In reporting on the housing crisis, I often hear some version of a simple story purporting to explain why so many Americans struggle to afford a place to live. The story goes like this: Housing costs are unaffordable because [INSERT BAD COMPANY HERE] is greedy and jacking up prices. The villain can be Airbnb or developers; it can be deep-pocketed foreigners or iBuyers. The story is compelling because it does not directly implicate regular people, sympathetic institutions, or elected officials.

To state the obvious, stories can be compelling without being true. Especially suspect are stories that scapegoat a group or an entity that is impossible or at least very difficult to defend: banks or oil companies or criminals, say. The scapegoat takes the blame for a complex problem. The trick is to cast a villain such that the surrounding facts become irrelevant. Who cares whether criminals have actually destroyed American cities? Attempting to stress-test theories like this just makes you look pro-crime and puts you on the same side as people who have committed terrible acts. But false narratives are dangerous because they distract attention from real problems, and plausible solutions.

The latest version of the housing-villain story targets private-equity firms and hedge funds, broadly “institutional investors” that have supposedly been outcompeting regular homebuyers and are therefore responsible for the skyrocketing rents and home prices of 2020 and 2021. “One of the largest hedge funds, the largest Wall Street firms in the world, is going around and buying up every single-family home in this country,” J. D. Vance argued at the start of his senatorial campaign in 2021, noting that first-time homebuyers, disproportionately Black Americans, were unable to become homeowners as a result.

I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but the idea that these firms are ultimately responsible for our housing-affordability crisis is absolutely ridiculous, and no one who knows anything about housing markets believes it. Yet this story has gained so much traction that it has spawned hearings and bills on Capitol Hill. One recent effort by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon seeks to levy high taxes on any company owning more than 100 single-family homes, in order to push it to sell those homes to owner-occupants or smaller investors. I asked Merkley what drew his attention to hedge-fund activity in the housing market, and he told me that he had “started to hear from people in the neighborhood saying, ‘Here’s the problem: We’re competing when we’re looking for a home; we’re competing against all-cash offers from businesses’ … It brought me back to thinking about whether we should have American families having to compete against billionaires to have a place to rent or to buy.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

In order to have the type of pricing power that would allow any entity to push up rents and home prices, it would need to own significant shares if not an outright majority of homes in a particular market. At the national level, this is obviously not happening. According to one report, institutional investors purchased just 3 percent of homes sold in 2021. At the state level, the story seems unlikely as well. Georgia, a state with a relatively high amount of investor activity, saw some 8.5 percent of 2021 home sales go to the largest investors, according to CoreLogic data. In Merkley’s home state, just 2 percent of sales went to “mega-investors,” who own 1,001 or more properties. But 8 or 2 percent of home sales doesn’t mean 8 or 2 percent of the total housing stock—far from it. After all, most homes aren’t up for sale; from year to year, a great majority of homes remain in the same hands. Further, a purchase does not mean a permanent holding. Investors in both states quite likely went on to sell some of these homes.

At any rate: Home prices and rents increased quickly across the country, in communities large and small. When trying to determine what is responsible for this phenomenon, you have to find an explanation that is common to all of these places, not one that is particular to this market or that one. From August 2020 to August 2021, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana, and Idaho, saw the most significant home-price increases, but of those states, just the first two saw relatively high rates of mega-investors, again according to CoreLogic data. (2021 data shows that Arizona saw the highest at roughly 8.9 percent of homes on the market going to mega-investors.)

Additionally, some proponents of the scapegoat story argue that even if institutional investors are not dominant at the state level, they could still be distorting local real estate. Someone looking for a three-bedroom single-family home in the suburbs of Atlanta is not equally satisfied with one in the Savannah suburbs, so what matters to that person is the local context. But just because something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean it’s actually happening. And these theories imbue investors with a mastermind quality that they frankly haven’t earned. For instance, fearmongering about Zillow buying up real estate fell flat when the company exited the market after off-loading many homes at a loss.   

If there are no solid data supporting the institutional-investor-scapegoat story, there are certainly plenty of misleading statistics. Here’s one egregious example: A report from the House Financial Services Committee reads that “in the third quarter of 2021 alone, institutional investors bought 42.8% of homes for sale in the Atlanta metro area and 38.8% of homes in the Phoenix-Glendale-Scottsdale area.” These are unbelievably big numbers, and they are—literally unbelievable, that is. The citation provided in the document was not correct, but I was able to find the relevant report and, wouldn’t you know it, that’s not what it says. The report shows only the share of purchases made by investors, not institutional investors. Why does this matter? Because investors include people or entities who own fewer than 10 properties, midsize investors who own 10 to 99 homes, iBuyers—which buy properties and then immediately resell them—and even people who purchase vacation homes through an LLC. Relatedly, a New America report last year of investor activity in North Carolina suggests that investor growth in that market is actually being driven by smaller players.

I’ve seen this type of bait and switch more times than I can count. Instead of being clear that institutional investors make up just a small fraction of total investor purchases, politicians conflate statistics, tangling up true facts with a predetermined story. At an event on the rise of institutional investors, Marcia Fudge, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, noted that in Cleveland’s eastern inner-ring suburbs, “investors have purchased nearly ⅓ of homes every year since 2015.” This is not as blatant as the House committee report, because Fudge was careful to say merely “investors.” But in the context of her remarks, given at an event titled “Institutional Investors in Housing,” the implication was that private-equity firms or hedge funds were taking over Cleveland.

[Annie Lowrey: The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine]

This bait and switch matters. First, because it reveals a lack of rigor when people find data to fit a preordained narrative instead of looking to determine what is actually happening. Second, because if these homes are being bought by a wide range of investors, this reduces even further the likelihood that any single investor has significant enough market share to mess with prices.

The other deceptive part of the latest scapegoat story is that these institutional investors are regularly outbidding homebuyers with all-cash offers. Although all-cash offers are certainly on the rise, many of these bids are from wealthy people, house flippers, or smaller landlords. And one survey of realtors found an average “0% difference in offer price of institutional buyers compared to other buyers.” In 2021, according to a recent report, the “median purchase price of institutional buyers [was] typically 26% lower than the states’ median purchase prices,” suggesting that they are not typically competing with ordinary individual buyers, anyway. Institutional investors tend to specialize in distressed communities. In these markets, they can take advantage of economies of scale in making repairs.  

There are real problems with corporate landlords. For instance, large corporate investors are significantly more likely to file eviction notices “even after controlling for past foreclosure status, property characteristics, tenant characteristics, and neighborhood,” according to a study of Fulton County, Georgia.  As the sociologist Esther Sullivan has argued, corporate investors may also take advantage of mobile-home owners, who tend not to own the land beneath their unit, by escalating fees for the maintenance of park properties.

These problems are worth solving by, say, increasing resources for code enforcement so that landlords of all stripes are held accountable for not keeping their properties habitable. Local governments should also  create rental registries that can track important information about properties and landlords to allow for both careful study and accountability of bad actors. The urban-policy expert Bruce Katz and his co-authors have also recommended that states require LLCs to disclose beneficial owners—anyone who owns more than 25 percent of the entity.

But if some institutional investors make bad landlords, that doesn’t mean they’re behind the housing-affordability crisis. They are not why rents are so high or why homeownership is out of reach for so many. Investors are not driving the unaffordability; they are responding to it. Many different investors are all flocking into the housing market; what is most relevant is the fundamental reason  they are all being drawn there.

Housing is primarily unaffordable in this country because of persistent undersupply. In fact, institutional investors are entering the single-family-home market precisely because supply constraints have led to skyrocketing prices. One institutional investor’s SEC filing admitted just that, celebrating a “decline” in supply that has “driven strong rental rate growth and home price appreciation.” The filing also lamented the possibility that “continuing development … will increase the supply of housing and exacerbate competition for residents.”  

A lack of supply is caused by a complex web of rules and regulations that prevent developers—profit and nonprofit alike—from building enough housing to meet demand. A recent report from Freddie Mac estimates a shortage of 3.8 million housing units. For decades the United States has been underbuilding in employment hubs (such as San Francisco, New York, and Boston) and the surrounding suburbs, pushing prices up. Elected officials have allowed the home-building process to become hijacked by unrepresentative opposition and gummed up in legal challenges, many under the guise of bogus environmental concerns.

If elected officials want to fix the problem, they should eliminate those constraints, such as regulations that require large structures on large lots of land or bans on duplexes, triplexes, and multifamily buildings. And they should curtail the various legal pathways that are used to obstruct new housing. As the Brookings Institution expert Jenny Schuetz explained to the House Financial Services Committee last summer: “Targeting a small subset of landlords without addressing underlying market conditions and policy gaps will not meaningfully improve the well-being of renters and prospective homebuyers.”  

[M. Nolan Gray: How California exported its worst problem to Texas]

As I’ve followed the scapegoat story, I’ve also been struck by the implicit suggestion that renters are less worthy of single-family homes than owner-occupants are. After all, corporate landlords rent to real people. In his announcement speech, Vance made the implicit explicit, arguing, “If you can’t own a home in your community, you’re not a real citizen.” And Merkley’s bill, which hopes to transfer single-family-rental homes to owner-occupants, skates past what its success would mean for renters. One report indicates that 85 percent of single-family-rental residents would not qualify for a mortgage.

I asked Merkley’s office what would happen to the families renting these properties if his bill were to pass and large investors were forced to sell them off. His office pointed me to a provision that would create down-payment assistance for potential homebuyers, and argued that pushing investors out of the market would reduce rents. But down-payment assistance doesn’t change the fact that most of these renters don’t have the credit score to qualify for a mortgage, nor would the assistance necessarily go to the families settled in these homes now. And I hope by this point it’s clear that even if institutional investors exited these markets, that would not make a dent in home prices or rents. Notably, a similar policy in Hong Kong led to a reduction in short-term speculation but did “not effectively cool down housing prices.”

Private equity isn’t the first villain, and it likely won’t be the last, to be cast in the role of the housing scapegoat. Airbnb, foreign buyers, greedy developers—all of these groups have taken center stage and probably will again. Nobody needs to defend these entities, but playing whack-a-mole with the villain of the moment won’t increase the amount of affordable housing we build, it won’t untangle the uncomfortable matrix of interests that opposes change and growth and opportunities for first-time homebuyers, and it won’t satisfy the growing anger of the tens of millions of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

The political project of building enough affordable housing and enacting necessary tenant protections is a hard one. Don’t let make-believe villains distract you from the real solutions to the housing crisis. We have to build.

When someone is accidentally shot and killed on a film set, who is responsible: the actor holding the gun, the person who handed it to him, or the professional charged with managing the movie’s weaponry? Last week, New Mexico prosecutors proposed an answer: all three.

The actor Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer—the person who manages the set’s firearms and their related safety protocols—also faces charges. Meanwhile, Assistant Director Dave Halls, the person who reportedly handed Baldwin the gun moments before the incident, has taken a plea deal on a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, according to prosecutors.  Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed have denied responsibility for Hutchins’s death.  

I spoke with Thomas Pimentel, a Massachusetts-based armorer, twice over the phone about the charges, the state of the armorer position in the movie industry, and whether Hollywood should stop using guns on film sets altogether.

Our conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Just right off the bat, what did you make of these charges?

Thomas Pimentel: I’m happy about it. This never should have happened. It was definitely preventable. I am married with children, and I’m an armorer. So when I hear that someone gets killed because of negligence, and they leave a mom behind and they leave children behind, it’s horrible.

[Read: Why Hollywood can’t quit guns]

Nobody should lose their life over make-believe. They shouldn’t. You should expect a level of professionalism and safety in whatever workplace that you’re in. And it was unacceptable.

Nyce: Obviously, there are multiple people being charged here. Do you have any opinion about who’s responsible?

Pimentel: Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer, was inexperienced. There was live ammunition on the set. That’s just absurd.

And the assistant director never should have been handling any of those firearms or the props. That’s the armorer’s job.

Nyce: In a lawsuit, Gutierrez-Reed claims she was not in the building at the time of the shooting because she wasn’t notified that a gun was being used. What do you make of that?

Pimentel: You can probably chalk that up to them having a half assed production, is what it sounds like. This sounds like another one of the many mistakes or oversights that happened on this project.

Nyce: So, in your experience, the armorer should be the only person, other than the actor, handling the gun?

Pimentel: One hundred percent. When the armorer wakes up in the morning, those guns and the ammunition should be under lock and key. Everything should have been inventoried the night before. They look at their call sheet; they know what they need. They’ll normally have a cart that has the weapons for that particular scene locked up with keys that only they have on their person. They’ll transport them to set when they’re called to set. They’ll open up those cases. For a rehearsal, a lot of times, they will bring out the guns. Now, a lot of times you can do a rehearsal without guns.

Nyce: Baldwin was rehearsing when this happened, right?

Pimentel: Right. But the thing is, if they had not used them in rehearsal and then used them in the actual scene, would he have shot her then? Who knows. But it’s just another layer of protection that’s put in place.

When you’re ready to go, the actors stand on their marks. Firearms are called in. The armorer will walk in with the firearms and put them in the actor’s hands. If they need to fire the guns, the armorer will chamber a round into whatever gun needs to be fired. And he will say “This weapon is hot” right to the actor’s face. Of course, this is after your typical safety briefings that they have every single day and before every single scene is shot with firearms, to let everyone know that firearms are on set.

Nyce: According to court documents reviewed by The New York Times, Halls, the assistant director, is alleged to have announced “cold gun,” indicating that the weapon did not contain live rounds. And the District Attorney who filed the charges against Baldwin claimed that the actor didn’t check the gun. One of Baldwin’s lawyers issued a statement maintaining that the actor “had no reason to believe there was a live bullet in the gun—or anywhere on the movie set.” The statement said Baldwin “relied on the professionals with whom he worked, who assured him the gun did not have live rounds.” What’s your reaction to those statements?

Pimentel: So first of all, if the assistant director was the one who handed him the pistol, there was no professional involved who knew anything about firearms. So that’s hugely concerning.

[Stephen Gutowski: Guns—even props—are not toys]

Baldwin has been doing this long enough. He’s been in a lot of movies, action movies and things like that. If someone hands him a gun, what’s stopping him from looking down and looking through that chamber and saying, “oh, I got rounds in here”? “Why are we dealing with rounds? Are they dummy rounds? Can I inspect the dummy rounds myself?" He’s totally okay to ask that.

Nyce: Do you think safety is partially the actor’s responsibility?

Pimentel: Of course it is. If you do a movie about Ford versus Ferrari, you’re going to drive cars. You get in a race car, and you learn how to drive race cars. You do everything that you have to do to get as competent and proficient in that particular field as possible. Handling firearms is no different.

Anybody that uses guns in a movie should have to go through the exact same training and licensing process that people like me go through: background checks by the FBI, local and state police, insurance, things like that.

Nyce: Gutierrez-Reed’s lawsuit alleges that Baldwin ignored a request to schedule a “cross draw training.” Baldwin is not named as a defendant in Gutierrez-Reed’s suit. What do you think about that allegation?

Pimentel: Anybody who’s fired a real gun from a holster knows that it’s not a skill that you can just pick up in an afternoon, and certainly not with an antique firearm. That is something that you practice thousands of times over and over and over again.

Nyce: But can you train someone?

Pimentel: You absolutely could. As an actor, that part of your job is to make it believable. So why wouldn’t you want to give it your best foot forward?

It’s funny to me how there are so many rules, especially in filmmaking. If there’s going to be a candle on a table in a scene, I kid you not: They will have a briefing about the fire risk that day. And they will have a fire marshal on set for a candle. It’s so amazing to me, especially nowadays, because you can do so much with technology. Everyone’s seen a good flickering LED candle.

It’s make-believe. I think it’s part of the old Hollywood system. Ever since they’ve made films, they’ve used real guns with blanks in films. And it’s just the thing that people continue to do. And believe me: There are tons of productions that still, to this day, use real guns with blanks all the time, and they do it safely. Those are the people that people should be looking at and consulting, asking, “How do you stay so safe?”

Nyce: So is it a training problem, or would you ever see a world in which they remove real guns from movies altogether?

Pimentel: (Laughs.) I don’t know.

Nyce: Is that putting your profession on the line?

Pimentel: Oh, no, no. I don’t do anything with blank-firing guns anymore. I stopped working with blank-firing guns probably 10 years ago.

Nyce: Why did you do that?

Pimentel: Because it’s a hassle. The only guns that we use are airsoft guns and replica guns. And later on, in postproduction, we put in the smoke and the sound and the shells ejecting from the sides. That’s what they’re doing in films anyway. If you have a real gun on a set, a machine gun, and you’re firing blanks out of it, not only do they take the sound out and put in a new sound in postproduction; they put muzzle flash. And they’ll touch up the spent rounds that are coming out the side. So why would you even do all that? Well, it doesn’t make any sense, right?

There’s a show on CBS and Paramount+ called SEAL Team, and they show these guys having these intense firefights and explosions. They do that every week. They manage to pull all that stuff off, and they do it well and safely. So there are ways that you can do it. Does it enhance the production? It totally does. One of the best shoot-outs in movie history is this intense bank-robbery scene from the movie Heat, with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. It’s an incredible scene. And one of the things that makes it so realistic is because everyone on that set, all the actors involved, can hear it. They can feel it. There is something to be said for immersing people in things like that.

I’ve seen it a lot, too, where you hand an actor a gun that doesn’t make any noise, and they have to pretend. And a lot of these movies use airsoft guns that don’t make any sounds. And the actors are supposed to be firing these guns, and no one’s blinking at all. They’re just standing there.

Nyce: That sounds like an acting problem.

Pimentel: Ahh, yes! Thank God somebody finally said it. You’re absolutely right. Which goes back to my original point: These people are so concerned with “My character’s left-handed, so I have to spend six weeks eating soup with my left hand.” There are so many microscopic details that they pay attention to, and yet they gloss over firearm safety and realistic acting with firearms.

[Kimberly Wehle: The best hope for fixing America’s gun crisis]

There aren’t people on a film set whose job it is to come in and say, “Don’t do that.” It’s very difficult to because of the hierarchy. An armorer can come in and handle weapons, but good luck trying to speak up when you hand an A-list celebrity a pistol, and he puts his finger on the trigger and he’s not supposed to. I’ve been there: “You can’t say anything to them in front of the rest of the crew. It’ll be embarrassing.”

Nyce: But that’s why they hired you!

Pimentel: Well, you can say that about dozens of positions.

Nyce: Sounds like a power dynamic.

Pimentel: There’s so much of that involved. Not everybody is paying attention to what they should be doing in their job. It’s everywhere in every department.

Nyce: How do you design a system to protect those people from themselves and harming others?

Pimentel: Exactly. (Laughs.)

Nyce: No, I’m serious.

Pimentel: Oh, I know.

Nyce: The point of having an armorer there is for safety. If the power dynamics on set are not great and making it hard for an armorer to do their job, is it worth it to reform that job? Or should that job just not exist?

Pimentel: I think it absolutely should be reformed. Boy, I’ll tell you, the contracts for working on a movie set have changed dramatically post-#MeToo, which is great.

But nothing has changed in the industry on firearm safety because of what happened with Alec Baldwin. The day that happened, people were calling for—not only did they not want guns in movies, they didn’t want guns at all. All the celebrities came out, and they were tweeting about it. But they’re gone now. They’re on to something else, and nothing has changed.

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, “What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries?” Dozens of readers shared their personal experiences, good and bad––so many, in fact, that I’m going to run some additional responses on Wednesday (if you haven’t yet signed up for the newsletter, do so here).

Today, we’ll start with four people who’ve led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in some capacity, and then we’ll hear from people who’ve been on the receiving end of diversity training at work. E. is a cynic about the aims of diversity work in corporate America:

I have worked in HR for Fortune 500 companies for 25 years in diversity, diversity and inclusion, and as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer. The intent of DEI training is for executives to think they are improving the organization for “minorities,” LGBTQ people, women, people with disabilities, etc. Spend a little money without any accountability or significant change. DEI training is to check a box. It is not meant to improve anything, and it doesn’t. Some trainings––the Intercultural Development Inventory, unconscious bias––make things worse. In general, DEI training exists to make executive teams and boards feel good.

M.V. is “enthusiastic about DEI work” and believes the grassroots group he leads at his workplace conducts it better than most outside consultants:

Far too often we trust external experts to bring solutions, which can neglect the critical value of truly centering employees and building culture from the bottom up. I’ve sat in corporate training sessions in which well-intended academics identify behaviors like “avoiding eye contact” as racial microaggressions. These generalities can do more harm than good; what if the person who can’t keep eye contact has social anxiety? Have we propagated that anxiety by encouraging the recipient to assume the worst implication?

The road toward reinforcing separation and the road toward building connection are, in fact, two different roads with different approaches. So how does our group approach DEI?

First, we value personal storytelling, which has been championed by the Moral Courage College founder Irshad Manji. There is a difference between hearing, say, about the importance of pronoun use from a nonbinary employee as compared to a training module. A discussion about labels with a diverse set of employees drives home the message that the “correct” term for a person can’t just be looked up but can only be gleaned through personal connection and the grace that comes with knowing the limitations of words.

Second, we adopt the teachings of Loretta Ross and Loan Tran on “calling in the calling-out culture,” which they offer in a superb online course. Though call-outs have their place, building trust and fostering mutual vulnerability are superior for having challenging conversations.

Third, we promote genuine curiosity and asking questions. The work by Mónica Guzmán of Braver Angels—including her book, I Never Thought of It That Way—teaches us to strive to understand the people we read and hear about but never meet. As she states, “Whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination.”

Personal storytelling, calling people in, and getting genuinely curious: These three sets of tools can transform a culture and really help people be seen for who they actually are, not just the phantoms that fill the gaps in our heads, which are the root of much bias. These approaches that challenge the usual corporate DEI programming are largely championed by women of color (Manji, Ross, Guzmán, Chloé Valdary). For skeptics of DEI alternatives who also believe in centering the thinking of women of color during these times, I can suggest no stronger slate of philosophies to challenge their thinking.

Taisha has worked in the diversity industry for 15 years and believes a shift in its approach is needed: In a crisis-prone world, she writes, we need to organize people around shared goals, not shared identities. If a diverse group focuses on a goal (such as higher wages) that would benefit everyone working toward its, or a goal (such as reducing carbon emissions) that would benefit society in general, diversity goals will be achieved as a by-product of everyone cooperating.

She writes:

A common goal motivates people to handle themselves, so their personalities become less of a hindrance to the group’s purpose; to identify and develop their unique assets to benefit the group; and to recognize and mobilize their peers to do the same for the group’s good. Humans are inherently selfish and self-centered. But when we find something to believe in, we are more willing to set aside our personal likes and dislikes to work alongside others who share our goals. Then we think less of our identity differences. This sameness of purpose achieves inclusion without sacrificing differences.

The success of current unionizing efforts illustrate this new approach to DEI that I call  “Purpose not Personalities.” Unions organize a diverse group of people around a centrally compelling purpose (better treatment, higher wages, etc.) that motivates them to set aside whatever issues they might have with one another and dedicate the best of themselves, including their unique perspectives and skills, to help the group achieve success. To solve the many crises facing us, organizations can and should shift their DEI efforts to encourage less focus on personality or identity differences and more on group GOOD, trusting people to work out their differences as they lose sight of themselves.

Now on to the great majority of correspondents who have experienced DEI training sessions as participants. John agrees with the notion that an emphasis on shared goals tends to yield success:

I spent 24 years in the organization that, in my opinion, has done the best job with diversity and inclusion: the U.S. military. The real success happened at a cultural level: We all had a unifying mission. Anyone not in the military was the other, for the kinds of people that need an “other.”  And if someone did bring their prejudices and racism to work in the military, they were dealt with quite harshly. In this example, we should see a way forward. It is a shared mission and shared purpose that brings all people together. Anytime you substitute some other word for human, dehumanizing behavior occurs.

Our leaders, DEI educators, and media should all stress our shared culture and humanity. Instead, our leaders and DEI educators emphasize and exacerbate differences. We are doing the opposite of the right thing to bring about less racism and prejudice.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that the military took this approach with race far earlier than with sexual orientation, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell formally in place until 2011, when the unifying mission (and the justness of equality under the law) was treated as mattering more than the difference in identity.

J., a high-school teacher in Canada, writes:

Diversity training is not about diversity. Diversity training is about providing excuses to institutions that don’t want to tackle poverty and the fundamental inequality of our capitalist system. Instead, they blame “institutional”' racism, an intentionally obscure term. What does it look like? How does one measure it? Who is implicated?

The conceit of these sessions during my 20 years as a teacher: You frontline workers, YOU are the reason these students fail. In my context—high schools—the only “proof” required for this conceit is the fact that some demographic groups do worse than others. We know that outcomes tell an incomplete story when variables like income, family, mental health, etc. are ignored. Diversity training is privileged people (professionals, administrators, politicians, professors, academics, many of whom make a good living as “experts” in this field) advancing a story, a theory. Yet, the literature demonstrates no meaningful successes to this decades-long progressive experiment.

We need viewpoint diversity in our institutions. Our fixation as progressives on dogma, and a narrow, Orwellian definition of what counts as diversity, is as much fuel for the culture wars as the excesses of the right. It’s just that we lefties are, ironically, too blind to our own privilege—educational privilege, class privilege, trauma privilege, etc.—to see it.

S. used to love being a professor:

I am a Bernie Sanders voter. I have spent 25 years working toward countering racism. I have lost friends and family, as I was “too woke.” I had my dream job, teaching mostly underprivileged students. I now almost loathe my job.

Faculty have been subjected to an authoritarian agenda of DEI/social justice since George Floyd was killed. His death had nothing to do with our campus or state, but it’s as if nothing matters anymore but racism, DEI, and payback for his situation. We are constantly peppered with meaningless utopian aspirations toward “equality of outcomes,” which is patently absurd, even within a family, let alone a state, school, nation, or planet. We are forced to listen to meaningless equity language and endure tortuous training and workshops, often required. They are usually run by unimpressive people whose qualifications seem dubious, usually taking the chance to scold the white faculty who have earned master’s and Ph.D.s and are established and renowned teachers who committed their lives to average-to-low pay for the sake of equity and justice.

Nobody dares offer any dissent. I have spoken to high-level administrators, people white and nonwhite, and they will not say anything. Nobody dares counter the social-justice/equity people. All are fearful of cancellation or firing. All have families and bills to pay and err on the side of lethargic caution. Everybody knows none of this is helping students.

I will never vote conservative on any policy, for what it’s worth. I will, however, wonder if I am in the most Orwellian career imaginable. My irritation is endless and my despondency palpable. My friends are tired of hearing about it. I’m a tenured, published, respected professor in California. on the verge of depression for the first time in my life.

Sherri, a gay woman who worked from 1988 to 2017, shared her thoughts on diversity training:

I’m a Ph.D. chemist, meaning I spent my career in a very male-dominated industry at a time when senior-level women were very rare, much less senior-level out LGBTQ people. I was closeted for the first 10 years of my career and then very out. In the ’90s, while I was still fairly junior and still closeted, my company, like many in the chemicals industry, started a Leadership Training protocol that in part focused on diversity awareness. I am convinced it is one of the worst things the company could have done.

They took a gaggle of senior managers off-site, away from day-to-day work pressures for a week; raised their awareness ofn “diversity”––which really just focused on representation––then sent them back with no skills for truly creating change. They all then felt that they “got it” and weren’t the problem. But day to day, they went back to their ingrained behaviors. Only now they felt enlightened and didn’t even try to look in the mirror.

Later, when I was out, I became a popular speaker on the internal circuit of department meetings to discuss what it felt like to be a gay senior woman at the company. I spent a fair amount of time trying to sensitize people to the concept of privilege without calling it that. The analogy I used was a fish versus a scuba diver. Both could survive in the ocean, but the fish did so effortlessly as the environment was built around their needs and capabilities. The scuba diver needed an oxygen tank, wet suit, fins, and had to expend a fair amount of energy to just survive in the ocean, much less thrive. The scuba diver was constantly aware of his difference and how much conscious effort it took to navigate underwater, and it was exhausting. The fish didn’t even know what water was.  

We are all fish in some ways and scuba divers in others. Where you are a fish, remember what it feels like when you are a scuba diver. And reach out to the scuba divers and help them survive.

We are so bent out of shape focusing on what we consider a “defining characteristic” that we miss what is most important: seeing each person as an individual human. We generalize and make assumptions based on gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or what have you. Maybe instead we should follow the Ted Lasso model of being “people curious.” Teach people about unintentional bias that all humans carry and use nontraditional examples like assumptions about how someone dresses or the school they went to or their accent. Then focus on the fact that bias in and of itself isn’t bad; it’s what you do with the knowledge that you carry bias. Don’t focus so much on someone’s speech or behavior as much as on what they should learn from it.

We will all make mistakes; we will all offend; in most cases it is not intentional. We all want to be seen as fully human and treated with respect. Can’t we just focus on that?

Richard is an engineer and describes how the DEI initiatives he’s been exposed to have changed:

In 2000, I moved from the U.K. to the U.S.A.

It was a job-related move, within a large company, working with semiconductors for automotive applications. About three years later, I encountered my first corporate DEI initiative. In the simplest terms, the company informed us that hiring practices were changing to increase profit. The training consisted of a few pages of reading, followed by a discussion during my manager’s weekly group meeting.

My boss provided us with a relevant example, and a nod in my direction. “Imagine a car with a subsystem design flaw that’s only exposed when driving on the left-hand side of the road.” He’d made his point: having a diverse team working on a problem would result in a more robust solution.

By 2018, I was working for a different tech company. I was also living in a much redder state, and DEI had become a divisive issue. Arriving extremely late to the game, my employer started rolling out DEI training. The introductory reading material was reluctant to mention the profit motive for maintaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce. DEI was presented as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Over the course of a year, a new branch appeared on the org chart, a vice president was hired, corporate goals were set, support groups established, and mailing lists created. Personal DEI goals were defined, refined, and aligned with corporate goals. Employee-development task lists were expected to feature several DEI-related objectives. Progress would need to be demonstrated on a quarterly basis. Mostly, my DEI training consisted of online “unconscious bias” courses provided by an external company.

At first, I was enthusiastic. Engineers like knowing how things work, and I thought I might gain some insight into my biases. But I soon realized that instead of gaining an increased level of self-awareness, I was simply learning the names of a long list of biases. Meanwhile, the continuing stream of emails from the DEI branch of the organization prompted me to set up an email filter, and my enthusiasm for the initiative began to wane. I started to feel like my corporate parents were openly expressing a preference for one of my siblings. It turns out you definitely can have too much of a good thing.

During one of my unconscious-bias courses, I learned that groups who’ve enjoyed an unchallenged, privileged position are the same groups most likely to feel threatened by change. What the courses didn’t mention was that any backlash directed at the intended beneficiaries of DEI initiatives would have been misplaced. I certainly felt exasperated with my employer, though.

The company seemed unwilling to explicitly state that certain new employees provided extra, unquantifiable value. And at no point did the company decide that some of that value should be returned to each new hire in the form of a higher salary. In fact, while the DEI initiative was being rolled out, salary ranges were tightened to prevent perceived discrimination. I’ve become less tolerant of heavy-handed corporate initiatives. A corporation should be able to profit by becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive while maintaining the morale of existing employees. In my experience, hitting the optimum rate of corporate culture change is difficult.

Greg, 61, says diversity training at the large aerospace company where he works has been addressed more intelligently and effectively than he would have anticipated based on media coverage.

He writes:

The training we had was pretty good, even to a skeptical observer. I remember a compelling discussion by one diversity trainer who said that we most frequently associate diversity considerations with gender and race, but that was in part a historical accident because those groupings were particularly important in the 1960s and 1970s when thinking about diversity as a workplace concept emerged. This trainer used an alternative case of employees in today’s workplace with prominent tattoos, a group that may be viscerally disturbing to older employees based on our conditioning when we were young, but tattoos are essentially irrelevant to workplace performance.

After President Donald Trump was elected, about 2,000 of our senior-level employees were on a quarterly phone call with our CEO. One asked: Given the change in administration, were we going to change our diversity policies? Our CEO replied that we would change nothing, because our policies were not to curry political favor. Our diversity strategy was to out-compete our rival companies, because we would expand our access to talent by addressing issues that have historically undervalued certain groups of people.

K. resents the training she was subjected to while doing civic work:

I have volunteered with the City of Madison (Wisconsin) Clerk’s Office every election since the 1990s and in recent years have worked as a special voting deputy helping with voter registration, taking absentee ballots to nursing homes, and the like. The city clerk’s office motto is “We exist to assist,” and most of us there let that be our guiding light in the service of democracy. Because our city is deeply concerned about equity, “diversity training” has been required for city personnel for the past several years. These sessions seem to be aimed at people who have never considered—much less worked to ameliorate—the problem of inequity and have only served to offend and alienate me.

I am an old progressive whose first professional position was bringing support services to migrant farm workers and their families. As a female raised in the 1960s, I know ALL about discrimination; you don’t need to describe it. The condescension implicit in these “woke” puppies presenting the novel idea that some people start off at a disadvantage to others is offensive.

I love my city, deeply respect its staff, and am still fully committed to equality as a cause, but showing me diversity slide shows has not had what I am pretty certain was the desired effect. And, yeah, it’s not about me, but please. I’ve been trying all my life. All. My. Life. I’ve been trying to make a difference.

Megan believes the DEI programming she has seen in higher education doesn’t address academia’s most pressing problems:

Grad school is a toxic environment: Students on assistantships are paid poverty wages, given health care they can barely afford, are overworked by advisers who perpetuate the bad mentorship practices they experienced, and get degrees in fields flooded with people vying for jobs. This is a bad environment for even a cis white male or female with good mental health … and the focus is increasing departmental diversity and pronoun training.

How is any person supposed to thrive here?

T.M. doesn’t fit neatly into any identity box:

I’ve worked as an adjunct professor for over a decade, mostly at a prestigious northeastern university. I’m also of Assyrian descent, with a heavy mix of old-school New England. I sometimes think the reason I wound up in American studies as a discipline is because in 1991, while I was doing a genealogy project for fifth-grade social studies, the teacher told me I couldn’t be an American. Here I was, 11 years old, the United States had gone to war in Iraq, and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to explain who or what Assyrians are. Iraq didn’t exist in 1906 when my father’s family came to America.

I don’t consider myself white-passing, but it’s been obvious since I was young that my grandfather and great-grandfather were of darker complexion than I am. I’m aware that I’ve been privileged by my white complexion, but I am often met with resistance to my belief that DEI is actually reinforcing the arbitrary cultural signifier of whiteness rather than decreasing it. Today, because I don’t fit neatly into one box, I find that the administrators at the university where I teach lack the same nuance as my fifth-grade social-studies teacher. My questions as to the efficacy of trainings are met with vague, bureaucratic language.

Echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr., we at the university are told we are now a “beloved community,” but unlike MLK, the DEI initiatives ignore economic equity or inclusion. Diversity, instead, is merely a way to fit people into categorical racial boxes. It’s no wonder some people are resentful of being categorized into something that is so ill-defined.

The academy has failed to generate conversations that truly explore the functions of race and class. It’s off-putting to get boilerplate messaging about racial diversity from people who make six-figure salaries when they are the same people who cut my health care last year. I don’t see the equity or inclusion of that decision, but yet we are now “beloved.”

How can we truly be diverse, equitable, and inclusive when over half the faculty who teach in higher education are treated as disposable? We’re denying the very cracks in our foundation the administrators claim to be fixing. DEI isn’t a solution. It’s a corporate orthodoxy that creates problems. I am distrusting of these initiatives.

Caleb scoffs at “equity” efforts that ignore income:

I was an administrative assistant at a law firm in Maine. Through six hours of mandatory DEI trainings, professional and administrative staff alike were educated on the nuanced definitions of equality and equity, complete with visual aids of children standing on different sizes of wooden boxes. Meanwhile, there was an elephant in the room that was never acknowledged: the attorneys sitting in on these Zoom trainings with us were, and are still, paid in the range of five to 20 times what the administrative staff make.

During the pandemic, while we were expected to consume gas and time commuting to the office, masked up and at risk of infection, to sort and scan mail, print checks, etc., the professional staff could work from home, expense meals, and receive compensation for work-related travel. When I asked if I could receive compensation for my 90-minute commute, I was laughed out of the office. The consensus of the administrative staff after our mandatory six hours of preachy DEI trainings: They are a cruel joke so long as they ignore financial inequality. Of course, they could hardly be so popular in the business world if they highlighted the outrageous economic inequality it fosters.

Jaleelah, a student, describes how diversity programs feature in the world of competitive debate in Canada:

Virtually all debate teams and competitions have “equity officers” (a name that would give Ron DeSantis an aneurysm) who are responsible for “making sure participants are comfortable.” In practice, this means that barely trained university students are tasked with a wide range of responsibilities. Here is a list of equity functions I support:

Arranging subsidies for students who can’t afford to pay for competitions Communicating with organizers to ensure disabled debaters are only assigned to rooms they can physically access at tournaments Ensuring that there are no conflicts of interest between judges and the teams they are assigned to adjudicate

Here is a list of functions I oppose:

Mandating that trigger warnings be given before speeches (thankfully, this practice is not ubiquitous) Vetoing debate topics on the grounds that they might prompt people to make offensive arguments

And here is a list of functions that I have a neutral or varying opinion on:

Constantly reminding people not to make sweeping generalizations about groups of people Mediating conflicts between students (some equity officers are horrible mediators, but I generally support the approach) Providing input on debate topics (when it is clear that students are not permitted to issue vetoes)

That’s a long list, but equity teams usually run pretty smoothly. I suspect that there are three reasons for this. First, equity’s power in debate is sufficiently limited. Judges do not penalize teams for the sole reason that a speaker said something “inequitable.” Equity teams cannot intervene in debate rounds (outside of a situation where one competitor is screaming targeted slurs or physically assaulting another), nor can they alter the results. Their most severe power of removing people from clubs and competitions is almost exclusively reserved for students who have committed crimes against other students (and those people usually resign anyway). When people perceive overreach, they complain loudly. Trigger-warning mandates for speakers have been greatly reduced because a number of people (including me) argued that they are ineffective.

Second, there are social incentives for equity officers to avoid doing stupid things. All equity officers are also debaters. It’s a bad idea to harshly punish someone for accidentally saying something offensive when you know you’ll have to spend an entire weekend with their friends. Equity officers are not above other students. This is sharply different from DEI trainings in the corporate world where a team of outside instructors assume a position of power over a given office or team.

Finally, the debate community assumes that people have good intentions. When conversations about ideological bias arise, conservatives and communists never accuse liberals of intentionally rigging rounds against them—they analyze the ways in which common unconscious biases cause judges to favor certain arguments.

And last in today’s roundup, an anonymous reader shares a diversity-training experience that caused him a lot of anxiety:

After years of teaching history at the college level, I took a job at an elite private high school, drawn in part by their stated goal of investing time, energy, and money in DEI education and initiatives. The school had a contract with a DEI-training company to educate all the faculty and administrators via a three-day retreat on race. My research and teaching has focused on race throughout my career. In a real sense, talking and writing about race is my job. Due to my personal and professional goals, I signed up to go.

We were immediately told by the facilitators that the purpose was not to train us in DEI but instead to have us spend the entire time reflecting on our own racial journeys. It was immediately clear that the space was designed to be a sort of deconstructed learning experience, where we were expressly forbidden from discussing the issue from the standpoint of research or debate. Instead we would discuss it at a personal level. Such ideas and stories, once shared, were subject to attack by the facilitators.

One white, female teacher was talkative and engaged in the first couple sessions, and the facilitators called her out for what they felt was a race-based domination of the space. Certainly, she’d made some “mistakes” in what she said about race, but the goal appeared to extract some kind of mea culpa. She meekly apologized and never spoke again.

Later, we were told with the utmost confidence that none of us talk about race in the classroom and that when the subject comes up we all shy away from it out of fear and cowardice. When a couple of teachers, including me, said that we were required to talk about race as part of the subjects we teach, this was met with a reiteration of the assertion that we do so reluctantly. The white facilitator then sat down cross-legged on the floor and spent an hour telling us how racist she was. I’m not being flip: The gist was that she once thought she wasn’t but then learned that she was and now understood that no matter how much she learned, she’d never escape her racist origin. She asked the whites in the room for their thoughts.

No one said anything for a long time. Then a white teacher started crying and said she'd been picked on for being poor and dark-skinned as a kid. The facilitators made it clear that this was the wrong answer.

On the final day, the most notable activity was one in which the group was split into white and people-of-color affinity groups. Afterward we came back to the main room and reflected. A Black teacher talked about positive stereotyping of Black people being just as reductive as negative stereotyping. I responded that this was something I've taught about in the case of the Middle East, saying that Orientalism not only perpetuates nasty things about Middle Eastern peoples (e.g. “All Muslims are sexist”) but posits supposedly good characteristics as uniform (e.g. “All Muslims are hospitable”). After a break, we came back together and the facilitators said that before we went on they wanted to tackle something.

Facilitators: “In the last session, you used the word ‘Orientalism.’ We want you to know that ‘Oriental’ is a very racist term to describe Asian people. But you put an -ism at the end and we wanted to ask what you meant by that.”

Me: “Um, well, ‘Orientalism’ refers to a group of scholars who called themselves ‘Orientalists’ because they studied the Middle East, and from the 1960s onward, were criticized by other scholars (especially Edward Said) for their reliance on Western biases.”

Facilitators: “Well, that is the scholarly, academic world. Here, in this space, ‘Oriental’ is a racist term. And we want you to reflect on that.”

Me: “I’m, um, sorry if anyone took it that way. In my work, this is a term we use to talk about racism …” [face red, heart racing]

Facilitators [interrupting]: “We’re out here, in this space. That space is academic. In this space, this is a space where ‘Oriental’ shouldn’t be said.”

I was fuming. To me, that exchange totally undermined any authority they had to speak on race, if they didn’t even know the primary word used to describe racism against Middle Eastern people. It doesn’t matter if people who are supposed to be experts in race have never heard of the term “Orientalism,” as if they missed the post-9/11 debates over Western biases against anyone deemed “Eastern”––I could lose my job over being called racist.

At some point this year, perhaps as soon as this month, the former president of the United States may be charged with a serious crime. After a years-long elaborate dance with the law in which he usually stayed just one step ahead, Donald Trump now faces at least three serious investigations that could produce criminal charges. He denies wrongdoing in all cases, but many legal experts think that prosecutors have grounds to charge him and will. Others believe that Trump shouldn’t be charged, or that prosecutors might choose not to charge him even if they can.

What actually will happen is unpredictable. We don’t know what pieces of evidence—or even what investigations—might exist that aren’t public, we don’t know how prosecutors will wield the discretion the law affords them, and, of course, we don’t know how a jury might fall on any charges that end up being tried. But the mountains of evidence already before the public—about Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, about his handling of government documents, and about his previous interactions with the justice system—suggest a fierce conflict to come. “He has learned that due process is the Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor, told me. “He’s weaponized the court systems all of his life.”

[Read: The inevitable indictment of Donald Trump]

Despite all of the uncertainty, the information already available makes it possible to know what to watch for, or perhaps where to watch. Here is a field guide to the potential indictments of Donald Trump.

Fulton County

The first movement might come from an investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, which includes part of Atlanta. A special grand jury there conducted a lengthy investigation that began in June 2022 and concluded earlier this month. District Attorney Fani Willis requested the panel after audio emerged in January 2021 of Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” in the state, enough to surpass Joe Biden’s tally. The grand jury’s work is secret, but it has reportedly interviewed dozens of people, including Senator Lindsey Graham and the former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Willis appears to be interested not only in Trump’s pressure campaign against Raffensperger but also in a slate of fake electors who gathered in Georgia, and in various claims that Trump allies made about supposed election fraud.

The special grand jury, unlike a normal grand jury, cannot bring indictments; instead, it makes recommendations, and Willis would have to seek indictments from a normal grand jury. When the special grand jury completed its work, it requested that a judge make its report public. Judge Robert McBurney has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow, January 24, on that question, and opinions differ as to whether he is effectively required to release the report or might have discretion on timing. The report is expected to include recommendations for indictments and to reveal much of the scope of the investigation, so its possible release means that Willis is likely to seek charges soon, if she is not doing so already.

Willis would seem to have a wide range of charges she could bring against a range of defendants, but any charges against Trump would likely center on the Raffensperger call. “The tape is the tape and it’s pretty darn compelling by itself, and it looks like it would be the centerpiece of any charges,” Rosenzweig told me. Trump often speaks elliptically and avoids clearly implicating himself, but Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former U.S. attorney, told me that the recording of the call, combined with evidence turned up by the House January 6 committee showing that Trump knew claims of fraud were false, provides both a clear act of wrongdoing and proof of criminal intent.

[David French: Georgia has a very strong case against Trump]

If Willis does want to charge Trump, she’ll have to decide whether to pursue discrete cases against individuals or a large racketeering case against many. She’s shown a fondness for the latter, most recently in a case against the rapper Young Thug, but a big case would be more complicated and messy, and it would require a huge investment of resources for a county prosecutor’s office. “The only thing worse than not prosecuting would be to bring charges and then to lose,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, told me.

But the seriousness of the misconduct might push Willis toward charges despite the risk, and her approach so far suggests an eagerness for both the national spotlight and tough fights. It has also set public expectations. “She has to go up and answer to the voters of Fulton County, and if she doesn’t charge some of these folks for patent violations of Georgia law, she better have a damn good reason,” Kreis said.

Mar-a-Lago Documents

On paper—no pun intended—the probe into Donald Trump’s removal of documents from the White House should be much simpler than the Fulton County case as a matter of law and thus more straightforwardly likely to result in charges against him by the U.S. Department of Justice. It’s not just that Trump removed documents, including classified material; it’s that he repeatedly defied requests to return them and seems to have obstructed the government’s attempts to recover them. From public evidence, many experts view the case as cut-and-dried—legally, at least. “It certainly seems like the law is clear,” Rosenzweig told me. “There’s a relatively narrow, confined set of facts. Prosecutors tend to like small cases, not big cases.”

[David A. Graham: Trump opened Pandora’s prosecutorial box]

The simplicity of the law doesn’t mean the politics aren’t complicated. Charging a former president—and current presidential candidate—is always going to be more delicate than a typical criminal case. The case would likely have to be brought in Florida, where a jury might be more sympathetic to Trump than in Washington, D.C. Trump might also seek to shift blame to his lawyers, who represented to the government that all documents were returned, and he might succeed. These are all considerations for Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed as special counsel in November to oversee the documents investigation as well as the January 6 probes.

And Smith’s considerations just got more complicated in recent weeks with the revelation that classified documents were found at Biden’s home in Delaware and his think tank at the University of Pennsylvania. Trump has already begun arguing that he is being persecuted for something that Biden also did. Factually, that’s wrong: We don’t know as much about the Biden documents, but there’s no sign of obstruction so far. Garland has appointed a separate special counsel to handle the Biden case, so any decision to charge or not charge him will be somewhat independent. “The cases are completely dissimilar,” Rosenzweig. “That would be stupid, but all you need is one stupid juror. Trials are stories, and there are no slam dunks.”

Charges, or even a conviction, against Trump on the documents case would be somewhat ironic. A man who has publicly committed far more egregious acts—including the two for which he was impeached—getting busted for stolen documents would be a little bit like Al Capone’s conviction for tax evasion. Still, a case would send the message that Trump is not above the law.

January 6

The most interesting case, and perhaps the most consequential for American democracy, involves Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election—something often shorthanded as “January 6” but that includes not just the riot that day but also the weeks-long paperwork coup that preceded it. Though Willis’s investigation captures one slice of that, her purview is also restricted to one state among the several where Trump tried to interfere with results. A federal case has the potential to really capture much of the scope of the former president’s plot against American democracy.

Delivering on that potential will not be easy. The scope is enormous: fake electors, the Justice Department mutiny, the actual January 6 riot, the pressure campaign against Mike Pence, and more, all united by the goal of keeping Trump in power despite the outcome of the election in Biden’s favor. Although the House committee uncovered a great deal of evidence, some of it is hearsay and thus not admissible in court, and although in common parlance Trump is clearly to blame, securing a conviction is still tough. “Even if in your heart of hearts you think he is guilty, can you get 12 strangers to agree?” McQuade asked.

[Read: The biggest takeaway from the January 6 report]

If Smith decides that charges are merited, he could try for a sweeping case—the better to punish the scope of the behavior—or go for something more targeted, which might feel less cathartic but be more likely to end with a conviction. He also has to consider the possible risks of a federal prosecution. “If you ask my opinion, I would say the substantial federal interest in protecting the lawful transfer of presidential power exceeds any collateral consequence,” McQuade said. “How egregious does it have to be before you charge a former president? I would draw the line somewhere before inciting an insurrection.”

Smith also has to watch the clock. On January 20, 2025, a new president could take office—possibly a Republican, perhaps even Trump—which would likely spell the end of any case against him. But Rosenzweig said Trump’s continued presence amplifies the need for accountability too. “If Trump had gone away and faded from the scene, we’d probably let him get away. The specter of indicting a former president is just too terrible,” he said. “But he and his party have made January 6 a rallying cry, and that is going to make it harder to say no.”

Manhattan

One enigma is an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney. That office recently obtained a conviction of the Trump Organization for tax fraud and other crimes. Previously, it had been investigating other allegations, including claims that the company paid hush money to a porn actor who said she had sex with Trump. That investigation appeared moribund—and its lead prosecutors left the office—but it has recently shown signs of life, including an interview with the estranged Trump fixer Michael Cohen and a warning to a former prosecutor that his book could hurt the probe. Little is clear about what charges, if any, could result, or when.

The Next Steps

Say one of these prosecutors does indict the former president of the United States. What happens next? Some answers are pretty clear; the really big ones are not.

If Trump is indicted, he’ll have to be booked and fingerprinted like any other defendant, whether that’s at the Fulton County jail or some federal courthouse. Don’t expect a dramatic perp walk with windbreakered FBI agents leading him, though. Trump’s lawyers would likely arrange a time for him to come in, and bail conditions would be agreed upon ahead of time, but he’d have to appear before a judge. Then would come a seemingly endless slog of procedural motions, legal maneuvers, and discovery—all elongated as much as possible by the defense to run out the clock, exhaust the government, or find weaknesses, and all appealed as often and as high as possible.

[David A. Graham: The tragedy of the Congress]

If a prosecutor actually managed to get to trial, they would then have the huge task of convicting Trump. Few will bring cases they don’t think they can win, but nothing is a sure bet. Even something as plain Trump’s call to Raffensperger might play differently in court, Titus Nichols, a defense attorney and former prosecutor in Georgia who represented the whistleblower Reality Winner, told me. “If a regular person had done that, they’d be indicted, no question,” he said. “When you’re a person with resources or you’re famous, then everyone wants to give you the benefit of the doubt.” Prosecutors might also manage to convict some lower-level players but not Trump.

If Trump is indicted and convicted, the charges are ones that could very well lead to incarceration, as Willis herself has noted. “If someone were convicted of one of these serious crimes, a prison sentence would be likely,” McQuade told me. But other observers think it’s doubtful that Trump will ever see the inside of a jail cell, given the complications and the length of probable appeals.

All of these considerations make for nearly impossible decisions for prosecutors. When I joked to Rosenzweig that he didn’t sound like he envied Jack Smith, he quickly corrected me. “I do envy him, in that he’s got a really exciting and interesting job, but I would not want to be him or Merrick Garland,” he said. “They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Trump has broken the system, and there are no good choices.” For Garland and Smith—and Willis, too—the task is to find the least bad option, and then pursue it with care.

Late Night's Stephen Colbert had a lot to say about the hoodie-suit combo Don Lemon recently wore on CNN This Morning. In response, Don explained why he flaunts the style status quo.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

“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.

Romance isn’t the only part of life in which mixed feelings can cause pain. Maybe your ambivalence is instead directed toward your employer, and you can’t decide whether to stay and work to make things better, or go someplace else. Or maybe some of your memories are painfully mixed and hard to interpret. Perhaps your childhood was both good and bad, not fitting into a neat frame, and thus feels impossible to explain to others or even yourself.

Mixed emotions drain your emotional batteries, like a phone connecting to multiple networks simultaneously. They are one of the most complex psychological phenomena we are capable of, and bring us a great deal of distress. You might think that purely negative emotions are the most unpleasant ones; in truth, a cocktail of negative and positive can be worse.

The idea of being able to experience truly “mixed” feelings is quite new. Well into the 20th century, many psychologists believed that positive and negative emotions existed on a continuum. If you felt “less bad” as time passed after a loss or trauma, that simply meant you felt “more good.” Researchers didn’t think you could feel good and bad at the same time. Even today, people often talk about happiness and unhappiness in this way—as if the presence of one means the absence of the other.

In the 1960s, new psychological research began to collect evidence that positive and negative emotions were in fact separable, and as further research observed, could be felt simultaneously, and also in rapid succession. Neuroscience added support for this hypothesis when scholars found that positive and negative emotions largely correspond to activity in different hemispheres of the brain (for many people, negative emotions align with activity on the right, positive on the left).

[Read: Sit with negative emotions, don’t push them away]

Today, many emotion researchers believe that mixed emotions happen to just about everyone. Sometimes you feel positively about your romantic relationship in the morning, and negatively in the afternoon, for no clear reason. Or in one moment, you feel good about the overall partnership (I’m glad we’re together!) but bad about certain aspects (she isn’t very affectionate, and that worries me).

You might assume that your net happiness at a given time would be something like your positive emotion minus your negative emotion; if good > bad, then you are “net happy.” But as Catullus suggests, it’s not so simple: Mixed emotions can impose a psychological toll that’s greater than the result of that equation, because they are confusing and conflictive. You might say that the bad and good are at war internally, exhausting you emotionally.

Last year, a researcher found just this when he measured the effects of positive, negative, and mixed emotions on well-being: Positive emotions pushed well-being up, and negative emotions pushed it down; meanwhile, the independent measure of mixed emotions also pushed well-being down, and by more than negative emotions alone. In other words, hating your relationship or your job is emotionally easier than being ambivalent about it.

One seemingly obvious solution to the problem of mixed emotions is to try to eradicate them through more binary thinking. For example, you could attempt to eliminate shades of gray in your romance by simply deciding that it is “good” or “bad,” and then acting accordingly. My wife—a Spaniard—has told me that she thinks a lot of Americans do this: Everything has to be either wonderful or awful. Psychologists call this “dichotomous thinking,” and studies show that it is neither helpful nor healthy; on the contrary, it is associated with a number of personality disorders.

Rather than trying to think more dichotomously, lean into the zone of mixed emotions, which psychologists call “dialectical thinking.” This is the attitude that opposite emotions are normal and compatible. Some cultures are better than others at dialectical thinking—and my wife is right that Americans tend to be especially weak at it. For example, one 2021 experiment on American and Chinese students asked them to read statements that elicited happy memories and sad emotions at the same time, such as “I have been dreading this moment, but it has finally arrived. A chapter in my life is ending, and the future is still uncertain. I’ll miss the neighborhood and the friends I’ve made. I really do not want to leave. It’s a sad and nostalgic time.” The Americans experienced almost 50 percent more discomfort when reading this than their Chinese counterparts, possibly because they did not recognize or focus on the fact that missing one’s neighborhood and friends implies that one has happy memories of them.

[Read: The countries where people are the most emotionally complex]

To become more dialectical in your thinking, start by consciously acknowledging your conflicting feelings, as opposed to letting them battle away in your subconscious. If you’re conflicted about your relationship, try writing down its positive and negative aspects. Consider how you might manage the aspects you dislike, or perhaps accept them if you can’t change them. But decide—if the benefits outweigh the costs—that nothing is unnatural or wrong about having positive and negative feelings about someone you love. I have applied this technique in many areas of my life; it provides real relief and raises my happiness.

Once you are more comfortable with your mixed emotions, start to explore the richness that ambivalence can bring to your understanding of your life. Researchers in 2017 showed that people can find a deeper sense of purpose when contemplating both their happy and sad emotions about a particular occurrence, such as graduating from college. Seeing the true complexity of our relationships and experiences takes us beyond the superficial “great” or “horrible” descriptions that obfuscate more than elucidate our lives.

Note here an apparent contradiction: Mixed emotions may bring unhappiness, but they can also bring meaning to life. On reflection, you will notice that there is no inconsistency. Meaning is not only positive; on the contrary, a truly meaningful life is one filled with all types of experiences and emotions, including those we find disagreeable. This is why some psychotherapy seeks to not only lower emotional pain, but also find deep purpose in it. In a fully examined life, your mixed and negative emotions don’t go to waste.

Catullus’s dilemma has haunted and inspired us for centuries. In 1989, the Rolling Stones offered a particularly direct reckoning in their song “Mixed Emotions,” which proved to be their last Billboard top-10 hit to date. “This coming and going is driving me nuts,” sang the modern-day Catullus, Mick Jagger. “This to-ing and fro-ing is hurting my guts.”

[Read: Measuring your happiness can help improve it]

Life is easier when the path forward is clear, of course, but it rarely is. We are built to experience highs and lows, and almost everything truly meaningful has both. Sometimes, that hurts your guts. But that’s the point. Don’t try to make life uncomplicated, or love it any less because it’s messy. Rather, resolve to be fully awake and alive inside that mess.

Some say the time of the tank is over, but Ukraine needs the weapons to push Russia out of its territory.

The recent discovery of a small number of classified documents, left over from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president and found at his private office and home, has injected confusion into the public’s understanding of whether any criminal liability might be appropriate for former President Donald Trump in connection with the huge trove of classified documents found last year at Mar-a-Lago.

Given the facts as they are now known, only the most superficial parallel can be drawn between Biden’s possession of these documents and Trump’s conduct relating to the documents held at Mar-a-Lago. To be clear, Biden having classified documents in unsecure, nongovernmental settings violates the law regarding the handling of such documents. Unfortunately, his administration has done itself no favor by its delayed disclosure of the problem, creating unnecessary suspicion and political turmoil.

[Quinta Jurecic: The classified-files scandal is the most Trumpy scandal of all]

Under these circumstances, Attorney General Merrick Garland has, in our view, acted wisely in appointing special counsels to fully evaluate the facts concerning both events, and his selection of a highly qualified, experienced prosecutor—Robert K. Hur—is a sign that he is taking account of the need for public trust in the administration of justice.

Even if, at some point, evidence of potential criminal conduct develops in the Biden case, in no proper prosecutorial universe should that affect or deter Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump. In the unlikely event that both men did commit crimes, that would be no reason not to prosecute Trump—or Biden, for that matter, once he is out of office. No person is above the law.  

But these two cases are not equivalent. For starters, let’s consider the two stories through the lens of the statutes cited in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant approved by a federal court.     

Individuals violate the Espionage Act when, among other things, they willfully retain national-defense documents and fail to return them to a proper government official upon request. In November, Biden’s personal lawyer discovered the classified documents and returned them to the government without a request. So that statute does not apply. Biden has denied knowing that he had the documents.

The contrast with Trump is stark. The National Archives and Records Administration first asked him to return missing documents in May 2021. The following January, Archives officials retrieved 15 boxes of government records, and on June 3, 2022, his lawyer signed a sworn statement that all documents responsive to a grand jury subpoena were being returned after a “diligent” search. (That any lawyer would do so without conducting the search herself raises serious ethical questions, and strongly implies that she was instructed by someone to make the statement.)

[Bob Bauer: Why do former presidents have access to classified information?]

In August, a federal court was provided evidence that the lawyer’s statement was likely false, and the court issued the search warrant that allowed the FBI to seize upwards of 11,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago. They included more than 70 documents marked “Secret” or “Top Secret,” some apparently containing information whose disclosure could conceivably endanger the lives of American intelligence sources overseas.

The apparent obstruction of justice—with evidence pointing to Trump’s direct involvement—make up the serious misconduct here, more serious than a former president simply having removed documents from their proper place. Trump’s lawyers repeatedly asserted in court that the Mar-a-Lago documents were “personal,” effectively admitting that Trump took them and kept them.

The centrality of concealment to the case is made even clearer by the second statute cited in the Mar-a-Lago affidavit. It subjects to prosecution anyone who “knowingly … conceals [or] covers up … any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede [or] obstruct … the investigation or proper administration of any [federal] matter.”

By contrast, in Biden’s case, no evidence yet exists of concealment or of intent to impede or obstruct the proper administration of any federal matter. With Trump, a federal judge has already determined, in approving the Mar-a-Lago warrant, that there was probable cause to believe that Trump intended to impede or obstruct an investigation or NARA’s proper administration of government records, and likely both.

[David French: Don’t minimize Biden’s classified-information mess]

Similarly, the third criminal statute relied on in the Mar-a-Lago affidavit prohibits “willfully and unlawfully concealing [or] removing” a government record or document from “any public office … of the United States.” Willful and unlawful intent requires knowledge that one is breaking the law, and Trump was placed on notice over the course of many months, and asked numerous times by multiple federal agencies to return all classified and presidential records. He still did not.

From what we know now, Biden’s situation differs significantly both from Trump’s conduct at Mar-a-Lago and from prior prosecutions of high-level government officials for mishandling classified documents.

In 2005, Sandy Berger, a former national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing government documents. In 2003, years after his government service, he had gone to the National Archives to review files, and as he left, a staffer spotted what appeared to be paper protruding from Berger’s pant leg. Stuffing documents into his trousers to hide them, along with his later attempt to throw the records into a construction site, was powerful evidence of willful and unlawful intent.

In 2015, David Petraeus, a former general and CIA director under President Barack Obama, pleaded guilty to having given his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, classified material that he had improperly retained. Petraeus had falsely attested to having no classified material in his possession. Like documents taken and concealed in clothing, false statements are compelling evidence of a guilty mind and a cover-up.

One of us (Mark S. Zaid) has represented many clients who have accidentally taken classified documents home or unintentionally left them in unsecured environments. Those cases involved no deliberate flouting of law but rather negligent or reckless conduct. These situations are routinely resolved through administrative proceedings, such as suspension or revocation of security clearances or other sanctions short of prosecution.

Biden’s case requires careful handling, and that appears to be just what Garland has in mind. In November, shortly after learning that classified documents were discovered at Biden’s University of Pennsylvania think tank, Garland properly directed U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr., a Trump-appointed prosecutor, to investigate the matter and later accepted his recommendation to appoint a special counsel. In that role, Robert Hur will determine whether the matter involves anything more than inadvertent security violations without any effort to conceal them.

The current state of facts strongly suggests that Biden’s errors are not criminal. It is not even clear that these incidents can be tied to him personally, unlike Trump’s conduct at Mar-a-Lago. But whatever Hur finds to be true, the facts and law regarding Trump’s concealment and evasion are a separate matter. The administration of justice must advance swiftly and not be influenced by those attempting to create a false equivalence between the two cases.

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