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On a long car ride recently, I listened to a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. I’d noticed it at the top of the charts, which I found curious. I later learned that was in part because Joe Rogan had recommended it. “I think some telepathy is real,” he had said. “It is real”—which is not a statement normally worth taking seriously. Except maybe now, when belief in telepathy seems to be joining forces with vaccine skepticism and belief in UFOs and nutritional remedies to create a Marvel Universe of conspiracy theorists banding together to fight the common enemy of Establishment Science.

The Telepathy Tapes starts with a small domestic miracle. It features nonspeaking autistic children who have learned to communicate using a method sometimes known as spelling, or facilitated communication. The facilitator, who in the podcast is mostly the speller’s mother, guides the child’s hand, or arm, or sometimes lightly touches them to help them spell out words. It’s a method developed in the 1970s to allow nonspeaking children to express their thoughts. Later tests proved the method to be wholly unreliable, although the podcast claims that it has evolved to be more so. And then the podcast ups the ante. Not only can the children communicate, but they are telepathic, and by the end of the series they are communing with the dead and predicting disasters.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we bring on Dan Engber, a senior editor on The Atlantic’s science desk, who started looking into facilitated communication about a decade ago. Engber explains how spelling and alleged telepathy have always been intertwined. And he theorizes why the forces of conspiracism have lately been aligning in a novel way.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: On a long road trip over winter break, I listened to all 10 episodes of this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. The show is about a group of nonspeaking autistic kids who are able to communicate using a method sometimes known as “spelling” or “facilitated communication.” Essentially, someone—the facilitator—helps guide the kids, using a keyboard or an iPad to spell out messages.

That already is a kind of magic because kids who have been unable to communicate can now share their thoughts. But this podcast takes it to a whole new level of magic. It’s not just that they can communicate; these kids can read minds.

Houston’s brother: I’ll bring Houston up to them and just tell him, Hey. Think of one little thing, and he writes it out on the board.

Ky Dickens: So he’s read your friends’ minds?

Houston’s brother: He has read my friends’ minds before. I’ve seen it firsthand.

Rosin: By the end of the series, the kids are not just reading minds. They’re communing with the dead, predicting disasters, and generally outclassing the neurotypical mortals.

Maura:  Again, she always tells me about these God visits, as she calls them, that happen at night. And so I said, Did he talk to you again last night? And she said, Yes, unfortunately. And then she does: Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Rosin: On that road trip, my partner and I got into a big argument about this podcast. The mind-reading scenes sounded so believable on the podcast, but telepathy?

Manisha: What is this phenomenon happening? Why are his mind and my mind completely connected?

Rosin: Why were so many people buying into this?

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Today we’re going to talk about how an idea like telepathy lands differently now: the cultural conditions that make this old idea—that’s almost too fringe to bother debunking—take off.

And we’re going to do that by looking at this blockbuster podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, which started out as this low-budget independent project. And then, in December, Joe Rogan started spreading the word.

Joe Rogan: I think some telepathy is real.

Duncan Trussell: It is real.

Rogan: I think it is real.

Rosin:  And then the host of Telepathy Tapes—her name is Ky Dickens—got an agent, did an interview with Rogan and then more interviews, and now she has a documentary in the works.

From the car that day, I sent a Slack message to an Atlantic colleague who knows a lot about facilitated communication.

Dan Engber:  December 28, 4 o’clock p.m.—not a time that I was on Slack.

Rosin: That is Dan Engber, a science writer at The Atlantic.

Engber:  I discovered that sliding my can of seltzer around on this table is sort of like an ASMR thing.

Rosin:  Dan started looking into facilitated communication about 10 years ago—

Engber: Was developed in the 1970s in Australia.

Rosin: —as part of the disabilities-rights movement, a form of empowerment.

 Engber: And it was seen in this whole tradition of liberating people with communication issues from, basically, the prison of lowered expectations—just because: They might not do well in an IQ test if they can’t talk, but if you give them a way to communicate, they can reveal who they really are.

Rosin:  The way it works is: A facilitator helps the autistic person spell out messages—

Engber: By holding the person’s hand or forearm or possibly their shoulder, or touching them in other ways, or holding the keyboard or the letter board in front of them.

The facilitated part of “facilitated communication” means someone has to be there to help.  It always involved someone else there, doing something to help the person type.

Rosin: Now, to be clear: Spelling, facilitated communication—or FC for short—is not reading people’s minds. Or it’s not supposed to be. So it’s a bit of a jump from FC to telepathy, which is why Dan agreed to look into the Telepathy Tapes podcast. It was a new—let’s say—development.

Ky Dickens, the host of the podcast, is not a science journalist. In interviews, she’s referred to herself as a “science nerd” and a “skeptic.” Generally, she makes documentaries. But since she didn’t have the funds at the time to make this documentary, she decided to make it into a podcast.

By the way, The Atlantic reached out to Dickens for comment, but she didn’t respond.

Okay. So the podcast begins with the series of spelling experiments that she’s running, sort of living-room experiments.

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: What’s the setup? Describe to us who and what is in this room.

Engber: Okay. The setup is, she starts by—this is kind of her entrée into this world. She hears a woman named Diane Hennacy Powell. This is a psychiatrist based in the Pacific Northwest who’s written a book about ESP and is very interested herself in the topic of people with autism who, in Powell’s view, have kind of a savant skill for reading minds or ESP or psi phenomena. So Dickens hears Powell on a podcast and gets the idea that she wants to pursue this.

And so she starts working with Powell to get some of these people and to design experiments, ways to test them, and then she’s going to film it and record audio from it and talk about it. And so that’s where the podcast starts.

So they set up in a rented house in Glendale, and they fly in a family from Mexico. All the spellers only go by their first name.

Sophia: This is Mia.

Diane Hennacy Powell: Hi, Mia. Nice to meet you.

Sophia: Yes. She’s waving.

Engber: So it’s this girl, Mia. I think she’s a teenager. And they start running these experiments.

Dickens: So Dr. Powell, what numbers do you want to put in there?

Powell: I would like to try three-digit numbers, so they’ll be numbers between 100 and 999.

Engber: Powell will generate a random number on an iPad app.

Rosin: Powell’s the scientist?

Engber: Powell’s the scientist.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: Then she’ll show that number to Mia’s mom. Behind a screen, Mia has a blindfold on. They’ve taken extra care to make sure, you know, they’ve covered up any mirrors in the room, even a TV screen.

Powell: That’s a reflective surface there, the TV, so we need to cover that.

Dickens: Okay. And there’s a mirror there.

Powell: And there’s a mirror there. Yes, that’s got to be covered up, as well, or taken down.

Engber: So they’re taking a lot of care to make sure only Mia’s mom is seeing this number. And then, Mia’s mom, who is the facilitator, sits next to Mia. And Mia spells out, using her letter board, what her mom has just seen, or she says what the number is. There could be numbers on the board too.

Woman: Se puede quitar.

Dickens: She’s pointing at six.

Mia’s mother: Nine, eight.

Engber: So that’s the test. That’s the telepathy experiment as described in the first episode of the show.

Rosin: And I have to say, listening to it, now just in the pure audio—obviously, I can’t see it, but I’m listening to it—it is like a magic show. I mean, when you listen to it, you do think, Whoa. You know, How are they doing this in the way they’re describing? Like, How is this autistic child doing this? Like, the mother hasn’t said a word. You haven’t heard the mother say a word. So that’s the feeling of listening to it. It is a little like watching a miracle, you know?

Engber: Yeah—

Rosin: Listening to a miracle. We’re not watching it. And I think that’s probably a key difference.

Engber: Well, I hate to say this to a podcast host, but I think the problem here is: There’s sort of a pernicious problem with audio that is in play here.

Rosin: Boo.

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: It’s all right. Go ahead.

Engber: It’s all about voices and people’s impressions. And it’s so intimate, right? And I think these are all things that are echoed in the people with telepathy—supposedly with telepathy—as well. So I think it’s worth talking this through. In listening to the podcast, you’re hearing Ky Dickens, the host, just be so amazed by what she’s seeing. And then one of the members of her crew, she describes as this real, like, skeptical guy, this real materialist, and he kind of has a conversion in real time on the podcast.

Michael Ognisanti: It’s hard for me to not believe this is authentic. I’m looking at everything. I’m watching her. I’m watching the mom. I’m watching—I’m watching everything. And for me and my perspective, it’s real.

Engber: So for the listener, you’re not even hearing Mia. Of course, Mia doesn’t speak. That’s the point. But you’re hearing the people who are seeing Mia, and you’re getting their reactions, and they are so amazed, and it is so sincere that that emotion just transfers to you. Also, the podcast is really, I would say, amateurishly produced. I talked to one podcast producer who described it as having kind of like a Blair Witch effect, which I thought was apt. It’s like, that just makes it feel a little more real somehow.

Mia’s mother: Uno, tres.

Group: Bravo, Mia! (Applause.)

Rosin: Okay. So back to my original question: Dan, as someone who knows about facilitated communication and spelling, what are we missing?

Engber: Okay, so what is not described in that first episode is how spelling works, which involves the facilitator—in this case, with Mia, her mom—sitting on the sofa next to her and placing her finger on Mia’s forehead the entire time that Mia is spelling.

So, I mean, this is just—what does that mean? I know what it means. But, like, I think if the average listener of the podcast were to watch the videos, and there are videos on the podcast website—you pay $10, you can become a member, and then you can watch the videos—it just, like, gives you a first sense of, well: This process of producing the answers, you know, the messages from Mia, it’s very intimate.

It’s collaborative. Something here is going on. It’s not Mia on her own with a pen and paper writing out digits. It’s this intensely cooperative process to produce the messages. And that is a signal for what could really be going on here, which is that this method—again, going back to the 1970s in Australia—has long, long, long been known to have a problem, which is: It can be really, really hard to tell who is the actual author of the messages being produced.

[Music]

Rosin: Facilitated communication found its way from Australia in the ’70s to the U.S. by the ’80s and the early ’90s.

In a PBS Frontline documentary called “Prisoners of Silence” that aired in 1993, Kathy Hayduke, the mother of a nonspeaking autistic child, recalled the moment her daughter Stacy had a breakthrough—all thanks to FC and her daughter’s new facilitator.

Kathy Hayduke: And she said, Kathy, she’s telling me this, and she’s telling me that, and you’ve got to see it. So one day, she came over to the house and she said, Stacy, I know you’re excited. After all these years, you must have something you want to tell Mom. And Stacy types out, I love you, Mom.

Rosin: I can understand a mom wanting to hear I love you from her child. So the relief was real, and the emotions around FC were deep. But soon after the method came to the U.S., it was debunked—or, at least, declared wholly unreliable.

Engber: A lot of tests were done of people using facilitated communication to see if they could ever spell out a message with information that their facilitator didn’t know. So if the problem is, maybe your facilitator is really the one writing the messages, well, there’s an easy test for it. Like, okay, let me show you a picture of a sandwich. And then while your facilitator is not in the room, bring him back in the room. Tell me what you saw. And the reality was few, if any, people using FC could pass that test.

Rosin: To quote a program director in the PBS documentary who was involved in some of that testing, out of 180 trials, quote: “We literally really didn’t get one correct response.”

Rosin: Are you suggesting manipulation? Or what are you suggesting, exactly?

Engber: Definitely not manipulation.

Rosin: As we mentioned before, FC in its original form was just holding someone’s hand or arm or shoulder while the other person typed on a keyboard. Potentially—at least, optics-wise—lots of room for subconsciously guiding the person to where you want them to type.

But in Mia’s case, on the Telepathy Tapes podcast, her mom just had a finger on her forehead, or she was holding her chin.

Engber: I think this is really important. It is extreme—you could have read or reported on this at great length, as I have, and it’s still extremely hard to tell what’s going on when you’re seeing it with your own eyes. So I think that’s sort of how the podcast works. The people, the host, the camera guy—they’re seeing it with their own eyes and then reacting. And they’re reacting the way most people would react, seeing this with their own eyes, which is not like, Hey. This looks fake, but rather, This looks real.

Rosin: Okay. So the filmmaker had a certain reaction, which we can assume was an honest reaction. I mean, let’s just say it was an honest reaction, the filmmaker and the cameraman. They looked—they saw the hands on the forehead; they were like, Whoa, something beyond my comprehension is going on here. What did you see then? How did you assess the forehead touch?

Engber: Well, I think what is so easy to miss or so hard to grasp, even if you know what you’re looking for, is this idea that this might be working something like a Ouija board, where, you know, two or more people put their hands on something, and just the uncertainty of having multiple hands on it—I think it’s called a planchette, on the Ouija board, the thing you’re sliding around to different letters—

Rosin: Sure.

Engber: —it kind of feels like it’s moving on its own, even when you’re doing it, right? But even understanding that—this is my point: Even knowing that a Ouija board is a toy or a game, it works. You know that, you know, a spirit isn’t moving this thing, and yet it kind of feels like, Well, who is moving it?

Rosin: So Mia and her mom are doing what, then? Is it, like, a collective—I’m just trying to find a word or articulate what is happening in that room, because you’re not calling it manipulation. You’re not saying that Mia and her mom are kind of hucksters doing a circus trick to get themselves on a podcast. That’s not your characterization of them at all, right?

Engber: No chance.

Rosin: And you’re not saying that Ky Dickens, the host, or the cameraman are lying. We’re not saying that.

Engber: No chance, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t read minds. I will admit that up front, but I just—I’ve interviewed a lot of spellers. I’ve interviewed a lot of spellers’ moms. I’ve never met one that I thought was lying about it.

There’s one part in the podcast, actually, where Ky Dickens is addressing the skeptics that she knows are out there, and she just says, The idea that the facilitators might be somehow creating these messages is—I forget the phrase—like, unambiguously false. She just rejects outright the possibility that there’s any unconscious influence from the facilitators, from the parents.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And then she quotes one of the parents saying, “The thing is, Ky, we can’t all be lying.”

Rosin: Right.

Engber: And the implication there is, Yeah. Okay. Maybe you’re so skeptical you think Mia’s mom is a grifter or something. But there are so many parents out here who feel that their kids have telepathy. It can’t just be a whole army of grifters.

Rosin: Okay. So what’s in the mix then? Let me just try this, and you see if I’m with you here. So it’s not lying that you think is in the mix between this parent and child. It’s some form of communion—love, maybe, even? Connection? I would say, hope?

Like, there’s so much out there—I’m a parent of an autistic child, though not a nonverbal one, but—so much hope of, like, inside the child, there’s so much that this child wants to say and express with me and, like, a wish for connection. There’s a relationship or intimacy, and that translates into something. But it’s not clear what it is. Is it something like that?

Engber: I think it is a profoundly intimate act. I’ve had facilitators facilitate me. And it is—I mean, you’re sitting with a stranger, or I was sitting with a stranger, and she puts her hand on mine, and I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just, like, you suddenly are holding hands with someone; you feel close to them, right? And there’s just such a desire to—I think we all have a desire to connect and feel understood and feel like we’re understanding people.

Now, raise that desire to the hundredth power if you’re talking about a mother or a father trying to connect with their child, to the thousandth power if that child is nonspeaking, and it’s always sort of hard to exactly understand what’s going on in your child’s mind.

I mean, “desire” is even shortchanging it. It seems like the most urgent need I can possibly imagine is to find a way to communicate with your child.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: And here is this thing, and at first, it’s frustrating. It’s not working. And then, Wait! What’s that? A glimmer of something. Like, We’re doing this method, and we spelled out a word, and then it flowers from there, right? And then now we’re spelling out short sentences, and now my son is writing poetry. And now I’m learning about all this stuff. Like, Oh! He’s got a girlfriend. And he’s telling me all about that. What more could you want than have your kid tell you about their first love?

And so you can just see how the drive to make this thing work and to find meaning in it is so intense. And I think that is both very moving and very dangerous.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: If you believe telepathy is real, what else might you believe?

[Break]

Rosin: So facilitated communication has been around for decades and, as you said, has been debunked. But this podcast goes way further than that, right?

Engber: Right. Yeah. And this podcast actually invokes something that—I didn’t realize it, but—has been present since the start of facilitated communication, which is just that: Okay, if it is the case, if you’re facilitating me, and the messages that are coming out are actually you subconsciously writing those messages yourself, at some point, you might think, Hey. Wait a second. Dan just spelled something that was in my head, right?

It is just a natural effect of how you have this Ouija-board illusion, right? Just eventually, I might type something or spell something that is, you know, information that only you know, that I shouldn’t know. And so this is, in some way, just a byproduct of the Ouija board effect, right?

Rosin: Oh. So the flaws that you’ve already described in facilitated communication—if you’re not seeing them as flaws, the other word to call them is telepathy.

Engber: Exactly. So it’s really—it’s just like, you hit this fork in the road early in the process, right? There’s two problems here. If it is really true that the facilitator is the one who’s actually creating the messages, there’s two problems.

One: If the speller knows something that the facilitator doesn’t know, the speller can’t spell that out. That’s the message-passing test. That was the test that the scientists used to debunk this whole thing. So that’s problem No. 1e. So you have to deal with that problem.

Problem No. 2, though, is exactly the opposite: Okay, why does the speller seem to know things that are in the head of the facilitator? Like, they shouldn’t—why can they do that? And so you can either see that happen and go, You know what? I’m a little worried that this method doesn’t work, and then you move on to other interventions to try to help the nonspeaking person, or you say, Oh, I know what it is. The spelling is valid, and they have ESP.

Rosin:  Oh my god. That’s so obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that. That’s exactly what it is. Of course you would call that telepathy because you are, in fact, reading the thoughts of the facilitator. It’s literally just a synonym for the problems you were describing.

Does the podcast talk about the history of facilitated spelling or telepathy at all?

Engber: Yeah, the podcast gets into it. I mean, there’s a certain point right at the beginning—it’s not clear what we’re even talking about. It’s just, Here’s this girl, Mia. She can read her mother’s mind. And as it goes along, it gets into the history of facilitated communication, the scandals. There were false sexual-abuse allegations; there were the debunkings of the ’90s.

And so the podcast has to engage with that, right? And what the host, Ky Dickens, does is: She basically acknowledges that all that happened. She says, But look—people were experiencing telepathy from the very beginning, and also the method has improved. We now have these new versions, called Rapid Prompting or Spelling to Communicate, and they’re much better. And also, she talks about one guy that she features in the podcast.

Manisha: What is that? What do you see, Akhil?

Engber: A man named Akhil, who is, according to the podcast, telepathic and can also speak to the dead.

Manisha: Akhil used to see, like, when my mom passed away, and I used to sit down and study with him, he would say, Your mom wants to play with me, and I said, Where is she? He said, She’s sitting beside me.

Engber: And he does this without being touched. So for her, it’s like, There you go. That’s proof.

Rosin: And what would you say about that? Because I do have to say, listening, Akhil and his mother are the most charming mother-son pair you will ever encounter.

Engber: I mean, this is, again—one of the complicating things about this is it’d be nice if you could just say, Oh, FC is fake, and everyone who uses it is, you know—the message is coming entirely from the facilitator. But it’s just such a diverse set of practices, and it involves such a diverse set of people and people-facilitator pairs. It’s just, like, a very complicated question.

Now, Akhil—you watched the video of him. He’s not being touched by his mother. But there are cases where he appears to read her mind by typing into an iPad keyboard, and she’s not touching him or the keyboard.

Dickens: Okay. So, Manisha, come stand here.

Dickens: (Narrating.) I’ve taken a step back and changed my body position slightly, just in case. I reach into the paper bag, and the new word is: tiger.

Dickens: This one.

Manisha: Okay. Here you go, buddy.

Voice software: T-i-g-e-r. Tiger.

Dickens: Wow, awesome.

Engber: I mean, it is really impressive. It looks like telepathy, but she is very involved in the process, right? She’s making sounds. She’s moving. And I think it just goes to show how this influence—what I would say is, like, unconscious influence over the creation of the messages—can happen in many different ways.

Like, it could happen if you’re holding a person’s hand. It could happen if you’re holding their shoulder, putting your finger on their forehead, holding the letter board for them and not even touching them. And my belief is that in the case of Akhil, it’s through these other cues. You can see in the video, she’s, like, leaning her body to one side or the other in concert with the direction that he has to move his finger to hit the next key on the keyboard.

So he has to type, you know, a-r, and those are on the left side of the keyboard, and she’s kind of leaning to the left. And then he has to type i-p-o, which is on the upper right of the keyboard, and she, like, leans her body in that direction. Now, in order for Akhil to pick up on those cues, I mean, the level of attunement that he must have to what she is, you know, perhaps subconsciously, wanting him to do is truly exquisite. I mean, it’s amazing.

Dickens: The answer is: 44,126,388.

Voice software: 4-4-1-2—

Engber: On the other hand, your other choice here is to believe that he really is telepathic and speaks to the dead. So you’re confronted with, you know, two extraordinary skills, one far more extraordinary than the other.

Rosin: Yeah. I have to say, I—listening to Akhil and his mother, I mean, never was I more torn. Like, I was tearing up listening to them, but mostly because of the depth of their love and attunement for each other, and her dedication to him. Like, I wasn’t so much paying attention to: Is he telepathic? I just doubted it from the beginning. But just this specific kind of intimacy they created with each other was just amazing.

So, you know, we’ve been talking about spelling and love. What are some of the more, can we say, outlandish claims that the podcast makes?

Engber: Yeah, so Dickens says that communing with the dead is—she describes it as—“a very common gift” among these telepathic spellers. I mean, there’s something funny about it—I’m sorry—about the fact that, you know, you’ve rejected, from the beginning, the possibility that this is a Ouija-board thing, and then the power that is emerged is, like, literally the conceit of a Ouija board, is talking to the dead.

Rosin: But it’s not just communing with the dead. I mean, you know, where it lost me is: She’s talking about universities in heaven. I mean, there’s some of the parents who feel extremely influenced by religiosity or spirituality.

Engber: Yes, the people are talking to angels. They’re prophesying disaster. They’re treating cancer. They’re, you know, reading hieroglyphics.

The list of powers—I mean, again, in Episode 1, it’s like, Oh, I know what number my mom is thinking of. By Episode 10, it’s like, I’m astrally projecting to a place called “The Hill,” where I am reading The Great Gatsby with angels.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: We hear about a telepathic parrot. We hear about a group of elephants that, for some reason, is able to observe a memorial on a specific day of the Gregorian calendar. Like, the claims really just—it’s almost like once you’ve accepted that telepathy is possible, once you have broken out of what Dickens refers to as the “materialist” mindset, anything is possible. Everything is on the table. You’re off to the races.

Rosin: Yes. Once you’ve gone through the portal, like, magic happens. Anything can happen.

Engber: Yeah, there’s a part in the Rogan interview where they’re just taking this to logical places. Like, once you accept the premise, Rogan is like, Imagine what the government would do with these kids.

Rogan: Isn’t that disgusting? That’s the first thing you think about: If someone’s extraordinary, could the government—like, the X-Men?

Dickens: Yeah.

Engber: And Dickens is like, Yeah, that’s a totally valid concern.

Rogan: That’s what everybody worries.

Dickens: Yeah. And it’s a fair worry. I mean, it is a fair worry. And, you know—

Engber: And I’m sitting there, and I’m like, I mean, it is a valid concern, right?

Rosin: Right, exactly. (Laughs.) Exactly.

Engber: They’re correct.

Rosin: So you and I could sit here in our mutual podcast spaces and, you know, be skeptical. And yet, the podcast has been enormously popular. As you were reporting—it’s now been a few months—how did you see the podcast evolve as a cultural phenomenon?

Engber: Yeah, so, I mean, it really—it was getting big in December. It was climbing its way through the Apple audio charts. And then Joe Rogan got into it on his Christmas Day episode. He said—

Rogan: Here’s the thing about all this.

Engber: —I think telepathy is real. And he talked about this podcast.

Rogan: Have you listened to The Telepathy Tapes?

Trussell: No.

Rogan: You haven’t?

Engber: And then, it immediately—The Telepathy Tapes shot to No. 1. And it’s really been, like, in the top 10 almost ever since. So I think it was that moment of, like, getting tapped by Joe Rogan.

It’s funny—if you actually watch the video of that episode, Rogan is wearing, like, a jester hat with bells, I guess, for Christmas. But it just makes it extra funny to have him talk about how, like, No. This seriously is real, and he’s dressed literally like a clown.

Rosin: And then he had Ky Dickens on more recently.

Engber: Yeah. Just last week, Ky Dickens was on the show for two and a half hours. And I think what you see there—just to your question of, Why now?—is the way that different sets of, I mean, I would say, sort of conspiratorial beliefs start to overlap and gravitate towards each other. And sometimes it’s very clean and it makes sense, and then other times, little tensions emerge.

So for Rogan—and he says this—he talks on and on in this podcast about, Oh, yeah. You know, there are these skeptics who just—they’re afraid of sounding stupid, and they just like to accept the mainstream narrative. And Dickens totally agrees. And you can see how their worldviews are just copacetic, right?

Like, Yeah. Why not telepathy? And you’ve proved it. And that’s amazing. And they’re, like, loving each other. And to the extent that Rogan has a whole set of other beliefs that I don’t know if Dickens has, but, like, they’re bonding in having figured out the truth about what “they” won’t tell you—what the elites, media elites, don’t want you to believe. And so I don’t know. I really—I was like, Oh, this is the moment right here where there is such resentment against the standard narrative—the elite narratives—that any counternarrative is appealing.

There have been people using spelling for decades, as we talked about. There have been people who believe that spelling reveals telepathy for decades. There are people who believe a lot of weird things. But I think, until now, they’ve all been kind of living in their own worlds. And now, I would say, in this moment, those people are kind of finding common cause. They’re realizing that they kind of share an outlook with respect to “the narrative,” maybe, and they’re forming alliances.

Rosin: Meaning that there have been people forever who have wanted to believe in counternarratives, or believe that you’re being lied to, and just right now, that’s ascendant. Like, that energy is ascendant.

Engber: I mean that there have been communities of people living in their own realities, but that’s just sort of like a private reality. And there are people who, for example, believe that childhood vaccines are deadly or cause autism or have many, many other harms. And they’re sort of living in their slightly more public private reality. And there are people who believe in UFOs, and they have their own community.

Of course, these people have been around all this time. But I think there are moments in—if I can be so grand—American history where the inhabitants of all these private realities kind of band together, and it becomes less like a menu of choices than a full meal. That’s what I mean by “the alliances.” So just to give an example, Diane Hennacy Powell, the scientist in the show—she is anti-vaccine, who’s spoken at an event with RFK Jr.

RFK Jr. has likened people who are skeptical of spelling to pediatricians who deny the harms of childhood vaccines. So right there, there’s an alliance between anti-vaccine activists and spellers.

Rosin: Yeah. They do meet in this place where, you know, mystical ideas, intuition, anything that mainstream science or the experts don’t believe is ascendant. Now, you are a person who is a science journalist, who does want to align yourself with what the mainstream scientific institution finds to be true. So what do you make of a moment like this?

Engber: I mean, I think sometimes the counternarratives are true, and it is good when they get an airing and become ascendant. It’s just, I think what is interesting to me to observe is the way it’s, like, open season on counternarratives, right? And so you’re seeing this negotiation among adherence to counternarratives, and it’s playing out even in the federal government.

And so it’s become—I mean, just to give one example: I’m sorry. This is going to sound far afield, but I think it speaks to the central point here. So we have an anti-vaccine activist in charge of [the Department of] Health and Human Services. There’s also—we’re going to have a COVID contrarian take over the National Institutes of Health. Both those people—Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr.—are into, essentially, paleo diets and the idea that carbohydrates are what’s causing so much chronic disease in this country, as I understand it.

Okay, so now maybe you’re getting this other group that has, you know, been making this counternarrative argument about nutrition, that the problem is not calorie intake but sugars. Now they have a foot in with this administration. This is just, like—somehow there’s, you know, common cause between the sugar-is-toxic crowd and the anti-vaccine crowd and the, you know, like, COVID contrarians.

And as I have said, like, you can draw these connections over into the world of spellers and telepathy. Like, I just think if you mapped out all of these different groups with, you know, their own hobbyhorses, some of which I think are, you know, reasonable—like, the reasonable arguments to have about what nutritional policy should be—but, you know, there’s just these new alliances. That’s what’s interesting to me about this moment.

Rosin: Dan, you have thoroughly explained this phenomenon to me. Thank you so much.

Engber: My pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Progressive ideas around race, gender, and immigration are under scrutiny by both the Republican-controlled federal government and Democrats chastened by the loss of the 2024 election. In this modern context, it’s easy to forget how persuasive these ideas once were. In 1995, just 25 percent of Democrats identified as liberal, while 46 called themselves moderate. Twenty years later, a sea change in public opinion had happened: In 2015, 45 percent of Democrats called themselves liberals.

Two political scientists and a researcher found that from 2011 to 2020 the attitudes of Democrats and independents became notably more liberal on racial inequality and immigration. But even looking after the period of anti-“woke” backlash that has characterized much of the past few years, attitudes among all Americans (including Republicans) are noticeably more liberal than they were in 2011, according to their research.

That’s not to say that every part of what has been called “wokeness” was popular or even persuasive to the most liberal of poll respondents. But I think in the next few months and years, we’ll come to see the anti-woke glee that has permeated through the first month of the Trump administration to be out of step with public opinion.

Today’s episode is a conversation I had last August with The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg about a column she wrote, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” The words she wrote then ring truer even now:

“There are aspects of the New Progressivism—its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech—that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: A few weeks ago, Darren Beattie was appointed to a senior role at the State Department—acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

Beattie is a known quantity. He was fired by the last Trump administration after it came out that he’d attended and spoken at a conference with white nationalists.

But this experience doesn’t seem to have rattled him, in the following years he made many controversial remarks on twitter including that “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Just watching the first few weeks of the new President’s term indicates that curbing wokeness and cultural liberalism is top of mind for the administration. It’s remarkable to look back on polling that shows that the economy, not the war on wokeness, was the top issue for Trump voters.

But from directing removal of trans Americans in the military to rolling back DEI initiatives throughout the government, the Trump administration has made anti-wokeness a core focus.

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. These past few weeks have had me thinking back to a conversation I had with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg last year about whether Americans would miss wokeness when it was gone.

No one, including myself, will defend every part of a movement’s form. There were many ridiculous DEI trainings, offensive instances of language policing, and stupid and counterproductive overreactions. But, as Goldberg wrote last year: “however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

I’m excited to revisit this episode with you all today.

Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Goldberg: Thanks for having me.

Demsas: I read an article you wrote a few months ago, and it was called, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.” And it’s been something I’ve been reflecting on myself because I think that there’s a conventional wisdom that’s been built up in traditional media—and then just a lot of our public discourse—that the backlash of the progressive tilt of the 2010s is a good thing, and that we’re seeing a good correction of a time period that went too far. And I thought that your article was a really interesting take on that idea.

But before we get into all that, I wanted to ground us in what we’re even talking about. When we talk about wokeness, what are we talking about when you use that term?

Goldberg: Well, it’s a hard term to define. I actually rarely use it except in quote marks because it’s one of those terms that was—obviously started out in Black vernacular and then was appropriated by people who are really hostile to it.

Basically, any time someone uses woke, you assume that they’re using it as an insult. Very few people actually identify their own politics that way. But how I often describe it, even if it’s a little clunky, is like a style of social-justice politics that is extremely focused on changing the world by changing the way we talk about the world.

Demsas: It’s funny because as I was preparing for this episode, I was just looking back at before the 2010s, and it feels like we had a version of this before then. People would complain about political correctness all the time. And I wonder how you distinguish the two eras. Is this just a piece that has always been in our politics—it just changes forms and maybe the specific issues it cares about?

Or is it actually something completely separate and different?

Goldberg: No. I think it’s basically a replay of the political correctness and the political-correctness backlash of the 1990s, which also came about at a time when you were seeing a lot more ethnic-studies, women’s-studies, area-studies programs in universities; some academic language starting to filter out into everyday life, a lot of people feeling really annoyed and alienated by that; and then a right-wing backlash, which was out of proportion and was so much more damaging to progressive politics than any gains that they might have made through the evolution and language that people were pushing at the time.

Demsas: So when you chart the beginning of this—I think it’s hard because it’s fuzzy. I was looking back to see when people really started talking about this. Matt Yglesias has this piece in 2019 in Vox where he coined the term the Great Awokening, and he charts it then as beginning with the 2014 protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot by a police officer. He looks at the increase that you see in polls in concern for racial inequality and discrimination and the simultaneous divergence of the Democratic Party, where you see racially conservative Democrats leave the party.

And his story is very focused on race and immigration there. I think there are other people who would go even earlier, and then others who think it really takes off with Hillary Clinton. What time period are you really thinking about?

Goldberg: It’s interesting that Matt Yglesias says that. I felt that was also maybe the year that this style of politics became really dominant in certain circles, if not in the culture at large. And I wouldn’t just limit it to the debate about race and policing, because I think some of it comes out of Tumblr culture and just the perverse incentives of social media, the perverse incentives of left-wing politics.

I wrote a piece in 2014 for The Nation, where I was a writer at the time, called, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars.” And it wasn’t about quote, unquote, “wokeness.” I don’t remember if people were actually using that word at the time. But it was about this really destructive style of competitive self-righteousness. And one of the texts that helped me make sense of what was going on was an essay by a feminist writer named Jo Freeman from the ’70s called, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” that was about how—when you have ostensibly horizontal, leaderless organizations—people do, in fact, fight for power and leaders emerge, but they do it through passive-aggressive and emotionally manipulative means. And so, this has always been an issue on the left; it’s just that social media supercharged it.

Demsas: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about how much of this is a story about technology, right? Social media, as you say—to unpack a bit, there’s obviously an incentive to move to the extremes. People often only think about this in terms of talking about politics, in terms of, Oh, people are saying radical things.

But if you scroll through TikTok or anything—and I’m sure you’ve seen this stuff, too—you see pretty shocking content in general: people doing weird things with food, really bizarre things with different toys and things in order to just get the viewer confused and really fixated. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.) Right. Social media does two things: On the one hand, it just incentivizes extremism because you need to catch people’s attention. And extremism can also serve as a form of novelty. But it also—and I’ve written about this, as well—there used to be this idea that the problem with social media was that it kept people siloed in quote, unquote, “filter bubbles,” and I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is that it exposes you to some of the most obnoxious examples on the other side, so it ends up furthering this negative polarization.

Demsas: Let’s turn to the piece that you wrote. You titled it, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” Why is wokeness dying, and why do you miss it?

Goldberg: Obviously, I don’t miss all of it. As I write in the piece, there was tons of it that I have always found—I’m kind of a cranky Gen-X person. I didn’t like these clunky neologisms. I find some of the language, like the people-first language—I’m trying to think of even—

Demsas: Like saying person without housing, or saying unhoused instead of homeless?

Goldberg: Right. I do understand some of it. And that’s the problem, that all of this you can understand in certain instincts. I do understand that there’s certain language that can be really stigmatizing, and that there’s reason for language to evolve. I’m watching—my kids are super into 30 Rock right now, and they’re constantly saying things on 30 Rock that my kids are like, Oh, my God. You can’t say that!

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: And that show—I don’t remember at the time feeling particularly provocative. And so the natural evolution of language is often a good thing. The forced evolution of language in a way that feels like it comes down from some really sanctimonious, prissy commissar is not a good thing. Although I just said that, we have to remember that there actually was no commissar.

People, I think—in reaction to stuff that really annoyed them, the kind of people who made their identity around opposition to wokeness—they almost had to inflate its danger to match the scale of their annoyance. Rather than something that, like, really bugged them or really seemed obnoxious, it had to be totalitarian. It had to be something that was remaking all of the systems of our society, which I just don’t think was ever really true.

But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump. And one of the reasons I don’t like this approach to politics is that changing the way you talk about things is one of the easiest things to do, as opposed to making concrete, material change.

But nevertheless, it’s a step. It was a good thing that people felt less comfortable using certain kind of slurs. Let me put it this way: It was a good thing that when J. D. Vance was writing to one of his left-wing classmates, who I believe he had described as a lesbian, but they were trans, and wrote (these emails have now leaked) this sensitive email that, you know, I love you. I’m sorry if I misgendered you. I hope you know it was coming from a place of respect—I think it was good that conservative men, or all sorts of people, felt the need to be a little bit more thoughtful and sensitive.

Obviously, there was plenty of places where it veered into self-parody, and those places were exaggerated and amplified by a social-media panic, which has now led to a really ugly right-wing backlash.

Demsas: The definition you gave for wokeness, too—it really speaks to the idea that it’s about language and discourse policing in a way. And I wonder—because it seems almost like a definition that has been won by the opponents of it, right? Because I would imagine the people in the 2010s who are really parts of these movements—whether they’re part of #MeToo movement or they’re part of racial-justice movements—there were very specific policy ideas and things that they were upset about.

And many of them were very popular. Police brutality becomes—even amongst independents and, in some polls, even with Republicans, you see support for measures that would rein back police. Of course, the prosecution of people like Harvey Weinstein was very popular. And then, of course, something like abortion, which is seen as now the best issue for Democrats, is something that’s obviously an issue about women’s rights and feminism.

But there’s a way in which we’ve bifurcated these two things that I’m not really sure how to think about. Because, at one point, I totally agree with you: There is clearly an increased focus on what types of things people are saying, but that seems it was at least intended by some people to be a way to get people on board with a policy agenda.

But those two things seem difficult to also separate. If you’re looking for who your allies are and you’re like, Who’s misgendering trans people? That tells you who’s part of your political movement. And I wonder how you think about how we’ve bifurcated the policy goals of these movements from the discourse policing, and were those two things really necessary to be together?

Goldberg: It’s a complicated question. But I would agree with you that the intention of a lot of people was to make real-world change, not just to change the way people talk about things. Do you remember, at a certain point on the internet, there was this taboo against quote, unquote, “tone policing?”

Demsas: Yeah.

Goldberg: Which meant, in turn, that it was almost impossible for the left to either make or listen to any kind of critique of its rhetoric or the way it approached people who might be partially on board but not fully on board. And it ended up really alienating a lot of people outright and then creating this rumbling, subterranean resentment that was then able to be harnessed by really sinister forces. And I think it’s easy to say, Well, if you were attracted to fascism because you don’t like being told what to say or because you’re angry about some new terminology, then that’s on you. And that shows that you always had these inclinations.

But people have lots of different inclinations. And it’s the job of a social movement to, I think, meet people where they are and draw out the parts of them that you want to encourage.

Demsas: Well, it seems in your piece that you’re skeptical about the framing that wokeness has won in any way. And I wonder why you think that, because, from my perspective, I mean, it’s obviously hard. People can point to different areas in which different movements have been successful or not.

But when you look at attitudes amongst the general public on many progressive issues, they’ve shifted dramatically to the left. And, of course, a lot of that is being driven from people moving really far left within the Democratic Party. But even independents on these issues—they’ve moved people left on these things.

And I think there’s also material gains that have happened. People don’t talk about these a lot, but in the year after the murder of George Floyd, for instance, half of U.S. states passed legislation in at least one of the following categories: use of force; duty for officers to intervene, report, or render medical aid in instances of police misconduct; or policies relating to law-enforcement misconduct reporting.

Goldberg: Well, can I just say—I don’t think we should tar all. Again, I feel like this category of wokeness is so unstable and amorphous. But I definitely would not want to put criminal-justice reform under that auspice, right? When I’m saying that I think this style of politics is dead, I certainly don’t mean all left-wing politics, and I don’t mean all criminal-justice reform.

What’s dead is—not only is the Democratic Party trying to memory-hole calls to defund the police, but there was a social pressure to get on board with that language that is completely gone. And so I’m talking about something a little bit more hard to pin down, but something that a lot of people felt and responded to.

The reason I say it’s dead—and I wrote this piece in response to a book by Nellie Bowles called the Morning After the Revolution. It was sort of satirical, but it was also so exaggerated that it was kind of ridiculous. Like at one point she says, I heard people saying that roads were racist. And that didn’t come from some asshole teenager; that came from Robert Caro writing about Robert Moses. But I think that, in part, just to either justify her project or to inflate its importance, she said, This movement hasn’t calmed down because it lost; it’s calmed down because it won.

And I think that for some people that means they have to go to various HR workshops or whatever. But let’s just look at the evidence: You see company after company dismantling their DEI initiatives, states banning DEI in colleges. One of the examples I gave in that column was a school named after a Confederate general that had changed its name and then decided to change it back.

Target, for example, responding to these right-wing backlashes, taking Pride merchandise out of a lot of its stores—there was a sense, at one point, that corporate America wanted to ride the social-justice train. And it might have been hypocritical, but it also suggested that they saw these views as ascendant and something that they wanted to latch onto for their own purposes. I don’t think they see things like that anymore.

[Music]

Demsas: All right. We’re going to take a quick break. More with Michelle when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: I just want to run my theory for you why there was such a focus on discourse policing and on language versus these policies. I think that often—and I found that it felt a little disingenuous sometimes—you’d ask people, Hey, it seems like your organization’s really focused on these language things. Why are you policing whether someone says they’re Latino or Latinx, or something like that. And they would say, Well, we’re actually focused on all of these issues that impact people on the material level. And it’s like, Yeah, but what are you tweeting about? What is it that you’re actually talking about in public constantly? What is your driving ethos?

And so, when I see this, I don’t think of it as disingenuous. I think a lot of people have read this as sort of a disingenuous thing, that people don’t actually care about changing the material reality of people that they’re working for. But I think it’s actually just that the structures of movement organizations have changed so dramatically, such that movement building is now both really easy and really hard.

Any individual person can put up a flyer or an Instagram graphic and say, Hey, we’re gonna do a protest here. And that doesn’t require an organizational capacity to really get someone out and be a part of a group. And that means that people are just showing up for something—or not showing up for something—and it’s completely unrelated to whether they’re being drawn into a broader group.

In the past, you had an NAACP that could speak credibly and say, We actually have organized the groups and the individuals who care a lot about racial justice in this country. And if you don’t vote X or Y way on a bill, that means that we’re going to turn up and we’re going to protest you. But now they can’t credibly say, No one will protest you if you do X or Y, because anyone can do it. And in many ways, that’s great.

Goldberg: Did you read this book—a great book by my colleague Zeynep Tufekci—called, Twitter and Tear Gas?

Demsas: I have not, but I’ve heard it’s a great book.

Goldberg: That’s what the book is about.

Demsas: Can you tell us about it?

Goldberg: So the book—I mean, she could obviously speak to it better than I could, but the book is basically about how before social media, your ability to muster a large protest was an outward sign of your organizational capacity, right?

It meant that you had members. It meant that you had people working on all the stuff that it takes to get people out, and that you were building relationships. And you also had to build an internal structure just in order to get this stuff done, and that structure would be there after the march was over.

Now you have these protests that come together very quickly and virally. But there’s nothing to buttress them. And then the issues that I mentioned earlier, with “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” come up. Because, especially in left-wing spaces, there’s often an aversion to hierarchy, which makes sense to a point, but you need some lines of organization in order to keep something going. When you don’t have that, you do still have people emerge as leaders, but the way that they emerge as leaders is either about cultivating celebrity or shivving other people for not being radical or committed enough.

Demsas: Yeah. I think the horizontal nature of a lot of social movements now, it leads to the point where it becomes actually quite difficult to be a credible partner to or credible bargaining-table member with politicians. Because if they say, We’ll do what you’re asking us, but that means you have to mobilize your people in support of it, and if you can’t credibly do that, then it becomes politically disadvantageous for any politician to work with you.

And that doesn’t mean I agree with that. I think they should just do what they think is right. But at the same time, what ends up happening then is the places where you can see a lot of pressure is just around virality and around these issues where you don’t actually need to work through the formal systems of political power or electoral power. You can work discursively.

Goldberg: I also should say: Somebody who’s deep into progressive organizing once told me that they saw this also as just a form of work avoidance. And maybe people don’t mean this, but it’s just the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to do is to complain about the word somebody is using.

Demsas: But the most cynical argument that I think has been advanced by, especially, a lot of people who are on the right or in the center is that a lot of the movement on liberalization on these views has come from white Democrats, a lot of whom are materially advantaged already. So you have, for instance, people who are maybe homeowners in, or live in, really high cost-of-living cities, and they make a lot of money. And maybe they don’t want to see material changes happen, because that would actually affect their lives.

For instance, I do a lot of reporting on the housing crisis. And it’s clear that a lot of people who consider themselves progressives, who fight for a lot of these causes and seem very genuine and caring about that sort of thing, often will revolt if you say, I think that you should allow for affordable housing to exist in your community.

And I think that there’s some people who take that dynamic and attribute it largely and say, Yeah, the reason they’re focusing on whether you’re saying the right words is because they don’t want to focus on the sorts of material changes that would require something actually being taken from them.

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s that intentional. I find it very hard to imagine that somebody is saying, I don’t want zoning reform in my suburban neighborhood, so I’m going to distract people with a fight over whether it’s ableist to say that we’re standing up for ourselves. I just don’t think that’s how people work.

I do think that people who both went to elite colleges, where these concepts are really prevalent, and are highly verbal and work in fields where communication is a central part of the work they do—it’s not that surprising that they default to questions of communication when they’re involved in politics. And so I think that people have blind spots.

But, again, I think the right-wing version of this is often that it’s a conspiracy to deflect from real challenges to the material privilege of rich, white liberals. And I don’t think it’s a conspiracy.

Demsas: Yeah. I think your previous frame is more likely correct—that it is more a path-of-least-resistance argument. But that also, I think, still implicates people in this, Why is it the path of least resistance for you not to want to allow people who make less money than you to live in your neighborhood? Why is that so difficult to mobilize people around? And maybe it’s not intentional, but that is just a harder thing to do.

And so you see organizers at the local level—they’re often like, Well, we can get people to sign onto an agreement to get the city to raise a Pride flag, but we can’t get people to change the school-boundary lines near them to make it more inclusive to lower-income kids where they go to school. So there is a reason why I think progressive activists get pushed in a direction. And I do think that there’s probably some truth to the idea that the material changes would be much less politically popular.

But I want to turn a little bit because a lot of your writing is about feminism that I’ve followed for years now. And you wrote an article called, “The Future Isn’t Female Anymore,” and that’s very much in line with what we’re talking about today, so I’m hoping you talk a little bit about that piece. In it, you cite a poll from the Southern Poverty Law Center that asks respondents whether they agree that “feminism has done more harm than good.” And you write that while only four percent of Democratic men over 50 thought feminism was harmful, 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 did. And nearly a quarter of Democratic women under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good.

And so you see this split here, where you have older Democrats still towing the familiar line that feminism is, of course, on net, beneficial, and then younger folks increasingly feel that their feminism has done more harm than good.

And that’s among Democrats. What’s happening there, and why is this space really polarizing people?

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s younger folks. I mean, yeah, there is a section of women, but, in general, I think it’s younger men. I remember when I quoted that poll, a lot of people were suspicious of it, and you can always have one poll that’s an outlier, but there’s been a few polls since then that show that young men, specifically, are moving to the right. And there’s a growing political chasm between young women and young men that was really showing up a lot in the polling around the upcoming election. And I also just think there was a broader backlash.

It’ll be interesting because we’re at a different inflection point now. When I wrote that, there was a backlash to the idea of the girl boss. It had suddenly become really embarrassing to a lot of people, which, on the one hand—a backlash against unfettered ambition and burnout-inducing devotion to your career—I get that. But it came along with the rise of tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends and these old forms of female subservience in hip, new clothing.

And you see this again and again in the history of feminism, right? Because it’s hard to work. It’s hard to work and be a parent and fulfill all the expectations of ideal womanhood. People will look at being a kept woman of various guises and think that that’s an out. You saw this with Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and then you saw it with a whole bunch of articles about women stepping back from the workplace.

Demsas: And who is Susan Faludi?

Goldberg: Susan Faludi wrote one of the classics of modern feminism in a book called Backlash, which came out in the early 1990s and was about basically a decade of backlash propaganda telling women that feminism had made them miserable and that women wanted to return to cocooning and wanted to return to domesticity.

And what you see when you actually look at the people who are pushing this message is either that they’re not doing it themselves—you know, Martha Stewart was certainly never a homemaker, but neither was Phyllis Schlafly, right? These are professional women with high-powered careers. Or else you see women who do do that and then find themselves in really precarious situations if it falls apart. And so, again, there was this moment where, We don’t need girl-boss feminism. We want a soft life. You know, don’t we all? (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: But there was a refusal to see the traps that generations of feminists have identified in that life. Now we’re at a different moment because you’re starting to see women get really, really excited about the prospect of a female president again and getting really, really angry about patriarchy. Obviously, the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade was a big turning point for that. The Kamala Harris campaign is a big turning point.

It was interesting because when Hillary Clinton ran for president, there was always a dearth of organic enthusiasm compared to, say, Barack Obama. But there were people who were really, really excited about Hillary Clinton and were really, really excited about having a woman president. But a lot of them felt really embarrassed and afraid to admit that publicly.

I remember going to some of the places after Donald Trump was elected, going to some of the suburban communities where these women who hadn’t been very political before had suddenly gotten really political because they were so outraged and disgusted. And often they were like, I didn’t even realize there were other Democrats on my street. And so there was this sheepishness. And now that sheepishness is totally gone. It’s pretty new, but this is the first female campaign for president that is being really carried aloft on a tide of very vocal popular excitement.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, when I think about the wokeness message, the presidential candidate that tried to do this the most was Ron DeSantis, and it didn’t really work out for him. He obviously is not the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, but he also flamed out in a way that I think people were not expecting.

There was a ton of enthusiasm after he won his race by around 20 electoral points in Florida, when he ran for re-election for governor. And he was very clear on the national, at the local, at the state level that he was fighting a war on woke. But then you saw this message falter. You saw it falter in the Republican Party. People were much less interested in polls for voting for someone who’s fighting wokeness than they were for people who were following traditional economic messaging. And obviously he himself did not do well there.

Goldberg: Although, let’s remember—let’s look at who the Republicans chose as their vice president. J. D. Vance—he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 that was called, “The Universities Are the Enemy,” and it was all about—I don’t know how much he used the word wokeness, but that’s basically what it was about. And he is obsessed with this stuff. It’s part of what makes him weird.

Demsas: I agree with you. I think it’s interesting because it seemed like, at the end, Trump was between the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who’s a much more traditional Republican, and he ends up picking J. D. Vance, who I think is part of this wing of the party that’s defined themselves by wokeness.

During the Olympics, Imane Khelif, who is an Algerian boxer, beat an Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics, and it sparks this conservative outcry. Khelif is a cis woman; she was assigned female at birth and continues to identify as such. But people have really turned on her as being a man. J. D. Vance literally tweeted that Khelif was “a grown man pummeling a woman.” He called it “disgusting” and blamed Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender.

This is obviously a very small vignette in a bunch of different areas in which you’ve seen the right radicalize in this space. But, to me, while of course Trump did pick Vance, it doesn’t seem like this is actually a message that’s a winning message for voters. I think a lot of people feel that this is actually going in the same way that maybe wokeness harmed the Democratic Party in some ways—that this version is actually not palatable to even Republican voters, but definitely not to independents or swing voters.

There’s polling—this is when Biden was the presumptive nominee, from May—by Data for Progress that asked 1,200 voters whether they think Joe Biden’s woke. And 21 percent said they didn’t know what that meant. Twenty-seven percent said they didn’t care. And 22 percent were the only people that said he was woke and that was a bad thing. So how much of this is just a fight that’s really happening but is not actually electorally relevant or even electorally desirable?

Goldberg: Well, I don’t think it’s super electorally relevant in that, yes, vanishingly few people, if you ask them, What are the issues that are important to you? are going to say any version of wokeness. Where I think it’s relevant is around the edges.

I think that people really underestimate just how much of politics is about emotion and how much of it is about how candidates make you feel. And so whether the language that candidates use resonates with you or is alienating to you really matters. Again, this is where I say that a lot of these linguistic changes, I feel like, are irritating and alienating, but that’s very different from saying that they’re part of some totalitarian conspiracy, which is often how the anti-woke side comes off. And so I think it’s why even voters, again, to the extent that they’re even aware of these arguments over linguistic conventions—and I think they are in a vague way.

Demsas: Especially at the office, if you have DEI training or something like that.

Goldberg: Right, or even just when I would go to Trump rallies, the thing I would hear over and over again—I remember in 2016, I would try to draw them out. You know, Did a factory close around here? Are you having trouble getting a job? But mostly it was like, No. But you just can’t say anything anymore. There was just so much anger. And then sometimes you would ask them what they wanted to say, and you’d be like, Oh yeah. You definitely can’t say that. (Laughs.) And you shouldn’t be able to say that. But I do think that it grates on people. But there’s a difference between it grating on people and it being an all-consuming fixation.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, how do we then understand the nascent Kamala Harris campaign? Because you’ve been doing some reporting about her campaign. And her candidacy, as you said, it’s a historic candidacy. She’s the first Black woman and South Asian woman presumptive nominee for a major party ticket. She will be only the second woman to achieve that, after Clinton.

One thing I think that’s interesting is Clinton really leaned into her identity as a woman. And there’s some reporting that indicates she was trying to follow the mold of Obama, who clearly made that a part of his historic rise and tapped into that “first” energy to build momentum.

Harris seems to be tackling that quite differently. I know you said that you’re seeing this energy finally out in the open, of women getting to be excited publicly for the first female potential president. But, at the same time, it seems like there’s not as much attempt on the part of her and her team—at least so far—to really lean into that. Are you seeing that?

Goldberg: Right. And she doesn’t need to. Well, no, she doesn’t need to. And I don’t see any reason why she should. The people who are excited about it are getting excited about it.

Demsas: But why not? Why not lean into it?

Goldberg: First of all, because most people I think who are really, really excited to vote for the first woman candidate for president, the first Black woman candidate for president, the first Asian American woman candidate for president—those people are mostly voting for Harris. She doesn’t really need to remind them of the historic nature of her candidacy.

And she does in some ways, right? She speaks to the AKAs, the other members of her Black sorority. But I just think that, for the people that she needs to win over, she needs to convince them that she’s going to make their lives better in some tangible, material way, rather than achieving a symbolic victory for certain identity groups.

Look, obviously the identity component is there. You see people self-organizing these huge Zoom calls. But I guess the difference is that it would have been a big mistake for the Harris campaign to take the lead on doing that kind of stuff. People want to do it themselves. You can see that that’s really powerful.

Demsas: I also think that because she avoided a primary, it was much less important to base mobilization that that rhetoric would sometimes be used. You’d encourage it in that case, right? I think Warren and Harris both leaned into this during the 2020 presidential primaries—their historic nature of their candidacy. There were lots of references to Shirley Chisholm in Harris’s 2020 primary.

Goldberg: Oh, yeah. And I saw people wearing Shirley Chisholm shirts at the Harris rally in Atlanta. People are obviously really aware of it. I think you’re right about the primary. She didn’t need to distinguish herself in that way in a primary.

And the fact that there was (a) no primary and (b) that so many Democrats feel like they were saved from near-certain doom means that the fissures that are usually left over after a really bruising primary just aren’t there.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Michelle. I’ve been reading your work for years, and I’m so glad to have you come on the show.

Goldberg: Oh, thanks for having me.

Demsas: I want to ask you our last question, which is: What’s an idea that seemed good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Goldberg: I’m going to say communism.

Demsas: Oh, okay. Tell me more.

Goldberg: I mean, I’m honestly surprised that anybody answers anything else. (Laughs.) It just seems so obvious—it just seems obvious to me that, at a time when industrial capitalism was so brutal and exploitative, along comes this utopian theory promising human equality, gender equality, the brotherhood of man, the end of poverty, right? I don’t know if you have kids, but my kids—and I think a lot of people have this experience—when they first learn about communism, they’re like, Yeah, that sounds great. It does sound great. It just has not worked.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, that is the most one-word-only-needed “good on paper” we’ve heard so far. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.)

Demsas: Usually it does require a lot more explanation. Communism—good on paper. Thank you again for coming on the show. We’re so excited to have you on and continue following your work as you write about this issue on the campaign trail.

[Music]

Goldberg: Thank you so much.

Demsas: This episode of Good on Paper was produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smerciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The movie The Wild Robot features a robot with a quality that, in a different context, would put the audience on alert: an operating system that can convincingly mimic falling in love. The story launches with an accident. Roz, a helper unit, lands on an uninhabited island when a Universal Dynamics cargo ship carrying crates of fellow robots crashes. While running away from a bear, she crushes a goose nest and kills all the birds except one. Raising the gosling, Brightbill, becomes her task, and so Roz has to learn to be a mother. The movie is technically classified as sci-fi, but this is not Her or Westworld. It’s an animated film based on a children’s book, which means the storyline of a robot developing a soul lands softly.

This year, The Wild Robot was nominated for an Oscar in sound design, maybe because the movie managed Roz’s growing emotions in such a novel and delicate way. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Randy Thom, the director of sound design at Skywalker Sound and the supervising sound designer on The Wild Robot, about how he and his team helped to create the sound of Roz’s voice and movements. Thom explains how he manipulated the voice of Lupita Nyong’o, who voiced the robot, so she slowly sounded less robotic and more maternal. And how he invented a way to literally breathe life into Roz.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Hey. It’s Hanna, again. So last year, we did an episode with the sound designer behind The Zone of Interest, which ended up winning the Oscar for Best Sound. We thought we’d do a similar episode with one of this year’s nominated films, which is the bonus episode you’re about to hear. Enjoy.

Roz: Hello. Bonjour. Guten Tag. Jambo. Hola. Congratulations on your purchase of a Universal Dynamics robot.

Rosin: That is the voice of Roz from the animated film The Wild Robot, up for three Oscars this weekend, including for Best Sound.

Roz, who’s voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, is a helper robot: a kind of turbocharged Siri who gets stranded on a deserted island and learns to communicate with the animals that live there.

She also finds a goose egg—the only one left after she accidentally destroyed its nest—and she decides that her task is to raise this gosling and basically become its mom. But that means she has to do all the parts of becoming a mom.

Fink: But she remembers one thing: you. And when she finally sees you, she feels—

Roz: Crushing obligation.

Fink: —very lucky to be a mother.

Brightbill: Mama.

Rosin: This all created an interesting challenge for the movie’s sound-design team, which is: What should this robot sound like? And what should it sound like if it has a soul?

Roz: How do you know if you love something, someone?

Fink: If you do, you should probably tell them.

Roz: What if it is too late?

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Today we’re talking about how a movie handles our complicated feelings about robots, with the guy who had to figure that out in sound—

Randy Thom: My name is Randy Thom.

Rosin: —and who did it well enough to get an Oscar nomination.

Thom: And I’m the supervising sound designer on The Wild Robot.

Rosin: There is a long history of robots in film, from him:

C-3PO: Here he comes.

[Sounds from Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope]

Rosin: To him:

Wall-E: Wall-E.

Eve: Wall-E.

Wall-E: Ohhh.

Rosin: To Her:

Samantha: Hello? I’m here.

Theodore: What do I call you? Do you have a name?

Samantha: Yes. Samantha.

[Music]

Rosin: And Randy and The Wild Robot filmmakers knew they had to include some element of that classic robot feel for Roz’s voice, like a little bit of monotone:

Thom: If I were to say, Let me adjust this microphone, and then we decide we want to flatten it, it would be: Let me adjust this microphone. (Voice distorts mechanically.)

Rosin: Ah. That was pretty good.

Thom: So it’s all kind of one note.

Rosin: And then some extra processing in the voice.

Thom: As good an example as any would be C-3PO.

Owen Lars: Can you speak Bocce?

C-3PO: Of course I can, sir. It’s like a second language to me. I’m—

Lars: All right. Shut up. I’ll take this one.

C-3PO: Shutting up, sir.

Thom: His voice, when C-3PO was speaking English, was processed quite noticeably in terms of restricting its bandwidth, so it sounds a little bit like you’re hearing it over a telephone. It doesn’t have many low frequencies in it or extremely high frequencies.

C-3PO: What makes you think there are settlements over there?

[R2-D2 beeps]

C-3PO: Don’t get technical with me.

[R2-D2 beeps]

Thom: There’s this thing called “audio phasing,” where a signal, a sound gets combined with itself but slightly out of sync with itself, and it makes this kind of swishing sound. And so a little bit of that is typically added to a voice to make it sound a little more like a robot.

C-3PO: I’ve just about had enough of you. Go that way. You’ll be malfunctioning within a day, you near-sighted scrap pile.

Rosin: By the way, Randy would know all of this because—

Thom: I’m the director of sound design at Skywalker Sound. Are you looking for that kind of title?

[Star Wars theme song]

Rosin: I mean, if you had that title, would you ever introduce yourself in any other way?

Anyway, back to Roz and The Wild Robot.

Thom: One of the things that Gary Rizzo, the dialogue mixer on the film, did, I think, to very useful effect was to dial up a reverberation algorithm that makes it sound like her voice is inside a metal container.

Roz: Congratulations on your purchase of a Universal Dynamics robot. I am Rozzum 7134.

Thom: And the effect of it, if you use that kind of processing subtly enough—

Roz: Congratulations on your purchase of a Universal Dynamics robot.

Thom: —is that it feels like you’re hearing her metallic body resonate when she speaks.

Rosin: Whoa.

Roz: I am Rozzum 7134. A Rozzum always completes its task. Just ask.

Thom: We did initially think that there might be quite a bit of robotizing of Lupita’s voice. But the more we tried that, the more we realized that we really need this character to express emotion, because what’s kind of going on in the story is that this robot develops a soul.

Rummage: Can you explain again what we are doing?

Roz: I don’t know! I’m just making stuff up! I don’t know what I’m doing. And I have to! I have to because he’s relying on me!

Thom: And so what you hear in the film is something that does sound very much like a robot for the first six or eight things that she utters.

Roz: Was this task accomplished to your satisfaction?

Brightbill: (Screams.)

Thom: But then, fairly quickly, we dial out the processing, and so that what you’re left with is Lupita’s performance as a robot.

Roz: They cut my power, but I still heard you because I was listening with a different part of myself.

Rosin:  Now, of course, Roz is not the only robot. You voiced a robot in Wild Robot. You play essentially the equivalent of a Stormtrooper—like, the bad-muscle robot.

Thom: That’s right.

Rosin: How did you think about those robots differently?

 Thom: Well, this is a case where my big, bassy voice was useful. These are very large, you know, military robots. And so I just tried to manifest that as well as I could.

VONTRA: Your target is Rozzum 7134.

RECO: Deploy.

Thom: But even my voice needed to be augmented to make it sound even bigger. And so I pitched my voice down almost an octave—

RECO: You do not belong here. This is a wilderness.

Thom: —and put some of that kind of metallic reverberation on it.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

RECO: You do not belong here. This is a wilderness.

Thom: And I just needed to perform it in as, kind of, aggressive and intimidating a way as I could muster.

Rosin: Okay. Give us one line. I’m trying to imagine your voice an octave deeper than I’m listening to.

Thom: (Laughs.) Yeah. I won’t be able to simulate that part of it. “This is a wilderness. You do not belong here.”

Rosin: (Laughs.) That was excellent.

Thom: (Laughs.)

Rosin: That was excellent.

Thom: Well, thank you.

Roz: I’m already home. Thank you.

RECO: You do not belong here. This is a wilderness.

Roz: And I am a wild robot.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back: Randy has a breakthrough.

Thom: Damn! That’s going to work.

Rosin: That’s coming up.

[Break]

Rosin: So one thing Randy Thom had to figure out is what Roz’s voice would sound like. But he also had to figure out how Roz would sound when she moved: like, when she’d twisted her body or extended her arm, and when she walked around.

Thom: The tradition for doing robot movement sounds for movies is to use recordings of servo motors.

[Sounds of servo motors]

Thom:  A servo motor is a kind of electric motor that’s often used in robots. And the sound that it makes—when the robot walks—is sort of … (Mimics sound.)

[Sounds of servo motors]

Thom: Sounds like that were used in the Star Wars films. R2-D2 really rolls, rather than walks, but C-3PO is anthropomorphic, has arms and legs. And you hear servo motors when C-3PO walks.

[Music]

C-3PO: He tricked me into going this way. But he’ll do no better.

Thom: So that approach had been done well. But at this point, it seemed like a bit of a cliche, and so I wanted to stay away from it for that reason. But probably the more important reason I wanted to not use servo motors is that Roz is supposed to be very high-tech, so she had to sound elegant and smooth and subtle when she moved.

Roz: Rozzums are programmed for instant physical mimicry.

Thom: So I started listening to pneumatic systems. And in a pneumatic system, air under pressure is used to propel certain kinds of things. And as I listened to those, I was thinking, Wow. Yeah. That’s going to work. Something like that’s going to work.

[Sounds from The Wild Robot]

Rosin: And what does a pneumatic system sound like? I actually tried to YouTube yesterday “pneumatic systems,” and mostly what you see is video images. But I couldn’t find one that had any kind of elegant sound.

Thom: Well, they’re often something like … (Mimics sound.) That sort of thing.

[Sounds from The Wild Robot]

Rosin: Oh. That’s what a pneumatic system is. It’s, like, a tube going through a thing, is how we associate it.

Thom: Yeah. If you can imagine a kind of cylinder being pushed through a tube—

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Thom: —that has air in it, and what you’re hearing is the air escaping around the edges of the cylinder inside the tube, it’s like that.

[Sounds from The Wild Robot]

Thom: The more I listened to those sounds and edited them to be in sync with Roz’s movements on the screen, the more it occurred to me that they were a little like breathing. So I decided to try actual breath sounds—inhales and exhales—not for Roz breathing, because she doesn’t breathe, but for her movement sounds, for her walking. So every time she would take a step, you would hear this … (Mimics sound.) That sort of thing.

[Sounds from The Wild Robot]

Thom: And so I performed some of the breaths.

Rosin: Were they slow, like meditation-yoga-class breaths? Or what kind of breaths?

Thom: Well, it depends a little on what she’s doing. There’s one moment early in the film where she reaches into a cave that a bear—who’s voiced by Mark Hamill of Star Wars, by the way.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Thom: She reaches into this cave, and her arm has to extend quite a distance.

[Sounds from The Wild Robot]

Thom: I had to do a fairly long breath for that arm movement, so it was like … (Mimics sound.) And I have to be careful that I don’t pass out from doing that too much. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Right. (Laughs.)

[Sounds from The Wild Robot]

Thom: But the trick, of course, is to do it subtly enough so that it doesn’t literally sound like breathing. And so we don’t want the audience to think, We’re hearing her breathing as she’s walking. It has to be quiet enough so that it’s mostly subliminal.

[Sounds from The Wild Robot]

Rosin:  You know what’s philosophically—as you’re talking, the symbolism of this, of breathing life into the robot, is very interesting, you know?

Thom: Yeah. That’s the little light bulb that got turned on in my head once I started listening to these breath sounds. So for me, it was probably the most fun activity that I had working on the film, figuring out a new kind of paradigm for robot movement.

[Music]

Rosin: In his past work, Randy has figured out sounds for much bigger—and less, shall we say, aerodynamic—kinds of robots, like The Iron Giant.

Thom: Well, I did use some servo sounds for the movement of The Iron Giant, which is an animated film.

Hogarth Hughes: See this? This is called a rock. Rock.

Iron Giant: Rock.

Thom: But I also used some hydraulic sounds for that giant robot.

Hughes: Yes.

Iron Giant: Rock?

Hughes: No, no. That is a tree.

Rosin: Early in his career, Randy also helped to come up with the sound for an even bigger kind of robot, which he found in recordings of a huge metal shear—think: like, a metal guillotine.

Thom: And it made this really great multisyllabic, syncopated sound, so it made this sort of … (Mimics sound.) And that’s the sound that the Imperial Walkers make in The Empire Strikes Back.

[Sounds from Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back]

Person 1: Echo station 3TA, we have spotted Imperial Walkers.

Person 2: Imperial Walkers on the north bridge.

Rosin: So you’re moving essentially from something that is metallic, to something that is a little more organic, to something that feels fairly humanlike. That does feel like an evolution.

Thom: Yeah, I think it is.

Rosin: Do you have a sense now, after working on Wild Robot, what an ideal robot would sound like? Like, do you think we could ever go back to the days when robots sounded metallic? Or are we just living in a world where our expectation is that robots have a humanish feel of some kind?

Thom:  I don’t think we’re there yet. It depends, in movies, of course—so if you see a robot in Her—

Samantha: Was that funny?

Theodore: Yeah.

Samantha: Oh, good. I’m funny.

Thom: —then you certainly don’t expect to hear, you know, servo motors.

[Sounds of servo motors]

Thom: But if there’s a kind of retro look to the robot, then I can certainly imagine a movie being made next year where it would be appropriate to go back to servo motors.

Rosin: Right. So we’re not firmly in the era of the humanoid robot. Who knows how it could go?

Thom: Yeah.

Rosin: We could start having nostalgia for the robot robot as we knew it.

Thom: I’m sure we will.

Rosin: Yeah. One day.

[Sounds from Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back]

C-3PO: And you’re having delusions of grandeur.

[R2-D2 beeps]

Rosin: Well, thank you so much for joining us and for explaining this so patiently. I really appreciate it.

Thom: Oh, it was my pleasure. Nice to talk with you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Genevieve Finn. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

This week President Emmanuel Macron of France visited Washington and called Donald Trump “Dear Donald” four times. A photo of their meeting shows them smiling and clasping hands. We, of course, don’t know Macron’s true degree of affection for Dear Donald. But we do know that European leaders have noticed that the rules of diplomacy have changed and they are quickly adjusting.

First, European leaders sat through a speech from Vice President J. D. Vance at a security conference in Munich in which he criticized them and made clear that they could not rely on the United States in the same way they had before. Then Trump repeated Russian talking points, claiming that Ukraine started the ongoing war. And now there are reports that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is flying to Washington to discuss a deal with Trump in which Zelensky would give up national resources in exchange for security protections from the United States, an offer that staff writer Anne Applebaum describes this way:

You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor with whom you’d had cordial relations with a long time, who’d helped you fix your car and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that, you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you, I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Applebaum about what she calls the “end of the post–World War II order.” We also talk with staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are responding to this new posture from the Trump administration, and what this means for a group of allies that have long routinely shared intel with the U.S.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: When Donald Trump was running for his second term as president, last year, he gave plenty of hints that he didn’t care all that much about staying chummy with our European allies. For example, he once said if NATO countries didn’t pay their fair share, he would encourage Russia to, quote, “do whatever the hell they want.”

So maybe no one should be surprised a year later that he and members of his administration are spending their first few weeks in office offending their allies and shaking up the world order. But it is kind of surprising—at least, the speed of it and the dismissive tone: For example, Vice President J. D. Vance telling the EU leadership, some of whom he referred to as “commissars,” that their countries were suppressing free speech, or Donald Trump repeating Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

Donald Trump: You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal. I could’ve made a deal for Ukraine.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we talk about what this shift in the world order might mean. In the second half of the show, we’ll be talking to staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, about how intelligence agencies are reacting to the changes.

But first, we talk to Anne Applebaum, author of the book Autocracy Inc. and host of the podcast Autocracy in America. Anne started her career tracking autocracy around the globe, and, with the rise of Trump, she started noticing it creeping up in her own country.

Anne Applebaum: I went around Germany, like, five years ago and did Cassandra-like lamentations, and nobody believed me, you know. And now, like, every German newspaper wants me to say, How do you feel about being right? And I’m like, I feel like shit, you know. What do you mean, How do I feel about being right? I feel terrible. I don’t want to be right.

[Music]

Rosin: Anne, this new administration’s shift in tone has been so sudden and so stark that I want to understand it better and figure out what its implications might be.

Applebaum: So No. 1: The language and body language that have been coming out—not just from the White House but from the defense secretary, from many people affiliated with Trump over the last few days, last couple of weeks—has been strikingly negative. The vice president went to a security conference in Munich, where generals and secretaries of defense and security analysts were gathered to hear the administration’s view of what it felt about the Russian military threats to Europe, and to the United States and to the rest of the world. And instead, he made a supercilious speech mocking them. That was No. 1.

No 2: Donald Trump announced a restart of conversation with Russia that wasn’t an attempt to find a solution to the war that would keep Ukraine safe and sovereign. It seemed to be an attempt to create a U.S.-Russian relationship of a new kind that seemed very sinister. And then, finally, I think it was the real turning point—and this, for many people, was a stunner, I think—was a UN vote. Ukraine and its allies around the world proposed a motion condemning Russian aggression.

The U.S. not only did not back the motion; the U.S. voted against it, together with Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, the Central African Republic, and a handful of other Russian allies around the world. And that package of things, put together, is an indication that the U.S. appears to be switching sides.

Rosin: Yeah. I guess that’s the way to put it: “The U.S. appears to be switching sides.” I mean, I’m trying to think of the right way to characterize this. You immediately said the end of the post–World War II order—you declared that right after these things happened. You feel strongly—you feel definitively about that?

Applebaum: I feel definitive about it. That doesn’t mean other things aren’t going to happen. It doesn’t mean it’s not reversible. It doesn’t mean that Trump won’t get pulled in other directions. The Russians are famous for lying about what their plans are and for promising things they don’t deliver. He may find himself disappointed with the relationship he’s trying to build with Putin.

I’m not saying that there’s a straight line from here in a predictable direction. But I think I can safely say that no American administration—Democrat or Republican, since the 1940s—has talked the way the Trump administration talks. In other words, not just doubting its allies or criticizing its allies—I mean, that’s happened lots of times—but actually criticizing the fundamental premise of the alliance.

The impression Europeans have now is that that’s not true anymore. And because they were still pretty sure it was true three weeks ago, this is a very sudden and rapid change.

Rosin: Right. And this is not a good thing. I hear the alarm in your voice. Why is the post–World War II order important?

Applebaum: The post–World War II order—and, I mean, even calling it an order is too highfalutin. I mean, it’s really just a set of alliances that the U.S. built in Europe, and I should keep saying in Asia, as well, and Japan, South Korea, Australia are also part of the same world. It was a world the U.S. built in which a group of the world’s wealthiest countries agreed to work together to share their security, to develop similar and compatible economies.

The U.S., together with the Europeans and their Asian allies, created these real zones of prosperity and peace. And the U.S. was a beneficiary of that same prosperity. The U.S. was the major investor in these countries. The U.S. was allowed to lead in all kinds of ways. U.S. ideas about trade or about economics were genuflected to. I mean, although maybe that sounds too subservient. But, I mean, the people wanted U.S. leadership, the U.S. benefited from leadership, and the U. S. had those allies when it wanted to do other things.

When the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, American allies also went. When the U.S. wanted to fight terrorism in the Middle East or around the world, U.S. allies cooperated. They cooperated with intelligence. They sometimes cooperated militarily. They sent soldiers when they were asked to send them. So the U.S. had an unusual kind of power in the world.

So other countries, of course, have military power and economic influence, but the U.S. had a form of economic and military influence that persuaded other countries to join it. This has been true over many years, in many different ways. It means that when European countries are considering big investments, big power plants, they will sometimes choose U.S. companies over their own or over those of their neighbors because they want to maintain those good relations with America.

Rosin: I mean, I guess what’s rattling about this moment is: There isn’t a precipitating event. There isn’t a ratcheting up of hostilities, the way there has been, historically. It’s just Trump. It’s just, you know—he changed his mind, so there’s really no warning. However, he did signal during his campaign, you know, Russia should be able to do whatever the hell it wanted. Is what’s rattling, especially about this moment, the speed? Like, it all unraveled in a few weeks?

Applebaum: So I would go farther. I mean, Trump has been talking about his disdain for allies and alliances since the 1980s. In 1987, notoriously, he took out these huge newspaper ads, after a trip to Moscow, I should say, saying that alliances were a waste of money, and we shouldn’t, you know—at that time, Japan, people were particularly worried about. During his first term, he repeatedly looked uncomfortable with allies, attacked them, disparaged them, famously wanted to leave NATO. He told John Bolton that he wanted to leave NATO, on the way to a NATO summit. And he was talked down by Bolton and by Jim Mattis and by others. So in that sense, it’s nothing new.

Nevertheless, since the election, Trump mostly was talking in a normal way to allies. He had phone conversations with European leaders and Asian leaders. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying, Putin’s a loser. We need to put pressure on him, you know, to end the war. And then, suddenly, as you say, it was the speed—about 10 days ago, about two weeks ago, maybe. Suddenly, the tone shifted and switched.

Rosin: The whole thing brings up the forever question about Trump: Is he chaotic or intentional? Which I think is important here because intentional would imply that he is actively remaking the world order. Like, actively aligning the U.S. with Russia. Do you sense that’s the case?

Applebaum: I think it’s a possibility, yeah.

Rosin: You do?

Applebaum: I do.

Rosin: And why? What are the best guesses about why? To what end?

Applebaum: The best guesses include: He’s been convinced of wealth and riches to be had for the United States or, perhaps, for people in his entourage by a better relationship with Russia. He’s been convinced that putting pressure on Ukraine, rather than on Russia, will end the war quickly. He’s bored of the war; he doesn’t really know how to end it, and he’s looking for a shortcut. Those are the guesses that we have. I mean, whether there’s been a specific conversation or a specific offer, I don’t know.

I should have included this in my list: I mean, the fact that he has been repeating Russian propaganda—so saying things that aren’t true but that are the kind of thing that you hear from the Russian media and from the pro-Russian media in the United States—means that he’s hearing that from somebody. And so the best guess is that he’s been speaking to someone who has changed his mind or has convinced him that Russia is a better and more predictable ally than France or Britain or Germany or Japan.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, that’s the moment where I sat up and took notice, is the way he was talking about Ukraine, repeating such obvious lies about the origins of that war, and then, also, that document that the treasury secretary offered Ukraine. Can you describe that document? That one, for me, was a shocker.

Applebaum: Okay, so this is a document of a kind that I can’t think of a precedent for. It was given to President Zelensky of Ukraine, first by the treasury secretary, who went to Kyiv to do this. And, essentially, the document says Ukraine is supposed to sign away 50 percent of its natural resources, both rare earth minerals and other minerals and other resources and income from ports and infrastructure, to the United States indefinitely.

So the Ukrainians are meant to hand over half of their national wealth for the foreseeable future to Americans, and in an unclear way. It’s not clear to whom they would give this wealth and how the wealth would be extracted and how it would be measured and who would decide what 50 percent was—none of that is clear at all. And they would do that out of some kind of gratitude to Americans, or some kind of fealty to Donald Trump, perhaps. And they would not receive any clear security guarantees or anything else in exchange.

Rosin: And what’s unprecedented about that? That it’s unfolding like a real-estate negotiation? Or what is, you know, unusual about it?

Applebaum: An open-ended demand from a sovereign country that it hand over its wealth to another country—I mean, this is a kind of 18th-century, colonial way of dealing with a country. And this is, of course, a country that’s been an ally to the United States, that’s worked closely with U.S. intelligence, that’s been a part of an American security structure. You know, it’s as if you went to your neighbor, with whom you’d had cordial relations a long time, who’d helped you fix your car, and with whom you had good relations and said, Actually, in exchange for all that—you know, in exchange for the salt I lent you and the cookies I baked you—I’m demanding half of your wealth right now.

Rosin: By the way, a few hours after recording this, there were reports that the proposed deal was updated. The new version apparently now includes a vague mention of security guarantees for Ukraine. And Zelensky is supposedly flying to Washington later this week to meet with Trump about it. We don’t have many more details, but Anne’s neighbor analogy still holds.

Okay. Back to the conversation.

So the obvious thing to read into this betrayal of Ukraine is: There is no sanction for autocrats who want to invade other countries. Do you think that is the intended message?

Applebaum: I don’t know whether Trump understands that as the message and also, because I still don’t understand what the endgame is, how exactly he thinks the war will end. I don’t want to say something terrible has happened before it’s happened, right? But yes, if the war ends in such a way that Ukraine loses its sovereignty or is forced into some kind of humiliating situation or is unable to defend itself in the future against a rebuilt Russian army two years from now, then yes—the conclusion will be that might makes right.

Big countries are allowed to invade small ones and get away with it. And not only will the U.S. not help you if you’re a democracy being invaded by your dictatorial neighbor; the U.S. might side with the invader. That would be the lesson. And that, too, I mean—there are cascading consequences.

Rosin: Yeah. And, you know, during the Ukraine war, you’ve talked about the importance of us standing up for Ukraine, because there are consequences for Estonia. I mean, there are consequences for lots of countries.

Applebaum: There are consequences for Germany. There are consequences for Britain. You know, maybe there are even consequences for the United States. I mean, if we won’t, you know—what are we prepared to defend?

Rosin: Yeah. As things are realigning quickly, I mean, French President Emmanuel Macron seemed to indicate in his visit to Washington this week that, in fact, Europe should be less dependent on the U.S. and more in charge of its own defense. That’s what Trump says he wants. Could that be a neutral shift? Like, is that necessarily a terrible shift? How should we think of that kind of shift, where Europe is more in charge of contributing to security for its own region?

Applebaum: I think it’s a fine shift and one that I’ve been arguing for, for a long time. But it’s not a shift that you can do in two weeks, and so there is a very dangerous moment coming.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Applebaum: Well, when, you know—if the U.S. is serious about withdrawing from Europe, or if that’s the way that Trump wants to go, then there will be a moment when Europe is not yet prepared for that scenario.

Rosin: I see. So it just can’t happen this quickly. Like, the same as DOGE—it’s just sort of “come and burn everything down,” but it’s not, like, an intelligent or useful way—

Applebaum: No, it’s not an intelligent solution.

Rosin: Yeah.

Applebaum: As I said, I don’t know whether Trump or people around him have thought this through. I mean, the U.S. gains a lot of advantages by being the leading security power in Europe. And will European countries still want to buy U.S. weapons? Will they want to buy U.S. security products? There would be consequences for the U.S. too. I mean, it’s not like the U.S. just withdraws, and Europe takes over, and everything’s fine. No. There would be, as I said, this kind of cascading series of economic and political consequences that might turn out to be quite dramatic.

Rosin: Yeah. Last thing: I know you were in Munich with defense and security officials, people who help with Ukrainian defense. I’m curious what the mood is of people who have to think on the ground about strategy and defense, and how quickly they’ve been able to adjust.

Applebaum: People are adjusting very fast. The new chancellor of Germany, who was elected on Sunday—Friedrich Merz—one of the first things that he said: We have to prepare for a new world in which we are independent of the United States. And I can’t tell you how dramatic that is. He’s been pro-America. He’s been an advocate for close relations between Germany and America, and Europe and America. And to have him say that means that people are thinking fast.

So it will take a long time, of course, for military production cycles and strategic planning to change, but the beginning of the mental change has already started.

Rosin: Well, Anne, thank you so much for joining us and for naming everything that’s happening so clearly. It’s so helpful.

Applebaum: Thanks.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: spies. We talk to Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris about how these shifting alliances are affecting the intelligence community, and what that might mean for American security down the road.

[Break]

Rosin: So in the first half of the show, we talked about the shifting world order and the political issues it causes. And now I kind of want to talk to you about operational issues, like sharing of intelligence, spycraft, you know—the things that happen between nations that make the world run. So from your reporting, are you finding that any agencies, governments are wondering how much they can trust the U.S.?

Shane Harris: I think that has been a question that has been simmering for a lot of the country’s allies since even before the election, when they looked to the possibility that Donald Trump might come back to office. How much could they trust the United States to be a reliable partner in protecting secrets, protecting intelligence that they might share? I should say it wasn’t, like, a “five-alarm fire” kind of worry. But people are really starting to ask this because Donald Trump had a history of disclosing other countries’ information, disclosing the United States’ own secrets, in some cases, and notably was criminally charged for mishandling classified information.

So I think with his election, those anxieties rose, and now what we’re seeing is kind of compounding that is this even more, I might even say, kind of existential question of not just, Can we count on the United States to protect our information and be a good security partner at the kind of tactical level? but, Can we count on them to be a good partner strategically at all anymore?

And I think all of these questions are kind of colliding right now and really undermining what had been decades of confidence that European allies, in particular, had had in the United States, regardless of whether a Republican or a Democrat was sitting in the Oval Office.

Rosin: Right. Can you actually explain how intelligence sharing works? Like, who are our critical partners? Who provides intelligence? Who provides the most intelligence? Just so that we understand what could change.

Harris: Yes. So the most important intelligence-sharing arrangement that the United States has is something that is referred to as the “Five Eyes.” And that refers to five countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand—that have this long-standing kind of pact, where they share highly sensitive intelligence and information on a routine basis with one another that’s of interest to their mutual security.

And really, sort of the big, big, big players in this often are the United States and the United Kingdom. I’m just going to give you an example of how closely we share information with the U.K. When it comes to signals intelligence—which is like electronic eavesdropping, intercepting emails and other digital communication—the physical infrastructure, you know, literally the technology, the kit that these two countries rely on, is intertwined in some locations. It is that closely enmeshed.

On the level of human intelligence, so information that an agency gets from spies in the field or from assets that it has, the U.S. and the U.K. routinely share the fruits of that kind of intelligence with each other as well. And all the other partners do that on a pretty regular basis too.

And then the United States does share, maybe on a less exclusive, maybe a bit more restricted basis, but certainly shares with other NATO allies—you know, France, Germany. The United States, you know, for decades has depended extensively on German intelligence to tell us information about terrorist organizations and particular threats that are brewing in Europe that might be of interest or a threat to the United States.

So this is the kind of on-the-ground, if you like, level of sharing that goes on just routinely. And it happens, importantly, via channels and via career employees that are in place, regardless of who the heads of government, the heads of state are in the various member countries.

Rosin: By the way, the term Five Eyes. It’s so good. Like, it’s a little on the nose, but it’s so good. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a movie, or no one’s written a novel called The Five Eyes, in which one of them betrays each other or something like that happens.

Harris: I’ve always loved it because, you know, it’s: They’re all watching. And importantly, I should say, and interesting to follow on that: In the Five Eyes, in that agreement, what’s important, too, is they do not spy on each other, right? That is something that’s also very special to the relationship in those five countries.

Rosin: I mean, I’m reading in the lines of what you’re saying. So we don’t know the degree of mistrust yet. It’s probably brewing, but it sounds like, from what you’re saying, it makes everybody less safe. Like, it makes us less safe, too, because these are how, you know, terrorist threats are detected, and these networks are very intertwined, so it feels a little precarious, dangerous.

Harris: I think that’s right. And you’re right to say that it makes everyone less safe, because if any country is holding back on information, arguably, that is potentially making everybody less informed and less aware, which could have real-world implications. And I should stress that no one has said to me, Well, we’re just going to stop sharing information with the United States, because we don’t trust you.

The real concern now is that (A) the United States might just start cutting off information flows to other countries. We did see, this week, the Financial Times had a very interesting report that Peter Navarro, who is sort of an aide to Donald Trump—who is known for saying some pretty outlandish things, I should say—was raising the idea that Canada should be kicked out of the Five Eyes arrangement. And presumably, this is some kind of coercive measure that would be used to try and get more-favorable trading terms from Canada. Now, Navarro came out and said there was nothing to this; it was a made-up story.

But we have heard rumors of this. I’ve heard chatter about it before, about whether or not Trump was considering doing that. The mere idea that the United States would be using Five Eyes membership and access to national-security intelligence to protect the country’s citizens as a coercive measure to try and get more favorable trading terms, you know, strikes people I’ve talked to as appalling, but totally in keeping with what they would expect Donald Trump to do, which tells you just how far we’ve deviated from the norm.

Rosin: So what else are people bringing up that makes them nervous? You mentioned, you know, Trump has leaked secrets before. Like, I think he famously tweeted a top-secret image of an Iranian rocket-launch site. I mean, he’s known for being a little lax with other people’s intelligence. So that’s one thing. Is that on people’s minds?

Harris: That’s definitely on people’s minds. You know, there was a famous incident in the first year of his first term where he seemed to disclose a top-secret source of information we were getting from Israeli intelligence during a meeting he had with two Russian officials, which didn’t go over great. So there is that kind of general concern about Trump himself and the people around him being very leaky and using intelligence in a way that is to their own benefit and interest. That’s been a worry.

You know, another, I think, less-appreciated concern has been: This intelligence-sharing relationship, while it is ostensibly a two-way street, really, it’s the other four Five Eyes that are depending on the United States for most of the information. I mean, the British security service, while very capable, is much smaller than the United States, and they really depend on the information they’re getting from the Americans, and it’s less about how much the Brits are giving to us.

And several people I’ve talked to in the Five Eyes community worry that as agencies—particularly, like, the FBI, which routinely shares information with the Five Eyes partners—as they’re going through this sort of chaotic period where they’re being taken over by political loyalists, like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the new deputy director, and Trump has gone through and fired these sort of upper echelons of the career establishment, or is trying to, those are the people, the individuals with whom these different allied countries interact with on a regular basis.

And some of them have said to me, Look. You know, while you guys, basically, can’t get your stuff together, and you’re kind of in chaos, we worry that that’s going to have a downstream negative effect on us, because you’re so distracted by politics and internal witch hunts and, you know, personnel matters that maybe you’re taking the eye off the ball, and we’re not getting the usual high quality of intelligence that we depend on.

Rosin: Right. You know, some leaders in Europe have talked about—like, Emmanuel Macron hinted at this in his meeting with Trump—that actually, being less dependent on the U.S. for their security might be a good thing for Europe. I wonder if there’s a version of that for intelligence. Like, We don’t want to be as dependent on the U.S. There’s some advantage to switching up the way that we’ve been doing things.

Harris: I think that there is. And certainly, intelligence officials I speak to aren’t quite there yet in proposing it, but everyone is aware that the nature of the alliance is shifting—and perhaps not irrevocably, but at least for the foreseeable future.

You know, if you take some intelligence agencies in Europe right now—you know, take the British intelligence service and the security service right now, for instance. They have been very aggressive and far more kind of at the front line of the action in Ukraine than the United States has. They’ve developed certain capabilities and networks and sources of information that are very useful to them.

The European countries, the U.K. included, really do see the threat from Russia, I think, differently than Americans do. They see it as something that is very much kind of in their backyard. And because of that, I think that they have been devoting more resources to beefing up their own intelligence on Russia. And could that push them, you know, in a direction where maybe they say, Look—we’ve got to start being less dependent on the United States and beef up our own capabilities and share with each other? I think that’s quite possible.

What the United States has to offer is, you know, technical reach. I mean, we’re talking about electronic information. We’re talking about just a constellation of satellites that can capture imagery and all kinds of other information. So the United States still has that bulk and has those numbers, but that does not mean that these other countries can’t develop even more specific and tailored ways of collecting information that suit their own interests and make them less dependent on the United States. I think that could happen.

Rosin: Yeah. And that’s, I suppose, value neutral? Like, we don’t know if that’s good or a bad thing.

Harris: Well, look—count me on the side of people who believe that the alliances have been very much in the interest of the various members, and that this information sharing is just a culture that now pervades among these countries. There’s a belief that more sharing, you know, and a kind of mutual—not dependence but, you know—feeling of we’re all in it together is generally good for the collective whole.

I don’t want to overstate this. The United States is the dominant intelligence force in the West. Could it go off on its own and probably be okay? Yeah, it probably could be for the near term. But you never want to be missing that one key piece of information that tells you about, you know, a bigger threat. And I just don’t see any reason, particularly, other than Trump being Trump, why we need to blow up those alliances. But, you know, this is where we are right now, isn’t it?

Rosin: A last thing: I’m thinking about Trump signaling his closeness with Vladimir Putin, you know, how he recently repeated some Russian talking points. I wonder how those kinds of signals get received among the people you talk to—intelligence officials, the people who are guarding these alliances. What’s the result of those kinds of actions?

Harris: I think that they hear that, and, honestly, they think, We’ve heard this before. Everyone talks a lot about J. D. Vance’s speech in Munich, and some of the statements that Donald Trump has made about Zelensky being a dictator, and this affection for Putin. And all of this has been happening in the past month.

My mind goes back to 2018, when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki—and listeners may remember—the question of Russia’s interference in our elections in 2016 came up. And Trump—in front of the audience, in front of the world—said that he believed Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies when Putin said that Russia didn’t interfere in the election. And I think that was as stunning of a single, jaw-dropping moment as I can remember in my career covering intelligence—that the president of the United States was standing there next to an ex-KGB officer and saying, I believe him and not the U.S. intelligence community.

Our allies heard that. And really, ever since then, when I talk to people, you get a range of opinions, from, Donald Trump is just a businessman, and he likes Putin’s tough-guy attitude, all the way toward people thinking, I can’t prove it, but I’ve always suspected the Russians are either blackmailing him, or somehow, he’s secretly an agent. Like, you get the range of opinions from people.

So I think that they have just always, generally—the security services in these ally countries—have always seen that relationship that he has with Putin as a significant problem. And it’s one that they have to manage. So what they’re hearing from him now, with this affection for Putin, is not new. The difference is that now Trump is actually breaking these alliances with the West. And he is talking about a settlement in Ukraine that does not necessarily appear to be either in the interests of Ukraine or other European countries. And that has intelligence officials in Europe extremely nervous.

Rosin: I see. So this erosion of trust is long and slow. And what’s been shocking to the rest of us, the intelligence community has been monitoring for a while, those who are keeping close tabs.

Harris: I think that’s right.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you so much for joining us today. You always teach us so much about worlds that we don’t know a lot about.

Harris: It’s great to be with you. Thanks, Hanna.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

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May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people’s piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn’t think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: “Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.”

But moving isn’t happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: “Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.” So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall?

[Music]

Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?

Yoni Appelbaum: “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America’s most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”

Rosin: Okay. Let’s start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?

Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.

Rosin: And you’re not just describing something geographic. You’re describing something psychological.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.

Rosin: Right. Because it’s not just about geography. It’s not just about money.

It’s about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren’t class-bound in any way.

Appelbaum: Here’s the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join.

Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don’t want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs.

And then in the early 19th century, there’s a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place.

Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What’s the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now?

Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year.

Rosin: Every year?

Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It’s dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century.

Rosin: It’s so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems.

Appelbaum: For a long time, that’s exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the “floating proletariat,” right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn’t actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another.

And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it’s the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were.

Rosin: It’s like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called “Moving Day,” from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is?

Appelbaum: We’ve got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better.

And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they’d hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they’d be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn’t room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures.

It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.

Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s one thing that really upset the upper crust.

Rosin: And who are they? Let’s define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?

Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don’t know their place. They don’t know their station. They’re always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.

But the people who are participating in it, it’s very broad. I mean, when you’re talking about half the city moving, what you’re talking about is activity that’s as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected.

But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you’d get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they’re chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it’s got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it’s a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.

Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It’s considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah. It’s sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that’s ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.

Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they’re extraordinary. Maybe I’m just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it’s, like, 600 per acre. It’s really, really, really high. There’s no place in Manhattan today that’s even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they’re really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they’re really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right?

They’re looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They’re not subtle about it. They’re quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there’s a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.

Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the “they”? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it’s unexpected, this part of the history.

Appelbaum: Lawrence Veiller is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He’s the guy who will write most of the reports, who’ll serve on the commissions, who’ll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements.

And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can’t keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I’ve done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it “fire safety,” you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods.

And it’s one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can’t believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he’d said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods.

Rosin: So we’re in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What’s the next step they take?

Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It’s not enough to keep the apartments back. It’s not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side.

And there’s a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You’re scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It’s their one chance for fresh air, and it’s a public sidewalk. So there’s a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can’t build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side.

Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism.

Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied—

Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That’s another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins.

Appelbaum: It’s a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can’t do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces.

And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national.

Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have.

Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That’s the famous one.

Appelbaum: Exactly. That’s the original zoning ordinance: We’re gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you’re pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population.

Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that’s Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.

She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out.

And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn’t understand at the time—maybe couldn’t have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into?

Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street.

Rosin: Okay, she’s on Hudson Street. That’s an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn’t other people like her.

Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn’t. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it’s changing at the time. She’s not alone in coming in, in that way.

But it’s mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It’s got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it.

Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she’s a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin?

Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolph Hechler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you’re going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors.

It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there’d been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever.

And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family’s need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there’s a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you’re not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you’re going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices.

Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors?

Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen.

Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge.

Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it’s historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that’s what ends up freezing change? Like, that’s what ends up preventing change?

Appelbaum: Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around.

They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you’re going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We’re going to pick and choose what we allow. We’re going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways.

And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you’ll separate out your population by race, by income. That’s what happens. That’s what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted.

And as we’ve switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there.

Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It’s like, “breaking the engine of opportunity.”

Appelbaum: It is, and it’s led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They’re inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent.

I’ll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent.

Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there’s a housing crisis, but that isn’t quite right.

Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we’ve got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there’s a lot of cheap housing in America. It’s not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we’re trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we’re pursuing the wrong solutions.

We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we’ve never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it’s like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you’re really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages.

And so if we have policy that’s focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that’s simply focused on affordability, we’re likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we’re also likely to return the sense of personal agency.

Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you’re making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America’s infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you’ve talked about that or reconciled it.

Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn’t—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven’t, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way.

When we’re moving a lot, we’re much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you’re gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you’re in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they’re less likely to be attending them, and they’re less likely to add new ones.

The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we’re moving around a lot, we’re creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there’s one other side, too, which is: It’s not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you’re moving a lot, you’re giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you’ve inherited.

We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they’re more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too.

And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn’t something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn’t have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did.

And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it’s not some sort of assault on tradition. I’m not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I’m saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose.

And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that’s great. If you feel like you’ve got no choice, that’s really terrible.

Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today.

Appelbaum: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Neko Case is best known as a lead vocalist for the Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers and a solo career that doesn’t quite fit any genre (“country noir” and “odd rock” are two labels she has suggested). Her songs feature unusual protagonists, many of whom are animals, and critics and fans have been puzzling over her lyrics for years. Recently, Case published a memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which suggests possible source material for her vivid and sometimes alarming imagination. In the memoir, she writes mostly about her experience growing up as the child of teenage parents who, in her telling, never came around to wanting a child. And about finding an alternative home in the music scenes of the American Northwest and Canada.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Case about men, music, her own sliding sense of gender, the impossibility of being a musician in the age of streaming, and most important, how not to suffer for your art. After a lifetime of thinking about her parents, she also has good advice on when not to forgive.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Just a quick note: This episode contains some cursing that you might not usually hear on this show.

Neko Case is one of those musicians that people have really strong personal attachments to, especially indie music lovers of a certain generation. Like, I know two people who have named a child after her.

Neko Case is a lead vocalist of the indie-pop collective the New Pornographers, and she’s also had a long solo career. But what’s most distinct about her are her lyrics, which are often oblique. Like, a song seems to be about a car crash, but maybe it’s really about incomplete grief. You have to listen a few times before you get closer to it.

[“Star Witness,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then there are lots of times when Case seems to be writing about herself, but it’s not entirely clear.

[“Things That Scare Me,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Last month, Neko Case peeled back some of the mystery. She’s written a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which shares part of the same title as one of her albums from 2013.

She writes about growing up poor and neglected. Her parents were teenagers when they had her, and her guess is that neither of them ever wanted a child. By the end of her sophomore year in high school, she asked her mom for emancipation. She writes: “She couldn’t sign it quickly enough; she didn’t even have to think it over.”

And so Case hid a lot behind her music.

[Music]

Rosin: One of my favorite scenes is you as a kid in the school library. Like, you remembered that the beanbags were corduroy. The image was so perfect. It was such a perfect image from that era. And you were hiding out with your headphones on. I think you mentioned listening to “Atomic,” by Blondie.

Neko Case: Over and over and over and over, like only a neurodivergent ADHD kid can do.

Rosin: Right. Right. (Laughs.) Like, just a million times. Do you have words for what that was like for you? Because it felt like, Okay, that’s the moment that she discovers the power of music. In a movie, that would be the scene in which you discover what music is for and what it does to you.

Case: Music was always just there. And I took it for granted, but I also leaned really heavily into it. I did not make a connection that music was something I would want to do or I would do, because I was just a girl. And I did not make a connection between myself and Blondie, or myself and the Go-Go’s. I just knew I really loved them.

Rosin: So why did it take so long, do you think, for you to open your mouth and sing? You played in bands, but you didn’t really sing for a while.

Case: Well, I was raised to be female in the United States of America so, you know, I wasn’t raised with a lot of self-confidence.

Rosin: So what was the point where you were like, Oh I can do this?

Case: It wasn’t so much deciding I could do it. It was just that I couldn’t help but to do it, because the desire was so intense.

Rosin: Now, the desire is the desire to make music, to write music, to sing? What was the desire?

Case: Even just to sit near it. Anything. Anything I could have.

Rosin: In the book, you complain about your voice. You write that it was neither pretty nor powerful. And that’s—

Case: Oh that’s not a complaint.

Rosin: It’s not a complaint. Okay, okay, okay.

Case: No, no, no. It’s not powerful, and it’s not pretty. Like, those are things that—you know, I wish it were powerful. I don’t care that it’s not pretty. I very much enjoy hearing women singing in ways other than being pretty. And singing is an incredible physical feeling. It’s like your mouth is a fire hose, and you can twist your insides and make a powerful thing come out to the point where your feet levitate ever so slightly off the floor.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Case: It gets so physical. It is so athletic, and there’s nothing else like it.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Well, even in this just few minutes that we’ve been talking, you describe a little journey from a point where the world gives you a set of expectations and tells you, you can and can’t do things. And you seem to sort of find your way out of that, either through your voice or how you experience music, or even the way you write about institutions. Like, you write the country-music institution was limiting in some ways.

Case: Oh it’s straight up misogynist and racist and hateful. We don’t even have to sugarcoat that one. The current country-music scene of radio music in Nashville is absolutely heinous. And I watch young women try to get in there, and I love them so much, and they’re trying, and I’m like, Don’t even bother. Let that thing die. That thing is poison. Come over here. Let’s make the other thing.

Rosin: And is the other thing, like, you inventing your own genres? You’ve given them names over the years that are—“country noir” or “odd rock,” and things like that. Like, is that the way out? Is that what you tell women?

Case: I think that what it is, is the gatekeepers of country music are absolutely terrified that it might evolve, whereas the gatekeepers of rock and roll don’t have a problem with evolution. But there’s something very white supremacist about how country music works. And they’re really, really dialing down on it now.

Rosin: So you don’t mean just then. You’re talking about then, and now there’s a resurgence. Because there was a great moment—

Case: I think it’s worse now. I think it’s far worse now than it has been in a long time.

Rosin: I mean, there was a good moment for women—it was a brief good moment for women in country music.

Case: There have been a couple.

Rosin: Yeah.

Case: Sometimes, people are so talented that they’re undeniable, and not even the gatekeepers can keep them out.

Rosin: Well, it’s good Beyoncé made that country album then.

Case: We’re lucky to have Beyoncé doing a lot of things. That’s all I’m saying.

Rosin: That’s true. That’s true. (Laughs.) I think reading your memoir, for me, changed how I heard your music, and I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing or not the intended thing. Is that something you explicitly thought you were doing? At times, I almost read it like, Oh this is a key to some lyrics, and I wasn’t sure if that was correct or not correct.

Case: I tried to not give away the songs as much as possible. Like, there was a couple times where I kind of went into them, but I don’t like to ruin songs for people. You know how you will hear the lyrics of a song one way, and then you find out it’s not the lyric that you thought it was, and then you’re like, Oh. It’s not as good anymore?

If you think you know what a song’s about, and it makes you feel connected emotionally to it, and it becomes a little chapter heading in your life, you don’t want to ruin that for people.

Rosin: Yeah. But I don’t know if it’s ruin it. I think it’s just complicate it. I’ll give you an example—and maybe just indulge me, and you can walk me through the process. I’m the listener. You’re the singer. When I read the book title, of course, I immediately thought of your 2013 album—

Case: Yes.

Rosin: —The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, for obvious reasons. Because of the song “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” which has run in my head for 10 years—

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —which starts with the kid at the bus stop, and then the perspective is quickly shifting, so it’s hard to keep up with who’s the you and who’s the me.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then that kind of devastating line about, “My mother, she did not love me.”

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: In your mind, is that line related to the book in any way?

Case: Well, that song was a real event. I was really at a bus stop in Honolulu, fleeing Hawaii. And I saw it happen, and I just felt so helpless.

Rosin: You felt helpless to protect the kid?

Case: Yeah. But the kid, also, was being very resilient, and she was entertaining herself. She was very spunky and cute. And her mom was just an asshole.

Rosin: I mean, reading your book, I did think, Oh that line resonated with Neko for a reason, because of struggles with your own mother. Do you mean for people to read the memoir that way?

Case: Well, I mean, I told the story. I just—I’ve never written a book before, and I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I wanted to write fiction, but it was at the height of the pandemic, and Hachette said, We’ll pay you to write a memoir, though. And I was like, Okay. A memoir it is. And that’s not a complaint or, you know, they didn’t hold my heels to the fire or anything. I just thought, Okay, well, it’ll just be a little challenging, because, you know, talking about yourself or writing about yourself to yourself isn’t the most exciting thing ever.

You spend a lot of time with yourself. So I don’t think of myself as like, Oh people are really going to want to know this. So I mean, that’s one of the reasons I tried to pick more interesting stories from childhood that were scenes, maybe, of good things, too, because I didn’t want it to just be, Oh poor me, especially because it’s not unusual. It’s most people’s experience.

I mean, my situation with my mother is pretty bizarre. But neglect or abuse or things like that—those are most people’s experiences. Or growing up really poor—that is most people.

Rosin: I think your experience is actually pretty unusual.

Case: Yeah. It’s pretty damn weird.

[Music]

Rosin: “Pretty damn weird” it is.

When Case was in second grade, her father told her that her mother had died of cancer, which was surprising because Case didn’t even realize she was sick. And then a year and a half later, her dad said to her one day: I don’t want you to think your mom’s a ghost, but she came home.

As Case recalls in her memoir, the story was that her mother had had terminal cancer and gone to Hawaii to recover but didn’t want Case to see her so ill. And Case—who, remember, was a little kid—believed her. She had her mom back. She was happy.

It only occurred to her later—after many, many years and another disappearing act from her mother—that she might never have been sick in the first place.

Rosin: It’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard. I mean, it is a little shocking and hard to forget. And I’m not sure if you knew that or recognized it in that way.

Case: I didn’t know that until I was in my early 20s, and I told somebody I knew that my mom faked her death. And then they were like, That’s the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I was like, Oh yeah. That is actually pretty weird, isn’t it? But you know kids. Kids just think what’s happening to them is what happens. So it didn’t occur to me.

Rosin: So where did it register for you? Because now I see that what I am assuming about that song isn’t actually how you move through the process. I just assumed you had that in your head when you wrote the lyrics, “She did not love me.”

Because that lyric is haunting, even the way you sing it and the pacing of it. I just assumed you had that in your head, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just had it in your subconscious somewhere.

Case: It’s in me all the time. And, you know, it’s just not my fault.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Case: She didn’t love me. And it’s just the fact.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: When you work out memories and pains in song, is cathartic a banal word to use here? Does it do something for you to work it out and learn?

Case: Only in a super-nerdy, kind of neurodivergent-slash-Virgo way where I’m like, Oh! I’m taking all the things, and I’m organizing them in this box. And so now I can put this box over here like a hard drive, so my brain has more room in it. And it’s all color-coded, and I know where it is. That’s, like, Virgo organization.

Rosin: Interesting.

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Because I feel like one glib way to read a memoir like this is, Oh from family trauma and a mother who didn’t love you comes immense creativity. How wonderful! What’s wrong or right about that interpretation?

Case: Well, the mythology of people needing to suffer to make beautiful things or just art or creative things, in general, is not true.

Rosin: You mean they don’t need to suffer? Because it feels like, reading this book, your suffering is related to how you think and work through things and organize things.

Case: No. If I had had a supportive upbringing, I would be able to read music and play instruments and would probably be a lot further along. You don’t need that.

Rosin: So to you, it just feels like pure baggage. It’s, like, a thing you’ve had to tolerate, but you could have been a singer some other way.

Case: Oh it’s an absolute trunk of shit.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Case: The things that I admire about myself are despite those things. You know, like, I still am a trusting person. I still really want to see the good in people, and sometimes I will make mistakes and trust people I shouldn’t. And I could beat myself up about that, or I could just go, No. You still want to believe people are good. And I think that’s a more important quality than whether or not you’re wily enough to spot a jerk a mile away—you know what I mean?

Rosin: Yeah, I was more thinking, like, you had this life, and you had to escape this life and find your family elsewhere, and you had a huge, strong motivation to do that, and so you found music.

Case: Yes.

Rosin: But that’s just another way of saying trauma made you a great musician.

Case: No. Music is the only thing that never let me down. But trauma did not make me a great musician. I am a journeyman, at best, and, you know, I’m broke. I don’t know—I think great musicians do other things.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wait. Did you just say you were broke?

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Do you mean financially broke or personally broke?

Case: Financially broke.

Rosin: Really? How is that possible? I think your fans would be shocked.

Case: The confluence of my house burning down, COVID, and streaming—those three things together.

Rosin: Wow.

Case: And I cannot catch up.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back—more with Neko Case on politics, on forgiveness, and a recent experience with a friend’s death that she said felt like getting on the spaceship to go to the moon.

Case:  I felt absolutely unafraid. And I was seeing an actual moment of grace in life, and I couldn’t believe it.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: I wanted to ask you about gender, because the way you write and sing about gender is very much the way a lot of people talk about gender now. And I’m curious how you have watched the evolution of how people inhabit and think about gender, like in your lyrics to “Man”—

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —you don’t mean that literally. What do you mean by “I’m a man”?

Case: I do mean it literally.

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Case: I mean, I am of the species. I am a man. Like, whatever’s going on downstairs doesn’t matter. I have all my faculties. You can call a female or a male lion a lion, and they’re still a lion. I’m a man in that same way.

And I am so thrilled and proud and excited by generations younger than mine who are not backing down from who they think they are and the idea that they get to be who they are. That has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever witnessed, and it has given me so much more insight into myself because I never felt like a girl or totally a guy. I’m more of a gender-fluid person.

Rosin: And when you say it’s taught you so much about yourself, what do you mean? Because in the book, there is one way in which you very much inhabit the experience of a woman of that generation, just at the hands of careless and arrogant and brutal men, like a teacher, older brothers, fellow musicians. And then there’s a sense, I imagine, of being trapped in that.

So what have you learned about yourself in this era of gender fluidity? How do you think about yourself?

Case: As neither. I am neither. I still call myself she/her. I’m used to it. It doesn’t bother me. And partly because the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it. I just won’t. But I also understand that the world hates gender-fluid people and trans people, LGBTQ people, and I understand the importance of not abandoning that, either.

Rosin: So you see the world as making some cultural progress and how we think of what’s a man and what’s a woman in some corners, but not a lot of progress politically or socially.

Case: Politically, we are fucked. Socially, I don’t think what the president and his people represent, represents the American people. I don’t believe that Americans, in general, have a hatred or a problem with people who are not white, who are LGBTQ, who are immigrants. I just don’t think they do.

Rosin: To shift away from politics, since we get a lot of it over here in D.C., although this is related, the thing—

Case: Well, I mean, a human being’s right to be is—I mean, that’s just everyday life. Like, politics and everyday life just—they just aren’t separate, not that I want to talk about politics, specifically. Because I just refuse to be afraid.

Rosin: Do you feel like that’s something you found at this age? Because you’ve said there are times in your life where you haven’t had self-confidence, you’ve been depressed, or you’ve kind of lost your mind, even, in one section of the book. Is it easier to not be afraid now?

Case: Well, I have really benefited from menopause. And a lot of people who menstruate who don’t anymore have said the same things about, you know, the hormone shift. Like, you don’t care anymore what people think of you.

And also, I just came from seeing one of my best friends die. And sitting with her body for four days as—you know, she was an organ donor, and she had a massive aneurysm. And her partner just heroically did CPR, and then the paramedics came and kept her pulse going and got her to the hospital, and they stabilized her, despite the fact that she had no brain activity.

And you cannot be an organ donor unless you die on a respirator in the hospital. Like, it’s very, very specific. And then you have to wait for all the tests. There are barrages of tests that happened to make sure that you’re healthy and that your organs can really save someone else’s life and not be rejected. And so we spent days just with her and talking about her life and what a selfless person she was. And we joked a lot about how she was going to work, even in death. She was all about service.

And then the day came. Right on the way to the OR, what they do is they do a thing called an “honor walk.” And we went down what seemed like miles of corridors behind her hospital bed, behind the doctors. And the corridors were lined with doctors and nurses and hospital staff honoring her. And it seemed like one of those movies where you see the people going down the corridor in slow motion to get into the spaceship to go to the moon or whatever, and everyone’s saluting them, and it seems so important. And I think I actually saw that in real life.

And I just thought, All those things that I worry about and the injustices—we are so right to fight for them. And I was there watching this incredible thing happen, and these beautiful people from all over the world—many of the doctors are immigrants—and it was a mix of people of all colors from all over the world and all different cultures. And I felt so utterly galvanized against the fear and so utterly galvanized in that joy is the way forward.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Case: Loud-ass, exuberant joy.

Rosin: I mean, one of the things I took most from your book is how you write about forgiveness. It’s related to this. I mean, you definitely acknowledge the beauty of forgiveness, but then you say this other thing, and you could read this in a lot of different ways, which is the “trust your contempt” paragraph. Do you remember that? You don’t have the book in front of you, right?

Case: I don’t. But I do talk about this, occasionally.

Rosin: Yeah. Dissect it if you can. If something doesn’t stir anything but contempt in you, then there’s a reason. Don’t canonize your contempt, but don’t ignore it.

This is the part that I love. It’s so good: “Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson.”

Where would you say you are—you know, you have a lifetime of songs; you have this memoir; it sounds like you have friends—on this path? Is it different for different people? Like, forgiving members of your family, people who have hurt you in the past?

Case: Oh yeah. I mean, relationships with people are all very different, and some are very complicated, and some are not.

Rosin: So you would say you’re at different places with different people?

Case: Oh yeah.

Rosin: What about your dad? I was curious about him because he plays a kind of shadow role in the book, not quite with the extravagant cruelty of your mother. Maybe neglectful—maybe—is the right way to read that.

Case: I have a lot of compassion for my dad and a lot of sadness because I feel like his development was arrested completely. And he had to be an adult man and head of the family and all these things, and he was just a kid inside. And he didn’t know how to handle it. He maintained it with drugs and drinking for a long time, but then it catches up with you.

And the kind of pain from that—he didn’t use what happened to him to manipulate anyone. His forward path was genuine. He wasn’t doing a great job, but he was also a 19-year-old kid when he had me. And he didn’t want me, but he ended up with me.

Rosin: Yeah. And ended up raising you.

Case: Not really.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. Ended up housing you under the same roof.

Case: Sometimes.

Rosin: Sometimes. Yeah, there was that moment when you guys reconnect over a car. You speak car talk with each other—

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: —which is very familiar to me. I come from a family of mechanics and car people. And so I found that very peaceful. It was a tiny second of peace in a very rocky journey.

Case: Yeah, it was nice because when I was a little girl, I would have loved to have had him show me how to do things, because he was always fixing the car or the truck or whatever, and it would have been nice to have been included. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought he wanted a boy, and I thought he was really disappointed. But he just didn’t want any kid.

Rosin: You know, I’ve just been nonstop listening to your music to prepare to talk to you and sort of tuning into the different moods of different albums. And I wonder, from you: What’s the song you wrote when you were happiest? Or even when you listen to it now, it makes you happy. Like, it just makes you feel good.

Case: Probably “Hold On, Hold On.” It’s melancholy, but it feels very much like I am in charge of myself. And I make good decisions in it.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: So it’s, like, a song that makes you feel like all of this pain and trauma—like you can handle it.

Case: Partially. It’s a moment of actually seeing yourself clearly. It doesn’t mean the moment’s going to last.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Case: I think I also partly feel that way because I wrote it with the Sadies, and I have such a loving relationship with them. And it’s always made me feel good to play it. And my dear friend Dallas Good passed away a couple of years ago, way too young. And so now it takes on a new sort of heaviness, but it’s a heaviness that feels good to carry somehow.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Thanks again to my guest, Neko Case.

[Music]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Sometime on Tuesday evening, the USAID website was taken down and replaced with what looked like a beta page from the internet of the 1990s. There were no affecting photos of American government officials distributing food and medicine overseas. Instead, a box of text explained that nearly all USAID personnel would be placed on administrative leave, globally. With administrative assistance from Elon Musk, President Donald Trump seems to have wiped out the world’s largest donor agency in just a few days. It was a radical act, but maybe not as politically risky, in the domestic sense, as other plans in the grand project of dismantling the federal government. USAID has important beneficiaries, but most of them are not Americans and live overseas.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we discuss where Trump and Musk seem to be headed and the obstacles they are likely to encounter in the future. What happens when Trump starts to face challenges from courts? What happens when Musk goes after programs that Americans depend on, particularly those who voted for Trump? What new political alliances might emerge from the wreckage? We talk with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics. And we also talk with Shane Harris, who covers national security, about Trump’s campaign to purge the FBI of agents who worked on cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol.

“I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends,” Harris says. “I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Today is the deadline for some two million federal employees to decide if they want to type resign in response to the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email. The email, of course, is one in a list of things that Elon Musk, empowered by President Trump, has been doing in order to “disrupt” the federal government.

Donald Trump: We’re trying to shrink government. And he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.

Rosin: For example: gain access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system—

News anchor: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granting Elon Musk’s DOGE team access to the federal government’s payment system, which handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Rosin: —dismantle USAID, of which Trump is not a fan—

Trump: And we’re getting them out. USAID—run by radical lunatics.

Rosin: —and neither is Musk.

Elon Musk: If you’ve got an apple, and it’s got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you’ve got actually just a ball of worms, it’s hopeless. And USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple, you’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.

Rosin: All of these efforts are unusual, maybe even unprecedented, norm-breaking—even for Trump. But are they unconstitutional? And could they fundamentally change the character of the country?

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

[Music]

News anchor: At the FBI, some agents have started to pack up their desks as fears of mass firings grow.

Rosin: In the second half of the show, we’re going to focus on a special case inside the government, which presents a different set of potentially history-changing problems—the FBI—with staff writer Shane Harris.

But first, we are going to discuss what’s at stake, more broadly in this overhaul, with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics for The Atlantic.

[Music]

Rosin: Jon, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to be here.

Rosin: So, Jon, of all the unorthodox things that Trump has authorized Elon Musk to do with the federal government, which one strikes you as pushing constitutional limits the most?

Chait: Attempting to eliminate or cut spending for agencies that have been authorized by Congress. This is just a totally revolutionary step in terms of the structure of our government. And it’s kind of shocking, to me, how far he’s been able to go, and how much permission he’s received from the Republican Party.

Rosin: And is there another time in history when a president tested this limit between what Congress authorizes and what the president can do with that? And how has it worked out in the past?

Chait: That’s a great question. You had a struggle with Andrew Jackson over the Bank of the United States. That was a real constitutional struggle between him and his enemies as to how much power the president had vis-à-vis Congress and whether the president had just total authority to do what he wished. And Andrew Jackson was sort of known for pushing the boundaries of the office to or past their limits, and saying if the Supreme Court ruled against him, he would just do what he wanted, anyway. He did the same thing with his attempts to ethnically cleanse Native Americans to take their land. He just fundamentally didn’t care if he had authority from Congress.

That’s the kind of struggle we’re, I think, heading into right now. And Richard Nixon tried a smaller version, I think, of what Trump is doing now. He basically said, Congress has authorized certain kinds of spending, and I’m just going to impound it. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, and Congress passed the Impoundment [Control] Act that formalized the fact that Congress has this authority, and the president doesn’t, and if Congress authorizes spending, with very limited exceptions, the president has to carry it out. And if the president objects to certain forms of spending that Congress enacted, he has to persuade Congress to pass a law to change it.

Rosin: Got it. Okay. So that’s the line we’re working with. So it’s the Impoundment Act. It’s been defined by the Supreme Court. Can we talk about examples of, say, how far an administration can go in resisting a previous administration’s policies, but not pushing against this constitutional line? What would be something we’ve seen before? And what would prompt what people would refer to as, say, a legal or constitutional crisis?

Chait: Just in the big picture, the executive branch has been asserting more and more authority, over decades, as Congress has gotten more and more dysfunctional. The use of the filibuster has risen. Congress has gotten less and less able to fulfill its constitutional obligation to really direct national policy the way the Constitution imagined it. And so the executive branch has really kind of filled in this gap in a lot of ways. So you’ve seen presidents of both parties creatively exerting their authority.

You had Trump doing this with immigration, where he, you could say, couldn’t or just barely even tried to get Congress to fund the wall that he wanted. So he just basically redirected funding from the Pentagon to the border by calling it an emergency. And Trump is doing the same thing with tariffs.

Now, Congress basically ceded the president emergency authority to declare tariffs for various national-security emergencies, thinking that this would just be used in the case of something like a war or an international conflict, but it let the president decide what an emergency is. And so Trump can just say, well, an emergency is whatever he wants, and that’s on Congress.

And Biden has kind of pushed the limit in a lot of ways, I think most controversially with student loan forgiveness, where the executive branch has control over student loans, and so Biden just kind of forgave those loans on a kind of sweeping basis. Now, he was challenged legally. But when you’re in power, your party has a pretty strong incentive to interpret executive power in the most sweeping way.

So there’s a way in which both parties have really been engaged in this, but I really think what Trump and Musk are doing now has totally breached the walls of normal and is just turning the Constitution into a farce.

Rosin: Okay. So the reason that’s true is mostly because of appropriations? Because from what you’ve said, presidents are pushing this line constantly. So what are they doing that doesn’t just break norms or traditions, but actually is pushing into constitutional crisis?

Chait: Article I of the Constitution, which is really just, like, the guts of the Constitution, says that Congress has authority over spending.

So Congress establishes an agency. Congress sets its spending levels. And throughout our history, with the exception we’ve described for Nixon, which was slapped down, the presidents have to follow that because that’s the law, right? Now, the president has a role in that. The president can veto some of these laws. If Congress proposes spending that the president doesn’t want, the president can veto it, and then Congress can override it, or Congress can make a deal with him. But whatever emerges from that is the law, and the president has to follow the law.

Rosin: Okay. And does the Trump team have any creative arguments for how to get around this Impoundment Act?

Chait: So far, Elon Musk is just operating in this totally chaotic legal gray zone. So his first target has been the United States Agency for International Development. And one thing they’ve made this argument is that, Well, that was just established by an executive order by the president, John F. Kennedy, 1961, so it can be ended by an executive order. The problem is: After it was established by executive rule, it was later established by Congress. Congress voted to make the United States Agency for International Development an agency.

So after Congress established the United States Agency for International Development, it had the force of law. And so saying, We’re going to eliminate this agency, is just a violation of the law. It’s pretty simple.

Rosin: Okay. I can see the argument. So can we play out both scenarios? The first scenario is: The courts push back on Trump. You know, they enforce the Impoundment Act. They say, You cannot do this. You can’t end USAID. Elon Musk has to stop roaming around the federal government and making these decisions that violate this constitutional balance of power. What happens then? Does it call Trump’s bluff?

Chait: It might, but I wouldn’t count on it, for a couple reasons. Number one: Musk is moving much faster than the legal system can move. And it’s a lot easier to destroy something than it is to build something. So once you’ve basically told everyone they’re fired, and they can’t come to work, they can sit and wait for the courts to countermand that while they’re losing their income and their mortgage is going under, or they could just go find another job somewhere.

Rosin: I see. So it’s just, like, facts on the ground change, so that even if the legal reality doesn’t budge, you’ve already disintegrated the actual infrastructure.

Chait: You lose the institutional culture. You lose the accumulated expertise. And by the time the courts have stepped in, rebuilding it is difficult to do, even if the president wanted to. And obviously, they’re not going to want to anyway. Second of all, it’s not totally clear that they’re going to follow the law, that the law has any power over them.

I mean, remember: Donald Trump established on the first day of his administration that he believes that people who break the law on his behalf can get away with it when he pardoned the entire—or commuted the sentences of the entire—insurrectionists, right?

Rosin: Yeah.

Chait: So Elon Musk knows full well that if he violates the law, Trump is going to have his back. So I think that’s also shaping the behavior of everyone involved in this episode.

Rosin: Right. So it sounds like you pretty strongly believe there is no brake to this. b-r-a-k-e. There is no stop to this. I was thinking that maybe the courts or something to, you know, put some hope in to stop this. But it sounds like no.

Chait: Well, in the long run, the courts can have an effect by saying, You don’t have the authority to eliminate this agency. It still exists, meaning that when the Democrats win back the presidency, if that ever happens, it’ll still be there, and then they can actually rebuild it.

Rosin: So in other words, in that scenario, there’s temporary dismantling, but the balance of powers remains in place, is affirmed by the courts, and things get slowly rebuilt.

Chait: Right. Although, you know, you’ve lost all your talent, you’ve lost your institutional memory, and then you’re probably rebuilding this agency from scratch.

And keep in mind, USAID is just the test case. I think they’re just picking on the most politically vulnerable agency. It deals with foreign aid, right? So most of the people affected by this right now are mostly living in other countries, who won’t get, you know, drinking water and food. And people are going to starve and die of diseases, but they’re not going to be Americans. They can’t vote, so they’re politically weak and vulnerable.

So that’s the target that they’ve picked to establish this principle that the presidency can pick and choose what spending is real and what isn’t. So then they’re going to start to go on to do domestic targets. But then, I think, once they’ve started attacking domestic targets, then they’re going to start dealing with political blowback in a way they’re not facing when they’re going after foreign aid.

Rosin: I see. So that’s a different political—so if that starts to happen, if we enter a period where you have people who have stake in this in the U.S., can you see any interesting alliances that could come out of that moment?

Chait: It’s really hard to see where they’re going, because Elon Musk is not proceeding from an accurate map of reality.

So to just explain what I mean by that, he said that he wants to cut—first he said—$2 trillion from the fiscal-year budget, from one year. Then he revised it down to $1 trillion. So right away, you know, when you’re just picking these random round numbers, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. But he said, like, basically, there’s a trillion dollars in just, you know, waste and improper payments—and there just isn’t. There’s nothing close to that by even the most expansive possible definition. So Musk thinks he’s going to just go through the budget and find waste, and just kill it and add up to a trillion dollars. And he’s obviously not.

So the question is: What happens when his fantasy starts to run into reality? Does he start to just attack social-welfare programs and end payments of food stamps and Medicaid reimbursements and programs like that to people? Does he realize that he didn’t know what he was talking about and he’s in way over his head? We don’t know how it’s going to go, but I think that is the question you’ve got to answer before you start to figure out what the politics look like.

Rosin: Right. And there’s also military budgets. Like, if you think where the giant spending is, you’re running up against budgets that will face a huge amount of resistance if you slash them in the way that he’s slashed other things.

Chait: Right. Yeah. If they start going after the Pentagon, I think you, obviously, cut pretty deeply into the Republican coalition pretty fast. I even think they’re probably starting to accumulate small amounts of domestic political targets with USAID, right? They cut off funding to a Lutheran charity, but, you know, those are midwestern religious conservatives who are operating those programs who are being targeted. Now, most of the money is going overseas, but you’re still hurting people in the United States of America. And I think that pain is going to start to spread more widely if they keep going.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so you’re describing a realistic scenario in which this whole operation does encounter resistance. There are many policy researchers—on the left, even—who have argued that the government does, in fact, need an overhaul and, more specifically, isn’t equipped for a digital age. Is there a chance that in all of this, you know, Elon Musk could usher in a more efficient, tech-friendly kind of government?

Chait: Yeah, well, that was the initial hope that some people who specialize in government reform were hoping for. Jennifer Pahlka is an expert in what’s called “state capacity,” which is just the ability of government to function and to bridge the gap between its ambitions and its actual ability to meet those ambitions.

And part of that is fixing the way government hires and fires people.

But the problem is: Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be interested in that in any way whatsoever. He’s just holed up with a bunch of engineers who don’t seem to have any expertise in government or state capacity whatsoever. And they’re just finding programs that people within this kind of right-wing bubble in which he resides think sound radical and just, you know, saying, Delete it! Delete it! and getting cheers on social media for it.

It’s just so completely haphazard. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in actually making the government, you know, operate better.

Rosin: Yeah. And I suppose Twitter did not become a better, more profitable, you know, smoother-functioning company after Elon Musk took it over. It just became a kind of tool of the culture war—like, an effective tool of the culture war.

Chait: Right. It became smaller, less profitable—jankier, but more conservative.

Rosin: Right, okay. All right. One final thing. So project far into the future. Let’s say that your blowback scenario is real. What political alliances can you see reforming? Like, if you had to predict a political realignment some years down the road that includes a reaction to everything that’s going on now, what does it look like?

Chait: Well, the Trump coalition has really been built on winning multiracial, working-class voters back from the Democrats—and those voters are disproportionately to the right on social policy—and they’ve exploited some of those progressive stances on social policy that the Democratic Party has adopted over the last decade, but they’re still relatively to the left on economics. Maybe they don’t believe in government, in the abstract, but in the specific, they really rely on programs, like nutritional aid and Medicaid, Obamacare.

And every time the Republicans have gone after those programs, their coalition has splintered. That was really a major element in killing George W. Bush during his second term. He decided to privatize social security, and that was a major cause of the decline of his popularity that made him politically toxic, along with the Iraq War and Katrina, social security privatization.

You know, you could see a version of that happening with Trump, but I wouldn’t take for granted that it’ll play out that way because we live in a different world in a lot of ways.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Jonathan Chait.

After the break: Donald Trump also has his eyes set on the FBI. We hear from The Atlantic’s Shane Harris about what that might mean.

[Break]

Rosin: Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Harris: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So the president asked the FBI to turn over the names of every agent who worked on the Capitol riots. What do you read into that request?

Harris: Well, I think you don’t even have to read that closely between the lines. You can just read the lines as they were sent in the order that we now have seen publicly, that went from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, of course, who had been one of Donald Trump’s lawyers as a private citizen, telling the acting director for the FBI, Look—we want the names of these people because they believe in the words that he has put, that they can no longer have trust that these FBI employees will implement the president’s agenda faithfully.

So what they are saying is that these are individuals who they don’t think are on board with Trump administration policies. And then of course, you know, we can do a little bit of inference, which is, you know, why would he go after the people who investigated January 6 and his role in it? Which was, by the way, the biggest FBI investigation in the country’s history. You know, these are the agents who interviewed and ultimately gave evidence that created the charges for the Capitol rioters—who were sent to prison, who Trump then later pardoned and who are now free—who investigated his own activity around January 6 and efforts to impede the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration.

So these are the FBI agents who did that case. And you know, what Trump is making very clear here is that, you know, he wants to identify them. He doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t trust the leadership that oversees them, and either wants them removed or moved, or we’ll see what the disciplinary action is. But some of them, he’s actually said he wants them fired immediately. He’s made pretty clear how he feels about these people and why he’s going after them, I think.

Rosin: Now, that must have landed in a very particular way at the FBI. You know the agency better than I do. As far as I understand it, I mean, you are assigned a case; you work on that case. So how have leaders in the agency responded to that request?

Harris: I think it’s been really interesting. I mean, there’s been this mixture from people I’ve talked to of: On one level, people are not surprised that Donald Trump went after FBI personnel, because it was expected that he would go after senior-leadership-level type people. I mean, he had essentially pushed out the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who—remember—became the FBI director when Donald Trump fired the previous FBI director, James Comey, in his first term.

But people were genuinely stunned by the scope of this demand to know the names of all of these agents who worked J6—and then there’s one other related case—because it’s, you know, potentially 4,000 to maybe even 6,000 personnel if you’re taking in FBI agents, analysts, people who play a support role.

But then something really fascinating has happened: There has been this—I hesitate to say the word defiant—but there are senior leaders at the FBI, including the person who is serving as the acting director right now, who essentially are saying, No, you cannot just fire agents for this reason, for no real cause. These people have protections under civil-service rules. They have due-process rights. And what’s more, some of the advocates for these folks are saying, Look—you can just read the plain language of the order that I just read to you and see that this is a retaliatory response, that what the president is doing is going after people because he doesn’t like their opinions or what they did.

As you pointed out, these thousands of agents didn’t pick to be on the case. I mean, it’s not like they raised their hand and said, Yes, please. I would like to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. They were assigned these cases. So the leadership has actually really kind of dug in here, some of them, and essentially is saying, There’s a process for this. This isn’t fair.

Now, we’ll see how long they can resist the White House on this, but we’re seeing some real institutional pushback from the FBI, which personally, I think, is encouraging.

Rosin: I want to get more into the pushback, but I’m curious what we know about this group of agents. There’s a few thousand. Because, yes, I followed the January 6 cases. I know that it was the biggest investigation in history, but who are they? Like, if you think about losing these 4,000, is why I’m asking, what’s their expertise, and what do they generally do?

Harris: If we take that group of the J6 investigators, the agents themselves, these could be people who were pulled in from all over the country. So this could include agents that were investigating national-security-related matters, counterterrorism matters, transnational crime, narcotics. The universe of these agents, as you know, was so big because the case was so big and demanding.

Trump, though, has zeroed in, more particularly, on some individuals, including some very senior-level officials that have the title of executive assistant director, and he actually named some of these in this order. And those people were involved in things like, for instance, the Mar-a-Lago investigation, when Donald Trump took classified documents from the White House and stored them at his estate in Florida—offenses for which he was later charged under the Espionage Act.

Some of these people—one of them was the special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, which participated in the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Others had supervisory and leadership positions on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It was a counterintelligence squad at the Washington Field Office in D.C. that handled the Mar-a-Lago case. So, you know, he understands that there are people who, individually, separate from J6, worked on the Mar-a-Lago case, as well, and those people are being singled out too.

Rosin: Right. I mean, there are two things here. One is, we’ve talked about this in terms of other agencies, like USAID, which is: What vast institutional knowledge would you lose? So these people worked on individual cases, but also, they have a lot of expertise in counterterrorism. They just must have a large, you know, body of knowledge and experience that you could lose.

Harris: Absolutely. So let’s just take, for instance, the squad at the Washington Field Office that did the Mar-a-Lago investigation. They work in the counterintelligence division of the FBI. So when those folks are not investigating, you know, Donald Trump’s removal of classified documents, they’re looking at things like spies operating inside the United States trying to maybe steal government secrets or recruit agents in the United States. They’re looking at people who might be mishandling classified information. They look at people who might be leaking to journalists as well.

These are folks who work on highly specialized counterintelligence cases. This isn’t just something that you, you know, kind of step into, and on day one, you know how to do it. These are different kinds of tradecraft. They’re very sensitive. These people all will have high-level security clearances. They will have been vetted for these jobs. So folks who are in positions like that, when you eliminate them, you know, it’s not entirely clear to me that there is just then, like, a backup bench of people who can come in to do these really important national-security cases.

And the same would go for anyone who’s working actively on counterterrorism, you know. I mean, Donald Trump has talked a lot about his concern that there are, you know, terrorists making their way inside the United States, taking advantage of, you know, weak border security or other ways of getting into the U.S. Well, it’s FBI agents who do counterterrorism cases that investigate things like that.

So if you’re suddenly moving people with this level of expertise off their jobs, or you are creating a real disruption and distraction while they’re trying to do their jobs, I think that arguably weakens national security, it creates vulnerabilities, and it distracts the FBI from doing its job, which is to go out and not just investigate crimes but to try and stop violent crimes and bad things from happening to Americans and to the U.S. government.

Rosin: Right. So you can see the future crisis. Like, you can project a future crisis where we are vulnerable to terrorism or something like that because we’ve lost a huge amount of this expertise.

Harris: I think that’s right. Yes. It doesn’t seem to me like he is thinking through the consequences of hobbling the FBI at this moment. What he is interested in is retribution. He’s interested in payback. And he is putting, you know, not only the country, but he’s putting his administration at grave political risk by doing that.

Rosin: Okay, Shane. Here’s something else that I was wondering about. Since when did the FBI come under so much suspicion from the right? I’ve always thought of the FBI as an agency conservatives can get behind, and Trump’s attacks feel like they upend all that. It’s confusing.

Harris: Oh definitely. And this has long been one of the more baffling aspects of Donald Trump’s critique of the FBI, as he’s painting them as this kind of leftist deep state.

I mean, the FBI—I’m speaking in general terms, of course, I mean—it is a generally conservative institution, both because I think that the people who work in it are often politically conservative or just sort of dispositionally conservative. It’s a law-enforcement agency. I mean, it does everything by the book. There are jokes in the FBI about how it takes, you know, five forms that you have to fill out before you can make a move on anything. It is a very hidebound, bureaucratic, small-C conservative organization. I mean, these are cops.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Harris: Okay? It’s a bunch of cops, right? This is like, if you want to think in generalities, like, you know, USAID is like, Oh, yeah, it’s people who want to get to charities, and they worked in the Peace Corps, and they’re all about humanitarian causes. And that, too, is kind of a broad brush.

But, you know, when I talk to people who have worked in the bureau, if you knew these people, these are not people who you would associate with progressive causes. That doesn’t mean that they are sort of reactionary right-wingers. I don’t want to make that impression either. They’re very much following the rule of law. It’s a conservative institution. It is very hidebound and steeped in tradition and in regulation.

And, you know, Trump just has this image of it as this out-of-control left organization. And he has persuaded large numbers of his followers and Americans that this is true. And I have to tell you, in the 20-plus years that I’ve covered national security, one of the most fascinating and bewildering trends that I have seen is this change in political positioning, where now, people who tend to be on the left, sort of—I don’t want to say revere the FBI and the intelligence agencies but—hold them up as models of institutions of government that we need to have faith and trust in, and they’re there to try and protect people. When it was a generation ago, people on the left who were deeply skeptical of the CIA and the FBI because these agencies were involved in flagrant abuses of civil rights and of the law in the 1950s and ’60s.

And now it’s people on the right who, particularly after 9/11, used to be so reflexively defensive of the CIA and the FBI and counterterrorism and Homeland Security, who now have sort of swapped political positions with the critique on the left that see these institutions as, you know, run through with dangerous, rogue bureaucrats who want to prosecute their political enemies. I mean, it’s just like the people have switched bodies.

Rosin: Let me ask you a broader question about this. As someone who’s been tracking Trump’s attempts to rewrite the history of January 6 for a while, I could say I was a little surprised by the blanket pardon of insurrectionists, maybe a little more surprised by this effort to go after the agents who investigated them. Because—and tell me if this is an exaggeration—to me, that could send a message to supporters: If you commit violence on my behalf, not only will you not get punished, but anyone who tries to go after you will be in trouble. Which, if I continue that logic, seems like, potentially, a blank check to commit violence on the president’s behalf. Is that paranoid?

Harris: No. It’s not. It’s not. That is, I think, one of the clear risks that we face with the president behaving in the way that he has. And I would take it one step further, which is to say: The message is that if you are an FBI agent, or maybe more to the point, an FBI leader, someone in a management position, there are certain things that you should just not look into and investigate.

And not to say, like, now that the president enjoys, you know, presumptive immunity for all official acts. I mean, who knows what the FBI is even going to investigate when it comes to Donald Trump. But how good would you feel being assigned a case to look into Elon Musk or, you know, Trump campaign donors who may have engaged in illegal activity or influence peddling, the whole universe of people connected to Trump?

What he is saying by pardoning these J6 rioters is that If you are on my side, I will come protect you. And I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends. I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.

The FBI is there to investigate crimes objectively, regardless of who may have committed them. And what the president is doing now is essentially saying there’s a whole category of people who, if not outright exempt, are people that are going to fall under his protection, and for the people who might dare to investigate them, there will be consequences.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you, but no thank you, for laying that out in such a clear and chilling way. I appreciate it.

Harris: My pleasure, Hanna. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

This week, House Republicans created a select subcommittee to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and uncover the “full truth that is owed to the American people,” Speaker Mike Johnson said. Presumably this is a “truth” that somehow fell outside the frames of the thousands of videos taken that day that showed rioters storming the building and beating police officers with whatever weapons were at hand. Despite January 6 being an extraordinarily well-documented crime, many Republicans seem intent on whitewashing what many federal judges, jurors, and really any average American citizen can see with their own eyes.

In the past year, I’ve gotten to know many J6ers well. My partner, Lauren Ober, and I made the podcast We Live Here Now. The thing they had all been waiting for are the pardons that President Donald Trump delivered as promised “on day one.” Trump kept his promise. Hours after being sworn in, he gave clemency to more than 1,500 people convicted of involvement at the Capitol that day. Among them were some longtime militia leaders who carefully planned the riot. Now they’re free. For some, this is order restored; for so many other Americans, this is lawless abandon. And not everyone is reacting to the pardons the way you might expect.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Marie Johnatakis: Hello?

Hanna Rosin: Hey, this is actually Hanna Rosin. I’m calling on my son’s phone for various reasons.

Johnatakis: Hanna! How are you?

Rosin: You sound happy.

Johnatakis: I am. I just got done bawling.

Rosin: Bawling. As in crying. Hard.

Johnatakis:  I think everything just came out. I was just holding it in for the last how many years?

Rosin: That was Marie Johnatakis, whose husband, Taylor, was just pardoned by President Donald Trump. He’d been sentenced to over seven years for what he did at the Capitol on January 6. Now he’s coming home.

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

A few hours into his second term, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some had been charged with serious felonies, like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. Others were charged with misdemeanors, like trespassing and disorderly conduct.

I’ve gotten to know a lot of January 6ers over the last couple of years, so I know how these prosecutions have upended their lives. And I know that for a lot of them, the pardons have restored their sense of justice. For them, this week feels like the world is set right again.

And as I checked in with them this week, and hung out outside the D.C. jail, mostly I just saw the chasm more clearly: how one person’s order restored is another person’s lawless abandon.

Johnatakis: I know this is going to sound crazy, but I have just really felt like Trump will do what he says he’s gonna do. And so, ever since that, I was like, “Well, if Taylor gets pardoned, it will be the first day.”

Rosin: Three weeks ago, when her world was still in chaos, Marie Johnatakis bought a one-way ticket home for Taylor. Trump had mentioned that he might pardon all the January 6ers, but you could never be sure. Politicians don’t usually do what they say, her daughter told her. And for a family whose only working parent had been in jail for more than a year, an airline ticket is a luxury.

But Marie had watched the video over and over of Trump telling an NBC reporter that he would pardon the J6ers on day one of taking office.

Donald Trump: We’re gonna look at everything. We’re gonna look at individual cases—

Kristen Welker: Everyone?

Trump: Yeah.

Welker: Okay.

Trump: But I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Welker: Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump: First day.

Welker: First day?

Trump: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

Welker: You’ll issue these pardons.

Rosin: And then on day one, the world flipped.

Man: First we have a list of pardons and commutations relating to the events that occurred on January 6, 2021.

Trump: Okay. And how many people is this?

Man: I think this order will apply to approximately 1,500 people, sir.

Trump: So this is January 6. And these are the hostages, approximately 1,500 for a pardon. Full pardon.

Rosin: On Monday night, just before midnight, Marie finally picked Taylor up from prison, and she sent me a picture. They sat side by side, smiling, like a late Christmas-card photo. Marie hasn’t sat side by side with her husband since he was taken into custody just before Christmas 2023.

I asked her if she thought his transition home would be rocky, and she said no—it’llbe seamless. Taylor has written each of their five children a letter a week from prison, and he sometimes reads them books over the phone. In her mind, family harmony will be quickly restored, and so will the rightness of all things.

Johnatakis: I mean, this started with January 6, four years ago, and we were the scum of the Earth. We were domestic terrorists. We were people that you were supposed to be afraid of. Every time Trump had anything with criminal charges or anything like that, he has really been our hope for anything that would ever mean a pardon for us. And so a lot of us feel like it was one miracle after another.

And people don’t look to Trump—people in the movement on the chats that I’m on and stuff like that don’t look to him like a savior. But I think a lot of the people—almost everyone has faith, like a faith in God, a faith in Jesus. And I do hear a lot of like, for us, it’s a miracle.

Rosin: There is a whole other way that these pardons could have rolled out.

A little more than a week before inauguration, Vice President J. D. Vance made it clear to Fox News that he wasn’t expecting blanket pardons.

J. D. Vance: If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there, but we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.

Rosin: During the transition, I spoke with Republican lawyers who imagined there might be some kind of review board, like maybe a Justice Department committee that would evaluate cases such as Taylor’s.

Taylor was not among the several hundred convicted solely of misdemeanors, such as trespassing or disorderly conduct. But also, he was not among the small handful convicted of seditious conspiracy. His assault charge hung on the fact that he was yelling into his bullhorn, urging a crowd to push a barricade into a row of cops. All captured on video.

Taylor Johnatakis: One foot! One, two, three, go!

Rosin: And under the J. D. Vance scenario, there would have been qualified lawyers debating in a room about degrees of “assault” and what length of sentence they merit. But instead, Trump chose to go with a blanket pardon, which sounds uncomplicated but actually brings maximum chaos.

Tuesday night, I was walking down my own street past a house that I know well. It’s a kind of safe house for January 6ers. Micki Witthoeft lives there. She’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed at the Capitol that day. So does Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy, was sentenced to over seven years for bringing a gun to the Capitol. Occasionally, a young January 6er named Brandon Fellows stays there too.

My partner, Lauren Ober, and I got to know the people in that house last year when we made an Atlantic podcast about it called We Live Here Now. I’ve walked by their house hundreds of times. But when I walked the dogs past the house on Tuesday in freezing weather, I saw Brandon outside, wearing an ICE jacket—as in Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This is his version of a sartorial troll.

Rosin: So what’s going on? I guess I don’t even know the basics of what’s going on.

Fellows: Last I heard was from Jen. We were at lunch with Stewart Rhodes—breakfast with Stewart Rhodes today.

Rosin: He’s here?

Fellows: Yes. But we’ve all been up, and he’s taking a nap real quick. So we just got back, but—

Rosin: Is he staying here?

Rosin: I froze—and not from the cold. Stewart Rhodes, the guy with the eye patch, who founded the Oathkeepers. He for years recruited and cultivated an armed militia to resist government tyranny. His estranged ex-wife recently said she fears that she and their kids are on his quote “kill list.” Rhodes’s attorneys have said that the idea that his family’s in danger is unfounded.

Before Trump’s commutation he was serving an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, one of the longest of all the January 6ers. Now Stewart Rhodes was taking a nap down the block from my house.

[Music]

More on that after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: While Rhodes was napping in her house, Nicole Reffitt, was outside, being interviewed by a Dutch news crew. Her family is notorious, because her son, Jackson, turned in his father to the FBI. Someone adapted the trial transcript into an excellent play called Fatherland. Anyway, this week her husband, Guy, was about to get out of prison. But unlike Marie Johnatakis, she seemed unsettled about the pardons.

Rosin:  How do you guys feel about the blanket pardon?

Reffitt: You know, I was never a fan of that. I guess he thought it was the quickest way—pull the Band-Aid off. I was more in favor of commutations and then let’s look at everything, because not only did people do bad things that day, but there were some charges that were absolutely wielded like a weapon against people. And those things also need to be looked at because, you know, I don’t want anyone to have to go through this. And that’s my biggest concern.

Rosin: What do you mean “concern”? Like, I don’t know how to think about the blanket pardon either, Nicole. I’m trying to think what’s the difference between this and if it had gone a different way—what does it mean that it’s a blanket? Have you guys talked about that?

Reffitt: Well, because now all charges are gone.

Rosin: Yeah.

Reffitt: You know, and, uh, I’m a law-and-order gal, really. And so not all charges should be gone there. People did really bad things that day.

Rosin: In many people’s minds, Nicole’s husband, Guy, was one of the people who did really bad things that day, and he did get a fair sentence. Guy brought a gun to the Capitol, although he didn’t enter the building or use it.

Reffitt: Yeah, I never expected him not to have something, you know, like, I figured he’d be charged with something, because it was so significant, but it was just so over-the-top to me, all of the charges and that has always been my biggest issue.

[Crowd chanting]

Rosin: As of Wednesday only eight of the 22 people held at the D.C. jail had been released. But outside the jail had turned into a gathering place for people released from all over the country. Camera crews stood around from Sweden, Japan, Norway broadcasting interviews with the newly freed. And when Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” came on the speakers, the crowd belted it out together.

[Sound of “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley]

Rosin: On Tuesday night, I caught a glimpse of Stewart Rhodes at the edge of the crowd. He’s hard to miss, with the eye patch. He was giving an interview to a right-wing YouTuber.

Stewart Rhodes: It’s a day of celebration. I mean, yesterday it was too. When President Trump was inaugurated, it was awesome. You know, like he said himself, you know, God saved him to save America, and I believe that’s true. And then he turned around and saved us last night, I mean, and restored us to our freedom. I mean, I’m not 100 percent restored yet. I’m still waiting for a pardon, but it’s so, so wonderful to be out, be out of these bars.

Rosin: That’s Rhodes’s one big complaint—that he’d been given a commutation instead of a pardon. A commutation can erase a sentence, but it does not restore all your rights, such as the right to buy guns. He told the interviewer he was applying for a pardon. He said, “ I think everyone deserves a pardon, without any exception.”

Rhodes: No one got a fair trial. It’s impossible to get a fair trial here if you’re a Trump supporter. And so you don’t have an unbiased jury, an impartial jury; you don’t have an impartial judge; you don’t have a jury that’s going to hold the government to its standard beyond reasonable doubt.

It’s not going to happen. So if you have no chance of a fair trial, then you should be presumed innocent. That’s put back in your natural state, which is an innocent and free human being.

Rosin: So that’s Rhodes’s version of history. They were sham trials. It was actually a day of peace. It’s a revision of history that Trump and his allies are likely to try to push and push for the next four years. House Speaker Mike Johnson has already formed a select subcommittee on January 6, to quote “continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people”

But for a whole crew of other people involved in January 6, these pardons represent a reversal of justice.

January 6 did not require delicate forensics. It has to be one of the most well-documented crimes in modern history. There are tens of thousands of hours of video showing rioters beating up police with whatever tools are at hand.

At least five people died for reasons that are in some way related to the insurrection. Some 140 police officers were injured, and many could never work again. On Wednesday, retired officer Michael Fanone had choice words for Rhodes that he expressed live on CNN.

Michael Fanone: This is what I would say to Stewart Rhodes: Go f— yourself. You’re a liar.

Anchor: We didn’t obviously to beep that word out …

Rosin: Fanone said he’s worried for his safety and that of his family.

The judge who sentenced Taylor Johnatakis, Judge Royce Lamberth, wrote a letter in connection with the sentencing. He wrote: “Political violence rots republics. Therefore, January 6 must not become a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions.” Lamberth is 81. His wife died a few months ago. He had a handful of new January 6 cases on his docket, but of course they’ve disappeared. In that sentencing letter, he continued, “This is not normal.”

We tried to reach him to talk about the pardons, by the way, but he wasn’t ready to talk about them yet.

 Reffitt: My husband’s being processed out of Oklahoma right now. Can’t wait to see that man. He will be here in D.C. tomorrow. And you know what? We’re getting freedom, baby! That’s right. We’re getting freedom! We are getting freedom. And that’s absolutely right.

Rosin: At the Tuesday-night rally, Nicole got a call from Guy. He was out. On the road. Headed towards the airport.

Reffitt: He’s in the car. He’s in a car! In a car!

Rosin: Stewart Rhodes told the crowd that he was headed back to California this week. As for Marie and Taylor, they fly home on Thursday. Marie told me the kids are gonna make dinner.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Stef Hayes. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Donald Trump has said, at different times, that he will pardon some, most, or even all of the January 6 insurrectionists. He’s also said at least once that he would do this on his first day in office, which is imminent. Given Trump’s past rhetoric about the incident (calling it a “day of love”) and the people who were jailed for acts they committed that day (“political prisoners,” “hostages”), his pardons can be understood only as part of his alarming—and alarmingly successful—attempt to rewrite the history of the day that nearly brought down our democracy. But what if the pardon were to come in a different spirit? That could move the country a long way toward healing.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we invite the author and scholar Linda Kinstler to talk about a centuries-old legal theory, embraced at calmer times in American history, of “oblivion.” When two sides have viciously different experiences of an event, how do you move forward? You do a version of forgetting, although it’s more like a memory game, Kinstler says, “a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What if President Joe Biden had pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists—that is, the 1,500 or so people charged with federal crimes related to the riot?

And yeah. I said Joe Biden, not President-Elect Donald Trump.

This is an idea I’ve heard floated around these past few weeks. And on its face, it sounds illogical. Like, why on earth would the outgoing Democratic president pardon people who damaged property or injured law enforcement officers or plotted to overthrow democracy?

Trump has said many times that he will pardon the J6ers. He said he’ll pardon some of them or most of them, or even consider pardoning all of them, at different times. He’s said he’ll pardon them on his very first day in office, which is just in a few days.

Donald Trump: People that were doing some bad things weren’t prosecuted, and people that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now. So we’ll be looking at the whole thing, but I’ll be making major pardons.

Rosin: Right. So why would Biden do that, again?

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

The answer to that question requires you to zoom out to different countries and different periods of history to understand the long political traditions that pardons are a part of and what, at their very best, they could accomplish. And it matters who does the pardoning and their motive for doing it.

I myself did a lot of research on the January 6 prosecutions for a podcast series I hosted for The Atlantic called We Live Here Now. And as I was researching, I came across a couple of articles by author and journalist Linda Kinstler that helped me understand these cases and this charged political moment in a new way. Linda is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She writes about politics and collective memory, and she’s written for many publications, including The Atlantic.

She’s also working on a new book about the idea we’re talking about today, which is: oblivion.

[Music]

Rosin: Linda, welcome to the show.

Linda Kinstler: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: Absolutely. So the J6 prosecutions are, for the most part, unfolding at the federal courthouse in D.C., just a few blocks from where we are now. Linda, you attended some of these cases. I did also. What is your most vivid or lasting impression from these trials?

Kinstler: Oh, wow. I mean, I spent months—I mean, the better part of a year, actually—attending these trials in downtown D.C. And there are so many elements, as you have described, about the courthouse—namely, that it’s right across from the Capitol and overlooks the grounds upon which all of these crimes happened. And there were so many times I was walking through the halls of the courtroom. And some of them had little windows you can peer through, and almost on every single one—there was one day when you could see in the monitors in the courtroom, and you could see that they were all playing January 6 footage.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Kinstler: You know, different angles. You could hear the sounds of the footage that the prosecuting attorneys had assembled.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’re trying to make our way through all this.

Kinstler: And you really do get the sense there that in this building, this really pivotal event in history is being litigated and worked through in real time—kind of away from the public eye, even though these are open to anyone who wants to come see them.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: We need to hold the doors of the Capitol.

Rosin: A few of these cases have stuck with Linda, for different reasons. One was the hearing of a member of the Proud Boys: It was the juxtaposition of this violent offender and his young kids, who were playing around on the courthouse benches at his sentencing.

And the other was a woman, a nonviolent offender with no prior record.

Kinstler: She just kind of walked through the building and clearly made horrible, horrible choices that day, as many of them did who were there. And she repented before the judge. And the judge said, I’m choosing to view this as an aberration in your life, as a kind of lapse of judgment. And she cried.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’ve lost the line. We’ve lost the line. [indistinguishable] Get back.

Rosin: And did you feel—how did you feel in that moment? Did you feel like, Oh, there’s some injustice being done? Or not quite that?

Kinstler: No. I mean, I think this is justice, right? This is actually the levers of justice working. It is absolutely that these people broke the law, and they are being brought to court because they violated public order in different ways, so it is kind of like our ur-definition of justice.

But it’s a different question—and I think this is the one that has kind of been left undealt with in public, is: Okay. This is one version of justice, but this is not a kind of public reckoning with what January 6 was. And the, kind of, how these individual offenders are being treated and punished for what they did is not the same thing as, How is the country going to deal with what January 6 threatened to, kind of, the fabric of democracy? Those are two separate questions, I think.

Rosin: Interesting. So what you’re saying is: There is a legal process unfolding. The courts can do what the courts can do. But what you’re saying is the courts can only do so much.

Kinstler: Correct.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Kinstler: Right. And there’s, in general, been an overreliance, I think, upon the legal process to deal with January 6 for, quote-unquote, “us”—for us, the public—in a way. And I don’t think there has been a broader conversation about what it means in the long haul.

Rosin: Okay. I want to take what you just said and compare it to the public conversation that is happening around these court cases—namely, from Trump, because we’re a few days from him taking office.

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.

[Recording of “Justice for All” by the J6 Prison Choir]

Rosin: And the way he puts it is that the J6ers were treated unfairly, persecuted by the justice system; they’re hostages. He’s said this in many different ways, with many different degrees of passion throughout the course of his campaign.

Trump: Well, thank you very much. And you see the spirit from the hostages—and that’s what they are, is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that.

Rosin: What do you think of that argument, and how does that fit into what you are saying?

Kinstler: Yeah. On the face of it, what they are doing is manipulating historical terminology, right, for their political ends.

Rosin: So you don’t think they were unfairly—your argument is not at all that they were unfairly persecuted.

Kinstler: No, no. I mean, I think that they broke the law, and they should be punished for what they did. I think there’s a genuine argument you could have about which offenders should be facing jail time, but I don’t think that’s the conversation we’re having right now.

But I do think what this question raises is the fact that Trump himself has not been held accountable for what he did on January 6, right? And there were many efforts to do that. And my view of this whole process is that, historically speaking, we’re doing it backwards. Historically, it was the top people in power who oversaw the crime, who would be the first to be held responsible for what they had done.

In this case, we have almost the exact opposite, right? We have the lower-level offenders—the people who are easier to find, the kind of foot soldiers of Trump’s movement—who are being the ones hauled into court. And, obviously, we have seen: The efforts to prosecute Trump himself have sequentially collapsed and now are almost certainly not going to happen.

Rosin: Do you have an example in your head of a time when, historically, it unfolded in the correct way? Like, a way that promotes a sense of fairness and justice?

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of subject that has fascinated me for many years—is, like: How have societies worked through moments in which you have a population of perpetrators or people who have violated the public order, who nevertheless must remain in the country or the city in some way? How have you dealt with that?

And so in my work, the prototypical example comes from ancient Athens after the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, where you had a population of oligarchs—30 of them—who overtook the city, stripped people of their rights and properties, killed people unjustly, oversaw all of these abuses, and then were deposed by the victorious democrats. After the fact, there was a kind of general amnesty for most of the supporters of the Thirty. But the Thirty Tyrants themselves were made to choose between standing trial and exile from the city.

So in that case, you have this prototype of the people who are responsible having to account for their crimes—verbally and in, you know, a kind of legal system—while the lower level of people were offered a different set of choices.

And, of course, the reason this is so fascinating is because this becomes the blueprint for centuries of leaders after that: if you look at 1660, after the English civil war; it kind of comes after World War II, where there’s this question of, What do we do with Nazi perpetrators? How wide and deep should the justice run? And we know that denazification failed in many ways. So I do think, in our country, we are going through something like this, in a sense.

Rosin: Can we talk about Nazi Germany for a minute? I mean, I realize we always have to be careful when we’re making historical comparisons to Nazi Germany. But you threw out this sentence, Denazification didn’t work. There were, though, a lot of higher Nazi officials who were held accountable. So how can we use what happened in Nazi Germany to inform what you’re saying we have to figure out right now?

Kinstler: Right. So yes, of course. Saying denazification didn’t work is a huge, sweeping claim, and we can argue about that a lot. But what you had there was the Nuremberg trials—of course, what we think of as Nuremberg—did hold the top brass accountable for what they had done. And then you had many, many smaller, sequential trials, both in West Germany and in the former Soviet Union.

But what I often think of—and I want to be careful about making the comparison today, of course—but I have been thinking about this line that the philosopher Judith Shklar said, which was that why denazification failed, in many ways, was because the prosecutors mistook a group of individual offenders for a social movement. So in other words, they thought that by continuing with all these trials that they would squash the kind of violent, virulent sentiment underlying Nazism itself.

Rosin: Which holds some intuitive appeal because you think, I’m holding people accountable. That’s what we’re supposed to do as a society: hold people accountable.

Kinstler: Totally. And it feels good. It appeals to all of our liberal sensibilities about how order and justice are supposed to work.

Rosin: And particularly—you say liberal, because I think right now, we do have this divide where Democrats, or maybe the left, are trusting in institutions, and the right is a lot less trusting in institutions. So Democrats are putting their faith, in this case, in this institution—the court—to go through the paces and do the right thing.

Kinstler: Exactly. We are in a very legalistic society, in that we like to talk about courts and legal cases as solving political problems. And I do think we repeatedly have seen that over the last however many years—about, you know, Oh, maybe the courts will save us from Trumpism writ large. And we have seen, of course, that the legal system is just not capacious enough to do that for many reasons.

Rosin: That’s a really interesting and concise way of looking at it. We have been relying on Jack Smith, the cases against Trump, these January 6 cases, of which there are, you know, 1,500. What’s the gap? What does the legal strategy leave out?

Kinstler: I mean, so much, in that it’s just a legal strategy, right? It doesn’t—and I think I can kind of see this in the almost allergy that people have when talk of pardons comes up, for example, right? There’s this notion that if you pardon someone, you’re letting them off the hook. But that’s not what a pardon does. A pardon confirms the crime.

And I guess I’m saying there is this paucity of a wider understanding of what happened that day because it has become this legalistic football, right? Of, like, Who was standing where? Who was part of the mob? What does it mean to be part of the mob? Who was commanding them? Etcetera, etcetera. You get lost in all these details and all these individual cases. And, of course, this is the role of historians, to say, This is what that event did that day, and this is its lasting impact.

But that’s what I’m saying—that’s the gap, right? The gap is: What is the narrative of this event? How do you protect it from manipulation, particularly when the person who’s about to be inaugurated has been one of its kind of manipulators in chief? And I do think there are answers.

Rosin: Okay. Let’s just ground ourselves in the moment we’re in. (Laughs.)

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Let’s say, on day one, Trump does what he has many times said he’s going to do: pardon the J6ers.

Trump: I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Kristen Welker: Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump: First day.

Welker: First day?

Trump: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

Welker: And issue these pardons?

Trump: These people have been there—how long is it? Three or four years?

Rosin: Is it possible that it accomplishes any of the goals of putting this to rest? Like, any of the goals of reconciliation?

Kinstler: I mean, reconciliation, I think, is a different question. I think it’s not going to accomplish that. I think the only sense in which it “puts it to rest,” quote-unquote, is that it will, as I said, confirm their crimes, right? A pardon does not erase what people did.

It’s unfortunate, in my view, that Trump will be the one to pardon them, because I do think there was an opportunity for the Democrats to extend a kind of grace towards some of the January 6 offenders—and by no means all of them—if they had been the ones to pardon them.

Rosin: Okay. You said that casually, and there have been a few law professors who floated that idea. It is, on its face, a kind of shocking idea. Like, when you read a headline that says, Should Joe Biden pardon the J6ers? it’s actually kind of hard to get your head around. What do you think of that idea?

Kinstler: Well, I think, first of all, historically, pardons have been almost a routine thing that any new ruler or president has done upon taking office.

Interviewer: Are you glad that you pardoned those people that went to Canada, the draft evaders?

Jimmy Carter: Yes, I am.

Interviewer: Why?

Carter: Well, it was a festering sore and involved tens of thousands of young men.

Rosin: Like, I was reading about Jimmy Carter, who pardoned draft dodgers, and thinking that, like, we can look in retrospect and say they were peaceful, and the January 6ers were violent rioters. But it must have been hurtful to a lot of people whose children, or who they themselves, went to Vietnam, didn’t want to. And it was quite controversial. So to what end does a new president pardon people?

Kinstler: Well, I mean, on the face of it, it’s a gesture of goodwill. But it’s supposed to say, We are all subject to the law, and let’s start on the right foot, etcetera, etcetera.

Rosin: So it sets a national mood.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: It sets a mood of, I’m the president for all of you. We’re all in this together. And the value of this country is mercy. Mercy is a value.

Kinstler: Yes.

Carter: So after I made my inaugural speech, before I even left the site, I went just inside the door at the national Capitol, and I signed the pardon for those young men. And yes, I think it was the right thing to do. I thought that it was time to get it over with—I think the same attitude that President Ford had in giving Nixon a pardon.

Gerald Ford: We would needlessly be diverted from meeting those challenges if we, as a people, were to remain sharply divided over whether to indict, bring to trial, and punish a former president who is already condemned.

Rosin: I was looking for historical precedent and read about George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion, because that was a fairly violent rebellion—and it was hundreds of people—and he pardoned some of them. And I was wondering if that was analogous.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know about the analogy, but it is kind of an instance in which you have a violent community of offenders who nevertheless must remain in the country, right?

Ford: The power has been used sometimes as Alexander Hamilton saw its purposes: “In seasons of insurrection … when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if served [sic] to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.”

Kinstler: You can’t get rid of all of them. It wasn’t moral forgiveness. It was just a measure that allowed them to remain in the society in a way that wouldn’t cripple the society itself at this moment of extreme fragility.

[Music]

Rosin: So yes, there are presidential pardons. But if we can neither forgive nor forget something, we just may need something else to move forward: an act of oblivion.

That’s after the break.

[Music]

[Break]

Rosin: Linda, you have researched and written about what’s called “an act of oblivion.” Can you lay out the basics of what that is?

Kinstler: Yes. So historically speaking, we see that there were either acts of oblivion, laws of oblivion, or articles of oblivion that appeared in peace treaties or as legislative measures or as kind of kingly edicts that were issued in the aftermath of revolutions, wars, and uprisings. And what they were, essentially, is a kind of resetting of the legal order, where they said—and this is generally happening in the, quote-unquote, “Western world,” but we also see similar measures elsewhere.

But what they would say is: Everything that happened prior to this law—whatever it was, whether hostility, war, killing, theft, etcetera—none of that can be litigated or spoken of, quote, “in public,” which often meant: You can’t bring a lawsuit after this measure is passed.

Rosin: So it’s not actual forgetting. It’s like a public declaration that we shall all forget together.

Kinstler: Right. And in some ways, forgetting isn’t even the right word. And the interesting thing to me is that the word oblivion is the kind of Roman invention that was used to describe it, that Cicero used after the fact, and that was kind of like his spin on it, right? And everyone is telling tales about how to make a democracy work or how to make a state or a kingdom work, right? Not all of these are democracies.

But, yeah, forgetting is, in some ways—it’s not really the correct description of what’s going on. It’s more of a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.

Rosin: Got it. It’s almost a funny word. Like, I’m gonna blast you into oblivion. It’s a very powerful word. I don’t know if it was meant as kind of campy—probably not—by the Romans. (Laughs.) But there is something kind of, like, huge about it, you know?

Kinstler: Yeah. Oblivione sempiterna: “eternal oblivion,” to kind of wash away everything. It’s a totally beguiling word, and it kind of connotes erosion, in English, and erasure. But there’s also, in other languages: in Russian it’s вечное забвение, “eternal oblivion,” right? Eternal forgetting, in a way.

Rosin: So it’s almost so grand and big that it’s not connected to the mundane act of, Oh, I forgot my keys.

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Like, it’s almost so big that it’s on a grand, national scale. Maybe it’s something like that.

Kinstler: Yeah, I mean, like, you’re always rescuing things from oblivion or losing things to oblivion. I mean, it is in a way, right? Because you’re burying something in oblivion. It’s a physical location, right? It’s a noun, oblivion. And so to me, I think of it as, Okay, you’re burying it, but you’re not forgetting where it is, right?

Rosin: Right.

Kinstler: It’s always there.

Rosin: So what’s the difference between what you just described and whitewashing, revisionist history—sort of what we’ve seen happen with January 6 and Trump calling it a “day of love”?

Trump: But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions—it’s, like, hundreds of thousands—

Rosin: Like, sort of actively describing it as something it wasn’t. Can you compare those two modes?

Kinstler: Yeah. I would say they’re kind of fundamentally opposite, right? One is constructive, and one is malignant, right? Which is not to say that the two couldn’t be conflated. But for the sake of argument, the oblivions I have been looking at have been kind of, like, ideal types. Obviously, none of these, historically, ever work perfectly, right? It’s more about the idea that people wanted them to work, that there was this desire for reconciliation that would be operative.

And obviously, that’s not what you see at all in the language that Trump has been using and in the way he and his supporters have been framing January 6. Usually, I think, if we were to follow the framework of oblivion, what should have happened was that Biden—upon taking office and kind of restoring liberal order, we could say—would have passed an act of oblivion for the January 6ers that would have mandated that, kind of, Trump and his immediate circle would have to stand trial for their actions that day. And what we have been seeing with the lower-level offenders, that some of them would not have had to explicitly, as a kind of gesture of goodwill.

Rosin: A couple of challenges I can think of to using this approach with January 6: The first, surface one is just the sheer amount of documentation, YouTube videos. Like, what you’re describing—which is a clever act of forgetting or a memory game—I mean, if you’re a prosecutor working in the federal courthouse, this is a gift. You’ve seen these trials. Basically, what you’re doing at these trials is watching videos. Like, some Facebook video that somebody made, saying, Hey. I was at the Capitol. I did this—me. Nobody else did this.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: Literally, that’s what some of them say because they’re proud in that moment.

[Crowd noise, chanting from January 6]

Man: Whatever it takes. I’ll lay my life down if it takes. Absolutely.

Rosin: And then—I mean, there’s footage from everywhere.

Kinstler: Yeah.

[Crowd noise, overlapping screaming from January 6]

Rosin: So since you are talking about historical examples: What do you do with an era in which everything is über-documented?

Kinstler: Yeah. And it’s actually interesting. I was in a couple of trials where the judge, to the prosecutor, was saying, Listen. I’ve been to so many of these trials. You do not need to establish for me what happened on January 6 writ large. Like, I get it. Can you please fast forward?

But I guess what I’m talking about is not even about, Oh, you know, keep these videos from circulating, or, Don’t talk about what happened. It’s more about: Don’t expect the legal process to achieve something that cannot be achieved through law.

Rosin: Okay. That makes sense. You just have to accept the fact that the footage is everywhere. The footage is—in fact, maybe that makes what you’re saying more urgent. Because I do find, even with myself—like, if I hear a Capitol Police officer on the radio, if I watch that A24 movie that’s a documentary about January 6, it’s, like, right there all over again, and you just have to be, maybe, aware that that’s the age we live in.

Kinstler: Right.

Rosin: Second question I have is: I read your various articles you’ve written about oblivion. And it almost scared me, reading them, only because we live—this is the first era that I’ve lived through, as an adult, where I’ve watched the revising of history happen in real time. I don’t recall a president talking about facts the opposite of what I saw with my own eyes.

It’s a very bad feeling. So in that context, I feel nervous about even entering into a conversation about oblivion, memory games, or anything like that. And I wonder how you’ve squared that.

Kinstler: Oh my gosh, absolutely. This is what fascinates me, precisely because we are in this era of, kind of, historical revisionism, and we have been in for a long time. But the thing about acts of oblivion is that they actually, in my mind, consecrated what happened, right? They protected the historical record. They didn’t literally say, Oh this never happened. And in fact, what you see is that they’re often accompanied by records—like, historical accounts—of what happened, such that an act of oblivion was necessary, right? Like, Okay, actually, what happened here was a civil war or a tyranny or a revolution that totally wiped out the legal order, so we needed to do this extremely drastic thing if we were to reestablish democratic law.

The one that I often point to is: After the Revolutionary War, there were—because you did have the kind of legacy of British law, right—acts of oblivion came to the Americas from the European system. So there you did have, kind of, royalists who were subjected to acts of oblivion. It was individual states passing them over their royalist populations to allow them to remain, even though they had been defeated.

Rosin: So it was essentially an act of mercy saying, The royalists are going to live among us. They’re not going back. And what? How did it define—

Kinstler: It meant that they couldn’t be ostracized, essentially. They couldn’t be perpetually held accountable for what they had done, for everything that they had done against their neighbors, right? And often, it was a kind of very local, proximate question of, like, We’re not going to kick you out unless you want to be kicked out. That kind of thing.

Rosin: So you could imagine that kind of thing would be controversial at first. People would want vengeance. And so in the immediate, it would be difficult to swallow. But then in the long term, it would put things to rest. That’s the idea.

Kinstler: Yeah. And, I mean, there are a lot of failed oblivions. After the Civil War, a lot of the Southern states were, quote-unquote, “crying for an act of oblivion.” And it was a term that was circulating in the papers. And there’s this amazing quote from Frederick Douglass, who said, you know, I look in Congress, and I see the solid South enthroned, and the minute that that is not the case, we will join you in calling for an act of oblivion, but as long as they have not been held accountable, we cannot support this.

Rosin: Okay. So let’s move to the current moment. If you were King Linda—

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: So is what you would want an act of oblivion around January 6?

Kinstler: No. No. Because I would never be so bold as to say that. But I do think it’s a useful political concept. I think that there was a missed opportunity during the Biden administration to do something concerted—that wasn’t just the Jack Smith investigation—about it. I think there could have been something really meaningful done.

Rosin: Okay. So you’re not going all the way to saying, you know, an act of oblivion. But you’ve started to eke at little things. Like, what do you mean by Biden could have? I mean, we’re in the very, very last days of the Biden administration. But if he had pardoned some of the low-level offenders, would that have been in the spirit of oblivion?

Kinstler: Yeah. I think that would have been a really potentially transformative thing to do, because it would not have done anything to jeopardize the record of what occurred that day or what it meant to participate in it.

But we are going to move beyond it, and I think we will see the narrative of January 6 begin to settle in some way, right? And as always happens, the conspiracies about it will become part of the narrative of how this is told, right—not in a kind of whitewashing way, but just in, like, it shows how volatile it is and how manipulable.

And I think there’s been this debate about how to memorialize that day, whether it’s through a physical memorial, a memorial to the Capitol officers who died, or to anyone who died that day. I think those are the questions that we haven’t kind of figured out, really.

Rosin: I see. So there is a potential that, even though we’re not figuring them out now, they’ll be figured out in a sideways way through questions down the road—like, questions about how we will ultimately remember that day—not necessarily how we’ll remember it in this charged political moment, but how we’ll remember it 10, 20 years from now.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I was at the Capitol for the year anniversary of January 6 and watched all the ceremonies from the press gallery. And it just struck me how it was almost like a kind of nothing. You know, like how it was—

Rosin: What do you mean?

Kinstler: It was just so quiet, somber, of course. But there was no fan—you didn’t get the sense of the enormity of the event that was being consecrated, right? And it was almost like—and understandable because it was so close and so terrifying—there was this sense that we haven’t figured this out yet.

William Hungate: The Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the House Committee on the Judiciary today welcomes the president of the United States, Gerald R. Ford.

Ford: As a people, we have a long record of forgiving even those who have been our country’s most destructive foes. Yet to forgive is not to forget the lessons of evil and whatever ways evil has operated against us.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Instead of the typical New Year’s reckoning of choices past and future, this year, I opted for some AI assistance by signing up for the MIT Future You project, and I met my future self. The program prompts you to answer a series of personal questions and then builds a version of you 20 years in the future. Then you and your future self have a conversation, and you’re free to ask whatever you want. I was nervous to meet my future self, lest she be depressed or full of regrets. But it turns out I was worried for the wrong reasons.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talked to Pat Pataranutaporn and Pattie Maes, two creators of the Future You project, about all the reasons it’s crucial to feel closer to your future self—and the pitfalls. Pataranutaporn, a writer on the Netflix series Tomorrow and I, also talked about the very different ways a future self works in sci-fi. And I talked to future Hanna, who—let’s just say—was a frustrating interviewee.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Hello?

Future Rosin: This is Future Hanna.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Oh, boy. My name is pronounced Hoh-nuh, Hanna. You should know that, of all people.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Rosin: Who are you?

Future Rosin: Hey there. I’m Hanna Rosin, an 80-year-old journalist from the future. I’m here to have a conversation with you about our career and life experiences, and offer some insights and advice based on my own journey.

Just a heads up, though, since we are from different timelines, things may be slightly different for me than they will be for you. But regardless of what lies ahead, I am excited to chat with you and share my thoughts.

Rosin: Oh, boy.

Rosin: What if you had the chance to meet your future self? In make-believe—meaning movies—people get to meet their future selves a lot. Usually, it’s coming around to teach them something, like a kid is desperate to be older—

David Moscow (from the movie Big): I wish I were big.

Rosin: —only to learn that being an adult is kind of terrible. Or it’s the holidays, when everyone is supposed to be smiling and drinking eggnog but, instead, they’re frantically reevaluating all their life choices.

Michael Caine (from the movie The Muppet Christmas Carol): Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?

Rosin: Or you’re a teenager doing stupid teenager things when the future you all of a sudden pops up.

Aubrey Plaza (from the movie My Old Ass): Dude, I’m you. Well, I’m 39-year-old you.

Maisy Stella: What?

Plaza: Left boob: one cup smaller than the right. And no, it never catches up to the right. But honestly, you get used to it, and it’s okay. Guys can’t really tell.

Rosin: There’s always this hunger to talk to our future selves, to know how things end up—a desire to change something today that will have an effect on tomorrow.

But life isn’t a movie, and I’m not an actress. So instead, I signed up for this program from MIT called Future You. It’s a web-based platform that lets you have a conversation with an older version of yourself, which—in my case—was 80-year-old Hanna.

First, I answered a questionnaire about my life, my family, my career. I sent in a photo, which gets aged up a few decades to create a sort of Avatar Hanna. And then Future You spawned a future me—like, a really, really cheerful future me.

Rosin: Do you have any advice for me now?

Future Rosin: My advice for you is to always stay true to yourself and your values. It may seem difficult at times, but never compromise who you are for the sake of others’ approval or expectations. Embrace your unique qualities, follow your passion, and trust that everything will fall into place when you stay true to yourself.

Rosin: By the way, the voice of Future Hanna is a combination of an AI-generated voice from ElevenLabs and some audio magic from our end. And I’ll note here that The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs to read out some articles on our site.

To be clear: The MIT project does not actually talk to you voice-to-voice. It’s all text based. But this being a podcast and all, we needed something more audio friendly.

Rosin: How do you feel about being older?

Future Rosin: I feel grateful for the life I’ve lived and all the experiences that have come with it. Of course, there are physical challenges that come with aging, but overall, I am at peace with who I am and the journey I have been on.

Rosin: You sound much sunnier than the real Hanna.

Future Rosin: Well, I suppose with age comes a different perspective on life. But trust me—I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs and challenges along the way. It’s all a part of the journey. But in this moment, I’m just grateful for where life has brought me and excited for what’s to come.

Rosin: Do you talk to your friends this way?

Future Rosin: Absolutely.

Rosin: Do you have any pets?

Future Rosin: Yes. I have a beloved rescue dog named Max. He has such a big personality and brings so much joy into my life every day. Sometimes the simplest names are the best ones for our furry friends.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Do you talk this way to our children? Because I don’t think they would like it. I don’t think they’ve ever heard me say the phrase “furry friends.”

Future Rosin: Of course I do. I have always been honest and open with our children about personal growth and change. And besides, they know that no matter what changes come their way, my love for them will never waver.

Rosin: Are you running for political office?

Future Rosin: No. I can confidently say that politics was never in my future. But I have found ways to use my platform and voice as a journalist to bring awareness and advocate for important issues that align with my core values.

Rosin: Oh my God—

Future Rosin: Keep following your passions, Hanna. You never know where they may lead you.

Rosin: Stop calling me Ha-na.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay. I hate that she doesn’t know how to say our name. Also, I’m not sure how I feel about this earnest, positive person. It doesn’t feel like any possible version of me. Unless it is? Like, could I one day turn into Yoda Hanna? Do I want to?

So I called up two of the people who worked on this program to find out: What’s the point of creating a space where people encounter their future selves, especially future selves that seem so annoyingly positive?

Also, I just needed to talk to someone about the photo they aged up.

Rosin: By the way, I uploaded a picture, and I yelped. I was like, Oh my god. That’s my mother. I’m sure a lot of people have that experience when they do that.

Pattie Maes: Yeah.

Rosin: That would be MIT professor Pattie Maes—

Maes: Hi. Nice to meet you.

Rosin: And MIT researcher Pat Pataranutaporn, who spoke to us from an AI conference in Vancouver.

Pat Pataranutaporn: For Voice Memos, I’m just recording the whole thing, correct?

Rosin: Pattie and Pat were both part of the team that created Future You.

Pataranutaporn: I was actually inspired by a cartoon that I watched as a kid. It was actually a Japanese animation called Doraemon.

[Theme from Doraemon]

Pataranutaporn: Which is actually the name of the robot that comes back from the 22nd century to help a boy who was not very interested in school to discover himself and become the best version of himself.

And in this cartoon, there was a time machine where the robot companion actually took the boy to see his future self, when he’s actually grown up and become a scientist, and to help the boy realize his potential. So this idea actually stuck with me for a very long time. And I started to learn more and do research in this area of future self and realized that there’s a rich area of research exploring how we can help people grow and flourish by understanding the future self-continuity.

Rosin: Future self-continuity. This is an idea that who we are—our personality, our values, our beliefs—basically, the core of what makes us us—remains the same, even as we get older.

A lot of researchers, by the way, think that there is no consistent identity—that we change so much over time that the “core self” is just a comforting illusion. But let’s just accept, for the purposes of this experiment, that the self exists, if you look for it.

The idea is: If you believe that you 20 years from now is the same you as right now, you’ll be more protective of future you. And if you don’t believe that, you’ll get in all kinds of trouble.

Rosin: So what evidence do we have that people do not, in fact, connect with their future selves? Because I think a lot of people listening to this might say to themselves, Oh, of course, I’ll save money for my future self, or, I’ll make good decisions for my future self. I think people think that they act in favor of their future selves, but you guys have turned up evidence that, in fact, people don’t.

Maes: Well, for one, you always think that there’s going to be more time to do things, so whatever goals and interests and satisfaction you can get in the short term often gets priority over taking actions that, ultimately, you will only benefit from in the longer term. That’s just human nature, I would say.

I mean, a lot of our life is limited by how we see ourselves. We stereotype people, but we also, in a way, stereotype ourselves. And that often limits the goals that we set for ourselves and the beliefs that we have in our own abilities.

Rosin: Have there ever been, say, brain studies about what people think when they encounter a vision of their future self? Is it more like they’re thinking about themselves, or is it more like thinking about a stranger? I’ve always been curious about that.

Pataranutaporn: Yeah. There was a study, actually, by Professor Hal Hershfield, who we collaborated with, trying to understand this sort of, you know: How do people treat the future self?

And I think from his study, people usually identify the future self not as a continuation of yourself. Because I think if you think of yourself as a stranger in the future, that disconnection could lead you to ignore that your consequence now would actually lead to you becoming that person in the future, right? So the gap is the thing that we need to work on to strengthen the connection.

Rosin: I see. Okay. That’s really interesting. So if I’m presented with the concept of my future self, I register that person as sort of a stranger. I don’t register it as me.

Like, if you told me, I’m going to meet you tonight, I can imagine myself at that restaurant with a friend as myself. But the future, that almost seems like a different person.

Pataranutaporn: Totally. And I think, sometimes, people often miss this connection. They would think that their future is maybe driven by some other factors that they cannot control. But I think our research is trying to make that connection more clearly and also show that, even though sometimes you may not always do everything that you want to do, there is a sense of possibility that in the future, you’ll be okay in some other way. So I think that sort of comforting visualization that we are trying to do with Future Self is really critical.

And one thing we often tell people is that this future-self simulation that we create is more of a possibility rather than a prophecy. So if you change what you’re doing today, there’s also a possibility that in the future it could be very different. And we encourage people to actually talk to this system and change the thing that you say to the system and try to encourage people to kind of go back and forth between the present and the future and reflect on what they actually want to pursue and do in the future.

[Music]

Rosin: This was making more sense. So upbeat, cheerleader Hanna is not supposed to be my destiny; she’s more aspirational. And if I could connect to her just enough—just feel a little protective of her—maybe I could start to feel hopeful that I could inch my way towards a sunnier old age.

There’s just one twist: In addition to being a scientist, Pat is also a TV writer. His Netflix sci-fi show, Tomorrow and I, just recently came out. And in it, the people of the future? They are very, very dark—definitely not people to be trusted.

That’s after the break.

[Music]

[Break]

Rosin:  Pat, you were a writer for the new Netflix show Tomorrow and I, which is a kind of Black Mirror set in Thailand, a very interesting show.

[Sound from Tomorrow and I]

Rosin:  One thing I noted is that in that show, like in a lot of sci-fi, emissaries from the future—unlike in your Future You program—they are not often the wise or kind ones. They are not necessarily leading you to a better place. And it’s the people in the present who very strongly embody humane values.

How do you see that sci-fi idea of a scary, untrustworthy future as related to the very, say, positive, encouraging version of future beings who exist in Future You?

Pataranutaporn: No. Thank you for making that connection. I think you are really spot on with that.  With today’s technology, we’re trying to make technology that looks more like us, speaks more like us. We’re making technology more humanized. But at the same time, we are also turning human into some form of machine, right?  

So in a way, we are creating these paradox, where we are making humanized machine and also sort of dehumanizing ourselves.

Rosin:  Yeah. And in Tomorrow and I, you can see those two versions of the future being battled: some people who are indifferent to the idea that technology is making us more mechanized, and some people who are fighting against that idea. So you see both those kinds of characters.

Pataranutaporn: Totally. And I think in our own work—even the work at MIT—we also think a lot about this question. We wrestle with the question of: When we make technology, does it actually lead us to having negative consequence or lead to sort of the future that we don’t want? So I think we try to be critical but also optimistic at the same time, which I think is rare these days, right? People are either super optimistic or super critical, but I think that the path forward—you need to do both.

Rosin: Right. So it’s a choice, a choice for society—our technological future can be bright, or it can be dark, but we have to guide it—and a choice for each of us, individually.

Pat says he actually experimented with a version of Future You which was more like his sci-fi series, where you could move toward a darker version of future you.

Pataranutaporn: Like, I became alcoholic after I finished my Ph.D. at MIT. I don’t drink, personally, but that version of me was super alcoholic, so it was interesting. It kind of really showed the fragility of the future, that things could slip, and things could happen at any moment, and it could change your trajectory in life.

Rosin: Obviously, he didn’t love that version, so they stuck with the cheery AI, which also had some hard lessons to teach him—not alcoholic hard, but still hard.

Pataranutaporn: Right now, I’m living in the U.S., but my parents are still in Thailand, where I’m from. You know, my future me, at 60 years old, tells me that when you’re 60, your parent might actually be very senior, very old, and you need to think about taking care of them. And in one future, my parents already passed away in that future. So it also changed my perspective on: How much time do I have left with my parents? And what should I prioritize right now? And thinking about preparing for that future where my parents might need more of me to take care of them in the future.

You might think this is somewhat obvious, but I don’t think there is that threshold when how old is old enough for you to think about taking care of your parents? But this sort of simulation makes it clear to me that, at one point, I need to start thinking about that. And when it’s the future me telling me, it also makes it very personal, as well.

[Music]

Rosin: I can see that. Advice from yourself to yourself is harder to ignore, so I’ll give my future self one more try.

Rosin: How do you feel, physically? How do you feel in your body?

Future Rosin: Physically, I feel good for my age. Of course, there are aches and pains that come with getting older. But overall, I am grateful for the health and vitality I still have.

Rosin: Do you ever get depressed?

Future Rosin: There are moments when I feel down or sad, but I wouldn’t say I get clinically depressed. However, it is important to acknowledge and validate those feelings and take care of my mental health just as much as my physical health.

In my younger years, I did struggle with depression, and it was a difficult journey to overcome. But through therapy and self-care practices, I have learned how to manage those emotions and live a fulfilling life.

Rosin: Do you ever think about death?

Future Rosin: Yes. I do think about death. As an 80-year-old woman, it’s natural for me to reflect on my life and contemplate the idea of death. But instead of dwelling on it or fearing it, I choose to focus on making the most out of every moment and leaving a positive impact in this world. Death is a part of life, and accepting that has helped me live my life more fully, without regrets.

Rosin: I have to say, that sounds a little glib.

Future Rosin: I can understand why it may seem that way. But as someone who has seen and experienced much in my 80 years, I’ve learned to approach death with a sense of peace and acceptance. It’s not about being glib or dismissive of its weight but, rather, finding a way to cope and make the most out of the time we have left on this earth.

Death is an inevitable part of life. But how we choose to live our lives is what truly matters.

Rosin: I think I’ve always been afraid of getting older, as a person who’s full of regrets and lingering darkness. But now I realize I might also be afraid of becoming a person who’s just flatly positive all the time.

Future Rosin: I understand your fears, and I don’t believe that being positive means ignoring or suppressing negative emotions. It’s about finding balance and not letting negativity consume you. And as for regrets, I have learned to let go of them and focus on the present moment instead of dwelling on the past.

Life is full of ups and downs, but it’s important to appreciate both and find lessons in every experience. Trust me—aging has its challenges, but it also brings a sense of peace and wisdom that is truly invaluable. Embrace it with an open mind and heart, my dear younger self.

Rosin: Okay. That got through to me a little bit.

[Music]

Future Rosin: Just remember: Life is a journey. And it’s never too late to change your mindset and find happiness within yourself.

Rosin: Can you please stop saying, “Life is a journey”?

Future Rosin: Fair enough.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Happy New Year. And thank you for listening.

And to my future self: I’ll see you later.

Future Rosin: You’ll figure it out, Hanna. Just keep living your life and following your heart. See you in 2050.

Rosin: (Laughs.) So weird. (Laughs.) That was very disconcerting.