New data on the end times

The “fire in a crowded theater” case involved neither a fire, nor a theater, nor a crowd, and resulted in one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever reached. But the phrase fire in a crowded theater was repeated by both vice-presidential candidates during their debate on Tuesday, demonstrating an ongoing misunderstanding of free speech.Toward the end of the debate, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, pointed out that former President Donald Trump tried to overturn—first by fraud and later by force—the 2020 presidential election, which he lost. J. D. Vance, the Republican who was selected to replace former Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket precisely because he is the sort of quisling lapdog who would participate in such a scheme, retorted that Walz supported “Facebook censorship.”“You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test,” Walz said.“Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks,” Vance replied.[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]The equivalence that Vance draws between social-media moderation and Trump trying to stage a coup is ridiculous, but revealing in terms of how conservatives have come to conceive of free speech: They believe that right-wing speech should be sacrosanct, and liberal speech officially disfavored. Walz is simply wrong about the Supreme Court standard for what kind of speech can be outlawed, but the invocation of that archaic test does illustrate how safety can become an excuse for state censorship. It just so happens that social-media moderation is not state censorship, because social media is not the government.In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of socialist anti-war protesters under the Espionage Act in Schenk v. United States. The accused, Charles Schenk and Elizabeth Baer, had been passing out flyers urging people to resist the draft during World War I. The Court ruled unanimously in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that the convictions were constitutional, with Holmes writing, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force.” (The next time someone tries to tell you that “words are violence” is something left-wing college students came up with, remind them that the U.S. Supreme Court said it first.)The cultural context here is as important as the legal one. As the legal scholar Geoffrey Stone writes in Perilous Times, the country was in the throes of the first Red Scare, and the Supreme Court was “firmly in conservative hands. The values and experiences of the justices led most of them to hold anarchists, socialists, and other ‘radical’ dissenters in contempt.” As Stone notes, Schenk and Baer’s pamphlets urged political support for repeal of the draft, not even unlawful obstruction of it. The justices, however, did not consider the political beliefs of those they were judging to have value, and therefore they had no problem seeing people thrown in jail for those beliefs, no matter what the First Amendment said. After all, it was wartime.So there was no fire, no crowd, and no theater. What actually happened was that some people had unpopular political beliefs and the government wanted to throw them in jail, and the Supreme Court said that was fine. That also happens to be the kind of thing that Trump wants to do as president, the kind of thing that the arch-conservative Supreme Court has decided he should have immunity for doing.The Schenk standard, however, was repealed in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, a case involving Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader who was convicted under a state law that prohibited advocating political change through terrorism. The Supreme Court—then a liberal court, something that had not existed before and has not since—overturned his conviction, ruling that that government can only bar speech advocating “imminent lawless action” that is “likely to incite or produce such action.” Stone writes that the Court was trying to tie its own hands to prevent the government from acting under the spell of “fear and hysteria” that can be brought on by wartime. It’s a much better standard than the kind that gets you imprisoned for handing out pamphlets. (Vance, a Yale Law graduate, is probably aware that Trump’s speech working up a mob that went on to ransack the Capitol and try to hang Pence could meet that much higher standard, known as the “Brandenburg test.”)But the fact that the government can put you in prison points to how matters of free speech are different for social-media companies. Social-media companies can’t put you in prison, because they are not the government. They can ban users for not adhering to their standards, but this in itself is a form of speech: Just as the right-wing website Breitbart does not have to publish my writing, social-media companies do not have to publish the content of users who violate their rules. Social-media moderation is not state censorship, and it should not be treated as such. Conservatives understand this when the moderation decisions land in their favor, which is why the union-busting billionaire Elon Musk’s favoritism toward conservative speech and attempts to silence his critics on the social-media platform X have not drawn the attention of the Republican majority in Congress. Nor should they—he owns the place; he can do what he wants with it. The point is that conservatives fully get the distinction when they want to.[Read: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]Vance’s implicit position is that conservatives have a state-enforced right to the use of private platforms; that the state can and should force private companies to publish speech that those companies disagree with, as long as that speech is right-wing. Such a policy really would be a form of censorship.Immediately after Trump’s disastrous September debate, conservatives, including Trump himself, began calling for ABC News to lose its broadcast license for fact-checking Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. These threats of state retaliation against media outlets—or anyone who speaks out against Trump—illustrate that what conservatives mean when they talk about free speech is a legal right to use private platforms as venues for right-wing propaganda, whether or not those platforms wish to be used that way. That is a form of censorship far more authoritarian than private social-media platforms deciding they don’t want to carry rants about COVID shots putting microchips in your blood that can receive signals from alien invaders. As for Walz, he foolishly cited an archaic standard that the Supreme Court has thankfully abandoned, one that in actuality shows how dangerous it can be for the government to pick and choose which speech is acceptable. Walz has previously asserted that “misinformation” and “hate speech” are not protected, a mistaken belief that is unfortunately popular among some on the left. The flawed standard he cited last night explains why such speech is and should be protected—because the window for state power to police what individual people say should be as small as reasonably possible.His opponents Trump and Vance, however, do not think that such an approach is dangerous at all. A government that chooses which speech to punish and which to promote is their ideal situation, provided that they are the ones in charge.

In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.

In an otherwise confident debate performance on Tuesday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, conspicuously dodged questions from the CBS moderators about his views on health care. For weeks, Vance has made clear his desire to dismantle one of the central pillars of the Affordable Care Act: the law’s provisions that require the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick. On Tuesday, though, Vance refused to elaborate on his plans to reconfigure the ACA, instead pressing the implausible argument that Donald Trump—who sought to repeal the law, and presided over a decline in enrollment during his four years in office—should be viewed as the program’s savior.Vance’s evasive response to the questions about health care, on a night when he took the offensive on most other subjects, exposed how fraught most Republicans still consider the issue, seven years after Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. But Vance’s equivocations should not obscure the magnitude of the changes in the program that he has signaled could be coming in a second Trump presidency, particularly in how the law treats people with significant health problems.The ACA provisions that mandate risk-sharing between the healthy and sick underpin what polls show has become its most popular feature: the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage, at comparable prices, to people with preexisting conditions. In numerous appearances, Vance has indicated that he wants to change the law to restore to insurance companies the ability to segregate healthy people from those with greater health needs. This was a point that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accurately stressed during the debate.The political paradox of Vance’s policy is that the trade-off he envisions would primarily benefit younger and healthier people, at a time when most young people vote Democratic. Conversely, the biggest losers would be older adults in their last working years before they become eligible for Medicare. That would hit older working-class adults, who typically have the biggest health needs, especially hard. Those older working people are a predominantly white age cohort that reliably favors the Republican Party; in 2020, Trump won about three-fifths of white voters ages 45 to 64, exit polls found. The threat that the GOP’s ACA alternatives present to these core Republican voting groups represents what I called in 2017 “the Trumpcare conundrum.”“Going back to the pre-ACA days of segregated risk pools would lower premiums for young and healthy people, but result in increased cost and potentially no coverage at all for those with preexisting conditions,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), told me.Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign hopes to exploit that tension by launching a major advertising campaign across swing states this week to raise an alarm about the plans from Trump and Republicans to erode the ACA’s coverage. Support for the ACA—in particular, its provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions—may be one of Harris’s best assets to hold support from older and blue-collar white women, who may otherwise be drawn to Trump’s argument that only he can keep them safe from the threats of crime and undocumented immigration.[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]The efforts of Republicans like Vance to roll back the ACA this long after President Barack Obama signed it into law, in 2010, are without historical precedent: No other major social-insurance program has ever faced such a lengthy campaign to undo it. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, Alf Landon, the GOP presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing it. But when he won only two states, no other Republican presidential candidate ever again ran on repeal. And no GOP presidential candidate ever ran on repealing Medicare, the giant health-care program for the elderly, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1966.By contrast, this is the fourth consecutive election in which the GOP ticket has proposed repealing or restructuring the ACA—despite polling that shows the act’s broad popularity. During Trump’s first year in office, House Republicans passed a bill to rescind the law without support from a single Democrat. The repeal drive failed in the Senate, when three Republican senators opposed it; the final gasp came when the late Senator John McCain voted no, giving a dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.Most health-care analysts say that, compared with 2017, the ACA is working much better today. At that point, the ACA exchanges had begun selling insurance only three years earlier, following a disastrously glitchy rollout of the federal website that consumers could use to purchase coverage. When congressional Republicans voted on their repeal plans, about 12 million people were receiving coverage through the ACA, and the stability of the system was uncertain because insurers feared that too many of those buying insurance on the exchanges were sicker people with more expensive health needs.“In 2017, not only did we have rising premiums because insurance companies were worried the market was getting smaller and sicker, but we also had insurance companies exiting markets and raising the risk that parts of the country would have nobody to provide coverage,” Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told me.Today, however, “we are in a very, very different place,” she said. “I would argue that the ACA marketplaces are thriving and in a very stable” condition. The number of people purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges has soared past 21 million, according to the latest federal figures. Premiums for plans sold on the ACA exchanges, Corlette said, are rising, but generally not faster than the increase faced by employer-provided insurance plans. And enough insurers are participating in the markets that more than 95 percent of consumers have access to plans from three or more firms, according to federal figures.Despite Vance’s portrayal of Trump as the program’s savior, the number of people receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges actually declined during Trump’s term, to 11.4 million, after he shortened the enrollment period and cut the advertising promoting it. The big leap forward in ACA participation came when the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 passed a major increase in the subsidies available to people for purchasing insurance on the exchanges. That made a mid-range (“silver”) insurance plan available for people earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level at no cost, and ensured that people earning even four times that level would not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.“The biggest criticism of the ACA from the start, which in many ways was legitimate, was that the coverage was not truly affordable,” Levitt said. “The enhanced premium subsidies have made the coverage much more affordable to people, which has led to the record enrollment.”Neera Tanden, the chief domestic-policy adviser for President Joe Biden, told me that the steady growth in the number of people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges was the best indication that the program is functioning as intended. “A way to determine whether a program works is whether people are using it,” Tanden said. “No one is mandated to be in the exchanges, and they have grown 75 percent in the past four years. This is a program where people are voting with their feet.”Conservative critics of the law nonetheless see continuing problems with the system. Michael Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that many insurers participating in the ACA exchanges limit their patients to very narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, a trend acknowledged even by supporters of the law. And Cannon argues that the continued rise in premiums for plans sold on the ACA show that it has failed in its initial ambition to “bend the curve” of health-care spending, as Obama often said at the time.The ACA “has covered marginally more people but at an incredible expense,” Cannon told me. “Don’t tell me it’s a success when it is exacerbating what everyone acknowledges to be the main problem with the U.S. health sector”—the growth in total national health-care spending.Other analysts see a more positive story in the ACA’s effect on coverage and costs. The insurance exchanges established by the ACA were one of the law’s two principal means of expanding coverage for the uninsured. The second prong was its provision providing states with generous grants to extend Medicaid eligibility to more working, low-income adults. Although 10 Republican-controlled states have still refused to extend eligibility, nearly 24 million people now receive health coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.Combined with the roughly 21 million receiving coverage through the exchanges, that has reduced the share of Americans without insurance to about 8 percent of the population, the lowest ever recorded and roughly half the level it was before the ACA was passed.Despite that huge increase in the number of people with insurance, health-care spending now is almost exactly equal to its level in 2009 when measured as a share of the total economy, at slightly more than 17 percent, according to KFF figures. (Economists usually consider that metric more revealing than the absolute increase in spending.) That share is still higher than the equivalent figure for other industrialized countries, but Levitt argues that it counts as an overlooked success that “we added tens of millions of people to the health-insurance rolls and did not measurably increase health-care spending as a result.”[David Frum: The Vance warning]The ACA’s record of success underscores the extent to which the continuing Republican opposition to the law is based on ideological, rather than operational, considerations. The GOP objections are clustered around two poles.One is the increase in federal spending on health care that the ACA has driven, through both the generous premium subsidies and the costs of expanding Medicaid eligibility. The repeal bill that the House passed in 2017 cut federal health-care spending on both fronts by a total of about $1 trillion over a decade. This spring, the conservative House Republican Study Committee released a budget that proposed to cut that spending over the same period by $4.5 trillion; it also advocated converting Medicaid from an entitlement program into a block grant. Every serious analysis conducted of such proposals has concluded that they would dramatically reduce the number of Americans with health insurance.Even if Republicans win unified control of Congress and the White House in November, they may not be able to muster the votes for such a sweeping retrenchment of federal health-care spending. (Among other things, hospitals in reliably red rural areas heavily depend on Medicaid.) At a minimum, however, Trump and congressional Republicans would be highly unlikely to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of 2025, a move that could substantially reduce enrollment on the exchanges.The other main Republican objection is the issue that Vance has highlighted: the many elements of the ACA that require risk-sharing between the healthy and the sick. The ACA advanced that goal with an array of interlocking features, including its core protection for people with preexisting conditions.In varying ways, the GOP alternatives in 2017 unraveled all of the law’s provisions that encouraged risk-sharing—by, for instance, allowing states to override them. That triggered the principal public backlash against the repeal effort, as Americans voiced their opposition to rescinding the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. But Vance has made very clear that a second Trump administration would resume the effort to resurrect a pre-ACA world, in which insurers sorted the healthy from the sick.“A young American doesn’t have the same health-care needs as a 65-year-old American,” Vance argued recently on Meet the Press. “A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health-care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.” Although “we want to make sure everybody is covered,” Vance claimed, “the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach.”Supporters of this vision, such as Cato’s Cannon, argue that it would allow younger and healthier people to buy less comprehensive plans than the ACA now requires, at much lower cost. As those more affordable options become available, Cannon says, cutting Medicaid spending to the degree Republicans envision would be more feasible, because people currently covered under that program could instead purchase these skimpier but less expensive private-insurance policies. Government-subsidized high-risk pools, the argument goes, could provide affordable coverage for the people with greater health needs whom insurers would weed out from their new, slimmed-down plans.“If you want to make health care universal, you need to give insurers and consumers the freedom to agree on the prices and terms of health-insurance contracts themselves,” Cannon told me. “You need to let market competition drive the premiums down for healthy people as low as possible so they can afford coverage.”Supporters of the ACA generally agree with the first point: that a deregulated system would allow insurers to create less expensive plans for young, healthy people. But they believe that all the arguments that follow are mistaken. Initial premiums might be lower, but in a deregulated system, even young and healthy families might find comprehensive policies, including such coverage as maternity benefits, unaffordable or unavailable, Georgetown’s Corlette told me. And when, before the ACA, states sought to establish high-risk pools for people with greater health needs, those efforts almost uniformly failed to provide affordable or adequate coverage, she pointed out.Even if a reelected Trump lacks the votes in Congress to repeal the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements, he could weaken them through executive-branch action. In his first term, Trump increased the availability of short-term insurance plans that were free from the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Biden has shut down such plans, but if Trump won a second term and reauthorized them, while ending the enhanced subsidies, that could encourage many healthy people to leave the exchanges for those lower-cost options. Such actions would further the goal of Vance and other ACA critics of separating the healthy and sick into separate insurance pools.Vance’s most revealing comment about this alternative vision may have come during a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, when he said that his proposed changes to the ACA would “allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.” But—as many health-policy experts noted to me, and Walz himself observed last night—that notion rejects the central purpose of any kind of insurance, which is to spread risk among as many people as possible—which, in fact, may be the point for Vance and other conservative critics of the ACA.“The far right,” Tanden told me, “has always believed people should pay their own way, and they don’t like the fact that Social Security, Medicare, the ACA are giant social-insurance programs, where you have a giant pooling of risk, which means every individual person pays a little bit so they don’t become the person who is bankrupted by being sick or old.”To date in the presidential race, health care has been eclipsed by two other major issues, each foregrounded by one of the nominees: immigration for Trump, and abortion for Harris. Under the glare of the CBS studio lights on Tuesday night, Vance was tactical in saying very little about his real health-care ideas. But the arguments he has advanced aggressively against crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act have made clear that its future is still on the ballot in 2024.

Donald Trump and his allies on the populist right believe they have a compelling argument for why the GOP is the true blue-collar party: Immigration is killing the American worker, and only Trump will put a stop to it. “Kamala Harris’s border invasion is also crushing the jobs and wages of African American workers and Hispanic American workers and also union members,” Trump declared at a recent rally. At other times, he has referred to immigration as “all-out economic warfare” on the working class. It’s a message that the former president repeats in one form or another at just about every one of his public appearances.The argument carries a certain commonsense logic: Immigration means more workers competing for jobs, which translates to lower wages and employment rates for the native-born. During Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Republican Senator J. D. Vance said that his boss’s proposal to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants would “be really good for our workers, who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.”Mainstream Democrats used to vigorously dispute the notion that immigration hurt native-born workers. No longer. Today, the two major parties are jockeying to convince voters that they are the ones who will truly secure the border. To the extent that liberals still defend immigration, they often do so by arguing that deporting migrants would reduce the labor supply and send prices soaring again—an argument that implicitly accepts the premise that immigrants do in fact depress wages.This is a tragedy. The effect of immigration on wages is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in empirical economics, and the results are clear: Immigrants do not make native-born workers worse off, and probably make them better off. In many domains, the conventional wisdom among progressives is mistaken, oversimplified, or based on wishful thinking. The economics of immigration is not one of them.Econ 101 tells us that when the supply of a good, like labor, increases, then the price of that good falls. This is the lens through which economists viewed immigration for much of the 20th century: great for corporations (cheap labor) and consumers (lower prices) but bad for native-born workers. Then a study came along that shattered the consensus.In 1980, Fidel Castro briefly lifted Cuba’s ban on emigration, leading 125,000 people, most of whom lacked a high-school education, to travel from Mariel Bay to Miami in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. In a few months, Miami’s workforce expanded by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands because of immigration in a typical year, creating the perfect conditions for a natural experiment. The economist David Card later realized that if he compared Miami with cities that did not experience the boatlift, he could isolate the effect that immigration had on native-born earning power. If immigrants really did depress wages, then surely the effect would be visible in Miami in the 1980s.Instead, in a paper published in 1990, Card found that the boatlift had virtually no effect on either the wages or employment prospects of native-born workers in Miami, including those who lacked a college degree. Economists have since used similar natural experiments to study the effect of immigration in countries including Israel and Denmark, arriving at the same conclusion that Card did. (These studies mostly focus on low-skill immigration; high-skill immigration has long been viewed almost universally as economically beneficial.)[Derek Thompson: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong]The simple Econ 101 story turned out to have a blind spot: Immigrants aren’t just workers who compete for jobs; they are also consumers who buy things. They therefore increase not only the supply of labor, which reduces wages, but also the demand for it, which raises them. In the end, the two forces appear to cancel each other out. (The same logic explains why commentators who suggest that immigration is a helpful inflation-fighting tool are probably wrong. I have made a version of this mistake myself.)Inevitably, not everyone accepted the new consensus. In a paper first circulated in 2015, the Harvard economist George Borjas reanalyzed Card’s data and concluded that even though average wages were indeed unaffected, the wages for natives who lacked a high-school degree—and thus competed most directly with the Marielitos—had fallen as a result of the boatlift. Borjas’s study seemed to back up restrictionist policy with empirical data, and for that reason became a pillar of anti-immigration discourse. In 2017, for example, Stephen Miller cited it when pressed by a New York Times reporter for evidence that immigration hurts American workers.But Borjas’s debunking of Card, such as it was, has itself been debunked. The data underlying his argument turned out to be extremely suspect. Borjas had excluded women, Hispanic people, and workers who weren’t “prime age” from his analysis, arguing that the remaining group represented the workers most vulnerable to immigrant competition. As the economist Michael Clemens has pointed out, Borjas ended up with an absurdly tiny sample of just 17 workers a year, making it impossible to distinguish a legitimate finding from pure statistical noise. Another study looking at the same data, but for all native-born workers without a high-school degree, found no negative impact on wages. Subsequent natural experiment studies have yielded similar conclusions. “Economic models have long predicted that low-skill immigration would hurt the wages of low-skill workers,” Leah Boustan, an economist at Princeton University, told me. “But that turns out not to be true when we actually look at what happens in the real world.”On paper, immigrants and natives without a high-school education might look like easily substitutable workers. In reality, they aren’t. Take the restaurant industry. New immigrants may disproportionately get hired as fry cooks, which, in turn, depresses wages for native-born fry cooks. But by lowering costs and generating lots of new demand, those same immigrants enable more restaurants to open that need not just fry cooks but also servers and hosts and bartenders. Native-born workers have an edge at getting those jobs, because, unlike new immigrants, they have the English skills and tacit cultural knowledge required to perform them.This dynamic helps explain why many efforts to deport immigrants have hurt native-born workers. From 2008 to 2014, the Department of Homeland Security deported about half a million undocumented immigrants through its “Secure Communities” program. Because the initiative was rolled out in different counties at different times, researchers were able to compare how workers fared in places where mass deportation was under way against outcomes for those in as-yet unaffected places. They found that for every 100 migrant workers who were deported, nine fewer jobs existed for natives; native workers’ wages also fell slightly. Other studies of immigration crackdowns throughout American history have reached similar conclusions. When a community loses immigrant workers, the result isn’t higher-paid natives; it’s fewer child-care services provided, fewer meals prepared, and fewer homes built.Low-skill immigration does have some economic costs. Most studies find that the income of other immigrants takes a hit when a new wave of migrants arrives. Low-skill immigration also tends to slightly exacerbate inequality because it increases demand for college-educated professionals such as doctors, managers, and lawyers, resulting in even larger wage gains for that group. But these complications don’t mean that immigration is crushing the American working class.Hold on, immigration’s critics say: Natural experiments can only tell you so much. You must instead look at the broad sweep of American history. As the liberal New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has pointed out, the decades in which American workers experienced their fastest income gains—the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—occurred when immigration was near historic lows; since the ’70s, immigration has surged while wages for the median worker have stagnated. “The trajectory of American history tells a very clear story,” Oren Cass, the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, told me. “High levels of immigration are correlated with poor outcomes for workers.”The problem with relying on history is that correlations also only tell you so much. Some readers will recall that quite a few things have changed since the 1970s; most relevant for our purposes, these include the loosening of trade policy, the weakening of labor unions, and the enormous rise in corporate concentration. All of these trends have been more persuasively linked to the declining fortunes of the working class. Without some evidence of causation, the co-incidence of stagnating wages and rising immigration really does look like just that: a coincidence.[Michael Podhorzer: The paradox of the American labor movement]Two data points are instructive here. First, the parts of the country that have received the largest numbers of immigrants in recent decades—Texas, Florida, the D.C.-to-Boston corridor—are those that have experienced the least wage stagnation. Second, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has experienced both a huge surge in illegal immigration and perhaps the most significant reduction of wage inequality since the 1940s. That doesn’t mean high levels of immigration caused the spike in wages at the bottom. But that’s exactly the point: Historical trends don’t necessarily imply neat causal relationships.The other problem is that you can just as easily make the circumstantial case that the natural-experiment literature underestimates the economic benefits of immigration. The aforementioned Denmark study tracked every single individual across the country (something that isn’t possible in the U.S. because of data constraints) over a 20-year period and found that low-skill natives who were most exposed to immigration responded by pursuing higher levels of education and moving to higher-paying occupations. Ultimately they achieved higher earnings than their peers who weren’t exposed to immigration. A study in the U.S. found that immigrants were 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start a business, and that the rate of entrepreneurship was just as high for immigrants from low-income countries as those from high-income countries. “Immigrants to the U.S. create so many successful businesses that they ultimately appear to create more jobs as founders than they fill as workers,” Benjamin F. Jones, one of the authors, wrote in The Atlantic last year. Immigrants, he noted, are inherently risk-takers. “We should not be surprised that they are exceptionally entrepreneurial once they arrive.”I admit to being partial to this view for personal reasons. My grandfather came to the U.S. in the 1960s as an undocumented immigrant from Lebanon, having never finished high school and speaking very little English. Within a few months, he landed a job as a car mechanic at a local gas station, leaving for work each morning before his kids woke up and returning after they were asleep at night. An economic study might find that he helped depress the wages of native-born mechanics, which might have been balanced out by his spending in other areas. What it probably wouldn’t capture is what happened next: He opened up his own station, and then another, and then another, employing dozens of mostly native-born mechanics, attendants, and cashiers. Along the way, he became a darling of his community, bringing a little bit of Arab hospitality to a mostly white suburb of New Jersey. His life was its own kind of natural experiment.The appeal of restricting immigration has, to put it lightly, never been primarily about economics. Surveys of public opinion generally find that people’s feelings about immigration are driven less by material concerns than they are by cultural anxieties about crime, social norms, and national identity. Anti-immigrant sentiment is much higher among older Americans (many of whom are retired) living in rural areas that contain few immigrants than it is among working-age Americans in immigrant-heavy cities such as New York and Los Angeles.Even if conservative policy wonks sincerely believe that limiting immigration would help the American worker, the guy at the top of the Republican ticket clearly has other things on his mind. In his debate against Kamala Harris, Trump, who has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” mentioned the supposed economic impact of migration exactly once. He spent much more time portraying undocumented immigrants as a marauding horde of psychopathic murderers “pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” At one now-infamous moment, he even claimed that immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. In Trump’s hands, the economic case against immigration is a fig leaf that barely obscures a much larger and more nakedly bigoted body of work.[Gilad Edelman: Donald Trump’s theory of everything]The example of Springfield is a revealing one. In the past few years, thousands of Haitian immigrants—overwhelmingly with legal status—have settled in the town of 58,000. This has led to some problems. Housing prices rose quickly. The health-care and education systems have come under stress. And relations between longtime residents and the new arrivals have at times been contentious, especially after a traffic accident caused by a Haitian immigrant last year resulted in the death of an 11-year-old boy.But after decades of dwindling population and shrinking job opportunities, Springfield has also experienced a jolt of economic energy. The immigrants have helped auto factories stay in operation, filled shortages at distribution centers, and enabled new restaurants and small businesses to open. Wage growth in the city took off during the migration wave and stayed above 6 percent for two years, though it has since slowed down. And the flip side of strain on the housing, education, and health-care systems is that there are now more jobs available for construction workers, teachers, and nurses to meet that increased demand. “What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, said in a recent interview, referring to the Haitian immigrants. “They’re very happy to have them there, and frankly, that’s helped the economy.”For DeWine and other public officials, this is a trade that is well worth making: Immigrants might cause some social tensions, but overall they make the place better off. Others, of course, disagree. According to Gallup, 2024 is the first year in nearly two decades that a majority of the public wants less immigration to the U.S. In the past year alone, the desire to reduce the amount of immigration has jumped by 10 points for Democrats and 15 points for Republicans. No matter who wins in November, we will likely see more restrictive immigration policy in years to come. If that is the will of the voters, so be it. Just don’t expect it to do anything to help the working class.

And the most predictable criminals

J. D. Vance put a sheen on Trumpism, and Tim Walz’s niceness unwittingly helped him succeed.

About half an hour into last night’s vice-presidential debate, the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan turned to Tim Walz and asked a question that the Minnesota governor had to have known would come. “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989,” she said, noting that new reporting suggests Walz didn’t go to Asia until months later. “Can you explain that discrepancy?”“Look,” Walz began, “I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies ’til the street lights come on.” He went on to explain how, as a teacher, he’d taken young people on educational visits to China. “I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times.”Kamala Harris chose Walz, most observers have agreed, for his Everyman aesthetic and fluency in retail politics. And so far, the affable former high-school football coach and hype man for Menards has mostly received glowing reviews. He is much more adept than his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance, at engaging with voters as a regular guy.Which is why he should have had a better answer last night. And Walz’s failure to provide a coherent, succinct correction for an entirely predictable inquiry about one of his flubs suggests ill-preparedness for a spotlight that is only going to get brighter—and harsher—in the weeks to come.Vance delivered a slick debate performance, though it would be a mistake to call it a “win” when he engaged in so much sinister revisionist history. In what would turn out to be the most striking moment of the night, Vance refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. The senator from Ohio also mischaracterized Trump’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Vance claimed, falsely, that he’s never supported a national abortion ban.Walz, for his part, deployed a few effective jabs. “That’s a damning nonanswer,” he said simply, after Vance’s election-denial tap dancing. Another time, in an exchange about gun-violence prevention and mental-health care, Walz looked right at the camera and said, “Sometimes it just is the guns. It’s just the guns.”But when you’re running a campaign against liars and bloviators, it becomes all the more important not to lie or bloviate. And the Walz fumble on China was sloppy enough—and early enough in the proceedings—to feel significant. After his first answer, CBS’s Brennan gave him another chance to clarify. “All I said on this was, I got there that summer—and misspoke on this,” Walz said, before taking a long pause. “So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”The bungled response made the moment worse than it needed to be. And calling himself a “knucklehead” came off more cringeworthy than charming. But it wasn’t the first time Walz has been ensnared by his own nonanswers. In August, a video surfaced on social media in which Walz referred to weapons “that I carried in war” to explain his support for an assault-weapons ban. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, but was never deployed to a combat zone. Asked about it in a sit-down interview, Walz had an exchange with CNN’s Dana Bash that followed a now-familiar pattern.“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed, actually, in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.“I speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about our children being shot in schools and around guns. So I think people know me. They know who I am,” Walz said.Bash pressed. “Did you misspeak, as the campaign has said?”“I said we were talking about—in this case, this was after a school shooting—the ideas of carrying these weapons of war,” Walz replied, “and my wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar is not always correct.”Some Democrats dismiss these fumbles. “So he had a bad answer to something that happened 35 years ago. Next!” the political strategist James Carville told me. That’s right in the sense that Walz’s remarks seem more slippery than nefarious. He isn’t obfuscating, as Vance is, about the results of the 2020 election.Still, Walz’s sloppiness highlights a bigger problem with media accessibility and versatility for the Harris campaign. Both Democratic principals have been reticent, seemingly reluctant to engage with the press; lately, Walz especially has been tightly bubble-wrapped. Unlike the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Walz does not regularly appear on cable-news programs or spar with reporters at campaign events. He is out of practice, and it shows.This morning, perhaps as an attempt at post-debate cleanup, the Harris campaign announced that Walz is expanding his schedule. The governor will travel to several swing states in the next few weeks, and do a lot more media appearances, including a podcast, a late-night-TV hit, and two national-TV interviews. That will surely help Walz get in some badly needed reps. Perhaps he’s kicking himself that he didn’t before last night.

Iran’s large-scale attack on Israel presents the United States with the chance to achieve a set of longstanding objectives.

In the lead-up to last night’s vice-presidential debate between J. D. Vance and Tim Walz, CBS’s decision not to have moderators provide live fact-checking became a minor controversy. One pundit argued that this amounted to giving the truth-challenged Vance “license to lie,” and many of the Democratic faithful voiced similar complaints on social media. Mother Jones went so far as to precheck the debate. The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign declared: “JD Vance is going to lie tonight. A lot. So we are going to give you the facts.” It then fact-checked the event in real time, pointing out Vance’s dodges and deceptions.At one moment early in the debate, the moderators seemed to struggle to suppress their journalistic impulse to correct the record. Contradicting Vance’s talking points about “illegal immigrants” in Ohio, CBS’s Margaret Brennan said, “Just to clarify for our viewers: Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status,” earning an irritated objection from Vance. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he protested.Other than that one “clarification,” the moderators mostly didn’t. But contrary to what liberals might believe, the lack of fact-checking probably didn’t help or hurt Vance (and by extension, Donald Trump). The uncomfortable truth is that if, journalistically, news outlets like CBS have a duty to contest lies, politically, fact-checking is less magic bullet and more magic beans.[Listen: When fact-checks backfire]Since Trump rode down his gaudy tower’s escalator to announce his presidential bid nearly a decade ago, the public has been inundated with a deluge of his lies. And as the media, voters, and Trump’s opponents attempted to figure out how to rein in a politician of unprecedented perfidy, fact-checking and combatting disinformation found new salience in public life. In the intervening years, fact-checking has transformed from a necessary piece of journalistic due diligence into a fetish object for Trump-weary Democrats. Some Democrats came to expect too much from fact-checking, and often seem to accord debunking a kind of political power to beat back Trumpism.The 45th president has been subjected to a sustained fact-checking campaign for the better part of a decade. I do not think it’s an exaggeration to say that no politician in American history has been fact-checked more thoroughly than Donald Trump. And yet, all those years of myth-busting have had next to zero impact on his electoral viability. He managed to attract new voters in the last election. And even as he spouts racist nonsense about immigrants—thoroughly myth-busted by journalists—he is increasing his share of non-college-educated voters of color in this election.My point isn’t that Democrats should give up on fact-checking, but that they need to remember that debunking is not a substitute for politics. At the presidential debate last month, when Trump repeated the conspiracy that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, the moderator duly corrected this bit of xenophobic fearmongering. For her part, Harris seemed to revel in Trump’s lies being called out live on air. “Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing, seeming to enjoy the moment.What Harris didn’t do was take the opportunity to articulate anything about her worldview or policy positions on immigration, or point out that Springfield had welcomed immigrants as a way to combat the economic toll of decades of deindustrialization, which was itself the result of conservative trade policies that helped offshore manufacturing. Basking in the glow of the freshly checked fact, she forgot to outline a positive agenda, as though beating Trump were a game of whack-a-mole in which you win by smacking down all the fibs that pop up.Does anyone really believe that the kind of voter who hears Trump blather about cat-barbecuing immigrants—and isn’t immediately disgusted—is likely to be moved by a CNN moderator tsk-tsking him and explaining that, actually, that isn’t true? Is any right-leaning swing voter or nose-holding Republican actually going to rethink their vote when they log on to the CBS website—if they even bother—and discover that Vance lied when he claimed that Harris is not invested in clean air or that she had been appointed “Border Czar”? For that matter, is any Harris-pilled Democrat going to rethink their vote when they find out that Walz lied about being in China during Tiananmen Square?[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]Arguably, CBS should have fact-checked the debate, because it is a news outlet, news outlets provide journalism, and journalists fact-check. But journalists should also be honest about the limits of the practice. Because calling out every falsehood is impossible, journalists are forced to make judgment calls about which lies are significant enough to merit dispelling. Republicans distrust that selection process, rolling their eyes at misinformation-wrangling, which they believe is unfairly directed at their co-partisans, while Democratic dishonesty is given a pass. And all too often, journalists call out brazen lies while committing lies of omission themselves. Many journalists spent months ignoring the truth that Joe Biden was deteriorating before their eyes, and had the audacity to tell the American public that videos of the octogenarian president looking visibly confused were something called “cheap fakes.”Pinning political hopes on fact-checking isn’t just bad for journalism, which gets reduced to a partisan instrument. It’s also bad for Democrats, causing them to forget to make a clear case to the American public that they have better policies. Donald Trump remains a fixture in American life not because of insufficient fact-checking—everyone, including his supporters, knows that he’s a bullshit artist—but because politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, have failed to make a convincing case that they have truths on offer that are better than his lies.

Tim Walz stumbled and struggled on the debate stage in New York last night, while J. D. Vance spoke smoothly and effectively.I’ve known Vance for 15 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many reinventions of the Vance story, heard many different retellings of who he is and what he believes. Last night, he debuted one more retelling. His performance of the role was well executed. The script was almost entirely fiction. Yet theater reviews aside, three issues of substance stayed with me.The first is that Vance truly is no friend of Israel’s.The evening opened with a question about yesterday’s Iranian missile barrage. This question presented Vance with a trap. On the one hand, Vance’s party wants to criticize the Biden-Harris administration as weak on defense, soft on Iran. On the other hand, Vance is himself intensely hostile to U.S. alliances. He has led the fight to deny aid to Ukraine. He keeps company with conspiracy theorists who promote anti-Semitism. Vance managed that contradiction in the debate mostly by evading the question about what the U.S. might do to support Israel. Israel’s actions, he said, were a matter for Israel to decide; beyond that, he had nothing to say.[Read: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]But the trick in evading a question is that the evasion works only if it goes unnoticed. This evasion does not. If you care about Israel, what you heard was nothing where there needed to be something. He offered no solidarity with the Israeli families who had spent the evening in bomb shelters because of the most massive country-to-country ballistic-missile attack in the history of the world. No friendship, no sympathy, for the state of Israel. Above all, what Vance delivered—Israel will do what Israel will do—was a message of abandonment, not a message of support. If you wondered what kind of voice Vance would be in the Situation Room when Israel is under threat, now you know: not a friend.The second enduring impression is that Vance has thoroughly analyzed the Republican problem on abortion and decided that the only option is to lie his way out.When the Trump Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, it opened the door to a new regime of state-level policing and punishment of American women. After this year’s election, Republicans may or may not have the votes in Congress to pass a national abortion ban. That’s not the most important question, however. The most important question is: Will a Republican administration use executive power to aid Republican states in their surveillance of American women? Vance’s own record on that is emphatic: Yes, he will, and, yes, he has.Onstage, Vance disavowed his record. He professed support for generous investment in maternal health and child nutrition. But his record has not disappeared because he denied it. Vance’s actual preferred health policy is to restore to health insurers the right to treat people with preexisting conditions differently—to do less risk-sharing, not more, even if that leaves many Americans without affordable insurance. Women and children face more health risks than able-bodied men. Vance’s policies are the direct opposite of Vance’s slogans.American women have had their privacy and autonomy ripped away from them—and Vance offered nothing to protect them. He was able to purr his way past his own cat-lady comments. But if American women were wondering, What happens to us under a Trump-Vance administration?, they have their answer: Your sex life and reproductive rights will be subject to government control in a way it has not been for half a century.[Read: J. D. Vance tries to rewrite history]The third enduring impression is that Vance remains all in on Trump plots to overthrow the election. At the podium last night, Vance refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. That’s not just a lie about history. It’s a threat to the future.Right now, Republicans in key states are working to bend the law to convert voting defeats into Electoral College victories. They hope to disenfranchise unwanted voters, to disqualify unwanted votes, to use a bag of old Jim Crow tricks and some new ones to defeat the people’s verdict in 2024. Vance’s answer about Trump’s violent coup after the last election expresses his willingness to support and assist his party’s stealthier subversion of the coming election.You have been warned.

Light through the blindssprays the gray wall-paper. The sonographerhunts for thingsthat could kill me,her wand wheezinglike wind in a cave untilshe squeezes my calfand a heartbeat leapson-screen. Vessels vibratebeneath the heatof a device runningdown my thighs. To passtime, I make the alphabeta game (a is for antibody;b for blood; c, coagulate;d, another dawn ...), multiplytiles massing the ceilingthen return, finally, tothe papered wallwhose twiggy whispsrace toward some unseenspring, their knobbyends clotted with littlered knots that burstone by one into view.

Not long ago, Catherine did something many other people have done. She ignored a medical bill.Catherine, who asked me to use only her middle name to protect her privacy, is a white-collar worker in Pennsylvania. “About 10—Jesus, 12—years ago, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s,” she told me, which led her to rack up debt, some of it related to her use of a $46,000-a-year IV-infusion drug. After her mother’s death from brain cancer in 2022, she decided to get her life in order. “I’m on this big journey,” she told me. “I had bills going back to an urgent-care visit I made in college. I was going to get on top of it.”Yet when she started calling hospitals, doctor’s offices, and collection agencies, she realized that nobody could tell her what she was paying for and why she was being charged a certain amount. Some bills had been forgiven; some were miscoded. “I was like, I’m not going to just send you $500 for this random you-know-what,” she told me. “My takeaway was: Nobody knows what these bills are for.” So she did not pay them. She tossed new ones in the trash. She sent unknown numbers straight to voicemail. Getting on top of her debts meant ignoring them.She wants to pay her bills, she told me; she’s not the type to walk out on the tab. But “it’s like no one even knows how much my procedures are going to cost,” she said. “The whole thing is so convoluted.”In years past, Catherine’s medical debt would have accumulated late fees and interest. Her creditors might have sued, seizing her assets or garnishing her wages. Her credit score would have plummeted, making it hard or even impossible for her to rent an apartment or buy a home. Some doctors might have refused to give her care. Some companies might have refused to employ her. But now, all of Catherine’s debts might not augur much of anything. A quiet, confusing revolution is happening in the world of medical debt, one that—and I cannot believe I am typing this—actually bodes well for consumers.[Read: What happens when you don’t pay a hospital bill]Medical debt is not like other debt. The stuff is omnipresent: Two in five American adults owe something to a health-care provider, and 3 million people each owe more than $10,000. But this is largely a financial burden dumped on consumers, not chosen by them. People often have no idea how much a medical procedure might cost, what their insurance might cover, or how much they might end up owing. Shopping around is rare and difficult to do, and sometimes—if you’re brought to a hospital after an accident, say—impossible. Billing offices fudge the numbers they send to insurers and patients, taking into account who’s paying, for what, where, how, and when. Half the time the bill is wrong.That does not stop hospitals from sending debts to collectors or going after patients themselves. Nearly 60 percent of bills in collections are medical bills, and more than half of the debts on consumer credit reports are medical debts. Debt collectors buy bills and quietly “park” them on credit reports, to pressure individuals to pay up once they realize their score has dropped. “Americans are often caught in a doom loop between their medical provider and insurance company,” Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), has argued. “Our credit reporting system is too often used as a tool to coerce and extort patients into paying medical bills they may not even owe.”Poor, sick Americans are much more likely to have medical debt than affluent, healthy ones; debt burdens are particularly heavy for the profoundly ill, such as cancer patients. Two in three people with medical debt report cutting back on food and other necessities to try to pay their bills; large shares skip other bills, work extra hours, or delay major purchases. Many avoid or delay getting more medical care. In extreme cases, medical bills have led Americans to lose their home.That is just one way our broken medical system is broken: In a country in which most adults have insurance, and in which most pay hefty out-of-pocket costs in addition to insurance premiums, many are nevertheless hounded to fork over cash for specious medical charges that do little to shore up the health system’s finances but a lot to trash family budgets and crush sick people’s souls.Ten years ago, an Occupy Wall Street–inspired nonprofit called RIP Medical Debt (now going by the name Undue Medical Debt) began publicizing how horrid this all was, while buying up medical debt from collections agencies and forgiving it. The debt abolitionists have erased $14.2 billion in debt owed by 8.6 million people, and counting.[Read: Americans are going bankrupt from getting sick]The relief had more muted financial effects than many consumer advocates had hoped: A randomized control trial showed that it had no impact on recipients’ credit access, did not relieve measures of financial distress, and did not improve their mental health. “We were surprised,” Neale Mahoney, an economist at Stanford, told me. “And, frankly, disappointed, because these are people who are struggling, and if there was a scalable way to make their lives a little bit better, that would be awesome.”But the nonprofit was nonetheless successful in raising awareness of the issue and setting the groundwork for policy change. In early 2022, municipal governments began purchasing and erasing medical debt, using money from the COVID-era American Rescue Plan. Cook County, Illinois, used $12 million to erase up to $1 billion in debt; New York City spent $18 million to forgive $2 billion for half a million residents; Washington, D.C., wiped out $42 million.Private industry made changes too. In early 2022, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, the country’s three major credit bureaus, announced that they would not put medical debts on consumers’ credit reports until the bills were a year old. Shortly after, VantageScore removed medical debt in collections from its credit-scoring model. And in 2023, the credit bureaus declared that medical bills under $500 would no longer appear on credit reports at all. These companies were not changing their policies out of pure altruism, but with the understanding that medical debt is not a great predictor of creditworthiness, anyway: Getting hit by a car is not the same thing as buying a Corvette with a credit card.The policies governing medical debt began shifting as well. Federal agencies are eliminating the consideration of medical debt when underwriting loans such as government-backed mortgages and small-business loans. Colorado, Rhode Island, and other states barred medical bills from credit reports. New York prohibited hospitals from putting liens on people’s homes and garnishing their wages; Delaware forbid companies from foreclosing because of medical debt; Florida and Virginia made it harder for providers or collectors to sue; Delaware and Maine banned creditors from charging interest on medical bills.Now a truly colossal change is pending. The CFPB has proposed excluding medical bills from credit reports altogether. The agency has a rule-making process that takes months, but if the changes go into effect as anticipated, $49 billion in debt will disappear from 15 million consumers’ credit reports in an instant.When that happens, will Americans simply start ignoring their medical bills? Well, no. Depending on the state, hospitals and providers could still sue, foreclose, or affect the chance of a person getting hired or being able to rent an apartment. “All the other ways to collect continue,” a CFPB official told me. “Just because it’s not on the credit report doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, and doesn’t mean that there’s no recourse for collecting it.”Plus, most people do pay their debts if they can. “There’s this theory, this myth, that the American people won’t pay their bills unless there’s a sword of Damocles hanging over them,” the official said. “We just don’t have that same perspective on the nature of the American people.”Hospitals themselves don’t seem that concerned. I asked the American Hospital Association, the powerful lobbying group, for comment, expecting fierce pushback against the CFPB proposal. A spokesperson instead directed me to a mild statement emphasizing the importance of insurance coverage. (Notably, cash coming from overdue medical bills constitutes as little as 0.03 percent of hospitals’ revenue.) Still, the financial-protection agency is taking away the main lever—a lower credit score, with all the annoyances and costs that come with it—that debt collectors use to get people to pay up. The CFPB forecasts that the rule change will result in 22,000 additional mortgages being approved a year.Even if consumers end up protected from harassment over their medical debts, they would be better off not accruing them in the first place, health experts told me. Sara R. Collins of the Commonwealth Fund, a health-care-policy think tank, described the underlying issue: First, hospitals charge too much, too opaquely, for medical services, and do not provide enough financial assistance to low-income patients, even when required to do so by law. Second, insurance coverage is not nearly comprehensive enough for lower-income Americans. “We still have about 25 million people who are uninsured, and they have high rates of medical debt,” Collins said. “But the big issue is people are underinsured, with high deductibles or high out-of-pocket costs relative to their income.”Fixing those issues would be far more difficult and expensive than writing off past-due debts and scrubbing credit reports. The medical-billing system remains “impossible to navigate,” Catherine told me. “If someone could tell you up front how much health care would cost, that would change the experience. For me, that would make the numbers real.” For now, she is planning on just ignoring the numbers and enjoying her health.

The senator from Ohio conspicuously refused to agree that the 2020 election was stolen.

The singer-guitarist MJ Lenderman has been hailed as his genre’s next big thing. Does it matter if he’s offering more of the same?

Joe Biden’s presidency is ending sooner than he hoped, but he can still cement his legacy by accomplishing something no other president has: the commutation of every federal death sentence.In 2020, Biden ran partly on abolishing the federal death penalty. His campaign website promised that he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example,” adding that death-row prisoners “should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole.” The Democratic Party platform that year also provided for the abolition of the death penalty, and shortly after Biden’s inauguration, a White House spokesperson confirmed that the president was indeed opposed to capital punishment.But the actual practice of his administration has been mixed. In July 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on executions. “The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” Garland wrote in a memo. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.” Asked for comment on Garland’s announcement, a Biden spokesperson said, “As the president has made clear, he has significant concerns about the death penalty and how it is implemented, and he believes the Department of Justice should return to its prior practice of not carrying out executions.”[Read: Can America kill its prisoners kindly?]Biden’s administration has not carried out any federal executions, but neither has he instructed Garland to stop pursuing new death sentences, or to stop defending ongoing capital cases. Biden’s Department of Justice has continued pursuing death sentences for mass murderers and terrorists, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and Dylann Roof, the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter. And Biden has declined to advocate for legislation that would eliminate the federal death penalty. Opponents of the death penalty have criticized Biden for failing to honor his campaign promises concerning capital punishment.So far, Biden has approached federal executions in the same way Barack Obama did: leaving the architecture for carrying out capital sentences in place but benevolently neglecting to use it. Donald Trump’s example, however, demonstrates how easy it is to resume executions even after a long gap. From 2003 to 2020, the federal government did not carry out executions. Then the Trump administration put to death 13 prisoners in a few months. Garland’s defense of current federal death sentences and pursuit of new ones has laid the groundwork for adding new prisoners to federal death row.Perhaps Biden is hoping to leave abolition up to his successor. But that, too, would be a mistake. His successor could well be Trump, and his vice president is unlikely to act boldly in this area, as she isn’t reliably opposed to capital punishment. In 2004, when Kamala Harris refused as San Francisco district attorney to seek a death sentence for the murderer of a police officer, Democratic politicians skewered her decision publicly. Then-Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer as well as then–Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown all called for the death penalty. The experience was apparently formative for Harris, who reportedly became much more politically cautious as a result. Since then, Harris’s position on the death penalty has shifted several times. Right now, Harris won’t clarify whether she intends to authorize her DOJ to seek death sentences or advance current ones, and the 2024 Democratic platform has been stripped of references to capital punishment. I doubt Harris intends to resume federal executions, but neither does she seem primed to commute every sentence on death row, or to advocate vigorously for abolition.So the opportunity is in Biden’s hands. If he really does abhor capital punishment as he has claimed, then he has several avenues through which to act with the last of his executive power. He could instruct his DOJ to withdraw its pending notice of intent to seek capital punishment in the 2022 Buffalo, New York, shooting case; rescind a Trump-era letter saying the FDA has no right to regulate the distribution of lethal drugs; and commute the death sentences of the roughly 40 prisoners on federal death row. The president no longer has to worry about the political ramifications of decisive work on capital punishment, and therefore has the freedom to act on his values and save dozens of lives. He ought to take this opportunity to keep his campaign promises, and to honor the dignity of human life.

In an underground parking lot beneath an ordinary building in an ordinary Ukrainian city, dozens of what appear to be small, windowless fishing boats are lined up in rows. The noise of machinery echoes from a separate room, where men are working with metal and wires. They didn’t look up when I walked in one recent morning, and no wonder: This is a sea-drone factory, these are among the best engineers in Ukraine, and they are busy producing the unmanned vessels that have altered the trajectory of the war. Packed with explosives and guided by the world’s most sophisticated remote-navigation technology, these new weapons might even change the way that all naval wars are fought in the future.Certainly, the sea drones are evolving very quickly. A year ago, I visited the small workshop that was then producing the first Ukrainian models. One of the chief engineers described what was at the time the drones’ first major success: a strike that took out a Russian frigate, damaged a submarine, and hit some other boats as well.Since then, the sea drones, sometimes alone and sometimes in combined attacks with flying drones or missiles, have sunk or damaged more than two dozen warships. This is possibly the most successful example of asymmetric warfare in history. The Ukrainian drones cost perhaps $220,000 apiece; many of the Russian ships are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The military impact is enormous. To avoid Ukrainian strikes, Russian ships have mostly left their former headquarters, in the occupied Crimean port of Sevastopol, and moved farther east. They no longer patrol the Ukrainian coast. They can’t stop Ukrainian cargo ships from carrying grain and other goods to world markets, and Ukrainian trade is returning to prewar levels. This can’t be said often enough: Ukraine, a country without much of a navy, defeated Russia’s Black Sea fleet.Nor is Ukraine’s talent for asymmetric warfare confined to water. During a recent trip, I visited another basement, where another team of Ukrainians was working to change the course of the war—and, again, maybe the course of all subsequent wars as well. (I was allowed to tour these operations on the condition that I not identify their locations or the people working at them.) This particular facility had no machines, no engines, and no warheads, just a room lined with screens. The men and women sitting at the screens were dressed like civilians, but in fact they were soldiers, members of a special army unit created to deploy experimental communications technology in combination with experimental drones. Both are being developed by Ukrainians, for Ukraine.[Read: The ‘Gray Zone’ comes to Russia]This particular team, with links to many parts of the front lines, has been part of both offensive and defensive operations, and even medical evacuations. According to one of the commanders, this unit alone has conducted 2,400 combat missions and destroyed more than 1,000 targets, including tanks, armored personnel vehicles, trucks, and electronic-warfare systems since its creation several months ago. Like the sea-drone factory, the team in the basement is operating on a completely different scale from the frontline drone units whose work I also encountered last year, on several trips around Ukraine. In 2023, I met small groups of men building drones in garages, using what looked like sticks and glue. By contrast, this new unit is able to see images of most of the front line all at once, revise tools and tactics as new situations develop, and even design new drones to fit the army’s changing needs.More important, another commander told me, the team works “at the horizontal level,” meaning that members coordinate directly with other groups on the ground rather than operating via the army’s chain of command: “Three years of experience tells us that, 100 percent, we will be much more efficient when we are doing it on our own—coordinating with other guys that have assets, motivation, understanding of the processes.” Horizontal is a word that describes many successful Ukrainian projects, both military and civilian. Also, grassroots. In other words, Ukrainians do better when they organize themselves; they do worse when they try to move in lockstep under a single leader. Some argue that this makes them more resilient. Or, as another member of the team put it, Russia will never be able to destroy Ukraine’s decision-making center, “because the center doesn’t make all the decisions.” Members of Ukraine’s 22nd Mechanized Brigade assemble a Poseidon reconnaissance drone in Sumy province, near the Russian border, in August. (Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty) I recognize that this account of the war effort differs dramatically from other, grimmer stories now coming out of Ukraine. In recent weeks, Russian glide bombs and artillery have slowly begun to destroy the city of Pokrovsk, a logistical hub that has been part of Ukraine’s defensive line in Donetsk for a decade. Regular waves of Russian air strikes continue to hit Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. The repeated attacks on civilians are not an accident; they are a tactic. Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to deprive Ukrainians of heat and light, to demoralize the people as well as the government, and perhaps to provoke a new refugee exodus that will disrupt European politics.Russia remains the larger and richer country. The Kremlin has more ammunition, more tanks, and a greater willingness to dispose of its citizens. The Russian president is willing to tolerate high human losses, as well as equipment losses, of a kind that almost no other nation could accept. And yet, the Ukrainians still believe they can win—if only their American and European allies will let them.Two and a half years into the conflict, the idea that we haven’t let Ukraine win may sound strange. Since the beginning of the war, after all, we have been supporting Ukraine with weapons and other aid. Recently, President Joe Biden reiterated his support for Ukraine at the United Nations. “The good news is that Putin’s war has failed in his core aim,” he said. But, he added, “the world now has another choice to make: Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let a nation be destroyed? We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away.” Hoping to rally more Americans to his side, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spent much of last week in the United States. He visited an ammunition factory in Pennsylvania. He met with former President Donald Trump, and with Vice President Kamala Harris.Eliot A. Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien: How defense experts got Ukraine wrongZelensky also presented a victory plan that asked, among other things, for Ukraine to have the right to use American and European long-range missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia. This kind of request is now familiar. In each stage of the war, the Ukrainians and their allies have waged public campaigns to get new weapons—tanks, F-16s, long-range missiles—that they need to maintain a technological edge. Each time, these requests were eventually granted, although sometimes too late to make a difference.Each time, officials in the U.S., Germany, and other Western powers argued that this or that weapon risked crossing some kind of red line. The same argument is being made once again, and it sounds hollow. Because at this point, the red lines are entirely in our heads; every one of them has been breached. Using drones, Ukraine already hits targets deep inside Russia, including oil refineries, oil and gas export facilities, even air bases. In the past few weeks, Ukraine’s long-range drones have hit at least three large ammunition depots, one of which was said to have just received a large consignment from North Korea; when attacked, the depot exploded dramatically, producing an eerie mushroom cloud. In a development that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the war, Ukraine has, since early August, even occupied a chunk of Russian territory. Ukrainian troops invaded Kursk province, took control of several towns and villages, set up defenses, repelled Russian troops, and have yet to leave.But in truth, the imaginary red lines, the slow provision of weapons, and the rules about what can and can’t be hit are not the real problem. On its own, a White House decision to allow the Ukrainians to strike targets in Russia with American or even European missiles will not change the course of the war. The deeper limitation is our lack of imagination. Since this war began, we haven’t been able to imagine that the Ukrainians might defeat Russia, and so we haven’t tried to help those who are trying to do exactly that. We aren’t identifying, funding, and empowering the young Ukrainian engineers who are inventing new forms of asymmetric warfare. With a few exceptions, Ukrainians tell me, many allied armies aren’t in regular contact with the people carrying out cutting-edge military experiments in Ukraine. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, says that the Ukrainians have spare capacity in their own drone factories, and could produce more themselves if they just had the money. Meanwhile, $300 billion worth of frozen Russian reserves are still sitting in European clearinghouses, untouched, waiting for a political decision to use that money to win the war. Biden is right to tout the success of the coalition of democracies created to aid Ukraine, but why not let that coalition start defending Ukraine against incoming missiles, as friends of Israel have just done in the Middle East? Why isn’t the coalition focused on enforcing targeted sanctions against the Russian defense industry? Worse—much worse—is that, instead of focusing on victory, Americans and Europeans continue to dream of a magic “negotiated solution” that remains far away. Many, many people, some in good faith and some in bad faith, continue to call for an exchange of “land for peace.” Last week, Trump attacked Zelensky for supposedly refusing to negotiate, and the ex-president continues to make unfounded promises to end the war “in 24 hours.” But the obstacle to negotiations is not Zelensky. He probably could be induced to trade at least some land for peace, as long as Ukraine received authentic security guarantees—preferably, though not necessarily, in the form of NATO membership—to protect the rest of the country’s territory, and as long as Ukraine could be put on a path to complete integration with Europe. Even a smaller Ukraine would still need to be a viable country, to attract investment and ensure refugees’ return. Right now, the actual obstacle is Putin. Indeed, none of these advocates for “peace,” whether they come from the Quincy Institute, the Trump campaign, the Council on Foreign Relations, or even within the U.S. government, can explain how they will persuade Russia to accept such a deal. It is the Russians who have to be persuaded to stop fighting. It is the Russians who do not want to end the war. Portraits of Russian service members killed during the invasion of Ukraine are projected onto the State Council building in Simferopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea, in April. The letter Z is a symbol of the Russian invasion. (AFP / Getty) Look, again, at the situation on the ground. Even now, two and a half years into a war that was supposed to be over in a few days, the Kremlin still seeks to gain more territory. Despite the ongoing Ukrainian occupation of Kursk province, the Russian army is still sending thousands of men to die in the battle for Donetsk province. The Russian army also seems unbothered by losing equipment. In the long battle for Vulhedar, a now-empty town in eastern Ukraine with a prewar population of 14,000, the Russians have sacrificed about 1,000 tanks, armored vehicles, and pieces of artillery —nearly 6 percent of all the vehicles destroyed during the entire war.Russia has not changed its rhetoric either. On state television, pundits still call for the dismemberment and destruction of Ukraine. Putin continues to call for the “denazification of Ukraine,” by which he means the removal of Ukraine’s language, culture, and identity—as well as “demilitarization, and neutral status,” by which he means a Ukraine that has no army and cannot resist conquest. Nor do Russian economic decisions indicate a desire for peace. The Russian president now plans to spend 40 percent of the national budget on arms production, sacrificing living standards, health care, pensions, broader prosperity, and maybe the stability of the economy itself. The state is still paying larger and larger bonuses to anyone willing to sign up to fight. Labor shortages are rampant, both because the army is eating up eligible men and because so many others have left the country to avoid conscription.Negotiations can begin only when this rhetoric changes, when the defense machine grinds to a halt, when the attempts to conquer yet another village are abandoned. This war will end, in other words, only when the Russians run out of resources—and their resources are not infinite—or when they finally understand that Ukraine’s alliances are real, that Ukraine will not surrender, and that Russia cannot win. Just as the British decided in the early 20th century that Ireland is not British and the French decided in 1962 that Algeria is not France, so must the Russians come to accept that Ukraine is not Russia. At that point, there can be a cease-fire, a discussion of new borders, negotiations about other things—such as the fate of the more than 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped and deported by the Russians, an orchestrated act of cruelty.We have not yet reached that stage. The Russians are still waiting for the U.S. to get tired, to stop defending Ukraine, and maybe to elect Trump so that they can dictate terms and make Ukraine into a colony again. They are hoping that the “Ukraine fatigue” they promote and the false arguments about Ukrainian corruption (“Zelensky’s yachts”) that they pay American influencers to repeat will eventually overwhelm America’s strategic and political self-interest. Which, of course, might be the case.But if it is, we are in for a nasty surprise. Should Ukraine finally lose this war, the costs—military, economic, political—for the U.S. and its allies will not go down. On the contrary, they are likely to increase, and not only in Europe. Since 2022, the military and defense-industry links among Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China have strengthened. Iran has delivered drones and missiles to Russia. Russia, in turn, may be providing anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, Iranian proxies who could use them against American and European commercial and military ships in the Red Sea. According to a recent Reuters report, the Russians are now constructing a major drone factory in China. The Chinese stand to benefit, that is, from the huge technological gains that the Russians have made, in many cases by imitating the Ukrainians in drone warfare and other systems, even if Americans aren’t paying close attention.[Read: Confessions of a Russian propagandist ]A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbors. I doubt very much that Germany and France, let alone Poland, are prepared for the consequences of a truly failed Ukraine, for a collapse of the Ukrainian state, for lawlessness or Russian-Mafia rule at the European Union’s eastern doorstep, as well as for the violence and crime that would result.The means to prevent that kind of international catastrophe are right in front of us, in the form of Ukraine’s drone factories, the underground sea-drone laboratory, the tools now being designed to enable the Ukrainian army to beat a larger opponent—and also in the form of our own industrial capacity. The democratic world remains wealthier and more dynamic than the autocratic world. To stay that way, Ukraine and its Western allies have to persuade Russia to stop fighting. We have to win this war.

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The obsession that would overtake Craig Unger’s life, get him labeled a member of the “tinfoil-hat brigade,” and nearly destroy his career as an investigative reporter took root on an April morning in 1991. Scanning The New York Times and drinking his coffee, he came upon an op-ed detailing a treasonous plot that had sabotaged Jimmy Carter’s reelection efforts a decade earlier—a plot that would become known, somewhat ironically, as the October surprise.Gary Sick, a former Iran specialist on the National Security Council, was alleging that during the 1980 presidential campaign, while more than 50 Americans were being held hostage in Iran, Ronald Reagan’s team made a backroom arms deal with the new Islamic Republic to delay the hostages’ release until after the election. Carter, bedeviled by the international fiasco, would be denied the narrative he needed to save his sinking chances—an October surprise, that is—and Reagan could announce the Americans’ freedom just after he was sworn in (which he went on to do).This story was “literally unimaginable,” Unger writes in his new book, Den of Spies—a crime of the highest order. He was hooked. American hostages depart an airplane on their return from Iran. Their release was announced minutes after President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. (Getty) Speaking with me about the October surprise from a leather booth at a Greenwich Village tavern more than three decades later, Unger, now 75, lit up. Uncovering exactly how Republican operatives had improbably and secretly worked out an agreement with Ayatollah Khomeini would give him a chance to be Woodward and Bernstein, or Seymour Hersh—journalistic heroes whose crusading investigations he revered. “For anyone who had missed out on Watergate, the October Surprise seemed to offer another shot,” he writes in Den of Spies. But it would not be Unger’s Watergate. It would be his undoing. Within a year, the story was downgraded to a hoax and Unger was both out of a job at Newsweek and being sued for $10 million. He had become, he writes, “toxic.”Now, though, on the strength of newer and more credible evidence, he is returning to the story. Den of Spies is not just a summation of his years of steady research into the plot, and not even just a play for redemption; it’s a referendum of sorts on a style of journalism that once ruled the day.Unger is what anyone would call an old-school reporter. His instincts were formed during the Watergate era, when the public’s reflexive trust in government was high (somewhere near 70 percent before Richard Nixon took office, as opposed to about 20 percent today) and journalists began fashioning themselves as adversaries with the presumption that the worst abuses of power were happening behind closed doors. Their role was to break Americans’ credulity—and they did. When I met Unger in mid-September, a second apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life had just occurred. I asked him for his first thought. “Cui bono?” he said. “Who benefits from it?” He wasn’t saying it had been a false-flag operation. But he definitely started from the premise that it might have been.[James Fallows: An unlucky president, and a lucky man]This is how Unger thinks. His previous two books tried to cement the idea that Donald Trump is an asset of Vladimir Putin. Unger’s modus operandi is to point to many different dots and then wonder at how they might connect, even when he can’t connect them himself or when those dots are being served up by deeply unreliable sources, such as a former KGB agent. Suspicion is what matters. He traffics in doubt. One negative review of his book American Kompromat in The Guardian described it as “dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all ‘too good to check,’ in the parlance of old-time journalists.”When it comes to the October surprise, Unger couldn’t give up on it, even after it rapidly moved from news to apparent fake news. A friend called the story his “white whale” (“I did not need to be reminded that things had ended badly for Captain Ahab,” Unger writes). Without any publication to support his continued pursuit of the story, he traveled to Paris and Tehran on his own to interview sources, made his way through thousands of pages of documents and sales receipts, combed through it all year after year. His book contains all of this evidence, published during another consequential October—and landing, as a sort of personal gift, on Carter’s 100th birthday.But the world in which Unger is now laying out his proof is very different from the America of 1980, or even of 1991, when his fixation began. Trust in leaders has eroded so completely that no one is moved anymore by the revelations of secrets, lies, or treachery—if you want to hear about stolen elections, just tune in to any Trump rally. Definitive evidence will now have to compete with loopy conspiracy theories. This is unfortunate, because the once-debunked October surprise has shifted over the same decades into the realm of high plausibility (though nothing close to agreed-upon history). And Unger and a few other reporters of his generation are responsible. They think that what actually happened still matters. “I don’t like to be wrong,” Unger told me, glaring through tortoiseshell glasses. “And worse, I don’t like to be called wrong when I’m right.”The alleged linchpin of the October surprise was William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager through most of 1980. Casey was the head of secret intelligence for Europe in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, and for the rest of his life maintained a broad network of contacts among the spies and dodgy arms dealers of the world. He was a furtive, mumbly guy; a Manichaean thinker; a Cold Warrior; and, as Unger put it to me, a “dazzlingly brilliant spy.” Casey also seemed to have few scruples about doing what was needed to win. He was accused of having obtained Carter’s debate briefing papers during the 1980 campaign. And once the election was over, Casey was made director of the CIA. Then–CIA Director William Casey accompanies President Reagan after signing a bill prohibiting the exposure of CIA agents in 1982. (Bettman / Getty) Much of Unger’s book focuses on Casey and the connections and motives that would place him at the center of such a plot, one that would involve breaking an embargo to illegally supply Iran with much-needed spare parts and weapons and using Israel as a conduit to do so (a shocking collaboration to consider today).After Sick’s 1991 op-ed, every major news publication sought to follow up and investigate. Most of the reporting focused on whether Casey was present at meetings in Madrid at the end of July 1980, when the plan was supposedly hatched. Endless minutiae surrounded this question. Unger showed me a copy of an attendance chart from a conference in London around the end of July, at which Casey was a participant. For the two days he was supposedly in Madrid for the meetings, some of the check marks on the chart indicating his presence in London are in light pencil, not in pen, meaning that he was expected but possibly never showed; did he sneak off to Spain? “Anyone can see this, right?” Unger said, squinting at the chart.The pieces of this puzzle were that tiny. Or they involved shady characters who said they were at the Madrid meetings or their follow-ups and could attest to the plotting—people such as the brothers Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi, Iranian businessmen who were acting, Unger alleges, as double agents, pretending to negotiate the hostage release with Carter while working with Casey to stall it for Reagan’s benefit.Unger, who had been a freelance investigative reporter, was hired by Newsweek, shortly after Esquire published his first article on the October surprise, to join a team dedicated to tracking down the plot. Like Woodward and Bernstein on Watergate, Unger imagined the team would do a series of stories leading, eventually, all the way to the White House. One version of the theory even placed George H. W. Bush, who in 1991 was beginning a reelection campaign, in Paris for the final planning meetings with the Iranians. Craig Unger (pictured, right) points to an allegedly incriminating chart in his new book, Den of Spies. (Benedict Evans for The Atlantic) And as with Watergate and other conspiracy investigations of various credibility—whether the cigarette industry’s cover-ups or Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction—this one relied on a rogues’ gallery of sources. Unger made contact with Ari Ben-Menashe, an arms dealer who claimed to be an intelligence asset for the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. Ben-Menashe gave Unger details about the deal and described Casey’s participation. Unger knew that Ben-Menashe was not exactly to be trusted—most Israeli intelligence officials dismissed him as a low-level translator—but Unger considered it worth the risk. “The truth is, people who know most about crimes are criminals,” he told me. “People who know most about espionage are spies. And what you want to do is hear them out and corroborate.” When he tried to do that, Unger said, he was “eviscerated.”Newsweek was not interested in an incremental Watergate-like build. Instead of Unger’s scoops, they published an article about how Ben-Menashe was a liar who had helped invent the story of the October surprise. Other publications followed. Unger had no time and no outlet to make his case, and he looked like he’d been taken for a ride. These characterizations, he said, “carried the day in terms of creating a critical mass that overwhelmed any data we could surface.”Unger was soon out at Newsweek. Then he and Esquire were sued for libel by Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser (the case was thrown out, and McFarlane lost his subsequent appeal). Two congressional investigations looking into the plot were launched in the early 1990s; the House produced a nearly 1,000-page report. Both inquiries concluded that no proof of a conspiracy existed. According to the chair of the House task force, the whole story was the product of sources who were “either wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.”There was no question that if you pursued this, you were finished,” Unger told me. He tried to rebuild his career, eventually becoming the editor of Boston magazine and then moving back into freelance journalism. He wasn’t exactly the Ahab of the October surprise; that dubious honor belongs to Robert Parry, another old-school type who modeled himself on I. F. Stone, the paragon of independent journalists. It was Parry who kept discovering more clues, including, in 2011, a White House memo that definitively put Casey in Madrid for the July 1980 meetings. Parry died in 2018, leaving behind all of his collected files, including 23 gigabytes of documents. Unger used this material to reopen his own investigation.In the years since that first op-ed was published, a lot of other testimony and evidence had helped bolster the October-surprise theory, some of it from more reliable sources—notably Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the president of Iran in 1980, who insisted to anyone who would listen that he had been aware of the plot. Unger went to meet with Bani-Sadr at his home in Versailles, and traveled to Iran in 2014 to see if he could pick up any leads. Among the new material in the book, Unger reveals records he uncovered that appear to document shipments of military equipment from Israel to Iran around the time of the November 1980 election.[David A. Graham: The Iranian humiliation Trump is trying to avenge]And just last year, The New York Times published a bombshell report in which Ben Barnes, a prominent Texas politician, revealed a secret he had been keeping for nearly 43 years: In 1980, he traveled throughout the Middle East with John Connally, the former Texas governor, seemingly at the behest of Casey to ask Arab leaders to persuade Iran to delay the hostage release. Barnes said he wanted to add to the record while Carter was still alive. “History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes told the Times.After this story, The New Republic ran an essay co-authored by Sick, the former National Security Council official; Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic-policy adviser; and two prominent Carter biographers, Kai Bird and Jonathan Alter. Under the headline “It’s All but Settled,” they wrote that they now “believe that it’s time to move past conspiracy theories to hard historical conclusions about the so-called October Surprise.” Like Unger, they had little doubt that Casey “ran a multipronged covert operation to manipulate the 1980 presidential election.”The odds that Unger will get a renewed hearing for the October surprise—vindicating himself and maybe Carter too—are low. The most recent bizarro episode in the current election might explain why. As anyone following along will recall, the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, seeking to stoke fears about immigrants, helped spread a rumor that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ cats and dogs. This was not true—and he knew it. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he recently told CNN.Unger wants to unmask politicians and reveal the truth. But we now live in a country where politicians seem to openly brag about lying, and enough people despise the media so much that they’re willing to believe those lies anyway. We have an epistemic problem that no Woodward or Bernstein could solve. Detailing a nearly half-century-old conspiracy theory, even with Unger’s mass of evidence—the receipts, a videotaped interview with Jamshid Hashemi, those little pencil check marks on an old attendance chart—would read like old news to one half of the country and partisan revisionism to the other half. Benedict Evans for The Atlantic Reporters used to be able to change the “national conversation,” Unger told me. That’s what he was hoping to do, impossible as it seems even to him. Once upon a time, the large newspapers and television networks had, Unger said, “enough authority that a big story would really just land big and change the conversation, and that the organs of government would suddenly click into action to respond with congressional investigations. It is so hard to get that done.”I wondered, though, in my discussions with Unger, whether reporters like him bore some of the responsibility—whether the kind of skepticism and mistrust that marked his generation of journalists had helped create our post-truth reality. There were moments when he slipped from crusading truth teller to something closer to a conspiracy theorist willing to believe the most outlandish speculations. In the book, for example, with very little proof, he entertains the idea that rogue spies looking to undermine Carter sabotaged the helicopters used in a failed hostage-rescue mission in April 1980, which ended with eight soldiers dying in a crash. I asked Unger whether he really believed this. “Well, I think it is a possibility,” he told me.It was easier to sympathize with Unger—to see the genuine idealism behind the swagger—when he explained why he couldn’t ever let go of the theory that had so hobbled his career.He grew up in Dallas; his father was an endocrinologist and his mother owned the biggest independent bookstore in the city. Unger told me about a visit he took to the Dachau concentration camp when he was 14, in 1963. This was instead of a bar mitzvah. While there, he saw Germans atoning for their national sins, not even 20 years after the end of the war, and it stayed with him, that honest reckoning with the past. He told me it made him think of his city’s own Lee Park, named after the Confederate general and defender of slavery, and how shameful it was that so long after the end of the Civil War, Lee’s name was unapologetically honored.“When my colleagues and I first took on the October Surprise more than thirty years ago, we became actors in a case study of America’s denial of its dark history, its refusal to accept the ugly truth,” Unger writes in his book. After Unger told me the story about his childhood and Lee Park, I looked up the green space and saw that it had been renamed Turtle Creek Park in 2019. Ugly truths, even in America, do occasionally get acknowledged—but it can take longer than one journalist’s lifetime for that to happen.

Iran’s attack on Israel yesterday evoked a sense of déjà vu. On April 13, too, Iran targeted Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones—at that time marking a first-ever in the history of the two countries. The latest strikes were notably similar: more show than effect, resulting in few casualties (April’s injured only a young Arab Israeli girl, and today’s killed a Palestinian worker in Jericho, in the West Bank). No Israeli civilians were hurt in either attack, although it’s likely that Iran’s use of more sophisticated missiles brought about greater damage this time.Now, as then, my sources suggest that Iran has no appetite for getting into a war and hopes for this to be the end of hostilities. And yet, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to take the risk. In the past month, Iran has had to watch while Israel made quick work of destroying Hezbollah’s command structure and killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Tehran was fast losing face, and Khamenei apparently made up his mind to shore up his anti-Israel credibility. History will show how consequential this decision was.Shortly after the missile barrage, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced that Iran had made a “big mistake” and would “pay for it.” Israel’s dedicated X account echoed this threat in Persian. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called on Netanyahu to attack Iran’s nuclear and energy sites, claiming that this could lead Iranians to rise up and bring down their regime at last. Israel has had no better chance in half a century to change the region fundamentally, Bennett said.[Read: Ordinary Iranians don’t want a war with Israel]This is a terrifying moment for Iran. Khamenei has long pursued what he calls a “no peace, no war” strategy: Iran supports regional militias opposed to Western interests and the Jewish state but avoids actually getting into a war. The approach was always untenable. But Iran is not ready for an all-out war: Its economically battered society does not share its leaders’ animus toward Israel, and its military capabilities don’t even begin to match Israel’s sophisticated arsenal. Iran lacks significant air-defense capabilities on its own, and Russia has not leapt to complement them.“We don’t have a fucking air force,” a source in Tehran close to the Iranian military told me, under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Of the attack on Israel, he said, “I don’t know what they are thinking.”Iran’s diplomats have said that the attacks were an exercise of self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Iran targeted “solely military and security sites” that Israel was using to attack Gaza and Lebanon (an odd fit for self-defense claims, because neither of these is Iranian territory). He added that Iran had waited for two months “to give space for a cease-fire in Gaza,” and that it now deemed the matter “concluded.” Other regime figures have contributed more bluster. “We could have turned Tel Aviv and Haifa to rubble, but we didn’t,” said Ahmad Vahidi, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force. “If Israel makes a mistake, we might change our decision and turn Tel Aviv into rubble overnight.”For Israel, a war is worth avoiding for strategic reasons. “Israel has no choice but to retaliate,” Yonatan Touval, a senior policy analyst at Mitvim, a Tel Aviv–based liberal-leaning foreign-policy think tank, told me. But the Axis of Resistance is on its back foot, and for this reason, he said, Israel has a stake in not escalating: “Israel should ensure that, whatever it does, it does not reinforce an alliance that is remarkably, and against all odds, in tatters.”In the past couple of weeks, Israel’s blitzkrieg actions against Hezbollah have neutralized Iran’s most potent threat—that of Hamas and Hezbollah missiles pointing at Israel from two directions. Some observers have compared the moment to 1967, when Israel decisively defeated Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. Israel seemingly holds all the cards; it could still choose to “take the win,” as President Joe Biden urged Netanyahu to do back in April, and carve a new place for itself in the region through diplomacy. In one sign of the possibility for goodwill, as in April, Arab states such as Jordan intercepted some of the Iranian missiles aimed at Israel.But Biden has remained strangely silent for the past two days, and one wonders whom Netanyahu is listening to now.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Media | YouTube | Pocket CastsJanuary 6 could have faded for Republicans as a day they’d rather not talk about. But then six months later, Donald Trump landed on a story that’s become useful to him. He started talking about Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer. Over a few weeks, Trump started spinning a new story: Babbitt was a martyr, and the people imprisoned for January 6 were political prisoners, and the villain was the Deep State, the same shady entity that denied him the presidency.In this episode of We Live Here Now, we trace how Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, got Trump’s attention and may have changed the course of history as a result. Witthoeft never had anything to do with politics before her daughter was killed. But by her constant presence at January 6 vigils and rallies, she managed to create a new reality.This is the third episode of We Live Here Now, a six-part series about what happened when we found out that our new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.The following is a transcript of the episode:Lauren Ober: I wonder what justice looks like and what happens if it doesn’t come.Hanna Rosin: This is a question Lauren would ask Micki a lot.Micki Witthoeft: I want to see somebody held accountable for my daughter’s death.Nicole Reffitt: Exactly.Witthoeft: You know, I want to see a lot of people held accountable for my daughter’s death and the way she’s been treated since then.Ober: By whom?Witthoeft: By people that consider her disposable.Ober: What happens if no one is held accountable in a way that feels correct for you?Witthoeft: Well, that’s a good question, Lauren. But I guess, then, I will just have to take my dying breath trying to bring that about.Rosin: Micki has been in D.C., far from home, for a long time. She has four sons and two grandsons, one she barely knows because most of his life, she’s been 3,000 miles away on “Freedom Corner,” chasing this slippery justice—these somebodies to hold accountable, whatever “accountable” means. And then there’s Nicole.Reffitt: Yeah, it looks like a very long road. My family is never going to be the same as they were prior to January 6 ever again. Micki’s family is never going to be the same. Ashli’s never coming back. But being here in D.C. and seeing what that looks like, we ask ourselves that all the time. You know, like, What are we doing? We say that a lot to each other.Rosin: Lauren and I have that same question. What did they get done here? Seen one way, Micki Witthoeft and Nicole Reffitt have spent 700-plus evenings far away from their families to organize a small, fringey protest at the back of the D.C. jail. But seen another way, these two women diverted the course of history.Or maybe both are true, because this is a very weird political era where fringe can merge with power, and suddenly the world is upside down.I’m Hanna Rosin.Ober: And I’m Lauren Ober. And from The Atlantic, this is: We Live Here Now.In this episode, we try and tease out how Micki’s personal mission and Donald Trump’s political mission collided with each other. Warning: Hanna and I do not land in the same place on this one, and we have our very own hot-mic moment debating things. So lucky for you.In her previous life, Micki wasn’t all that political. But almost as soon as she learned her daughter died, politics came up. On January 7, she gave an interview to Fox 5 in San Diego.[Music]Witthoeft: I would like to invite Donald J. Trump to say her name out loud, to acknowledge the passing of his loudest and proudest supporter, Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt.Rosin: It’s revealing that at her saddest, Micki thought to call on Trump. You can hear that and think, Maybe there’s a hint of a possibility here that she thinks he should take some responsibility for Ashli’s death.There was another woman who died on January 6 at the Capitol: Rosanne Boyland, a Trump supporter who was around Ashli’s age. She was crushed by the mob just outside the Capitol. The day after her death, her brother-in-law squarely and publicly blamed her death on Trump and QAnon for leading her astray.Micki, too, could have decided that Trump spread the lie that the election was stolen to soothe his wounded ego, which lured her daughter to D.C. and got her killed. But she didn’t. Something moved her in the opposite direction. And for thousands—who knows, millions—of people, the meaning of January 6 started to shift along with her.Trump didn’t know Micki’s name on January 7, because back then, he was on the defensive. There were reports that some Republican leaders were going to ask him to resign.That never happened. Instead, they settled at: How about we just forget this whole January 6th thing? Just don’t mention it.And then around July 4, 2021, in a series of speeches, candidate Trump took a bold left turn—actually, a right turn.[Crowd noise]Donald Trump: Wow, that’s a lot of people. Thank you.Rosin: It started, as best as I can tell, at a rally. It was July 3rd—nearly seven months after the Capitol riots. It was a Saturday in Sarasota, Florida. Trump is hitting all his usual rally points, and then you can hear him reach for something new.Trump: The Republicans have to get themselves a real leader. You got some great senators, but they have to get themselves a real leader. And by the way, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Who shot Ashli Babbitt?Rosin: With an investigation into January 6 just getting underway, Trump tried a new tack.Trump: Who? Who shot Ashli Babbitt? I spoke to her mother the other day. An incredible woman. She’s just devastated like it happened yesterday. And it’s a terrible thing. Shot, boom, there was no reason for it. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? It’s got to be released.Rosin: Four days later, he was talking about it again, this time at a press conference in New Jersey. At this point, the investigation was still not releasing the name of Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli.Trump: But the person that shot Ashli Babbitt—boom, right through the head. Just boom. There was no reason for that. They’ve already written it off. They said, That case is closed.Rosin: She was shot in the shoulder, not the head. But Trump wasn’t interested in details here. They’ve already written off Ashli’s murder. They said the case is closed. Who was “they”? Of course, the same people who stole the election.Five days after that, Trump is on Fox News:Trump: Who shot Ashli Babbitt? People want to know. And why?Rosin: Now, the Big Lie could easily have faded away—just been recorded in history books as that moment when a man named Donald Trump tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. But phew—democracy is resilient. The Department of Justice closed its investigation into Michael Byrd and said there was no reason to press charges. Problem solved.But that’s not what happened. Ashli’s death became the most direct and vivid way to give the Big Lie new life. Trump invoked Ashli at rallies and on TV and in press conferences. He had landed on a powerful new strategy, and he worked it for the better part of a year.Ober: Eventually, Micki landed in D.C., and within a month, she and Trump, who had both been talking about Ashli separately, were now talking about Ashli together. It happened in September 2022, when Trump called into the vigil Micki was hosting that night.Witthoeft: You’re on livestream with different countries and our crowd outside. Thank you for calling, and you’re on. Go.Trump: Okay. Well, Micki, it’s an honor to be with you. And to everybody listening, it’s a terrible thing that has happened to a lot of people that are being treated very, very unfairly. We love Ashli, and it was so horrible what happened to her. Micki, you’re asking me to just speak to everybody, but we cannot allow this to happen to our country. So God bless everybody. We are working very hard.Witthoeft: Thank you for calling, President Trump. I know the men inside appreciate you, as I do as well.Trump: And say hello to everybody.Rosin: This is the moment their missions collided. Micki had asked for Trump to say her daughter’s name out loud, and he did. He said, “We love Ashli.” So when Micki and Nicole say to themselves, What did we get done on Freedom Corner?, thisis a moment they can point to.But many a grieving American mother has received a call from a powerful politician. It can be just a fleeting moment of political theater, or it can lead to something much bigger. In this case, I would argue that it’s the latter. And I can back that up based on what Lauren saw when she followed Micki to the biggest event on the conservative political calendar.[Music]Ober: In February of this year, I tagged along with Micki and the “Eagle’s Nest” crew to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. If Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, then CPAC is its Sundance. It’s been the premier Republican convention for the past 50 years. It usually happens just outside D.C., in suburban Maryland, and it’s become a place for conservative candidates to dry run new messaging.Witthoeft: I think the check-in line is going to be a freaking zoo, because we don’t yet have our badges.Ober: Yeah, but everything’s, like, electronic, so it seemed like they have enough spots.Witthoeft: Yeah, but there’s a lot of old people, like me, that can’t work our shit.Ober: Of course, the first thing I wanted to do when we got to CPAC was visit the vendor hall.Ober (on tape): So now I’m in, like, Vendor Village area.Ober: And I was not disappointed. There were folks hawking MAGA hammocks and vibration plates that shake your cellulite away and candles that smelled like freedom, allegedly. The drag queen Lady Maga was there, waving adoringly to her fan. And did I catch a glimpse of Mr. MyPillow himself, Mike Lindell? Yes, I did.Ober: Also on offer—Vendor: You wanna play some pinball?Ober: I’m terrible at it.Vendor: That’s okay.Ober: But sure. Why not?[Game noises]Ober: A January 6 pinball game—[Game noises]Ober: What do I get if I win?Vendor: You get a high score.[Laughter]Ober: —where I could get points for storming the Capitol.Vendor: Save America. You made it to the Capitol.Ober: Oh, like January 6.[Game noises]Ober: Okay, I wasn’t there to play Insurrection Pinball. I was there to observe.As I followed Micki around the convention hall, it was clear to me that she was here to play a role. She was the living, breathing mother of the J6 martyr, complete with the costume: a T-shirt that read “ashli babbitt, murdered by capitol police, january 6, 2021.” Plenty of people recognized her. They did those sad, little pity smiles and asked for a handshake or a hug or a photo. More than a few people approached Micki and asked if they could pray for her.Stranger 1: Dear Lord, thank you for this woman that’s here. And thank you for her bravery, and for her taking this season of pain and turning it into something that’s for your glory, Lord. And we know that you are victorious, and you will surround her with your comfort and your peace, and you will infuse her with strength, and just bless this whole weekend and every interaction she has. And we know that all is done for the glory of you. In Jesus’s name, amen.Witthoeft: Thank you, ladies.Stranger 1: You’re welcome. Good work. Good work.Witthoeft: Thank y’all.Ober: Three-plus years into playing this role, I could see it was wearing on Micki. She looked exhausted. Throughout the conference, stranger after stranger approached Micki.Stranger 2: I’m so sorry for your loss. These people will be held accountable.Witthoeft: I sure hope so.Stranger 2: Justice will be served.Witthoeft: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. I hope so.Ober: Micki is gracious about it, but I’ve been around her long enough by now to know that there are other things bubbling under the surface.Ober: This happens again and again and again throughout the three-day convention. And Micki is gracious about it, but I’ve been around her long enough by now to know that there are other things bubbling under the surface.Ober: Is it tiring when people come up to you and they say, Oh, I’m so sorry? Like—Witthoeft: That’s not tiring. There are certain phrases that I find offensive. And people don’t mean them offensively, but sometimes they—Ober: Like what?Witthoeft: Like, the one that always gets me is: It could have been me. I don’t like that when people say that to me. My response is, Okay, thanks. Nice to meet you. Bye.Ober: Right.Witthoeft: I mean, I try not to be rude, because I know people don’t mean it in a way to be offensive. It’s recognition of Ashli’s sacrifice on a certain level. So I don’t want to be offensive back at them, because I don’t feel like they mean to be offensive to me. So I just, you know, try to be as polite as possible and move on.Ober: Right. Right.Witthoeft: Try not to say, Yeah? Well, I wish it was, and it wasn’t my daughter, because that’s not appropriate either. But the truth is, I wish it was anybody else. So you know, I don’t know how you respond to that as—Coffee! Big-ass sign right there.Ober: Okay, that conversation ended a bit abruptly. Anyway, on the last day of CPAC, Hanna came, and we met up in the press section, which looked like it was more filled with right-wing TikTokers than actual traditional journalists. Hanna and I were eating snacks and waiting for Trump’s speech to start when something familiar came over the loudspeaker.J6 Choir: O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light—Ober: My first thought was, What is this garbage recording? Surely, the Trump campaign could have found a higher-quality rendition of our national anthem.But then we realized why the song sounded like that. This was sung at the D.C. jail, the J6 prison choir, which Micki played every night at the vigil over the loudspeakers.Trump: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.Ober: Mixed with Donald Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.Rosin: This was the fight song for the “Patriot Pod” prisoners, the musical backdrop to Micki’s dream about Ashli. And now the possible next future president was taking it up as his own.Trump: I stand before you today, not only as your past and hopefully future president, but as a proud political dissident. I am a dissident.Rosin: And in this speech—the darkest one of his campaign so far—he vowed to get revenge.Trump: For hardworking Americans, November 5 will be our new liberation day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day! Their judgment day.[Crowd cheers]Rosin: It would be an exaggeration to say Micki orchestrated this political moment. After all, she’d never really been into politics. Her San Diego life was just fine without mainlining Fox News. Maybe the more accurate way to say it is that between her dream and her enduring grief, she manifested this moment—where Trump and the J6ers became one—where Trump said over and over that if he became president, he would pardon the J6ers, basically, magically fulfilling Ashli’s vision in Micki’s dream.Ober: The day after CPAC, we ran into Micki while walking the dogs and asked her what she thought of Trump’s speech. Apparently, she hadn’t seen it. The Eagle’s Nest crew left and went home before Trump even took the stage. When the politicians come in the room, she said, that’s when the bullshit starts.Rosin: So the Micki–MAGA relationship—it’s pretty complicated. That’s after the break.[Break]Ober: If you ask Micki if she thinks all the jailed J6ers should be pardoned for their actions at the Capitol, her answer is probably not going to be the one you expect. More than once, Micki has told me that not everyone acted like a Boy Scout that day. So the more violent ones—or the folks who brought implements, like pitchforks, say—deserved to be punished. So Trump saying he’s gonna pardon all J6ers doesn’t really move her much. But she sees the utility of Trump talking about January 6. She can use him to bring attention to her cause, just like he has used her daughter as a campaign prop.There are other things about Micki that don’t necessarily track with MAGA lunacy. She thinks that healthcare shouldn’t be tied to employment and that there should be term limits for judges and lawmakers. She’s pretty pro-LGBTQ, since Ashli was bisexual. And once, we had a five-minute conversation about gun control where we almost—almost—came to a shared conclusion.Now, that doesn’t mean that Micki is turning blue any time soon. She’s more like a populist libertarian who often says impolitic things, even harmful things—like the time right before I met her, when she said this about Lieutenant Michael Byrd.Witthoeft: Michael Byrd needs to swing from the end of a rope, along with Nancy Pelosi.Ober: Byrd is Black. Micki is white. Which she discussed when she brought up the comment to me.Witthoeft: You know, I mean, there’s much talk about me saying Michael Byrd should be swinging from the end of a rope. It’s saying, Oh, look at her. She’s calling for a lynching. I am not calling for a lynching.Ober: Her explanation wasn’t exculpatory by any means, and no one should be calling for anyone’s execution. But I wanted to hear Micki out. So we’re gonna let this run because she landed in a place I didn’t see coming.Witthoeft: A hanging and a lynching are two different things. A hanging occurs after a trial and you’re pronounced guilty, and your ass gets hung. That’s how it happens. It’s happened. And it’s happened not just to Black people, specifically. Lynchings—most of them are Black people. But hangings—hangings are retribution for something that you got coming to you. And they used to do it right on the battlefield. If you got convicted of treason, they would either shoot you or hang you. And that’s the way I meant that. And I said it about Nancy Pelosi too, and she’s about as white-bread as you come, which is another thing when people start talking about white privilege. I am not that white-privilege person. I have never had money. Ashli doesn’t come from white privilege. She worked hard for anything she ever had, and so has my family.Ober: Sure. I have worked hard for everything I have, and I also have an enormous amount of privilege, largely due to my race and economic status.Witthoeft: I understand that Black people have been treated in a different way than white people have in this country for a long time—well, forever. But I thought that we were making huge strides in that, until, you know—until I came to this city, actually. But what I will say is: Being the parent of a child that was murdered under color of authority.Ober: Yeah.Witthoeft: It does make me—’cause you don’t know until you know—it does make me identify somewhat with Black and brown mothers who have been going through this for decades, because their children have been murdered under color of authority without any avenue for retribution, for years.Ober: You can see how a Black mother whose child was killed by police would forever mistrust authority. Micki landed in the same place. Only for her, the mistrust was supercharged.Witthoeft: When they killed Ashli, they took a lot more from me than my daughter. They took my whole belief in the system that runs America from me. Even though, you know, It’s a little bad; it’s mostly good. I don’t believe that anymore. And so in that process, I don’t know what I believe them capable of. Is it eating babies and drinking their blood? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what they’re up to. I really don’t know what they’re up to.[Music]Ober: Years from now, when Micki and Nicole ask themselves the question, What did we actually accomplish in D.C.? they might come up with an answer that has nothing to do with Trump or Justice for January 6. These two women who had only ever known themselves as wives and mothers learned they could whisper in a president’s ear and whip up the media and become impossible to ignore. And they could’ve only done it because they walked out of that courtroom together, hand in hand.One of the things I’ve been most surprised about is the depth of their friendship, which is only a couple of years old. Since Ashli died, Micki can barely sleep. She’s had panic that takes her breath away and nightmares that make her weep. She can’t bear to sleep in a room by herself. So she and Nicole share the basement of the Eagle’s Nest, their mattresses pushed head to head. Oliver, the dog, plops himself in between the two of them like a canine headboard. Just hearing Nicole and her dog softly breathe is a comfort to Micki.Witthoeft: I’ve bonded with Nicole in ways that I’ve bonded with very few people. There’s really nothing about me that Nicole doesn’t—I mean, I’m sure there’s things, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her. Maybe that’s because we sleep head to head, and we yap all night, but I don’t know.Ober: Micki had no idea who Nicole Reffitt was when she showed up at Guy Reffitt’s sentencing in August of 2022. But their connection was almost instantaneous.Witthoeft: If you believe in love at first sight, which I don’t really do—I believe in sexual attraction at first sight, but I don’t know about love at first sight. But I think if that’s possible, then friendship at first sight is. And when I first saw Nicole, like I said, I had never met her, and I knew instantly who she was. And she just had this defiant, “strong-ass woman” look on her face, and I just knew she was somebody I could be friends with.Ober: There was one moment early on in their living together that kind of sealed the deal for Micki.Witthoeft: But when I knew that we would be friends forever, oddly enough—why do you always make me cry, Lauren? Shit. It was the day my dog died. Because she, you know—I was on the couch with Fuggles, and I couldn’t make it happen. I was like, I just—I wanted to call.Ober: But she couldn’t. So Nicole called the vet and had Fuggles put down. That small kindness meant everything to Micki.Witthoeft: I just thought at that minute that I truly loved her. I do.[Music]Ober: Now, because Nicole and Micki are often seen together, and because of that one hand-holding scene after Guy’s sentencing, the online haters have had a field day. Someone made a music video that mashed up their voices from the vigil with overtly sexual innuendo and patriotic imagery. It’s too crass for me to play for you here, but I’m sure you know how to Google, if you’re interested.Recently, someone sent Nicole a cardboard mailing tube that said the words “oversizeddildos.com” plastered on the side. The tube was empty. Right after the mailer arrived, Micki texted me a photo. “Did you prank us?” she wrote. For the record, I did not. She wrote back: “I told you I hate it when the left is funny. There wasn’t anything in the canister. More empty promises.”Ober: After I had a good laugh about the whole situation, I pushed Nicole to try to put a name to the love that they have for each other.Ober: A lot of people’s intimate relationships can’t be defined. And so I could ask you, Okay, is it like you feel like a sister bond?Reffitt: It’s more.Ober: Is it like you feel, like—right. Like a—Reffitt: It’s not sexual, but it is more.Ober: Yeah. Like an intimate-partner bond.Reffitt: Oh yeah. It’s definitely an intimate-partner bond.Ober: Right.Reffitt: I don’t even know what kind of love that must be, because I love Micki more than a friendship love. But you know, there’s not a lot of the sexual aspect of it. But there’s intimacy.Ober: Mm-hmm. What does “intimacy” mean?Reffitt: I don’t know. You can have intimate moments with someone while being fully clothed. You know, like, you can share very close feelings without touching anyone. So those are intimate moments, I think.Ober: Like, give me an example.Reffitt: Well, I’m not gonna tell you shit. I’m already telling you all this. I know, but like—Ober: No. Because I’m just trying to understand.Reffitt: I mean, I think this is—well, this is a level of intimacy. It’s a level that we’re having.Ober: You and me?Reffitt: Yeah. We’re being intimate. I mean, I’m being intimate with you.Ober: Right. It’s not an equal exchange.Reffitt: Exactly. Like, you’re not being intimate with me, but I absolutely am being intimate with you. So I’m being very vulnerable.Ober: Mm-hmm.Reffitt: But Micki is reciprocal. I mean, like, we’re sharing that.Ober: Mm-hmm.[Music]Rosin: Would you say that you guys were friends?Ober: I guess it depends on what your version of friend is. No. I mean, we’re neighbors.Rosin: I pressed Lauren a lot about this. Obviously, she was a journalist, and it was her job to spend time with these guys. But had she become, like, friends friends with them? Is that a good thing? Is it dangerous? Sometimes we had fights about it. This one, for example—it’s the hot-mic moment we promised you.Rosin: I feel so differently than you do about this. I don’t spend this much time with them. What I notice at the vigil is not what you notice at the vigil. I don’t think it’s fucking cute at all.Ober: You think I think it’s cute? No. It’s fucking weird. But I also don’t think that it’s, like, shredding—Rosin: No. I don’t think it’s weird. I think it’s absolutely destructive.Ober: But, see, I don’t have any proof that it is. Like I don’t have proof that it’s destructive. I don’t have any notion that it’s any—Rosin: How about Trump playing that song at Waco, Texas?Ober: Of course, but it wasn’t about the J6—Rosin: Who got that song into the public consciousness? Micki.Ober: No, she didn’t, actually. She had nothing to do with it.Rosin: Lauren, we just feel differently. To me, it’s like, I think Micki is a lovely, interesting, complicated person. And I think this mission that she’s on in D.C. is absolutely destructive.Ober: Show me proof of destruction. That is not new. They have a platform—Rosin: Okay, Micki didn’t cause it. Micki didn’t bring it into being. Micki created an audience for it. She brings Trump to them. She brings these politicians to them.Ober: But it’s not—Rosin: So you have to account for the things that Micki is supporting and laying out the red carpet for. Like, her ideology is meaningful.Rosin: I dug in. This fight went on for, like, an hour and a half more. And by the end of it, nothing was resolved.In our next episode: Lauren gets even closer to the action, and she asks herself whether she ruined a J6er’s life.Marie Johnatakis: It was really surprising that they took him into custody then. And I just remember thinking, like, He’s not a danger. He’s been out this whole time. Can you please just let us? You know, we just need a little more help.Ober: That’s on the next episode of We Live Here Now.[Music]Ober: We Live Here Now is a production of The Atlantic. The show was reported, written, and executive produced by me, Lauren Ober. Hanna Rosin reported, wrote, and edited the series. Our senior producer is Rider Alsop. Our producer is Ethan Brooks. Original scoring, sound design, and mix engineering by Brendan Baker.This series was edited by Scott Stossel and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Art direction by Colin Hunter. Project management by Nancy DeVille.Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. The Atlantic’s executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s editor in chief.

For more than 90 minutes, J. D. Vance delivered an impressive performance in the vice-presidential debate. Calm, articulate, and detailed, the Republican parried tricky questions about Donald Trump and put a reasonable face on policies that voters have rejected elsewhere. Vance’s offers were frequently dishonest, but they were smooth.And then things went off the rails.In the final question of the debate, moderators asked the Ohio senator about threats to democracy, and in particular his statement that as vice president he would not have certified the 2020 election. In his response, Vance tried to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021, riot and Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the election, revealing why he would be a dangerous vice president.Vance claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20” and said, “I believe we do have a threat to democracy in this country, but it’s not the threat that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It’s the threat of censorship.” This strange misdirection requires Americans to disbelieve what they saw and what Trump said in favor of an extremely online conservative talking point.[David A. Graham: Don’t let them pretend this didn’t happen]Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic nominee, sniffed blood and asked Vance point-blank whether he believed Trump had lost the 2020 election. Vance refused to answer, and instead rambled again about censorship. “You guys wanted to kick people off Facebook,” he said, as though that allegation was worse than stealing an election.A vice-presidential debate is important not because it is likely to shift the polls—it isn’t—but because it tells voters something about the policies of the two people who could become president. Although both candidates dodged the moderators’ direct questions, voters may well have gained a more complete understanding of the two parties’ platforms on climate change, the economy, and immigration, and how widely they diverge. Both candidates were civil, even polite. But Vance’s answer on fundamental issues of democracy—or rather, his refusal to commit to it—suggested that such a basic question should have arisen far earlier in the night.[David Frum: How Harris roped a dope]For most of the 90 minutes, Walz was clearly struggling. Ahead of the debate, both sides tried to set expectations, with Democrats warning that Walz was historically a shaky debater and the Trump campaign insisting he was great at it. The Democrats were closer to the mark. Walz came out seeming nervous, and though he calmed down, he never looked comfortable. He frequently sounded like he was spinning his wheels, with none of the casual conversationalism that has been his trademark in his brief time in the national spotlight. He was somber and effortful.The Minnesota governor’s worst moment came when he was asked why he’d said he was in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre, when in fact he’d arrived later that summer. Vance gave a circuitous answer about his personal biography, copping to occasionally being a “knucklehead.” Only when pressed in a follow-up did he finally just admit he’d misspoken, falling short of the image of the plainspoken plainsman he’s cultivated so carefully. Walz’s best moments came when he was most personal, such as when he talked about Minnesota farmers experiencing the effects of climate change or how meeting the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting shaped his views on gun control.[Mark Leibovich: Tim Walz is too good at this]The best evidence of Walz’s poor performance was the fact that Vance, who has been a gaffe machine and can seem wooden and impersonal—“weird,” in Walz’s parlance—came across well by comparison. He seemed relatively smooth and competent even though he tried to change the subject or twist the context when asked to defend Trump’s past actions. For example, rather than defend Trump’s family-separation policy at the border, Vance said that “the real family-separation policy in our country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’s open southern border.” (You would never have known from Vance’s answers that Harris is vice president or that Joe Biden even exists.) Pressed on Trump’s bogus claim that climate change is a “hoax,” Vance gave a misleading answer about Harris’s energy policy. When moderators clarified details about legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance complained that debate rules banned fact-checking.On subjects such as abortion, where Vance’s past statements have been controversial, he was able to appear thoughtful and reasonable. Explaining why he had supported a national ban on abortion in the past but no longer did, he cited the results of a 2023 referendum in Ohio that supported abortion rights. “What I learned from that, Nora, is that we’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust,” Vance said. Notably, this isn’t the same as taking a clear position on abortion. Trump has waffled on his position, but has boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade.[Read: The next Republican leader]This kind of spin, however misleading, is a bit of a throwback to politics the way they used to be practiced. For much of the night, the debate was strikingly boring, in the best way—unlike the NASCAR vibe that we’ve become accustomed to since 2016, where viewers are watching to see if there’s a fiery crash. Vance’s final, appalling answer about January 6, though, was a reminder that Trump is a destructive force, which his running-mate, of all people, can’t hope to escape.

What was once his winning campaign issue is now a toss-up.

More than a million American are still without electricity. EV owners using their cars to keep the lights on.

In the final moments of the last day, some 2,000 people were on their feet, arms raised and cheering under a big white tent in the grass outside a church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. By then they’d been told that God had chosen them to save America from Kamala Harris and a demonic government trying to “silence the Church.” They’d been told they had “authority” to establish God’s Kingdom, and reminded of their reward in Heaven. Now they listened as an evangelist named Mario Murillo told them exactly what was expected of Christians like them.“We are going to prepare for war,” he shouted, and a few minutes later: “I’m not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.”That is how four days under the tent would end—with words that could be taken as hyperbolic, or purely metaphorical. And on the first day, people were not necessarily prepared to accept them. But getting people ready was the whole point of what was happening in Eau Claire, an event cast as an old-fashioned tent revival, only not the kind involving Nilla wafers and repentance. This one targeted souls in swing states. It was an unapologetic exercise in religious radicalization happening in plain sight, just off a highway and down the street from a Panera. The point was to transform a like-minded crowd of Donald Trump–supporting believers into “God-appointed warriors” ready to do whatever the Almighty might require of them in November and beyond.[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]So far, thousands of people have attended the traveling event billed as the “Courage Tour,” including the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, who was a special guest this past weekend in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. The series is part of a steady drumbeat of violent rhetoric, prayer rallies, and marches coming out of the rising Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose ultimate goal is not just Trump’s reelection but Christian dominion—a Kingdom of God. When Trump speaks of “my beautiful Christians,” he usually means these Christians and their leaders—networks of apostles and prophets with hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a day preceded by events such as those happening now.Although Murillo headlined the Eau Claire revival, the chief organizer is the influential prophet Lance Wallnau, who exhorted his followers to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6, casting efforts to overturn the election as part of a new “Great Awakening.” Kindred events in the coming weeks include a series of concert-style rallies called “Kingdom to the Capitol,” aiming to draw crowds to state capitals in Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, with a final concert in D.C. just days before the election. A march called “A Million Women” is planned for the National Mall in mid-October. Every day, internet prophets are describing dreams of churches under attack, Christians rising up, and the start of World War III, acclimating followers to the prospect of real-world violence.And this is what awaits people under the tent: leaders waging an intentional effort to move them from passivity to action and into “God’s army.” It involves loudspeakers. It involves drums and lights and a huge video screen roughly 20 feet wide and eight feet high. It is a deliberate process, one choreographed to the last line, and in Eau Claire, on the grass outside Oasis Church, the four days began with a kind of promise.“The first thing I’m going to say is you did not come to see me,” Murillo said. “You came to see Jesus Christ.”This was on a warm Sunday evening, the first day of the process. Volunteers were smiling and waving cars into a gravel parking lot, ushering people toward the tent on the grass. The mood was friendly. The crowd was young and old and mostly white, people wearing khaki pants and work boots, gold crosses and Bible-verse tattoos. They were locals and out-of-towners from as far away as Texas.Into the tent they went, past a gantlet of tables that left no doubt that the great spiritual battle they believed to be under way included politics, and that God had chosen sides. People could sign up to be “patriots” with America First Works, which is linked to the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. They could sign up for something called the Lion of Judah, which aims to place Christians inside election offices, a strategy that the group’s founder would refer to on day two as “our Trojan horse.”Now the sun was setting, and the video screen was glowing blue with drifting stars. A praise band blasted one surging, drum-pounding song after another until Murillo arrived to set expectations for the days to come, starting with establishing his own authority.“God has chosen to speak through men—men and women—who are anointed,” he began.“My father and my God … you have orchestrated for them to hear the words I’m about to speak,” he continued. Then, step by step, he framed the moment at hand. “Something evil is at work in America,” Murillo said, describing a country of lost souls, decaying cities, and drug addiction, and a degenerate culture preying on children. “Any culture that surgically alters the gender of children is a sick, perverted society.”People began clapping. “I want you to listen to me,” he went on. “If you want equality? If you want women’s rights? If you want freedom from drugs? You want Jesus Christ.” More clapping and amens.“But we chose, in America, a philosophical approach,” Murillo said, proceeding to argue against 400 years of Enlightenment thought underpinning the concepts of individual rights, religious pluralism, Church-state separation, and American democracy itself. The problem, he said, was a wrong turn in the Garden of Eden, followed by a wrong turn in the 17th century, when people replaced God with their own reason. “The philosophical elephant in the room for America is very simple,” he said. “To the degree that we took God out, we brought misery in. If we want the misery to get out, we’ve got to bring God back into our schools, back into our government.”People cheered, and soon, Murillo introduced Wallnau, a slightly disheveled man in jeans and a sweat-soaked shirt, a fast-talking former pastor whom some modern-religion scholars consider the most influential theologian of the 21st century.When mainstream evangelicals were rejecting Trump during the 2016 GOP primary, it was Wallnau who popularized the idea that God had anointed Trump for a “special purpose,” activating a fresh wave of so-called prophecy voters. By now, he was a Mar-a-Lago regular. He had about 2 million social-media followers. He had a podcast where he hosted MAGA-world figures such as the political operative Charlie Kirk, and frequently spoke of demonic forces in U.S. and global politics. He was a frequent guest on a streaming show called FlashPoint, a kind of PBS NewsHour for the prophecy crowd, where he’d implied that the left was to blame for the July assassination attempt against Trump. Lately, he’d been saying that Harris represented the “spirit of Jezebel.”“America is too young to die. It has an unfinished assignment,” Wallnau told the crowd now.“Tomorrow,” he went on, “I want to talk to you about your unfinished assignment.”For the moment, though, he described a battle scene from the film Gladiator, one that takes place in an arena in ancient Rome, where a group of enslaved warriors comes under attack. The film’s hero, Maximus, rallies them to join forces, at which point they decapitate, bludgeon, and otherwise defeat their enemies in a bloody fashion. Wallnau wasn’t merely entertaining the crowd, but also suggesting how real-life events might play out.“How many of you would like to be activated in your Maximus anointing?” Wallnau said. People in the crowd cheered. “Put your right hand up in the air!”They did.Day two. By 10 a.m., the drums were pounding, the band was blasting, and Wallnau was at the podium holding up a small brown bottle. It was frankincense oil.“We’re adding to this wild army!” he told the crowd, calling people up to the stage.“Lord, they are hungry,” he prayed. “Now, Lord, they want more. They believe this is real. They believe something is happening.”He cued the praise band, then walked up and down the line of people streaming to the stage, pressing his oiled hand to their foreheads. He said the Lord was filling them with “mighty power.” Then he sent them back to their chairs, ready to hear what they were meant to do with it. People took out notebooks and pens.“I daresay a lot of us are nobodies on Earth who are somebodies in the spirit,” Wallnau said, explaining how good Christians like them had allowed themselves to become something God never intended them to be: victims. He said that they had been naive. That they’d misplaced their faith in a government of “elites” and “oligarchs” who wanted world domination. He said the worst part was that Christians had allowed this to happen. “You either have God, or you’ve got government,” he said. “Only one person can be supreme.”And this is when he explained the assignment he’d promised the day before. He set up a whiteboard. He drew seven mountains. Above them he drew a stick figure, representing Jesus Christ looking down on the world. He explained that each mountain was a sphere of society—education, business, government, and so on—and that believers’ job was to assert authority over each sphere. The point was not just individual salvation but societal reformation, the Kingdom. He said democracy would not work without the flourishing of Christian conscience. He said Christians are called to be “the head and not the tail.”“I’m tired of people thinking Christianity is just some kind of a backwoods, redneck religion,” he continued. “It’s not. It’s the force that produced the Reformation in Europe. That formed the United States!”After 30 minutes of this, Wallnau led the crowd in a declaration. “Father, I am ready,” came the sound of 2,000 voices repeating his words. “To be a part. Of a new move of God. In the United States. And I will occupy. The territory you give me. For the glory of God.”Next came a man in a blue suit. This was Bill Federer, a former congressional candidate from Missouri and the author of a book called Socialism: The Real History From Plato to Present. He took out a laser pointer. “You are important people,” he said. “God has chosen you.”Then he pointed his laser at the big screen, and began clicking through a slideshow illustrating human history as a bloody struggle between godly forces that want democracy and free-market capitalism, and demonic forces that want world domination and are currently working through Democrats. He clicked to a Bible verse. He clicked to a quote from the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. “The political slogan of the antichrist is ‘peace and safety,’” it read.“In other words,” Federer told them, “don’t be afraid of the world ending. Be afraid of the people that promise to save you from the world ending.” He clicked to the last slide, a cartoon of a golden-walled Kingdom in the clouds. “Someday, you’re going to be dead,” he said, telling people to imagine heaven. Gold streets. Mansions. Also, a hypothetical gathering in the living room of Moses, where all the great Christian heroes would tell their stories. Moses would tell about facing a government “trying to kill us.” David would tell about chopping off Goliath’s head.“Then everyone’s going to look at you,” Federer said. “Tell us your story … What did you do when the whole world was against you, when the government was trying to kill you?” He paused so they could imagine. “Guess what? We’re still on this Earth,” he said, smiling. “You can still do those courageous faith-filled things that you will be known for forever. This is your time.”Wallnau returned to the stage. He told the crowd that 50,000 more people were watching online, a number that was not verifiable. Then he introduced a Polish Canadian preacher named Artur Pawlowski, who calls himself “The Lion” and “a convicted felon just like your rightful president of the United States.”Pawlowski was known in Canada for protesting Pride Month, railing against Muslim immigrants, and leading anti-lockdown protests during the pandemic, including one involving tiki torches—activity that gained him notoriety in the U.S., where he turned up as a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He was later convicted for “inciting mischief” for encouraging truckers who staged a blockade at the U.S.-Canadian border.Now the audience watched the big screen as a video showed scenes of Pawlowski cast as a martyr, being arrested, on his knees, in jail, all set to a pounding rock song that included the lyric “Once they grab the pastors, they come for the common man.”And this was the point. Pawlowski told people that the government would be coming for them next. He spoke of “the venom of lies and poison of falsehoods that have been spreading through the veins of our society,” and “sexual perversion,” and politicians working for “the globalists,” calling them the modern-day Philistines, the biblical enemies of God’s chosen people, who are “under attack.”He told them that Christians had been too timid, too “gentle” and “loving.”“Here is what God is saying,” he said. “It is time to go after the villains. It is time to chase the wicked. The time has come for justice, and justice demands restitution.” People cheered. “It’s time to move into offense,” he said.Like Federer, Pawlowski left things vague. “You want to be promoted in the Kingdom of God?” he said. “How many of you would like to see Jesus face-to-face? Then you have to go into the fire, my friends. He always comes to the fire. He is the fire. He is in the fire. And in the fire, he sets you free.” Pawlowski never explained to the people under the tent what the fire was, or what going into it meant, only that a time would come when each of them would have to make some sort of sacrifice.Then Wallnau dismissed people for lunch. The anointed gathered their Bibles and hand fans and headed for Panera and McDonald’s to process what they’d heard. “It’s a little overwhelming,” a woman named Melanie Simon, a member of Oasis Church, said. “I’m praying for God to remove fear from our spirit,” a man in camouflage shorts said. He gave only his first name, Steven, because he had gotten fired from his job and was in a legal dispute with his former employer. “We’re going to have to go to extremes,” a 63-year-old Wisconsin man named Will Anderson said. He’d driven two hours to hear all of this. He said he was bracing for some kind of “clash” in November. He said it was possible that people like him would have to take “steps and measures,” but he was not sure what they might be. “I’m not into passivity, and neither is God,” he said.Later, he and the others came back for more. In the hot afternoon, Wallnau introduced a young political operative named Joshua Standifer, who gave people one concrete idea of what they might do. He was the founder of the Lion of Judah, whose homepage includes the slogan “Fight the fraud.” Standifer flashed a QR code on the screen, explaining that it would connect people to their municipality, where they could apply to become an actual election worker—not a volunteer; a worker.“Here’s the difference: At Election Night, what happens is, when polls start to close or chaos unfolds, they’re going to kick the volunteers out,” he said. “You’re actually going to be a paid election worker … I call this our Trojan horse in. They don’t see it coming, but we’re going to flood election poll stations across the country with spiritual believers.”He flashed on the video screen the photo of Trump raising his fist after the July assassination attempt, blood streaking down his face. “Our enemy is actively taking ground and will do everything they can to win by any means necessary,” he said. “Our hour of action has arrived.” He added that he meant not only November but “what’s coming after that.” He did not elaborate on what that might be.“The Lord is with you, valiant warrior,” Standifer said at one point. “Everyone say ‘Warrior.’”“Warrior,” the crowd repeated.Day three didn’t start until evening, and what happened felt familiar, normal, more like the old-fashioned tent revival that Murillo had promised in his ads. As the sun was setting, people streamed across the green grass and back into the white tent, now lit up under a deep-orange sky, the giant screen once again glowing blue with drifting stars. The band started, and the singer spoke of people “tormented by thoughts of premature death” as Murillo took his place in front of an audience full of diseased hearts, bad livers, arthritic hands, worn-out knees, and minds disturbed by depression. “Hallelujah,” he said as people clapped. “We are the only movement in the history of the world where the founder attends every meeting. He’s here!”This, too, was part of the radicalization effort, an exercise in building trust and shoring up group identity. People waved colored flags, believing that the same Holy Spirit that would save America was swirling through the tent at that very moment. Murillo promised that the “power of God is going to fall on all of you.” He said that he didn’t want to get political tonight, but that the power was going to fall on the entire state of Wisconsin on Election Day, too. Then he launched into a barn burner of a sermon. Murillo spoke of souls in “spiritual danger,” and the death of the “brittle fairyland” of the self, and the power of surrendering that self wholly to the Lord. Soon he cued the band and called people to the stage.“Lord, I believe the pain in their soul is greater than their fear of embarrassment,” Murillo said as people came forward, old men with canes, fresh-faced young women, young men crying. “Every step you take is a step toward freedom. Every step is toward power. What you’re doing is wise.”He led them in a prayer about being washed in the blood of Jesus, then told them to turn around and look at the back of the tent. A line of volunteers smiled and waved, ready to welcome them with prayers, and take down their phone number and email address. “Ladies and gentlemen, they are saved,” Murillo declared as the crowd applauded and cheered for the new recruits. “The devil has lost them!”The evening went on like that, the band playing gospel, Murillo moving onto the faith healings, the people willing to believe.“People who are deaf, ears are opening,” he said.“The lady in the orange—there is a growth that will vanish,” he said.“God is healing your spine.”“I rebuke cancer in the name of Jesus.”Murillo looked out at the crowd of people crying, fainting, raising hands, closing eyes, walking when he said walk, dancing when he said dance. “Nothing will stop the will of God,” he said.“How many of you believe we need a miracle in America?” Murillo began on the final day. By now Wallnau was gone and the Canadian preacher had left; it was just Murillo and a crowd that was the largest of all four nights, filling the folding chairs and spilling outside the tent onto the grass, where people had brought their own lawn chairs.Murillo said that he’d had a sermon planned, but that God had “overruled” him and given him another message to deliver. “I want you to listen like you’ve never listened to me before,” he began. If there was any confusion about what the past four days had been about, Murillo himself now clarified. It was about November. It was not just about defeating Kamala Harris, but about defeating the advance of Satan.“I don’t want a devil in the White House,” Murillo said.“God is saying to the Church, ‘Will you wake up and realize that I’m giving you the authority to stop this thing?’” he said. “You have the authority.”He said that the Secret Service had deliberately failed to protect the former president from an assassination attempt in July. “They wanted him dead.”He said, “It is the job of every shepherd to get up in his pulpit … and say to the people, ‘We are going to prepare for war.’”He said, “I didn’t pick a fight; they picked the fight,” he said.He said what leaders of groups say when they are attempting to justify violence, and if people thought he was speaking only of spiritual warfare, Murillo clarified with a story.[Tim Alberta: The only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism]“Say you’re in your backyard grilling,” he said. “You got a fence. And somebody jumps that fence, comes after your wife. You’re not going to stand there and say, ‘It’s in God’s hands.’ No. Right now, brother, it’s in my hands. And my hands are going to come on you real strong right now. I’ll stop you any way I can. And we gotta stop the insanity going on in the United States.”He went on like that, telling people to “quit feeling sorry for yourself” and to see themselves as an “absolute lion of God.” And as the process came to its final minutes, Murillo delivered the last message that he’d been preparing people to hear.“I am not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.” He went on: “I am not on the Earth to feel good. I’m not on the Earth to do my own thing. I’m on this Earth as a God-appointed warrior in a dark time.”That is what four days of carefully choreographed sermons and violent imagery had come to with only weeks to go before the presidential election. And just as the crowds had in Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, people in Eau Claire cheered. They said amen, and then 2,000 Christian warriors headed into the Wisconsin evening, among them a young man named Josh Becker, a local who’d attended all four days. He said he felt inspired. He said he wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do, only that “we have to do something—we have a role.”“I believe the father is going to lead us through a dark time,” he said, referring to the election and whatever God might require of him. “The Kingdom of God is now.”

Presidents always seem to have a crisis to deal with. George W. Bush had 9/11. Barack Obama had the Great Recession. Donald Trump had the coronavirus pandemic. Joe Biden had the war in the Middle East. For America’s next president, the crisis might be bird flu.The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented bout of bird flu, also known as H5N1. Since 2022, the virus has killed millions of birds and spread to mammals, including cows. Dairy farms are struggling to contain outbreaks. A few humans have fallen sick, too—mostly farmworkers who spend a lot of time near chickens or cows—but Americans have largely remained nonplussed by bird flu. No one in the U.S. has died or gotten seriously sick, and the risk to us is considered low, because humans rarely spread the virus to others.On Friday, the fear of human-to-human spread grew ever so slightly: The CDC confirmed that four health-care workers in Missouri had fallen sick after caring for a patient who was infected with bird flu. A few weeks earlier, three other Missourians showed symptoms of bird flu after coming in contact with the same person. It’s still unclear if the workers were infected with H5N1 or some other respiratory bug; only one has been given an H5N1 test, which came back negative.The CDC says the risk to humans has not changed, but the incident in Missouri underscores that the virus is only likely to generate more scares about human-to-human transmission. The virus is showing no signs of slowing down. In the absolute worst-case scenario—where Friday’s news is the first sign of the virus freely spreading from person to person—we are hurtling toward another pandemic. But the outbreak doesn’t have to get that dire to create headaches for the American public, and liabilities for the next president.Either Trump or Kamala Harris will inherit an H5N1 response that has been nightmarishly complex, controversial, and at times slow. Three government agencies—the FDA, the CDC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—share responsibility for the bird-flu response, and it’s unclear which agency is truly in charge. The USDA, for example, primarily protects farmers, while the CDC is focused on public health, and the FDA monitors the safety of milk.Adding to the complexity is that a lot of power also rests with the states, many of which have been loath to involve the feds in their response. States must typically invite federal investigators to assess potential bird-flu cases in person, and some have bristled at the prospect of letting federal officials onto farms. The agriculture commissioner for Texas, which has emerged as one of the bird-flu hot spots, recently said the federal government needs to “back off.” Meanwhile, wastewater samples—a common way to track the spread of a virus—indicate that bird flu is circulating through 10 of the state’s cities.Government alone can only do so much. Though only 14 Americans have knowingly come down with bird flu, we have a woefully incomplete picture of how widely it is spreading in humans. Since March, about 230 people nationwide have been tested for the virus. Although the federal government has attempted to compel farmworkers to get tested—even offering them $75 to give blood and nasal swabs—it has struggled to make inroads. That could be because of a range of factors, such as distrust of the federal government because of farmworkers’ immigration status, and lack of awareness about the growing threat of bird flu. A USDA spokesperson told me the agency expects testing to increase as it “continues outreach to farmers.”You should be experiencing some serious déjà vu by now. In 2020, the U.S. was operating in the dark regarding COVID because tests were scarce, many states were not publicly reporting their COVID numbers, and the federal government and states were fighting over lockdowns. The systematic problems that dogged the pandemic response are still impediments today, and it’s unclear whether either candidate has a plan to fix them. Trump and Harris both seem more intent on pretending that the worrying signs of bird flu simply don’t exist. Neither has outlined a plan for containing the virus, or said much of anything publicly about it. (The Trump and Harris campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.) If America is going to avoid repeating our COVID mistakes, things need to change fast. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, highlighted the need for more widespread testing, and vaccinations for those at high risk of catching the virus. (The federal government has a stockpile of bird-flu vaccines, but has not deployed them.)H5N1 is already showing its potential to spoil both candidates’ promises to lower grocery prices. Poultry flocks have been hit hard by bird flu, and the price of eggs has spiked by 28 percent compared with a year ago. (Inflation also played a role in increased prices, but bird flu is mostly to blame.) The next president will have to spar with America’s dairy industry if they want to get useful data on how widely the virus is spreading. Dairy farmers have been reluctant to test workers or animals for fear of financial losses. But none of this will compare with the disruption that a new president will have to deal with should this virus spread more freely to humans. For Americans, that will likely mean a return to masks, another vaccine to get, and isolation. Some experts are warning that schools could be affected if the virus begins spreading to humans more readily.Bird flu doesn’t seem like a winning message for either candidate. Talk of preparing for any type of infectious disease triggers the fears of uncertainty, isolation, and inconvenience that Americans are still trying to shake after the pandemic. It’s hard to imagine either Trump or Harris starting their presidency by instituting the prevention measures that so many people have grown to hate. Unfortunately, the next commander in chief may not have a choice.

For the suffering New York Mets fans of the 1960s, any sign of progress was thrilling, especially after the team’s comically bad debut season, in 1962, when it set the modern-day Major League Baseball record for losses in a single season: 120.The optimistic cartoon on the cover of my treasured copy of the team’s 1967 yearbook seemed perfectly reasonable, within that context of relentless defeat. It pictured a pint-sized, pinstripe-uniformed Met climbing a stairway toward baseball heaven.Each tread of the stairway was emblazoned with the team’s annual records. Only a ball club that had lost more than 100 games in its initial four years could see a record of 66–95 as a step up.“Where do you think YOU are going!” an older figure in the cartoon, wearing a uniform symbolizing the legacy franchises of the National League, said to the apple-cheeked mini Met.[From the July/August 2023 issue: Moneyball broke baseball]The Mets, of course, were on their way to the miracle of 1969, when, led by the golden arms of Jerry Koosman and future Hall of Famer Tom Seaver, they stunned the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles to capture the World Series.But in Mets lore, the miracle of ’69 cannot be separated from the futility of ’62. The two seasons were like bookends, the sweetness of that improbable Series win made all the sweeter by the enormous pile of losses the team accumulated in its first year. Courtesy of Blair Kamin This is sports yin and yang, a lot like life itself—a mix of the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of pleasure and pain. Every once in a while, they fit together.The good times seem better if you remember them through the lens of the bad times, a principle that transcends teams and grows only more potent with the passage of time and the accretion of bitter defeats.In retrospect, the Mets’ 1969 victory, just eight years into the history of the franchise, looks like instant gratification compared with the record-setting 108-year drought that the Chicago Cubs put their fans through until they won the World Series in 2016. The same goes for the Boston Red Sox, who broke their own epic World Series drought in 2004. Football’s equivalent is the perennially losing Detroit Lions, who earlier this year thrilled their fans with playoff victories for the first time in decades.All of these teams are defined by their history of losses as much as their breakthrough wins. As the late Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse famously remarked, “Any team can have a bad century.”So I experienced mixed emotions as this year’s inept Chicago White Sox slid inexorably toward breaking the Mets’ record, prompting some of their acerbic fans to put paper bags over their heads and wear T-shirts that said White Sux. And I descended into sadness when the Sox finally dropped historic No. 121—sad for the erasure from the record books of a distinctive chapter in Mets’ history. But then, in their last two games, the Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, giving them a final record of 41–121.[Tim Alberta: The thrill of defeat]The math nerd in me reached for a measure of salvation. Punching a few numbers into my smartphone calculator, I realized that by winning those last two games (and five of their last six), the hapless but resilient Sox had not completely “out-worsted” the ’62 Mets.The Sox’s winning percentage turned out to be .253—dismal, yes, but slightly less dismal than the ’62 Mets’ even more dismal .250 share of victories.Yet almost no one in the sports media took notice. Perhaps for good reason. Why weaken a strong story about the Sox’s flaming garbage dump of a season with a wonky aside about the team’s almost-but-not-quite-worst winning percentage?Even so, it seems to me that history should add a footnote to Sox’s disastrous 2024 campaign. Yes, the Sox lost more games in a single season than any other modern-day baseball team. But no, they did not have the worst single-season winning percentage.That dubious distinction, I’m happy to say, still belongs to the beloved ’62 Mets, who taught us an essential lesson: In sports, as in life, pleasure is inseparable from pain.

Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles a reader’s existential worry. He wants to hear about what’s ailing, torturing, or nagging you. Submit your lifelong or in-the-moment problems to dearjames@theatlantic.com.Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox. Dear James,I have an unhealthy need to listen to health-related podcasts. The more I learn about my body, working out, and nutrition, the more I feel like I have control over uncontrollable things. A few problems with this: (1) It does not really give me more control. (2) I only follow a fraction of the advice that I hear. (3) Whenever I bring questions about the information to my actual doctors, they are not having it.Why do I continue to consume information that can’t be applied to my real life? One guy says I should have some blood test, but my doctor says it’s unnecessary. The entire world says I should be taking creatine, but my doctor says I don’t need it. Another podcaster says I should use a fancy mattress cover that regulates my temperature, but who can spend thousands of dollars on that? It seems so out of touch with my reality, and yet I still keep at it. Why?Dear Reader,The great Joe Strummer—who died, of course, much too young—once suggested that people who don’t smoke should be prohibited from enjoying the artistic output of people who do. (Or did.) Because what’s life for, after all? Obsessing about your mercury levels? Counting calories? Or staying up all night, thumping fascists, and singing “The ice age is coming, the sun’s zoomin’ in”? On nobody’s gravestone is it written: He was very healthy.I can guarantee you one thing: Get that blood test, pop your creatine, lie down on your thermally intelligent mattress, and it still won’t be enough. I think you already know this. You know that after only the briefest interlude of serenity, some podcaster or supplement salesman will have you twitching again, worrying that you need this or that. What a racket it’s become, the wellness business. And forgive me for going off here, but I suspect that half these guys are secret eugenicists. The non-gorgeous, the nonproductive, the misshapen and the lonely and the mad—they’d optimize them (us) out of existence if they could.Why? you ask. Why can’t I quit these dudes? Because you’re human in the 21st century, and one of our possessing idolatries is health. The health of the individual, that is. (Screw everybody else.) We’re stuck inside a myth of private perfectibility. Also: It’s good to feel good. You want to be strong. Perhaps, like me, you need to manage your moods, and some of the stuff they talk about on these podcasts is helpful. (Andrew Huberman’s “physiological sigh,” for example, the double huff of inhalation that he recommends for short-circuiting anxiety—I like that. It works!)So here’s my rule of thumb for the world of wellness: If you have to pay for it, don’t. Cold showers are free. Meditation is free. Push-ups are free. Breathing is free. All of this vitality is at your fingertips, right now, gratis. Create your own system: You know yourself, and your body, better than any podcaster does. Create your own podcast—why not? You’ve already done the research. Fancy Mattress: My Journey Through Wellness and Out the Other Side. Your first guest could be your doctor.Wishing you (real) health,JamesBy submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

The 15th annual panoramic-photo competition has just concluded, and the winning images and finalists have been announced.