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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to President Trump’s latest round of tariffs and explains why he believes they are weakening America’s economy and its alliances.

Then, David is joined by his Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait for a wide-ranging discussion on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whether presidents should be funny, the growing attacks on Barack Obama’s legacy, and the battle in Michigan between moderates and the progressive left that could shape the Democratic Party’s future.

Finally, David closes the show with a discussion of Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed and the Bronze Age collapse.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: You are kind of an immoderate centrist. You’re ready to—you have centrist views, but you’re ready to brawl. But do you see, as you look at the Democratic Party, that there’s something about the moderate—they will not fight back? And therefore, they’re abdicating by default to people who are going to end up empowering Trump. And whoever Trump’s successor is, probably J. D. Vance, and all that J. D. Vance means for the future of American democracy.

Chait: Absolutely. Look, it’s, it’s an old problem, right? The definition of a liberal is someone who’s too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves, without doing anything to change, for generations.

[Music]

David Frum: Welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait, and we’ll be talking about Obama’s legacy and what it means for the future of American politics. The book this week will be 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline, a study of the end of the Bronze Age.

But before either my dialogue with Jonathan Chait or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on the most recent rounds of tariff announcements by President Trump. Last Friday, President Trump announced his latest tariffs to go into effect. He targeted 60 economies. I say “60 economies,” because one of the 60 targeted was Taiwan, which is not regarded by the United States as a country but only as an economy. So, 60 economies including Taiwan; 59 countries plus Taiwan.

The ostensible basis of this new round of tariff increases was to combat forced labor. President Trump used a provision in American law that allows the president power to impose tariffs on countries that use forced or slave labor, and he said: That’s it. In order to fight forced or slave labor, these 60 economies, including Taiwan, are going to be targeted by a new round of tariff increases.

The grounds given for the tariffs are not really very plausible. There is no or barely any factual showing that all of these 60 were engaged in some way in forced labor. The United States, after all, is not completely clean on this question either, and there’s no graduation of the tariff to the alleged cause. There’s no saying: Such-and-such country has more forced labor or more openness to forced labor, such-and-such has less; therefore they have different tariff rates. No. It’s just—we accuse these 60 economies, we target them with tariffs, and we’re doing this even though our own hands are not clean. The United States economy is open in many ways to forced labor.

Pretty obviously, what is going on here is that Trump is looking for some legal basis to reinstate the tariffs that he has had struck down in the past. President Trump originally used an emergency economic authority from the 1970s. The Supreme Court told him he couldn’t do it. Then he fell back on a temporary provision that allowed him to impose tariffs for a period of time, I think 150 days, and that time has run out. So now he’s looking for what he can get.

As the president returns again and again and again to imposing tariffs on the world, a question has to be asked: What on earth could any Trump supporter imagine the president is possibly doing that is, in any way, in the American national interest? The emotional basis, the argumentative basis, the intellectual basis for tariffs is that we are supposedly reindustrializing the United States. But since Donald Trump has become president, manufacturing jobs in the United States have declined by the tens of thousands, probably somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 net manufacturing jobs fewer as I record in the summer of 2026 than when Donald Trump became president at the beginning of 2025.

Because other sectors other employment sectors are continuing to grow, especially health care, this loss of a net 100,000 manufacturing jobs means that manufacturing as a share of nonfarm payrolls has now dipped below 8 percent, which is the lowest level that manufacturing has had in American employment since figures began. Maybe it was lower in 1776 than it is now, but since good figures began, this is the lowest. It’s a record. So obviously, it’s not working. And it’s not just jobs that are being lost. Manufacturing output and manufacturing investment also seem to be in decline. This is a little harder to calculate because there’s a huge capital-investment boom going on because of artificial-intelligence data centers. A lot of money is being committed to these data centers, and the question is: To what extent does this get counted as manufacturing investment and whatnot? But private economists who have tried to separate out seem to be in some kind of agreement that, at best, manufacturing investment is flat in the Trump year and a half, maybe down a little bit, because of the problem of the Trump tariffs.

The thing I wish I could pound into the head of tariff supporters is that every tariffed item is not only a product that you sell to consumers; it’s also an input into something else. When you impose tariffs on goods, you make not just things more expensive for American consumers—you make things more expensive for the American companies that buy those things and put them into other things. It’s a house-that-Jack-built problem. Every time you make an input more expensive, you make the ultimate product more expensive and make the final American product that much less competitive on world markets. And the result is: You can’t compete, so you sell less, so you invest less, so you employ less.

A large part of the attraction of tariffs to Donald Trump seems to be that they appeal to his desire for dominance. His perception of the world is divided into subjects and into enemies, and if you’re not a subject, then you’re an enemy. And if you’re an enemy, then there are no rules. And if you’re a subject, for that matter, there aren’t any rules either. That everything is an expression of will and ego, and all economics is a matter of I win, you lose, and if I don’t feel I’m winning, then I must be losing.

This has become the signature political and economic philosophy of an entire political party under Donald Trump. The party that used to stand for markets and enterprise, the Republican Party, the party of Reagan and Romney. We’re on a bad track here, and these latest tariffs mark another bad milestone on that bad track. We need to get off this, and we need to start creating in freedom and with rules.

That doesn’t mean that we pretend that China is not a problem. China is a problem, and there’s forced labor in China. And China is a rule-breaker and steals intellectual property. You need a China-specific solution to the problem of trade, not a solution that destroys the whole apparatus of trade with all of America’s friends and, increasingly, former friends.

The United States is now bound in a grinding and frustrating war with Iran. It needs all the friends it can get. The idea that it is waging economic aggression on all of its partners and then acting baffled and befuddled that these partners don’t help out on the Iran problem—a war that the United States started and that it did not have to start and that now it can’t get out of—that just, again, seems to be another bad milestone on another bad path.

The way out of all of America’s problems—it’s not the whole solution, but it’s the beginning of a solution—is to return to the path of free and fair trade with friendly-minded nations, bracketing China as a special problem, and otherwise dropping tariffs to the lowest rates possible and returning to the days when the United States negotiated agreements with its friends to trade in freedom and prosperity with mutual benefit and understanding that true trade makes all those who participate in it better off.

And now my dialogue with Jonathan Chait.

[Music]

Frum: Jonathan Chait has dedicated 30 years as one of this country’s sharpest, wittiest, and most ornery advocates for liberalism, first at The New Republic, then at New York magazine, and since 2024 at The Atlantic. It’s a remarkable career made more impressive by the fact that journalism was always his second choice of avocation, adopted only after the involuntary abandonment of his true ambition: head coach of the University of Michigan football team.

Jonathan Chait is the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. And Jonathan is a continuing reminder that liberalism doesn’t have to be apologetic or bashful about itself. Jonathan, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, David.

Frum: Okay, so we have a number of things to talk about today. I want to start—I know this is a topic that’s maybe a little more interesting to me than to you—but to start by looking back at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that was recorded on Saturday night, just a few days before you and I record. This has always been a kind of troublesome event from a point of view of Washington journalism. There are big advantages to being close to politicians, and big hazards as well. So I know you worked at the glory days of The New Republic when there was a lot of intimacy between The New Republic and the politicians it liked. How do you think about events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner? And do you think about them differently in the age of Trump from the way you thought about them before?

Chait: I was always very skeptical of these events. I went to one to see what it was like, but I felt like if you go to more than one, then you’re no longer going anthropologically; you’re actually part of the thing. And I didn’t want to be part of the thing, because I think it’s a little bit gross. Part of it, just mechanically, is journalistic outlets using themselves as intermediaries for their advertisers to give them access to politicians and to celebrities. The celebrities come because they get some cachet for being at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The politicians get access to donors and to celebrities and to journalists. And I feel like it’s cozy for everyone, but I don’t think it’s really good for the journalism profession at all, and never has been.

In the Trump era, people have started to question it more than they have, but I feel like The New York Times was correct 20-some years ago to pull out of the event, and I wish everyone else would too.

Frum: Trump has changed the ritual in one very noticeable way—which was, in the past, the president’s speech always followed a strict form. Which was a series of gentle jibes at the press, somewhat tougher jibes at himself, occasional jibes at political opponents. That was handled with extreme care. Obama did them more than others, but that was always a little dangerous to do because it sort of violated the treaty of the evening. Followed, of course, by the moment at the end where the politician switches from humor to seriousness and pays tribute to the important role of the press, and everyone likes hearing him say it, whatever the politician may think in the recesses of the politician’s heart.

Trump just goes on pure aggression, pure attack. And that may make it easier for journalists to disavow or disconnect themselves from something that was troublesome before.

Chait: I think that’s right. What was the most revealing joke he made was actually a decent joke, at least on paper. His delivery was horrible, because he can’t deliver written text. But he made a joke about how he’s basically taken control of CBS News, how he effectuated regime change there and installed Bari Weiss. And that’s actually pretty chilling, right? I mean, that’s the [Viktor] Orbán playbook that we were all warning about in action, and he’s just boasting about it to the faces of the journalists.

Frum: It’s also, by the way, self-defeating in a way that Trump’s speeches are often not very strategic. But if it were true that Bari Weiss was the person you had installed at CBS, that is the last joke in the world that a president should make, because it only detracts from the effectiveness of your supposed ally. Which I, again, I don’t think she is. But if she were, it detracts from your effectiveness. It undercuts her. It puts her in an untenable situation. Why would you say such a thing? Trump doesn’t seem always to think those things through

Chait: Well, he doesn’t think them through. But I think at some level he’s acting from some instinct to dominate and to make everyone acknowledge the domination, right? He doesn’t work with any subtlety. He actually has to tell people what he’s done and force them to wear the hat on their head.

We may not want to go down this path of debating what’s happened at CBS, but I think it’s pretty clear that Trump believes he has done this at CBS. Now, whether Bari Weiss thinks that’s what she’s doing is a different question.

Frum: I think you make a very shrewd point. Which is that Trump, even when he would do better to allow dignity to people whom he thinks of as allies—he can’t do it. He has to humiliate; he has to dominate. He has to actually take his friend’s head and dump it in the bucket of shit, and pull the friend’s head out again and say, See, my friend is now covered in shit thanks to me. That’s the kind of guy I am, and this is the kind of low-grade character my friend is.

Chait: That’s right. That’s right. I mean, bending the knee is a metaphor people often use, but there’s a visual strikingness to it, right? I mean, an actual sign of submission is what he requires of people who submit to him.

David Frum: Now, let me pivot here to the Barack Obama first White House correspondent dinners, and then his presidency. When I wrote speeches for President [George] W. Bush, I occasionally tried to introduce jokes into them. I have this especially vivid memory of writing a joke that—I’m now going to forget what the joke is, unfortunately. But I remember thinking it was quite good, and putting it into a speech, and having the joke be struck by [senior adviser] Karl Rove personally. And when I went to Karl Rove to complain and say the joke was funny, Rove said—and I thought this was very wise—he said, The joke was funny. That’s why I killed it. It was too funny. Presidents shouldn’t be that funny.

And one of the things that was very striking when Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was he was that funny. He said the thing you couldn’t believe a president had said. They were often hilarious, but often sometimes too funny. Did you have qualms about that?

Chait: No, I don’t. I think there’s a belief that some people have that humor and insight and dignity are in tension with each other, and I’ve just never thought that. I’ve always thought of humor as an aspect of intelligence. When someone can say something funny, to me that’s a sign that they have some insight that they’re able to express into the world. And I’ve never objected to any figure of any persuasion being funny. [Senator] Ted Cruz, with whom I disagree on almost everything, can often be very, very funny, and I appreciate that about him. I think we need more of it.

Frum: Well, let me quote the Obama joke that made me most uncomfortable, but that was very funny.

So I believe this was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner just after he had been reelected in 2012, and he was taking a bit of a victory lap, and he mentioned that one particular donor, I think it was Sheldon Adelson, had spent the then-astonishing sum of $100 million to defeat him. And Obama, sort of exulting that it hadn’t worked, said: If he felt that strongly about it, why didn’t he just offer the $100 million to me and ask me to leave politics altogether? I’m not saying I would’ve done it, but I would’ve thought about it. And that was really funny, but it’s—

Chait: It’s a great joke.

Frum: It’s a great joke, but why is it a great joke? So, there’s a theory that humor is how we adjust discomfort. It’s how we deal with the taboo and discuss the taboo in a way that’s socially acceptable.

And so the taboo there is, yeah, politicians could bribe rich people. We’ve reached a degree of wealth in American society where a rich man could say: You know, I don’t like your views. Here’s $10 million. Go to an island. I want you never to be heard from again. And there are politicians who might say, Satchel full of money, airplane ticket in hand, off I go. And when you joke about it, you remind people of that reality. Which we all know, but it’s a little uncomfortable to face.

Chait: Or that we’re still banning bribery—at the time, we were still banning bribery. We no longer are banning bribery anymore. But you can spend $100 million. So there’s this last barrier against a rich man’s influence that we can’t cross. So he can go all this way, but he can’t just take the most direct possible route to his ambition.

Frum: So you wrote this book about Obama at the very end of the Obama presidency. Trump came to office. You attracted a lot of attack for the book, because how could you say Obama was effective when he was immediately followed by Trump? You spent a lot of the 2010s defending Obama from critics on the right who said he was a communist and a Kenyan, or a Kenyan communist, or a communist Kenyan. Now the attacks seem to come from the left. I know you’re not a person of tender sensibility, but how do you deal with this?

Chait: You know, it is interesting, and I have reflected on this, because I would say 75 to 80 percent of the argument I make in the book is against those critics on the right, and maybe 20 percent is against the criticisms of the left. And there were criticisms from the left of Obama at the time, but they were just much, much less important.

And what’s interesting in retrospect, as you sort of indicated, is that the conservative critiques have mostly been forgotten, dropped altogether. They’ve just moved on to other things to anger them at the moment. Whereas the left-wing criticisms have survived. They’ve just been repeated over and over again and have established themselves as kind of official histories of that era and are widely believed, even if they weren’t widely believed at the time. And it’s really been fascinating, and I don’t quite have a full handle on how that happened other than just the sheer power of repetition at the time.

In other words, to listen to people talk about Obama now, you would think that Obama was just leaving on the table all these left-wing victories he could have been taking because he was just such a neoliberal shill. That he, out of cussedness, just hated Medicare for All and loved Wall Street.

But at the time, he was seen as a socialist. And it wasn’t just by the Republican Party. The mainstream media was portraying him as a radical. Let me just give you one example—and there are many examples of this—but the kind of official history we have now of the stimulus is that Obama held down the size of the stimulus because he didn’t want to spend more money on stimulus, because he was worried about the deficit. The truth is that Obama, rightly or wrongly, was trying a strategy to get the maximum stimulus sum he thought he could get out of Congress. And Obama was being seen at the time as being completely irresponsible in pursuing stimulus. The New York Times was treating the deficit as the big crisis and the economic crisis as a secondary problem. It was treating his attempt to stimulate the economy in the face of these deficits as perverse. It was basically running stories saying: We are looking at $100 trillion dollar deficits down the road, and nonetheless, Barack Obama wants to spend even more money. Which is such a hard sell. That was the mainstream narrative that he was fighting against, and the whole context in which he was operating has been completely forgotten.

Frum: Well, we were there. And it is true that Obama’s first job as president was saving the banking system and the larger American free-enterprise economy. And maybe he didn’t love that job, but that was the job that history gave him, and that’s what he did.

I have a very unusual view on this, which is I actually think that the period from October 2008 to March of 2009—the Bush-Obama transition—is actually one of the finest hours in the history of U.S. government and the finest hours in the history of the presidency. And a remarkable testimony to two men of different backgrounds working together on a common enterprise in ways that were very generous.

And the one I think about the most was one of the questions that George W. Bush faced in the fall of 2008 was: Should he save General Motors or not? And there were two obvious choices. One was save General Motors, and do it, and then your predecessor would have to live with it. And the other was, kill General Motors, and then your predecessor would have to live with it. And Bush instead made the decision, save them for 90 days, or prob—well, I would forget the exact number of days, but save them for enough of a period that your successor would have full autonomy to decide for himself whether to save General Motors or not. And indeed, we didn’t have a Great Depression, and we didn’t have the collapse of democratic systems all over the world, and we didn’t have a collapse of world communism, er, world capitalism. We didn’t have global communism. I think of those as good things.

Chait: And do you remember the phrase that conservatives applied to the bailout of GM? Gangster. Gangster government was the most common one. Gangster government. This was them indicating that he had gone beyond—they’d already called him a socialist. Now he had gone so far beyond socialism they needed an even viler epithet to describe what he was doing. That these dangerous methods he would use to leverage control of the private sector and basically put us on the road toward communism and improper uses of government power.

Frum: I remember very vividly a conversation I had sometime in the spring of 2009 with a group of young, I think they were Koch fellows or some kind of group funded by conservative projects. And I was much more in the conservative world in those days than I am now, although well on my way out because of this. I remember talking to this group of four or five young people, and they were explaining that if it had been up to them, they would’ve allowed the banks to liquidate themselves.

So I said, Let’s play that out. And I walked them through—I won’t take time here to do it—but, what happens if you allow a bank liquidation? And that means all kinds of people who had good assets suddenly find they don’t have liquidity sufficient to cover their assets. So even though the assets are perfectly fine, they have to be liquidated hastily to raise capital. And you have this accelerating crisis through the whole economy, which is the story of 1931, ’33. But I played it out for them in very vivid terms. And I remember one of them, as I described this nightmare scenario, getting quite ashen and saying: Well, I guess it’s a good thing we weren’t in power then, because our ideas wouldn’t have worked in an emergency.

Chait: Right.

Frum: Well, if your ideas don’t work in an emergency—all the ideas work in nonemergency. (Laughs.) Everything works when it’s not an emergency. The test of your ideas: Does it work when it is an emergency?

Chait: No; I’ve always been taken by that comment because what it’s saying is that our ideas are just a theological commitment. More of an aspiration and not something that you can actually trust to work in the real world. But nonetheless, that we should be guided by them for theological reasons and not for practical ones.

Frum: One of the legacies of that Obama experience was—so the Obama stimulus was about $800 billion, if I remember correctly. About half of it in the form of immediate cash relief and about half of it in the form of spending, which was a big number at the time.

In the Democratic world, that experience was remembered as: Obama didn’t do enough. And so Biden, who was confronting not a deflationary crisis the way Obama was, but an inflationary crisis, he spent much more and ran even bigger deficits—well, maybe they weren’t bigger deficits to the economy, because the government’s revenue hadn’t collapsed as much. But he ran very big deficits. And of course, this time the voices of conventional wisdom were correct; that Biden was spending too much, and he had overlearned the Obama experience that Obama had handled successfully and Biden handled less successfully.

Chait: Obama understood that he needed to stimulate the economy more. I mean, as soon as he got the stimulus, he tried to get more stimulus. He got every dollar he could get out of Congress. You could make an argument that he could have gotten more if he tried different methods, but he was trying to get—he understood, first of all, the recession was deeper than they grasped at the time they passed the stimulus. So they calculated the size of the hole, and they figured out, Okay, so how close to filling up the hole can we get? And then it turns out the hole was even deeper than they thought. So then, they immediately were trying to get more money, and they did get more money. They got more tax credits; they pulled out more stimulus here and there. But they did not get enough stimulus, and the recovery was too slow. And that was the main lesson, that they needed to not repeat that mistake. But the problem is they just erred in the opposite direction under Biden.

Frum: So the left theory of the Obama presidency is: Obama didn’t do enough, and therefore the working class got mad, and they voted for Trump, and it’s Obama’s fault.

Chait: I mean, you can explain Trump’s victory through normal political arguments. You don’t need to summon this crisis of capitalism that produced Trump. It’s hard to win a third consecutive term for any party.

Hillary Clinton was a less talented politician than Obama. She was challenged from the left by Bernie Sanders, and her response to that challenge was for herself to move leftward still. So the candidate who ran in 2016 under difficult conditions for any candidate was not running as Obama’s third term. But she was running significantly to the left of Obama’s third term with less political skills.

Obama left office with a 60 percent approval rating. Obama, had he been able to run for president for a third time, would’ve wiped the floor with Donald Trump. There’s just no reason to believe that Donald Trump was a repudiation of Obama, who was and is very popular, and far more popular than Trump.

Frum: I have a really brain-dead theory of what happened that ignores all the personalities and so on.

Which: This is my theory of how Obama led to Trump. The economy returns to precrisis levels of output and employment in 2014. Pre the crisis of 2007, ’08. So we’re back at 2014 to where we were in 2007, although the growth trajectory is lower. At that point, respectable opinion says: Right; Obama’s been running these big deficits. This could lead to inflation if unchecked. Now is the time for the Federal Reserve to tighten interest rates. And that was not a crazy decision. That’s a very conventional, normal decision. The crisis is over. I mean, we’re back to where we were. Tighten now.

And it turns out the economy was still, in 2014, not healthy yet. And when you tightened in 2014, instead of saying, Okay, the growth continues, as it did when you tightened in the middle ’80s, instead what happened is: The employment growth slows. And so you have very not-recessionary conditions in 2015, 2016, but disappointing conditions. People do not feel continuing improvement, and they weren’t just grateful to be pulled from the sea to the shore. They wanted to resume the normal, you know, trajectory from the shore. And that didn’t happen. And so the incumbent party lost, and then the Federal Reserve recognized its mistake, loosened in 2016, and the economy accelerated in 2017, 2018, 2019. We had three good years before the COVID pandemic.

Chait: Right. They thought we were at capacity. There was a debate about: Are we at capacity? Are we about to hit the point of accelerating inflation in 2014? And we weren’t, and we found that out in Trump’s first term that there was actually plenty of slack left in the labor market, plenty of room to grow.

You’re right. That was an important moment. And that could well have made the difference, because the 2016 election was so close. Just a little bit more growth in those last two [years] could have made the difference. A lot of things could have made the difference.

But I would just point out in the overall macro-situation, Obama was popular. Obama’s popularity was not the problem. I mean, if he was even more popular, it would’ve helped more, but he was overall popular.

Frum: Now in 2026, we have this attack on Obama from the left. He’s now become quite a demon figure. And explain to me—what is the left case in 2026 against Obama? Why is Obama now bad?

Chait: Well, the main thing that they will say that Obama did badly was bailing out the banks in 2008. Obama’s 2008 bank bailout—

Frum: 2009. 2009.

Chait: No, no, no; 2008. Now, of course, the bank bailout did occur in 2008.

Frum: Yeah.

Chait: But Obama did not become president ’til 2009. But when I point this out, people will never believe me. I’ve been pointing this out for 15 years, and no one will believe me. So I think I just have to accept that I’m wrong, and that Barack Obama actually was president in 2008, and he’s therefore responsible for the bank bailout that occurred in 2008.

Frum: I think the bank bailout was good. And whoever was president in 2008—which turns out to be maybe a more difficult question than … I’m sorry to have interrupted you, because I thought it was an easy question. But as you say—as with the question, Who was president in 2020?—it turns out to be quite hard.

Chait: Yes. (Chuckles.)

Frum: So leaving aside the mysterious question of who was president in 2008, why is it, if you’re the left and you love [President] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved the banks, why do you hate whoever was president in 2008, who saved the banks?

Chait: Yeah. I’ve brought up this point many times. It’s very hard for me. I want to faithfully reproduce their criticisms; I don’t want to just be battling straw men. But it’s very hard for me on this point, because I feel like so little sense can be drawn from the criticisms they make. Like I said, the No. 1 point they make is the bank bailout. That’s by far the most common critique they make of Obama. The second most common they make is failing to jail anyone for the crimes of the financial crisis.

What actually happened was, [the Obama administration] looked at it and said: Well, they didn’t commit any crimes. The problem is all this stuff was legal, so we need to change the laws. And so they passed the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, which were the strongest regulations of Wall Street since the 1930s. At the time, those reforms were celebrated by progressives. If you ask any of the progressive experts in financial regulation, they will say that’s a very powerful law; a set of reforms that were formative. It looked at all the problems of the financial crisis, really regulated all of them. It also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But [critics] blame Obama for not imprisoning anyone for activity that was only subsequently made illegal. So again, I’m sort of attacking arguments that sound like straw men, but these really are the most common attacks made on Obama.

Frum: Go, take a step beyond the attacks. Because often when people say things, they are applying imperfect words to deep feelings. Okay, so maybe they don’t have good rationalizations, but where does it come from? What is the mentality that says, I revere Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but I hate Barack Obama? Where does that mood come from? Where does, where does Bernie Sanders-ism, what is the emotional need that it meets?

Chait: I think there was significant difference between Obama and the organized progressive movement. Do you remember when Obama’s spokesman derided the professional left? That was a somewhat notorious comment, but it really did capture a hostile relationship between the organized progressive movement and the Obama administration. And he thought that these organized progressive lobbies were unrealistic, didn’t have good ideas, and he had better ideas for messaging and for policy strategy. So they were always on the outs with him, and they resented that.

Biden, by contrast, was so deeply enmeshed with the progressive movement—the “professional left,” as they were called under the Obama era—that it was almost impossible to draw any distance between them at all. Biden did whatever they wanted. And so even though Biden had dramatically less legislative success, the progressive movement really celebrated Biden’s administration all the way ’til the end, when they decided that now Gaza was the only thing that mattered, and Gaza was the reason that he was a failure. But really, up until that moment they were celebrating Biden as the heir to Roosevelt. Biden as the progressive hero, and Obama as the sad, weak appendage to the Reagan era.

Frum: Is there something going on, too, that if you’re on the real left that you regard Trump as not the worst possible outcome? Because if you’re on the real left, Trump is obviously—it isn’t that they like him, but they know the working class, they will sooner or later see through the folly of Trump.

So all we have to do is eliminate the false messiahs and then give them our true messiah, and then they will see through the right and turn to the true messiah. And in fact, an interval of right-wing government maybe—or a Trump government, whether you call it right wing—is a necessary step in the process. Just as Hitler led to the triumph of communism in Germany, so—not to compare Trump to Hitler—but this is the thinking. The far right gets its turn; then we get our turn. We just need to exclude the middle, and then we win.

Chait: This was also the thinking of the communist left in Weimar Germany, right? They saw Hitler’s constituency as their own constituency. They really thought that there was this fluidity between the far left and the far right. I don’t think that was correct at all.

Frum: But at the intellectual level, there’s something to that. I mean, we all know people, and we could name them if we wanted to, who do seem to move very easily between far left and far right. And these are people who are very well educated, who care a lot about politics, care a lot about ideas. You’ll hear them say: I’m a progressive, but I feel at home when I talk to these ultra-MAGA people. We both hate bankers, we both hate Ukraine, we both hate Israel. We have so much in common. And they think, and that must apply at the voting level, where people vote for reasons that are less ideological.

Chait: That’s right. It’s the same error. And that’s why in some level, you’re right that Trump’s election filled them with hope. That they really saw this proletarian uprising that they’ve been longing for but were dejected that was not happening, finally glimmers of it happening. Because you could see elements of Trump’s populist rhetoric as reflecting their own. So I think you’re spot on on that observation.

Frum: So how much of your life do you spend defending the Obama legacy to people who want to detract it, from the left?

Jonathan Chait: Too much. Too much. I’m planning to write something maybe early next year. I’ve gotta just put it all in one place. But It’s gotten to the point where I have this alternate history that only I and a handful of deranged lunatics are aware of. And we’re living in an alternate universe in which everyone else has settled on a completely different interpretation of what happened during those years.

So I’ve gotta just put it all in one place, I think.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about your native Michigan now, because these issues are being played out in real time. Why is the Michigan Senate race, in your view—so much attention was focused on Maine. Now Maine is fading from the center of the discourse. The camera is swiveling to Michigan. Why is that Senate race so important?

Chait: There’s a Democratic Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is the left-wing candidate. Haley Stevens is sort of the mainstream center-left candidate. They’re both—

Frum: And is there an incumbent senator in Michigan?

Chait: No. Gary Peters is the incumbent Democrat who’s retiring, so there’s an open seat.

Frum: How competitive a state is Michigan?

Chait: It’s a slightly blue state, although Trump won it in 2024 and in 2016. So it’s very close at the presidential level. Democrats have usually won the Senate races and have usually won the gubernatorial races most of the time, but Donald Trump did win it a couple times. And it’s close enough that the Democrats could lose a Senate seat even in a wave year if they really screw things up. And they seem to at least be putting that possibility on the table.

Frum: So now there’s an open Democratic nomination. There is a Republican candidate who’s competed before, who’s a strong candidate, who’s not a loony at all.

Chait: Right.

Frum: And the Democrats will soon vote to choose one of two candidates. So tell us about the two Democratic choices.

Chait: There’s Haley Stevens, who’s a kind of center-left traditional Democrat. Who would basically—if you took all the Democrats who have won Senate races in Michigan in the last 30 years and put them in a blender and poured them out, you know, you would get Haley Stevens. She’s just an amalgamation of the traditional center-left Democratic Party in the state of Michigan.

Abdul El-Sayed is very left wing for the Democratic Party. He would be the most left-wing Democrat in the Senate, I think even to the left of Bernie Sanders. He would be as far left maybe as people like [U.S. Representatives] Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. He’s just across-the-board left on every issue, and has really emphasized opposition to Israel as a campaign theme. But he’s trying to do what [former Senate candidate] Graham Platner seemed to be on the road to doing in Maine. But I think he’s even doing it in a more confident, ideologically confident fashion. And he said that if he wins the primary and wins the general election, he is going to start carrying out purges of other Democrats who he thinks can be beaten in primaries.

Frum: And he seems to be a less psychologically troubled person than Graham Platner. And although this is maybe invidious to say, probably more intelligent than Graham Platner.

Chait: I actually have come to question some of his political judgment recently. I feel like he’s played this shrewdly but aggressively, really pushing up against the edge of how much he can get away with. But I feel like recently, it’s like a gambler who’s on a winning streak and is just overplaying his hands.

I’ll give you an example. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens over the weekend.

Frum: Gretchen Whitmer is the governor.

Chait: The popular governor of the state of Michigan. Popular with Democrats and popular with voters on the whole. If you’re El-Sayed, you just want to just take your lump and walk away from it, right? You want to minimize the impact of this. This is not going to be a good story for you. The only question is how much attention it’s going to get.

But then he goes and attacks Gretchen Whitmer. He takes a shot at her management of the roads, which was one of her original campaign slogans, just fixing the roads, and says the roads haven’t been fixed. So now you’ve given every reporter covering this race a license to extend the story and write about El-Sayed’s vendetta against Whitmer, and you’ve invited Whitmer to weigh into the race once again on Stevens’s behalf. And her approval rating among Democrats, I think, is 88 percent. So you have a tiny number of Democrats who agree with El-Sayed that Gretchen Whitmer is a corporate sellout, which he also thinks and has been saying. But the vast majority love her.

So he’s managed to skate by without really bringing to the surface the degree to which he rejects the entire Democratic Party and its entire philosophy. And he’s trying to get a lot of loyal Democrats to his side, who just want someone who will fight harder against the Republicans and don’t fully understand the ideological extremism that he is bringing to the table.

Frum: Why is this a story outside Michigan? So Democrats may be about to nominate someone who’s more to the left and has a high level of personal aggression and really, really, really hates Israel. And that’s issue No. 1 for him, how much he hates Israel. So suppose he wins. Why is this a story outside Michigan?

Chait: His plan is he will then become the leader of the left. And he said this, and a lot of other leftists have said this, that he will become their standard-bearer. Bernie Sanders is getting old now. And if [El-Sayed] can win, he will prove something that they’ve never been able to demonstrate before—that a left-wing candidate can win in a purple state. You’ve had DSA candidates winning in New York City. You have Bernie Sanders up in Vermont, which is a little bit idiosyncratic. And you have some other House candidates, you have some mayors, but you’ve never had anyone in a purple state winning on a platform this far left. And while El-Sayed is not in the DSA, he is supported by the DSA and he is aligned with the positions of a lot of DSA candidates. So that will completely change the perception of what is electable within the Democratic Party.

Frum: One of the things that matters outside Michigan is the left has probably given away the Maine Senate seat. Susan Collins looks like, at this point, if you had had to guess, she’d probably survive even in Maine, a mostly blue state, even in—

Chait: I’m not sure I agree. It’s a chance. There’s a chance. It’s at risk.

Frum: But something that should’ve been an easy pickup is now very contested.

Michigan is also very—again, as you say, a blue state, but one that does elect Republicans—also could be at risk. Is there any way to a Democratic Senate majority without both Maine and Michigan?

Chait: No. No, I don’t think there is. And the truth is, if you want to think about it from a politically sophisticated perspective, Michigan should have been an easy, easy hold, right? In a blue wave, off-year election, a state that almost always elects Democrats to the Senate—not by huge margins, but pretty reliably by three or four points—should have been an easy hold. And the outcome that I think a lot of moderates are afraid of is that El-Sayed runs, say, four points behind the national Democratic Party. Underperforms due to his extremism, but still gets in because it’s such a huge wave. And then the left turns around and says, See? This shows that our agenda is popular, and we need to implement it everywhere all the time.

Frum: And so then the Democrats lose in 2028 to J. D. Vance and his program of Orbánism in the English language.

Chait: Right. This is going to become the main proof point that’s being used in this interfactional war within the Democratic Party. So if El-Sayed wins, it will be the proof point that the Democratic Party needs to run as far as it can to the left, and that will not impair their ability to win the election in 2028. And I think actually is going to be quite important in terms of the presidential outcome in 2028. In fact, it might even be El-Sayed himself, because they are so enthusiastic about his candidacy. He could, like Obama, [who] went from a first-year senator to presidential candidate, El-Sayed could easily be on that trajectory. That’s how powerful he’s become within the movement so quickly.

Frum: Well, you know, people worry about the loss of consensus in American life and the polarization. But if you have an “El-Sayed versus J. D. Vance” ticket in 2028, at least we can have a consensus about the danger of the Jews. That would be—

Chait: (Laughs.) That’s right.

Frum: America could be united. The two parties could agree on something.

Chait: Right. And then Bloomberg will run a third-party race and get 2 percent, all Jewish vote.

Frum: So what’s at stake here is not just the 2026 outcome but the 2028 outcome as well.

Chait: I think that’s correct; yeah. Yeah, so it’s tremendously consequential.

Frum: So I’m gonna ask you a somewhat personal question, and forgive me if I overstep here. But one of the reasons why Republican moderates lost first to the Tea Party and then to Trump—and there was very little resistance to the Tea Party; there was a lot of resistance to Trump, but it was overwhelmed—was that people of moderate views understandably have moderate personalities. They don’t like conflict. They don’t like trouble. They always believe in compromise, that you can work things out.

And so you get these kinds of soft—you have moderate ideas backed by soft personalities. Fred Siegel—who is a great urbanist, used to be at the Manhattan Institute—had this praise of Rudy Giuliani. And whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani personally, this is, I think, a great phrase. He described Giuliani as “an immoderate centrist.” Which is: He had centrist views, but he was just, he was full of aggression.

Chait: Which eventually won out over the centrism.

Frum: Yeah. So that I think you’ve—this is the part that I was going to put you in. I mean, you are kind of an immoderate centrist. You’re ready to—you have centrist views, but you’re ready to brawl.

Chait: Pugilistic.

Frum: But do you see, as you look at the Democratic Party, that there’s something about the moderate—they will not fight back? And therefore, they’re abdicating by default to people who are going to end up empowering Trump. And whoever Trump’s successor is, probably J. D. Vance, and all that J. D. Vance means for the future of American democracy.

Chait: Absolutely. Look, it’s, it’s an old problem, right? The definition of a liberal is someone who’s too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves, without doing anything to change, for generations.

You know, you can find historical exceptions. Sometimes we point to the post–World War II moves by Arthur Schlesinger and Walter Reuther to form Americans for Democratic Action, to exclude the communists, to keep the communists out of the New Deal coalition. And to fight for civil rights and fight for the New Deal values.

But that’s maybe more the exception than the rule in some ways. I mean, there really is something inherent to liberalism, that’s necessary to liberalism. Which is an openness to critique—to not want to become so confident in yourself that you shut out all challenges, right? So I think there is a strength to that quality of liberalism that allows us to be supple, to change our positions with new facts. And I think has made liberalism enduring.

Frum: Where is Obama in all of this? It’s his legacy that is under attack. Both institutionally, but also quite personally. Will he stand up for himself in an argument? Why doesn’t he make himself heard? In a lot of these states, if the choice is Bernie Sanders versus random local Democratic official, Bernie Sanders may win. If it’s Bernie Sanders versus Obama, we know how that fight goes. Is it because he’s an ex-president and doesn’t want to return to the muck and mire of politics? Where is he?

Chait: I think he’s calculated that he can have the most influence by operating behind the scenes. And you’ll notice that the Bernie people absolutely despise Obama, specifically not just for his presidency, but for his role in 2020, right? When you had this sudden coordination of the non-Bernie opposition. The Bernie Sanders strategy in 2020 was to win the Democratic nomination with under 50 percent, by just having his opponents stay divided all the way through the convention. And he would never have to win a Democratic Party majority, and he could get the nomination anyway. And then all of a sudden, just everyone realized they couldn’t win and dropped out and endorsed Biden. And Obama played a role there, and they hate him for that.

So Obama will take an active role, but he doesn’t want to play this factional leadership role that Bernie Sanders plays, where he goes into every contested primary and endorses the most left-wing candidate. I think he’s calculated that will reduce his ability to influence people across the party. That will just make him a much more narrow factional figure. That doesn’t seem like a crazy calculation to me. I can’t say for sure it’s right, though.

Frum: I’m reading, this summer, Kai Bird’s new biography of Roy Cohn, which is—

Chait: Oh, so am I.

Frum: Oh, okay. so if you’re reading the book, you’ll know what I mean. And one of the anecdotes that Bird tells in this book is how President Eisenhower kept coming up with very convincing, very ingenious, plausible arguments for not taking on [Senator] Joe McCarthy directly.

And the first time he says it, and the second time he says it, you think, You make a point. The third and fourth time, you begin to think: You’re just unwilling—possibly you’re scared, but you’re unwilling to take the risk. And actually you’re not acting for good statesmanlike motives. You’re acting for self-preservationist and maybe unworthy motives. When McCarthy starts to attack the Army and to attack Eisenhower’s friends—not just George Marshall, whom he attacked in ’52—but he attacks John J. McCloy in ’53 and ’54. And Eisenhower keeps trying to do things indirectly and has some success. Partly because McCarthy is a desperate alcoholic and becoming very sick. But if McCarthy had not been a desperate alcoholic, it’s not clear that Eisenhower’s methods would’ve worked so well, and he just was making things easy for himself. And I wonder whether with all the subtlety and ingenuity you attribute to Barack Obama, whether he’s also just trying to make things easy for himself.

Chait: You might be right. I’m trying to explain what I think his calculation is. I can’t say for sure that the alternative course of action wouldn’t work, that if he really was willing to fight back and defend his legacy. You know, he does do it in bits and pieces. But he really has allowed the left to win this argument about his legacy, and he hasn’t put up much of a fight.

I mean, I was making the point during his presidency that his support for education reform, which was really something he cherished, began to disintegrate when the teachers’ unions and the left fought back against it, and he just kind of let them do it. And he didn’t defend it, and by the time Hillary Clinton came along, it was really no longer viable ground or defended in the Democratic Party. So I think you’re right that there is this passivity.

Frum: When you say, That’s what he thinks will work. One of my rules of politics is, in fact, none of us know what, what will work. We are always guessing, and we’re usually looking in the mirror and projecting our own wishes. We’re very poor judges of what will work.

But we can be very good judges of what’s the right thing to do. And we also can be, if we really look inward—we know when our reluctance to take a risky action is prompted by truly a prudential calculation. And when there’s just a certain element of, Oh, it’ll be a lot of trouble, a lot of hardship. It’ll be easier for me if I take the softer course. And now I will talk, persuade myself, well—the softer course is also the smart decision. But we never know what the smart decision is. We only know what the right decision is.

Chait: I can’t improve on that.

Frum: Wow. Well, that’s very collegial. (Laughs.)

Jonathan Chait, thank you so much. I’ve got to pocket the rare Chait positive review and put it into my pocket.

Chait: Thank you. I’ll find something to criticize you. Don’t worry. (Laughs.)

Frum: Okay. I know. (Laughs.) Thanks so much for joining me today.

Chait: Thank you, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Jonathan Chait for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a work of history—1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline. Published in 2014 by Princeton University Press.

Now, I have not yet seen The Odyssey. I may be alone on my block. It sounds wonderful, and I’m keen to get to it. But one of the things that I am remarking with admiration is that as people have gone to see The Odyssey, they have become fascinated by this question of the transition from one period of civilization to another. A character, I think it’s Odysseus himself, says in the movie, “Our age of bronze is collapsing.” Which is maybe a little on the nose for movie dialogue, but is right.

The Odyssey is a story set in the Bronze Age, written in the Iron Age, measured by which metal was the predominant metal that went into weapons of war and other kinds of tools. And there was a big collapse in between the two. And Eric Cline’s book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a study of the collapse and an attempt to explain why it happened.

As I understand, and again, I haven’t seen the movie, but the great theme of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is that this collapse is, first and foremost, a moral collapse. One civilization has had the kind of life energy seep out of it and is giving way to a new and successor civilization that will be guided by different rules and different values.

And indeed, there really was, across the eastern Mediterranean, a remarkable collapse around the year 1177 B.C. The Hittite Empire—which was the superpower of the time based in what is now southern Turkey—that vanished entirely, and its capital disappeared. Across the Mediterranean, city-states vanished. The Minoan civilization vanished. The New Kingdom in Egypt didn’t quite vanish, but it lost a lot of its military power and never again exerted the kind of power over the region that it had before about the year 1200. Mycenaean Greece, which is where the the characters in The Iliad and The Odyssey supposedly come from, that civilization utterly collapsed. It even lost the ability to read and to write for hundreds of years, only to reemerge later as an Iron Age civilization. And so it is, through up and down the Levant, into the islands, Cyprus.

So what happened? Eric Cline tries to give us an answer. But the key thing to keep in mind, as to the background that enabled all this is that bronze, which is the weapon that the heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey used for, the metal that they used for their weapons. And that was the main form of armor and tools.

Bronze is a compound of copper and tin. So copper was relatively abundant in the Mediterranean world. There were copper mines in Cyprus and in other places. But tin was scarce in that part of the world and had to be brought to be united with the copper from very far-flung places—as far as Cornwall in Great Britain and Afghanistan in the center of Asia.

So when you’re committed to bronze, you’re committed to very global trade routes. And because the trade routes are so extended, you build large states. Because you have large states, you need ways to manage the states, including organized religion and reading and writing and some kind of numbering system. How do you keep track of how much tin has moved from Afghanistan to Babylonia, and when it moved, and who moved it? You need some form of writing. And you need a bureaucracy. You need comparably sophisticated and elaborated states.

Something happened around the year 1177 [B.C.E.], and Cline makes a good case that it’s a compound of ecological effects. Droughts and earthquakes that weakened the states, ended their ability to import tin, reduced the availability of the bronze alloy made from copper and tin, and set these states reeling backward and made them militarily vulnerable to invaders and small bands that otherwise they would’ve just brushed off with superior strength.

Through the Bronze Age, people knew about iron. But iron was a more difficult material to work. In particular, it required a lot of heat. And it just seemed that bronze—which was easier to work with and had a lot of prestige attached to it—that that was the natural metal of choice. But once the bronze is no longer available because the tin has become hard to get, people are forced back to figure out ways to work with the iron. And once they do so, they find that iron is a dramatically superior weapon of war. Makes sharper, stronger swords, spears, and arrowheads. And so iron replaces it, and the world never looks backward to bronze. Bronze is from then on used primarily for statuary and art, because it remains a prestige material, but it’s not a workable material.

But the Cline story is one of environmental change leading to material innovation, not a story of moral decay. It wasn’t that people somehow lost faith in themselves and therefore turned away from bronze, and then found a new faith and therefore turned to iron. They had very practical problems. Now, I don’t want to dispute the importance to art of telling stories about moral decay and moral regeneration. But as we’re trying to understand why civilizations actually change, I mean, morality surely plays a part in it. Anyone watching the crisis of American democracy right now has to face that the greatness of a society and the ebb of greatness can be attributed to moral defects in that society.

But we also need to pay a lot of attention to ecological changes that force change upon society, and to the material responses to environmental change. Because while we’re not doing a great job in 21st-century America to adapting to our moral challenges, we’re doing an even worse job of adapting to climate changes. And if climate is what felled the Hittites, and as other historians will tell us, if climate is what felled the Romans, and if climate is what, as other historians again tell, felled the Ming Empire and led to the rise of new civilizations in China—then climate, if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be the falling of us.

So as we enjoy the movie, as we absorb its powerful moral lessons, we also need to keep our eye on the material world, the world of climate and weather. Maybe we can’t control it, but we’d best learn to adapt to it. Because if we don’t, it will be the end of us.

Thanks so much for watching The David Frum Show this week. I hope you will share the program and like it on whatever platform you use. As ever, if you’re minded to support the program, the best way to do so is by subscribing to The Atlantic and support all of my colleagues, including my colleague Jonathan Chait. See you next week on The David Frum Show.

Bye-bye.

A couple of years ago, Peter Galassi realized that he had a problem: His 9-year-old son was still, somehow, constantly on Roblox, despite the screen-time limits Galassi had set for him. He soon discovered that his son had used his mom’s phone to secretly open multiple accounts on the platform. Why? Because, like a gambler with a fistful of lottery tickets, he wanted to increase his odds in games such as Adopt Me, in which players hatch eggs for a chance to win rare pets.

Every time the boy played, though, he seemed to sink into distress. Fighting games offended his sense of fairness: He was outraged that players could pay to be VIPs, killing everyone within seconds. And watching other players get “lucky” over and over left him in tears. Then came the “apoplectic meltdowns,” three broken tablets, and this devastating refrain: “My luck is horrible; my life is horrible.” It was, Galassi said, like “we had a son who was on meth.”

A tech-savvy Millennial who also games, Galassi had vetted Roblox before allowing his son to play. Roblox itself doesn’t design the games that appear on its platform; it provides creation tools to third-party developers, whose games Roblox then hosts. Galassi’s first impression, as he surveyed the landscape, was: “These games all seem really crappy and boring—I don’t understand what is the appeal.” It wasn’t until he looked again, after his son started throwing tantrums, that he realized something much more complex was going on.

Not all video games are created equal, of course. Some build social connection, boost memory and focus, and even encourage physical activity, Jason Nagata, an associate professor of pediatrics at UC San Francisco, told me. But many of today’s most popular games involve a style of play unlike any that parents might have seen before, if they were raised on Super Mario Bros. and Tetris. The games have cartoony graphics that may look innocuous, especially when compared with hyperrealistic first-person shooters. But in many cases, their design and interactive elements are less Zelda, more Vegas.

Many games that might appear, to the casual observer, to be an obstacle course or a world-building challenge also contain tempting loot boxes: virtual items that players open blind, revealing surprise rewards of varying value. Nearly 60 percent of the top-grossing games on Google Play and iPhone include them. Although they can be earned, they’re also typically available for purchase. The promise of winning rare items—such as limited-edition hats and extra-lethal weapons—may prompt additional spending. It’s like the Pokémon pack-opening craze, in which people buy dozens, sometimes hundreds, of packs hoping to snag a rare card—except that with games on Roblox and other platforms, players need not schlep to the store or even rise from the couch.

Video games have long operated on a system of challenges and rewards. But earning those prizes usually depended on defeating a dragon, solving a maze, unearthing clues. Today’s bounty, by contrast, can be a player’s instantly—if they’re willing to pay for multiple rolls of the dice or a boost of luck.

These mechanics are not incidental. In the games that employ them, they are designed to maximize engagement. And they’re nearly identical to the variable-reward loops that slot machines and sports-betting apps use in games for adults and that research has shown to be particularly addictive. Games that look like simple fun, according to addiction experts I spoke with while reporting this article, may be normalizing behaviors that could lead to serious consequences down the road.

In recent years, since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that overturned a federal ban on sports gambling, researchers and psychiatrists specializing in addiction have argued that the rise in problem gambling has become a more and more urgent public-health concern. Thirty-nine states and Washington, D.C., have legalized sports gambling, to the tune of nearly $167 billion wagered and roughly $17 billion in revenue last year. Prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, once curiosities primarily for finance and math nerds, are now mainstream. (Both companies have disputed that their prediction-market services are a form of gambling.) Last year, the National Problem Gambling Helpline reported a steady rise in calls to helplines year over year from 2020 to 2024, and a “significant” increase in calls from younger people, ages 13 to 34, from 2023 to 2025. Meanwhile, scientists and regulators are scrambling to understand and mitigate any potential impacts.

[From the April 2026 issue: Sucker]

All mammals, humans included, are evolutionarily primed to prefer random rewards over predictable ones, Anthony Vaccaro, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. It’s a drive that helped our ancestors find the tree with the best fruit or the hunting ground with the most game—and a fact of our nature that can make us inclined to find gambling really, really fun.

Normally, the brain’s control center keeps its reward center in check to curb behavior such as compulsive gambling. But in gambling addicts—and in kids, whose brains are still developing—that balance can tip. “The adolescent brain might be particularly vulnerable to developing problems” such as addiction, Marc Potenza, a psychiatrist and gambling researcher at Yale, told me. That’s because brain regions sensitive to rewards develop earlier than those that exert control. Thus, children’s early exposure to games that emphasize intermittent rewards might derail normal brain development, the thinking goes, leading to a higher risk of addictive behaviors in adulthood.

This pattern has clear analogs in other contexts. Take e-cigarettes: Some studies have found that kids who vaped were “much more likely to become hooked on nicotine” than if they had not vaped, Vaccaro said. Research into whether gambling-like play among video gamers can be linked to problem gambling is still nascent. And it is unclear whether loot boxes inspire gambling or simply attract people already prone to gamble. But some evidence—including analyses of behavioral patterns among people who, as children, played games featuring loot boxes—suggests a connection. One 2023 longitudinal study observed, for example, that young adults who played games with loot boxes were, six months later, more likely to start gambling than those who did not play with loot boxes.

Anna Lembke, a professor and medical director of addiction medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, told me that one can look to other patterns of addiction and begin to connect the dots. “There is evidence showing that the earlier that a child is exposed to social media, the more likely they are to get addicted to social media,” she said. “The earlier that they’re exposed to drugs and alcohol, the more likely they are to get addicted to drugs and alcohol. So we can infer from that that the earlier they’re exposed to gambling, the more likely they are to get addicted to gambling.”

Even if loot boxes aren’t creating problem gamblers, Vaccaro told me, exposure matters. When gambling mechanics are embedded in so many games, they end up “capturing more people that would be at risk,” he said. If at age 6 you’ve spent hours in a game hatching eggs compulsively, it could be that in your 20s, throwing some action on a Knicks game might not feel like such a leap. Or, as Galassi told me: “It’s hard for me to not believe that, like, we’re not priming these kids to just dump their money into FanDuel the second they have a checking account.”

Lembke noted that it is important to not overstate the risk. “Typically, the majority of people exposed to an addictive substance do not get addicted to that substance,” she said. “But if you have a substantial-enough minority of folks getting addicted, then you have a public-health problem. I think we’re beginning to recognize that we have a public-health problem when it comes to addiction to all kinds of digital media, including gambling.”

Many parents don’t realize that their children are being ensnared by psychological tricks similar to those that casinos use to hook adults. “They just think, Oh, my kid wants some money to spend in an online game,” Michael Robb, a researcher at Common Sense Media who released a report in January on gambling and boys, told me. But frequent requests such as this could indicate that the games children play are cultivating compulsive behavior.

Many of the parents I spoke with who caught on fastest to these dynamics work in tech fields that employ gambling-like strategies. Tony Nguyen, a digital marketer in Orange County, California, told me that when his 11-year-old son started playing games on Roblox, his personality changed practically overnight. Some mornings, his son would wake up at 5 a.m. to attend “limited drop” events, in which rare items are doled out to participants at random. “He would just sit for all three hours” for a chance to win one skin, a custom outfit for an avatar, Nguyen said. His son also gamed while watching streamers: people playing in real time for a live audience on YouTube, part of an entangled ecosystem of influencers, game developers, and players that keeps kids locked in. These influencers were also popular with Galassi’s son, the Adopt Me aficionado. Galassi shared one video with me, a 19-minute clip. In it, the host, who has 3.64 million subscribers, gets lucky just two minutes in: She squeals as she hatches a turtle, pumps her fist in the air, and chants, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

[Read: My son’s math homework is essentially just Pokémon]

For many, seeing a rare item on a loot-box prize list, surrounded by bright colors and countdown timers, can trigger intense FOMO. A desire for social cachet—players can opt to make their treasured inventory visible to others—also tempts kids to try to land a coveted object. These pressures, coupled with a lack of knowledge about how probability works, can lead to significant financial fallout.

Parents may not notice until a credit card linked to a Roblox account has accrued substantial charges or until a child has begged or traded for one too many gift cards for Robux, the platform’s in-game currency. In a report last year, Fairplay, an advocacy organization working to shield children from exploitative business practices by tech companies, highlighted instances of children racking up thousands of dollars in purchases. “The kid just thinks, I gotta keep clicking until I reach this item,” Haley Hinkle, Fairplay’s policy counsel, told me.

In the United States, these gaming dynamics have largely escaped regulatory scrutiny. Most gambling laws were written for a pre-digital world, which means that loot boxes exist in a “crazy space,” Robb said. Not everyone, for example, considers loot boxes gambling—parents included. And federal law states that something of value must be wagered to qualify as gambling. So loot boxes, whose contents typically can’t be exchanged for money, may not meet this definition—though a robust marketplace of third-party vendors does offer opportunities for players to trade rare items for cash.

Some regulators and legislators are approaching the issue from a consumer-protection angle, the tactic taken in recent lawsuits against Meta and Google, which allege that these companies’ products are addictive and developmentally inappropriate for minors. (Both companies have disputed the lawsuits’ accusations.) Legislators in New York State are considering several loot-box bills that would prevent platforms such as Roblox from offering gambling-like features such as skin cases and pay-to-win transactions on platforms children use. And in May, Fairplay, together with other advocacy groups, asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Roblox for unfair and deceptive practices designed to keep kids online and spending. Their request, which the FTC has not yet responded to, argues that the platform’s mechanics—layered currencies obscuring real prices, complex probability calculations that even an adult would find confusing, casino-style visuals, ads bombarding players the moment they log on—cause harm. It also argues that because so many children are on Roblox (in 2024, the company reported that roughly 40 percent of its active daily users were younger than 13), the potential impact on kids is profound. Roblox has stated that it “strongly disputes these claims.”

Complicating questions about who is liable when problems arise is the fact that Roblox doesn’t design its own games. Independent developers, some as young as 13, have created the more than 40 million “experiences,” or games and interactive worlds, available on the platform. Theoretically, developers must follow Roblox’s community standards and creator guidelines, which outline what counts as prohibited types of gambling. But those definitions are both narrow and subjective. Many games may not look exactly like slot machines or roulette wheels, for instance, but they contain imagery that strongly resembles such games, substituting cute characters for coin or playing-card imagery. (AI tools are likely to make it even easier for people to quickly spin up addictive games.) It is also unclear how many developers who skirt the rules will ever face consequences: Potential breaches of the guidelines are largely self-policed, with the company relying on moderators and gamers to report violations.

Roblox, which had $4.9 billion in revenue last year but is not profitable, takes a substantial cut—up to 70 percent—of every in-game item a developer sells to players. So creators must earn, and earn a lot, to see a return, which can influence how they design. They might, for instance, lean more into creating games involving trading and random chance, Taylor Hardwick, a postdoctoral researcher who studied Roblox’s revenue-generating strategies while at the University of Sydney, told me. She was part of a team whose research began as a broad look at Australian children’s spending choices. In one study, the researchers gave 22 children 20 Australian dollars each to spend as they wished. But when half used the money on Robux, the most popular choice by far, the team quickly pivoted their research to an analysis of Roblox itself. She described the “pay to play” ethos on Roblox as “ambient.”

When I asked Roblox about the widespread presence of pay-to-play games on its platform, a spokesperson noted that “only 1.4 percent of our 132 million daily active users were payers” and that it has “clear policies prohibiting both actual and simulated gambling.” It also pointed to its recent rollout of age-based accounts, which it said “bring age checks, content ratings, ongoing game reviews, and parental controls into an easy-to-understand framework for kids, teens, older users, and parents.” Of course, 1.4 percent of daily active users could still be a lot of children, based on the company’s reported number of young users.

Chance-based games and predatory sales practices have plagued other companies that welcome third-party developers, including Minecraft and Fortnite, although Minecraft doesn’t directly profit from these games. Lamar B., a Minecraft player from Kentucky with whom I chatted on Reddit, and who asked that his last name not be used because he feared being harassed online for criticizing the platform, posted that his 10-year-old niece had gambled away her allowance on loot boxes in third-party Minecraft servers, including some appearing under the Official Minecraft Server List. He’d encountered roadblocks when trying to report some loot boxes as offensive content. “Most of the time, you cannot get a human to answer—they have an AI chatbot on their support site,” he told me. Games he reported months ago continue to thrive. When I contacted Minecraft to ask about Lamar’s claims, a spokesperson wrote that the company’s usage guidelines “prohibit gambling-related content, and we take action when experiences violate those standards.”

Hinkle told me that companies trusted to self-regulate sometimes fall short. Roblox’s age checks and expanded parental controls may represent progress, but they don’t address the underlying gameplay mechanics, she said. That would require more substantive structural changes to the way games earn money, which would inevitably cut into companies’ profits. Overall, the global market for in-game purchases is huge—estimated at $81 billion for mobile games in 2024, and $34 billion for games on PCs and consoles last year.

For now, parents must decide where to draw the line. That is possible only with awareness, however. Some parents, such as Galassi and Nguyen, have banned their children from playing any games with gambling-like mechanics. Yet with screens infiltrating many aspects of life, kids have abundant opportunity to play out of sight of even the most vigilant families. Grassroots advocacy groups, such as Parents Standing Together and Parents Together Action, offer support and education. But ultimately, the burden rests with families to set boundaries—and stay alert.

Masonic sheep
grazing
on hillsides

in Virginia, appearing there
like mystic
popcorn

in the long Jeffersonian
$2 bill–
tinted twilight

of early
July,
yippee-ki-yay.

Sheep
with human
eyes.

The nation’s crisis in maternity care and newborn health is concentrated in the countryside—and federal policy is about to make that crisis significantly worse. In the months and years ahead, unless something dramatic changes, giving birth in a rural county is going to become an even more dangerous prospect. Care will be in shorter supply, travel distances will stretch further, and high-risk situations will more likely result in mortality.

On nearly every metric, rural mothers already fare worse. Maternal mortality—death during pregnancy, childbirth, and the first six weeks after delivery—averaged 81 percent higher in rural areas than in urban ones from 2016 to 2019. During that same period, rural women had a roughly 14 percent higher risk than urban women of needing treatment in an intensive-care unit during or after delivery; they are almost twice as likely to require transfer during or after birth to another hospital because a needed treatment is not available where they are.

These figures reflect the dismal state of rural-health-care infrastructure, which is particularly acute in maternity care. Since 2005, 109 rural hospitals have closed outright. Of those that remain, many have been closing down their labor-and-delivery units. Most rural hospitals no longer offer labor-and-delivery services, and in the past five years, an average of more than two rural hospitals a month have closed these units. As of 2023, 60 percent of rural counties had no hospital-based obstetric care. With few options available, rural women are less likely than urban women to receive prenatal care; this in turn makes them and their babies more susceptible to preventable complications.

Several related factors have contributed to these closures. Labor-and-delivery units have high fixed costs (physician and nurse salaries, birthing beds, fetal warmers), making them a financial liability if they are not operating at or near capacity. As fertility has declined, more units have gone into the red because they have too many empty beds. But even a steady flow of patients is not always enough: A rural hospital’s labor-and-delivery unit can struggle economically despite full beds because pregnant rural women are less likely than pregnant urban women to be enrolled in the commercial insurance plans that have high reimbursement rates. Instead, rural women are more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid, which has lower reimbursement rates, or to have no insurance at all.

[Read: The largest undocumented disparity in maternal health]

Further, only 4 percent of the country’s ob-gyns practice in rural areas, which is where 10 percent of women ages 15 to 49 live. And that proportion is likely to fall even more because many new entrants to the field are not willing to do a residency or start a practice in states that restrict abortion, many of which are more rural.

Rural family doctors can and do still deliver babies in the absence of ob-gyns. But the proportion of generalist doctors willing and trained to do so has been declining for decades. Many family physicians I met while touring rural areas as part of a Brookings and American Enterprise Institute commission on rural life cited liability risks as the motivator of their retreat from maternity care. Adverse birth outcomes are among the most common claims against physicians in medical-malpractice lawsuits, and awarded judgments can be very high, which inflates the liability-insurance premiums that doctors must pay. In addition, in places with few ob-gyns, a generalist is more likely to have to handle high-risk cases without expert help.

As dire as this situation already is, public policy is about to make it worse. Prior to the second term of President Trump, rural areas were trying to make up for health-care-professional shortages through the H-1B visa program. The proportion of practicing physicians from other countries who are on an H-1B visa is almost twice as high in rural areas than in urban ones. Last September, Trump issued an executive order dramatically increasing the cost of H-1Bs to $100,000, which will surely have an effect on how many people can come to the United States with this status.

An even greater challenge will be the massive cuts to Medicaid within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, many of which Congress set to go into effect after this fall’s elections. Medicaid covers more than 40 percent of American births overall and an even higher proportion in rural areas. More generally, the program is crucial to the financial viability of many rural hospitals, such that even if the cuts didn’t touch pregnant women at all, they could still deprive women of care by producing more rural-hospital closures. As an inducement to get votes from conservative rural congressional members, the OBBBA included a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund, but this is substantially less money than the Medicaid cuts will total across rural America.

Proposing federal-policy solutions to this crisis may seem quixotic when Washington is so dysfunctional and polarized. But both parties have good reason to be responsive to rural voters. Partisan attachment in urban and suburban areas has been remarkably stable in recent decades, but rural areas have shifted sharply, meaning that Republicans want to hang on to their new advantage and Democrats want to swing things back. Beyond political self-interest, many policy makers genuinely care about maternal and newborn health even if they do so for markedly different reasons—a feminist commitment to women’s health for some, worries about declining fertility for others.

One simple step that the Trump administration could take tomorrow would be to drop its appeal of U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin’s recent ruling that the executive branch does not have the authority to jack up the price of H-1B visas. If that is a bridge too far, an alternative would be to exempt rural health professionals from the scope of the order. The stated purpose of the order—to stop immigrants from taking jobs from Americans—is clearly not a concern in rural counties that have no obstetric care at all.

[Read: The states where it’s riskier to have a baby]

Another worthy step would be to expand the availability of telehealth. Some rural states, such as North Dakota, have excellent broadband connectivity, but others, such as Alaska, do not and will need federal assistance to build it in general or for specialty purposes—for instance, a telehealth center for all patients in each county. Of course, many aspects of maternal care cannot be provided at a distance, but even so, having this option more widely available could be useful for fielding routine questions and identifying cases that require in-person care.

More crucially, the Rural Health Transformation Fund should be at least doubled to cushion the blow of Medicaid cuts. Although most Republicans would probably oppose the added spending, perhaps it could be coupled with something that most Democrats would likely oppose but that would also expand rural maternity care: capping liability awards in medical-malpractice cases.

But the most radical and useful policy would be to stop making the prenatal care and birth of Americans dependent on the whims of each state’s Medicaid policy and the national political currents of the day. Instead, the government should define getting a healthy start in life as the entitlement of every American and therefore something that should be federalized like Medicare, with services reimbursed at a rate that keeps labor-and-delivery units and prenatal-care programs viable wherever they are needed. The future of a country quite literally depends on healthy births.

Sign up for Work in Progress, a newsletter where Rogé Karma investigates the mysteries of a complicated economy.

When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, experts warned that oil prices could hit $150 or $200 a barrel within a few weeks. The great mystery of the Iran war is why that hasn’t happened—why, nearly five months later, oil prices have scarcely surpassed $100, even as countries around the world have been forced to dip into their oil reserves. Now an explanation seems to be emerging: China.

Before the war, China, by far the world’s largest oil importer, was buying more barrels than the entire European continent and almost twice as much as the second-largest importer, the United States. Then, weeks after the conflict broke out, the country abruptly slashed its oil purchases, eventually cutting them by half compared with prewar levels. That appears to be why global prices have risen so much less than experts predicted. The shift also poses mysteries of its own. No one outside China knows how exactly the country has managed to meet its energy needs while forgoing imports, nor why its leaders chose this course. And no one knows how long the situation can last.

The predictions of catastrophe for the world’s oil system were based on simple supply and demand. The Strait of Hormuz saw the passage of 20 million barrels of oil a day, a fifth of the world’s total supply. Countries found ways to make up for some of that loss, including by releasing barrels from strategic stockpiles, but not enough to avoid a price shock. If demand stayed constant, buyers would be forced to try to outbid one another to secure the scarce remaining supplies.

[Andrew Exum: The war is lost. Now fix what it broke.]

But demand didn’t stay constant. The amount of oil that China stopped buying, about 5 million barrels a day, represented about a quarter of what was lost when the strait closed and is equivalent to the entirety of imports to India, the world’s third-largest importer. This significant and unexpected drop in Chinese demand freed up those barrels to go elsewhere, preventing the kind of shortage that might have led to truly catastrophic prices. “China was definitely the most important factor in keeping prices down,” Rory Johnston, an oil-markets analyst who writes the widely cited newsletter Commodity Context, told me. “And the thing is that nobody—and I mean nobody—saw it coming.”

The most obvious way a country can reduce oil imports at this scale is by drastically lowering its energy consumption. There is no evidence that China has done so. Unlike during the coronavirus pandemic, when the country essentially shut down, most indicators of energy consumption, such as traffic congestion, have hardly budged. The reduction also can’t be explained by a shift to clean energy. China has been investing heavily in renewable energy and electric vehicles for decades, but its economy remains reliant on imported oil. Such a dramatic change would have required millions of Chinese consumers to suddenly switch to EVs virtually overnight. “It’s a genuine puzzle,” Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy who specializes in Chinese energy markets, told me. “We’re in one of those rare moments where even the experts are forced to rely on a whole lot of speculation.”

Could China be secretly getting extra oil from Russia? Since 2022, the Kremlin has been shipping huge amounts of oil to China using a “shadow fleet” of tankers that hide their point of origin to avoid Western sanctions. But it’s one thing to try to obscure where a given shipment of oil comes from; it’s another to hide the physical barrels that show up on Chinese shores, which are carried by giant tankers and unloaded at major ports. If Russia—or anyone else—were sending millions of extra barrels to China, the world would know about it.

A more realistic possibility is that China has been tapping into its immense oil reserves, which it has spent years accumulating in the case of a crisis. But the giant outdoor tanks where China keeps much of its known oil reserves have remained full since the war began. This fact has given rise to yet another theory: On top of its known reserves, perhaps China has been stashing oil, as well as refined diesel and gasoline, in secret facilities, which it is now using to keep its economy running. “I sometimes feel like I should put on a tinfoil hat when I start talking about this,” Johnston said. “We have almost no evidence of it. And yet, it’s really the only explanation that makes any sense.”

Even if the secret-reserve theory turns out to be true, that still leaves the question of why China decided to cut off imports so thoroughly. Several energy experts told me that when a nation taps into its reserves, it typically coordinates with other countries to make sure that no one is shouldering too much of the burden. Then, once the price of oil falls, it starts replenishing the depleted stockpiles. China has done the opposite. It unilaterally and without warning chose to reduce its imports far more than any other country, even after the price of oil fell below the point at which China would have historically started buying again.

[Rogé Karma: Oil prices might not go back to normal anytime soon]

This has led some experts to speculate that China was seeking to build soft power by saving the world economy or trying to gain leverage over the United States. Others have suggested that Beijing saw the Strait of Hormuz crisis as an opportunity to show the world that it could successfully withstand an oil shock. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports arrive through the Strait of Malacca, a narrow waterway that could be cut off in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. This has long been considered a potentially decisive advantage for Taiwan and its Western allies. Perhaps Beijing wants to subtly warn the rest of the world that it could not be brought to its knees by an energy blockade. But if any of those geopolitics-focused hypotheses were true, then China would presumably have taken credit for its actions. Instead, its leaders have been completely silent.

A final possibility is that China is propping up foreign economies to protect its manufacturing base. China’s economy relies on exporting huge amounts of cheap goods all over the world. If its biggest customers across Europe and Asia suddenly experienced a recession, the journalist Max Fisher recently argued, China could lose “half its export market and a bunch of its economy with it.” Providing an energy lifeline to the rest of the world might have been a necessary step to keep its own economy humming. This possibility, unlike the others, would explain China’s silence: Beijing likely wouldn’t want to loudly declare to the rest of the world that it has a vested economic interest in helping to cushion future oil shocks.

Whatever China’s exact motivations, the country has demonstrated yet another source of power it can wield on the global stage. As long as the Iran war continues, China’s leverage over oil prices gives it the ability to inflict immense pain on American consumers, and really the entire world, at a moment’s notice. Even if China doesn’t choose to do so, the fact that it can might be enough to give the country even more sway over international affairs. “For the last 50-plus years, whenever there was an oil shock, the first thing the U.S. president did was call Riyadh to try to persuade the Saudis to help out,” Jason Bordoff, the founding director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. “Maybe the place everyone needs to call now is Beijing. That’s a very powerful position to be in.”

When I saw that the commentator Max Blumenthal was going to speak in Washington, D.C., about his recent trip to Iran, I couldn’t stay away. I have long been fascinated with Americans—especially privileged, well-connected Americans—who, out of alienation from their own country, show an admiration for distant authoritarian lands.

Blumenthal, the son of the Clinton-family adviser and former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, was one of some 400 pro-regime influencers invited by the Iranian government to cover the funeral earlier this month of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli air strike on February 28. Speaking last week at the flagship location of the progressive bookstore and restaurant chain Busboys and Poets, Blumenthal portrayed the man who’d overseen the mass slaughter of young Iranian protesters in January as “a father, a guide, a religious teacher” and presented the regime that he’d led as not only legitimate but also an inspiration to the world. Khamenei’s assassination, he told the standing-room-only crowd, ought to have generated far more outrage than it did. “Imagine,” he said, “if a rogue foreign state went and assassinated the pope, how so many Catholics would feel.” The analogy feels slightly off: Pontiffs aren’t typically known for brandishing rifles at Mass or calling for the death of entire countries.

[Graeme Wood: The U.S. is subtly shifting its Iran strategy]

Blumenthal has become part of an ignominious tradition. In the early 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty wrote stories denying the famine that Joseph Stalin’s forced-collectivization policies were causing in Ukraine and mocked journalists who reported the truth. “Russians Hungry, but Not Starving,” read the headline of one Duranty dispatch, which repeated an insouciant justification of revolutionary violence: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

Blumenthal doesn’t have the prestige of the newspaper of record behind him. But illustrious affiliations are no longer necessary to gain an audience. On X, Blumenthal has nearly 860,000 followers. He appears regularly on Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Iranian, and Venezuelan state-funded media. He founded a website, The Grayzone, whose roster of contributors includes alumni of Kremlin-backed media outlets. (Blumenthal did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

On multiple platforms, Blumenthal has vouched for the world’s worst mass murderers. At Russia’s invitation, Blumenthal addressed the United Nations Security Council, where he denounced Ukraine and described Western support for it as an “international Ponzi scheme.” He denied that deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and has implied that Syrian rebels did. He denied Hamas’s systemic sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7. “A Chinese state media darling,” according to Axios, Blumenthal has downplayed evidence that the Chinese government is repressing its Uyghur Muslim minority.

Outside Busboys and Poets before Blumenthal’s talk, two young Iranian women held a banner commemorating the demonstrators who had been killed by forces of the Islamic Republic during two days of protests in January. On his way into the store, Blumenthal paused to berate them. “Zionist cuck,” “Sellouts,” and “Persian gusanas,” he shouted at them. (Gusanas is the feminine form of the Spanish word for “worms”—what Fidel Castro called Cubans who fled his dictatorship.)

When Blumenthal entered the venue, he received rapturous applause. Sitting on a stage beneath portraits of the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., he began with a breakdown of “Operation Epstein Fury,” a nod to the claim that President Trump initiated the war against Iran to distract the American people from his connection to the deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But the actual instigator of the conflict, Blumenthal explained, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, America’s “real president,” who’d visited the White House Situation Room in February and taken “the unprecedented step of sitting at the head of the table, moving Donald Trump to the side.” (The most detailed account of the meeting, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, placed Netanyahu on a side of the table, opposite Trump.) It was at this meeting, according to Blumenthal, that Israel (“the epicenter of evil in the world”) ordered the United States (“the most perfidious force on the planet”) to attack Iran.

Blumenthal presents himself as a courageous truth teller whose work is too daring for the corporate media. But mainstream outlets abound with criticism of every aspect of the war, including Israel’s role in it. Indeed, outside the precincts of Trump-friendly media, the daily coverage of the conflict has been almost uniformly negative. But there’s a market for a darker and more insidious explanation as to how the world works. Blumenthal delivered just that—a conspiratorial account of Jewish power, American malignity, and the Islamic Republic’s righteousness. When he mentioned mourners at Khamenei’s funeral holding signs declaring KILL TRUMP, a smattering of applause broke out.

Blumenthal then returned to the country that Iranian leaders call “the Little Satan.” “Do we actually believe that the U.S. would be attacking Iran right now if Israel did not have full control over the Trump administration?” Blumenthal asked. He insinuated that Miriam Adelson, a Jewish Republican donor, had bribed the president to attack Iran, and he accused the Jewish state of trying to “weaponize the assassination attempts to manipulate Trump.” Israel would be “indirectly responsible” for an Iranian attempt on Trump’s life, which would be “blowback for the special relationship with Israel.” In other words, anything that happened to the president would be Israel’s fault.

Assessing the real motives and intentions of the regime in Tehran is difficult. Because Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that routinely arrests and in some cases executes journalists, Western reporters hoping to cover the country must either work clandestinely or submit to government supervision. Blumenthal sneered at his mainstream-media colleagues who disclosed in their stories that they were reporting from Iran with the Iranian government’s permission. “So they’re basically trying to say Iran is this authoritarian country that controls their coverage,” he argued. Blumenthal also defended the regime’s monitoring of foreign journalists due to “the long history of U.S. surveillance and spying and sabotaging.” Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was convicted on phony espionage charges and jailed for 544 days, might beg to differ with Blumenthal’s analysis.

In defending the Islamic Republic, Blumenthal made one false or misleading assertion after another. He parroted the regime’s claim that 35 million people had participated in Khamenei’s funeral, “possibly the largest gathering in human history.” He said that women make up a greater percentage of the Iranian Parliament than the U.S. Congress. (In reality, only 5 percent of members of the Majlis are women, compared with more than a quarter of Congress.) He described Israel’s apparently unintentional bombing of a Tehran synagogue as a deliberate act; the presence of a captive Jewish community in Iran “discredits Zionism,” by Blumenthal’s account. The exile-staffed news network Iran International, he said without evidence, is “run by Israeli intelligence,” and “there is so much U.S. air power concentrated in Israel right now that Israel will not allow U.S. planes to be at Ben Gurion International.” In reality, the Tel Aviv airport has bent over backwards to accommodate the U.S. Air Force, at one point reducing its civilian flight capacity to about a third of normal.

Blumenthal was particularly keen to minimize the Iranian regime’s brutality toward its own people. The regime maintains that slightly more than 3,000 people were killed during January’s anti-government protests, which Blumenthal characterized as “riots.” Reporting by human-rights groups and other journalists tells a different story. According to Time, so many people were killed during the two days of protest that “the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead” was “overwhelmed.” Two senior health-ministry officials, speaking anonymously, told the magazine that at least 30,000 dead (and possibly many more) was a likelier figure, and one that was corroborated by a group of first responders who collected data surreptitiously. Blumenthal insisted that a death toll this high isn’t possible. Regime opponents’ estimates of 40,000 or more dead, he said, are “fake numbers.”

Blumenthal was most contemptuous toward Iranians who do not share his rosy view of the late ayatollah and the brutal theocracy that he led for nearly four decades. He described Masih Alinejad, the Iranian exile whom the regime brazenly tried to murder in Brooklyn and who wears a flower in her hair in protest of the forced hijab, as “basically a CIA asset” and “the lady with the hair.” Her flower, he said, “should be drenched in blood.” Blumenthal showed no patience for Iranians he met who blame their government’s economic mismanagement, and not America, for their troubles. “I mean, as ignorant as you think Americans are about sanctions, there are many Iranians who don’t really see the role of sanctions in their economic misery,” he complained.

Presidents of both parties have provided critics of American foreign policy with endless grounds for legitimate criticism. But the work of Blumenthal and others like him reveals a reflexive paranoia, if not hatred, of the United States and its allies, to the point where criticism is insufficient. Far too often, they veer into downplaying or even endorsing the depravities of illiberal governments and movements simply because they adopt an “anti-imperialist” posture.

Sadly, there is a large and growing audience for this reactionary analysis. “One of the reasons why I opened Busboys and Poets is to educate people,” the chain’s owner, Andy Shallal, said before Blumenthal took the stage. Shallal extolled the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, international law, and international norms. These are fine principles, the bedrock of any decent society. What’s jarring is to hear them invoked on behalf of someone doing public relations for a regime that flouts every one of them.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

President Trump has mused about being the most powerful man in history. He has started wars and remade his nation’s economic and strategic relationships with the world. He has demanded, and largely received, total obedience from his party. He has dominated the national discourse like no president has before, and he’s tried to recast his nation’s capital—and even its history—to his liking. He’s everywhere. He has said he believes that there are “no limits” to his power.

But if that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t now. Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.

Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.

Once the midterms are over, Trump could face his worst fear: irrelevance. He will be a lame duck, down to his final two years in office, and at some point will no longer be the nation’s top topic of conversation. As focus shifts to the presidential primaries, Trump risks disappearing from the headlines. Even some of his closest allies don’t know how he’ll react.

Trump gathered a team of senior advisers at the White House on Friday to walk through the latest options in the war that he’d already declared won. The meeting came after nearly two weeks of the United States bombing Iran, with Tehran striking back against allies in the region, including a hit on a military base in Jordan that killed three American service members. Trump had wanted to avoid resuming hostilities after signing a cease-fire agreement last month at Versailles, of all places. But negotiations for a permanent peace have stalled, and Iran has continued to menace the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to charge tolls for ships using the vital waterway, a nonstarter for American allies in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the new wave of bombings, green-lit by Trump, has not produced meaningful change along the strait. The meeting was set to discuss the possibility of returning to an all-out war.

[Read: War by any other name]

Trump has threatened escalations many times before, only for Iran to call his bluff. This time, a senior White House official familiar with the discussions told me, the frustrated president seemed more inclined to order a heavier assault—but he and his advisers once again opted against it. There were several reasons to discard the idea, at least for now, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. That included the risk of dangerously depleting the number of defensive interceptor missiles available to the military’s Central Command, which is responsible for operations in the Middle East. Advisers also expressed worry about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the anger of key Gulf allies targeted by Iran’s counterattack, and the potential for an energy or a refugee crisis. Trump repeatedly told advisers that he worried that an escalation could spark a global economic conflagration and “turn me into Hoover,” the senior official told me.

A number of influential Republicans and conservatives have begun to urge Trump to abruptly declare some sort of win and leave the Iran mess behind. They argue that the short-term benefit of doing so would be to lower prices, push Iran out of the headlines, and potentially salvage Republicans’ midterm chances this fall. But the geostrategic consequences would be significant; Tehran would possess an economic weapon—control of the strait—that it could wield at any time to inflict global economic pain. And the Iranian regime could strike with impunity at its neighbors, including Israel.

Trump’s campaign swing through Michigan yesterday was a rarity in his second term. But his refrain there was not: He made unfounded claims about election fraud and, this time, appeared alongside a GOP congressman running for governor who falsely said that Trump had won the state three times. (Nope, only twice.) The president exaggerated the nation’s manufacturing rebound under his watch and, once more, mocked the affordability crisis that polls suggest is top of mind for many voters. His recent moves seem designed to dissuade or prevent voters from casting their ballot, not to inspire them. He has spent weeks talking about election security, including in a prime-time White House address, prompting Democrats to warn that Trump is trying to set up a pretext for challenging this fall’s results. His administration has appealed to the Supreme Court to curb mail-in voting, and Trump has relentlessly pushed for voter restrictions via the SAVE Act.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has refused to do away with the filibuster, a move that would allow the GOP to push the SAVE Act through. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said last week that the president’s “patience is running out” with Thune, and a senior adviser told me that Trump has privately derided the majority leader as “one of my biggest headaches.” (Trump downplayed the friction yesterday, telling reporters on Air Force One that his relationship with Thune was “fine” while also demanding that the legislation pass.)

Just over a year ago, the GOP marched in lockstep to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act tax legislation. Now Trump’s wish list has stalled. Some Republicans have sought permission to distance themselves from the unpopular president, and even loyalists such as House Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that, in terms of the war, it was time to “wrap it up.” By no means are Republicans in revolt. But Trump’s grip on the party has loosened, just a little.

The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson reiterated to me in a statement that the SAVE Act “has always been a top priority for President Trump and it remains one,” adding that he “will not stop fighting until it is passed.”

Trump, a man who has spent his life in pursuit of attention, is also beginning to contemplate the limits of his relevancy. The former celebrity developer and reality-TV star has famously declared that he’d rather receive bad publicity than no publicity. At times, he even faked being his own publicist to plant some news. One of his superpowers is his ability to command attention, to change the news cycle or move markets with a stray comment or tweet. His ubiquity, some of his advisers believe, is a strength—because Trump is everywhere all the time, he’s hard to pin down, and controversies slide away. With loud volume and relentless repetition, he can shape the national conversation.

[Read: A different kind of fading president]

But even those in Trump’s inner circle aren’t sure what to expect if people start talking about him less. The political calendar is relentless: Once the midterms clear, Washington will turn its focus to the 2028 presidential campaign. With no incumbent in the race and no clear front-runner in either party, it will be as wide-open as any race in decades. Trump may no longer be among each day’s top stories—arguably for the first time since he came down the Trump Tower escalator more than a decade ago. It’s not as if he will suddenly vanish; he’ll aim to play GOP kingmaker, and he’ll still be commander in chief. But he’ll be staring at life as a private citizen again, one whose businesses and family could face questions from a future Democratic president’s Department of Justice. His widely panned speech at last week’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner seemed to offer a preview of his future: His grievances were met mostly with silence. Some of the president’s allies have begun to privately wonder how he might handle a new, reduced status. No one suspects that he’ll take it well.

Lindsey Graham always had a deep appreciation for earpieces, motorcades, and heavily secured environments. He recognized heady Washington status symbols when he saw them—including posthumous ones, such as big memorial services held in big, important rooms containing big, important entourages.

These were Graham’s kind of sanctums. And today was his kind of send-off.

The South Carolina Republican, who died earlier this month at 71, was celebrated in back-to-back departure rites—a morning ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, followed by a funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. Both gatherings were invitation-only, and heavily guarded. Graham would have liked that too; it underscored the potent lineup of dignitaries who’d come to pay respects to a senator who craved few things more than being part of top-level delegations, high-wire negotiations, and inner-circle golf foursomes. Power mourners included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vice President Vance, a good portion of the Trump Cabinet, and a bipartisan assemblage of the U.S. Senate.

President Trump, whom Graham once despised—until Trump was elected and Graham managed to contort himself into an Oval Office confidant—served as the senator’s marquee eulogist. “A true American original,” Trump called Graham, which is one of those catchall descriptors for odd-duck characters who defy easy classification. Trump acknowledged that he and Graham “did not exactly get off to the best of starts.” Eventually, though, they would forge an important, if volatile, partnership. The president recounted an especially rough patch during the 2016 presidential campaign when Graham called Trump a “jackass” and Trump responded by sharing Graham’s private cellphone number at a rally in South Carolina.

[Anne Applebaum: The quintessential politician of this era]

For old times’ sake, Trump recited the number in his speech today: “202-228-0292, if anybody wants to give it a shot.” He added that Graham had the last laugh, “because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends, and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.”

Trump’s line drew laughs, but it also contained the key to Graham’s political durability: his ability to disarm opponents and to be dexterous in his alliances. “He understood that if people like you, then they’re more likely to work with you,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told me shortly after the Rotunda service had broken up. “He could endear himself to you,” Tillis said of Graham. “That’s who he was. But it was also smart politics.”

Graham could sometimes come off as a disheveled mess of a man. “A small earthquake,” as his Senate colleague John Kennedy of Louisiana put it to me. He could be persistent, exhausting, and unrelenting. And he was not always in perfect harmony with Trump.

[Mark Leibovich: What Lindsey Graham wanted]

Graham was a devoted advocate of Ukraine, and a close ally of Zelensky’s. “He never saw a war that he didn’t like,” Trump said in his eulogy. He seemed to mean this as a slight exaggeration. Or maybe not. But Graham learned to modulate his hawkishness toward Russia for the sake of keeping peace with Trump—and also keeping his audience with him.

In this way, Graham made himself an essential player in the life of Trump-era Washington. It took some doing. And no doubt compromise, frustration, and countless blows to his dignity. But Graham succeeded in making himself a center of influence and an important “voice in the room.”

“I have never been called this much by a president in my life,” Graham told me late in Trump’s first term. He found this exhilarating and was always gravely serious about his role.

Trump was followed to the podium by none other than Sean Hannity of Fox News. This felt quite fitting, as Graham had been a regular guest on Hannity’s nightly show, just as Trump was a regular viewer.

Graham “probably has a heavenly version of Mar-a-Lago,” Hannity said. “It may even be a little bigger.” He envisioned a massive ballroom and an arch somewhere on the property: a big, important room for Lindsey Graham, for all eternity.

Rarely, as a romance reporter, am I confronted with breaking news. When I am, it can come in the form of a TikTok video. And in some cases, it’s a video of two people making out.

This should never have been news in the first place. But on Thursday, a TikToker posted a video of a pair kissing on a bench in New York City’s Central Park. “Get a room,” he tells them as he approaches, clearly filming. “There’s kids around.” By today, the clip had received 3.9 million views. Commenters had identified the kissers, noting with glee that one of them appears to be married to someone else. Thousands flooded in to offer takes. (“Nice of you to teach them a lesson!”) One person posted a close-up picture of the woman’s face, making fun of her appearance. Several took it upon themselves to ridicule the man’s socks. Soon, the New York Post had published an article identifying the two as lawyers involved in defending OpenAI in a lawsuit (as if that gives their makeout public-interest relevance) and referring to the incident as “the kissyface.” The Daily Mail shared that the woman “appears to have called in the cavalry—her parents Tracy and Matt have flown in from California to New York.” I’d call mine too.

The whole saga unfolded almost exactly a year after two co-workers—a company’s CEO and its head of human resources—went viral for embracing at a Coldplay concert, a jumbotron moment that spread around the internet for months. People accused them of cheating on their partners. One person in the pair, Kristin Cabot, told The New York Times in December that she’d received 500 or 600 calls a day since the video blew up, and a total of about 60 death threats. She’d been labeled a slut and a home-wrecker and had her looks picked apart. Local police had to start surveilling her house. She resigned from her job. Her children became afraid to go out in public.

Public shaming of this sort is terrible for the people filmed. But these videos don’t affect only their subjects; they’re corrosive to the whole culture. Even if the chances are slim that you’d show up in a viral video, the possibility can be chilling. And the last thing Americans need right now is another reason not to make out.

[Read: Too scared for sex]

Already, the country is in a season of unsexiness. Young adults in particular are having less sex and partnering up less. A large share of single people say they aren’t interested in dating at all. Perhaps this is partly because these activities are, if you ask me, messy and a little embarrassing. Flirting and dating open the door to rejection. Kissing and sex are sometimes awkward and—I mean this in the best way—pretty much always weird. Falling in love—well, that’s actually just humiliating. Romance, in all of its forms, is like learning a language: You can’t move forward without putting yourself out there, flailing around, and looking stupid.

The prospect of looking stupid is even scarier when your mistakes—or, let’s say, less-chic moments—can be permanently documented and distributed on a mass scale. Members of Gen Z, a cohort raised on social media, might feel especially paralyzed by this. When their parents were getting drunk and French kissing at parties, talking too loudly on a street corner or failing to call someone’s landline when they said they would, they did not have to worry about being filmed or having their texts screenshotted or becoming the next West Elm Caleb.

Now, in a time of life meant for sloppiness and lessons learned, many young people seem unwilling to be imperfect. In one Yahoo/YouGov poll, published earlier this year, a large share of Zoomer respondents said that the fear of being “cringe” held them back from opening up emotionally, pursuing hobbies, seizing professional opportunities, and expressing themselves freely online. A survey from the dating app Hinge found that nearly 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said their fear of rejection had stopped them from pursuing a relationship, and a similar share reported that they’d declined to tell someone how they felt because doing so might be a turnoff.

This is what happens when you live in a panopticon. No one even has to have a camera out for people to feel, subconsciously, like they must be on good behavior—a tiny crisis-PR professional fast-walking around in their mind.

[Read: The reality show that captures Gen Z dating]

Of course, accountability is good. The public-shaming impulse has been, at times, a reaction to years of bad behavior—particularly among men accustomed to getting away with a lot and facing very few repercussions. On platforms including “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups and the Tea app, some women have tried to create virtual whisper networks, naming offenders so that other people don’t get hurt. But those efforts, and social-media callouts in general, can seem like a giant club hammering a glass nail. In the case of public makeouts, one also has to ask: Who is actually harmed?

The online vigilantes don’t really know what’s happening in the Central Park man’s marriage, and it’s not their business. (Neither person in the video seems to have spoken with the press.) Cabot, of the Coldplay episode, told the Times that she and her husband had already been divorcing at the time of the concert, and that her boss had been going through the same process. “I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” Cabot said. “I want my kids to know that you can make mistakes, and you can really screw up. But you don’t have to be threatened to be killed for them.”

I’d venture to say that more people could stand to have a couple of High Noons and dance—and act, if not inappropriately, a little chaotically. In fact, I’m starting to appreciate the public display of affection as a means of resistance against the surveillance mindset. Why not kiss in front of strangers? In an erotic environment this frigid, plenty of people could stand to be reminded of what unabashed yearning looks like: live and spontaneous, not curated for the screen.

[Read: Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage]

The psychological research, insofar as it exists, smiles upon PDA. A doctoral dissertation completed last year, for instance, found that PDA was positively associated with relationship satisfaction and constructive communication. A 2022 study found that heightened “PDA-related vigilance” was linked to worse psychological well-being. To be fair, affectionate behaviors in public and private tend to be healthy for couples. But there’s something extra special, I think, about the willingness to act on a surge of romantic fondness as if no one is watching—in a world where anyone could be. It shows that you’re able to step away from guardedness, or perhaps that you’re so taken with someone that you don’t even care how you look. It’s a feat of un-self-consciousness in service of lust or love.

One might call it cringey—but that’s precisely why it’s great. I used to feel mild discomfort watching people I didn’t know (or, worse, ones I did) in an act of intimacy. I’d lightly judge and look away. Next time, instead, I’ll tip my hat. Thank you, I’ll say silently. That’s the shameless energy this nation needs.

This article originally referred to “West End Caleb.” In fact, the figure is “West Elm Caleb.”

American manhood is a fragile and precarious thing, shattered by the slightest deviation from ever-shifting norms—eating the wrong taco, tasting tofu, not eating meat, or maybe eating too much meat. Or at least, that is what right-wing commentators have suggested by their attacks on the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, James Talarico.

Since the 37-year-old state senator clinched the nomination, right-wing politicians and media figures have been running a bizarre smear campaign attacking Talarico for not being manly enough. President Donald Trump called Talarico a “vegan,” and Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has twice declared that Talarico is “transgender.” Right-wing media figures have referred to him as “Tofu Talarico” and suggested that he is “against meat.” That prompted the Talarico campaign to put out photos of the candidate eating meat, leading the Fox News host Jesse Watters to sneer that Talarico was “getting his hands on whatever meat he can.” Watters is 48 years old.

Anyway, you get it. Talarico is gay or something, and for the GOP, there’s definitely something wrong with that. Its own candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is mired in allegations of corruption and infidelity, and is committed to some policies so extreme that, like Trump himself, they are unpopular even in deep-red Texas. Talarico’s choirboy looks and religiously inflected liberalism provide a stark contrast to Paxton’s hypocritical self-righteousness, and so Republicans are desperately trying to make those qualities seem like weaknesses.

George W. Bush’s advisers snickered that John Kerry looked “French.” Trump, of course, is famous for put-downs whose cruelty is part of their appeal. But there’s something new about the attacks on Talarico. Calling a man “French” or “vegan” retains a mote of the old deniability. Calling Talarico “transgender” does not. The rhetoric resembles nothing more than the frothing tone of masculinity influencers in the online manosphere, with its strict but arbitrary standards for what makes a man a man. Although Republicans have devoted themselves to this type of marketing, parts of the Democratic coalition have an appetite for it as well—they’ve already face-Platnered at least once as a result.

[Listen: When both parties try to out-macho each other]

The Trump administration and the conservative movement seem to have taken this advertising strategy and transformed it into an ideology. The result is a secretary of health and human services who posts videos of himself working out in jeans and then presides over outbreaks of measles and explosive diarrhea; a director of Medicare and Medicaid who takes a break from stripping health care away from children to demonstrate how not to do a squat; and a defense secretary who interrupts his day job of starting and losing pointless, illegal wars in the Middle East to announce that he will force testosterone tests on service members. And Americans are supposed to be impressed by these overgrown children showing off their masculine prowess while failing at their basic adult responsibilities.

Any man who goes online today is apt to come across content telling him that he will never find a partner who will earn him the respect of other men if he lacks money and connections, if he is not bodybuilder-fit with a full head of hair, if he is not more than six feet tall. Online influencers who push this narrative have products to sell. They want you to buy their workout apps, their advice sessions, their investment plans. That’s just how a lot of advertising works: It makes you insecure so you’ll pay for a product in hopes of temporarily silencing your gnawing sense of inadequacy.

Ad campaigns have long preyed in this way on female insecurities, telling women how they are supposed to look and act. In her 1991 book, Backlash, the feminist writer Susan Faludi observed that the rise of women in the workplace was a boon for the beauty industry. Women were told they needed to buy more makeup because they’d been masculinized by having a job: “Professional progress had downgraded their looks; equality had created worry lines and cellulite,” Faludi wrote.

That marketing, though, was designed to turn women against themselves; the manosphere now tells men to lash out at others instead. It encourages white men in particular, but not exclusively, to blame their problems on a society that has allowed their lessers to compete with them for employment, power, and prestige by removing the barriers that once kept them out. The heroin-chic era was destructive for women, but it didn’t result in popular media figures advocating for men to be stripped of the right to vote. Notably, tradwife content, the ideological companion to manosphere content, is mostly about how wonderful it would be to be a kind of slave.

Social scientists have found that when men think their masculinity is being questioned, they may dismiss that challenge as irrelevant, they may quietly feel bad or insecure, or they may overcompensate by trying to behave in a more stereotypically masculine fashion. And that last reaction is where the dollars are. Be a man and buy a gun. Get the manly cereal for men. Wipe your butt with the wet wipes for men. Get the manly-smelling deodorant. Eat the manly steak. It’s no coincidence that gambling apps and crypto companies have spent so much money on ads that make giving them your money seem adventurous.

Just as the manosphere and its galaxy of hucksters want you to fork over your cash so you can feel better about yourself as a man, Republicans want to make you feel insecure about your masculinity so that you vote Republican. Masculinity, in this sense, is a lifestyle product: one that comes with a set of political beliefs predicated on the subjugation of women, minority groups, and anyone else who men are told are their inferiors.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with masculinity itself. Boys and young men don’t seek out the manosphere “because they inherently hate women or think they are inferior,” the feminist writer Jessica Valenti has written. Rather, they “are desperate for community and answers in a confusing time of their lives.” When people are constantly told that the only way to be a worthwhile human being is to conform to gender norms, they will naturally strive to meet those expectations, even if it means being harsh to themselves or others. But the strength of those emotions is precisely what makes them so exploitable.

Adam Stanaland, a psychology professor at the University of Richmond, told me that what’s concerning is when insecure men feel pressured to validate their manhood by harming others. Stanaland co-authored a study on “fragile” masculinity that notes that such men may compensate by endorsing “political bigotry, homophobia, sexual violence, and anti-environmentalism,” and that they are “more likely to endorse policies and politicians that disproportionately harm marginalized groups.”

Stanaland speculated that for “white men especially, their masculinity is framed by this idea they must be at the top of not only the gender hierarchy, but also other social hierarchies, and so any kinds of threats to that positioning of them at the hierarchy could be responded to with these compensatory behaviors.” Sexist ideology nevertheless has a broader appeal. The former congressman Matt Gaetz, whose nomination for attorney general was derailed by allegations that he’d had sex with a minor (allegations that he denied), predicted before the 2024 election that “for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.”

Ironically, some of the most prominent masculinity influencers are not themselves white. Andrew and Tristan Tate, who were recently arrested on rape and sex-trafficking charges after being spared from legal consequences for years thanks to interventions by the Trump administration, are biracial. This has not stopped the brothers from repeating racist far-right arguments that play well online, such as Andrew implying that Jews are “subverting western populations into mass genetic suicide.” This idea, known today as the “Great Replacement” theory, is a continuation of old-timey racist fears of “race mixing” (a common manosphere preoccupation)—and it’s a little weird to hear coming from a biracial man. One part of selling a product is knowing your customer base, I suppose.

More than a decade ago, when I was first reporting on the manosphere, it was populated largely by middle-aged men, many of them divorcés, who retained a superficial concern for men’s welfare. They at least pretended that it was a normal political movement focused on issues such as suicide, rules disfavoring dads in custody battles, and male victims of domestic violence. They may have dreamed of forcing women back into traditional subservience—taking away female suffrage, repealing antidiscrimination laws, and making it harder for women to divorce—but mostly they avoided saying so out loud.

Over the past 10 years, the misogyny of the manosphere has become more open and strident, but the big innovation seems to have been combining that conspiratorial misogyny with earnest self-help advice. Heartbreak and rejection leave people emotionally vulnerable, and the manosphere pitch often comes paired with benign advice about standing up for yourself, being mentally tough, or becoming physically active. But getting yourself together with the expectation that soon everyone you meet will be forced to respect you inevitably leads to disappointment.

When that disappointment sets in, the manosphere has an explanation: Can’t find a girlfriend? It’s because women who make their own living can no longer be forced into marrying guys they don’t like. Can’t find a job? It’s because undeserving women and minorities are being picked instead of you, even though you’re better. Feel bad about yourself? It’s because our feminized society deprived you of a life of meaningful toil, military adventure, and elevated social status. It is a bleak view of the world, a kind of male doomerism in which a meaningful life can be found only in the domination and exploitation of others.

The fact that none of that advice could ever help someone find real intimacy or success isn’t a problem for the manosphere hucksters, because those achievements would be bad for the business model. They prefer their followers to be tied only to them, forking over cash to be told they’re victims of one conspiracy after another. They’ll just tell you that women can’t be trusted because they are mere baubles to impress other men with, and other men cannot be trusted because they are the competition.

There probably shouldn’t be a lot of overlap between religious-right leaders, government officials, and someone like Andrew Tate, who proudly describes himself as a “pimp.” Yet Tate’s belief that “society functions better as a patriarchy” is hard to distinguish from the views of Doug Wilson, the pastor invited by Hegseth to preach at the Pentagon, who thinks that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Pious or secular, these beliefs come down to the same idea: Men are people, and women are things.

As my colleague Helen Lewis has reported, “Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements.” She adds: “You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.”

You can win a lot of votes that way, too.

[Russell Berman: The return of the Democratic manly man]

The logic of this male-doomer industry is to remove all unfair competition—from women, from minorities, from immigrants—by either disenfranchising or dispossessing them, and in this way reassert the dominance to which white American men are entitled. And even if you’re not white, wouldn’t it feel good to put all those women who don’t like you in their place?

One prominent explanation for the resurgence of reactionary ideas about gender is that it’s a consequence of structural changes in the economy: Manly jobs such as manufacturing and construction have been lost, while feminine-coded service jobs such as caregiving have surged.

This is an accurate description of what’s happened in the economy, but it’s not a sufficient explanation for the rise of extreme misogyny. For one thing, these economic changes are decades old. Faludi followed up Backlash with Stiffed, which argued that working-class American men were being deprived of work they could be proud of while still being expected to live up to a traditional idea of men as providers. Stiffed was published more than a quarter century ago.

The theory also doesn’t necessarily line up with who is most likely to buy into what the manosphere is selling. “There’s this myth out there that the young men who are embracing this ideology and moving to the right in a coherent and virulent way are people being left behind by the economy,” John Ray, who does polling for the Young Men Research Project, told me. “Actually, a lot of the young men who have these more extreme right-wing views are more economically well-off than others in the sample.” The project’s polling, he said, has found that “young men who were more economically precarious, broadly speaking, were less ideological—one way or the other. It was actually young men that said that they were less worried about their finances who are more likely to have some of those right-wing views.”

The modern data economy must play a bigger role. People spend more time than ever on their phones. Virtually everything you see while you are scrolling a social-media site is an advertisement—for a product, a lifestyle, or an individual feed. Social-media companies want you to be glued to your phone for as long as possible so they can sell you things or produce data they can sell to others. It doesn’t matter if the things you’re watching or reading are true or false, right or wrong.

Extremism draws attention, so it’s not surprising that we’re seeing more extreme ideas about what it means to be a man. Yet when conservatives complain about diverse casting in movies, or romanticize the era of colonialism, or insist that women should be disenfranchised, this is more than mere trolling for eyeballs. They are telling you their policy plan. And they are using the psychological lever of male insecurity to win political support for that program.

What kind of program has this internet-brain-rotted masculinity brought us? A public-health official who neglects fatal outbreaks of preventable diseases because he seems to believe that only the strong should survive. A Department of Defense, renamed the Department of War, that launches a needless war of choice in the Middle East. A government that props up the fossil-fuel industry (manly) while deliberately suppressing green alternatives (girly), leading to a catastrophic rise in energy prices when that war doesn’t go as planned. A president who imposed tariffs to bring back “manly jobs,” but only drove up inflation instead.

It’s hard to see how any of this has made men’s lives better. But maybe making other people’s lives worse is enough.

Photographs and Videos by Ana Hop

“¡Mire! ” My guide, Silvestre, pointed upward, as if I wasn’t already walking with my neck craned as far back as it could go. The sky was alive with millions of fluttering shapes, congregating into clouds at random, occasionally turning into ribbons that wound through the trees. So many butterfly wings beat the air that their vibrations were audible, like a waterfall rushing in the distance. I understood for the first time the immensity of the event I’d come to see.

I was in the center of El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, part of Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Unaccustomed to the thin air at nearly 11,000 feet above sea level, I’d ridden Pelucha, a rust-colored mare, to the heights of the reserve. About halfway up, the orange-and-black butterflies had begun appearing in groups, alighting on flowers or gathering to sip water from puddles. Coupled pairs mated everywhere, and their constant entanglements on the path made it difficult to avoid stepping on them; Pelucha happily crunched more than a few underfoot. I dismounted at the top of the trail and followed Silvestre as he ducked under a rope that kept tourists from accessing the most sensitive areas of the reserve.

It was February, and the monarchs—northerners that had wintered in Mexico—were preparing for their final journey, which doubled as the first leg of a multigenerational relay race north. Their delicateness belies a life cycle that more resembles long-haul trucking than anything you might read in a children’s book. Each of the butterflies above me had already braved many grueling trials. In the following week or so, the majority would be on their way.

Monarch migration is a wonder of the natural world, one of the longest annual cycles of movement undertaken by any creature on Earth, spanning thousands of miles. Over the past half century, the lands that the monarchs traverse have become more hostile to them, a result of development and herbicides, global warming and organized crime, all of which have put the future of that migration in doubt. And yet, the story I’d come to write—my reason for interloping in this and other sanctuaries—was not just a narrative of beauty being diminished by human trampling and greed. Recently, there’s been good news: Population estimates, after a long march downward, have been increasing for the past two years. This stabilization appears to be connected at least in part to efforts to save butterfly habitats in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Those developments are reason to hope that there may still be a pathway left for saving the monarchs and their migration.

The monarch persists partly because of the dogged work from its human partners; because of people who have given their life—in every sense of the phrase—to preserve nature. But mostly, the monarch persists because life’s job is to live; because within those thimble-size bodies hides a dynamo of survival that puts our most incredible machines to shame. The more we learn about the butterflies, the more we understand how extraordinary it is that they have so far beaten the odds we have stacked against them, and how forbidding those odds remain.

We’ve known just how epic the monarch’s migration is for only about half a century. In the 1970s, using paper tags placed on butterflies’ wings, the Canadian butterfly researchers Fred and Norah Urquhart completed a lifelong mission to uncover the mystery of where all the monarchs born in Ontario went in the fall. To their surprise, the sojourners they followed made it all the way down the length of the U.S., and on to the mountain forests of Michoacán, Mexico. There they roosted, packed tightly into just a handful of colonies that collectively cover no more than a few city blocks, yet hold nearly all of the continent’s monarchs in winter. The Urquharts first visited these colonies in 1976, and National Geographic published a cover story on their breakthrough.

For centuries, Indigenous people in Mexico’s highlands have witnessed the monarchs’ annual return during harvest season, though for most of that time they didn’t know where they came from. The butterflies have been making this migration for as long as 20 millennia, once finding paths to and from the fields gouged out by glaciers retreating with the spring during the last Ice Age. Now their roosting grounds sit within a handful of sanctuaries that I visited. At Sierra Chincua, a few miles north of El Rosario, I stood on a cliff overlooking the slender trunks of oyamel fir trees. I watched living streams of monarchs flying in different directions, sometimes winding about one another like a gigantic knot forever being tied, and looked in vain for three monarchs that I knew were in the fray.

Each had been given a designation in a spreadsheet—CHI016, CHI013, and CHI001—but those were all very boring names for butterflies, so I’d asked my 6-year-old daughter to give them better ones. She’d come up with Cinderella, Eric, and Carle. (She knows The Very Hungry Caterpillar by heart.)

Nothing about the trio was unusual, save for the gear they wore. Affixed to each butterfly’s thorax, like a tiny backpack, was a transmitter the size of a grain of rice. These transmitters, called BlūMorpho tags, had been developed by a company called Cellular Tracking Technologies, and Cinderella, Eric, and Carle were part of the first generation of monarchs to wear them.

Before my visit to the sanctuaries, I’d spoken with David La Puma, an executive at CTT and one of the brains behind the BlūMorpho. The company had initially focused on developing tech for tracking eagles, but La Puma had previously worked in monarch conservation, and carried his interest in the butterflies with him. Tracking a monarch is different from tracking an eagle, as monarchs each weigh less than a dollar bill. Any transmitter attached to one could weigh no more than a few grains of sand.

No battery could be made that small and still provide power over months of flying, and the solar panels that CTT used for eagle trackers were much too heavy. But the team figured out a solution: taking the ultrathin solar squares that line the wings of satellites and carefully chopping them up into tiny bespoke cells. An early version of the tracker, applied to butterflies with dabs of eyelash glue, was linked with a cellphone app via Bluetooth, allowing enthusiasts to follow nearby butterflies—a sort of “Pokémon Go for monarchs,” La Puma said—and record their locations in somewhat haphazard fashion. The newest iteration works more like Google Maps, providing far more complete data on the butterflies’ locations to anyone, almost in real time.

Knowing more about butterflies’ individual habits may enable us to help them thrive collectively (more on that later). The data also just help us get to know the monarchs better. As it turns out, some seem to be worse with directions than others, and can find themselves traveling west or south from Mexico. In the prototyping stage, some monarchs were detected near oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, nowhere near land, and some butterflies appeared to enjoy Caribbean vacations. Yet the majority seem to follow well-established paths along invisible corridors in the air.

Cinderella, Eric, and Carle had all been tagged in Sierra Chincua, which meant that I could deduce certain facts about their lives. They were already bona fide world-class wanderers, having flown there all the way from Canada in the fall, a three-month trip. Along the way, they’d dodged birds and windmills and cars, eventually reaching the same patch of forest—perhaps even the same trees—that their great-grandparents had roosted in. For much of the winter, they had not eaten and had barely moved, jamming themselves so tightly against their fellow travelers that from a distance they looked like scales armoring the sides of the trees. Now they’d awakened, stretching their wings and warming up.

Though I couldn’t spot them in the sky, I could see from my phone that Cinderella, Eric, and Carle were near. Over the next several weeks, I would keep tabs on them, following their movements with a level of detail that would have been impossible only a year ago.

Individual butterflies can travel as far as 100 miles in a single day and can congregate in groups so thick that they show up as clouds on weather radar. Glider pilots have seen them flying at altitudes above 10,000 feet. Year after year, new generations tend to gather around the same landmarks, despite having never seen them before. They seem, for example, to love the Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island, in New Jersey.

The monarchs’ feats of navigation are enabled by their internal technology, a set of instinctual tools that in some ways surpasses our understanding. The butterflies’ eyes can sense the angle and intensity of different forms of light. In each antenna, a complex series of molecules maintains their circadian clock, which, when combined with sunlight cues, gives them their sense of direction.

When the sun is unreliable, monarchs have a secondary method of pathfinding— a biological compass that allows them to sense Earth’s magnetic field. Internal thermostats help govern the timing of their northward movements.

The butterflies’ migration evolved to fit North America’s geography. Monarch caterpillars eat only milkweed, which grows best in cooler climates, but the butterflies can’t tolerate freezing temperatures. The length of the continent’s interior, unbroken by mountains or oceans, allows the monarchs to find the right weather and plants throughout the year—a Goldilocks ecology, neither too hot nor too cold. They are a marvel of nature’s engineering, of the kind of elegance that evolution can achieve over deep time.

“Winter is hard for insects that have to survive it, and monarchs basically avoid it by leaving,” says Karen Oberhauser, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a co-founder of the Monarch Butterfly Fund. Unlike many other butterfly species, which are adapted to very specific microbiomes, monarchs have options if a local environment changes.

Indeed, they seem strikingly well adapted for living alongside the world’s most disruptive change agent: humanity. Milkweed tends to thrive in transitional areas, such as fallow fields, unkempt lawns, and the edges of highways. “When I first started studying monarchs, it really did seem like they kind of had an advantage over a lot of other species,” Oberhauser told me. “That’s a disturbance-adapted species.” She said, affectionately, that monarchs are like rats or pigeons, all part of the strange but sturdy menagerie of modern life.

But there are limits to any creature’s adaptability, and human activity has steadily eroded the monarch’s margin for error. In the 1930s, Mexico’s land-reform program created ejidos, areas designated for communal use by peasants. They began clearing the ancient oyamel forests to plant corn, beans, and squash, and sold the felled timber. Commercial interests also stepped in, accelerating logging in the butterfly’s winter habitats.

North of the Rio Grande, there have been disturbances to the disturbances. Although milkweed can flourish along roads, the advent of the interstate system also introduced one of the most efficient killers of butterflies: speeding traffic. And although farmland in the Midwest was once a reliable (if accidental) incubator for milkweed, the development of Roundup Ready crops in the ’90s allowed more promiscuous use of herbicides. Almost overnight, milkweed disappeared from large-scale farms.

According to a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund, the total area covered by monarch colonies in winter decreased from 45 acres in 1996 to a low of fewer than two acres in 2013. The five-year average of colony size has dropped by 80 percent since the mid-’90s, a plunge of some 170 million butterflies.

As Oberhauser told me, the changes wrought by humans have caught up to the monarchs. In fact, the complexity of the migration might now be a liability, as multiple stops on the journey face upheaval at once. “What makes them so strong also makes them vulnerable,” she said.

My trio of butterflies had been strong from their beginnings. As caterpillars, they’d gorged on milkweed, a plant that is toxic to most animals, and incorporated its poison into their bodies. Their distinct coloring is both a warning for predators and a badge of initiation.

They are already one-percenters—only one in 100 of the eggs laid in Ontario last year had produced butterflies that made it this far. Their generation, called a “super-generation,” is bigger and more robust than their parents’ was or their children’s will be: They are centurions built to make the journey all the way south and partway back. (Two successive generations will eventually complete the round trip to Canada.) Now, after a winter of fasting, huddled close against the cold, they are regaining their strength, sipping nectar from flowers near their roosting trees. On my phone, I can see a map with each location that the butterflies ping as they meander from place to place, ever returning to their central roosts.

My phone shows only their movements, not their more private matters, but I know that before they leave these forests behind, they will each find a mate. For Cinderella and Eric—which, as I told my daughter, is a female butterfly—their mates’ package of sperm will also contain a deposit of nutrients that will help them handle the rigors of the trip. Carle will weaken himself, giving his mate a gift that she must use to ensure the survival of their offspring.

For the past several decades, a diverse group of grassroots activists, scientists, and enthusiasts has worked to forestall the monarchs’ decline. I’d come to Sierra Chincua as the guest of one of them. José Luis Álvarez Alcalá, a local activist and farmer, showed me around. He pointed to the visitors’ center, restaurants, and gift shops near the sanctuary’s entrance. “None of this was here 30 years ago,” he told me. Then he pointed to a copse of young trees creeping up the hills. “A lot of that wasn’t either.” Álvarez Alcalá would know: He helped create much of it.

Years of chain-smoking can be heard in the thickness of Álvarez Alcalá’s voice, and when we met, he sported a limp from a recent fall while working. He wasn’t originally a butterfly guy, he said, but was interested in revitalizing the region that encompassed the sanctuaries, and he ran a tree nursery on Hacienda la Cruz, a 17th-century Spanish colonial estate that he’d restored. By the 1980s, just a few years after the National Geographic story came out, the monarchs were already drawing streams of intrepid sightseers from abroad, despite almost no tourism infrastructure. Álvarez Alcalá realized that there might be a way to align the survival of the species with the local economy.

In 1986, President Miguel de la Madrid gave national protections to the main colony sites, creating the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. But those protections did not halt or even slow logging. Encouraged by the butterfly scientist Lincoln P. Brower, Álvarez Alcalá and his associates came up with a more proactive plan. They would give the members of the ejidos oyamel fir and pine saplings to grow, instead of their usual crops. The growers would still be free to profit from their land by selling timber for Christmas trees, lumber, or charcoal, but would be encouraged to harvest the wood sustainably. If done right, on a wide-enough scale, the model could help provide both income for the ejidatarios and the basis for butterfly tourism.

Álvarez Alcalá says that, since launching in 1997, his La Cruz Habitat Protection Project has planted about 20 million oyamel fir and pine trees. Other groups have also reforested hundreds of hectares. The oldest of the trees planted as part of this experiment are now maturing and providing winter homes for exhausted monarchs.

Over the span of just a few years, reforesting and ecotourism have transformed much of Michoacán, the state in which the sanctuaries reside. In the municipality of Angangueo, a brilliant mural depicts the social history of the monarchs, the “hijas del sol,” including a painting of the now-famous 1976 National Geographic cover. In El Rosario, the trinkets and souvenirs, the tour-bus parking lots, and even the stable of horses for rent all speak to a symbiosis that has only recently come to be.

The monarch’s star turn has changed the places along the more northerly parts of its route as well. In the U.S., seven states list the monarch as their official insect or butterfly, and in many places, monarchs appear on license plates that urge fellow drivers to protect the environment. More than 50,000 yards, parks, and schools now feature Monarch Waystations, special gardens stocked with milkweed and flowers.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the overwintering areas covered by monarchs this year increased by 64 percent. Cinderella, Eric, and Carle’s generation was the largest to leave Mexico in seven years. The measured takeaway from the WWF is that “despite challenges, conservation efforts are making a difference.”

Yet there are new challenges, new crises in front of the monarchs. And these may eclipse the ones they’ve seen so far.

“Fucking avocados.” Álvarez Alcalá’s son Luca was driving me around the outskirts of Hacienda la Cruz, where La Cruz Habitat Protection Project is based. He pointed to the offending field in the distance, its neat rows of hunter-green bushes a dead giveaway. The fruits represented one of the emerging threats to the reforesting mission, and to the monarch’s survival.

I’d arrived in Mexico just after the annual high-water mark for avocado consumption: the Super Bowl. Michoacán is the largest avocado-growing region in the world, producing nearly all avocados eaten in the United States. Its volcanic soil is ideal for the fruit, and intense American demand for guacamole and fancy toast has, in these parts, given avocados the moniker oro verde—“green gold.”

Unfortunately for monarchs, their forests sit right in the middle of some of the most promising areas for growing avocados. And the green-gold rush is so lucrative that it has drawn the attention of the area’s cartels, which now extort local growers, smuggle many of their avocados across the border, and even operate plantations directly. There’s a good chance that if you bought chips and guac to eat while you watched Bad Bunny during the big game, a cartel profited.

Recently, cartels have been a major force behind illicit logging in the forests that Álvarez Alcalá and his son have tried to revive and protect, and much of the land has been converted for avocado farming. In 2020, Homero Gómez González, a prominent conservationist at the Biosphere Reserve, was found dead in Ocampo, the closest municipality to the sanctuary. Gómez González had been known as a vociferous antagonist of loggers. His killing has not been solved, but many outlets have placed the blame on the cartels.

Those same cartels instigated the crisis that gripped Mexico during my travels. Just three days before I got to Hacienda la Cruz, Mexican authorities killed Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The death of “El Mencho” sparked violence across the states of Jalisco and Michoacán: Cartel members erected barricades on major roads and ambushed National Guard members, killing at least 25 and also attacking several journalists.

When I asked the elder Álvarez if touring the region would be safe, he gave perhaps the least-encouraging encouragement I’d ever heard: “I think there will be no problems,” he said. “But nothing in life is for sure.” During my trips to El Rosario and Sierra Chincua, both sanctuaries were mostly empty of tourists; cartels had been burning cars near the base of Sierra Chincua. It was all a stark reminder of how precarious monarch tourism is, and how much money there is to be made in destruction.

When I spoke with Megan Fulton, the executive director of Álvarez Alcalá’s project, she was keen to point me to a recent report from the WWF showing that, the avocado boom notwithstanding, rates of forest degradation and illegal logging in the sanctuaries have slowed in the past year. She attributed the positive development to the local communities being galvanized by global warming and weather changes. “They are the communities that are already seeing the effects of climate change,” she said. “So they want to restore their land and protect it for future generations.”

But the very fact that the communities are experiencing tangible effects—unprecedented heat waves that have killed hundreds, record droughts and wildfires that have ruined crops—means that the problem is bigger than organized crime, and perhaps beyond the ability of individual people or local groups to solve. Climate change is an accelerant for troubles that are already afoot. High mountain elevations that were once cool and less hospitable for avocado growing are getting hotter—and thus more tempting for felling. Warmer temperatures will also narrow the already tiny bands of habitability for oyamel firs, disrupting forest ecologies even in places that logging hasn’t yet touched.

[From the December 2025 issue: Vann R. Newkirk II on what climate change will do to America by mid-century]

The most ominous signs were visible from Hacienda la Cruz. In the forests just outside the property, like scars on the green mountainside, three ugly patches of brown, bare tree skeletons stood out. Luca explained that these patches had been infested by pine bark beetles, notorious evergreen-killers that feed on stressed or weakened conifers. The beetles are a normal part of forest ecosystems, and their numbers are usually controlled by cold winters. But the season has grown warmer. More trees now suffer from heat stress and dehydration, making them targets. Oyamels are particularly vulnerable. Authorities have already been forced to cut down whole sectors of the reserve to keep beetle infestations from spreading.

On my phone, I can see that by mid-February, Cinderella is restless, regularly streaming to the southwest and back, even visiting Ocampo once or twice, veering toward Loncheria Los 4 Elementos, a little snack bar in town that sells tortas, burgers, and micheladas. Eric is a bit more adventurous, making her way almost as far west as Ciudad Hidalgo, where the great father of the nation once owned a hacienda. Carle is more of a homebody, sticking closer to Sierra Chincua and often staying in its forests.

Eric is the first of the trio to leave for good, but her eagerness might be her undoing—the weather might not yet be warm enough for a successful transit. She flies north through Querétaro, but then her tracker stops transmitting. Cinderella and Carle choose to leave with the bulk of their cohort a week later, around the second week of March. There’s not much road ahead for Carle; he stops transmitting soon after.

But Cinderella keeps going, winding her way through Querétaro, swerving toward the old colonial city of San Miguel de Allende, then bending northeast. On March 15, she crosses the Rio Grande in the vicinity of Rio Grande City, Texas.

The same week that Cinderella and her fellow survivors began fanning out into the United States, I visited Monarch Watch, an organization based at the University of Kansas that has long served as a hub of monarch research and conservation. I met Kristen Baum, its current director, and Chip Taylor, its founder and director emeritus. Baum runs a blog for Monarch Watch that tracks the radio-tagged butterflies’ movements. These data points could help conservationists model the migration more accurately, anticipate changes in population size, and better decide how and where to allocate resources to restore habitats. The day before my visit, Baum noted that CHI016, Cinderella’s government name, was likely the farthest north among all the tags.

The tiny building that Monarch Watch occupies is jam-packed with records, research, and the butterflies themselves. In one room, I watched as a female split open her green chrysalis and emerged to spread her wings. Across the hall were refrigerators full of milkweed seeds—the group has donated more than 1 million milkweed plants for restoration projects since 2015.

Taylor himself developed an artificial diet that could be used to raise caterpillars in lieu of live milkweed. In 2009, Monarch Watch sent caterpillars provisioned with this food (which looks something like old guacamole) on the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station, where they successfully metamorphosed into butterflies.

The word emeritus doesn’t capture the full role that Taylor, 88, still plays; he is a constant presence around the building. Before he secured more generous funding, he’d bankrolled many of Monarch Watch’s activities himself, using the proceeds from investments that he and his wife had made in Apple. He helped pay 100-peso rewards for finding paper butterfly tags—still the standard, low-tech method of tracking the creatures—in Mexico, which became a problem one year when people recovered more than 3,000 tagged butterflies. “That cost me $12,000,” he told me. “I wasn’t too anxious to do that over and over again.”

It was hard, there in the middle of all of the butterfly posters and joyful pictures, to ask him the question I’d really come to ask. But Taylor eventually sighed and launched into an answer on his own. “What we’re doing ecologically to save the monarch butterfly, the scale of it is just nothing compared to what’s going on,” he said. “The population is going to creep lower and lower in time because we’re incapable, I think, at this point, of really mastering enough of the restoration.”

In the United States and Canada, the math leads to a similar place as it does in Mexico. For all the bootstrapped recent successes in forestalling the butterfly’s decline, we’ve merely been playing catch-up. Now climate change is the primary threat to monarch numbers, and it is implacable. Higher temperatures make monarchs more susceptible to infection by a protozoan called Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, a parasite that drains the butterfly’s strength and makes it less likely to complete its journeys. And climate shifts are yet another threat to milkweed’s viability in particular locales, throwing off the distances and timing that are so crucial to each butterfly’s travels.

“Maybe we can do something about the climate, but the opportunities for doing that are really, really diminishing very rapidly,” Taylor said. Even accounting for this year’s surprising bounce-back in numbers, he puts the timeline at 20 years or so before the migrating monarch’s numbers become too low to recover. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates upwards of a 50 percent chance that the eastern migratory monarchs will be extinct by 2080.

When I was growing up, the flowers outside my bedroom window always brought visitors. I’d often wake up in the morning to the buzzing of a hummingbird’s wings. But the visitors I greeted most joyfully were the monarchs. On late-summer days, kaleidoscopes of butterflies would land together, covering the flowers like an orange blanket. Even then, I understood that there was something special about their fleeting delicateness. And fleeting it was: The world will probably never again see as many monarchs as existed then.

But I would not bet entirely against the monarch. The fight to protect the species continues. In its persistence and its cooperative nature, that fight shares qualities with the monarch itself. The project is proof, in a fractured time, that people can join together and decide to help defend the things they see as valuable.

Even as Taylor despaired of the monarch’s future, he mused, briefly, about the possibility of restocking wild-butterfly populations using a scaled-up version of Monarch Watch’s colony program. With that, his exertions in perfecting his homegrown colony process—the green smoothie for caterpillars, testing procedures for parasites—came into clearer view for me. They could be understood, I realized, as the beginnings of an attempt to bottle a fragment of the monarch’s magic for the future world. Maybe migration will continue, in that future, with an assist from something like a butterfly doomsday vault. Or maybe the next generation of the monarch’s friends will find further innovations to defeat problems that now seem insurmountable.

The things we have learned recently about individual butterflies will be helpful for vanquishing those scientific problems, but the most important contribution of all this new information might be wonder itself. I am not a scientist, but after watching and tracking the butterflies for months, it seems to me that monarchs have something of a personality, a level of individuality that might endear them even more to the public. Some appear impulsive, or impressively rangy, leaving earlier and traveling more, whereas others fail to leave altogether. In El Rosario, when I asked Silvestre, my guide, about why groups of butterflies chose specific times to find water, he was enigmatic: “They decide.”

And whether or not we call it personality, there’s science behind the idea of the butterflies’ individuality. In humans, traits such as neuroticism and recklessness appear to have some evolutionary basis—emerging perhaps to provide our species with sentries who alerted us to threats, and with explorers who led the way to new food sources. Research suggests that the goofball butterflies that might seem to lack a sense of direction are actually pioneers, scouts finding new habitats to exploit or new places to hunker down should worse come to worst.

No matter what happens along the Mexico route, the monarch is likely to live on, albeit in smaller numbers, elsewhere. Across the planet, most populations of monarch butterflies—in Spain, in Hawaii—are likely descended from vagrants that veered off the Mexico migration path. Monarchs introduced to Australia in the 1870s have now established an annual migration along the east and southwest coasts—they have earned the fitting local epithet of “wanderers.” And in little pockets of the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean, in places where milkweed grows year-round, small monarch populations have settled in, no longer migrating and now sporting shorter wingspans than their more transient cousins.

For all their seeming fragility, monarchs will be an extraordinarily capable partner in efforts to save them. They may yet surprise us. We may yet surprise ourselves.

Cinderella is a marathoner. She flies through San Antonio and then skirts Austin, avoiding the congestion of the city proper during the South by Southwest festival, and then cuts through the Piney Woods toward Texarkana. At the time of her last detection, Cinderella is in Arkansas, having likely traveled from the Great Lakes to the Mexican highlands, and then halfway back. The diaspora she belongs to has spread out across a wide expanse of the country, ending up in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and every place in between. They’ve spent themselves, but they have fulfilled their biological missions.

During her roughly eight-month life, Cinderella traveled farther than scientists might have imagined possible, more than 3,000 miles as the butterfly flies. Along the way, she likely glued hundreds of tiny eggs onto milkweed plants. Perhaps some of the hatchlings will live, and continue her line. Perhaps they, too, will have her preternatural strength and tenacity. I hope, for the sake of my own daughter, and her ability to live in a world of beauty, that they will.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “How Do Monarchs Do It?”