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This evening, Ron DeSantis is announcing his presidential campaign by talking to Elon Musk on Twitter. The Florida governor’s attempt to fit into Donald Trump’s shoes is only going to get worse from here.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Four forces bind Trump’s supporters more tightly than ever. The meat paradox There is no evidence strong enough to end the pandemic-origins debate. Local politics was already messy. Then came Nextdoor.

Not Serious People

I am not going to open Twitter this evening to hear Ron DeSantis announce—finally, for real, no joke, this time he means it—his campaign to become the leader of the free world. Neither are you, in all likelihood; Twitter is composed of a tiny fraction of highly engaged social-media users, and most people in America aren’t on the platform. Even fewer use Twitter Spaces, the audio component of Twitter where users can tune in to a live conversation. (I’ve participated in some of them. They’re fun, but a bit cumbersome.)

More to the point, very few of the people Ron DeSantis wants to reach are on Twitter. Most of them won’t hear any of the conversation, unless somehow the Ron and Elon Show is blasted from loudspeakers in Florida’s retirement mecca, The Villages. Yesterday, after Fox News announced tonight’s event, Reuters published an explainer: “What is Twitter Spaces where DeSantis will announce his presidential run?” If you’re unfamiliar enough with Twitter that you need to read the explainer, you’re not likely to join the event.

Regardless of what plays out tonight, or how many people tune in (or don’t) to hear it, I have to wonder: Who came up with the galaxy-brained idea of matching up two of the most socially awkward people in American public life for a spontaneous discussion on Twitter? It’s not even laden with the pomp and suspense of a real announcement: As my colleague David Frum tweeted yesterday, “If you tell Fox News you plan to announce your candidacy on Twitter, isn’t that really … announcing on Fox News?”

In any case, the venue is, to say the least, something of a risk. The last time Musk tried to participate in a Twitter Spaces event, he got exasperated with journalists for asking him questions and quickly left the discussion. (Much like Donald Trump, Musk seemingly cannot internalize that everyone in the world does not actually work for him.) This time, Musk has brought in his friend David Sacks as the moderator. Musk reportedly once tossed Sacks out of a room with a wave of his hand by saying, “David, this meeting is too technical for you.” Sacks denies that this happened, but still, a close Musk adviser like Sacks is unlikely to ask anything too challenging.

DeSantis’s campaign likely saw two reasons for choosing this stunt. First, Trump has not come back to Twitter, despite Musk lifting the former’s president ban from the platform. (Trump vowed not to return, and amazingly, it’s one of the few public promises he’s ever kept.) The Florida governor will get a Trump-free environment, where he can show that he’s cool and hip and down with his fellow kids on the interwebs, unlike the elderly Trump. (Trump, of course, pioneered the abuse of social media for political reasons, but he’s now over on his own platform.)

The second reason is likely more important: DeSantis seems to think he can win the nomination by imitating Trump (sometimes physically), and part of that, apparently, is owning the libs on social media. In that sense, Musk’s weird and cloddish right-wing politics make him a perfect partner for DeSantis; both of them need a public-relations boost after months of missteps. Of course, Musk will still be a billionaire and the CEO of three major companies no matter who likes or hates him. DeSantis, meanwhile, needs money and Republican primary voters, and he has apparently decided that the way to gain Trump’s share of those voters is to troll, and troll hard, while generating free publicity by appearing with the guy who tried to wreck Twitter just to get even with the blue-check media elites.

DeSantis’s moves so far fit into that strategy. The war with Disney, the attack on public education, the phobic reaction to anything regarding race, sexuality, or gender—it’s all performative cruelty aimed at the most socially and politically retrograde voters, which is another way of saying “the GOP-base voters who will decide the primaries.” DeSantis could be a true believer in his own policies, but he’s clearly decided to lean into the idea of being a Trumplike outsider and culture warrior. (As Jill Lawrence pointed out today in The Bulwark, possible candidates such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin are also culture-war partisans, but they seem to understand the risks of scaring off less extreme voters.)

In my view,  the United States will be better off if Donald Trump does not become the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. His continued support of violent insurrectionists forever renders him unfit to participate in our elections; anyone would be better on the ticket than Trump, and that includes DeSantis. But DeSantis has learned from Trump that winning the GOP nomination is not about policy; it’s about playacting. He knows that the primary faithful want rallies and revenge, costumes and chaos.

The presidency is a job for a serious person, but in today’s Republican Party, serious people need not apply. DeSantis seems to understand this, and will appear with Elon Musk in the hope, perhaps, of winning over Twitter power users such as @catturd2 and the various pestilential extremists Musk welcomed back to the platform. Though it might be a good move for DeSantis—who needs to do something to reinflate his shrinking political bubble—his cozying up to Musk is just another moment when Succession’s Logan Roy might look at the 2024 GOP primary candidates as he did at his children, shake his head sadly, and say: “You are not serious people.”

Related:

The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis Twitter is a far-right social network.

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris called for Congress to enact more gun-safety legislation on the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Uvalde. Tina Turner, the rock-and-roll pioneer and pop icon, died at the age of 83 after a long illness. Montana banned people dressed in drag from reading books to children at public schools and libraries, becoming the first state to do so.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Hawaii's feral chickens are out of control, Tove Danovich writes.

More From The Atlantic

The problem with how the census classifies white people The silence that mass shootings leave behind There is no constitutional end run around the debt ceiling.

Culture Break

Read. Chain-Gang All-Stars, a new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s set in a world where imprisoned people duel to the death as entertainment for others.

Watch. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (streaming on Netflix), a perplexing new documentary that offers glimpses of the tabloid star but fails to reckon with the forces that ruined her.

P.S.

Though some readers may know that I spent more than 25 years teaching at the Naval War College (and many years before that teaching at Dartmouth and Georgetown), they may not know that I also have taught for 18 years in Harvard’s continuing-education division, the Harvard Extension School. I have now retired from Extension, and last night I was honored to receive the school’s highest award, the Harvard Extension School Medal, for my teaching and service. Harvard’s program is (of course!) the oldest in America: Founded as the Lowell Institute in 1835 (Oliver Wendell Holmes, who named this very magazine, was a lecturer then), it became known as “Extension” in the early 20th century. I was proud to be part of the mission to deliver quality education to anyone who wanted it, including the nontraditional students who would come to class after a full day at work—just as I had.

My time at Extension, however, also taught me that Americans often overlook or underestimate the value of such programs. I am an advocate for residential, four-year college programs—that is, for the students likely to benefit from them. Not everyone can or should go to a full-time program; some students would rather work, others need to pick up a course on a topic only as part of their professional development, and others might be lifelong learners who are coming back to school merely out of interest in a particular subject. Continuing-education programs at America’s universities help provide this learning at a fraction of the cost of a full-time degree, and often with the same instructors and on the very same campuses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

On the island of Kauai, wherever humans go, chickens go too. Hens and chicks kick around in grocery-store parking lots and parks. They’re visitors to cookouts and picnics. On popular hikes, many people are rewarded at the end of the trail with a picturesque view of the island and a small flock of chickens. The birds kick up newly planted condo landscaping and community gardens. Restaurants hand-paint signs asking patrons not to feed the fowl.

These are not your average chickens. Descended from birds brought to the island in centuries past, they are now feral, surviving on their own, which suits them just fine. The hens are drab and blend into the bushes. The roosters are a mixture of orange, mahogany red, and iridescent black. At night they roost in trees for safety. In the morning, roosters begin calling long before dawn—and continue all day long. All roosters do this, but these ones live among people instead of in industrial barns. Even so, tourists seem to love them. When I was there a few years ago, I saw souvenir shops full of T-shirts and caps that referred to the roosters as Kauai Dawn Patrol.

Local lawmakers have attempted to keep the population under control, because although some chickens are a local curiosity, too many are a nuisance. They’re loud. They scratch up landscaping and farmland. They regularly get in the way of cars. But so far nothing has worked. In the fight between humans and chickens, the chickens are winning. This may be the chickens’ most powerful survival trait: They thrive in proximity to humans and human-created environments, Eben Gering, an evolutionary biologist at Nova Southeastern University who has studied feral chickens, told me. They’re chickens, yes, but thanks to their origins, they have supercharged survival skills.

The origin story of these particular chickens begins with Polynesians who brought pigs, dogs, and small fowl with them when they took their outrigger canoes across the oceans to settle places such as Easter Island and Hawaii. Researchers have found markers in both ancient and modern chicken DNA that trace back to precontact Polynesian fowl and can be used to show when and where the birds were transported. Those brought to Hawaii were actually red jungle fowl, the wild ancestor of the modern chicken. Over the years, those birds mixed with domestic chickens brought later by European colonists and others. In the late 20th century, major hurricanes Iwa and Iniki hit the Hawaiian Islands and destroyed chicken coops, freeing flocks of domestic fowl to roam. The chickens, especially on Kauai, where they don’t have predators such as mongooses (which were introduced in a failed attempt to control the rat population on other islands and have since made themselves at home), are uniquely adapted to their circumstances.

[Read: The chickens that are surrogates for rare breeds]

“One of the reasons that red jungle fowl were domesticated into chickens and that they make good agricultural animals is that they were pretty hardy and adaptable to begin with,” Gering said. Both wild and domestic genes contribute to the chickens’ success. Because they live in a wild environment where humans no longer treat their maladies, they have genes that correspond with greater parasite resistance than the average domestic fowl has. Many of Kauai’s feral chickens are able to reproduce year-round (jungle fowl reproduce seasonally) but take better care of their eggs than domestic breeds: They’ve retained genetics that make them inclined to incubate eggs—something bred out of many modern production lines.

“In many ways they are just as wild as the wild animals,” Dominic Wright, a biology professor at Linköping University, in Sweden, told me. He keeps a flock of red jungle fowl for research and said that the hybrid chickens on Kauai, which he studied with Gering, look and act almost exactly like his birds. Both species’ males engage in “tidbitting,” dancing and clucking to call hens over for a special edible treat they’ve found; their crows are similar too. Over time, the chickens of Hawaii have managed to rewild themselves while keeping the best parts of domestication.

“They’re not the smartest birds, but they’re smarter than people give them credit for,” Gering said, in part because chickens are social learners that empathize with other members of their group. “Those attributes tend to be helpful in adapting to new environments,” Gering told me. Chickens share that trait with what some might say are one of the most successful and resilient animals on the planet: Homo sapiens.

In other words, the chickens aren’t going anywhere. Once a species like chickens has become established, getting rid of them is hard, and humans aren’t helping. Hawaii has tried, unsuccessfully, to establish fines for people—tourists and residents alike—who feed the chickens. Some people do hunt and eat the chickens. Others eat the eggs. None of it has been enough to make a significant dent in the population. In 2022, Hawaii lawmakers attempted to pass a bill that would have considered the use of an avian birth control to manage chicken populations, but it didn’t pass. (Tools for population control—whether birth control or poison—can also find their way into the environment or the wrong species.) The birds are craftier than they seem. Over several months last year, officials on Oahu spent $7,000 on traps but have caught only 67 birds.

[Read: Images of the Aloha State]

Humans like to categorize the animals around us. This one is a nuisance; that one is worth protecting. This animal is productive; that animal is destructive. These judgments have some reason to them: Controlling invasive species is important, especially when it protects sensitive plants and animals that can’t adapt as well to a changing environment. “On islands, the primary driver of biodiversity loss is invasive species,” Christy Martin, the program manager for the Coordinating Group on Alien Pest Species, told me. A major worry, Martin said, is that chickens might be a disease reservoir for illnesses that can kill native birds. Yet the chickens are simply trying to live their lives in a world where we make it easy for them, even when we don’t intend to. “We plant nice fields full of food and assume animals can read signs that say No Trespassing,” Bethany Brookshire, the author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, told me. “If we learned more about how those animals behave, what they need, and changed our behavior accordingly, we could probably save ourselves and them a lot of headaches, traps, and poisons,” she said. But it’s easier to be annoyed with animals who aren’t playing our games by our rules.

The feral chicken is likely in Hawaii to stay, and could easily be seen as another pest among the many that seem to be taking over these days. Pythons are eating their way north through Florida. New York City has hired a rat czar to deal with increased rodent activity. Australia is still trying to manage its rabbit population more than 150 years after one settler imported 24 rabbits onto his estate. The animals always get the blame for their behavior, but to have a chance at controlling them, we will have to change our own. And at the same time, we could better appreciate the value chickens have just by virtue of being chickens, dinosaur-like birds that roam the landscape.

Once, the islands’ chickens were a valuable food source for people who lived there, though “I can’t say they were ever as revered as the forest birds,” the featherwork artist Kawika Lum-Nelmida told me. But, he added, they are in some old songs and stories going back to the legend of Maui. Many examples of precontact featherwork, such as the ʻahu ʻula cloaks worn by high chiefs and kings or the scepterlike kāhili standards, incorporated roosters’ black tail feathers into their designs.

Lum-Nelmida often gets calls from people when they find native birds that die, because he has permits that allow him to use wild-bird feathers in his work. “No one ever calls me when a chicken dies,” he said—no one thinks the birds have value. Only when their feathers are made into something else, black glinting with blue and green in the light, do people find them beautiful. The feather is the same; it’s our perspective that’s changed.