Trump submits affidavit saying he does not have documents sought in civil probe, but court continues $10,000-daily fine.

After weeks of reluctance over banning Russian oil imports, German officials today (Apr. 29) reversed course, agreeing to a gradual, EU-wide embargo. Other European countries have recently grown more amenable to such a ban as well, as Russia’s war on Ukraine has persisted.

The EU’s 27 member states have to agree unanimously for a ban to come into effect. But Germany has been the major opponent to this measure, because it purchases so much Russian oil and gas. Last year, Germany bought 27 billion tons of Russian crude, a third of its overall oil consumption. “It was a mistake that Germany became so heavily dependent on energy imports from Russia,” Christian Lindner, Germany’s finance minister, told the New York Times earlier this month.

Germany is fast ridding itself of Russian oil

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

Whatever your views on “cancel culture,” one thing is certain: Search-and-rescue missions on behalf of the disappeared can take strange forms. Witness a 2020 New Yorker essay that was published online under the title “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The question suggested the possibility that something as vile as racism might be calibrated—and that O’Connor’s case had moved from the verdict to the sentencing phase. Was she un-racist enough that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” could still be taught in English classes, or was she so racist that all copies of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” should be collected and destroyed?

But if you read past the title, the essay—by Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs—turns out to be excellent, a model of the form. It neither shies away from an accounting of O’Connor’s sin nor treats her stories and essays as diminished by that sin. Elie invites us to do something difficult: to hold both the artist and the art in our minds at once.

It’s a tall order, because her opinions are vile. “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste,” she wrote to a friend. “I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them.” As for James Baldwin, she said that he is “very ignorant but never silent.” James Baldwin—ignorant! The statement is preposterous. “My question is usually, would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.”

Elie gives no quarter to the often-made argument that all of this is explained—and therefore mitigated—by the time and place in which she was born: “All the contextualizing produces a seesaw effect, as it variously cordons off the author from history, deems her a product of racist history, and proposes that she was as oppressed by that history as anybody else was.”

It’s loathsome; she is loathsome. But Elie turns the coin over and over in his hands, at every turn complicating the story. He makes a powerful summation: O’Connor’s words “don’t belong to the past, or to the South,” he writes. “They belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.”  

The New Yorker recently published an essay about a similarly complicated writer, Alice Walker. This one is by Lauren Michele Jackson, an assistant professor at Northwestern and a contributing writer at the magazine. The occasion is the publication of Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, a collection of Walker’s diary entries from 1965 to 2000, about which Jackson writes elegantly and often persuasively: “Pain, joy, spells of depression, unease, engagement, even disaffection—all are material. They’ll feed the writings; they’ll sustain the readings.”

The publication of a writer’s journals provides an opportunity to combine an assessment of the art with an accounting of the life, and the essay’s somewhat perplexing online title—“Alice Walker’s Journals Depict a Writer Restless on Her Laurels”—lets us know we’ll be hearing about Walker’s many achievements. The Color Purple was such an enormous success—the recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, with more than 1 million copies sold in the first three years—that it tends to overshadow the rest of her work. But Walker is a prolific writer, with an oeuvre composed of novels, short stories, essays, and poetry.

Speaking of Walker’s poetry, here are two lines from her 2017 poem “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud”:

Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only

That, but to enjoy it?

“How Anti-Semitic is Alice Walker?” The New Yorker might have asked. The straightforward answer is very, very anti-Semitic.

As my Atlantic colleague Yair Rosenberg has reported, since 2012 Walker has promoted the ideas of a repugnant person, David Icke, the author of a book called And the Truth Shall Set You Free. The book, Rosenberg writes, “mentions the word ‘Jewish’ 241 times and the name ‘Rothschild’ 374 times. These citations are not compliments.” Icke suggests that the Jewish people helped pay for the Holocaust themselves (if it even happened; he thinks schoolchildren should be encouraged to debate this). He says that the KKK is secretly Jewish, and he seems to be a big fan of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

As recently as 2018, Walker praised And the Truth Shall Set You Free, during an interview with The New York Times. “In Icke’s books,” she said, “there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.” Who knows how many people she has introduced to this terrible thing.

Walker is a fierce critic of the state of Israel, and has refused to allow a Hebrew translation of The Color Purple. She has rejected charges of anti-Semitism as attempts to silence her support for the Palestinians, but the argument that Walker’s issue is only with the Israeli government, not with the Jewish people, is specious. In that poem, she describes the Palestinians as just the latest examples of the victims of an “ancient” evil perpetrated “with impunity, and without conscience, / By a Chosen people.” This is hate.

The New Yorker essay is 4,000 words long, and only a few sentences, in the final two paragraphs, concern Walker’s anti-Semitism. Jackson presents And the Truth Shall Set You Free almost as a bit of sci-fi: “Icke’s thinking includes the theory that mankind has unwittingly been ruled by an intergalactic race of reptilians since antiquity.” Entirely true—but try to guess who most of the reptiles are. As for the troubling fact of Walker’s anti-Semitism, Jackson offers a Freudian explanation: “Having grown up in a place where conspiracies, racial and sexual, were daily realities to be reckoned with, Walker may have developed a belated hunger for more.” Weirder still is this sentence: “Walker, a proper boomer, seems also to have been diving deep into the brackish waters of YouTube.” The “OK Boomer” defense.

I didn’t know exactly which brackish waters she had been diving into, but I turned once again to “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud”:

I recommend starting with YouTube. Simply follow the trail of “The

Talmud” as its poison belatedly winds its way

Into our collective consciousness.

I have no intention of following that recommendation, but I know that videos that describe the Talmud as “poison” aren’t so much “brackish water.” Walker does not seem to feel that her beliefs need any defense, let alone apology. As far as I know, she has never backed down from her position. Last year, in the postscript to her new book, she wrote, “I have no regrets.”

Here’s what I don’t understand, in the case of the New Yorker essays and in the broader sense: Of all the forms of hatred in the world, why is anti-Semitism so often presented as somehow less evil than the others? Alice Walker’s beliefs are every bit as repugnant as Flannery O’Connor’s. Yet even The New Yorker is willing to dismiss them as the consequence of boomerism, of the sorrow and oppression of her youth, of YouTube—as a late-in-life aberration. It is willing to print an assessment of And the Truth Shall Set You Free that describes it as promoting “anti-Semitic crackpottery.” Crackpottery? That’s one way of putting it. I realize now that this phrase includes the only appearance of the term anti-Semitic in the essay. If you didn’t come to this essay with a preexisting understanding of Walker’s hateful ideas, I expect it would be very easy to read these sentences about her beliefs and not really know what they are.

Would The New Yorker publish an article on someone with vile beliefs about gays, for example, and never mention those beliefs until the very end—and then in such a coded way that a reader might miss them altogether?

It wouldn’t and it shouldn’t. So why is hatred of Jews treated so gently—and in The New Yorker of all places? Something is rising, and it’s happening right in front of us, and somehow we are all sleeping through the part when there is still time to step in. Last year, David Baddiel, a Jewish comedian from Britain, wrote a book, Jews Don’t Count, arguing that “a sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if the Jews aren’t in it.” Why? ​​“There are lots of answers. But the basic one, underpinning all others, is that Jews are the only objects of racism who are imagined—by the racists—as both low and high status … somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters.”

I’m also a “proper Boomer,” born in 1961, 16 years after the end of the Second World War. And like a proper Boomer, I read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl as a teenager. The opening entries made the deepest impression on me—how joyous Anne’s life still was. The book begins with the occasion of her 13th birthday—the presents and flowers from her parents, the plate of cookies she baked and shared with her classmates, the weekend viewing of a Rin Tin Tin film. But already the yellow stars have been sewn on, the curfews implemented. The danger is rising, rising.

The Franks had two daughters, Anne and her talented older sister, Margot. The family was forced into hiding when Margot was “called up.” I didn’t know what that phrase meant. It meant that she received a letter ordering her to leave her home and report to one of the camps. I had an older sister too, and she was also the smarter, more patient one. What if someone came for her? What would we do?

The Franks went into hiding, and almost made it to safety: They lived in the secret annex for two years, and weren’t discovered until August of 1944—less than a year before victory in Europe. The family was sent to Auschwitz, and then the sisters were moved to Bergen-Belsen. Within a few months they died there, and neither of them was ever again seen on the face of this Earth.

Never let anyone—not David Icke, not Alice Walker, not the editors of The New Yorker, not anyone, ever—try to convince you that this hateful ideology is less serious than any other.

Over the past month, the number of new COVID cases in my social circle has become impossible to ignore. I brushed off the first few—guests at a wedding I attended in early April—as outliers during the post-Omicron lull. But then came frantic texts from two former colleagues. The next week, a friend at the local café was complaining that she’d lost her sense of smell. My Instagram feed is now surfacing selfies of people in isolation, some for the second or third time.

Cases in New York City, where I live, have been creeping up since early March. Lately, they’ve risen nationally, too. On Tuesday, the national seven-day average of new COVID cases hit nearly 49,000, up from about 27,000 three weeks earlier. The uptick is likely being driven by BA.2, the new, more transmissible offshoot of Omicron that’s now dominant in the United States. BA.2 does seem to be troubling: In Western Europe and the U.K. in particular, where previous waves have tended to hit a few weeks earlier than they have in the U.S., the variant fueled a major surge in March that outpaced the Delta spike from the summer.

At least so far, the official numbers in the U.S. don’t seem to show that a similar wave has made it stateside. But those numbers aren’t exactly reliable these days. In recent months, testing practices have changed across the country, as at-home rapid tests have gone fully mainstream. These tests, however, don’t usually get recorded in official case counts. This means that our data could be missing a whole lot of infections across the country—enough to obscure a large surge. So … are we in the middle of an invisible wave? I posed the question to experts, and even they were stumped by what’s really happening in the U.S.

For a while, COVID waves were not all that difficult to detect. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, when the country was desperately short of tests, people sought out medical help that showed up in hospitalization data. Later, when Americans could easily access PCR tests at clinics, their results would automatically get reported to government agencies. But what makes this moment so confusing is that the COVID metrics that reveal the most about how the coronavirus is spreading are telling us less and less. “Why we’re seeing what we’re seeing now is one of the more challenging scientific questions to answer,” Sam Scarpino, the vice president of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation, told me. Not only is our understanding of case counts limited, but all the epidemiological data we do have in the U.S. is rife with biases, because it’s collected haphazardly instead of through randomized sampling, he said. The data sets we rely on—case counts, wastewater, and hospitalizations—are “blurry pictures that we try to piece together to figure out what’s going on,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown, told me.

An invisible wave is possible because cases capture only the number of people who test positive for the virus, which is different from what epidemiologists really want to know: how many people are infected in the general population. That’s always produced an undercount in how many people are actually infected, but the numbers are becoming even more uncertain as government testing sites wind down and at-home testing becomes more common. Unlike during past waves, each household can request up to eight free rapid tests from the federal government, and insurance companies are required to reimburse Americans for the cost of any additional rapid tests they purchase. These changes in testing practices leave even more room for bias.

Sheer pandemic fatigue probably isn’t helping, either. People who are over this virus could be ignoring their symptoms and going about their daily lives, while people who are getting reinfected may be getting milder symptoms that they don’t recognize as COVID, Nuzzo said. “I do believe we are in a situation where there’s more of a surge happening, a larger proportion of which is hidden from the usual sort of sensors that we have to detect them and to appreciate their magnitude,” Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the City University of New York, told me. He was the only expert I spoke with who suggested that we might be in a wave that we’re missing because of our poor testing data, though he too wavered on that point. “I wish there was a clear answer,” he said.

Instead of relying solely on case counts to gauge the size of a wave, Nash said, it’s better to take into account other metrics such as hospitalizations and wastewater data, to triangulate what’s going on. Positivity rate—the percent of tests taken that have a positive result—can be more informative than looking at the raw numbers, too. And right now, the nationwide positivity rate is telling us that an increasing number of people are getting sick: Nationwide, 6.7 percent of COVID tests are coming back positive, versus 5.3 percent last week.

Unlike traditional COVID testing, wastewater surveillance, which is a process of detecting SARS-CoV-2 in public sewage, doesn’t reveal who exactly might be infected in a particular community. But by analyzing sewer data for evidence of the coronavirus, it can provide an early signal that a surge is happening, in part because people may shed virus in their feces before they start feeling sick. Nationwide levels of COVID in wastewater have climbed steadily in the past six weeks, suggesting more of a wave than the case counts indicate, though they vary greatly by region and can’t account for the chunk of the population who doesn’t use public utilities, says Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Scarpino noted a rise in certain areas, including Boston and New York, but he didn’t characterize them as a wave. “Multiple data sets are showing [a] plateau in some places,” he said. “It’s that combined trend across multiple data sets that we’re looking for.”

If America is indeed not experiencing a big wave at all, that would be breaking with our recent history of following in Europe’s path. One possibility is that “the immunological landscape is different here,” Scarpino said. At the peak of Omicron’s sweep across the U.S., in January, more than 800,000 people were getting infected each day, partly a function of the fact that just 67 percent of eligible Americans are fully vaccinated. Most of those who recovered got an immunity bump from their infection, which might now be protecting them from BA.2. Even with all the data issues we have, the relatively slow rise in new cases “does raise the possibility of there being less population vulnerability” in the U.S., Nuzzo said. But, she noted, this doesn’t mean people should think we’re done with the pandemic. States in the Northeast and Midwest are seeing far more cases than the South and the West. As this wide regional variation suggests, many pockets of the country are still vulnerable.

In all likelihood, we’re seeing elements of both scenarios right now. There could be many more COVID infections than the reported numbers indicate, even while the situation in the U.S. may be unique enough to prevent the same pattern of spread as in Europe. Regardless, the course of the pandemic would be far less uncertain if we had data that truly reflected what was happening across the country. All the experts I spoke with agreed that the U.S. desperately needs active surveillance, the kind that involves deliberately testing representative samples of the population to produce unbiased results. It would tell us what percentage of the general population is actually infected, and how trends differ by age and location. Now that “we’re moving away from blunt tools like mandates, we need data to inform more targeted interventions that are aimed at reducing transmission,” Nuzzo said.

In some ways, not knowing whether we are in an invisible wave is more unsettling than knowing for certain. It leaves us with very little to go on when making personal decisions about our safety, such as deciding whether to mask or avoid indoor dining, which is especially frustrating as the government has fully shifted the onus of COVID decision making to individuals. “If I want to know what my risk is, I just look to see if my friends and family are infected,” Scarpino said. “The closer the infection is to me, the higher my risk is.” But we can’t continue flying blind forever. It’s the third year of the pandemic—why are we still unable to tell how many people are sick?

But our inability to nail down whether we’re in a wave is also an indication that we’re closer to the end of this crisis than the beginning. An encouraging sign is that COVID hospitalizations aren’t currently rising at the same rate as cases and wastewater data. Nationally, they’re still close to all-time lows. Hospitalization data, Nuzzo said, is “one of our more stable metrics at this point,” though it lags behind the real-time rise in cases because it usually takes people a few weeks to get sick enough to be hospitalized.

Even if BA.2 is silently infecting large swaths of the country, it doesn’t seem to yet be causing as much severe illness as previous waves, thanks to immunity and perhaps also antiviral drugs. If that trend holds, it may mean we are seeing a decoupling of cases and hospitalizations (and, thus, with deaths too). “This is the kind of thing we really want to see—we can absorb a big surge without a lot of people having severe infection and dying,” Nash said. Still, it’s impossible to say for certain. For that, yet again, we’d need better data.

Over the past several days, newly public reporting has revealed that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy harshly criticized Donald Trump after the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” McConnell, then majority leader, told advisers. McCarthy was caught on tape saying that he would push Trump to resign.

As my colleague David Graham wrote last week, when McConnell and McCarthy shrug off concerns about January 6 now, “they are committing an act of moral and political cowardice.” Perhaps they feel like they can’t criticize Trump, because doing so has cost other Republican candidates and leaders (hello, Liz Cheney).

But as our staff writer Mark Leibovich argues, in the 2024 presidential primaries, “some nervy Republican challenger” just might come out on top by calling the former president a loser. Trump’s dominance is only part of the conventional political wisdom that our writers think is due for a shake-up.

Trump can be toppled. “If it was true in 2016 that other Republicans couldn’t touch Trump, it’s not necessarily so now, given the win-loss record he has since accumulated,” Mark writes. Candidates with shady pasts could win—or lose—the Senate for the GOP. “In the Trump era, no one knows where, or whether, voters will draw a line on candidates who might have been unacceptable in the past,” our staff writer Russell Berman notes. Democrats win when they get off the high road. After a colleague accused Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow of grooming children, she fought back. “McMorrow proved that rebuttal can be done effectively—and she succeeded because her rebuke rested on a personal narrative,” our contributing writer Molly Jong-Fast argues.

Further reading: America’s political dysfunction is turning school boards away from the business of schooling, my colleague Adam Harris writes.

The rest of the news in three sentences:

Russia stopped supplying gas to Poland and Bulgaria, which in turn distribute gas to Germany, Hungary, and Serbia. A manufacturer recalled more than 120,000 pounds of ground beef over E. coli concerns. Anthony Fauci said that the United States is “out of the pandemic phase” of COVID-19.  

Latest dispatches: Non-fungible tokens are coming for New York’s nightclub scene—but money can’t buy cool, and never could, Xochitl Gonzalez argues in the latest Brooklyn, Everywhere. And in Up for Debate, Conor Friedersdorf asks readers: What types of speech should Twitter forbid, specifically?

Tonight’s Atlantic-approved activity: Do a puzzle. Hopefully you’ll finish before the world ends.

A break from the news: Kids make the best philosophers. (Want a single great story like this sent to your inbox each weekday? Sign up for One Story to Read Today.)

Mitch McConnell isn’t known for his joyousness, but the dour Senate Republican leader was able to find delight even in the bleak aftermath of the January 6 insurrection: This, at long last, was the end of Donald Trump.

“I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell told the New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin late that night, according to Martin’s forthcoming book with Alex Burns, This Will Not Pass. “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

Across the Capitol, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy also foresaw Trump’s demise. Unlike McConnell, McCarthy had worked hard to stay on Trump’s good side. Now, however, he’d had enough. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” McCarthy told members of his leadership team four days later. He said that with impeachment sure to pass the House and conviction in the Senate a strong possibility, he would recommend to Trump that he resign, though he didn’t expect the president to take the advice.

[David A. Graham: Don’t let them pretend this didn’t happen]

As a former House member once noted, a politician should never let a serious crisis go to waste. McCarthy and McConnell had a moment to finish off Trump, who had long bedeviled them personally and haunted the party. On January 7, they had the means to end his elected career once and for all, and they had the votes. But they flinched, throwing away the chance to help themselves, and perhaps even to save the republic. The story is a tragedy of the Congress, a failure of collective action leading to ruin.

What is remarkable about the reporting in This Will Not Pass, and especially in leaked recordings of McCarthy, is the unvarnished picture it gives of GOP congressional leaders’ views about Trump and about the MAGA faction in the House. Throughout the Trump years, Republican members lived in fear of the president and toed his line in Congress, but would moan and groan about him anonymously. You can call this cowardice—I have—or you can chalk it up to a warped pragmatism. These elected officials rationalized their submissiveness by saying they could help contain Trump, keep the MAGA hordes at bay, and be ready in case of a crisis.

The tension between McConnell and Trump was never a secret. The Senate stymied the president from time to time, and Trump would rail against McConnell, but the men were brought together by a shared desire to confirm conservative judges and hurt the Democratic Party. McCarthy worked harder to remain publicly in step with Trump.

Privately, many GOP leaders hated Trump, as exemplified by McConnell’s exhilaration. Some of their disdain was a revulsion at his law- and norm-busting; some was a loathing of his politics, never fully aligned with traditional D.C. conservatism; some was anger about how he had warped the functioning of Congress, and thus made their own lives difficult. They disliked the members most closely aligned with him too.

In leaked recordings, McCarthy wondered whether Twitter could ban some of the most extreme members of the caucus, just as it had banned Trump. On a January 10 call, leaders expressed horror that several members had spoken at Trump’s rally on January 6. McCarthy called Representative Mo Brooks’s comments that day (“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass”) worse than Trump’s, and he fumed about how Representative Matt Gaetz’s were dangerous—not to the health of American government, but to the lives of members of the House. “He’s putting people in jeopardy,” McCarthy said. House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, publicly a close ally of Trump’s, went further: “It’s potentially illegal what he’s doing.” All in all, the discussion on the tapes shows that behind closed doors, nothing Republican leaders were saying would have been out of place on CNN, or perhaps even on MSNBC.

For a few days following the riot, McConnell and McCarthy had the chance to rid themselves of Trump. The former president wouldn’t have disappeared from the scene, and he would have retained a powerful voice and influence to dog them. But they also could have ensured that he was blocked from the presidency, closing off his electoral career. If Republicans had rationalized their earlier acquiescence on the premise that they might someday need to stop Trump, this was the moment they were waiting for.

They almost certainly had the votes. McCarthy was never going to get a GOP majority to vote for impeachment—some of his members loved Trump, and many others were still too cowed by Trump—but he knew that Democrats would impeach Trump anyway, and a conviction would have freed the fearful Republicans. On the Senate side, conviction required 67 votes, and Democrats were likely to provide 50 of them. Getting a Republican majority seemed tough, but getting to 67 would be no problem as long as the powerful McConnell voted for it and pushed other Republicans to do so. Meanwhile, polls in the days after the insurrection showed that the public was furious and blamed Trump.

Then Republican leaders froze up. Exactly when this happened remains unclear, but the shift was complete by January 13, one week after the riot. That day, the House voted to impeach Trump. But McCarthy had already gone weak. He did not whip his caucus to vote yes, and he voted no. In the end, only 10 Republicans voted in favor. That day, McConnell rejected calls for a quick impeachment, saying that because Trump was leaving office anyway, the matter could wait until Joe Biden was inaugurated.

[David A. Graham: The end of the Republicans’ big tent]

The most charitable interpretation is that McCarthy and McConnell got greedy: They hoped Democrats would do the dirty work of getting rid of Trump for them, saving them from having to take the political hits. “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” McConnell told a friend, according to the authors of This Will Not Pass. He seemed convinced that Trump had self-destructed, without accounting for the need to nudge the process along.

But with each day that passed, the MAGA crowd was able to talk people out of what they had just seen, to create excuses, to sow doubt. McCarthy and McConnell were surely keeping abreast of conservative media, where an effort to excuse the insurrection took hold quickly. They must also have been haunted by the memory of the October 2016 Access Hollywood episode, in which a recording was leaked of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. For a moment, Republicans seemed ready to throw Trump over, but the nominee managed to hang on, and then went on to win the presidency. His survival made Republicans gun shy.

The delay was fatal. By the end of January, it was too late. When the Senate finally voted in February, seven Republicans voted for impeachment. Other gettable votes had probably been spooked by the House vote. McConnell himself voted no, even as he scorchingly condemned Trump in a floor speech. Within months, Representative Liz Cheney, one of the participants on McCarthy’s calls, was stripped of her leadership position for saying in public some of the same things McCarthy had said privately.

The failure to punish Trump is bad for the United States. But although it’s tempting to say that McCarthy and McConnell sold out the greater good for their own gain, they may not have even gotten that. McConnell could become Senate leader again next year, but he’s endured months of attacks from Trump, and the former president’s influence will make it even harder for him to run the chamber. McCarthy might have it worse. The leaked recordings have stirred up opposition to him, especially among the members he complained about in January 2021. Trump seems prepared to forgive, at least for now, but Tucker Carlson—the other leading light of contemporary conservatism—has launched a crusade against the House minority leader. McCarthy could become speaker, but he’d start the job weaker than his two Republican predecessors, who were both run off by their caucuses.

McCarthy and McConnell aren’t the only potential victims of their failure of nerve. So are Congress’s power to check the executive branch, the rule of law, and the Constitution itself. Their failure of collective action has become ours.

When Briana Goodman gave birth to twins in 2015, she found herself surrounded by people telling her the best way to take care of her newborns. Any time she would bring up using a sleep-training method that encourages babies to cry it out and self-soothe, everyone seemed to have a judgmental opinion to share. But there was one place that Goodman, a clothing reseller in a suburb of Baltimore, could always turn when she wanted to talk about her preferred tactic: a Facebook group called “Support Group for ‘Moms On Call’ Method.”

Goodman was overjoyed to find a group of like-minded women who felt they could freely share their experiences without fear of being criticized. The group “was a very, very large part of my life and kept me in touch with reality,” Goodman told me over the phone. “It changed my life for the better because it taught me how to get my kids to sleep through the night … It was really nice to have other people, other moms.” Now an administrator of the group, she helps mothers with kids younger than hers navigate one of the most stressful periods of child-rearing.

But using Facebook—which has been dogged by privacy-breach and political-misinformation scandals in the past several years—to foster a community like this leaves some members, including Goodman, uneasy. The Cambridge Analytica debacle, in which 87 million Facebook users had their personal data leaked, and the Facebook Papers’ revelation that the company spread false information about the 2016 presidential election, has brought Facebook’s unethical systems into focus. “It’s just one of those things, where, for better or for worse, [Facebook] is attached to us in a way that I don’t know if we can ever undo,” Goodman said. “You can see that it’s not good, but what else are you supposed to do?” She’s one of the many people for whom Facebook groups provide an incomparable social experience, but who are also struggling to reconcile that with the platform’s antidemocratic practices.

[Read: ‘History will not judge us kindly.’]

According to the company, Facebook groups connect more than 1.8 billion people every month. One of the key benefits of the feature is that it lets users self-segregate into curated mini-societies, such as “subtle asian traits,” a group dedicated to cheeky memes about the Asian diaspora, or “Disapproving Corgis,” which features humorous photos of the dogs. Both groups have more than 1 million members. Others, such as “White People. DOING Something.,” allow people to have difficult conversations about race in a constructive manner. Another group, African Mums in Deutschland, helps women foster connections when they find themselves living somewhere new. Not all groups function as a social haven for users, but many do. One woman I spoke with, who’s part of a group for queer farmers, told me, “I have been aware of how much it is kind of like my lifeline to other people.”

Several Facebook-group administrators and members described to me the conundrum of relying on an imperfect platform to create strong, and for many people invaluable, communities. They understand that their groups exist on a controversial site, but they also say that not many alternatives have the capacity to build fellowship the way that Facebook does. “As someone who really tries to live the most harm-reduced life possible, there’s this almost defeat I find when I think about using Facebook,” Alexx Duvall, a co-founder of “NYC Plant Friends Hangout,” told me over the phone. Even though the group, which plans real-life and virtual events for plant lovers, has an Instagram account and an email listserv, Duvall finds that the community it cultivates on Facebook is ultimately more active. Nurturing that rare level of connection can feel more important than other concerns people may have about Facebook’s ethics.

A study from New York University’s Governance Lab supports that notion: It found that most Facebook-group members and administrators are more concerned about facilitating productive discussions than privacy. “These [groups] are pockets of democratic self-governance within a largely antidemocratic space,” Beth Simone Noveck, one of the report’s authors, told me over the phone. In fact, the Groups feature was promoted, in part, to rehabilitate the company’s “antidemocratic” reputation. Facebook launched Groups in 2010, but it didn’t pivot to focus on the feature until 2016, after the company faced severe scrutiny over its role in perpetuating misinformation during the presidential campaign. To drive engagement, Facebook marketed the feature heavily, claiming that the company was creating “meaningful” communities of like-minded people. The tactic worked. “It’s a very positive narrative for the company and hugely profitable because all of the work is being done by the members, and by the moderators,” Noveck said. (Facebook has a slew of upgrades planned for Groups in 2022, including allowing members to create even more focused subgroups by region.)

[Read: Facebook is a doomsday machine]

A corporate entity touting the creation of “meaningful” communities may sound bleak, but the claim has borne out for some. When Kelly Lavoie’s seven-month-old daughter was first diagnosed with infantile spasms, a form of epilepsy that can cause serious harm to infants’ developing brains, she did what everyone who has just received a devastating diagnosis would do—she Googled. “I was devastated by the stuff that I saw out there,” Lavoie, a computer programmer based in Wisconsin, told me. “They said that [these babies] wouldn’t live productive lives, that some of them die, that they regress back to being a newborn and they never come out of that stage.” It wasn’t until she discovered the Facebook group “Infantile Spasms” that some of her anxiety retreated. She found parents like her, some of whom had been members for years, helping newcomers understand different medications and processes, and offering their support to anyone seeking comfort and empathy. Still, Facebook’s privacy violations linger in the back of her mind. “As a computer programmer, it’s very concerning. I know how damaging the breaches can be,” she said. “And yes, I pause for that. But [I have] a disabled kid.” She has resolved to “take precautions” with regard to her online security, but ultimately, the group is too important for her to give up.

Even when their children make a full recovery, people in “Infantile Spasms” have stuck around to help others. “Some parents have typical kids,” Holly Rickman, an administrator of the group, told me over the phone. “Some parents have kids that haven’t had as good of a trajectory. But there’s this sense of reaching back to your fellow man.” For caregivers like Rickman, concerns over privacy have to be weighed against the effect that groups like these have had on members’ lives. “Anybody can take your information at any point, and it’s kind of at your own risk. But at the same time, the benefit that you gain supersedes the risk,” she said. Rickman told me that this group is one of the only places she could find where a condition like infantile spasms, which affects 2,000 to 2,500 children in the U.S. each year, is discussed.

The utility of Facebook Groups has at times extended beyond interpersonal connection: During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, medical professionals used the feature to share important information and resources about COVID-19. And groups like “Infantile Spasms” that focus on rare medical conditions can be indispensable to those desperate for information and advice. It’s clear why the people who have created these unique spaces may struggle to abandon a harmful platform, especially if they see Groups as essential to their well-being. The negative headlines may continue to plague Facebook, but the relationships formed within Groups will most likely keep people logged in.

San Francisco and Los Angeles are two of America’s most liberal large counties. Democrats dominate their elected offices up and down the ballot. Yet in both places, serious efforts are under way to recall left-leaning district attorneys who have not even completed their first term.

San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and L.A.’s George Gascón each ran for office on confronting structural racial inequities, reducing incarceration, and toughening accountability for law enforcement. Their victories, in 2019 and 2020, respectively, represented landmark moments in the nationwide “progressive prosecutor” movement. But in San Francisco, opponents have already collected enough signatures to force a June 7 recall election for Boudin that most local political professionals doubt he can survive. While Gascón’s situation isn’t quite as dire, opponents say they have collected hundreds of thousands of signatures toward the 566,857 they need by July 6 to prompt a recall election against him. And polls show substantial disapproval of his performance.

The drives to remove both men have drawn energy from local controversies specific to each city. But the similarities in these twin struggles far outweigh the differences. And those similarities underline the structural challenges confronting the broader push for criminal-justice reform that exploded into massive public protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Reformers in cities across the country have made the case that a more equitable system will produce a safer community over time by reducing the number of repeat offenders hardened by excessive incarceration. But the recalls show how vulnerable those arguments are to short-term changes in the crime rate. The successes of Boudin and Gascón’s approach—as measured by individuals who are kept out of prison and use the opportunity to stabilize their lives—are inherently much less visible than the failures: offenders who, when given that chance, commit more crimes. While the impact of Boudin’s and Gascón’s tenures might take years to assess fairly, both men have been battered by public anxiety about immediate trends in safety and disorder—even if the causes, most experts agree, extend far beyond the policies of the D.A.’s office, and even if crime rates are also increasing in communities with hard-line police chiefs and district attorneys.

To reform advocates, the backlash testifies to the depth of resistance to change in almost every corner of the criminal-justice system, including police departments and D.A. offices, where career prosecutors have taken a stunningly public role in support of each recall. More ominously, the prospect that voters might turn on Boudin and Gascón has some reformers wondering whether the millions of people who marched in the streets in 2020 really meant what they said when they called for a fairer justice system.

“It’s almost as if the summer of reckoning in 2020 has never happened,” says Lara Bazelon, a University of San Francisco law professor who serves on a commission Boudin established to review possibly wrongful earlier convictions by his office. “People are happy to be progressive and happy to be anti-racist as long as their bike doesn’t get stolen, or they don’t watch a viral video of a theft at Walgreens. Once that happens, or they feel vulnerable in some way, they throw out the high-minded ideals that made them vote for a reformer.”

Yet if Boudin’s and Gascón’s troubles suggest that the momentum for criminal-justice reform might already be receding, they also offer hints of how the reform movement might recalibrate to build more durable political support.

Gascón, 68, and Boudin, 41, took very different paths to their current positions. Born in Cuba, Gascón immigrated to the United States with his parents; he then worked his way up from a beat cop in Los Angeles to become an assistant chief, before being named chief of police in Mesa, Arizona, and then in San Francisco. When Kamala Harris was elected as state attorney general in 2010, California Governor Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco’s mayor, appointed Gascón to replace her as the city’s district attorney. After serving two terms, Gascón somewhat surprisingly resurfaced in Los Angeles and won election as the county district attorney in 2020, unseating incumbent Jackie Lacey, who had strong support from law-enforcement unions.

Boudin, who won the 2019 race in San Francisco to succeed Gascón, had much less experience. Before his election, he had served as a law clerk to two federal judges and a deputy public defender in San Francisco (as well as working as a translator for Hugo Chávez’s administration in Venezuela). He is the son of famous 1960s radicals (Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert) and was raised by even more famous ’60s radicals (Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn) after his parents were sentenced to prison for their role as getaway drivers in a fatal 1981 robbery.

[Read: His dad got a chance at clemency. Then his baby was born.]

Although they started with marginal support, both men pulled off upset victories and arrived on the job determined to reorient their office. Gascón announced a broad range of policy changes on his first day, rooting his approach in the belief that “our criminal-justice system is riddled with what I would call systemic racism,” as he told me when I interviewed him at an Atlantic event last year. Boudin was equally direct when he announced his own changes less than two months after taking office in 2020: “Today … we send a message that is loud and clear to the police department and to communities of color. We will no longer participate in, condone, tolerate, or amplify racist police tactics.”

The ensuing policy changes were sweeping. Each D.A. set a prohibition against trying juveniles as adults (though Gascón this year backpedaled to allow exceptions in rare cases). Each said that, with only rare exceptions, he would not seek sentencing enhancements, which can rapidly multiply the length of a prison term for added factors such as gang activity, the use of a weapon, or offenses that apply against California’s three-strikes law for repeat offenders. Boudin also said he would not seek cash bail for any defendant, while Gascón ruled out cash bail in all instances except serious and violent felonies. (Both men said they would ask judges to impose pretrial detention on only the most dangerous defendants.) Each said he would largely stop prosecuting “quality of life” misdemeanors often associated with homelessness, like trespassing and public urination. Each pledged not to seek the death penalty and to reassess the death sentences their offices already had imposed. And each promised to prosecute alleged misconduct by law-enforcement officers more aggressively.

An aerial view of a homeless encampment in San Francisco. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency / Getty)

There’s little disagreement that Gascón and Boudin have attempted to implement the agendas they promised to voters. Gascón’s policy on juvenile prosecution kept about 100 minors from being transferred to adult courts from the time he took office, in December 2020, through 2021, according to a report he released last year, and his refusal to seek sentencing enhancements eliminated an estimated 18,000 years from prospective sentences. He also reported last year that he had identified 60,000 earlier cannabis convictions for dismissal and had filed 17 cases of misconduct against 21 law-enforcement officers.

The overall jail population in Los Angeles hasn’t changed much under Gascón. But Michelle Parris, a California program director for the Vera Institute of Justice, a liberal advocacy and research group, says that’s primarily because the county has not established an independent, comprehensive pretrial-services office to offer judges more alternatives to detention. Even so, she says, the group has found, using government data, that Gascón has significantly reduced the proportion of inmates held in jail on misdemeanors, another high priority for reformers.

Boudin’s office has not quantified his results as precisely. But San Francisco has seen significant reductions in both the jail population and the number of juveniles in custody since Boudin took office, as well as the first ever homicide prosecutions against police officers for actions on duty. “He did the things he said he would do,” says Jonathan Simon, a professor of criminal-justice law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

In each city, the new D.A. faced almost immediate resistance from within the law-enforcement community. In Los Angeles, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the union representing career prosecutors, filed a lawsuit just weeks after Gascón took office to block his policy rejecting the use of three-strikes counts and other sentencing enhancements. This past February, the union’s membership voted virtually unanimously to support the recall of their own boss. Alex Villanueva, Los Angeles County’s bombastic hard-line sheriff, also supports Gascón’s recall. In San Francisco, the police-department leadership has openly feuded with Boudin, and the police union has bitterly criticized him.

Brooke Jenkins, who resigned from the San Francisco D.A.’s office last October and has emerged as one of Boudin’s most visible critics, argues that his “blanket policies” against seeking cash bail and trying juveniles as adults are hindering prosecutorial discretion and undermining the office’s “ability to hold some of our most dangerous offenders accountable and, many times, to do what we need to protect the public.” In L.A., Eric Siddall, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys’ vice president and a 15-year veteran of the office who now prosecutes crimes against law enforcement, says that when Gascón barred prosecutors from seeking sentencing enhancements, including three-strikes counts, he put the office’s line attorneys “in an ethical dilemma” of following “his orders or … the law.” The laws, Siddall continues, that Gascón “refuses to enforce were passed by the legislature and, in some cases, were passed by the people of the state of California directly. So, no one man has a right to overturn state law by himself.” (An L.A. County judge ruled partially in favor of the union last year that Gascón must apply the three-strikes law, but the case is on appeal.)

[Darcy Covert: The false hope of the progressive-prosecutor movement]

Supporters of Gascón and Boudin, meanwhile, view the breadth, and especially the speed, of the backlash as a measure of law enforcement’s reflexive resistance to change. “You have an institution and a culture that is being told that everything you were doing for most of your career you weren’t doing correctly, and here is this other way,” Bazelon, the University of San Francisco law professor, told me. “And there are people who are going to react very badly to that.”

Some see law enforcement’s support for the recalls as an attempt by entrenched interests to nullify the will of the voters. “The voters voted in Gascón. I think all of the other elected officials and all the other people that are opposing him, including the A.D.A.s that are within his office, at the bare minimum should at least give him the opportunity to implement the policies that he promised to bring in,” says Sam Lewis, the executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in L.A., a group that works with the formerly incarcerated. “If he fails, after his first term, vote him out. But don’t make up reasons to vote him out [now].”

In each city, the opposition from law enforcement—along with support from right-leaning donors—provided the initial spark for the recall efforts. But each has fed on what polls show is broadly shared public anxiety about safety. And while there’s no question both cities have experienced some very high-profile crimes—including mass shoplifting events and follow-home robberies of wealthy individuals—the crime statistics are mixed. Some safety indicators have undeniably deteriorated, but others haven’t budged much or have even improved.

In San Francisco, the police department’s dashboard shows that the total number of serious offenses from January 1 through April 24 of this year (14,625) was significantly higher than during the same period in 2021 (13,345), while more of the city was still closed down because of the coronavirus pandemic, but much lower than during the equivalent period in 2019 (16,174), before the outbreak began and before Boudin took office. Through late April of this year, assaults were up 6 percent compared with the same period in 2019, and burglaries were up 12 percent. Break-ins or thefts of motor vehicles have soared by almost 50 percent over that time. But rapes, robberies, and property thefts all have declined, and the number of homicides hasn’t changed much (11 in the early months of 2019 versus 15 in the same period this year.)

Los Angeles also showed mixed trends through 2021, though with a clearer tilt toward more violence. The total number of property crimes that year, while higher than in 2020, remained slightly lower than in 2019. The number of violent crimes, conversely, was slightly higher in 2021 than in 2019. Most troubling in L.A. has been a dramatic rise in the number of people shot and the number of homicides, each of which spiked by more than 50 percent from 2019 through 2021. Homicides per capita are still much lower than they were in the 1990s, or even the 2000s, but they have demonstrably increased since bottoming out soon after 2010.

Magnus Lofstrom, the policy director for criminal justice and a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, says the rise in homicides and aggravated assaults across California is genuine cause for concern. (California’s increase in homicides from 2019 through 2020, he points out, was the biggest since the state started keeping records in 1960.) But property- and violent-crime rates across the state are generally returning to the relatively low levels experienced before the pandemic, he says. “Broadly,” he told me, “you are not seeing patterns that are unique to Los Angeles or San Francisco over the last couple of years compared to the rest of the state, and the state in general is broadly reflecting what we are seeing in the country as a whole.”

Indeed, the recent nationwide rise in the crime rate also affected jurisdictions where police chiefs and prosecutors are implementing hard-line policies. “These traditional prosecutors often act as if their traditional policies produce safety, and that is clearly not the case,” says Parris of the Vera Institute of Justice. “They are just as susceptible to the trends that we are seeing around the country that have really complex root causes. But their records are rarely scrutinized.”

The available data also suggest that Gascón and Boudin aren’t ignoring serious crimes, as aides to each pointed out when I spoke with them about their bosses’ records. A detailed analysis by the Los Angeles Times found that Gascón filed charges in just over 58 percent of the felony cases brought to him by police in 2021, almost exactly equal to Lacey’s annual average over her eight years in office. An online dashboard maintained by Boudin’s office shows him filing charges this year and last in just under three-fifths of felony cases, which equals or slightly exceeds Gascón’s record in most years when he held the job there. “Arguments attacking our filing rates hold no water,” Rachel Marshall, Boudin’s director of communications, told me.

[Read: A Texas prosecutor fights for reform]

Still, critics of Gascón and Boudin argue that their policies of not prosecuting most misdemeanors and seeking cash bail for only the most serious offenses have created a sense of impunity. “It not only makes residents feel less safe,” Vicki Halliday, who sits on the board of directors of the Venice Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles, told me. “It emboldens the petty criminal.”

Siddall, of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, raises another complaint about Gascón’s approach to bail: Under California law, people with a previous felony conviction are not allowed to possess guns. But if a felon is caught with a firearm (without using it), that offense is technically a nonviolent felony, Siddall says, which means that under Gascón’s rules he or she is released without bail. “They are released before the police report is even written,” Siddall says. “When you are allowing hard-core criminals to run around our society with impunity, with guns, you are going to create a very dangerous situation.” Los Angeles Police Department officials similarly have complained about gun-toting defendants in follow-home robberies who have been repeatedly arrested and released.

Alex Bastian, a special adviser to Gascón, says the bail policy applied to those gun-possession cases is shaped by a California State Supreme Court decision discouraging reliance on cash bail, and by rules the state and county court systems instituted to reduce incarceration during COVID-19 outbreaks; Gascón, Bastian adds, is working with law enforcement to explore whether there should be more exceptions to the rule for repeat offenders or others who pose a special risk.

In San Francisco, critics point to the significant increase in the number of cases Boudin’s office has resolved through diversion into behavioral or counseling programs. According to his office, the share of all cases resolved through diversion has increased more than fourfold since 2016, and while Boudin has applied that remedy mostly for misdemeanors, the number of felony charges channeled into diversion has nearly tripled over that period—to just over one in five.

The remains of a crime scene in Beverly Hills. (Damian Dovarganes / AP)

It’s also clear that both Gascón’s and Boudin’s reputations have been damaged by the unease in each city about a problem that’s distinct from but related to crime: homelessness. In recent polls, considerably more Los Angeles residents expressed concern about homelessness than about crime. In both cities, it has become harder to get through the day without encountering people living on the street, many of whom appear a danger to themselves or others. In Los Angeles, that anxiety is compounded by the presence of large encampments that have created a sense that the city is losing—or ceding—control of its public spaces. (The area around the public library in Venice, for instance, has been so engulfed by tents that I have a hard time imagining many parents bringing young children there.)

The resulting frustration among even liberal voters is reminiscent of the anxieties about urban anarchy that inspired the famous “broken windows” policing strategy in the 1980s, and the election of Rudolph Giuliani as New York mayor, on a promise to tame disorder, in the 1990s. (In Los Angeles, the wealthy developer Rick Caruso has leveraged that sentiment, and a torrent of his own television spending, into one of the leading positions in this year’s mayoral race.)

Experts agree that cities cannot arrest their way out of a homelessness problem that requires more mental-health and drug treatment, as well as more housing. And, compared with other elected leaders, district attorneys have only limited leverage over homelessness, mostly through their prosecution (or not) of misdemeanors like public urination or drunkenness. Yet because of the momentum created by the recalls, Gascón and Boudin might pay the price.

This public backlash against Boudin and Gascón points to two intertwined challenges both men face in defending their reform agendas.

The first is that the successes of their strategy are much more difficult to quantify than are its setbacks. Progressive prosecutors are acutely vulnerable when anyone kept out of prison by their policies reoffends—as happened in San Francisco on December 31, 2020, when a repeat felon out on parole killed two pedestrians as he rocketed a stolen car through an intersection, a tragedy that many consider the initial spark for the Boudin recall. But an offender who’s kept out of prison, or sent there for a shorter term, and takes the opportunity to straighten out his or her life is virtually invisible to the public.

Lewis, of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, told me the stories of two young offenders he has worked with in Los Angeles. Each was convicted as a juvenile but later received a reduced sentence, and both used that second chance to reshape their lives. One is now working as a firefighter; the other, as a carpenter. Both regularly join Lewis to counsel younger kids drawn to gangs and violence. “They got their life back on track, but they got their life back on track earlier, when they were 25 years old, as opposed to when they were 45 years old,” says Lewis. “As we multiply these things over the years, it enhances public safety.”

Academic studies have not consistently concluded that longer sentences reduce future offending. Parris, of the Vera Institute of Justice, also notes that a study conducted in Boston and surrounding communities in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, found that prosecuting fewer people for low-level, nonviolent misdemeanors shows promise as a way of both reducing longer-term crime and helping those offenders straighten out their lives. Yet even if most people kept out of prison by such policies find a productive path, the smaller share of those who reoffend inevitably attracts much more media attention.

Time is the second big challenge for progressive prosecutors. “The effect that any policies that a D.A. adopts has on crime will take some time to manifest itself,” says David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor who studies criminal justice. Although it might seem logical to increase prosecutions and stiffen sentences in response to rising crime rates, Sklansky points out that incarcerating more people for longer periods can seed more crime later, as “people become hardened criminals behind bars and then [are] released into their communities to reoffend.” Conversely, he notes that although diversion programs or investment in social services might look like leniency today, those policies can foster safety over time by shrinking the pool of potential future offenders.

The benefit of reducing unnecessary incarceration, Bastian says, “is less recidivism, lowering the likelihood of future victims, and lowering the fiscal costs, while advancing public safety at the same time. Unfortunately, it is going to take more time for us to know the full value of that.”

The question is whether voters have the patience to see what comes of Boudin’s and Gascón’s policies over the long term, while some key measures of crime keep rising. Sklansky doesn’t think the American public has turned on the progressive-prosecutor movement yet, observing that California law makes it unusually easy to qualify a recall for the ballot. And the reelection of progressive prosecutors Larry Krasner in Philadelphia last year and Kim Foxx in Chicago the year before suggests that it’s possible to retain majority support for reform policies even when crime is rising.

[Read: Why Larry Krasner’s defeat would be ‘disastrous’ for criminal-justice reform]

But other observers, including many Democrats broadly sympathetic to criminal-justice reform, say it would be myopic not to take lessons from the pushback Boudin and Gascón have faced. Every analyst and practitioner of San Francisco politics I spoke with said they would be stunned if Boudin survives the June recall election. Gascón has a better chance of keeping his job, but he will be at serious risk if the recall effort gathers enough signatures: Recent polls by both Univision and the Los Angeles Times have found that only about one-third of county residents approve of his job performance. And hardly any prominent Democrats are defending either man’s policies (even if some, like Representative Karen Bass, the leading liberal candidate in the L.A. mayoral race, oppose the recalls on the grounds that the district attorney should face voters at the end of a full term).

Some of that distancing reflects the uncertainty among Democrats nationally over how to respond to Republicans’ attempts to paint the party as soft on crime. But Democratic officeholders and political strategists in each city consistently expressed exasperation that Boudin and Gascón have demonstrated little sympathy, or even concern, for the middle- and working-class families that are genuinely unsettled by the types of crime that are increasing, and by homelessness. “If you run for prosecutor, you do have a job: to prosecute. You have discretion, but people basically see your job is to get people who are dangerous off the streets,” says one veteran California Democratic political strategist, who asked for anonymity to discuss the races candidly. “When you start rejecting, essentially, the job people hire you to do, it creates all sorts of problems.”

Rafael Mandelman, a centrist Democratic member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, generally backs the goals of criminal-justice reform, but he rejects the idea that a D.A.’s only choices are to sustain an unfair status quo or change direction as quickly and sharply as Boudin has tried to: “I don’t think it’s a binary—either you go along and get along and you don’t have any problems, or you blow everything up and have explosions every day.” The D.A.s and their allies make a forceful counterargument for swift, bold action: Gascón told me last year that moving more cautiously would only perpetuate racial inequities without winning over the forces that oppose him. Yet neither he nor Boudin can advance reform at all if they are removed from office.

Bazelon told me she worries the message of the recalls is that “moving forward, the progressive movement can’t be as progressive as we want.” But the message might be less about direction than approach. Any elected official can sink into trouble by issuing too many absolutist pronouncements or by appearing indifferent to changing circumstances, like the rising public concern in both cities, largely extending across racial lines, about safety. Boudin and Gascón have legitimate reason to worry that the system won’t change without blunt-force directives. But their experience shows the risks of coming across as too inflexible in pursuing reforms.

The threat to these two men is rooted, above all, in the impression that they are more concerned about the small minority of people accused of crimes than about the larger majority whose principal interest in the criminal-justice system is that it keep them safe. However the recall efforts turn out, the pushback against Gascón and Boudin suggests that progressive prosecutors ultimately can do more to eradicate bias if they never lose sight of preserving safety.

A year and a half ago, less than three weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published a story about the recovery of a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, and a trove of personal emails and photographs allegedly found on it. Many were embarrassing; a few were interesting enough to become memes. (The most indelible—the authenticity of which I have not personally verified—is of Hunter smoking a cigarette in a bathtub.) The meat of the article was the claim that the younger Biden had traded inappropriately on his family name, up to the point of arranging meetings between his Ukrainian business associates and his father, while the latter was vice president.

President Donald Trump’s camp made the story out to be more than it was—Hunter Biden was already well known for invoking his family’s political fame to help him make money, and he denied the specific allegations of wrongdoing (though a broader investigation into his affairs has been ongoing for years, led by federal prosecutors in Delaware, working with the FBI and the IRS). The story’s claims about Joe Biden’s participation were weak (at best). It quickly came out that some of the Post’s own staff did not think that the paper had done enough to confirm the authenticity of the laptop. But the story was a lit match, and the national mood at the time was kerosene.

Trump was actively undermining democracy and pushing his supporters toward hysteria about online censorship. His party was gripped by QAnon, which holds at the center of its belief system the idea that the Democratic elite are sleazy and corrupt. The laptop was a gift to the paranoid and the disingenuous. Meanwhile, the other half of the country was gripped by the memory of 2016. What if voters were faced with an eleventh-hour red herring, another disaster like the James Comey letter? What if reporters fell for another trick from zany upstart “citizen journalists” with enormous follower counts—or, worse, Russia? And journalists who had spent four years telling themselves that they were the nation’s last defense against tyranny were, to put it as politely as I can, starting to appear a bit hysterical. By the way, there was still a pandemic. Enter flames.

To many members of the media and tech industries, the timing of the story felt suspicious, as did the fact that it came from Rudy Giuliani, a MAGA operative and one of the oddest people alive. Reporters recoiled from the story; columnists blasted the Post for publishing personally embarrassing information that was of tenuous public interest. Social-media companies also reacted instantly. Facebook limited the spread of the story while third-party fact-checkers reviewed it (but removed the limitation after a week). Twitter took the more dramatic action of blocking new shares of the link altogether, arguing that the story, which contained screenshots with unobscured email addresses and phone numbers, constituted a violation of its policy on doxxing (it reversed course after two days).

Some of the story turned out to be true, but not right away. The New York Times and The Washington Post were only recently able to verify many of the emails. And in the intervening months, many of the details about why journalists and tech companies acted the way they did have been forgotten, leaving behind only the impression, mostly on the right, that they “colluded” to keep Americans away from an authentic news story with political implications. The truth was more boring and possibly grimmer.

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: This single water-damaged laptop represented an end point. Americans no longer had a method for coming to agreement about what was—in the most basic sense—going on. Eighteen months later, there’s nothing anyone could ever say about this laptop that would bring Americans into alignment about its significance and meaning, or about the culpability and agendas of those who have previously expressed opinions on it. In fact, if anything, things have gotten worse.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic co-hosted a conference with the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, called “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” at which Hunter Biden’s laptop was a star of the show.

It came up in the very first Q&A session of the conference. A University of Chicago freshman and a senior editor of the campus’s right-wing publication (tagline: “Outthink the mob”) asked my colleague Anne Applebaum whether “the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.” The student was unsatisfied with Applebaum’s answer—that she didn’t think the laptop qualified as a major news story, disinformation or no—and later appeared on Fox News to say so. His tweet about the exchange, which incorrectly stated that Appelebaum had failed to answer the question, went viral. This kicked off a vitriolic and widespread campaign against Applebaum from the right, pushed by influencers including Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, and multiple Fox News hosts; she was subjected to weeks of personal threats.

The laptop came up again the next day, first thing in the morning. A panel discussion titled “Politics as Usual or an Insidious Attack on Our Democracy?” took its premise from a November 2021 column by Ben Smith, then of The New York Times, in which he used the Biden laptop story to demonstrate how confusing the conversation about misinformation and disinformation had become. In dealing with the laptop, reporters were understandably wary of repeating the mistakes made regarding the WikiLeaks hack-and-dump operation before the 2016 election, which led to over-coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which was ultimately inconsequential. That’s why many of them dismissed the story, or labeled it a new front in the information war. But many presidential election cycles have unearthed confusing, scandalous revelations requiring investigative journalism to verify or debunk them, Smith argued. Labeling this a problem of the social-media age, and focusing on mis- or disinformation as phenomena that can be corrected, hidden, or blocked at the platform level, is “a technocratic solution to a problem that’s as much about politics as technology,” he wrote. He reiterated much of this during the panel, saying that the laptop story had been mishandled by reporters, and “most disturbingly” by social-media companies.

I heard this opinion repeatedly in casual conversations and from the speakers onstage. Jonah Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Dispatch, argued during the panel that the “disinformation” label can backfire by feeding into the idea that the “powers that be” are forbidding people from looking at information that they consider illegitimate. He illustrated his point with Biden’s laptop too. Twitter and Facebook treated it like disinformation before the truth could be determined. “Whether you think that was smart in the heat of the moment or not, [it] has backfired enormously,” he said. “Because now it seems like it was all conspiratorial.”

I was a little surprised by how often the laptop came up, but I shouldn’t have been. Its aura has grown ever more powerful as the story around it has cohered. After a short period during which Fox News also considered the laptop story suspect, the network has been covering it even more intensely than it did the leaked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016. In December 2020, when I was interviewing users of the alternative social-media platform Parler, almost everybody I spoke with brought it up. A cool, anonymous Substack writer beloved by New York City’s art set has also made frequent disapproving reference to Twitter’s and Facebook’s actions around the laptop story. Angry online chatter about it never truly went away, but now it’s back with a vengeance. All of my friends know that something went wrong with the laptop. Many of them do not care, but they still know. This week, hours after the news broke that Elon Musk would be acquiring Twitter, he replied to a tweet in which Twitter’s chief legal officer and general counsel Vijaya Gadde was referred to as the company’s top “censorship advocate,” writing, “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

That cursed computer, otherwise known as “the laptop from hell,” as Donald Trump has called it, is an icon of our information ecosystem’s dysfunction. Some journalists relied prematurely and too much on popular frameworks when covering it. The story really was suppressed by tech giants. But it also really was complicated, and required time and resources to investigate. Finding the truth takes time and effort and a willingness to be surprised. It also requires some grace on the part of the public—journalists need to be able to publish facts bit by bit, as they learn them, doing their work in front of an audience that is receptive to the idea that knowledge shifts and that coherent drama that blazes forth all at once is rare. This is, the laptop makes clear, no longer possible. By the time reporters put in the work to verify parts of the story, it was too late—the corrupt “media” was a monolith with an agenda.

Facebook and Twitter really did make sloppy decisions. They and other tech platforms had spent the past several years struggling with how to fact-check a pandemic and when to interfere with election interference; the laptop undermined that work by illustrating just how bizarre—and dangerous—it would be to centralize the responsibility for discerning truth. Twitter has apologized for its handling of the story and made changes to its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. Facebook has elaborated on its decision-making process, which was informed by the FBI’s warning to watch for hack-and-leak operations carried out by foreign actors. And if federal prosecutors indict Hunter Biden for possible financial crimes, it will not be solely on the basis of the man’s laptop, so the case could be made that the thing doesn’t matter much anymore. Yet it isn’t going anywhere. Why would it? It’s perfect!

“This is arguably the most well-known story the New York Post has ever published and it endures as a story because it was initially suppressed by social media companies and jeered by politicians and pundits alike,” Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and a speaker at the conference, told me in an email. The laptop is now shorthand, and it makes an easy point. For example, after another panel at the conference, a University of Chicago student asked CNN’s Brian Stelter a question to which there was undoubtedly no satisfying answer: Invoking the Biden laptop, he asked, “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?” Stelter’s response was polite, if a bit meandering, and he offered to speak with the student one-on-one after the event, which he apparently did.

Even though this sequence of events was a bit dry, it was useful all the same. A video of the exchange was viewed millions of times on Twitter that Thursday, under the caption “Brian Stelter just got destroyed by a college freshman!” It was featured two days later on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, and Carlson was giddy while describing it. “There are still a couple of kids at the University of Chicago who are awake enough to say, ‘Wait a second, what are you talking about? Disinformation?’” After playing the video, he cracked himself up.

The majority of Americans who insist that “cancel culture” is a problem and the minority who counter that it is a fraud, a myth, or a moral panic are too often talking past one another.

One faction invokes the term cancel culture as shorthand for a range of complaints: for instance, that figures such as the political analyst David Shor and Emmanuel Cafferty, a California utility-company worker, lost their jobs after innocent acts that provoked unreasonable offense in others; that universities have unjustly punished hundreds of scholars for protected speech in recent years; or that so many Americans are self-censoring that deliberative democracy is threatened.

Another faction dismisses complaints about cancel culture and reframes the status quo as “accountability culture.” This shorthand encompasses what many regard as long-overdue consequences for figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, two entertainment-industry giants credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault, and the former NBA owner Donald Sterling, who was pushed out of the league after recordings of his racist comments surfaced.

Using any one term to frame such varied controversies hides the actual lines of disagreement. People who complain about “cancel culture” should always clarify what they oppose. They should be told: Be more specific, unless you’re literally saying that no one should ever be fired or stigmatized for anything they say or do. Likewise, people who laud “accountability culture” or dismiss cancel culture as a myth should be told: Be more specific about what you consider fair punishment, unless you’re literally saying that everyone fired or stigmatized for speech was treated justly.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The threat to free speech, beyond ‘cancel culture’]

Before going any further, I’ll lay my cards on the table. Although I dislike the term cancel culture because of its vagueness and potential for misinterpretation, I tend to think that “cancel culture” is a problem, by which I mean:

Like former President Barack Obama, I fret about a puritanical streak in U.S. politics that condemns others too often and leaves too little room for forgiving them. In my view, Margaret Atwood, Cornel West, Deirdre McCloskey, and my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams—among many other authors who signed the controversial 2020 Harper’s Magazine letter on free expression—were right to lament waning “norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” Like the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I suspect that speech taboos on university campuses are undermining teaching and scholarship. And like the New York Times editorial board, I worry that some Americans are withdrawing from public discourse because they so frequently see others personally attacked, capriciously punished, or unjustly shamed by digital mobs who reject liberal speech values.

Inevitably, fair societies impose social sanctions on some bad behaviors. But fair societies also levy such sanctions in ways that the average citizen understands and accepts. They frown on arbitrary or excessive sanctions. And they reserve the most extreme extralegal punishments, such as public shaming, shunning, or depriving people of their livelihood, for extreme cases. If everyone were more specific, people who come down on opposite sides of the abstract, 30,000-foot debate over cancel culture might find some agreement about concrete cases.

To illustrate how greater specificity could keep the two sides of the debate from talking past each other, consider a 2021 Mother Jones article with the headline “Roxane Gay Says Cancel Culture Does Not Exist.” Indeed, that’s precisely what Gay, a best-selling feminist author, tells her interviewer: Cancel culture, she says, “is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior and when their faves experience consequences. I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake—and we all do, by the way—there should be consequences.”

Yet in the next breath, Gay seems to acknowledge that punishments are not being meted out fairly: “The problem is that we haven’t figured out what consequences should be,” she says. “So it’s all or nothing. Either there are no consequences, or people lose their jobs, or other sort of sweeping grand gestures that don’t actually solve the problem at hand.”

The interviewer’s next question was about the podcast Reply All, which had reported on allegations of unjust workplace dynamics at the magazine Bon Appétit but canceled the series before it was finished, because similar accusations arose against Reply All’s own host. “I think it’s a mistake,” Gay declared. “I understand that the reporting is not finished on the final two episodes. But this is not the Mona Lisa. Somebody can finish these stories. I think the Bon Appétit story is interesting. And it’s typical. And it deserves to be told.

As it turns out, Gay and I agree that a journalistic institution imposed a wrongheaded “consequence.” Its decision makers solved no problems while stymieing a valid inquiry into a worthy subject.

That’s more common ground than one would expect from the headline of the Mother Jones article. In the same spirit, I agree that, absent a rigorous definition of cancel culture, bad actors can exploit any ambiguity to deflect legitimate criticism of their conduct.

“Why should we care about having a serious discussion about defining cancel culture?” asks the attorney Ken White, who is deeply skeptical of the term. “We should because simply complaining about it in the abstract, without attempts to define it, without actionable responses, and without taking the rights of ‘cancellers’ doesn’t ease the culture war. It inflames it.” He’s right.

[Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture]

That said, the most incisive critics of cancel culture have specifically defined when a line is crossed, as they see it, from vigorous public disagreement with someone’s views to misguided attempts to stifle their expression. The free-speech activist Greg Lukianoff defines cancel culture as “the measurable uptick, since roughly 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is—or would be—protected by the First Amendment.” In the higher-education sector, which Lukianoff tracks closely, he and Komi T. German note:

Since 2015, we documented 563 attempts (345 from the left, 202 from the right, 16 from neither) to get scholars canceled. Two thirds (362 incidents; 64 percent) of these cancellation attempts were successful, resulting in some form of professional sanction leveled at the scholar, including over one-fifth (117 incidents; 21 percent) resulting in termination … In 2001, the idea of one tenured professor being fired for protected speech seemed impossible, yet since 2015 there have been 30.

The author Jonathan Rauch offers a list of cancel-culture tells, which include “Are people denouncing you to your employer, your professional groups or your social connections?” “Is the tone of the discourse ad hominem, repetitive, ritualistic, posturing, accusatory, outraged?” “Are [campaigners] claiming that allowing you to be heard is violence against them or makes them unsafe?” The writer Wesley Yang has published videos, tweets, and essays fleshing out his theory that “cancel culture” is how activists pursue “the politicization of everyday life, the rule of didacticism in art, and the installation through coercive means of a dysfunctional new moral system by a tiny and unaccountable elite.”

Have any of the critics who dismiss cancel-culture concerns made a commensurate attempt to flesh out which punitive social norms are desirable, to define “accountability,” or to specify when it is warranted?

Americans will never achieve consensus about exactly which behaviors are beyond the pale—or what should happen to those who violate accepted norms. But even contested yet clearly understood rules (like the comedian George Carlin’s famous seven words you couldn’t say on TV) are better, if adopted provisionally by institutions or consistently adhered to in public discourse, than an alternative in which taboo lines are so murky that all manner of adjacent speech is chilled and many people refrain from speaking publicly at all for fear of unwittingly transgressing.

In some cases, the standards are kept vague because more specific ones would be indefensible. If you want to know which faction is abusing its relative power in a given sphere of society, ask who sees no problem with opaque taboos versus who is worried that they will unduly stifle speech.

In states solidly controlled by Republicans, for example, populist-right legislators want to punish certain categories of speech related to race or sex, likely chilling some expression that they could not persuade majorities to ban specifically, and progressive educators are noticing that vague and malleable standards guarantee such speech-dampening excesses. At Ivy League universities, progressive faculty members and DEI administrators are the ones pushing to punish certain kinds of speech related to race or sex, in many cases launching investigations into poorly defined transgressions, and centrist liberals and conservatives are the ones pointing out the danger of vague and malleable standards.

When any faction with power fails to clarify which statements and behaviors it would punish (as opposed to merely criticize) if given the chance, its members might like the fact that they are chilling the speech of their culture-war antagonists. A dearth of clarity is hugely useful for wielding social control. It leaves everyone guessing. But a self-governing people shouldn’t have to guess at what speech is forbidden and what’s allowed.