Hollywood’s biggest horror franchises have lately been lacking in all-star villainy. This isn’t to demonize long-running hit series such as The Conjuring, Insidious, and The Purge, none of which rely on one big bad guy. But many of scary cinema’s most infamous adversaries—Michael Myers, Leatherface, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees—have grown quite long in the tooth, without any obvious contemporary heirs. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Saw X, one of the biggest horror-movie offerings this Halloween season, centers on a man in his early 80s.

I refer to John Kramer (played by Tobin Bell), otherwise known as the Jigsaw Killer, an ornery civil engineer who’s obsessed with trapping people in escape rooms that are heavy on death and dismemberment. Jigsaw first popped up in Saw (2004), a tiny indie directed by James Wan that became a surprise smash, grossing $103 million worldwide on a $1.2 million budget. The franchise was quickly run into the ground off that success, pumping out a sequel every year until 2010’s risible Saw 3D. Since then, two halfhearted reboot attempts have done all right at the box office, but both failed to grasp Kramer’s star power. Saw X does not make that mistake, leading to one of the franchise’s strongest installments since the original, mostly because it gives Jigsaw center stage.

Jigsaw himself is something of an afterthought in the original Saw; though he is the architect of the twisted puzzle traps, he’s only glimpsed briefly in flashback as a terminal cancer patient. The film’s big twist is that he is also a criminal mastermind, compelled to trap people and have them face death as a way of valuing their own life, something he himself failed to do. Saw II reveals that Amanda (Shawnee Smith), a heroin addict whose jaw Jigsaw encased in a nasty device called a “reverse bear trap,” became Jigsaw’s acolyte after escaping the trap, convinced by his morbid philosophy.

The sequels to Saw should have followed an easy formula: Kramer and Amanda putting people in bizarre situations as some sort of spiritual punishment. The first Saw imprisoned two people in a room with chains around their ankles and rusty hacksaws in their hands, imploring them to cut through their own legs to escape. The comparatively higher-budgeted sequels elevated the complexity of the traps, but the thinking behind them was usually the same: to push some poor, morally deficient soul into making an extreme sacrifice to save their life. The issue is that both Kramer and Amanda died at the end of Saw III; subsequent Saws featured Kramer only in flashback, usually little more than a glorified cameo for Bell.

[Read: When social-justice horror goes wrong]

Saw X does the opposite, putting Bell front and center for two hours (an epic length for a grimy slasher) and letting him showboat as much as he can. Jigsaw is no longer a grizzled shade lurking behind the scenes and dispensing information to his victims via tape recorder. The film is set between Saw and Saw II, a risk given that Bell is now 81 years old. But the actor returns to the role with relish, playing up both his anguish over the mortal disease he’s battling and his resolute desire to keep Jigsawing folks until the day he dies. Though the recent Halloween films pulled the same trick—recruiting the original Michael Myers performer, Nick Castle, to stalk around in a mask—Bell is doing something much more Shakespearean, delivering monologue after monologue with eerie glee.

In Saw X, Kramer is lured to Mexico in search of an experimental treatment to fight his cancer. It turns out to be a scam, but the film devotes a surprising amount of time to this plotty preamble, spending 30 minutes with Kramer as he gets suckered in and robbed. The decision to turn him into a more resolutely sympathetic protagonist is an interesting one: Though Jigsaw does have a bizarre code he always follows (victims are always given a chance to win the “games” he plays with them), he is responsible for so much arbitrary loss of life.

But in Saw X, his victims largely have it coming, because they’re all part of the scam that preyed on his hope. Amanda joins Kramer as he sets up shop in a giant warehouse, imprisons the confidence tricksters, and goes to work. In every other Saw movie, Kramer is unseen during this part—usually, at least 10 minutes of running time are devoted to new prisoners yelling and screaming as they seek to figure out what’s going on. In Saw X, Kramer is out in the open, a gesture I perceived mostly as a meta-textual homage to Bell himself, a well-liked character actor who stumbled into the biggest role of his career in his early 60s.

If the film is enough of a hit, I imagine Bell could return for more, but it’s just as easy to imagine Saw X as a swan song, a goodbye to a prominent member of schlock horror’s rogues’ gallery. Through the rise of streaming and the hardships of the pandemic, the genre has remained one of Hollywood’s most financially durable, but such legacy sequels can’t exist forever. Bell might be sprightly for his age, but by dint of plot convention alone, his Kramer is stuck in the past, a relic of the Bush era and a time that was fond of hand-wringing discourse about the cultural value of “torture porn.” It’s fun, in a depraved way, to see him trotted out for one more ride, but Jigsaw won’t be around to play games with us forever. Enjoy it while it lasts.

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.

Like many women activists of my generation, I came of age politically by joining in the fight over reproductive rights. In 1986, I boarded a bus packed with other college students and rode from New Haven to Washington, clutching a handwritten cardboard sign that urged the Supreme Court to preserve Roe v. Wade. Later, in law school, I came to believe two things about the American legal system. First, its crowning achievement was the expansion of constitutional rights during the postwar New Deal era. In the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional, protected the rights of criminal defendants, and put teeth on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, among other landmark decisions. And, of course, there was Roe.

The second thing my classmates and I learned was that this achievement was under assault by a conservative backlash. The same forces that powered Ronald Reagan into office in 1980 were seeking to curtail many of the constitutional rights secured by the courts in the postwar era. That’s why, early in my career, I took a job as the legal director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Later, I spent 11 years running the American Constitution Society—the liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society—where I helped vet and promote judges. In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed me to his Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. All along, I was focused on preserving and enlarging civil rights.

Given my background, the reversal of Roe last year felt like a crushing blow. But as I reflect on my career in the law, my greatest regrets lie elsewhere. The progressive advances of mid-20th-century America weren’t, after all, only about civil rights and social justice. Equally important was the political-economic arrangement established during and after the World War II era. It featured a powerful regulatory state, aggressive antitrust enforcement, and strong labor unions. These policies kept corporate power in check and helped drive the fastest, most widely shared advance in living standards in American history.

[Read: Red states are rolling back the rights revolution]

I recognized the importance of this legacy—my first job practicing law was at a union-side labor-law firm—but it was not top of mind for liberals of my generation. It was for the other side. The conservative legal movement was just as intent on dismantling the political-economic achievements of the New Deal era as it was on reversing the rights revolution. And its leaders understood that they could leverage each goal to help achieve the other. To culturally conservative voters, they vowed to appoint judges who would overturn Roe. At the same time, much more quietly, they assured large corporations and economically conservative billionaires that these same judges would also be hostile to unions, business regulation, class-action lawsuits, and antitrust enforcement. The strategy brought huge numbers of culturally conservative voters into the Republican column while helping ensure a steady stream of campaign contributions from libertarian-leaning mega-donors such as Barre Seid, who recently gave $1.6 billion to the Federalist Society, and the Koch brothers. These patrons may be indifferent to abortion and supportive of other civil liberties, but they are above all convinced of the evil of business regulation.

That two-pronged approach has been highly successful, helping entrench a Supreme Court majority hostile to the social-justice and civil-rights agendas I spent my whole career fighting for. It pains me to recognize the extent to which progressives like me ignored it.

Nothing encapsulates liberals’ tunnel vision more than the acrimonious confirmation hearings for Robert Bork, whom President Reagan nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987. Top Democrats at the time, led by Senators Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy and backed by liberal activist groups, attacked Bork for his reactionary views on civil rights and free speech. In a famous opening statement, Kennedy described “Robert Bork’s America” as “a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions” and “Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.”

The strategy worked; the Senate voted against Bork, and the seat eventually went to the more moderate Anthony Kennedy. In hindsight, however, what’s remarkable is what the campaign against Bork left out. Bork was an antitrust professor and a key figure in the laissez-faire economic revolution based at the University of Chicago. His most important work, by far, was his 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox, which argued that America’s long tradition of aggressive enforcement was based on a false premise. The antitrust laws weren’t designed to curtail corporate power, he argued. They were meant only to promote economic efficiency, or “consumer welfare,” as he called it. Monopolies were generally benign, in his view, because they would be more efficient than smaller firms.

Bork’s writing on this subject was massively influential, especially where it mattered most: the federal judiciary. In a 1979 decision, the Court endorsed Bork’s claim that “Congress designed the Sherman Act as a ‘consumer welfare prescription.’” Bork’s ideas also became a keystone of the Reagan administration’s economic policy. In 1980, two of Bork’s ideological allies from the University of Chicago (one of whom, Richard Posner, became a prominent federal judge himself) wrote a detailed memo to the Reagan transition team urging the administration “to prune an area of luxuriant and pernicious federal regulation: the overexpansion of antitrust law enforcement.” Reagan followed this advice closely. His antitrust chief wrote new prosecutorial guidelines that sharply cut back on antitrust enforcement, enabling the endless rounds of mergers and acquisitions that fueled the explosive growth of both Wall Street and inequality.

During Bork’s 30 hours of testimony during his confirmation hearings, antitrust wasn’t a major area of emphasis. On the very last day, however, in a sparsely attended session, Charles Brown, the attorney general of West Virginia, warned that Bork’s position on antitrust law, though unlikely to make a “10-second spot on the evening news,” was by far the most worrisome part of his record. “I submit to this committee that in no other area will the effect of a Bork appointment be so completely felt,” Brown said. “The short-run effect would be the squeezing of American pocketbooks and the draining of America’s entrepreneurial spirit. The long-run impact would be to impede those principles of business freedom which Americans so deeply cherish.”

These words proved prophetic, even though Bork wasn’t confirmed—because on economic issues, he had already won. Even Democrats had gotten on board with parts of the deregulatory agenda. In fact, Ted Kennedy had spearheaded airline deregulation in the 1970s. In the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, many liberals worried more about government overreach than about corporate power. Bork had explicitly compared New Deal antitrust to New Deal civil-rights jurisprudence. The Warren Court, he wrote, “wrecked many fields of law in its reckless and primitive egalitarianism. Antitrust was one such field.” Liberals, however, didn’t make the connection.

Reagan had made a point of packing the federal judiciary with pro-corporate, anti-regulation judges. And yet, after Democrats regained the White House in 1992, there was no push to appoint jurists who would break with the Chicago-style agenda. Indeed, in 1994, Clinton nominated Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court. Earlier in his career, Breyer had been Ted Kennedy’s top aide on airline deregulation. As a justice, he would combine a committed defense of abortion and voting rights with a business-friendly posture on antitrust and regulation.

In the assessment of the legal scholars Lee Epstein, William Landes, and Richard Posner—yes, the same guy who urged Reagan to “prune” antitrust enforcement—the right has captured even most liberal judges with regards to economic policy. In a 2017 paper titled “When It Comes to Business, the Right and Left Sides of the Court Agree,” they wrote that “the four Democratic appointees serving on the Roberts Court are far more business-friendly than Democratic appointees of any other Court era. Even more surprising, the Democrats vote in favor of business at significantly higher rates than Republican appointees in all the other chief justice periods since 1946.” The Democratic appointees are still more liberal on economics than their Republican-appointed colleagues, but they’re far to the right of their own liberal predecessors.

In a 2003 antitrust case, for example, all of the liberals joined an opinion by Antonin Scalia that declared, “The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system.” In 2017, Breyer wrote the majority opinion in a case upholding the right of debt-collection companies to go after people for money they no longer owed. The same year, Sonia Sotomayor wrote an opinion that limited the Securities and Exchange Commission’s power to force those found guilty of securities fraud to give up their stolen gains.

Liberal judges have issued opinions like these while simultaneously championing progressive positions on issues such as abortion and voting rights. By delivering measurable wins to business-side conservatives, they have helped fuel an engine designed precisely to unravel the civil rights they held so dear. The more the courts favor big business, the more powerful big business becomes, and the more powerful big business becomes, the more financial support it can lend to the right-wing legal movement.  

In my decade running the American Constitution Society, I never gave much thought to political-economic issues such as antitrust and competition policy—they were just not on our agenda. When we scrutinized the records of Bush and Trump judicial nominees, we probed their views on abortion, voting, and criminal justice, and, to a lesser extent, on labor. When we pushed the Obama administration on judicial candidates, we focused mostly on demographic diversity, while unsuccessfully pushing for more civil-rights lawyers and public defenders. When lawyers with backgrounds in antitrust or labor law made it to the bench, they typically came from the corporate-defense side. I’m proud of my work promoting judges from backgrounds that were woefully underrepresented in the judicial branch. But I regret that I mostly ignored where these judges stood on the question of corporate power.

[Read: How democrats killed their populist soul]

Now the Biden administration is repeating the same mistake. In many ways, Biden has broken from the modern trend of Democrats ignoring questions of economic power. His administration recently identified rigorous enforcement of antitrust and other competition policies as one the three main pillars of his economic plan, and he has appointed aggressive antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. The success of these antitrust officials, however, hinges on how their arguments are received in federal court—and on judicial nominations, Biden has mostly maintained the liberal status quo.

Biden has excelled in advancing diversity in the courts, including in the kind of law his nominees have practiced: Two-thirds of his judicial appointments have been women and two-thirds people of color. More than half worked at public-interest, civil-rights, or legal-aid organizations, according to an analysis done by Demand Justice, a progressive legal-advocacy organization. But Biden has advanced very few candidates to the federal bench with any background whatsoever in administrative law, union-side labor law, or antitrust. In July, a judge appointed by Biden to the United States District Court waved through the largest tech merger ever, between Microsoft and the giant video-game publisher Activision Blizzard, over the objections of the Federal Trade Commission and its Biden-appointed chair, Lina Khan.

In the past few years, members of both parties have begun to realize that unconstrained corporate power threatens some of their core values. The Biden administration is trying to do something about it, but that hasn’t generated much excitement from a liberal base that is still more focused on social issues. Progressives, especially, must recognize that preserving constitutional freedoms depends on winning the fight for economic liberties. Treating them as separate goals will ultimately mean losing out on both.

William Safire wrote in the introduction to his classic compendium Lend Me Your Ears that “what makes a draft speech a real speech is the speaking of it.” But I’ve found that some of the most interesting speeches written were never delivered at all. I spent years collecting examples of the words that went unspoken because events intervened, or a leader had a change of heart, or history took a sudden turn.

Last year, shortly after leaving my role as a special assistant and senior speechwriter for President Joe Biden, I published them as a book. For 19 of the speeches I wrote about—all historically significant, many previously unseen—I could offer readers the full text of what might have been. The 20th remained elusive.

[From the September 2021 issue: What Bobby McIlvaine left behind]

I first learned of its existence in 2004, from a report in The Washington Post. “Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn’t on Terrorism; Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense,” the front-page headline read. The story by Robin Wright detailed a speech that was to have been delivered by President George W. Bush’s national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on September 11, 2001. In the excerpts published by the Post, she seemed dismissive of the threat of terrorism: “We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway, [but] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of mace and then decide to leave your windows open.”

But the Post hadn’t seen the full speech, and assessing the excerpts without their full context was difficult. In 2019, as I began working on my book in earnest, I filed a FOIA request, which yielded ancillary materials used in the creation of the speech, but not the text itself. I then requested relevant documents from the files of the man who’d drafted the speech. That, too, was denied. I appealed last September. And a month ago, I finally received the drafts and read the speech that the public never heard, and whose authors tried so hard to forget had ever existed.

What I found was more measured and more thoughtful than I had expected. It also held some surprises. As we mark the 22nd anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the speech might be more relevant than at any time since the morning on which it was suddenly scrapped.

On August 6, 2001, Matthew Waxman, who was serving as Rice’s executive assistant, tapped out an email to John Gibson, the National Security Council’s director for foreign-policy speechwriting. “DCR would like to change the focus of the Rostov Lecture,” he wrote. “Instead of focusing on the unilateralism/isolationism issue, she’d like to speak on missile defense … She wants to emphasize that missile defense is one part of a larger effort to transform the relationship w/Russia. As she says it, ‘lets take a shot at 10 years of calling it the post-Cold-War era.’ It’s time to move beyond.”

Gibson turned to Bob Joseph, who was serving as the NSC’s senior director for proliferation strategy, and asked him to put together a draft that would reflect the limited guidance they had. (Like other Bush-administration officials named in this story, Gibson did not respond to my request to speak about the preparation of the speech.)

“We really ought to use this opportunity to do something we’ve never done in the President’s speeches and statements on this: take on the countervailing arguments,” Gibson wrote. “The president’s speeches on this have been very good in making an affirmative case for why he’s right and this speech should also, but I think it would greatly benefit by fully acknowledging and dealing with the other side … By not doing it on this issue, I think we have not only failed to score substantive points but have also reinforced some negative impressions of the President – i.e., when you don’t take people’s arguments on, it reinforces a charge of arrogance and unilateralism.” Gibson also noted that the Rostov Lecture, held at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, “is a fairly big deal, serious talk.” And he reminded everyone of the timeline to get it written; Rice would be delivering it on September 10, 2001. He was off by a day. The speech was actually scheduled for September 11.

Conventional wisdom holds that the threat of massive retaliation is the only thing stopping a nuclear attack on America. This is the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD.

But a small group of policy makers disagree, emphasizing instead the potential of missile defense. The idea really entered the public conversation in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan called for the use of ground- and space-based systems to shield the United States against a first-strike missile attack. The goal, he said, was to make “nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Reagan called the plan the Strategic Defense Initiative. But it was largely theoretical, dependent on yet-to-be-invented technologies such as X-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions. Senator Ted Kennedy derisively described these ideas as “reckless Star Wars schemes.” The nickname stuck.

Research and investment in missile defense did move forward, but because of the technical complexity of such systems (the analogy most often used was “hitting a bullet with a bullet”), support for long-range missile defense was more about ideological positioning than practical

deployment. And the ideology, in the words of Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, was “a radical rejection of benign acquiescence in mutual assured destruction.”

But even if the cost could be borne and the technical and political hurdles overcome, a geopolitical hurdle would remain. In 1972, the United States became a signatory to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which was explicitly designed to prevent countries from building missile defenses. The philosophy behind the treaty was that no defense would be perfect, so any missile defense would simply force adversaries to build up their missile offenses, leading to endless arms escalation.

Although the treaty became a cornerstone of American foreign policy, and several follow-on agreements reduced nuclear arsenals, many conservative policy makers remained adamant that the ABM was dangerously outdated, because it didn’t account for ballistic missiles in the hands of rogue states or actors.

One of those policy makers was Donald Rumsfeld, who served as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford and returned to that role under President George W. Bush. In 1998, Rumsfeld chaired a commission to assess the ballistic-missile threat to the United States, and though the findings of the report it produced were controversial, it stated that a rogue ballistic-missile threat could emerge sooner than previously thought. One month later, North Korea launched a missile that was intended to put a payload into orbit (a necessary precursor to an intercontinental ballistic missile), further stoking those fears.

When President Bush came into office in 2001, his foreign-policy team was focused on the linked goals of withdrawing America from the ABM Treaty and building an effective missile-defense system. In a speech to the National Defense University four months after his election, Bush made the case for building a missile-defense system (despite the immature technology) and for the need to “move beyond the constraints of the 30-year-old ABM Treaty.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell remained skeptical, preferring to bring allies along rather than act rashly and unilaterally in scrapping the treaty. Nor did he see much of a rush: Missile defense remained unproven, controversial, and costly.

However, Powell was being outmaneuvered by Rice. From the moment she was named national-security adviser, Rice staked out a role that made her both more of a policy architect and more of a policy advocate than many of her predecessors were. Indeed, Rice, not Powell, became the Bush administration’s first top foreign-policy official to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a departure from traditional protocol that hadn’t occurred since Henry Kissinger served as national-security adviser. Similarly, Rice, not Powell, gave the major speech laying out the administration’s foreign policy. And Rice was the one now preparing to deliver the Rostov Lecture.

On September 9, 2001, Rice appeared on Meet the Press to argue that it “would not be … responsible of the president of the United States to not respond to that threat” of ballistic missiles.

The guest who followed her was Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden proceeded to deconstruct Rice’s argument, passionately arguing that missile defense “will not protect us from cruise missiles. It will not protect us from something being smuggled in. It will not protect us from an atom bomb in the rusty hull of a ship coming into a harbor. It will not protect us from anthrax … all of which the Defense Department says are much more likely threats than somebody sending an ICBM with a return address on it.”

The next day, in a speech at the National Press Club, Biden pressed the point further, arguing that “missile defense has to be weighted carefully against all other spending and all other military priorities … In truth, our real security needs are much more earthbound and far less costly than missile defense.”

(Biden’s words sounded especially prescient in retrospect; in the 10 days that followed his appearance, America experienced not just the attacks of September 11 but also a series of deadly anthrax attacks on the offices of two Democratic senators and several news outlets.)

At that moment, another factor was in play: The Bush presidency was foundering. Bush’s policies had driven Senator Jim Jeffords to switch parties, throwing control of the Senate to Democrats and hobbling the president’s legislative agenda. The Dow had dropped by nearly 10 percent since Bush had taken office, unemployment was on the rise, and a poll that appeared on the front page of The Washington Post found that a majority of Americans no longer approved of his signature tax cut. Republican senators were claiming that the Bush administration’s foreign policy lacked a big picture.

In this context, a strong statement on missile defense felt like it could satisfy both the policy goals of the true missile-defense believers and the political goals of providing strength, clarity, and direction.

The initial draft, prepared by John Rood and Bob Joseph, arrived in Gibson’s email on September 7. In order to make the argument against the ABM Treaty, it first credentialed Rice as one of its biggest proponents.

I was one of the High Priestesses of Arms Control; a true believer. I had little doubt that sound, verifiable arms agreements were a way the world could avoid the Apocalypse. Like so many others, I eagerly anticipated those breathtaking moments of summitry where the centerpiece was always the signing of the latest arms control treaty; the toast; the handshake, and, with Brezhnev, the bear hug. For those precious few minutes the world found comfort in seeing the superpowers affirm their peaceful intent. And the scientists would set the clock back a few minutes further away from midnight. Deep down we knew that arms control was a poor substitute for a real shared agenda based on common aspirations. But it was the best way anyone could think of regulating the balance of terror.

Her authority thus established, Rice turned to explain why those agreements were no longer relevant, why those handshakes and toasts were worthless, and why it was time to pursue missile defense in a robust way, replacing a reliance on treaties and multilateral agreements with a comprehensive strategy to deal with proliferation.

The section that followed, however, failed to deliver that comprehensive strategy, or much of a strategy at all. It enumerated the treaties the administration supported that were currently in force, and then attacked the Clinton administration for its approach to these agreements.

That Administration often signed treaties that it knew the U.S. Senate would never approve of for ratification. At other times, it justified its signature of flawed agreements as necessary to enable it to seek changes to the documents later. In the private sector, no one believes that signing a contract is the best way to get it changed. This is true of treaties as well.

In short, we will not sign treaties that do not serve our national interests. It is not isolationist to suggest that the United States has a special role in the world and should not adhere to every international convention or agreement that someone thinks to propose. Going along with the crowd is not leadership.

An additional point the initial draft made was that the pursuit of missile defense would not stand in the way of protecting against “other means of delivering a WMD payload to the United States, such as a terrorist using a suitcase or car bomb.” By the time the draft reached its fourth iteration, that idea had shrunk to a couple of paragraphs.

Gibson thought the draft was a strong start, although he asked pointed questions—for example, was the “2.5 percent of the defense budget” that was cited as the cost the total, or a downpayment on some tests? If the latter, he thought that shouldn’t be buried rhetorically, but stated clearly, as “a very modest payment to at least find out what we can do.”

He worked to more thoroughly dismantle arguments in favor of the ABM Treaty. One line of argument—“If the ABM Treaty had never existed, no serious person would urge us to create such an agreement today”—was consistent in each successive draft.

However, the next line fell out. “Yet serious people do defend the treaty—with an attachment that almost seems theological.” Gibson seems to have recognized the irony of mocking an excess of belief while promoting a technology that required a leap of faith.

But Gibson thought that the draft was missing some of the “strong leadership” points he wanted to make. So the subsequent iterations (I was able to review four drafts in all) sharpened their criticism of treaties, noting:

The United States is a signatory to over 50 conventions and treaties that still await ratification … Many were designed even though—or even worse, because their ratification prospects were so grim … The United States is a great power. We have been for a century. Today, we occupy a position on the global stage that can only be described as singular. Our interests span every time zone. Nothing anytime soon is going to change that fact. And it is neither isolationist—nor unilateralist—to suggest that we have to adhere to every international convention and agreement that someone thinks to propose.

One of the documents that appears in the speech file seems to be an attempt to buttress that call for leadership. It’s a series of quotes from President Harry Truman on the importance of leaders doing what is right, polls be damned, including this choice one:

How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he had taken a poll in the land of Israel? What would have happened to the Reformation if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong and leadership.

If one of the goals of Rice’s speech was to burnish Bush’s leadership bona fides, a quote from a president that served to put Bush in the company of Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther wouldn’t have hurt.

No Truman quote, however, made it into any of the drafts that I was able to gain access to. Gibson did write his own version of that idea, in what reads today as a powerful—but tragically ironic—line:

Once you strip away the myths, misconceptions, shibboleths, I think the argument becomes pretty simple. If you think the threat is real—and it is—and if you think we have the technology to protect ourselves against the threat—and a robust testing program will tell us—then don’t you have an obligation to move forward? Would it be gross malfeasance to take a pass? Five, ten, fifteen years from now—following some catastrophic event—I certainly would not want to be in the position of having to answer why, in the face of these facts and these arguments, I urged a course of inaction. And I won’t.

Of course, the defining catastrophic event of a young century was already in motion.

On the morning of September 11, Gibson was going back and forth with Rice on final edits.

Interestingly, none of the four drafts I was able to access included the lines that appeared so damning in the excerpts that were leaked years later to The Washington Post. (They were apparently added between the fourth and final drafts.)

Rice was in her office at 8:46 a.m. when her assistant told her that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Like most Americans, Rice thought it was a horrible accident. She was in her regular 9 a.m. staff meeting when her assistant rushed in: A second plane had hit the other tower of the World Trade Center.

Even in the midst of world-changing events, many speechwriters are afflicted with a project-based myopia, trying to figure out if a speech will still happen and, if so, how much of it will need to be rewritten. In a conversation we had years ago, Gibson remembered keeping his phone on throughout the afternoon, wondering if the speech would still be given and awaiting any additional edits, even as it became clear that the United States had suffered its most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The speech he wrote was never delivered.

Seven months after September 11, Rice finally gave the Rostov Lecture. Her new speech showed just how quickly and completely the world had changed.

Rice spoke almost exclusively about the administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. The only mention of missile defense was a reference to using “every tool at our disposal to meet this grave global threat.” There was no need to rhetorically manufacture strong leadership against the theoretical threat of missiles when President Bush had seized the opportunity—from atop a smoldering pile of rubble at Ground Zero and in the well of the House of Representatives—to demonstrate that toughness against the clear and present threat of terrorism.

Rice celebrated the international cooperation, intelligence sharing, and multilateral partnerships required to effectively prosecute the War on Terror—the very relationships her earlier, undelivered speech had been set to diminish, if not dismiss outright.

According to the Washington Post article that broke the story about the original speech, administration officials said that the speech Rice ultimately delivered did not contain any of the original text. However, that wasn’t quite accurate. One phrase appeared in both drafts: “tectonic plates.”

In the original speech, Rice was to have chided supporters of the ABM for “a failure to recognize that the tectonic plates of history really have shifted.” In the remarks she ultimately delivered in April 2002, she said, “An earthquake of the magnitude of 9/11 can shift the tectonic plates of international politics.”

[From the September 2021 issue: 9/11 was a warning of what was to come]

Today, there are those such as James Acton, who leads the nuclear-policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who argue that America’s withdrawal from the ABM, which formally took place in December 2001, has failed to yield a system that could protect us from a rogue state such as North Korea. It has, however, fueled a new arms race, encouraging Russia to develop new nuclear-delivery systems, such as intercontinental hypersonic gliders, and China to arm some ICBMs with multiple warheads. In that sense, our withdrawal may have intensified the very threat its proponents claimed it would counteract.

It’s fitting that the only phrase that survives both drafts is “tectonic plates.” After all, the historical lesson and the geological lesson are one and the same, one that has the power to shake our world: Tectonic plates are always shifting.