My mother used to tell a certain story at family parties when trying to explain why my sisters and I didn’t really speak Cantonese, my parents’ primary language. It’s probably a familiar narrative, especially to kids of immigrants in America. Still, it stung every time I heard it.

When my oldest sister, Steph, was in her suburban-Connecticut kindergarten, she returned home one afternoon embarrassed and upset, and insisted that our parents talk to her only in English. Steph was young and doesn’t remember the specifics, though the scenario is easy to imagine: some kid, probably oblivious but still cruel. Our parents, who came to the United States separately from Guangzhou, China, in the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Hong Kong, spoke mostly the Chinese dialects Cantonese and Taishanese to us, but also possessed fluent English from their education in colonial Hong Kong. They conceded to Steph’s request, my father told me, and we became a primarily English-speaking household. Although my sisters and I could understand and speak some Cantonese (mine was the most limited, because I was the youngest; I was born a few years after Steph’s kindergarten incident), the ability faded as we aged.

The term for what my sisters and I experienced—the forgetting of a language by a once-proficient speaker and a family’s subsequent intergenerational dilution of the skill—is language attrition, and research shows that it occurs rapidly. Linguists say that in many cases, a heritage language becomes all but extinct by the time a family’s third generation is living in a new country. The reason is simple, according to scholars I spoke with: A language stays alive when used out of necessity. And the longer a group lives in a new country, the more likely another language will take its place.

Attrition can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration. For me, though, the outcome also feels dire. The thought of future generations of our family having even less of a connection to my parents’ language than I do stirs a specific melancholy in me, a sense of relinquishing something greater than myself—a shared history, perhaps. For a long time, I experimented with different methods of learning Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, the most common Chinese dialect and the one for which learning resources are easier to find. I tried a college course, a tutor, online classes, Duolingo, watching films from Hong Kong. Throughout, I asked myself: What was the hole that I was trying to fill by attempting to absorb my family’s language? And was it possible to reverse this attrition, so that the next generation wouldn’t have to experience it?

Three and a half decades after my sister Steph renounced her Chinese, these questions return to me when I’m visiting her in the suburbs of New York City. I’m helping her take care of her children, who suffer none of my language anxieties.

Her 3-year-old daughter is home from day care and hunched over an iPad that is playing Frozen II in Mandarin. She turns to me beseechingly. “Wo yao li,” she says. Translation: She wants something, though I don’t know what.

“‘Li’? ‘Li’ shi shenme? What is ‘li’ in English?” I ask her, translating myself.

She studies me with a cool, appraising expression. She knows the English word for li. She’s just hazing me, Steph will confirm later. Bored, my niece turns back to the movie.

I type different fruit names into Google Translate. After a few minutes, I learn with sheepish amusement that li, spoken in a rising tone, means “pear.”

My niece and her 5-year-old brother speak mostly Mandarin to their parents. My sister’s in-laws—Mandarin speakers—live nearby and often look after the kids, which has helped reinforce the dialect as the household’s dominant language. That, plus the Saturday Chinese school the kids attend every week. And—crucially—my sister’s hard work.

Steph primarily speaks to her children in a mix of English and elementary, self-taught Mandarin. She has spent hours translating her kids’ books and labeling mundane objects around the house with their Chinese names, memorizing the characters for “light switch” and “refrigerator” in the process. The family watches the Mandarin versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Bluey, and Moana, and in her free time, Steph uses Duolingo for her own lessons.

The result is that I’m constantly amazed by my niece’s and nephew’s linguistic abilities. I’ve also had a preview of the incredible parental labor required to raise children in a language one is also learning.

Much of it involves making peace with being outsmarted by children who toggle seamlessly between two languages, and who, in my case, sometimes correct my pronunciation. My nephew and niece sense that my Chinese is lacking, and converse with me in English. This behavior isn’t a snub, but kind of feels like a cause for shame, because it comes from a child. I try to cobble together my broken Mandarin to keep up. I realize that I can no longer joke that my Chinese is “toddler level,” because my toddler niece has far surpassed my abilities.

Steph has told me that having her children speak Chinese—whether that’s her Cantonese dialect or her husband’s Mandarin—is one of the most meaningful ways for them to engage with their lineage. To be proficient in a language makes you not merely a cultural spectator that passively enjoys food or classic films with subtitles, but an active participant. You can contribute information to a conversation; you can entertain others with your wit; you can give rather than just take.

I’ve always wondered about the relationship that any future children of mine might have to their family history. Yet there’s a comfort in what my sister has achieved. To me, she has wrested back some semblance of control. Her kids—and maybe even Steph herself—are connected to their past in a manner that I am not.

The key to reversing language attrition is simple in theory and difficult in practice: Expose your children to the language. “It’s really about time with that language—and high-quality time,” Krista Byers-Heinlein, a psychology professor at Concordia University, in Montreal, whose work focuses on infant development and language acquisition, told me. “When we say ‘high quality,’ we mean interactions with real people, with the things that parents and adults normally do, so just talking back and forth.”

Byers-Heinlein said the figure varies, but a child typically has to have a minimum of 20 to 25 percent of their waking time with those high-quality interactions in order to be able to speak a second language proficiently. She walked me through a hypothetical scenario: Say a kid attends a three-hour Chinese school each Saturday, and hears Chinese only in that environment. If this child were to sleep 12 hours a night (optimistic!), that would mean they were awake for 84 hours that week. The child would need at least an additional 14 hours a week of Chinese interactions.

The challenge is how to boost a child’s exposure when the parents don’t speak the language well themselves. In these cases, a parent’s key resource is a community, Maria M. Carreira, a Spanish professor at California State University at Long Beach and a co-founder of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, told me. For parents to rustle up the 20 to 25 percent of waking hours needed in a language, perhaps they can rely on schools or day-care centers that teach in multiple languages, extended family close by, play groups or library storytimes, caregivers who speak the language.

Of course, so much depends on where someone lives in the U.S. and how many generations their family has been in the country. A nationwide survey that Carreira and colleagues conducted from 2007 to 2009 analyzed people learning their heritage languages, among them Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Persian. Carreira and the late UCLA professor Olga E. Kagan noted in a subsequent report on their findings that Spanish-speaking respondents had some of the highest levels of proficiency, which they attributed to the closeness of Latin America to the U.S., as well as to the country’s large population of Spanish speakers. Though most Mandarin and Cantonese heritage-language learners surveyed were—like the Spanish speakers—born in the U.S. or had arrived before age 11, their exposure to their heritage language “was considerably more limited than that of Spanish speakers.” The researchers pointed out some potential reasons: Compared with Spanish speakers, fewer Mandarin and Cantonese speakers visited their (or their parents’) birth country each year, and nearly half of them reported never having read in their heritage language.

These data fed my curiosity about how Asian American parents in particular navigate teaching their children a heritage language they’ve lost. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed an influx of newcomers from Asian countries, my parents included; many Asian Americans around my age were thus the first in our families to be born in America. Through our immigrant parents, we understand our heritage. And we’re also, by virtue of being born here, indelibly American. How we raise children—and in what language—can feel like an inflection point for our cultures.

[Read: My novel is a love letter my mother can’t read]

These challenges are hardly unique to Asian Americans, however. Silvina Montrul, a linguist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, notes in her recent book, Native Speakers, Interrupted, that “in the United States, English is the language of power and the language children choose to speak with their peers.” She nods to the work of colleagues who found that in Miami, some children who grew up speaking Spanish at home and English and Spanish at school still chose to converse in English outside school.

Montrul, who is Argentinian, went to remarkable lengths to make sure that her two daughters spoke Spanish. She formed the University Language Academy, an after-school and summer immersion program for children ages 4 to 17. She recalls that she was particularly firm in making Spanish the primary language she used to interact with her daughters, even when one—in an echo of my sister Steph’s story—begged her not to. Montrul says that if a child picks up another language before puberty, there’s a good chance they’ll sound like a native speaker with continued exposure and use. But without that practice, the language can just as easily fade. “As I say in my work, children are great language learners,” Montrul told me over the phone, “but they are also great language losers.”

Even though America is full of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, Americans tend not to speak multiple languages. According to the nonprofit American Councils for International Education, only 20 percent of K–12 students take foreign-language classes. In Norway, Romania, and Luxembourg, by contrast, every primary- and secondary-school student takes foreign-language classes. And even European countries with lower percentages of students learning a foreign language far outpace the U.S.: Greece with 87 percent, Portugal with 69 percent, and Belgium with 64 percent. Large immigrant populations have historically brought new languages to America, yet as the scholars Rubén G. Rumbaut and Douglas S. Massey note, the country has a “well established reputation as a graveyard for immigrant languages.” This is no aberration; it is grounded in decades of policy and sentiment.

Efforts to suppress languages other than English were present even in the country’s earliest days. Starting in the 1800s, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to so-called residential schools to be educated according to white American standards; they were punished for speaking their own languages.

In 1915, speaking at Carnegie Hall on Columbus Day, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that there was “no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.” He would proclaim four years later in a letter to the American Defense Society that the U.S. had “room for but one language here, and that is the English language.” Roosevelt’s words foreshadowed a posture of monolingualism. The following century of American hegemony allowed this approach: People in other countries have had to learn English to apply to study at American colleges, to conduct business with American companies, or to understand the nuances of Hollywood films. Americans have felt far less pressure to reciprocate by learning foreign languages.

Today, true fluency in multiple languages is uncommon in most of the United States, even as it exists in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada, where the government weaves multiple languages into daily life through street signs and official forms. Legislation in Wales and Quebec have established Welsh and French, respectively, as official languages. In Wales, nearly 30 percent of people age 3 or older can speak Welsh—about 900,000 people—according to a population survey from 2022. In Quebec, just under 86 percent of people said in a 2021 analysis that they spoke French regularly at home.

[Read: How to save a dying language]

Compare that with Hawaii, where U.S. authorities banned teaching in the native language in the 19th century. Not until 1978 was the state constitution amended and Hawaiian recognized as an official language; prior to this change, fewer than 2,500 people spoke Hawaiian, most of them 60 years or older, according to Larry Kimura, a professor of Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. To try to save the language, educators created a nonprofit preschool, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, a Hawaiian immersion program that has become a model for indigenous-language revitalization around the world. ‘Aha Pūnana Leo and its Hi’ipēpē Infant Program now have more than 6,000 alumni, and the organization has offshoots that extend Hawaiian immersion schooling all the way to college. If language can be decimated by government policies, efforts around the world have shown that language can also be saved from extinction, even if progress is often fragile.

In the U.S., bringing a heritage language back into a family usually comes down to the efforts of individuals. The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort.

Betty Choi, a pediatrician who lives outside Santa Barbara, California, and is the author of the children’s book Human Body Learning Lab, is another remarkable example of just how far a dedicated approach to language instruction can go. Choi grew up in Syracuse, New York, and wanted to connect her two young children to the memory of her late parents, who spoke various dialects of Chinese, and to her husband’s family, who live across the country and speak Korean. So Choi set about teaching herself and her children Mandarin and Korean.

Over a few years, she cycled through different methods: enrolling herself in language classes; seeking out multilingual child-care providers; and exposing her children to books, songs, and videos in those languages. (Few other Asian Americans live where Choi does, which presents a particular challenge, she told me, in her effort to expose her children to Chinese and Korean outside the house.) Eventually, Choi created her own curriculum, which she parlayed into what is now Chalk Academy, an online resource for raising multilingual children that includes worksheets; articles; and suggestions for books, toys, and activities that help facilitate learning Chinese and Korean.

Choi’s children are now conversational in Mandarin and have retained a small number of Korean words. (“It was painful to watch my children forget Korean so quickly,” Choi wrote in an email, sharing that the Korean words they mostly say now are: ttong (poop), bang-gu (fart), and saja (lion), referring to a favorite stuffed animal.) She’s worried they will start to lose their Mandarin, too, as the English terms they’re learning at school and with friends outpace the amount of self-taught Mandarin she can speak to them at home. “But my kids know that Chinese language is a family value, not simply an extracurricular activity. As such, Mandarin is still the primary language that I speak with my children,” Choi wrote. Still, the children might reply in English, Mandarin, or a mix of the two.

[Read: Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it]

There is, of course, another alternative to either total fluency or abandoning a language. Hieu Truong, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the area, has a 4-year-old son and a six-month-old baby. She’s slowly trying to introduce her children to Vietnamese, but has remained realistic about their potential bilingualism and her own abilities.

Truong, whose parents left Vietnam for the U.S. in the early ’80s, says she can understand, speak, and read only a little Vietnamese—enough to order in a restaurant, but maybe not enough to digest the newspaper. Truong sometimes reads her son children’s books in Vietnamese—through those books, she learned the words for, say, “zebra” and “giraffe” herself, and he’s now familiar with basic Vietnamese words, like the one for “numbers.” Truong also benefits from resources that didn’t exist when she grew up: Netflix shows and movies dubbed in Vietnamese; activity books and flashcards sold online; resources such as the SEAD Project, a Minneapolis-based organization that offers Hmong, Vietnamese, Khmer, and Lao language courses, and emphasizes the history and culture of the Southeast Asian diaspora through its programming.

For her son, “fluency isn’t necessarily the goal,” Truong told me. She knows personally how hard it is to maintain proficiency and doesn’t want to add that pressure. “But I do want him exposed to it. I want him to go into a Vietnamese restaurant and be like, ‘Okay, I know what’s going on.’ I want him, when he talks to his older relatives, to know how to properly greet them—know how to say ‘Thank you.’”

[Read: Forgetting and remembering your first language]

Ultimately, Truong said that a big part of teaching her son Vietnamese is “untangling” the objective for herself versus the one for her toddler. Here, I relate to her, even though our goals differ. Being far from family and a network of Cantonese speakers with whom I could interact on a daily basis makes the goal of everyday fluency difficult to attain. But I long for the emotional closeness that comes with an ease of interaction. Having only a vague familiarity with a language is like navigating the world with blurred vision. Everything appears with softened edges, and I am forever grasping for true meaning, deciphering fuzzy translations. I can see the outline of things, but I can’t be confident that I truly know what I’m seeing.

Fluency would sharpen my focus. It would allow me to see and participate in the small details of my life that are rendered in Cantonese: the textures of a conversation with extended family, the jokes that unfold at the dinner table, the subtext that is begging to be teased out with a gentle question. I’m seeking to know more of these tiny moments.

This is what I want for any potential children of mine, too. I don’t desire fluency for them merely to compensate for what I lost as a kid. Rather, I yearn for them to have a closeness to the culture and the little joys of everyday life that such proximity can reveal. Language facilitates many things: at its most basic, a transfer of information, and at its most complex, an exchange of emotion. But perhaps what I value above all else is that it grants intimacy.

By Beijing’s reckoning, the U.S.-led global order is in turmoil, and a Washington in decline has no answers to the world’s mounting problems. Fortunately for the future of humanity, however, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping does. He would like to replace Washington’s “rules-based” world order with a framework of his own—one whose most sacred principle is national sovereignty, or the right of states to govern themselves, free from outside interference.

In the world Xi envisions, nations will no longer have to endure Washington’s preaching about democracy and human rights. All governments, no matter how repressive, will be equals, with their sovereignty assured. Xi enshrined the protection of sovereignty as the very first plank of his Global Security Initiative, an ideological blueprint for a new global system that he introduced, probably not coincidentally, several weeks after the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

That war has posed a bit of a problem for China’s professed position, however. Russia, China’s strategic partner, trammeled an international border to invade a neighboring country in what could hardly be a clearer violation of that country’s sovereignty. But rather than sympathize with Ukraine’s desperate struggle to preserve its independent existence, Xi cemented his partnership with the Russian invaders intent on annihilating it.

“You can’t be helping Russia conduct this war and say you believe in Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told me. “Obviously, you can’t square that circle.”

Yet Xi has tried to do so. His contradictory stance on the war has forced his diplomats to tap dance, seeking to preserve Beijing’s pretense of principled neutrality even to the point of staging a purported peace mission. Meanwhile, the war has raised serious questions about the place of sovereignty in Xi’s vision for a new world order, and, relatedly, about his ability to achieve his grandiose plans.

In practically every diplomatic statement, Communist China affirms its commitment to honoring the sovereignty of other countries. It expects no less in return: Sovereignty, China’s leaders claim, confers upon the Communist Party the authority to govern as it wishes within China’s borders. Sovereignty, from the Chinese viewpoint, gives Beijing the right to lock up Uyghurs in Xinjiang and democracy advocates in Hong Kong, and it forbids Washington from interfering in China’s internal affairs by complaining about its human-rights record. Beijing rejects the notion of  “universal values” that apply to all people, no matter where they live.

[Read: Xi Jinping is done with the established world order]

Beijing’s fixation on sovereignty is inseparable from its claim that Taiwan is part of China: By so much as interacting with Taiwan’s government, other countries are violating China’s sovereignty, Beijing maintains. Because they believe the country is not yet completely unified, says Maria Adele Carrai, an international-law expert at NYU’s Shanghai campus, Chinese leaders “feel very sensitive and also partly fragile about their sovereignty.”

Xi’s position on sovereignty holds obvious appeal for other autocrats intent on suppressing dissent without interference. But it also attracts adherents in the developing world, where many leaders still contend with the persistent, detrimental legacy of Western colonialism. For those leaders, says Jonathan Fulton, a specialist in Chinese relations with the Middle East at Zayed University, in Abu Dhabi, “when they hear a great power say, ‘We’re not going to do the kind of stuff that the West did to you,’ that resonates.”

The deeper Xi wades into international affairs, however, the more his purported principles come into conflict with his strategic goals. His government routinely intrudes on other countries’ sovereignty; witness the Chinese spy balloon caught floating in American airspace, or the scandal over alleged Chinese interference in Canada’s national elections. But little has challenged Xi’s ideological framework more than the Ukraine war. His choice was stark: Stand with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Xi has called his “best” friend, and sacrifice his supposed commitment to sovereignty, or stand for sovereignty by siding with Ukraine, thereby breaking a partnership that he perceives as crucial to his campaign against U.S. hegemony.

At the war’s outbreak, Chinese leaders seemed ambivalent, even conflicted. Though Foreign Minister Wang Yi asserted that Putin’s security concerns were “legitimate,” he also came out clearly in defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty. “All countries’ sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity must be safeguarded,” he told the Munich Security Conference only days before the invasion began. “This is also what China has been upholding, with no exception regarding Ukraine.”

As the war has ground on, Xi has strengthened his relations with Russia. He has done so without directly aiding Moscow’s war effort but by supplying political and economic support as Russia has become isolated from the West. Chinese diplomats still sometimes talk about sovereignty, but they do so with greater ambiguity. In a March press briefing, then–Foreign Minister Qin Gang reiterated Beijing’s position that all countries’ sovereignty should be respected but brought up Ukraine’s specifically only to criticize Washington: “Why does the U.S. talk at length about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity on Ukraine, while disrespecting China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on China’s Taiwan question?” he asked rhetorically.

[Read: What is Putin worth to China?]

Last February, Xi issued a 12-point proposal for ending the Ukraine conflict. The first entry asserts that “the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld”—but it does not mention Ukraine in this regard. In an April conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Xi stressed—apparently without irony—that “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity is the political foundation” of relations between the two countries, but he did not pledge to ensure Ukraine’s or offer any specific proposal for preserving it, at least according to the official Chinese summary of their talk.

For the Ukrainians, the principle of sovereignty affords no ambiguity. Zelensky told Xi in April 2023, “We did not start this war, but we have to restore the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country.” He added that “there can be no peace at the expense of territorial compromises. The territorial integrity of Ukraine must be restored.”

If Zelensky’s words made Xi uncomfortable, the Chinese leader did not let on. Just days earlier, the Chinese diplomat Lu Shaye had let slip a remark that opened a window on Beijing’s thinking. Then serving as China’s ambassador to France, Lu claimed that the sovereignty of the countries formed from the ruins of the Soviet Union—such as Ukraine—had no basis in international law, because no international agreement had specified their status. They had asserted their own sovereignty, and Lu’s comments suggested that he did not recognize such a path to independent statehood. His words sparked outrage across Europe. China’s foreign ministry clarified that the government officially recognized the sovereignty of those states—but Chinese diplomats rarely stray far from approved talking points. More likely than not, Lu’s ideas carry some currency among the Chinese leadership.

Chinese leaders could possibly see Moscow’s assertion of control over territory once included in the Soviet Union as parallel to its own yearning after lands, including Taiwan, that were once ruled from Beijing under the Qing dynasty. In both cases, earlier political entities claimed these territories, suggesting that sovereignty can be a slippery idea when aggressive or nationalist leaders wish it to be.

Will the incipient allies attracted to Xi’s sovereignty rhetoric be put off by China’s lack of regard for Ukraine? Herbst believes that the leadership’s contradictory stance “certainly makes it harder for them to present themselves as some new sort of power representing something even better than the Western-organized international system.” But he did not think the inconsistency would cost China much in the global South.

Many developing countries lie far removed from Ukraine’s crisis and are not much invested in it. And according to Fulton, the countries of the global South are less interested in Xi’s transgressions of avowed principles than in its promise of counterbalance: Many leaders “want to see a shift in the distribution of power so the West doesn’t get to behave the way it has in the past and the global South has more influence,” he told me.

In that sense, Xi may be onto something. The United States has set aside its commitment to democracy to promote its strategic interests on any number of occasions, but its ideals have still given common cause to a worldwide network of alliances and inspired many of those suffering under oppressive regimes to dream of greater liberty—including within China. Perhaps Xi’s ideological blueprint, no matter how unworkable or compromised, could play the same role: that of a glue binding partnerships opposed to American ideals and American power. Perhaps in global diplomacy, what leaders say can matter more than what they do.

Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death.

That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.)

And yet, none of the nation’s front pages blared “Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution” or “Former President Accuses General of Treason.” Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.

Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.

Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. If a mob boss were to say, “In times gone by, people like you would have had their legs broken,” nobody would mistake that for a historical observation. The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country.

Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism. An influential figure with a large following demonizes a person or a group of people. The likelihood is strong that some small number of followers will take those words literally—when Trump implies that Milley deserves to be put to death, some of his disciples might take it as a marching order. The number of those who take action does not have to be large for the result to be horrific.

Already, one of Trump’s minions in Congress has echoed the incitement to violence. The Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona wrote—in his taxpayer-funded newsletter, no less—that “in a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.” The meaning is not ambiguous: Gosar is explicitly saying that killing Milley would be desirable.

[From the November 2023 Issue: The Patriot]

As a political scientist who studies political violence across the globe, I would chalk up the lack of high-profile assassinations in the United States during the Trump and post-Trump era to dumb luck. Already in 2018, one deranged Trump follower, Cesar Sayoc, sent pipe bombs to public figures (and a media organization) who just so happened to be among those whom Trump most often attacked in his Twitter feed. Thankfully, nobody died—not because the dangers of Trump’s rhetoric were overstated but because Sayoc was bad at building bombs.

Heading toward one of the most consequential, divisive elections in American history, every ingredient in the deadly recipe for political violence is already in the mix: high-stakes, winner-take-all politics; widespread conspiratorial delusions that detach followers from objective realities; a suggestion that one’s political opponents aren’t “real Americans”; a large supply of violent extremists with easy access to deadly weaponry; and a movement whose leader takes every opportunity to praise those who have already participated in a deadly attack on the government.

Eventually, all luck runs out. Political violence is notoriously difficult to forecast with precision, but would anyone really be surprised if Trump’s violent rhetoric led to real-world attacks in the run-up to the 2024 election—or in its aftermath, if he loses?

For all of these reasons, Trump’s recent unhinged rant about Milley should be a wake-up call. But in today’s political climate, the incident barely registers. Trump scandals have become predictably banal. And American journalists have become golden retrievers watching a tennis-ball launcher. Every time they start to chase one ball, a fresh one immediately explodes into view, prompting a new chase.

Eventually, chasing tennis balls gets old. We become more alive to virtually any distraction: The media fixate on John Fetterman’s hoodie instead of on stories about the relentless but predictable risk of Trump-inspired political violence.

Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we’ve lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.

Twenty years ago, a Republican president, George W. Bush, created the most successful, life-giving global-health program in history. This year, House Republicans appear determined to undermine it. If they succeed, it will be an act of extraordinary recklessness, done even while claiming to be the pro-life party.

In 2003, nearly 30 million Africans had AIDS, including 3 million under the age of 15. In some countries, more than one-third of the adult population carried the disease. More than 4 million required immediate drug treatment, yet only 50,000 AIDS victims were receiving the medicine they needed.

“To meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad,” President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” He asked Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean. PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—was the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.

In 2007, Bush asked Congress to double America’s initial commitment and approve an additional $30 billion for HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment over the next five years, which Congress did. At that point, estimates were that 1.2 million lives had been saved and that PEPFAR had helped bring lifesaving treatment to about 1.7 million people around the world.

“Calling to mind the story of Jesus raising his friend from the dead,” Bush has observed, “Africans came up with a phrase to describe the transformation. They called it the Lazarus Effect.”

PEPFAR has since been supported by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Over the span of two decades, more than 25 million lives have been saved in more than 50 countries. More than 20 million women, men, and children are receiving lifesaving antiretroviral treatment. More than 7 million orphans, vulnerable children, and their caregivers have been aided. Five and a half million babies who would have otherwise been infected with HIV have been born without it. PEPFAR has also helped train 340,000 health-care workers to deliver and improve HIV care. The program has typically been reauthorized for five years at a time, drawing support from liberals and conservatives, and from different religious groups. In an acrimonious era, PEPFAR was one program that was immune to our polarized politics.

Until now.

The deadline for the next five-year reauthorization for PEPFAR is September 30, and opposition to it is being led by right-wing groups and members of Congress, including Representative Chris Smith, a onetime champion of PEPFAR who now insists the program is promoting abortion.

That charge is carelessly false. U.S. law does not allow taxpayer money to fund abortions in global-aid programs. No credible authorities have found that the program is being used to promote abortion-related activity, and nothing has changed in how PEPFAR is administered in this respect since the advent of the program. Oversight and reporting requirements are greater for PEPFAR than for other global-health programs.

Father Richard Bauer, who spent 25 years working in clinics for people with HIV in Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia, condemned in The New York Times the “falsehoods that have been disproved by people close to PEPFAR’s daily work and governance—including me.” Bauer, who is pro-life, managed two major PEPFAR-sponsored programs through the Catholic Church in Namibia and Kenya, and “at no point was abortion part of our work or our mission. If anything, we prevented women with H.I.V. from seeking abortions, by using PEPFAR funding and treatment to provide hope that they could deliver H.I.V.-negative babies.”

Doug Fountain, the executive director of Christian Connections for International Health, a group that has supported local organizations fighting HIV/AIDS throughout Africa for decades, told Christianity Today that the abortion criticism is coming from people who don’t have “field experience.”

“If there was a concern,” he said, “the faith communities in the implementing countries would have complained.”

Instead, some 350 leaders of faith-based organizations in Africa wrote to Congress to defend the program, calling the claim that it funds abortion “unfounded and grossly unfortunate.” Identifying themselves as “steadfast believers in the right to life for both the unborn and the living,” they emphasized that, thanks to PEPFAR, “life expectancy is rising, orphanhood is falling, healthy births are increasing in health care facilities.”

And Shepherd Smith, an evangelical pro-lifer who co-founded the Children’s AIDS Fund International, wrote, “There simply is no factual evidence to support the rumor that PEPFAR is funding, or has funded, abortion or promoted abortion.” Some PEPFAR critics have claimed that organizations that receive money from PEPFAR will then have funds freed up to perform abortions. But Smith notes that grants under PEPFAR have strict compliance requirements; they require close congressional oversight; and “a total ban on funding to any entity that, with its private dollars, carries out activities contrary to moral teachings would render it impossible to invest in anything, from infrastructure to defense to anti-poverty programs to lifesaving international assistance.”

My former Bush-administration colleague Mark Dybul was one of the architects of PEPFAR and served as the United States global AIDS coordinator. He told me that U.S. rules on the funds are very clear. “Fungibility just doesn’t—and can’t—exist because of how money flows and is accounted for,” he said. Dybul explained that the NGOs that work with PEPFAR typically raise money for their other activities through grants and contracts. Very little of that money is unrestricted, which means it can’t be moved around. Large NGOs that implement PEPFAR live grant to grant and contract to contract; when they lose a grant, they sometimes have to fire hundreds of people or even close down country offices. The most notable exceptions to this pattern, ironically, are faith-based organizations (FBOs). They generally raise money with no strings attached and can decide how best to use it—but they’re not the groups that concern PEPFAR critics.

“Money dedicated to PEPFAR doesn’t free up money for abortion any more than money dedicated to abortion frees up money to fund PEPFAR work,” Dybul told me.

Dybul pointed out that African society generally remains very socially conservative. If groups funded by the United States government “were running around supporting abortion, it would be shouted from the rooftops,” he said. There’s a reason that’s not happening.

Spurious claims about PEPFAR supporting abortion have been made before, and they’ve been debunked before. But this time around, misinformation and disinformation have far greater reach. And much of the rhetoric being used by critics of PEPFAR—for example, the claim by an executive at the Family Research Council that PEPFAR is “being used as a massive slush fund for abortion and LGBT advocacy”—is not just false but maliciously untrue.

PEPFAR’s critics are not looking to defund the entire program—at least not yet; they are advocating a one-year authorization. But they have clearly turned on the program and are attempting to weaken it. If the U.S., which has provided global leadership on PEPFAR, pulls back its commitment to the program, other nations will follow. Right-wing critics of PEPFAR are insisting on changes that would sabotage it—for example, that PEPFAR must be governed by the Mexico City Policy, which requires foreign NGOs to certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” using funds from any source, including non-U.S. funds, as a condition of receiving U.S. global-family-planning and global-health assistance. (The Mexico City Policy has not been in place for PEPFAR for 16 of its 20 years in existence.) Groups opposing the reauthorization of PEPFAR are going so far as to promise to register a vote for a five-year reauthorization as a vote for abortion rights on the scorecards they issue, which would make some Republicans vulnerable to a primary challenge. This threat may well intimidate enough Republican House members to ensure that reauthorization of PEPFAR is defeated.

So House Republicans and their allies are advocating “solutions” that don’t apply to a problem that doesn’t exist, ringing alarm bells that don’t need to be rung, while in the process threatening one of the most effective and humane programs in American history.

The most generous explanation is that groups and individuals who have made defending the sanctity of life central to their work believe they are being faithful when in fact they are misinformed. In May, the Heritage Foundation published a deeply flawed report about the program, attacking what it described as “the Biden Administration’s effort to poison bipartisan support for PEPFAR by misusing it to promote abortion.” A lot of people with little knowledge of how PEPFAR actually works took the foundation’s assertions at face value. The claim that PEPFAR was funding abortion became a rallying cry in the pro-life movement, even something of a litmus test. Once people publicly committed to a position critical of PEPFAR, they became reluctant to change, despite the mounting evidence undermining their original stance. They have convinced themselves that being wrong is better than being seen as weak.

One person who is staunchly pro-life, and who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me that what is happening can’t be understood apart from what this person called “the politics of the pro-life movement.” In a post-Dobbs world in particular, I was told, “You can’t have anyone get to your right.”

I also spoke with a theologian who began to help AIDS victims in Africa decades ago. He told me that he thought “strategic cynicism” explained, at least in some cases, the newfound opposition to PEPFAR. What better way for the new right to discredit a previous Republican era, he told me, than to “tar and feather” one of its greatest and most compassionate achievements?

Nor can the attacks on PEPFAR be separated from the sensibilities of right-wing culture warriors. We have seen it in the COVID-vaccine attacks, which are baseless but powerfully resonant on the right. Those critiques, along with the ones aimed at PEPFAR, seem to be driven by a need to find a “woke” social agenda even where it doesn’t exist. An obsessive concern, animated by an unrelenting and unforgiving ideology, has now produced an entire infrastructure that fully incentivizes such attacks. This is what happens in a diseased political culture.

Almost every domain of contemporary American life, including science and health, has now been sucked into the culture-war maw. But nihilism has also come to characterize much of the American right. Attacking the establishment, burning things down, owning the libs—that’s what draws attention and attaboys. The very fact that so many “elites”—including Democratic members of Congress and the public-health establishment—want to extend PEPFAR is cause for suspicion, and evidence that opposing it embodies bravery and conviction.

What makes all of this even stranger is that, as others have pointed out, the right has significantly more power in media, the courts, and Congress than it did in, say, the 1990s. Just last year, a conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had been the pro-life movement’s top priority for the past half century. Yet catastrophism is fashionable on the American right. Some people find the belief that they’re involved in an existential struggle vivifying. It provides purpose to their life that would otherwise be lacking, and so they go in search of monsters to destroy. Even imaginary monsters. Even PEPFAR.

That the pro-life movement and many self-described Christians are spearheading this effort is sad and painful, especially for those of us who have been sympathetic to the pro-life cause and count ourselves as followers of Jesus. But it isn’t surprising. For individuals and organizations claiming to be committed to the sanctity of life to undermine a program that has saved 25 million people is only the most recent manifestation of the right’s morally inverted world. It is a world that is detached from reality and, even unwittingly, cruel. But there is a way back. There is always a way back.

In Matthew 25, Jesus teaches that to select those who will inherit the Kingdom of God, he will separate his true followers from his counterfeit followers by how they love and care for those in need. The test, presented in a parable, is a simple one: How did you treat the hungry, the thirsty, and the stranger; those who needed clothes; those who were sick and imprisoned?

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

It is not too late for House Republicans to cast a vote later this month to continue to heal the sick and the wounded, to care for the stranger, and to help the least of these. To do anything else—to do anything less—would be lethally dishonorable.