Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder. Voice-impersonation technology and deep-fake videos are scaring campaign strategists, who fear that their deployment in the days before the 2024 election could decide the winner. Even some AI developers are worried about what they’ve unleashed: Last week the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT practically begged Congress to regulate his industry. (Whether that was genuine civic-mindedness or self-serving performance remains to be seen.)

Amid the growing panic, however, a new generation of tech entrepreneurs is selling a more optimistic future for the merger of AI and politics. In their telling, the awesome automating power of AI has the potential to achieve in a few years what decades of attempted campaign-finance reform have failed to do—dramatically reduce the cost of running for election in the United States. With AI’s ability to handle a campaign’s most mundane and time-consuming tasks—think churning out press releases or identifying and targeting supporters—candidates would have less need to hire high-priced consultants. The result could be a more open and accessible democracy, in which small, bare-bones campaigns can compete with well-funded juggernauts.

Martin Kurucz, the founder of a Democratic fundraising company that is betting big on AI, calls the technology “a great equalizer.” “You will see a lot more representation,” he told me, “because people who didn’t have access to running for elected office now will have that. That in and of itself is huge.”

[Annie Lowrey: AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.]

Kurucz told me that his firm, Sterling Data Company, has used AI to help more than 1,000 Democratic campaigns and committees, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and now-Senator John Fetterman, identify potential donors. The speed with which AI can sort through donor files meant that Sterling was able to cut its prices last year by nearly half, Kurucz said, allowing even small campaigns to afford its services. “I don’t think there have ever been this many down-ballot candidates with some level of digital fundraising operation,” Kurucz said. “These candidates now have access to a proper campaign infrastructure.”

Campaigns big and small have begun using generative-AI software such as ChatGPT and DALL-E to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches. A handful of consultants told me they were mostly just experimenting with AI, but Kurucz said that its influence is more pervasive. “Almost half of the first drafts of fundraising emails are being produced by ChatGPT,” he claimed. “Not many [campaigns] will publicly admit it.”

The adoption of AI may not be such welcome news, however, for voters who are already sick of being bombarded with ads, canned emails, and fundraising requests during election season. Advertising will become even more hyper-targeted, Tom Newhouse, a GOP strategist, told me, because campaigns can use AI to sort through voter data, run performance tests, and then create dozens of highly specific ads with far fewer staff. The shift, he said, could narrow the gap between small campaigns and their richer rivals.

But several political consultants I spoke with were skeptical that the technology would democratize campaigning anytime soon. For one, AI won’t aid only the scrappy, underfunded campaigns. Deeper-pocketed organizations could use it to expand their capacity exponentially, whether to test and quick produce hundreds of highly specific ads or pinpoint their canvassing efforts in ways that widen their advantage.

Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits first-time progressive candidates, told me that the office seekers she works with aren’t focused on AI. Hyperlocal races are still won by the candidates who knock on the most doors; robots haven’t taken up that task, and even if they could, who would want them to? “The most important thing for a candidate is the relationship with a voter,” Litman said. “AI can’t replicate that. At least not yet.”

Although campaigns have started using AI, its impact—even to people in politics—is not always apparent. Fetterman’s Pennsylvania campaign worked with Kurucz’s AI-first firm, but two former advisers to Fetterman scoffed at the suggestion that the technology contributed meaningfully to his victory. “I don’t remember anyone using AI for anything on that campaign,” Kenneth Pennington, a digital consultant and one of the Fetterman campaign’s earliest hires, told me. Pennington is a partner at a progressive consulting firm called Middle Seat, which he said had not adopted the use of generative AI in any significant way and had no immediate plans to. “Part of what our approach and selling point is as a team, and as a firm, is authenticity and creativity, which I think is not a strong suit of a tool like ChatGPT,” Pennington said. “It’s robotic. I don’t think it’s ready for prime time in politics.”

If AI optimists and pessimists agree on anything, it’s that the technology will allow more people to participate in the political process. Whether that’s a good thing is another question.

Just as AI platforms could allow, say, a schoolteacher running for city council to draft press releases in between grading papers, so too can they help a far-right activist with millions of followers create a semi-believable deep-fake video of President Joe Biden announcing a military draft.

“We’ve democratized access to the ability to create sophisticated fakes,” Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at UC Berkeley, told me.

Fears over deep-fakes have escalated in the past month. In response to Biden’s formal declaration of his reelection bid, the Republican National Committee released a video that used AI-generated images to depict a dystopian future. Within days, Democratic Representative Yvette Clarke of New York introduced legislation to require political ads to disclose any use of generative AI (which the RNC ad did). Early this month, the bipartisan American Association of Political Consultants issued a statement condemning the use of “deep-fake generative AI content” as a violation of its code of ethics.

[Read: Just wait until Trump is a chatbot]

Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story expressed some degree of concern over the role that deep-fakes could play in the 2024 election. One scenario that came up repeatedly was the possibility that a compelling deep-fake could be released on the eve of the election, leaving too little time for it to be widely debunked. Clarke told me she worried specifically about a bad actor suppressing the vote by releasing invented audio or video of a trusted voice in a particular community announcing a change or closure of polling sites.

But the true nightmare scenario is what Farid called “death by a thousand cuts”—a slow bleed of deep-fakes that destroys trust in authentic sound bites and videos. “If we enter this world where anything could be fake, you can deny reality. Nothing has to be real,” Farid said.

This alarm extends well beyond politics. A consortium of media and tech companies are advocating for a global set of standards for the use of AI, including efforts to authenticate images and videos as well as to identify, through watermarks or other digital fingerprints, content that has been generated or manipulated by AI. The group is led by Adobe, whose Photoshop helped introduce the widespread use of computer-image editing. “We believe that this is an existential threat to democracy if we don’t solve the deep-fake problem,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, told me. “If people don’t have a way to believe the truth, we’re not going to be able to decide policy, laws, government issues.”

Not everyone is so concerned. As vice president of the American Association of Political Consultants, Larry Hyuhn helped draft the statement that the organization put out denouncing deep-fakes and warning its members against using them. But he’s relatively untroubled about the threats they pose. “Frankly, in my experience, it’s harder than everyone thinks it is,” said Hyuhn, whose day job is providing digital strategy to Democratic clients who include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Am I afraid of it? No,” Hyuhn told me. “Does it concern me that there are always going to be bad actors doing bad things? That’s just life.”

Betsy Hoover, a former Obama-campaign organizer who now runs a venture-capital fund that invests in campaign tech, argued that voters are more discerning than people give them credit for. In her view, decades of steadily more sophisticated disinformation campaigns have conditioned the electorate to question what they see on the internet. “Voters have had to decide what to listen to and where to get their information for a really long time,” she told me. “And at the end of the day, for the most part, they’ve figured it out.”

Deep-fake videos are sure to get more convincing, but for the time being, many are pretty easy to spot. Those that impersonate Biden, for example, do a decent job of capturing his voice and appearance. But they make him sound slightly, well, younger than he is. His speech is smoother, without the verbal stumbles and stuttering that have become more pronounced in recent years. The technology “does require someone with some real skill to make use of,” he said. “You can give me a football; I still can’t throw it 50 yards.”

The same limitations apply to AI’s potential for revolutionizing campaigns, as anyone who’s played around with ChatGPT can attest. When I asked ChatGPT to write a press release from the Trump campaign announcing a hypothetical endorsement of the former president by his current Republican rival, Nikki Haley, within seconds the bot delivered a serviceable first draft that accurately captured the format of a press release and made up believable, if generic, quotes from Trump and Haley. But it omitted key background information that any junior-level staffer would have known to include—that Haley was the governor of South Carolina, for example, and then served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Still, anyone confident enough to predict AI’s impact on an election nearly a year and a half away is making a risky bet. ChatGPT didn’t even exist six months ago. Uncertainty pervaded my conversations with the technology’s boosters and skeptics alike. Pennington told me to take everything he said about AI, both its promise and its peril, “with a grain of salt” because he could be proved wrong. “I think some people are overhyping it. I think some people are not thinking about it who should be,” Hoover said. “There’s a really wide spectrum because all of this is just evolving so much day to day.”

[Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it]

That constant and rapid evolution is what sets AI apart from other technologies that have been touted as democratic disrupters. “This is one of the few technologies in the history of planet Earth that is continuously and exponentially bettering itself,” Kurucz, Sterling’s founder, said. Of all the predictions I heard about AI’s impact on campaigns, his were the most assured. (Because AI forms the basis of his sales pitch to clients, perhaps his prognostication, too, should be taken with a grain of salt.) Although he was unsure exactly how fast AI could transform campaigns, he was certain it would.

“You no longer need average people and average consultants and average anything,” Kurucz said. “Because AI can do average.” He compared the skeptics in his field to executives at Blockbuster who passed on the chance to buy Netflix before the start-up eventually destroyed the video-rental giant. “The old guard,” Kurucz concluded, “is just not ready to be replaced.”

Hoover offered no such bravado, but she said Democrats in particular shouldn’t let their fears of AI stop them from trying to harness its potential. “The genie is out of the bottle,” she said. “We have a choice, then, as campaigners: to take the good from it and allow it to make our work better and more effective, or to hide under a rock and pretend it’s not here, because we’re afraid of it.”

“I don’t think we can afford to do the latter,” she added.

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

The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The play that explains Succession (and everything else) The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet. COVID shots are still one giant experiment. AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets. A Tense Summer

Russia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.

I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:

U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.

That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.

The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.

Now, about those Belarus nukes.

Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”

Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.

Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.

It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.

Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)

What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.

As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.

Related:

“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.” The irreversible change in Belarus Today’s News A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law. A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct. The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated. Dispatches Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney

A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

By Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.

American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.

Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)

With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.

It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”

I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Photographs by Spencer Ostrander

Over the course of two years, Spencer Ostrander made several trips around the country to take pictures of the sites of more than 30 mass shootings. This is a small selection from that body of work. The numbers of those killed and injured in each incident do not include the perpetrators.

A

ccording to a recent estimate by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, there are 393 million guns currently owned by residents of the United States—more than one firearm for every man, woman, and child in the country. Each year, approximately 40,000 Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those 40,000 gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for about half of all suicides per year. With the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, and the law-enforcement killings caused by guns, the average comes out to more than 100 Americans killed by bullets every day.

On that same average day, another 200-plus are wounded by guns, which translates into 80,000 a year. Eighty thousand wounded and 40,000 dead, or 120,000 ambulance calls and emergency-room cases for every 12-month tick of the clock, but the toll of gun violence goes far beyond the pierced and bloodied bodies of the victims themselves, spilling out into the devastations visited upon their immediate families, their extended families, their friends, their fellow workers, the people of their neighborhoods, their schools, their churches, their softball teams, and their communities at large—the vast brigade of lives touched by the presence of a single person who lives or has lived among them—meaning that the number of Americans directly or indirectly marked by gun violence every year must be tallied in the millions.

Those are the facts, but helpful as it is to look at the figures that support those facts, they do not answer the question of why mass shootings occur so frequently in America and nowhere else. Bloodshed and death on this scale and at this level of frequency would seem to call for national action, a concerted effort on the part of state, federal, and municipal governments to control what by any measure of rational understanding is a public-health crisis. America’s relationship to guns is anything but rational, however, and therefore we have done little or nothing to fix the problem. It’s not that we lack the intelligence or the wherewithal to relieve this threat to the safety and well-being of society, but for complex historical reasons, we have lacked the will to do so, and so obdurate have we become in our refusal to address the problem that in 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was barred by Congress from using federal funds to conduct research that “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” (In 2019, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health were given $25 million to research gun violence.)

[Read: Five people died in the Kentucky shooting. The full toll is much higher.]

Macy’s department store, at Cascade Mall,
Burlington, Washington.
September 23, 2016:
5 people killed. Macy’s department store, at Cascade Mall,
Burlington, Washington.
September 23, 2016:
5 people killed. Umpqua Community College,
Roseburg, Oregon.
October 1, 2015:
9 people killed, 8 injured by gunfire. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church,
Charleston, South Carolina.
June 17, 2015:
9 people killed, 1 injured by gunfire.

By contrast, consider the progress we have made with the cars we drive and how conscientiously we have pushed down the death and injury rates caused by automobile accidents over the years. And make no mistake about it: Cars are not terribly different from guns. A high-powered automatic rifle and a 4,000-pound Chevy barreling down a highway at 70 or 80 miles an hour are both lethal weapons.

The car has been with us since the tail end of the 19th century, and at the beginning of its life the horseless carriage was seen as nothing more than a faster, motorized version of the horse-drawn carriage. Consequently, there were initially no standardized laws or regulations governing its use: no licenses, for example, which meant no road tests to prove one’s competence behind the wheel; no stop signs; no traffic lights; no speed limits, no brake signals; no rearview or side-view mirrors; no left- or right-turn-signal lights; no penalties for drunk driving; no shatterproof windshields; no padded dashboards; and no seat belts.

Bit by bit, over the better part of the 20th century, each one of those improvements was made—made and enforced by law—and the roads, streets, and highways of the country have become safer because of them. There are still an appalling number of traffic deaths in America every year, but compared with the dizzying rates of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the percentage of deaths per total miles driven by about 229 million licensed American drivers in close to 280 million registered vehicles—trucks, vans, passenger cars, buses, and motorcycles—has in fact been vastly reduced. Which raises the question: If we could face up to the dangers represented by cars and use our brains and sense of common purpose to combat those dangers, why haven’t we been able to do the same thing with guns?

[Read: Coming undone in the age of mass shootings]

Ned Peppers Bar,
Dayton, Ohio.
August 4, 2019:
9 people killed, 17 injured by gunfire. Left:
King Soopers supermarket,
Boulder, Colorado.
March 22, 2021:
10 people killed.
Right:
Mandalay Bay Hotel,
Paradise, Nevada.
October 1, 2017:
60 people killed, 422 injured by gunfire. Tree of Life Synagogue,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
October 27, 2018:
11 people killed, 6 injured by gunfire. Sikh Temple of Wisconsin,
Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
August 5, 2012:
7 people killed, 3 injured by gunfire.

Guns have been around a lot longer than cars, of course, but cars are much bigger than guns and therefore more visible, and after circulating among us for the past 120 years, they have established a hold on the American imagination no less dominant than the spell cast by our passion for guns. Cars and guns are the twin pillars of our deepest national mythology, for the car and the gun each represents an idea of freedom and individual empowerment, the most exciting forms of self-expression available to us: Dare yourself to push the gas pedal to the floor, and suddenly you are racing along at 100 miles an hour; curl your fingers around the trigger of your Glock or AR-15, and you own the world.

Nor do we ever tire of watching and thinking about those things. The two most beloved components of American films have long been the shoot-out and the car chase, and no matter how many times we have lost ourselves in the spectacle of those deftly orchestrated thrill-a-thons as they played out on-screen, we still go back for more.

[Read: The second generation of school shootings]

On the other hand, for all the similarities between cars and guns, there are fundamental differences as well. Guns exist for the sole purpose of destroying life, whereas cars are manufactured to carry the living from one place to another, and even if too many drivers, passengers, and pedestrians happen to be killed in cars and because of cars, we largely call their deaths accidental, a tragic by-product of the risks and dangers of the road. By contrast, nearly every death by gun is intentional, whether the person using the gun is a soldier in battle, a hunter stalking deer in the woods, a deranged or cold-blooded murderer on a city street or in the kitchen of someone’s house, an armed robber who panics while holding up a jewelry store, or a crushed, despairing soul who downs half a bottle of bourbon in a dark room and then fires a bullet into his head.

Cars are a necessity of civilian life in America. Guns are not, and as more and more Americans have come to understand that, the percentage of households that own guns has been dropping steadily over the past five decades, from half of them to a third of them. Yet the number of guns currently owned by Americans has grown—and just a small group of people own a great percentage of these guns. How to account for this great difference, and why at this moment in our history have Americans been pulling further and further apart on the subject of guns, leading to a situation in which most of us want little or nothing to do with them and some of us—a minority that contains millions—have fetishized them into emblems of American freedom, an essential human right granted to all citizens by the Framers of the Constitution?

Walmart,
El Paso, Texas.
August 3, 2019:
23 people killed, 22 injured by gunfire. Century 16 movie theater,
Aurora, Colorado.
July 20, 2012:
12 people killed, 58 injured by gunfire. Pulse nightclub,
Orlando, Florida.
June 12, 2016:
49 people killed, 53 injured by gunfire. Borderline Bar and Grill,
Thousand Oaks, California.
November 7, 2018:
12 people killed, 1 injured by gunfire.

This article has been excerpted from Paul Auster’s new book, Bloodbath Nation, with photographs by Spencer Ostrander.

For years, Republican presidential primaries have been chaotic affairs.

In 2008, Rudy Giuliani looked like a prohibitive front-runner until his disastrous decision to forsake campaigning in the calendar’s first two states (an indicator of judgment issues to come) created openings for Mike Huckabee and eventually John McCain. In 2012, things got so weird that Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain all led the field at various points. Then 2016 was even weirder—the earliest debate saw 17 participants in two tiers—and culminated in Donald Trump’s stunning victory.

But 2024 was supposed to be different. In one corner was Trump, making his attempt at a comeback from an election loss he still hasn’t acknowledged. No one was sure whether he was unbeatable or if he was a hollowed figure, outwardly fearsome but ripe for toppling. If the latter, then the man to do it was surely Ron DeSantis, the hotshot young Florida governor who his backers believed had formulated a highly potent version of Trumpism without Trump.

[David A. Graham: The 2024 U.S. presidential race–a cheat sheet]

And who knows? That might be where things end up, but it’s not where they are now. This week, DeSantis is finally expected to formally enter the race—a leap that some people already believe is coming too late. But rather than consolidating the Trump-alternative space, DeSantis enters a race that is expanding. The growing number of candidates reflects wariness among Republicans about Trump’s weakness in a general election, yet a big field could smooth his path to the nomination.  

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina officially announced his campaign yesterday. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a fairly outspoken Trump critic, is “accelerating” his move toward a bid, according to The Dispatch. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who earlier this month ruled out a bid “this year” (careful language!) is now acting like a guy who’s not ruling out a bid altogether. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who not long ago was publicly wrestling with the gap between his desire to run and his worry that Trump was unbeatable, is now rumored to be announcing a bid any day now. Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry is, for some reason, thinking about a third stab at the nomination. So is Doug Burgum, who you’ll be forgiven for not knowing is the governor of North Dakota.

Yes, a couple of potential candidates, Larry Hogan and Mike Pompeo, have decided against running, but the new entrants join an already large field that includes Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence (presumptively), and Asa Hutchinson. All of this happens even as Trump’s position has actually improved over the past few months, despite his indictment in New York, legal troubles elsewhere, and a loss in a $5 million civil case for sexual assault and defamation.

[Read: A bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism]

The growing candidate list reflects skepticism about both DeSantis’s and Trump’s chances. DeSantis’s estimation has sunk sharply since last fall, as he has appeared lethargic, unsure how to take on Trump, and frankly just a little weird, and some Republicans simply don’t believe that Trump is as invincible as he looks. Perhaps this is because they think his legal troubles will eventually catch up with him, or perhaps they are indulging in wishful thinking.

Not every candidate runs because they think they can win. They could be trying to raise their profile for a 2028 run, when Trump will presumably actually be out of contention, or they could be hoping for a Cabinet role under whoever the winner is, or even a good cable-news sinecure. Another reason would be that someone is willing to pay for it. Why not take a chance to bask in attention and travel the country on other people’s tab? Any semi-viable Republican candidate has to have some megadonors in his or her corner, or believe he can get one. (Burgum is a billionaire in his own right.)

The important thing is that many major Republican donors are up for grabs. These people tend to be older-school Republicans who want low taxes, a favorable business environment, and not a lot more. They were never all that enamored of Trump, whom they found gauche and whose love of tariffs and dislike of immigration turned them off. They didn’t give much to him in 2016, when he ran on a shoestring budget and eschewed them, and although they grudgingly donated in 2020, they didn’t like January 6 and worry he can’t beat Joe Biden in a rematch.

Initially, many of them gravitated toward DeSantis, but as his polling has faded, so has their ardor. John Catsimatidis, a New York grocery baron, told the Washington Examiner that he wouldn’t back DeSantis, asking, “Why would I support somebody to become president of the United States that doesn’t return phone calls?” The financial-tech billionaire Thomas Peterffy, sounding uncannily like a Joe Biden ad, told the Financial Times he was cool on DeSantis too: “Because of his stance on abortion and book banning … myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.” He then sent a big check to Youngkin’s PAC. The financier Ken Griffin, who’d looked like a DeSantis backer, is among those waiting. A fellow Wall Street titan, Stephen Schwarzman, wasn’t convinced after a meeting with the Florida governor. Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has said she plans to stay neutral in the GOP primary. The Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, a former Trump backer, hasn’t committed to any candidate yet, per Puck. Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle, reportedly plans to put millions behind Scott. The hedge-funder Steve Cohen is reportedly backing Christie. (DeSantis did recently pick off the former Trump donor Hal Lambert, the New York Post reports.)

As long as the big money hasn’t started consolidating around a few candidates, there’s no reason for the field to start contracting. But the splintering is a reminder of why so many donors gravitated to DeSantis in the first place: because they wanted to stop Trump. The irony is that a diffuse field is good news for the former president, just as it was in 2016, when he won the nomination despite plenty of party opposition split among his many rivals. Trump is often described as a chaos agent, but he’s happy to be a chaos client, too.

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Senator Tim Scott today joined the ranks of GOP candidates hoping to displace Donald Trump as the party’s nominee. America would be better off if one of them could win, but the GOP is no longer a normal political party.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Beware of the food that isn’t food. Harlan Crow wants to stop talking about Clarence Thomas. Where living with friends is still technically illegal A firearm-owning Republican’s solutions for gun violence

Thanos From Queens

Tim Scott of South Carolina joined the field of Republican contenders for the GOP presidential nomination today. He’s polling in single digits among primary voters, as are all of the other (so far) declared candidates. Only Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is managing to get out of the basement—rumors are that he will announce his candidacy this week—and even he is getting walloped by Donald Trump in polls of the Republican faithful.

Scott seems like a classic no-hoper presidential prospect but a strong choice for vice president, which of course is why some weaker candidates run and then bow out (see “Harris, Kamala”). The current GOP field, however, includes at least some politicians who should be credible alternatives to Trump: In any other year, people such as DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Asa Hutchinson, all current or former governors from the South, would be obvious contenders. Instead, their campaigns are flailing about in limbo while the rest of the field is populated by the likes of the wealthy gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy and the radio-talk-show host Larry Elder.

Of course, in a normal year, a twice-impeached president who has been held liable for sexual abuse would do the decent thing and vanish from public life.

The United States desperately needs a normal presidential election, the kind of election that is not shadowed by gloom and violence and weirdos in freaky costumes pushing conspiracy theories. Americans surely remember a time when two candidates (sometimes with an independent crashing the gates) had debates, argued about national policy, and made the case for having the vision and talent and experience to serve as the chief executive of a superpower. Sure, those elections were full of nasty smears and dirty tricks, but they were always recognizable as part of a grand tradition stretching all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—rivals and patriots who traded ugly blows—of contenders fighting hard to secure the public’s blessing to hold power for four years.

Such an election, however, requires two functional political parties. The Republicans are in the grip of a cult of personality, so there’s little hope for a normal GOP primary and almost none for a traditional presidential election. Meanwhile, Republican candidates refuse to take a direct run at Donald Trump and speak the truth—loudly—to his voters; instead, they talk about all of the good that Trump has done but then plead with voters to understand that Trump is unelectable. (Hutchinson, who is unequivocal in his view of Trump, has been an honorable exception here and has called for Trump to drop out.)

The electability argument about Trump is not only amoral, but it also might not even be true: Trump might be able to win again. In normal times, there’s nothing wrong with “electability” arguments. It is hardly the low road, if presented with two reasonable candidates in a primary, to choose the one who can prevail in a general election. But such a choice assumes the existence of  “reasonable” candidates. Instead, some of the Republicans who are running or leaning toward running against Trump are saying, in effect, that Trump really should be the candidate, but he can’t win—instead of saying, unequivocally, that no decent party should ever nominate this man again, whether he can win or not.

Republican contenders are caught in a bind. If they run against Trump, they will likely lose. But if they don’t run against Trump, they will certainly lose—to Trump, and then everyone in America loses. GOP primary candidates want to pick up Trump’s voters without overtly selling them Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, which is why the “electability” dodge is nothing but pandering and cowardice. Not that any of these hopefuls have tried to lay a punch on Trump: Haley is AWOL—is she even still running?—and DeSantis is busy clomping around with flaming wastebaskets on his feet as he tries to stomp out fires he’s already set.

Tim Scott is an especially vexing case, because he has a life story that should have made him the natural anti-Trump candidate in every way. A religious man who triumphed over poverty, got an education, and became a successful businessman, his life and character are a photo-negative image of Trump’s. And yet, Scott can’t help himself: He’s “thankful” for Trump’s years in office.

None of these Republicans are going to overcome the Thanos from Queens, who, with a snap of his fingers, will soon make half of the GOP field disappear.

These Republicans are likely waiting for a miracle, an act of God that takes Trump out of contention. And by “act of God,” of course, they mean “an act of Fani Willis or Jack Smith.” This is a vain hope: Without a compelling argument from within the Republican Party that Fani Willis and Jack Smith or for that matter, Alvin Bragg, are right to indict Trump—as Bragg has done and Willis and Smith could do soon—and that the former president is a menace to the country, Trump will simply brush away his legal troubles and hope he can sprint to the White House before he’s arrested.

No one is going to displace Trump by running gently. A candidate who takes Trump on, with moral force and directness, might well lose the nomination, but he or she could at least inject some sanity into the Republican-primary process and set the stage for the eventual recovery—a healing that will take years—of the GOP or some reformed successor as a center-right party. DeSantis would rather be elected as Trump’s Mini-Me. (It might work.) Hutchinson has tried to speak up, but too quietly. Haley, like so many other former Trump officials, is too compromised by service to Trump to be credible as his nemesis. Tim Scott is perfectly positioned to make the case, but he won’t.

A Republican who thinks Trump can be beaten in a primary by gargling warm words such as electability is a Republican in denial. Trump is already creating a reality-distortion field around the primary, as he will again in the general election. Is it possible that the GOP base would respond to some fire and brimstone about Trump, instead of from him? We cannot know, because it hasn’t been tried—yet.

Related:

Why outspoken women scare Trump America’s lowest standard

Today’s News

The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has vowed to transfer the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut to the Russian army by June 1. Ukraine insists that the city has not been entirely captured. Arizona, California, and Nevada agreed on a plan to reduce water usage from the drought-stricken Colorado River.   Speaker Kevin McCarthy said U.S.-debt-ceiling talks were on the “right path” ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden this evening.  

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn down “Pumptinis” at a live screening of the scariest show on TV.

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Evening Read

Apple TV+

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon Is a Triumph

By David Sims

David Grann’s nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is the sprawling story of a criminal investigation undoing a systemic evil. It lays out in riveting detail the mystery of the Osage murders of the 1920s, when dozens of Native Americans were killed in a grand conspiracy to exploit their oil-rich land. Grann digs into the societal phenomenon surrounding the Osage, many of whom became ultra-wealthy after generations of displacement and persecution. But the book’s through line is the federal investigator Tom White, who helped solve the murders on the orders of a young J. Edgar Hoover.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will be released in theaters this October, takes a very different narrative approach.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Roys stumble into the real world. A world without Martin Amis My friend, Tim Keller

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Read. The Princess Casamassima, a novel written more than 100 years ago (and originally serialized by The Atlantic!), is a political novel that could’ve been written today.

Listen. The first podcast episode of our new podcast series How to Talk to People, which explores the barriers to good small talk.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m concerned about events at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, where the Russians have apparently dug in for a fight. I’m especially concerned that the Kremlin, facing a Ukrainian counteroffensive, might be planning a nuclear disaster in retaliation for losing more ground. That hasn’t happened yet, and I promise I’ll come back to this if events change.

In the meantime, however, the danger at the Ukrainian nuclear installation has jogged loose a memory of a lost bit of music from the 1980s. After the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl—also in Ukraine—the New Zealand musician Shona Laing released a song in 1987 titled “Soviet Snow.” (You can see the video here.) Given my, ah, heterodox musical tastes, you might be surprised that I would like something with such obvious environmental advocacy. (Don’t tell the other young Ronald Reagan voters, but I also bought Bruce Cockburn’s Stealing Fire album in 1984, and I still like it.) There is an urgency and panic in the song, a strong New Wave feel over Laing’s plea:

Are we wide awake? Is the world aware?

Radiation over Red Square

Creeping on to cross Roman roads

I remember feeling a great unease hearing that song the first time. Thirty-six years later, I am feeling that same unease once more.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Playing in her first real WNBA game in 579 days, Brittney Griner did something Friday night in Los Angeles that national television audiences hadn’t seen her do in a long time: The Phoenix Mercury center stood for the national anthem.

She stopped doing so in 2020 but has resumed the practice after returning from 10 months of imprisonment in Russia. “One thing that’s good about this country is our right to protest,” Griner said after the game when I asked her about the issue. “You have a right to be able to speak out, question, to challenge, and do all these things. [After] what I went through, it just means a little bit more to me now. I was literally in a cage and could not stand the way I wanted to … and a lot of other situations. Just being able to hear my national anthem, see my flag, I definitely wanted to stand.”

[Tom Nichols: To Putin, Brittney Griner is a pawn. To the U.S., she’s a person.]

Although she stood for “The Star Spangled Banner” during the preseason, her team’s regular-season opener on Friday night against the Los Angeles Sparks attracted far more media attention. No opposing player this season is likely to get the reception that Griner did from L.A. fans. The exuberant crowd wore pro-Griner T-shirts, gave her a lengthy standing ovation, and held up signs that further showed their support. A number of sports superstars were there to witness the joyous occasion, including the Los Angeles Lakers legend Magic Johnson, the tennis champion Billie Jean King, and the Basketball Hall of Famer Dawn Staley, who coaches the University of South Carolina women’s basketball team.

But what brought the moment full circle and speaks to the significance of Griner’s return was Vice President Kamala Harris meeting with both the Sparks and the Mercury before the game, praising the players for making sure that Griner’s plight was never forgotten. “Thank you for all that you did in supporting Brittney,” Harris told them, “because I know that was rough and that was so difficult for you. Team is family.”

While on her way to play for a Russian team during the WNBA offseason, Griner was arrested at a Moscow airport in February 2022, and accused of carrying cannabis oil in her luggage. She was later convicted of drug smuggling. Her ordeal was widely viewed as an attempt by President Vladimir Putin to gain diplomatic leverage against the United States. The U.S. government negotiated her release in December in exchange for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout.

[Read: How politics compounded a hostage family’s grief]

Harris has taken some heat for advocating for Griner’s return. As San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general, she oversaw prosecutions for marijuana offenses and opposed marijuana legalization. But people are allowed to change their positions. As a senator, Harris co-authored a comprehensive marijuana bill that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level and resentence or expunge the records of those who received marijuana convictions.

Griner’s perspective on the national anthem has evolved too.

In 2020, after Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor and the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, Griner vowed then she wasn’t going to stand for the national anthem, and even suggested that it shouldn’t be played at any sporting event. “I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season,” Griner declared. “I think we should take that much of a stand.”

Like a lot of athletes during that time, Griner wanted to use the anthem to prove a larger point: that the country’s national symbols mean nothing if the human rights of its Black citizens are routinely being violated by the people in charge of protecting them.

This is a tricky dance for an openly gay Black woman who stands at 6 foot 9—balancing love of her country and an appreciation for its freedoms with wanting the U.S. to have a better record of equality and social justice. Like Black soldiers who fought for America overseas but were denied basic rights at home, Griner—who twice represented the U.S. in the Olympics—understands that you can love a country while knowing it doesn’t treat your community fairly.

Some critics believed that Griner didn’t deserve support from the U.S. government because of what she had said about the anthem, and many people on the right criticized the Biden administration for coming to her rescue. When Griner was released, former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, his social-media site, “What kind of a deal is it to swap Brittney Griner, a basketball player who openly hates our country for the man known as ‘The Merchant of Death.’” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., called Griner an “awful America Hating WNBA player.”

[Danté Stewart: The right’s Brittney Griner obsession]

Despite these desperate attempts to paint Griner as anti-American, nothing is more American than Griner’s initial dissent or her decision to stand for the national anthem now.

Some will surely delight in her receiving her comeuppance through the horrors she experienced in Russia, or will use her 180-degree turn to minimize the problem that prompted her negative feelings toward the national anthem and flag in the first place. “Sometimes when it doesn’t go the way other people want it to go, you get labeled un-American or something like that,” Griner said on Friday. “I think it makes you more American.” She said she still supports players who decline to stand for the anthem.

Griner’s dissent was always a poor excuse to question her patriotism. If she didn’t love this country, she never would have criticized it. If she didn’t love this country, she wouldn’t have helped Team USA win two gold medals. And if she didn’t love this country, she certainly wouldn’t be standing up for its anthem now, even as she believes America has much more work to do.

North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers overrode a veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper last night, enacting a ban on most abortions after 12 weeks of gestation. The ban will take effect in July.

The Old North State has frequently offered a preview of new currents in American conservatism over the past decade, hosting skirmishes about gerrymandering, restrictive voting laws, and spurious fraud claims before they became national issues. Now it could be setting a model for the nation on abortion battles too. Unlike in other, more solidly red states where GOP politicians have aimed for total or near-total bans on abortion, North Carolina Republican lawmakers opted for a law that would further restrict such procedures but allow most to continue. Under current law, abortions are legal up to 20 weeks.

Cooper and Democrats in the state fiercely opposed the law, and the override will make abortion central to the state’s elections in 2024, when North Carolina will see a heated contest over the governorship and is expected to be a presidential battleground. Those races will test whether voters in a closely divided state view the 12-week ban as a reasonable compromise, or revolt in the same manner as voters in states that have passed or attempted to pass more stringent laws.

[David A. Graham: The state election that could change abortion access in the South]

Yesterday’s vote overriding the veto was the culmination of a dizzying series of events. In November, Republicans gained seats in the General Assembly, nearly establishing a veto-proof majority but falling just short. Cooper and other Democrats placed his veto—especially his power to veto restrictions on abortion—at the center of the Democratic messaging during the election.

“I’m not personally on the ballot. My ability to stop bad legislation is. The effectiveness of the veto is on the line,” Cooper told me in October. If Republicans went on to win supermajorities in November, he warned, “there will be extreme legislation on abortion passed.”

After the votes were counted, Democrats managed to deny Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state House by a single vote. But in April, State Representative Tricia Cotham, a Charlotte-area Democrat, shocked the state’s political class by switching to the Republican Party. The reasons for Cotham’s switch remain obscure. She’s the scion of a Democratic political family, and speculated reasons for her jump include personal pique and the lingering effects of long COVID. Whatever the reason, Cotham’s switch gave Republicans supermajorities in both houses and paved the way for abortion restrictions.

In January, Cotham joined other Democrats in sponsoring a bill to codify Roe v. Wade into state law. (In the GOP-controlled General Assembly, that bill was never anything more than a gesture.) Yet after her party switch, Cotham voted for the Republican abortion bill, which was designed in part to garner her vote as well as the support of other caucus moderates.

Cooper, other Democrats, and pro-abortion-rights groups rallied furiously against the bill. They hoped they might be able to pressure one or more of a handful of Republicans in swing districts to vote to sustain the veto, but when the Senate and then the House took up the override yesterday evening, Republican leaders kept their ranks together.

The new law makes North Carolina a pioneer for a compromise approach to the abortion issue—one that could defuse the issue, but could also fail to satisfy either side of the debate. As The Washington Post’s Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein report, “It is the first new abortion ban to pass since the fall of Roe v. Wade that does not outlaw all or most abortions, effectively allowing roughly 90 percent of abortions to continue.” As states across the South have restricted abortion, North Carolina has become a magnet for women seeking abortions from all around the region, as Cooper emphasized to me in October.

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Even with the new restrictions, North Carolina will be among the more permissive southern states. Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi all ban abortion in almost all circumstances. Florida recently passed a six-week ban, the same as Georgia’s. South Carolina’s law remains in flux after the state supreme court blocked a six-week ban, and a bipartisan bloc of female senators has resisted strict measures.

Republicans have sought to portray the 12-week law as a reasonable, “mainstream” compromise. The law includes exceptions for rape and incest up to 20 weeks, and for fetal life-limiting anomalies up to 24 weeks. But Democrats hope that even this bill will go too far for many voters ahead of the 2024 election. “North Carolinians now understand that Republicans are unified in their assault on women’s reproductive freedom and we are energized to fight back on this and other critical issues facing our state,” Cooper, who is not eligible for reelection in 2024, said in a statement last night.

The likely Republican candidate for governor, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, is a strident abortion opponent, and Democrats hope that the extremity of his position will help them hold the governor’s office. The state has consistently voted for Republican presidential candidates except in 2008, when Barack Obama won the state, but Democrats see the state as winnable in 2024, and will seek to make the campaign a referendum on abortion rights.

Whether voters endorse Republicans’ attempt at a more moderate path or punish them at the polls, the result is likely to offer an indicator of the post-Roe politics of abortion in other purple states around the nation.

Case centres on allegation Republican lawmakers in South Carolina drew district maps to dilute share of Black votes.

Across multiple fronts, Democrats and their allies are stiffening their resistance to a surge of Republican-led book bans.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the past month have conspicuously escalated their denunciations of the book bans proliferating in schools across the country, explicitly linking them to restrictions on abortion and voting rights to make the case that “MAGA extremists” are threatening Americans’ “personal freedom,” as Biden said in the recent video announcing his campaign for a second term.

Last week, Illinois became the first Democratic-controlled state to pass legislation designed to discourage local school districts from banning books. And a prominent grassroots progressive group today will announce a new national campaign to organize mothers against the conservative drive to remove books and censor curriculum under the banner of protecting “parents’ rights.”

“We are not going to let the mantle of parents’ rights be hijacked by such an extreme minority,” Katie Paris, the founder of the group, Red Wine and Blue, told me.

These efforts are emerging as red states have passed a wave of new laws restricting how classroom teachers can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as measures making it easier for critics to pressure schools to remove books from classrooms and libraries. Partly in response to those new statutes, the number of banned books has jumped by about 30 percent in the first half of the current school year as compared with last, according to a recent compilation by PEN America, a free-speech group founded by notable authors.

To the frustration of some local activists opposing these measures in state legislatures or school boards, the Biden administration has largely kept its distance from these fights. Nor did Democrats, while they controlled Congress, mount any sustained resistance to the educational constraints spreading across the red states.

But the events of the past few weeks suggest that this debate has clearly reached a turning point. From grassroots organizers like Paris to political advisers for Biden, more Democrats see book bans as the weak link in the GOP’s claim that it is upholding “parents’ rights” through measures such as restrictions on curriculum or legislation targeting transgender minors. A national CBS poll released on Monday found overwhelming opposition among Americans to banning books that discuss race or criticize U.S. history. “There is something about this idea of book banning that really makes people stop and say, ‘I may be uncomfortable with some of this transitional treatment kids are getting, and I don’t know how I feel about pronouns, but I do not want them banning books,’” says Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster.

The conservative call to uphold parents’ rights in education has intensified since Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in 2021 unexpectedly won the governorship in blue-leaning Virginia partly behind that theme. In the aftermath of long COVID-related shutdowns across many school districts, Youngkin’s victory showed that “Republicans really did tap into an energy there” by talking about ways of “giving parents more of a choice in education,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who specializes in family issues, told me.

But as the parents’-rights crusade moved through Republican-controlled states, it quickly expanded well beyond academic concerns to encompass long-standing conservative complaints that liberal teachers were allegedly indoctrinating kids through “woke” lessons.

[Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave]

New red-state laws passed in response to those arguments have moved the fight over book banning from a retail to a wholesale level. Previously, most book bans were initiated by lone parents, even if they were working with national conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, who objected to administrators or school boards in individual districts. But the new statutes have “supercharged” the book-banning process, in PEN’s phrase, by empowering critics to simultaneously demand the removal of more books in more places. Five red states—Florida, Texas, Missouri, South Carolina, and Utah—have now become the epicenter of book-banning efforts, the study concluded.

Biden and his administration were not entirely silent as these policies proliferated. He was clear and consistent in denouncing the initial “Don’t Say Gay” law that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed to bar discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. But that was the exception. Even during the 2022 campaign, when Biden regularly framed Republicans as a threat to voting and abortion rights, he did not highlight red-state book bans and curriculum censorship. Apart from abortion and voting, his inclination has been to focus his public communications less on culture-war disputes than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to working families. Nor had Education Secretary Miguel Cardona done much to elevate these issues either. “We have not seen a lot of visibility” from the Education Department, says Nadine Farid Johnson, PEN’s managing director for Washington.

The administration’s relative disengagement from the classroom wars, and the limited attention from national progressive groups, left many grassroots activists feeling “isolated,” Paris said. Revida Rahman, a co-founder of One WillCo, an organization that advocates for students of color in affluent and predominantly white Williamson County, south of Nashville, told me that the group has often felt at a disadvantage trying to respond to conservative parents working with national right-leaning groups to demand changes in curriculum or bans on books with racial or LGBTQ themes. “What we are fighting is a well-funded and well-oiled machine,” she told me, “and we don’t have the same capacity.”

Pushback from Democrats and their allies, though, is now coalescing. Earlier this month, the Freedom to Learn initiative, a coalition organized mostly by Black educators, held a series of events, many on college campuses, protesting restrictions on curriculum and books. The Red Wine and Blue group is looking to organize a systematic grassroots response. Founded in 2019, the organization has about 500,000 mostly suburban mothers in its network and paid organizers in five states. The group has already provided training for local activists to oppose curriculum censorship and book bans, and today it is launching the Freedom to Parent 21st Century Kids project, a more sweeping counter to conservative parents’-rights groups. The project will include virtual training sessions for activists, programs in which participants can talk with transgender kids and their parents, and efforts to highlight banned books. “We want to equip parents to talk about this stuff,” Paris told me. “It’s moms learning from moms who already faced this in their community.”

Illinois opened another front in this debate with its first-in-the-nation bill to discourage book banning. The legislation will withhold state grants from school districts unless they adopt explicit policies to prohibit banning books in response to partisan or ideological pressure. Democratic Governor J. B. Pritzker has indicated that he will sign the bill.

[Read: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

Potentially the most consequential shift has come from the Biden administration. The president signaled a new approach in his late-April announcement video, when he cited book bans as evidence for his accusation that Republicans in the Donald Trump era are targeting Americans’ “personal freedom.” That was, “by far, the most we have seen on” book bans from Biden, Farid Johnson told me.

One senior adviser close to Biden told me that the connection of book bans to those more frequent presidential targets of abortion and democracy was no accident. “There is a basic American pushback when people are told what they can and cannot do,” said the adviser, who asked for anonymity while discussing campaign strategy. “Voters,” the adviser said, “don’t like to be told, ‘You can’t make a decision about your own life when it comes to your health care; you can’t make a decision about what book to read.’ I think book bans fit in that broader context.”

Biden may sharpen that attack as soon as Saturday, when he delivers the commencement address at Howard University. Meanwhile, Vice President Harris has already previewed how the administration may flesh out this argument. In her own speech at Howard last month, she cited book bans and curriculum censorship as components of a red-state social regime that the GOP will try to impose nationwide if it wins the White House in 2024. In passing these laws, Republicans are not just “impacting the people” of Florida or Texas, she said. “What we are witnessing—and be clear about this—is there is a national agenda that’s at play … Don’t think it’s not a national agenda when they start banning books.”

The Education Department has also edged into the fray. When the recent release of national test scores showed a decline in students’ performance on history, Cardona, the education secretary, issued a statement declaring that “banning history books and censoring educators … does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

His statement came months after the department’s Office of Civil Rights launched an investigation that could shape the next stages of this struggle. The office is probing whether a Texas school district that sweepingly removed LGBTQ-themed books from its shelves has violated federal civil-rights laws. The department has not revealed anything about the investigation’s status, but PEN’s Farid Johnson said if it concludes that the removals violated federal law, other districts might be deterred from banning books.

The politics of the parents’-rights debate are complex. Republicans are confident that their interconnected initiatives related to education and young people can win back suburban voters, especially mothers, who have rejected the party in the Trump era. Polling, including surveys done by Democratic pollsters last year for the American Federation of Teachers, has consistently found majority national support for some individual planks in the GOP agenda, including the prohibitions on discussing sexual orientation in early grades.

Brown said he believes that at the national level, the battle over book bans is likely to end in a “stalemate.” That’s not only, he argued, because each side can point to examples of extreme behavior by the other in defending or removing individual books, but also because views on what’s acceptable for kids vary so much from place to place. “We shouldn’t expect a national consensus on what book is appropriate for a 13-year-old to be reading, because that’s going to be different among different parents in different communities,” Brown told me.

Yet as the awakening Democratic resistance suggests, many in the party are confident that voters will find the whole of the GOP agenda less attractive than the sum of its parts. In that 2022 polling for the teachers’ union, a significant majority of adults said they worry less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students. Paris said the most common complaint she hears from women drawn to her group is that the conservative activists proclaiming parents’ rights are curtailing the freedoms of other parents by trying to dictate what materials all students can access. “What you’ll have women in our communities say all the time is ‘If you don’t want your kid to read a book, that’s fine, but you don’t get to decide for me and my family,’” she told me.

The White House, the senior official told me, believes that after the Supreme Court last year rescinded the right to abortion, many voters are uncertain and uneasy about what rights or liberties Republicans may target next. “There is a fear about Where does it stop?,” the official said, and book bans powerfully crystallize that concern. Trump and DeSantis, who’s expected to join the GOP race, have both indicated that they intend to aggressively advance the conservative parents’-rights agenda of attacks on instruction they deem “woke” and books they consider indecent. Biden and other Democrats, after months of hesitation, are stepping onto the field against them. The library looms as the next big confrontation in the culture war.

The last public execution in the United States was a raucous and tawdry affair. By the time 20,000 people poured into Owensboro, Kentucky, for the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea, a Black man in his 20s who had pleaded guilty to the rape of a 70-year-old white woman, public executions had been on the wane in America for several decades. Reformers worried about the brutalizing effect of such violence on spectators, and southern states seemed disturbed by the displays of mass religious devotion among the gathered crowds, in which white people and Black people often numbered equally. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, hangings that lured the masses began to give way to electrocutions hidden inside prison walls.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: A history of violence]

But Kentucky was a holdout, and Bethea’s execution drew viewers from around the country. Part of the appeal was the widespread presumption that Owensboro’s sheriff, Florence Thompson, would conduct the execution herself, a lurid curiosity at the time. Though Thompson ultimately delegated the job to a male surrogate, the event’s many thousands of viewers still received their share of spectacle in the form of a clearly drunk hangman slurring his way through the execution.

Many legislators and cultural commentators of the 20th century were abashed by the carnivalesque mass indulgence in executions, and some worried that continuing the public killings would eventually result in the end of capital punishment altogether, fretting that a civilized public wouldn’t tolerate such barbarism for long. For both sincere and Machiavellian reasons, therefore, the notion that it was neither decent nor ennobling for the citizenry to enjoy deaths by violence as a spectator sport was crucial in ending public executions state by state. After the media frenzy surrounding Bethea’s killing, Kentucky banned the practice as well.

But American interest in public execution has never quite expired: Just this March, the Daily Wire host Michael Knowles wholeheartedly pitched the idea of public executions on a call-in show, and a Tennessee Republican state representative proposed “hanging by a tree” as a potential execution method. If Knowles’s suggestion landed with little disturbance, that was likely because this territory is already familiar on the right. Earlier this year, Rolling Stone reported that Donald Trump has floated the idea of televised executions. The proposal is of a kind with right-wing moves to harshen capital-punishment protocols as killing criminals becomes a potent electoral issue in the run-up to 2024.

But there’s something ironic about conservatives calling for public executions: If conservatives wanted to let people see executions, they could just stop preventing them from doing so.

States go to great lengths to ensure that their executions remain as secret as possible. For states with active capital-punishment regimes, protecting information about executioners’ identities and qualifications, lethal drugs and drug suppliers, and the precise procedures used in putting citizens to death is crucial to securing the future of executions. This is why access to executions is already as limited as it is, and why execution states routinely limit press access to executions. Members of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections, for example, repeatedly closed the blinds on the observation window in the execution chamber during Clayton Lockett’s botched execution in 2014, blocking the media’s view. The Nevada Press Association sued the Nevada Department of Corrections and other Nevada state officials for full access to executions in 2021. And if I had a nickel for every red-state Department of Corrections that won’t take my calls, I could buy myself a nice cup of coffee.

[From the June 2015 issue: The cruel and unusual execution of Clayton Lockett]

According to a 2018 report by the Death Penalty Information Center, 13 states have enacted execution-secrecy statutes since 2011: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming. In April 2019, Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas signed a bill that expanded upon the state’s existing execution-secrecy laws with new privacy provisions, and in May 2022, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a similar statute in Florida. Last month, state lawmakers in South Carolina passed a set of bills introduced by three Republicans that will levy criminal penalties—including imprisonment—for revealing the identity of executioners or the name of execution-drug retailers.

Supporters of capital punishment need this information to be hidden for a few reasons. First, and perhaps foremost, killing people for a living is something of an ignominious job that many are eager to encourage but few are willing to take. The guarantee of secrecy helps death-penalty states fill jobs.

But the information also threatens the institution of capital punishment itself, because it tends to be highly discrediting. In 2008, for example, the Missouri Department of Corrections was forced to sever ties with a dyslexic executioner with more than 20 malpractice suits filed against him. He admitted that he had mistakenly given some inmates smaller-than-protocol doses of lethal-injection chemicals. In 2012, according to court documents, an Idaho corrections official exchanged a suitcase containing  $10,000 in cash for a dose of lethal chemicals from a vendor in a Walmart parking lot inTacoma, Washington. Wholly public executions would make discoveries along these lines only more, not less, frequent.

But right-wing provocateurs don’t want executions to be public in the sense of being made available to the citizenry for scrutiny as a matter of civic interest. What I suspect they mean is that they would like executions to be vulgarized: to be popularized and commodified but not necessarily to be significantly revealed in any way. A vulgar execution may be televised or livestreamed or otherwise alchemized into content, but like any content, it need not expose the truth. If public executions were to return, they would be edited for effect, and consumed on phone screens and tablets and laptops; the profiteers would be the usual networks and streaming platforms. Anything more comprehensively public would compromise the institution of capital punishment, and its supporters know that.

Without a civic purpose, there’s no strong argument for expanding the American state’s catalog of content to include human slaughter. To claim this new frontier would be to join the ranks of the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations that routinely publicize executions for propagandistic reasons. And it would be to surrender to a fascistic cheapening of human life that is plenty emergent in American society as it is, and needs no further prompting from this kind of mass-market barbarism. For now, these proposals are just talk; with good fortune and an ounce of political wisdom, they’ll remain so.