At the end of the first episode of Harry & Meghan—the five-and-a-half-hour exploration into the tender center of everlasting love; rat-bastard English people and the nasty things they get up to; heady, “Goodbye to You” defection from the British Royal Family; and the reality-show-within-a-reality-show miniseries Fifteen Million Dollar Listing—I informed my husband that henceforth he should call me “C” and I would call him “R.” This would put us in league with the glamorous young couple, and also allow us to imagine that we are characters in a Victorian novel whose names must never be revealed, not even to each other.

This project was immediately undermined, because it is just about impossible to impose a new nickname on someone you’ve known intimately for three decades, and with whom—even in the early years, back in the rent-controlled apartment with your big dreams and your red wine—you have never achieved even an ounce of the “Band on the Run”/Sentence Finishing/Pillow Talk Spectacular of the famous couple. These kids are so in love that absolutely any obstacle—bad press, frosty English sister-in-law, mean American half sister-in-law, disappointing fathers, paparazzo in a boat—only makes their love more passionate, their need to review their wedding videos and photo albums more urgent.

I had settled in to watch Episode 2 when R said that he’d rather watch hockey highlights, a preference that produced in me a stab of the kind of minor, familiar disappointment that—stab by stab, year by year—amounts to a strong and unbreakable union. In this way, Harry & Meghan, though it depicts a couple married for only four years, is a statement on marriage itself: Isn’t the institution, at its essence, a union between two people making compromises and trying to avoid their in-laws?

Ultimately, however, this is a series shaped around a single question: Can these two titled but underappreciated lovebirds transcend their bad luck and learn to find happiness in a nine-bedroom mansion located in the most exquisitely beautiful place in the world?

This is a story about resilience.

The very first scene of this Russian novel takes place at Heathrow Airport and consists of a clearly careworn Harry looking into his laptop or cellphone—the couple have been advised by “a friend” to keep a video diary, because “one day it will make sense,” and also (presumably) because B-roll doesn’t grow on trees—and telling us, “We’re here.” Before you can ask yourself where, exactly, they are (a Starbucks in Terminal 5? A laptop-charging power pole in Terminal 3?) a chyron solemnly informs you that Harry is speaking from inside the WINDSOR SUITE, LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT.

Let this be a reminder that whatever you or I think of as the better thing (the first-class lounge, the ramekin of warm nuts in business class, Boarding Group A) is merely a token in a game that the truly rich would never play. The Windsor Suite comprises eight “private lounges,” in which the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the traveler come true, starting at $4,000 for two hours. It’s the bottle service of Departures.

You haven’t realized just how vile air travel has become and how deeply you have been demoralized by it until you’ve imagined what it would be like to be greeted at the curb by a doorman, whisked into a private elevator, and delivered into the capable hands of your own butler, who will be just a bell cord away to answer your every call.

This, then, will be the ongoing challenge of watching (and presumably making) Harry & Meghan: The show needs to provide a compelling enough account of their emotional injuries that we are moved by them, while also luxuriating in the unimaginable opulence in which the couple nursed their wounds. It’s been done before: Wuthering Heights; Harlequin romance novels; all 22 seasons of Kardashian content. We’ve all had our problems, but have we had them in the rolling hills and designer shopping malls of Calabasas? The poor little rich girl is a perennial. But watching Meghan Markle sitting in a grand living room while bravely explaining that as a senior royal she wore muted colors so as not to upstage anyone could try the patience of Malala. (The couple was interviewed inside someone else’s Montecito pleasure dome, now on the market for $33.5 million, presumably because they’re determined to safeguard their … privacy. Or could it be that their own $15 million spread is too down-market for the dream to endure?)

We will be introduced to a few themes in this 330-minute (plus hockey highlights) presentation, the first of which concerns what was apparently a shock to Meghan and an oversight of Harry’s: the overt racism that lingers among members of European royalty who live in castles and whose exalted status depends on convincing a populace that fairy tales are real.

At Meghan’s first Christmas lunch (an annual tradition in which the extended Royal Family gets together at Buckingham Palace before the seniors decamp for Sandringham), Princess Michael of Kent arrived wearing a white coat, on the lapel of which was affixed a large brooch, depicting a Black man wearing a golden turban, and decorated in colored gemstones. The figure was a “Blackamoor,” portrayed in a historical style celebrating the glory days of colonialism and combining exotica with the perennial theme of ownership: of the man, the continent, the gold, the gems.

Why in God’s name would this woman wear this ornament to an event where Meghan Markle was being introduced around? Let me remind you that Princess Michael of Kent is the daughter of a literal Nazi, and has spent years making viciously racist comments (“The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they do their children”) and then offering insulting “apologies” for them. But please don’t call her a racist, because she feels that as “a knife through the heart.” She has traveled to Africa and described in a TV interview her “adventure with these absolutely adorable, special people … I really love these people.” Moreover, “I even pretended years ago to be an African, a half-caste African, but because of my light eyes, I did not get away with it. But I dyed my hair black.” The apology for the jewelry is in a class of its own: “The brooch was a gift and had been worn many times before. Princess Michael is very sorry and distressed that it has caused offense.” In other words, everyone’s been cool about it except Meghan Markle, and this whole episode has victimized Princess Michael, who is now enduring distress.

Anyone can find themselves related to a racist, and the standard method of dealing with this fact is simplicity itself: You disavow them, you shun them, you block their phone number, and if anyone asks about them, you tell the truth. That’s not what the Windsors have done. Princess Michael lives in a grand apartment in Kensington Palace (owned by King Charles, on behalf of the nation), where, at various times, she has been neighbor to William and Kate, Princess Eugenie, and—for half a decade—Harry himself, who lived in a cottage on the palace grounds.

God knows Harry himself hasn’t been perfect. He dressed up as a Nazi (specifically as a member of the Afrika Korps—you know, Rommel and all that) for a costume party when he was 20, and he tells us during the show that it was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. But, he says earnestly, he atoned by meeting with the chief rabbi in London and traveling to Berlin to talk with a Holocaust survivor, which is apparently the Windsor Suite version of doing the work. What’s going on in that family that you need to have some champagne and me-time in Heathrow VIP and fly to Germany to learn that Nazis = Bad? Currently, Harry’s immersed in a wholehearted effort to unpack his “unconscious bias,” but that could be an endless enterprise, given the complex history of his own family.

This is the incoherence of the couple’s position. They had wanted to carve out a “progressive new role” for themselves within the Royal Family, a role they had seen as including more outreach to the Commonwealth nations, in particular the ones (principally in Africa and the Caribbean) in which the majority population consists of nonwhite people. But what could possibly be progressive about representing the crown—the entity, more or less, that perfected the concept of empire—to these countries?

In the other corner: M’s family.

As she has throughout this courtship and marriage, Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, remains a class act. In her interviews for the series, she shows grace and restraint, and an absolute determination not to sully herself or her daughter with the antics of either her ex-husband’s family or Harry’s family—two groups that seemed equally matched. You can clearly sense that having her daughter and grandchildren safely back in California, barely two hours’ drive from her home in L.A., is a tremendous comfort to her.

Meghan’s father—and the aforementioned half sister, Samantha, from his first marriage—turn out to be spectacular characters, an accurate portrait of whom would require the combined talents of William Faulkner, J. D. Vance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. The half sister turns out to be genuinely frightening, having once left Florida to show up uninvited at Kensington Palace in order to “deliver a letter” and later pitching a book on “the evolution of my biracial lens.” (She’s white, her parents are white, whatever biracial lens she possesses has been trained on her biracial half sister and the best way to make her miserable.)

The salve for having been raised among these various characters has been the intense and world-historical level of romantic love that bonds our principals and that provides the through line of our five and a half hours in their company. Have you ever been to one of those weddings where the bride and groom—although well into their 30s—each deliver a speech that includes so many cute and romantic and “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” moments that you don’t know where to look and your face becomes a rictus of sympathetic embarrassment for the couple, and people start kicking you under the table?

Harry & Meghan is the eternal return of that experience.

The things the British tabloids had to say about Meghan’s race are beyond the pale, and that this kind of coverage sells papers in the U.K. was reason enough for Harry to take his wife and baby and get the hell out of there. The soundness of this decision was proved a few weeks ago, when The Sun published a column by a popular television commentator named Jeremy Clarkson: “I hate her on a cellular level. At night I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

When I read that, I felt a stab of fealty and protectiveness more powerful than anything evoked by Harry & Meghan. The Sun withdrew the column and apologized for it after 20,000 complaints—but someone accepted it, someone approved it, someone published it online, and any number of people must have known that in addition to the people the column angered, there would be plenty of people who agreed with it. Who would like this kind of filth? Clarkson spells it out for us: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.” No kidding, old man.

The very top of the column set the tone. It said that everyone had known that Harry (whom Clarkson referred to as “Harold Markle”) was a “slightly dim” but fun-loving fellow, and Meghan had “obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.”

And there it is: The idea that women will use whatever wiles they have to castrate a real man and turn him into a eunuch who lives to serve her, no matter how much humiliation she serves up. People like Clarkson—and Piers Morgan, and so many other men of their generation—are apparently experts on the treachery of women. Many are also devotees of the notion that masculinity is best defined by military service, the ultimate test of manhood. Clarkson has made popular television documentaries about great battles of the Second World War, and apparently that, too, is an act of manhood. Except that it’s not.

Here’s the truth: Harry served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, the second as an Apache helicopter pilot—once apparently helping rescue American servicemen under Taliban fire—and fought with great valor, very much in the shit. He was held in the affectionate, ball-breaking high regard of his fellow soldiers. This wasn’t Charles getting seasick in the navy, or Andrew forgetting how to sweat in the Falklands, or William assisting the Liverpool Coast Guard on civilian rescue sorties. This was war, and Harry survived it, came home with the usual psychic wounds of combat, and carried on with his life.

Harry is a grown man, he’s had a lot of experience with women (and “bedroom promises”), and he married the one he loved. When she was miserable, the way his own mother had been miserable, he didn’t do what his grotesque father had done—cheat on her, treat her like a broodmare, ignore her suffering; he moved her and his family far away. Considering that three of his grandmother’s four children got divorced, he seems to have a better idea of what constitutes marital obligation than most of his in-house role models.  

Quit while you’re ahead! you want to yell at the television screen—but they can’t. These two burn through money at a fantastic rate, and the only thing that reliably sells is their own story, which is getting pretty threadbare. It’s so familiar to us by now that we could tell it ourselves.

But we probably could never tell it the way they do, could never cast the fairy-tale spell that they can. We could never convince a vast audience that the paper moon hanging over the cardboard sea is real—if only you can believe in it.

In the first episode, we see a video diary of Meghan standing on an endless lawn, in the blue shadows of early evening, the sky beyond turning the saturated orange and pink of a color-enhanced postcard of the original California dream. She’s wearing a striped apron and a pair of gardening gloves, and she’s holding a handful of blush-colored roses. In the weary tones of Every Mom, she tells us in a near whisper, “Both the babies are down.” It’s a “nice, calm night.”

For a moment, we take it all in: the huge lawn, the sunset, the rose garden in which not a single bloom is marred by spider mites or overwatering or bad attitude. Her voice lowers to an actual whisper and here she is, the picture of a pretty wife and mother, her children sleeping and her attention turned to simple abundance: “Just picking some roses.”

Maybe you have not had the best year. But take some consolation from the fact that you did not YOLO yourself into overpaying for an unprofitable social-media platform, publicly try to wriggle out of the deal, get lawyered into ponying up, liquidate billions of dollars of stock in a down market to do so, take over a company you did not really want, shitpost your way into a revenue crisis, quit paying your bills, antagonize your super-users, wink-wink at Nazis, and decimate your staff, all the while damaging your other, more lucrative businesses. Or at least probably not, unless you are Elon Musk. Twitter’s new owner might have fared better than Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency magnate who improbably saved Musk from winning the title of Tech Fortune–Craterer of the Year. But Musk nevertheless spent 2022 lighting billions of dollars and his reputation on fire.

Musk’s behavior raises many questions, such as Why?, Why?, and Why?! And Is he going to bankrupt this thing? He looks like he is trying to: On Tuesday evening, Musk vowed to resign as CEO of Twitter “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” He and whoever is foolish enough to succeed him certainly face a challenging year ahead. The once–richest man on Earth took over a company losing $220 million a year and multiplied its losses by 10, if not more, according to one analyst’s estimate. Twitter looks likely to bleed users, advertisers, and money for the foreseeable future. But the social network is Musk’s to fund, not just run. And he’s one of the few people on the planet with essentially limitless amounts of money to lose.

[Caroline Mimbs-Nyce: This is what it looks like when Twitter falls apart]

Musk’s Twitter purchase never made much financial sense. The company’s core microblogging product has scarcely changed since its debut in the mid-aughts. Its user base has stopped expanding in the United States. Its engagement levels are declining. And the company—less than one-third the size of TikTok and one-tenth the size of Facebook, as measured by monthly active users—has turned a profit in just two of the past 10 years.

But Musk bought the platform for personal and ideological reasons, not financial ones. In the spring, he bought a large chunk of the site’s shares, promising to push Twitter to be friendlier to the political right. Shortly after that, he offered to take the company private, to turn it into “the platform for free speech around the globe,” he wrote in a letter to its then-chair, by which he seems to have meant the platform for anti-Semitism, racism, and white-nationalist incitement. Plus, Musk is an impulsive rich dude who just really, really loves to post: suggesting we nuke Mars, defaming a hero who saved a bunch of schoolkids, making “boner” jokes at Bill Gates’s expense, getting in a fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission by falsely claiming he had “secured” funding to take Tesla private at—deep breath—$420 a share.

In Musk, idiosyncratic ends had endless means. And in April, he offered to buy Twitter at—inhale again—$54.20 a share, significantly higher than its share price at the time. Twitter’s executives naturally took the offer. The price tag might have been hefty, but the plan was a straightforward one: Get control of Twitter. Narrow its losses. Expand its revenue base. Make the company profitable. Hold it, sell it, or, most likely, have it go public again. Make bank.

On the cost side, Musk did trim the budget, if as erratically as possible. He purged more than half of the company’s workforce, firing many employees outright and asking those remaining to sign up for an “extremely hardcore” cultural reset. This produced “significant savings,” Drew Pascarella, who teaches corporate finance to M.B.A. students at Cornell, told me, adding that Musk also seems to have positioned the company to renegotiate its rent and other contracts.

But Musk has slashed Twitter’s income as erratically as possible too. Nearly all of the social network’s revenue comes from advertisements. Numerous deep-pocketed companies—Chevrolet, Ford, Jeep, BlackRock, Citigroup, Chanel, Nestl​​é, Coca-Cola, Merck, Verizon, Wells Fargo, the list goes on and on—have pulled or paused advertising in the past two months. Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told me he estimated that Musk’s takeover has cost the company as much as $4 billion. “That’s a gut punch,” Ives said.

Those companies have stopped putting ads on the site, I would note, because of Musk. “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers,” Musk himself wrote on Twitter. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.” He also insisted that hate speech has declined during his tenure. But independent researchers have found the opposite. After his takeover, use of the N-word increased by 202 percent; the use of homophobic, misogynist, and transphobic slurs went up at double-digit rates; the use of the slur groomer has increased exponentially. Coca-Cola does not want to put its ads next to vile terminology and anti-Semitic Pepe memes, including ones Musk himself is posting.

[Tom Nichols: The childish drama of Elon Musk]

Plus, Musk loaded Twitter up with debt—some $13 billion of it—when he acquired it via a leveraged buyout. The company is going to need to make loan payments, roughly $1 billion a year, even if it is running in the red. It has options. Musk could write the checks; he is “unfathomably wealthy,” Pascarella told me. “While most of his wealth is not liquid, I have no reason to believe he won’t be able to come up with several billion dollars of cash if need be.” Musk could buy the debt from the company’s creditors. He could raise new equity investment, something he seems to be trying to do already. Or, in an extreme case, Twitter could go bankrupt.

Right now Musk is using “Tesla stock as his personal ATM machine to fund the losses from Twitter,” Ives noted. But his behavior has cratered Tesla’s stock, which has dropped 42 percent in the past six months. (By comparison, shares in Toyota are down 13 percent and Ford’s stock is flat.) If Tesla becomes even more distressed, that could be a problem; the company’s shareholders are uneasy and rightly angry. A broader economic downturn could hurt the carmaker and the social network alike. Perhaps the most personally salient risk for Musk is that he could end up losing control of Tesla.  

Musk keeps personally funding this thing that he bought, hates, and is ruining is not exactly a happy financial equilibrium. Some adult needs to come in to return the social network to that general plan: keep it running, cut losses, and get it ready to go public again several years down the road. Good luck to whoever is foolish enough to want to do that.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

I’ll be back tomorrow to tell you about some of the funniest things that happened in politics this year. Today, though, I would like to offer a break from current events. Sorry in advance, skiers. I hope you are too busy skiing to read this newsletter.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The homeownership society was a mistake. Maybe consider not kissing that baby. Prosecuting Trump runs into some serious First Amendment troubles.

It’s that time of year again. The time when skiing permeates the culture. Big-box retailers start selling ultrasoft pajama bottoms decorated with tiny skiers. The holiday rom-coms on Netflix seem to all involve meet-cutes at fancy ski resorts in cozy mountain villages. Your friends who moved to Colorado to “find themselves”? They’re hitting the slopes with their expensive season passes.

And this year, my boyfriend would like to join them. He has a milestone birthday soon, he reminds me, and to celebrate, why not take a big ski trip with all of our friends? Because, I reply, I would rather be at home doing literally anything else.

The thing about skiing is, I hate it.

First: getting there. You drive two hours to get up to the mountains, maybe more. You sit in traffic inside your SUV packed with gear, alongside all of the other cars full of people who are also going skiing today. You notice that many of these cars idling in traffic have bumper stickers that say things like CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL and THERE IS NO PLANET B. You want to laugh at this, but you’re too mad about having to ski.

Second: arriving. You put on so many layers of clothing that you are warm but unrecognizable. You trudge up to the lodge and fork over a wad of cash: $150 for the day, not including the $60 you already spent to rent an enormous pair of boots, skis, and sticks. (“It’s cheaper if you buy that stuff!” you might say. “Never!” I might reply.) You struggle with the buckles on your boots. Are they supposed to feel like that? Your weird big toe already hurts.

Third: skiing. You actually have to do it now. The thing they don’t tell you before you ski for the first time is that other skiers do not care that it’s your first time. They will ski right at you and weave around you condescendingly. Sometimes they are toddlers, and this is even more upsetting. Other times they are snowboarders, and you simply have to trust that they won’t knock you over. That’s right, you are entrusting your life to snowboarders.

The first time I ever skied (Virginia), I was 27 years old, and I spent most of the day weeping. The bunny slope was solid ice. I’d ski an inch, slam to the ground, and lie there for a while, because I have no upper-body strength. Once, I did the splits so hard that I pulled a muscle in my groin. My boyfriend laughed a little, which made the pain worse. I spent a lot of time at the ski lodge, eating a sandwich I’d brought from home because ski-lodge food is expensive.

The second time I skied (Utah), I was 28, and I rode a conveyor belt to the top of the bunny slope with a group of actual children. That part was fun, I’ll admit. The ski lift that I tried later was not. The view is beautiful from up there. But when I collapsed at the end, the operator raised her eyebrows. “Not a great place to stop,” she said, helpfully.

By the end of that day, I was able to descend the bunny slope without falling. It was a good feeling, a satisfying feeling. But was it worth it? No.

Because winter is for thick socks and murder mysteries and baked-potato soup. Winter is for smutty novels and sipping cocoa on the couch. It is not for skiing. If I ever yearn to feel a strong, cold wind in my face, I’ll ride my bike downhill with wet hair. Whenever I get an urge to pay too much for mediocre fries, I’ll walk to Shake Shack.

Aprés-ski? More like I pray never to have to ski again.

Related:

Why was I suddenly bad at skiing? How skiing went from the Alps to the masses Today’s News The House Ways and Means Committee is voting on whether to release Donald Trump’s tax returns. A 6.4-magnitude earthquake hit Northern California early today, leaving at least two people dead and 11 injured, and more than 70,000 people without power. Wells Fargo was ordered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to pay $3.7 billion to settle charges of consumer-law violations. Dispatches I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on her writing life over the past year and looks ahead to 2023. Brooklyn, Everywhere: “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to stay myself, even as I move further away from the experiences that shaped me as a person,” Xochitl Gonzalez writes. Famous People: Kaitlyn Tiffany and Lizzie Plaugic share the second installment of their series on a Sideways-themed weekend in California.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read (Getty; The Atlantic)

What It Feels Like When Fascism Starts

By Gal Beckerman

Among the many Holocaust anecdotes I heard again and again as a child—my grandparents were the kind of survivors who liked to talk—certain stories took on the force of fables. And none was more common than the tale of the brother who stayed and the brother who left. Different versions of this basic narrative abounded, set in 1933, in 1938, in 1941. One brother couldn’t bear to abandon his small shop or his parents or his homeland, while another brother packed a suitcase at the first inkling of danger and set off toward the French border or over the North Sea or into Soviet territory. The more impetuous one lives. That was the takeaway. When the social and political barometric pressure begins to drop, when you can feel that tingling: Leave.

Even recounted by survivors, maybe especially so, the simple story of a threshold, in or out, always seemed too shaped by retrospect. A decision like that—ethical, national, personal—must have been grueling and not at all obvious. How many of the people who swore they would leave after Donald Trump was elected, fearing the same collapse of democratic norms that the Nazis portended, actually did? Not so many. Identifying that point at which all is lost is not so easy.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

An alternative to overspending on presents We haven’t seen the worst of fake news. The photographer undoing the myth of Appalachia Culture Break (A24; The Atlantic)

Read. The French novelist Marguerite Duras’s second novel, The Easy Life, which has been recently translated into English, shows the thrill of reading a celebrated writer’s early work.

Watch. The Eternal Daughter (in theaters and available to rent on multiple platforms) is both gentle and suffused with the kind of English tension that its director, Joanna Hogg, specializes in.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Thank you for being so patient during my screed about skiing. If you’re looking for something a bit more positive, I’d like to recommend this lovely article from our friends at The Washington Post about a dog named Princess Fiona who has a chronic illness that gives her a belly like a balloon. Princess Fiona spent 119 days at an animal shelter waiting for a family until, finally, she met a little girl who loved her. Did Fiona find a home for the holidays? Read it to find out!

— Elaine

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Among the many Holocaust anecdotes I heard again and again as a child—my grandparents were the kind of survivors who liked to talk—certain stories took on the force of fables. And none was more common than the tale of the brother who stayed and the brother who left. Different versions of this basic narrative abounded, set in 1933, in 1938, in 1941. One brother couldn’t bear to abandon his small shop or his parents or his homeland, while another brother packed a suitcase at the first inkling of danger and set off toward the French border or over the North Sea or into Soviet territory. The more impetuous one lives. That was the takeaway. When the social and political barometric pressure begins to drop, when you can feel that tingling: Leave.

Even recounted by survivors, maybe especially so, the simple story of a threshold, in or out, always seemed too shaped by retrospect. A decision like that—ethical, national, personal—must have been grueling and not at all obvious. How many of the people who swore they would leave after Donald Trump was elected, fearing the same collapse of democratic norms that the Nazis portended, actually did? Not so many. Identifying that point at which all is lost is not so easy.

This existential dilemma is Lion Feuchtwanger’s abiding concern in The Oppermanns, a long-forgotten masterpiece published in 1933 and recently reissued with a revised translation by the novelist Joshua Cohen. It is a book written in real time—written, that is, right on that threshold. Feuchtwanger was one of the most popular German writers of his generation, and he meant for this family saga (think of a high-speed Buddenbrooks) to open the eyes of those blind to Hitler’s full intent. It offers something more, though, almost in spite of itself. The novel is an emotional artifact, a remnant of a world sick with foreboding, incredulity, creeping fear, and—this may feel most familiar to us today—the impossibility of gauging whether a society is really at the breaking point.

In The Oppermanns, the members of one German Jewish family come to realize, each at a different pace, that they are no longer welcome in the country they have come to think of as home. Showing us this dawning, its varying velocity and consequences, is Feuchtwanger’s project. The best-selling writer of popular historical fiction was already living in exile in the south of France by the spring of 1933, when he began writing this book. The Nazis had ransacked his personal library. His own work was being burned in massive bonfires. And his German citizenship had been stripped. It was at this moment that he cast back just a few months to begin his story of the Oppermann siblings, describing their fate over the course of nearly a year, from November of 1932, just before Hitler was appointed chancellor, through his quick consolidation of all power, and ending in the summer of 1933 with the family “scattered to all the eight winds.”

[Read: Why democracies are so slow to respond to evil]

Feuchtwanger endows his titular clan with a 19th-century forebear, Immanuel Oppermann, a paragon of successful assimilation who built a well-loved business producing affordable, good-quality furniture for the German middle class. His portrait serves as the firm’s logo, a testament to a man who made “the emancipation of the German Jew a fact, not a mere printed paragraph.” His four grandchildren have inherited this sense of ease in German society. Martin is the serious-minded steward of the company. Gustav is a self-satisfied intellectual and playboy, whose passion project is a biography of the German philosopher Gotthold Lessing. Edgar is an internationally recognized throat specialist. And Klara, though mostly absent from the book, is married to Jacques Lavendel, an outspoken Eastern European Jew who has remade himself in Berlin through his connections to the family. (We learn of a fourth brother, Ludwig, who was killed as a soldier in World War I—the ultimate tribute to fatherland.)

When we meet them, staying or going is not the siblings’ immediate concern. They are not there yet. They confront a different choice: maintaining dignity versus heeding common sense. These two phrases, dignity and common sense, echo throughout the book, and Feuchtwanger’s characters are troubled, in this moment of emergency, by the tension between these imperatives: Do you follow where your ethics and ego lead, or do you pay attention instead to the sounds of breaking glass outside, the “barbarism,” as the Oppermanns describe it, and recognize that it cannot be overcome by one person, let alone by a Jew?

Martin, for whom dignity is “a quality that was so dear to his own heart,” is given one of the first tests. When the newly empowered Nazis begin moving toward the “Aryanization” of all Jewish businesses, his advisers, including his brother-in-law, Lavendel, tell him to come to an agreement with a competing furniture firm’s owner, Heinrich Wels, and allow for an orderly takeover before the family is dispossessed of everything. Martin won’t do it. He won’t abase himself in front of Wels, who is very much enjoying his sudden advantage.

Common sense here dovetails with historical sense, and it’s left to Lavendel, the fatalistic Eastern European, to make the argument (and a Jewish joke of sorts), telling a totemic story about a town: “Grosnowice changed masters seventeen times. Seven times the changes brought pogroms with them. Three times they seized a certain Chayim Leibelschitz and told him: ‘Now we are going to hang you.’ Everyone said to him, ‘Be sensible, Chayim, Leave Grosnowice.’ He did not leave. They seized him a fourth time and again they did not hang him. But they did shoot him.”

Eventually, Martin relents. Wels demands that he come visit him, makes Martin wait 40 minutes, and then finally appears dressed in a storm-trooper uniform. Martin is then denied an honorific (“he would not be Herr Oppermann any longer”) and at first even a chair, a hint of what will come in the book’s last act, when he finds himself forced to stand in a dank prison basement for hours as a form of torture. This, though, is the first premonition of dehumanization. Martin’s belief in his individual value, in his everlasting, exalted place in Berlin, is no match for the societal forces shaping the moment. “I let you wait a long time, Oppermann,” Wels tells Martin. “A matter of politics. As you know, Oppermann, politics are now the first consideration.”

Feuchtwanger ratchets up the moral intensity for Martin’s 17-year-old son, Berthold. A Nazi has recently become his instructor and informed him that the report the young man had been planning to deliver to the class—“Humanism and the Twentieth Century”—won’t do. The Nazi forbids him “on principle” from taking on such “abstract subjects.” Instead, he switches Berthold’s topic to Arminius, an ancient tribal leader who triumphed in battle over the Romans and is heralded as a proto-German nationalist. From “Humanism” to “What can we learn today from Arminius the German?”: Feuchtwanger here, as in many other places, is far from subtle.

Berthold’s talk goes awry when he begins to raise a few possible objections as to Arminius’s lasting significance. From the back of the classroom, the glowering Nazi instructor starts shouting, “Who do you think you are, young man? What sort of people do you suppose you have sitting here before you? Here, in the presence of Germans, in this time of German need, you dare to characterize the tremendous act that stands at the beginning of German history as useless and devoid of meaning?” To this harangue, Berthold answers, “I am a good German, Herr Senior Master. I am as good a German as you are.” A battle of wills ensues, with the Nazi demanding a public apology from Berthold if he wants to avoid expulsion, and Berthold, like his father, standing on principle, defending his dignity.

Berthold can’t understand what he did wrong. He fails to see that national identity and power matter more than intellectual inquiry in Nazi Germany. The greatest injury to his sense of dignity is the notion that he must lie. Or, more precisely, that he must take back something he said in his lecture that was irrefutably true—that Arminius’s resistance to the Roman legions, the source of the nationalists’ pride, made hardly a dent on the empire. The primacy of lying, its role as the building block for this new form of German-ness, is something that he, and the other Oppermanns, simply can’t handle. “Was it un-German to tell the truth?” he asks himself.

But Berthold, unlike his father, does not abandon his dignity for common sense. On the evening before he must publicly apologize in front of the entire school, he swallows a fatal handful of sleeping pills—the hinge moment of the novel. On top of the manuscript of his lecture, Berthold leaves behind a short note: “There is nothing to explain, nothing to add, nothing to leave out. Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no.” The date is March 1, 1933, one day after Hitler’s Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspends civil liberties and due process of law. In a few weeks, the Dachau concentration camp will open.

The fact that Feuchtwanger could write with such clarity about history-altering events that had not yet been fully digested is astonishing. We still don’t have the 9/11 masterpiece or the pandemic novel to silence all other pandemic novels. The book has its share of heavy-handedness, to be sure: the busts of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, standing in for reason and brute power, respectively, that sit in opposite corners of a schoolmaster’s office; a stain on the wall of one character’s apartment that grows as his situation worsens. Feuchtwanger intended his book to be a morality tale, a work of proselytizing by the brother who left.

But what pulses through this story of the Oppermanns is the emotion. Feuchtwanger, sitting in exile, was grieving and angry. He was panicked. Not enough people were seeing just how corrosive this confusion of truth and lies could be, how harmful it was for the most vulnerable in society, who were liable to be turned into scapegoats for almost anything. Hannah Arendt elaborated on these insights in The Origins of Totalitarianism 18 years later, after Auschwitz, but Feuchtwanger just felt them. He wants to provide a structure, a container for the story of madness that he’s telling, but what leaks out is the madness itself, the experience of men enduring the same pain and sorrow that he is.

[Read: Monuments to the unthinkable]

The varied reactions to what feels, in 1933, like a rupture that might lead to worse or might not, will be recognizable to readers of the reissue in 2022. Some of the first pages are filled with laughter at these new contenders for power, at just how “ridiculous” they are, how “vulgar.” Certainly they are no match for the civilizing force of German culture and Bildung. Gustav Oppermann mocks the terrible German of Mein Kampf. The crudeness of Hitler and his followers seems enough to strangle National Socialism in its cradle. Mockery leads to incredulity: How can people not see what’s in front of their noses?

One by one, each sibling is confronted with a reality that feels as determined as a natural disaster, in which the volume of lies being hurled against them, and against Jews in general, becomes impossible to even begin to refute. “It was an earthquake, one of those great upheavals of concentrated, fathomless, worldwide stupidity,” Feuchtwanger writes at the moment of no return. “Pitted against such an elemental force, the strength and wisdom of the individual was useless.”

Once in exile, they still must contend with how hard it is for Germans to acknowledge exactly what is happening. When Gustav’s girlfriend, Anna, visits him in the south of France, where he (like Feuchtwanger) is taking refuge, he tries to impress upon her that the Germany they knew is slipping away. A national boycott of Jewish businesses has just taken place. But she can’t, or won’t, absorb this. “One national government had given place to another, which was still more nationalist,” is how Feuchtwanger captures Anna’s point of view. “That boycott was, of course, an atrocious thing and so was the book burning. It was disgusting to read the papers and disgusting to hear the row the Nationalists made. But who took that seriously? As a matter of fact, life was going on just the same as before.” Gustav doesn’t even blame her too harshly. This self-deception is “the only way to protect oneself; even honest, right-thinking people did it, so as not to lose their very foundations, their homeland.”

We do get a glimpse of the horror to come, the aftershock upon aftershock of that earthquake: Gustav, for example, sneaks back into Germany under an assumed name to confirm the facts in a dossier passed on to him detailing pogroms and other acts of local violence, and is arrested and taken to a concentration camp, where he is tortured before being released. But in 1933, deracination seems to be as bad an outcome as Feuchtwanger can imagine for Germany’s Jews. Occasionally, I’d be reminded of how little, for all his worry, he could really guess about what would follow. A minor character, upset that the new anti-Jewish sentiment might mean the loss of his job and his apartment, thinks to himself, “If the rest of his life were to go on as it was at present, one might just as well turn on the gas right away.” I almost dropped the book.

Feuchtwanger himself had a harrowing escape from Europe. When Germany and France went to war in 1939, he was detained, eventually released after his publisher paid a bribe, then detained again. He managed to break out of barracks in Nîmes with the aid of his wife, and he became one of the many German Jewish artists and intellectuals (including Arendt) whom the journalist Varian Fry helped flee to the United States. Feuchtwanger settled into his unlikely edenic exile in Los Angeles alongside Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. There, he continued writing novels at a steady pace until his death in 1958.

It’s hard to know how much to relate a book like The Oppermanns to our present reality. The same retrospective knowledge that can produce needed foresight and activism can also lead to overreaction, panic, and distraction. Has it ever really been that useful to compare Trump to Hitler? Sometimes yes, but oftentimes no. Feuchtwanger himself doesn’t seem to be offering a template for how democracy dies. If anything, in his novel, templates shatter easily and quickly. For all the lessons he is trying to impart in 1933, there is no clearer answer about when exactly it’s time to go, when holding on to dignity becomes self-indulgent and dangerous. What remains instead is a deep sense of that rumbling “elemental force,” and the impossible choices should you find yourself stuck in its path.

Only the second Jew to play for Germany, Hirsch broke records and fought in WWI for a country that would kill him.

Could anyone, once thrust into a war zone, kill innocents and commit atrocities?

For decades, experts have debated why combatants—including seemingly normal people who once worked standard jobs and love their family back home—are capable of war crimes. The question is one of profound importance; scholars estimate that 80 million to 200 million people have been victims of mass killings since the beginning of the 20th century. In Ukraine, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has recorded at least 15,246 civilian casualties since Russia invaded in February, though the true figure is likely much higher. At least 390 children have been killed. In some areas, like Bucha, there is strong evidence that Russian troops tortured, raped, and mutilated civilians.

According to a new book by Jonathan Leader Maynard, an expert on mass killings at King’s College London, ordinary people in any society can commit atrocities if they fall under the sway of certain beliefs about the wars they are fighting. They are not unusually evil. “They’re within the normal ambit of human psychology,” Leader Maynard told me, “and they’re guided by a relatively normal set of human motivations.”

This means that to prevent more mass atrocities in Ukraine and elsewhere, we need to properly understand how ideology motivates people to perform extreme acts of violence.

[Andrew Exum: The Russian military has descended into inhumanity]

Leader Maynard points to three theories commonly used to explain mass killings and war atrocities. But all three can be debunked.

The first explanation is what I call the Broken Brains hypothesis. This is the notion that the sadism of torturing innocents or committing genocide makes sense only if the perpetrators have abnormal brains, or even are psychopaths. Experts turned to the Broken Brains theory when trying to understand the Nazis. An array of psychiatrists closely examined and interviewed the Nuremberg war criminals. After one of the top Nazi perpetrators, Robert Ley, hanged himself while awaiting trial, his brain was preserved, shipped by air mail to the United States, and studied by neuropathologists, who found that he had brain damage, “a longstanding degenerative process of the frontal lobes.”

But as research continued, it became clear that Ley was an outlier, that the architects of the Holocaust likely did not have brain pathologies, and that the Nazis’ genocidal machine had so many people pulling various levers that most of them had to be neurologically normal. This was not a case of a few psychopaths, but rather of millions engaged in what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil.”

It’s possible that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is an undiagnosed psychopath, but that can’t explain the widespread barbarism throughout the war in Ukraine, especially as the Russian military fills with conscripts, ordinary Russians who have been forced into combat. There might be psychopaths within the world’s military ranks, and psychopaths might be overrepresented in positions of power. But Leader Maynard says researchers agree that those carrying out horrific violence do not, by and large, have different brains from the rest of us.

The second common explanation is what I call the Lord of the Flies hypothesis—the idea that we are all killers by nature, with an innate capacity for cruelty, and that we commit atrocities when we are on war-zone “islands” that are free from constraints and consequences. Once placed into a conflict, any of us could engage in torture.

Yet research from experts such as Rebecca Littman and Elizabeth Levy Paluck shows that most people have a hard time killing other people. Other scholars have argued that in many of the great battles of history, such as Gettysburg, an astonishing number of guns were left loaded and unused—because it’s so psychologically difficult for untrained killers to shoot human beings, even when their own life is at risk. If most people find it difficult to fire a gun at someone else, how could they electrocute them in a hole in the ground, as apparently occurred in the city of Kherson last month?

A third common explanation for mass killings and wartime atrocities is what I call the theory of Coerced Killers—the idea that evil emerges at gunpoint, that we are capable of atrocities when we feel we have no other choice. Some people do engage in horrific violence only in such circumstances, or because they fear retribution against themselves or their families. But the most rigorous analysis of historical mass violence suggests that these cases make up a tiny minority of the overall picture.

If these three explanations don’t explain mass killings generally—or help make sense of what’s happening in Ukraine—then what does? The answer, according to Leader Maynard’s extensive analysis of atrocities, is ideology. By this he does not necessarily mean the grand isms of 20th-century history, but instead simply a set of political beliefs about how the world works, or should work. Mass killings become more likely when a society engaged in warfare produces a coherent narrative about why extreme violence is desirable or at least justified for a grander strategic purpose. Ideology acts as a social glue, ensuring that the architects of the violence, the rank-and-file soldiers who carry it out, and the broader public all tolerate, or even applaud, atrocities.

Crucially, Leader Maynard finds evidence that perpetrators need not be “true believers” or hard-liners who buy into a regime’s ideological mythmaking. Instead, the existence of the ideology and its widespread acceptance in society can provide a sufficient justification for their violence.

[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine and the words that lead to mass murder]

Leader Maynard’s research points to six specific ideological factors that lead to mass killings. And I would argue that all six are present in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

1. The perpetrators must see civilians as threats, rather than innocent bystanders. Putin has painted Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, and has justified operations targeting civilians, including trying to knock out the Ukrainian energy grid.

2. The aggressors must transform the victims into perpetrators, accusing them of committing serious crimes. Russian propaganda calls Ukraine a “Nazi state.”

3. Perpetrators must strip the enemy population of any shared identity. This is why, despite some cultural and linguistic links between Russia and Ukraine, Russian state media refer to Ukraine as a fictional state and paint Ukrainian fighters as NATO puppets.

4. The aggressors must celebrate acts of extreme violence against the enemy population as virtuous patriotism. This a hallmark of the Russian propaganda that is beamed into households through the bloodthirsty nightly television “debates” among Kremlin stooges (even as the Russian government characteristically denies responsibility for atrocities in Ukraine).

5. State propaganda must present violence not as a goal in itself, but rather as part of a strategy to obtain larger goals that the broader population desires. This is why Putin speaks of how Russia’s “special military operation” will help protect Russia from future wars and keep Russians safe from an invasion.

6. Finally, violence becomes more likely when state propaganda makes it seem like there is no alternative to mass killings or war crimes. This factor has perhaps not been as explicit in the current war in Ukraine, but Russian broadcasts have suggested that Ukraine must be wiped off the map.

Given that Russia fulfills these criteria, we could see even more, and possibly more severe, violence in the future. Winning the war in Ukraine, and minimizing the number of atrocities against civilians, therefore also requires winning a war of ideology. This will be impossible to accomplish within Russia, where the media ecosystem is heavily controlled. But morale among Russian conscripts already has reportedly collapsed, so Ukraine and its allies should make every effort to pierce the bubble of Putin’s lies within the ranks of Russian troops wintering in Ukraine.

Ignoring the ideological aspect of war crimes would be easy if we could chalk up mass killings to a few psychopaths, to human nature, or to perpetrators being forced to commit unspeakable atrocities. Instead, we’re forced to confront a more disturbing reality: War crimes, torture, rape, and barbaric murders are often carried out by people who are disturbingly like ourselves. Ordinary humans, when seduced by ideologies of violence, can be extraordinarily brutal.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers, “What is the best response to anti-Semitism in America?”

Yosef responded with acid observations about the type of anti-Semitism that prompts the most media coverage:

I find it ironic that those who are the most perplexed and dismayed about any rise in anti-Semitism are those who are least Jewish. At the same time, those who are most affected by anti-Semitism are those who are most Jewish. In greater New York City, in mass shootings and daily crime, it is the Hassidim who are attacked the most. But [violent] anti-Semitism and online anti-Semitism are distinct forms. One is a stone and one is a tweet.

Tweets take place on Twitter, which is a space almost devoid of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Yet you ask me this question because of anti-Semitic tweets, not when Jews are stabbed. Stabbings of Hassidim just don’t seem to occupy the same societal headspace that right-wing lunatics do. The Jews who live outside of the Jewish world are less likely to be physically attacked because they don’t look Jewish. They notice anti-Semitism when Kanye tweets it. It is these Jews who bring anti-Semitism to your attention in its most benign form.

We do not ask for a national conversation about anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism is a fact of Jewish existence. It will always exist, in many forms, in flavors palatable to any taste in politics. From my street-level view, teens with stones have as much power as Ye or Nick Fuentes.

There are two types of anti-Semitism: One is local crime and one is national politics. We just want crimes to be prosecuted, and for mayors not to tell the police to stand back.

[Read: How should we deal with high-profile anti-Semites?]

Meredith urges a broad coalition that starts with education:

Overcoming anti-Semitism is an age-old challenge and often a matter of life or death. Christian leaders must work together with leaders of all faiths, officeholders of all parties, and prominent figures to expose the lies that underpin anti-Semitism. Public schools must educate children and teenagers about anti-Semitism in different historic periods, not just the one during World War II. It is insufficient to teach history in which Jews don’t appear until the Nazis are systematically hunting and murdering them by the millions.

Marilyn makes a shorter case for education:

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who casually compared the Holocaust with COVID mandates, seems to have gained something from her visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. If someone as offensively uninformed as she is can admit she didn't really know what the Holocaust was, then I’m sure just about anyone can learn the error of their ways.

DC urges a return to first principles:

The subhead under the title of Bari Weiss’s interview with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a quote from Abdul-Jabbar: “Black people have to know that when they mouth antisemitism, they are using the exact same kind of reasoning that white supremacists use against blacks.”

That clear-eyed observation seems to me to express a principle that we have lost sight of in our current culture wars, which is that all forms of bigotry and discrimination—even when intended as a weapon against bigotry and discrimination—make bigotry and discrimination far more acceptable across the board. I don’t think that phenomenon is limited to expressions of anti-Semitic sentiment or to Black speakers; racial and socioeconomic and ethnic-group membership have become a permissible, if not defining, factor in how some of us judge others and how we speak about them and in what we feel they are entitled to say. No group will ever be able to claim that kind of “reasoning,” as Abdul-Jabbar rightly calls it, for itself. It is a contagion, and will continue to be adopted by other groups and for other causes for as long as we tolerate it.

Anti-Semitic speech cannot be legally prohibited. But the reactions it provokes and the conversations it ignites (like the one you’ve invited) are critical weapons in opposing it. Private organizations and businesses can and should denounce and punish it in whatever way they see fit, and they have seemed to do that lately. Public figures can and should denounce it and respond to it, as Abdul-Jabbar has done, among others.

But a broader-based backlash against the unprincipled basis for these kinds of statements is needed. We can’t pick and choose the forms of bigotry we object to. We have to be all in on the principle or watch as bigoted speech becomes more widely practiced and accepted.

Glenn cautions against prejudice or differential treatment rooted in group identity:

From many, one. Identity politics is the poison at the well of democracy. For the sake of expediency and the shallow thinking of the moment, we place individuals into groups so that we need only address ideas and stereotypes rather than persons. We dehumanize by this intellectual sleight of hand.

Of course, one’s culture is significant. We would be all the poorer as a people without those unique cultural flavors mixed into our “melting pot,” a perfectly good term. If we are to be, in any meaningful sense, a people, there will have to be a melting pot. One’s culture, history, and identity belong to the self and not to the civitas.  

All the Semitic peoples are a particularly old and honored cultural contributor to our nation. We are indebted to them, and should show our great gratitude and respect by treating them exactly like one of our own and not another. Leave it to each of us individually to separate ourselves into our own unique identities and proclivities, but let us in deep respect treat one another exactly as if we were the same. No more, no less.

Errol warns against punitive censoriousness:

I say give people like Kyrie Irving and Ye the rope to hang themselves with. Punishing them for essentially saying that the Jews run everything just proves their point to them. They go to their inner circle and say “See? Told ya.” Soon that underground club will grow in numbers, and we may have a serious problem on our hands that seemingly came from nowhere. This is why I think it’s backward to do things like outlaw Holocaust denial, as Canada and other countries have done. This doesn’t kill the idea, because ideas cannot be killed––they grow like a germ in a petri dish when you try to put a lid on them.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant in a majority of cases. And unfortunately, we have lost the art of making fun of bigotry and racism. There’s a particular archetype of comedy we no longer have.

Think of Archie Bunker. The joke is not that people make fun of Archie; the joke is Archie himself. He’s a character who spews idiotic sentiments that we laugh at because we find viewpoints such as his to be laughable. We have since veered far away from making light of people like him and in movies such as The Producers.

Bryan Cranston spoke in recent years about being offered a chance to direct a comedic play that made the KKK look, well, stupid. He turned it down because he felt it “a privileged viewpoint to be able to look at the Ku Klux Klan and laugh at them and belittle them for their broken and hateful ideology.” This attitude is a mistake. Humiliation is powerful and can diffuse someone’s hateful thoughts and convey better than forced apologies the idea that people like this don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

[Read: The gift of civil discussion]

DG argues that anti-Semitism should not be ignored, and that it should be punished:

I think some background is essential. We no longer live in a world in which poisonous ideas can be expected to die through the lack of nourishment. That world perished with the advent of social media. The lure of having instant impact through provocative expressions has short-circuited prudent inhibition in the same manner as four shots of tequila.

The appropriate response to Irving and Ye should be evaluated from the perspective of their desired effect. They hoped to gain influence with their words. The most effective and appropriate outcome would be for them to lose influence. These are bullies. Bullies need an audience. And the next generation is watching.

If Elon Musk wants to reinstate Ye’s account, it should be on Twitter users to unfollow both of them. Or to leave the platform. We are not without power here. We should not exercise power unjustly. The response should fit the offense. In addition, a clear statement of disagreement with the objectionable views expressed should be considered by all observers who feel these ideas are divisive, harmful, or at least malicious in nature and intent.  

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” As Ella Wheeler Wilcox said, “To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.”

Harvey notes the belief among people, including Donald Trump, that even bad press is better than no press, and argues that Ye, Kyrie Irving, and Nick Fuentes are all better ignored than addressed because of the particular roles that those individuals play in American culture:

West is widely known but widely ignored on most subjects as a nut whose opinion has no influence except for those following him based more on his status as an artist than a political figure.  

Irving is an athlete. Most people care more about how he does on the basketball court, not his political or sociological beliefs. Fuentes is virtually unknown except among people who already agree with his position. His comments are so outside the mainstream as to render him unable to influence anybody except a small group. Only those with similar beliefs care about his opinions, except for those who follow him for a living, such as the FBI and the [Southern Poverty Law Center].

It seems to me that with these individuals, we would be better to ignore them than give them more oxygen than they warrant. Giving them more publicity validates their feelings of self-importance in ways that they do not deserve.

Tony agrees:

Anti-Semitism, along with every single other inflammatory, attention-seeking behavior from whatever quarter, but particularly from celebrities, should be ignored. It’s all excessive and immature, toddler-like even, and so doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response. There have to be some grown-ups in the room, and that should be the media.

And Jaleelah draws some distinctions:

Are you asking about how we should deal with high-profile anti-Semites or how we should deal with anti-Semitism in America? Those are two very different questions.

Disclaimer: I am neither Jewish nor an expert in the field, so I won’t claim to know the best way to deal with either of these issues. I will, however, share an observation. “High-profile anti-Semites” are not the greatest force of anti-Semitism in America. They’re certainly a threat, but most people have other entry points to anti-Semitism. Common conspiracy theories, evangelical tales about the End Times, and extreme anti-elite/anti-outsider rhetoric are all gateways to hating Jewish people. As a result, I find your qualms about “drawing attention to anti-Semites” an unconvincing reason to ignore them.

There will always be hateful figures who platform other hateful figures. Anti-Semitism is so engrained in American culture that it will not become less popular when non-Jewish commentators remain silent on it. You may be able to ignore Kanye’s hateful remarks, but Jewish figures will always be asked to comment on them. And Jewish people have no good options. Either they can let anti-Semitism thrive, or they can fight it and be painted as censorious.

So what is the largest anti-Semitic threat, and how can we stop it? I would argue that it’s the low-level anti-Semitic rhetoric that exists across all American communities, particularly when it comes from places of authority.

I was quite sheltered from anti-Semitism for the first 15 years of my life because I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and attended a Jewish-majority school. My Muslim Palestinian grandparents raised me to treat Jewish people with respect and to resist people who try to turn us against each other. I thought it was ridiculous that anyone could actually believe Jewish people are behind some grand conspiracy to control the media or the government.

I truly believe that authority figures—whether religious, political, or educational—are the only ones capable of raising Americans to believe such obvious hateful untruths. Stop letting them make excuses.

Trump's meeting with open anti-Semites should disqualify him from the 2024 race. That it won't reflects on the GOP.

If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended to own the libs by adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election. (Remember the “Deplorables”?) It was written in support of the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, shortly after he wore a White Lives Matter shirt during one of his fashion shows.

This was just the beginning of a shocking two-month spiral of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has led to the undoing of Ye’s business empire and his full transformation into arguably the most openly bigoted famous person in American life. Throughout this grim unraveling—which has as its backdrop Ye’s ongoing mental-health issues—he has been thoroughly embraced by right-wing media as well as prominent white nationalists. He has also been active on the Republican political scene, most recently dining with former President Donald Trump and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

All throughout, the @JudiciaryGOP tweet stayed up. Over the past eight weeks, people have used it as a barometer for what kind of awful behavior the GOP will accept. And so it is notable that, yesterday afternoon, it was finally deleted after Ye’s calamitous appearance on Alex Jones’s Infowars broadcast. Wearing a black face mask, Ye drank Yoo-hoo, read from the Bible, and repeatedly and enthusiastically offered his praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (“They did good things, too”) while spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric alongside Fuentes.

[Read: An unholy alliance between Ye, Musk, and Trump]

Ye’s Infowars disaster is emblematic of something that seems to be happening across the far right. Although their messaging is always noxious and hateful, right-wing shock jocks and politicians like to employ thinly veiled innuendo and dog whistles to rally their audience. The game is to push the boundaries of social acceptability but leave just enough room to deny culpability when things go off the rails. Then they can blame political opponents for bias and censorship when they’re criticized or suspended by the supposedly “woke” left.

But things are taking a turn, and it’s not just about Ye. Though it’s always been a sewage system for political sludge, Twitter has recently lifted its floodgates under Elon Musk’s ownership, reinstating banned accounts, suspending researchers without cause, and drastically reducing content moderation overall. The New York Times reported today that hate speech has “soared” on the platform in the weeks since Musk’s takeover. And there’s reason to suspect that things may get even worse: Musk said yesterday that he wants to foreground “view count” on every tweet, which could encourage attention-grabbing and incendiary posts even more than the platform already does.

It’s a dog-catches-car moment: Republicans are getting what they asked (and tweeted) for, and finding that it makes them uncomfortable by association (in public at least). The makeshift walls have crumbled around the far right, and it’s flummoxing those who try to launder their message for a wider audience.

As Melissa Ryan, a progressive strategist who tracks the far right, told Semafor’s Dave Weigel earlier this week, Musk’s reinstating of banned right-wing accounts is “going to suck for Republicans … Some of these guys are going to go hog wild as soon as they can.”

Travis Brown, a researcher who has been tracking the reinstatement, has been struck by the rise in violent anti-Semitic rhetoric on the platform. “One thing that’s been remarkable to me is the sheer amount of blatant anti-Semitic stuff you can see,” he told me this week. “It’s much more on the surface recently. Click around in any of these Pepe avatar accounts and you will see jokes referencing 6 million cookies, which is a Holocaust reference.” Some of these accounts, Brown noted, have also thanked Musk for their reinstatement.

It’s well worth noting that researchers, academics, activists, politicians, and journalists covering the far right have been issuing warnings about this dynamic for years, sounding the alarm on the profound harm caused by the mainstream right’s embrace of anti-Semitic rhetoric and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, as well as its associations with bigots. Though these problems do not begin and end with Trump, they’ve noted an acceleration of extremist and bigoted rhetoric that coincides with his descent down the golden escalator; his description of Mexicans as rapists; his refusal to condemn the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; his mention of “good people on both sides” at the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally; and his flirtations with QAnon during his presidency (which became an open endorsement postpresidency).

All of which leads us to Ye, whose appearances on popular right-wing media channels have caused visible discomfort for shock jocks who love to toy with or even use hateful rhetoric in their broadcasts. On Monday, Ye and Fuentes appeared on Tim Pool’s popular YouTube channel. Before the show, Pool excitedly shared photos of Ye, Fuentes, and the noted troll Milo Yiannopoulos en route to the appearance in a private jet and hyped the broadcast on his Twitter feed. But during the show, Pool—who has recently begun monologuing about Great Replacement and has been called out by The Daily Beast for “dangerously whitewashing the far right”—was reduced to stammering as Ye went into a stream-of-consciousness riff about Jewish executives de-banking him and invoked Jared Kushner and Rahm Emanuel as members of a Jewish political conspiracy.

Pool appeared eager to try to sympathize with parts of Ye’s rhetoric. “I think they’ve been extremely unfair to you,” Pool said. But when Ye pushed back, asking, “Who is ‘they,’ though? We can’t say who ‘they’ is, can we?” Pool stammered and said he disagreed with the implication that Jews control the media. Ye walked out, leaving the host looking overwhelmed.

The dynamic was similar to Ye’s appearance yesterday on Infowars. Jones—who has made a career out of anti-Semitic dog whistling about a Jewish-controlled media, egged on birtherism, and spread lies that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation—seemed uncharacteristically rattled as Ye began talking favorably about Hitler. He tried to give the rapper an out, saying, “You’re not Hitler. You’re not a Nazi.” But, as in other appearances, Ye seemed almost delighted not to take it. “Well, I see good things about Hitler, also,” he responded. “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.” Later on, in a jarring exchange just before a commercial break, Jones clarified for his audience that “I don’t like Nazis.” Ye, sneaking in the last word, shot back, “I like Hitler.” Jones can’t recontextualize this moment or accuse the media of misrepresenting what happened on Infowars yesterday. It was hours of Nazi sympathizing. There’s a small difference between this and Jones’s generally repugnant broadcasts—which have cost him dearly, thanks to a series of defamation cases—but it’s a meaningful one.

We should not mince words: The normalization and increase of this rhetoric is terrifying and threatening in a country that continues to watch as extremists commit hate crimes against people of color, religious minorities, and LGBTQ communities. At the same time, it is unclear what it means for politicians and launderers of the extremist right when the rules of the game change. It seems that the far right, which has longed for the marketplace of ideas to turn into a free-speech-maximalist thunderdome, is going to be forced to test how the rest of the country feels about having its most vile and extreme views amplified as explicitly as possible.

Overnight, it got an answer of sorts. Ye was once again indefinitely suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika inside a Star of David: an “incitement to violence,” Musk said. It’s been less than two weeks since he welcomed the rapper back from his previous ban.