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After the second indictment of Donald Trump, some extremists in the Republican Party have made barely veiled threats of violence against their fellow citizens. People who believe in the American idea should respond with faith in the American constitutional order and open disdain for people in public life who are both dangerous and ridiculous.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

A star reporter’s break with reality The Vision Pro is the perfect gadget for the apocalypse. Now political polarization comes for marriage prospects. The corrosive legacy of Silvio Berlusconi

Vigilance and Scorn

I made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias.

I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man, a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology.

It’s less funny if you have to explain it, but the idea of Kari Lake going from television anchor to cult leader after a pandemic seemed pretty on the nose, and her whole Grand Guignol act is so close to Zerbe’s melodramatic thundering that I couldn’t resist.

But maybe the joke isn’t that funny. Lake may be inane, but insofar as any of her followers believe that she’s issuing a call to action, she is also dangerous. She’s not alone; after news of Trump’s indictment broke, two of the most disgraceful members of Congress, Andy Biggs and Clay Higgins, essentially called for open conflict with their fellow citizens. “We have now reached a war phase,” Biggs tweeted on Friday. “Eye for an eye,” he added, going full Hammurabi.

Higgins, meanwhile, issued a tweet of paramilitary babble:

President Trump said he has “been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.”

This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this.

Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.

As Jeff Sharlet wrote in The Atlantic this weekend, Higgins is trying to sound like a militia commander, issuing orders to his troops on behalf of “rPOTUS,” or the “real president of the United States.”

My first reaction to both of those tweets was basically: Whatever, Sgt. Rock. But perhaps that’s not enough. Trump and his cult followers, especially those in public life, have made threats of violence a routine part of the American political environment. (I have received many such threats over the years that I’ve been writing about Trump.) Notice, for example, how Trump has gone out of his way to name Special Counsel Jack Smith’s wife: Trump knows that Smith is a tough prosecutor who has dealt with some hard characters and is unlikely to fear a weak man like Donald Trump, so he put Smith’s wife in the public eye—and in the crosshairs of his supporters. It’s become commonplace to say this is Mafia-like behavior, but that’s something of an insult to the old-school Mafiosi who generally left family members alone when settling their beefs.

As Sharlet noted, Trump’s most violent supporters are not nearly the majority they think they are, so there’s no point in fear-driven hysteria. Nevertheless, such people can be dangerous not only to their fellow citizens but to the constitutional order itself, by inducing anxiety about democracy among ordinary citizens and potential office seekers, as well as a reluctance to speak out and participate in our system of government. (Also, it takes startlingly few individuals who are willing to commit acts of violence to do real damage.)

So maybe what we need is a solid balance of vigilance and scorn. National politicians gibbering their own down-home versions of “Hail Hydra” should be an ongoing scandal: Such behavior is un-American, and every supporter of American democracy should respond with the self-assured contempt that free people must bestow on the aspiring authoritarians among us.

I know that some readers will object, saying that spotlighting such behavior in the media spreads its reach, but I disagree: The nature of a hyperconnected, internet-driven society means that the kind of people who admire someone like Clay Higgins already know where to find him. Higgins knows this too, which is why he sent his message on Twitter—or “in the clear,” as intelligence folks would say. He wasn’t sending instructions to putative comrades waiting for a sign; rather, he was apparently hoping that ordinary Americans would see all this spy-speak applesauce and become fearful that hidden armies are waiting to avenge the arrest of Donald Trump.

In the media, every elected Republican should be asked every day about these threats, especially those from members of Congress, not because such questions will induce a sudden fit of conscience in Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell but because after the violence of January 6, 2021, the voters have a right to know if a national political party is going to stand behind members talking about “war” and pretending to issue marching orders to seditionists. (CNN’s Dana Bash tried to get an answer from Representative Jim Jordan on Sunday. It went as you’d expect, but at least she asked.)

Finally, there’s nothing wrong with some dismissive scorn among sensible voters. These people are not 10 feet tall. They are, in fact, small and ridiculous. (This is why I couldn’t help but laugh when Lake hissed about the NRA; the hooded face of Matthias just popped into my head unbidden.) As I wrote more than a year ago, naming lunatics and shaming poltroons is essential to a healthy democracy. But the prodemocracy movement must fight with the confidence and maturity of adults:

Ditch all the coy, immature, and too-precious language about former President Donald Trump and the Republicans. No more GQP, no more Qevin McCarthy, no more Rethuglicans and Repuglicans. No more Drumpf. No more Orange Menace … Be the adult alternative to the bedlam around you.

Juvenile nicknames too easily blur the distinction between prodemocracy voters and the people they’re trying to defeat. If you’ve ever had to endure friends or family who parrot Fox-popular terms like Demonrats and Killary and other such nonsense, think for a moment how they instantly communicated to you that you never had to take them seriously again.

I know it’s hard to find the right balance between vigilance and alarm, between scorn and flippancy; I’m not always sure how to do it myself. It’s a line all of us find difficult to walk, because we’ve never had an American political scene so thoroughly infested with kooks, conspiracists, and would-be traitors. But remember: They are a minority, and they know it, and many of their leaders are likely more fearful—of irrelevance, of change, of failure—than anyone else. Take their threats seriously, but with the faith that American democracy was here before them and will be here after them.

Related:

The congressman telling Trump supporters to “buckle up” The new anarchy

Today’s News

The former Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, known for his polarizing politics and his role in multiple scandals, has died at the age of 86. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has signed a disaster-emergency declaration following the collapse, yesterday, of a section of I-95 in Philadelphia, which will potentially disrupt traffic in the area for months. Ukraine says that its military has reclaimed seven villages in the Zaporizhzhia province and the eastern Donetsk region in its first gains since it began its counteroffensive.

Famous People

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn manifest a successful growing season for Brooklyn’s crops with a garden party.

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Evening Read

Photo illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

What Reparations Actually Bought

By Morgan Ome

In 1990, the U.S. government began mailing out envelopes, each containing a presidential letter of apology and a $20,000 check from the Treasury, to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who, during World War II, were robbed of their homes, jobs, and rights, and incarcerated in camps. This effort, which took a decade to complete, remains a rare attempt to make reparations to a group of Americans harmed by force of law. We know how some recipients used their payment: The actor George Takei donated his redress check to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. A former incarceree named Mae Kanazawa Hara told an interviewer in 2004 that she bought an organ for her church in Madison, Wisconsin. Nikki Nojima Louis, a playwright, told me earlier this year that she used the money to pay for living expenses while pursuing her doctorate in creative writing at Florida State University. She was 65 when she decided to go back to school, and the money enabled her to move across the country from her Seattle home.

But many stories could be lost to history. My family received reparations. My grandfather, Melvin, was 6 when he was imprisoned in Tule Lake, California. As long as I’ve known about the redress effort, I’ve wondered how he felt about getting a check in the mail decades after the war.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I couldn’t mention The Omega Man without recommending it to you. It’s … not great, but it was a fun addition to Heston’s run of sci-fi pictures that included Planet of the Apes and its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (a movie that doesn’t get enough love as a great sequel, in my view), as well as Soylent Green. Filmed in 1970, The Omega Man is a strange time capsule from its era. It was set in the near future of 1977, two years after a Sino-Soviet war (which nearly happened a few years before the movie was released) sparked the use of biological weapons and wiped out most of the planet. Heston’s romance with a Black female lead—Rosalind Cash, in her first major movie role—was pretty daring for its time. The Omega Man was actually the second movie based on Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 novel, I Am Legend; the first was The Last Man on Earth in 1964, starring Vincent Price. (Frankly, both of those are better than the messy Will Smith remake released in 2007.)

Critics did not love The Omega Man, but then, critics didn’t love much about cheesy early-1970s science fiction. It’s a movie best seen at a drive-in, but because those are now mostly gone, you could do worse on a rainy afternoon than stream this one and watch Heston passing his days in a deserted Los Angeles watching the documentary Woodstock over and over (no, really) before doing battle with a bunch of technology-hating ghouls.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

In the past six years, California has logged three of its five deadliest fires on record, and eight of its 10 biggest. More than 100 people have died, tens of thousands have been displaced, and millions more have been subjected to smoky air, the health consequences of which we don’t fully understand.

We know that climate change supercharges these fires thanks to the drier environments it creates, but by how much is tricky to say. Fire science is a complicated thing: A blaze might arise from a lightning strike, a hot car on tall summer grass, snapped power lines. But a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences delivers a fuller sense of the relationship between human-caused warming and California’s wildfires. It finds that climate change is responsible for almost all of the increase in scorched acreage during the state’s summer fires over the past 50 years. And its authors predict that the increase in burned area will only continue in the decades to come. The arrival of this study is a timely reminder just days after East Coasters endured a toxic haze that originated in Canada: Wildfire is an international problem, and it’s likely to get worse as time goes on.  

Using data from 1971 to 2021, the team behind the paper built a model to understand the relationship between wildfire and climate. The researchers then repeatedly simulated worlds with and without climate change. This allowed them to isolate the impact of human-caused climate change versus normal, naturally occuring hot years, and to look at how various factors played a role. They found that human-caused warming was responsible for nearly all of the additional area burned.  

[Read: Wildfire masking is just different]

A similar approach was taken in a previous modeling paper by one of the authors of this study. It found that factors attributed to human-caused climate change nearly doubled the amount of forest burned in the American West from 1984 to 2015, relative to what otherwise would have been expected. (The increase amounted to an additional 4.2 million hectares—approximately the combined size of Massachusetts and Connecticut.) Another paper found anthropogenic climate change to be responsible for half of the increase in fire weather in France’s Mediterranean region.

This particular paper adds more evidence to the pile. It’s what’s called a climate-attribution study, a paper that tries to tease out the impact of climate change on shifts in the environment and specific weather events, whether wildfire or hurricanes or sea levels. Experts told me that this style of work can help us better plan for the future by giving us a more precise understanding of different contributing factors. “Without careful analyses like this, we would not be able to resolve arguments about the relative roles of climatic and non-climatic factors in driving changes in wildfire,” Nathan Gillett, a climate-attribution scientist who works for Environment and Climate Change Canada, told me over email.  

Troublingly, researchers predict that the number of burned acres from summer fires in California will continue to grow in the coming years, even though so much has already burned.

For now, though, much of the state is in a climate lull. Acres burned so far this year are far below average, in part thanks to all the rain this past winter. Canada, on the other hand, is having a downright hellish season. This year is already the country’s third-worst in at least a decade, and it’s still early. “What’s really interesting to me is how extensive the burning is and how early it is this year,” Piyush Jain, an agricultural, life, and environmental sciences professor at the University of Alberta, told me. “It’s in May and June, which are not the warmest parts of the summer, even.”

Jain also noted that several regions are on fire at once, rather than most of the wildfires being focused in the west, as is typically the case. Canada moved to Level 5—the most severe rating—on its fire-preparedness scale on May 11. That’s the earliest it has done so in history.

Much of what’s burning in Canada right now is called boreal forest—very cold northern forests. These forests burn differently than the ones in the American West, though forest management and human activity also play a role. Once the fires have ended, scientists will likely get to work trying to figure out which factors contributed to them. Until studies like the one released today come out, we won’t be able to say precisely how much climate change contributed. But whatever the impact on any individual event, climate change is loading the dice for future fire seasons.

Perhaps my brain is poisoned from a decade-plus of staring at cascading social feeds of depressing news, but the first thing I noticed about Apple’s demo video for its upcoming Vision Pro headset was the haze-colored light. The promotional clip features well-dressed men and women—mostly alone in their spartanly furnished homes—bathing their eyes in lush content from the $3,500 aluminum-alloy ski goggles. Despite the bells and whistles, I fixated on the glow emanating from the windows in Apple’s painstakingly constructed demo environments: I’ve come to recognize and resent it as the golden hour of a sky tinged by wildfire smoke.

As millions more know after last week, it’s impossible to forget the feeling of being enveloped by low-hanging smog. I moved out West from New York six years ago: Since then, smoke seasons have exacted a physical and psychological toll. Weather patterns grind to a halt, and time seems to stand still in the acrid haze. It doesn’t just sting your eyes and scratch your throat: It forces you, during summer’s longest, most cherished days, to retreat indoors and away from the outside world.

I know this isn’t what the meticulous design geniuses at Apple were going for when they debuted the footage last Monday. The demo was clearly lit to evoke the intimacy and warmth of a late evening’s light as it slants into the double-paned bay windows of an idealized California bungalow—not the sepia-toned haze of a 400 air-quality index. I reminded myself to chill out, stop being such a doomer, and move on. But about 18 hours later, I woke up to images of the East Coast with that familiar climate-apocalypse Instagram filter. My mind wandered back to the Vision Pro, an advanced marvel of immersive technology with the primary purpose of shielding our eyes. An excellent device for an imperiled planet.

[Read: Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse]

Last week was, in other words, an especially weird one to unveil a future in which people with enough disposable income can retreat from the physical world into the gated-face community of a 360-degree iPhone screen. It’s easy to reflexively overanalyze the peculiar aesthetic of Apple’s presentation or the dystopia-adjacent features of the Vision Pro headset, which include an outward projection of your eyes so that people in your vicinity know when you’re gazing at them and not playing seven-dimensional Angry Birds. And it may be uncharitable to connect a marketing video to climate-disaster avoidance. Still, I struggled to watch the world’s biggest technology company lay out its vision for the future of computing and not find it cynical, even a bit apocalyptic.

A screenshot from Apple’s Vision Pro marketing video

There is a moment in Apple’s demo where we see an exhausted-looking woman on a crowded airplane. A baby is wailing in the background. She adjusts the Vision Pro: The chaos of the plane fades to the background as she becomes one with her premium content. This full immersion has an obvious appeal, but it also represents “a total concession to the screens,” as New York’s John Herrman put it. I see the Vision Pro as a play for the last available acreage of pixel real estate: Your peripheral vision.

This is a decent strategy for a corporate juggernaut worth nearly $2.9 trillion. There’s a final-frontier vibe to it all—total sensory colonization. But it’s also a rather depressing turn away from Apple’s previous vision of its products. Historically, the company has marketed its transformative products as tools that help users navigate the world. In sleek promotional videos, iPhones and Apple Watches aren’t just intermediary screens: They propel people through life and enrich it at every turn. Maps, Siri search, calendar apps, and other features support the idealized, highly productive “Apple Man” as he lives efficiently and presently in his daily life. The Vision Pro’s proposition is different. It beckons its user to turn further inward. It is not a tool meant to help navigate the physical world: It is a way to tune it out.

Evaluating a new technology is difficult without also considering the world that it’s dropped into. In the case of the Vision Pro, we’re talking, in part, about a world of inescapable climate emergencies that, as we saw last week, large parts of the country are unprepared for. In recent years, even the optimists in Cupertino have appeared to be grappling with this broader context, introducing Apple features such as crash detection, satellite emergency calling, extreme weather monitoring, and, recently, mental-health insights. These are features for staying safe and alive in a hostile world.

Perhaps it is this tacit recognition that makes the company’s pivot to inward-facing technology feel particularly cynical. How else should one feel when they hear a tech executive utter the phrase “Your entire world is a canvas for apps?” What I do know is that transformative technologies immediately spark our imaginations and elicit strong emotions—maybe an immediate understanding that something new is possible. Here, for me, the Vision Pro succeeds. When I look at it I feel a strong and sudden pull in the wrong direction—a concession to screens at a moment when so many signs suggest challenging or reevaluating our relationships to them. When I look to the future, I feel the anxiety and uncertainty of a series of challenges that necessitates an ability to confront problems head on. The Vision Pro may be merely an expensive gadget and a gimmick, but it represents a rationale that feels almost comically ill-suited to our moment: an invitation to narrow our collective aperture at a moment that asks us to bear witness and that demands our clear, unblinking gaze.

Things did not go smoothly when, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in spring 2020, Congress turned to the unemployment system to help people who found themselves out of work. The under-resourced state agencies that carry out the day-to-day administration of the unemployment system would now have to get tens of billions of dollars into the pockets of the newly unemployed—which, by and large, they did. But they also had to avoid making payments to grifters who didn’t qualify. That proved more difficult.

Consider Michigan, the state where I live. In pre-COVID times, Michigan’s unemployment agency would wait at least 10 days before paying a claim to allow the agency to verify an applicant’s work history. During the pandemic, with claims skyrocketing, Michigan officials came under intense bipartisan pressure to “get money out the door faster.” As part of that effort, the agency decided the 10-day hold wasn’t strictly essential. Even without it, an automated system called Fraud Manager would still review every claim and flag suspicious ones.

That was the plan, at least. But, as is typical with technical matters, the agency had contracted out responsibility for running Fraud Manager. And the contractor, unbeknownst to the agency, had set Fraud Manager to run only in the evenings. That approach worked fine when the 10-day hold was in place, because Fraud Manager would inevitably run before any claim was paid. When the 10-day hold was eliminated, however, the agency started to pay claims the same day they were received—before Fraud Manager could review them.

[Read: The time tax]

It took the state unemployment agency more than two months to notice the problem, according to a subsequent audit by Deloitte. In the meantime, the agency paid out an estimated $1.5 billion—that’s billion with a b—in claims that should have been flagged for possible fraud.

What’s wild about this story isn’t the absurdity of the mistake or its outsize financial consequences. What’s wild is that it’s completely typical. Every state unemployment agency struggled with fraud claims. Notoriously, a rapper known as Nuke Bizzle bragged about scamming California for more than $1.2 million. (He is now serving a six-year prison sentence.) The inspector general at the U.S. Labor Department estimates that as much as $163 billion in pandemic-related unemployment benefits shouldn’t have been paid.

And the issue isn’t just unemployment insurance. As Jennifer Pahlka explains in her indispensable new book, Recoding America, similar tech problems plague government across nearly every program and at all levels—federal, state, and local alike. Addressing those tech problems would not only help us avoid billion-dollar mistakes in the future; it is also crucial, Pahlka argues, to the broader project—one that is starting to catch the attention of both pundits and policy makers—of improving the government’s capacity to do what we have collectively asked of it.

Pahlka is a former deputy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the founder of Code for America, a nonprofit that aims to help government agencies with their tech issues. She excels at describing in cogent, accessible prose why government is so bad at tech.

That sounds like it should be easy. It’s not. You need someone with technical expertise and an insider’s understanding of how a complex system operates at the line level. But you also need someone who can understand the policy and political forces that have shaped the system—and can see how the lessons from one program might generalize to other programs.

Pahlka has all that, and what makes her account so forceful—and what will make it ring true for anyone who has worked in government—is that it’s not a story about bumbling civil servants or venal politicians. It’s not even that the government can’t afford to hire people with the needed tech skills. Instead, it’s about the structures and incentives that make it more attractive for agencies to check bureaucratic boxes than to design usable tech.

When you apply for food stamps, for example, you have to demonstrate that you’re eligible. But some of the applications have swollen to absurd lengths—Michigan’s used to be 40 pages long—and ask detailed, confusing, ridiculous questions about applicants’ financial situation. A lot of people give up before they finish, even if they’re eligible. In the old days, that was a literal paperwork problem. Now that applications have moved online, it’s a problem with code—and the user experience is not top of mind for many government coders.

At the tail end of her time in the White House, Pahlka was trying to convince a career bureaucrat over at the Office of Management and Budget that simplicity had to be the watchword when it came to digital services. To drive her argument home, she pointed to some of these food-stamp applications, which among many other things asked if applicants owned any burial plots. “Why on earth,” she asked, “does government want to know about burial plots?”

The bureaucrat was unmoved. Yes, he knew all about the burial plots. He used to work at the agency that oversaw the food-stamp program—and had written the regulations about burial plots. Why would he call for including such an inane question on forms that were already far too long? “Congress said to assess their assets,” he said. “A burial plot is an asset.” He was going to follow his instructions to the letter, the consequences be damned.

[Deborah Pearlstein: How the government lost its mind]

For Pahlka, this check-box mentality is at the root of much government dysfunction. We have a penchant in the United States for holding civil servants accountable not for the quality of the public services they provide, but for strict compliance with programmatic requirements. When the inspector general comes knocking, that’s what’s evaluated. So, too, with courts. It’s not their job to take a holistic view of whether the agency is doing its job effectively. They ask whether the agency has jumped through the prescribed procedural hoops.

In prior work, I’ve railed about the way this “procedure fetish” in American law has hampered effective governance. Pahlka brings to vivid life how a cover-your-butt culture that prizes legalistic compliance above all else is especially pernicious for government tech. Policy makers layer requirement upon requirement without considering whether the benefits of complexity outweigh the costs. Even when policy makers give agencies some flexibility, the bureaucracy often transforms suggestions into rigid requirements, which are then slavishly followed. The public interest gets forgotten along the way.

In other words, Pahlka’s book isn’t just about tech. It’s about the American administrative state, and it’s a call for paring back the rigid rules that make it so hard to govern, and for rebuilding government’s ability to do its job effectively. In this, Pahlka joins ranks with the likes of Brink Lindsey, Misha Chellam, Alec Stapp, and Ezra Klein, who are all beating a similar drum about the need to improve the government’s ability to meet our collective aspirations.

This nascent “state capacity” movement—also known as supply-side or abundance progressivism—has arisen in response to the urgency of the housing crisis, the massive land-use changes needed to pivot to renewable energy, and the exorbitant costs of new public transit. Pahlka would add to that list the deplorable performance of government tech. We need a government that can build, whether it’s wind farms or websites.

How we get there from here is a hard question. For now, the movement’s origin in housing, renewables, and transit means that it’s associated with the political left. Its emphasis on construction and deregulation, however, means it holds some bipartisan appeal. Maybe there’s room for progress out of the limelight. For her part, Pahlka doesn’t see government capacity as an especially partisan issue. Big problems with government tech, she argues, typically arise because of implementation failures that both Republicans and Democrats would like to avoid.

That’s a departure from the conventional account on the left. Return to the story of unemployment insurance that I opened with. Part of the reason the tech worked so badly is because of decades of underinvestment in a safety-net program that Republicans dislike. In other words, the problem was not just implementation. It was also a kind of sabotage. As Jerusalem Demsas here at The Atlantic has written, “State capacity is downstream of ideological commitments: When we have political consensus, we have state capacity, and when we don’t, we don’t.”

Demsas is certainly onto something. Better tech is harder for programs that face political headwinds. Pahlka doesn’t disagree, but she suggests that we can sidestep some of the deeper challenges—for now—by focusing on the relatively low-salience domain of policy implementation. Food-stamp applications didn’t ask those in need about burial plots to harass them or to surreptitiously shrink the food-stamps program. It really was just bad implementation.

Which is another way of saying that there are some low-hanging fruits to pluck, if we care enough to try. Implementation, Pahlka writes, “can’t be beneath the attention of our most powerful institutions, and it can’t be beneath our attention as a public.” When Americans no longer see government websites as laughingstocks—when applications ask sensible questions, when submitting your taxes online is easy, when signing up for health insurance doesn’t require a Ph.D.—maybe the politics will follow. You’ve got to start somewhere.