An ex-US Navy SEAL, who deserted the American military nearly four years ago, was killed fighting in Ukraine, according to the Navy.

Have you heard the latest ridiculous turn in the George Santos story? No, not that one. The newer one. Oh wait: That’s out of date now, too.

This week alone we’ve learned that Santos’s mother, who he said was in the Twin Towers on 9/11 and died years later from complications, probably wasn’t even in the United States that day. We’ve heard an allegation that he stole $3,000 he had raised for a military veteran’s ailing dog, a story that seems too cartoonish to make up. We’ve also seen a photo that a Brazilian drag queen insists is Santos in drag, though he denies it. In more scandalous sartorial news, a former roommate says that the scarf Santos sported at a Stop the Steal rally was, fittingly, stolen.

If you’re unable to laugh at these stories, you should check your pulse. But if you’re only laughing at them, you should check your head. The Santos story is funny, but a real danger exists that the public might allow its amusement to eclipse the horror of such a candidate reaching office and the consequences for Congress and the American political system’s remaining shreds of repute.

[Tom Nichols: Amazingly, George Santos is a member of Congress]

Voters have a right to know whether the people they vote for are who they say they are. In Santos’s case, even the fact of his name is marshy; many former acquaintances say he used to go by “Anthony Devolder”—his middle name and mother’s maiden name—and detested what one might call his government name, in two senses of the word. In response to his ill-gained success, some of his critics, including other members of Congress, have suggested bills that would require something like truth in advertising for political candidates, an approach both legally dubious—any sufficiently sweeping bill would probably violate the First Amendment—and more broadly imprudent, the latest example of Americans seeking to enlist the justice system to do work the political system can and should do better.

That said, Santos ought to be investigated to see whether he broke any existing laws. He already faces complaints before the House Ethics Committee and Federal Election Commission about his campaign spending, and there’s a larger question about how Santos, who was previously strapped for cash, per his own disclosures, suddenly got the money to loan his campaign $700,000. Brazilian authorities have revived a long-moribund fraud investigation against him there, too. In the meantime, he’s in Congress, where he recently won placement on committees on small business and science, space, and technology, and he may get access to classified information, a privilege afforded to members of the House.

Politics has always had its share of oddball stories, but the country seems to be suffering through an epidemic of funny-but-not-funny episodes. A recent example—in which Santos had a walk-on role—was the tortuous election of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House on the 15th ballot, after days of failures. The speaker election was as riveting as any process that takes place over several days on the House floor can possibly be. For excitement and length, it would certainly beat out a cricket test match. The human drama was irresistible (for a certain type of nerd—present company included). But it was not low-stakes. The functionality of the government was on the line, most urgently in the matter of whether Congress will raise the debt limit in time to avoid a national default.

The apotheosis of this dynamic is Donald Trump, who can be very funny by intent and often by accident (“very legal & very cool”), even when (or especially when) his behavior is boorish and unbecoming of a leader. Trump is entertaining, in the sense that he provides hours of diversion and he emerged from the world of entertainment.

Figures like this don’t necessarily act the way they do to be amusing, but they know that throwing a three-ring circus can relegate their truly bad behavior to the sideshow tent. To borrow a different metaphor, their approach helps feed what Patrick Hruby has called “the SportsCenter-ization of political journalism,” in which “coverage of Washington—and the world, really—apes a glossy entertainment product dedicated to spectacular touchdowns, gee-whiz statistics, [and] prefabricated drama.”

[Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man]

Jon Stewart, who in his previous guise as host of The Daily Show was both a lucid critic and a major catalyst of politics-as-entertainment, connected Santos to Trump in this respect this week. “The thing we have to be careful of, and I always caution myself on this and I ran into this trouble with Trump, is we cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger, because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things,” he said.

Even if Santos is eventually forced out of office, as seems possible, treating him like a mere joke risks feeding a vicious cycle that will persist after his exit. When clowns get elected, it rightly lowers the esteem in which the public holds Congress; this, in turn, leads voters to be more apt to elect more clowns, which only produces a Congress even less worthy of respect. So go ahead, laugh at George Santos. But when your giggles peter out, don’t let your attention drift away.

On October 21, 1970, Truman Capote went to jail. Considering he’d spent much of his life fascinated by crime, it nevertheless came as a shock, to him and others, when he was sentenced to three days on a contempt-of-court charge. “I've been in thirty or forty jails and prisons, but this is the first time I’ll ever be in one as a prisoner,” Capote told reporters at the time, his bravado a substitute, according to his biographer Gerald Clarke, for the “stark terror” he was actually feeling.

Every true-crime writer has to contend with Capote. In Cold Blood, his rapturously received “nonfiction novel” (as Capote termed it) about a Kansas family’s homicide in 1959, is embedded in the DNA of every book in the genre. As Justin St. Germain wrote in his critical reexamination, “Capote spiked a vein, and out came a stream of imitators, a whole bloody genre, one of the most popular forms of American nonfiction: true crime.” (I’m no exception, as Capote ended up a minor character in my own recent nonfiction book, Scoundrel.)

The sheer glut of recently released books and films about Capote—the past few years alone brought forth Capote’s Women, by Laurence Leamer; the documentary film The Capote Tapes; and, at the end of last year, Roseanne Montillo’s Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire’s Wife, and the Murder of the Century—seem less interested in Capote’s relationship to true crime than in his obsessive social striving. The two parts of his identity were not completely separate—the smash success of his Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in November 1966 was built, after all, on the back of In Cold Blood’s runaway popularity. But surely there must be something new to discover about Capote’s relationship to criminality? If so, uncovering how he came to spend time (however brief) among the incarcerated may yield some clues.

When he went to jail in 1970, Capote wasn’t far removed from his heights as one of America’s most celebrated writers. He had also, improbably, become a go-to pundit on criminal-justice matters, opining about criminal cases on popular programs such as The Tonight Show and Firing Line, and spending years interviewing death-row prisoners for various projects.

Perhaps it’s no accident that Capote’s career and personal free fall began in earnest after his time in jail, a surprisingly little-reported episode that raises larger questions about his own attraction to true crime, and the ethical compromises involved in doing this sort of writing. Understanding how and why this happened requires a look back at Capote’s troubled youth, which foreshadowed an adulthood marked by secrets and lies.

Capote’s biological father, Arch Persons, was a con man whose wife, Lillie Mae, summarily abandoned him when she realized he couldn’t deliver on the financial promises he’d made her. Reinventing herself as Nina, she took up with her second husband, Joe Capote, a Cuban émigré who had a taste for the finer things, even if it meant spending more money than he made. Nina and Joe lived an extravagant lifestyle in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut. But according to Clarke’s biography as well as George Plimpton’s 1997 oral history, its demands led to Joe’s arrest for embezzlement, a guilty plea, and a year-long stint in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in 1955. By that time, Nina was dead of a Seconal overdose.

Capote’s relationship with his mother was ambivalent at best, tortured at worst—he often described his earliest memory, from around the age of 2, as being abandoned in a hotel room. Even after Nina and Joe married, young Truman spent the bulk of his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, living with his cousins. There, he befriended not only Harper Lee—who would serve as his co-reporter and amanuensis for what would become In Cold Blood—but also Martha Seabrook, an older girl who’d landed in Monroeville from Milton, Florida, and who lived across the street.

[Read: In search of the real Truman Capote]

Sometime during the summer of 1934 or 1935, either Capote or Seabrook got the notion to run away to Evergreen, Alabama, where Seabrook’s uncle owned a hotel. Their journey lasted a single night before they had to return to Monroeville. That fall, Capote went back to New York to join his mother and stepfather, and Seabrook’s family moved away. They never saw each other again.

Years later, Capote learned what had happened to Seabrook. As Martha Beck, she took up with Raymond Fernandez, and their poisonous alchemy led to multiple murders, mostly of women who answered “lonely hearts” ads. Both Fernandez and Beck were executed at Sing Sing in 1951. “I didn’t even realize it was the same person until years later all my relatives in that town said: ‘Oh, that’s the girl who was here that summer. She’s the one you ran away with,’” Capote told an interviewer.

Eight years after Beck’s execution and four years after his stepfather’s imprisonment in the same correctional institution, Capote infamously alighted on a wire story about the Clutter family’s homicide in Holcomb, Kansas. He would tell more grandiose and authoritative versions of In Cold Blood’s origin story. He minimized Lee’s pivotal role as a researcher and fellow journalist on the project; obfuscated the truth about his relationship with Perry Smith, one of the murderers; grew petulant about the lack of resolution when Smith and Dick Hickok’s execution dates kept getting postponed; and fabricated incidents when it suited his narrative, including the book’s final scene (in which the lead investigator visits the Clutter family’s graves with the daughter’s best friend).

Chronicling and identifying with the ultimate transgressors—murderers—became Capote’s career calling card. Doing so was a way of empathizing with society’s underclass, yes, but it also gave Capote the opportunity to bend stories to his will, because readers would be more inclined to trust his version over the murderers’. Playing fast and loose with the truth might have been accepted at the time in literary and high-society circles, but when Capote was faced with the stringencies of the legal system and the consequences of actual jail time, his storytelling instincts would prove to be his undoing.

Truman Capote interviewing prisoners for the late-night special “Truman Capote at San Quentin,” in San Quentin, California, 1973 (Disney General Entertainment Content / Getty)

From 1967 to 1968, Capote interviewed more than two dozen prisoners housed in three different death-row facilities: Oregon and Colorado State Penitentiaries and San Quentin State Prison. He did so at the behest of ABC, which had commissioned Capote to create and host a documentary that would, in the executives’ minds, be a natural follow-up to In Cold Blood.

Most of the murderers who would appear on camera in Death Row, U.S.A. (and be quoted in print in the accompanying October 1968 Esquire story) were incarcerated at San Quentin, which Capote visited on several occasions. There, he met and spoke with Joseph Morse. Morse was originally sentenced to death for the murders of his mother and disabled younger sister in 1962, but his conviction was overturned on a technicality. While awaiting a new trial, Morse killed a fellow prisoner after a dispute over cigarettes, resulting in yet another death sentence that would eventually be overturned (both times, Morse was resentenced to life imprisonment).

“My problem is I’m a case afflicted with severe sociopathy. I can’t change because I can’t benefit by experience. Experience teaches me nothing,” Capote quoted Morse as saying in the Esquire article. But it was Morse’s next series of quoted comments that landed Capote in hot water in the fall of 1970: “If I were to get out of here tomorrow, I’d probably kill again. Do it without any thought of the death penalty. Even though I’ve already spent five years on Death Row and know full well what it means.”

The Orange County prosecutor tasked with resentencing Morse to death wanted Capote to testify about these comments. Capote had no intention of doing so, “believing, like any other honorable reporter, that interviews are confidential,” according to Clarke, his biographer. Capote fled to New York as his lawyers tried and failed to work things out. The judge, exasperated by all the goings-on, finally had enough and gave Capote his jail sentence.

Back at his bungalow in Bel-Air, Capote took several pills, retreated to bed, and ordered one of his lawyers, Alan Schwartz, to “call Ronald Reagan!” But even the then-governor of California couldn’t help. Capote went to jail, though his sentence would be reduced to a mere 18 hours because of ill health. Schwartz told Clarke that Capote, after his release, seemed “as if he had been raped, rolled, and beaten up.” (Capote, meanwhile, never described the ordeal in any detail beyond saying “It was very uncomfortable in there” and “I don’t advise anybody to go there to write a book.”)

[Read: The new true crime]

Perhaps there would have been greater dignity in this episode if Death Row, U.S.A. had had some impact. But the documentary for which Capote had interviewed Morse never aired. By 1968, the ABC executive (a friend of Capote’s) who had green-lit the project had left the network, and the new man in charge judged it “too grim” and refused to broadcast it. (Capote, furious, later retorted, “Well, what were you expecting, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?”)

Capote tried to brush off the failed documentary as proof that he should stick to books. Still, it had to be devastating to see a project begun with the best of intentions killed before it could even reach an audience. Save for a single theatrical screening at a theater in Manhattan—an event organized and funded by Capote himself—Death Row, U.S.A. has never been shown.

Capote made several more attempts to recapture the In Cold Blood magic, including Truman Capote Behind Prison Walls in 1972, another ill-fated documentary for ABC about the life of the incarcerated (although this program actually aired, the critical reception and ratings were poor). Then came “Handcarved Coffins,” the centerpiece of Capote’s 1980 collection, Music for Chameleons; the story purported to chronicle a number of unsolved murders that bordered on the bizarre. Because Capote still had lingering credibility as a criminal-justice expert, readers and critics took the story at face value, believing it to be a true and accurate account.

Yet the investigating “homespun” detective, Clarke wrote, “was not a real person, but a composite of several lawmen [Capote] had known.” And a 1992 Sunday Times story, published eight years after Capote’s death, offered even more proof that “Handcarved Coffins” was pure fiction. Once again, Capote had chosen story over the truth. And if one takes the word of Morse, the murderer whose published comments legally imperiled the author, making things up was also the reason Capote went to jail in 1970.

Morse wrote and edited for the San Quentin News during his long incarceration there, several stints over nearly 30 years. (He died in 2009 in a different correctional facility.) When the Behind Prison Walls documentary aired in December 1972, the editor of the satirical anti-establishment magazine The Realist wrote to Morse soliciting his opinion of the program.

Morse was withering in his assessment of what he called “this fiasco,” a distortion of life at San Quentin. (“If asked to ‘review’ this film, I would say it was one of the best rip-offs I have seen in quite a while,” he said.) Morse also told his version of what had happened with the contempt-of-court case. During Morse’s conversation with Capote back in 1968, the writer had asked him, “If you were to get out right now do you think you could kill again?”

Morse took his time answering. He knew that if he got out, “I would revert to being a smack freak—which would engender a need for money,” which might then necessitate a need to murder somebody. When Morse finally replied, he reported that he’d said “Probably” without elaborating. But his “terse, one-word reply” had been embellished in Capote’s magazine article.

This put Capote in a bind. “He could testify that I did make the statement, but then he would have to try to explain why the transcription of the interview contained no such quote,” Morse wrote. “The transcription would have really fucked him, and he had only one alternative. He would have to tell the truth and admit that my answer was, simply, ‘Probably.’ This, too, would have fucked him because he would then have to admit that he lied to Esquire (and the public). He was fucked either way. As a result, he split and ignored the subpoena.”

There’s no way to know if Capote ever saw Morse’s comments in The Realist; he never disputed or confirmed them. If Morse was correct, testifying in open court would have put Capote’s credibility on the line at a time when he had maximum goodwill and authority. Not doing so, however, set Capote up to make poor decision after poor decision, and the blurred lines between fiction and reality destroyed friendships, wrecked his writing and health, and ruined his credibility after all.

The costs of Capote’s repeated inability to contend with factuality weren’t felt only by him; they also permeated throughout the genre he’d redefined almost single-handedly with In Cold Blood. As the crime journalist Jack Olsen once said, “That book did two things. It made true crime an interesting, successful, commercial genre, but it also began the process of tearing it down.” The past few years in particular have made us question whose crime stories get credence and attention. Infusing the genre with greater meaning—and possibly even rectifying some of these past inequalities—might mean coming to terms with Capote’s messy, convoluted, and fabulist relationship with the darkest parts of life and crime.

American Michael Mmoh is afraid he will wake up and realize his run to the Australian Open third round was just a dream.

Gun homicides and car accidents are the leading causes of youth death. American children confront challenges as varied as bullying, poverty, gangs, sexual abuse, mental illness, and drug addiction. A state legislator hoping to protect kids might reasonably focus on any number of issues. Drag shows, those improbable culture-war flash points, are not among them. Yet Republican legislators in at least seven states are pushing bills to restrict shows where performers may deviate from traditional gender norms.

The most sweeping and objectionable proposals are not mere efforts to deprive drag shows of taxpayer funding or to keep them out of public primary schools. Rather, they would classify drag shows (as the sponsoring legislators variously define them) as akin to pornography. They would redefine any venue hosting such a show as an adult business, or try to shield even teenagers from drag in a society where almost all of them have regular access to the internet. Should any such proposal pass into law––at this early stage, their prospects are uncertain and may vary from state to state—the free speech and association rights of private venues, performers, artists, and willing audiences will all be infringed upon. And for what?

[Read: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the art of self-love]

These proposals are needless, excessive, and unconstitutional––so much so that more than one would belong in a Hall of Fame for legislative overreach that is at odds with freedom of speech.

Parents expose young kids to all sorts of things that strike me as age inappropriate, including the most hypersexualized drag shows that circulate via aggregators such as Libs of TikTok, which are outliers. Meanwhile, mountains of inappropriate movies, TV shows, video games, and internet content exceed the relative mole hill of inappropriate drag performances (which would be just as inappropriate if cisgender women performed the same actions), whether measured by the ease of accessibility to kids or how many total kids see them.

Abstractly, the question of how many people need to be harmed to justify a new state law can be a difficult one. But I can find no evidence that any child has been harmed as the result of a drag performance. One suspects that some GOP legislators see drag shows not as especially big problems so much as big opportunities because a faction of their constituents zealously dislike them.

Regardless of motivation, any Constitution-respecting American should reject a law that infringes on free speech or artistic expression if the matter in question has zero proven victims. Some supporters of anti-drag laws maintain that drag shows have the effect of “grooming” kids into LGBTQ activism or an LGBTQ lifestyle. But that claim is speculative and unproven––and even if it were true that drag shows influence how kids think about gender, neither art nor free speech can survive if it is constitutionally unprotected anytime it influences how some of the children who witness it think. Of course, once drag-queen story hours for children weirdly became both progressive acculturation events and culture-war battle grounds, attempted interventions in statehouses was inevitable. Perhaps it was also inevitable that many proposals would go further than is legal. Neither faction is committed to butting out when private undertakings offend its sensibilities. In this matter the Republicans are in the wrong.

In Nebraska, where the age of majority is 19, a law proposed by State Senator Dave Murman would prohibit anyone 18 or younger from being present at a drag show, which it defines expansively, as follows: First, the performance’s “main aspect” is “a performer which exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer's gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers.” (I’d have thought a conservative would say that one’s sex is recorded at birth, not that one’s gender is assigned, but set that aside.) Second, “the performer sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment.”

By that definition, an 18-year-old would be legally prohibited from attending a performance of the Broadway musical Mrs. Doubtfire, a comedy set by Eddie Izzard, a lecture on being trans by Caitlyn Jenner, or a rock concert by a female-and-costumed Beatles tribute band.

The proposed Nebraska law goes on: “Any person nineteen years of age or older who knowingly brings an individual under nineteen years of age to a drag show shall be guilty of a Class I misdemeanor.” That standard would have made criminals of numerous World War II officers, what with the ubiquity of drag shows performed by and for troops overseas during that era. (Here’s Ronald Reagan introducing a dramatization of one of those shows circa 1943.) I hoped to question Murman about the breadth of entertainment that his proposal would constrain and the conduct that it would criminalize, but a spokesperson declined an interview invitation while passing along the prepared statement “I will always uphold my promise to enact policies that reflect Judeo-Christian values and defend the innocence of children.”

But what 18-year-old’s innocence would be ruined by Mrs. Doubtfire? A law can prohibit showing some expressive material to minors that would be legal for adults without violating the First Amendment, but it’s hard to imagine Nebraska’s expansive definition passing an obscenity test.   

Democratic State Senator Megan Hunt is opposing the bill. A spokesperson in her office said that they intend to fight it but that defeating it may be an uphill battle that requires engagement from the public because Republicans enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature. Neither the bill nor an attempt by Hunt to indefinitely delay it has yet been debated on the floor.

In Arkansas, one bill would amend the definition of adult-oriented businesses to include drag performances. That bill is less egregious than its Nebraska analog in that only drag shows “intended to appeal to the prurient interest” are affected, but it’s more restrictive in that it doesn’t just affect performances in which drag is “the main element”––even one extra in drag could trigger the law. It is hardly novel for legislators to seek to protect minors from performances that are “prurient,” which is to say, that appeal to a lustful interest in sexual stimulation or gratification, but it’s striking to draft a law that shields kids from ostensibly prurient performances only when the performers are cross-dressing. The approach seems to subject genderqueer people to unequal treatment under the law and suggests animus against them, failing another civil-rights test.

[Genevieve Lakier: The great free-speech reversal]

Similarly speech-infringing and chilling proposals are circulating in a number of other states. In Arizona, S.B. 1030 would classify and regulate establishments that conduct drag shows in the same way as adult arcades, massage parlors, and strip clubs. It defines a drag performer as “a person who dresses in clothing and uses makeup and other physical markers opposite of the person’s gender at birth to exaggerate gender signifiers and roles and engages in singing, dancing, or a monologue or skit in order to entertain an audience.” Under that definition, Rod Stewart’s upcoming concert at the stadium where the Phoenix Suns play could conceivably result in its reclassification as an 18-and-up venue––while not generally thought of as a drag act, he has frequently styled himself in ways that incorporate normatively feminine looks.

Texas Monthly reported on an effort by State Representative Jared Patterson to treat venues that host “drag performances” as “sexually oriented businesses,” noting that if the bill passes, “a rock club or a community theater that doesn’t offer sexually explicit performances could find itself governed by the same rules” as strip clubs and porn theaters. “Given the stakes, those venues may well be unlikely to offer trans performers—even if they’re just strumming guitars or sitting behind drum kits—the opportunity to play.”

That analysis seems reasonable to me, and demonstrates how the bill would obviously discourage artistic expression and would presumptively make it disproportionately harder for trans performers to get work.

The Tennessean reported last month that State Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson is sponsoring legislation, S.B. 3, that is written broadly enough to conceivably encompass the actions in a bawdy sketch like the one that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani performed in drag together back in 2000 if it was performed in a place where a child could see it. The effect of that proposal, too, would be to chill all manner of speech and artistic expression for cis and trans performers who depart from the traditional gender norms of their sex.

Similar bills are under consideration in Missouri and Montana. One wonders if more are coming. Even if none passes, it is notable that legislators in so many states are singling out drag, especially in ways that raise significant constitutional problems. And should any bill pass aiming to restrict drag performances anywhere a child might see one, legal challenges will follow. As the UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment expert, told me in a phone interview, the precedent in the 1975 Supreme Court case Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville would be relevant. In that case, a Jacksonville, Florida, ordinance made it a punishable offense for a drive-in movie theater to show films containing nudity when the screen was visible from the street. The Supreme Court struck the ordinance down on First Amendment grounds.

“Much that we encounter offends our esthetic, if not our political and moral, sensibilities,” it ruled. “Nevertheless, the Constitution does not permit government to decide which types of otherwise protected speech are sufficiently offensive to require protection for the unwilling listener or viewer.”

[Read: Don’t use these free-speech arguments ever again]

The Court went on to address concerns about children. “Appellee maintains that even though it cannot prohibit the display of films containing nudity to adults, the present ordinance is a reasonable means of protecting minors from this type of visual influence,” the majority opinion states. The opinion points out that “the ordinance is not directed against sexually explicit nudity, nor is it otherwise limited. Rather, it sweepingly forbids display of all films containing any uncovered buttocks or breasts, irrespective of context or pervasiveness.” The ruling concludes that  “speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them. In most circumstances, the values protected by the First Amendment are no less applicable when government seeks to control the flow of information to minors.”

In my own estimation, the state’s ability to control the flow of information to minors should be at its very weakest in cases where parents or guardians are in favor of exposing their children to the art or expression in question. And most young children who attend drag shows of any sort do so because their parents chose to take them. In an essay where the journalist and pioneering proponent of gay equality Andrew Sullivan both celebrates many types of drag performances and laments as regressive progressivism “the idea that a drag queen—rather than, say, a firefighter or a pilot or a tennis player—is somehow an ideal role model for young gay children,” he points out that drag-queen story hour is

a voluntary activity. It’s not compulsory. Parents can choose to take their kids or not. (The introduction of this into public schools where kids cannot opt out and parents aren’t told is another matter entirely.)

Either you believe in parents’ rights, or you don’t. And I’m happy to leave it up to parents—and no one else. The post-liberal right, we have come to understand, only believes in parents’ rights if the parents are social conservatives.

Of course, the legislation discussed above goes far beyond trying to unconstitutionally ban drag-queen story hours, similarly infringing on a wide array of performative events, even though, as the ACLU of Nebraska’s Jane Seu put it in a statement, “Families have a First Amendment right to attend these events and performers and venues have a right to offer them.” Free-speech claims are often denigrated by neo-puritan factions on the right and left these days, but they remain an essential bulwark protecting minority communities from would-be censors. If the GOP improbably succeeds in overcoming those claims, its Pyrrhic crusade against drag will triumph at the expense of individual liberty and expressive rights for everyone.

The administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is blocking a new Advanced Placement course for high school students on African American studies. CNN political analyst Bakari Sellers and Republican strategist David Urban join CNN's Anderson Cooper to discuss.

A defeated New Mexico GOP candidate allegedly hired others to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials, in a case that is intensifying concerns about political violence in America.

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

The longest study on human happiness found the key to a good life. What winning did to the anti-abortion movement Trying to stop long COVID before it even starts

Negative Polarization

On Monday, police in New Mexico arrested Solomon Peña, a Republican who, after losing a race for state representative last fall, allegedly paid four men to participate in at least two shootings at the homes of Democratic state officials in Albuquerque. Peña has blamed his loss on election fraud, and police believe the attacks were politically motivated.

I called the Atlantic staff writer David Graham, who reported last summer on the killing of a retired judge in Wisconsin, to discuss the political violence that appears to be on the rise in America.

Isabel Fattal: In your article about the assassination of the retired judge, you wrote that, based on the limited research that exists, the U.S. is showing warning signs of a rise in political violence. What are those signs?

David Graham: There are a few. One is we just have a really polarized country, and in particular, we have what political scientists call “negative polarization” or “affective polarization,” where people are driven almost more by their dislike of the other party than they are by any kind of shared value among their own party. And you see attitudes of a kind of dehumanization—seeing the other side as less than human, as a threat to democracy. All of these things encourage folks to take up violence; they make them believe that violence might be justified.

So you have these risk factors. And then we see lots of political violence, even though it’s not always on the level of assassination. The most obvious case is January 6. We have seen some attempted assassinations. We had a shooting at the practice for a congressional baseball game in 2017, in which Republican Representative Steve Scalise and others were injured, and we had the Trump-supporting pipe bomber in 2018. We had a guy who tried to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati and was then killed.

Isabel: What was your reaction to this New Mexico case?

David: It’s interesting to compare it with the Wisconsin case. One thing that’s good about this is no one was killed or seriously injured, which is a major difference. But in other ways, as part of the trend, I think it’s almost a bit more concerning.

The Wisconsin case, from what we know, is somebody who had a personal vendetta against this judge because of a case where the judge ruled against him. People are always going to have that sort of disagreement, and what we don’t want is a situation where political violence is normalized so they think violence is a good way to deal with that.

But in Albuquerque, we have somebody who was specifically complaining about elections being stolen; who described himself as the “MAGA King”, according to postings online; and who seemed to be really motivated by the sorts of things we hear people talking about in regular discourse about “stolen” elections. So you can see how it connects to things we hear every day and then takes on this really dangerous form. In that sense, I think the outcome is less grave—but we need to be more worried.

Isabel: Solomon Peña, the alleged perpetrator in New Mexico, didn’t act alone—he involved other people in the shootings. What does that say more broadly about political violence right now?

David: I think the organization is alarming. On January 6, we could see some coordination among groups, but it’s unclear how coordinated it was. And you wonder, if these people had had their act together more, what might have happened? Could Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi have been harmed?

The same thing applies here. This guy was allegedly able to get some people to go shoot at these folks’ houses for him. It seems, from what we know now, that they’re kind of small-time criminals, so it’s not like this was a mass political movement. But it’s worrying that someone was able to enlist people. You wonder how big it gets when it goes beyond a single actor.

Isabel: What relevance, if any, do you think the recent convictions in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have to this trend?

David: I think it’s a little ambiguous. It’s obviously important that people who commit crimes like this are caught and prosecuted and punished for it. The discourse around the Whitmer case is weird, because on the one hand, you have folks getting some pretty stiff sentences, and on the other hand, you have a critique—and this is not just on the right, you hear this from folks on the more civil-libertarian left too—saying, Is this a real plot, or is this something the FBI cooked up? Because we’ve seen cases where the FBI takes people who are prone to violence and helps get them going. You have an argument among some people that this plot was really deep-state puppeteering.

So in that case, although you have a deterrent effect, you also may end up with people distrusting the government more and being angrier about things.

Isabel: There’s obviously no easy answer to this, but what can be done to stem this violence?

David: The short answer is it’s really complicated. One thing we do know is that leaders make a difference, and when leaders are condoning or even encouraging violence, that is likely to produce more violence. When leaders say it’s unacceptable, even in the service of their cause, that will tamp it down. That’s not all of the answer, but it’s one simple answer that we do have.

Related:

A chilling assassination in Wisconsin The New Lost Cause

Today’s News

The United States hit its debt ceiling, and the Treasury Department announced that it has begun using “extraordinary measures” to prevent the federal government from breaching the limit. Prosecutors are planning to charge Alec Baldwin and one crew member with involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 accidental shooting on the set of the film Rust. The Agriculture Department announced that it is tightening its oversight on which products can be labeled “organic.”

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson suggests that journalists should stop trying to ask “smart questions.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Jan Buchczik

Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions

By Arthur Brooks

“Ōdī et amō,” the Roman poet Catullus wrote of his lover Lesbia about 2,000 years ago. “I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.”

Maybe you can relate. If you’ve ever had mixed feelings about someone you love, you know the intense discomfort that results. If your feelings were purely positive, of course, the relationship would be bliss. Even purely negative feelings would be better, because the course of action would be clear: Say goodbye. But mixed feelings leave you confused about the right thing to do.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The unsinkable Maria Ressa Others take Nelson Mandela’s name in vain, but not Harry and Meghan, Mandela’s grandchild writes.

Culture Break

A still from “The Last of Us” (HBO)

Read. Good for a Girl, Lauren Fleshman’s memoir about life as a runner, asks: When should athletes stop pushing through the pain?

Watch. The Last of Us, a new HBO series (the first episode is now available to stream), makes the apocalypse feel new again.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

David recently wrote about a very different example of how political polarization plays out: the debate over gas stoves, which, he argues, exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics. But you can also read the article for the simple pleasure of his wordplay. It’s a sharp analysis with many great air-, cooking-, and heat-related puns nestled in it.

— Isabel