This week Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution. Civil-rights groups challenged the bills, and some medical providers who oversee the treatments have already quit or left the state. The estimated  tens of thousands of young people in Texas who identify as trans—roughly 1 percent of the state’s population of kids between ages 13 and 17, according to one count—and their families, must grapple with a new political reality.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to one trans girl who found herself caught in the middle of these debates in Texas. She says she’s not an activist. She doesn’t protest for her right to medical care or mention her identity on her Instagram bio. She’s not “super-pro Democrat,” she says. She describes herself as not a “cheerleader or anything,” just a “normal, semi-popular girl.” She’s grown up with supportive parents, in an accepting community. But just as she was facing puberty, trans medical care became something politicians argue over. She could handle middle-school bullies. It was knowing the Texas government was against her that made her worry that she would be taken away from her parents, and question whether she could stay in the state.

Her mother and father faced an agonizing decision about what to do. They loved living in Austin. But their family was not safe. And they started to see signs in their daily life—in school, in the dentist’s office, at the hospital—that their family was in danger. They ultimately decided to leave, becoming a new kind of domestic political refugee.

“I started realizing that not only it was the kids and the people being mean, but it was the government in my state that was now also against me.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m, like, fixated on your posters. I’m just, like—I really want to start the interview, but I’m just trying to guess what each of the posters are. Who set up your room when you moved?

Teenager: Me.

Rosin: You did? Did you have—are these movie posters from your old room?

Teenager: Yeah, I brought most of my stuff I’ve seen.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And I’m talking to a teenager from Texas. Or she used to be from Texas. She left the state earlier this year and moved to a more suburban-y place in California.

Teenager: I was new. I got here after winter break, so I was like the only new kid in the middle of the year.

Rosin: What’s the first thing you noticed about it? Because you think of yourself as a city kid.

Teenager: The first thing I noticed was I saw the same cars all the time. I’ll say that.

Rosin: What do you mean? Your dad said you were into cars, and I was like, “Really? What do you mean?” What’s your favorite car, by the way?

Teenager: Subaru WRX STI, 2004.

Rosin: Damn, he was not kidding.

Teenager: And I work on cars too. You should see my shelves. I have an alternator, an oil cover, and a muffler, and a bunch of tools up on my shelf.

Rosin: Okay, so, before we go back to what happened and how you landed here: Your parents said that you wanted to talk, or were willing to talk, because we asked them about that. I was wondering, did you have a reason? Why did you want to talk to us?

Teenager: Um, well, I wasn’t 100 percent sure what we were gonna really be talking about, but if it is what I think it is, it’s just about me and everything in Texas.

Rosin: “Everything in Texas”

How one state senator wrote a letter to the attorney general one day asking whether what he called “sex-change procedures” for children equaled child abuse.

And then suddenly all the grown-ups—senators, judges, teachers, parents, reporters—were talking about things like puberty blockers and gender-reassignment surgeries and who was doing the better job “protecting children.”

And now this fact about herself, that she mostly talked about with her parents, her doctor, maybe one or two people at school, had now become a political issue.

She still cannot fathom why anyone would be yelling about this in the statehouse or on the streets or wherever.

Teenager: I’m not a part of the trans community; I am trans. That’s it. I don’t have flags up in my room; I don’t have it in my Instagram bio. I’m not a crazy super-pro-Democrat. I mean of course I’m against the people who are making my life like this, but I’m not an advocate or an activist; that’s why I want to do this anonymously.

I don’t go to protests; I don’t. I’m not very involved in the trans community, and not that I have a problem with that, but that’s just not who I am.

Rosin: Hmm. So who are you then? That’s really, really, really important, what you just said, because I think, if you’re talking about this, you’re affected by politics. People might just make those assumptions, but like, that’s just not you.

Teenager: I’m just—I’m not, like, “Oh, I’m a cheerleader,” or anything, but I’m a normal, semi-popular girl.

Rosin: Mhmm. And what do you most remember about living in Austin?

Teenager: My best day in Austin probably was summer of fifth grade, and everyone in the whole neighborhood got together, and we had water-balloon fights every day all summer.

Rosin: That sounds amazing. And are you good at water-balloon fights?

Teenager: I would like to say. Mostly, I remember being good, everyone being nice and happy. And when I actually, like, formally “came out” or whatever, I was probably 11. But everyone knew by the time I was, like, in second grade.

Rosin: Because had you said things?

Teenager: Kinda like how I dressed and how I acted. I didn’t act weird, but I just wasn’t a boy. It was never something that set me apart when I was younger. I was just who I was and everyone was okay with it. Then once everyone got older and got into middle school, they developed their opinions about me and people like me. Most of Austin was nice. But of course if you’re in the middle of Texas, people are gonna let you know what they think about you.

Rosin: Mhm. What’s the first time you remember having that thought?

Teenager: Probably COVID year, in sixth grade, when everyone was online. I was probably searching for something for class, and then the news things come up, and then, you know, I click on it, and I kind of went down this rabbit hole.

Rosin: And what did you understand? Or what words jumped out at you?

Teenager: Um, “unhealthy,” I think, jumped out, and um, “unhealthy” and “unnatural.”

Rosin: Mmm, those are hard words to read, unhealthy and unnatural. What was the thought in your head after you read those?

Teenager: I laughed. I thought—oh, I didn’t laugh, but I thought it was funny. Because, at first I thought, like, Oh, it’s a hick; it’s a redneck; it’s a … I don’t care, ’cause it’s not like I’m ever gonna be in contact with these people. So it didn’t affect me. I was fine. I honestly didn’t mind it. I was like, Okay. But then on and on, I realized, like, Oh, it’s not just random Texas guys and their trailers. It’s kids, and it’s everyone. A lot of people.

Rosin: How did you come to realize that?

Teenager: Probably seventh grade. And I got to be with, instead of with fifth graders, with seventh graders. Then I realized a lot of these kids think the same as what I thought was a couple of old rednecks. But I realized that a lot of people in my life agreed with what those people thought.

Rosin: And what was your main feeling? Were you scared? Were you sad? What do you remember of how you were actually feeling during that period?

Teenager: I was annoyed. I didn’t want anything to do with them either.

Rosin: Mmhmm. So at that point, it’s still just annoying?

Teenager: I thought that, eventually, they would move on. They did not. And so I became less annoyed and more angry, but never really sad. And then I started realizing that not only was it the kids and the people being mean, but it was the government in my state that was now also against me.

Mark Davis: That is today’s slate, so let’s go right to the phones. Say hi to Governor Abbott. Good morning, sir. How are you doing?

Rosin: In July 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott spoke to Mark Davis, a local conservative talk-show host.

Davis asked him about a proposal to outlaw medical treatments for transgender youth.

Which, heads up, Davis invokes a false notion about surgery for minors that is common in anti-trans circles, and he does it in pretty crude language.

Abbott: I’ll be candid with you. I’ll tell you what everybody knows, and that is: The chances of that passing during the session in the House of Representatives was nil.

Davis: Why? In a conservative state with Republicans in charge, a law that states, “We’re not going to let you carve up your tenth grader ’cause he thinks he’s a girl,” how in God’s name does that not pass in Texas?

Abbott: I can’t answer that. However, what I can tell you is: I have another way of achieving the exact same thing.

Rosin: Pretty soon, it became clear what his way was.

John Krinjak, Fox 7 News: In a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Governor Greg Abbott claiming so-called sex-change procedures constitute child abuse and directing the agency to investigate any reported instances.

In the letter, Governor Abbott calls on teachers, doctors, and nurses to report if they think these treatments are happening.

Rosin: This was the moment that these ideas, that this teenager was “unhealthy” and “unnatural,” moved from somewhere out there in Texas to the statehouse and then landed in her own house—more specifically, her mother’s bedroom.

Mom: I did not sleep at all that night.

Rosin: Because, theoretically at least, Child Protective Services could remove a child from their home. That’s her mom by the way. We’re keeping the family’s identities private to try to protect them and their children from harassment.

In their Slack group, the parents of trans kids started to try to manage their panic by trading information. Could they trust their teachers? Did they need to prepare an emergency medical file? Should they hire a lawyer?

Mom: Children could be taken from the home or school or anywhere at any time and put in foster care during the investigation. So that’s when the real fear began.

Rosin: Though maybe it would be more accurate to say: That’s when the fear became much harder to manage. The fear had always been there, just in a different way. The kind of fear you have as a parent when your child isn’t like everyone else and you have to actively work to convince yourself that it’s okay; they’ll be safe, if the world will just agree to be nice about it.

Mom: The first day that it was very marked was a school or a classroom play. And she auditioned only for the female parts, but at that time wasn’t socially identifying as female, and it was perfectly fine. She got the most glamorous female part, got the most glamorous dress, costume, makeup for it, and was the first time I think we really, like, She really likes that costume, and—

Rosin: Can you describe the costume? I’m curious. And what year was this, by the way?

Mom: Third grade, so 8 years old, and she was Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

So a pink tulle dress with a big, huge skirt and high heels. And she had long hair at that time.

Dad: Both of our kids had sort of long hair, and when we would go on road trips, when we’d go to restaurants, 75 percent of the time or more, the servers would think they were both girls.

Mom: That didn’t happen in Austin, but as soon as we left, whenever we’d leave Austin, it’d be like, “And for the little ladies?” And they’d be fine with it.

Rosin: [Laughs.] And just so I don’t exaggerate or say it wrong, was it really this smooth? Like there was nothing?

Mom: Totally. Before the transition: the only “boy,” invited to all the girls’ slumber parties, friends who were boys, no friction in the elementary school.

Rosin: So when is the first moment you remember that ease not being there anymore?

Mom: At age 12, when I think the early signs of puberty began, she started to show more distress and came to me and said, “I don’t want to be a boy. I want to be a girl.” And was from that moment on, and never any wavering, that she has been a girl.

Dad: Never a moment.

Mom: Change to a female name, female pronouns, everything.

Rosin: How did you think it was gonna unfold? Like, how did you—what did you think the next, like, the middle-school, high-school years were gonna be like?

Mom: She was very distressed by even the early signs of male development. So we spent a lot of time in the, What is this? Did so much research, contacted experts who were in these New York Times articles from both sides, had full consultations with them, pros and cons; got into the local endocrinology clinic, had very, very long conversations with them.

I definitely had the thoughts of, like, Can a 12-year-old make this decision? We wouldn’t let our child get a tattoo. Why would we let them do this? So I definitely went through all of that and all the things of, What are these interventions? I am gonna read all of the real primary research on what is, what do these interventions do to brain development, heart development. I definitely was open to, like, if there’s a problem with this stuff, I want to know.

Rosin: It sounds like you guys are in the sort of parental tight space. You're like, What’s this gonna mean for my kid? What’s this gonna mean for us as a family? But you didn’t see any bigger trouble on the horizon. You weren’t thinking about that.

Mom: The Texas of it all. No. [Exasperated laughs.]

Rosin: They started “going to the endo,” as the teenager called it. Every three months, the nurse would inject a puberty blocker into her thigh. She asked her mom to video because it was a big needle and she wanted proof for her future self and everyone else of how tough she was.

At some point during her treatments, the governor’s directive went into effect, which meant that doctors and nurses were required to report any efforts to enable a child’s gender transition to Child Protective Services. It was unclear whether the governor had the authority to issue this directive, but he did.

The clinic told the family that, for the moment at least, they would keep seeing patients, implying they would not turn anyone in.

Rosin: When you said you were up all night, what were the thoughts in your head?

Mom: Yeah. The thoughts were, Can I send my child to school? Because I am sending my child into a state-run agency where all of the staff have now been instructed to report us to Child Protective Services, so does my child go to school? Or not? And decided the next morning that we had to let our daughter know if she were called to the office and asked any questions about her gender, to not answer them and to call us, to not give them any information, because they said they could take the child without informing the parents or talking to the parents first.

Rosin: There were already news reports of an eighth grader pulled out of a classroom without his parents present, of an investigator who visited a kid at home and asked, “Who’s the better cook, your mom or your dad? Do you know where your privates are? Has anyone touched them?”

Mom: We had to put together a whole docket of all the paperwork saying, trying to prove that it wouldn’t be abuse, so that if she were taken into foster care, we could get her back as soon as possible.

Rosin: Was it really like one day it was fine, the next day you hear about a directive on social media? Like, was that how it happened in your life?

Mom: Yes.

Rosin: It just came out of the—like, you’re living your life, driving your kids, doing whatever you’re doing, and then just one day this lands on you?

Mom: Yeah. And I’ll give two examples. We had an endocrinology appointment not long after the letter, and our daughter was afraid I was going to be arrested on sight. And at the dentist where a new hygienist pulled me aside and said, “Y’all aren’t safe here. We had a staff meeting this morning, and most of the staff said they didn’t think children should be allowed to be transgender, so you should find another practice.”

Teenager: At school, um, during standardized tests, they have to use my legal name

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: In the doctor’s office, they have to do the same protocols as they do with any other boy. Any, like, government or official office refers to me as someone that I’m not.

Rosin: And did that ever happen to you? Like did you ever have an encounter?

Teenager: All the time.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: It’s not just a political situation; it’s, like, making my life a crime, right? My parents could be sent to CPS, and I could go to foster care. So that was probably the moment where it started to make me more sad than angry.

Rosin: In May, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the governor couldn’t compel DFPS to investigate. Civil-rights groups also sued the state, which created a legal standstill.

The teenager kept getting her injections.

As summer turned to fall, there was something to grab on to. Governor Abbott, who had opened the investigations, was up for reelection against Democrat Beto O’Rourke, and the race was at least a race.

The night of the election, some neighbors had planned a block party. The kids made Beto signs; Austin’s “gentle weirdos,” as her parents called them, gathered to do their thing: play vinyls, drum, have some beers.

The results started coming in.

Teenager: I remember that one night when my dad brought everyone and everyone from the street was watching the election and then the bad guy that we didn’t want to win won, and then I was around everyone else. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody talked about it; it was just like a Saturday-night thing. Like it was a party.

It didn’t affect anyone else, other than me. With this guy getting elected, for everyone else it was just like, they were into politics, so they wanted to watch it. And they were like, “Uh, he didn’t win.” And then, you know, said whatever they thought about it, but I was like, “Why is everyone …?” I didn’t say anything. I wanted to go home, because I didn’t feel like that’s something that should be a party.

Rosin: Yeah, I totally get that. For you, some tragedy happened, and everyone’s, like, cleaning up the dishes.

Teenager: It reminded me of the Hunger Games books, where they all go to watch this terrible thing happen. Which I didn’t understand.

I think that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Probably.

Rosin: What was the straw? The election?

Teenager: Yeah. I only went to school for a couple days until I went to the hospital, so I, you know, obviously wasn’t in a safe place geographically and then also mentally. So those two combined things made me make some really bad decisions and made me close to making another really bad decision.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: So I went to the hospital for a couple weeks and then—

Rosin: Did you take yourself? Did you ask to go to the hospital?

Teenager: I knew that I had to.

When I was, like, getting set up for the hospital, my dad was asking me, like, “What’s going on?” And I told him, “It’s ’cause of Texas,” and he was like, “Okay.”

Dad: When a minor says that they don’t feel safe or that they might hurt themselves, it triggers an involuntary commitment process. And so they took her in an ambulance. I drove behind because, you know, I couldn’t drive her there. So this was really the first moment of, like, We are losing control of our child. Now this process that we’ve been afraid of for most of the year is now under way. The wheels are turning, and we don’t really know what is going to happen now.

Mom: At the intake, the intake person said she didn’t think kids should be given the right to choose this, as we’re there taking her in.

Dad: She had understood before I did that we have to leave.

Mom: I’ve been up thinking about what we can do, and I said, “One option is we can move to a different state where you’d be safe and legal.” And she lit up and said, “That would make me very happy.”

Rosin: So they made this maybe extreme arrangement. She would leave right away. The rest of the family still had a life in Texas—work, school—so in the meantime, the parents would split their time between California and Austin, and the whole family would reunite over the summer

Rosin: When they called you and said, “We’re moving,” what was your reaction?

Teenager: I was excited. Obviously, I don’t want to move from where I’ve lived, but it’s gonna be better.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: Yeah, I was happy.

Rosin: Uh-huh. And what about the rest of your family? How did the conversations go in the house about moving?

Teenager: My brother doesn’t, my dad doesn’t, and my mom don’t. They don’t want to move, but I do. And if it were up to me, I would probably go and live with my grandparents and let them stay here in Texas, because I don’t want to do that to them. But at the same time, I’m not—I didn’t want the fact that I happen to live in a place that is in America, the country that is the home of the free, like, if I’m just a couple thousand miles away from, you know, not having to feel like this.

Rosin: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

Teenager: I’m not gonna put up with everything.

Rosin: How is your California school, by the way? I was curious about it.

Teenager: I think at my new school, though, the politics of this area is better. My peers are a lot worse than in Texas, because they don’t understand truly how what they say can affect other people. So they’ll say a lot more hurtful stuff and a lot more often, but it doesn’t really affect me as long as I know that the politics—like, here, I’m safe.

I don’t have to hide.

Rosin: Best-case scenario for the summer and the next year, worst-case scenario?

Teenager: Best-case scenario: My family gets adjusted, and everyone has a good time. Worst-case scenario: They don’t like it here, and everyone’s miserable, except for me.

Rosin: By summer, her whole family joined her in California. It wasn’t easy for them to move, but they could pull it off—a lot of families in Texas couldn’t.

In May, all the doctors at the Texas clinic where the teenager had gotten her shots left after the attorney general announced he would investigate the clinic.

In June, the governor signed a new bill, which was a version of the original bill he’d been trying to pass all those years.

It points at doctors, criminalizing puberty blockers and hormones and any surgeries for minors—basically any medical interventions to enable a minor’s transition.

This law goes into effect in September.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Ethan Brooks and edited by our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid. It was mixed by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress.

If you or a loved one is having thoughts of suicide, please call National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. Or text talk—T-A-L-K—to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

In an era of artificial wonders, authenticity—or at least the illusion of it—is only going to become a more coveted commodity. Perhaps that’s one reason country music has ruled the highest reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 for most of the summer. And no one is selling authenticity like Oliver Anthony, a former factory worker from Virginia who was totally unknown until his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” hit No. 1 two weeks ago. His rise is surprising, but it also fits with a long pattern of audiences cherishing—and power brokers exploiting—figures who seem like the real deal.

Sporting a beard and voice of comparable wildness, Anthony yowls a blend of working-class angst, complaints about the welfare state, and references to child trafficking by elites on “Richmond.” The power of his performance is straightforward; the reaction has not been. While right-wing figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene evangelized for the song days after its release, music-industry experts wondered if an astroturfed campaign was unfolding: Digital downloads, an outdated and easily manipulated format that receives outsize weight in how the charts are calculated, drove the song’s initial ascent. Such suspicions—as well as liberal criticisms that Anthony’s lyrics dissed poor and obese people—spurred indignation from political pundits for whom Anthony’s success confirmed various pet narratives. At the GOP presidential debate, the very first question was about Anthony: “Why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now?”

The story has become even more complicated since then. Driven more now by streaming than downloads, “Richmond” is spending a second week at No. 1, which suggests that it has found a genuine foothold among listeners (unlike country’s other recent benefactor of right-wing rage, Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which plummeted to No. 21 after one week at the top of the chart). And Anthony is pushing back against attempts to use him as a political prop. In a video he posted on Friday, he said he laughed at the fact that he was invoked at a GOP debate. “That song was written about the people on that stage,” he said. He also defended himself against liberal allegations that his lyrics attack the needy. What he’s doing, he said, is speaking the truth about how America’s “haves” work to keep its “have-nots” feeling helpless.

The video in which he says these things is a fascinating document. Anthony talks for 10 minutes into the camera, from the front seat of his truck, while rain hammers the roof. Behind the conflagration of his beard is a face of actorly wholesomeness, with a wry smile and slate-blue eyes. He speaks with quiet carefulness about having connected with disgruntled workers across the world. Stardom beckons, but he’s wary: “I don’t want to go on some roller-coaster ride and come off a different person.”

Anthony began writing music in 2021, during what he describes as a dark period for the world and for himself. The scattered songs he has posted online connect personal problems such as sadness and addiction to the failings of modern society: “People have really gone and lost their way / They all just do what the TV say,” goes a typical line from “I Want to Go Home.” Hot-button issues show up—one song, “Doggonit,” maligns insect protein and self-driving cars—but mostly as a scary contrast with his rural refuge: “There’s a little town somewhere, the only thing you hear at night / Is that old mill humming.” If his policy views sound confusing and occasionally conspiracy-minded, they might be taken as evidence of how many despairing Americans have been fed confusion and conspiracy theories rather than a constructive political vision.

If anything is radical here, it is not Anthony’s ideology but his asceticism. He’s sick of Republicans and Democrats, but more forcefully, he’s sick of technology, and most of all sick of working for the man. What he wants to do, he says in his songs, is relax with pot, wine, and his dogs. These are classic country-music wishes, but Anthony’s lonely, scraping voice creates a more apocalyptic mood than what Nashville tends to promote. Messianic musical traditions—gospel with its transcendence of the material world, or even reggae with its rejection of Babylon—come to mind. But he is, thus far, a reluctant savior at most. He claims to have turned down an $8 million record deal. He wants to remain, as he wrote on Facebook, “just some idiot and his guitar.”

Oliver’s arrival can’t help but bring to mind another white working-class hero in country music—though framing Zach Bryan in any sort of culture-war context feels a bit unfair. A 27-year-old former Navy ordnanceman from Oklahoma, Bryan has mostly avoided talking politics outside of labeling himself a libertarian and discouraging transphobia. His influences include classic country voices such as Merle Haggard, indie-rock softies such as Bon Iver, and, most of all, Bruce Springsteen and his grit, idealism, and vulnerability.

Bryan’s rise began when he, while still in the military, started posting lo-fi videos of himself singing and playing guitar. For a taste, look to “Heading South,” which he filmed in September 2019. He’s outside at night, bugs humming in the background. He has the jawline of a superhero and the guileless air of a cherub. The phone camera is at knee height, his pupils and skin flash red, and he sings in great, gasping gulps. The song is a tumble of strummed chords set to an anxious rhythm tapped out by his left leg. The lyrics celebrate a rural misfit who amazes the world with his songs. “They’ll never understand that boy and his kind,” goes one line. “All they comprehend is a worthless dollar sign.”

[Read: When small-town pride sounds like anger]

Today, that song’s narrative feels like a prophecy. Bryan touts a Grammy nomination, a top-10 Hot 100 hit (“Something in the Orange”), a sold-out arena tour, and collaborations with stars including Kacey Musgraves and the Lumineers. He somewhat fits the mold of “alt country” singers who capture the NPR crowd, but if you scroll through social media, you’ll find fan fervor reminiscent of what’s bestowed upon telegenic rappers or Taylor Swift.

Last week, he released a self-titled album that applies a light dash of polish to his primary asset: his voice. Bryan sometimes sounds like he’s on the verge of laughter and other times like he’s delivering his lyrics in a sobbing bellow. Usually, he seems to be rasping around a syllable, giving his melodies a kind of bleeding, watercolor effect. His songwriting is elegantly idiosyncratic too. “Summer’s Close” strings together nature metaphors to describe romance, but if you listen closely, you hear a specific story about illness and loss. The song closes, “Tonight I’m dancing for two.”

Bryan, like Anthony, has a kind of defiant gravitas: Though Nashville’s current standard-bearer, Morgan Wallen, uses rural-versus-urban stories as grist for breezy romantic comedies, Bryan’s music is more like a Terrence Malick drama. He sings of being a wanderer, cycling between adventure and return, constantly renewing his appreciation for the simple life. On the spoken-word poem that opens his new album, he says that “excess never leads to better things / It only piles and piles on top of the things that are already abundantly in front of you.” On another track, “Tradesman,” he rejects the music industry’s overtures: “Give me something I can’t fake / That rich boys can’t manipulate / Something real that they can’t take / Cuz, Lord, I’m not your star.”

If an ideology underlies that hunt for “something real”—both for Bryan and for Anthony—it is most credibly described as an exhaustion with capitalism. These men sing of being drained by hustle, bored by superficiality, and weary of exploitation; they insist that the valuable things in life can’t be bought or sold. In Anthony’s professed reluctance to play ball with the music industry, you can, perhaps, see a similar impulse to the one that has led Bryan to take a stand against excessive pricing schemes for concerts. (The name of Bryan’s 2022 live album: All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster.)

But it would be naive to see either of these budding artists as serving any coherent political project. Music, especially popular music, rarely works that tidily. These men are, in fact, offering a different flavor of the same balm that pose-striking pop divas or slick Nashville bros do. Politicians comb culture for art they can co-opt as propaganda, but listeners tend to want something else: commiseration as they dream of a world purer than the one they live in.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur running for the Republican presidential nomination, has initiated a war against what he views as an outdated, establishment foreign policy. He is deeply skeptical of NATO. He wants to swiftly end the war in Ukraine, detach Russia from China, and compel Taiwan to defend itself without America. He also proposed reducing American financial aid to Israel, a stance long considered politically impossible on the right, before saying he would do so only with Israel’s approval. This week, Ramaswamy attempted to justify such stands with an essay in The American Conservative called “A Viable Realism and Revival Doctrine.”

Invoking Presidents George Washington, James Monroe, and Richard Nixon—whom Ramaswamy has called “the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country, probably in all of American history”—the article appears to be an effort to lend coherence and gravitas to Ramaswamy’s worldview. It also seems to be an attempt to counter the attack by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley that he has “no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” In the article, Ramaswamy promises to restore American national pride and identity after decades of feckless liberal internationalist and neoconservative policies. “We will be Uncle Sucker no more,” he writes.

[David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest]

It would be foolish to underestimate Ramaswamy, who has vaulted past many of his detractors to become a breakout star in the GOP primary. And at a moment when Republican support for the war in Ukraine is plummeting, his call for retrenchment, much like Donald Trump’s denunciation of the Iraq War in 2016, is perfectly pitched to appeal to the party’s nationalist wing. But just how realistic and viable is his vision?

The truth is that Ramaswamy is slapping the realist brand onto a hodgepodge of policy proposals that are divorced from reality. Realism is about a number of things—the balance of power, national interests, spheres of influence—but one thing it is not about is wishful thinking. Yet that is what Ramaswamy is peddling. His vision is no less dogmatic than the neoconservatism he professes to despise, substituting the belief that America should intervene everywhere with the conviction that it shouldn’t intervene anywhere. And his proposals almost seem calculated to injure, not promote, American interests.

Like more than a few Republicans these days, Ramaswamy is obsessed with China, which he depicts as the locus of evil in the world, and cavalier about Russia, which stands accused of perpetrating war crimes in the heart of Europe. He does not explain how China’s current troubles—a faltering economy, an aging population, grave environmental problems—can be reconciled with his portrait of a totalitarian power about to turn a new generation of Americans, as he averred in a speech at the Nixon library, into “a bunch of Chinese serfs.”

[Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth]

Ramaswamy’s demagoguery about China is reminiscent of the apprehensions voiced by American conservatives after World War II, when the GOP contained an “Asia First” wing, led by Senator Robert A. Taft and others who disparaged American aid to Europe and claimed, improbably, that American military supplies to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would allow him to easily topple the communist dictatorship on the mainland. Ramaswamy seems to want to avert a conflict with Beijing, but his truculent calls for confronting China would render a fresh world war more, not less, probable.

In his American Conservative essay, Ramaswamy lauds Nixon as the president whose foreign policy he most admires. “He got us out of Vietnam,” Ramaswamy writes. Not exactly. As president, Nixon embarked upon the policy of “Vietnamization” to reduce American troops, but he needlessly expanded the war with a secret bombing campaign against Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge, led by the genocidal Pol Pot, ended up coming to power in 1975. No less addled is Ramaswamy’s grasp of the history of Nixon’s opening to China. He announces that, as president, he would carry out a new version of what Nixon accomplished in 1972 by traveling to China—visiting Moscow in 2025 to create peace with Russia and then “elevate [it] as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.” But Nixon never sought to isolate the Soviet Union; he sought to create a stable equilibrium among the three countries, pursuing what he and Henry Kissinger called “triangular diplomacy.” In addition, Nixon and Kissinger hoped that a web of economic ties between America and the Soviet Union would constrain its propensity to expand abroad—the very approach that Ramaswamy now condemns when it comes to long-standing American policy toward China.

Declaring that “Putin is the new Mao,” Ramaswamy claims that he will be able to woo the Russian leader away from China. He proposes to bow to Russian suzerainty over the territories it controls in eastern Ukraine and oppose Ukrainian membership in NATO “in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” But as others have noted, those two countries do not have a military alliance. In any case, Putin has repeatedly displayed no interest in serious peace negotiations over Ukraine, a country that he remains wholly intent on reducing to the status of an imperial Russian colony.

[David Frum: The next U.S. president will need to defeat isolationism]

Like Trump before him, Ramaswamy tries to disguise his apparent animus toward democratic countries by scorning what he maintains is Western Europe’s piddling military spending. But Central and Western Europe’s military outlays reached $345 billion last year, almost 30 percent higher than they were a decade ago. The obstacle to real reform, we are told, is an ossified NATO bureaucracy that is pushing liberal internationalist missions whenever and wherever it can. Ramaswamy claims that he would transform NATO into a “strictly defensive military alliance”—as though it were an imperialist power marauding around the world looking for wars to wage.

Ramaswamy’s candidacy has exposed real rifts within the GOP over foreign policy. The Wall Street Journal denounced him for seeking to sell out Ukraine, and National Review asked whether “he’s auditioning for a geopolitical game show instead of the presidency of the United States.” To some extent, his comments can be dismissed as bluster. But he and his fellow self-proclaimed realists—a cluster of activists and thinkers at places such as The American Conservative, the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—are responding to a genuine, if dismaying, phenomenon in the American electorate. No one is trying to exploit it more audaciously than Ramaswamy, who continues to offer chimerical promises about restoring America’s national identity. We now know better than to disregard such salesmen.

Popular sentiment has a role in the political life of all nations, but the Jewish state, born after two millennia of persecution and yearning, offers a particularly strong case study in how emotion can affect politics—underlying everything from ideology to the drawing of lines on a map. The last six months alone has seen a surge of strong sentiment, ironically, over the question of who gets to decide whether a particular law is “reasonable.” The streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have filled with passionate protestors, their faces distorted by crying or yelling, waving giant flags as water cannons force them off their feet. And the debate has been colored as much by argument as by resentment, anxiety, pride, and a plethora of other potent feelings.

Two new books, Eva Illouz’s The Emotional Life of Populism and Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State, zero in on those emotions, like love and fear, which are so seldom acknowledged for what they are but play an outsize role in shaping politics.

Though written from different angles—Illouz is a prominent sociologist, and Penslar is a distinguished historian—both echo the brilliant Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Historians have always acknowledged the impact of emotions on the body politic. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides emphasized how fear led the Spartans to declare war on Athens, how fear deafened Athenians to the reason of Pericles, and how fear made them vulnerable to the demagoguery of Cleon. But Thucydides also emphasized the role of love, noting that Pericles failed to persuade his fellow citizens to love Athens and lamenting that Alcibiades, Pericles’s unworthy successor, seduced the Athenians with his proposal to invade Sicily—generating a bolt of eros that, after galvanizing the city, led to its eventual downfall.

More than two millennia later, fear and love are still tearing us apart and bringing us together. Both Illouz and Penslar consider these and other emotions. On the dark side, there are the usual suspects: resentment, disgust, and (in Penslar’s case) hatred; on the light side, Illouz focuses on pride as well as love, while Penslar takes up gratitude.

Consider fear. Illouz paraphrases a famous remark by Thomas Hobbes in writing that when Israel was born, fear was born as its twin. She neglects to add that Hobbes insisted that the news of the Spanish Armada invasion in 1588 caused his mother to give premature birth to him. As for Israel, the fear that accompanied the country's founding stemmed not just from the news that the Arab armies were invading in response to its announcement of independence but also from the “quasi-metaphysical belief,” as Illouz puts it—stoked by centuries of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic experiences that climaxed in the Holocaust—that the world, quite simply, demanded the annihilation of the Jews.

This sense of constant threat is an active force in the country, where fear is permanently installed over the political landscape, giving rise to what Illouz calls a “securitist democracy” whose politics are shaped by existential imperatives. Of course, she does not dismiss the serious and several threats that confront Israel. (Among the people she interviewed were three women who belong to a kibbutz in the northwestern Negev, where “constant fear” dictates their daily schedules and sentiments.) But Illouz also emphasizes the crippling fears that inform the lives of Arabs living in Israel. As a lawyer in East Jerusalem observes, one “lives with the constant threat of incarceration, of stop and frisk … You are in constant fear of being in the wrong place.”

[Read: After 30 years in Israel, I see my country differently]

In the realm of fear, the demagogue is king. The fear spurred by a clear and present danger can have a positive consequence, forging a sense of unity and community where none had before existed. Much more often, however, fear is exploited by political leaders for partisan goals inimical to the nation’s well-being. Illouz describes the dependence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long political career—he has served as Israel’s prime minister longer than Franklin Roosevelt did as America’s president—on his relentless and skillful manipulation of fear. Illouz even goes so far as to say that Netanyahu wrote the playbook to which Donald Trump’s political career is an appendix. Netanyahu’s rhetoric, she concludes, portrays a state of Israel divided between two camps: “one that would defend the survival of the state, another that would threaten it.”

Similarly, Penslar associates Netanyahu with what the author calls “Catastrophic Zionism,” which combines and capitalizes on the “fear for the survival of Jews outside Israel and those in the state of Israel itself.” Like Illouz, Penslar emphasizes that Netanyahu fueled this fear on the eve of the 2015 elections, when his campaign deliberately blurred the line between Palestinians living in the occupied territories and those who were Israeli citizens, sending a text message warning supporters that “Arab voters [are] moving in droves to the polling stations.” It was a winning strategy for Netanyahu, as it was for other populists one year later. In 2016, as British voters prepared to vote on the Brexit referendum, posters appeared picturing droves of nonwhite migrants under the bold red warning Breaking Point, while American voters, poised to vote in the 2016 presidential election, listened to the Republican candidate Donald Trump warning against droves of drug dealers and rapists massing at the southern border.

We tend to hate the things we fear. With great care and clarity, Penslar traces not just the long  history of hatred aimed at Jews by anti-Semites and many anti-Zionists. He also tracks the hatred that most Zionists directed at the British during the mandate governing Palestine from 1918 to 1948—a hatred that shifted to Palestinians after independence. His summary of Israel’s denial of its citizens’ own anti-Palestinian hatred and its baleful consequences is especially powerful. Though many Israelis, Penslar writes, “bore the knowledge of what they had done during the 1948 war, the instruments of official memory … presented a sanitized version, denying not only the violence wrought by Jews against Palestinians but also the presence of hatred and rage behind it.”

We also hate those things which disgust us. In another of her books, From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum measures this emotion’s noxious effects on societies. Whereas anger, which can lead to urgent political or social reforms, has its uses, disgust is worse than useless. As Nussbaum argues, it leads at best to “escape and disengagement” and at worst to racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. Illouz, who cites this book of Nussbaum’s, argues that disgust also fuels anti-Arab sentiment in Israel, a trend boosted by what she calls “disgust entrepreneurs” whose task is “to create, engineer, and reinforce disgust from some groups to others.”

One trailblazing entrepreneur was among America’s most toxic exports: Meir Kahane, the founder of Israel’s ultranationalist and racist Kach Party. His extremist views on citizenship, marriage, and education—all of which align with a politics of purity driven by fear of contamination—set the standard for admirers who now have prominent roles in Netnayahu’s government, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current national-security minister, who belonged to Kach’s youth movement, and Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister, who called for “wiping out” a West Bank town that was recently at the center of violent actions against settlers.

Ben-Gvir spoke at a commemoration for Kahane last year and reminded his audience, “Ultimately, Rabbi Kahane was about love.” That love can be as problematic as it is powerful was underscored by Ben-Gvir’s proviso that Kahane loved Israel “without compromise, without any other consideration.” In a superb account of the ties that bind Eros and Eretz Israel, Penslar reveals the pivotal role played by historians and novelists—not just Jewish writers such as Heinrich Graetz, whose sentimental historical narratives about Jews over the centuries won a wide following in Europe in the 19th century, but also Gentile writers such as George Eliot. The eponymous hero of the latter’s novel Daniel Deronda, a noble and sensitive youth who discovers his Jewish roots, in effect became Victorian England’s rejoinder to the self-interested, unscrupulous character of Fagan from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist— Deronda was someone with whom Jewish and Gentile readers could fall in love.

Penslar pursues the impact of literary works on the evolution of American Jewry’s emotional ties to Israel well into the 20th century, including a long glance at Leon Uris’s Exodus. Published in 1958, the novel sold more than 20 million copies and galvanized American Jewish readers. As they became enamored with the characters Ari Ben Canaan and Kitty Fremont, they fell even more deeply in love with the idea of Israel—albeit an Israel where all Israelis were portrayed as brave and brilliant and all Arabs as untrustworthy and unworthy. (Penslar gives short shrift, though, to the film version. Was I the only American teenager who, when he left to work as a kibbutz volunteer, was humming Ernest Gold’s theme song?)

[Read: Israel has already lost]

Just as love can unite a people, a love that is built on excluding others can also divide. Illouz offers a sobering account not only of the deepening animosity between Israelis and Palestinians, but also of the persistent acrimony between Israel’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities. It is no secret that Netanyahu’s Likud party has won the support of Sephardic voters by exploiting their resentment over the discrimination they have experienced. As Illouz argues, Likud’s populist and nationalist rhetoric has seduced the Mizrahim—Jews of Afro-Asian descent—despite the fact that the leadership is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and their neoliberal policies penalize the very people who support them. As a result, she concludes, “nationalism has come to be a class marker, as it has become the identity of those who stand diametrically opposed to … the ‘cosmopolitan class.’”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Illouz and Penslar both conclude their books by investigating hopefulness as an emotion. Israel, after all, originated as a great vessel of hope for people across the world—nationalism as a kind of redemption for a long-suffering people. Illouz suggests that hope, in principle, can strengthen the bonds of fraternity not just among the nation's own members but with other countries as well, opening the way to dialogue, tolerance, and justice. Perhaps, but there is something forlorn in hoping that hope will carry the day. Given recent events in Israel (and the United States),  Penslar’s conclusion, tragically, carries greater weight. He reminds us that the Hebrew word for hope is tikvah, whose literal biblical meaning is “cord” or “rope”—“something to hold onto.” Many of us now find ourselves grasping this cord more tightly than ever before.

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Former President Donald Trump continues to smash through boundaries without losing support. Below, I explain why Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 Republican nomination now seem stronger than ever. But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani’s attacks on democracy are attacks on people. Fall’s vaccine routine didn’t have to be this hard.

Wilder and Clearer

Consider the Kool-Aid Man. He is large, red-faced, perpetually stuck in the late ’80s, and, whenever he breaks through walls? Celebrated. Our 45th president, much like the Kool-Aid Man, has aligned his personal brand with gleeful destruction. And, at least among GOP leaders and his steadfast base of supporters, Trump’s product remains extremely popular.

Ever since his political rise eight summers ago, Trump’s opponents have been naively clinging to the hope that he might one day say or do something so awful as to alienate even his most ardent fans. This will never happen. The premise itself is flawed—Trump’s enduring appeal is derived from his ability to storm past perceived barriers. Were he to suddenly start walking through doors like the rest of us, he’d lose his bad-boy sheen.

Trump’s recent statements, namely on the idea of imprisoning his enemies if reelected and the specter of political violence, are prime examples of just how flawed this “reckoning” idea really is. At the moment, his rhetoric is as heightened as it’s ever been, and yet his dominance in the Republican presidential primary continues. He’s currently polling at an average of about 50 percent, with his closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, at just under 15 percent. The rest of the field is fighting to break out of the single digits.

Trump’s 2024 challengers have failed to unite in opposition to him. During last week’s GOP debate, former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie each took their best shot at condemning Trump in relation to January 6, yet neither appears to have even a remote chance of winning the nomination. Most of the others hemmed and hawed. The majority of the field raised their hands in the affirmative as to whether they would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted criminal. That night, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized Trump as “a guy who’s running 40 points ahead, who tried to end the constitutional republic, and whose braying mobs chanted for the murder of one of the guys on stage.” Taken as a whole, the event had a disturbing patina of resignation and nihilism.

Trump, of course, didn’t even bother to show up and field questions from the Fox News moderators. Instead, he staged counterprogramming: a sitdown with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter). The pair’s conversation was ominous. Rather than wave off Carlson’s questions about the possibility of conflict on American soil, Trump was disconcertingly vague and threatening: “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.”

Yesterday, the former Fox host Glenn Beck asked Trump whether he would “lock people up” if he becomes president again. Trump replied that he would have “no choice because they’re doing it to us,” referring to his own criminal indictments.

Even Trump’s mug shot, which the art critic Jerry Saltz deemed “the most famous photograph in the world,” carried a palpable rhetorical message. As my colleague Megan Garber observed, Trump’s scowl symbolizes his power. “He treats his mug shot as our menace.”

It keeps working. All of it. As we approach September, some four months ahead of the Iowa caucuses, it’s looking less and less likely that anything could slow Trump’s march to the nomination. Rather than being humbled by a jailhouse booking, Trump transformed even that event into a product he could monetize. (A “Never Surrender!” mug-shot T-shirt will set you back $34; a mug-shot coffee mug is a comparative steal at $25.) Citing self-reported campaign data for the past three weeks, the former president’s team sent an email blast yesterday with the subject line “ICYMI: Trump fundraising spikes after Fulton County mugshot, surpassing $20M in August.” (These emails barge in multiple times a day, not unlike the aforementioned Kool-Aid Man.)

Trump’s messaging is simultaneously wilder and clearer than ever. He portrays himself as a martyr and a victim, and, according to the arc of his hero’s journey, he believes that he will return home to the White House as a victor. Trump has shrewdly ascertained that, even eight years later, America can’t look away from the epic saga that is his life. Or, as another recent campaign-email subject line read: “Another disgrace I have to tell you about.”

Related:

The mug shot is a warning. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump.

Today’s News

Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm and is traveling across Florida and into Georgia and other parts of the Southeast. A federal judge ruled that Rudy Giuliani was liable for defaming two Georgia election workers after he claimed that they had mishandled ballots during the 2020 election. Narcan, the opioid-overdose antidote, will for the first time be widely available over the counter and online next week at major retailers, including Walgreens and CVS.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question: What would you ask the Republican presidential candidates? The Weekly Planet: Kylie Mohr asks: What happens when the heat repeats?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: David Lees / Getty; Grzegorz Czapski / Alamy; The J. Paul Getty Museum

In Praise of Heroic Masculinity

By Caitlin Flanagan

The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Molly Fairhurst for The Atlantic

Read. Alicia Kennedy’s first book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, lays out the benefits of a meatless diet—without scolding those who find the idea hard to swallow.

Watch. The third and final season of Reservation Dogs (streaming on Hulu) fleshes out its ensemble with backstories that illustrate the lasting effects of grief.

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Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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