Daniel Hegarty, 15, was shot twice in the head during an Army operation in Londonderry in 1972.

Cam Cameron planned to spend 60 days living on the uninhabitable rock in the Outer Hebrides.

Rival forces have a stronger presence in the capital, despite the fact that the army is much bigger.

Photographs by Olivia Crumm

On the day she heard God tell her to buy a mountain, Tami Barthen already sensed that her life was on a spiritual upswing. She’d recently divorced and remarried, an improvement she attributed to following the voice of God. She’d quit traditional church and enrolled in a course on supernatural ministry, learning to attune herself to what she believed to be heavenly signs. During one worship service, a pastor had even singled her out in a prophecy: “There’s a double door opening for you,” he’d said.

But it was not until two years later, in June of 2017, that she began to understand what that could mean, a moment that came as she and her husband were trying to buy land for a retirement cabin in northwestern Pennsylvania. They’d just learned that the small piece they wanted was part of a far larger parcel—a former camp for delinquent boys comprising 350 acres of forest rising 2,000 feet high and sloping all the way down to the Allegheny River. As Tami was complaining to herself that she didn’t want a whole mountain, a thought came into her head that seemed so alien, so grandiose, that she was certain it was the voice of God.

“Yes, but I do,” the voice said.

She decided this must be the beginning of her divine assignment. She would use $950,000 of her divorce settlement to buy the mountain. She would advance the Kingdom of God in the most literal of ways, and await further instructions.

What happened next is the story of one woman’s journey into the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country—a movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House, that fueled his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and that is becoming a radicalizing force within the more familiar Christian right.

It is called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a sprawling ecosystem of leaders who call themselves apostles and prophets and claim to receive direct revelations from God. Its congregations can be found in cities and towns across the country—on landscaped campuses, in old supermarkets, in the shells of defunct churches. It has global prayer networks, streaming broadcasts, books, podcasts, apps, social-media influencers, and revival tours. It has academies, including a new one where a fatigues-wearing prophet says he is training “warriors” for spiritual battle against demonic forces, which he and other leaders are identifying as people and groups associated with liberal politics. Its most prominent leaders include a Korean American apostle who spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the January 6 insurrection and a Honduran American apostle whose megachurch was key to Trump’s evangelical outreach. Besides Trump, its political allies include school-board members, county commissioners, judges, and state legislators such as Doug Mastriano, a retired Army intelligence officer whose outsider campaign for Pennsylvania governor last year was widely ridiculed, even as he won the GOP nomination and 42 percent of the general-election vote.

The movement is seeking political power as a means to achieving a more transcendent goal: to bring under biblical authority every sphere of life, including government, schools, and culture itself, establishing not just a Christian nation, as the traditional religious right has advocated, but an actual, earthly Kingdom of God.

For that purpose, the movement has followers, each expected to play their part in a rolling end-times drama, and that is what Tami Barthen, who is 62, was trying to do.

I called her recently and explained that I was in Pennsylvania trying to understand where the movement was headed, and had found her on Facebook, where she follows several prominent prophets. She said that she was willing to meet but that I should first do three things.

One was to go see a film called Jesus Revolution, and this I did that afternoon, the 2 o’clock showing at an AMC Classic outside Harrisburg. As the lights dimmed, scenes of early-1970s California washed over the screen. What followed was the story of a real-life pastor named Chuck Smith, who opened his church to bands of drugged-out hippies who became known as “Jesus freaks,” a transformation depicted in scenes of love-dazed catharsis and sunrise ocean baptisms—young people rejecting relativism for the warm certainty of God’s one truth. The film, a full-on Hollywood production starring Kelsey Grammer and produced by an outfit called Kingdom Story Company, has earned $52 million so far.

The second thing was to visit a church in Harrisburg called Life Center, whose senior pastor had been among the original California Jesus freaks and now held the title of apostle. I arrived at a glass-and-cement former office building for the midweek evening service. In the lobby, screens showed videos of blue ocean waves. The books on display included Now Is the Time: Seven Converging Signs of the Emerging Great Awakening and It’s Our Turn Now: God’s Plan to Restore America Is Within Our Reach. The apostle was out of town, so another pastor showed visitors into the sanctuary, a 1,600-seat auditorium with no images of Jesus, no stained-glass parables, no worn hymnals, no reminders of the 2,000 years of Christian history before this. Instead, six huge screens glowed with images of spinning stars. On a stage, a praise band was blasting emotional, surging songs vaguely reminiscent of Coldplay. Rows of spotlights were shining on people who stood, hands raised, and sang mantra-like choruses about surrender, then listened to a sermon about submitting to God.

The last thing was to attend a touring event called KEY Fellowship, which stands for “Kingdom Empowering You.” So I headed to a small church in State College, Pennsylvania, the 44th city on the tour so far. On a Saturday morning, 100 or so attendees were arriving, a crowd that was mostly white but also Black, Latino, and Korean-American. They all filed through a door marked by a white flag stamped with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven—a Revolutionary War–era banner of the sort that rioters carried into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. “We thank you, Father, that you have chosen us,” said the woman who’d organized the event, explaining that its purpose was to “release spiritual authority” over the region. And then the releasing began. The band. The singing. The shouting: “Lord, have your dominion.” Several men stood and blew shofars, hollowed-out ram’s horns used in traditional Jewish worship, and meant in this context to warn demons and herald the gathering of a modern-day army of God. Out came maracas and tambourines. Out came long wooden staffs that people pounded against the floor. Others waved American flags, Israeli flags, more pine-tree flags. The point, I learned, was to call the Holy Spirit through the prefabricated walls of the church and into the sanctuary, all of this leading up to the moment when a local pastor, a member of the Ojibwe-Cree Nation, came to the stage.

She was there to declare the restoration of the nation’s covenant with Native American people, which, in the movement’s intricate end-times narrative, is a precondition for the establishment of the Kingdom. A sacred drum pounded. “Father, we pray for a holy experiment!” someone shouted. A white man cried. Then people began marching in circles around the room—flags, tambourines, maracas, staffs—as a final song played. “Possess the land,” the chorus went. “We will take it by force. Take it, take it.”

Once I had seen all of this, Tami said I could come.

The view from Tami’s house (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

The road to the mountain runs through the small town of Franklin, an hour or so north of Pittsburgh, then winds uphill and through the woods before branching off to a narrower road marked private. At the entrance is a Mastriano sign, left over from when Tami served as his Venango County coordinator.

“We don’t really do politics,” she was saying, riding onto the property with her husband, Kevin. “But then we heard God say, ‘You need to do this.’”

She had raised and homeschooled three children, been the dutiful wife of a wealthy Pennsylvania entrepreneur who traded metals, but as I came to learn over the next few weeks, so many new things had been happening since she started following the voice of God.

“All this is ours,” Kevin said, passing old cabins, a run-down trailer, and other buildings from the property’s former life.

“And right up here is where it all happened,” Tami said.

They parked and went over to a wooden footbridge, part of the only public path through the property. This is where they’d been walking when Tami had first seen the spot for their retirement cabin, at which point she had looked down and seen three blue interlocking circles stenciled onto the bridge, some sort of graffiti that she took as a sign.

“I said, ‘Kevin, we’re at the point of convergence,’” she recalled.

Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971.

That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in Bolivia, where he had noticed churches growing explosively and where he claimed to have seen signs and wonders, healings and prophecies. A professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Wagner began studying what he believed were similar forces at work in the underground house-church movement in China and certain independent Christian churches in African countries, as well as Pentecostal churches in the U.S. He eventually concluded that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way across the globe—a supernatural force that would erase denominational differences, banish demonic spirits, and restore the offices of the first-century Christian Church as part of a great end-times battle. By the mid-1990s, Wagner and others were describing all of this as the New Apostolic Reformation, detailing the particulars in dozens of books.

The reformation meant recognizing new apostles—men and women believed to have God-given spiritual authority as leaders. It meant modern-day prophets—people believed to be chosen by God to receive revelations through dreams and visions and signs. It meant spiritual warfare, which was not intended to be taken metaphorically, but actually demanded the battling of demons that could possess people and territories and were so real that they could be diagrammed on maps. It meant portals: specific openings where demonic or angelic forces could enter—eyes or mouths, for instance, or geographic locations such as Azusa Street in Los Angeles, scene of a seminal early-20th-century revival. It meant the rise of the Manifest Sons of God, an elite force that would be endowed with supernatural powers for spiritual and perhaps actual warfare. Most significant, the new reformation required not just personal salvation but action to transform all of society. Christians were to reclaim the fallen Earth from Satan and advance the Kingdom of God, and this idea was not metaphorical either. The Kingdom would be a social pyramid, at the top of which was a government of godly leaders dispensing biblical laws and at the bottom of which was the full manifestation of heaven on Earth, a glorious world with no poverty, no racism, no crime, no abortion, no homosexuality, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one God: theirs.

Wagner helped convene the International Coalition of Apostles in 2000. It became the model for what remains the loosely networked structure of a movement that is both decentralized and inherently authoritarian. Apostles would lead their own ministries and churches, sometimes with the counsel of other influential apostles. The movement grew rapidly, creating its own superstars whose power came from the following they cultivated, and who were constantly adding prophecies that sought to explain how current events fit into the great end-times narrative.

Broad-brush terms like Christian nationalism and white evangelicals have tended to obscure these intricacies. NAR’s growth has also gone largely undetected in conventional surveys of American religiosity, with their old categories such as Southern Baptist and Presbyterian. It is most clearly reflected in the rise of nondenominational churches—the only category of churches that is growing in this country—though not fully, because many followers do not attend church. A recent survey by Paul Djupe of Denison University hints at its scope, finding that roughly one-quarter of Americans believe in modern-day prophets and prophecies. Those who have tracked and studied the movement for years often say it is “hiding in plain sight.”

Yet Trump-allied political strategists, such as Roger Stone, understand the power of a movement that offers the GOP a largely untapped well of new voters who are not just old and white and Bible-clinging, but also young and brown, urban and suburban, and primed to hear what the prophets have to say. Recently, Stone told one interviewer that he saw a “demonic portal” swirling over Joe Biden’s White House. “There’s a live cam where you can actually see, in real time,” Stone said. “It’s like a smudge in the sky, almost looks like a cloud that doesn’t move.”

Like Many in the movement, Tami doesn’t use the phrase New Apostolic Reformation, but she first encountered its kind of Christianity in 2015, when a friend gave her a book called Song of Songs: Divine Romance. It is part of a series called The Passion Translation, described by its author, a pastor named Brian Simmons, as a “heart-level” version of the Bible.

At the time, Tami had just extracted herself from what she described as a long and difficult marriage. She had left the traditional evangelical church she’d attended for years, where she said the pastor tended to side with her wealthy husband. She was estranged from some of her family. She was alone and at a vulnerable point in her life when she opened Simmons’s book and began reading passages such as “I am overshadowed by his love, growing in the valley,” and “Let him smother me with kisses—his Spirit-kiss divine,” and “So kind are your caresses, I drink them in like the sweetest wine!”

She had never felt so loved in her life, and she wanted more. The friend who’d given her the book attended Life Center, and Tami signed up for a conference at the church called “Open the Heavens,” where she learned more about prophecy, spiritual warfare, and the idea that she herself had a role to play in advancing the Kingdom of God, if she could discern what it was.

Among the speakers she heard was a rising apostle named Lance Wallnau, a former corporate marketer whose social-media following had grown to 2 million people after he prophesied that Donald Trump was anointed by God. Tami had voted for Trump in 2016, but her interest in Wallnau at this point had more to do with what he’d branded as “the Seven Mountains mandate,” or 7M, the imperative for Christians to build the Kingdom by taking dominion over the seven spheres of society—government, business, education, media, entertainment, family, and religion. Wallnau gives 7M courses and holds 7M conferences, and that is how Tami learned about convergence: the notion that there are moments in life when events come together to reveal one’s Kingdom mission, as Wallnau writes, “like a vortex that sucks into itself uncanny coincidences and ‘divine appointments.’”

That was exactly how Tami felt as she considered buying the mountain. Divine appointments everywhere. At Life Center, a man told her that he’d had a vision of God “pouring onto the mountain” everything she would need. Someone else shared a vision of Tami as a princess riding a horse, which she found ridiculous but also, as a woman who’d always felt under the thumb of some man, compelling. And then she herself heard the voice of God telling her what to do.

“See that?” she said now, back in the car, passing a rusted oil tank where someone had spray-painted what appeared to be a yellow Z.

“I’ll explain that later,” Tami said.

An oil tank on Tami’s property (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

She and Kevin drove to the former camp director’s home where they now lived. Inside was a piano with a shofar and two swords on top, which Tami had bought to remind herself that she is a triumphant warrior for Christ. On a wall hung a portrait she had commissioned, which depicted her clad in medieval armor. An Appeal to Heaven flag was draped over a chair. She opened a sliding-glass door to a deck overlooking the Allegheny River, and explained what happened after she and Kevin had closed on the mountain: how they began to envision building a “Seven Mountains training center.” How that led to someone from Life Center introducing her to an apostle from the nearby city of New Castle, who visited the mountain and wrote Tami a prophecy—that what was happening was “bigger than whatever you could dream or imagine.” How he introduced her to a group of five men who claimed to be connected to anonymous Kingdom funders, and how, not long after that, the group came to the mountain, where Tami, full of nerves, presented a plan that included a lodge, a conference center, an outdoor stage, and some yurts along the river.

“The main thing they asked is whether we were Kingdom,” Tami said.

She told them that she and Kevin were Kingdom all the way; they told her that God wanted her to double the size of the project, and then told her to “add everything you can possibly dream of,” Tami recalled.

So they did—adding plans for an outdoor pistol range, an indoor pistol range, a tactical pistol range, and a rifle range, along with a paintball course, a zip line, and other recreational facilities. They printed brochures for the Allegheny River Retreat Center, which, Tami said, was now a $120 million project.

As they waited and waited for funding, the 2020 presidential election arrived. Tami again voted for Trump, this time in concert with prophets who said he was an instrument of God. She soon began listening to an influential South Carolina apostle named Dutch Sheets, who had for years advocated an end to Church-state separation and co-authored something called the “Watchman Decree,” a kind of pledge of allegiance that included the phrase “we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth.” Sheets was among a core group of apostles and prophets spreading the narrative that the election had been stolen not just from Trump, but from God. He began promoting daily 15-minute YouTube prayers and decrees, which were like commandments to those in the Kingdom. He branded them “Give Him 15,” or GH15, and at their peak, some videos were getting hundreds of thousands of views.

Tami began reading Sheets’s decrees aloud at sunrise every morning, videotaping herself on the deck overlooking the Allegheny River and posting her videos to Facebook.

“Lord, we will not stop praying for the full exposure of voter fraud in the 2020 elections,” she read on November 12.

“We refuse to take our cue or instructions from the media, political parties, or other individuals,” she read on November 17. “We believe you placed President Trump in office, and we believe you promised two terms. We stand on this.”

She started receiving lots of friend requests and was getting recognized around town. She bought an Appeal to Heaven flag, which Sheets had popularized as a symbol of holy revolution. She kept seeing signs that made her wonder whether the mountain might have a specific purpose in what she was coming to see as a global spiritual battle.

One day the sign was a dove flying across the sky as she read the morning decree, and the dove feathers she found on her doorstep after that. Another day, two women who’d seen her videos showed up at her door with bottles of water from Israel, saying they needed to pour it in “strategic” places along her riverfront that God had revealed to them. Another day, Sheets himself announced that he was holding a prayer rally at the headwaters of the Allegheny River—two hours north of Tami—part of a swing-state prophecy tour as Trump challenged election results.

Tami went. And when Sheets and other apostles and prophets urged followers to convene at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, she felt God telling her to go there, too. So she and Kevin boarded a bus that a friend had chartered to Washington, D.C., where she read the daily decree, the Washington Monument in the background, as Kevin held the Appeal to Heaven flag.

“Let the battle for America’s future be turned today, in Jesus’s name,” she said. From what she described as her vantage point outside the Capitol, the big story of the day was not that a violent insurrection had occurred but rather that a movement of God was under way, another Jesus Revolution. “It was one of the best days of my life,” Tami said.

When she got back to the mountain, she kept recording the daily decrees from her deck, in front of a pink flower pot with an American flag.

“We refuse to allow hope deferred and discouragement to cripple the growth of your people in their true identity—the army you intended them to be,” she read after Joe Biden took office.

She flew to Tampa, Florida, for a stop on the “ReAwaken America” tour. She drove to another one a few hours away from her home, then watched others online, events featuring a roster of prophets alongside the headliner, retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, who was now declaring the nation to be in a state of “spiritual war.” She always came home with a cellphone full of new contacts. She began introducing herself as “Tami Barthen, the one who bought a mountain for God.”

Tami and Kevin in a demonstration of prayer (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic) Left: The flag that Tami hangs on her deck, where she reads prayers from Dutch Sheets at sunrise. Right: Tami shows a visitor the feathers that she found on her doorstep. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Occasionally she said this with a note of sarcasm, because the Kingdom funding had yet to come through, and at times she was not sure where all the signs were ultimately pointing. In those moments, she sought more prophecies.

She messaged a prophet who’d appeared on a Dutch Sheets broadcast, asking him what God might tell him about her project. “This is what I hear the Lord saying,” he wrote back. “God says this came forth from His heart and He has already orchestrated the completion.”

At a Kingdom-building conference in Oregon, she asked Nathan French, a prominent prophet, what God was telling him and recorded the answer on her iPhone: “I feel like that mountain is like Zion, and I feel like God is even saying you can name it Mount Zion … I see the Shekinah coming,” he said, using the Hebrew term for God’s presence, “the shock and awe.”

Tami had rolled her eyes at this grand new prediction, but when she got home, another sign appeared.

“The Z on the oil tank,” she said now, sitting on her porch.

It was spring. She took the Zion prophecy, which she had transcribed and printed on thick paper, and slipped it into a binder, where she archived the most meaningful ones in protective plastic covers. She was trying to figure out what it was all adding up to.

“Why was Dutch Sheets at the headwaters of the Allegheny? Why is there a Z on the oil tank? Why am I meeting all these people? There are all these pieces to the puzzle, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to be yet,” Tami said.

A new piece of the puzzle was that Trump had been indicted in New York on charges of falsifying business records related to payoffs to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Tami had watched coverage on an online show called FlashPoint, which has a cable-news format, except that the news bulletins come from prophets.

“This is not just a battle against us; this is a battle against the purposes of God,” one had said about the indictment, and Tami understood this to be an escalation. A few days later, an apostle named Gary Sorensen called. He was an engineer who had been among the group claiming to represent the Kingdom funders. He was calling to invite Tami on a private spiritual-heritage tour of the Pennsylvania capitol, which was being led by one of the most powerful apostles in the state.

Tami took it as another sign, and she and Kevin drove to Harrisburg.

She was slightly nervous. The apostle was a woman named Abby Abildness, who heads a state prayer network that was part of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, a fixture of the religious right. During the legislative session, she convened weekly prayer meetings with state legislators along with business and religious leaders. She had a ministry called Healing Tree International, which claimed representatives in 115 countries, and focused on what she described as “restoring the God-given destinies of people and nations.” She was just back from Kurdistan, where she had met with a top general in the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military. To Tami, Abildness was like a high-ranking Kingdom diplomat.

“So,” Abildness began. “The tour I do is about William Penn’s vision for what this colony would be. And it starts—if you look up, we have the words he spoke on the rotunda.”

Tami looked up at the gilded words beneath a fresco of ascending angels.

“There may be room there for such a Holy Experiment,” Abildness read. “And my God will make it the seed of a nation.”

“Wow,” Tami said.

They were the kind of words and images found in statehouses all over the country, but which Abildness understood not as historical artifacts but as divine instructions for the here and now.

They headed down a marbled hallway to the governor’s reception room.

“So this is William Penn,” Abildness said, pointing to a panel depicting Penn as a student at Oxford, before he joined the Quaker movement. “He’s sitting in his library and a light comes into the room, and he knows something supernatural is happening.”

They moved on to the Senate chamber.

“Here you are going to see a vision of what society could be if the fullness of what Penn planted came into being—a vision of society where all are recognizing the sovereign God,” Abildness said as they walked inside.

Tami looked around at scenes of kings bowing before Christ, and quotes from the Book of Revelation about mountains.

“You see here, angels are bringing messages of God down to those who would write the laws,” Abildness said.

They moved on to the House chamber.

“This is The Apotheosis,” Abildness said, referring to an epic painting that included a couple of Founding Fathers, and then she pointed to a smaller, adjacent painting, depicting Penn making a peace treaty with the Lenape people.

Tami listened as Abildness explained her interpretation: God had granted Native Americans original spiritual authority over the land; the treaty meant sharing that spiritual authority with Penn; later generations broke the covenant through their genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, and now the covenant needed to be restored in order to fulfill Penn’s original vision for a Holy Experiment. Nothing less than the entire Kingdom of God was riding on Pennsylvania.

Tami listened, thinking of something she’d always wondered about, a sacred Native American site across the river, visible from her deck, known as Indian God Rock. It is a large boulder carved with figures that academic experts believe have religious meaning. As the tour ended, she kept thinking about what it all could mean.

“People I hang with think we’re moving from a church age to a Kingdom age,” Sorensen was saying.

“It’s like, what are all these signs saying?” Tami said.

Left: Tami’s King Solomon sword. Right: A wall in her living room features a painting of her as a spiritual warrior. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Sorensen was involved in various organizations devoted to funding and developing Kingdom projects. There was Reborne Global Trust, and New Kingdom Global, and Abundance Research Institute, among others. He told Tami not to worry about her benefactors coming through. He said $120 million was peanuts to them. He said one funder was an Australian private-wealth manager. He said others were “international benefactors,” as well as  “sovereigns,” people he described as “publicly known royal and ruling families of well-known countries.”

“We are looking into establishing a Kingdom treasury,” he said, elaborating that some of the funders were setting up offshore banking accounts. “Outside the central banking system—so we can’t get cut off if we’re not voting right.”

Everything would be coming together soon, he told her.

Driving back to the mountain, Tami and Kevin listened to ElijahStreams, an online platform that launched after the 2020 election. It hosts daily shows from dozens of prominent and up-and-coming prophets, and claims more than 1 million followers.

There were so many apostles and prophets these days—the old standards like Dutch Sheets, and so many younger ones who had podcasts, apps, shows on Rumble. By now Tami followed at least a dozen of them closely, and what she had noticed was how politically involved they had become since the 2020 election and how in recent months, their visions had been getting darker.

Lance Wallnau, whom Tami thought of as fairly moderate, had spoken on Easter Sunday about hearing prophecies of “sudden deaths,” and he himself predicted that “the disciplinary hand of God” would be coming down.

Now, as she and Kevin were winding through the woods, she was listening to a young prophet from Texas named Andrew Whalen, who was being promoted on popular shows lately. He described himself as “close friends” with Dutch Sheets, and on his website, characterized the moment as a “context of war,” when “a new generation is preparing to cross over into ‘lands of inheritance’—places that Christ has given us authority to conquer.”

“I’m boiling on the inside,” he was saying, describing a dream in which he saw the angelic realm working with “earthly governments and militaries.” He continued, “I just say even today, let Operation Fury commence, God. We say let the fury of God’s wrath break forth against every evil work, against systems of demonic and satanic structure.”

Tami listened. And in the coming weeks, she kept listening as Operation Fury became a page on Whalen’s website where people could sign up to help “overthrow jezebel’s influence from our lives.” She kept listening as Trump was indicted a second time, for mishandling classified documents, and a prophet on FlashPoint described the moment as a “battle between good versus evil.”

She sometimes felt afraid when she imagined what was coming.

“It’s going to get bad. It’s going to get worse,” she said. “It’s spiritual warfare, and it’s going to come into the physical. What it’s going to look like? I don’t know. God said to show up at Jericho, and the walls came down. But there are other stories where David killed many people. All I can say is if you believe in God, you’ve got to trust him. If you’re God-fearing, you’ll be protected.”

The morning after her tour in Harrisburg, Tami went out on her deck and recorded the daily decree.

“We use the sword of our mouths just as you instructed,” she read. “The king’s decree and the decrees of the king are hereby law in this land.”

After that, she went to her office.

On her desk were bills she had to pay. On a table were towers of books she’d read about spiritual warfare, demon mapping, the seven mountains. In a file were all the prophecies she’d tried to follow, all the signs.

She thought about Operation Fury, and what Abby Abildness had said about Pennsylvania, and Indian God Rock, and as she began putting all the signs together, she had a thought that filled her with dread.

“I don’t want this job,” she said. “What if I mess up? Why me?”

She pulled out a 259-page book called The Seed of a Nation, about what William Penn envisioned as a “Holy Experiment” in the colony of Pennsylvania, opening it to the last page she had highlighted and underlined.

“See?” she said. “I only got to page 47.”

She thought that maybe the funding was not coming through because she had missed a sign. Maybe she had not been obedient enough. Maybe she, Tami Barthen, was the one delaying the whole Kingdom, and now instead of listening to the voice of God, she was listening to her own voice saying something back: “I’m sorry.”

She thought for a moment about what would happen if she let it all go, if instead of being a Christian warrior on a mountain essential to bringing about the Kingdom of God, she went back to being Tami, who had wanted the peace of a retirement cabin by the river.

Tami in her driveway (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

“I can’t think of a Plan B,” she said, so she reminded herself of how she had gotten here.

She had been living her life, trying to pull herself out of a dark period, when she felt the love of God save her, and then heard the voice of God tell her to buy a mountain. And who was she to refuse the wishes of God?

So she had bought a mountain, 350 acres redeemed for the Kingdom. Now she would wait for word from the prophets. She reminded herself of a favorite Bible verse.

“He says, ‘Occupy until I come,’” Tami said. “Like the Bible says, ‘Thy kingdom come.’”

On September 16, 1991, Senator Wigberto Tañada gave a soaring speech on the floor of the Philippine senate. The country’s president, Corazon Aquino, was proposing to sign a new military-base treaty with the United States. As the treaty came before the senate, lawmakers had “the awesome task of severing the last remaining shackles of colonialism in our motherland, the U.S. military bases,” Tañada said. “The sight of the last American warplane flying out of our skies, the last American battleship disappearing from our horizon, and the last American soldier being airlifted from our soil should inspire us to greater heights of achievement.”

Twelve senators voted against the treaty, dooming it by a single ballot. Socorro Diokno, an activist who led the Anti-Bases Coalition at the time, told me that she was astonished by the outcome. “This was a fight that was begun by my great-grandfather,” she said, “and I was lucky enough to be part of it and in the thick of it when it finally ended, when we finally won.”

The United States had maintained a military presence in the Philippines since 1898. But by the time of the senate vote, Manila and Washington were squabbling over payments for the bases, whose usefulness was in question as the Cold War waned and President George H. W. Bush sought to deepen relations with China. In the Philippines, a popular uprising had ousted the American-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos just five years earlier, and nationalist sentiment was still high.

“From the American end, it was a withdrawal,” Walden Bellow, an academic and a former congressman in the Philippines, told me. “From the Philippines’ end, it was that we kicked them out.”

Thirty-two years later, there is no talk of reestablishing U.S. bases, but more American troops have returned to Philippine soil. On a scorching stretch of beach along the South China Sea in April, U.S. military reservists from Mississippi hunted target drones out of the air with Stinger missiles and heavy machine guns. Artillery fire pounded a warship floating offshore in a mock attack. Farther north, on a far-flung island just over 100 miles from Taiwan, hundreds of U.S. troops simulated securing control of what would be a key maritime transit point in the case of a conflict with Beijing.

[Read: The price of being principled in the Philippines]

President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of the ousted dictator, has reinvigorated his country’s alliance with the United States as a buttress against actual and anticipated Chinese aggression. Ships from the Chinese coast guard and navy regularly harass Philippine forces and fishermen, and Beijing has asserted expansive claims in the South China Sea. Unfettered by an international tribunal’s 2016 ruling in Manila’s favor, China is placing military installations on several islands it built in the contested waters.

This year, the United States and the Philippines reached an agreement giving U.S. forces access to four bases in the Philippines in addition to the ones they can already use. The joint military exercises in April, an annual tradition, were the largest in history between the two countries. Two months earlier, Marcos had summoned China’s ambassador to complain about maritime harassment by a Chinese naval vessel, then four days later delivered a warning that the Philippines was facing “heightened geopolitical tensions that do not conform to our ideals of peace” and that the Philippines “will not lose an inch of its territory.”

For the moment, at least, the need for a counterweight against China seems to have overridden the vexed history between the Philippines and the United States—one in which the people of the Philippines have held Washington responsible for colonial oppression, aiding a dictator, and the excesses of its troops.

The United States took control of the Philippines in 1898, as a victor’s bounty in the Spanish-American War, and established military bases there starting in the early 1900s. The colony gained independence after World War II but signed an agreement in 1947 that granted the United States a 99-year lease on a range of military and naval facilities. The countries later signed a mutual-defense treaty that cemented their alliance.

Ferdinand Marcos, a staunch anti-communist and skilled lawyer, was elected president in 1965. He entranced crowds with his rhetorical power and governed democratically at first. But within 10 years he had imposed martial law, and his rule descended into human-rights abuses and kleptocracy.

Still, during the Cold War, Washington viewed Marcos as a bulwark against the spread of communism, and the U.S. bases as essential to keeping the threat at bay.

“There was a belief deeply held in the Reagan administration that we had to stick with our friends, and Marcos was a friend,” Stephen Bosworth, who was the American ambassador to Manila in the late 1980s, said in an oral-history project recounting his post in the Philippines.

Marcos’s chief political rival, Benigno Simeon Aquino Jr., was brazenly assassinated in 1983, but even then, Ronald Reagan insisted that the U.S. should offer constructive criticism of the Philippines’ rulers rather than, as one contemporaneous news story paraphrased the president, “throwing them to the wolves and then facing a communist power in the Pacific.” The position became untenable, however, as the country’s economy staggered and opposition coalesced in response to Aquino’s killing. In February 1986, Aquino’s wife, Corazon, won a presidential election, and mass protests that would come to be known as the People Power Revolution foiled Marcos in his desperate attempt to cling to power.

Bosworth had the task of telling Marcos that he had lost U.S. support. “With that,” Bosworth said, “we had removed the sign of heaven from him, the mandate of heaven. He was done.”

[Read: China could soon be the dominant power in Asia]

The Marcos family and its large entourage of cronies, carrying bags laden with stolen wealth, diamonds tucked into their children’s diapers, lifted off from the U.S.-controlled Clark Air Base on February 26, 1986. They went first to Guam and then to Hawaii, where the fiery orator who had ruled the Philippines for 20 years would die in ignominious exile within four years.  

The movement to eject the U.S. military in 1991 linked the presence of American bases to Marcos’s abusive rule. Diokno and her colleagues at the Anti-Bases Coalition held that without American support, Marcos would never have stayed in power as long as he did. Then the U.S. had allowed him safe passage and a haven abroad, rather than forcing him to face justice in the Philippines. This history had a personal dimension for Diokno. The Marcos administration had imprisoned her father, a former justice secretary and a senator, for nearly two years.

The American military presence was objectionable to many in the Philippines on its own terms as well. A sex trade catering to U.S. servicemen, euphemistically referred to as an '”entertainment industry,” flourished around the bases. In Olongapo, the city near U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay, dozens of bars and thousands of women served young American men. The U.S. military helped create a debaucherous playground for sex tourists—“the bargain hunters, freaks, pedophiles, psychopaths, creeps, and crackpots” who were lured “by brochures that promise ‘anything goes at Olongapo,’” a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune wrote in a 1989 dispatch from the town.

Tens of thousands of children fathered by U.S. servicemen were left behind when the men rotated out of the country. AIDS broke out among sex workers. Horrific incidents of underage prostitution regularly caught the attention of the media. Nearby cities were often violent and lawless. The shootings and frequent base break-ins were startling. “Holy shit,” Lee Badman, who served at Clark Air Base in the late 1980s with the U.S. Air Force, told me he remembered thinking when he arrived. “This is a hostile place when it was supposed to be peacetime.”

Still, Badman remembers his posting to the Philippines fondly. Monsoon rains and touts hawking souvenirs were wholly new to a young man from small-town America. He explored the airfield cut from the jade-colored jungle on his bicycle, awed by the scenery and sheer size of the facility. A huge, highly secretive listening station known as the Elephant Cage sat far out on the base, marking “the end of civilization,” he said. Beyond it stretched even more dense forest and the foothills of the Zambales Mountains.

Mount Pinuatubo, a volcano only nine miles from Clark Air Base, exploded on June 15, 1991. The ash cloud rose 28 miles into the air. Pyroclastic flows, surging avalanches of hot volcanic gas and fire, barreled down its slopes. A powerful typhoon moved ashore at the same time. Heavy rain mixed with ash, creating a blanket of wet sediment that collapsed the roofs of homes and buildings. Clark Air Base was wrecked.

Frank Wisner arrived in Manila to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines shortly after the eruption. The anti-bases campaign was at its height, and Clark was in no condition for American forces to return. But the United States wasn’t ready to relinquish its presence at Subic Bay, which remained important for the 7th Fleet roving the Pacific.

“We worked like hell. I campaigned for it,” Wisner told me recently. “I went all over the country. I marched.” The effort was unsuccessful.

Wisner flew to Washington after the senate vote, hoping to rally support for a last-minute fix, but found little interest in an expensive basing agreement thousands of miles from home as the threats from the Cold War faded. In a meeting at the White House, Wisner told me, President Bush “made it clear his heart wasn’t in it either.” In late November 1991, Wisner received the crisply folded American flag that had flown over Clark, once America’s largest overseas military base. The last American warship sailed out of Subic a year later.   

In the years that immediately followed, the Philippine navy had sporadic run-ins with Chinese poachers fishing illegally in Philippine waters. In the mid-1990s, the Chinese began building structures that appeared to be small huts on Mischief Reef, about 129 nautical miles from Palawan island and within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. The Philippine government protested, but Beijing brushed its objections aside. There was little understanding at the time of the breadth and speed with which China would build up its military forces and position itself to dominate the South China Sea.

“In hindsight,” Rommel Jude Ong, a former vice commander of the Philippine navy, told me, “the vacuum created by the loss of Subic and Clark provided opportunities for China to take over.”

The Philippines backtracked. It signed a Visiting Forces Agreement with the U.S. in 1998, allowing U.S. forces to come and go from temporary stints on Philippine bases, rather than operating from bases of their own, so as not to run counter to the 1991 vote. The groups that had opposed the U.S. bases had splintered by this time, and a challenge to the agreement in the country’s Supreme Court failed.

“It was very disappointing,” Diokno told me.

Maritime tensions with China were continuing to build. In 2012, Chinese ships moved into the waters around Scarborough Shoal, a rocky atoll that sits roughly 120 nautical miles west of the Philippine island of Luzon in the South China Sea. After a tense standoff with Philippine forces, Beijing effectively took control of the shoal and has held on to it ever since. Later that year, Xi Jinping became China’s president and stepped up Beijing’s militarization activities in the South China Sea, despite pledging during a White House visit not to do so.

The Philippines looked to the United States for support, and in 2014, the two countries signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a 10-year security pact allowing a larger U.S. military presence in the country. Within months, questions about the power imbalance between the U.S. and the Philippines again arose. A U.S. Marine taking part in joint exercises murdered Jennifer Laude, a transgender Filipina. Authorities discovered her strangled, her head pushed into a toilet in an Olongapo motel.

Yet Manila largely tolerated and even welcomed the military relationship until President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016. Duterte insisted that the Philippines was no match for its powerful neighbor, and that it was better to court investment than to antagonize China. He flattered Beijing and made a show of his independence from Washington, regularly lambasting the United States and then-President Barack Obama. He even threatened to scrap the Visiting Forces Agreement, but then abruptly did an about-face. The relationship between the U.S. and Philippine militaries was, Ong told me, “the only reason the alliance survived.”

I visited the old Clark facility during the Duterte period, in 2019. The veterans’ cemetery was immaculate, its brilliant-white headstones almost fluorescent in the afternoon sun. Other parts of the old air base had been swallowed by the jungle. Some of the bars were still open. They were relics of the heyday of the 1980s, the walls filled with military memorabilia of long-departed units and photos of young airmen sporting ringer tees and mustaches, their arms slung around Filipina women. The American patrons the bars now drew were a considerably older crowd, mostly retirees in blue-and-yellow veterans’ hats sipping from bottles of San Miguel beer.

[Read: A U.S. ally is turning to China to ‘build, build, build’]

Government officials at the time were abuzz over anticipated Chinese investment, which they said would help develop the area into a business hub and woo residents sick of the congestion and stifling crush of life in Manila. And Chinese investment did flow into the Philippines during Duterte’s tenure—particularly into the pockets of those close to the president. But many of the large-scale, Chinese-backed projects his administration promised never materialized. The $2 billion industrial park that was to provide hundreds of jobs at Clark was one such phantasm.

As U.S. troops left the Philippines in 1991, the Marcos family returned from Hawaii and set about rehabilitating its dynasty through a sustained campaign of historical revisionism. The effort paid off handsomely last year, when Bongbong Marcos was elected president. Joe Biden was one of the first world leaders to call the new president after his victory.

Marcos came to office with scant public record of a foreign policy. But his priorities became clear in short order, as he abandoned what Victor Andres Manhit, the founder of Stratbase ADR Institute, a think tank in the Philippines, described to me as Duterte’s “appeasement policy towards China” in favor of stronger ties with the United States and other maritime powers, such as Japan and Australia. Wendy Sherman, a high-ranking U.S. State Department official, jetted to Manila to meet Marcos even before he was sworn in. Marcos announced the expansion of the 2014 security agreement, granting U.S. forces access to four more bases in addition to the five it already uses. Two of the new ones are close to Taiwan.

The Balikatan Exercises have been held annually for years, but the scale and scope of the 2023 events were meant to send a warning to China. On the beach of San Antonio, in Zambales, hundreds of soldiers trudged through powdery sand, manning heavy weapons and logistical equipment. U.S. Marines sweltered in rows of tents lined up just off the beach. Military helicopters and V-22 Osprey, a hybrid aircraft, passed overhead. Counterparts from the Philippines and Australia worked alongside the American soldiers.

Toward the end of the week-long exercises, target drones meant to mimic competitors’ hardware launched from the beach and buzzed just offshore. A burst from a .50-caliber machine gun sent one nose-diving into the South China Sea. Another was eviscerated by a Stinger missile. (A different Stinger plopped into the sea, an apparent dud. “Obviously not what we were looking for,” an Army major quipped.) Later, at another site, a set of American Patriot missiles ripped through the air. Members of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, a newly formed group designed specifically for fighting in the Pacific island chains, performed sensing and intelligence operations for the exercises, its very existence a testament to the priority Washington now places on the region’s security.

[Read: China’s plan to buy influence and undermine democracy]

The exercises concluded with a mock attack on a 1940s warship anchored eight nautical miles offshore in the direction of Scarborough Shoal. Having served in World War II before being transferred to the Philippine navy, the ship had been “built to take some punches,” a Marine public-affairs officer told me. And it did.

Marcos looked on from an observation tower alongside the U.S. ambassador and military brass. A barrage of artillery hammered the ship, its repercussions setting off car alarms and sending billows of smoke rolling down the beach. Attack helicopters shot at the ship, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, like those supplied to Ukraine, fired on it. Marcos, the first Philippine president to watch the exercises in more than a decade, peered through a pair of binoculars at the display. Even as the exercises were happening, a Chinese coast guard ship offshore blocked a Philippine patrol vessel, nearly hitting it.

Marcos eventually descended from his perch and sped off in a convoy of black SUVs, kicking up a cloud of dust. Days later, he arrived in Washington, where Biden briefly reminisced about Marcos visiting the White House as a child with his father while Reagan was in office.

Such memories don’t cast a particularly warm glow for many in the Philippines, despite worries about Chinese designs. Senator Risa Hontiveros, a Marcos critic who backed his progressive challenger in the last election, told The Philippine Star in November that she fears her country will soon find itself “choosing between our former colonial master and one that wants to be the new regional or global colonial master.”  

Diokno, the anti-bases advocate, expressed a similar frustration. The aspiration in 1991 was for the Philippines to stand on its own. But “we have done nothing to defend ourselves from foreign aggressors. Why do you think China can do this to us?” she said of Chinese ships’ harassment of Filipino fishing and coast-guard vessels.  

“Because we are nobody; we don’t do anything. We have had since 1991 to do this and we have done nothing but rely on the U.S.”

Major-General Sergei Goryachev, chief of staff of Russia's 35th Army, reported killed in missile strike in Zaporizhia.

Illustrations by Alicia Tatone

The footage is shown before she takes the stage: Lara Logan in a headscarf, addressing the camera from the streets of Mogadishu. Logan ducking for cover as bullets crack overhead in Afghanistan. Logan interrogating a trophy hunter in Texas. Logan walking with Christine Lagarde, Justin Trudeau, Mark Wahlberg, Jane Goodall.

It is a tour through Logan’s past life as a journalist for CBS’s 60 Minutes, a glimpse at the various exchanges and explosions that earned her the awards and a “prominent spot,” as her former network once put it, “among the world’s best foreign correspondents.” Then, three minutes and one second later, it is over. Cut to right now, February 27, 2023, in Fredericksburg, Texas: Logan looking out at 200 people gathered in a creaking church auditorium for the inaugural meeting of the Gillespie County chapter of Moms for Liberty.

“If you want to know why it’s called social media,” Logan says, “I’ll tell you why: Because Karl Marx was hired by Henry Rothschild, by the Rothschild family, to develop a system of social control. So when you see social, it is a form of control—that’s all it is. Social media is a form of controlling us all.”

She goes on, picking up on the title of a recent book by a friend of hers, retired General Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser and a far-right conspiracy theorist: “So what does fifth-generation warfare really mean?” It means that “you’re meant to believe the narrative, regardless of the truth.”

For the next 45 minutes, Logan, wearing a floral wrap dress and a cream-colored cardigan, lays out what she sees as the true narrative: for instance, that by aiding Ukraine, America is arming Nazis; that the events of January 6 were not an insurrection at all. Turning to The New York Times to understand this moment, Logan warns, is “like being in the battle of Normandy, on the beaches of Normandy, Dunkirk, and going on your knees every day and crawling over to the Nazi lines and asking them to please write nice things about your side in German propaganda.” Her dress is decorated with two identical navy-blue stickers reading STOP WOKE INDOCTRINATION.

As Logan talks, her words at times eliciting applause, the final frame of the introductory footage hovers ghostlike in the background. Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.

Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.

First CBS, and then Fox News. Not even the far-right Newsmax wants journalists who risk piercing the narrative. In October, during an appearance on that network, Logan declared that “the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world” and that the global elite “want us eating insects” while they “dine on the blood of children.” Newsmax condemned her remarks and announced that it had no plans to invite Logan on its shows again.

Logan’s life has been rife with personal trauma, some of it well known. In 2011, she was gang-raped in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2013, a story she reported for 60 Minutes was publicly disavowed. I went to Fredericksburg, where Logan now lives, on that February evening because I wanted to know what had happened in the decade since. I wanted to understand how, after years of association with the tick-tick-tick of 60 Minutes, she had slipped into a world bracketed by MyPillow discount codes and LaraLoganGold.com. How a career built on pursuing the truth had become so unmoored from it.

When I had contacted Logan about an interview, her response, via text message, was: “Unfortunately I have no doubt this is another hit piece desperately seeking to discredit several decades of award-winning work at 60 Minutes, CBS, ABC, NBC and beyond and you are only seeking my voice to add legitimacy to the anonymous cowards you will use to attack me once again. Feel free to use this statement if you are sincere.” She then shared a screenshot of our exchange with her 530,000 Twitter followers.

And so I braced for an unpleasant encounter when I approached Logan at the end of the night, after the long line of grandmothers and mothers and teenage girls who wanted a photo with her had finally dwindled. I introduced myself and said that I had seen probably every story she had ever done for 60 Minutes. “But here you’ve come,” she said. “Here you’ve come to destroy it all.”

She has been described in terms of hazardous weather. A tornado whipped through Midtown Manhattan and there suddenly was Lara Logan, June 2008, striding high-heeled from the wings of The Daily Show. “She is the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News,” Jon Stewart announced, the studio audience cheering as he shook Logan’s hand and guided her to center stage. “You remind me of a young Ted Koppel,” he said.

Logan tilted her head back and laughed. “Dan Rather used to say that about me!”

Logan had begun her career as a full-time journalist 16 years earlier, fresh out of college and with a résumé consisting of two part-time newspaper gigs in her hometown of Durban, South Africa, along with a bit of swimsuit modeling. In her first days covering the post-apartheid landscape as a producer at Reuters Television in Johannesburg, Logan, then in her early 20s, had not exactly reminded anyone of a young Ted Koppel. “The word bimbo came up a lot,” one of Logan’s former Reuters colleagues told me. But opinions began to shift once fellow journalists saw her in the field. “It was a very, very intense time … She’s a fucking hard worker, and she takes risks,” the former colleague said. “She had incredible guts.” (This person, like most of the nearly three dozen other onetime colleagues or friends of Logan’s I interviewed, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.)

By 30, Logan was a correspondent for the British morning show GMTV. She was working out of London on 9/11, and within days she was pleading with an embassy clerk for a fast-track visa to Afghanistan. At first, GMTV management seemed unsure what to make of it, this young woman apparently desperate to embed herself in al-Qaeda territory. Where would she sleep? What about a driver, security? She’d figure it out. She was en route to Kabul shortly after the first American air strikes that October.

It didn’t take long for Logan’s superiors to recognize the opportunity before them, the potential for their coverage of the biggest story on Earth to become an event unto itself. This was not just because Logan was a woman but because she was attractive. It is prudent to address this now, because the fact of Logan’s attractiveness would soon become unavoidable, the gathering resonance of her journalism inextricable from the public’s gathering interest in her appearance.

Logan had been in Kabul less than a month when her Independent Television News competitor Julian Manyon suggested in a Spectator essay that the “delectable” correspondent’s swift infiltration of Bagram Airfield and the upper ranks of the Northern Alliance was due to her “considerable physical charms.” Logan, he wrote, “exploits her God-given advantages with a skill that Mata Hari might envy.” Responding in a short dispatch for The Guardian, Logan parried adroitly. “If General Babajan smiles around me, perhaps it is because I offer him respect and attempt, at least, to talk to him in a non-demanding manner,” she wrote. “It’s not rocket science.”

The British tabloids, delighted to have located the sex in jihad so quickly, scrambled to build on the story. In the course of interviewing Logan’s mother at her home in Durban, a reporter got access to the swimsuit photos for which Logan had posed to earn extra cash while in high school and university. The photos soon appeared on the front pages of the Daily Record and The Mirror. At first Logan was furious, embarrassed. But then she decided to lean in, to fashion herself as the rare emblem of both harrowing journalism and unabashed femininity. The tip for the next Mirror splash (“Here’s a sight that would stop the Taliban in its tracks. War reporter Lara Logan relaxes on a deck chair in a sizzling swimsuit”) reportedly came from Logan herself. “She was the first field correspondent I ever met who sort of understood her brand, which was a really new thing at the time,” a producer at a rival network told me.

As her profile grew, Logan charmed feature writers with her willingness to talk, to play ball when they asked her about things as personal as the last time she’d had a “good snog.” She argued that not using her looks would be malpractice. “There isn’t a journalist alive who won’t admit to you they use every advantage they have,” she told The New York Times.

Alicia Tatone. Sources: Chris Hondros / Getty; Saul Loeb / Getty.

More fundamental to Logan’s success in Afghanistan, however, was the simple fact that she showed up when others didn’t. In addition to her GMTV job, Logan worked as a stringer for CBS News Radio, and just a few weeks after arriving in Kabul, she found herself the only CBS-affiliated reporter on hand to cover the Taliban’s rapid unraveling. The network aired her prime-time debut from the capital.

This was when Dan Rather saw a young Ted Koppel. An article in Vogue described Rather as the first to urge CBS to hire Logan full-time. He marveled at her ability to “get through the glass,” as he told the magazine. “The good ones,” he said, “always want the worst assignments.” By spring 2002, Logan had a $1 million contract with the network.

Her new colleagues understood the appeal. “She knows how to position herself, she knows how to relate to the camera—she’s incredibly good at that,” Philip Ittner, a former CBS producer who worked with Logan, told me. “She was also very good under fire. Even in a very bad firefight or something, after an IED exploded, she would get in front of the camera, and she’d be able to deliver.”

But then there was the tornado of it all. “She likes to stir stuff up, unconsciously,” the former Reuters colleague told me. “Wherever she goes, there’s a lot of kinetic energy that’s not necessarily net positive.”

Logan grew up one of three children in a well-off white family in apartheid South Africa. She enjoyed snacks prepared by housekeepers and a swimming pool in the backyard and the tacit belief that her parents had only ever existed, and indeed would only ever exist, in relation to each other. And then one morning when she was 8, her father pulled into the driveway and Logan raced out to greet him and there in the car was a 5-year-old girl she had never seen before. Say hello to your sister, her father said. He was leaving to be with this other daughter and her mother.

“It was such a shock, such a traumatic experience,” Logan later recalled. After the divorce, she watched her mother struggle to reassemble the pieces of her life. Yolanda Logan moved her young children into a small apartment and found work as a sales representative at a glass company, never remarrying. “I learned about betrayal and dishonesty,” Logan told the Sunday Mirror soon after returning to London from Kabul. “When I looked at Mum, I saw a woman who thought she was secure and safe in her marriage suddenly alone.”

That was how Logan explained it when the Mirror reporter asked why she was so willing to pitch herself into danger as a journalist. “I’m afraid of being seen as vulnerable,” she said. “All my life, I’ve been fighting to prove that I’m not weak.”

She refused orders from CBS to keep out of Iraq during the American invasion in 2003, hiring local fixers to sneak her across the Jordanian border. On the drive into Baghdad, she played Van Morrison. With virtually every other American television broadcaster evacuated from the city, “shock and awe” was hers. One of Logan’s early segments for the relatively short-lived Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes showed a Humvee she was in flip over when it hit a land mine; in a Sunday segment, viewers saw Logan defy a vehicle commander’s orders to stay put as he went to inspect an unexploded bomb. In 2005, the Times christened her the “War Zone ‘It Girl’ ”; in 2006, CBS elevated her to chief foreign correspondent.

Whether Logan was daring or heedless depended on whom you asked—and, as is typical in the environs of television news, a great many of her colleagues enjoyed being asked. Some felt that Logan showed undue deference to the military line; others groused about what they saw as stubbornness and self-absorption. Still others watched Logan peer down at an unexploded bomb and saw not bravery as much as recklessness. At a certain point, “a lot of people refused to produce her,” one of her former producers told me.

If, for Logan, this was not cause for introspection, it was perhaps because her approach was winning a lot of awards. (In her first six years at CBS, she picked up Gracie Awards and Murrow Awards and an Emmy.) And if, for Logan, the New York Post article headlined “Sexty Minutes” had not been cause for alarm, it was perhaps because Jeff Fager, then the executive producer of 60 Minutes, had hung a framed copy of the article in his office. “It’s hard to judge what Lara Logan is going to be in 10 years,” Fager told Broadcasting & Cable magazine in the fall of 2008. “But boy, she’s made a mark in a short period of time.”

And yet, for as long as Logan had craved precisely this level of success, she also seemed uncomfortable with having actually attained it—as if to accept life as it presented itself to her, the way her mother once had, risked revealing it to be a trick of the light. She spoke sometimes of unspecified plans to derail her career. “I’m sure people are interested in seeing me fail,” she said shortly after joining CBS. She detected threats where no threats were intended. In 2006, when reviewing Katie Couric’s premiere as the first solo female anchor on a major-network evening news show, the Times pronounced that “the woman who stood out the most” was not Couric herself, but rather the “experienced and unusually pretty” CBS war correspondent. The unwanted comparison with her senior colleague seemed only to reinforce Logan’s inchoate sense of being conspired against. “I always think it is some kind of secret plot to destroy me,” she told Vogue in 2007. “I mean, to disparage the anchor at my expense?”

This dim, diffuse paranoia would sharpen, according to some colleagues, after the start of Logan’s relationship with the man who is now her husband, Joe Burkett.

Logan was married for the first time in 1998—to Jason Siemon, an American who played professional basketball in the United Kingdom. She met Joseph Washington Burkett IV, a Texas native and an Army sergeant who was also married, a few years later, while reporting in Kabul. Early 2008 found them working again in the same city, this time Baghdad. Logan was now in the final stages of a divorce and Burkett was newly estranged from his wife. He quickly became a regular presence in the press compound outside the Green Zone.

It was not clear to Logan’s colleagues what Burkett did for a living, and Burkett seemed to prefer it that way. He cultivated an air of secrecy, dropping hints that he was involved in clandestine operations. Logan seemed drawn in by the mystery of Burkett and his “very secretive job,” as she once called it. It was a while before Logan’s colleagues learned that Burkett had been in Baghdad on behalf of the Lincoln Group, a now-defunct firm quietly contracted by the Pentagon to disseminate pro-America propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. But they needed only a few conversations to register his penchant for conspiracy theories.

As Logan’s relationship with Burkett progressed, some of her colleagues noticed slight shifts in her story ideas. “As much as she would occasionally come up with loony tunes stuff on her own, it would always be more of, like, ‘Hey, let’s go right into the most dangerous part of’ whatever environment they were currently covering,” Philip Ittner told me. “But when Burkett came on the scene, it was like—and this is a hypothetical—‘Clearly the CIA is bringing in hallucinogens to put into the water supply of Baghdad; we really need to dig into this.’ ” (Logan declined to answer questions about herself, her husband, or other topics related to this article. In response to a list of factual queries and requests for comment that The Atlantic sent her, Logan wrote, “You are a hundred percent wrong on everything.”)

Logan and Burkett were wed in November 2008; Logan was seven months pregnant with their first child. They began married life in a house they bought in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

On the evening of February 11, 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, Logan threaded through the congested streets of Cairo. She, her cameraman, her security guard, and her producer had come straight from the airport, as she later recounted on 60 Minutes, having landed just moments after President Hosni Mubarak announced his resignation. “It was like unleashing a champagne cork on Egypt,” she recalled.

Logan’s agent, Carole Cooper, had advised against the trip; only a week earlier, Logan and her crew had been detained overnight by Egyptian officials targeting journalists. But now, in Tahrir Square, thousands of people were singing, chanting, unfurling flags. For more than an hour she reported from the crowd, people smiling and waving at the camera. Then the camera’s battery went dead. The light illuminating Logan and the people around her was suddenly gone. A few moments later, Logan felt hands on her body. She thought that if she screamed loud enough, the assault would stop, but it didn’t.

[Read: Brutal assault on CBS’s Lara Logan in Egypt shows risks to female reporters]

The mob tore off her clothes. For a few minutes she managed to hold on to her security guard’s arm, but then, like everyone else in her crew, he was beaten back. This was when Logan thought she was going to die. Later she would recall for Newsweek how the men raped her with their hands, with sticks, with flagpoles. Onlookers took photos with their cellphones. The assault lasted at least 25 minutes before a group of Egyptian women intervened. They were able to cover Logan until soldiers managed to reach her and get her to her hotel, where she was seen by a doctor.

The next morning, Logan was on a flight home to her husband and two young children in Washington. She would spend four days in the hospital. People from all over the world sent flowers and letters. President Barack Obama called her to share his support. Logan’s eventual decision to talk openly about what happened inspired other women in journalism to share their own stories of being sexually assaulted while on the job. After she spoke out, the Committee to Protect Journalists launched a major effort to survey the problem and stigma of sexual violence in the field.

Over time, the most obvious reminders of Logan’s assault—the hand-shaped bruises all over her body—faded. For years afterward, however, as she told the Toronto Star, Logan would continue to cope with internal injuries—severe pelvic pain, a hysterectomy that failed to heal. And there was the emotional damage. Logan talked about problems of intimacy with her husband, the dark memories that could sweep over her with a single touch.

A little over a year after the assault, Logan, at 41, was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer; she underwent a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation, then went into remission. It was during this period of her life, Logan would say, that she “wanted to come apart.” She felt herself in a situation where “nobody could see it and nobody could see me and nobody understood.” She began suffering panic attacks. She tried therapy.

[Read: It’s more dangerous than ever to be a female war reporter]

Through it all, Logan found refuge in her career. In April 2013, a little more than two years after the assault, The Hollywood Reporter published a glowing feature on executive producer Jeff Fager’s 60 Minutes. The article depicted Logan as a confident correspondent striding into a screening for her next story, settling in beside Fager as he prepared to mark up the script. His verdict: “Terrific.” She could always make it back to terrific.

Until, that is, she couldn’t.

Not long after the Hollywood Reporter article, Simon & Schuster reached out to CBS with a pitch. A conservative imprint within the publishing company had a book coming out in the fall—The Embassy House—about Benghazi: the “real story,” as the prologue promised, of the deadly attack on the American compound and CIA annex in September 2012, as recounted by “the only man in a position to tell the full story.”

The man’s name was Dylan Davies, but he was writing under a pseudonym—for his safety, the book explained, and also because he had “no interest in seeking official recognition.”

Davies, a British-military veteran from Wales, was a security officer whose employer, Blue Mountain, had been hired by the State Department to help protect the Special Mission in Benghazi. In his book, he described how, on the night of the attack, he had scaled the compound’s 12-foot wall to try to save the Americans trapped inside, rifle-butting a terrorist in the process. He also said that he had seen Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s body at the hospital.

Logan and her producer, Max McClellan, agreed to consider The Embassy House for a feature on 60 Minutes. The basics of Davies’s biography appeared to check out; email correspondence that Davies shared with Logan seemed to confirm, as he claimed, that he had been interviewed by officials from across the U.S. government, including the FBI, about everything he had seen and heard and done that night. Over the next few months, Logan and McClellan put together a Benghazi segment featuring Davies’s story as well as original reporting on the attack. After the screening of the finished product, CBS and 60 Minutes leadership, including Fager, green-lit the broadcast for air.

Some of Logan’s reporting broke significant ground. No journalist had yet substantiated, for example, the role of Abu Sufian bin Qumu, an Ansar al‑Sharia leader and former Guantánamo Bay detainee, in the Benghazi attack; the Obama administration did not publicly announce his involvement until the next year. But the segment’s revelations were framed almost as sideshows to the Rambo-esque account of Davies, whose view of the attack comprised the majority of the report’s 15 and a half minutes.

Within days of the broadcast, his story began to unravel. The Washington Post reported that Davies had told his employer he wasn’t at the compound that night—something 60 Minutes had known but did not mention, accepting Davies’s explanation that he had lied to his employer. A week later, The New York Times revealed that Davies had also told the FBI that he wasn’t at the compound. Logan and McClellan knew that Davies had been interviewed by the FBI; they had not checked what he actually said. And when, after the Times report, they tried to reach Davies to demand answers, they couldn’t find him—The Daily Beast later reported that he had emailed his publisher saying that because of a threat against his family, he was going dark.

I was recently able to reach Davies via email. He claimed without evidence that his son’s life had been threatened by “the US state department (Clinton)” after the 60 Minutes report. (A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton denied the allegation and noted that Clinton had stepped down as secretary of state several months before the Benghazi report aired.) When I pressed him on whether he had told the FBI and 60 Minutes different versions of his story, he replied that he didn’t “want anything to do with Benghazi” and asked what was wrong with me.

Media Matters, the liberal watchdog group founded by the Clinton ally David Brock, seized on the controversy immediately, publishing no fewer than 36 stories highlighting problems in Logan’s reporting. Other outlets would point to a speech Logan had given a year earlier, in which she accused the Obama administration of perpetuating a “major lie” about the ongoing threat of al-Qaeda, as evidence of political bias.

On November 8, 2013, for the first time in her career, Logan went on air to announce the retraction of a story. “We were wrong,” she said. Simon & Schuster withdrew The Embassy House from sale later that day. For CBS, and Fager in particular, it was a colossal embarrassment—the program’s “worst mistake on my 10-year watch,” he wrote in a 2017 book. Logan would later say that a nondisclosure agreement she and McClellan had signed with the publisher had prevented them from checking Davies’s story with the FBI. It was an odd line of defense—Logan arguing that she had given up the right to verify key points. An internal CBS review concluded that problems with Davies’s account were “knowable before the piece aired.” Logan and McClellan agreed to take indefinite leaves of absence. (CBS News declined to comment on the Benghazi report and its aftermath.)

Sitting in her home in Cleveland Park during the leave of absence, Logan took calls from colleagues and tried to make sense of things. For the first time in her career, she was losing control of the narrative.

Logan soon learned that Joe Hagan, a writer at New York magazine, was working on a profile of her. Hagan’s article, titled “Benghazi and the Bombshell,” was published in May 2014. Hagan attributed the Benghazi mistake to a “proverbial perfect storm” of factors, including Logan’s reputed personal sympathies with the Republican line on the attack, and the “outsize power” she enjoyed at 60 Minutes thanks to Fager.

Logan would later file a lawsuit against Hagan and New York—a suit quickly dismissed by a federal judge. The complaint alleged that prior to publication of the “Hagan Hit Piece,” as Logan called it, Fager and CBS Chair Les Moonves had come up with a “specific and detailed plan” for her to return to 60 Minutes. According to the lawsuit, after the article appeared Moonves felt that he and Fager had been painted as Logan’s “lapdogs” and decided to shift course; Fager then informed her that she would return to the program in a “drastically altered role.” When she went back to work in June, her relationship with him was, she claimed in the suit, “irreparably damaged.” “She really felt hung out to dry,” a person formerly close to Logan told me. (Neither Fager nor Moonves responded to requests for comment.)

For Logan, reckoning frankly with the circumstances in which she now found herself would have meant accepting her own responsibility for creating them—accepting, in other words, the unextraordinary truth of the human capacity for poor judgment. But in the fall of 2014, a movie came out that helped Logan rewrite her narrative.

Based on a book by the journalist Nick Schou, Kill the Messenger tells the story of Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News journalist who, in 1996, published a blockbuster investigation that linked the CIA to America’s crack-cocaine epidemic by way of its relationship with the Nicaraguan contras. Although much of the reporting was solid, Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series also had serious flaws; the Mercury News eventually determined that the series “did not meet our standards” in several ways. Webb resigned from the paper not long afterward. He died by suicide in 2004. In the movie’s telling, the various news outlets that called Webb’s work into question were motivated less by a desire to correct the record than by petty jealousies and a longtime deference to the CIA.

It’s unclear whether Logan had ever heard of Webb before she saw the film. In many respects, their experiences were utterly unalike. Nevertheless, Logan seemed to cling to Webb as a kind of life raft, and would later invoke his name and story in interviews about her Benghazi report. (She also questioned whether Webb’s death had truly been a suicide.) Logan ultimately decided that Media Matters, in an effort to discredit the “substance” of the Benghazi report—about security flaws at the compound—had worked in concert with various media outlets to silence her. The problem, as she now saw it, was not that she had put an unverified account on air. It was that her report had dared to criticize the Obama administration. To use Webb’s own formulation—one that Logan repeats to this day—she had told a story “important enough to suppress.”

Alicia Tatone. Sources: Chris Hondros / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty.

In mid-2015, when Logan’s contract was coming up for renewal, CBS offered, and Logan accepted, a part-time correspondent role on 60 Minutes. Shortly after the contract was signed, she, her husband, and their children packed up their house in Washington and moved to Burkett’s hometown of Fredericksburg, Texas.

For most of her professional life, Logan had not struck her peers as especially political—“very moderate,” one former colleague called her. She now began to shape a new worldview, one steeped in antagonism toward the media establishment she felt betrayed by, and toward the figures and institutions she believed it served. It was a worldview that offered both absolution and purpose. And it was soon to find a partisan expression in Donald Trump.

On-screen, over the next two years, Logan seemed much the same journalist and person she’d always been. She continued to file stories from various countries for 60 Minutes. Off-screen, however, she was becoming closer to people like Ed Butowsky, a Fox News regular and Texas-based financial adviser of whom Logan was now a client. Butowsky would play a central role in the story of Seth Rich.

In July 2016, the murder of the Democratic National Committee staffer—in a botched robbery, police said—produced a torrent of right-wing conspiracy theories. Butowsky helped instigate an investigation that resulted in a Fox News story suggesting that Rich had been killed by Hillary Clinton associates in retaliation for supposedly leaking emails from the DNC to WikiLeaks. (Fox soon retracted the story and later settled a lawsuit brought by the Rich family. Butowsky settled a separate lawsuit brought against him by Rich’s brother.)

According to Facebook messages shared with The Atlantic, Logan, too, had been suspicious of the botched-robbery line, and saw in the episode another instance of the elite media providing cover for the left. In an April 2017 exchange with Trevor FitzGibbon, a left-wing public-relations strategist whose firm had represented WikiLeaks, Logan wrote that she did not know “for a fact” that Clinton’s associates were responsible for Rich’s murder. “But I would be stunned if it were not true.” No journalist had reported this, because “they”—presumably the Democrats—“own the media,” she wrote, and pointed to the fallout from her Benghazi report. “They saw me as a threat and went after me and the show.” A few months later, Joe Burkett attended a small gathering at Butowsky’s home at which, according to one attendee’s sworn deposition, the possibility of wiretapping Rich’s parents’ house was raised. (Butowsky has denied that this was ever discussed.)

Toward the end of 2018, CBS declined to renew Logan’s contract. She was likely not surprised. Logan later characterized her final four years at the network as isolating; executives who’d once supported her now treated her with “utter contempt.” (Fager and Moonves, as it happened, were both ousted at approximately the same time—Fager for sending a threatening text message to a CBS News reporter looking into #MeToo allegations against him and Moonves when a dozen women said he had sexually harassed or assaulted them. Both denied the sexual-misconduct allegations.)

[Read: Les Moonves and the familiarity fallacy]

In interviews, a number of Logan’s former colleagues expressed the belief that, in time, she would have been picked up by another network. Her 60 Minutes segment in 2015 on Christians in Iraq had won a Murrow Award; in 2017, she and her team won an Emmy for their report on the battle for Mosul. But what Logan’s messages with FitzGibbon seem to underscore is that, even if a continued career in mainstream media had been possible, she wasn’t necessarily interested in pursuing one.

Logan was creating, in effect, a new brand for herself. She unveiled it in early 2019, sitting down for a three-and-a-half-hour podcast interview with the former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland, whom she had once interviewed for 60 Minutes. Logan related the story of her life and offered a blistering critique of the mainstream media she had chosen to leave behind. In speaking out against what she saw as the media’s liberal bias, Logan told Ritland, she was committing “professional suicide.” She likened right-wing outlets such as Breitbart News and Fox to the “tiny little spot” where women are permitted to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, while “CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever”—the “liberal” media—took up the rest of the space, reserved for men. The interview went viral, and Sean Hannity invited her on his show for a follow-up. “I hope my bosses at Fox find a place for you,” the host told her.

By the start of 2020, Logan had a deal with Fox News’s streaming service Fox Nation, for a series called Lara Logan Has No Agenda. Along with reported segments on subjects including illegal immigration and the dangerous advance of socialism in America, Logan would use her new role to build on her criticism of the media. One of Logan’s former producers remembers calling her around this time. “I was like, ‘You know, you’re talking about me … You’re talking about all these people who’ve worked with you—we’re part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Like, seriously, you believe that?’ And she was like, ‘No, you don’t understand … You may not know you’re complicit—but you’re complicit.’ ”

As the months passed, Logan’s comments became more extreme. Eventually some of her closest friends from her former life could no longer stomach a phone call with her, knowing it might turn into a stem-winder on the virtues of Michael Flynn, who had admitted to lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian ambassador. When Trump supporters mobilized to deny the results of the 2020 election, Logan was right there with them; she would work on a movie (financed by MyPillow’s Mike Lindell) about alleged voter fraud. After the January 6 insurrection, she rallied behind the people who were charged with taking part in it.

All of which seemed to culminate in an appearance on Fox News—in November 2021, as the country battled COVID—during which Logan compared Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Fox stayed silent about the remarks but ultimately did not pursue a new season of Logan’s streaming show.

It was the sort of moment that those few friends left over from her old life thought might finally force a reckoning. Even her newer allies struggled to defend the remarks. (“Anytime you bring up a Nazi in anything, you’re kind of going off the reservation,” Ed Butowsky told me.) But by that point, Logan had come to seem firmly of the mind that setbacks, criticism, or a reproach of any sort were only evidence that she was doing something right. Carole Cooper, her agent—who, according to people familiar with their long relationship, had been like a second mother to Logan—dropped her. Less than a year later, Newsmax, where Logan often appeared on the commentator Eric Bolling’s weeknight show, washed its hands of Logan, following her riff on the global blood-drinking elite.

Logan was undeterred. The stakes, as she had come to see them, were simply too high. This is what she tries to communicate to people at the various local speaking gigs that now constitute much of her career, events such as the Park Cities Republican Women Christmas fundraising lunch in Texas, which she keynoted last year. “We had to cut her off because she was going too long,” one member who helped arrange the lunch recalled. The message was: “The world is on fire” and “your kids are being exposed to cats being raped” and “elections are stolen” and “we’ve lost our country.” The woman added, “It’s a Christmas lunch, mind you.”

The truth is that I had been nervous about approaching Logan on that February evening in Texas. Two weeks earlier, she had suggested on Twitter that I was engaged in a broader “strategic hit job” involving an effort to frame her as a Mossad asset. I did not know how she would respond to my presence at the Moms for Liberty event, which I paid $10 to attend. After my initial exchange with Logan, her manner softened, though she would not speak with me on the record.

In the past several years, I have written about a number of public figures on the right who believe very few of the things they profess to believe, who talk in public about stolen elections and wink at the specter of global cabals, and then privately crack jokes about the people who applaud.

I don’t think Logan is one of these figures. People who know her say the private person is also the public one. It was with sincere urgency that she recommended Flynn’s The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare to her audience that evening. I Googled Flynn’s book as I waited to approach Logan. It is advertised almost as a self-help guide, the promotional copy encouraging Americans and “freedom loving people everywhere” to buy the volume to “understand the manipulation happening around you” and “why you feel the way you do.” “When I just saw General Michael Flynn,” Logan had told the audience, “he said to me—opening words—‘We’ve got maybe 18 months before we lose this country.’ ” She had nodded as many in the crowd vocalized their dismay. “This is not something you can pick and choose about whether you want to do.” She declared, “I’m not going to surrender. Even if they throw me in a prison and execute me—’til my last breath, I’m going to be fighting.”

In recent years, many Americans have embraced conspiracy theories as a way to give order and meaning to the world’s chance cruelties. Lara Logan seems to have done the same, rewriting her story as a martyrdom epic in the war of narratives. Five years after Logan departed CBS, few tethers remain to the woman on the projector screen. Executives and journalists who were once her greatest advocates have long since stopped talking to her and would prefer not to talk about her, either. “Respectfully, I would like to pass speaking on this subject. Best wishes,” Dan Rather wrote in a Twitter message when I reached out to him. Former friends who remember Logan as empathetic and generous now fear incurring the vitriol of a woman who frequently trashes critics and perceived enemies as “evil,” “disgusting,” “worthless.” The only former colleague of hers who was willing to be quoted by name in this article agreed to do so out of a sense of duty. “She is spreading Kremlin propaganda,” Philip Ittner told me. “And as somebody who is here in Ukraine, trying to fight back against the Russian information warfare, I can’t in good conscience just sit idly by.” It may be that saying nobody owns you, as Logan so often does, helps dull the reality that very few people claim you.

But the people at the event in Fredericksburg did claim her. After the speech was over, Logan talked one-on-one with dozens of audience members who seemed anxious to learn more about why they felt the way they did. She lingered until the very last person left the auditorium.

I think she stayed for as long as she did that night because she believes she has seen the light and wanted the people in the auditorium to see it too. I think she also stayed because the people there represent some of the only community she has left.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “A Star Reporter’s Break With Reality.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

I’m always looking for a way to get near Mel Brooks. Can you blame me? He has acted in, directed, produced, and written some of the most memorable films in human history—among them The Producers, Blazing Saddles, History of the World, Part I, and Spaceballs. He is the reason I went into comedy. As a young man, I obsessively watched his films and his appearances on late-night television. I would listen to his 2000 Year Old Man albums—in which Mel played the character of an ancient man explaining the origins of humanity—and dream of having the same job as him.

Once, I interviewed Mel at an event where he was so funny that I locked up completely and didn’t dare attempt a single joke. After I wrote the foreword to his book about the making of Young Frankenstein, I got to watch him record the audio version of it. Fifteen minutes into the reading, he stopped and shouted, “Why did I make this thing so damned long?! This is going to take forever!” Then there was the time that I took my friend and fellow comedian Bill Hader to Mel’s office just to chat. He regaled us with stories for several hours. When we were getting ready to leave, Mel said, “Come and visit again, but not soon! Wait a few months.” As we walked to our car, he screamed from the far distance, “Get the fuck out of here!”

Mel is turning 97 this summer. He is way sharper than I am, which isn’t saying much, and he is still riotously funny. Recently I visited him at his house in Los Angeles, not just so I could bask once more in the comic genius of a true master (although also that), but because I hoped to glean some of his wisdom. I wanted to understand what made Mel Brooks who he is, and I attempted to steer him toward the philosophical and the spiritual, so that we might all benefit from what he has learned in almost a century on this Earth. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. And to make me seem less dumb.

Judd Apatow: I’m always happy to have an excuse to talk to you.

Mel Brooks: I usually say no. No, no. It’s not you; it’s COVID. I’m afraid. I got sick. I got so sick, I had to go to the hospital.

Apatow: Really?

Brooks: Yeah. Remdesivir. You can only get it in the hospital. So I got it. I think it saved me. I felt like I was swallowing glass.

Apatow: Oh no.

Brooks: Oh, it was awful.

Apatow: Well, the pandemic has been the biggest calamity in the United States in a long time. But you’ve seen other big calamities. When you think about World War II and everybody saying, We have to join together to get this done, do you think, We don’t have that anymore ?

Brooks: Oh yeah. I went overseas as a private in the artillery. I was a radio operator. And when we got to Europe, I was going to be a fast-speed radio operator and forward observer in the artillery. Got off the boat, got onto a truck. They said, “You’re in the combat engineers. We need a lot of combat engineers to build bridges and to defuse mines and booby traps. And you’re going to love it.”

Apatow: You’re going to love it!

Brooks: I got over in February 1945, and the war was over a few months later—March, April, May, and I was home. So I was lucky. But I defused a lot of booby traps, a lot of mines. One good thing was I got my training at a farmhouse in Normandy. And there was a little kid with a bicycle, and he fell in love with me because I gave him chewing gum and chocolate, and he’d go “Private Mel, Private Mel!” He’d just follow me on his tricycle. Sweet little French kid.

Apatow: Were you drafted or did you enlist?

Brooks: I enlisted, but not as a hero. Somebody from the Army came to Eastern District High School in Brooklyn and said, “If you join the Reserve, we will send you to the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program for your last year of school, and it will actually be your first year of college.” Sounded good. So I enlisted in the Army Reserve.

Apatow: They were nice enough to put you in the division that had to defuse mines.

Brooks: You’d go to the toilet, and there was a chain that hung down, and if you pulled the chain, you’d blow up the house. You’d go right to heaven. So the first place we’d look was in that water closet, right above the toilet. And then every door could have a hinge attached to a bomb. When the troops cleared out a farmhouse, we’d go right in and clean it up so that they could actually sleep in it, stay in it for a night or two, instead of on the ground. The scariest and funniest one was a jar of pickles. Our top sergeant explained to us: “Don’t open a jar.” Because in the middle of the pickles, there could be dynamite. He had defused it already. So he took out the jar, he took off the lid, and in the middle of the pickles there was a stick of dynamite.

Apatow: Oh my God.

[Read: HBO’s ‘If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast’ offers a sunnier take on aging]

Brooks: Crafty. So anyway, we would test the soil around the farmhouse with our bayonets at a 45-degree angle. We’d hit the soil, and if we heard a tink or a dink dink dink, we were supposed to defuse.

Apatow: And do you remember your state of mind? Were you thinking, Any day now, I’m going to get blown up? Or did you just feel confident, like, We know what we’re doing ?

Brooks: It was more Any day now, I’m going to get blown up.

Mel Brooks in the Army during World War II (Courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense)

Apatow: How did people treat the Jewish soldiers?

Brooks: Once in a while you’d get a couple of guys from Alabama who would ask, “Take off your helmet. I want to see if your ears are long.” Sometimes for real, just curious. And sometimes just mean. A lot of mean guys.

Apatow: When my mom was in college—this is in the early 1960s—her roommate at Michigan State asked to see her horns. For real. “Can I see your horns?”

Brooks: When I was a kid, I’d feel sorry for non-Jewish kids who would go by, and the Jews would harass them. I always felt that in my little clique of Jews, that that’s what the world was. Mostly Jews and a few strange people. It was quite a revelation when I was in the Army, that maybe me and two other guys were the only Jews in a battalion.

Apatow: Fighting to free the Jews.

Brooks: It was strange. I mean, it was an eye-opener. I woke up.

Apatow: Do you have an interpretation of how people have changed over the generations? Or do you think it’s all basically the same?

Brooks: No, it’s not basically the same. They’ve changed, mostly for the better, mostly for being more tolerant and more understanding about people. And you know, as a matter of fact, it’s only recently that I’m aware of so much anti-Semitism. For many years, there was none that I was aware of.

Apatow: Yeah, well. You’re the one Jew everyone likes.

Brooks: In the Army, I was entertaining and I was fun, and they overlooked that I was Jewish. They just liked me for my personality.

Apatow: Were you depressed?

Brooks: No! It was terrible and wonderful.

Apatow: And the wonderful part was the camaraderie?

Brooks: The wonderful part was camaraderie. The day the war ended, or was going to be ended, it was May 7. And they said, “Tomorrow, the war ends.” A buddy came with me from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where we both learned how to be radio operators for the Field Artillery—we both located into the combat engineers. He said to me, “Come with me.” We were in a little schoolhouse. And in the basement, he had set up a table with white wine. And he said, “We’re going to sleep here tonight and stay here all day tomorrow.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Because tomorrow is going to be V-E Day. And knowing soldiers, they’re going to shoot their rifles up and yell and celebrate. Shoot a lot of stuff up in the air, forgetting that some of those bullets have to come down. So we’re going to spend all of it here.” Until when the celebration was over.

Years later when we made The Elephant Man, we had a 20-day break because we were going to a location in London, and the writers had roughly 20 days where we could rewrite. I said, “How would you guys like to see where I was stationed?” So we took the ferry and then hired a car in Paris, and we went to Normandy. I knocked on the door of the farmhouse. And the door opened: a bear of a man with a great big black beard. Scary guy. “Que voulez-vous? ” “What do you want?” And he said, “Un moment, un moment.” “One minute.” [Gasps] “Ah, Private Mel!” he shouted. I said, “Oh my God. You were that little—” “Yes! Je suis l’enfant.” “I was the little boy.” He was a monster. He was a big, beautiful guy. And it was a great afternoon.

Apatow: That’s incredible.

Brooks: I’ll never forget that roar. “Private Mel!”

Apatow: When you look back now, do you think the level of fear you experienced during the war affected you when you got back and started working in comedy?

Brooks: Yeah. But in the end, fighting in World War II was better than facing a tough Jewish audience in the mountains. Because I mean, they could kill you. I remember I once said, “Man of 1,000 faces!” I did faces, you know. And I did one; I did Harpo Marx. I figured, I’ll get a laugh by two, you know. And they waited. When I got to about 280, I said, They’re actually waiting for 1,000 faces.

Apatow: Did you know before the war that you wanted to be a comedian in the Catskills?

Brooks: That was the dream. That was the road to being a star comic. If you wanted to become Henny Youngman, I don’t know why, but that was the road you took.

Apatow: Who was the person before World War II that you loved, that you thought, Oh, I’d love to be like that person ?

Brooks: Actually, there was one comic who was really funny. Myron Cohen was his name. He’s very Jewish, and I stole one of his really great, great jokes. The joke went like this: “Guy walks into an appetizing store.” I mean, so Jewish—there are no appetizing stores! “Guy walks into an appetizing store, says to the grocery guy, ‘I want some lox, I want some cream cheese, I want four bagels, I want—’ He stops. He says, ‘Salt, salt. Why have you got so many boxes of salt? All your shelves are covered with red boxes of salt. You must have 100 boxes of salt. You sell a lot of salt?’ And the grocer says, ‘Yeah, well, if I sell a box of salt a week, I’ll throw a party. It’s a miracle. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt? Boy, can he sell salt.’ ” And I love it. I love that joke.

Apatow: How do you think you would have been a different comedian if you hadn’t gone to World War II?

Brooks: When you’re a kid, you don’t really understand totalitarianism. You don’t know what it’s all about, and why they’re shooting. You really don’t understand: Why war? When I found out what Hitler was doing with Jews, that was enough to drive me crazy. I don’t know whether I would fight in any other war, but I was gung ho.

Apatow: Were you funny as a result of being around other funny people or as a result of no one being funny?

Brooks: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I have no idea. I think other people.

Apatow: You were on the very first Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, with Groucho Marx.

Brooks: Johnny Carson was the best. On other shows, they’d fight for the spotlight or they’d fight for the laugh. Johnny Carson never, never fought for the laugh. And he could get plenty. He was good at it. However, if you hit him in the right spot, he’d leave his chair and be down under his desk. Holding his belly, you know? Quite often, I got him down on the ground.

Left: Brooks performs on the first-ever broadcast of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, October 1962. Right: Brooks and Anne Bancroft, his wife of 41 years, in the 1990s. (NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty; Vinnie Zuffante / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

Apatow: But the tape from that very first episode is lost to time.

Brooks: I think they needed the tape.

Apatow: They were like, We got to erase this so we can tape another one! How funny was Groucho? Was he genuinely hilarious? Or was it people writing for him?

Brooks: He was funny. His choice of what to say was sometimes so bizarre, so different. When we hung around with Groucho, he was Julius; he was not Groucho. For some reason, he was triggered to cap a story with a comment that was funnier than what you were doing.

Apatow: He would top everybody.

Brooks: He would top it. He was a topper.

Apatow: There were different cliques of comics. The Hillcrest group, like Jack Benny and all those guys. Then your group was Dom DeLuise and Gene Wilder. It almost seems like Dom was your Chris Farley—anything for a laugh. The second he walked in, you were so happy, and you’d laugh your ass off, and he would want you to laugh your ass off.

Brooks: Right. Exactly, exactly. He loved being funny. He loved making comedy. And yeah. We did that yenem velt.

Apatow: What’s that?

Brooks: It’s a Jewish word which means “otherworld,” maybe “heavenly.” Yenem velt. And it was Dom and his wife, Carol; and there was Norman Lear and Larry Gelbart. And once in a while Ron Clark. And of course, Carl Reiner and his wife, Estelle. You know, Carl wouldn’t let us sleep. We’d go for a weekend at a house in Palm Springs. And we’d all say goodnight, you know, be in our pajamas and stuff. And then over the intercom you’d hear, “Oh, yenem velt ! Oh, yenem velt !” That was Carl. “There is no velt like yenem velt !” Otherworld. It’s like heaven.

Apatow: You’ve had amazing friends. Was that the blessing of your life?

Brooks: It was a blessing. I was so lucky to run into people who were so sweet. And Carl was my best friend, you know. He cared for you. You could feel his love. And he’d stop whatever he was doing. He was so generous with his time for you. Carl was a very different person.

Apatow: I lived with Adam Sandler right after college. So it’s funny for us—

Brooks: He is so incredibly prolific. I can’t get over the amount of good ideas and good jokes and good characters.

Apatow: When he wins awards, I think back to when I lived with Adam, like, Why did we get into comedy? And it really was you, and Rodney Dangerfield, but also the idea that you could write sometimes, be the director sometimes, or the producer. Your career was the model for so many of us.

[Read: Mel Brooks: portrait of an artist as an old man]

Brooks: A multijob. I remember on the Show of Shows, we would write a sketch that was a little dangerous here and there, and they’d cut out the danger and they’d trim it. And I vowed that when I grew up, I’d be a director, so that I didn’t have to give it to a director to spoil. It all became about defending your initial thought, your initial concept. So I started being a writer. Then I defended the script by being a director. Then I defended the project by being the producer, so they wouldn’t sell it or distribute it incorrectly.

Apatow: But that’s stressful too, right? The fighting with the studios. Were you stressed as a businessman, just with the daily battles, or did you get a kick out of it?

Brooks: Mostly stressed.

Left: Brooks wrote, produced, directed, and starred in History of the World, Part I (1981). Right: Brooks and the producer Michael Hertzberg on the set of Blazing Saddles in 1974. (Everett Collection; Everett Collection)

Apatow: Is there a film experience that was your most fun one?

Brooks: I think I finally relaxed by making Robin Hood.

Apatow: And Dave Chappelle is in it.

Brooks: Yeah! From nowhere. I just liked this sweet kid. He came up during the filming; he said, “I’d like to do Malcolm X.” I said, “How?” And he went into this rant. I said, “Do it! Do it!” And he did it in the movie. It was great. Dave Chappelle. Wonderful, sweet guy. Great guy.

Apatow: Did you evolve as a person? What was the arc of your acquiring wisdom, the big lessons you had to learn along the way?

Brooks: You just can’t spout at the mouth. There is a thing called manners, which is very hard to understand why they invented this thing that held you back. It held me back. You can’t live a real life if you’re just a bunch of firecrackers going off. You got to play ball with the universe. So I settled down. I learned that from my oldest brother, Irving. Irving, Lenny, Bernie, and me. And Irving was the wisest. We lost our father when I was 2 and Irving was 10. So Irving took on that duty of raising me. He was the guy in my life. He explained math to me, which was just a jungle of insanity. To this day, I don’t know why we need it.

Apatow: For counting money.

Brooks: Yeah, yeah. Get somebody who loves it; let him do the math. It’s called an accountant. But Irving—we all ate dinner together. So Irving would say, “Shut up,” or “Pay attention,” or “Pass the potatoes.” He was our intelligence, our regulator. And I think Irving really was a great influence in my life, to tame me.

Apatow: Were you just obnoxious, or high-strung?

Brooks: Obnoxious and unthinking. And he made me an aware human being. I was not aware until Irving taught me.

Apatow: And what did Anne [Bancroft, his wife of 41 years, who died in 2005] have to teach you?

Brooks: Anne was one of the wisest people I ever met. And she gave me the best advice, always gave me the best advice. When The New York Times gave me a terrible review of my first movie, The Producers (Renata Adler—thank you, Renata! It was just a terrible review), I said, “Okay, they don’t like me in movies. They liked me in television. I’m going back to television.” Anne said, “No, you’re not. It’s a remarkable movie. It shows how talented you are. You’re gonna stay in movies, and you’re gonna make more movies.” And she’d be there, you know? She was just lovely and wise.

Apatow: Didn’t you win an Oscar for The Producers ?

Brooks: Yeah, for writing.

Apatow: So Renata immediately was proved incorrect. Didn’t you beat Stanley Kubrick for 2001? [Ed. note: He did.]

Brooks: I sent a letter to Renata Adler a few times. I said, “Wrong! You were wrong!”

Apatow: Did she respond?

Brooks: No, I never got a response.

Apatow: Isn’t it funny how mad those reviews can make you when you’re young, and you don’t realize that they don’t matter as much as you thought they did?

Brooks: I always said the critics were very good to me after the movie they knocked. They’d kill something like Blazing Saddles. And then when they reviewed High Anxiety, they’d say, “What happened to the genius that gave us Blazing Saddles ?” And then later they’d say, “This is no High Anxiety.”

Apatow: People now are like, “Can you even show Blazing Saddles ?” Fifty years later. It’s like, “Oh, is that too far?” For something that is also so beloved. I mean, it’s dangerous not to have that type of satire in society.

Brooks: The comedian has always been the court jester. He’s always, You got it wrong, your majesty; you got that one wrong. He’s got to whisper in the king’s ear when the king gets off on the wrong track. We have a good job to do.

Apatow: When did you realize that part of what you’d like to do with some of your comedy was to be shocking? That you were going further than everybody else?

Brooks: That’s a good question, because I didn’t know I was being shocking. I just thought I’d get a big laugh here. The purpose was not to be shocking. The purpose was in the surprise, which, of course I’d get a bigger laugh. It was always to get the biggest laugh. Never to make a political point—I was never making any points. I was always: Surprise them! You know, surprise them and get a big laugh.

Mel Brooks in the late 1960s (TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy)

Apatow: But unconsciously you have a morality that defines your comedy style. Because it’s everywhere—about human nature and the way people are cruel to each other, and the mocking of hurtful people.

Brooks: Sometimes I get angry at something and say, Don’t you know that what you did was bad? Here, I’m going to show you. I’ll just put you on skates. So: Hitler on ice! When I did “The Inquisition” [the song in History of the World, Part I ], I think underneath it the engine was to say, Hey, look what they did to Jews. But as long as you were laughing, it was okay.

Apatow: Because Carl Reiner said that one of the keys to understanding you is that you like to push the joke all the way to abstraction. What do you think he meant by that?

Brooks: That the joke should have more than one meaning than just the joke. Information. You went all the way from comedy to information.

Apatow: Are you very religious? I’m seen as a Jewish comedy person. But I’m not very religious.

Brooks: No.

Apatow: And was your family not religious? I mean, my family wasn’t either.

Brooks: Well, my family wasn’t religious, because we were pretty poor and my mother had to raise four boys with no husband.

Apatow: No time for religion.

Brooks: If she wanted to go to synagogue on a High Holy Day, they were charging a dollar to get in and sit down. And she had four children—that was five bucks. She simply couldn’t afford it. So, not that she wasn’t religious; she just couldn’t.

Apatow: Did you ever feel pulled into it later in life?

Brooks: Never.

Apatow: Where did your philosophy or your spirituality land?

Brooks: To this day, I haven’t worked it out. I’m not sure. I say, “Well, if there is a God, I’m pretty sure he’s Jewish.” But I didn’t think religion would save me. If there is a God, he probably has sent me some warnings that I didn’t heed.

Apatow: Harold Ramis used to say that he didn’t believe in God at all, which made life very simple: “If I don’t believe in God, then in every moment, I get to decide if I’m a good person or a bad person. And I’ve just decided to be a good person. I’d rather do that. And that’s all it is. If it’s up to me, I’d rather be a good guy.”

Brooks: That’s great. I like that. I like that a lot.

Apatow: Because some people spend their whole life searching for answers. But that wasn’t your thing.

Brooks: No.

Apatow: Do you think it was replaced by creativity or comedy? Or did you not even feel it as something that needed to be filled?

Brooks: I say praying is good, but penicillin is better.

Apatow: You were always a big reader, right?

Brooks: Well, when I was just a kid writer—I’ll never forget—Mel Tolkin, the head writer of the Show of Shows, when I worked with him, he said, “Even though you’re an animal from Brooklyn, I think you have the beginnings of a mind.” So he said, “I’m gonna help you; you know, you’re a natural comedy writer, but you should read what comedy is and maybe you’ll get an idea of what path to take.” And he gave me Dead Souls to read. Nikolai Gogol. It’s a brilliant idea and great writing. And then later I read Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, who wrote The Twelve Chairs. I love The Twelve Chairs. I made it into a movie.

Apatow: How did reading those novels change how you were writing, and your creativity?

Brooks: Immensely. They were serious until there was some insane twist at the end, and you say, “Gee, this guy. He really takes his time!” He waits, he sucks you in, and you believe him, and you’re almost in tears, and suddenly you’re laughing. I said, “This guy knows how to do it!” So I read a lot of Gogol and a lot of other comedy writers.

Apatow: Chekhov?

Brooks: Yeah, well, Chekhov wasn’t that funny. But reading was another education.

Apatow: About the absurdity of life.

Brooks: Exactly. So Tolkin was responsible for my leaving the comedy of “I just flew in from Chicago. And boy, are my arms tired.” I checked out of that kind of comedy for something more real and more human.

Brooks and Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein in 1974 (20th Century Fox / Album / Alamy)

Apatow: So he was the mentor of that.

Brooks: Yeah. And Sid was that kind of comedian. He loved real-life comedy, not jokes.

Apatow: A lot of comedians are depressed or tortured. Sid Caesar had his struggles with alcohol. Did you see that?

Brooks: Absolutely. When he finished the show on Saturday night, we would go to a kind of nightclub slash restaurant, like Al & Dick’s. Anyway, he took with him a bottle of vodka and finished that bottle. He needed the relief—the relief and release. And then on Sunday, sometimes I’d visit him just as a friend, not as a writer. And he’d been in the shower for an hour just letting the water run on his head. It was amazing.

I’ll tell you a great story about me and Sid Caesar. I asked to have dinner with Sid, alone. Me and Sid. No other writers. I said, “Sid, you’re genuinely funny. You make funny faces. You can make funny voices. You can imitate a pinball machine. Nobody else can. You’re a pinball machine! You’re perfect.” I said, “Your Show of Shows. You do it on Saturday, and you really knock yourself out. It’s brilliant. It’s funny. It’s hysterically fun. Sunday morning? It’s forgotten. Monday, Tuesday come around. Forgotten. We’re writing a new one. There’s no memory of the show. There’s no history.” I said, “Movies! A bad Buster Keaton movie, 65 years later, is still around, because we can go see it. And we remembered it when we were kids. You make one movie a year, and you’re immortal.” And I said, “I’ve decided I’m gonna go into movies.”

And so a week goes by and he says, “I’m thinking!” I’d pass him in the hall. “I’m thinking!” Finally, he calls me and says, “I want to have dinner with you.” So he sits down and he says, “I think you’re right. But I couldn’t resist. Because when I told Max Liebman” (our producer), “he told Pat Weaver” (who conceived of the Today show). Brilliant guy, Pat Weaver. “And Pat Weaver took it to David Sarnoff” (who ran RCA and founded NBC), “and they got excited.”

And so when it got to Sarnoff, they had a board meeting! Big shots. Sid was making something like $5,000 a show, which was a lot of money in 1952 or 1953; $5,000 a show, every Saturday night. So Max called him in, and Pat Weaver was there. And they had a meeting, and he was offered a three-year contract for $25,000 a show. He said, “I didn’t have to think about it twice. That’s a million dollars this season. I just couldn’t say no. I didn’t know how to say no to that.” So he said, “After our contract is over, we’ll go into movies.” I said, “It may be too late.” And that was it.

Apatow: It’s true that people should remember Sid Caesar more.

Brooks: My finest hour was writing for Sid Caesar as a young comedy writer. The kids today say, “Who?” How could you say “Who?” 

Apatow: You were so forward-thinking about that, because in today’s media landscape, one of the big issues is there’s too much stuff, and it disappears really fast. So to have planted your flag with all these movies—you know, Blazing Saddles is like The Wizard of Oz.

Brooks: So it’s still true that movies are forever.

Apatow: I always remember seeing Young Frankenstein here in Santa Monica. The biggest laughs I’ve ever heard. There’s Something About Mary, Airplane!, and Young Frankenstein—and Young Frankenstein clearly had the most. The place was just losing their minds. But I was surprised at the jokes’ success rates. Because how we do it today is so different than how you did it. We improvise our brains out. If a joke doesn’t work, we have 10 other jokes in the footage. But you’re just believing in your scripts. You don’t have eight other “Oh, Gene riffed a whole nother version of this.” It’s pretty incredible. Do you notice a difference—like when you were working with Nick Kroll [on History of the World, Part II, released in March], did you go, Damn, Nick’s as funny as some of those guys ?

Brooks: Well, you know—funny is funny. They were great. It’s just a pleasure. Sometimes I could still make them laugh, which is a thrill for me. I had an idea about General Robert E. Lee at the surrender at Appomattox. I said, “He’s the only guy really dressed up. He was always very snappy, and he wore his sword. He always wears his sword to the meeting, you know? And every time he turned around, he hit somebody in the balls with it.” They loved that. It’s in the show.

Apatow: We all know the writers’ rooms where people will say anything to make the room laugh.

Brooks: Yeah.

Apatow: But now people go, “Will I get in trouble?”

Brooks: Nothing is off the table. Nothing. It’s not for us to censor ourselves. There are plenty of censors around, you know?

Apatow: Could you sense your influence on them, in how they wrote jokes?

Brooks: I don’t know. I’m not sure about that. Sometimes comedy’s a mystery. The why and how.

Apatow: Isn’t it weird? You just never know. Every joke is an experiment that could succeed or fail spectacularly.

Brooks: Exactly, exactly. You never know. But there is one rule: You don’t go further if it didn’t make you laugh. You personally have to break up and laugh, or the idea is off the board.

Brooks, Apatow, and Carl Reiner in 2013 (Courtesy of Judd Apatow)

Apatow: I remember I once saw you talking about how you don’t like to type. That had a big influence on me. I tried to write longhand, but I didn’t like that. So I started doing more dictation. I don’t even like the idea of typing, because I feel like it slows down my mind that I’m doing this mechanical thing.

Brooks: It seemed to me that anytime it was typed, it was finished.

Apatow: No matter how bad it was.

Brooks: Because I couldn’t type, and I would write in longhand. And then some secretary would type, and I’d say, “Whoa, looks good.” The look of it was good. That’s why typed is dangerous.

Apatow: Do you noodle around with creative things now?

Brooks: Once in a while. I never know when it’s gonna strike me, you know? I think of something and it’s a mystery where it comes from, and how it proceeds in your mind, to how it gets organized into a sketch or into a play.

Apatow: People always say that the key to aging is being engaged and social and having friends—that it’s more important than even quitting smoking, that you have a passion.

Brooks: Some people are—there’s a reason why they last. Because they’ve got a good mind that grabs something and uses it. I remember sitting at the table at NBC. A couple of us were sitting there, and George Burns was sitting opposite me. I had tuna fish. And Jack Benny was a guest star on, maybe it was on Carson or something. But anyway, he walked past our table. And he was dressed as an Indian chief with moccasins, feathers, and everything. And George Burns looked up and said, “Hi, Jack. Working?” Just, I mean, gifted. The turn of mind that seized on something and nailed it.

Apatow: Sometimes an idea comes and it’s so out of the blue that it makes you go, There must be something going on, because it’s just weird that that arrived in some way. That’s the only time I ever think that there might be a God.

Brooks: Strange emanations from where and how.

Apatow: Bob Dylan used to say the whole song just came. You were around in that scene in the ’60s, though. Would you go to see Lenny Bruce?

Brooks: Absolutely. Lenny Bruce had a tremendous—what a mind. For instance, I’ll never forget, in one of his shows, he said out of the blue, “What if Jesus was electrocuted?” Just that one sentence. I really shrieked. What a mind.

Apatow: Would we all be wearing little electric chairs?

Brooks: You’re right! He said, “At the top of every tall building, there’d be an electric chair. And we’d wear little electric chairs around our neck.” I mean, it was amazing.

Apatow: It really felt like no one else was doing this.

Brooks: In five minutes, he really just busted up all my thinking.

Apatow: Was it shocking?

Brooks: Yeah. No one talked like that before. I said, “That’s the opposite of ‘I just flew in from Chicago. And boy, are my arms tired.’ ”

Apatow: Your body of work is so enormous. How do you look at it now?

Brooks: I don’t look back at it. I simply don’t. I just know that we did a lot of good things.

Apatow: Well, there’s a quote from you where you said, “We should enjoy life; we should not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves more.”

Brooks: Yeah.

Apatow: Has that always been your philosophy?

Brooks: No, I just made that up at the moment.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “The Immortal Mel Brooks.”

On Sunday, 500,000 people marched peacefully through the streets of Warsaw. The occasion marked the 34th anniversary of elections that led to Poland’s nonviolent exit from communism. But the mass showing was no ritual commemoration; it was both a celebration of the past and a protest against the current Polish government’s effort to return the country to autocracy.

The ruling Law and Justice Party government had spent the previous week mocking the march’s organizers and discouraging Poles from participating. On its official Twitter account, the party even went so far as to publish an outrageous video spot featuring footage of train tracks in front of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with The June 4th March superimposed over the camp’s entrance. A few politicians walked back their party’s attempt to weaponize Auschwitz, but the offensiveness of the spot stoked public anxiety in the week leading up to June 4: Would Law and Justice try to shut down the march? Would the two dozen “counterprotests” approved for the same day become a pretext for violent provocations by some of the far-right organizations that draw government subsidies?

[From the October 2018 issue: A warning from Europe]

Elections are often written off as boring procedural exercises; even in free societies, without state TV channels that drown out the opposition with progovernment propaganda, opponents have a hard time mobilizing voters to dislodge the ruling party. Why, then, should commemorating the anniversary of elections held more than three decades ago strike such fear into the hearts of Poland’s governing elite?

Contemporaries worldwide are more likely to remember June 4, 1989, as the day when 200,000 Chinese troops made the streets of Beijing run red with the blood of protesting students and bystanders. Halfway around the world from Tiananmen Square, however, Poles had spent the day voting in their freest elections since the 1920s. That exercise led to an extraordinary, previously unthinkable moment: Poland’s autocratic, Moscow-backed communists voluntarily surrendered power, acknowledging that the Solidarity movement had overwhelmingly defeated them at the polls.

In the words of the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who observed the elections firsthand, “until almost the day before, anyone who had predicted these events would have been universally considered not a logician but a lunatic.” Mikhail Gorbachev was already celebrated across the Soviet Bloc for his reforms at home, but Poles took seriously the risk that he might green-light a Red Army intervention to keep communists in power. News of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which broke simultaneously with the Polish election results, heightened these worries. Instead, Gorbachev blessed the results, and Solidarity created a coalition government led by Eastern Europe’s first noncommunist prime minister in decades.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the election that brought down communism in Poland was therefore celebrated. But the Law and Justice Party has spent a good part of the past two decades convincing voters that the 1989 election should instead be a source of shame: Communists should have been hanged; dissidents who made the 1989 elections possible sold Poland out for a quick buck; and Poland is still governed by a shadow conspiracy.

The bottom-line message from Law and Justice is that most Polish voters should stay home, even if they worry that Poland is currently governed by autocratic xenophobes, because the only alternative is an opposition that will sell Poland out to the Russians—and that derives from a political lineage that has been doing so since the 1980s. What once was a fringe position on the right is now mainstream in Poland. Parliamentary elections are coming up this fall, and Law and Justice fears a loss, so it is making full use of antidemocratic tactics honed over eight years in government: subordinating the judiciary to elected politicians, turning public media into government-propaganda outlets, and fomenting culture wars.

Throughout 2022, experts imagined that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine might reverse Poland’s antidemocratic course, with the European Union and NATO seeing Poland as their anti-Russian bulwark. Alas, this was wishful thinking. In March, TVN, a majority-U.S.-owned television station, aired a documentary revealing that Pope John Paul II had been entangled in clerical abuse in communist Poland. The U.S. ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry to answer for the TV station’s involvement in “hybrid warfare.” The import was clear: Challenging the government-sanctioned image of a heroic Poland, symbolized by a saintly pope, threatens NATO, because NATO needs Poland.

Scholarly lectures that provide evidence of Polish anti-Semitic violence during the Holocaust are now regularly, even violently, disrupted. Just last week at Warsaw’s German Historical Institute, a far-right parliamentarian staged a sit-in to prevent a lecture on government censorship of Holocaust research. He flashed his official ID at police trying to evict him, claiming that it afforded him immunity. The would-be speaker, the distinguished historian Jan Grabowski, was spirited out the building’s back door to avoid violence by right-wing protesters. He said, “I felt like I was in Poland in the 1930s.”

What brought Poland to a frenzy in the week leading up to Sunday’s anniversary goes beyond culture wars in alleged defense of Poland’s public image. On May 29, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into law a bill creating a new standing commission to investigate Russian influence in Poland from 2007 to 2022. The commission is empowered to investigate any citizen, without obligation to produce documentation. Rather than a narrowly defined mandate, the law contains vague wording (it provides no definition of Russian influence) that affords the Parliament-appointed commission almost limitless scope: It can break the legal protections surrounding confidential business dealings; it can pierce attorney-client privilege.

[From the December 1962 issue: Poland]

Polish civil-society critics have focused primarily on what the law means for elections, because the commission can ban anyone from public office for 10 years. Law and Justice lawmakers have been vocal about their intention to use the law against Poland’s main opposition politician, former Prime Minister and former European Council President Donald Tusk. (Opponents call the new law “Lex Tusk.”) But the law declares that the commission also has wide powers to reverse or declare null and void any “administrative decision that was rendered under Russian influence to the detriment of the interests of the Polish Republic.” The commission can unilaterally cancel contracts in commercial sectors connected to “critical infrastructure,” such as energy and information technology, with potentially catastrophic implications for business investment in Poland. And all of the commission’s determinations are final: They are nominally subject to an administrative court appeal, but that court can only verify that the commission acted according to the law that created it. For all intents and purposes, the politically appointed, administrative commission wields supreme judicial power.

The law is Polish McCarthyism, plain and simple. On May 29, the State Department released a press statement noting, “We share the concerns expressed by many observers that this law to create a commission to investigate Russian influence could be used to block the candidacy of opposition politicians without due process.” The European Parliament voted to debate the new Polish law. A former Polish prime minister (now a Law and Justice MEP) responded by promising to punish Poles who used “the European Parliament to incite rebellion in Poland, calling openly for people to go out into the streets.”

Jarosław Kurski, an influential commentator in Poland, noted on Sunday that it was no longer possible to separate the celebration of the country’s peaceful 1989 revolution from “fury at the shameless and incompetent governance of Law and Justice.” The turnout of a half million was 10 times what organizers had predicted—it amounted to one-third of Warsaw’s population—and that number does not even include the smaller marches across Poland’s major cities.

The far right planned to meet these demonstrations with counterprotests, but clearly 500,000 people could not be stopped even by violent far-right provocateurs. Yet Law and Justice doesn’t need to send police or fascist gangs into city streets to shut down political opposition. In the fall of 2020, more than 400,000 Poles protested the effective elimination of abortion rights by the Law and Justice–controlled Constitutional Tribunal; in the end, the government waited out the protests, then enforced the abortion ban.

Poles have taken June 4 back as a symbol of hope that one election can reverse an autocratic tide. Now comes the hard part: translating Sunday’s turnout in Warsaw’s streets into votes at the polls this autumn.