The Trump administration has sparked fury by deporting alleged “Venezuelan gang members” to El Salvador.

Experts warn that the sudden lack of funds may spur further migration of Venezuelans beyond neighbouring Colombia.

US President Donald Trump is trying to win Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for a 30-day ceasefire.

As Wall Street grapples with the increasing likelihood of a U.S. recession, the Trump administration has gone to bat defending President Donald Trump’s stock market-slamming trade policies.

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The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

Related:

DOGE’s fuzzy math Is DOGE losing steam?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Democrats have a man problem. There was a second name on Rubio’s target list. The crimson face of Canadian anger The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing.

Today’s News

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats will support a Republican-led short-term funding bill to help avoid a government shutdown. A federal judge ruled that probationary employees fired by 18 federal agencies must be temporarily rehired. Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister, succeeding Justin Trudeau as the Liberals’ leader.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The Trump administration is embracing AI. “Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient,” Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of literary work that takes on COVID, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by John Gall*

I’d Had Jobs Before, but None Like This

By Graydon Carter

I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars.

Read the full article.

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The kind of thing dictators do Trump is unleashing a chaos economy. RFK Jr. has already broken his vaccine promise. The NIH’s grant terminations are “utter and complete chaos.” Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out. Republicans tear down a Black Lives Matter mural.

Culture Break

Music Box Films

Watch. The film Eephus (in select theaters) is a “slow movie” in the best possible way, David Sims writes.

Read. Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting, Hillary Kelly writes.

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President Donald Trump’s administration is embracing AI. According to reports, agencies are using the technology to identify places to cut costs, figure out which employees can be terminated, and comb through social-media posts to determine whether student-visa holders may support terror groups. And as my colleague Matteo Wong reported this week, employees at the General Services Administration are being urged to use a new chatbot to do their work, while simultaneously hearing from officials that their jobs are far from secure; Thomas Shedd, the director of the GSA division that produced the AI, told workers that the department will soon be “at least 50 percent smaller.”

This is a haphazard leap into a future that tech giants have been pushing us toward for years. Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient, as Elon Musk and DOGE have promised.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: pressureUA / Getty; Thanasis / Getty.

DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way

By Matteo Wong

A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people.

The Trump administration is testing a new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees at the General Services Administration and may release it to the entire agency as soon as this Friday—meaning it could be used by more than 10,000 workers who are responsible for more than $100 billion in contracts and services. This article is based in part on conversations with several current and former GSA employees with knowledge of the technology, all of whom requested anonymity to speak about confidential information; it is also based on internal GSA documents that I reviewed, as well as the software’s code base, which is visible on GitHub.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

Elon Musk looks desperate: “Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself,” Charlie Warzel writes. Move fast and destroy democracy: “Silicon Valley’s titans have decided that ruling the digital world is not enough,” Kara Swisher writes.

P.S.

The internet can still be good. In a story for The Atlantic’s April issue, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance explores how Reddit became arguably “the best platform on a junky web.” Reading it in between editing stories about AI, I was struck by how much of what Adrienne described was fundamentally human: “There is a subreddit where violinists gently correct one another’s bow holds, a subreddit for rowers where people compare erg scores, and a subreddit for people who are honest-to-God allergic to the cold and trade tips about which antihistamine regimen works best,” she writes. “One subreddit is for people who encounter cookie cutters whose shapes they cannot decipher. The responses reliably entail a mix of sincere sleuthing to find the answer and ridiculously creative and crude joke guesses.” How wholesome!

— Damon

When I served as counselor of the State Department, I advised the secretary of state about America’s wars with Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda. I spent a good deal of time visiting battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as shaping strategy in Washington. But when I left government service in 2009, I eagerly resumed work on a book that dealt with America’s most durable, and in many ways most effective and important, enemy: Canada.

So I feel both morally compelled and professionally qualified to examine the Trump administration’s interesting but far from original idea of absorbing that country into the union.

There are, as Donald Trump and Don Corleone might put it, two ways of doing this: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be if Canadians rose up en masse clamoring to join the United States. Even so, there would be awkwardness.

[Read: The angry Canadian]

Canada is slightly larger than America. That would mean that the “cherished 51st state,” as Trump calls it, would be lopsided in terms of territory. It would be 23 times larger than California, which would be fine for owning the libs, but it would also be 14 times larger than the Lone Star State, which would definitely cause some pursed lips and steely looks there. Messing with Texas is a bad idea.

The new state would be the largest in population too, with 40 million people—more than California by a hair, and considerably more than Texas, Florida, or New York. Its size would pose a whole bunch of problems for Trump: Canada is a much more left-wing country than the United States, and absorbing it could well revive the political fortunes of progressives. If its 10 provinces became 10 states instead of one, only three would probably vote for the GOP; the other seven would likely go for Democrats. That might mean adding six Republican senators and 14 Democrats. If Trump were impeached a third time, that might produce the supermajority required for conviction in the Senate.

But such political ramifications are purely academic considerations at the moment. Polling suggests that 85 to 90 percent of all Canadians cling to sovereignty. Having been denied the easy way of absorbing Canada, therefore, the United States might have to try the hard way, conquering the country and administering it as a territory until it is purged of Liberals, Conservatives, and whatever the Canadian equivalent of RINOs turns out to be.

Unfortunately, we have tried this before, with dismal results. In 1775, before the United States had even formally declared independence from Great Britain, it launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to make it the 14th colony. The psychological-warfare geniuses in Congress ordered that the local farmers and villagers be distributed pamphlets—translated into French—declaring, “You have been conquered into liberty,” an interesting way of putting it. Unfortunately, the Catholic farmers and villagers were largely illiterate, and their leaders, the gentry and parish priests who could read, were solidly on the side of the British against a bunch of invading Protestants.

There were moments of brilliant leadership in this invasion, particularly in a daring autumn march through Maine to the very walls of Quebec. There was also a great deal of poltroonery and bungling. The Americans had three talented generals. The first, Richard Montgomery, got killed in the opening assault on Quebec. The second, John Thomas, died of smallpox, along with many of his men. Inoculation was possible, but, like today’s vaccine skeptics, many thought it a bad idea. You can visit the capacious cemetery for the victims on Île aux Noix, now Fort Lennox, Canada.

The third general, the most talented of the lot, was Benedict Arnold, who held the expedition together even after suffering a grievous leg wound. Eventually, however, he grew disgusted with a Congress rather less craven and incompetent than its contemporary successor and became a traitor, accepting a commission as a brigadier general in the British army and fighting against American forces.

We tried again in 1812. Thomas Jefferson, the original Republican, described the acquisition of Canada as “a mere matter of marching.” This was incorrect. The United States launched eight or nine invasions of Canada during the War of 1812, winning only one fruitless battle. The rest of the time, it got walloped. For example, General William Hull, like other American commanders a superannuated veteran of the Revolution, ended up surrendering Detroit with 2,500 troops to a much smaller British and Indian force. Court-martialed for cowardice and neglect of duty in 1814, he was sentenced to death but pardoned.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is perhaps unfamiliar with the Battle of Chateaugay. The last three letters are, after all, gay, and as such, the battle has doubtless been expunged from Defense Department websites and databases, meeting the same fate as the Enola Gay. Still, it is instructive. An invading force of 2,600 American regulars encountered about 1,500 Canadian militia members, volunteers, and Mohawks under a Francophone colonel, Charles de Salaberry.  They were defeated and had to withdraw.

Since the War of 1812, Americans have not tried any formal invasions of Canada, but there was tacit and sometimes overt support for the 1837–38 revolt of the Canadian patriotes, a confrontation over Oregon (a sober look at the size of the Royal Navy dissuaded us from trying anything), and the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. The Fenians were rather like the Proud Boys, only better organized and all Irish, and they also ended up fleeing back over the border.

Perhaps today’s Canadians are a flimsier lot. The Canadian armed forces are quite small (the army numbers only about 42,000, including reservists), although spirited and hardy. One should note with respect that 158 Canadians were killed fighting alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan. But even if the Canadian military were overcome after some initial bloody battles, what then?

Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum.

[Read: Canada is taking Trump seriously and personally]

Parenthetically, there remains the problem of the First Nations (as the Canadians refer to them), whom they treated somewhat less badly than Americans treated Native Americans (as we refer to them). There are about 50,000 Mohawks straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and they are fearless, which is why you will find them building skyscrapers at terrifying heights above the street. As members of what used to be the Iroquois Confederacy, they were ferocious warriors, and they retain a martial tradition. It is sobering to consider that they may think, with reason, that we are the illegal immigrants who have ruined the country, and therefore hold a grudge.

There is a martial spirit up north waiting to be reawakened. Members of the Trump administration may not have heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the crossing of the Sangro, Juno Beach, or the Battle of the Scheldt. Take it from a military historian: The Canadian soldiers were formidable, as were the sailors who escorted convoys across the North Atlantic and the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany. Canada’s 44,000 dead represented a higher percentage of the population than America’s losses in the Second World War. Those who served were almost entirely volunteers.

Bottom line: It is not a good idea to invade Canada. I recommend that in order to avoid the Trump administration becoming even more of a laughingstock, Secretary Hegseth find, read, and distribute to the White House a good account of the Battle of Chateau***. It could help avoid embarrassment.

On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court’s gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” delivered Marshall into a state of euphoria. “I was so happy, I was numb,” he said. After exiting the courtroom, he joyously swung a small boy atop his shoulders and galloped around the austere marble hall. Later, he told reporters, “It is the greatest victory we ever had.”

For Marshall, the “we” who triumphed in Brown surely referred not only, or even primarily, to himself and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues, but to the entire Black race, on whose behalf they’d toiled. And Black Americans did indeed find Brown exhilarating. Harlem’s Amsterdam News, echoing Marshall, called Brown “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” W. E. B. Du Bois stated, “I have seen the impossible happen. It did happen on May 17, 1954.” When Oliver Brown learned of the outcome in the lawsuit bearing his surname, he gathered his family near, and credited divine providence: “Thanks be to God for this.” Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Montgomery’s activists in 1955 by invoking Brown: “If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” Many Black people viewed the opinion with such awe and reverence that for years afterward, they threw parties on May 17 to celebrate Brown’s anniversary.

Over time, however, some began questioning what exactly made Brown worthy of celebration. In 1965, Malcolm X in his autobiography voiced an early criticism of Brown: It had yielded precious little school desegregation over the previous decade. Calling the decision “one of the greatest magical feats ever performed in America,” he contended that the Court’s “masters of legal phraseology” had used “trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated—Hooray! Hooray!—and at the same time … told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’ ”

[Read: The children who desegregated America’s schools]

But that criticism paled in comparison with the anti-Brown denunciation in Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation two years later. They condemned not Brown’s implementation, but its orientation. The fundamental aim of integration must be abandoned because it was driven by the “assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community,” they maintained.

To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community.

Although Black skeptics of the integration ideal originated on the far left, Black conservatives—including the economist Thomas Sowell—have more recently ventured related critiques. The most prominent example is Marshall’s successor on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995, four years after joining the Court, Thomas issued a blistering opinion that opened, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”

Desperate efforts to promote school integration, Thomas argued, stemmed from the misperception that identifiably Black schools were somehow doomed to fail because of their racial composition. “There is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment,” he wrote. Taking a page from Black Power’s communal emphasis, Thomas argued that “black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.” In a 2007 opinion, he extolled Washington, D.C.’s all-Black Dunbar High School—which sent dozens of graduates to the Ivy League and its ilk during the early 20th century—as a paragon of Black excellence.

In the 2000s, as Brown crept toward its 50th anniversary, Derrick Bell of the NYU School of Law went so far as to allege that the opinion had been wrongly decided. For Bell, who had sharpened his skills as an LDF lawyer, Brown’s “integration ethic centralizes whiteness. White bodies are represented as somehow exuding an intrinsic value that percolates into the ‘hearts and minds’ of black children.” Warren’s opinion in the case should have affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” regime, Bell wrote, but it should have insisted on genuine equality of expenditures, rather than permitting the sham equality of yore that consigned Black students to shoddy classrooms in dilapidated buildings. He acknowledged, though, that his jaundiced account put him at odds with dominant American legal and cultural attitudes: “The Brown decision,” he noted, “has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause.”

In her New Book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children, Noliwe Rooks adds to a growing literature that challenges the portrayal of the decision as “a significant civil rights–era win.” Rooks, the chair of the Africana-​studies department at Brown University, offers an unusual blend of historical examination and family memoir that generally amplifies the concerns articulated by prior desegregation discontents. The result merits careful attention not for its innovative arguments, but as an impassioned, arresting example of how Brown skepticism, which initially gained traction on the fringes of Black life, has come to hold considerable appeal within the Black intellectual mainstream.

As recently as midway through the first Trump administration, Rooks would have placed herself firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp, convinced that addressing racial inequality in education could best be pursued through integration. But traveling a few years ago to promote a book that criticized how private schools often thwart meaningful racial integration, she repeatedly encountered audience members who disparaged her core embrace of integration. Again and again, she heard from Black parents that “the trauma their children experienced in predominantly white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.”

[From the May 2018 issue: The report on race that shook America]

The onslaught dislodged Rooks’s faith in the value of contemporary integration, and even of Brown itself. She now exhibits the convert’s zeal. Brown, she writes, should be viewed as “an attack on Black schools, politics, and communities, which meant it was an attack on the pillars of Black life.” For some Black citizens, the decision acted as “a wrecking ball that crashed through their communities and, like a pendulum, continues to swing.”

Rooks emphasizes the plight of Black educators, who disproportionately lost their positions in Brown’s aftermath because of school consolidations. Before Brown, she argues, “Black teachers did not see themselves as just teaching music, reading, or science, but also as activists, organizers, and freedom fighters who dreamed of and fought for an equitable world for future generations”; they served as models who showed “Black children how to fight for respect and societal change.”

Endorsing one of Black Power’s analogies, she maintains that school integration meant that “as small a number as possible of Black children were, like pepper on popcorn, lightly sprinkled atop wealthy, white school environments, while most others were left behind.” Even for those ostensibly fortunate few flecks of pepper, Rooks insists, providing the white world’s seasoning turned out to be a highly uncertain, dangerous endeavor. She uses her father’s disastrous experiences with integration to examine what she regards as the perils of the entire enterprise. After excelling in all-Black educational environments, including as an undergraduate at Howard University, Milton Rooks became one of a very small number of Black students to enroll at the Golden Gate University School of Law in the early 1960s.

Sent by his hopeful parents “over that racial wall,” Milton encountered hostility from white professors, who doubted his intellectual capacity, Rooks recounts, and “spit him back up like a piece of meat poorly digested.” She asserts that the ordeal not only prompted him to drop out of law school but also spurred his descent into alcoholism. Rooks extrapolates further, writing:

Milton’s experience reflected the trauma Black students suffered as they desegregated public schools in states above the Mason-Dixon Line, where displays of racism were often mocking, disdainful, pitying, and sword sharp in their ability to cut the unsuspecting into tiny bits. It destroyed confidence, shook will, sowed doubt, murdered souls—quietly, sure, but still as completely as could a mob of white racists setting their cowardice, rage, and anger loose upon the defenseless.

The harms that contemporary integrated educational environments inflict upon Black students can be tantamount, in her view, to the harms imposed upon the many Black students who are forced to attend monoracial, woeful urban high schools. To make this point, Rooks recounts her own struggle to correct the misplacement of her son, Jelani, in a low-level math class in Princeton, New Jersey’s public-school system during the aughts (when she taught at Princeton University). She witnessed other Black parents meet with a similar lack of support in guiding their children to the academically demanding courses that could propel them to elite colleges. In Jelani’s case, she had evidence that teachers’ “feelings were hardening against him.” He led a life of relative safety and economic privilege, and felt at ease among his white classmates and friends, she allows, even as she also stresses that what he “experienced wasn’t the violence of poverty; it was something else equally devastating”:

We knew that poor, working-class, or urban communities were not the only places where Black boys are terrorized and traumatized. We knew that the unfamiliarity of his white friends with any other Black people would one day become an issue in our home. We knew that guns were not the only way to murder a soul.

Frustrated with Princeton’s public schools, Rooks eventually enrolled Jelani in an elite private high school where, she notes, he also endured racial harassment—and from which he graduated before making his way to Amherst College.

seven decades have now elapsed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Given the stubbornly persistent phenomenon of underperforming predominantly Black schools throughout the nation, arguing that Brown’s potential has been fully realized would be absurd. Regrettably, the Warren Court declined to advance the most powerful conception of Brown when it had the opportunity to do so: Its infamously vague “all deliberate speed” approach allowed state and local implementation to be delayed and opposed for far too long. In its turn, the Burger Court provided an emaciated conception of Brown’s meaning, one that permitted many non-southern jurisdictions to avoid pursuing desegregation programs. Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history.

[From the May 2014 issue: Segregation now ...]

Disenchantment with Brown’s educational efficacy is thus entirely understandable. Yet to suggest that the Supreme Court did not go far enough, fast enough in galvanizing racially constructive change in American schools after Brown is one thing. To suggest that Brown somehow took a wrong turn is quite another.

Rooks does not deny that integration succeeded in narrowing the racial achievement gap. But like other Brown critics, she nevertheless idealizes the era of racial segregation. Near Integrated  ’s conclusion, Rooks contends that “too few of us have a memory of segregated Black schools as the beating heart of vibrant Black communities, enabling students to compose lives of harmony, melody, and rhythm and sustained Black life and dignity.” But this claim gets matters exactly backwards. The brave people who bore segregation’s brunt believed that Jim Crow represented an assault on Black life and dignity, and that Brown marked a sea change in Black self-conceptions.

Desegregation’s detractors routinely elevate the glory days of D.C.’s Dunbar High School, but they refuse to heed the lessons of its most distinguished graduates. Charles Hamilton Houston—Dunbar class of 1911, who went on to become valedictorian at Amherst and the Harvard Law Review’s first Black editor—nevertheless dedicated his life to eradicating Jim Crow as an NAACP litigator and Thurgood Marshall’s mentor in his work contesting educational segregation. Sterling A. Brown—Dunbar class of 1918, who graduated from Williams College before becoming a distinguished poet and professor—nevertheless wrote the following in 1944, one decade before Brown:

Negroes recognize that the phrase “equal but separate accommodations” is a myth. They have known Jim Crow a long time, and they know Jim Crow means scorn and not belonging.

Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.

In the 1990s, Nelson B. Rivers III, an unheralded NAACP official from South Carolina, memorably heaved buckets of cold water on those who were beginning to wonder, “ Was integration the right thing to do? Was it worth it? Was Brown a good decision?” Rivers dismissed such questions as “asinine,” and continued:

To this day, I can remember bus drivers pulling off and blowing smoke in my mother’s face. I can remember the back of the bus, colored water fountains … I can hear a cop telling me, “Take your black butt back to nigger town.” What I tell folk … is that there are a lot of romanticists now who want to take this trip down Memory Lane, and they want to go back, and I tell the young people that anybody who wants to take you back to segregation, make sure you get a round-trip ticket because you won’t stay.

Nostalgia for the pre-Brown era would not exercise nearly so powerful a grip on Black America today if its adherents focused on its detailed, pervasive inhumanities rather than relying on gauzy glimpses.

No one has pressed this point more vividly than Robert L. Carter, who worked alongside Marshall at the LDF before eventually becoming a distinguished federal judge. He understood that to search for Brown’s impact exclusively in the educational domain is mistaken. Instead, he emphasized that Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life. Despite Chief Justice Warren formally writing the opinion to apply exclusively to education, its attack on segregation has—paradoxically—been most efficacious beyond that original context.

[From the October 1967 issue: Jonathan Kozol’s ‘Where Ghetto Schools Fail’]

“The psychological dimensions of America’s race relations problem were completely recast” by Brown, Carter wrote. “Blacks were no longer supplicants seeking, pleading, begging to be treated as full-fledged members of the human race; no longer were they appealing to morality, to conscience, to white America’s better instincts,” he noted. “They were entitled to equal treatment as a right under the law; when such treatment was denied, they were being deprived—in fact robbed—of what was legally theirs. As a result, the Negro was propelled into a stance of insistent militancy.”

Even within the educational sphere, though, it is profoundly misguided to claim that Black students who attend solid, meaningfully integrated schools encounter environments as corrosive as, or worse than, those facing students trapped in ghetto schools. This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t analysis suggests an entire cohort stuck in the same boat, when its many members are not even in the same ocean. The Black student marooned in a poor and violent neighborhood, with reason to fear actual murder, envies the Black student attending a rigorous, integrated school who worries about metaphorical “soul murder.” All struggles are not created equal.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Was Integration the Wrong Goal?”

When Viktor Orbán gave a speech in 2022 at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Budapest, he shared his secret to amassing power with Donald Trump’s fan base. “We must have our own media,” he told his audience.

As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I have had a firsthand view of how Orbán has built his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press. As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency—the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats—it all looks very familiar. The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well.

I saw the roots of Orbán’s media strategy when I first met him for an interview, in 2006. He was in the opposition then but had served as prime minister before and was fighting hard to get back in power. When we met in his office in a hulking century-old building that overlooked the Danube River in Budapest, he was very friendly, even charming. Like Trump, he is the kind of politician who knows how to connect with people when he thinks he has something to gain.

During the interview, his demeanor shifted. I still remember how his face went dark when I pushed on questions that he obviously did not want to answer. It was a tense exchange, but he reverted to his cordial mode when we finished the interview, and I turned off the recorder.

What happened afterwards was less friendly. In Hungary, journalists are expected to send edited interview transcripts to their interviewees. The idea is that if the interviewees think you took something they said out of context, they can ask for changes before publication. But in this case, Orbán’s press team sent back the text with some of his answers entirely deleted and rewritten. When my editors and I told them we wouldn’t accept this, they said they wouldn’t allow the interview to be published.

In the end, we published it without their edits. That was the last time I interviewed Viktor Orbán. And when he returned to power in 2010 after a landslide election victory, he made sure that he would never have to answer uncomfortable questions again.

One of the first pieces of legislation his party introduced was a media law that restructured how the sector is regulated in Hungary. The government set up a new oversight agency and appointed hard-line loyalists to its key positions. This agency later blocked proposed mergers and acquisitions by independent media companies, while issuing friendly rulings for pro-government businesses.

The Orbán government also transformed public broadcasting—which had previously carried news programs challenging politicians from all parties—into a mouthpiece of the state. The service’s newly appointed leaders got rid of principled journalists and replaced them with governing-party sympathizers who could be counted on to toe the line.

Then the government went after private media companies. Origo, a popular Hungarian news website, was one of its first targets. For many years, Origo—where I had been working when I conducted the 2006 Orbán interview—was a great place to do journalism. It was owned by a multinational telecommunications company and run by people who did not interfere with our work. If anything, they were supportive of our journalism. In 2009, after conducting some award-winning investigations, I was even invited to the CEO’s office for a friendly chat about the importance of accountability reporting.

But a few years after Orbán’s return to power, the environment changed. As we continued our aggressive—but fair—reporting, the telecommunications company behind Origo came under pressure from the government. Instead of sending encouraging messages, the outlet’s publisher started telling the editor in chief not to pursue certain stories that were uncomfortable for Orbán and his allies.

My colleagues in the newsroom and I pushed back. But after repeated clashes with the publisher over one of my investigations, into the expensive and mysterious travel of a powerful government official, the editor in chief was forced out of his job. I resigned, along with many fellow journalists, and soon the news site was sold to a company with close links to Orbán’s inner circle. Now Origo is unrecognizable. It has become the flagship news site of the pro-government propaganda machine, publishing articles praising Orbán and viciously attacking his critics.

Origo is part of an ecosystem that includes hundreds of newspapers and news sites, several television channels—including the public broadcasters and one of the two biggest commercial channels—and almost all radio stations. That’s not to mention the group of pro-government influencers whose social-media posts are distributed widely, thanks to financial resources also linked to the government.

This machine is not even pretending to do journalism in the traditional sense. It is not like Fox News, which still has some professional anchors and reporters alongside the openly pro-Trump media personalities who dominate the channel in prime time.

The machine built under Orbán has only one purpose, and it is to serve the interests of the government. There is hardly any autonomy. Editors and reporters get directions from the very top of the regime on what they can and cannot cover. If there is a message that must be delivered, the whole machine jumps into action: Hundreds of outlets will publish the same story with the same headline and same photos.

In 2022, Direkt36, the investigative-reporting center I co-founded after leaving Origo, wrote about one such example. In the story, which was reported by my colleague Zsuzsanna Wirth, we described an episode in which Bertalan Havasi, the prime minister’s press chief at the time, sent an email to the director of the national news agency.

​​“Hi, could you write an article about this, citing me as a source? Thanks!” Havasi wrote. (The instruction was about a relatively mundane matter: a letter that a European rabbi had sent to Orbán thanking him for his support.) Later, Havasi also told the agency what the headline and lead sentence should be. The news agency followed the instructions word for word.

A few years ago, I investigated the pro-government takeover of Index, another of Hungary’s most popular news sites. I obtained a recording in which the outlet’s editor in chief described to one of his employees how Index had received financial backing from a friend of Orbán’s, a former gas fitter who has become Hungary’s richest man thanks to lucrative state contracts. The editor in chief warned that Index had to be careful with news about Orbán’s friend because, without him, “there will be no one who will put money into” the outlet.

Just as Orbán explained in his CPAC speech, this sophisticated propaganda machine has played a crucial role in his ability to stay in power for more than 15 years. When the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a watchdog group of which the United States is a member, published its report on Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections, it pointed to the media as a major weakness in the country’s democratic system.

“The lack of impartial information in the media about the main contestants, the absence of debates among the major electoral competitors, and the independent media’s limited access to public information and activities of national and local government significantly limited voters’ opportunity to make an informed choice,” the election monitors concluded, after a vote that yet again cemented the power of Orbán’s ruling party.

What has happened in Hungary might not happen in the United States. Hungary, a former Eastern Bloc nation that broke free of oppressive Soviet control only three and a half decades ago, has never had such a robust and vibrant independent media scene as the one the U.S. has enjoyed for centuries. But if someone had told me when Orbán returned to power that we would end up with a propaganda machine where the free Hungarian media had once been, with many of the old outlets shut down or transformed into government mouthpieces, I would not have believed it.

And I see ominous signs in the U.S. that feel similar to the early phases of what we experienced here. When I read about the Associated Press being banned from White House events, that reminds me of how my colleagues at Direkt36 have been denied entry to Orbán’s rare press conferences. When I see the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump, that reminds me of how big corporations and their wealthy executives, including the owner of my former workplace, bent the knee to Orbán.

When I read about ABC settling a Trump lawsuit of dubious merit—and CBS contemplating the same—it brings to mind the way the courts and the government itself can be used to manipulate and bully media organizations into submission.

Journalists and anyone else who cares about the free press must understand that democratic institutions are more fragile than they look, especially if they face pressure from ruthless and powerful political forces. This is particularly true for the news media, which is also being challenged by the technological revolution in how we communicate information. Just because an outlet has been around for decades and has a storied history does not mean that it will be around forever.

If any good news can be learned from Hungary’s unhappy experience, it is that unless your country turns into a fully authoritarian regime similar to China or Russia, there are still ways for independent journalism to survive. Even in Hungary, some outlets manage to operate independently from the government. Many of them, including the one I run, rely primarily on their audience for support in the form of donations or subscriptions. We learned that it is easy for billionaires and media CEOs to be champions of press freedom when the risks are low, but that you can’t count on them when things get tough. So we rely on our readers instead.

If they feel like what you are doing is valuable, they will be your real allies in confronting the suffocating power of autocracy.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

In the less than two months since Donald Trump took office, he has upended decades of foreign policy by targeting the country’s allies. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the effects of his policies in the U.S. and across the globe.

Meanwhile, Congress averted a government shutdown on Friday evening, passing a bill that will fund the government through September. Although Chuck Schumer of New York rallied enough votes for the bill, some Democrats now say that the minority leader capitulated to Trump. Especially among House Democrats from districts that the president carried in the election, “they feel as though he kind of left them out to dry,” Laura Barrón-López said last night.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.