mainstream feminism being very, very popular in ways that were of use to the salesmen of major corporations and electoral politics alike The same thing kept happening over and over again with all the most popular feminist commodities and archetypes of those years. Hollywood released dozens of pop culture revivals and reboots and sequels that tried to justify their existence via their feminism, and then they turned out to be not very good. The famous girlbosses turned out to be scammers and bullies. We had a decade of corporate-friendly, easy, mainstream feminism being very, very popular in ways that were of use to the salesmen of major corporations and electoral politics alike. It got defanged and then it got boring. Now it’s out of fashion. The good news is that what’s going out of fashion is simply the decade-old signifiers of feminism, not its substance. Reproductive freedom is incredibly politically popular. The past decade of mainstream feminism has left the movement with dozens of powerful activists and networks ready to activate. A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it. On the other hand, if Harris loses even after being so careful about the f-word and all the baggage that comes with it; if we learn that America would rather reelect the man who overthrew Roe and was found criminally liable of sexual assault than grant the office to yet another perfectly capable woman, no matter how neatly she sidesteps identifying as a feminist — well, if that happens, we’ll have learned a lot about what this country really thinks about women and the project of their political and social equality.

Why do we love to scare ourselves? A Jack O'Lantern leers. It’s spooky season, that time of year when people spend lots of time and money deliberately freaking themselves out. It’s a time for watching scary movies or touring through haunted houses or curling up with a bloodcurdling Stephen King novel. This is, for many people, very fun. But why? Why do some people (myself not included, if I’m being honest) get such a kick from being scared? What is so fun about fear? You could make an evolutionary case for running away from things that scare us — that is, generally, a good way to stay alive — but why do some people then turn around and run toward fear? What are they getting out of it? It’s a question that Mathias Clasen and Marc Andersen have been puzzling over for several years. They’re the co-directors of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, and along with several colleagues, they’ve been investigating why we seek out fear, and what our penchant for the horrible might teach us about ourselves. “We see it [fear for fun] everywhere,” Clasen says, citing everything from kids enjoying peek-a-boo to teens watching horror movies and adults going on roller coasters. “But at the same time, it’s sort of scientifically understudied or even ignored. So there was something there that mandated serious scientific study. Plus we were having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.” Clasen and Andersen are quick to stress that they’re not the first people to explore this subject. But they see a lot of questions left to answer and explore. On a recent episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast, they laid out some of the things they’ve learned as they’ve investigated the paradox of fun fear, and what they’d still like to learn. The haunted house studies When you imagine the perfect scientific setting, you’re probably not picturing an abandoned fish factory in the middle of the woods. You’re also probably not imagining killer clowns or zombies or people waving chainsaws. But Clasen and Andersen and their colleagues have run several experiments in exactly this kind of environment — setting up shop at an elaborate haunted house in Denmark called Dystopia. “It’s a ridiculously chaotic context in which to try to do any kind of controlled, systematic, scientific investigation,” Clasen admits. Someone will be trying to mount a camera for an experiment, he says, “and then some clown — a literal clown actor — will come and throw fake blood on us.” “But in a way, this kind of horror house is much more well calibrated to investigate the kind of phenomena that we are really interested in,” Andersen says. After all, in a normal lab setting, there’s only so much you can do to scare the bejesus out of people before you start crossing some ethical lines, but if someone shows up at an abandoned fish factory, literally looking to be scared, that is their choice. So this haunted house has helped them glean some pretty key insights into how fear and fun might be connected. In one study, for example, they asked a bunch of participants to fill out a questionnaire before they went through the house. They hooked them up to a heart rate monitor, filmed them during some of the house’s biggest jump scares, and then surveyed them again right after they’d left the house, all to get a sense of both how scared they’d been, but also how much they had enjoyed themselves. And they found that the relationship between self-reported fear and self-reported fun in the surveys had a kind of an upside-down U-shape. Essentially, if you’re not very scared at all by a haunted house, it might not be that fun. But if you’re very, very scared, it’s also probably not super enjoyable. You’re looking for a kind of sweet spot between the two extremes. “You can think of it as sort of the Goldilocks principle of horror,” Andersen says. “There seems to be sort of a middle way where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.” This pattern showed up in their heart rate data as well. There, again, the people who enjoyed themselves the most tended to be the people whose hearts were behaving a little differently from their usual, but not enormously so. “It is as if humans dislike being very far from their normal physical state,” Andersen says. “But we seem to like being a little bit out of our comfort zone or a little bit out of our normal state.” Andersen and Clasen saw a similar U-shaped pattern in other research, too. Some studies on curiosity, for example, also showed that people were especially curious about things if they expected to be moderately surprised. “They are not really curious about things where they know that they are going to be way off,” Andersen says. “They are typically interested in things that lie a little bit outside of their normal knowledge.” Eventually, Clasen and Andersen started to hypothesize that maybe, when people sought out a little fun fear, they might be trying to learn through play — or in other words, trying to teach their bodies how to handle fear. “It’s about learning how your, you know, your body reacts, for instance, when, when you become scared,” Andersen says. “We know from other studies in cognitive science that the brain has a tendency of suppressing input that it can predict. If you have tried something several times, then oftentimes that experience feels less intensive. So one of the main hypotheses that we have is that recreational fear exposure allows you to learn about fear and handle it in a sort of more optimal way.” When the whole world became scary Unfortunately, the Recreational Fear Lab got a great opportunity to explore their hypothesis: the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, horror movies did really well at the box office. In April 2020, Penny Sarchet, now the managing editor at New Scientist, tweeted at Clasen: “I’ve been wondering if people who like apocalyptic/horror movies (which I’ve always hated!) will be more resilient to the trauma of this pandemic. Will you be looking into this?” “What an intriguing idea, Penny!” Clasen replied. It was so intriguing, in fact, that Clasen and some colleagues wound up running a study to investigate whether people who watched a lot of scary movies exhibited fewer symptoms of psychological distress in those early, scary days of lockdown. They couldn’t go into the field (it was, after all, a global pandemic), but they distributed questionnaires to get a sense of peoples’ personalities, their mental distress symptoms, and their movie preferences and tastes. They found that “fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of ‘prepper”’ genres like alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness.” These are, of course, self-reported results. And as Clasen told me, this finding is correlational, meaning that they can’t say one thing caused another. “We can’t say, based on this study, that watching a scary movie makes you better at keeping your stress levels down during a pandemic,” he says. Maybe the kind of person who likes scary movies is just less likely to get stressed out in the first place. How can we harness our fear? Clasen and Andersen are excited to continue exploring this question. Andersen says they want to do a longitudinal study with randomized control groups to see if exposing people to some kind of recreational fear brings their stress levels down over time. They also want to see if this hypothesis could be applied to help kids who’ve gotten treatment for anxiety disorders. “We would like to sort of enroll them — if they would like — in sort of a bravery module,” he says, though he stresses that the terminology there might change. Essentially, it would involve “inviting them to the roller coaster theme park, having them enroll in a climbing course, maybe seeing some scary movies.” The goal is not to freak some anxious kids out, but to create an environment in which they may have a little bit of fun with their fear. He wants to know if that would actually help these kids learn how to deal with anxiety better. Essentially: Could we fight fear with fear? Whatever they learn, they’ve demonstrated that our obsession with horror is about more than some cheap thrills. There’s something fascinating and mysterious at its heart. “It seems to be the case that stories and fiction are vital instruments for navigating the world for humans,” Clasen says. “Imagination might be our coolest asset. We can use our uniquely evolved imaginations to run through scenarios, to imagine different states of affairs, and to prepare.”

2 d

vox.com

A Jack O'Lantern leers. It’s spooky season, that time of year when people spend lots of time and money deliberately freaking themselves out. It’s a time for watching scary movies or touring through haunted houses or curling up with a bloodcurdling Stephen King novel. This is, for many people, very fun. But why? Why do some people (myself not included, if I’m being honest) get such a kick from being scared? What is so fun about fear? You could make an evolutionary case for running away from things that scare us — that is, generally, a good way to stay alive — but why do some people then turn around and run toward fear? What are they getting out of it? It’s a question that Mathias Clasen and Marc Andersen have been puzzling over for several years. They’re the co-directors of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, and along with several colleagues, they’ve been investigating why we seek out fear, and what our penchant for the horrible might teach us about ourselves. “We see it [fear for fun] everywhere,” Clasen says, citing everything from kids enjoying peek-a-boo to teens watching horror movies and adults going on roller coasters. “But at the same time, it’s sort of scientifically understudied or even ignored. So there was something there that mandated serious scientific study. Plus we were having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.” Clasen and Andersen are quick to stress that they’re not the first people to explore this subject. But they see a lot of questions left to answer and explore. On a recent episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast, they laid out some of the things they’ve learned as they’ve investigated the paradox of fun fear, and what they’d still like to learn. The haunted house studies When you imagine the perfect scientific setting, you’re probably not picturing an abandoned fish factory in the middle of the woods. You’re also probably not imagining killer clowns or zombies or people waving chainsaws. But Clasen and Andersen and their colleagues have run several experiments in exactly this kind of environment — setting up shop at an elaborate haunted house in Denmark called Dystopia. “It’s a ridiculously chaotic context in which to try to do any kind of controlled, systematic, scientific investigation,” Clasen admits. Someone will be trying to mount a camera for an experiment, he says, “and then some clown — a literal clown actor — will come and throw fake blood on us.” “But in a way, this kind of horror house is much more well calibrated to investigate the kind of phenomena that we are really interested in,” Andersen says. After all, in a normal lab setting, there’s only so much you can do to scare the bejesus out of people before you start crossing some ethical lines, but if someone shows up at an abandoned fish factory, literally looking to be scared, that is their choice. So this haunted house has helped them glean some pretty key insights into how fear and fun might be connected. In one study, for example, they asked a bunch of participants to fill out a questionnaire before they went through the house. They hooked them up to a heart rate monitor, filmed them during some of the house’s biggest jump scares, and then surveyed them again right after they’d left the house, all to get a sense of both how scared they’d been, but also how much they had enjoyed themselves. And they found that the relationship between self-reported fear and self-reported fun in the surveys had a kind of an upside-down U-shape. Essentially, if you’re not very scared at all by a haunted house, it might not be that fun. But if you’re very, very scared, it’s also probably not super enjoyable. You’re looking for a kind of sweet spot between the two extremes. “You can think of it as sort of the Goldilocks principle of horror,” Andersen says. “There seems to be sort of a middle way where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.” This pattern showed up in their heart rate data as well. There, again, the people who enjoyed themselves the most tended to be the people whose hearts were behaving a little differently from their usual, but not enormously so. “It is as if humans dislike being very far from their normal physical state,” Andersen says. “But we seem to like being a little bit out of our comfort zone or a little bit out of our normal state.” Andersen and Clasen saw a similar U-shaped pattern in other research, too. Some studies on curiosity, for example, also showed that people were especially curious about things if they expected to be moderately surprised. “They are not really curious about things where they know that they are going to be way off,” Andersen says. “They are typically interested in things that lie a little bit outside of their normal knowledge.” Eventually, Clasen and Andersen started to hypothesize that maybe, when people sought out a little fun fear, they might be trying to learn through play — or in other words, trying to teach their bodies how to handle fear. “It’s about learning how your, you know, your body reacts, for instance, when, when you become scared,” Andersen says. “We know from other studies in cognitive science that the brain has a tendency of suppressing input that it can predict. If you have tried something several times, then oftentimes that experience feels less intensive. So one of the main hypotheses that we have is that recreational fear exposure allows you to learn about fear and handle it in a sort of more optimal way.” When the whole world became scary Unfortunately, the Recreational Fear Lab got a great opportunity to explore their hypothesis: the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, horror movies did really well at the box office. In April 2020, Penny Sarchet, now the managing editor at New Scientist, tweeted at Clasen: “I’ve been wondering if people who like apocalyptic/horror movies (which I’ve always hated!) will be more resilient to the trauma of this pandemic. Will you be looking into this?” “What an intriguing idea, Penny!” Clasen replied. It was so intriguing, in fact, that Clasen and some colleagues wound up running a study to investigate whether people who watched a lot of scary movies exhibited fewer symptoms of psychological distress in those early, scary days of lockdown. They couldn’t go into the field (it was, after all, a global pandemic), but they distributed questionnaires to get a sense of peoples’ personalities, their mental distress symptoms, and their movie preferences and tastes. They found that “fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of ‘prepper”’ genres like alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness.” These are, of course, self-reported results. And as Clasen told me, this finding is correlational, meaning that they can’t say one thing caused another. “We can’t say, based on this study, that watching a scary movie makes you better at keeping your stress levels down during a pandemic,” he says. Maybe the kind of person who likes scary movies is just less likely to get stressed out in the first place. How can we harness our fear? Clasen and Andersen are excited to continue exploring this question. Andersen says they want to do a longitudinal study with randomized control groups to see if exposing people to some kind of recreational fear brings their stress levels down over time. They also want to see if this hypothesis could be applied to help kids who’ve gotten treatment for anxiety disorders. “We would like to sort of enroll them — if they would like — in sort of a bravery module,” he says, though he stresses that the terminology there might change. Essentially, it would involve “inviting them to the roller coaster theme park, having them enroll in a climbing course, maybe seeing some scary movies.” The goal is not to freak some anxious kids out, but to create an environment in which they may have a little bit of fun with their fear. He wants to know if that would actually help these kids learn how to deal with anxiety better. Essentially: Could we fight fear with fear? Whatever they learn, they’ve demonstrated that our obsession with horror is about more than some cheap thrills. There’s something fascinating and mysterious at its heart. “It seems to be the case that stories and fiction are vital instruments for navigating the world for humans,” Clasen says. “Imagination might be our coolest asset. We can use our uniquely evolved imaginations to run through scenarios, to imagine different states of affairs, and to prepare.”