David Chang changed the way America eats. In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar, a ramen joint in NYC’s East Village, ushered in a style of restaurant that’s now recognizable everywhere: food that emphasized “what cooks really wanted to eat” with little regard for existing conventions; unabashed loudness; and a maniacal attention to detail and deliciousness, perhaps best encapsulated in its signature dish, a pork-belly bun that would be imitated across the country.

Along with Momofuku’s rise has come Chang’s own. He’s now attached to some 15 restaurants spanning NYC to Toronto to Sydney (not counting his growing Fuku fried chicken enterprise), is the figurehead of a media and entertainment company, and, thanks in part to well-reviewed shows on PBS and Netflix, has become a recognizable public figure, even among those who have never eaten his food. After 15 years spent in the public eye, Chang has transcended his place in the so-called “bad boy” chef generation, and is now a leader in the restaurant industry. “He is probably the modern equivalent of Norman Mailer or Muhammad Ali in the 1960s and ’70s,” the New York Times’s Pete Wells wrote in 2018, “somebody whose success in one part of the culture allows him to sound off on the rest of the culture and where it is heading.”

For those who’ve closely followed Chang’s arc, it’s impossible to divorce the chef and restaurateur’s ascent from the image that helped propel him there — angry, effusive, self-aware, self-righteous, and disarmingly candid — an avatar embraced by the media, but largely created by Chang himself. As the canny narrator of his own story, he has often declared that he is mystified by his own success, as in a2014 interview with CBC/Radio-Canada, when he described himself as “so in the moment, and unaware, and unprepared for any success, and I just didn’t care what anyone thought.”

Part of Chang’s savvy has been the mindful integration of his flaws in public; he has catalogued them throughout his career, so that the man and the myth are nearly inseparable. The latest entry in this ongoing project of self-narrativization is his memoir Eat a Peach, which was released in September. The book, co-written with food writer (and Eater contributor) Gabe Ulla, focuses on Chang’s years building Momofuku, 2004 to roughly 2017, although it briefly explores his formative years, from his “certifiably average” childhood in Virginia to his time in culinary school and as an inexperienced young cook at NYC institutions Craft and Café Boulud.

I am definitely not the intended audience for Eat a Peach: In 2008, I was hired as the corporate beverage director for Chang’s young empire; I held this job for seven months before I was fired without explanation. At the time, there were just three restaurants, all within a stone’s throw of each other, and there had never before been an official sommelier or beverage director at Momofuku.

A few months ago, I began an essay about my experience working at Momofuku. Peter Meehan, food editor of the Los Angeles Times and onetime Chang co-conspirator, had recently stepped down from his position following allegations of toxicity and “explosive anger” directed at his employees. I wanted to know, in part, why Chang hadn’t been held similarly accountable for his own behavior during the late 2000s — the wall-punching, desk breaking, violent threats, and screaming he’s been open about for years — when the peers who had surrounded him were dropping like flies as their misdeeds came to light.

Though my Momofuku career was short-lived, its impact on my life and career was not: For much of the 12 years that followed, I wondered whether being chewed up and spit out was the fault of the industry or the result of my own ineptitude. And now I’m fresh off of some 290 pages of Chang’s innermost thoughts, mea culpas, and sanguine reflections of restaurant life, all of which have reminded me why I began this inquiry in the first place. The David Chang I visited in this memoir is familiar, though the story he tells, viewed from the perspective of someone who lived on the other side of it, feels distorted: Important characters have been stricken from the page, while his own tale has been edited into an ultimately redemptive one — an inward-looking, relentlessly self-flagellating apology performed in public, when the people he hurt deserve one most of all.

Eat a Peach is divided into two sections. The first chronicles Chang’s rise to fame in largely chronological order, while the second section, as he defines it, abandons “the chronological telling of this story to explore subjects I’ve yet to fully process with [his therapist]: mania; some armchair philosophizing and shameless artistic comparisons; the limits of anger; racist chicken; the joy of pushing the boulder back up the hill.”

Chang often switches back and forth in time throughout the book, discussing events that are germane to whatever topic he happens to be addressing (section titles include “On Being Addicted to Work,” “The Magazine Business,” and “Fast Food and Asian Villains”). Vignettes are woven into chapters as footholds, from the time Chang publicly swore at an industry leader who’d given him a “degrading lecture” in the early days of Noodle Bar to trips to overseas festivals once de rigueur in the industry — the Cook It Raw and Omnivores of the mid-2010s.

Like any memoir, Eat a Peach is an exercise in self-reflexivity. But it’s also remarkably transparent about how it operates and what it intends to do. Primarily, it wants to reframe Chang’s self-righteous anger, to bundle it up with his guilt, regrets, and ruminations, and to sell it back to the public as his pardon. He’s older and wiser, he wants us to know — a cliché, but he really means it. This is, of course, classic Chang: to lean into the obvious, to embrace it, and, in the process, to render the accompanying criticism pointless, whether it’s his well-documented love of Bud Light or his passionate embrace of Domino’s pizza. “Even this book, written with the benefit of greater knowledge and better perspective, is still riddled with problems,” he writes. “I’ve talked a great deal about the importance of failure as a learning tool, but it’s really a privilege to expect people to let us fail over and over again.”

And Chang does fail again and again, as he recounts in the book, especially when it comes to his anger. His memoir both acknowledges these failures and attempts to move past them, because absolution feels like the true goal here. “I hate that the anger has become my calling card,” Chang writes. “With friends, family, my co-workers, and the media, my name has become synonymous with rage.” Chang, always seeking to be in control, wants to reassert it over his own mythos, and to that end, he largely succeeds in Eat a Peach — as he always has in telling (and selling) his own story.

After all, the myth of Momofuku did not create itself. It took work. To fuel his high standards of creativity and perfection, Chang needed — and created — a combustible environment at Momofuku, aided by internal and external forces. “Conflict was fuel, and Momofuku was a gas-guzzling SUV,” Chang writes. His pursuit of that conflict was often valorized by the media. A few weeks after I began working at Momofuku, Larissa MacFarquhar’s March 2008 profile in the New Yorker, “On the Edge,” dropped. That profile painted a robust picture of an angry chef who had trouble controlling his emotions: In response to a series of mistakes, none “egregious” in themselves, MacFarquhar writes that Chang had “screamed and yelled until a friend showed up and dragged him out of the restaurant, and his head still hurt nearly twenty-four hours later.”

The anger was always framed as a means to an end, part of Chang’s quest to create “the perfect restaurant.” This need for perfection is a deep throughline in the Chang mythology; a child golf prodigy, he won the Virginia state championship two years in a row. When his peers began to catch up as he grew older, he recounts his father sitting him down to “analyze each mistake I’d made.” Chang has embraced this part of his biography, as well as the emotion that arrives when his peers don’t possess his relentless drive, or when he recognizes that his own high standards are, in fact, unreachable: rage.

Eat a Peach is strewn with references to how this anger manifested within Chang’s body, always simmering just beneath the surface. “When I’m angry, I seethe with such intensity that it can’t simply be emotional,” he writes. “It’s like I’m an animal registering danger.” Elsewhere, he writes that “the only thing that could snap me out of my fits was punching a wall or a steel countertop, anything to cause me some kind of physical pain.” There are the headaches that follow each outburst, the “constant thrum of depression in the back of my skull.”

There are moments when Chang appears to understand the weight of his anger and his indulgence of it. In one section, he describes reading an eGullet review written just a month after Noodle Bar’s opening, in which a diner recounted witnessing Chang’s takedown of an employee during dinner. The diner describes the scene as a “public humiliation,” noting that Chang “brought his cook to the verge of tears, told him he was going to be fired” in full view of guests. “We left feeling a bit traumatized,” the reviewer said of his experience. Chang writes that he doesn’t remember the specific incident, but concedes that, apart from a few details, the account is “accurate and could have been written about almost any night I was working service.”

But acknowledging a problem doesn’t necessarily begin to fix it. It is possible to be both broader in one’s perspective and still complicit in its lack of resolution. It’s notable that Chang’s acknowledgement of this incident, complete with the benefit of hindsight, is presented to the reader as a lesson about how his anger affected the restaurant’s guests. “Recently, I’ve started to see this particular incident for the lesson it was,” Chang writes. “I was contradicting my own belief that the only thing that matters is how the diners feel when they walk out the door. Because we were in such tight quarters, when you came to Momofuku, you were eating dinner with me. And nobody wants to eat dinner with a dick.”

What this anecdote shows is that, while Chang believes that he has learned from his errors, he appears to have missed the full lesson: He was abusive — at the time, unapologetically so — to his staff. I had worked in kitchens for a long time, and I knew chefs, so even MacFarquhar’s startling portrait of a chef so emotionally volatile that he gave himself shingles felt in line with the overall climate of restaurant work. Yet I was surprised by Dave. In all my years of restaurant work, I had never seen anything like the roiling, red-faced, screaming, pulsing, wrath-filled man that was David Chang.

Despite the formative role that Chang’s rage plays in both his personality and the memoir, as someone who witnessed it, its scope and its effects on the people around him never feel adequately described, partly because he favors hazy generalities over specifics, and partly because he claims to suffer from memory lapses in and around the maelstrom of his anger. “The slightest error or show of carelessness from a cook could turn me into a convulsing, raging mass,” he writes, cutting the recipient of the abuse out of the description. At another point in the book, when relaying an outburst he had in Copenhagen, Chang describes the moments that led up to it, and the precipitous aftermath, but not the incident itself,nor whom it affected.

The recipients of Dave’s anger — his employees — lack the same power to forget, or to leave the consideration of its impact to others. I vividly remember the day that a line cook, who could not have been more than 22, was brought to tears by Dave’s rage for cooking what was deemed a subpar family meal: “I will scalp you,” Dave screamed. “I will murder your fucking family!”

I recall, too, in sharp relief, the afternoon service meeting in which I was excoriated in front of my staff for purchasing a sparkling moscato to pair with one of the courses at Ko, even though Dave had himself told me that I had carte blanche to serve whatever I wanted with his food, since I, a certified sommelier through the Court of Master Sommeliers, was the expert. “Who the fuck told you that you could buy this?” he screamed. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Reached by my editors, Dave provided the following comment about those two incidents: “While I do not recall these specific instances, they are entirely consistent with my behavior at the time, which I did not begin to correct until several years later,” he said. “The bottom line is that I’m sorry. I’m still working to get better and repair many personal and professional relationships, but I also respect that the path to forgiveness does not exist on my terms. No one but me deserves to carry the burden of my past failings.”

That apology, while noted and accepted 12 years later, cannot change the fallout of that moment. Dave didn’t really care about the moscato; he cared, it seemed, more about cutting me down in front of the staff I managed, so that they no longer saw me as their boss but, instead, as a small, easily flustered, puffy-with-tears young woman. He succeeded. From then on, it was virtually impossible to command respect from my staff. They had seen me as Dave saw me, as someone unworthy of respect. And that was enough.

A memoir is necessarily a work of hindsight, but even for a memoir, Eat a Peach is extremely self-referential. In the book’s preface, ever getting ahead of criticism, Chang sets the reader up for his role as an imperfect narrator: “I won’t pretend I can recount everything exactly as it happened,” he writes. “I’m sure I’ve also contradicted statements I’ve made in the past, whether it’s because I’ve changed my mind or I was playing fast and loose with the facts before or I’m misremembering them now.”

What Chang does effectively with this maneuver is reveal every storyteller’s role as an editor. Often, he points out what hindsight offers in the retelling of a story. And in some vignettes, when Chang recounts actions and events he’s now not proud of, he deems them worth “correcting” — but instead of addressing those he has harmed outright, he fervidly professes his guilt, then opts to write over them. It’s better living through editing.

This is the entire conceit of a chapter simply entitled “Thirty-Five”: It’s printed in the book’s normal black typeface, with “crossed out” sections “written over” in a red typeset, a trick that makes obvious the work of self-editing. “[I]t’s revisionist history if I change [what I was truly thinking at the time],” Chang writes at the beginning of the section. “All I want to do is edit this period of my life — not just for you, but for myself. I wish I could have seen and experienced it all differently. I wish I could am going to rewrite this whole chapter.” The “wish I could” is replaced with “am going to” in red.

Using this storytelling device, Chang pulls back the curtain, revealing some examples of what we now acknowledge were long-standing foundations of abuse in restaurant kitchens. He recalls criticizing and swearing at multiple job candidates who sought a work-life balance: “I convinced myself that basic human needs were selfish. … I had conflated my own selfishness with selflessness. I was miserable to work for,” he writes in the edited red text. With the exception of one struck-through “fuck that guy,” the edit ultimately glosses over exactly how those candidates were dismissed. It projects a better outcome (the edited one) while using his own shame to skip over any direct reckoning of his effect on other people.

Editing happens in less obvious but more egregious ways, as well. One night in Sydney, Australia, as Chang writes in “Thirty-Five,” he threatened a hotel employee — essentially a colleague — with a knife. “My staff tells me I screamed at the man. Threatened him. They said I had been slicing something on a cutting board and was now gesticulating wildly with the knife. They said it could be interpreted as a weapon.” This moment, written in the “edited” red-text format, enjoys one paragraph in Eat a Peach, a spare handful of sentences dedicated to what is almost certainly a crime. (Chang notes, in the lived-in clarity of black text, that “the ensuing report to HR nearly got me deported from Australia.”) Chang claims, and so the reader experiences, an absence of memory.

Elsewhere in the book, Chang displays his ability to recall — or, at least, to fact-check — miniscule details about the past. There are nearly 100 words dedicated to poularde en vessie, an obscure French dish that Chang learned to make at Café Boulud, in which a whole chicken is stuffed with truffles and foie gras and then placed inside of a pig’s bladder. In another place, a description of tuna carpaccio takes up 339 words. And Chang shows off his persistent dedication to detail by including lengthy end-of-night manager log emails from Momofuku, which cover everything from new dishes to staff recalculations to mechanical issues in the kitchen.

The knife-wielding, earth-shattering incident, however, takes up no space whatsoever in Chang’s brain. He claims to have blacked out, his anger so hot a flame it melted his memory. But he could’ve made the same effort to recount the incident and reckon with its impact in the book that he did to unearth all those lavish descriptions of onetime dishes. (As a point of comparison, the late New York Times journalist David Carr’s 2009 memoir, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, is a model of excellence when it comes to self-reporting, employing standard journalism methods to get to the soul of murky personal truth.) Instead, as an editor, Chang decided that these details could not be rehashed by him after the fact — that his side of the story was all that he could tell. But in his capacity as “truth-teller,” which is partly what he’s attempting to project here, Chang has an obligation to dive deeper into these liminal spaces, particularly if he’s serious about contending with the abuses of his past and their consequences.

One thing in particular that I needed to know was how Chang’s memoir would handle Andrew “Drew” Salmon, who was the behind-the-scenes partner in all things Momofuku for more than a decade (and who went on to become an advisor to Christina Tosi after parting ways with the company in 2017). When I began at Momofuku, he was Chang’s business partner and the company’s chief operating officer. As the head of the restaurant group’s managerial operations, he was my boss. Early into my brand-new job, I was called into a meeting with him. Ostensibly, it was to discuss my schedule, but the only thing I remember,12 years later, is the question he asked in that cramped cellar room.

“Are you a chef-fucker?”

“A what?”

“A chef-fucker. The kind of person who goes around trying to fuck famous chefs.”

I was not, but I suppose that was what he had heard about me. I was young, I had come from other restaurants, and I had slept with a famous pastry chef who was friends with Dave. Word had, I suspected, gotten around, as it does in New York restaurants. Still, being presented with my private life was gutting. Salmon used this meeting to exert his power, and was, from that moment forward, a hostile manager in my eyes. (Salmon, reached by my editors, provided the following comment in regards to the allegation of this conversation: “I’m sorry, I have no recollection of the conversation that is being described. I don’t want to dismiss her feelings or take away from her story or perspective, but I don’t remember having said this.”)

In a straightforward retelling of Momofuku’s history, even one as compressed as Eat a Peach, one might expect at least a passing nod to the business partner whose presence loomed large for more than a decade. But in the 290 pages of Eat a Peach, Salmon’s name never once appears, despite the long and steady roster of other names recited. And if Salmon, whose condescension and abrasiveness as Momofuku’s No. 2 left staffers feeling demeaned and bullied, is absent from this book, I can only wonder what else is left unsaid. (Salmon provided the following comment to my editors regarding his demeanor and its effect on staff: “It was a long time ago. I predominantly worked from our office and probably didn’t fully appreciate how much talent we had in every part of our company. I’m sure I could have been more patient and empathetic in all my communications.”)

At a minimum, Chang has largely left out the problematic friendships that swirled around him during the most meteoric phase of Momofuku’s rise. Missing from the majority of the book’s narrative are the bad actors who had parties in “rape rooms” and then kicked backed at Ssäm Bar, the ones renowned for their bad behavior. He doesn’t get to that part of the story until page 225, tying it specifically to the emergence of the #MeToo movement, and by then it feels like an afterthought.

In fact, for all his supposed self-awareness, Chang does not hesitate to bathe in nostalgia when it comes to the so-called good old days — a point he acknowledges, writing “you can still sense my bro-ish excitement when I tell old war stories.” But when I think about Chang and “war stories,” I mostly remember how, when he came into a room back then, the staff held their breath, like a grenade could detonate at any moment — or the particular terror we experienced if Chang came in and the music was playing too quietly at Ssäm Bar. Then, his sonorous indignation. The rage. None of that was exciting to those of us who were in the blast radius.

Unsurprisingly, I’d push back on the much-repeated idea in Eat a Peach that, as Chang writes, “My greatest strength is in creating environments for other people to grow and succeed. I love teams.” It may be true now, but back then, the restaurant came before its workers, and, beyond that distinction, the back of house superseded the front. In 2008, Chang took what he describes as “the whole gang” to the James Beard Awards, where he ended up winning for Best Chef: New York City. I wasn’t on the “Momobus,” with its disco lights and stripper pole, for “a night the team wouldn’t soon forget,” because I wasn’t invited aboard. Someone had to work service, even though, as Chang writes, at that point, “I still didn’t understand what a sommelier really did.”

Dave was always quick to remind those of us who made up the front-of-house team of our general lack of expertise. More than once he said that he could run a restaurant without the front of house, and yet, there we were, Momofuku’s ugly stepchildren, overpaid, he told us, for skills we didn’t possess. We couldn’t cook, he told us; we were no artists. We were just “greedy bastards,” as he put it in his New Yorker profile. In the book, Chang concedes this prior wholesale lack of respect for the roles played by bussers, managers, sommeliers, and servers. “I’d always felt there was a huge imbalance in the way that servers were compensated with tips, while cooks were not,” he writes, all these years later. “It was my opinion that the kitchen made the only truly essential contribution. Wine lists and waitstaff were affectations of Western dining.”

Early in my tenure at Momofuku, I waited on then-New York Times dining reviewer Frank Bruni, who awarded our restaurant three stars. My pairing with the crab course, which I devised the day before the critic arrived, made it into the newspaper: “[Ko’s] sense of mischief is underscored by the ‘wine pairing’ for a course of soft-shell crab: a glass of chilly Budweiser, bringing to mind a day at the beach,” Bruni wrote. I poured the beer counterside (Ko had no actual tables), into a sake glass, much to his unconcealed delight. But to hear Dave tell it at the time, contribution to the newspaper’s review notwithstanding, my role was that of an overpaid appendage, a testament to his belief that only cooks can add value to restaurant life.

The managerial structure produced by that belief, devised to pit the back of house against the front of house — by tipping kitchen staff out of the collective tip pool, always a point of contention among servers, for instance — meant that the nervous system of Momofuku was permanently electrified with tension. Chang was never abashed about these underpinnings, so perhaps it’s fair to say that his employees knew what they were getting into. But there was also a push and pull between men and women: Momofuku often felt like a boys club, with more male bussers, more male kitchen staff, more male managers, and, generally speaking, more men working at the restaurant than women. While women were in administrative positions and ran much of the company, many were also swayed — or cowed — by the Chang ethos. As a result, there could be a palpable thrum of misogyny, however unintentional, cascading down through the restaurants.

This is all to say that Momofuku culture was insider culture. Either you were in or you were out; I was never “in,” so I was delivered a regular helping of mistreatment by the people — managers, people in administrative roles, and chefs who went on to become nearly as famous as Chang himself — whom Chang groomed to believe that coolness was the premium capital of the Momofuku brand. My schedule changed on a whim. Days off flip-flopped and requests were not recognized. Unpredictability and the personality clashes are common in restaurants, but I lived in a constant and dizzying state of fluctuation. That was the norm, because as Chang writes, “It didn’t matter to me what your personal needs were. Any needs were indicative of frailty and I was of the mind that there was no place for weakness in our company.”

My time at Momofuku ended in September 2008, when I was called into the main office on a fall afternoon and fired without explanation. I had never been written up for any infractions during my time working at Momofuku, nor had I, to my knowledge, broken any rules or done anything in violation of my contract (although New York is an at-will state). I began privately dating a server during my time there, but that was not a contractual issue — and, actually, other staff members higher on the ladder than I was were publicly dating subordinates at the time. My cause for termination was never made clear; I simply understood it to mean that I was being fired because I was not liked by the upper echelons of management, not because I was bad at my job.

In these past months, I have spent a lot of time talking to friends and colleagues from those days. Most remember my trauma, or can speak to their own. I was surprised at how much I unearthed, and also at how much I had forgotten, like the Roundtable emails circulated among management at the end of each night, or the needlessly respected bloggers who visited us in the early days at Ko (though I never forgot Gael Greene, who committed me to the page as a “gorgon”), or even Peter Serpico’s hand-torn pasta with snails and chicken skin, a dish I loved, but filed away with all of my own strange emotions from that time.

I ran into Dave five summers after I was fired, when I was moonlighting as a sommelier at a restaurant in the Hamptons, where I now live. Removed from Momofuku, he did not seem to remember that there had ever been anything but ease between us, and he invited me to sit down at his table for a drink. I declined. He had apparently been able to put our shared past behind him, but I couldn’t.

The problem with Chang’s apparent ability to move on was that many of us who worked for him could not, the scars we received lasting for years, if not a lifetime — a fact he seems to be starting to reckon with. “Recognizing my flaws doesn’t mean I’m ‘cured,’” he writes at one point. “I’ve done so much harm,” at another. But for all of the hand-wringing, all of the guilt, all of the acknowledgment of the bad things that he’s done or condoned, nowhere in the book does he say “I’m sorry” or apologize — the word “sorry” appears six times, never in the form of an apology — other than to “anyone whose role I’ve exaggerated or downplayed in my memory.” In the end, Chang’s trauma, and the trauma he inflicted on other people, becomes part of his public persona, while we simply carry ours.

At the time that Salmon asked me if I was a “chef-fucker,” part of me believed that I deserved to be spoken to in that way, which is why I didn’t quit. Momofuku was the biggest, most important, and best-paying job I’d ever had — I was making $100,000 a year under the most visible umbrella in the dining world — and I had convinced myself I couldn’t replace it. Beyond telling friends and family members, I stayed largely silent. As a leader, a manager, and a chef, Chang had a real and lasting impact on people’s livelihoods. He made careers: Without Chang, you may never have heard of Christina Tosi, Akira Akuto, or Peter Serpico — and that’s just the abbreviated list. He also broke careers. So like everyone else, I accepted the abuses of Momofuku for fear of being fired, of being blacklisted, of never being able to gain a foothold in the restaurant industry again.

But I remain convinced that I speak here not only for me, but also for so many other staff members who walked through the doors of Momofuku one last time, looking back and wondering if they would remember the sublime — and there were enough of those moments — or only the sour. Not everyone shares my experiences or memories, of course, but I know that I am not alone in wondering why it took so long to talk about the despotism of Momofuku. Wrapped up in rising stardom, and in the blackouts of anger, David Chang let the important business of taking care of his staff get away from him; he let us down. He let me down.

And Chang’s impact on restaurant workers goes far beyond me or Momofuku: The “norms” that he initiated over a decade ago still thrive in other restaurants, his intricately documented rage influencing a generation of young chefs. In a restaurant group where bad behavior was sometimes rewarded, that is a lesson learned. Those of us who worked for him — and who lauded him — are not absolved of our responsibility. We may have been terrified, but we should have held him accountable. Even after his rage was given prime real estate in one of the country’s most respected magazines, we gave him a pass.

I think about all of this a lot, and I also think about the fact that I was worked to the bone, drained of my love for restaurants, convinced that I was bad at my job, that I wasn’t cool, that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t a hard worker, that I wasn’t worthy. The routine assault of my skill set deflated me so completely that, even though I came to Momofuku with an Ivy League degree, a master’s, and a sommelier certification, after my departure, I enrolled in a full-time culinary program at Chang’s alma mater, the French Culinary Institute. I graduated second in my class. He will never be able to say I can’t cook again, I told myself.

Still, even after all this, after all the anger that Dave and Momofuku planted in me, I sometimes think of him and my time there fondly. What I gained at Momofuku, perhaps most surprisingly, are deep and lasting friendships that I find immeasurably meaningful. And, in a strange and twisted way, Momofuku delivered to me my current and complete life: Ten years ago, a close friend whom I met at Momofuku (who still keeps me in her phone as “Momo Hannah”) asked me to come out to Long Island to help her open a restaurant, and, after that, I never really left. I met my husband here, bought my house here, had my babies here, and may even retire here someday.

As for Dave, he was funny, and generous, and I liked him, and I wanted him to like me, in that thirsty way that you want the people whom you feel will never truly like you to at least understand who you are. I stayed longer than I should have, chasing moments that were pleasant enough: a bag of gifted cockles during a weekend in Sag Harbor, a night drinking flaming tiki bowls at the Rusty Knot. I saw versions of Dave that were decent and kind. The world has seen that, too; on November 29, Chang became the first celebrity and 14th contestant in history to win $1 million on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the sum of which he donated to Southern Smoke Foundation, a Houston-based crisis relief organization for people in the COVID-battered hospitality industry. He is not a monster, but what he created could devour people in monstrous ways.

Taking Chang at his word, I recognize that he sees some of the pain and torment in what he has birthed. “Restaurants saved my life, but they’ve also hurt and betrayed many of my peers,” he writes. I have no doubt that he has grown in the 12 years since I worked for him. Like me, he’s a parent now. I hope that he is kinder, that he surrounds himself with better people, that he approaches management with less of the toss-spaghetti-at-the-wall wildness than he did back then. I also know that Momofuku is different than it was during my time there: It has a human resources department, and support systems, and it may even be a wonderful place to work now. The place, I hope, like the man, has reached maturity.

Some have asked me what I, personally, would like to see as the denouement to this story. What does restitution look like to those of us harmed by Dave and what he built? Yes, it was different then, and our culture has changed, and I understand that he is working toward becoming a better person. I also believe that he owes a tithe beyond an apology. (Releasing every former employee from any nondisclosure agreement that prevents them from talking about what they experienced at Momofuku might be a start.) For all that Dave has edited in and out of this narrative, what he cannot change is the trauma left in his wake. The one thing he can offer up that is commensurate with the scope and scale of the grief he has caused is the space he occupies in restaurants and in culture: He can cede it to someone who will use it to change this toxic industry that has broken so many of us.

The book’s parting image leaves the reader with a fruit-laden Chang, peaches and nectarines, acquired from the farmers market, firmly in hand. “What are you going to do with all that fruit?” his wife, Grace, asks in the final line of the book. He does not answer. I suspect that he does not yet know what the fruit of his labor should become.

Hannah Selinger’s IACP award-nominated work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Cut, Wine Enthusiast, and elsewhere.
Dola Sun is a freelance illustrator.

Disclosure: David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.

For a guy who chugged a Ghost energy drink for breakfast, Mike Satinover has remarkably steady hands. They don’t jitter when he places a level, the kind you’d buy at Home Depot, on top of two logs of rolled-up dough sheets, resembling industrial spools of paper towels.

Rolling out ramen dough is exacting work. And Satinover won’t trust anyone else at his restaurant to do it — not until he can train someone properly, and that might take months. So with hands as still as a watchmaker’s despite three espresso shots’ worth of caffeine in his bloodstream, he adjusts the rolls of dough until the level’s bubble floats precisely between the center lines.

This ensures an even thickness when the machine he feeds the dough into pushes out what will become 300 servings of ramen noodles. Unfurled end to end, the sheets of dough he’ll make today would stretch 116 yards — longer than a football field.

Satinover, 35, sports peach-fuzz hair and a black Pippin’s Tavern hoodie that’s dusted with flour. As the noodle-making machine whirs and slowly coils, he takes out a pocket humidity gauge. The air inside his Logan Square restaurant, Akahoshi Ramen, measures 17 percent this winter morning, too dry for his ramen to remain as pliable as he’d like — 30 to 40 percent humidity is ideal. Already he’s had to repair some broken patches. Maybe he’ll buy a humidifier, yet one more unexpected expense.

Mostly, the man is exhausted. Energy drinks don’t get Satinover wired anymore, only lift him to a state of not-collapsing. But this is what he signed up for when he left his lucrative marketing job to toil from dusk till dawn in pursuit of serving a perfect bowl of ramen.

“I’m not getting good sleep. It’s pretty brutal,” says Satinover, whose restaurant has been packed since he opened it in late November. “I’m worried the mental and physical exhaustion will get to me.”

He continues feeding dough into the complicated and frightening Yamato Richmen noodle-making machine. It’s all buttons, rollers, and dials — 595 pounds of shine and chrome that could mangle appendages if you’re standing too close and not paying attention. At $40,000, it costs as much as a 2024 BMW 2 Series (shipping alone, from Japan, was $5,000), and for over a year it took up space in Satinover’s West Loop apartment, even before he signed the lease for the restaurant space.

His devotion to precision is astounding to behold, exasperating to capture in words: Three hundred servings of noodles (at 135 grams each) requires 30 kilograms of flour. But not just any flour. Over the years, Satinover has dialed in on the two types and the ratio he needs to hit the sweet spot of noodle firmness, a 13.2 percent protein level: 19,500 grams of King Arthur Sir Lancelot (14.2 percent protein) and 10,500 grams of King Arthur Sir Galahad (11.7 percent). Then, to give the noodles the toothsome chew and pale yellow hue he desires, he adds exactly 10,500 grams of water containing 330 grams of sodium bicarbonate, 150 grams of potassium carbonate, and three-eighths of a teaspoon of riboflavin.

Even with a noodle-making machine as high-tech as Satinover’s, he can’t just set it and forget it. The noodles need to be pressed again and again. Ramen noodles are denser than, say, macaroni — if kept in broth overnight, good ramen noodles shouldn’t bloat. The dough enters the machine between two rollers, set at 1.5 millimeter thickness. Once it emerges, it’s folded by Satinover, then pressed again at specific intervals five more times before it’s cut into those familiar long strands. And that’s just the noodles for his miso ramen; for his soupless ramen, he uses a thicker noodle with an entirely different, but also painstakingly derived, formulation.

This noodle-making process eats up five hours of Satinover’s day, and it doesn’t include the 48 hours required for the noodles to sit in a sealed proofing box, commonly used for pizza dough, to age and develop flavor. All this should yield enough noodles to meet the demand for two nights of dinner service. But the way business is going at Akahoshi Ramen, the buzz surrounding it growing by the day, the reality is closer to a night and a half.

Striving for a perfect bowl of ramen — even if it can’t practically be achieved — requires more than feel, intuition, and thousands of hours of muscle memory. It demands exactitude measured in decimals, seconds, and milligrams, using levels, humidity gauges, and refractometers. It is cooking that veers into the domain of laboratory science.

Ask Satinover why this kind of precision is necessary — or really any question at all — and you’ll get an answer that is thought out, quantitative, ready to be bullet-pointed: “There are two reasons. From a business perspective, it’s consistency. My intuition about what’s right isn’t applicable to every component of every dish. I need a control, and numbers are easy to control. The other reason is to avoid having to think about it, to avoid the mental load of what’s correct and what’s not. The number is correct. Twenty grams of onions is correct, not 10 onions. What if you have a larger onion? It’s for a reduction in mental exhaustion.”

Satinover is a chef obsessed and possessed. But he doesn’t have the contemplative intensity of a Grant Achatz or Curtis Duffy — he is more in the mold of a chill gamer and sneakerhead, his cooking philosophy formed on Reddit, not at the Culinary Institute of America. His singular infatuation with ramen has served him well. For more than a decade, Satinover achieved esteemed status on Ramen Internet, which led him to roll out a series of pop-ups around the country and now to open what is Chicago’s most buzzed-about restaurant in years.

Anything is possible in America, even the redemption of a punch line. As recently as 20 years ago, outside of Little Tokyos and suburban strip malls catering to the Japanese, the idea of ramen as an American dining genre was a fanciful notion. Ramen was the staple of hungry and destitute college students. Ramen was chicken-flavored noodle soup from Maruchan, a dozen packets collecting dust in a food donation bin. Ramen in America was an avatar for cheapness and convenience, until it wasn’t. And now? People travel across multiple state lines just to sample a bowl of Japanese noodle broth because someone on Reddit said it was worth the trip. What a country.

The online forum r/ramen is one of the friendlier corners of Reddit. The majority of posts by its 787,000-plus members feature photographs of homemade ramen attempted by amateur cooks. The photos are beautifully composed, the presentation of the ramen an art form in itself.

The more meticulous artisan will execute the “noodle fold,” which involves draping noodles over chopsticks, then carefully folding them once, all together, onto themselves, the individual strands aligned, resembling a three-dimensional barcode. Some bowls have ajitama — a soft-boiled egg marinated in soy sauce — that’s been bisected lengthwise, showcasing its oozy, lustrous yolk in all its sunflower-yellow glory. Amateur cooks are known to use an eyedropper to place precisely random beads of aroma oil — a fat such as butter or lard flavored with aromatics — on the soup’s surface in service of a gorgeous photo.

By and large, r/ramen feels like an encouraging place, with the genial vibe of a student art exhibition. Once the finished bowls are posted, there’ll be upvotes from fellow members, with comments like “Looks amazing” or “Great job!”

Spend any length of time on r/ramen and you’ll notice one user getting name-checked a lot: Ramen_Lord, often spoken of in language befitting actual deities (“Praise be to Ramen_Lord” and “All hail Ramen_Lord,” sayeth two recent posts). Since 2013, Ramen_Lord has earned his reputation by rigorously sharing every data point of his research on making ramen at home, hundreds of thousands of words now. If you’ve posted a photo of a homemade bowl on r/ramen, there’s a decent chance the recipe was developed by Ramen_Lord. At Satinover’s previous job, at the marketing research firm Kantar, a colleague learned Satinover was into ramen and suggested he check out the writings of the Reddit user Ramen_Lord.

What the co-worker didn’t know: Satinover is Ramen_Lord, a secret he kept from all but his family for nearly four years. Like many usernames, the self-glorifying moniker was intended as a joke. Satinover never imagined that one day he would, in fact, be viewed as a ramen lord.

It wasn’t until the food website Serious Eats interviewed the man behind Ramen_Lord in 2017 that Satinover outed himself. There was nary a a word about Satinover not being of Japanese ancestry, this gaijin who dared to call himself Ramen_Lord. By this point in the rise of ramen in America, the well-known names making it weren’t even Japanese: David Chang of the Momofuku Noodle Bar empire is a Korean American. Ivan Orkin is a New York native who ran beloved shops in Tokyo and New York and cowrote a bestselling English-language ramen cookbook.

Reddit users saw Satinover as someone who put in the work, who earned his stripes by being rigorous with his research. From the start, Satinover’s posts were treatises reminiscent of the recipe deep dives that propelled food writer J. Kenji López-Alt into culinary celebritydom. At a time when cooking content is condensed ever shorter, and more aspirational than useful, everything about Satinover’s instructions is slow and precise: Pork belly chashu should be cooked sous vide in a water bath at exactly 154 degrees Fahrenheit. For ajitama, the amount of soy sauce and mirin needed is 10 and 8 percent, respectively, of the combined weight of the peeled eggs and the water, which should be weighed separately.

There’s a culture of secrecy around ramen recipes in Japan, especially among shop owners in a fiercely competitive market. But Satinover wasn’t yet a restaurateur, just a hobbyist. Over the years, he would post a dozen recipes that he developed — from chicken paitan and tonkotsu gyokai tsukemen to a new wave Tokyo-style soy sauce — and these arrived on Reddit with the impact of a surprise Beyoncé album drop.

“I decided I’m just going to have no secrets, no matter what happens. I have to be an absolutist in that approach,” Satinover says. “The more I delved in, the more I realized they weren’t really my secrets to have. I’m not even Japanese. As an outsider, it felt very bizarre to think, Well, I have amassed this knowledge; let me just hoard it for myself. Why not share it? These things deserve to be known by everybody.”

Satinover’s most popular post was his most ambitious. In 2020, he and his twin brother, Scott Satinover, posted a free 137-page e-book called The Ramen_Lord Book of Ramen. There’s no fancy layout and only a handful of pictures — it’s just Satinover’s ramen brain downlinked to 47,351 words in a single-spaced Google doc. (A doctoral student in engineering, Scott helped write, edit, and explain the science.) Whatever poisonous reputation Reddit has sometimes earned, this was the very opposite: a community of like-minded folks celebrating something nice, flipping out in all-caps exaltations that its Lord had collected his wisdom into a bible.

A frequent question from Reddit users: When might they ever get to taste Satinover’s ramen in person. One-off pop-up dinners? Sure. But in that Serious Eats unmasking, Satinover was asked whether he’d consider opening his own restaurant. He replied: “I’m not sure I’m cut out for it. Loving a dish and loving making a dish are only part of the equation for owning a restaurant, and I have an immense respect for those who pursue that career, but it might not be my strong suit.”

Mike Satinover’s upbringing wasn’t dissimilar to that of other kids in 1990s Oak Park: He played a lot of video games, tried tennis and gymnastics, generally earned excellent grades. For a while, he was deep into spoken-word poetry, and his parents remember him obsessing over every word on his laptop to find the perfect imagery. “Mike has a goal in mind and then he pursues it with passion and vigor,” says his father, Ira Satinover, a retired oral surgeon. His mother, Luisa DiPietro, is a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Dentistry.

Their son would spend long stretches of his days immersed in role-playing video games like Final Fantasy, the type of attention-span-testing contests where, Mike Satinover says, “you just have to grind to beat it — no shortcuts.” Later, in college, he would go through a phase of making macarons, the notoriously finicky Parisian confection. Over several years, he baked 38 batches, a few dozen cookies each time, documenting every attempt with detailed recipe notes.

In high school, Satinover had aspirations of becoming a chef. It was the alchemy and instant gratification, the possibility that, when it came to ingredients, one plus one plus one could equal five. When he was old enough to drive, he worked 20 hours a week as an unpaid stagiaire at an Italian restaurant in Forest Park. This was about the time Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential became a pop culture sensation, and the restaurant industry’s seedy side was still being glorified as rock ’n’ roll. Satinover enjoyed the quieter parts — picking herbs and piping goat cheese into squash blossoms — but the head chef treated him like scum. “He called me all sorts of crazy names,” Satinover says. “He never taught me anything. It was all very unpleasant.” After a solid year of full-frontal shit eating, he couldn’t stomach the idea of entering culinary school, much less spending his life working in a restaurant.

His decision in high school to study Japanese (which interested him more than French or Spanish — that, and he was a fan of Dragon Ball Z) opened up new options. His junior year, he took a two-week trip to Nagano, Tokyo, and Kyoto, spending part of the time with a host family. An Italian Jewish gaming-obsessed geek who knew only upper-middle-class Oak Park, Satinover had his world rocked by Japan. Beyond the modernity and cleanliness, it was the cultural minutiae — like waking up to the smell of a rice cooker instead of an alarm clock — that most intrigued the impressionable 17-year-old. On a more abstract level, the collectivist culture of the Japanese, which stood in contrast to American individualism, was strange and strangely compelling to him.

When the time came for college applications, Satinover sought out schools with strong Japanese language departments. That’s how he ended up at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He spent his junior year at Hokkaido University. It was there, in Sapporo, Japan, on a frigid November night in 2009, that one perfect bowl of miso ramen would slingshot Satinover’s life into a whole new trajectory.

Sapporo has something in common with Chicago: It, too, is a northern city that endures bitter winters. The warming properties of ramen make the dish a popular elixir, and Sapporo boasts more than a thousand ramen shops in a city of two million people. The defining feature of Sapporo ramen (there are upward of 40 recognized ramen variants across Japan) is a broth cooked with miso, a fermented soybean paste. Unlike cleaner, lighter broths such as shoyu (soy sauce) or shio (sea salt), miso ramen is viscous and often creamy, its pungent, earthy savoriness particularly soul satisfying in cold-weather climates.

Sapporo-style miso is one of the few types of ramen requiring a wok. At searingly high temperatures, woks provide the requisite char (Chinese originators called it “wok hei”) that gives food an appealing, slightly burnt tinge. In Sapparo-style ramen, bean sprouts (or cabbage) with a thick dollop of miso paste first get this charring, the flames from the gas burners licking high and caramelizing the sugars. Pork broth is then ladled into this stir-fry, and within seconds everything comes to a vigorous boil.

What happens next necessitates nimble hands and tight choreography. As soon as the curly yellow noodles come out of the cooking water, they are shaken dry to remove excess moisture (overcook them by even 10 seconds and they’ll lose that springy chew). When they land in the serving bowl, the wok broth with bean sprouts is poured over top. Toppings — pork belly chashu, strips of bamboo shoots called menma, scallions, sometimes corn and butter — are nestled into the noodles. Then the finished bowl is quickly dispatched to the diner. Assuming every component is properly prepped, a bowl of miso ramen should take less than four minutes from cook to serve.

Satinover knew none of this when a fellow student recommended he visit Sumire, a legendary miso ramen shop in Sapporo. The only ramen he’d had theretofore was of the instant packet variety, plus a few bowls from the food court at Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights. He wasn’t yet a superfan, but the dish sounded more exciting than the broiled fish and steamed rice served at the dorm canteen.

When the ramen bowl arrived at his counter seat, it was nothing pretty: yellow noodles submerged in murky beige with a tangle of light green scallions. On the surface of the soup was what looked like a quarter-inch layer of liquefied pork lard. This insulated a scalding hot broth, McDonald’s-coffee-lawsuit hot, a temperature many degrees higher than what American restaurants would serve.

Here’s the part of the biopic where Paul McCartney sees the guitar in the music store window or Dorothy enters the Technicolor world of Oz: The first sip burned his mouth.

Ask Satinover to describe how the ramen tasted, and he’ll respond by telling you how it made him feel: incredulous. “My brain couldn’t comprehend what this really was in terms of composition. I didn’t understand that you could make food taste like this,” he says. “There was something immensely pleasurable about it in a core, visceral way. Nothing was wrong. Everything was correct.”

If ever a bowl of noodles could kick your ass, Sumire’s miso ramen did it to Satinover with steel-tipped boots. For the first time since arriving in Japan, he was tasting food in the outer bounds: intense savoriness, extreme richness, wobbly fat from the chashu, bean sprouts charred dark. As he sat alone at this second-floor walkup in Sapporo, his life changed, even if he didn’t know it at the time. But the problem with losing his ramen-in-Japan virginity to something so maximally delicious was that it set Satinover up for a high nearly impossible to replicate, like having Gisele Bündchen as your first girlfriend.

Satinover’s ramen bell couldn’t be unrung. Every free moment in the coming months was spent at a ramen shop, slurping, chasing that dragon. So obsessed was he that he proposed doing an independent study at school, documenting and reviewing ramen shops in Sapporo. (Basically, a food blog.) There would be lengthy write-ups of restaurants, photos, interviews with chefs, Google Maps listings. In his introductory post to the Sapporo Ramen Guide, still online today, Satinover wrote (grammar cleaned up slightly):

So, using my decent-at-best Japanese, I will be compiling some of the best, and some of the worst, shops there are, written for your pleasure and use. I will do the research, I will conduct the interviews, I will ask the questions, then show you the results, so you don’t have to.

Two months and 21 posts later, his teacher scored his project 98 out of 100.

When Satinover returned to the University of Wisconsin to complete his degree (in addition to Japanese, he also majored in international business and marketing), he began feeling an intense yearning. The one place in town serving ramen might have been fine for Madison, but it was inadequate for someone who had visited nearly a hundred ramen restaurants during his year abroad. He describes what he felt as “deep reverse culture shock”: “I was like an addict. I went from eating this thing all the time to not having it at all. I missed the memory of it. I had a lifestyle, and that lifestyle was immediately stripped from me in an intense, difficult way.”

Let’s pause to look back at Chicago’s fledgling ramen scene, circa the early 2010s. It’s not like ramen wasn’t around then, but the offerings here were of the mom-and-pop variety, with no online footprint, no publicists — the types of places Eater wouldn’t hyperventilate over. There was one spot where local ramen geeks got their fix: Santouka, the noodle chain with an outpost in Mitsuwa’s food court. But Arlington Heights was so far away that city dwellers had to pay the Illinois Tollway each time they wanted a bowl.

If there was one chef who helped ramen achieve “city cool” in Chicago, it was Bill Kim, who spent time under Charlie Trotter. Kim’s restaurant Urbanbelly, which opened in 2008, had a few things that lent it street cred: It was next to a laundromat in a sad Avondale strip mall, its interior design oozed hipness, and its seating was communal benches, which, apart from Avec, was still a novel concept here at the time.

Kim, a Korean American, served an array of pan-Asian dishes, including lamb and brandy dumplings and a killer pineapple and pork belly fried rice. Urbanbelly also offered ramen, and though it didn’t adhere to traditional Japanese interpretations, it was nonetheless delicious: The restaurant’s flagship bowl featured pork belly and shiitake mushrooms in a broth tinged with pho spices, lime juice, and fish sauce. I suppose you could call that pho, but the noodles were ramen-style.

After Urbanbelly, Chicago’s culinary scene began treating ramen as a fine-dining novelty. (Wagamama was already doing this in London, and David Chang was making waves at his Momofuku in New York.) Around this time, chef Takashi Yagihashi started serving shoyu and miso ramen in the food court at the Macy’s store in the Loop and during Sunday brunch at his namesake white-tablecloth Bucktown restaurant. Those led to Slurping Turtle, which he opened in River North in 2011. After that, Oiistar made a splash in Wicker Park, buoyed by its Yamato noodle-making machine.

Chicago’s ramen renaissance truly arrived in the mid-2010s: High Five Ramen from the Au Cheval team, Furious Spoon, Wasabi, Ramen Shinchan in Palatine. Nick Kokonas, the financier behind Alinea and later the Tock reservation system, said he considered opening a place called Fuck Yeah Ramen.

But for Mike Satinover, posted in the ramen hinterlands of central Wisconsin in 2011, his Sapporo noodle experience became a phantom limb, an itch that couldn’t be scratched.

The only solution was to make ramen himself. Early attempts were predictably awful. The process of making a bowl from scratch is so labor intensive that most amateurs would have given up after one go. But just as it had with macarons, Satinover’s predilection to try, tinker, and try again kicked into gear. His motivation this time was a deep yearning, a physical craving for that one perfect bowl of ramen. So he kept going.

By night he was the mythical Ramen_Lord, chronicling every step of his ramen journey for an online fan base. By day, Mike Satinover made use of his business degree, working as a marketing research analyst. The decade he spent in that job gave him an understanding of consumers and of the product features that appealed to different types of them. (For example, how willing would someone living in the West Loop be to pay $19 for a bowl of ramen?)

He reached, then blew past, his 10,000 hours for mastery a number of ways. Early on, he’d make a bowl of ramen from scratch once a month, and as he became more proficient, he upped that to once a week, then two, sometimes three bowls a week. Over the years, he amassed two dozen Japanese-language ramen cookbooks. He’d discover these during weeklong pilgrimages to Japan, where he’d consume between three and five bowls daily — “a very normal amount,” Satinover contends — fastidiously documenting his research on Reddit and Instagram.

What improved Satinover’s ramen making most swiftly was hosting pop-up dinners around the country, the first in 2017 at New York’s Ramen Lab, an incubator for ramen chefs by the noodle manufacturer Sun Noodle. He’d get in his reps making as many as a hundred bowls a night. Driven by Satinover’s growing profile on social media, coupled with a 2017 profile in the Chicago Tribune, his pop-ups became a hot item. He’d release the tickets on Tock at noon, and within 30 seconds, all 90 seats would sell out. Satinover branded his pop-ups Akahoshi Ramen — the name means “red star,” a symbol that, fittingly and remarkably, appears on the flags of both Chicago and Hokkaido prefecture, of which Sapporo is the capital.

Satinover harbored dreams of quitting his lucrative day job to make ramen. But how? His celebrity on Reddit opened access to a network of professional chefs. “For something in the English language about ramen that showed proper technique, how to source ingredients, how to make proper tare, there was no one else before Mike posted on Reddit,” says Scott LaChapelle, who runs the acclaimed Rhode Island ramen shop Pickerel. “There was no information online, and Mike propelled that forward.”

There’s little consensus on who’s the best ramen chef in America, but Keizo Shimamoto is on the shortlist. A Japanese American who blogged about ramen, he relocated to Tokyo for four years to learn how to make it. That devotion earned him a starring role in the 2013 documentary short Ramen Dreams. When he returned to the United States, he created the ramen burger (a hamburger with a bun made of crispy noodles), which became a viral sensation, and opened his acclaimed shop Ramen Shack in New York City and a second location in Orange County, California.

Satinover dined at Shimamoto’s New York restaurant and introduced himself. Soon the two became friends. Satinover invited Shimamoto to his Chicago apartment, where he served him his interpretation of miso ramen. “It’s top notch. I was really impressed,” Shimamoto says. “I fell in love with miso ramen in Sapporo, and having Mike’s in Chicago and getting that Hokkaido Sapporo feeling, that’s what makes me emotional.”

Shimamoto adds: “He tells everyone I’m the best ramen chef in America. He’s definitely taking that crown pretty soon.”

It’s one thing to control every variable and cook one perfect bowl of ramen in your apartment. It’s something else entirely to scale this up to serving 200 bowls a night to a paying public with sky-high expectations. There’s the practical realities of opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant. (Running joke: How do you become a millionaire as a restaurateur? Be a billionaire, open a restaurant, and run it until you become a millionaire.) Even if the margins are decent, invariably there will be supply chain issues and fluctuating food costs. You’ll need to train staff members to replicate your ramen faithfully, only to have many of them leave the job after a few months. Then there’s dealing with the weekly torment of municipal bureaucracy.

Every pain point makes attaining that one perfect bowl even more difficult. Shimamoto himself urged Satinover not to open a restaurant. In 2022, Shimamoto closed his remaining Ramen Shack in California. In addition to the staffing and supply issues that led to the decision, Shimamoto says, physical and mental health issues had taken a toll on him: “Whether you’re making a million bucks or not, you struggle and question daily what the point is of everything.”

Running a restaurant isn’t the domain of a talented hobbyist. Satinover knew scrutiny and bad reviews would come. And even though he could speak Japanese, he recognized that the optics of a white man making Japanese food and being heaped with acclaim for it weren’t great, even if the criticism came largely from white people on social media. “​​I doubt very much that the best ramen is in some white guy’s house,” one Facebook commentator wrote in response to the 2017 Tribune story. Satinover’s personal Facebook account was flooded with messages from people calling him a cultural appropriator — but not one of those people, as far as he could tell, was Japanese. (Several Japanese friends tell me that when gaijin come to Japan and attempt their culture’s cooking, the locals view it not as appropriation but as appreciation of their cuisine.)

It’s routine that chefs — white chefs in particular — who devote their culinary lives to a cuisine not of their ethnic origin hear about it from the online cultural appropriation police. The really successful ones, like Andy Ricker, formerly of Portland’s Pok Pok empire, and Rick Bayless, Chicago’s Mexican food devotee, mitigate criticism by being fastidious in their research and respect for tradition. They speak the language, they spend time living in the country, they dive into the cuisine headfirst.

Of those who criticize him, Satinover says this: “It doesn’t matter that I studied Japanese throughout high school and college, that I majored in Japanese. It doesn’t matter. I’m not Japanese, I’ll never be Japanese.”

It would be one thing if this were a passing fancy for Satinover. But it’s a deeply embedded desire of his — one he can’t deny himself. He decided against outside investors because he didn’t want to compromise on his vision. So he poured his life’s savings into Akahoshi Ramen. His goal is simple enough to be written on a napkin: He just wants to make ramen for a living. And he is fine, at least for now, earning a third of his marketing job salary to do it.

“Just doing the math, there’s no return on investment here,” Satinover says. “It’s to have my dream ramen shop. I need my own ramen shop. I don’t care if it makes money or not. I would just hate myself if I didn’t have my ramen shop.”

Over the last few years, this pursuit has provided plenty for Satinover to talk about with his therapist. Recently, their sessions have focused on pushing back against the high expectations of others and, in a way, the voice in his own head. Satinover feels a particular turmoil in accepting praise: He needs a certain amount to satisfy the ego, but he also feels dishonorable when the word “best” gets foisted on him. It sets him up for failure.

“ ‘Best’ is what I’m working towards, and when I get it, I don’t like it,” he says. “How do I give myself more compassion to enjoy the fruits of my labor, instead of beating myself up?”

Fourteen years nearly to the day he tasted that life-changing bowl in Sapporo, 70 days after quitting his marketing job, Mike Satinover peeled back the butcher paper taped over the windows and doors, wiped the glass clean, and opened Akahoshi Ramen to the public. It was the night after Thanksgiving.

He had installed a seven-seat counter, where you could watch him assemble bowls, like you might at a shop in Sapporo. What felt more like an American restaurant were the additional 50 tabled seats, where you could dine more leisurely and, ideally, order a few yuzu highballs to drive up the check average. He had assembled a team of four cooks and five front-of-house staffers. One of those cooks, a longtime fan of Ramen_Lord, DM’d Satinover about working for him the day Satinover announced Akahoshi on social media.

Satinover had learned that if you try to please everyone with options, you risk pleasing no one. So he kept his menu intentionally sparse: four types of ramens, two rice dishes, and extra toppings. That’s it. There is no tonkotsu, the crowd-pleasing, bombastic, pork-fat-laden ramen that’s seemingly obligatory on every ramen menu in America.

His signature bowl is, of course, the Sapporo-style miso ramen, made with a blend of three miso pastes imported from Japan. Also on the menu is a lighter variant, the soy-sauce-based shoyu, as well as tantanmen, a Japanese take on the Sichuan street food dan dan noodles. This bowl does not have broth; instead, it’s mixed with a cool sesame sauce and topped with numbingly spicy crumbles of ground pork. Satinover’s final ramen is also soupless: aburasoba, a garlicky, soy saucy variant with fried scallions and a generous heap of chopped pork belly.

“We only have four ramen, so each one has to be pretty awesome,” he told me as he prepared for the opening that night. “If it’s not awesome, we’ll have a problem.”

The best word to describe the scene in the restaurant hours before the first-ever customers arrived: “boring.” Satinover was washing dishes, sipping his dinner of Monster Energy Ultra Sunrise. The pork belly chashu sat sliced in a hotel pan in three-ounce portions. The broth had been heated to exactly 203 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that won’t agitate and cloud the soup. A line cook was snipping toasted seaweed with a pair of scissors. Satinover offered the cooks their choice of prep music, and they chose an album called Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress by the hardcore metal band Gulch. Everything was prepped and precise.

At 5 p.m., the music was switched to something less cranium crushing and more low-fi chill, and soon Satinover called out the restaurant’s first orders: “Two shoyus, two misos, please!” The first tantanmen came out of the kitchen at 5:30; Satinover was delighted that the diner asked for extra chile oil.

From the open kitchen, Satinover hobnobbed with well-wishers, many of whom were regular attendees of his pop-ups, and accepted liquid gifts of congratulations. Unlike the ramen culture in Japan, where diners eat as quickly as possible, then leave, Akahoshi has a relaxed come-stay-for-a-while air about it.

Judging from messages reposted on the restaurant’s Instagram feed, customers — including local food writers — enjoyed what they tasted. Nick Kindelsperger, who has since left his post as a Tribune food critic, was among the first diners that opening night, and he posted on Instagram: “This is the best ramen I’ve had in Chicago.”

But there were issues that first week. One night, the ajitama sat too long in the warm soy sauce marinade, so instead of the oozy lava flow, the yolks were fully hard-boiled. Some of the soup was overly salty because the broth wasn’t properly diluted. Another night, the bok choy on the tantanmen was ice cold. The toilet in one of the restrooms overflowed.

Five days in, Eater Chicago published a story about the restaurant’s growing popularity under the headline “Akahoshi Ramen, Now Open in Logan Square, Is Chicago’s Toughest Reservation.” Satinover wasn’t thrilled about that, because it’s not entirely true, as he allocates 50 seats to walk-ins nightly. Between a reputation for hard-to-score reservations and the early adulation from reviewers, Satinover had a creeping sense that the lofty expectations were getting pushed further beyond reach. He’s already heard from a number of customers that $19 a bowl is too expensive. One Google reviewer questioned whether those claiming Akahoshi has the “best ramen in Chicago” were paid off by Satinover.

“The major criticism of this restaurant is that it’s overhyped,” Satinover says. “I knew we would have this problem, I just didn’t realize how much.”

As a former food writer at the Tribune and an avowed ramen geek, I’ve tasted a good sampling of bowls around town. How does Satinover’s stack up? I find his interpretations fantastic — the miso and tantanmen in particular. I’ve had countless other bowls that leave me feeling like I ingested a fat-and-salt bomb. Akahoshi’s are rich but not heavy. The flavor is subtly robust, and the noodles have an appealing bounce. Everything about the bowls tastes clean and unadulterated.

I think part of why Satinover’s ramen seems so exceptional to me is that I have been given privileged information. He painstakingly walked me through the choices he made in composing each bowl. He explained to me how he gives the noodles the requisite chew. I saw him scoop out the three-miso blend used for the tare, the primary seasoning agent that contributes the earthy, sweet-savory undertow in his miso ramen. I watched him use a refractometer to make sure his broth had the proper viscosity. Would a casual diner, without all that, appreciate Satinover’s ramen the same way?

Apparently so. As I watched Satinover prepare the dough that morning in early December — Akahoshi Ramen’s 11th day in business — he spat out his restaurant’s scores for me like a die-hard Bulls fan reciting Michael Jordan stats: On Google, Akahoshi had exactly 39 reviews, with an average of 4.7 stars; on OpenTable, it had 70 reviews, all but one a five-star rating. The previous night, 147 customers walked through the door, ordering 180 bowls of ramen. (Weeks later, Satinover would serve 197 bowls in four hours.)

A normal day at the restaurant for him is 14 hours. And a little more than a week into his new life, he was very tired. Asked on Reddit what he misses from his old desk job, Satinover answered that it was not having body aches all day long. “I’ve prioritized this restaurant over everything else in my life,” he told me. “I have no other hobbies, nothing else is driving me. It’s more important than friends, my own mental and physical well-being. And I’m kind of OK with that.”

This is his new reality, from now until the day his restaurant shutters: coming to terms with the fact that making one perfect bowl of ramen 180 times a night is impossible and futile. Where does one cede control? What compromises will need to be made? And when others proclaim you the most exciting ramen chef in America, is that just putting a target on your back?

Satinover thinks about all this often — it’ll be fodder for his next conversation with his therapist. But that morning there were more pressing issues. He needed to finish making those noodles. And he had just gotten word that his dishwasher had a DJ gig that night and wouldn’t make dinner service. Satinover was going to have to wash 180-plus bowls himself.

For decades, in courthouses and government offices all across the US, people have been filing bizarrely worded pseudo-legal documents filled with strange symbols, secret coded language, and even bloody fingerprints in an effort to unlock secret bank accounts set up for them by the evil impostor government that runs this country.

These people call themselves "sovereign citizens," and the complex symbolism they use in these documents offers a fascinating insight into the beliefs and practices of a fringe movement whose prominence in America has grown over the past few decades and whose ideology overlaps with that of many other, often more dangerous, far-right extremist movements in the US, including groups like the militia that recently took over a national wildlife refuge in Oregon.

The bizarre conspiracy theory at the center of this all

The sovereign citizens movement is a far-right anti-government extremist movement in the US that believes the government — at all levels, local, state, and federal — is illegitimate and has enslaved the American people.

Their belief system is complex and rooted in a series of bizarre conspiracy theories that hold that the original US government set up by the Founding Fathers has been replaced with an evil secret government that has sold all US citizens into slavery by using them as collateral against foreign debt.

As explained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, they believe the government creates a secret alternate identity for each American at birth and sets up a secret US Treasury account — sort of like a corporate "trust" — under that alternate identity. The US government funds these "corporate shell" accounts to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

Because the US no longer uses the gold standard, it instead uses these accounts as collateral to back up its currency. The money is said to represent each citizen's future earning potential. The sovereign citizens thus believe the government has "pledged its citizenry as collateral, by selling their future earning capabilities to foreign investors, effectively enslaving all Americans," according to the SPLC.

Part of their proof is that birth certificates and other government documents, said to represent this scheme, put names in all capital letters. So whereas Jennifer Williams is the real person, JENNIFER WILLIAMS is the secret Treasury account.

By declaring themselves "sovereign citizens," members of these groups say they are freeing themselves from government enslavement and separating themselves from their secret, government-created alternate identity.

According to the FBI, which considers this a domestic terrorist movement, "By declaring themselves 'sovereign citizens,' they [believe that they] are emancipated from the responsibilities of being a U.S. citizen, including paying taxes, possessing a state driver’s license, or obeying the law."

Things like driver's licenses, permits, and even zip codes are seen as "contracts" with the illegitimate US government that cede one's sovereignty. By rejecting these things, you're "tearing up" the contract and freeing yourself.

These beliefs may be nutty, but the groups are quite serious. A 2014 survey asked US law enforcement officials to rank terrorist threats to the United States. They ranked sovereign citizens as the highest threat — with Islamic extremists coming in second.

How sovereign citizens think court documents will unlock their secret accounts

Sovereign citizens believe they can tap into their secret US Treasury account (and get access to all that secret hidden money) by "filing particular government forms in a particular order, and by using precisely the right language," according to the SPLC.

This is what is known among sovereign citizens as "redemption theory": Basically, all you have to do is break the secret code, and the government — in particular, court judges, who are all in on the conspiracy — will be forced to unlock your account and give you access to all that money that is rightfully yours.

This is part of why sovereign citizens file endless court documents with strange wording, odd capitalization, fingerprints made in red ink or even blood, and other coded symbols. Take this document, for example, written by a sovereign citizen, in which he declares himself to be a superior court judge:

JJ MacNab, who tweeted the document, is an expert in far-right extremist groups who has studied and written extensively about the sovereign citizens movement. In a series of tweets, MacNab "decoded" the document, explaining the meanings behind many of the strange elements included in it.

Here are a few of those tweets, which are really fascinating (note: "sovcits" is sovereign citizens):

As mentioned above, sovereign citizens believe each person has two identities: a real identity, which they refer to as their "sovereign" or "flesh and blood" identity, and a secret government-created alternate identity, which they refer to as their "corporate" identity.

They use red ink (or sometimes even blood) instead of blue or black ink to signify to the evil shadow government and their puppet judges that it is the true flesh-and-blood person who is signing a particular document and not the corporate shell.

This is a signal to the judge both that the individual knows the secret code that will unlock his sovereignty (and Treasury account) and that the signature on the document is not to be interpreted as the individual signing over his sovereign rights in a contract with the shadow government.

This use of postage stamps and blood on legal documents, MacNab explains, is related to a broader "ritual" that is used to get one's sovereignty recognized by, of all things, the US Postal Service.

The strange way they write their names on documents — with odd punctuation and lowercase letters — is also part of the secret code.

According to a 2010 report by the Anti-Defamation League, it's "very common" for sovereign citizens "to use punctuation in their name — such as commas, colons, and semi-colons — to separate their first and middle names (their 'Christian appellation') from their last name, which many think is their 'government-given' name."

For example, "Michigan militia leader Mark Koernke, when he also became a sovereign citizen, began writing his name as 'Mark Gregory,, Koernke.'"

These are just a few of the odd, secret coded messages that are often included in these documents, but they give you a sense of the incredible intricacy of these rituals and how very seriously these people take their beliefs.

Okay, so they're weird. But are they actually dangerous?

As I mentioned, the FBI considers the sovereign citizens movement to be a domestic terrorist movement, and there have been a number of violent incidents involving sovereign citizens.

Terry Nichols of the Oklahoma City bombing was a sovereign citizen; Andrew Joseph Stack, who flew his small plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, was also affiliated with the movement.

Sometimes violent incidents erupt from routine encounters between sovereign citizens and law enforcement. For example, on May 20, 2010, a routine traffic stop in West Memphis, Arkansas, ended in the deaths of two police officers at the hands of Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son Joseph, both of whom were "deeply immersed" in the sovereign citizens movement. Both Kanes were also killed in the shootout.

Sovereign citizens also frequently find themselves in court for criminal activity. SPLC reports that sovereign citizens "are notorious for engaging in a variety of schemes involving money, false identification documents and the courts — scams that land them in criminal trouble with remarkable regularity."

But for a lot of sovereign citizens, their "activism" mostly comes in the form of harassing county clerks and judges by filing endless pseudo-legal documents in an attempt to "crack the code" and unlock their sovereignty and their secret US Treasury accounts.

Given that these secret accounts are completely fictitious and do not actually exist outside the minds of these people, they strangely never seem to be able to crack the code. So they just keep filing more documents.

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The oppression of women is ancient and has manifested itself in different ways over the centuries. It is one thing to see this, it is another to ask how, when it is so deeply unnatural, it has been maintained.

Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation Devaluation A lowering of the exchange rate of one currency as regards others. of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.

The role and image of women is historically transformed in relation to the economic developments that have prevailed, particularly in Western Europe, the cradle of capitalism and so-called human rights. Through economic and social transformations, capitalism and patriarchy end up reinforcing each other. Capitalism is not the only factor, but by establishing unequal social relations (as a consequence but also as a condition for its existence), capitalism explicitly serves patriarchy by facilitating the oppression of women. Patriarchy, on the other hand, is useful to capitalism as it provides a devalued population from which it will be able to derive maximum benefit.

Three visions structure the feminist analysis of the links between capitalism and patriarchy

The first considers gender and sex relations as constituting an autonomous system and that the same applies to race or class relations. Since patriarchy preceded capitalism and persisted during it, it would therefore reproduce itself independently. However, this hypothesis does not exclude the possibility that the two systems influence each other: capitalism is sometimes useful to patriarchy and vice versa. This theoretical current influenced by Marxism tends to analyze the oppression of women according to the same methodology as class oppression: it defines women as composing a patriarchal class exploited by the dominant class of men appropriating their surplus labour. Despite the importance of Christine Delphy’s reflections developed in the book The Main Enemy - Political Economy of Patriarchy which demonstrate that all women, regardless of their status, are victims of oppression, this analysis minimizes the importance of other dynamics and is insufficiently based on a more economic analysis of domination. According to this logic, it could be argued that the housewife of an immigrant worker would belong to the same class as Silvio Berlusconi’s ex-wife, Veronica Lario. Proponents of this hypothesis consider the anti-patriarchal struggle to be predominant: there must be greater solidarity among all women than between men and women of the working class. As Cinzia Arruzza claims, we believe it is necessary to add capitalism to the equation. Not all members of the same “patriarchal class” live the same realities and oppressions and are therefore not immediately in solidarity with each other. One cannot compare the experience of immigrant (working class) women with that of wealthy women, as the latter can exploit the former. Thinking only of the gender class (even if it does exist) while ignoring the socio-economic aspects inherent in capitalism blurs the understanding of patriarchy as it is and ? actually helps to its perpetuation?

The second hypothesis, embodied in the neoliberal discourse, sees capitalism as indifferent to patriarchy, having even eroded it: thanks to capitalism, they claim, women have experienced a degree of liberation through access to salaried work, credit, consumption, etc... For these theorists (generally represented by liberal feminists), capitalism could do without gender oppression because the market is indifferent to the identity of workers. Yet it is obvious that capitalism benefits from reproductive services performed by women. It also benefits from the fact that part of the population is devalued (and therefore more flexible, less paid). This theory implies that capitalism is not only be independent of patriarchy, but even to be glorified when it comes to gender equality! To consider patriarchy as a residue eroding in contact with capitalism is a fundamental error, highly detrimental to any dynamics of women’s emancipation, as we see in this section.

The third hypothesis, which we support, argues that patriarchy cannot be regarded as an independent system. Women and feminists in the colonies understood this well through the various structural and physical violence they faced, whereas very few Western feminists were just beginning to address the issue. Cinzia Arruzza insists "on the need to consider capitalism not as a set of purely economic laws and mechanisms, but rather as a complex and articulated social order that contains within it relations of exploitation, domination and alienation. From this point of view, the attempt is to understand how capitalist accumulation continues to produce, reproduce, transform, renew and maintain relations of hierarchy and oppression. It is a question of analyzing and understanding gender oppressions in a comprehensive way, without turning a blind eye to the diversity of mechanisms that participate in them, and avoiding falling into simplifications that would exclude certain realities.

An historic alliance

In the forthcoming book on debt and feminism, we will devote a whole section to deconstructing historical myths about the place of women. We see how the devaluation of women is not a coincidence of history - the time when their position changed coincided with the commodification of the world. The advance of capitalism has profoundly transformed their role within family and society while modifying and amplifying their oppression. Many of the discourses and stereotypes explored above have their origins in the historical stages of capitalism. At the same time as capitalism was taking root at the expense of the feudal system - where sex and gender were not the first criteria for discrimination - a wave of expropriation, privatization and monetarization of life laid the essential foundations of male domination as we know it today. By accentuating the worst features of already existing marginalization and thus formalizing a status of “inferior” to a number of activities, capitalist accumulation formalizes the separation between so-called productive and reproductive work. Domestic work becomes a woman’s affair, a private affair, cut off from the collective, from remuneration, from social recognition. Yet it is necessary and essential to life, to well-being, to the reproduction of social conditions... and ultimately to capitalism. The elites have understood this: the idealization of the housewife and the persecution of all the others are proof of this.

The devaluation of women and their work - in the broadest sense of the word - in the same way as colonial expansion, the plundering of resources or slavery, is thus not simply a consequence but a condition for capitalist expansion. This is not to say that capitalism by definition needs gender oppression in order to reproduce itself, but we can see that it has never existed without gender oppression. Capitalism and patriarchy are therefore today simply inseparable: the former establishes social relations that facilitate the exploitation of women, the latter provides the justifications for it.

Capitalism in its current form is thus structurally patriarchal: it fundamentally needs the appropriation of women (of their work, their bodies, their knowledge, etc.), but also of other groups categorized as inferior during the great moments of capitalist expansion (nature, animals, racialized people, etc.), in order to make profits and therefore to reproduce.

This system is extremely dynamic and opportunistic, capable of adapting, finding gaps and new opportunities for profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. . Crises feed it; current social relations are opportunities for commodification and profits. In essence, capitalism will never be able to contribute to a reduction of inequalities. It is therefore completely illusory to believe that gender inequalities can be fought without fighting capitalism and other social relations that are intimately linked to it such as racism and extractivism. They are consubstantial and clearly manifest themselves in the current realities of women’s work.

In a sharp New York Times column, David French argues that Elon Musk’s problems at Twitter show how the “new right’s theory of power” has failed. The new right—culture war focused, often very online, rejects small government conservatism as weak—thought Musk buying Twitter would force their cultural preferences onto America, as they believe the old owners did for the left. But American culture is too much of a bottom-up process. Individual preferences and the market are bigger forces, which we’re seeing now as advertisers flee, and companies launch Twitter competitors that attract some interest, such as Threads.

It’s a good point, but I’m going to take it further: This theory of power is not just wrong, it’s insane. Nuts. A distortion of reality. More conspiracy theory than empirical assessment, based on a false premise that stokes feelings of victimization.

Here’s how French explains the theory:

“In the new right’s telling, the story of contemporary American culture is the story of progressive elite capture of the nation’s most important institutions — from the academy to big business to pop culture to the “deep state” — followed by its remorseless use of that institutional power to warp and distort American values.”

French argues that the new right’s counter-strategy of “domination and imposition” isn’t working and won’t, but he doesn’t really interrogate the premise.

The idea that leftists executed a hostile takeover of all major institutions and now use them to persecute conservatives is a foundational truism for the new right. Feeling like a victim of that persecution, and justified in taking drastic action in response, might be the main thing holding the movement together.

For example, here’s some typical rhetoric from Christopher Rufo, who Governor Ron DeSantis recently empowered to reshape higher education in Florida: 

Rufo doesn’t say anything issue focused, like “reforming higher education.” Nor something generic, like “get the government out of the way.” Instead, it’s sweeping language with martial metaphors like “recapturing the institutions” (all of them). Elsewhere, he called his plan “laying siege to the institutions,” and announced his appointment to New College of Florida’s Board of Trustees with “we are now over the walls.”

Why would such dramatic action be needed? Because “left-wing radicals” did it first.

Except they didn’t. But pretending that happened offers a handy rationalization for doing what the new right wanted to do already—in Rufo’s case, use state power to purge universities of “wokeness” and other ideas he doesn’t like—and calling it self-defense.

To claim progressive elites control all of America’s important institutions, you first have to define the following as powerless: 

The Supreme Court, many lower courts, U.S. Senators, the Electoral College, states (including two of the biggest, Texas and Florida), the most-watched news network, some of the most-read websites, some of the biggest podcasts, the most shared pundits on Facebook, a bunch of religious institutions (that don’t have to pay taxes), a lot of the business world (energy, finance, agriculture, etc.), police unions, and more.

You also need to ignore any distinction between the progressive left and the centrist establishment that leftists deride, and to employ a narrowly social conservative definition of left and right.

Take Hollywood, considered a powerful, quintessentially left-wing institution. But entertainment products portray wealth and guns as awesome. Talented rich men who play by their own rules—Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark—will save the day, if only bureaucracy stops interfering, like something out of Ayn Rand. As writers and actors strike, Hollywood bosses are at the forefront of the fight against labor, trying not to share future profits from artificial intelligence with workers.

But Hollywood also sends the message that sex is fun and fine to do outside marriage, insists that LGBT people should be treated as equals, sometimes casts women and non-white people in heroic roles, tends to mock or look down on people of faith, and the most public-facing component (actors) includes a lot of outspoken Democrats. In the new right’s culture war taxonomy, that puts the institution on the left.

But even within that frame it gets ridiculous. For example, right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, one of 23 people Musk now pays to make content for Twitter, mocked what he calls the “communist writers strike.” Hollywood studios good! He also declared that America is “a nation in decline” because he saw a photo from the set of Disney’s live action remake of Snow White showing a multiracial, rather than all-white, Seven Dwarfs. Hollywood studios bad!

The movie and TV industry doing some things the right cheers and the left opposes is hard to square with the claim that it’s dominated by crusading leftists. 

Or take academia. The faculty tends progressive, but the administration doesn’t. Like Hollywood bosses, the people with real power often try to exploit labor, such as adjuncts. 

Much of the claim that academia has been ideologically captured by the left overlaps with claims about the pervasive repressiveness of cancel culture. But setting aside oft-repeated anecdotes and examining the data shows those claims to be heavily overstated.

It’s reasonable to classify Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, and most research programs on identity, such as Gender Studies, as culturally progressive, but that’s hardly all of academia. University presidents, trustees, and football programs tend conservative. The most common major is business, with health professions second. All social sciences combined are third, which includes more quantitative economists and political scientists than identity theorists. Fourth is engineering. 

The average college student is, unsurprisingly, to the left of the average American. Of professors who make political contributions, far more donate to Democrats than to Republicans. Higher education is staunchly pro-science, and rejecting science on things like climate and vaccines—or rejecting the authority of experts in general—is a prominent feature of today’s right. Academia treats diversity as a value, while much of the new right is organized around opposing that idea. The internal culture and external influence of academia are both, on balance, to the left.

The institution is not, however, dominated by left-wing radicals ruthlessly prioritizing an activist agenda. Public and private institutions educate, employ, and elevate conservatives. Millions of college graduates vote Republican (just not as many as vote Democrat). Even if academia as a whole leans left, some prominent institutions, such as the University of Chicago, make a public contribution that is, on balance, to the right.

Five of the six Republican-nominated Supreme Court Justices got their law degree from Harvard or Yale—Amy Coney Barrett went to Notre Dame—as did multiple Republican senators. Ted Cruz (R-TX) graduated Harvard Law, then clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist (also Harvard, nominated by Richard Nixon). The conservative Federalist Society is thriving, placing judges and clerks throughout the judiciary. 

Recounting these well-known facts doesn’t address questions about tolerance towards alternative viewpoints, measuring the effectiveness of DEI approaches, or the ideal allocation of education funds. They don’t show that academia (or Hollywood) is actually right-wing, nor totally neutral. But they’re more than enough to disprove claims of leftist institutional dominance focused on crushing the right.

The claim of progressive-dominated institutions grows even more stretched when branching beyond academia and Hollywood into other influential areas. The idea that the FBI is a bunch of leftists persecuting conservatives, as Congressional Republicans insisted in a recent hearing with Trump-appointed, GOP Senate-confirmed FBI Director Christopher Wray, is laughably absurd. And that theory isn’t much better when applied to sports and business.

For example, you’d have to say the NFL stifling antiracist protest by Colin Kaepernick and other players doesn’t count. But an NFL team calling a Thursday game in September “Pride Night” and expecting players to go along with it, as they expect for every promo, is of great importance.

To most people, these look like business decisions. (1) A bunch of our customers don’t like players kneeling during the national anthem, let’s stop it. (2) Maybe we can get more gay people to buy our stuff if we do a theme night and make merch with rainbows. But to the aggrieved culture war right, Pride Night is proof that not just football, but sports as an institution, is in the tank for the left.

Or consider a recent business decision the new right turned into a cause celebre. Dylan Mulvaney, an influencer who posted videos documenting her gender transition, partnered with Bud Light on a promotion during the NCAA’s March Madness, where they sent her some cans with her picture on them and she talked up the beer on Instagram. In response, right-wing figures called for a boycott. A commoncomplaint was “people just don’t want it shoved down their throat.”

Except it wasn’t. At least not by Bud or Mulvaney.

It looks like a straightforward social media marketing move. A wide variety of people like to drink alcohol, the Bud Light brand might have a frat bro image, so during a major college sporting event, they did a promo with a Gen Z internet personality who has a different audience (10 million followers on TikTok; 2 million on Instagram).

Budweiser didn’t make Mulvaney the star of Super Bowl commercials or put her picture on every can. Even if you think that would be wrong for some reason, this was a niche promotion, targeting Mulvaney’s Instagram circles. Most outside those circles who heard about this did so because right wing social and professional media amplified the ad campaign and drove outrage about it viral.

To the extent anyone “shoved” this “down their throats,” they did it to themselves. Then called it an example of their persecution.

As the boycott grew, parent company Anheuser-Busch put out an empty corporate statement about “bringing people together over a beer” instead of being “part of a discussion that divides people.” Mulvaney got online mobbing, offline stalking, and death threats. While Bud stood by the promotion in generic terms, they made another business decision and kept their distance from her.

An institution captured by progressive gender activists hellbent on pushing their religion-like ideology would’ve issued statements in support of Mulvaney. Crusading woke leftists would’ve grabbed the opportunity to portray her as a victim, tried to blame the Republican Party, and deepened the brand’s public partnership with her. Anheuser-Busch did not.

Who, exactly, was hurt by a beer brand hiring a trans woman for a promotion? I don’t mean whether it was a smart/dumb business decision—those happen all the time—but whether anyone suffered any real harm.  

No one has to be into Mulvaney’s schtick (I’ve never watched her videos), and like any other public figure, she’s not above criticism. But this went far beyond that. Why spread corporate marketing to people it doesn’t target and say its existence, which they otherwise wouldn’t know about, is a personal attack on them?

The complaint appears to be that Dylan Mulvaney is out in public, acting happy and proud to be trans, while an All-American brand like Bud Light treated Mulvaney and her fans as normal – just another internet celebrity and potential customers. The only way to satisfy that complaint would be for Bud Light—for every brand—to shun trans people, or at least not openly welcome them the way they do numerous other demographic groups.

That doesn’t look like conservative persecution by institution-dominating progressives. It looks like frustration with lost dominance. 

Social conservatives aren’t wrong to think their beliefs have less influence in America today than in past eras, but that doesn’t make them victims. Rather, they’ve gone from the overwhelmingly dominant force in the culture to a large faction within it, with less ability to impose their values upon others, or take for granted that their views were default.

It wasn’t long ago that no gay teacher was out of the closet, at least not in school. Now some display rainbow flags and a picture of their same-sex spouse in class, and Republican-led state governments pass ambiguous, potentially onerous laws to chill it.

It wasn’t long ago that virtually no trans people were out and seeking mainstream recognition. Now they’re asking others to use their pronouns, calling people who reject their gender identity bigoted, and getting sponsorship deals online. 

LGBT people haven’t taken over all major American institutions and started repressing their enemies, but they have carved out enough acceptance in society that trying to bully them out doesn’t work like it used to. Now people who want to shun them have to compete, and competing at the national level requires appealing to a wide variety of people, not just those on your “side.” Especially when we’re talking about all of society here, not just partisan politics, since tons of Americans don’t vote (about 80 million, even in record-turnout 2020).

Yes, the new right’s theory of power, with culture-transforming dictates imposed from above, is wrong. But the illustrative case they use to build their theory, and the way they measure power distribution in society, are both so far off—more a fantasy that casts themselves as victims, with anything they want justified in response, than an empirical study—that any theory based on it is fundamentally flawed.

The reason no one has a good explanation for how left-wing radicals took over all major institutions, and how the right can counter these leftists’ remorseful application of power, is because that didn’t happen, and isn’t close.

Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed. 

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. 

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds. 

“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.”

No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam. 

Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers. The only time I was ever in the same room as Henry Kissinger was at a 2015 national security conference at West Point. He was surrounded by fawning Army officers and ex-officials basking in the presence of a statesman. 

Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who was the most prominent exception to the fawning coverage of Kissinger, watched journalistic deference take shape as soon as Kissinger entered the White House in 1969. “His social comings and goings could make or break a Washington party,” Hersh wrote in his biography The Price of Power. Reporters like the Times’ James Reston were eager participants in what Hersh called “an implicit shakedown scheme” — that is, access journalism — “in which reporters who got inside information in turn protected Kissinger by not divulging either the full consequences of his acts or his own connection to them.” Kissinger’s approach to the press was his approach to Nixon: sniveling obsequiousness. (Although Kissinger could vent frustration on reporters that he never could on his boss.) Hersh quotes H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, remarking that Kissinger was the “hawk of hawks” inside the White House, but “touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.” 

Reviewing one of Kissinger’s litany of books, Hillary Clinton in 2014 said Kissinger, “a friend” whose counsel she relied upon as secretary of state, possessed “a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.” Kissinger told USA Today within days that Clinton, presumed then to be a president-in-waiting, “ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.” The same story noticed a photograph autographed by Obama thanking Kissinger for his “continued leadership.” 

It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters. When the Kissingers of the world pass, their humanity, their purpose, their sacrifices are foremost in the minds of the respectable. American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever.

KISSINGER’S ASCENT OCCURRED THROUGH AN OBSCENITY THAT TIME CANNOT DIMINISH. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in tacit recognition of the nightmare he, building on the works of his two immediate predecessors, brought to life in Vietnam. Kissinger, an influential Cold War defense intellectual at Harvard, had access to members of the diplomatic delegation to the Paris talks. He used it to feed information from the negotiations to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign — a campaign whose defeated GOP rival, Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger advised — and despite Kissinger’s closer political ties to the coterie around Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic rival. 

Nixon ran for president claiming to have a secret plan to end the war. His advisers told Hersh they were deeply afraid that Johnson and Hanoi would reach an accord before the election. It would save lives in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese, but it would undermine Nixon’s hopes of exploiting the explosion in domestic antiwar sentiment. Nixon gratefully took what Kissinger gave him to make the U.S.’ proxy regime in Saigon, whose regime peace would destabilize, more intransigent. No agreement was reached until 1973, and the war ended in American humiliation with Hanoi’s 1975 victory. 

“It took some balls to give us those tips,” Richard Allen, a foreign policy researcher on the Nixon campaign, later reflected to Hersh. After all, it was “a pretty dangerous thing for [Kissinger] to be screwing around with the national security.” 

Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger. We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser. 

Once in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger found themselves without leverage to produce a peace accord with Hanoi. In the hopes of manufacturing one, they came up with the “Madman Theory,” the idea that North Vietnam would negotiate peace after they came to believe Nixon was adventurous and bloodthirsty enough to risk anything. In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By the summer of 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger — who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command — was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. Ray B. Sitton told Hersh for The Price of Power. A second phase of bombing continued until August 1973, five months after the final U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. By then, U.S. bombs had killed an estimated 100,000 people out of a population of only 7,000,000. The final phase of the bombing, which occurred after the Paris Peace Accords mandated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, was its most intense, an act of cruel vengeance from a thwarted superpower.

Cambodia, like Laos before it, was a formally neutral country, meaning that bombing it was an illegal aggression under the United Nations Charter. But beyond the control of Prince Sihanouk, the North Vietnamese used Cambodian territory for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a weapons pipeline not unlike the one America is currently operating for Ukraine. In April 1970, following a coup by American client Col. Lon Nol that overthrew Sihanouk, Nixon ordered U.S. troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia outright. In the air or on the ground, they were unable to destroy the trail, only human beings. Those who survived reacted. “Sometimes the bombs fell and hit the little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge,” a former Khmer Rouge cadre told historian Ben Kiernan, founder of Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program.

Nixon and Kissinger’s failure in Cambodia prompted in 1971 the U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, another failure. Kissinger later blamed defeat on the U.S.’ clients, rather than, say, people like himself. “In retrospect, I have come to doubt whether the South Vietnamese ever really understood what we were trying to accomplish,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs. 

At the time, the secret bombing of Cambodia was a startling offense that prompted substantial political backlash when it became public. One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon prepared by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 held that bombing Cambodia was a constitutional usurpation of Congress’ war powers. But on July 30, the committee ended up rejecting the article, 26 votes to 12, and it never became part of the coalescing impeachment effort that stopped with Nixon’s resignation. 

Forty years later, and likely as a consequence, U.S. presidents routinely bomb countries the U.S. is not at war with. They provide the barest minimum of disclosure that the bombs have fallen, and often not even that. When the U.S.’ declared wars fail, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, their architects and stewards blame the client militaries and governments they propped up. They cover their troop withdrawals with futile bombing campaigns that kill people so American statesmen can save face. Whether he realized it or not, when President Biden in July 2021 blamed the Afghans for losing the Afghanistan war — “the Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight” was a typical line — he was reaching for Nixon and Kissinger’s template. 

KISSINGER PLAYED A ROLE IN THE DEATHS OF SO MANY DIFFERENT PEOPLES that treating each with due consideration requires writing a book. Here is one example among many of the sort of carnage Kissinger inflicted indirectly rather than by edict. In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people — and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging. 

That perspective typified Kissinger. The Cold War was a geopolitical balance among two great powers. The purpose of Cold War statecraft was to maximize American freedom of action to inflict Washington’s will on the world — a zero-sum contest that meant restricting the ability of the Soviet Union to inflict Moscow’s — without the destabilization, or outright armageddon, that would result from pursuing a final defeat of the Soviets. That last part explains much right-wing hostility toward Kissinger. Kissinger represented anticommunism without ideological zeal. He was an energetic, even relentless practitioner of the Cold War, the theater of anticommunist conflict. But like George Kennan before him, Kissinger thought viewing the Cold War in ideological terms missed the point. The point was American geopolitical dominance, something measured in impunity and achieved by any means necessary. That permitted Nixon and Kissinger the creativity to reopen China, something Nixon would have demagogued anyone else for attempting. 

Reopening China was by far the greatest achievement of Nixon’s foreign policy. It was the rare geopolitical initiative where Kissinger was a mere facilitator. Sy Hersh, in The Price of Power, calls Nixon “the grand theoretician” of rapprochement with Beijing, with Kissinger Nixon’s “occasional operative.” Kissinger’s dramatic, secret July 1971 trip to Beijing in advance of Nixon’s visit probably renders that description parsimonious. But, writes Hersh, “there is no evidence that Kissinger seriously considered the question of an American-Chinese rapprochement before his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser.” Once it happened, Kissinger became an overnight celebrity, the sort of person destined to be shrouded in myth and apology. 

Kissinger might not have been motivated by hatred of communism. But he was a reactionary who empowered and enabled the sort of reactionaries for whom anticommunism was a respectable channel for America’s racist and exploitative socio-economic traditions. His chief aide on the National Security Council was a rabid anticommunist militarist, Army Col. Alexander Haig, a future secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. When Kissinger came under attack from neoconservatives and others on the right who couldn’t tolerate detente with the Soviets and rapprochement with the Chinese, neither he nor they recognized that both of them were driven by the Cold War forces that Kissinger stoked when convenient. 

Most important of all the reactionaries was Nixon, without whom Kissinger would have lacked power, and from whom Kissinger would withstand any indignity. 

Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement.

Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.” 

Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological.  

Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake. 

IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, KISSINGER DESTROYED. But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live. 

On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.” 

Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency. 

Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it. 

The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order.

Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work. 

He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others.  

Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt. 

In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “​​I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents.

Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order. 

In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America, 1619. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.”  

Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory. 

That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be. 

Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history? 

Italien ist keine Demokratie mit einer rechten Regierung, sondern ein Musterbeispiel für das Zusammenspiel von postdemokratischem Neoliberalismus und Faschisierung der Gesellschaft. In der EU wird diese Entwicklung weitgehend ignoriert – auch weil es der Regierung Meloni noch gelingt, nicht alle Elemente ihrer Machtergreifung deutlich sichtbar werden zu lassen.

Gallionsfiguren der drei maßgeblichen Fraktionen des italienischen Rechtsextremismus (erste Reihe von links nach rechts): Ministerpräsidentin Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d‘Italia), der am 12. Juni dieses Jahres verstorbene ehemalige Ministerpräsident Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia) und der ehemalige stellvertretende Ministerpräsident und Innenminister Matteo Salvini (Lega). (Foto: EPA-EFE/Fabio Frustaci)

Über die verschlafene mitteleuropäische Presse kam, jedenfalls dort, wo sie noch Reste von sozialem Gewissen aufweist, die jüngste Nachricht aus dem (post-)faschistischen Italien wie ein kleiner Gruselschock: Per SMS hat die Regierung Giorgia Melonis Hunderttausenden Menschen mitgeteilt, dass sie von jetzt an keinen Anspruch auf den „reddito di cittadinanza“, das Bürgergeld, als Sozialleistung mehr hätten.

Die Kommunen waren so wenig auf diesen Coup vorbereitet wie die Betroffenen. Man hätte es allerdings wissen können, dass diese Sanierung der Staatsfinanzen auf Kosten der Armen in solch brachialer Weise kommen würde – und doch glaubten die meisten, die neofaschistische Regierung würde es unter den Augen der Weltöffentlichkeit doch nicht so weit treiben, wie es ihre Rhetorik des „runter vom Sofa“ vermuten ließ, mit der sie ihren Geldgebern von Industrie, Landwirtschaft und Tourismus billige Arbeitskraft zutreibt. Nicht so sehr, weil nun diese Betroffenen, die plötzlich keine Miete, keine Mahlzeiten, keine Ausbildung für die Kinder mehr zahlen können, sogleich ins Billiglohn-Prekariat wechseln könnten, sondern weil sich Angst breit machen soll und mit der gleichzeitigen zähen Ablehnung des Mindestlohns von neun Euro pro Stunde, wie ihn die Opposition fordert, ein Heer der Arbeitsreserve gebildet werden soll, eine strukturelle Neosklaverei, auf der die „Melonomics“ ihr Wirtschaftsmodell aufbauen wollen.

Die italienische Republik, so steht es in der Verfassung von 1947, ist auf Arbeit aufgebaut; die Faschisten von heute übersetzen Arbeit mit Ausbeutung, Entrechtung und Verachtung.

Der Krieg gegen die Armen

Wenn man die scheinbar so rücksichtslose wie übers Knie gebrochenen Maßnahme zur radikalen Reduktion des Bürgergeldes als eine Art von Demaskierung oder als einen ideologischen Bruch ansieht, sitzt man einer doppelten Täuschung auf. Erstens nämlich gehörte diese Reduktion ja zum Wahlprogramm der „Fratelli d’Italia“ (FdI), der Partei Melonis: Sie wurden gewählt (und vor allem: finanziert), damit sie diesen Krieg gegen die Armen führen. Denn neben dem Rassismus gehört der Klassenhass zur DNA des Postfaschismus: Die „Fremden“ werden genauso gehasst wie die „unten“, die Schmutzigen und die Nutzlosen. Nur in der Sklavenarbeit auf den Tomatenfeldern oder in niederen Dienstleistungen im Tourismusgeschäft, mit Löhnen, die zum Sterben zu viel und zum Leben zu wenig abwerfen, sollen sie geduldet werden. Und in beiden Fällen gehören die europäischen Konsumenten, die europäischen Urlauber mit zu den Nutznießern.

Und zweitens gehört es durchaus zum Plan, dass diese Reduktion Protest und Chaos auslöst. Denn jedes rechte Regime braucht ein solches Spektakel des Aufruhrs, der „niedergeschlagen“ werden kann. Es ist ein bewährtes Mittel der Faschisten, sich als Bezwinger des Chaos zu inszenieren, das sie selber angerichtet haben.

Zum zweiten Mal zeigt dieses Regime „Härte“, nach der brutalen Verweigerung von Hilfe für die Geflüchteten im Frühjahr dieses Jahres, und zum zweiten Mal ist diese Härte auch als Schauspiel gedacht. Beide Male hatte Giorgia Meloni die Wahl, sich auch gegen ihre Vasallen und ihre Programme als mütterlich-mitfühlend, als eine Rechte mit menschlichem Gesicht zu zeigen. Sie hat es demonstrativ nicht gemacht; Giorgia Meloni ist eine Faschistin durch und durch.

Neben dem kulturellen Kahlschlag, der zähen, aber konsequenten Arbeit an einer Transformation der parlamentarischen Demokratie in ein autoritäres Präsidialsystem, neben der brutalen Politik gegen Geflüchtete, der schrittweisen Übernahme von Schulen und Universitäten durch die Organisationen der Rechten ist dieser Krieg gegen die Armen ein weiterer Beleg eines für ganz Europa entscheidenden Vorgangs: Italien ist keine Demokratie mit einer rechten Regierung, Italien ist ein Land, in dem modellhaft der innere Zusammenschluss von neoliberaler Postdemokratie und funktionalem Postfaschismus erprobt wird. Die Totalität dieser Transformation wird leicht übersehen, da es der Regierung Meloni noch gelingt, nicht alle Elemente ihrer Machtergreifung deutlich sichtbar werden zu lassen.

Fahrplan der faschistischen Transformation

Dabei hat sie einen sehr einfachen Fahrplan, den jeder kritische Beobachter ohne weiteres durchschauen könnte. Es werden fünf „Kriege“ geführt:

1. Der Krieg gegen die Kultur. Die simpelsten Elemente sind die „Nationalisierungen“. Überall werden Kuratorinnen, Museumsleiter oder Gremien-Entscheider ausgetauscht und durch FdI-Leute oder FdI-genehme Leute ersetzt. Verträge werden nicht verlängert, fadenscheinige Entlassungsgründe konstruiert, man verhängt einen „Ausländerstopp“ et cetera. Das jüngste Beispiel ist die absehbare Vernichtung einer Einrichtung, um die ganz Europa die italienische Filmkultur beneidet hat, des „Centro Sperimentale“ in Rom. Für jede kulturelle Institution, die man durch neue Regelungen oder durch Sperrung von Mitteln kaputtkriegt, entsteht irgendwo ein neurechter „Think Tank“ in einem korrupten System der „Beratungen“.

2. Der Krieg gegen die Flüchtlinge und gegen die Ausländer. Was das anbelangt, ist die italienische Rechte genau auf der Linie der anderen europäischen Rechten, allerdings kommt noch eine nationale Kränkung hinzu, wie in anderen Bereichen auch: Man lässt „uns“ mit dem Problem allein; man will zugleich „uns“ belehren und bevormunden.

3. Der Krieg gegen die Linken, die Liberalen und die Kritiker, die allesamt „fälschen“ und „hetzen“, insbesondere was die italienische Vergangenheit oder die dubiosen Geschäfte rechter Politiker*innen anbelangt. In Ermangelung eines wirklichen linken Feindes richten sich auch hier die Tiraden gegen alle, die auch nur um eine Nuance abweichen. Die linke und demokratische Opposition ist so schwach, dass man sich die inneren und äußeren Feinde schon herbeizwitschern muss. Wird, wie jüngst, ein besonders dreister Fall ruchbar, die Geschichte des Rechtsterrorismus in Italien zu fälschen, wird die Woche drauf gleich ein aufwendiger „Blitz“ gegen eine Handvoll Anarchisten durchgeführt, die ein paar Monate lang ein kleines Blättchen herausgaben: Vier oder fünf Anarchisten, die böse Artikel in einem Blatt schreiben, das niemand liest und das schon vor einem Monat sein Erscheinen einstellen musste – eine „nationale Gefahr“.

4. Der Krieg gegen Frauen, Queere und Dissident*innen. Hier versucht es vor allem Giorgia Meloni – „Mutter und Italienerin“ – eher mit einem Rückgriff auf das konservative Familienbild als mit der offenen Konfrontation. Auffallend immerhin ist der Abbau aller Foren und Beratungsstellen, wenn sie staatliche Unterstützung bräuchten. Während sich die rechte Propaganda immer weiter verstaatlicht, wird alles, was dem Regime nicht nutzt, ins Private abgeschoben.

5. Der bereits erwähnte Krieg gegen die Armen. Was diese Regierung anstrebt, ist offenbar eine Form der strukturellen Zwangsarbeit beziehungsweise eine neue Klassenstruktur: eine rassistisch-ideologische neue „Elite“ (von der Giorgia Meloni vor den Vertretern der „Gioventù Nazionale“, der Jugendorganisation der Fratelli, schwärmt), eine für ihren Fleiß, ihren Gehorsam und ihre Korruption belohnte Kleinbürgerschicht und das neue Heer der willenlosen Arbeitskräfte, das durch Disziplinierung, Propaganda und Feindbilder zusammengehalten wird. Ein geradezu klassisches Gesellschaftsbild des Faschismus, das sich hier zwanglos mit den neoliberalen Phantasmen und den Idiotien der Unterhaltung verbindet.

Die Stärke dieser faschistischen Transformationsbewegung rührt nicht zuletzt daher, dass sich in ihr die Interessen der Wirtschaft, das Befinden der konservativen Kleinbürger (die ihre politische Heimat bei der längst verblichenen Democrazia Cristiana verloren haben), die Schwurbeleien etlicher „Querfrontler“ oder Vertreter des „Dritten Wegs“, schließlich aber genauso die Impulse der Mussolini-Nostalgie, des Rechtsterrorismus und der „Neuen Rechten“ zusammenfinden. Ganz im Gegensatz zur Linken, die sich immer weiter aufspaltete, deren Fraktionen sich gegenseitig immer heftiger ablehnten, ließ die italienische Rechte ständig Verbindungen zwischen legalen und illegalen, populistischen und sektiererischen, „konservativen“ und neofaschistischen, ja, zwischen offiziellen Parteien und Untergrundorganisationen bestehen.

Spuren in den schwarzen Untergrund

Die Biographie und die verzweigte Familiengeschichte von Giorgia Meloni zeigt im Übrigen, wie mannigfach und scheinbar widersprüchlich die Entstehungsgeschichte des Regimes ist. Seit ihren Anfängen als Anführerin der „Azione Studentesca“ und als „Koordinatorin“ der faschistischen Jugendorganisation der „Azione Nazionale“ im Jahr 2002 – als diese gerade mit öffentlichen Verbrennungen von Büchern, die das Ansehen Italiens „beschmutzen“, Furore machte (unter einer zünftigen Bücherverbrennung machen sie es nun mal nicht) –, kreuzten Giorgia Melonis politischen und familiären Weg eine Reihe von dubiosen Gestalten samt deren unaufgeklärter Taten. Immer wieder tauchen Bilder aus ihrem politischen „Familienalbum“ auf, wie das des neofaschistischen Bandenmitglieds Marcello De Angelis, Bruder eines einstigen „Verlobten“ Melonis und Herausgeber einer ultrarechten Postille, der Spuren im Fascho-Rock wie in der rechten Szene des Terrors hinterlassen hat.

Giorgia Meloni hat immer klargemacht, dass sie sich nicht von Organisationen und Personen des Rechts-
terrorismus distanzieren will. Wie auch? Die Übergänge etwa zwischen „Lotta Studentesca“, „Terza Posizione“ und „Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari“ (NAR, neofaschistische Terrororganisation 1977 bis 1981) waren immer fließend. Und nach und nach wird bekannt, wie viele Spuren aus Giorgia Melonis direktem Umfeld in den schwarzen Untergrund führen. In diesem Fall kommen sich selbst alternative Fakten gelegentlich in die Quere: Während De Angelis die Kriminalgeschichte der italienischen Rechten zu fälschen versucht – er bezeichnete drei wegen des Anschlags von August 1980 auf den Bahnhof von Bologna mit 85 Toten verurteilte rechte Terroristen der NAR als unschuldig –, muss Giorgia Meloni ihre eigene Vita fälschen. Um ihre Macht zu festigen, muss sie Posten verteilen an ihre Vasallen, die so geltungssüchtig, inkompetent und korrupt sind, dass man es beim besten Willen nicht mehr verschleiern kann. Auf eines allerdings verstehen sich diese Postfaschisten, nämlich auf Propaganda.

Daneben gibt es die fünf nuclei der faschistischen Gesellschaft, das sind Territorien oder Institutionen, die für sich in relativer Geschlossenheit schon „voll“ faschistisch funktionieren, ohne das allgemeine Bild des Alltags- und Tourismusitaliens zu sehr zu beeinflussen: das sind die Sommercamps der faschistischen Jugend; die für rechten Terrorismus offenen „Kultureinrichtungen“ wie das besetzte Haus „Casa Pound“ in Rom; jene Schulen und Universitäten, die bereits vollständig in rechter Hand und mehr noch der der FdI sind; mehrheitlich rechtsgerichtete Medien und schließlich der reale, gewalttätige faschistische Untergrund und seine Social-Media-Wolken, von denen sich das Meloni-Regime nie offen distanziert.

Zudem gibt es fünf Punkte, die den Erfolg der Rechten stabilisieren:

1. Der Organisationsgrad der neofaschistischen „Bewegung“, der sich in Jahrzehnten und viel zu wenig beachtet herausgebildet hat.

2. Die Galionsfigur(en): Meloni, Matteo Salvini („Lega“, ehemaliger Innenminister und stellvertretender Ministerpräsident) und (bis zu seinem Tod im Juni) Silvio Berlusconi (viermaliger Ministerpräsident) sind und waren nicht nur Vertreter, sondern so präzise Darsteller für die Interessen und Phantasmen der drei Fraktionen des Rechtsextremismus – Faschismus, Populismus, libertärer Neoliberalismus –, dass sie immer ein wenig wie gecastet erscheinen.

3. Die Drift des konservativen Kleinbürgertums nach rechts, wie sie in ganz Europa zu beobachten ist.

4. Die Bereitschaft der staatlichen und gesellschaftlichen Institutionen, Justiz, Polizei, Bürokratie et cetera, sich den Rechten zu öffnen und anzudienen.

5. Die Erschöpfung, Lähmung und Selbstbeschränkung der gesellschaftlichen Mehrheit. Nirgendwo scheint die Flucht vor der Politik, der Rückzug ins Familiäre und „Private“ so ausgeprägt wie in Italien. Dazu kommt eine seit Jahren beobachtete Flucht der ästhetischen, wissenschaftlichen und kritischen Intelligenz ins Ausland.

Faschistische Nachwuchsförderung

Der Krieg um die Schulen und Universitäten wird auf drei Ebenen geführt. Zum einen werden die (post-)faschistischen Organisationen von Schülern, Studenten und Lehrpersonal nach Kräften gefördert. Allein unter den älteren Schüler*innen und den Student*innen gibt es sechs rechtsextreme Gruppierungen, die häufig zusammen, selten gegeneinander wirken:

Will die Europäische Union von innen transformieren, anstatt sie von außen zu bekämpfen: 
Italiens Ministerpräsidentin Giorgia Meloni am 29. Juni dieses Jahres in Brüssel. (Foto: EPA-EFE/Olivier Matthys)

Das „Centro Casaggì“ (das sich selbst als „spazio identitario“, als identitären Raum, bezeichnet) ist eine 2005 in Florenz entstandene Parallelorganisation zur „Azione Studentesca“ – die es seit 1996 gibt –, der Jugendorganisation des AN („Azione Nazionale“), und mittlerweile, 2016 neu ausgerichtet, das universitäre Instrument der „Fratelli d’Italia“. Der „Blocco Studentesco“ ist der militante Ableger aus der Casa Pound und offen neofaschistisch, ohne sich mit dem „Post“ des Melonismo aufzuhalten. Sie sind bekannt dafür, schon junge Mitglieder an den Mittelschulen für ihre Zwecke zu rekrutieren. „Lealtà Azione“ (Treue Aktion) stammt aus Mailand und ist der studentische Arm der rechtsextremen Terrorszene der „Hammerskins“. Die „Generazione identitaria“ schließlich hat ihre Wurzeln in Frankreich und entspricht in etwa den „identitären“ Rechten hierzulande, sie sieht sich im Gegensatz zur „Lealtà Azione“ eher als „Elite“.

Bleibt am Ende „Lotta Studentesca“, die es schon seit 1976 gibt, die Jugendorganisation der „Forza Nuova“, der größten gewaltbereiten faschistischen Kraft in Italien, die besonders im Milieu der „Querfront“-Propagandisten verwurzelt ist, die wiederum im Habitus wie in den Sprechweisen Aspekte der einstigen linken Studentenbewegung übernehmen – tatsächlich gaben De Angelis und Maurice Bignami, einst führender Kopf der linksradikalen militanten Gruppe „Prima Linea“, in den 1990er-Jahren gemeinsam eine Zeitung heraus: „La spina nel fianco“ (etwa: Der Stachel im Fleisch). Diese studentischen faschistischen Gruppen tun sich, auch wenn sie „kulturell“ nicht ganz zusammenzupassen scheinen, immer wieder zu Protesten und Aktionen zusammen.

Der einzige wirkliche Widerspruch besteht bei der Haltung zu Russland. Es gibt knallharte Putin-Verehrer wie die „Lotta Studentesca“, während die „Azione Studentesca“ mehr oder weniger dem offiziellen Regierungskurs folgt, der sich in dieser Hinsicht an der Außenpolitik der EU orientiert. Alle eint aber der Drang zur Aktion: „Pensiero che diventa azione“ (Gedanke, der zur Tat wird) lautet einer der gemeinsamen Slogans, der die antidemokratische Grundhaltung, die Ablehnung aller „ökologischen“ Bedenken, den fundamentalen Rassismus und vor allem den bedenkenlosen Voluntarismus ausdrückt.

Offensichtlich wirken diese militant rechten studentischen Gruppen auch auf die „Unpolitischen“ attraktiv; die rechtsradikalen Gruppierungen sind aus Querfront-Bewegungen bei Demonstrationen gestärkt hervorgegangen, die „neutrale“ Belange behandelten wie die Pandemiemaßnahmen, und sie übernehmen Ausdrucksweisen und Strategien der linken Studentenbewegung von einst. Die Lieblingsworte sind denn auch hier immer wieder die „libertà“ und der „nonconformismo“.

Im Februar dieses Jahres organisierten die rechten Schüler und Studenten gemeinsam einen medienwirksamen „Marsch“ in Rom, und dieses Bündnis hat mittlerweile in fast allen italienischen Universitätsstädten Fuß gefasst. Die Gruppen sind straff und hierarchisch geführt, finanziell gut ausgestattet, von Politik, Medien und Justiz weitgehend unbehelligt und einig mit der Regierung darin, die italienische Demokratie in einen autokratischen Präsidial- oder Führerstaat umzuwandeln. Über die „Azione Studentesca“ spricht Giorgia Meloni in den höchsten Tönen: Diese repräsentiere, sagt sie, „die Schulungsinstanz für die kommende politische Führungsklasse“. Deutlicher kann man als Postfaschistin wohl nicht werden.

Das rechte Jugendnetzwerk wird im Großen und Ganzen zusammengehalten durch die „Gioventù Nazionale“, die offizielle Jugendorganisation der „Fratelli d’Italia“, die immer mehr Züge faschistischer Erziehungskader annimmt. Die jungen Schülerinnen und Schüler finden bei den „Sommerlagern“ der „Gioventù Nazionale“ sportliche Ertüchtigung, paramilitärische „Kameradschaft“ und politische Unterweisung. Gerade die weniger begüterten Eltern sind froh, ihre Kids während der langen Ferien für wenig Geld versorgt und beschäftigt zu sehen.

So also wird der (nicht gar so) neue italienische Faschismus von unten her aufgebaut. Der Krieg gegen die Armen ist nun ein Teil des faschistischen Kriegs gegen die Arbeiterklasse. Er ist damit nicht nur die Erfüllung eines zumindest impliziten Versprechens an die neoliberalen Geldgeber, er dient auch dazu, die Jugend in den Griff zu bekommen, für die insbesondere im Süden eigentlich keine Hoffnung auf ein bürgerliches Leben besteht. Es gibt nun unter den gegebenen Umständen nur drei Lebensentwürfe für sie: ein Leben als ewiger Hungerleider, Verlierer, Ausgebeuteter, eine Position in der jeweiligen Mafiafamilie – oder eine Karriere in der faschistischen Durchorganisation.

Jede dieser drei Optionen ist in der einen oder anderen Weise nützlich für das (post-)faschistische Regime. Demgegenüber wirken die Kämpfe von Gewerkschaften und Opposition für einen Mindestlohn und eine Grundsicherung chancenlos, selbst dann, wenn sich die Regierung Meloni hier und da zu einem Kompromiss bereit-
erklären will oder mit der symbolischen Abschöpfung der Extraprofite von Banken ihre Art von „Gerechtigkeit“ inszeniert. Der neoliberale Flügel sorgt schon dafür, dass es nicht so schlimm wird.

Dazu wird das öffentliche Fernsehen, vielleicht nicht mehr das zeitgemäßeste aller Medien, aber gerade in den weniger wohlhabenden Familien doch immer noch ein medialer Anker, in Windeseile unter den Einfluss der Regierungsparteien gebracht und von den einstigen Vertretern eines unabhängigen kritischen Journalismus „gesäubert“. Aber damit nicht genug: Auch das schiere Entertainment wird attackiert; unbotmäßige Äußerungen von Schlagerstars in San Remo führen dazu, dass man die Festivalübertragung von nun an zensieren wird. Einstige Größen des Showgeschäfts werden ebenso aus den Sendern gedrängt wie die Redakteure, die nicht auf Linie sind, und die FdI geben unumwunden zu, dass es sich dabei auch um „Rache“ handelt.

Keine Partisanen, nirgends

So ist also die Gegenwart durch die Hegemonie in Medien, Kultur und Öffentlichkeit wie die Zukunft durch die faschistische Organisation der Jugend weitgehend unter der Kontrolle des postfaschistischen Dreierpakts geraten. Fehlt noch die Vergangenheit. In der Sommerpause gilt vor allem die italienische Geschichte in ihren pädagogischen Grundübereinkünften als Angriffsziel (wir erinnern uns: Bücherverbrennung im Namen der faschistischen Geschichtsrevision war bereits Melonis Anliegen in Studententagen). In Giorgia Melonis gehäuften Ansprachen an das Lehrpersonal und die Gremien kommen die Wörter „resistenza“ und „partigiano“ (Partisan) nicht mehr vor; der italienische Faschismus wird als Epoche der Sauberkeit und Ordnung dargestellt, wo man es nur an einigen Punkten übertrieben hat, vor allem aber werden die „Helden“ des Faschismus so sehr rehabilitiert wie die Partisanen zu „Banden“ herabgestuft werden, denen es nur um persönliche Abrechnungen und Interessen gegangen sei.

Wie die Geschichtsrevision im Alltag vollzogen wird, mag ein kleines Beispiel zeigen: In dem Städtchen Nervi, unweit von Genua, befindet sich ein kommunales Schwimmbad, das nicht nur wegen seiner tollen Aussicht aufs Meer berühmt ist, sondern auch, weil hier Nanni Moretti 1989 seinen Film „Palombella rossa“ (deutscher Verleihtitel: „Wasserball und Kommunismus“) gedreht hat. Zunächst stand der Erhalt des Bades auf der Kippe; als sich dann der rechte Bürgermeister doch zum Erhalt durchringen konnte, benannte er das Bad nach dem Faschisten Luigi Ferraro, der noch in der Republik von Salò der berüchtigten faschistischen Elitetruppe „Xª Flottiglia MAS“ angehörte und nach dem Krieg zwar als Taucher berühmt wurde, aber nicht müde wurde, zu erklären, dass er es nie bereute, für den Faschismus gegen eigene Landsleute gekämpft zu haben. Trotz der Proteste der Gewerkschaften und etlicher Bürgerinnen und Bürger von Nervi wurde die Namensgebung durchgesetzt und, nicht genug damit, im Internet mit dem Emblem des Casa Pound, des „Kulturzentrums“ der Neofaschisten in Rom, verbreitet. Wie viele italienische Gemeinden können solche Geschichten erzählen! Neben der Revision der Schulbücher, der gewalttätigen Unterdrückung „falscher Darstellungen“ des Faschismus in Italien an den Universitäten werden solche Rehabilitierungen faschistischer „Helden“ zur Alltagserfahrung. Sie sind das andere Gesicht einer Obstruktionspolitik, die die Vertreter der rechten Parteien in jenen kommunalen und regionalen Einrichtungen betreiben, in denen sie noch nicht das Sagen haben. Jede noch so kleine Verbesserung auf dem Gebiet der lokalen Infrastruktur wird mit einer faschistischen Aneignung teuer bezahlt.

Nach den Worten Melonis in einem Interview mit der Tageszeitung „Corriere della Sera“ ist das wohl einzig Schlechte am historischen Faschismus, dass er die Demokratie abschaffte. Es ist offensichtlich das Ziel des Postfaschismus, eine faschistische Gesellschaft, eine Regierung nach dem Präsidialprinzip (natürlich ohne Amtszeitbegrenzung) zu errichten, bei Beibehaltung gewisser demokratischer, eher: postdemokratischer Rituale wie Wahlen (Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan et cetera lassen grüßen).

Melonis Politik, anders als die einiger ihrer Vasallen, besteht auch darin, die innere Faschisierung nicht allzu sehr als ein international lesbares Bild zu präsentieren. Die Giorgia Meloni, die auftritt, wo man unter sich ist, und die Giorgia Meloni, die vor internationalen Kameras spricht, unterscheiden sich gewaltig. Möglicherweise ist es das Glück der Demokratie in anderen Ländern, dass bei den dortigen Faschisten niemand intelligent genug für ein solches Possenspiel ist.

Faschisierung und Europa

Bleibt am Ende die Frage, wie das alles geschehen kann. Die eine Antwort: Der (post-)faschistische Angriff gilt einer in weiten Teilen „erschöpften“ Gesellschaft. Selbst denjenigen in der Mitte der italienischen Gesellschaft, die sich von diesem Totalangriff fernhalten, fehlt die Kraft, fehlen aber auch die Medien, die Diskurse, die Ideen zum Widerstand. Diese Gesellschaft, die aus einem jeweils in sich widersprüchlichen Lager der Linken und der katholischen Gemeinde, aber auch aus den drei Landesteilen Norden, Mitte und Süden besteht, ist zerbrochen, alle gesellschaftlichen Fortschritte, auch die im Kampf gegen die Mafia, gegen die Steuerflucht, gegen den Zerfall von Bildung und Infrastruktur, werden abgewickelt. Italien heute, das ist vor allem Beute.

Der zweite Grund ist ein Europa, dessen Länder mit ihren eigenen Post- oder Präfaschisten genug zu tun haben und einfach nicht genau hinsehen wollen, solange Giorgia Meloni außenpolitisch und europäisch Zurückhaltung übt. Denn all das, was in Italien passiert, das passiert auch in anderen europäischen Ländern, wenn vielleicht auch nicht mit dieser Deutlichkeit.

Der dritte Grund – auch das ein Phänomen, das in ganz Europa beobachtet werden kann – ist der desolate Zustand der demokratischen Zivilgesellschaft und der linksliberalen Milieus. Elly Schlein, die designierte Vorsitzende des oppositionellen „Partito Democratico“, konnte gewiss einiges wiedergutmachen, was ihre Vorgänger an Zugewandtheit und Engagement vermissen ließen, und doch lässt sich einfach keine wirkliche linke, demokratische Einheit herstellen, die es wahlrechnerisch und öffentlichkeitsrelevant mit der Rechten aufnehmen könnte.

Ist also Italien, anders als Spanien, für die Demokratie verloren? Ganz sicher nicht, wenn sich die oppositionellen Kräfte nur einmal besinnen könnten, wenn es eine europäische Solidarität gäbe, in der es nicht bloß um die Wettbewerbsfreigabe von Badestränden und die Frage nach Flüchtlingsaufnahmen ginge, und wenn sich auch die entmachtete Kultur ihrer ursprünglichen Aufgaben wieder besänne.

Georg Seeßlen arbeitet als freier Autor, Feuilletonist und Filmkritiker; er lebt im Allgäu.

Fünf Gründe für den Erfolg der italienischen Rechten:

1. Gestiegener Organisationsgrad der neofaschistischen Bewegung.
2. Verknüpfung der drei Fraktionen des Rechtsextremismus: Faschismus, Populismus und libertärer Neoliberalismus.
3. Drift des konservativen Kleinbürgertums nach rechts.
4. Bereitschaft der staatlichen und gesellschaftlichen Institutionen, sich den Rechten zu öffnen und anzudienen.
5. Lähmung und Selbstbeschränkung der gesellschaftlichen Mehrheit.

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With alleged accomplices flipping left and right, it’s been a rough week for Donald Trump. On Tuesday, though, Trump’s attorneys looked to turn that momentum around, filing three additional motions to dismiss the Jack Smith–led federal prosecution of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The legal filings offer a fascinating preview of Trump’s potential defenses in the Washington prosecution brought by the special counsel. Will it work? Almost certainly not. Legal experts say the arguments are almost certain to fail to result in dismissal of the case, and in many ways, Trump’s defenses are outright absurd. Former federal prosecutor and impeachment expert Frank Bowman called the dismissal motions “an embarrassing goulash of mischaracterized facts and inverted logic, not to speak of misapplied legal citations.”

How bad are Trump’s latest motions for dismissal—and thus his possible defenses at trial? At one point, Trump’s attorneys literally argue who’s to say what’s true and what’s not true in regards to Trump’s (untrue) claim that the election was stolen. That claim, remember, underpins the entire case. “Bottom line on all of this stuff is that it’s so bad from a legal perspective that some of it comes close to being sanctionable by the court,” Bowman said.

Here’s a quick look at some of the most ridiculous and grotesque arguments for Trump’s innocence made by his legal team in these latest filings.

Argument 1: You Can’t Prove That the Election Wasn’t Stolen

This is the argument that takes the cake—and is likely in there almost exclusively for the satisfaction of the client. One of Trump’s motions to dismiss rests on the premise that he’s being persecuted for unpopular—but First Amendment–protected—political speech. That claim rests on the notion that none of the actions he and his alleged co-conspirators took to try to overturn the election went beyond such protected speech, a debatable premise at best.

Here, though, is where Trump’s lawyers truly go off the rails. They state that there’s no way to prove that Trump’s claims about a stolen election were even false, and so therefore all of his actions could have been taken to secure the sanctity of, not warp, the 2020 election.

From the motion (emphasis mine):

Claims about the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election—including claims that the election was “rigged” and/or “stolen,” or that fraud and irregularities tainted the outcome in certain States or across the Nation … constitute … core political speech … that is not readily verifiable or falsifiable. Thus, they lie at the heartland of the First Amendment’s protection, and the federal government may not dictate whether such claims are true or false—nor prosecute the purveyors of the allegedly “false” views.

This is especially true because claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “rigged” or tainted by fraud and irregularity … do not involve “easily verifiable facts.” … Such claims require the assessment of mountains of information from which each person will draw competing inferences based on facts as well as their personal, deep-seated political views and presuppositions. They are not readily verifiable or falsifiable.

Bowman summed up this legal claim: “There is, apparently, no such thing as reality.”

Trump’s premise here is that because he used the bully pulpit to convince large segments of the country of the lie that he won the 2020 election, which he lost, the position is now debatable and any actions he took to turn that “big lie” into political reality were protected by the First Amendment. The motion states:

This is why Americans’ opinions on these issues are profoundly divided, very much to this day. The First Amendment does not permit the prosecution to dictate what is “true” and what is “false” on such broad, vigorously disputed, politically charged questions—especially not in the context of a criminal prosecution that effectively seeks to criminalize a political viewpoint shared by over 100 million Americans.

Bowman summarized this position as “a testament to the fact that Trump and the right-wing media complex have—astonishingly—managed to convince a segment of the population that the crime Trump committed in plain sight was not really a crime.” He concluded that this idea that there is no such thing as the truth is “not a proposition that the law can admit. At least, I hope not.”

Argument 2: Trump Is the Subject of a Witch Hunt Led by Joe Biden

One of Trump’s latest motions to dismiss focuses exclusively on the notion that this is a “selective prosecution” orchestrated by President Joe Biden as a means of taking out a top political rival, i.e., a witch hunt. From the motion:

This prosecution is also driven by an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose: Biden’s publicly stated objective is to use the criminal justice system to incapacitate President Trump, his main political rival and the leading candidate in the upcoming election.

If the case is not dismissed, Trump’s legal team is asking that a hearing be held to subject members of the prosecution to direct examination as to whether or not they are “witch hunters.”

The problem for Trump is that the bar for proving such a political prosecution is … very high.

“Trump will have to establish that 1) others similarly situated could have been prosecuted but were not and 2) that the government’s selection of him for prosecution was motivated by insidious intent. It is an almost-impossible-to-meet standard,” said Norman L. Eisen, a former special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment.

To demonstrate Trump’s claim of a witch hunt, the defense points to a pair of Trump’s Truth Social posts, as well as two mainstream news articles reporting that, behind the scenes, Biden was frustrated that Attorney General Merrick Garland took so long to put Trump in the sights of federal prosecutors. But these articles—and the defense—offer no evidence that Biden meddled in the prosecution, or even had any contact with Garland over it. (Biden’s comments that Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, which were anonymously sourced, were reportedly made privately to members of his “inner circle.” The New York Times article cited by Trump’s legal team explicitly says, “The president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland.”)

Another comment cited in the motion references Biden as saying, “I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next President again.” The motion claims that Biden’s statement was in reference to prosecuting Trump, but that claim has been fact-checked by the Associated Press as false.

“The quoted statements seem pretty plainly to refer to beating Trump in the next election,” Bowman said. “There is no evidence Biden has interfered in the DOJ’s decisionmaking.”

Argument 3: Trump’s Impeachment Means He’s Protected by Double Jeopardy

I covered a version of this argument after Trump’s legal team first made it in a previous motion to dismiss earlier this month, but Trump’s attorneys make it a primary focus of one of the new motions to dismiss, stating:

The government—through Congress—already put President Trump on trial once, placing him in jeopardy for an alleged criminal offense arising from the same course of conduct alleged in the indictment. Having failed to obtain a conviction, President Trump’s acquittal in the United States Senate must stand, and the prosecution may not seek a retrial in this forum.

As I wrote earlier, this is the opposite of what Trump’s legal team stated when he won that acquittal in the Senate. Then, they claimed the appropriate venue for accountability for Jan. 6 was the criminal justice system and not an impeachment of a former president and private citizen. Here, though, Trump’s team goes a step further, saying that he has already been tried via impeachment and can’t be tried again.

“The double-jeopardy claim is comical,” noted Bowman, who wrote a 478-page comprehensive history of impeachment. “It mischaracterizes the impeachment clauses and rests on the wholly incorrect notion that impeachments are criminal proceedings that trigger double-jeopardy protections.”

Argument 4: Trump’s “Stop the Steal” Campaign Did Not Constitute “Deceit or Trickery”

This one is a little wonky, but the bottom line is that one of the statutes Trump is charged under—conspiracy to defraud the United States—demands a showing that the criminal action be taken with the purpose of “deceit or trickery.” Trump argues that he had no such purpose and that, even if he had, there’s no way that little old he could have possibly been responsible for convincing anyone of anything during his efforts to strong-arm officials into overturning the election results. As the lawyers write:

To assert that President Trump, as one voice among countless millions, was somehow capable of unilaterally “tricking” or “deceiving” these individuals, who include some of the most informed politicians on the planet, simply by advocating his opinions on this contentious issue, is beyond absurd.

As anyone who might have lived through that period would know, it is not absurd.

Ultimately, the defense goulash rests on the premise that Trump did nothing wrong and is a victim of political persecution, without offering any evidence of either. No serious prosecutor thinks that this will go well for him.

“The evidence that has been unearthed during the past year is simply overwhelming,” said Marty London, the defense attorney who negotiated Spiro Agnew’s plea deal with federal prosecutors when Agnew was vice president. “The rats are abandoning the sinking ship. And the ship will sink, I believe, and the big rat will go down with it.”