Two of them were sprawled out on a long concrete bench in front of the main Haverford College library, one scribbling in a battered spiral-ring notebook, the other making annotations in the white margins of a novel. Three more sat on the ground beneath them, crisscross-applesauce, chatting about classes. A little hip, a little nerdy, a little tattooed; unmistakably English majors. The scene had the trappings of a campus-movie set piece: blue skies, green greens, kids both working and not working, at once anxious and carefree.

I said I was sorry to interrupt them, and they were kind enough to pretend that I hadn’t. I explained that I’m a writer, interested in how artificial intelligence is affecting higher education, particularly the humanities. When I asked whether they felt that ChatGPT-assisted cheating was common on campus, they looked at me like I had three heads. “I’m an English major,” one told me. “I want to write.” Another added: “Chat doesn’t write well anyway. It sucks.” A third chimed in, “What’s the point of being an English major if you don’t want to write?” They all murmured in agreement.

What’s the point, indeed? The conventional wisdom is that the American public has lost faith in the humanities—and lost both competence and interest in reading and writing, possibly heralding a post-literacy age. And since the emergence of ChatGPT, which can produce long-form responses to short prompts, universities have tried, rather unsuccessfully, to stamp out the use of what has become the ultimate piece of cheating technology, resulting in a mix of panic and resignation about the influence AI will have on education. But at Haverford, the story seemed different. Walking onto campus was like stepping into a time machine, and not only because I had graduated from the school a decade earlier. The tiny, historically Quaker college on Philadelphia’s Main Line still maintains its old honor code, and students still seem to follow it instead of letting a large language model do their thinking for them. For the most part, the students and professors I talked with seemed totally unfazed by this supposedly threatening new technology.

[Read: The best way to prevent cheating in college]

The two days I spent at Haverford and nearby Bryn Mawr College, in addition to interviews with people at other colleges with honor codes, left me convinced that the main question about AI in higher education has little to do with what kind of academic assignments the technology is or is not capable of replacing. The challenge posed by ChatGPT for American colleges and universities is not primarily technological but cultural and economic.

It is cultural because stemming the use of Chat—as nearly every student I interviewed referred to ChatGPT—requires an atmosphere in which a credible case is made, on a daily basis, that writing and reading have a value that transcends the vagaries of this or that particular assignment or résumé line item or career milestone. And it is economic because this cultural infrastructure isn’t free: Academic honor and intellectual curiosity do not spring from some inner well of rectitude we call “character,” or at least they do not spring only from that. Honor and curiosity can be nurtured, or crushed, by circumstance.

Rich private colleges with honor codes do not have a monopoly on academic integrity—millions of students and faculty at cash-strapped public universities around the country are also doing their part to keep the humanities alive in the face of generative AI. But at the wealthy schools that have managed to keep AI at bay, institutional resources play a central role in their success. The structures that make Haverford’s honor code function—readily available writing support, small classes, and comparatively unharried faculty—are likely not scalable in a higher-education landscape characterized by yawning inequalities, collapsing tenure-track employment, and the razing of public education at both the primary and secondary levels.

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, colleges and universities were returning from Thanksgiving break. Professors were caught flat-footed as students quickly began using the generative-AI wonder app to cut corners on assignments, or to write them outright. Within a few weeks of the program’s release, ChatGPT was heralded as bringing about “the end of high-school English” and the death of the college essay. These early predictions were hyperbolic, but only just. As The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost recently argued, there has been effectively zero progress in stymying AI cheating in the years since. One professor summarized the views of many in a recent mega-viral X post: “I am no longer a teacher. I’m just a human plagiarism detector. I used to spend my grading time giving comments for improving writing skills. Now most of that time is just checking to see if a student wrote their own paper.”

While some institutions and faculty have bristled at the encroachment of AI, others have simply thrown in the towel, insisting that we need to treat large language models like “tools” to be “integrated” into the classroom.  

I’ve felt uneasy about the tacit assumption that ChatGPT plagiarism is inevitable, that it is human nature to seek technological shortcuts. In my experience as a student at Haverford and then a professor at a small liberal-arts college in Maine, most students genuinely do want to learn and generally aren’t eager to outsource their thinking and writing to a machine. Although I had my own worries about AI, I was also not sold on the idea that it’s impossible to foster a community in which students resist ChatGPT in favor of actually doing the work. I returned to Haverford last month to see whether my fragile optimism was warranted.

When I stopped a professor walking toward the college’s nature trail to ask if ChatGPT was an issue at Haverford, she appeared surprised by the question: “I’m probably not the right person to ask. That’s a question for students, isn’t it?” Several other faculty members I spoke with said they didn’t think much about ChatGPT and cheating, and repeated variations of the phrase I’m not the police.

Haverford’s academic climate is in part a product of its cultural and religious history. During my four years at the school, invocations of “Quaker values” were constant, emphasizing on personal responsibility, humility, and trust in other members of the community. Discussing grades was taboo because it invited competition and distracted from the intrinsic value of learning.

The honor code is the most concrete expression of Haverford’s Quaker ethos. Students are trusted to take tests without proctors and even to bring exams back to their dorm rooms. Matthew Feliz, a fellow Haverford alum who is now a visiting art-history professor at Bryn Mawr—a school also governed by an honor code—put it this way: “The honor code is a kind of contract. And that contract gives students the benefit of the doubt. That’s the place we always start from: giving students the benefit of the doubt.”

[Read: The first year of AI college ends in ruin ]

Darin Hayton, a historian of science at the college, seemed to embody this untroubled attitude. Reclining in his office chair, surrounded by warm wood and, for 270 degrees, well-loved books, he said of ChatGPT, “I just don’t give a shit about it.” He explained that his teaching philosophy is predicated on modeling the merits of a life of deep thinking, reading, and writing. “I try to show students the value of what historians do. I hope they’re interested, but if they’re not, that’s okay too.” He relies on creating an atmosphere in which students want to do their work, and at Haverford, he said, they mostly do. Hayton was friendly, animated, and radiated a kind of effortless intelligence. I found myself, quite literally, leaning forward when he spoke. It was not hard to believe that his students did the same.

“It seems to me that this anxiety in our profession over ChatGPT isn’t ultimately about cheating.” Kim Benston, a literary historian at Haverford and a former president of the college, told me. “It’s an existential anxiety that reflects a deeper concern about the future of the humanities,” he continued. Another humanities professor echoed these remarks, saying that he didn’t personally worry about ChatGPT but agreed that the professorial concern about AI was, at bottom, a fear of becoming irrelevant: “We are in the sentence-making business. And it looks like they don’t need us to make sentences any more.”

I told Benston that I had struggled with whether to continue assigning traditional essays—and risk the possibility of students using ChatGPT—or resort to using in-class, pen-and-paper exams. I’d decided that literature classes without longer, take-home essays are not literature classes. He nodded. The impulse to surveil students, to view all course activity through a paranoid lens, and to resort to cheating-proof assignments was not only about the students or their work, he suggested. These measures were also about nervous humanities professors proving to themselves that they’re still necessary.

My conversations with students convinced me that Hayton, Benston, and their colleagues’ build-it-and-they-will-come sentiment, hopelessly naive though it may seem, was largely correct. Of the dozens of Haverford students I talked with, not a single one said they thought AI cheating was a substantial problem at the school. These interviews were so repetitive, they almost became boring.

The jock sporting bright bruises from some kind of contact sport? “Haverford students don’t really cheat.” The econ major in prepster shorts and a Jackson Hole T-shirt? “Students follow the honor code.” A bubbly first-year popping out of a dorm? “So far I haven’t heard of anyone using ChatGPT. At my high school it was everywhere!” More than a few students seemed off put by the very suggestion that a Haverfordian might cheat. “There is a lot of freedom here and a lot of student autonomy,” a sophomore psychology major told me. “This is a place where you could get away with it if you wanted to. And because of that, I think students are very careful not to abuse that freedom.” The closest I got to a dissenting voice was a contemplative senior who mused: “The honor code is definitely working for now. It may not be working two years from now as ChatGPT gets better. But for now there’s still a lot of trust between students and faculty.”

To be sure, despite that trust, Haverford does have occasional issues with ChatGPT. A student who serves on Haverford’s honor council, which is responsible for handling academic-integrity cases, told me, “There’s generally not too much cheating at Haverford, but it happens.” He said that the primary challenge is that “ChatGPT makes it easy to lie,” meaning the honor council struggles to definitively prove that a student who is suspected of cheating used AI. Still, both he and a fellow member of the council agreed that Haverford seems to have far fewer issues with LLM cheating than peer institutions. Only a single AI case came before the honor council over the past year.

In another sign that LLMs may be preoccupying some people at the college, one survey of the literature and language faculty found that most teachers in these fields banned AI outright, according to the librarian who distributed the query. A number of professors also mentioned that a provost had recently sent out an email survey about AI use on campus. But in keeping with the general disinterest in ChatGPT I encountered at Haverford, no one I talked with seemed to have paid much attention to the email.

Wandering over to Bryn Mawr in search of new perspectives, I found a similar story. A Classics professor I bumped into by a bus stop told me, “I try not to be suspicious of students. ChatGPT isn’t something I spend time worrying about. I think if they use ChatGPT, they’re robbing themselves of an opportunity.” When I smiled, perhaps a little too knowingly, he added: “Of course a professor would say that, but I think our students really believe that too.” Bryn Mawr students seemed to take the honor code every bit as seriously as that professor believed they would, perhaps none more passionately than a pair of transfer students I came across, posted up under one of the college’s gothic stone archways.

“The adherence to it to me has been shocking,” a senior who transferred from the University of Pittsburgh said of the honor code. “I can’t believe how many people don’t just cheat. It feels not that hard to [cheat] because there’s so much faith in students.” She explained her theory of why Bryn Mawr’s honor code hadn’t been challenged by ChatGPT: “Prior to the proliferation of AI it was already easy to cheat, and they didn’t, and so I think they continue not to.” Her friend, a transfer from another large state university, agreed. “I also think it’s a point of pride,” she observed. “People take pride in their work here, whereas students at my previous school were only there to get their degree and get out.”

The testimony of these transfer students most effectively made the case that schools with strong honor codes really are different. But the contrast the students pointed to—comparatively affordable public schools where AI cheating is ubiquitous, gilded private schools where it is not—also hinted at a reality that troubles whatever moralistic spin we might want to put on the apparent success of Haverford and Bryn Mawr. Positioning honor codes as a bulwark against academic misconduct in a post-AI world is too easy: You have to also acknowledge that schools like Haverford have dismantled—through the prodigious resources of the institution and its customers—many incentives to cheat.

It is one thing to eschew ChatGPT when your professors are available for office hours, and on-campus therapists can counsel you if you’re stressed out by an assignment, and tutors are ready to lend a hand if writer’s block strikes or confusion sets in, and one of your parents’ doctor friends is happy to write you an Adderall prescription if all else fails. It is another to eschew ChatGPT when you’re a single mother trying to squeeze in homework between shifts, or a non-native English speaker who has nowhere else to turn for a grammar check. Sarah Eaton, an expert on cheating and plagiarism at Canada’s University of Calgary, didn’t mince words: She called ChatGPT “a poor person’s tutor.” Indeed, several Haverford students mentioned that, although the honor code kept students from cheating, so too did the well-staffed writing center. “The writing center is more useful than ChatGPT anyway,” one said. “If I need help, I go there.”

But while these kinds of institutional resources matter, they’re also not the whole story. The decisive factor seems to be whether a university’s honor code is deeply woven into the fabric of campus life, or is little more than a policy slapped on a website. Tricia Bertram Gallant, an expert on cheating and a co-author of a forthcoming book on academic integrity, argues that honor codes are effective when they are “regularly made salient.” Two professors I spoke with at public universities that have strong honor codes emphasized this point. Thomas Crawford at Georgia Tech told me, “Honor codes are a two-way street—students are expected to be honest and produce their own work, but for the system to function, the faculty must trust those same students.” John Casteen, a former president and current English professor at the University of Virginia, said, “We don’t build suspicion into our educational model.” He acknowledged that there will always be some cheaters in any system, but in his experience UVA’s honor-code culture “keeps most students honest, most of the time.”

And if money and institutional resources are part of what makes honor codes work, recent developments at other schools also show that money can’t buy culture. Last spring, owing to increased cheating, Stanford’s governing bodies moved to end more than a century of unproctored exams, using what some called a “nuclear option” to override a student-government vote against the decision. A campus survey at Middlebury this year found that 65 percent of the students who responded said they’d broken the honor code, leading to a report that asserted, “The Honor Code has ceased to be a meaningful element of learning and living at Middlebury for most students.” An article by the school newspaper’s editorial board shared this assessment: “The Honor Code as it currently stands clearly does not effectively deter students from cheating. Nor does it inspire commitment to the ideals it is meant to represent such as integrity and trust.” Whether schools like Haverford can continue to resist these trends remains to be seen.

Last month, Fredric Jameson, arguably America’s preeminent living literary critic, passed away. His interests spanned, as a lengthy New York Times obituary noted, architecture, German opera, and sci-fi. An alumnus of Haverford, he was perhaps the greatest reader and writer the school ever produced.

[Read: The decade in which everything was great but felt terrible]

If Jameson was a singular talent, he was also the product of a singular historical moment in American education. He came up at a time when funding for humanities research was robust, tenure-track employment was relatively available, and the humanities were broadly popular with students and the public. His first major work of criticism, Marxism and Form, was published in 1971, a year that marked the high point of the English major: 7.6 percent of all students graduating from four-year American colleges and universities majored in English. Half a century later, that number cratered to 2.8 percent, humanities research funding slowed, and tenure-line employment in the humanities all but imploded.

Our higher-education system may not be capable of producing or supporting Fredric Jamesons any longer, and in a sense it is hard to blame students for resorting to ChatGPT. Who is telling them that reading and writing matter? America’s universities all too often treat teaching history, philosophy, and literature as part-time jobs, reducing professors to the scholarly equivalent of Uber drivers in an academic gig economy. America’s politicians, who fund public education, seem to see the humanities as an economically unproductive diversion for hobbyists at best, a menace to society at worst.

Haverford is a place where old forms of life, with all their wonder, are preserved for those privileged enough to visit, persisting in the midst of a broader world from which those same forms of life are disappearing. This trend did not start with OpenAI in November 2022, but it is being accelerated by the advent of magic machines that automate—imperfectly, for now—both reading and writing.

At the end of my trip, before heading to the airport, I walked to the Wawa, a 15-minute trek familiar to any self-respecting Haverford student, in search of a convenience-store sub and a bad coffee. On my way, I passed by the duck pond. On an out-of-the-way bench overlooking the water feature, in the shadow of a tree well older than she was, a student was sitting, her brimming backpack on the grass. There was a curl of smoke issued from a cigarette, or something slightly stronger, and a thick book open on her lap, face bent so close to the page her nose was almost touching it. With her free hand a finger traced the words, line by line, as she read.

Photo-illustrations by Vanessa Saba

Last year, in Texas, a deteriorating marriage became the testing ground for a novel legal strategy favored by some of the country’s most prominent right-wing lawyers and politicians.

Marcus and Brittni Silva’s divorce had just been finalized when Marcus filed a lawsuit against two of Brittni’s friends. According to his complaint, Brittni had discovered that she was pregnant with their baby in July 2022, and ended the pregnancy by taking abortion medication. Marcus alleges that her friends Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter “assisted Brittni Silva in murdering Ms. Silva’s unborn child.” He is suing for wrongful death and asking for at least $1 million in damages from each defendant.

Noyola and Carpenter tell their own version of what happened in a countersuit they filed. Marcus drank often, they allege, and when he did, he was prone to verbally abusing Brittni. He got so drunk at one of her work events that he had to be escorted off the premises—but not before he called her a “slut,” a “whore,” and an “unfit mother” in front of her co-workers. Brittni had stayed in the marriage for the sake of their two daughters, but Marcus’s outburst convinced her that there was no saving it. In the spring of 2022, she filed for divorce.

That summer, soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned but before Texas’s abortion “trigger ban” went into effect, Brittni got a positive result on a pregnancy test. Certain that she did not want to have another child with Marcus, Brittni texted Noyola and Carpenter to talk about her options. Noyola and Carpenter allege that Marcus disapproved of the friendship; he would sometimes hide Brittni’s car keys to try to prevent her from seeing her friends.

Brittni kept her pregnancy test a secret from Marcus, but according to Noyola and Carpenter’s suit, he learned about it when he riffled through her purse and discovered a Post-it note with the number for an abortion hotline and, on her phone, her texts with her friends. Marcus took photographs of the texts. The next day, he looked through her purse again and found a pill that can be taken to induce abortion.

Later, Marcus confronted her, Brittni told her friends. She wrote in a text message that he had demanded that she give him her “mind body and soul” and act “like his wife who loves him.” If she didn’t agree to give him primary custody of their daughters, Brittni wrote, he would “make sure I go to jail.” Brittni was surprised by Marcus’s reaction, her friends’ suit alleges; he’d never been opposed to abortion. Now he was accusing her of killing a baby and threatening to go to the police. (Noyola and Carpenter have denied all the claims in Marcus’s lawsuit, and he has denied all the claims in their countersuit.)

In fact, Marcus had already filed a police report. Soon, he obtained legal representation. Jonathan Mitchell, a conservative activist and attorney and the former solicitor general of Texas, became his lawyer in the case. Mitchell is often cited as the brains behind Texas’s 2021 “bounty law,” which provides a reward of at least $10,000 to plaintiffs who successfully sue someone who “aids or abets” abortion. The Silva case follows a similar logic: Marcus is, in effect, seeking a reward for reporting his ex-wife’s friends to the state.

Mitchell declined to comment for this article. But his work on the Silva case and the bounty law, among other matters, reflects a tactic that conservatives have recently embraced in a range of social battles, including those over abortion, LGBTQ issues, and school curricula. Across the nation, Republican-controlled state legislatures and conservative activists have passed bills and embraced legal strategies that encourage Americans to monitor one another’s behavior and report their friends, family members, and neighbors to the authorities. Call it the Snitch State.

[Adam Serwer: The Constitution is whatever the right wing says it is]

Texas has been particularly hospitable to rules that promote such monitoring in service of advancing conservative ideological goals. Perhaps it’s a matter of necessity: Despite right-wing victories in court and at the ballot box in recent decades, public sentiment on a variety of cultural issues has drifted leftward. And so, in an effort to impose their values, Republicans have turned to invasive forms of coercion.

Most Americans, including most Texas voters, believe that abortion should be legal in some form. The architects of this new anti-privacy regime do not. Republican legislators in Texas have proposed numerous additional restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned, including bills that would punish employers who help their workers get abortions, outlaw abortion funds that help women seek the procedure in another state, and circumvent local district attorneys who refuse to criminally prosecute abortion providers. Some proposed measures would restrict access to contraception. One would criminalize speech by making it illegal to provide “information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug” and forcing internet providers in Texas to censor such information.

It’s hard not to conclude that the people pushing for bills like these want women to be scared to even contemplate having an abortion, let alone seek one out. They have said so themselves; in 2021, for example, the anti-abortion organization Texas Right to Life said it was “optimistic that,” in light of the bounty law, “the day is soon coming when abortion will not only be illegal, but unthinkable.” Even expressing support for abortion rights could be considered suspect. Indeed, the Silva lawsuit seems to foreshadow this reality: It alleges that Brittni and her friends “celebrated the murder by dressing up in Handmaid’s Tale costumes for Halloween,” as if their costumes indicate liberal views on abortion that deserve sanction by the state.

[From the October 2024 issue: What abortion bans do to doctors]

As of this writing, no one has yet been successfully sued under Texas’s bounty law, and other measures that seek to turn citizens into informants have faced challenges in court. (If reelected, former President Donald Trump is likely to appoint more federal judges who would look favorably upon such measures.) But these policies have chilling effects whether or not they are strictly enforced. The mere threat of having one’s privacy invaded and one’s life potentially destroyed is sufficient to shape people’s speech and behavior. American history shows us where this could lead.

The roots of this political style lie in the state-sponsored efforts of the first and second Red Scares. During the first, in the years following World War I, a wave of anarchist violence provided a predicate for suppressing free speech, as well as a justification for mob violence against people perceived to be disloyal to the government. But it was during the second Red Scare, in the 1940s and ’50s, that the informant emerged as a paramount figure in American politics, when the federal government’s attempts to block Soviet espionage metastasized into a national panic. Dozens of states passed laws criminalizing speech deemed subversive. Private employers, unions, and professional groups adopted loyalty oaths and administrative tests that inquired about personal beliefs and past associations.

According to the constitutional scholar Geoffrey R. Stone, from 1947 to 1953, more than 4.7 million people were scrutinized as part of the federal government’s loyalty program, leading to about 40,000 “full-field investigations” undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The bureau relied on allegations from informants, many of which were “unsubstantiated hearsay—mere gossip, rumor, and slander,” Stone writes. The accuracy of the allegations hardly mattered; federal investigators often did not take the time to verify informants’ claims. As a result, people policed their own thoughts, actions, and relationships out of fear that someone might tell on them.

Soviet espionage and expansionism were both very real threats. Many Red hunters, however, were not merely trying to prevent the establishment of Soviet-style communism in the U.S., or to protect U.S. atomic secrets. At a moment when liberalism appeared to be ascendant, conservative beliefs about economics, labor, race, gender, and sexuality could all be imposed in the name of “fighting communism.” As historians such as Ellen Schrecker and Landon R. Y. Storrs have argued, the second Red Scare was, in this way, successful at constraining the radical possibilities of New Deal social democracy. The power of organized labor was curtailed, and the potential for a more generous welfare state was limited. Even in books, films, and television shows, Americans sought to avoid topics and storylines that might be interpreted as left-wing.

Black workers—who were asked questions like “Have you ever danced with a white girl?” and “Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?”—were among those who “suffered disproportionately” from loyalty investigations, Schrecker has written. Homosexuality, or perceived homosexuality, was also punished. As the historian David K. Johnson writes in The Lavender Scare, at one point during the Truman administration, “in the State Department alone, security officials boasted that on average they were firing one homosexual per day, more than double the rate for those suspected of political disloyalty.” Ruining someone’s life with an anonymous accusation was, for a time, a relatively simple matter.

During the second Red Scare, communism was frequently described as a plague that infected and transformed unwilling victims. Modern conservatives use similar rhetoric to justify fighting “wokeness” or “the woke mind virus,” presenting liberalism as a civilizational threat that justifies extreme measures to suppress it—particularly, these days, in the name of protecting children. But whereas conservatives in the ’40s and ’50s depicted the Soviet Union as a dystopian cautionary tale, their counterparts today openly venerate the oppressive tactics of illiberal societies abroad. In March, for example, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tenure as “a model for conservative governance.” In September, Trump praised Orbán from the presidential-debate stage.

The contemporary crackdown is different in another crucial respect: Although many of the people targeted during the second Red Scare chose to withdraw from public service or public life in the face of invasive surveillance and constant suspicion, that is much harder to do in the 21st century. Today, many of us share intimate details of our personal lives online with friends, loved ones, and, often, total strangers. Whether we intend to or not, thanks to the data economy, we are all our own informants, sharing our location, reading habits, search terms, menstrual-cycle dates, online orders, and more. In exchange for using online services and social-media platforms, we make ourselves more visible to those who would become the eyes and ears of the state.

If you live in a part of the country where your very person could attract unwanted attention from the state and its informants, abstaining from social media or even withdrawing from public life may not guarantee safe harbor. Sometimes, you just need to leave.

Karen Krajcer grew up in a conservative religious family in Houston before moving to Austin, where she and her husband raised their kids. When their eldest child, who is trans, was in first grade, she came up to Krajcer in the kitchen and said, “Mom, I’m a girl.” Krajcer replied, “You don’t have to be a girl to like girl things.” “I know,” her daughter said. “But I’m a girl who likes girl things.”

“She just held my stare,” Krajcer told me. “And I realized that I didn’t understand what she meant, but that I’m her parent, and it’s my job to find out.”

Then, one day when she was in fourth grade, Krajcer’s daughter asked if she was going to die. “She’s not prone to questions like that,” Krajcer told me. “She wasn’t talking about self-harm or suicide. She was afraid.”

It was February 2022, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott had ordered the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of minors who were receiving gender-affirming medical care. “The Texas Family Code is clear,” Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a legal opinion that Abbott used to justify his order. “Causing or permitting substantial harm to the child or the child’s growth and development is child abuse.” Abbott called upon “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to tell the government about families who were known to have trans children, so that they could be investigated for abuse. These families were now surrounded by potential informants: teachers, friends, neighbors—even extended family.

Photo-illustration by Vanessa Saba. Source: Bernd Eberle / Getty

Professional medical groups, including the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, objected to the order, noting in one legal brief that “the medical treatments characterized as ‘child abuse’ in the Abbott Letter are part of the widely-accepted treatment guidelines for adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria, and are supported by the best available scientific evidence.”

The portrayal of gender-affirming care as child abuse nevertheless led to a rash of reports. People called DFPS to report students “even if they’re just simply going by a nickname, or different pronouns,” Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, told me.

DFPS representatives appeared at Texas schools to pull students out of class for questioning, and showed up at children’s homes to speak with their parents. “As an investigator, when you go in to speak to a child, as easy as you try to be and as kind, it’s traumatizing; it just is. It’s invasive,” Morgan Davis, a former Texas child-welfare investigator, told me. Davis, who is trans, eventually resigned in protest of the order. A DFPS employee testified in court that, unlike with other kinds of investigations, she and her colleagues did not have discretion to set aside cases involving trans kids despite finding no evidence of abuse.

One DFPS employee who herself has a trans daughter asked her supervisor for clarification on the new policy. Would she now be considered an abuser for obtaining health care for her daughter? And if so, would her child be taken from her? According to a lawsuit that the ACLU filed on behalf of the employee and her family, she was put on leave hours later, and told the next day that she was under investigation. A state investigator came to her family’s home, seeking access to her daughter’s medical records.

The order threatened to separate trans children from their parents, which could lead to expensive legal battles for families who wanted to keep custody. Tracy Harting, a lawyer in Travis County who has been involved in child welfare for more than two decades, immediately grasped the cruel irony: If trans kids were taken from their parents, she told me, they would be entering a foster-care system “that’s already overrun with kids who were actually being physically and emotionally abused by their families.”

In response to the ACLU’s lawsuit, a judge blocked enforcement of Abbott’s order in March 2022, and two years later, a state appeals court upheld the injunction. But an exodus of families with trans children was already under way, particularly after Texas outlawed gender-affirming medical care for children in 2023. “I don’t want to live in this state of terror anymore,” one mother who left for Colorado told Texas Monthly.

[Listen: Radio Atlantic on when the state has a problem with your identity]

Krajcer and her family, who live in Oregon now, felt the same way. Although her daughter was not undergoing any medical interventions, Krajcer still feared that she could be reported to the authorities by someone who disapproved of her gender identity. The implications of staying in Texas, Krajcer said, were too terrifying to contemplate. “What happens if I’m out in a rural area and our trans daughter breaks her arm? Am I going to be able to take her to the ER for basic medical care? Or is there a chance that a nurse or a receptionist or just a person sitting in the waiting room could turn us in?”

“I imagined being led into some small windowless room for my monitored child visitation,” Krajcer said, “and looking at our children and knowing that we could have gone, that we could have left, but we didn’t.”

In August 2023, Michael Troncale, then an English teacher in Houston, was upset about what he saw as the “anti-trans propaganda coming from the right wing in Texas.” Wanting to show support for his transgender students, he put up a poster in his classroom that said trans people belong.

No one seemed to mind at first. But two months later, a school administrator told him that a parent had complained that the sign was “divisive.” Troncale didn’t know who the parent was, or if their child was in his class.

“ ‘Look, I’m sorry, but our legal team says you can’t have this up, because it’s a political message,’ ” Troncale says he was told. “I didn’t consider it political.”

Perhaps he should have. In the past few years, Texas conservatives have undertaken a campaign of censorship in schools that longtime educators told me is unprecedented in its breadth and ferocity—part of a nationwide backlash against what conservatives perceive as left-leaning books and ideas, many of them involving LGBTQ and racial issues. A major means of enforcement for this campaign is tattling: Parents and students alike are encouraged to report the teaching of forbidden ideas, so that those who teach them may be punished.

The recent spate of regulations against so-called critical race theory in K–12 schools exemplifies this logic. (Actual critical race theory is an academic framework conceived of by the Black legal scholar Derrick Bell; it is not generally taught outside higher education.) In 2021, Texas passed House Bill 3979, which included the provision that educators cannot “require or make part of a course” the idea that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Using language designed to sound egalitarian, the law purportedly safeguarded all students’ psychological well-being: Educators, it stipulated, cannot teach students that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.”

When Representative Steve Toth introduced the bill, he said it was “about teaching racial harmony by telling the truth that we are all equal, both in God’s eyes and our founding documents.” The alternative, he suggested, was communist indoctrination, “a souped-up version of Marxism” from which children needed to be protected.

In practice, though, H.B. 3979 and the similar Senate Bill 3—which went into effect three months later, replacing the House bill—constitute a de facto government ban on material that conservatives oppose, and essentially mean that the feelings of a certain category of student are the only ones that matter. In 2023, a school-district trustee in Montgomery County asked for “personal ideologies” to be “left at the door.” One parent, she said, had told her that their first grader had been so distressed by a poster celebrating racial inclusivity that he moved classrooms. Another trustee suggested that displaying LGBTQ flags in schools might be illegal.

Texas’s recent cascade of book bans has also been framed as an attempt to protect children from distress. “Parents have the right to shield their children from obscene content used in schools their children attend,” Governor Abbott has written. But parents already have the right to tell their kids which books they can and can’t read; what Abbott is calling for is the right to control which books other people’s children read.

[Read: Book bans are targeting the history of oppression]

Matt Krause, a former attorney for the Christian conservative law firm Liberty Counsel, was a Texas state legislator in the fall of 2021 when he sent a letter to superintendents inquiring about “books or content” in schools that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” He attached a list of roughly 850 books, requesting that the school districts tell him how many copies of each they had. Krause—who later acknowledged to The Dallas Morning News that he did not believe he had read the books in question—had no power to order any books banned, but his list, and his invocation of the language in H.B. 3979, helped spur an avalanche of challenges across the state.

According to a lawsuit filed by library patrons in Llano County, one woman, who would later be appointed to the county’s library board, sent an email to a county official with the subject line “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.” Attached was a spreadsheet of books from Krause’s list that were in the libraries. Another concerned citizen, who herself would also later be appointed to the library board, was more direct about what she found objectionable: In an email to allies, she referred to Krause’s list as the “16-page list of CRT and LGBTQ book[s].” Indeed, the titles on Krause’s list, many of which deal with topics such as racism, LGBTQ rights, and abortion, highlight the political nature of his effort.

Soon, the Llano County libraries began removing some of these books from their shelves. One librarian alleges that she was fired after she refused to remove targeted books. She is now working as a cashier to make ends meet while she sues the county over her dismissal. (The county has denied any wrongdoing.)

After a court ordered the books returned to the shelves, county officials appealed the order and considered shutting down the libraries altogether rather than allow community members to access the material. (County officials said the removal of books had nothing to do with their content. They ultimately decided to keep the library open, and an appeals court later ruled that some of the books must be returned. That court is now reconsidering its order.) The officials are represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the same attorney who is representing Marcus Silva. According to Axios, Mitchell has also reportedly drafted hypothetical bounty laws that would provide financial remuneration to those who snitch on librarians for keeping banned books on their shelves—or even just for expressing pro-LGBTQ sentiments.

In 2024, the purpose of banning books is not to keep children from accessing disturbing material—the internet exists—but to use the power of the state to stigmatize certain ideas and identities. Nelva Williamson, an Advanced Placement history teacher from Houston, told me that she sees efforts like Krause’s as part of a right-wing response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the earnest desire of many young white people to learn more about the country’s history of injustice. At the core of the backlash, Williamson thinks, is a fear that children will leave their parents’ politics behind. “They just put CRT as an umbrella over everything,” she said.

“What is included in the obscenity standard is actually very vague,” Jeremy Young, a historian who runs PEN America’s anti-censorship program for education, told me. “And this is something that you’ll see across these bill types. The vagueness is the point; the vagueness is the way that the bills are enforced. Which is to say, when a bill has very vague definitions, it can be either overenforced or underenforced, depending on the person doing the enforcing.”

Texas legislators cannot embed themselves in every classroom to monitor whether forbidden concepts and books are being discussed and assigned. But they can rely on informants. According to NBC News, a chief deputy constable in Hood County, recently spent two years attempting to bring criminal charges against a group of school librarians after activists filed a complaint alleging that their libraries were carrying obscene books (the county district attorney ultimately said there was not enough conclusive evidence to charge the librarians). In October 2021, Rickie Farah, a fourth-grade teacher in the Dallas area who had previously been named Teacher of the Year, was reprimanded by the school board after a parent complained about a book that her child brought home from Farah’s classroom—This Book Is Anti-racist, by Tiffany Jewell. Farah contested the reprimand and kept her job. But her colleagues got the message: Even allowing a student to encounter a book that a parent disapproved of might lead to consequences.

Higher education has also been a target for Republicans, who see universities as sources of “woke ideology.” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has argued that “tenured professors must not be able to hide behind the phrase ‘academic freedom,’ and then proceed to poison the minds of our next generation.” A 2023 bill to end tenure at state universities was rejected, but the legislature instead passed a law that gives politically appointed university overseers broad leeway to terminate tenured faculty for reasons of “professional incompetence” or “conduct involving moral turpitude.” Thus, in Texas, academic freedom may now be contingent on the political approval of state officials.

In 2022, Lauren Miller, who lived in Dallas, was pregnant with twins and suffering from such severe nausea that she found it difficult to eat and had to go to the emergency room twice. When one twin was diagnosed with a genetic disorder that is almost always fatal, she and her husband struggled to get clear guidance from medical professionals. No one would even say the word abortion out loud. “We would have genetic counselors—so, people who don’t even give abortions; they just counsel on options—get midway through a sentence and then just stop, just scared to say more,” Miller told me.

Then one genetic counselor, who had lived and worked in New York, let slip that in cases like these, doctors would usually perform a procedure called a “single fetal reduction.” Miller asked what that meant.

“She immediately clammed up and she started apologizing; you could tell she was scared,” Miller said. “It was truly like we had Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and, you know, other politicians, Texas Supreme Court justices, just sitting in that room taking notes, chewing on a pen cap right there with us.”

Miller decided to have the single fetal reduction—aborting one fetus—to protect her health and that of the other twin. Afraid to leave a paper trail, she told friends in a group text of the diagnosis, but not about her plans. She had a quick, careful phone conversation with a friend who was a gynecologic oncologist, who recommended a doctor in Colorado. As she spoke over the phone with the Colorado doctor, Miller noticed that he made sure to say explicitly that he was not in the state of Texas.

At a party with friends that fall, Miller and her husband were careful not to mention that they were going to Colorado. “Who was there who would overhear and report us because they want that $10,000?” Miller said. “We didn’t know everybody who was at the house that evening.”

They also worried about the logistics of their trip. “The first question,” Miller said, was “what kind of digital footprint are we leaving? Do we leave our phones behind? Do we drive? Do we do everything in cash?” Because of her severe nausea, she didn’t think she would make it 12 hours in a car from Dallas to Colorado, and she was concerned about driving through rural Texas on her way to get an abortion at 14 weeks pregnant, especially if she ended up in an emergency room. She decided to fly.

Miller was perhaps more fearful than she needed to be about her trip to Colorado. The Texas bounty law has not been used against people who travel out of state, and women themselves cannot be punished for having an abortion—only people who help them can. Still, given the political climate in Texas, her cautious behavior doesn’t seem irrational. What would the ultrasound tech back in Dallas say or do when they noticed there was only one heartbeat instead of two?

The procedure went well. Miller’s severe nausea subsided, and the remainder of her pregnancy was smooth. She delivered a healthy baby in March 2023. As it turned out, Miller’s doctor in Dallas, Austin Dennard, had also recently fled Texas for an abortion because of a pregnancy complication of her own. Miller recalled that at her first appointment with the doctor after her abortion, Dennard simply said, in a formal tone, “There is only one heart rate. I will note in your file that there is an intrauterine fetal demise of one twin.” The two women later joined a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sought to set clear standards for exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. This past May, the Texas Supreme Court issued a ruling leaving the vague exceptions language intact.

Such lack of clarity can have a chilling effect. “There’s a lot of confusion,” Damla Karsan, a Houston ob-gyn, told me. “People aren’t sure what they can and can’t legally say.” In December 2023, Karsan was personally warned by Paxton against performing an abortion for Kate Cox, a Texas mother who was ultimately forced to leave the state to get an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with the same genetic condition as Miller’s. (Karsan was also a plaintiff with Miller and Dennard in the Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit.)

Still, rules that provoke this kind of fear and uncertainty around private choices have flourished primarily in conservative enclaves; when I spoke with teachers in more liberal and diverse areas of Texas, they seemed less afraid of being reported to authorities. Areas like Llano County, where support for Trump is strong, have so far been most successful in their efforts to root out subversives and promote self-policing. For the time being, abortion laws like Texas’s, as restrictive as they are ambiguous, don’t stand a chance outside Republican-dominated states; women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox can still travel elsewhere—if they can afford it—to legally receive the care they need. Similarly, families with trans children can move out of state, and library patrons can go to court when books are removed from the shelves.

But for how long? In September, Texas sued to overturn federal privacy regulations that prevent investigators from seizing the medical records of women who leave the state to get an abortion. And just as the influence of the federal government supercharged the first and second Red Scares, it could very well, under a Republican president, expand the reach of the Snitch State nationwide. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, suggests adopting a measure that would allow for a political purge of anyone in the federal government who is not obsequiously loyal to Trump. The former president, and conservative legal elites, have called for the traditional independence of the Justice Department to be disregarded, which would allow Trump, if reelected, to use the immense power of federal law enforcement to target abortion providers, political dissidents, and even local prosecutors who do not use their discretion as the administration demands.

In his foreword to Project 2025’s 900-page Mandate for Leadership, Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes that “pornography”—which he describes as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children”—“should be outlawed,” and that “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” He adds that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” Roberts also describes gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” and echoes the legal language used to ban “critical race theory” in places like Texas. The policy blueprint outlines a plan for forcing states to report abortion and miscarriage data to the federal government, referring to the harrowing experiences of women like Miller, Dennard, and Cox with the dismissive euphemism of “abortion tourism.” Presumably, executing these plans would depend on a steady supply of willing informants.

Conservatives have long railed against the chilling effect of “cancel culture.” But by encouraging people to tell on their neighbors, Republicans have, in effect, constructed a legal framework for socializing the means of cancellation. Having routinely mocked left-wing college students as “snowflakes” for their use of content warnings and their desire for “safe spaces,” Republicans have now institutionalized their own opposition to points of view they dislike with laws that punish those who disagree with them. They have attempted to subject teachers, librarians, and educational administrators to harsh punishments should they express—or even make available—ideas that conservatives deem offensive. They have attempted to criminalize the parents of trans children, and have forced pregnant women to flee their home in order to receive lifesaving care. All of this has been done in the name of “liberty,” to combat what Roberts has called the “totalitarian cult” that is the “Great Awokening.”

The first and second Red Scares created oppressive societies in the name of preventing America from becoming one. The version of “liberty” being promoted by right-wing legislators and activists today rings just as hollow, a stifling political and social conformity enforced by the fear that someone, somewhere, might report you.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Right-Wing Plan to Make Everyone an Informant.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.