When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it will annihilate all life on the North American continent. Siberia will become one of the safest places on Earth—which is yet another reason “the Anglo-Saxon elites” want to capture the region from Russia.  

So says Nikolai Patrushev, the second-most powerful man in Moscow. Currently the head of Russia’s Security Council, Patrushev has been a colleague of Vladimir Putin’s since the two served in the Leningrad KGB in the 1970s and is now the president’s confidant and top adviser. A general of the army and a former director of the FSB—the successor agency to the Soviet KGB—Patrushev is also the de facto overlord of the country’s other secret services. Among Kremlin courtiers, he alone appears licensed to speak for Putin on strategic matters, including nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s view of the U.S., Europe, and NATO.

Following Putin’s lead, many top Russian bureaucrats compete in conjuring up monstrous conspiracy theories. Yet even in this cracked-up crowd, Patrushev stands out for the luridness and intensity of his anti-West—and especially anti-U.S.—animus. The hyperbole of his comments would make the Soviet propagandists of my youth blush: His prominence is a reminder that, if Putin were to lose power tomorrow, his potential successors could be more warlike and expansionist, not less. Americans should worry about how much Patrushev’s outlook reinforces his boss’s—and about how his delusional, more-belligerent-than-Putin fulminations in long interviews with top-circulation Russian newspapers become the party line, which deafening propaganda then inculcates in the mind of millions of Russians.

In Patrushev’s telling, the West has been maligning and bullying Russia for half a millennium. As early as the 16th century, “Russophobic” Western historians besmirched Russia’s first czar, Ivan IV—a mass murderer and sadist better known as Ivan the Terrible. Patrushev insists that Ivan is merely a victim of a concocted “black legend” that “portrayed him as a tyrant.”  

To the Security Council chief, the West’s 20th-century siege of Russia had nothing to do with communism and the Cold War. In fact, the fall of the mighty Soviet Union made the country a softer target for the Western plotters, and the United States strove to exploit the opportunity by forcing Russia to give up its “sovereignty, national consciousness, culture, and an independent foreign and domestic policy.” The conspiracy’s final objectives are Russia’s dismemberment, the elimination of the Russian language, the country’s removal from the geopolitical map, and its confinement to the borders of the Duchy of Muscovy, a small medieval realm.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

In Patrushev’s world, the U.S. invents new viruses in biological-weapons labs to annihilate the peoples of “objectionable states,” and the COVID-19 virus “could have been created” by the Pentagon with the assistance of several of the largest transnational pharmaceutical firms and the “Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros, and Biden foundations.”

Patrushev’s greatest current fixation is “all this story with Ukraine”—a confrontation supposedly “engineered in Washington.” In 2014, by his account, the U.S. plotted the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv—a “coup d’état”—that pushed out a pro-Moscow president and sought to fill Ukrainians with “the hatred of everything Russian.” Today, Ukraine is no more than a testing ground for aging U.S. armaments as well as a place whose natural resources the West would prefer to exploit mercilessly—and “without the indigenous population.” Preserving Ukraine as a sovereign state is not in America’s plans, Patrushev claims. Afraid of attacking Russia directly, “NATO instructors herd Ukrainian boys to certain death” in the trenches. Indeed, the West is essentially perpetrating an “annihilation” of the Ukrainians, whereas Russia’s goal is to “put an end to the West’s bloody experiment to destroy the fraternal people of Ukraine.”

This is the picture of the world that Patrushev serves up to Putin. The adviser provides “a framework” for the Russian president’s vision, the prominent Russian political sociologist Nikolai Petrov has argued.

Repeated and internalized by its audience, propaganda captures and imprisons the propagandist. Patrushev said last May that Western special services were training terrorists and saboteurs for “committing crimes on the territory of our country.” Russian civilians have suffered because of that view. Weeks before Islamic State terrorists attacked a music hall in a Moscow suburb late last month, U.S. intelligence officials told the Russian government about a threat to the venue. Putin dismissed the U.S.’s warning as “obvious blackmail” and a “plot to scare and destabilize our society.”

While furnishing his compatriots with elaborately paranoid interpretations of the world, Patrushev vigorously participates in shaping it. More and more a policy maker in his own right, he frequently stands in for Putin in essential negotiations with top allies, reducing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to ceremonial duties and the signing of meaningless treaties. As the exiled Russian journalist Maxim Glikin has pointed out, Patrushev is where foreign policy meets war. This nexus expands inexorably.

After Russia’s drubbing in Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2022, Patrushev flew to Tehran in November of that year to negotiate the sale of Iranian drones. He has traveled to Latin America to meet with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. With Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, Patrushev discussed “America-orchestrated color revolutions,” the “destructive activities” of nongovernment organizations, and the dispatching of Cuban troops to Belarus “for training.”

Patrushev works the darker side of Putin’s policies as well. He was likely involved in the 2006 poisoning in London of the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko. The attempted killing in Salisbury, England, of the former double agent Sergei Skripal 12 years later would have required his sign-off. Patrushev is also plausibly suspected of firsthand involvement in last August’s killing of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the rebellious commander of the Wagner mercenary group. The judicial murder of the prominent regime opponent Alexei Navalny, too, could not have happened without Patrushev’s approval. Indeed, as the Russian-opposition essayist Alexander Ryklin has pointed out, the only officials who could have authorized the slow execution of Navalny were Putin and Patrushev.

Perhaps most chilling, Patrushev has some sway over Russia’s nuclear strategy. In October 2009, he announced in an interview with the national newspaper Izvestia that Russian nuclear weapons were not just for use in a “large-scale” war. Contrary to the restriction spelled out in the 2000 version of Russian military doctrine, Patrushev proposed that Russia’s nukes could be deployed in a conventional regional conflict or even a local one. He also thought that in a “critical situation,” a preventive strike against an aggressor “may not be excluded.” Four months later, Putin signed a revision of the doctrine. As Patrushev had suggested, a conflict would no longer have to be “large-scale” for Russia to reach for its atomic bombs and missiles. (Patrushev’s agitation for preventive nuclear attacks has yet to make the text of the doctrine, but Putin’s blunt nuclear blackmail in the past two years suggests that Patrushev may eventually get his wish.)  

In its efforts to understand Russia’s intentions, the United States has tried to get to know Patrushev better. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s first call to Patrushev was on January 25, 2021, five days after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Sullivan and Patrushev would go on to speak on the phone five more times, in addition to meeting in Reykjavik in May of that year. After their conversation in November, according to The New York Times, Patrushev reported discussing ways of “improving the atmosphere of Russian-American relations.” A joint statement indicated that Sullivan and Patrushev had discussed “increasing trust between the two countries.”

[Anna Nemtsova: Putin’s ‘rabble of thin-necked henchmen’ ]

Thirteen weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. One of no more than a handful of officials who’d known about Putin’s plan—and reportedly a driving force behind it—Patrushev presumably enjoyed weaving a web of dezinformatsiya around his American counterpart.

This would have been all the more gratifying because of the Kremlin’s conviction that time was on Russia’s side. In Patrushev’s view, the West is slowly expiring. European civilization has no future, he has said. Its politics are in the “deepest moral and intellectual decline”; it is headed for the “deepest economic and political crisis.”

America’s downfall is also nigh, portended not only by ashes at Yellowstone but by the nation’s basic geography. The United States is but “a patchwork quilt” that could “easily come apart at the seams.” Furthermore, Patrushev told the main government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the American South could be drifting toward Mexico, whose lands the U.S. grabbed in 1848: “Beyond doubt,” America’s “southern neighbors” will reclaim the stolen lands, and a passive U.S. citizenry will do nothing to preserve the “wholeness” of the country.

In this and many other ways, Patrushev’s worldview will seem utterly alien to most Americans. But his enormous influence underscores that Putin is far from the only force preventing Russian politics from reorienting toward a more liberal regime.   

The pendulum of Russian history has generally oscillated between brutal, bellicose regimes and softer, less repressive autocracies that retreat from confrontation with the West. But this pattern may not hold for the post-Putin future. After a quarter century under Putin, Russia’s secret services, the foundation of his regime, have degraded all other institutions and monopolized power. Patrushev, who turns 73 in July, is a year older than the president. Yet should he survive Putin, Patrushev is certain to deploy his secret army to help guide the transition and may well have a shot at coming out on top. As he likes to say, truth is on his side.  

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The passage of the Ukrainian aid package by the House this past weekend is an extraordinary sign of political courage. But in the party of Donald Trump, this win for democracy may soon seem like a mirage.

(For further reading on Mike Johnson’s speakership and what the weekend’s victory could mean for him, I recommend Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile, “The Accidental Speaker,” published today in The Atlantic.)

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The politics of pessimism What Donald Trump fears most Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing

A Political Mirage

The mirages known as fata morgana, named for the character Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend, are extraordinary sights. When atmospheric conditions are just right, rays of light bend, transforming boats, islands, mountains, and coastlines before the viewer’s eyes. Despite their beauty, though, these mirages soon fade away—which brings me to this weekend’s remarkable scene in the House.

On Saturday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson faced down the threats from his party’s Trumpist isolationist wing and delivered a resounding bipartisan victory for the forces of democracy. The $61 billion Ukrainian aid package passed with more than 300 votes—the final total was 311–112—including 101 GOP votes and the support of every Democrat in the House. The bill, which is expected to be approved quickly by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden, will provide the embattled Ukrainians with crucial support at what seems a decisive moment in the war against Vladimir Putin and his army of invaders.

The vote was a stinging rebuke to MAGA world and its leader. “Ukraine won,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this weekend. “Trump lost.”

We also got a vanishingly rare glimpse of political courage. For months, Johnson dithered over legislation to aid Ukraine, and his delays contributed to the unconscionable loss of Ukrainian lives as Russia rained death on Ukraine’s cities. His conversion was as welcome as it was astonishing. Although his ideological shift has been described as an evolution, it felt more like a road-to-Damascus moment. Having played the role of Neville Chamberlain for months, Johnson suddenly sounded almost Churchillian.

“History judges us for what we do,” he said last week. “This is a critical time right now. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different. But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

Unlike his party’s maximum leader, Johnson paid attention to foreign-policy experts, listened to the pleas of American allies, and believed the intelligence community rather than Putin. “I really do believe the intel,” Johnson said. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.”

Johnson knew that the decision could cause him to lose his speakership. In this era of GOP political cowardice, his stand felt profoundly countercultural.

So did the House’s rare display of bipartisanship. The House Republican leadership (with the notable exception of New York Representative and vice-presidential wannabe Elise Stefanik) worked with Democrats to stand by Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

After years of dominating the public narrative, the GOP’s most extreme performers found themselves isolated and outvoted. Marjorie Taylor Greene had humiliation after humiliation piled on her; her amendments (including one funding “space laser technology” on the southern border) were widely mocked and then overwhelmingly defeated. Even Fox News seemed to turn on her, publishing a scathing op-ed calling her “an idiot” who is “trying to wreck the GOP” with “her bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy.”

The isolationists were left to vent their rage at displays of support for Ukraine, which included waving Ukrainian flags on the House floor. “Such an embarrassing and disgusting show of America LAST politicians!” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted. “You love Ukraine so much, get your ass over there and leave America’s governing to those who love THIS country!”

And yet, for a few hours, congressional Republicans almost looked like a functioning, rational, governing political party, one that saw the United States as a defender of democracy against authoritarian aggression. It was a party that Ronald Reagan would have recognized. But restrain your exuberance, because we most likely witnessed nothing more than a political fata morgana.

This is, after all, still Donald Trump’s party.

In the days before his legislative defeat, Trump tried to soften his message a bit, posting on Truth Social that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees,” he wrote, “Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!”

Frum noted in his recent article that Trump’s statement “was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.” (Perhaps the most bizarre spin came from Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, who went on Fox News to insist that “this would not have passed without Donald Trump.”)

But there should be no doubt what Trump’s election would mean for Russia, Ukraine, or NATO. And we have precious little evidence that the GOP would ever push back against a President Trump, who would side with Putin against our allies and our own intelligence agencies.

The directional arrow of the GOP remains unchanged: A majority of House Republicans voted against aiding Ukraine (the vote among Republican representatives was 101 for and 112 against); a majority of Senate Republicans is likely to vote no as well.

And the backlash on the right is just beginning. On cue, the flying monkeys of the MAGAverse came out quickly against Johnson and the Ukraine package. After the vote, Greene declared that Johnson was not merely “a traitor to our conference” but actually “a traitor to our country,” whose speakership was “over.” She continues to threaten to bring a motion to vacate the chair, which could plunge the GOP back into chaos and dysfunction.

Senator Mike Lee railed against what he called “the warmonger wish list” passed by the House. Denunciations of Johnson’s “treason” and demands for his removal flooded right-wing social media. Donald Trump Jr. fired a barrage of attacks against Johnson and the Ukraine bill, which he’s called a “garbage bill,” while posting his support for Greene’s attempts to derail it.

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, the rumpled consigliere of Republican anarchy, is escalating his attacks on Republicans who voted for the package. “Traitors One and All,” the former White House aide wrote on his Gettr account. Bannon called Johnson a “Sanctimonious Twerp” who had “Sold Out His Country to Curry Favor with the Globalist Elites.”

The Trump ally Charlie Kirk railed: “Not only is the DC GOP collapsing the country by their anti-American actions, they are participating in the end of the constitutional order as we know it.”

In a rational party, these would be voices from the fringe. But Greene, Don Jr., Kirk, and Bannon still represent the id of the GOP, because they have Trump’s ear and remain far closer to the heart of the MAGA base than internationalist Republicans such as Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, and Mike Pence—all of whom have been thrown into Republican exile. In a recent Gallup poll, just 15 percent of Republican voters said they think the United States is not doing enough to help Ukraine, while a strong majority—57 percent—think we are doing too much.

Despite the illusion of a rational foreign policy and this past weekend’s flash of courage and independence, Johnson and the rest of the GOP conference are all but guaranteed to rally to support Trump. Even as he stands trial on multiple felony charges, Republicans are lining up to pledge their fealty to the former president whether or not he is convicted; New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former Attorney General Bill Barr are merely the latest Republicans to bend the knee.

In just a few months, my hometown of Milwaukee will host the GOP’s re-coronation of Trump, affirming once again his absolute grip on the mind and soul of the party. By then, what happened this weekend will seem like a distant mirage.

Related:

Trump deflates. The accidental speaker

Today’s News

Lawyers in Trump’s hush-money trial in New York made their opening statements today. The head of the Israeli military’s intelligence directorate resigned, citing his department’s failure to anticipate Hamas’s attack on October 7. Hundreds of members of the teaching staff at Columbia University held a walkout to protest the administration’s decision last week to call in police officers, who arrested more than 100 students involved in a pro-Palestine demonstration.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Being busy has become a status symbol, Isabel Fattal writes. What do we miss when our focus is on staying productive above all else?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Cavan Images / Alamy

It’s Really Hard to Rebuild a Marsh

By Erica Gies

The water in California’s San Francisco Bay could rise more than two meters by the year 2100. For the region’s tidal marshes and their inhabitants, such as Ridgway’s rail and the endangered salt-marsh harvest mouse, it’s a potential death sentence …

To keep its marshes above water, San Francisco Bay needs more than 545 million tonnes of dirt by 2100. Yet for restorationists looking to rebuild marshes lost to development and fortify those that remain, getting enough sediment is just one hurdle: The next challenge is figuring out a way to deliver it without smothering the very ecosystem they’re trying to protect.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Freedom for the wolves Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York. The conservative who turned white anxiety into a movement

Culture Break

Christopher Pledger / Eyevine / Redux

Admire. “Miniatures imitate life but have no clear practical purpose,” Gisela Salim-Peyer writes. Here’s the case for why tiny art deserves more attention.

Read. “Hinge,” a poem by José A. Rodríguez:

“At the long edge of the screen door keeping most of the flies out. / At the classroom door, smooth and tight fit.”

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Ukraine won. Trump lost.

The House vote to aid Ukraine renews hope that Ukraine can still win its war. It also showed how and why Donald Trump should lose the 2024 election.

For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party. Senators might have loathed him, governors might have despised him, donors might have ridiculed him, college-educated Republican voters might have turned against him—but LOL, nothing mattered. Enough of the Republican base supported him. Everybody else either fell in line, retired from politics, or quit the party.

Trump did not win every fight. In 2019 and 2020, Senate Republicans rejected two of his more hair-raising Federal Reserve nominations, Stephen Moore and Judy Shelton.

But Trump won almost every fight that mattered. Even after January 6, 2021, Senate Republicans protected him from conviction at his impeachment trial. After Trump left office, party leaders still indulged his fantasy that he had “really” won the 2020 election. Attempts to substitute Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley as the 2024 nominee sputtered and failed.

[David Frum: The ego has crash-landed]

On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January 2023, the aid stopped. Every Republican officeholder understood: Those who wished to show loyalty to Trump must side against Ukraine.

At the beginning of this year, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated.

Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

The anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine rebellion started in the Senate. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats to approve aid to Ukraine in February. Dissident House Republicans then threatened to force a vote if the Republican speaker would not schedule one. Speaker Mike Johnson declared himself in favor of Ukraine aid. This weekend, House Republicans split between pro-Ukraine and anti-Ukraine factions. On Friday, the House voted 316–94 in favor of the rule on the aid vote. On Saturday, the aid-to-Ukraine measure passed the House 311–112. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate will adopt the House-approved aid measures unamended and speed them to President Biden for signature.   

As defeat loomed for his anti-Ukraine allies, Trump shifted his message a little. On April 18, he posted on Truth Social claiming that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!” But that was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side as his side was about to lose.

Trump is still cruising to renomination, collecting endorsements even from Republican elected officials who strongly dislike him. But the cracks in unity are visible.

Some are symbolic. Even after Haley withdrew from the Republican presidential contest on March 6, some 13 to 19 percent of Republicans still showed up to cast protest votes for her in contests in Georgia and Washington State on March 12; Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio on March 19; and New York and Connecticut on April 2.

Other cracks are more substantial—and ominous for Trump. Trump’s fundraising has badly lagged Biden’s, perhaps in part because of Trump’s habit of diverting donations to his own legal defense and other personal uses. In March, Biden had more than twice as much cash on hand as Trump did. Republican Senate candidates in the most competitive races and House candidates also lag behind their Democratic counterparts. CNBC reports that the Republican National Committee is facing “small-dollar donor fatigue” and “major donor hesitation.”

How much of this is traceable to Trump personally? The Ukraine vote gives the most significant clue. Here is the issue on which traditional Republican belief in U.S. global leadership clashes most directly with Trump’s peculiar and sinister enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And on this issue, the traditional Republicans have now won and Trump’s peculiar enthusiasm got beat.

[David Frum: Justice is coming for Donald Trump]

To make an avalanche takes more than one tumbling rock. Still, the pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump vote in the House is a very, very big rock. On something that mattered intensely to him—that had become a badge of pro-Trump identity—Trump’s own party worked with Democrats in the House and Senate to hand him a stinging defeat. This example could become contagious.

Republicans lost the House in 2018 because they were beaten in districts once held by George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Eric Cantor. They lost the presidency in 2020 in great part because their vote eroded among suburban white men. They lost the Senate in 2021 because Trump fatigue cost them two seats in Georgia. They lost Senate seats and governorships in 2022 because they put forward Trump-branded candidates such as Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

Republicans alienated too many of their own—and paid the political price. They alienated their own because of Trump’s hostility to Ukraine, and that price was paid in blood and suffering by Ukraine’s soldiers and civilians.

The issues that were supposed to keep the Trump show on the road have proved squibs and fizzles. Inflation is down. Crime is down. Republicans threw away the immigration issue by blowing up—at Trump’s order—the best immigration deal they’ve ever seen. The attempt to confect Biden scandals to equal Trump’s scandals turned into an embarrassing fiasco that relied on information from a suspected Russian spy indicted for lying to the FBI. And Trump himself now faces trial in New York State on one set of felony charges. He faces a federal trial, probably starting this fall, on the even graver criminal indictments arising from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Each of these warnings and troubles has deflated Trump. He has deflated to the point where he could no longer thwart Ukraine aid in Congress. Ukraine won; Trump lost. That may be a repeating pattern in the year ahead.

It’s not too late, because it’s never too late. No outcomes are ever preordained, nothing is ever over, and you can always affect what happens tomorrow by making the right choices today. The U.S. Congress is finally making one of those right choices. Soon, American weapons and ammunition will once again start flowing to Ukraine.

But delays do have a price. By dawdling for so many months, by heading down the blind alley of border reform before turning back, congressional Republicans who blocked weapons and ammunition for Ukraine did an enormous amount of damage, some of it irreparable. Over the past six months, Ukraine lost territory, lives, and infrastructure. If Ukraine had not been deprived of air defense, the city of Kharkiv might still have most of its power plants. People who have died in the near-daily bombardment of Odesa might still be alive. Ukrainian soldiers who spent weeks at the front lines rationing ammunition might not be so demoralized.

[David Frum: Trump deflates]

The delay has changed American politics too. Only a minority of House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, joined most Democrats to approve $60 billion in aid yesterday. What is now clearly a pro-Russia Republican caucus has consolidated inside Congress. The lesson is clear: Anyone who seeks to manipulate the foreign policy of the United States, whether the tin-pot autocrat in Hungary or the Communist Party of China, now knows that a carefully designed propaganda campaign, when targeted at the right people, can succeed well beyond what anyone once thought possible. From the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion, President Vladimir Putin has been trying to conquer Ukraine through psychological games as well as military force. He needed to persuade Americans, Europeans, and above all Ukrainians that victory was impossible, that the only alternative was surrender, and that the Ukrainian state would disappear in due course.

Plenty of Americans and Europeans, though not so many Ukrainians, supported this view. Pro-Russia influencers—Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance, David Sacks—backed up by an army of pro-Russia trolls on X and other social-media platforms, helped feed the narrative of failure and convinced a minority in Congress to block aid for Ukraine. It’s instructive to trace the path of a social-media post that falsely claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky owns two yachts, how it traveled up the food chain late last year, from the keyboard of a propagandist through the echo chamber created by trolls and into the brains of American lawmakers. According to Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, some of his colleagues worried out loud, during debates about military aid to Ukraine, that “people will buy yachts with this money.” They had read the false stories and believed they were true.

But with the passage of this aid bill, Russia’s demoralization campaign has suffered a severe setback. This is also a setback for the Russian war effort, and not only because the Ukrainians will now have more ammunition. Suddenly the Russian military and Russian society are once again faced with the prospect of a very long war. Ukraine, backed by the combined military and economic forces of the United States and the European Union, is a much different opponent than Ukraine isolated and alone.

[Read: The war is not going well for Ukraine]

That doesn’t mean that the Russians will quickly give up: Putin and the propagandists who support him on state television have repeatedly stated that their goal is not to gain a bit of extra territory but to control all of Ukraine. They don’t want to swap land for peace. They want to occupy Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv, and more. Now, while their goals become harder to reach, is a good moment for the democratic countries backing Ukraine to recalibrate our strategy too.

Once the aid package becomes law this week, the psychological advantage will once again be on our side. Let’s use it. As Johnson himself recommended, the Biden administration should immediately pressure European allies to release the $300 billion in Russian assets that they jointly hold and send it to Ukraine. There are excellent legal and moral arguments for doing so—the money can legitimately be considered a form of reparations. This shift would also make clear to the Kremlin that it has no path back to what used to be called “normal” relations, and that the price Russia is paying for its colonial war will only continue to grow.

This is also a good moment for both Europeans and Americans to take the sanctions and export-control regimes imposed on Russia more seriously. If NATO were running a true economic-pressure campaign, thousands of people would be involved, with banks of screens at a central command center and constantly updated intelligence. Instead, the task has been left to a smattering of people across different agencies in different countries who may or may not be aware of what others are doing.

As American aid resumes, the Ukrainians should be actively encouraged to pursue the asymmetric warfare that they do best. The air and naval drone campaign that pushed the Black Sea Fleet away from their coastline, the raids on Russian gas and oil facilities thousands of miles from Ukraine, the recruitment of Russian soldiers, in Russia, to join pro-Ukraine Russian units fighting on the border—we need more of this, not less. The Biden administration should also heed Johnson’s suggestion that the United States supply more and better long-range weapons so that Ukrainians can hit Russian missile launchers before the missiles reach Ukraine. If the U.S. had done so in the autumn of 2022, when Ukraine was taking back territory, the world might look a lot different today.  

This war will be over only when the Russians no longer want to fight—and they will stop fighting when they realize they cannot win. Now it is our turn to convince them, as well as our own pro-Russia caucus, that their invasion will fail. The best way to do that is to believe it ourselves.

Any discussion of freedom must begin with a discussion of whose freedom we’re talking about. The freedom of some to harm others, or the freedom of others not to be harmed? Too often, we have not balanced the equation well: gun owners versus victims of gun violence; chemical companies versus the millions who suffer from toxic pollution; monopolistic drug companies versus patients who die or whose health worsens because they can’t afford to buy medicine.

Understanding the meaning of freedom is central to creating an economic and political system that delivers not only on efficiency, equity, and sustainability but also on moral values. Freedom—understood as having inherent ties to notions of equity, justice, and well-being—is itself a central value. And it is this broad notion of freedom that has been given short shrift by powerful strands in modern economic thinking—notably the one that goes by the shorthand term neoliberalism, the belief that the freedom that matters most, and from which other freedoms indeed flow, is the freedom of unregulated, unfettered markets.

F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman were the most notable 20th-century defenders of unrestrained capitalism. The idea of “unfettered markets”—markets without rules and regulations—is an oxymoron because without rules and regulations enforced by government, there could and would be little trade. Cheating would be rampant, trust low. A world without restraints would be a jungle in which only power mattered, determining who got what and who did what. It wouldn’t be a market at all.

This article has been adapted from Stiglitz’s new book.

Nonetheless, Hayek and Friedman argued that capitalism as they interpreted it, with free and unfettered markets, was the best system in terms of efficiency, and that without free markets and free enterprise, we could not and would not have individual freedom. They believed that markets on their own would somehow remain competitive. Remarkably, they had already forgotten—or ignored—the experiences of monopolization and concentration of economic power that had led to the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). As government intervention grew in response to the Great Depression, Hayek worried that we were on “the road to serfdom,” as he put it in his 1944 book of that title; that is, on the road to a society in which individuals would become subservient to the state.

[Rogé Karma: Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history]

My own conclusions have been radically different. It was because of democratic demands that democratic governments, such as that of the U.S., responded to the Great Depression through collective action. The failure of governments to respond adequately to soaring unemployment in Germany led to the rise of Hitler. Today, it is neoliberalism that has brought massive inequalities and provided fertile ground for dangerous populists. Neoliberalism’s grim record includes freeing financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three-quarters of a century, freeing international trade to accelerate deindustrialization, and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Contrary to what Friedman suggested in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, this form of capitalism does not enhance freedom in our society. Instead, it has led to the freedom of a few at the expense of the many. As Isaiah Berlin would have it: Freedom for the wolves; death for the sheep.

It is remarkable that, in spite of all the failures and inequities of the current system, so many people still champion the idea of an unfettered free-market economy. This despite the daily frustrations of dealing with health-care companies, insurance companies, credit-card companies, telephone companies, landlords, airlines, and every other manifestation of modern society. When there’s a problem, ordinary citizens are told by prominent voices to “leave it to the market.” They’ve even been told that the market can solve problems that one might have thought would require society-wide action and coordination, some larger sense of the public good, and some measure of compulsion. It’s purely wishful thinking. And it’s only one side of the fairy tale. The other side is that the market is efficient and wise, and that government is inefficient and rapacious.

Mindsets, once created, are hard to change. Many Americans still think of the United States as a land of opportunity. They still believe in something called the American dream, even though for decades the statistics have painted a darker picture. The rate of absolute income mobility—that is, the percentage of children who earn more than their parents—has been declining steadily since the Second World War. Of course, America should aspire to be a land of opportunity, but clinging to beliefs that are not supported by today’s realities—and that hold that markets by themselves are a solution to today’s problems—is not helpful. Economic conditions bear this out, as more Americans are coming to understand. Unfettered markets have created, or helped create, many of the central problems we face, including manifold inequalities, the climate crisis, and the opioid crisis. And markets by themselves cannot solve any of our large, collective problems. They cannot manage the massive structural changes that we are going through—including global warming, artificial intelligence, and the realignment of geopolitics.

All of these issues present inconvenient truths to the free-market mindset. If externalities such as these are important, then collective action is important. But how to come to collective agreement about the regulations that govern society? Small communities can sometimes achieve a broad consensus, though typically far from unanimity. Larger societies have a harder go of it. Many of the crucial values and presumptions at play are what economists, philosophers, and mathematicians refer to as “primitives”—underlying assumptions that, although they can be debated, cannot be resolved. In America today we are divided over such assumptions, and the divisions have widened.

The consequences of neoliberalism point to part of the reason: specifically, growing income and wealth disparities and the polarization caused by the media. In theory, economic freedom was supposed to be the bedrock basis for political freedom and democratic health. The opposite has proved to be true. The rich and the elites have a disproportionate voice in shaping both government policies and societal narratives. All of which leads to an enhanced sense by those who are not wealthy that the system is rigged and unfair, which makes healing divisions all the more difficult.

[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]

As income inequalities grow, people wind up living in different worlds. They don’t interact. A large body of evidence shows that economic segregation is widening and has consequences, for instance, with regard to how each side thinks and feels about the other. The poorest members of society see the world as stacked against them and give up on their aspirations; the wealthiest develop a sense of entitlement, and their wealth helps ensure that the system stays as it is.

The media, including social media, provide another source of division. More and more in the hands of a very few, the media have immense power to shape societal narratives and have played an obvious role in polarization. The business model of much of the media entails stoking divides. Fox News, for instance, discovered that it was better to have a devoted right-wing audience that watched only Fox than to have a broader audience attracted to more balanced reporting. Social-media companies have discovered that it’s profitable to get engagement through enragement. Social-media sites can develop their algorithms to effectively refine whom to target even if that means providing different information to different users.

Neoliberal theorists and their beneficiaries may be happy to live with all this. They are doing very well by it. They forget that, for all the rhetoric, free markets can’t function without strong democracies beneath them—the kind of democracies that neoliberalism puts under threat. In a very direct way, neoliberal capitalism is devouring itself.

Not only are neoliberal economies inefficient at dealing with collective issues, but neoliberalism as an economic system is not sustainable on its own. To take one fundamental element: A market economy runs on trust. Adam Smith himself emphasized the importance of trust, recognizing that society couldn’t survive if people brazenly followed their own self-interest rather than good codes of conduct:

The regard to those general rules of conduct, is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence in human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions … Upon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.

For instance, contracts have to be honored. The cost of enforcing every single contract through the courts would be unbearable. And with no trust in the future, why would anybody save or invest? The incentives of neoliberal capitalism focus on self-interest and material well-being, and have done much to weaken trust. Without adequate regulation, too many people, in the pursuit of their own self-interest, will conduct themselves in an untrustworthy way, sliding to the edge of what is legal, overstepping the bounds of what is moral. Neoliberalism helps create selfish and untrustworthy people. A “businessman” like Donald Trump can flourish for years, even decades, taking advantage of others. If Trump were the norm rather than the exception, commerce and industry would grind to a halt.

We also need regulations and laws to make sure that there are no concentrations of economic power. Business seeks to collude and would do so even more in the absence of antitrust laws. But even playing within current guardrails, there’s a strong tendency for the agglomeration of power. The neoliberal ideal of free, competitive markets would, without government intervention, be evanescent.

We’ve also seen that those with power too often do whatever they can to maintain it. They write the rules to sustain and enhance power, not to curb or diminish it. Competition laws are eviscerated. Enforcement of banking and environmental laws is weakened. In this world of neoliberal capitalism, wealth and power are ever ascendant.

Neoliberalism undermines the sustainability of democracy—the opposite of what Hayek and Friedman intended or claimed. We have created a vicious circle of economic and political inequality, one that locks in more freedom for the rich and leaves less for the poor, at least in the United States, where money plays such a large role in politics.

[Read: When Milton Friedman ran the show]

There are many ways in which economic power gets translated into political power and undermines the fundamental democratic value of one person casting one vote. The reality is that some people’s voices are much louder than others. In some countries, accruing power is as crude as literally buying votes, with the wealthy having more money to buy more votes. In advanced countries, the wealthy use their influence in the media and elsewhere to create self-serving narratives that in turn become the conventional wisdom. For instance, certain rules and regulations and government interventions—tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, deregulation of key industries—that are purely in the interest of the rich and powerful are also, it is said, in the national interest. Too often that viewpoint is swallowed wholesale. If persuasion doesn’t work, there is always fear: If the banks are not bailed out, the economic system will collapse, and everyone will be worse off. If the corporate tax rate is not cut, firms will leave and go to other jurisdictions that are more business-friendly.

Is a free society one in which a few dictate the terms of engagement? In which a few control the major media and use that control to decide what the populace sees and hears? We now inhabit a polarized world in which different groups live in different universes, disagreeing not only on values but on facts.

A strong democracy can’t be sustained by neoliberal economics for a further reason. Neoliberalism has given rise to enormous “rents”—the monopoly profits that are a major source of today’s inequalities. Much is at stake, especially for many in the top one percent, centered on the enormous accretion of wealth that the system has allowed. Democracy requires compromise if it is to remain functional, but compromise is difficult when there is so much at stake in terms of both economic and political power.

A free-market, competitive, neoliberal economy combined with a liberal democracy does not constitute a stable equilibrium—not without strong guardrails and a broad societal consensus on the need to curb wealth inequality and money’s role in politics. The guardrails come in many forms, such as competition policy, to prevent the creation, maintenance, and abuse of market power. We need checks and balances, not just within government, as every schoolchild in the U.S. learns, but more broadly within society. Strong democracy, with widespread participation, is also part of what is required, which means working to strike down laws intended to decrease democratic participation or to gerrymander districts where politicians will never lose their seats.

Whether America’s political and economic system today has enough safeguards to sustain economic and political freedoms is open to serious question.

Under the very name of freedom, neoliberals and their allies on the radical right have advocated policies that restrict the opportunities and freedoms, both political and economic, of the many in favor of the few. All these failures have hurt large numbers of people around the world, many of whom have responded by turning to populism, drawn to authoritarian figures like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by where the U.S. has landed. It is a country now so divided that even a peaceful transition of power is difficult, where life expectancy is the lowest among advanced nations, and where we can’t agree about truth or how it might best be ascertained or verified. Conspiracy theories abound. The values of the Enlightenment have to be relitigated daily.

There are good reasons to worry whether America’s form of ersatz capitalism and flawed democracy is sustainable. The incongruities between lofty ideals and stark realities are too great. It’s a political system that claims to cherish freedom above all else but in many ways is structured to deny or restrict freedoms for many of its citizens.

I do believe that there is broad consensus on key elements of what constitutes a good and decent society, and on what kind of economic system supports that society. A good society, for instance, must live in harmony with nature. Our current capitalism has made a mess of this. A good society allows individuals to flourish and live up to their potential. In terms of education alone, our current capitalism is failing large portions of the population. A good economic system would encourage people to be honest and empathetic, and foster the ability to cooperate with others. The current capitalist system encourages the antithesis.

But the key first step is changing our mindset. Friedman and Hayek argued that economic and political freedoms are intimately connected, with the former necessary for the latter. But the economic system that has evolved—largely under the influence of these thinkers and others like them—undermines meaningful democracy and political freedom. In the end, it will undermine the very neoliberalism that has served them so well.

For a long time, the right has tried to establish a monopoly over the invocation of freedom, almost as a trademark. It’s time to reclaim the word.

This article has been adapted from Joseph E. Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.

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In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The October 7 rape denialists Finding justice in Palestine Biden’s safe, polite campaign stop in Scranton

New Rules

This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?

My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.

Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.

The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution. Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “Banality of Crazy.” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.

The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.

And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post. “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.

And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.

This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic.) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.

As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic, MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A.

To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.

So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.

First, we should redefine newsworthy. Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”

Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)

The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.

Related:

Political analysis needs more witchcraft. Right-wing media are in trouble.

Today’s News

The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way. House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives. Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.

Dispatches

The Trump Trials: The first days of the criminal case against Donald Trump have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable, George T. Conway III writes. The Weekly Planet: The cocoa shortage could make chocolate more expensive forever, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

By Ellen Cushing

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.

We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Jews aren’t taking away TikTok. Women in menopause are getting short shrift. The self-help queen of TikTok goes mainstream.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.

Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades, propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle.

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)

[Adrienne LaFrance: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand journalism]  

Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them. Neil Patel, a co-founder (with Tucker Carlson) of the Daily Caller, told me that the tech giants want “to crush any independent media that was perceived to have been helpful to Trump’s rise.” Patel calls this a form of “Big Tech–driven viewpoint discrimination” that “should scare any fair-minded individual.”

A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.

And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has mostly continued south. Among the big losers over the past year are The Washington Free Beacon, whose traffic was down 58 percent, and Gateway Pundit, down 62 percent. Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate’s was up 14 percent.

For conservative media publishers, the financial consequences of such a steep decline in readership are hard to know for certain. None of the best-known names publicly reports revenue figures, and many are supported by rich patrons who may not be in it for the money. But the situation can’t be good. Digital media still rely on advertising, and advertising still goes to places with more, not fewer, people paying attention. Traffic also drives subscriptions.

More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful faithful by recirculating, amplifying, and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.

[Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?]

The Daily Caller’s Patel insisted that faltering traffic alone isn’t a death sentence for the onetime lords of the conservative web. With the addition of a subscription service and tighter financial management, the Daily Caller’s financial health is solid and improving, he said. Outlets like his own can still succeed with people who “have lost trust in the corporate media and are actively seeking alternatives.”

The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times, and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble. “There’s a lot of choice,” Polskin said. “Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there.”

The DIY ethic is embodied by the likes of Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Steve Bannon, and Carlson, who became conservative celebrities while working for established media organizations but have maintained their profiles after leaving them in disgrace. Since being fired by Fox News last year, Carlson has moved his contentious commentaries and interviews (including one with Vladimir Putin) to X. Kelly has come back from a messy divorce with NBC in 2019 (which followed an unhappy exit from Fox News in 2017) to host a massively popular podcast. O’Reilly, likewise forced out of Fox in 2017, has kept talking via newsletters, video streams, and weekly appearances on the NewsNation cable channel. And Bannon, the former Trump consigliere who left Breitbart, which he founded, after publicly criticizing the Trump family, has gone the podcaster route himself; his War Room podcast was ranked as the leading source of false and misleading information in a broad study of the medium by the Brookings Institution last year.

The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.

Prince Sebastian had not signed up to fight for Vladimir Putin’s army. All he wanted was to escape poverty at home.

In a world without partisan politics, the Cass report on youth gender medicine would prompt serious reflection from American trans-rights activists, their supporters in the media, and the doctors and institutions offering hormonal and surgical treatments to minors. At the request of the English National Health Service, the senior pediatrician Hilary Cass has completed the most thorough consideration yet of this field, and her report calmly and carefully demolishes many common activist tropes. Puberty blockers do have side effects, Cass found. The evidence base for widely used treatments is “shaky.” Their safety and effectiveness are not settled science.

The report drew on extensive interviews with doctors, parents, and young people, as well as on a series of new, systematic literature reviews. Its publication marks a decisive turn away from the affirmative model of treatment, in line with similar moves in other European countries. What Cass’s final document finds, largely, is an absence. “The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass writes. We also don’t have strong evidence that social transitioning, such as changing names or pronouns, affects adolescents’ mental-health outcomes (either positively or negatively). We don’t have strong evidence that puberty blockers are merely a pause button, or that their benefits outweigh their downsides, or that they are lifesaving care in the sense that they prevent suicides. We don’t know why the number of children turning up at gender clinics rose so dramatically during the 2010s, or why the demographics of those children changed from a majority of biological males to a majority of biological females. Neither “born that way” nor “it’s all social contagion” captures the complexity of the picture, Cass writes.

What Cass does feel confident in saying is this: When it comes to alleviating gender-related distress, “for the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to achieve this.” That conclusion will now inform the creation of new state-provided services in England. These will attempt to consider patients more holistically, acknowledging that their gender distress might be part of a picture that also includes anxiety, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, or past trauma.

This is a million miles away from prominent American medical groups’ recommendation to simply affirm an adolescent’s stated gender—and from common practice at American gender clinics. For example, a Reuters investigation found that, of 18 U.S. clinics surveyed, none conducted the lengthy psychological assessments used by Dutch researchers who pioneered the use of medical gender treatments in adolescents; some clinics prescribe puberty blockers or hormones during a patient’s first visit. Under pressure from its members, the American Academy of Pediatrics last year commissioned its own evidence review, which is still in progress. But at the same time, the group restated its 2018 commitment to the medical model.

The Cass report’s findings also contradict the prevailing wisdom at many media outlets, some of which have uncritically repeated advocacy groups’ talking points. In an extreme example recently noted by the writer Jesse Singal, CNN seems to have a verbal formula, repeated across multiple stories, to assure its audience that “gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care.” On a variety of platforms, prominent liberal commentators have presented growing concerns about the use of puberty blockers as an ill-informed moral panic.

[Alia Wong: The power struggle over transgender students]

The truth is that, although American medical groups have indeed reached a consensus about the benefits of youth gender medicine, doctors with direct experience in the field are divided, particularly outside the United States. “Clinicians who have spent many years working in gender clinics have drawn very different conclusions from their clinical experience about the best way to support young people with gender-related distress,” Cass writes. Her report is a challenge to the latest standards of care from the U.S.-based World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which declined to institute minimum-age limits for surgery. The literature review included with her report is notably brutal about these guidelines, which are highly influential in youth gender medicine in America and around the world—but which, according to Cass, “lack developmental rigour.”

The crux of the report is that the ambitions of youth gender medicine outstripped the evidence—or, as Cass puts it, that doctors at the U.K. clinic whose practices she was examining, although well-meaning, “developed a fundamentally different philosophy and approach compared to other paediatric and mental health services.” How, she asks, did the medical pathway of puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones—a treatment based on a single Dutch study in the 1990s—spread around the world so quickly and decisively? Why didn’t clinicians seek out more studies to confirm or disprove its safety and utility earlier? And what should child gender services look like now?

The answer to those first two questions is the same. Medicalized gender treatments for minors became wrapped up with a push for wider social acceptance for transgender people, something that was presented as the “next frontier in civil rights,” as Time magazine once described it. Any questions about such care were therefore read as stemming from transphobic hostility, full stop. And when those questions kept coming anyway, right-wing politicians and anti-woke comedians piled on, sensing an area where left-wing intellectuals were out of touch with popular opinion. In turn, that allowed misgivings to be dismissed as “fascism,” even though, as the British journalist Sarah Ditum has written, “it is not damning of feminists that they are on the same page as Vladimir Putin about there being two sexes. That is just how many sexes there are.”

In Britain, multiple clinicians working at the Gender Identity and Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman Trust, the central provider of youth gender medicine, tried to raise their concerns, only to have their fears dismissed as hostility toward trans people. Even those who stayed within the service have spoken about pressure from charities and lobbying groups to push children toward a medical pathway. As Cass notes, “There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour.”

This hostile climate has hampered attempts to collect robust data about real-world outcomes. The report’s research team at the University of York tried to follow up on 9,000 former GIDS patients but was informed by National Health Service authorities in England in January that “despite efforts to encourage the participation of the NHS gender clinics, the necessary cooperation had not been forthcoming.” Cass has since wondered aloud if this decision was “ideologically driven,” and she recommends that the clinics be “directed to comply” with her team’s request for data.

As I have written before, the intense polarization of the past few years around gender appears to be receding in Britain. Kamran Abbasi, the editor in chief of The BMJ, the country’s foremost medical journal, wrote an editorial praising the report and echoing its conclusion that many “studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour.” The country’s left-wing Labour Party has already accepted that feminist concerns about gender self-identification are legitimate, and its health spokesperson, Wes Streeting, welcomed the Cass report as soon as it was published. (The ruling Conservatives have also enthusiastically embraced its conclusions, and the former health secretary Sajid Javid pushed through a law change that made its data collection possible.)  The LGBTQ charity Stonewall responded to the report by saying that some of its recommendations could be “positive,” and urged politicians to read it. Even Mermaids, the charity most associated with pushing the affirmative model in Britain, offered only lukewarm criticism that more gatekeeping could further increase waiting times.

The Cass report is a model for the treatment of fiercely debated social issues: nuanced, empathetic, evidence-based. It has taken a political debate and returned it to the realm of provable facts. And, unlike American medical groups, its author appears to have made a real effort to listen to people with opposing views, and attempted to reconcile their very different experiences of this topic. “I have spoken to transgender adults who are leading positive and successful lives, and feeling empowered by having made the decision to transition,” she writes in the introduction. “I have spoken to people who have detransitioned, some of whom deeply regret their earlier decisions.” What a difference from America, where detransitioners are routinely dismissed as Republican pawns and where even researchers who are trans themselves get pushback for investigating transition-related regret—and where red states have passed laws restricting care even for transgender adults, or have proposed removing civil-rights protections from them.

[Daniela Valdes and Kinnon McKinnon: Take detransitioners seriously]

Has the Cass report gotten everything right? The methodology and conclusions of its research should be open to challenge and critique, as with any other study. But it is undoubtedly the work of serious people who have treated a delicate subject seriously. If you still think that concerns about child medical transition are nothing more than a moral panic, then I have a question: What evidence would change your mind?

Following Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, conscription is being rebooted and expanded across Europe.