This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. (Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.)

To read about Henry Kissinger’s legacy is to confront the place of an undeniably influential figure in a difficult—and bloody—global history.

“How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere?” Gary J. Bass wrote in The Atlantic yesterday upon the news of Kissinger’s death at 100. “The uncomfortable question is why much of American polite society was so willing to dote on him, rather than honestly confronting what he did.”

The following is a guide to our writing about Kissinger, from 1969, when he first joined the Nixon administration, to the present day, including two pieces by Kissinger himself on the rise of artificial intelligence.

In His Own Words:
Conversations with, and writing by, Kissinger

The Lessons of Henry Kissinger, by Jeffrey Goldberg (December 2016) World Chaos and World Order: Conversations With Henry Kissinger, by Jeffrey Goldberg (November 10, 2016) A Conversation With Henry Kissinger, by David Samuels (April 2007) The Kissinger Transcripts, by James Warren (June 2005) How the Enlightenment Ends, by Henry Kissinger (June 2018) The Metamorphosis, by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher (August 2019)

1969–1976: Our Reporting on Kissinger
From the Nixon administration to the Ford administration

Prof. Bismarck Goes to Washington: Kissinger on the Job, by Nora Beloff (December 1969) Kissinger and Nixon in the White House, by Seymour Hersh (May 1982) The Price of Power, by Seymour Hersh (December 1982) Who’s Running the Country?, by Joseph Kraft (April 1974)= Kissinger’s Paper Peace: How Not to Handle the Middle East, by George W. Ball (February 1976)

Assessing Kissinger’s Legacy

Party of One: Judging Kissinger, by Thomas Griffith (July 1976) The Craft and Craftiness of Henry Kissinger, by Philip Geyelin (February 1980) Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism, by Robert D. Kaplan (June 1999) Living With a Nuclear Iran, by Robert D. Kaplan (September 2010) In Defense of Henry Kissinger, by Robert D. Kaplan (May 2013) The Flaw in Kissinger’s Grand Strategy, by Husain Haqqani (November 14, 2016) Henry Kissinger Will Not Apologize, by Graciela Mochkofsky (November 15, 2016) Kissinger: The View From Vietnam, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (November 27, 2016) Cooperation With Russia Is Possible, by Kathryn Stoner (November 22, 2016) What Joe Biden Could Learn From Henry Kissinger, by Martin Indyk (October 22, 2021)

Less than a month after the billionaire Elon Musk enthusiastically endorsed the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the deadliest massacre of Jews in American history, this week, he received a warm welcome to Israel from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since Musk took over Twitter, which he has renamed X, the sort of hateful content that drives both negative and positive engagement has flourished on the site. But he has also directly promoted some of the most toxic claims on the platform. He endorsed as “the actual truth” the idea that Jews were deliberately supporting the immigration of nonwhite people in an act of “hatred against whites.” The post’s implication was that not restricting immigration to Western countries on the basis of race and religion is racist against white people, who have a racially defined right to political, cultural, and demographic hegemony in those nations.

As my colleague Yair Rosenberg notes, “It wasn’t the first time Musk echoed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from his social-media bubble.” No conspiracy theory is necessary to explain why people flee poverty and persecution for nations with greater economic opportunity or political freedom; this is a large part of the story of the United States of America. But perhaps Musk finds in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories a useful means of redirecting frustration over social change or economic hardship away from the obscenely wealthy, like himself, who profit from lower marginal tax rates and a more threadbare social safety net.

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk among the anti-Semites]

At a New York Times event yesterday, Musk apologized for the post, which has caused the platform to hemorrhage advertisers. “I’m sorry for that … post,” Musk said. “It was foolish of me. Of the 30,000 it might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done. And I’ve tried my best to clarify six ways from Sunday, but you know at least I think it’ll be obvious that in fact far from being anti-Semitic, I’m in fact philo-Semitic.” That self-description is less than reassuring.

Whatever Musk’s motives, the incident has worsened X’s financial situation. The site had already plummeted in value since he turned it into a platform for amplifying the far right. For the prime minister of the Jewish state to host Musk mere weeks later, helping launder Musk’s reputation, may seem strange. In fact, it is part of a larger pattern in which Israeli politicians and pro-Israel advocates have offered to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism from far-right figures in exchange for support for Israel. As Emily Tamkin argues in Slate, Netanyahu himself has long courted far-right leaders in Europe who have strategically deployed anti-Semitism as a political tool. Such illiberal leaders are less likely to oppose Israeli territorial maximalism, and a Europe led by authoritarian right-wing populists is less likely to object to Israel holding Palestinians captive in an occupation that denies them suffrage or national self-determination. This is the same logic that explains Netanyahu’s courtship of American evangelicals at the expense of support from liberal American Jews. Right-wing Christian Zionists are less likely to express tedious pangs of conscience about the Israeli government’s actions.

It is important for non-Jews to understand that the Israeli prime minister is not the pope of the Jews. He is not a religious leader to whom global Jewry looks for guidance. He is a secular politician, in Netanyahu’s case one beholden to a right-wing constituency in a nation that defines itself in explicitly ethnic terms. Netanyahu cannot grant absolution for anti-Semitism to someone who has alleged that a global Jewish conspiracy seeks to destroy white people by allowing nonwhite people to be their neighbors. An anti-Semite cannot make a pilgrimage to Israel, kiss Netanyahu’s ring, bathe in the Jordan, and have the Hitler particles cleansed from his skin like Naaman curing his leprosy.

That Netanyahu’s actions effectively make anti-Semitism against diaspora Jews more respectable is, quite simply, not his problem—it’s not like they can vote for his opposition. Most Jews around the world support Israel as a Jewish state and as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Netanyahu, however, is more interested in bolstering his own vision of Israel’s future. Netanyahu views the Israeli national interest as preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The particular form of anti-Semitism endorsed by Musk is also consistent with Netanyahu’s own political values in its right-wing ethnonationalism. It is also not a stretch to say that Netanyahu, like Musk, sees those in his own society who advocate for equal rights for all as agents of a global conspiracy.

[Read: Elon Musk’s unrecognizable app]

The outcome of all this is a seedy transactional relationship, in which Netanyahu empowers anti-Semitism against diaspora Jews while shoring up support for Israel. But this approach is hardly unique to him; the right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro once said of the far-right pundit Ann Coulter that he does not “lose sleep” over remarks she made about Jews because she supports Israel. This is more or less the bargain offered: You can be as anti-Semitic as you like as long as you are also a Zionist.

No conspiracism is necessary to understand why American Jews, as a religious and ethnic minority, might prefer that the nations in which they live be liberal democracies. There is also no mystery why such a group would on average oppose racist immigration policies, given that such restrictions prevented Jewish immigration to the U.S. during World War II, thereby exacerbating the Holocaust. It is equally easy to understand why Netanyahu would view right-wing authoritarians, even those who hate Jews—especially left-wing Jews—as more reliable allies than his more universalist coreligionists. But all of this highlights the fact that the interests of the Jewish people and the interests of the state of Israel are not necessarily the same. Indeed, the more the Israeli government sees anti-Semitic Zionism as useful to its cause, the more they diverge.

Last fall, when RSV and flu came roaring back from a prolonged and erratic hiatus, and COVID was still killing thousands of Americans each week, many of the United States’ leading infectious-disease experts offered the nation a glimmer of hope. The overwhelm, they predicted, was probably temporary—viruses making up ground they’d lost during the worst of the pandemic. Next year would be better.

And so far, this year has been better. Some of the most prominent and best-tracked viruses, at least, are behaving less aberrantly than they did the previous autumn. Although neither RSV nor flu is shaping up to be particularly mild this year, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, both appear to be behaving more within their normal bounds.

But infections are still nowhere near back to their pre-pandemic norm. They never will be again. Adding another disease—COVID—to winter’s repertoire has meant exactly that: adding another disease, and a pretty horrific one at that, to winter’s repertoire. “The probability that someone gets sick over the course of the winter is now increased,” Rivers told me, “because there is yet another germ to encounter.” The math is simple, even mind-numbingly obvious—a pathogenic n+1 that epidemiologists have seen coming since the pandemic’s earliest days. Now we’re living that reality, and its consequences. “What I’ve told family or friends is, ‘Odds are, people are going to get sick this year,’” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told me.

Even before the pandemic, winter was a dreaded slog—“the most challenging time for a hospital” in any given year, Popescu said. In typical years, flu hospitalizes an estimated 140,000 to 710,000 people in the United States alone; some years, RSV can add on some 200,000 more. “Our baseline has never been great,” Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford, told me. “Tens of thousands of people die every year.” In “light” seasons, too, the pileup exacts a tax: In addition to weathering the influx of patients, health-care workers themselves fall sick, straining capacity as demand for care rises. And this time of year, on top of RSV, flu, and COVID, we also have to contend with a maelstrom of other airway viruses—among them, rhinoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, human metapneumovirus, and common-cold coronaviruses. (A small handful of bacteria can cause nasty respiratory illnesses too.) Illnesses not severe enough to land someone in the hospital could still leave them stuck at home for days or weeks on end, recovering or caring for sick kids—or shuffling back to work, still sick and probably contagious, because they can’t afford to take time off.

To toss any additional respiratory virus into that mess is burdensome; for that virus to be SARS-CoV-2 ups the ante all the more. “This is a more serious pathogen that is also more infectious,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. This year, COVID-19 has so far killed some 80,000 Americans—a lighter toll than in the three years prior, but one that still dwarfs that of the worst flu seasons in the past decade. Globally, the only infectious killer that rivals it in annual-death count is tuberculosis. And last year, a CDC survey found that more than 3 percent of American adults were suffering from long COVID—millions of people in the United States alone.

[Read: Is COVID a common cold yet?]

With only a few years of data to go on, and COVID-data tracking now spotty at best, it’s hard to quantify just how much worse winters might be from now on. But experts told me they’re keeping an eye on some potentially concerning trends. We’re still rather early in the typical sickness season, but influenza-like illnesses, a catchall tracked by the CDC, have already been on an upward push for weeks. Rivers also pointed to CDC data that track trends in deaths caused by pneumonia, flu, and COVID-19. Even when SARS-CoV-2 has been at its most muted, Rivers said, more people have been dying—especially during the cooler months—than they were at the pre-pandemic baseline. The math of exposure is, again, simple: The more pathogens you encounter, the more likely you are to get sick.

A larger roster of microbes might also extend the portion of the year when people can expect to fall ill, Rivers told me. Before the pandemic, RSV and flu would usually start to bump up sometime in the fall, before peaking in the winter; if the past few years are any indication, COVID could now surge in the summer, shading into RSV’s autumn rise, before adding to flu’s winter burden, potentially dragging the misery out into spring. “Based on what I know right now, I am considering the season to be longer,” Rivers said.

With COVID still quite new, the exact specifics of respiratory-virus season will probably continue to change for a good while yet. The population, after all, is still racking up initial encounters with this new coronavirus, and with regularly administered vaccines. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me he suspects that, barring further gargantuan leaps in viral evolution, the disease will continue to slowly mellow out in severity as our collective defenses build; the virus may also pose less of a transmission risk as the period during which people are infectious contracts. But even if the dangers of COVID-19 are lilting toward an asymptote, experts still can’t say for sure where that asymptote might be relative to other diseases such as the flu—or how long it might take for the population to get there. And no matter how much this disease softens, it seems extraordinarily unlikely to ever disappear. For the foreseeable future, “pretty much all years going forward are going to be worse than what we’ve been used to before,” Hanage told me.

[Read: The next stage of COVID is starting now]

In one sense, this was always where we were going to end up. SARS-CoV-2 spread too quickly and too far to be quashed; it’s now here to stay. If the arithmetic of more pathogens is straightforward, our reaction to that addition could have been too: More disease risk means ratcheting up concern and response. But although a core contingent of Americans might still be more cautious than they were before the pandemic’s start—masking in public, testing before gathering, minding indoor air quality, avoiding others whenever they’re feeling sick—much of the country has readily returned to the pre-COVID mindset.

When I asked Hanage what precautions worthy of a respiratory disease with a death count roughly twice that of flu’s would look like, he rattled off a familiar list: better access to and uptake of vaccines and antivirals, with the vulnerable prioritized; improved surveillance systems to offer  people at high risk a better sense of local-transmission trends; improved access to tests and paid sick leave. Without those changes, excess disease and death will continue, and “we’re saying we’re going to absorb that into our daily lives,” he said.

And that is what is happening. This year, for the first time, millions of Americans have access to three lifesaving respiratory-virus vaccines, against flu, COVID, and RSV. Uptake for all three remains sleepy and halting; even the flu shot, the most established, is not performing above its pre-pandemic baseline. “We get used to people getting sick every year,” Maldonado told me. “We get used to things we could probably fix.” The years since COVID arrived set a horrific precedent of death and disease; after that, this season of n+1 sickness might feel like a reprieve. But compare it with a pre-COVID world, and it looks objectively worse. We’re heading toward a new baseline, but it will still have quite a bit in common with the old one: We’re likely to accept it, and all of its horrors, as a matter of course.

A week before Christmas in 1983, two chemists at Yale University made a breakthrough that they thought could change the world. “It was like opening up a door and seeing a light,” one of the scientists, Stuart Schreiber, later told The New York Times. The pair had produced a substance, periplanone-B, that sends the male American cockroach into a thrashing, sexual frenzy.

What if this were used to build a better trap—a cockroach honeypot that lured bugs into a dish of poison? The implications were mind-bending. Cockroaches were overrunning U.S. cities in the 1980s—more than 2 billion lived in New York alone, according to the Times—and there was no good way of getting rid of them. Sprayed insecticides barely worked after decades’ worth of insect evolution. “Roach Motels” (glue traps, more or less) did next to nothing to prevent an infestation. My own family, like others living in apartments throughout New York City at the time, could only shrug at the roaches darting from our cupboards and crawling on the bathroom floor. I remember that my best friend’s parents had a gecko living underneath their fridge, supposedly for natural bug control. No doubt it was a fat and healthy lizard. The roaches were still legion.

So of course scientists producing a new roach attractant in a lab made the papers. Alas, the periplanone-B solution was just another failed idea—one of many bungled forays in a never-ending war. The bugs kept on marching through our homes, as they always had; they kept on laying all their hidden eggs. Yet again, the cockroach earned its reputation as the animal that could never, ever be wiped out.

But even as this disappointment faded, something unbelievable was just about to happen. A true miracle in roach control was already under way. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I speak with Hanna Rosin about a neglected achievement in the history of pest control.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. A few weeks ago, one of our science editors, Dan Engber, said he had a story to tell me. It’s a little weird, definitely gross. But it’s amazing. Here it is.

[Break]

Rosin: Well, first close the door behind you. Hey.

Daniel Engber: Hello.

Rosin: What’s up?

Engber: So I have a story about a scientific discovery made in very recent times that no one thought was possible, which changed the lives of millions.

Rosin: Ooh.

Engber: But no one remembers it.

Rosin: Wow. That sounds … fake? (Laughs.) Do you want to tell me what it is?

Engber: Sure. So this is a story of a forgotten solution, but also of a forgotten problem, and that problem is cockroaches.

Rosin: Cockroach—what do you mean cockroaches are a forgotten problem? I feel like I saw one recently.

Engber: Right. You saw one—one cockroach. In the 1980s, there were a lot of cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches were like a national news story and almost like a public-health emergency. So there would be articles with various levels of alarmism about how the risk of being hospitalized with childhood asthma was three times higher in kids who were exposed to cockroach infestations.

There were stories about how cockroaches could carry the polio and yellow fever viruses.

Rosin: Okay. So cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches bad for your health.

Engber: Cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches bad for your health.

Cockroaches in the nation’s Capitol.

[News reel]

Tom Brokaw: Congress certainly has its hands full these days with the deficit, the MX, Central America, and now debugging.

Engber: So this is an NBC Nightly News story with Tom Brokaw from the spring of 1985, which is a very important moment in the history of cockroaches.

[News reel]

Interviewee: It’s very serious. The problem: They’re in our desks. They’re under tables. They’re everywhere.

Journalist: Some members of Congress are trying valiantly to fight back. Congressman Al McCandless has installed this black box in his office. It exudes a sexy scent, which attracts female roaches, which are then roasted by an electric grill.

Engber: I mean, I think just in that short clip you hear how completely helpless we were to deal with the cockroach problem. We were trying everything.

Rosin: Yes, it does have a “throw spaghetti at the wall” [feel]. Like, this is the nation’s Capitol and we can’t—we don’t really have an answer, nor is anyone pretending to. It’s just like, They tried this. They tried that.

[News reel]

Journalist: Congressman Silvio Conte, dressed to kill today, proclaimed a war on Capitol cockroaches. A company from his home district has donated 35,000 roach traps to the Capitol. But Conte said more help than that is needed.

Silvio Conte: And I want to appeal to the president of the United States. I am certain that President Reagan wants to get rid of as many troublesome cockroaches who are running around the halls of Congress as possible. So please join me in this war and squash one for the Gipper!

[Music]

Engber: But, you know, listening to all this kind of has an almost, like, a dreamy quality for me because I actually lived through this myself. Like, I was a child of the cockroach ’80s. I had cockroaches in my house all over the place too, and it’s almost, like, hard to remember how pervasive they were.

[Music]

Engber: So I grew up in New York City.

Rosin: Where?

Engber: In Morningside Heights.

Rosin: In an apartment?

Engber: In an apartment.

Rosin: Okay.

Engber: So, middle-class families in the 1980s in New York City had a lot of cockroaches, as I can say from personal experience—just a number of cockroaches that I think is unimaginable to younger people, to my younger colleagues here at The Atlantic.

Rosin: Against my—really, like, every fiber of my being, I’m going to say, “Paint me a picture.” (Laughs.)

Engber: They’d be all over the place all the time, like, in full view, in day, in night. Um, certainly if you went into the kitchen at night and turned on the light, they would scatter. It wouldn’t be like you’d see individual insects; you’d see, like, a wave pattern.

You and your brother, let’s say, might be taking the Cheerios out of the cabinet. And open it up, and pour it into the bowl, and cockroaches would come out with the Cheerios, which I think sounds really terrifying to today’s New Yorker. But at the time it was just, like, Time to get a new box of Cheerios.

There’s really this feeling that it was, like, a natural phenomenon—like an endless sense of being enveloped in roaches. Like, it was an atmosphere of roaches or an ocean.

You’re speechless.

Rosin: Just to weigh in, I do 100 percent relate. I grew up in an apartment in Queens, and exactly your memory. The only difference is that it was cornflakes and not Cheerios, but they were everywhere.

Although, you know what’s weird? I can’t seem to remember if they freaked me out or not. Like, did they freak you out? Did you scream when you saw cockroaches or call for your mommy? What did you do?

Engber: So, I don’t think we were that squeamish about them. In fact, I know we weren’t squeamish, because the other thing I remember vividly was my brother and I would play with the cockroaches. We would use our wooden blocks and build, like, obstacle courses, sort of, and try to do cockroach Olympics.

Rosin: Did you actually touch them with your fingers?

Engber: I mean, it’s kind of hard to imagine that I didn’t, but it must be the case. I mean, like I said, there’s sort of a dreamy quality to all this, where I almost doubt my own memories. And so just to do a kind of a gut check, I wanted to call my brother.

Ben Engber: Okay.

Daniel Engber: First of all, did we have cockroaches in our apartment growing up?

Ben Engber: We had a lot of cockroaches in our apartment growing up, and I, being a little bit older than you, remember it extremely clearly. But it still seems somewhat fantastical, the prevalence of cockroaches in our life.

Engber: Okay, so first I asked him about the cereal.

Rosin: Okay.

Ben Engber: I loved Rice Krispies. And they used to have, like, a slightly over-toasted Rice Krispie that was, like, a darker brown.

Daniel Engber: Yeah, the occasional brown one.

Ben Engber: The brown one. And I definitely remember a lot of arguments about whether something was an over-toasted Rice Krispie—a small over-toasted Rice Krispie—or a roach doody. And we would frequently have these arguments.

Rosin: (Laughs.) He’s, like, completely chill about the roach-doody-for-breakfast situation.

Engber: If only it was just the Rice Krispies, Hanna.

Ben Engber: We had the special medicine cups. They were sort of, like, plastic, hollow spoons.

Daniel Engber: Mm-hmm.

Ben Engber: And I remember one time, Mom poured whatever it was, probably Dimetapp or something like that, in and I saw something swimming in it.

Daniel Engber: Ooh.

Ben Engber: I was like, There’s a roach in there. I swear there’s a roach in there. And then she held it up to the light, and there was nothing in there. I didn’t want to take it. Finally she convinced me. I drank the whole thing.

I felt the roach crawling around all over my mouth.

Rosin: Oh, God!

Ben Engber: And I spit it all into the sink. And, uh, she said, Oh, there was a roach in it.

Roaches were just everywhere in our lives. So if we were constantly, like, throwing out something just cause a few roaches walked over it, we wouldn’t have anything.

Engber: So that’s how we lived, but here’s the important part from that conversation with Ben.

Daniel Engber: Do you remember if that was in apartment 44? I forget when we moved from apartment 44 to apartment 43.

Ben Engber: That was after. No, that was after it was solved, because we moved when I was 12 or 13, and it was, it was done by then.

Daniel Engber: Um, when you said that by that time the cockroach problem was solved, what’s your, what’s your memory of the solving of the problem in our home?

Ben Engber: Very simple: uh, Combat.

Engber: So, remember when I told you that the problem we forgot was roaches? This is the solution we forgot: Combat.

Rosin: Wait, you mean the Combat roach trap? Like, that little plastic disc where the roaches go in and then they die or something? Like, that’s what this is about?

Engber: Yes. That is the amazing American invention that we have all forgotten.

Rosin: The thing that sits in aisle 13 on the top shelf, that’s the amazing invention?

Engber: The thing that should be sitting in a museum.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Engber: The people who invented Combat are American heroes. They did something—I mean, you have to think about the fact that the cockroach was and is a symbol of indestructibility, right? This is the animal that’s going to outlive us after a nuclear war.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: This is an—if you’ve ever seen WALL-E, it’s a postapocalyptic Earth. All that’s left is a robot and a cockroach.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: It’s the animal that cannot be killed. And then in the 1980s, we did it. I think it’s fair to say that it solved the problem, and I don’t mean solved it completely and eliminated cockroaches forever, but really took a huge problem and made it much smaller. And that wasn’t just true in my apartment, but across the country. In fact, I found evidence that that is exactly what happened.

And so, I just was fascinated by the question of, Who did that?, and what it means that we don’t even really fully remember that it happened.

Rosin: Wait. There’s a who? Like, there’s a person who did that?

Engber: Yeah. Let me introduce you to a very important figure in the history of cockroaches.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: Who has a catchphrase, and his catchphrase is “Always bet on the roach.”

He’s, um, a member of the pest-management hall of fame.

Are you familiar with Pi Chi Omega, the fraternal organization dedicated to furthering the science of pest control?

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: They have an annual scholarship called the Dr. Austin Frishman Scholarship.

Rosin: Ah. Wait, are we gonna hear from Austin Frishman himself?

Engber: Dr. Cockroach.

Rosin: Wow. Okay.

Austin Frishman: Hello?

Daniel Engber: Hi. Dr. Frishman?

Frishman: Speaking.

Engber: And so, I got him on the line, and he turns out to be sort of, like, a cockroach mystic almost.

Rosin: What is that?

Engber: Just, any question you ask, you might get an answer like this.

Frishman: I want you to picture a landfill, and it’s snowing. It’s about 28 degrees out, okay? And you’re there with seven or eight men, and you’re digging away at the snow because you’re teaching them how to bait on a landfill. Alright?

Daniel Engber: Mm-hmm.

Frishman: And then out of the snow in that cold comes American roaches running up, bubbling up—five, 10, 15, 60, 100, 200 from the smoldering heat down below.

Rosin: I love this man. He makes it seem, like, biblical. So where does this cockroach mystic, Dr. Frishman, fit into this story?

Engber: You know, Frishman is in the story almost from the very start. In 1985, and in the lead up to 1985, Frishman had been hired by a company called American Cyanamid. And American Cyanamid researchers had this product that they were selling for use in controlling fire ants.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And the researchers in their, you know, industrial-products division were aware of the fact that this fire ant poison worked on cockroaches. And, in fact, they used it in the lab to control cockroaches.

Rosin: Their own cockroach problem?

Engber: Yes. Yeah, they put it in peanut butter, and they put it around the lab, just so they could continue to do their work on fire ants.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: Um, but then the company was, you know, making this effort to try to figure out, Well, can we repurpose some of our industrial products for a consumer use? And so forth. So, you’ve got a hot, new roach-control product. Who do you call?

Rosin: Oh!

Engber: Austin Frishman.

Rosin: Yes. Austin Frishman.

Frishman: And I said, “Well, it’s going to be difficult, and it may not work.” And they said to me, “Listen. Do you want to do the project or not?” I said, “No. I’ll do it just so you know what we’re up against.”

Engber: Okay, so everything we had up until that point were these, you know, these insecticides that we’d just been using for years. And the roaches had just developed resistance to them. Even if you, you know, you killed 99 percent of them, the ones you didn’t kill would have some mutation that protected them or they’d have a thicker shell or something, a thicker exoskeleton, and they’d survive and reproduce. And now your insecticides weren’t working anymore.

Rosin: Right. So they would just keep outsmarting us?

Engber: Right. And so one of the things about this new product that made it different from the old ones was it wasn’t just a spray that you’d put in the corners. It’s actually a bait. That little, black disc had something in it that sort of tasted like oatmeal cookie that roaches loved, and they would come in and get it and then take it out.

Philip Koehler: We were filming the cockroaches, and we found that only 25 percent of the cockroaches ate the bait, but 100 percent of the cockroaches would die.

Engber: That’s Philip Koehler. He’s another cockroach expert. And what he’s talking about here is the fact that, like, this stuff would kill roaches that hadn’t even eaten it.

Rosin: Like, what do you mean? How?

Engber: Well, that’s what I asked Phil Koehler.

Koehler: It was a slow-acting toxicant that allowed transfer to other members of the colony.

Daniel Engber: Wait. They would regurgitate it? Or how does it get transferred?

Koehler: Well, there are several mechanisms of transfer. The main one would be that cockroaches will eat another cockroach’s poop. It was actually after this work with Combat baits that it became, uh, known that cockroaches actually feed poop to their young.

Rosin: Amazing. I love it when researchers are put in a position where they have to say words like poop, but just very seriously. (Laughs.)

Koehler: And there are actually other methods of transfer of toxicant as well. There is, like you said, regurgitation, where they get sick and they regurgitate some, and other cockroaches will come and feed on that vomit. Uh, there’s also cannibalism, where a cockroach will attack another cockroach and eat it. And there’s also, uh, necrophagy, where the cockroaches will eat the dead.

Rosin: Each method more charming than the next. (Laughs.)

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Engber: Vomit, poop, or cannibalism.

Rosin: This seems exciting.

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: No, I mean, if I were them, this would be really exciting. Like, I’m just imagining them, you know, like in Oppenheimer, sort of sitting in their lab, like, figuring out every element of this. How are we gonna make it safe? How’s it gonna work? It’s exciting.

Engber: Yeah, they were on the verge of something big.

Frishman: We would run to the lab early in the morning to see the results from the night before, or stay up half the night and watch. And we began to see, you know, what was happening. In the beginning, I was hesitant and the whole thing. But as we began to do the work and I saw the results first in the lab, it was a breakthrough. Okay?

Engber: Frishman was among the first to take this breakthrough product, put it in a syringe, take it out of the lab, and start using it in restaurants and diners to see if it worked.

Frishman: I went into a small diner, a little luncheonette place, and a bunch of guys were sitting and eating sandwiches, and I was behind the counter, so I was down low. And I had the bait, and I saw the roaches in a crack, and I just put a little dab. And as I went to go do it, the roaches started coming out, and they were gobbling it up.

Daniel Engber: You, uh, saw in real time them come to the bait.

Frishman: I was the first person in the world. I was shaking, okay? I’m telling you, I was shaking. I still have that syringe, that original one.

[Music]

Engber: This is the moment. This is the brink of the relatively roach-free world that we live in today. Now we had the little black discs, I would say, you know, two inches across or something.

Rosin: With an entrance and an exit.

Engber: With an entrance. With an entrance and an exit.

Frishman: I had written a book called The Cockroach Combat Manual, so that’s how it got its name.

Engber: And Frishman is going to take this product on the road.

Frishman: People would write in with horror stories, and they won a prize: the product and me. And we would go into those places and knock out the population.

Engber: So, he takes this to Texas. He takes it to Georgia. They do an event at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. They go to the Capitol. Remember the Tom Brokaw report? Those are Combat traps. And then ads start appearing on television.

[Compilation of Combat advertisements]

Engber: So this wasn’t just a marketing campaign. I mean, the product really did work.

Rosin: What do you mean, it worked?

Engber: Well, cockroach numbers were going down—you can find signs everywhere. Actually, a guy I went to high school with wrote an article for The New York Times in 2004, and he reported that there had been a survey of federal buildings and their cockroach complaints between 1988 and 1999—so this is Combat rollout era—and the number of complaints fell by 93 percent.

Rosin: Wow.

Engber: I also found a 1991 story from The New York Times—again, right in that Combat zone—and a New York City housing official is quoted as saying, “There was a time when people were horrified at roaches running rampant, and now everybody keeps saying, ‘Where did they go to?’”

Rosin: So it’s a thing. It’s, like, an actual, documented thing.

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: And yet it’s not a huge moment? Like, there aren’t a lot of stories saying, Yay, us. We have conquered the cockroach problem?

Engber: No, there are not. There are stories about Combat success as almost like a business case study.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: There are stories that remark upon the fact that there are fewer cockroaches than there used to be.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

But nothing that’s like, This enormous, giant, urban problem has finally been solved by this ragtag crew of amazing scientists.

Engber: (Laughs.) Nothing of that nature.

There’s a reason why I had to introduce Austin Frishman to you as a member of the pest-management hall of fame. And you weren’t like, Oh, you mean the guy on the back of the quarter?

Rosin: Yeah. (Laughs.) Right. But why?

Engber: I mean, that is the question that has been keeping me up at night. And I have some ideas.

Rosin: Dan, you said you had some ideas about why this discovery didn’t get the credit and hoopla that it deserved.

Engber: So my brother had a good theory about this. I said, How come just our family—why didn’t we celebrate and go to dinner or something? The roaches are gone. He said, Well, it’s because we just assumed they would come back.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: So I think that must be part of it, right? That there was like, Oh, this new thing works. But yeah, everything works the first time you do it.

So there was never one moment where you realized that the world had changed.

Or it could be that, you know, when things change for better, we just have a tendency to just accept the new, better reality and pretend the old thing didn’t happen. Hey, that’s done. I’d rather not discuss it.

Rosin: Like, what’s an example of that?

Engber: The Spanish flu, for example. There’s a famous gap in art and literature about the Spanish flu. There’s not a great literature of this cataclysmic event in the 19-teens. You’d think there would be, but there isn’t. Why not?

Rosin: Probably because it was traumatic. And actually, you know, I think that’s similar to the experience with cockroaches. When, at least in my memory, when I was living with them, it wasn’t just, like, gross or annoying or an inconvenience. It’s really unsettling. Like, it lives as this constant undercurrent of anxiety and a sense that you just don’t have control over things. It’s like a terrible feeling.

Engber: Like a free-floating, pervasive anxiety hanging over you at all times.

Rosin: Yes. Yes.

Engber: Can we talk about the Cold War for a second?

Rosin: Uh, yeah?

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: So, we were talking about how the cockroach was this, um, symbol of indestructibility that would outlast us in the event of nuclear war.

Rosin: Yeah?

Engber: This was—I mean, the cockroach was—in a way, a symbol of the Cold War. Like, the nuclear-disarmament groups would put ads in the newspaper with just a picture of a cockroach.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: To try to, you know, be like, Wake up, America. We have to disarm now, or this is the future.

Rosin: So it all just got blended in our heads—like, nuclear war anxiety, cockroach anxiety.

Engber: Yes. And then those two anxieties were being unwound at almost exactly the same time. Just to be frank, this is a highly tenuous theory, but I do want to line these things up.

So, you know, 1985, the Tom Brokaw report, the Combat is coming out. Spring of 1985, that’s also when Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power.

In fact, Silvio Conte—the congressman who on the steps of the Capitol is saying, “Squash one for the Gipper,” touting Combat traps, which are manufactured in his district—five days later he’s in Moscow for a historic meeting with Gorbachev at the Kremlin. That is considered a watershed moment in the wind down of the Cold War.

Silvio Conte: Gorbachev says, “At the present time, our relationship is in an ice age.” However, he said, “Spring is a time of renewal.”

Engber: I’m just saying the guy wearing the exterminator outfit on the steps of the Capitol, touting Combat, gave Ronald Reagan the advice to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Rosin: Like, in the span of a week?

Engber: In less than a week. In less than a week he was in Moscow. And you start to see Combat traps are, you know, spreading through the country as glasnost is spreading through the USSR.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Engber: And in the years that follow, we have the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those are exactly the years when the cockroach populations are finally diminishing, when we’re winning the war on cockroaches and we’re winning the Cold War. It’s happening concurrently.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is our nuclear fears dissipate. Our cockroach fears dissipate. And what?

Engber: What I’m saying is it was the cockroach that took over the imagination as this thing. They made sense to stand in for nuclear fears.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And then going the other way, once we were free of that nuclear anxiety, we just sort of glided into a roach-free world.

[Music]

Engber: Okay, Hanna. There’s one more thing.

Um, so the roaches are coming back.

Rosin: No.

Engber: I’m sorry to say.

Rosin: What?

Engber: It seems clear that the roaches are coming back, but it has taken a really long time, right? So it’s true that they couldn’t develop biological resistance to the poison.

But then roaches did develop what’s called a behavioral resistance to the baits.

Basically, roaches stopped preferring sweet foods. So, the poison would still kill them, but they weren’t interested in the oatmeal-cookie bait in the center of the Combat trap.

So, roach numbers are slowly going up again. And if you read publications of the Pest Management Association newsletter, which maybe I’ve done recently, you can see that there’s, you know, there’s some chatter about how roach calls are increasing.

Okay, so I pulled some numbers. I went to the American Housing Survey from the federal government. In 2011, 13.1 million estimated households had signs of cockroaches in the last 12 months. In 2021, 14.5 million.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: So, creeping. That’s the word: creeping. The numbers are creeping upward.

Rosin: Does that raise the possibility that future generations—my children, their children—will actually have to contend with roaches?

Engber: They might. It’s possible. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s also a little bit appealing in a way.

Rosin: No. Did you say appealing?

Engber: Well, okay. This came up when I was talking to my brother.

Daniel Engber: What’s the attitude of your children towards cockroaches?

Ben Engber: My children are total wusses about it. They run away and they scream. Shosh is terrified of insects.

Daniel Engber: Is she better or worse for that?

Ben Engber: I would say she’s worse for that.

Rosin: I mean, isn’t that what everyone says? Like, We were the toughest generation, and everything has gone downhill since then. I mean, I feel that there’s a little bit of that in this conversation we’re having.

Engber: Yes. That is exactly the conversation we’re having. And it’s embarrassing but true. I can’t shake it. Like, I have some pride in the fact that we did the Roach Olympics. It might be a ridiculous thing to be proud of, but I feel like we were being imaginative and fearless and having fun.

My kids are imaginative and have fun. They are not fearless.

Ben Engber: Falling to pieces at the sight of an insect does not strike me as a healthy way to attack life. As a species, we would not have made it very far if just a little filth took us out. And maybe the roachy upbringing is what instilled that in me.

Daniel Engber: So you’re pro-roach. Mom has been vindicated for feeding you a roach in medicine.

Ben Engber: Oh, yeah. Mom is absolutely vindicated.

Rosin: So the thing you’re actually nostalgic for is both freedom and maybe even a little bit of courage.

Engber: Yeah, but, you know, it’s more than that. Not only did my brother and I get to enjoy the feeling of being unafraid of cockroaches, we also got to enjoy the feeling of things getting better.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: An intractable problem gets solved. And I feel like that’s, you know, that’s a really nice lesson to learn, even as a kid. And unfortunately, I don’t know that my kids have had many opportunities to learn that specific lesson. So I’m nostalgic for that, too.

[Music]

Rosin: You know what, Dan?

Engber: Yeah?

Rosin: I think that it’s time that me and you and your brother go and have our celebratory dinner that we never had all those years ago. Like, instead of going to a steakhouse, we’ll just each get bowls of cereal. Bowls of cereal for everyone.

Engber: Rice Krispies.

Rosin: Yeah.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Ethan Brooks. It was edited by Jocelyn Frank, fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca, and engineered by Rob Smierciak.

Special thanks to Sam Schechner for his roach reporting in The New York Times.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Does Nikki Haley really have a shot at beating Donald Trump? Does any Republican?

On Monday afternoon, a basketball gym in Bluffton, South Carolina, was packed with people who had come to hear Haley’s latest sales pitch. Hundreds more were waiting outside. No Republican candidate besides Trump can reliably draw more than a thousand attendees, but about 2,500 showed up for Haley. (Granted, this speech was in Haley’s home state, where she formerly served as governor. Also, the gym was a stone’s throw from the Sun City retirement community, a place where, gently speaking, people may have had nothing better to do at 2 p.m. on a Monday.) One of Haley’s volunteers told me this weekday event had originally been booked at a nearby restaurant, but that, given the current excitement of the campaign, organizers pivoted to the gym, on the University of South Carolina at Beaufort campus. Everyone in Haley’s orbit is understandably riveted. She’s squarely challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for second place in the Republican presidential primary, no matter how second that place may be.

While the former president still floats high above his dwindling field of competitors, Haley is the only person who keeps rising in the polls. Her climb is steady, not a blip. Haley’s campaign and super PAC are planning to spend $10 million on advertisements over the next eight weeks across Iowa and New Hampshire. On Tuesday, she received an endorsement from the Koch brothers’ network, Americans for Prosperity Action, and along with it an undisclosed amount of financial support. (It will be a lot.) But this year-end, all-in effort to stop Trump ignores the fact that he is a singular vortex, a once-in-a-century figure, a living martyr with a traveling Grateful Dead–like roadshow. His abhorrent behavior and legal woes do not matter. Three weeks ago, at his rally in South Florida, vendors told me that items with Trump’s mug shot are their biggest sellers. How does a mere generational figure, as her supporters hope Haley might be, compete with that?

Haley bounded up onstage in a light-blue blazer and jeans. “We’ve been through a lot together,” she told the crowd. She meandered back and forth—no lectern, no teleprompter. When you ask people what they like about her, many point to her presence, her poise. Haley delivers her stump speech in a singsong voice. A few words, a pause, a smile. Speaking to the Low Country crowd, she seemed to be thickening her southern accent and peppering in a few extra-emphatic finger points for good measure. She’s just a down-home, neighborly southerner whose most recent job happened to be in Manhattan, serving at the United Nations. The volunteer who had bragged to me about the venue change later pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of himself and Haley at a wedding reception. He pointed to her bare feet. She’s so real, he said.

[Read: Nikki Haley offers an alternate reality]

Several women in the audience were wearing pink shirts with a Margaret Thatcher quote on the back: If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. Sue Ruby, a 74-year-old attendee from nearby Savannah, Georgia, was wearing a WOMEN FOR NIKKI button on her sweater. “I feel like we’ve given men a lot of years to straighten our society out, and they haven’t done so great, so let’s try a woman,” she said. Ruby told me she’s a Republican who begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the past two elections because she viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. A Sun City resident named Lorraine, age 79, told me that “it’s time for a woman,” but that she would nevertheless vote for Trump if he wins the nomination. “I don’t want to vote for the opposite,” she said, refusing to say Biden’s name. Carolyn Ballard, an 80-year-old woman from Hilton Head, South Carolina, told me she’s a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump twice, but that she believes he’s past his prime and that Haley is her candidate. “He just irritates people and he stirs up a lot of trouble,” she said of Trump. “Although he’s very smart, and he did a lot for the country. I mean, everybody was happy when he was president.”

Haley doesn’t lean as hard into gender dynamics as past female presidential candidates have. Nevertheless, she skillfully uses her womanhood and Indian heritage as setups for certain lines. “I have been underestimated in everything I’ve ever done,” she told the room. “And it’s a blessing, because it makes me scrappy. No one’s going to outwork me in this race. No one’s going to outsmart me in this race.” Or this: “Strong girls become strong women, and strong women become strong leaders,” which had a surprise left turn: “And none of that happens if we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports.” (Huge applause.)

Courting Never Trump voters, exhausted Trump voters, and, yes, even some likely Trump voters simultaneously is not an easy trick. She hardly ever criticizes her former boss. Here’s her most biting critique from Monday: “I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time … and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” (Note the passivity; she won’t even say Trump catalyzes the chaos.) Having already served as his ambassador to the UN, she may be under consideration for vice president. Compared with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, Trump has gone relatively soft on her, opting for the mid-century misogynistic slight “birdbrain.” Like most of her competitors, Haley has said she would pardon him.

Whereas Trump has tacked authoritarian and apocalyptic, Haley has mostly kept her messaging grounded. At the rally, she bemoaned the price of groceries and gas. “Biden worries more about sagebrush lizards than he does about Americans being able to afford their energy,” she quipped. (She also called out her fellow Republicans for adding to the deficit.) She’s a military wife, and spoke about her husband’s PTSD and the persistent problem of homeless veterans. Though she lacks Trump’s innate knack for zingers, she landed one about how things might change if members of Congress got their health care through the VA: “It’ll be the best health care you’ve ever seen, guaranteed.”

Although many of her fellow Republicans have adopted a nativist view of the world, Haley waxes at length about America’s geopolitical role. (And subsequently gets tagged as a globalist.) “The world is literally on fire,” she said Monday. She affirmed her support for both Israel and Ukraine, and went long on the triple threat of Russia, China, and Iran, paying particular attention to China as a national-security issue. In doing so, knowingly or not, she began to sound quite Trumpy. “They’re already here. They’ve already infiltrated our country,” Haley said. “We’ve got to start looking at China the way they look at us.” She called for an end to normal trade relations with China until they stop “murdering” Americans with fentanyl. She chastened the audience with images of China’s 500 nuclear warheads and its rapidly expanding naval fleet. “Dictators are actually very transparent. They tell us exactly what they’re going to do,” she said.

Perhaps Haley’s biggest advantage right now is her relative youth. She’ll turn 52 three days before the New Hampshire primary. Trump has lately been making old-man gaffes, drawing comparisons to Biden, who was first elected to the Senate the year Haley was born. She speaks wistfully of “tomorrow,” of leaving certain things—unspecified baggage—in the past. “You have to go with a new generational leader,” Haley proclaimed. Onstage, she endorsed congressional term limits and the idea of mental-competency tests for public servants older than 75. The Senate, she joked, had become “the most privileged nursing home in the country.” Throwing shade at both Trump and Biden, she spoke of the need for leaders at “the top of their game.” Hundreds of gray-and-white-haired supporters before her nodded and murmured in approval.

Monday’s event took place roughly 90 miles south of Charleston, where, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, hoping to start a race war. At the time, Haley was governor of South Carolina, and Trump—who had descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy for president just the day before—still seemed like a carnival act. Photos of Roof posing with a Confederate flag ricocheted across social media. Haley had the flag taken down from the South Carolina statehouse, a reversal from her earlier position on the flag. Five years later, after the murder of George Floyd, Haley tweeted that, “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.” During Monday’s rally, though, she sounded much more like an old-school Republican: “America’s not racist; we’re blessed,” she said. “Our kids need to love America. They need to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance when they start school.”

As her audience grows, she continues to tiptoe along a very fine line: not MAGA, not anti-MAGA. In lieu of Trump-style airbrushed fireworks and bald eagles and Lee Greenwood, she’s going for something slightly classier (leaving the stage to Tom Petty’s “American Girl”) while still seizing every opportunity to own the libs. At the rally, she attacked the military’s gender-pronoun training and received substantial applause. “We’ve got to end this national self-loathing that’s taken over our country,” she said. Early in her speech, she promised that she would speak hard truths. As she approached her conclusion, one hard truth stuck out: “Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. That is nothing to be proud of. We should want to win the majority of Americans.” It was the closest thing to a truly forward-thinking message that any serious Republican has offered this cycle.

In the most generous of interpretations, the race for the GOP nomination is now among three people: Haley, DeSantis, and Trump. Mike Pence is already out. Tim Scott, Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, dropped out two weeks ago. Vivek Ramaswamy, who has struggled to break out of single digits in the polls, recently rented an apartment in Des Moines and will almost certainly stay in the race through the Iowa caucuses. Ramaswamy has also unexpectedly become Haley’s punching bag: Her campaign said she pulled in $1 million in donations after calling him “scum” during the last debate.

At next week’s debate in Alabama, the stage will likely be winnowed to Ramaswamy, Haley, and DeSantis. (“When the stage gets smaller, our chances get bigger,” Haley told her rally crowd.) DeSantis seems to be betting his whole campaign on Iowa, and has secured the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. This weekend, DeSantis will complete his 99-county tour of the state. Haley needs to beat DeSantis, but she also needs his voters if she has any serious shot of taking on Trump. If DeSantis drops out before Haley, his supporters are far more likely to flock to Trump. So maybe Haley needs a deus ex machina. In 2020, Biden’s campaign was viewed as all but cooked when, here in South Carolina, with the help of Representative Jim Clyburn, everything turned around, propelling him to Super Tuesday and the nomination.

Haley’s campaign declined to let her speak with me. A spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas, instead emailed me the following statement: “Poll after poll show Nikki Haley is the best challenger to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That’s why the largest conservative grassroots coalition in the country just got behind her. Nikki is second in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and is the only candidate with the momentum to go the distance. Ron DeSantis has a short shelf life with his Iowa-or-bust strategy.”

[David A. Graham: Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis]

As rally-goers made their way to the parking lot, I struck up conversation with a man in a T-shirt that read NOPE NOT AGAIN, with Trump’s hair and giant red necktie decorating the O. He wore a camouflage baseball hat with an American flag on the dome. The man, Mike Stevens, told me he was a 25-year Army veteran, and that he was disgusted with Trump.

“He’s a bully. He’s not good. He causes hate and discontent,” Stevens said. “I mean, he didn’t uphold the Constitution. And now we’ve had a judge say that. First time ever—no peaceful transfer of power? Even Al Gore did it. I’ve always been a Republican, but if it’s him and Biden, I’ll vote for Biden, I guess.”

He was excited about Haley, and had been texting his friends and family about her rally—trying to wean them off their Trump addiction. But he also told me he had written Haley a letter: He was dismayed by her promise to pardon Trump, and he needed her to know that.

Photographs by Cole Barash

Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room.

The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green.

Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust of medical and public-health authorities. To Marissa—whose father, Diego Rodriguez, is himself an extremist leader and Bundy’s close friend—the hospital was a “lion’s den.”

By the next evening, Levi and Marissa were demanding to take their baby home, but hospital staff said it wasn’t yet safe. They left a few days later, with instructions to bring Cyrus in for follow-up appointments. When they failed to show up for a scheduled weigh-in at a local clinic the following week—Marissa was feeling sick herself and decided to postpone it—a nurse there referred the case to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Cyrus missed another appointment that afternoon at St. Luke’s, and another nurse contacted the detective on the case. Someone had to see the infant right away, she said.

That night, officers pulled the family over at a gas station in nearby Garden City. Marissa begged for Bundy’s help by phone. “They’re trying to take my baby. They’re trying to take my baby,” she kept telling him, until she was out of breath. Police lights were flashing all around her as a crowd began to gather. She couldn’t understand how things had escalated so fast.

Bundy put out a call for help from his group, the People’s Rights Network, which claimed to have more than 50,000 members, and told Marissa to livestream what was happening on Facebook. When a police officer demanded that she hand Cyrus over, she pleaded with him. “Do you understand what happens when the state takes custody of babies?” she said. “I’ve seen this so many times. I can’t be that next person—I can’t.” While Bundy was driving to the gas station, he learned that both Levi and Marissa had been arrested, and Cyrus was on the way to another St. Luke’s branch, an ER about 10 miles away in Meridian. Bundy and his supporters headed there.

Within an hour, a small crowd was blocking the ambulance bay, forcing the hospital to divert patients elsewhere. Protesters shouted that the hospital staff were kidnappers and child molesters. Some followed nurses to their cars as they left the building. Bundy himself was arrested for trespassing on hospital property, and Rachel Thomas, the lead doctor in the ER that night, feared that the crowd would break down the doors and try to take the baby.

Protesters gather outside St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center in downtown Boise, Idaho, in March 2022. (Darin Oswald / Idaho Statesman / AP)

In the early hours of the next morning, after getting out of jail, Bundy posted a video urging more of his followers to join the protest. “It’s just sickening, sickening, sickening,” he said. “These people believe they have the authority to take our little babies. They are wicked.”

By that time, it was clear to Dr. Thomas that the child had to be moved back to the hospital in Boise as quickly as possible for security reasons. She wrapped Cyrus in a blanket and carried him through the bowels of the hospital to an ambulance at a back entrance. Security officers led the way, searching each area for intruders before giving the “all clear” and letting her enter. She felt like she was in a cheap action movie. To avoid the crowd, the ambulance jumped the median as it made a U-turn and sped east on I-84.

Dr. Erickson met Cyrus on his arrival. He looked even sicker than he had the week before. His weight now put him below the .02nd percentile. As doctors reinserted the IV and the feeding tube, Bundy sent out a new People’s Rights alert redirecting the crowd to the Boise campus. Protesters arrived with Free Baby Cyrus signs. Bundy told his followers to call St. Luke’s, and soon threats were pouring in by the hundreds.

“The parents of a child have all the rights,” one caller said. “I need you to remind everybody who works there before we come and lop off your fucking head, bitch. We will fucking kill you.” Rodriguez, Marissa’s father, began holding regular rallies at the hospital and at one of them called on God to “crush the necks of those that are evil.” Three days into this ordeal, the FBI and state authorities warned St. Luke’s that some of Bundy’s followers were planning to storm in and take the baby by force. About 30 Boise police officers were called in. Hospital workers constructed a barricade of furniture to block access to the children’s wing.

As the protest escalated, Health and Welfare workers spirited Cyrus to a secret location, where they babysat him in shifts. A few days later, and about a pound heavier, he was returned to his parents. The protesters dispersed, and Bundy and Rodriguez celebrated. Cyrus’s return home, Bundy said, was nothing short of “a miracle.”

In the months that followed, Bundy pleaded guilty to misdemeanor trespassing at the hospital and avoided time in jail. But the protests he and Rodriguez had fomented with their false accusations of child trafficking resulted in a civil suit against them. This past August, after a weeklong trial that Bundy and Rodriguez skipped, a judge assessed $52 million in damages, almost certainly more than their combined net worth.

Bundy has promised to hold firm. If the county sheriff ever showed up on his property to collect, he told one interviewer, he’d “meet ’em at the front door with my friends and shotgun.”

In early August, I flew out to Idaho to visit Bundy. But at 3:11 a.m. the night before we were scheduled to meet, he texted me to cancel. He was on the verge of financial ruin, he said, and it was getting harder and harder to shield his children from the effects. The message went on for some 230 words about how a man described as one of America’s most dangerous right-wing extremists was “fighting a lot of emotional anxiety.”

If he did confront the sheriff, it wouldn’t be the first time his family had done battle with the law. In 2014, about a thousand militiamen and other supporters helped his family repel government agents trying to impound their cattle in Bunkerville, Nevada. Bundy’s followers still speak with awe about how officers Tasered him three times, and three times, with the help of the crowd behind him, he ripped out the Taser darts and stood his ground. His father, Cliven, led that battle, but when the Bundys clashed with government agents again in 2016, Ammon was in charge. His six-week occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge left a rancher dead, shot down by police officers after a backwoods car chase.

Left: An armed man stands guard as Bundy supporters arrive at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. Right: Early morning at the front-gate guard post during the occupation. (Alex Milan Tracy / AP; Jeffrey Schwilk / Alamy)

In 2020, with the start of the pandemic, Bundy found a new purpose. One of the first meetings of his People’s Rights Network, held in April of that year, was to plan an Easter service in defiance of local COVID-19 restrictions. At another early demonstration, members gathered outside a health commissioner’s home in Montana and burned masks on a grill. In August 2020, Bundy was arrested and jailed after leading a contingent of supporters, some with guns, as they stormed the Idaho statehouse, pushing officers and shattering a glass door, during a special legislative session on public-health precautions.

When People’s Rights members started telling Bundy about how the government was unjustly separating children from their parents, that became another cause. Instances of actual overreach by Child Protective Services became, for them, evidence supporting QAnon-style conspiracy theories about “government subsidized child trafficking,” as Rodriguez put it, which were proliferating in extremist circles and beyond. By the time Cyrus was taken, People’s Rights members had already staged protests on behalf of supposedly “kidnapped” children in Missouri, Oregon, and Washington. But none of those had escalated like the one at St. Luke’s.

Despite his late-night text, Bundy did in the end agree to see me, for what was supposed to be a quick hello but stretched into a day-long visit. I’d spend more time with him in the weeks that followed, and speak with him regularly on the phone. We discussed many aspects of his life, but most of all we talked about the judgment against him, and what would happen if the government tried to take his home.

“I feel like I’m not supposed to yield,” he told me at one point. If he were killed, he said, his friends and followers would avenge him: “They’ll go take the life of the judge and the sheriff and St. Luke’s CEO and the head attorney and all the most culpable people.” He delivered these words with an unnerving lack of menace—less like a threat than like a weather forecast.

Ammon Bundy in his auto-repair workshop

Bundy’s home sits on a five-acre property at the edge of Idaho’s Emmett Valley, just across the road from Last Chance Canal. If he could choose any place in the world to live, he told me, it would be here.

When I showed up, I found him pacing around his auto-repair workshop, looking for parts. His beard is almost fully gray, and at 48, he has a bit of a belly, which he finds embarrassing. As always, he wore a chocolate-brown cowboy hat and a mechanic’s jacket with the logo of the fleet-maintenance company he once ran. He’s worked on cars ever since he was a teenager, when his father told him that the family ranch could not sustain him and his siblings.

Ammon was the fourth of six children of an unhappy marriage. Cliven was often away, working construction jobs in Las Vegas. Ammon’s mother, Jane Marie, resented the lonely domesticity she’d been consigned to, he told me. When he was 5 years old, she left. One night soon after, a huge storm took down a tree in the yard. The next morning, as he and his siblings played in the wreckage, he remembers thinking, Where’s Mom? She had not said goodbye.

With their mother gone and their dad away, the Bundy children mostly raised themselves. Instead of doing homework, Ammon and his brothers hunted rabbits in the hills and built Quonset huts. After high school, he went on his Mormon mission to Minnesota and then started a truck-repair business. A couple of years later, he married Lisa Sundloff, a student at Southern Utah University whom he met through his secretary, and they moved to Arizona.

Their first apartment was tiny, but as Bundy’s business took off, they moved into a house in the Phoenix suburbs, then a bigger one with a stone fireplace and a swimming pool, a home he still speaks of with pride. He didn’t drink or smoke; he had five kids and avoided trouble with the law. He leaned libertarian, but he was no militant: In 2010, he took out a $530,000 loan from the Small Business Administration.

It isn’t easy, now, to reconcile that law-abiding suburban dad, his growing business supported by a federal loan, with the man he has become. Thirteen years and two standoffs later, Ammon believes the proper functions of government are limited to preventing violent crime, protecting private property, and defending the country from foreign threats. He says that abortion is murder and homosexuality is an abomination, but also that the government doesn’t have any business outlawing gay marriage (though it should prohibit same-sex couples from raising children). He opposes a border wall and views Trumpian policies as insufficiently compassionate, a position for which he has been criticized by other prominent right-wingers. He thinks it would perhaps be best if the country were divided in half before a partisan civil war breaks out.

At one point, he asked about my faith, and when I said Jewish, he remarked on how interesting it is that Jews hold so many positions of power in government, media, and finance. Somehow this didn’t sound like conspiracism, the way he said it. More like: Well played, Jews, from our small religious minority to yours.

Invariably, though, conversation turned back to his current predicament. He ranted for hours about the corruption of the government, the corruption of medical institutions, the corruption of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The courts, he said, are simply a “playbox” for the rich and powerful, a place for them to justify their misdeeds. Though he’d been cleared of any crime associated with the standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, the final legal victory came after he’d already spent nearly two years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, he said. By the time he was released, his business had all but collapsed, and he’d missed those years of his children’s lives. “That changed me,” he said. It taught him that even when you win, the process is the punishment.

I asked Bundy what he thinks motivates his many enemies, and how he accounts for so much wickedness. He reached for the Book of Mormon, put on his glasses, and began to read aloud. The passage he’d chosen told the story of Jared, a prince who devises a scheme to have his father beheaded and seize the throne for himself. The conspirators form “a secret combination,” which is “most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God,” and their scheme succeeds.

That is what Ammon Bundy believes is happening in America. His enemies, motivated by the desire for power, have formed secret combinations, which threaten, as the Book of Mormon warns they will, to “overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries.”

Ammon Bundy with one of his sons in Emmett

That night, I tagged along with Bundy to a barbecue hosted by Scott Malone, a friend of his who runs a dietary-supplement business and lives just down the road. About 30 people, many of them members of the LDS Church and most of them members of People’s Rights, sat at picnic tables with checkered tablecloths eating burgers and hot dogs and peach cobbler. After dinner, we played cornhole.

“I’m pretty much into conspiracy theories,” Malone told me. A sprawling web of nefarious forces is undermining our freedom, he explained, at the center of which are the Freemasons. In Gem County, where he and Bundy live, the sheriff and his deputies are all Masons. Malone knows this because he rents office space directly below the Masonic lodge, and he says he sometimes catches evil spirits wandering around the office on his security cameras. To cast them out, he performs exorcisms. “We think the basement has some kind of an underworld connection,” he said. “Crazy things, but we take it in stride.”

When Ammon launched the People’s Rights Network in early 2020, Malone was an early member. The group is sometimes described as a paramilitary organization—a sort of “Uber for militias.” That description is not wholly inaccurate, but it is misleading. People’s Rights’ membership does overlap with that of militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, and it serves in part to connect groups like these around the country. But it’s much bigger than those other groups, and it draws in people who would never join a traditional paramilitary organization. Most of its activities are mundane. Some members use the network to trade and barter; others organize workshops with naturopathic doctors. When one member’s truck broke down in early August, he put out a call via People’s Rights for someone to pick him up. In that sense, the group is less of a militia than a mutual-aid organization, where the aid sometimes takes the form of armed resistance to perceived despotism.

[From the November 2020 issue: Mike Giglio on the pro-Trump militant group that recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans]

Which is not to say that it doesn’t pose a threat. In addition to the protest at St. Luke’s and other instances of potentially dangerous intimidation, one member got into a shootout with police after a traffic stop in 2020. And its leaders have stated plainly that bloodshed is not only justified but necessary for resisting tyranny. “There is no silver bullet to securing liberty,” Bundy himself wrote on the People’s Rights website. “It is going to take unity, suffering and the willingness to use violence in defense.” The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors extremist organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, ranks Bundy’s group “at the top of our threat matrix.”

Beyond some basic tenets and anxieties of extreme libertarianism, those in Bundy’s group don’t agree on much. Some are fans of Donald Trump; others aren’t. Few would say that they support the police. Each seems to have his or her own peculiar origin story. While visiting Bundy, I met a onetime Ron Paul delegate who’d grown disillusioned with the Republican Party and stepped away, only to be drawn back in by the imposition of pandemic-era “Sharia law.” I met a former foster child turned chain-smoking Hempfest organizer who tried to live as a hermit before deciding that the only answer to government tyranny was active resistance. I met a Black kickboxing champion who has an on-screen credit in a Mad Max movie and, over the course of a decade, went from protesting the gentrification of Boise’s historically Black neighborhoods to sketching a portrait of Barack Obama with swastika-pupils.

And I met Malone, who may well be Bundy’s most loyal supporter. “He’s a good man, and I love him as a brother,” Malone told me. “I told my wife, ‘If I die with him, I die with him … I’m 72, and if this is how I end my life, then that’s how it ends. It couldn’t happen in a better way.”

By 9 o’clock, the party was winding down. The group prayed for me, just as they had when I’d arrived. (“We’re also grateful for our new friend, Jacob. Please bless him and help him on his journey and on his way.”) A grandmotherly woman who seemed genuinely concerned for my health warned me to stay away from the COVID vaccine. Another told me to be very careful driving home at this hour. A kid who’d recently returned from his Mormon mission invited me to go fishing the next day. Over the course of the evening, several people joked about the media calling them a militia. A militia?! they seemed to say. Just look at us!

As the sky darkened, everyone gathered in a circle to sing hymns. Bundy sat with his youngest son on his lap, the sunset at his back.

The next day, I met with Rachel Thomas, the ER doctor who’d ferried baby Cyrus to the back exit of the Meridian hospital as the mob pressed in. We sat at a small round table in a Boise coffee shop while her 6-year-old son ate a chocolate-chip muffin and watched Minions on his iPad for the dozenth time.

As we talked, Thomas noticed that a user named “Wolf Man” had just left a series of comments on her Facebook profile calling her a criminal and a perpetrator of “vile,” “disgraceful and appalling” acts. The comments linked to a new YouTube video Bundy had posted about the St. Luke’s case that very morning. “See, this is the problem with people like Rachel Thomas,” he says to the camera, after offering a litany of examples of her alleged dishonesty. “They are revered by the public because they are doctors and professionals, but they have no scruples. They are liars.”

With each new post like this, Thomas told me, the harassment ramps up again. “This is my life,” she said. “The second I feel like I can take a breath, they come after us again.” She pointed at her son, oblivious and chocolate-smeared behind her. “He didn’t sign up for this.”

For Natasha Erickson, the St. Luke’s pediatrician who first saw Cyrus, the threats and abuse began immediately and never stopped. Diego Rodriguez posted her photo and hospital bio on his website under the heading “Child Trafficker Profile.” “It is obvious she has a ‘god complex,’” he wrote, “and loves to threaten families using CPS as a weapon.” Bundy posted a video of his own calling Erickson “a wicked person for instigating this.” They said that she’d run unnecessary tests on Cyrus in order to profit off him and that she’d misdiagnosed his mild dehydration as life-threatening malnutrition. Commenters asked her how she’d feel if her kids were stolen.

Supporters gather on Bundy’s property after a judge issued a misdemeanor warrant for his arrest for contempt-of-court charges in April 2023. (Kyle Green / AP)

Erickson was less worried that large numbers of people would end up believing these claims than that a delusional person would take it upon himself to exact justice. She attached an emergency whistle to her purse, and her husband started carrying his handgun around whenever they were in public. She forbade her kids from playing in the front yard or answering the door, no matter who they thought was on the other side. The locks stayed bolted at all times.

For a while, Erickson was obsessed with what Bundy and Rodriguez were saying about her. She’d check their websites two or three times a day. At the grocery store, she was constantly afraid of who might be in the next aisle over. She took to wearing sunglasses whenever she could. Almost every time she saw a new patient, she worried that the parents might have seen her “Child Trafficker Profile,” and that they might genuinely believe it. So much of her job had been about forging personal connections with the “kiddos”: You like unicorns? My children love unicorns. But now even that felt fraught. When one child’s father asked her how old her kids were, she froze, retreated to the nurses’ station, and broke down sobbing. She considered leaving medicine entirely.

Both she and Thomas testified in the defamation case against Bundy and Rodriguez; so did a nurse who had seen Cyrus for a checkup and then coordinated his care for weeks after. But whereas Erickson and the nurse were named as plaintiffs, Thomas was not, because at the time St. Luke’s filed the lawsuit, she hadn’t yet been doxxed. She wound up getting the worst of both worlds: all of the harassment, none of the money.

This past summer, as she was driving with her son, he asked her out of the blue if “that Ammon Bundy guy” was gone yet, and whether he might hurt them. “No, buddy, we’re going to be okay,” she told him. By that point, the family had already taken steps to ensure their safety. In September, they packed up for New Zealand. They plan to stay for at least a year.

In between my trips to Bundy’s land in Idaho, I made a stop in Bunkerville, Nevada, to visit his father at the family ranch. When I got there, Cliven Bundy was sitting in a black leather recliner beneath a portrait of him by Jon McNaughton, the realist painter famous for his hagiographic renderings of Donald Trump. In the portrait, titled “Pray for America,” Cliven rides on horseback and raises an American flag. In the flesh, he chuckled a lot in a folksy-grandpa sort of way and held forth for some three and a half hours in his high-pitched rasp about faith, politics, biodiversity, and his decades-long conflict with the U.S. government.

If you were to tell the complete story of that conflict, you could begin in 1844, with the murder of Joseph Smith. Or you could begin in 1877, with the arrival of the Bundy family’s ancestors in Utah’s Virgin Valley. Or in 1934, with the Taylor Grazing Act. Or even in 1976, with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. But you could not begin any later than 1989, with the Mojave desert tortoise. That year, the tortoise was given an emergency endangered-species designation, and as part of its recovery plan, the Bureau of Land Management told Bundy and his fellow Clark County ranchers a few years later that they would have to limit their use of public lands for grazing cattle. At the same time, the county struck a deal with the Fish and Wildlife Service that allowed real-estate developers to expand the Las Vegas metropolitan area into the tortoises’ habitat. The ranchers got squeezed in favor of the city.

Almost all of the roughly 50 ranchers in Clark County took a buyout from the government. Cliven refused. He continued grazing his cattle the same way he always had, and his herd fanned out into the lands vacated by his former neighbors. For 20 years, this remained the uneasy status quo: Bundy’s fines soared into the seven figures, but no one tried very hard to collect. Finally, a federal judge ordered Bundy—now calling himself “the last rancher standing” in the valley—to remove his cattle. He ignored the judge, and so in early 2014, the BLM came in to do it for him. The next day, Cliven’s wife, Carol, posted on the family website: “Range War begins tomorrow.”

Left: Cliven Bundy speaks during a news conference near his ranch in April 2014. Right: Protesters gather at the Bureau of Land Management’s base camp, where the Bundys’ cattle were being held. (David Becker / Getty; Jim Urquhart / Reuters)

The climactic standoff took place at a sandy underpass beneath Interstate 15, near the spot where the BLM was keeping the impounded cattle. Federal agents were outnumbered and outgunned by Cliven’s militiamen supporters, and within a couple of hours, they’d released the herd. A group of armed vigilantes—cowboy heroes, they believed, in their own modern Western—had prevented the U.S. government from enforcing the law. And they seemed to be facing no repercussions.

Almost overnight, the Bundys were the “first family” of the Patriot Movement, with Cliven as its public face. Republican Senators fawned over him; Sean Hannity had him on Fox News again and again. And then, at a public meeting less than two weeks later, Cliven self-destructed. “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said, before wondering aloud whether Black people were maybe “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things,” than they were on the dole.

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Polite society can condemn Cliven Bundy and ignore the American racism that remains]

That was the end of Cliven Bundy’s brief stint as a Republican darling. Ammon took over as the family spokesman. He was good in front of a camera, with a soft-spoken polish that none of his siblings could match. A few weeks earlier, he’d been a successful businessman in Phoenix, living a comfortable, suburban life. He hadn’t been particularly political, and was certainly not a militant—an early BLM threat assessment had labeled him the least dangerous of the Bundy men—but now he was angry, and he saw the federal government as his enemy. Less than two years later, at Cliven’s urging, he went to Oregon to stage a standoff of his own.

To this day, Cliven’s cattle continue to graze on public lands, the courts be damned. At dusk on the evening of my visit, he rose from his recliner, and Ammon’s brother Ryan drove us up into the desert hills to see them. On the way, Cliven and Ryan explained their not-entirely-scientific theory of the mutually beneficial relationship between cattle and tortoises. “A cow never conflicted with a tortoise ever,” Ryan said.

The Mojave desert tortoise is extremely rare, but we’d been driving for only a few minutes, when, sure enough, we came face-to-face with one. Ryan stopped the car and we all got out. The animal looked prehistoric, its mud-colored shell weathered and chipped in places, its scales the same dusty black as the stones around it. Cliven walked over and started knocking on its shell. “Hey! Hey!” he said. The tortoise retreated inside. “Go on. Go on then!” Cliven said. It did not go on.

“You’re not gonna make him move,” Ryan said. Cliven reached down to try to overturn the tortoise, but it squirmed and hissed at him. After a few tries, he gave up. “He’s protecting himself,” Ryan said. “Imagine having to live in the rocks like he does. What a life, huh?”

On a Friday evening near the end of summer, six sheriff’s deputies arrested Ammon Bundy at a fundraiser for his son’s high-school football team. This was not the dreaded standoff, not the government coming for his land. But there had been a warrant out for Bundy’s arrest on contempt-of-court charges since April, and the sheriff seized his chance.

The officers marched into the hall just as people were finishing dinner. Bundy did not resist. He just put on his cowboy hat and placed his hands behind his back. Some people shouted and booed as the officers led him outside. Some sat quietly and looked away. “Nobody knows what they’re going to do to him!” his wife yelled. “They will abuse him!” Her voice broke. “This is our son! We’re here to support our boy! Come on! Come on, you guys, rally together! Help us!” She was sobbing now. Nobody moved.

When I went out to Emmett a few days later, I again found Bundy in his workshop, this time lying on his back beneath a ’67 Chevy Nova with his phone beside him. He’d posted bond Sunday morning, and now he had his father on speaker. “I feel like you shouldn’t have bailed out,” Cliven said. “You should’ve made a process of it.”

“I was going to, but the last time I did that, when they sent me to Ada County, they literally about killed me,” Ammon told him, referring to time he’d served as a result of the 2020 statehouse protest. “They call it the cold box. It’s an extremely cold cell. No pads, all concrete. And then they strip you. So all you’ve got is your underwear. No shoes, no nothing”—the jail says this isn’t accurate—“and it literally is torture, and that’s what they do. I just couldn’t think about going through that again.”

“I understand. I’ve been there before,” Cliven said. “But I don’t know.”

There was no sympathy in his voice. And perhaps one shouldn’t expect any from a man who, during the trial that followed the Bunkerville standoff, at the age of 71, had spent an extra month in prison rather than be released on house arrest, because he would accept nothing short of unconditional freedom. I know it’s hard, he seemed to be telling his son, but you’ve gotta suck it up.

That day, Ammon seemed more resigned, more circumspect than he had a week earlier. He told me that he’d decided to contest the legal case against him. “Not because I have a whole lot of faith in the courts,” he said. But he’d already started mourning the loss of his home, and he wasn’t sure it made sense to hold his ground. “There’s many ways to fight, and I may very well go down that route,” he told me, “but it just gets tiring to fight those battles. Alone, almost. Least it feels that way.”

This was a strange admission from the leader of a national network of rights-defending citizens, a network designed for just this sort of situation. “Maybe I shouldn’t say, but I think in his mind he was really hoping that People’s Rights would back him,” Cliven would later tell me. “But when it gets right down to it, I don’t know. He claims he has, like, 70,000 or more followers, but does he have one that would actually stand and fight with him?” Many of the People’s Rights members I put that question to were noncommittal. They’d have to see how the situation played out.

I visited Bundy one last time in mid-September. “The dog seems to always be chasing me,” he’d told me during our very first conversation, and now it seemed it might finally catch him. He didn’t have a lawyer, so he’d been staying up all night writing his own legal motions. Sometimes he lost track of what day of the week it was. At one point, I watched him try and fail to navigate a CAPTCHA prompt six times in a row as he attempted to access a legal document. The courts had frozen his assets and forbidden him from continuing to make false accusations against St. Luke’s and its staff.

Bundy’s co-defendant, Diego Rodriguez, had already moved, in 2022, to Florida, where he lives with Levi, Marissa, and Cyrus, who celebrated his second birthday in May. (Rodriguez declined to be interviewed for this story.) The baby’s vomiting problem has not gone away entirely, Marissa told me, though he is doing much better now. As of this month, she said, Cyrus is in the 28th percentile on the growth chart. (Though Levi was arrested at the gas station, he was never charged with a crime; charges against Marissa were dropped last December. The medical staff at St. Luke’s have said this didn’t seem like a case of intentional abuse or neglect but rather that Levi and Marissa did not appear to appreciate the gravity of their baby’s health problems.)

Just a few weeks earlier, Bundy told me, he’d nearly given up and fled the state too. This whole saga could devour years of his life, he’d realized, and so rather than let it, he’d go elsewhere, start fresh. The kids had been upset at first, but they’d come around. The boxes were packed. The mover was scheduled. And then, as Bundy lay in bed on the morning they were supposed to leave, he thought he heard the voice of God. The Lord wanted him to stay and fight.

How long? He didn’t know. Fight how? He couldn’t say. But he trusted that this would all become clear in time. “I have to believe that the things going on here are going to mean something,” he said in a video about his decision. It was hard not to hear these words as a sort of desperate self-exhortation, the sort of thing you whisper to yourself over and over in the hope that repetition will make it so.

Emmett, Idaho

One morning a few weeks ago, Scott Malone arrived at the Bundy property to find it deserted. He’d come to pick up some pots and stoves he’d lent to Ammon for the apple harvest, and he found those in the driveway. Otherwise there was nothing. The trucks were gone. The house was cleaned out. The workshop was stripped. Bundy hadn’t even said goodbye—a noble act, Malone believed, meant to protect friends from being implicated.

A few days after they left, Lisa posted a farewell message on Facebook (“It’s not goodbye, it’s ‘I’ll see you later’”), but she and Ammon stopped answering my messages and calls. When I finally managed to get in touch with Ryan Bundy, he told me that his brother had tried to muster a group to fight with him, “but when it come down to it, only about half of ’em are willing to stand.” And so now, Ryan said, Ammon was a “refugee.”

Malone says he has no idea where Bundy is. Lawyers for St. Luke’s have heard that the family is in southern Utah, hardly an hour’s drive from where Cliven lives, and from where the family staged its first standoff nearly a decade ago. But Bundy seems to have kept his plan a secret, even from his father. “I don’t know why he quit,” Cliven told me a few days later. “My way of thinking is you can’t give up on something like this. You got a battle going, and it’s a terrible one, and you know”—he trailed off, seemingly at a loss—“I don’t know.”

Ammon Bundy still faces an ever-growing list of contempt-of-court charges, and there is still a warrant out for his arrest, with bail set at $250,000. For Rachel Thomas and Natasha Erickson, the news of his flight delivered both relief and frustration: relief because it meant that, for the moment at least, they would not have to testify in the scheduled contempt trial; frustration because, once more, he had escaped accountability. Seeing him behind bars wouldn’t have undone the pain of the past year and a half—Erickson was still considering leaving medicine, and even in New Zealand, Thomas’s son was still asking, “Mommy, that Ammon Bundy guy can’t come here, can he?”—but it would have brought a degree of closure, a feeling that justice had been served.

Law enforcement could still come looking for Bundy in Utah, or wherever he is, and bring him back to Idaho. And if that happens, he could face months or even years in jail. Even if it does not, St. Luke’s will soon claim possession of the home he left behind.

Standing there alone on the deserted property, Malone felt his own mix of emotions. He, too, was relieved: Had Bundy stayed and fought, the sheriff and his deputies would have gunned him down, Malone was sure of it. He, too, was frustrated: People’s Rights could have done more; people weren’t prepared to lay down their lives for freedom the way they used to be. And he was also heartbroken: The others may have been afraid, but he really would have died by his friend’s side. And now Ammon Bundy was gone. The specific era of American extremism that had begun a decade earlier at Bundy Ranch was, in some sense, over.

Ammon never returned my calls, but he did eventually send me a brief message via an encrypted app. “I have always told the truth,” he said, “and God will be my judge.”

His note called to mind something he’d once told me about his enemies. “I think most people over the years come to think that they’re doing what should be done,” he said. “And it doesn’t change the fact that what they’re doing is not right.”

Henry Kissinger, who died today at the age of 100, was determined to write his own place in history. Richard Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s former secretary of state and national security adviser burnished his own reputation through his memoirs and books, by cultivating the press and foreign-policy elites, and winning the adulation of politicians as varied as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. For his 100th birthday on May 27, he was celebrated at a closed-door black-tie gala at the New York Public Library attended by the likes of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Director William Burns.

Yet for all the praise of Kissinger’s insights into global affairs and his role in establishing relations with Communist China, his policies are noteworthy for his callousness toward the most helpless people in the world. How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere?

Dismissing the arguments of dovish White House staffers, he came to endorse a secret U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia, which began in May 1970. In December, after Nixon complained that American aerial bombardment up to that point was inadequate, Kissinger passed along an order for “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.” Ignoring the distinction between civilian and military targets, Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?”

[Read: What Joe Biden could learn from Henry Kissinger]

In November 1975, after the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and began its mass exterminations of civilians, Kissinger asked Thailand’s foreign minister to relay a message. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them,” he said, referring to senior Khmer Rouge leaders. “They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.”

On another occasion, Kissinger expressed indifference toward the repression of Jews in the Soviet Union, telling Nixon in the Oval Office, “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Perhaps the most revealing chapter opened in 1971, during a series of massacres in what is now Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most-populous country, but was then the eastern section of Pakistan, an important American client state during the Cold War. Kissinger stood firmly behind Pakistan’s military dictatorship throughout one of the Cold War’s worst atrocities—a record that he subsequently sought to cover up. Some of the most sensitive parts of the White House tapes have for decades been bleeped out under bogus claims of national security. But in my own research on the crisis, I got several batches of tapes declassified over the course of 10 years of wrangling.

Pakistan, created by carving Muslim areas out of the former British India, was originally a bifurcated country. East Pakistan was predominantly Bengali, and many of its 75 million people resented the high-handed rule of Punjabi elites and a military dictatorship more than 1,000 miles away in West Pakistan. When Bengali nationalists won a democratic election in 1970, a crisis began. After constitutional negotiations stalled, Pakistan’s military junta launched a bloody crackdown on its Bengali population on the night of March 25, 1971, trying to shoot people into submission. Kissinger’s own White House staff told him it was “a reign of terror” from the start. By that June, the State Department publicly reckoned that at least 200,000 people had died; the CIA secretly came to a similar estimate in September, as the killing raged on. Some 10 million terrified Bengali refugees fled into India, where countless people died of disease in overcrowded camps. While an overwhelmed India sponsored Bengali guerrillas to resist the Pakistani onslaught, Pakistan attacked India, its much larger neighbor, in December 1971. The ensuing war, intense but short, ended with a humiliating drubbing for Pakistan and the creation of an independent Bangladesh—a crushing defeat for the United States in the Cold War.

The Nixon administration knew it had significant, although not unlimited, influence over Pakistan, which was fearful of India—an officially nonaligned democracy that was tilting toward the Soviet Union. Yet in the crucial weeks before the killing began, Kissinger, then the national security adviser, chose not to warn the Pakistani generals not to open fire on their own citizenry. He did not press them to accept in some rough form the results of the election, no urge them to cut a power-sharing deal with Bengali leaders to avoid an unwinnable civil war. He did not impose conditions to deter them from committing atrocities, nor threaten the loss of American support during the atrocities.

[Read: In defense of Henry Kissinger]

Despite warnings from his own staff about the potency of Bengali nationalism, Kissinger accepted the claims of Pakistan’s military rulers that the Bengalis were a cowardly people who would be easily subdued. He said to Nixon, “The Bengalis aren’t very good fighters I guess.” Referring to the number of Pakistani troops in East Pakistan, he told Nixon, “The use of power against seeming odds pays off. ’Cause all the experts were saying that 30,000 people can’t get control of 75 million. Well, this may still turn out to be true but as of this moment it seems to be quiet.”

In their attempt to hold on to East Pakistan, the Pakistani forces brutalized the Bengali enclave’s Hindu minority. Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador to India and a former Republican senator from New York, warned Kissinger to his face in June 1971 that “it is almost entirely a matter of genocide killing the Hindus.” Yet on the White House tapes, Kissinger scorned those empathetic Americans who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.” Briefing the White House staff about how Pakistani General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan helped to get him into China during his secret July 1971 trip—which was an important reason for his unyielding support for Pakistan—he joked, “The cloak-and-dagger exercise in Pakistan arranging the trip was fascinating. Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!”

Throughout the crisis, Kissinger scorned Indians as a people. On June 3, 1971, he said, “Of course they’re stimulating the refugees,” blaming the Indians for the Pakistani military crackdown. Then he castigated Indians as a nation, his voice oozing with contempt: “They are a scavenging people.” On June 17, speaking about the Indians, Kissinger told Nixon, “They are superb flatterers, Mr. President. They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That’s how they survived 600 years. They suck up—their great skill is to suck up to people in key positions.” Although he concentrated his intolerance against the Indians, Kissinger expressed prejudices about Pakistanis too. On August 10, 1971, he told the president: “The Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure.”

Although Kissinger would later try to hold himself apart from Nixon’s lawbreaking in Watergate, he made his own contribution to the atmosphere of lawlessness in the administration. During the war that began when Pakistan attacked India in December 1971, Kissinger worked hard to rush American weapons to Pakistan, via Iran and Jordan—even though he knew that this violated a congressional arms embargo. As Kissinger secretly told a visiting Chinese delegation, he understood that he was breaking the law: “We are barred by law from giving equipment to Pakistan in this situation. And we also are barred by law from permitting friendly countries which have American equipment to give their equipment to Pakistan.” He brushed aside warnings from White House staffers and lawyers at the State Department and the Pentagon lawyers that it would be illegal to transfer weapons to Pakistan. In front of the attorney general, John Mitchell, Nixon asked Kissinger, “Is it really so much against our law?” Kissinger admitted that it was. Not bothering to concoct a legal theory about executive power, Nixon and Kissinger simply went ahead and did it anyway. Nixon said, “Hell, we’ve done worse.”

Rather than reckoning with the human consequences of his deeds, let alone apologizing for breaking the law, Kissinger assiduously tried to cover up his record in the South Asia crisis. As late as 2022, in his book Leadership, he was still trying to promote a sanitized view, in which he tactfully termed former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi “an irritant”—even though during her tenure he repeatedly called her “a bitch,” as well as calling the Indians “bastards” and “sons of bitches.”

[Read: Henry Kissinger will not apologize]

Kissinger’s apologists today tend to breeze past such coarse stereotypes about foreign nations, extolling his pursuit of U.S. national interests while overlooking the toll on real human beings. Decades after the South Asia crisis, the bland version of Kissinger that now prevails bears scant relation to the historical record. The uncomfortable question is why much of American polite society was so willing to dote on him, rather than honestly confronting what he did.