Over the past few days, hundreds of thousands of posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, have lambasted a Jewish organization that many people are only vaguely aware of: the Anti-Defamation League. The #BanTheADL campaign, started by overt white nationalists and later boosted by Elon Musk himself, accuses the Jewish civil-rights group of seeking to censor the site’s users, intimidate its advertisers, and generally abrogate American freedoms in service of a sinister liberal agenda.

I’m pretty familiar with the ADL. Like many reporters and subject-matter experts on anti-Semitism, I’ve spoken at some of the organization’s events. I haven’t always agreed with its approach, whether on social-media moderation or Israel. But though the ADL doesn’t get everything right, it has a better batting average than most organizations in this difficult space. In any case, as I wrote earlier this week, none of what is happening to the group today has much to do with the specific policies it advocates, whatever their merits. Rather, the ADL is being scapegoated on Twitter for the platform’s own failings, and attacked as a stand-in for supposed Jewish power.

In an effort to disentangle criticism from conspiracy, I spoke last night with the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, about his organization’s approach to free speech, how he attempts to represent a Jewish consensus in such a polarized time, and whether the ADL is secretly trying to strangle Twitter.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Yair Rosenberg: This all started after you had a conversation with Twitter’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, about the company’s approach to moderating hate speech. You subsequently tweeted about the exchange, calling it “frank” and “productive.” To most people, this might seem perfectly banal—the sort of discussion that regularly happens between Twitter and outside interest groups—but it enraged some openly white-nationalist accounts on the platform, and led them to launch the hashtag #BanTheADL, claiming that the ADL wants to control what people can say on the site and, failing that, shut the whole place down. So what I want to know is: What actually happened on that call?

Jonathan Greenblatt: It was a half-hour Zoom attended by myself, Linda, and one of her staffers. It was an introductory conversation. We talked a little bit about our backgrounds and mutual friends. And we talked about a vision for Twitter. I shared that we had worked with the company since long before the ownership change last fall and that my hope was that we’d continue to work with the company in order to make the platform better. Our focus at ADL is fighting anti-Semitism and all forms of hate, and so in the dialogue I’ve had with Elon, that’s our goal. That’s what we’re trying to do. I don’t want to share all the contents of our conversation, but I left the call feeling very positive, so much so that when the staff person reached out and asked me to tweet about the meeting—not something I would normally do—I was willing to do so. And Linda then replied to my tweet in a positive manner as well. That’s where we left it—which was one reason why I was so surprised when things took a much different turn in the days that followed.

Rosenberg: Much of the anger directed at the ADL on Twitter this week has been explicitly anti-Semitic in nature. But some of the posts reference actual facts. It’s true that the ADL has lobbied social-media platforms to police what it sees as hate speech, working alongside many other, non-Jewish organizations that no one on far-right Twitter cares about because those groups are not Jewish. This effort long predates Musk’s tenure, and contrary to the claims of your critics, it has often been a fruitless pursuit. I’m thinking of your calls to Twitter’s previous management to sanction the account of the Supreme Leader of Iran, who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and attempted to incite genocide on the platform.

Are you pressuring advertisers to boycott Twitter if it doesn’t take your advice?

Greenblatt: No.

Rosenberg: So what is the nature of the ADL’s advocacy? The First Amendment doesn’t apply to private platforms, but we do have a free-speech culture in America, where we tend to err on the side of allowing people to say what they want in the public square. Where do you and the ADL draw the line between what is offensive and what is genuinely unacceptable?

Greenblatt: Let me break it down. We are focused on the broad intersection of technology and society. Why? Because increasingly, the line between the online and the offline has blurred. So many of us lead lives that are as digital as they are analog, whether it’s online gaming, or e-commerce platforms, or messaging apps, or social-media services. And the latter are a particular concern because social media is a super-spreader of anti-Semitism and hate—an issue on Twitter which long precedes Elon Musk. As you said, we were unable to affect the kind of change that we wanted under previous management.

Now, to the point about engaging with companies: We’ve worked with everyone from Amazon to Zoom. The goal is not to censor; it’s to support these companies, to share with them what we see, and to help them do a better job. The fact of the matter is that ADL is a civil-rights organization that has been ferociously defending the First Amendment for over 100 years. You’re correct to identify that businesses are not free-speech zones. Nonetheless, we believe very strongly that hate speech is the price of free speech. It is! To live in a democracy and an open society, you have to be willing to listen to things that you don’t like, things that you detest. Where that crosses a line is when people are inciting violence against others, spreading the kind of toxicity that can literally cause people harm.

Rosenberg: How can you tell which is which?

Greenblatt: I acknowledge that sometimes it can be difficult to differentiate between what’s in and what’s out. But to be clear, this is not a new concern. Twitter/X is a media company that draws its revenue through advertising and subscriptions. These are not new forms of business. These are as old as the Gutenberg press. And that’s really important to point out, because for as long as we’ve had commercial media, they have abided by certain standards and practices, acknowledging the fact that they can publish what they want, but also that there are consequences for what voices they choose to privilege. Now, we can argue about what’s the line. But again, media companies have been making these calls since the advent of these mass-media tools.

Likewise, Twitter has to make decisions about all this. Does it want to keep this or that material up? Does it think such content contributes to the public conversation? They make those calls. And then guess what? Advertisers and subscribers will make informed decisions based on what they see. And that’s all that’s happening right now. ADL has not called Elon Musk an anti-Semite. ADL has not called Twitter an anti-Semitic platform. ADL is not actively pressuring companies to not participate on Twitter. In fact, up until last week, ADL was advertising on Twitter. So the notion that we were trying to “kill the company,” that’s a fiction. The reason I met with Linda, the reason I’ve been engaged with Elon, the reason we continue to try to work with them, is because we want it to be better. Because a better, healthier, safer Twitter is a better outcome for the Jewish people, its users, and, I think, for the world.

I feel compelled to lay all this out because if you look at this hashtag #BanTheADL, there’s a lot of stuff among those tweets that I wouldn’t let my children see, because it’s so rancid. Now, if Twitter wants to keep that up there, that’s fine. That’s their prerogative. If they want to amplify it, again, their prerogative. But they shouldn’t be surprised when advertisers and subscribers and users more generally flee from that. Because it’s offensive, it’s ugly, and I think it’s wrong.

Rosenberg: I’m struck by the two very different versions of the ADL in this conversation. On the one hand, there’s the version of the ADL that preoccupies hard-right Twitter, which casts the group as this extraordinarily powerful yet secretive organization that manipulates what people see on social media through public and private pressure. And then there is the actual ADL in the real world, which I know from my reporting spends most of its time doing completely different things. Can you give a bird’s-eye view of what the  ADL does on a daily basis?

Greenblatt: The ADL is the oldest anti-hate organization in America. We’re focused on three things. No. 1: protecting our community. We do that by tracking anti-Semitic attitudes and incidents; by monitoring extremists and trying to understand what they’re doing, through research and analysis; and by working with law enforcement. ADL is the largest trainer of law enforcement in the country on issues of hate and extremism. And we track immediate threats, like the swatting incidents that have happened in synagogues in recent weeks, or the neo-Nazis who marched in Florida over the weekend.

Secondly, we work to improve the social climate through advocacy. We lobby in Congress and state legislatures on issues of extremism and hate. We also work with the executive branch, where we’re very involved in helping the administration think about the National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism. We are also engaged in the judicial branch. We file amicus briefs on cases where we see a connection to the issues we care about. We also litigate in the courts. Right now, we are suing the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. We’ve done that kind of work for years, and have helped bankrupt groups like the White Aryan Resistance.

Rosenberg: I can’t imagine why so many white nationalists on Twitter would want to ban you.

Greenblatt: This is part of why they hate us so much. Because we track them. Because we sue them. And because we are working very hard to beat back their bigotry. And by the way, sometimes that advocacy requires us to speak out not just in the judicial courts, but in the court of public opinion, which we do regularly, engaging not just with government or the press, but—as we’ve discussed—with companies and the private sector and other aspects of civil society.

Thirdly, we work to change the culture through education and representation. ADL is one of the largest providers in America of anti-bias, anti-hate, anti-bullying content in schools—material about standing up to anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism, etc. Last year, our content reached some 4.5 million schoolchildren. The truth is, to create long-term change, you can’t just arrest people or litigate. You have to change hearts and minds. So when ADL calls out the way Jews are represented in the media and works to change the way Jews and sometimes other minorities are perceived, that’s all about the long-term process of culture change.

To execute this work, we have a network of 25 field offices. And the main thing that they do is respond to anti-Semitic incidents. We’re the 911 for our community. When there’s an act of anti-Semitic vandalism, or an anti-Jewish assault, or a kid is harassed in school, or an employee is discriminated against at work, or an elderly Orthodox person gets attacked on the street, we show up and we’re there. Last year, we received reports of over 12,000 anti-Semitic incidents, and we investigated every one of them. We were able to ascertain that 3,697 were indeed anti-Semitic acts. This is what we’re doing every single day.

Rosenberg: I want to ask about some of the challenges of this work. You know and I know that anti-Semitism constructs itself as a conspiracy theory that alleges Jewish control of society and politics. This belief is a big part of the #BanTheADL campaign. And it really complicates your job, because it often puts Jews in an impossible situation when confronting prejudice. If they say nothing about what they experience, the bigotry continues. But if the Jews protest their mistreatment, and the culprits suffer any consequences—for instance, advertisers say, “We don’t want to be on this platform right now”—the bigots just cast their punishment as confirmation of the powerful Jewish conspiracy. Heads, the anti-Semites win; tails, the Jews lose. As a prominent Jewish organization, how do you navigate this catch-22? Do you ever worry that sometimes your involvement in something will inadvertently affirm the anti-Semitic worldview? Is there even a way to avoid this trap, or does it just come with top-down activism?

Greenblatt: This is one of the unique dimensions of anti-Semitism as a phenomenon. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Now, what I will say is that while that may be true with the anti-Semites themselves, I actually deeply believe in the goodness of most people. And I think when you call attention to bigotry, the vast majority of people see it for what it is, and they understand it when it is explained, which helps us to collectively defeat the prejudice. Unfortunately, there is an extreme that will continue to see evil in the Jews, whether it’s the individual embodiment of the Jewish people, like George Soros or Sheldon Adelson, or an organizational embodiment of the Jewish people, like ADL, or the national embodiment of the Jewish people in Israel. The hardened anti-Semites see only evil in all of these different manifestations of our community. And yeah, I think that’s a big problem.

Rosenberg: We’ve talked so far about the ADL’s illegitimate critics—bigots upset at being exposed for their bigotry, and people who wrap themselves in the First Amendment while opposing freedom of religion for Jewish people and groups, in violation of the First Amendment. But the ADL also has plenty of more considered critics. On the right, you have conservative Jews who feel that the ADL has strayed too far into partisan progressive politics by getting involved in fights like the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, for example. And on the left, you have Jews who’ve argued that the ADL conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism. Jews are a famously fractious people, and it’s hard to get them to agree about anything, and that includes the ADL. How do you go about attempting to represent a Jewish consensus when there are often conflicting stakeholders? What does it mean to be a Jewish organization in our hyperpolarized climate?

Greenblatt: Well, it’s certainly difficult. I think we try to be principled, not political. When ADL was founded in 1913, the mission statement that the founders wrote was extraordinary in its ambition. The notion that the organization would work to stop the defamation of Jewish people and ensure justice and fair treatment for all—it got them a lot of criticism. I know it did, because I’ve read our oral histories from the 1950s and 1960s. When we stood with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when we marched in Selma, when we changed our policy on demonstrations in order to participate in the original March on Washington, we got a lot of flak internally. We got a lot of flak in 1953 when we filed an amicus brief in Brown v. Board of Education, and again some of our considered critics said that this was not an ADL issue—that desegregating America’s schools was not a Jewish issue. But ADL’s leaders believed that it was, and they stood up, took the risk, and I think ended up on the right side of history. But there have also been times when ADL has taken other positions, like when, under previous management, ADL opposed the Park51 mosque near Ground Zero. And I think we got that wrong.

I’m giving you those two examples because I think if you look back at the history, sometimes we’ve gotten it right; sometimes we’ve gotten it wrong. If you look at the eight years I’ve been at ADL, there are things I’ve gotten right, and there are things I’ve gotten wrong. That said, we do have what I’ll call determined detractors, or congenital critics, who see nothing good in anything that we do. And I think in an era when so much of our public conversation is mediated on social media, you hear a lot of those people. Some of them are those who say that I have some sort of political agenda. I don’t. I have one agenda, which is protecting the Jewish community. And so, yeah, I don’t always get it right. But even the mistakes that I make come from that place.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Democracy is under attack around the world; in the United States, the summer brought good news and bad news. The institutions of democracy are still functioning, but not for long if enough Americans continue to support authoritarianism.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tim Alberta: The thrill of defeat The metaphor that explains why America needs to prosecute Trump There’s a word for blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. What were the Russians doing in Chornobyl?

Layered Repression

Almost two years ago, I engaged in a thought experiment about what the failure of democracy in the United States might look like. I wrote it for an Atlantic subscriber newsletter I had back then, and I hope you’ll forgive me for revisiting it, but after a summer in which American democracy has been walking a tightrope over the authoritarian chasm, it’s worth looking back to see how we’ve done since early 2022.

The most important point, and the one that I think bears repeating, is that the failure of democracy in America will not look like a scene from a movie, where some fascist in a black tunic ascends the steps of the Capitol on Inauguration Day and proclaims the end of freedom:

The collapse of democracy in the United States will look more like an unspooling or an unwinding rather than some dramatic installation of Gilead or Oceania. My guess—and again, this is just my stab at speculative dystopianism—is that it will be a federal breakdown that returns us to the late 1950s in all of the worst ways.

We’re already seeing this unwinding in slow motion. Donald Trump and many on the American right (including the national Republican Party) have made clear their plans to subvert America’s democratic institutions. They made continuous efforts to undermine the will of the voters at the state level, most notably in Georgia, after the 2020 presidential election, and then they tried to overrule the results at the national level by setting a mob on Congress on January 6, 2021. If Trump returns to the Oval Office, he and his underlings will set up a system designed to set up a series of cascading democratic failures from Washington to every locality they can reach.

They intend to pack courts with judges who are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. They want to destroy an independent federal civil service by making all major civil servants political appointees, which would allow the right to stuff every national agency with cronies at will. They want to neuter independent law-enforcement institutions such as the FBI, even if that means disbanding them. They will likely try to pare down the senior military ranks until the only remaining admirals and generals are men and women sworn not to the defense of the United States but to the defense of Donald Trump, even if that means employing military force against the American public.

Trump and his supporters are not even coy about some of these ideas. The Heritage Foundation—once a powerhouse think tank on the right that has since collapsed into unhinged extremism and admiration for foreign strongmen—has a “Project 2025” posted on its website, with sections that read like extended Facebook comments. I took a look so that you don’t have to, including at a policy-guide chapter on the military authored by former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Heritage and Miller (a seat warmer brought in by Trump at the tail end of his administration) think it’s very important for the next president—I wonder who they could possibly have in mind—to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs” and to reinstate personnel dismissed for disobeying orders to get vaccinated.

Also:

Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.

Why not just write up a loyalty oath to Trump? Little wonder that Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is holding up the promotion of some 300 senior officers; perhaps it’s occurred to him (or others) that sitting on those promotions until 2025 might open the door for Heritage’s unnamed next U.S. president to sweep out the Marxist gender theorists and replace them with “real Americans” who know that their duty is to a man rather than a moldering document in the National Archives.

The rest of Project 2025 is a lot of putative big-think from wannabe conservative intellectuals such as Ken Cuccinelli, Ben Carson, Stephen Moore, and Peter Navarro (who is currently on trial for contempt of Congress). Much of this stuff is nonsense, of course, but it’ll be nonsense right up until the point it isn’t: These are all names that would reappear in a second Trump administration, and this time, they’d move a lot faster in breaking down the federal guardrails around democracy.

This layered state, federal, and local repression is what I worried about back in early 2022:

This is where we really will have “free” and “unfree” Americas, side by side. To drive from Massachusetts to Alabama—especially for women and people of color—will not be crossing the Mason-Dixon line so much as it will be like falling through the Time Tunnel and emerging in a pre-1964 America where civil rights and equal treatment before the government are a matter of the state’s forbearance. If an American citizen’s constitutional rights are violated, there will be no Justice Department that will intervene, no Supreme Court that will overrule. (And arresting seditionists? Good luck with that. I expect that if Trump is reelected, he will pardon everyone involved with January 6.)

Trump, of course, has since made the promise to drop pardons like gentle rain from the sky. America’s democratic immune system, however, is for now still functioning. The courts have done their duty even when elected officials have refused to do theirs. (Imagine how much healthier American democracy would be right now if the Senate had convicted Trump in his second impeachment. Alas.) Trump is now under indictment for 91 alleged crimes, and Jack Smith seems undaunted in his pursuit of justice.

Likewise, the major ringleaders of January 6—all but one, I should say—have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, among other crimes, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Some of these supposed tough guys ended up blubbering and pleading for mercy in a federal courtroom, but to no avail. The would-be Oath Keepers centurion Stewart Rhodes and a leader of the Proud Boys, Ethan Nordean, each got 18 years, a record broken yesterday when a Trump-appointed federal judge sent the ex–Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio inside for 22 years, meaning he will be sitting out the next five presidential elections.

This is the good news, but none of it will matter if Trump returns to the White House.

I shouldn’t end on such a dire note. Trump is the likely nominee, and although I still feel a chill about the threat of authoritarianism, I also can’t shake the feeling that most Americans in most states want no part of this ongoing madness. I still have faith that most people, when faced with the choice, will continue to support the constitutional freedoms of the United States—but only if they understand how endangered those freedoms are.

Related:

The former Proud Boys leader finds out. Is Tennessee a democracy?

Today’s News

A Russian missile strike killed at least 17 people and injured dozens of others in Kostyantynivka, according to Ukrainian officials. A federal judge found Donald Trump liable for making defamatory statements against the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019, carrying over a federal jury’s verdict in a related defamation case earlier this year. Trump has appealed the jury’s verdict. Delta Air Lines announced that it is bringing Tom Brady on board as a strategic adviser.

Evening Read

Photograph by Erik Paul Howard for The Atlantic

Hip-Hop’s Fiercest Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

One sunny day in 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz, smoking joints and talking shit. Of course, Biggie did these things on many days during his short lifetime, but on this particular day, a neighborhood friend named dream hampton was in the back seat with a video camera. Wearing Versace sunglasses and a checked purple shirt, the 23-year-old rapper—whose breakout album, Ready to Die, had come out the year before—held a chunky cellphone to his ear. He was making plans and talking about girls, riffing in his lisped woof of a voice. He laughed and brought a square of rolling paper, full of pot leaves, to his lips.

From behind the camera, hampton asked whether he intended to consume their entire bag of weed. Annoyed at the interruption, Biggie mocked her question. Hampton’s voice turned sharp. “Why are you going at me today?” she asked. “What’s the problem? Do we need to do something before we go on the road? Take this outside?” The video cut to static.

Read the full article.

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Read. These six books are correctives to isolation.

Watch. D.P., on Netflix, is a compelling K-drama without a drop of romance.

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P.S.

I voted yesterday in Rhode Island, where our district had a special primary election to choose contenders to replace resigning Representative David Cicilline. Rhode Island CD 1 is a heavily Democratic district (it went for Joe Biden in 2020 by 29 points), so the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to prevail in the general election. Yesterday’s Democratic winner was Gabe Amo, a young man who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations. Amo is Black, and if he goes to Washington, he’ll be the first person of color to represent Rhode Island in Congress.

But what fascinated me yesterday was that we all voted in Rhode Island CD 1 without having much of an idea who was likely to win. For various reasons, including the short run-up to the primary, none of the local media outlets or universities did any polling. Twelve candidates, including several Rhode Island elected officials, ran in the primary. A few looked to be prohibitive favorites early on; one was felled at the last minute by scandal. Another, Aaron Regunberg, seemed to be ubiquitous on the airwaves, with ads touting his endorsement from Bernie Sanders. (Probably not a great idea in Rhode Island; Regunberg came in second but ran more than seven points behind Amo.)

I often say that people should vote as if their one vote will make the difference; for once, I walked into the booth with the thought that my vote could, in fact, be the deciding vote. As a political junkie, I love polls, but it was nice to be able to cast a ballot without knowing whether my preferred candidate was the likely winner or loser.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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Say this for the Proud Boys: They abide by their own creed. “Fuck around, find out!” members of the group, with Joseph Biggs in front, chanted as they marched down the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.

Over the past week, they’ve found out. Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, was sentenced today to 22 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy. Tarrio, who was not physically present at the riot after being kicked out of Washington the day before, was convicted in May. It’s the longest January 6–related sentence yet, and follows a series of long sentences announced last week for other Proud Boys: 17 years for Biggs, 18 for Ethan Nordean, 15 for Zachary Rehl—all of whom were found guilty of seditious conspiracy—and 10 years for Dominic Pezzola, who was acquitted of sedition but convicted of six other felonies. In May, Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for sedition, in his capacity as head of the Oath Keepers, another group involved in the insurrection.

[Michael Signer: America does have a way to save itself]

Seeing these long sentences levied now, more than two and a half years after the insurrection, is heartening. Hundreds of people have been sentenced for violence and more minor offenses committed at the Capitol, but the Proud Boys’ sentences, along with Rhodes’s, are more important, because they punish not just spontaneous violence but also a concerted, planned attack on the government.

The convictions and stiff sentences are a message about what the United States will tolerate. Juries have proved willing to convict even though the charges in question are rare and even though the likely sentences are strong. They also show that juries and judges, and not just prosecutors, are unwilling to treat the insurrection the way too many Republican elected officials have—as just a rally that got a little out of hand.

Political scientists call laws that defend democratic institutions from authoritarian threats—and the enforcement of them—“defensive democracy.” “American laws against seditious conspiracy and against advocating for overthrowing the government are quintessential defensive democracy,” Michael Signer wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

The Proud Boys leaders have received serious, hard-time sentences, not slaps on the wrist. This is true even though the prison terms are short of both the federal guidelines and what prosecutors requested (33 years for Tarrio and Biggs, 30 for Rehl, 27 for Nordean, 20 for Pezzola). Such sentences would verge on draconian, given the crimes involved: The conspiracy was dangerous and appalling, but also feckless and obviously doomed. (For comparison, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was jailed for two years before being released without trial.) And it’s true even if the men don’t end up serving the full terms, as is common—though their unrepentant attitudes suggest that they’re banking on pardons from a restored President Donald Trump, not early releases.

Notably, for the purposes of a sentence enhancement, Judge Timothy Kelly ruled that the Proud Boys’ actions represented terrorism, even as he gave them less time than the guidelines would stipulate. The defendants were aghast. “I know that I messed up that day, but I am not a terrorist,” Biggs protested at his sentencing. But Kelly, and common sense, said otherwise. Americans may be accustomed to the idea that terrorists are foreigners, most likely Muslims, but what the Proud Boys did on January 6 amounted to “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives,” which happens to be the FBI’s textbook definition of terrorism. It doesn’t matter that they were American-born or believed that they were in the right.

Speculating about the deterrent impact of the strict sentences and terrorism label would be premature, but the long sentences will take a direct bite out of the groups. The Proud Boys have since January 6 seemed to shift their efforts into grassroots involvement in local government, which could give them a lasting grip even with their top leadership locked up. The Oath Keepers, which centered around Rhodes, may be in more dire straits.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

These are positive indications about the strength of American defensive democracy, but they are not the final answer. Another test will come in the trials of the many people involved in what I call the paperwork coup—the series of extralegal (though often lawyerly) attempts to subvert the 2020 election. Recent indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis demonstrate how the various tendrils of this effort were intertwined. They add up to a scheme that was less blatant and less violent than the January 6 riot, but also a greater threat to the integrity of the election system. Will juries and judges recognize that peril, or will they treat it as bumbling paper-pushing?

Also unresolved is the larger question of Trump. If Tarrio and other Proud Boys deserved to have the book thrown at them, and if the rank-and-file rioters are serving their time, the justice system still hasn’t proved whether it can sufficiently hold accountable the man all of this was designed to benefit—and who, if the prosecutors are to be believed, orchestrated much of it. Even as the highest-profile Proud Boys cases are finishing, Trump is only now facing charges in Washington and Fulton County for his own role in the election plot.

[From the October 2023 issue: The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump]

While those cases slowly ramp up, though, Trump remains the strong favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and would enter a rematch with President Joe Biden with something near even odds at victory. As my colleagues Quinta Jurecic and David Frum have recently pointed out, the best and perhaps only way to contain the danger Trump still poses to the American system is to defeat him at the ballot box—in other words, putting the democracy in defensive democracy.