The chants of his name defined a decade: “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”

Jerry Springer died today at 79. His most obvious legacy will be the syndicated talk show that bore his name—one that embodied the frenetic voyeurism of the American ’90s. Sex, affairs, secret children, incest, love triangles, love trapezoids, more sex, people wrestling and sparring and throwing chairs at one another: The Jerry Springer Show was the tabloids come to life. The program democratized scandal and then exploited it. It allowed its viewers to peer into the lives not of celebrities, but of everyday people. It was gaudy and sad and insulting and irresistible.

Springer’s show, in that way, predicted our current moment even as it embodied its own. It was TikTok before TikTok, Twitter before Twitter, the logic of reality TV wrangled onto the set of a talk show. The most revealing element of The Jerry Springer Show, though, isn’t its scandal-mongering. It’s that the show, like its host, had its roots in politics.

Springer was born in London, in 1944, to Jewish Holocaust refugees. After coming to the U.S. as a child, he studied politics at Tulane University and received a law degree from Northwestern University. He embarked on a career in politics: Springer worked as an adviser to Robert Kennedy and served as the mayor of Cincinnati in the late 1970s. He ran for governor of Ohio—but then, after that attempt proved unsuccessful, he switched careers. He became a reporter at a local TV station and rose up to become an anchor. In 1991, he debuted The Jerry Springer Show. It began as a political talk show in the Phil Donahue vein: social issues and current events, high-minded discussions of politics. It was, like most talk shows of that time, relatively sedate. It featured conversations about gun violence and homelessness. Its guests included commentators such as Oliver North and Jesse Jackson.

And then … the show evolved. Or, perhaps, it devolved. It maintained its talk-show format but changed the subject of the conversation. The show’s titles were tabloid headlines turned into hour-long melodramas: “I Married a Horse” and “I Slept With 251 Men in 10 Hours!” and “I’m a Breeder for the Klan.” The debates became brawls. The chairs on set turned into weapons. The audience cheered. It jeered. It signaled its approval of the fighting by chanting Springer’s name. Springer had tapped into an American market that can never be fully satisfied: voyeurism. In 1998, Springer briefly bested Oprah Winfrey in the daytime ratings. Later that year, his show aired episodes that featured none of its signature fights; its ratings plummeted. In July, it put the violence back in and topped Winfrey’s ratings once more. In 2000, Springer signed a five-year contract for a total of $30 million.

One of Springer’s legacies will be his realization that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. Another will be his recognition that even shock can grow stale. Springer had to keep finding new ways to outdo the drama on his show. In the 2000s, he began arriving onstage by sliding down a stripper pole. When real people’s stories seemed insufficiently titillating, he brought on a character—the drunken “Reverend Shnorr”—to punch things up. Springer masterminded the havoc, but on-screen, he presided over it for the most part like a mild-mannered father amused by his unruly children. And then, for the final twist, he tried to graft meaning onto the chaos he’d just presented to his viewers. Springer ended each episode with his “Final Thought,” the wan sermon he delivered as a response to the stories just aired. The address, a holdover from a similar one he’d delivered during his days as a news anchor, tried to find a moral in the madness. It concluded, always, with the same line: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”

The hypocrisy of the Final Thought—its episode-by-episode effort to cleanse all the scandal with sanctimony—will be Springer’s most lasting legacy. The Jerry Springer Show exploited people fervently and ruthlessly and lucratively. It treated real tragedies as diversions. And it did all of that as it pretended to be more profound than it was. Springer tried to frame the show’s exploitation as anthropology, as something revealing and instructive. But it was Springer’s own arc that would prove most culturally revelatory: His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.

[From the March 2023 issue: We've lost the plot]

When Springer’s show ended, in 2018, The Guardian proposed that perhaps “The Jerry Springer Show was such a relentless orgy of humanity’s worst impulses that audiences became too sad to keep watching it.” As the article went on to make clear, the opposite was true. Jerry Springer’s talk show had not become too tragic to maintain an audience. It had simply become redundant.

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Imagine you’re in the heart of New York City—for example, on the steps of Madison Square Garden. One of the very first things you would notice there, no matter the time of day or the weather, would be the pungent aroma of burning reefer. This would also be the case if you found yourself at the entrance to the Q train at Union Square, or at a chessboard in Washington Square Park, or under some scaffolding erected on any random block in SoHo. Smelling cannabis has become an inescapable feature of living in (or visiting) the city, an emblem of life in New York akin to sipping a crème at a café table in Paris or strolling through Rome eating a gelato. In some parts of Midtown, weed aromas pump through the streets like those bizarre plumes of steam that blow continuously from orange-striped tubes at intersections.

Not so long ago, the United States took a draconian approach to marijuana. As recently as 2017, New York City alone recorded more than 18,000 arrests for weed possession, down from a peak of more than 50,000 in 2011. Some 93 percent of those 2017 arrests were for possession in public view or public consumption. In 2021, New York State approved legislation to legalize recreational marijuana, and adults may now smoke it wherever they can smoke tobacco. By the end of 2022, the grand total of marijuana arrests and summonses—in this city of 8.5 million inhabitants—had fallen to 179. It is an unmistakably good thing that New York, along with much of American society, has abandoned the puritanical War on Drugs absolutism that sought to prevent otherwise law-abiding adults from ever getting high on pain of criminal prosecution. Anti-marijuana laws from a previous, stricter era were not only hypocritical and ineffective—everyone who wanted to smoke weed could still do so; they were enforced to an extremely unequal measure, falling much harder on Black and Latino citizens. The old regime was clearly unsustainable.

[David A. Graham: Biden goes to pot]

But too much of a good thing can pose an entirely new set of problems, and two competing truths often exist simultaneously. The computer scientists Dylan Hadfield-Menell and Simon Zhuang argue that optimizing the pursuit of any given goal will lead to unanticipated consequences, including the achievement of ends that are antithetical to the original objective. In a recent podcast, the physicist Max Tegmark provided a concrete example of this idea. Pretend you’ve programmed a car to drive from Boston to New York City by telling it to go as southward as physically possible. Eventually, it will arrive in Manhattan, but without any further steps to redirect or halt its movement, it will inevitably keep going all the way to Florida. Tegmark says that the principle can be applied to the development of artificial intelligence. It can also help make sense of why I can’t step outside without smelling marijuana.

The desire to correct past wrongs hasn’t just resulted in marijuana smoking becoming permissible in most areas where tobacco smoking is allowed. Because of a larger disinclination toward any punitiveness at all, blunt-smoking can now be observed even where cigarettes are considered inappropriate or offensive. Police aren’t enforcing the law where it still holds. It is progress that people are no longer facing jail time for personal weed possession; it does not follow, however, that Americans should accept a total erosion of the etiquette around public consumption in shared and non-designated spaces. The car has traveled way past New York City and is on a ferry to Patagonia.

Several months ago, coming into New York City from the liberal-arts college in the Hudson Valley where I teach—where, for what it’s worth, I have never seen anyone openly smoking—I complained offhandedly on Twitter about the omnipresent aroma of cannabis. This wasn’t even an original observation. In 2018, as the city was still in the early stages of shifting its drug policy, Ginia Bellafante wrote in The New York Times that marijuana is the “signature olfactory experience of New York.” And last year, the mayor, Eric Adams, joked at a press conference, “The No. 1 thing I smell right now is pot. It’s like everybody’s smoking a joint now.”

I received a huge amount of pushback for my remark (in addition to quite a lot of agreement), much of it premised on the idea that any social response to public weed smell would inevitably result in the warehousing of Black and brown bodies. In fact, I don’t want the police to put public weed-smokers in jail. I simply think New Yorkers should do a better job of policing themselves: a middle ground in which smokers of any color exercise discretion where the law employs restraint.

[Sarah Milov: Marijuana reform should focus on inequality]

The pushback against my complaint is ongoing. Last week, in the libertarian magazine Reason, Liz Wolfe published an article titled “New York City Should Have Always Smelled Like Pot,” in which she opens with a rebuttal of my tweet. Hers is about the most compelling argument I’ve seen in favor of the new normal, and to her credit, she declines to partake in the customary gaslighting that would deny that a change has occurred in the first place. “The smell of weed in the streets,” Wolfe argues, “is a sign of progress and tolerance, not decline.”

Tolerance is a wonderful value in principle. And as the intolerant have long understood, it is also a value that can be easily exploited. It works best when buttressed by agreed-upon standards and a common investment in informal norms. “Some of today’s stoners do have a bit too much chutzpah,” Wolfe concedes, “like the guy I saw on the G train rolling a joint at 9 a.m. on an especially packed train car.” That experience rings familiar. On a recent Monday morning, I boarded an overflowing L train from Williamsburg into Manhattan, the entire car reeking of freshly puffed ganja. Progress demands that elderly people and small children must also inhale this? Something is perversely unserious about a culture that insists the answer is yes and that you are some kind of “Karen” if you beg to differ.  

“Fellow New Yorkers who have long tolerated cigarette smoke clogging up the public airways,” Wolfe writes, “should offer the same grace to weed.” But cigarette smokers haven’t had their way for two decades now, and anyone who would dare light a Marlboro on the subway today would receive the most withering glare—and possibly risk physical assault—because we now have not only laws but also real taboos around the spreading of secondhand smoke. Which is one reason you barely smell cigarettes at all, even in the streets, parks, and plazas where the scent of weed prevails.

The reflex to dismiss any criticism of violations against communal consideration exemplifies an evolving progressive politics, what the writer Michael Shellenberger has referred to as an ethos of “left-libertarianism.” In ways large and small, it has degraded urban spaces. In the absence of wider unspoken controls, the anything-goes mentality flirts with pandemonium. Turned up to a certain pitch, it produces something much worse than a public nuisance: It encourages self-reinforcing disorder. Look at San Francisco or Portland, Oregon, where tent encampments and open hard-drug use have in some districts made healthy and productive activity all but impossible. New York is by no means at a West Coast level of decline, but such states of decay are not binary. They operate along a dismal continuum, and public spaces forfeit structure by gradation. Broken windows left untended really do tell larger stories.

When is the last time you’ve seen someone pounding shots of vodka on the subway? You haven’t, and for good reason. Drug possession was once a crime as well as a taboo. Now that we’ve optimized the admirable goal of ensuring that it isn’t the former, we need a redirect to preserve the latter.

This month, a local TV-news station in Arizona ran an unsettling report: A mother named Jennifer DeStefano says that she picked up the phone to the sound of her 15-year-old crying out for her, and was asked to pay a $1 million ransom for her daughter’s return. In reality, the teen had not been kidnapped, and was safe; DeStefano believes someone used AI to create a replica of her daughter’s voice to deploy against her family. “It was completely her voice,” she said in one interview. “It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried.” DeStefano’s story has since been picked up by other outlets, while similar stories of AI voice scams have surfaced on TikTok and been reported by The Washington Post. In late March, the Federal Trade Commission warned consumers that bad actors are using the technology to supercharge “family-emergency schemes,” scams that fake an emergency to fool a concerned loved one into forking over cash or private information.  

Such applications have existed for some time—my colleague Charlie Warzel fooled his mom with a rudimentary AI voice-cloning program in 2018—but they’ve gotten better, cheaper, and more accessible in the past several months alongside a generative-AI boom. Now anyone with a dollar, a few minutes, and an internet connection can synthesize a stranger’s voice. What’s at stake is our ability as regular people to trust that the voices of those we interact with from afar are legitimate. We could soon be in a society where you don’t necessarily know that any call from your mom or boss is actually from your mom or boss. We may not be at a crisis point for voice fraud, but it’s easy to see one on the horizon. Some experts say it’s time to establish systems with your loved ones to guard against the possibility that your voices are synthesized—code words, or a kind of human two-factor authentication.

One easy way to combat such trickery would be to designate a word with your contacts that could be used to verify your identity. You could, for example, establish that any emergency request for money or sensitive information should include the term lobster bisque. The Post’s Megan McCardle made this case in a story yesterday, calling it an “AI safeword.” Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, told me he’s a fan of the idea. “It’s so low-tech,” he told me. “You’ve got this super-high-tech technology—voice cloning—and you’re like, ‘What’s the code word, asshole?’”

But we also should be wary of getting paranoid too quickly. A broader loss of trust in any audio, or video for that matter, could feed the “liar’s dividend,” or the idea that more public knowledge about fakes can make it easier for bad actors to undermine legitimate media. America doesn’t exactly have a surplus of trust right now: Faith in media and institutions, including organized religion and public schools, is polling miserably, at the same time that AI is amplifying the ability to spread false information online. “We want people to be aware of what’s possible,” Henry Ajder, an AI expert who has been studying synthetic voice technology for half a decade, told me. “We also don’t want to just absolutely terrify people.” If you do get an out-of-the-ordinary call, you can always just stay calm and ask commonsense questions that your loved ones should know how to answer, Ajder said.

Beyond the anecdotes, data about AI voice scams are practically nonexistent. Juliana Gruenwald, a spokesperson for the FTC, told me that the agency does not track how often AI or voice cloning is used in scams. Fraud-report statistics for the first three months of this year don’t show an increase in the number of scams involving the impersonation of family and friends. The FBI, which also keeps data on phone scams, did not respond to a request for comment.

[Read: The rise of AI Taylor Swift]

Still, there’s clearly genuine risk here. Last month, for a story about the proliferation of such clones on TikTok, I replicated Taylor Swift’s voice using just one minute of audio of her talking in an old interview on YouTube. It took five minutes and cost $1 using the online Instant Voice Cloning tool from ElevenLabs. (The company did not respond to a request for comment about how its software could be used in scams.) All the program needs is a short audio clip of the person speaking: Upload it, and the AI will do the rest. And you don’t have to be a high-profile figure to be vulnerable. It simply takes one public audio clip of you, perhaps pulled from a TikTok or an Instagram post or a YouTube vlog, and anyone can create an AI model of your voice that they can use however they choose. Our extensive digital histories, built over years of life online, can be used against us.

Although the technology feels like it’s lifted from a Philip K. Dick novel, this is, in a sense, a classic American story about the uncertainty of a new frontier. The historian Susan Pearson, who wrote The Birth Certificate: An American History, told me that when more Americans began moving from the countryside to cities in the mid-19th century, the country developed “a real cultural fascination” with swindlers and an “anxiety about being in these new large spaces, where all kinds of strangers are going to interact and you don’t necessarily know who you can trust.” We developed technologies like credit scores, for better or worse, so that we might know who we were doing business with. The expanse of the AI-powered internet is perhaps a corollary to that earlier fear.

We’re in a period of change, trying to figure out the benefits and costs of these tools. “I think this is one of those cases where we built it because we could and/or because we can make money from it,” Farid said. “And maybe nobody stopped to think whether they should be doing it.” There are some legitimate use cases for voice cloning: It could empower a person who has become impaired or lost their ability to use their own voice, for instance. In 2021, AI helped the actor Val Kilmer use his voice when he lost his natural ability to speak as a result of throat cancer. But the beneficial uses don’t necessarily require unregulated, free-for-all access, Farid pointed out.

Many critics of AI have said we should slow down and think a little more about what the technology might unleash if left alone. Voice cloning seems like an area in which we really ought to do so. Perhaps humans will evolve alongside AI and create new verification technologies that help us restore trust, but fundamentally, once we start doubting that the person on the other end of the line is really the person we want it to be, we’ve entered an entirely new world. Maybe we’re already there.  

About a decade ago, the social psychologist Sara Konrath led a study that yielded some disturbing results. As a researcher at Indiana University, she’d already found that narcissism rates seemed to be increasing among Americans, and empathy decreasing; that was a combination that didn’t bode well, she feared, for the quality of people’s relationships. So she decided to look more deeply into the state of Americans’ connections—and in order to do so, she turned to attachment theory.

Researchers have identified four basic “attachment styles”: People with a secure style feel that they can depend on others and that others can depend on them too. Those with a dismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overly committed to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection. People with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, cling or search for validation. And people with fearful (or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy, too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing them away. Konrath’s team analyzed nearly 100 other studies, completed from 1988 to 2011, that had measured college students’ attachment styles.

They found an unfortunate trend: a 15 percent decrease in secure attachment, along with a 56 percent spike in dismissing attachment and a nearly 18 percent increase in the fearful style—the two types associated with lack of trust and self-isolation. “Compared with college students in the late 1980s,” the researchers wrote in their 2014 meta-review, “a larger proportion of students today agree that they are ‘comfortable without close emotional relationships.’”

[Read: Attachment style isn’t destiny]

The good news: The trends that initially worried Konrath seem to have abated. Since about 2009, narcissism rates have steadily declined and empathy rates have increased. But at a conference in Chicago last year, Konrath and her colleagues found themselves presenting the same bleak findings when it came to attachment. Their poster showed the results of an updated analysis: From 2011 to 2020, secure-attachment rates had dropped even further; fearful attachment had continued to rise. Below those bullet points sat a stock image: a young man alone in a hallway, forlornly looking at his phone.  

These studies have only tracked changes among college students, simply because those are the data that were available—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that discomfort with intimacy isn’t spreading among older people as well. Michael Hilgers, a New Mexico–based therapist who’s been counseling for more than 20 years, told me he’s seen a notable increase in clients—adults of various ages—dealing with dismissing or fearful attachment. “It’s painful to watch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when he can sense that these clients do, deep down, want connection, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there.”

Perhaps the secure-attachment decline shouldn’t be surprising; surveys show that levels of social trust have been decreasing among Americans for some time. Faith in institutions, for one thing, has been faltering for years: A 2019 Pew Research Center poll showed that public trust in the government never fully recovered from a decline five decades ago, and sits at near-historic lows today. Confidence levels in the media, organized religion, the criminal-justice system, corporations, and the police are all falling. That suspicion seems to have translated to doubt in one’s fellow citizens: Nearly half of the Pew respondents agreed that “people are not as reliable as they used to be.”

[Read: The end of trust]

And yet, attachment trends signify something else—not just distrust in hypothetical, nameless Americans, but in one’s colleagues and neighbors, and even friends, partners, and parents. William Chopik, a Michigan State University psychologist who worked on those studies with Konrath, emphasized that we can’t truly know what’s causing that. But he did note, “People are feeling precarious right now.” He rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with: war in Europe, ChatGPT threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news. When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships. People tend to think of attachment style as a static personality trait; really, Chopik told me, “it’s an evaluation of the broader world.”

Konrath pointed to financial precarity in particular. The 2008 recession seems to have really rocked people; not long after that, she saw empathy start to rise and narcissism start to dip, and some researchers think the recession contributed to an increase in insecure attachment too. People might have started recognizing, more than ever, the difficulty others were experiencing—hence the empathy rise. But trust, on the other hand: “Trust takes time,” Konrath said. Perhaps people have been so busy hustling—trying to perfect their résumé to get into a good college, working, worrying about bills—that they haven’t had as much time to just hang out with people and slowly let their guard down.  

Look at how a typical kid’s time is spent today: Young people are spending less time on play and socializing, and more on homework. And many spend more hours than ever in organized activities, where they might be more focused on nailing their Model UN position paper than on casually, gradually getting to know people. This emphasis on achievement over leisure often continues into young adulthood. Konrath can see how much pressure the students in her college classes are under. “They feel like they have to keep working,” she told me. “They have to kind of get a kind of competitive edge on people. Then they’re not taking the time to care for themselves and to care for others.”

[Read: The trait that “super friends” have in common]

Of course, not every researcher agrees that sociopolitical issues—financial insecurity, climate change, gun violence—are the likeliest suspects behind the rise in insecure attachment. I asked Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who has studied the pre-2009 rise in narcissism, about that ambient feeling of precarity—the feeling that society is falling apart. “You can make that argument for any decade within the last 50 years,” she told me. (Trust in institutions did start plummeting in the ’60s and ’70s—though, notably, it’s kept getting worse.) Twenge believes that the major change to pay attention to is the rise of social media and smartphones, which some studies suggest is associated with less face-to-face interaction. Yes, trust levels started falling before those developments, but she thinks they compounded the problem.

Researchers have plenty of other theories: More people than ever are living alone. Fewer people are aspiring to marry or have children. American culture is placing more importance on “boundaries,” assuming we need to protect ourselves from others’ bad intentions in relationships. Dating apps allow users to virtually swipe through potential partners so efficiently that they feel disconnected from real people. It could be all of these things, some combination of them, or something else entirely. We can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing further and further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.

Still, the experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful. Hilgers knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues to change—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, he told me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to let people in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.

Konrath, for her part, has “reconstrued her role as a teacher”: Instead of focusing solely on the syllabus, she takes time during each class to ask students how they’re doing or how their weekend was; she follows up on why they’re feeling particularly tired one week, even laughs along with them when they groan about having to come to her class. Knowing that many of them won’t inherently trust her—or one another—she wants to show them that she’s consistent, kind, and safe.

We should all be so lucky to have a therapist or teacher this attuned to attachment. But Chopik reminded me that eventually, change can also happen naturally: Many people grow more securely attached over time. They make friends, go on first dates, fall in love, get heartbroken and survive it. “We all learn from those things, and we try to figure out relationships as we go along,” he told me. The world is a scary place, and our personal lives exist within it. But, as Chopik noted, “there’s a lot of power to a life lived.”

Of the roughly 1,000 people who have been charged for their participation in the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, nearly a quarter were indicted alongside a relative or romantic partner. All sorts of other close personal relationships run through the indictments: the two roommates from Ohio who have known each other since they were kids, the three high-school buddies from North Carolina, the three Marines from Camp Lejeune, a Florida man and his pastor, an electrician’s apprentice and his boss. The conventional wisdom about radicalization is that ideas attract people to extremist movements and to the violence those movements commit. Most adherents, though, never move beyond reading manifestos, watching videos, or plunging down internet rabbit holes. Very often, what differentiates those who commit overt violence is their personal ties to others in the movement. Because although extremist movements are ideological, extremist violence turns out to be strikingly social.

As a historian of American social movements, I’ve found that the perpetrators of violence tend to be pulled along not by ideas alone, as compelling as these people may find them, but also by the power of personal connections. These individual loyalties can create obligations so intense that they permit those who feel them to justify committing horrors.

[From the April 2023 issue: The new anarchy]

The phenomenon reaches far back into the 20th century. Think of the lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp. These two young Black men were accused of killing a white man, but their lynching was not determined by that. Instead, their murder, in August 1930 in Marion, Indiana, followed a grim pattern that became one of the most common forms of political violence in 20th-century America: an accusation of rape leveled by a white woman who had reason to lie, a quick arrest, the accused Black men’s imprisonment in a jail that police weren’t willing to defend when a mob descended. Once the jail’s doors had been battered down, Smith and Shipp were dragged from their cells and hanged from a maple tree on the courthouse lawn, two blocks away. The aftermath of the killings was captured in a commemorative photo sold as a postcard for 50 cents that showed members of the mob smiling for the camera, the young Black men’s brutalized bodies dangling above them.

A few days after the lynching, the executive secretary of the NAACP arrived in town to conduct a quiet investigation. His report on the murders, which was widely distributed through the organization’s press service, resulted in a storm of publicity that forced the county’s district attorney to respond. Together with the attorney general of Indiana, the D.A. launched an inquiry that stripped away the anonymity that normally protected lynch mobs’ leading participants.

The official investigation found that the assault on the jail began when the sheriff refused to hand Smith and Shipp over to the father and the uncle of the alleged rape victim, 18-year-old Mary Ball. Although the mob swelled to more than 1,000 people at its peak, witnesses attributed the worst of the violence to a core group of 21 men, 17 of whom, by my tally, lived close enough to one of the Ball brothers to be called their neighbors. White supremacy underpinned the killings of Smith and Shipp, but the rage of those who committed the atrocity was mobilized by the intimate ties of family and community.

Sixty-five years later, on April 19, 1995, a former soldier named Timothy McVeigh pulled a rented Ryder truck into the delivery zone of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. He primed the fuses on the nearly 5,000-pound fertilizer bomb that he and his friend Terry Nichols had assembled in the truck’s cargo bed. Then he got out, locked the truck’s door, and walked toward the car he’d left in a parking lot several blocks away. He was still on his way there when the bomb detonated, demolishing the front of the building and killing 168 people, including 19 children, many of whom had been in a day-care center right above the delivery zone.

[Read: Alt history]

McVeigh saw his political purpose as guided by the anti-government extremism he’d embraced in the white-power militia movement. On the morning of the bombing, he carried with him pages from The Turner Diaries, the apocalyptic 1978 novel whose white-nationalist hero counters Washington’s mounting oppression by blowing up the FBI’s headquarters. In that respect, there would seem to be a straight line from his ideological conversion to the violence he committed that day. But he had been immersed in the movement for seven years before his attack on the Murrah building. For most of that time, he had engaged in only the pettiest of political acts—until he became bound by the personal ties that ran through the militia movement as strongly as they did in the mob that murdered Shipp and Smith.

Those connections started to form in the mid-1980s, when James Nichols brought Terry, his younger brother, into the militia that was taking root around their home in rural Michigan. Terry joined the Army in 1988. During his basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia, he befriended McVeigh, whose own interest in white-power survivalism had been inspired, in large part, by The Turner Diaries. How much influence Terry then had on McVeigh is not completely clear, though McVeigh officially joined the movement during the first year they spent together, following a spell as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The two men had seemed to drift apart after Terry washed out of the Army in 1989, but they reconnected when McVeigh was discharged two years later. Terry was then living with James on their family farm. In early 1993, McVeigh also moved in. There, James revived his big-brother role as mentor, feeding his brother and his friend with movement propaganda, ferrying them to militia meetings, and stoking their anger in long conversations he tended to dominate. The two younger men took almost every step leading to the bombing together, except for the single act of driving the Ryder truck, which McVeigh did alone. When he was arrested, little more than an hour later, he listed the Nichols farm as his home and James as his next of kin.

In his lawyer’s telling, 24-year-old Hunter Seefried had no interest in Donald Trump’s January 6 rally at the Ellipse. He had voted for Trump. And he was sure that his father, Kevin, was right when he said that the Democrats had stolen the election. It just didn’t bother him enough to devote a day to protesting it. But his dad wanted the family to go with him, and saying no was likely to cause more trouble than it was worth. So, that morning, Hunter and his girlfriend made the two-hour drive with his parents from their small town in Delaware to Washington, D.C.

[Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Extremism has spread into the mainstream]

When the rally was over, Kevin insisted that they join the march on Congress, though they had planned on having lunch and heading home. Once they got to Capitol Hill, Hunter’s mother and his girlfriend faded into the crowd, while Hunter and his father worked their way to the front. They reached the west portico just as the first few rioters were climbing through a window that a Proud Boy had smashed open. Hunter carefully removed the last shards from the frame. Then he and his dad climbed in too.

They moved through the building together, up the stairs with the mob trying to chase down the Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, into an ugly confrontation with the backup officers Goodman had called. The two of them joined the mob’s front line, Kevin screaming at the officers to step aside or shoot him. When it became clear that the police wouldn’t back down, Hunter and Kevin left the building, 25 minutes after they’d entered.

Three months later, father and son were indicted together on seven misdemeanors and a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding.

We don’t yet know enough about all of the extremist organizations that were involved in the January 6 attack to be able to trace their webs of affinity with the same precision. But what we already know is revealing: The Seefrieds are hardly alone.

The federal indictments identify the 14 Oath Keepers who, at the height of the riot, marched through the mob in military-style stack formation. Six of them had come to the Capitol with a relative who was also an Oath Keeper. Two others, both military veterans, had a tight friendship. One of the pair had also found a mentor in another Oath Keeper, 15 years his senior. “Love the hell outta you,” the younger man texted him on January 8. “You too, my dear friend!” the mentor texted back. “We stormed the gates of corruption together (although on opposite sides of the building) so between that and our first meeting and getting to know you since I can say we will always be brothers!”

Hunter Seefried was no Oath Keeper. He was a barely political young man following his father, whose own radicalization had not gone beyond following right-wing news sites and pro-Trump social media. Yet they were among the first rioters to breach the Capitol building, half an hour before the Oath Keepers started their march.

At Hunter’s sentencing hearing this past October, his lawyer argued that he didn’t deserve prison time; Hunter had put himself in the mob’s vanguard only because he was a dutiful son, and not as an insurrectionist. But America’s history of violent extremism makes that distinction meaningless. The Seefrieds turned to violence as so many people had before them, through the tangling together of dangerous ideas and intimate obligations. The more extremism spreads into the mainstream, the more likely that combination is to take hold again. As the personal pulls the ideological closer and closer to the center of American democracy, there is no limit to the damage this potent combination might do.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has spent two decades taking some very fancy vacations with the immensely rich conservative donor Harlan Crow, who also allows Thomas’s mother to live rent-free on property he bought for a very generous price from Thomas almost a decade ago. Those revelations arrived in reports from ProPublica, Slate, and CNN over the past two weeks. Other outlets had previously reported that Crow had given a great deal of cash to the political-advocacy organization run by Thomas’s wife, Virginia, who was last seen urging Republicans to overthrow the 2020 presidential election to keep Donald Trump in power.

There is no proof Thomas ever acted at Crow’s direction. The justice has publicly stated that the failure to comply with the law by disclosing his financial entanglements with Crow was an unintended error, but if so, it was a mistake that is remarkably consistent with his ideological position that people who use their money and influence to steer the American political system ought to be able to do so in complete secrecy. This error was curiously convenient, in that it just happened to conceal a deep financial relationship with a very politically active right-wing donor who has bankrolled organizations that have a winning record before the Court. Perhaps more significant, Thomas’s idiosyncratic views about speech, democracy, and accountability have become more popular among the justices themselves as Republican appointments have moved the Court to the right. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write at Slate, Thomas has argued over decades that laws compelling such disclosure are unconstitutional.

[From the September 2019 issue: Deconstructing Clarence Thomas]

In the 2010 Citizens United decision striking down limits on corporate electioneering, Thomas was the only justice to argue that the Court “should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements,” because donors to the California anti-marriage-equality referendum Proposition 8 had been subject to threats, harassment, and verbal criticism. The first two are potentially illegal acts, and the last is a form of constitutionally protected speech. The conflation foreshadows the current right-wing discourse on free speech, the core of which is that conservatives have a right to prevent others from disassociating from them because they find their views noxious.

The 2010 case Doe v. Reed laid bare a key distinction between Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in whose shadow Thomas was often unfairly accused of laboring. The columnist Helen Thomas once described him as being in Scalia’s “hip pocket,” a claim that woefully misunderstood their ideological relationship. In fact, Thomas frequently staked out much more extreme positions. In Doe v. Reed, Thomas argued that citizens participating in a ballot referendum had a right to conceal their identities, because “a long, unbroken line of this Court’s precedents holds that privacy of association is protected under the First Amendment.” Scalia, by contrast, asserted the importance of transparency in a democracy with a passage that struck Court watchers at the time as notable.

There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.

Once, when asked to compare his approach with Thomas’s, Scalia reportedly quipped, “I’m an originalist, but I’m not a nut.”

The Court would get nuttier in Scalia’s absence—though it’s worth noting that he was prone to altering his jurisprudence to match trends in conservative politics. In the 2021 case Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the Supreme Court held that California’s donor-disclosure laws were unconstitutional, relying in part on a 1958 case, NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, which held that the civil-rights organization did not have to disclose its donors to a white-supremacist state government with a history of engaging in terrorism against its Black residents. A post on the website for the Federalist Society, the influential right-wing legal organization, hailed the recent decision as a victory against “cancel culture.”

[Read: The Clarence Thomas effect]

Put simply, the conservative position had moved from heeding Scalia’s reminder in Doe v. Reed of the importance of transparency and civic bravery in a democracy, to embracing Thomas’s 2010 Citizens United opinion, which conflates threats, violence, and harassment with people thinking you’re a jerk.

The financial relationship between Crow and Thomas raises obvious questions about the influence the Texas-based donor has over the justice; Crow-funded organizations have done remarkably well before the Roberts Court. Conservative outlets have asserted that the reporting by ProPublica, Slate, and CNN is a “smear,” but none of those outlets forced Thomas to not disclose his financial entanglements with a man spending fortunes to advance his political interests. If Thomas had made the disclosures, he still would have come under criticism, but public suspicion is much greater because he did not. And although that lack of disclosure is damaging in and of itself, it does not confirm that Thomas has ever used his power on Crow’s behalf.

After the Thomas stories broke, a number of conservative commentators piped up to defend Crow, testifying to his moral fortitude and personal integrity. But their rebuttals did more to illustrate the problems with Crow’s patronage than to defend it. Many of those who spoke up have personal or financial relationships with Crow. One such defender was Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito—who echoes Scalia’s resentments, preoccupations, and contemptuous tone far more than Thomas does, but without the late justice’s relative erudition—and a recipient of political donations from Crow. Lee asserted that the reporting on the financial relationship between the two men was defamatory.

“Make no mistake: this is defamation,” Lee wrote on Twitter. “The media gets away with it only because Justice Thomas is a public figure, and under a Supreme Court ruling from 1964, public figures have essentially no recourse when they’re defamed by the media.”

Lee was referring to Thomas’s crusade against the landmark case Times v. Sullivan, which established the standard of “actual malice” for defamation, under which public figures need to prove that a speaker knew something was false or had a reckless disregard for the truth when they made the statement. The precedent enables Americans to have a robust public discourse without being sued into silence by wealthy and powerful people. Even so, as Fox News and the right-wing commentator Alex Jones recently discovered, it is not an ironclad protection for liars with large platforms.

Indeed, Lee’s statement about the reporting on Thomas, implying that it’s false even though the justice himself has acknowledged some of his own errors, comes closer to defamation than anything those outlets have published. Fortunately for Lee, free-speech precedents like the one he wants to repeal protect his right to engage in baseless hyperbole on subjects of public interest when he feels like farming clout on social media.

Put together, Thomas’s hostility to disclosure laws and to free-speech precedents paints a vivid picture of American democracy as he believes it should exist: a system small enough to be bought by a tight circle of anonymous oligarchs, and big enough to silence anyone who might criticize them. Only then, when the rich men who own the place and the rich men who run the place can take their Indonesian cruises on superyachts together in private, will speech and association be truly free.

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