When I think of last year, I hear “Northeast Texas Women,” by Willis Alan Ramsey. I’ve carried it with me since my father played it in the car in January 2022, him drumming the steering wheel and me the dashboard. Our windows were open to the desert outside, the air all sagebrush and sunburnt dirt. I was nostalgic for the moment even as I lived it, five minutes and 51 seconds of country music in the Mojave.

But to Spotify, my favored music-streaming app, this was nothing more than a single “play,” just one data point among countless others. When the company released its annual “Wrapped” feature—an interactive slideshow that analyzes a user’s listening habits throughout the year and packages them into cheeky graphics that are meant to be shared on social media—Willis Alan Ramsey was nowhere to be seen. The platform had crunched my numbers, aggregating thousands of minutes spent streaming on the subway, at the gym, and in the office, to arrive at its assessment of my character. It produced a withering phrase: “Pumpkin Spice.”

Having my musical taste compared to a mass-market fall flavoring didn’t sit right. I’ve since learned that I’m not alone in being unsettled by what Spotify Wrapped—the latest version of which was released yesterday—seemed to say about my character. There are lengthy Reddit threads of people worrying about their results and trying to guess how they’re calculated in the first place. Articles deliver tips on how to expunge “cringe” music from the roundup. One college newspaper reported that listeners could create an impressive playlist and loop it silently while they sleep. A friend of mine recently suggested, in earnest, that I could get ahead of things by requesting my personal listening data from Spotify. I would have to wait up to a month for the company to email them to me in a spreadsheet file; then I could put that into ChatGPT and ask the chatbot questions about my music habits. What were my top five artists? What genres were most listened to? What are some words that describe the musical aesthetic of the dataset (DO NOT SAY “PUMPKIN SPICE”)? I didn’t, but I was tempted.

[Read: How Starbucks perfected autumn]

All of these ideas amount to algorithmic “folk theories,” as researchers call them—stories we tell ourselves about the technology that collects our data and presents some kind of compelling, inscrutable output in response. Users might assume that commenting on a TikTok prompts the algorithm to serve them similar content; I might speculate that looping Steely Dan will keep the soundtrack to High School Musical: The Musical: The Series off my Wrapped slideshow. But I’ll never really know if I’m right.

As Robyn Caplan, a social-media scholar at the Data & Society Research Institute, told me, “The gap between what we believe about algorithms and how they actually work will always remain.” Companies keep their algorithmic secret sauce under lock and key, and its precise recipe changes constantly anyway, as developers tweak and morph it for whatever mysterious reasons. But folk theories help us feel like we’re narrowing the gap between ourselves and the technology that shapes our online experience; they offer us a sense of control. And maybe when it comes to a platform like Spotify, which tries to capture something as personal as taste, people feel compelled to close another gap—between how the algorithm sees them and how they see themselves.

The central premise uniting these theories is that we can’t really tell an algorithm who we are; we have to show it. Platforms used to offer recommendations based on clear user inputs (consider that Netflix used to ask you to rate a movie out of five stars); now things have gotten murkier as our behavior is tracked and collated in complex, opaque ways. Consumers have learned to adjust their actions to get the content they want, according to Nick Seaver, an anthropology professor at Tufts University and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. “You were much more in control of how you represented yourself under those [earlier] systems,” Seaver told me. Now our behavior—even the embarrassing kind—generates our unique media world.

[Read: What will happen to my music library when Spotify dies?]

Just as the machine tailors itself to us, we try to tailor ourselves to it. This could mean deliberately streaming an album so that Spotify “knows” we like that artist or listening to some “tasteful” music to remind it that our preferences extend beyond guilty pleasures. It’s not just Spotify: People do this kind of thing on TikTok all the time, lingering on a BookTok video if they want more literary content, and so on.

This preoccupation with tweaking the algorithm reflects a belief that it’s saying something meaningful about who we are. Jeff Hancock, a communications professor at Stanford University, told me he calls it the “algorithmic mirror”—the assumption that whatever the technology spits back at us tells us something true about ourselves. A user might get served an ad for knitting needles, something they’d never used before, and think, I actually would like to knit!

Research has shown that people can be so swayed by an algorithm’s read of their personality that they will justify complete mischaracterizations. Motahhare Eslami, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, conducted a study in 2018 on how we process algorithmic communication. She explained to me that one person she spoke with kept receiving ads that were tailored toward living in New York City, even though the participant did not. Rather than assume that the program was making a mistake, the individual contrived an explanation: The algorithm thought she was interested in New York because she’d been watching a lot of Friends.

Spotify Wrapped leans into this mystique. It’s not just a calculation of the songs you’ve played—it’s the “real, the realer, and the realest listening moments” from your year, according to the 2023 marketing campaign. Of course, that’s not really true. The realest moments aren’t the ones when Spotify and its algorithmically curated playlists are just filling dead air or getting me through my commute. Maybe I’m pumpkin spice in the in-between moments of my life that I dot with John Mayer (apologies to my fellow women) and Olivia Rodrigo. But when I look away from the algorithmic mirror, I see my dad in the driver’s seat and hear Willis Alan Ramsey coming through the speakers. And I feel like myself again.

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.

The Irish singer-songwriter, whose hits include Fairytale of New York, was unwell for some time.

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.

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.

The plot targeted a US citizen in New York who was part of a Sikh separatist group, prosecutors say.

Luke Donald will remain Europe's Ryder Cup captain for the 2025 edition in New York after leading his team to victory in Rome in October.

Virgin Atlantic has launched the world’s first passenger plane flight powered entirely by alternative fuel. The Boeing 787, which took off from London’s Heathrow Airport today (Nov. 28) for New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, is running on so-called sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Made from a blend of sources,…

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It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was important. After the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.

[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson on Trump and the evangelical temptation]

Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism, yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance.

Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. In response to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, had tweeted, “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—the son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense. “Who are you @drmoore?” he replied. “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?”

This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.”

Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air. “Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked.

I stumbled. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus and Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter.

[From the June 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on how politics poisoned the evangelical church]

As the interview ended, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American evangelical Church. Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side bowing to earthly idols of nation and influence and fame—but I was too scared to say so. My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis.

Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues. As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone.

The last time I saw him was nine days earlier. The CEO of Politico, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party for me at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis—but before long he was holding court with diplomats and Fortune 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience.

It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.

“You see all these people?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.

“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.

The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.

“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”

Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was.

Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking Communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept him as his personal savior.

Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ too.

When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad said he felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might have been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling just about every material item they owned, leaving their high-salaried jobs in New York, and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

For the next two decades, they worked in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived, in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped books had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-18th century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and it was there, for the next 26 years, that he served as senior pastor.

Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised in the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high-school dates to Bible study, working as a janitor during a year of community college. I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At 9 years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex.

The last time I’d been there, 18 months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes. Now I would need to give a very different speech.

Standing in the back of the sanctuary, my three older brothers and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we’d arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek-linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away, in 2008, Cornerstone had grown from a couple hundred members to a couple thousand.

Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation.

They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.

It got to the point where I had to take a walk. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.

That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give at Dad’s funeral the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice.

In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who’d taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor.

Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me the day before, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I suggested, with some sarcasm, that if they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh ?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.

A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. Here, I thought, is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these women. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.

Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It had been left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad had called a friend, a man who’d mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life.

He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself.

However, there was still hope. Jesus forgives, and so could this man. If I used my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was supposedly sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.

I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then she flung the piece of paper into the air and, with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

There has never been consensus on what, exactly, it means to be an evangelical. Competing and overlapping definitions have been offered for generations, some more widely embraced than others. Billy Graham, a man synonymous with the term, once remarked that he himself would like to inquire as to its true meaning. By the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of televangelists and political activists, what was once a religious signifier began transforming into a partisan movement. Evangelical soon became synonymous with conservative Christian, and eventually with white conservative Republican.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at reductive analyses of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what he believed an evangelical to be: someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.

From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, less a lifestyle than a hobby, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church.

The author and his father in 2019 (Courtesy of Tim Alberta)

But for all his successes, Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country.

Once a talented young athlete, Dad came down with tuberculosis at 16 years old. He was hospitalized for four months; at one point, doctors thought he might die. He eventually recovered, and with the Vietnam War escalating, he joined the Marine Corps. But at the Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, he fell behind in the physical work. His lungs were not healthy. After receiving an honorable discharge, Dad went home saddled with a certain shame. In the ensuing years, he learned that dozens of the second lieutenants he’d trained alongside at Quantico—as well as a bunch of guys he’d grown up with—were killed in action. It burdened him for the rest of his life.

This experience, and his disgust with the hippies and the drug culture and the war protesters, turned Dad into a law-and-order conservative. Marinating in the language of social conservatism during his time in seminary—this was the heyday of the Moral Majority—he emerged a full-spectrum Republican. His biggest political concern was abortion; in 1947, my grandmother, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage, had almost ended her pregnancy with him. (She had a sudden change of heart at the clinic and walked out, a decision my dad would always attribute to holy intercession.) But he also waded into the culture wars: gay marriage, education curriculum, morality in public life.

Dad always told us that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership. He was so relieved when Bill Clinton’s second term ended that he and Mom hosted a small viewing party in our living room for George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, to celebrate the return of morality to the White House. Over time, however, his emphasis shifted. One Sunday in early 2010, when I was home visiting, he showed the congregation an ominous video in which Christian leaders warned about the menace of Obamacare. I told him afterward that it felt inappropriate for a worship service; he disagreed. We would butt heads more regularly in the years that followed. It was always loving, always respectful. Yet clearly our philosophical paths were diverging—a reality that became unavoidable during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.”

To his credit, Dad was not some lazy, knee-jerk partisan. He was vocal about certain issues—gun violence, poverty, immigration, the trappings of wealth—that did not play to his constituency at Cornerstone.

Dad wasn’t a Christian nationalist; he wanted nothing to do with theocracy. He just believed that God had blessed the United States uniquely—and felt that anyone who fought to preserve those blessings was doing the Lord’s work. This made for an unfortunate scene in 2007, when a young congregant at Cornerstone, a Marine named Mark Kidd, died during a fourth tour of duty in Iraq. Public opinion had swung sharply against the war, and Democrats were demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home. My dad was devastated by Kidd’s death. They had corresponded while Kidd was overseas and met for prayer in between his deployments. Dad’s grief as a pastor gave way to his grievance as a Republican supporter of the war: He made it known to local Democratic politicians that they weren’t welcome at the funeral.

“I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander in chief,” Dad thundered from his pulpit, earning a raucous standing ovation. “Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?”

This touched off a firestorm in our community. Most of the church members were all for Dad’s remarks, but even in a conservative town like Brighton, plenty of people felt uneasy about turning a fallen Marine’s church memorial into a partisan political rally. Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow the president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ himself.

I know Dad regretted it. But he couldn’t help himself. His own personal story—and his broader view of the United States as a godly nation, a source of hope in a despondent world—was impossible to divorce from his pastoral ministry. Every time a member of the military came to church dressed in uniform, Dad would recognize them by name, ask them to stand up, and lead the church in a rapturous round of applause. This was one of the first things his successor changed at Cornerstone.

Eighteen months after Dad’s funeral, in February 2021, I sat down across from that successor, Chris Winans, in a booth at the Brighton Bar & Grill. It’s a comfortable little haunt on Main Street, backing up to a wooden playground and a millpond. But Winans didn’t look comfortable. He looked nervous, even a bit paranoid, glancing around him as we began to speak. Soon, I would understand why.

Dad had spent years looking for an heir apparent. Several associate pastors had come and gone. Cornerstone was his life’s work—he had led the church throughout virtually its entire history—so there would be no settling in his search for a successor. The uncertainty wore him down. Dad worried that he might never find the right guy. And then one day, while attending a denominational meeting, he met Winans, a young associate pastor from Goodwill—the very church where he’d been saved, and where he’d worked his first job out of seminary. Dad hired him away from Goodwill to lead a young-adults ministry at Cornerstone, and from the moment Winans arrived, I could tell that he was the one.

Barely 30 years old, Winans looked to be exactly what Cornerstone needed in its next generation of leadership. He was a brilliant student of the scriptures. He spoke with precision and clarity from the pulpit. He had a humble, easygoing way about him, operating without the outsize ego that often accompanies first-rate preaching. Everything about this pastor—the boyish sweep of brown hair, his delightful young family—seemed to be straight out of central casting.

There was just one problem: Chris Winans was not a conservative Republican. He didn’t like guns. He cared more about funding anti-poverty programs than cutting taxes. He had no appetite for President Trump’s unrepentant antics. Of course, none of this would seem heretical to Christians in other parts of the world; given his staunch anti-abortion position, Winans would in most places be considered the picture of spiritual and intellectual consistency. But in the American evangelical tradition, and at a church like Cornerstone, the whiff of liberalism made him suspect.

Dad knew the guy was different. Winans liked to play piano instead of sports, and had no taste for hunting or fishing. Frankly, Dad thought that was a bonus. Winans wasn’t supposed to simply placate Cornerstone’s aging base of wealthy white congregants. The new pastor’s charge was to evangelize, to cast a vision and expand the mission field, to challenge those inside the church and carry the gospel to those outside it. Dad didn’t think there was undue risk. He felt confident that his hand-chosen successor’s gifts in the pulpit, and his manifest love of Jesus, would smooth over any bumps in the transition.

He was wrong. Almost immediately after Winans moved into the role of senior pastor, at the beginning of 2018, the knives came out. Any errant remark he made about politics or culture, any slight against Trump or the Republican Party—real or perceived—invited a torrent of criticism. Longtime members would demand a meeting with Dad, who had stuck around in a support role, and unload on Winans. Dad would ask if there was any substantive criticism of the theology; almost invariably, the answer was no. A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in. Dad told them all to get lost. If anyone had a beef with the senior pastor, he said, they needed to take it up with the senior pastor. (Dad did so himself, buying Winans lunch at Chili’s and suggesting that he tone down the tree hugging.)

Winans had a tough first year on the job, but he survived it. The people at Cornerstone were in an adjustment period. He needed to respect that—and he needed to adjust, too. As long as Dad had his back, Winans knew he would be okay.And then Dad died.

Now, Winans told me, he was barely hanging on at Cornerstone. The church had become unruly; his job had become unbearable. Not long after Dad died—making Winans the unquestioned leader of the church—the coronavirus pandemic arrived. And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

People at Cornerstone began confronting their pastor, demanding that he speak out against government mandates and Black Lives Matter and Joe Biden. When Winans declined, people left. The mood soured noticeably after Trump’s defeat in November 2020. A crusade to overturn the election result, led by a group of outspoken Christians—including Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, and the author Eric Metaxas, who suggested to fellow believers that martyrdom might be required to keep Trump in office—roiled the Cornerstone congregation. When a popular church staffer who had been known to proselytize for QAnon was fired after repeated run-ins with Winans, the pastor told me, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people Winans counted as confidants and friends.

By the time Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Winans believed he’d lost control of his church. “It’s an exodus,” he told me a few weeks later, sitting inside Brighton Bar & Grill.

The pastor had felt despair—and a certain liability—watching the attack unfold on television. Christian imagery was ubiquitous: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Senator Josh Hawley, explained in a speech the following year, long after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”

That sort of thinking, Winans said, represents an even greater threat than the events of January 6.

“A lot of people believe there was a religious conception of this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”

For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel,” Winans said, referring to the Old Testament narrative of God’s chosen nation. “You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”

Plenty of nations are mentioned in the Bible; the United States is not one of them. Most American evangelicals are sophisticated enough to reject the idea of this country as something consecrated in the eyes of God. But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

Winans chose to be hypervigilant on this front, hence the change of policy regarding Cornerstone’s salute to military personnel. The new pastor would meet soldiers after the service, shaking their hand and individually thanking them for their service. But he refused to stage an ovation in the sanctuary. This wasn’t because he was some bohemian anti-war activist; in fact, his wife had served in the Army. Winans simply felt it was inappropriate.

“I don’t want to dishonor anyone. I think nations have the right to self-defense. I respect the sacrifices these people make in the military,” Winans told me. “But they would come in wearing their dress blues and get this wild standing ovation. And you contrast that to whenever we would host missionaries: They would stand up for recognition, and we give them a golf clap … And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”

This kind of cultural heresy was getting Winans into trouble. More congregants were defecting each week. Many were relocating to one particular congregation down the road, a revival-minded church that was pandering to the whims of the moment, led by a pastor who was preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that sought to merge two kingdoms into one.As we talked, Winans asked me to keep something between us: He was thinking about leaving Cornerstone.

The “psychological onslaught,” he said, had become too much. Recently, the pastor had developed a form of anxiety disorder and was retreating into a dark room between services to collect himself. Winans had met with several trusted elders and asked them to stick close to him on Sunday mornings so they could catch him if he were to faint and fall over.

I thought about Dad and how heartbroken he would have been. Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this. Clearly, long before COVID-19 or George Floyd or Donald Trump, something had gone wrong at Cornerstone. I had always shrugged off the crude, hysterical, sky-is-falling Facebook posts I would see from people at the church. I found it amusing, if not particularly alarming, that some longtime Cornerstone members were obsessed with trolling me on Twitter. Now I couldn’t help but think these were warnings—bright-red blinking lights—that should have been taken seriously. My dad never had a social-media account. Did he have any idea just how lost some of his sheep really were?

I had never told Winans about the confrontations at my dad’s viewing, or the letter I received after taking Rush Limbaugh’s name in vain at the funeral. Now I was leaning across the table, unloading every detail. He narrowed his eyes and folded his hands and gave a pained exhale, mouthing that he was sorry. He could not even manage the words.

We both kept quiet for a little while. And then I asked him something I’d thought about every day for the previous 18 months—a sanitized version of my wife’s outburst in the living room.

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?”

Winans thought for a moment.

“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”

This article was adapted from Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Church of America.”

The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet—and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.

Substack, founded in 2017, has terms of service that formally proscribe “hate,” along with pornography, spam, and anyone “restricted from making money on Substack”—a category that includes businesses banned by Stripe, the platform’s default payment processor. But Substack’s leaders also proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ, albeit with spotty results, to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

[Adam Serwer: Why conservatives invented a ‘right to post’]

Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.  

Some authors, I should note, reject the toxic label Nazi even as they ostentatiously deploy Nazi and white-supremacist language and themes. This is true of Spencer—as The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood documented in a 2017 profile titled “His Kampf.” Spencer later claimed to have disavowed white nationalism, but his Substack features content such as a recent post, written by a contributor, that begins: “Geniuses, in their most consequential forms, appear predominantly among Aryans … orbited by successful Jews.” That statement combines at least two Nazi tropes: the portrayal of Jewish people as schemers and the pseudoscientific fantasy that white Europeans are descended from a genetically superior ancient race.

Other Substacks amplify anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including the century-old forgery known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as well as more modern ones that accuse Jews of “occupying” the U.S. government and taking advantage of COVID-19. (A newsletter called Turning Point Stocks offers this choice headline: “Vaccines Are Jew Witchcraftery.”) One overtly Nazi newsletter called The Tribalist recently published a fawning interview with Billy Roper, a former skinhead who led the most prominent American neo-Nazi organization in the 1990s. Roper is infamous for celebrating 9/11 because, as he put it, al-Qaeda had set out to “kill Jews.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has called him the “uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.” The post’s lead image is a photo of neo-Nazis giving a Hitler salute.

In August, Rolling Stone reported that a group calling itself the People’s Initiative of New England—a barely concealed front for the neo-Nazi organization NSC-131—had published a manifesto advocating “separation from the United States of America” for the purpose of creating a white ethnostate in the Northeast. That manifesto was published on the group’s Substack.

The platform has shown a surprising tolerance for extremists who circumvent its published rules. Patrick Casey, a leader of Identity Evropa, a defunct neo-Nazi group, had been banned from Twitter and TikTok and suspended from YouTube after running afoul of those platforms’ terms of service. (Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, subsequently announced an “amnesty” that restored Casey’s account, among others.) Perhaps most damagingly to a content creator, Stripe had prohibited Casey from using its services.

But Substack was willing to let a white supremacist get back on his feet. Casey launched a free Substack newsletter soon after the 2020 election. Months later, he set up a paywall, getting around Stripe’s ban by involving a third-party payment processor. “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling,” he wrote on his Substack in 2021. “The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Casey’s newsletter remains active; through Substack’s recommendations feature, he promotes seven other white-nationalist and extremist publications, one of which has a Substack “bestseller” badge.

Nazis and other violent white supremacists are “opportunists,” Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, told me. “Even if you’re pushing them off of one platform … they’re going to find a space that gives them the ability to do what it is they want to do.” And in Substack, she said, “they have found a safe space.”

Moderating online content is notoriously tricky. Amid the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza, Amnesty International recently condemned social-media companies’ failure to curb a burst of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic speech, at the same time that it criticized those companies for “over-broad censorship” of content from Palestinian and pro-Palestinian accounts—which has made sharing information and views from inside Gaza more difficult. When tech platforms are quick to banish posters, partisans of all stripes have an incentive to accuse their opponents of being extremists in an effort to silence them. But when platforms are too permissive, they risk being overrun by bigots, harassers, and other bad-faith actors who drive away other users, as evidenced by the rapid erosion of Twitter, now X, under Musk.

In a post earlier this year, a Substack co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, implied that his company’s business model would largely obviate the need for content moderation. “We give communities on Substack the tools to establish their own norms and set their own terms of engagement rather than have all that handed down to them by a central authority,” he wrote. But even a platform that takes an expansive view of free speech will inevitably find itself making judgments about what to take down and what to keep up—as Substack’s own terms of service attest. For all his bluster about open expression, Musk has been willing to censor posts on behalf of foreign governments, including Turkey and India.

[Jeffrey Rosen: Elon Musk is right that Twitter should follow the First Amendment]

Ultimately, the First Amendment gives publications and platforms in the United States the right to publish almost anything they want. But the same First Amendment also gives them the right to refuse to allow their platform to be used for anything they don’t want to publish or host.

“Substack is a platform that is built on freedom of expression, and helping writers publish what they want to write,” McKenzie and the company’s other co-founders, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement when asked for comment on this article. “Some of that writing is going to be objectionable or offensive. Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes—like incitements to violence—but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.” Still, some decisions seem obvious: If something that bills itself as “a National Socialist website” doesn’t violate Substack’s own policy against “hate,” what does?

I myself am a Substacker. I started my newsletter in 2019, at a time when the platform was known for hosting freelance journalists and bloggers, many on the left and center-left, attracted by the promise of a new way to scrape together a living amid the collapse of the journalism industry. McKenzie, in fact, personally encouraged me to join Substack. Along the way he offered suggestions about possible names for my newsletter and topics I could cover, and facilitated introductions to other journalists on the platform. I didn’t get any money up front from the platform, but for one year in the middle of my tenure, the company provided me with a part-time editor and podcast producer.

In the past few years, Substack has sought to appeal to more contrarian and conservative authors, such as Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, and to readers disenchanted with mainstream publications. The company also began positioning itself more overtly as a fervent supporter of free speech—a laudable goal. But in practice, Substack’s definition of that concept goes beyond welcoming arguments from across a wide ideological spectrum and broadly defending anyone’s right to spread even bigotry and conspiracy theories; implicitly, it also includes hosting and profiting from bigoted and conspiratorial content. As far-right commentators have flocked to Substack, the company has refused to engage with the distinct challenges that these extremists pose to a platform that claims to prohibit hate speech.

In April, when Substack launched its microblogging service, Substack Notes, to compete with Twitter, Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge, asked Best if the company would permit a hypothetical post that said, “We should not allow as many brown people in the country.” Best refused to answer, calling Patel’s question “gotcha content moderation” and saying: “We have content policies that are deliberately tuned to allow lots of things that we … strongly disagree with.”

Facing widespread criticism from many Substack creators—some of whom were threatening to follow previous outflows of writers who quit in protest—McKenzie insisted that “aggressive content moderation” didn’t work. “Is there less concern about misinformation? Has polarization decreased? Has fake news gone away? Is there less bigotry? It doesn’t seem so to us,” he wrote. (Though he added: “Now, this doesn’t mean there should be no moderation at all, and we do of course have content guidelines with narrowly defined restrictions that we will continue to enforce.”)

Since then, the company has tried to market itself in two contradictory ways. To nominally apolitical creative writers—poets, fiction authors, memoirists, and so on—it is billing itself as a “new economic engine for culture.” The platform has a growing roster of celebrity authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert, George Saunders, and the musicians Patti Smith and Jeff Tweedy. This effort was embodied recently by a strange new ad, created to market the redesigned Substack phone app, in which raging denizens of a burning cartoon dystopia beat one another in the streets, while more cultured readers take refuge in a tranquil bookstore called “Substack.”

To a different audience, the site’s leaders market themselves in the opposite way: by “leaning into politics.” In a recent post on the official Substack blog titled “In the 2024 U.S. elections, vote for Substack,” McKenzie declared that in the coming cycle, “the cable news channels, public radio stations, YouTube shows, and podcasts will all turn to Substack to find informed and opinionated writers to book for their programs. More and more, politicians and interest groups will look to Substack writers to help make their case for their policies and positions.”

Both of those marketing ploys are undercut by the co-founders’ willingness not only to accommodate but to promote writers with a history of making inflammatory racist comments. In June, McKenzie hosted the Substack writer Richard Hanania on the platform’s flagship podcast, The Active Voice. On Twitter the previous month, Hanania, a political scientist with a law degree from the University of Chicago, had described Black people as “animals” who should be subject to “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance.”

[Adam Serwer: The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again]

Soon after Hanania’s appearance on the podcast, HuffPost outed him as having written under a pen name in the early 2010s for several white-nationalist outlets, including Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com. In some of his older posts, Hanania called for the forced sterilization of those with “low IQ”—a group that he argued included most Black and Latino people. Hanania responded to the exposé with a Substack post in which he disavowed his past views, but in terms that raised significant doubts about his sincerity. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort,” he declared in the post, “is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.”

Nevertheless, Chris Best, who is also Substack’s CEO, hailed Hanania’s non-apology as “an honest post on a difficult subject.” Within weeks, Substack was promoting Hanania yet again, trumpeting in one of its newsletters that his new book, The Origins of Woke—in which he calls for gutting the Civil Rights Act—“is in hot demand from reviewers,” and providing a link to preorder it. (One of those reviewers, writing for The Atlantic, observed: “Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one.”)

In McKenzie’s recent post about “leaning into politics,” the Substack co-founder enthusiastically and prominently recommended a lesser-known Substacker, Darryl Cooper, as among the “up-and-comers” in political writing. Cooper’s podcast featured a complimentary interview with the white-nationalist magazine editor Greg Johnson—who, incidentally, published some of Hanania’s pseudonymous, more explicitly racist writings. Cooper has also used his personal Twitter account to claim that “FDR chose the wrong side in WW2.” (That tweet and the interview with Johnson were subsequently deleted.)

What should Substack do with the writers who are using it to spread Nazi ideas? Experts on extremist communication, such Whitney Phillips, the University of Oregon journalism professor, caution that simply banning hate groups from a platform—even if sometimes necessary from a business standpoint—can end up redounding to the extremists’ benefit by making them seem like victims of an overweening censorship regime. “It feeds into this narrative of liberal censorship of conservatives,” Phillips told me, “even if the views in question are really extreme.”

Yet, as she also noted, Substack isn’t just making decisions about whether to take posts down; it also has the choice of which writers to promote. “There’s a big difference between a platform hosting content and then maybe not co-signing what they’re saying, but giving them a microphone in an institutionally approved way: ‘I am inviting you onto my podcast and I’m going to let you speak.’”

The problem, Phillips said, is not that stumbling onto Nazi newsletters will magically turn anyone who reads them into a National Socialist. “The thing that is particularly concerning is, how is it going to take an already intense thinker about Nazi ideas and give them more of a community, more of a sense of belonging, more of a reinforcement of those beliefs, rather than creating the beliefs out of nowhere?”

The question is what kind of community Substack is actually cultivating. How long will writers such as Bari Weiss, Patti Smith, and George Saunders—and, for that matter, me—be willing to stake our reputations on, and share a cut of our revenue with, a company that can’t decide if Nazi blogs count as hate speech?