Co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore the web’s effects on our brains and how narrative, repetition, and even a focus on replaying memories can muddy our ability to separate fact from fiction. How do we come to believe the things we do? Why do conspiracy theories flourish? And how can we train our brains to recognize misinformation online? Lisa Fazio, an associate psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, explains how people process information and disinformation, and how to debunk and pre-bunk in ways that can help discern the real from the fake.

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Andrea Valdez: When I was growing up, I always believed that bluebonnets, which are the Texas state flower where I live, that they’re illegal to pick in Texas. And this is something that I feel like so many people very firmly believe. You hear it all the time: You cannot pick the state flower, the bluebonnet. And come to find out when I was an adult that there actually is no state law to this effect. I was 100 percent convinced of this as a fact. And I bet if you poll an average Texan, there’s going to be probably a healthy contingent of them that also believe it’s a fact. So sometimes we just internalize these bits of information. They kind of come from somewhere; I don’t know where. And they just, they stick with you.

Megan Garber: Oh, that’s so interesting. So not quite a false memory, but a false sense of reality in the present. Something like that. Wow. And I love it too, because it protects the flowers. So hey, that’s great. Not a bad side effect.

Valdez: Yeah.

Garber: Not a bad side effect.

Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.

Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.

Valdez: And this is How to Know What’s Real.

Garber: Andrea, you know, lots of mistakes like that are commonly shared. One of them I think about sometimes involves Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, who a lot of people became convinced that he had died in the 1980s, when he was in prison. But of course he didn’t die in the 1980s. He died in 2013. But the misconception was so common that researchers began to talk about the quote unquote “Mandela effect” to describe, I think, what we’re talking about: these false memories that somehow become shared and somehow become communal. And they’re often really low-stakes things. You know, like how many people remember the line from Star Wars? I hope this is not a spoiler, but the line from Star Wars isn’t “Luke, I am your father”—which is definitely what I thought the line was.

Valdez: Of course. Everybody does.

Garber: Yeah. But do you know what it is, actually? Because it’s not that.

Valdez: I do know what it is, but only because I feel like this has come up so much that people have the wrong idea. It’s “No, I am your father.”

Garber: Yeah, exactly; there’s no “Luke,” which is such a small distinction and so tiny in one way, but it’s also kind of humbling to think how that mistake just kind of took over the reality and how it took on a life of its own.

Valdez: There’s something actually innocent about getting things wrong. In casual conversation, you might say something wrong, and it’s okay; we all do it. But I think the forgiveness comes because the information trail you’re creating goes cold pretty quickly. Maybe you have a “cookie aunt” who tells you something when you’re a kid, and you just accept that it’s fact, and then maybe you take that cookie-aunt fact and you repeat it to a friend. And then it kind of just stops there, right? It doesn’t get passed along and along. But we live in a world right now where it feels like there’s rampant, never-ending misinformation, and with the internet and the sharing culture that we have on social media, this misinformation, it goes viral. And then it’s as if we’re all sick with the same misinformation.

Garber: And sickness is such a good metaphor. And one that scientists are using often, too. They compare bad information to bad health. Like you said, a virus that spreads from person to person, as a contagion. And the fact that it’s so easily transferable makes it really hard to fight off. And I wanted to understand a little bit more about that dynamic. And really about … what happens in our brains as we try to sort out the true information from the false.

Dr. Lisa Fazio is an expert on how our minds process information. I asked her more about how we come to believe—and how we end up holding on to incorrect information.

Lisa Fazio: So the short answer is in the same ways that we learn correct information. So the same principles of learning and memory apply. What’s different with incorrect stuff is: Sometimes we should have the knowledge to know that it’s wrong, and sometimes that means that we can avoid learning incorrect stuff. And sometimes that means we actually don’t notice the contradiction, and so we remember it anyways.

Garber: Could you tell me a bit more about the distinctions there, and how the new information interacts with the knowledge we already have?

Fazio: My favorite example of this is something that we call the Moses illusion. So you can ask people, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” And almost everyone will respond, “Two.” But! Once you actually pointed out to him that it was Noah and not Moses who took the animals on the ark, everyone goes, “Oh, of course; I knew that.” So that knowledge is in your head, but you’re not using it in the moment. So we’ve been calling this “knowledge neglect”: that you’ve got it stored in memory someplace, but in the moment you fail to use that knowledge and you instead learn this incorrect information.

Garber: Oh, that’s so interesting. What do you attribute that to?

Fazio: It really seems to be that when things are close enough, we don’t flag them as wrong. So if I asked you, “How many animals of each kind did Reagan take on the ark?”—you won’t answer that question. You’ll notice the error there. And it actually makes a lot of sense in our day-to-day lives when we’re talking to each other. We make speech errors all the time, but to have a conversation, we don’t point each one out. We just keep going.

Garber: So why, then, can we be so sure that we are correct?

Fazio: I think it’s one of the most fascinating things about our memory system that we can have these times that we are absolutely certain that we have seen this thing, we have experienced this thing, and it’s just not true. And I think part of it is that we often think about our memories for events as being kind of video cameras—that, like, we’re just recording the event. And then when it’s time to recall it, we play it back.

Garber: Huh.

Fazio: And that’s not at all how it happens. Instead, what you remember is partially what parts of the event were important enough for you to pay attention to, for you to encode.

Garber: And do we encode certain types of information differently from others?

Fazio: Memory researchers sometimes talk about the difference between what we call episodic memory and semantic memory, where episodic memory is your memory for events, your kind of autobiographical memory, versus semantic memory, [which] is just kind of all the stuff that you know about the world. So the sky is blue, my name is Lisa—all the just kind of general facts and things that we know.

And I will say, there’s argument in the field: Are these actually different memory systems, or is it just one that’s remembering two types of material? There’s some evidence—from kind of brain lesions, and some neuropsychology—that they are separate systems. But then there’s also evidence that, really, it’s all the same thing.

Garber: And where does fiction fit into that? How do our brains make sense of the difference between … the real facts and the fictional ones? Or does it?

Fazio: So there’s interesting work trying to figure out when we’re thinking about fiction, do we kind of compartmentalize it and think of it as something separate from our knowledge about the real world? And it seems to be that that’s not really what happens. So there’s much more blending of the two, and you really keep them straight more by kind of remembering that one is Lord of the Rings, and one is reality. But they can blend in interesting ways. So we have studies where we’ve had people read fictional stories. We tell them they’re fictional. We warn them that, “Hey, authors of fiction often take liberties with certain facts or ideas in order to make the story more compelling. So some of what you read will be false.” And then we have them read a story that contains a bunch of true and false facts about the world. And then later that day, or a few weeks later, we just give them a trivia quiz where we ask them a bunch of questions and see what they answer. And what they read in those stories bleeds over. So even though they knew it was fictional, it sometimes affected their memory, and they would recall what was in the story rather than what they knew to be correct kind of two weeks earlier.

___

Valdez: So Dr. Fazio is saying a couple of things. One, sometimes we can inadvertently create false memories for ourselves. We play back a memory in our head, but we have an incomplete picture of that memory, so maybe we insert some additional, not-quite-right details to flesh the memory back out, which ends up distorting the memory.

And then there’s our memories about facts about the world. And sometimes we’re recalling those facts from all sorts of information we’ve stored in our brain. And the fictional or false stuff can mix in with the real and accurate information.

Garber: You know, I’ve been thinking a lot, too, about all the efforts experts have made to distinguish between the different types of bad information we’re confronted with. So there’s misinformation: a claim that’s just generally incorrect. And then there’s disinformation, with a D, which is generally understood to be misinformation that’s shared with the intention to mislead. So misinformation would be if someone who doesn’t know much about Taylor Swift messes up and keeps telling people she’s been dating … Jason Kelce. When in fact, it’s his brother, Travis Kelce.

Valdez: And disinformation would be if I knew that was wrong, but then I turned around and purposely told my friend, a big football fan, that Jason and Taylor are dating, to mess with him.

Garber: Exactly! And then there’s propaganda. So: if a troll kept posting that the whole Taylor/Travis relationship is a psyop designed to promote a liberal agenda. Which was … a real claim people made!

Valdez: Yeah; I can see how this is confusing for folks. They’re all so similar, and hard to disentangle. You know, we have all of these ways to categorize these different errors. But are we really able to discern between all of these subtle distinctions? Sure, we can intellectualize them….but can we really feel them?

Garber: That’s such a good question. And something I was thinking about, too, as I talked with Dr. Fazio. And one answer might be that intellectualizing those questions could also be a way to feel them—where just being aware of how our brains are processing new information might give us that extra bit of distance that would allow us to be more critical of the information we are consuming. And I talked more with Dr. Fazio about that, and asked her advice on how we could foster a more cognition-aware approach.

___

Garber: I know you’ve talked about the difference between debunking misinformation and pre-bunking, and I love that idea of pre-bunking. Can you talk a little bit about what that is, and what it achieves?

Fazio: Yeah, so debunking is when people have been exposed to some type of false information and then you’re trying to correct their memory. So: They’ve had an experience, they likely now believe something false, and you’re trying to correct that. And we find that debunking, in general, is useful; the problem is it never gets you back to baseline. Having no exposure to the misinformation is always better than the debunk. Seeing a debunk is better than nothing; even better would be just no exposure to the misinformation. [What] pre-bunking interventions try to do is to kind of prepare you before you see the misinformation.

Garber: Okay.

Fazio: So sometimes this is done with something that’s often called inoculation—where you warn people about the types of manipulative techniques that might be used in misinformation. So using really emotional language, false “experts,” trying to kind of increase polarization. Things like that. But then you can also warn people about the specific themes or topics of misinformation. So, like: “In this next election, you will likely see a story about ballots being found by a river. In general, that ends up being misinformation, so just keep an eye out for that. And know that if you see a story, you should really make sure it’s true before you believe it.”

Garber: And along those lines, how would you make sure that it’s true? Especially with our memories working as they do, how do we even trust what seems to be true?

Fazio: Yeah; so I tell people to pay attention to the source. Is this coming from someplace that you’ve heard about before? The best way, I think, is multiple sources telling you that.And one of the things I also remind people of is, like: In the fast-moving social-media environment, if you see something and you’re not sure if it’s true or false, one thing you can do is—just don’t share that. Like, don’t continue the path forward. Just pause. Don’t hit that share button, and try and stop the chain a little bit there.

Garber: If you see something, don’t say something.

Fazio: Exactly. There we go. That’s our new motto. “See something, don’t say something.”

Garber: And do you find that people are receptive to that? Or is the impulse to share so strong that people just want to anyway?

Fazio: Yeah. So people are receptive to it generally. So when you remind people that, “Hey, Americans really care about the accuracy of what they hear. They want to see true information on their social-media feeds.” And that they’ll kind of block people that constantly post false information. We’ve got some studies showing that people do respond to that, and are less willing to share really false and misleading headlines after those types of reminders.

Garber: Could you tell me more about emotion and how it resonates with our brains?

Fazio: So Dr. Jay Van Bavel has some interesting work, along with some colleagues, finding that “moral emotional words”—so, words that can convey a lot of emotion, but also a sense of morality—those really capture our attention. Yeah. And lead to more shares on social media.

Garber: That’s so interesting. Do they offer an explanation for why that might be?

Fazio: Our brains pay a lot of attention to emotion. They pay a lot of attention to morality. When you smoosh them together, then it’s this kind of superpower of getting us to just really focus in on that information. Which is another cue that people can use. If something makes you feel a really strong emotion, that’s typically a time to pause and kind of double-check: “Is this true or not?”

Garber: And along those lines, you know, media literacy has been offered sometimes as an explanation, or as a solution. You know: Just if the public were a little bit more educated about the basics of how news-gathering works, for example, that maybe they would be even more equipped to do all the things that you’re talking about. You know, and to be a little bit more suspicious, to question themselves. How do you feel about that idea? And how do you feel about news literacy as an answer? One answer among many?

Fazio: Yeah; I mean, I think that’s the key point—that it’s one answer among many. I think there are no silver bullets here that are just going to fix the problem. But I do think media literacy is useful.

I think one thing it can be really useful for is increasing people’s trust of good news media.

Garber: Mm. Yeah. Yeah.

Fazio: Because one of the things we often worry about, with misinformation, is that we’ll just make people overly skeptical of everything. Become kind of this nihilistic: “Nothing is true; I can’t tell what’s true or false, so I’m just going to check out and not believe anything.” And we really want to avoid that. So I think an important role of media literacy can be understanding: “Here’s how journalists do their jobs, and why you should trust them. And all the steps they go through to make sure that they’re providing correct information.” And I think that can be a useful counterpart.

Garber: And what are some of the other factors that affect whether or not we’re more likely to believe information?

Fazio: Yeah, so one of the findings that we do a lot of work on is that repetition, in and of itself, increases our belief in information. So the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to think that it’s true. And they’re not huge effects, but just, kind of, things gain a little bit of plausibility every time you hear them. So you can imagine the first time that people heard the Pizzagate rumor, that [Hillary] Clinton is molesting children in the basement of a pizza parlor in D.C. That seemed utterly implausible. There was no way that was happening. And the second time you heard it, the 10th time you’ve heard it, it becomes just slightly less implausible each time. You likely still don’t think it’s true, but it’s not as outrageous as the first time you heard it. And so I think that has a lot of implications for our current media environment, where you’re likely to see the same headline or the same rumor or the same false piece of information multiple times over the course of a day.

Garber: And it occurs to me, too, that repetition can also work the other way—as a way to solidify good information.

Fazio: Yeah. And we know that this same work that’s looked at the role of repetition also finds that things that are just easy to understand, generally, are also more likely to be believed. So there’s even some findings that rhyming sayings are thought to be a little more truthful than sayings that don’t rhyme. So anything that makes it easy to understand, easy to process, is going to be appealing.

___

Valdez: Megan, a lot of what Dr. Fazio talked about reminds me of a process known as heuristics—which are these mental shortcuts we take when we’re presented with information, and we need to make quick decisions or conclusions or judgments. And actually, those mental shortcuts can be exploited. There’s a great article in Undark magazine about how our brains are inherently lazy and how that puts us at an informational disadvantage. And in it, the writer makes the point that simply using our brain requires a lot of energy. Like, literally: It requires calories, it requires glucose.

Garber: Oh, man, like fueling up for a race almost. You have to fuel up just to process the world.

Valdez: Right. And this article argues that as humans were evolving, we didn’t always know where our next meal was going to come from. So we would save some of that energy. So decisions and judgments were made really quickly, with survival first and foremost in mind.

Garber: Huh.

Valdez: And so cognition and critical thinking: Those are two things that require heavier mental lifting, and our brain really prefers to not lift heavy thoughts. And it’s probably part of the reason that we’re so easy to exploit, because we just often default to our lizard brain.

Garber: And that’s part of why conspiracy theories work so well, right? They take a world that’s really complicated and reduce it to something really simple—all these questions, with a single answer that kind of explains everything.

Valdez: And that’s a huge part of their appeal.

Garber: And it’s so interesting to think about, too, because one idea you hear a lot these days is that we’re living in a golden age of conspiracy theories. Or maybe like a fool’s-gold age, I guess. But I was reading more about that, and it turns out that the theories themselves actually don’t seem to be more prevalent now than they’ve been in the past. There was a 2022 study that reported that 73 percent of Americans believe that conspiracy theories are currently, quote unquote, “out of control.” And 59 percent agree that people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories, compared with 25 years ago. But the study couldn’t find any evidence, uh, that any specific conspiracy theories, or just general conspiracism, have actually increased over that time. So even our perception of misinformation is a little bit misinformed!

Valdez: That’s so fascinating. And it feels right!

Garber: Right! No, exactly—or wrong. Maybe. Who knows.

Valdez: Right, yes. The wrongness feels right.

Garber: And 77 percent blamed social media and the internet for their perception that conspiracies had increased. You know, that idea, it’s very hard to prove that out fully, but it does seem to have merit. Because it’s not just that we’re often wrong online, but it’s also that we just talk about the wrongness so much, and we’re so aware of the wrongness. So the environment itself can be a little bit misleading.

Valdez: And social media feels almost rudimentary to what’s coming with the AI revolution. If we already have a tough time distinguishing between real and fake, I imagine that is only going to get worse with AI.

Garber: Dr. Fazio, I wonder about how AI will affect the dynamics we’ve been talking about. How are you thinking about AI, and the effect it might have on how we know, and trust, the world around us?

Fazio: So, I go back and forth here, from, like, optimistic to really pessimistic. Okay. So the optimistic case is: We’ve dealt with changes before. So we had photography, and then we had Photoshop. And Photoshop was gonna ruin all of us; we’d never be able to tell when a photo was real or not. And that didn’t happen. We figured out ways to authenticate photos. We still have photojournalism. Photoshop didn’t kind of ruin our ability to tell what’s true or false. And I think a similar thing could be happening with generative AI. It could go either way, but there’s definitely a case to be made that we’ll just figure this out, um, and things will be fine. The pessimistic view is that we won’t be sure if what we’re seeing is true or false, and so we’ll disbelieve everything. And so you could end up in a spot where a video is released showing some sort of crime, and everyone can just say, “Well, that’s not real. It was faked.” And it can become a way to disregard actual evidence.

Garber: And at this moment, do you have a sense of which of those scenarios might win out?

Fazio: Yeah; so I will say we’re starting to see people do a little bit of the latter, where anytime you see anything: “Oh, that’s just not real. That’s faked.” And that worries me.

Garber: Yeah. And, I mean, how do you think about the sort of, you know, preemptive solutions? Like you said, you know, in previous iterations of this—with photography, with so many new technologies—people did find the answer. And what do you think would be our answer here if we were able to implement it?

Fazio: I mean, I think the answer, again, comes down to paying attention to the source of the information. I mean, so we just saw with the Kate Middleton picture that reputable news organizations, like AP, noticed the issue, and took the photo down. And I think it’s going to be on these organizations to really verify that this is actual video, and to become, a little bit, the gatekeepers there of kind of: “We trust this, and you should trust us.” And that’s going to require transparency, kind of: “What are you doing? Why should we trust you? How do we know this is real?” But I’m hoping that that type of relationship can be useful.

Garber: Thank you for the perfect segue to my next question! Which is: When it comes to news, in particular, how can we assess whether something is real? In your own life, how do you think about what, and who, to trust?

Fazio: Yeah. So I think one of the useful cues to what’s real is the sense of consensus. So, are multiple people saying it? And more importantly, are multiple people who have kind of knowledge about the situation? So not “multiple people” being random people on the internet, but multiple people being ones with the expertise, or the knowledge, or the first-hand experience. There’s a media-literacy strategy called lateral reading, which encourages people—that when you’re faced with something that you’re unsure if it’s true or false, that’s it’s counterproductive to dive into the details of that information. So, like, if you’re looking at a web page, you don’t want to spend a lot of time on that web page trying to figure out if it’s trustworthy or not. What you want to do is see: What are other people saying about that website? So, open up Wikipedia, type in the name of the news organization. Does it have, like, a page there? Or type in the name of the foundation. Is it actually, uh, funded by oil companies talking about climate change? Or is it actually a bunch of scientists? Figuring out what other people are saying about a source can actually be a really useful tool.

___

Garber: Andrea, I find that idea of lateral reading to be so useful—on its own, as a way to decide for myself which pieces of information to trust, but also as a reminder that, when it comes to making those decisions, we have more tools at our disposal than it might seem.

Valdez: Right. And there is some comfort in having so many resources available to us. More sources can mean more context, a fuller understanding. But it cuts both ways. Taking in too much information is exactly what short-circuits our lizard brains. In fact, there’s a whole school of thought that flooding the zone with a lot of trash information is a way to confuse and control people.

Garber: Well. And it’s so useful to remember how connected those things—confusing people and controlling them—really are. When I hear the term misinformation, I automatically associate it with politics. But misinformation is a matter of psychology, too. People who study propaganda talk about how its aim, often, isn’t just to mislead the public. It’s to dispirit them. It’s to make them give up on the idea of truth itself—to get people to a place where, like that old line goes, “everything is possible, and nothing is true.”

Valdez: Oh. That IS dispiriting. It almost encourages a nihilistic or apathetic view.

Garber: And I wonder, too, whether those feelings will be exacerbated by the influx of AI-generated content.

Valdez: Yes! Like, with the rise of deepfakes, I think that’s going to challenge our default assumption that seeing is believing. Given the way that evolution has worked, and the evolution of our information ecosystem, maybe seeing is not enough. But if you want to fight that nihilism, it’s almost like you need to fight the evolutionary instinct of making quick judgments on a single piece of information that’s presented to you.

Garber: Yeah. And one way to do that may just be appreciating how our brains are wired, and remembering that as we make our way through all the information out there. Almost like a form of mindfulness. This idea that awareness of your thoughts and sensations is a crucial first step in kind of moving beyond our lizard-brain impulses. Just being aware of how our brains are processing new information might give us that bit of distance that allows us to be more critical of the information we’re consuming, images or otherwise.

Valdez: Right. Seeing tells you a part of the story. But telling yourself the most truthful story—it just takes work.

[Music.]

Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

[Music.]

Valdez: Next time on How to Know What’s Real:

Deborah Raji: The way surveillance and privacy works is that it’s not just about the information that’s collected about you. It’s like your entire network is now, you know, caught in this web, and it’s just building pictures of entire ecosystems of information. And so I think people don’t always get that. It’s a huge part of what defines surveillance.

Garber: What we can learn about surveillance systems, deepfakes, and the way they affect our reality. We’ll be back with you on Monday.

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The Pat McAfee Show, hosted by the ex–NFL punter turned TV presenter, is the only program on ESPN that opens with a warning label. It was one of the few concessions McAfee made to his new Disney-owned employer when he brought his YouTube hit to the network in September in a five-year, $85 million deal. The label urges viewers to please bear in mind that the show is “meant to be comedic informative”—entertainment, in other words, not journalism—and that the often dopey opinions and sometimes false facts shared by him or his guests “do not necessarily reflect the beliefs” of anyone else at ESPN. The warning ends with a jokey plea: “Don’t sue us.”

McAfee is an athlete, not a reporter, and when it comes to stuff like accuracy, he’s careful to set the bar very low. He has become the epitome of athlete encroachment on terrain historically controlled by nonathlete journalists, and to put it mildly, the journalists are not happy about it. McAfee couldn’t care less.

Pat McAfee’s influence is bigger than his audience. His hours-long show airs during TV’s midday dead zone, when most sports fans are at work or school. It averages just 332,000 live viewers on its linear broadcast, according to the most recent figures from ESPN, and factoring in other platforms like ESPN’s YouTube channel and TikTok, its daily audience tops out at just under 900,000—a fraction of the eight-figure viewership for Monday Night Football. But the numbers belie how much attention he gets for the more provocative things that are said on the show, including the dingbat views of the Jets quarterback and anti-vaxxer Aaron Rodgers. Airtime equals power, and no one at ESPN spends more time on air than Pat McAfee. From the moment he arrived, he’s arguably been the network’s most influential mouthpiece and indisputably its most polarizing.

If you’re a newcomer to The Pat McAfee Show, it can be tough to follow. The show is filled with locker-room joshing delivered in the outer-Pittsburgh Yinzer accent of McAfee’s youth. It’s one of America’s more unsung regional accents, super fun to imitate, but McAfee and his supporting panel of regulars—even the ones who aren’t from Pittsburgh—lay it on so thick, you might need to consult an English-to-Yinzer dictionary. Teams win chompionships. Joe Flacco, the name of the aging Super Bowl–winning quarterback, is pronounced Jee-oh Flacc-kew. Even the ticker at the bottom of the screen has a Yinzer accent: Program is spelled “progrum.”

[Keith O'Brien: You’ll miss sports journalism when it’s gone]

Everyone observes a firm dress code: down. Way down. McAfee, who has bouffant hair that crests like a giant wave at Nazaré, prefers black tees and white tanks. Boston Connor, one of two members of McAfee’s peanut gallery known as the Toxic Table, has a porn ’stache, an intentional mullet, and an endless supply of animal-stencil T-shirts: wolves, lions, elephants, snow owls. He looks as though he saw Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover and thought to himself, That guy looks awesome. Ty Schmit, the other half of the Toxic Table, favors Green Bay Packers jerseys and University of Iowa hoodies. McAfee will often wrap up segments by leading all of them in a round of applause for themselves, like they just aced a tackling drill. “Good seg, good seg,” he’ll say.

Watching an episode of The Pat McAfee Show is like attending mass at sports church. Since its inception in 2015 as a YouTube livecast on Barstool Sports and continuing through its move to ESPN, the show has been broadcast from an enormous studio–slash–home gymnasium dubbed “the Thunderdome” on McAfee’s property outside Indianapolis, the city where he spent eight seasons with the Colts as a punter. His co-stars all appear to be cast in his image—jocular white dudes with beards—only paler and softer of flesh. They’re not athletes, they’re not journalists, they’re not even particularly good on TV, and yet they’re on ESPN for 15 hours a week because they’re friends with McAfee. When he really gets rolling, his flock will join in with some call-and-response, but instead of crying out “Amen” or “Praise Jesus,” they belch out a loud WHADD. Roughly translated, it means “Damn right.”

By the time McAfee retired unexpectedly from football at age 29 to concentrate full-time on The Pat McAfee Show, he’d made $15 million in the NFL, and according to the prevailing wisdom at the time, he was out of his mind to walk away from a job that paid him a fortune to kick a ball five or six times a game. In the NFL, though, kickers are marginal figures who get the spotlight only when they screw up. On The Pat McAfee Show, he’s the pope. He often describes himself as a “dumb punter” and his buddies on the show as “a collection of stooges,” but he’s far more shrewd than he lets on, and he proved it when he accepted ESPN’s offer. (He’s also a regular panelist on ESPN’s College GameDay, and a commentator for the WWE’s Monday Night Raw. McAfee might love pro wrestling even more than he loves football.)

The men who watch The Pat McAfee Show—its audience is almost entirely male—share a lot in common with Pat McAfee. It’s on in the weight room at the team training complex (whadd), or in the living room at the fraternity house (whadd), or on the TV above the bar at Buffalo Wild Wings (whadd). It’s like background noise for committed sports fans. It’s not so much content as friendly company. His viewers aren’t watching McAfee’s progrum with focused attention, or for trenchant insights. They’re watching because of the easy camaraderie, because he and his pals are a quality hang, solid guys who like talking sports and crushing beers.

In stark contrast with much of ESPN’s morning and daytime programming, with its fire-breathing takes and verbal warfare that 30 Rock once lampooned with a fake show called Sports Shouting, The Pat McAfee Show has very little conflict. No one’s arguing or talking over one another or putting guests on the spot. This is surely a big reason why so many notable sports figures are willing to come on the show.

In April alone, McAfee hosted the women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark; the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy; UConn’s back-to-back national-champion head coach, Dan Hurley; and Major League Baseball’s top pitching prospect, Paul Skenes (better known to McAfee’s viewers as Livvy Dunne’s boyfriend). During last week’s NFL Draft, McAfee offered a reminder about why he’s so valuable to ESPN, booking a pair of coveted media-averse guests: the former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. They feel comfortable letting down their guard around McAfee because he sees athletes, coaches, and the business of sports through the same prism that they do. ESPN may be paying his salary, but McAfee is clear about where his loyalties lie.

Since McAfee joined ESPN, he’s given just one extended interview of his own, and it was to a popular podcast called All the Smoke hosted by the ex-NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, whom McAfee befriended during Jackson’s stint with the Indiana Pacers. McAfee doesn’t talk with journalists unless it’s on his show and he’s the one doing the interviewing, and they’re rarely invited. (He didn’t respond to my requests for an interview.) ESPN’s NFL correspondent and scoop machine Adam Schefter appears often, and the NBA reporter Brian Windhorst has dropped by during the playoffs—mostly to talk about the Pacers—but they’re exceptions. Almost from the jump, the suspicions between McAfee and ESPN journalists have been mutual.

[Jemele Hill: Aaron Rodgers is lighting his football legacy on fire]

When ESPN offered McAfee that $85 million, its parent company, Disney, was in the midst of corporate-wide layoffs. ESPN was hit particularly hard. Lots of people got fired to pay for McAfee. Yet upon arriving, McAfee sounded hurt that he didn’t get a warmer reception. Just four months after joining the network, he accused ESPN executives of “actively trying to sabotage” his show, and he called out one of them by name, the powerful event and studio production chief Norby Williamson. Williamson, McAfee said live on air, was “a rat.”

It was a stunning moment—the kind of public airing of grievances that ESPN is renowned for not tolerating. Many past ESPN talents, such as Jemele Hill (now a writer for The Atlantic) and Bill Simmons, have been pushed out for far less. And yet McAfee suffered no consequences. No suspension, no public reprimand. Then, three months later, Williamson was fired. If any doubt remained about who had the power now at ESPN—the suits or the dumb punter—it vanished along with Williamson. McAfee could seemingly get away with anything, and then boast about it in public. Before Williamson got guillotined, McAfee bristled during his appearance on All the Smoke at the notion that he’d gone after one of his bosses: “I’m like, I don’t got a motherfucking boss! What are we … like, are we talking [ESPN Chairman] Jimmy Pitaro or [Disney CEO] Bob Iger? Is that who we’re talking about? Because those are people who could technically be described as my boss.”

No relationship, though, better crystallizes the growing enmity between McAfee and ESPN’s news division than his continued indulgence of his good friend, the New York Jets quarterback, defiant anti-vaxxer, ayahuasca enthusiast—and, for a brief moment, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rumored running mate—Aaron Rodgers.

On October 23, 2023, during one of his weekly appearances on The Pat McAfee Show, Rodgers took a veiled shot at the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, referring to Kelce as “Mr. Pfizer” for his participation in an awareness campaign urging people to get vaccinated against COVID. McAfee made sure to note on air that he was vaccinated, an implicit rejection of Rodgers’s position, but he didn’t challenge his friend about it and he expressed surprise afterward that anyone expected him to. That’s not the line of work he’s in, folks. He was just kibbitzing with his freethinking friend.

Then on January 2, 2024, Rodgers shared on McAfee’s show a slanderous rumor about the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and Jeffrey Epstein that deserves no repeating here. Kimmel’s show airs on ABC, which, like ESPN, is owned by Disney, meaning that McAfee had let his buddy use his platform to smear a co-worker. Kimmel responded angrily on X, calling Rodgers “a soft-brained wacko” and threatening to sue. This time, even McAfee seemed to know that Rodgers had gone too far. Later that day, he met with the only two people at Disney he recognizes as authority figures, Jimmy Pitaro and Bob Iger, then expressed contrition during his broadcast the next day. He chalked it up to “shit talk” gone awry and added, “We apologize for being part of it.”  

Once again, there was no evident discipline for McAfee. And a week later, Rodgers was right back on the show for his regular appearance, during which the quarterback notably did not apologize to Kimmel. (The next day, McAfee announced that Rodgers would not return to the program for the remainder of the NFL season, but no one seriously doubts that he’ll be back before the fall.)

Two months later, CNN reported that Rodgers had, in private conversations, expressed suspicions that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a government inside job. After Rodgers tweeted a denial—“I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place”—McAfee read it aloud on his show. “I’m happy to hear that,” McAfee said. “That is good news.” Anyone expecting McAfee to denounce his friend should’ve known better by then.  

[From the September 2013 issue: The global dominance of ESPN]

On All the Smoke, after the Kimmel smear but before the Sandy Hook nonsense, McAfee shared that he’d lost sleep over his role in the Rodgers saga, saying, “Maybe I am fucking this up completely.” But he also offered a novel defense, which is that his relationship with Rodgers had enabled him to tease out a more honest and complete portrait of a historic figure in sports. “Whenever there’s documentaries made about Aaron Rodgers, they are going to use so much of our show,” he said. “Is that not journalism?”

No. It is not. Journalism requires an active pursuit of the truth. This was more like stepping on a rake. He’s not completely wrong, though. We can debate forever the ethics of platforming public figures who say odious things, but it’s also true that Rodgers used to be considered among the more thoughtful, intellectually curious stars in the NFL. And now, thanks in no small measure to The Pat McAfee Show, we’ve heard enough of his self-satisfied, moronic bloviating to know better.  

April 5 had all the makings of a triumphant day for McAfee: Williamson had been fired in the morning, and the show would be broadcasting live from Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, site of that weekend’s WrestleMania XL. Borrowing from the College GameDay script, McAfee likes to take his show on the road, and wherever he goes, he’s greeted by a brigade of fans packed behind his broadcast platform like thick stogies. This day, at least 20 percent of them had fake championship belts slung over their shoulders like they were Triple H. You could swap any of them for Boston Connor, and no one would notice for an hour, including Pat. “Mac-uh-fee!” they chanted. “Mac-uh-fee! Mac-uh-fee!”  

Right away, though, something went wrong. To viewers at home, nothing seemed amiss, but inside the arena, the sound wasn’t working. The fans couldn’t hear anything. McAfee didn’t realize until sound technicians started scrambling behind the podium, frantically working to rectify the situation. Now the crowd began a new chant: “We want speakers! We want speakers!” Minutes of airtime passed. McAfee’s mood soured. “Obviously a massive week in Philadelphia—we’ve got all these people staring at us, can’t hear a damn thing we’re saying,” he said. “One of the most uncomfortable situations I’ve ever been placed in in my entire life right now.” Every time he tried to move forward with the show, the crowd would cut him off and start chanting again, and now they were getting salty. “Bulllll-shiiiit! Bullll-shiiiit! Bulllshiiiit!”

[Read: Sports streaming makes losers of us all]

On TV, you could see the panic bleed into McAfee’s eyes as it dawned on him how bad this could get. This was a three-hour broadcast. If they started bringing out WWE legends and the sound still wasn’t fixed—folks, this was a wrestling crowd in Philadelphia. They would absolutely turn on him. The situation required McAfee and his Toxic Table to do something they were deeply ill-prepared for: be television professionals. Buy time. Improvise.

Instead, McAfee and his panelists exchanged small talk for a while like they were waiting for an elevator to arrive. Apropos of nothing, Pat congratulated two crew members named Nick and Carly, who’d apparently just had a baby, and led the panel in a round of applause for them. A producer handed a mobile microphone to Boston Connor and instructed him to go interview fans, but Connor doesn’t really know how to do that, so instead he approached someone dressed as the WWE star Cody Rhodes and, unprovoked, called him a “crybaby bitch.”

Anything can happen on live television, as the cliché goes, which is why TV professionals always have a plan B. McAfee, though, barely has a plan A. Even on its better days, his show is slapdash to the point that it feels like an act of defiance, like a noogie to the heads of all those suits in Bristol. (“We don’t really like to plan or think things out,” McAfee says often.) Finally, after more than 30 minutes, the sound in the arena got fixed. McAfee, champion of the working man, led the panel in another round of applause: “Big shout-out to the Philadelphia union for coming through,” he said. He hinted that it must have been the suits, who were always out to get him, who’d screwed up. “Hey, I come from Pittsburgh. Believe me, I very much understand the entire process of the entire thing.” Whatever had gone wrong, disorder was now restored.

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After months of struggle with little movement, the war in Ukraine may be nearing a crucial point. The fight has not been going well for Ukraine. With American aid stalled, tired fighters on the front lines faced ammunition shortages just as Russia brought new sources of recruits and weapons online.

But although painfully delayed, military support from the United States is on its way. The aid package passed in April is the first since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives more than a year ago, but it’s also the largest yet. Now the question is: Will it make a difference in time?

The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum joins host Hanna Rosin on Radio Atlantic to discuss the state of the war and how the fight extends well beyond the battlefield itself.

According to Applebaum, the psychological toll Ukraine faced from the aid holdup is only the beginning. Russia may not be able to occupy Ukraine’s cities, but it can wage a kind of psychological warfare to make them unlivable.

She also describes an information war Russia has brought much closer to home for Americans. Her June cover story in The Atlantic chronicles the “new propaganda war” that Russia, China, and other illiberal states are waging on the democratic world, and how that war can shape the fate of Ukraine.

Listen to the conversation here:

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

News clip: Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine, including a major offensive near Ukraine’s second-largest city.

News clip: President Zelensky has warned that Russia’s latest push in Ukraine’s northeast could be the first wave of a wider offensive.

News clip: Congress approved $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine in April. The approval came after months of dire warnings from Ukraine that its troops are running out of weapons and losing ground to Russian fighters.

Hanna Rosin: The news out of Ukraine has recently turned bleak. Russia broke through critical lines in the north, and the Ukrainian side seems depleted of manpower and weapons. Now, a major part of what changed the dynamic was the halt in U.S. aid. The aid was stalled since Republicans took over the House of Representatives, although a month ago they passed the first aid bill in over a year, which may or may not be too late to turn things around.

Now, I know that there is a connection between what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine and U.S. politics. But I did not truly grasp how deep that connection was and how it could affect not just the upcoming election but all of American culture, until I talked to staff writer Anne Applebaum. Anne is the first person I always want to talk to in these moments when major shifts are under way, because she can read between the lines.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week: how Russia has brought its war much closer to home than Americans may realize.

Anne has a new book coming out this summer called Autocracy, Inc. And in it, she’s been putting together the pieces: how the war in Ukraine is not just a fight for ground but a fight for psychological territory—in Russia, in the U.S. election, and pretty much all over the world.

[Music]

Rosin: So things have shifted on the battlefield in Ukraine. I know that much. Can you explain exactly what happened?

Anne Applebaum: So, in essence, there are two different stories. There’s a story about the front line in northern and eastern Ukraine. And there we see what’s now a full-scale, very large Russian offensive.

Rosin: All of a sudden? Like it just—all of a sudden?

Applebaum: It’s been pushing for a while, but there was a relaunched attack in recent days and weeks against the city of Kharkiv, which is in the far north—quite near the Russian border, sort of northeast Ukraine—as well as in the east, in the sort of Donetsk region.

The Russians moved tens of thousands of troops into the area, supposedly 50,000 east of Kharkiv, and redoubled their attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. That seems to have been a plan, and it seems to have been timed to happen now.

Rosin: And why was it suddenly successful? Like, I feel like it’s been stalled and stalled and stalled for almost a year.

Applebaum: The Ukrainians have been running out of ammunition for a long time, and during the six months in which we weren’t helping them and the European ammunition was also still on its way, the Ukrainians were holding ground but were losing weapons and equipment. And during that same period, the Russians regathered their forces. And in the last few days, they decided to push forward, as I said, in those two places.

Rosin: And did anything change on the Russian side, like new strategy, new something?

Applebaum: A couple things changed on the Russian side—one was the recruitment of more soldiers. They now pay people a lot of money to be in the army. And in very poor parts of Russia, they will now go and fight. Also, there’s a kind of constant, back-and-forth electronic warfare, drone warfare. The Russians got better at using drones and better at blocking Ukrainian drones and equipment.

That’s one of these things where they do one thing and then the Ukrainians learn another thing. So there’s a kind of constant spiral, and that’s changing all the time. But they did recover from an earlier phase in the war when the Ukrainians could beat them using high tech a lot more easily.

I should say there’s another piece of the war, however. The second piece of the story is that the Ukrainians are now using long-range weapons—some European, some American, some stuff they’ve been given recently—to hit targets in Crimea and also in Russia itself. They hit an airfield. They’ve been hitting gas and oil storage facilities, production facilities.

And they’ve supposedly taken out perhaps as much as 10 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity. They’ve hit major military targets in Crimea. And so this is their new form of innovation—is to block Russian efforts from farther back. It’s almost like a separate war from the war on the front line.

Rosin: I see. So the traditional battlefield that we report on and have been tracking and monitoring looks bleak, but there’s other things happening elsewhere. Okay. That’s good to know.

A last battlefield question: What’s the importance of the cities, the particular cities and places where Russia has made incursions?

Applebaum: So the attack on Kharkiv, which is sort of Ukraine’s second city—it was actually, at one point in history, it was the capital of Ukraine. It’s a major cultural and industrial center.

The fact that the Russians are now so focused on it—focused on taking out their power stations, taking out their infrastructure, seemingly in order to force people out, to make people leave Kharkiv—is a pretty major shift in the war. They weren’t attacking Kharkiv earlier in the war.

Rosin: Tactically or psychologically? Because it’s such an important city.

Applebaum: I think it’s probably psychological. The idea is to make it unlivable. And my guess is that that’s really the Russian strategy for all of Ukraine, is to make it unlivable. They can’t capture it. I mean, capturing Kharkiv would be a kind of six-month Stalingrad-like urban battle. That would be my guess.

And they probably don’t want to do that. So what they probably want to do instead is force everyone to leave. If there’s no electricity and there’s no water and the center is bombed out and you can’t live there, then that’s a different kind of victory.

Rosin: Okay. I understand the strategy so much better. You mentioned U.S. aid. Everybody talks about U.S. aid. I feel like you, for months, have been warning: U.S. aid is critical. Please pass an aid bill. Looking back on this year, how critical is or has U.S. aid been to this shift in momentum?

Applebaum: So U.S. aid and the argument in the U.S. over the aid were hugely important—both for real reasons, in that, you know, the U.S. aid provides ammunition and bullets and guns on the ground, and for psychological reasons.

Because what the Russians are trying to do is to exhaust Ukraine, to convince people that Ukraine can’t win, to convince Ukrainians that they have no allies, and thereby to get them to stop fighting. And so the Russians are hoping to win through a psychological game as much as a military game.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so it’s not just literal weapons—and I mean, it’s also literal weapons.

Applebaum: It’s also literal weapons, but it’s not only the literal weapons.

Rosin: It’s: You are friendless and alone.

Applebaum: You’re friendless and alone, and your major supplier, which is the United States, or your big friend in Washington, isn’t going to help you anymore. And, you know, this had some impact on Ukrainians.

I mean, there’s a certain scratchiness that Ukrainians now have about the U.S. You know, We relied on them. And then, you know, U.S. domestic politics undermined that. You know, remember Biden went there and, you know—first U.S. president to visit a war zone in a place where the U.S. didn’t even have troops on the ground—and promised them he would stand by them. And then he didn’t. And, okay, it wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t him alone. But nevertheless, that was experienced by a lot of people as a kind of betrayal.

That was very psychologically damaging. It meant that there were soldiers on the front line who didn’t have anything to shoot back with.

Rosin: So when you say “scratchiness,” that’s what you mean? Just a mistrust?

Applebaum: Mistrust. Doubt. The sense of being part of a big, friendly alliance is chipped away quite a bit. I mean, it has to be said that during this time, there have been a bunch of new European projects to give them aid.

There was the so-called Czech ammunition initiative. The Czechs are major producers of ammunition and weapons and have been for many decades. And there are a number of big European projects that are just getting off the ground to make new weapons, to make ammunition and so on. So other things have been happening, but the U.S. aid was expected to carry Ukraine over for six months, and it wasn’t there.

Rosin: Right. So, U.S. aid was literally important, and it was meant as a bridge. So it’s like there is no more bridge.

Applebaum: Yes. Yes. I mean, it’s fixed now, in other words, so the aid is coming. It’s hard for me to tell from outside how fast it’s coming. It seems some things got there right away. These long-range weapons got there right away. Other things seem to be taking longer.

So that’s hard for me to tell, but there was some damage that was done by the delay. So, both psychological damage and damage in terms of lost territory and lost ability to fight.

Rosin: Can we look at this from the U.S. side for a minute, since there is about to be an election? Do you just look at it as standard deadlock, or do you see some isolationism rising up in a more powerful way than it had before? How do you read the long delay from the American side?

Applebaum: So I don’t think isolationism is the right word to use. I think what we were seeing was something different, which was a concerted effort to block aid that was coming from Donald Trump and people around Trump and was supported by people inside the Republican Party who are actually pro-Russian.

So I don’t think it’s just that they want America to withdraw and live in splendid isolation. I think there is a piece of the Republican Party that actively supports Russia. There are members of Congress who repeat Russian propaganda on the floor of the House and of the Senate, and who actively spread Russian propaganda on social media. Those people aren’t isolationists. I mean, there’s something a little bit more than that happening.

Rosin: Okay. So that sounds conspiratorial to the uninitiated. So, prove yourself!

Applebaum: So to unpack—I mean, so first of all: Don’t listen to me. Listen to the various Senate and House leaders who have also said this. So, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Tom Tillis, who’s a Republican Senator—they’re all people who have said on the record, on TV, in the last few weeks and months, have talked about their colleagues repeating Russian propaganda.

There’s one specific story. For example, there’s a story that circulated on social media a few months ago that said that President Zelensky of Ukraine had purchased two yachts, and there were pictures of the yachts that came in some kind of post.

Obviously, President Zelensky has not purchased any yachts. Kiev is landlocked. What does he need the yachts for anyway? It was a completely made-up story that nevertheless was passed around the sort of MAGA-Russian echo chamber, which are more or less the same thing.

That story: During the debate about Ukraine aid, Senator Tillis said he heard his colleagues in the Senate—Republican colleagues in the Senate—cite that story and say, for example, We shouldn’t give Ukraine aid, because Zelensky will just spend it on his yachts.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Applebaum: So that is a direct example of a false story that comes from the swamp of the internet, that is being passed around, and that is then repeated by a member of the United States Senate as a reason why we shouldn’t help Ukraine.

You couldn’t get a more pure example of how fever dreams created in some troll’s brain or on somebody’s phone then become a part of the conversation in Congress.

And there’s another set of arguments that are coming from Donald Trump’s camp, and Trump himself says some of it in public. He says he wants to do a deal with Russia. And there have been little leaks about what that deal might look like. And perhaps the deal includes some kind of negotiation over the border. Perhaps the deal includes some new U.S. relationship with Russia. Perhaps the deal includes some kind of deal to do with fuel prices, oil prices.

There’s clearly an interest in the Trump camp to have some kind of alliance with Russia. And some people also in the Trump orbit talk about breaking up Russia and China: We need a relationship with Russia in order to oppose China, which is one of these things that sounds great until you remember how much Russia and China have in common and that the reasons why they’re in alliance have nothing to do with us.

But that’s a separate topic. But there are enough people in that world who are looking for reasons why we should be allied with Russia and not with Ukraine that it’s not some kind of coincidence.

Rosin: I see. Okay. So what I’m taking from that is it’s not a totally coherent plan or motivation. There’s a little bit of pro-Russia business interests. There’s a little bit of Trump magic. There’s a whole bunch of interests, but somehow the result is that there’s a repeating of propaganda.

Applebaum: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, and 99 percent of it is visible to the naked eye.

I’m just quoting you things that people have said. And it’s simply a desire by a part of the Republican party to have a different role in the world. Like, we don’t want to be the country that aids struggling democracies. We want to be the country that does deals. We’re going to do a deal with Russia. We’ll do a deal with whoever we can do deals with.

The idea is that the United States isn’t a leader of NATO. The United States isn’t the leader of the democratic world. Instead, the United States is one power among many who does transactional deals with whoever it deems to be in its interest at that moment.

And that was Trump’s foreign policy in the first term. He was restrained in it. He was prevented from doing everything that he wanted to do. He wanted to drop out of NATO, but he was talked out of it by John Bolton and others. But that’s not a new phenomenon. That’s the way a part of the party is going.

Rosin: And interestingly, that faction did not win. There was U.S. aid—U.S. aid was delivered. How critical do you think the new infusion of aid is or will be?

Applebaum: So the new infusion of aid is critical. Again, I’m not on the ground, and I can’t tell you what exactly has got there and what exactly it will be doing. But, psychologically, it means the Ukrainians know more stuff is coming. So they’re not being shot at on the front lines with no help arriving.

So they have: Something is coming. It’s on the way. That’s very important. And then also some of the new weapons we’ve already seen in effect. So the hits on Crimea and on some of the other places on the front lines seem to be effective because of some of the new U.S. weapons.

[Music]

Rosin: All right. So that’s the situation in Ukraine. When we come back: Russian propaganda—how surprisingly effective it’s been, and how it’s taken root far from Moscow, both in the United States and elsewhere, and what that means for the future of democracy everywhere.

[Music]

Rosin: So where we are now: There’s this critical moment in the war, and then there are all these shifting, underlying alliances that we saw come out in the debate over aid. And a lot of them have to do with shifting propaganda and messaging, which is really interesting. How is Vladimir Putin messaging this moment? Like, what’s he saying?

Applebaum: So, Putin’s messaging—what Putin himself says—is of no significance. Russian messaging and Russian propaganda comes through a lot of different channels.

So it comes through proxies. It comes through some Russian ambassadors. There’s of course Russian TV. There’s RT. And some of it is laundered through—it’s called information laundering—it’s laundered through other kinds of publications that have links to Russia that you can’t see.

So there will be newspapers or websites in Africa or Latin America, which look on the surface like they don’t have anything to do with Russia but, in fact, they have links to Russia.

Rosin: This is why we have you, Anne Applebaum, to draw these lines.

Applebaum: I mean, I’m actually very interested in how it works in Africa, which I think is more interesting than how it works in the U.S., but that’s a separate story. But, you know, some of it, as we know, comes through trolls on social media. Twitter is now pretty much awash in different kinds of Russian trolls.

It’s hard to say if they’re really Russians or they’re just people who like Russia or they’re being paid.

Rosin: Who knows.

Applebaum: Who knows. But there’s a lot of it. So a lot of the attempts that social media companies made a few years ago to control some of this stuff, some of them don’t work as well anymore, especially on Twitter, but not only.

So the messages come in different ways. And I should also say that the other new factor is that the messages are sometimes amplified by other autocracies. So in addition to Russian messaging, you now have Chinese messaging, some of which echoes Russian messaging. You have Iranian messaging—same thing. Venezuelan messaging—same thing.

Rosin: What do you mean, “Same thing”? Like, same message about the Ukraine war?

Applebaum: Same messages about the Ukraine war.

Rosin: What’s the message?

Applebaum: The message is: The Ukrainians are Nazis. The Ukrainians can’t win. The war is America’s fault. This is a NATO war against Russia that was provoked by NATO.

There’s another strand alongside it that also says, you know, Ukraine is decaying and chaotic and catastrophic. The United States is also decaying and divided and catastrophic. These are all losing powers, and you shouldn’t support them.

I’m being very, very over general, but there is now a kind of authoritarian set of narratives, which more or less are all about that, and they’re now repeated by lots of different actors in different countries. I mean, there are some specific things about Ukraine.

In a cover story I wrote for The Atlantic, I describe a story that was very important at the very beginning of the war: the so-called biolabs conspiracy theory, which was an idea that the U.S. is building biological weapons in laboratories in Ukraine, and that somehow that’s a reason for the war. This was completely fake. It was debunked multiple times, including at the UN.

Nevertheless, it was repeated by Russian sources. It was repeated by Chinese sources. It went out—China has a huge media network in Africa. That whole story went out on that network. You could find it all over, you know, Ecuador and Chile and so on.

And that was a story that was so prevalent at the beginning of the war that something like 30 percent of Americans saw it and may well have believed it. And, certainly, a lot of Africans and Latin Americans also saw it and may well have believed it.

Rosin: You’re speaking, and I’m feeling utterly defeated. I mean, that’s the truth. I feel utterly defeated by these washes and washes and washes of information coming from all corners that are going to snag in some people’s minds and sort of corrode them. Like, that’s the image I had as you were talking.

So in a moment like this, all that is the groundwork. What you just described is the groundwork that’s been going on since the Ukraine war began.

Applebaum: It’s been going on for a decade.

I mean, it has to be said, the Ukrainians are also good at messaging, and they have resisted that pretty well. And they were very good at it in the first year of the war. The majority of Americans still support Ukraine. And the majority of Europeans still support Ukraine. So it’s not as if the Russians are winning everywhere all the time. It’s just that it turned out they had affected a key part of the Republican Party, which, actually, by the way, took me by surprise.

When the aid didn’t pass early last autumn, I was initially surprised.

Rosin: Surprised that this broader message was seeping up into—

Applebaum: It was the broader message and the degree to which Trump didn’t want it passed and was blocking it, and that therefore—first it was Kevin McCarthy, later Mike Johnson—were also willing to block it. That was not something I expected.

Rosin: Because you, in your mind, are used to like: Okay, there’s some isolationist strain. But the idea that the argument itself has taken on all kinds of force, motivation—

Applebaum: The idea that they had that much power at the top of the Republican Party. Because many senior Republicans, the leaders of all the important committees in the House, are all people who have been to Ukraine, who have been very pro-Ukraine, who understand the significance of Ukraine and the war in the world and were willing to help. And so none of the congressional leadership were buying any of this Russian propaganda. But then it turned out that it still mattered. Because of Donald Trump.

Rosin: I’m trying to wrap my head around this global propaganda war that you’re describing. I’m used to thinking of propaganda, I guess, in an old-fashioned way, which is something that happens over there in countries that are autocracies, and the autocrats impose it on their beleaguered citizens, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Like, it’s something I anthropologically witnessed.

Applebaum: That’s very 20th century. That’s the 20th-century idea. So in the 20th century, when you think of what was Soviet propaganda, it was posters with tractor drivers, and they had square jaws, and they were digging lots of wheat, and there would be overproduction in the steel industry and so on—

Rosin: And we might buy them in a campy way—

Applebaum: We might buy them in a campy way. I’m sure I own some. So that was 20th-century Soviet propaganda, which ultimately failed because it was so easy to compare that with reality. So even when I first went to the Soviet Union in the ’80s, people could see that wasn’t true. That was the major flaw of that form of propaganda.

What happens now, led by the Russians, and this has been true for a decade—modern Russian propaganda, and now other autocracies echo it, is not focused so much on promoting the greatness of Russia. Sometimes there’s a bit of that. Mostly, it’s focused on the degeneracy and decline of democracy. So the idea is to make sure that Russians don’t imagine there’s something better anywhere else.

Rosin: Because they wouldn’t know. Like, you can tell that Russian propaganda about Russia is a lie because you’re actually waiting on a bread line. So you know that it’s not as good as the posters are showing, but you don’t necessarily know.

Applebaum: But you haven’t been to Sweden or the United Kingdom or wherever. And a lot of it was—the implication of it was—now I’m just paraphrasing, but it was: Okay, not everything in Russia is perfect. And, okay, we may have some corruption, and we have some oligarchs. But look over there at the hideous decline of, you know, England and France and Germany and America. You wouldn’t want to be like that.

And the purpose of this is that the main opponents of Putin and Putinism were people—and over the last two decades, have been people—who used the language of democracy and transparency and anti-corruption.

Rosin: And freedom.

Applebaum: And freedom.

Rosin: Yeah.

Applebaum: And that kind of language was also aligned with an idea that there were better societies—like, you know, in Europe and North America—and Russia could be like them.

And remember that many Russians in the ’90s did hope that their country would become a democracy and believed well into the 2000s that it was still a possibility and were used to the idea that these countries are our friends.

And so what Putin has set out to do is to poison that idea—so poison the idea that there’s anything better—and to poison the idea of the ideas, poison the language: democracy, freedom, transparency, rule of law, anti-corruption. All those things have to be shown to be false.

And this has been done in various ways. So there’s a version of this inside Russia, and there’s a version abroad. But inside Russia, it’s been part of an anti-LGBT campaign. You know, The Western world is degenerate. Putin has said it himself: There are many different kinds of genders. Who even knows what happens over there anymore. An implication of degeneracy. Here we still have some kind of clean, more traditional way of life.

Rosin: Men and women.

Applebaum: Exactly. And that was mostly originally designed for the Russian audience. But it also had a certain echo and an appeal to a far-right audience in the United States and in Europe.

You know, the Russians do it because they want to weaken the United States. They want the U.S. to leave Europe. They want, you know, American decline to accelerate. And Americans do it because they want to take over the government and replace it with a different kind of government.

And so many of the people who will repeat Russian propaganda have been repeating some of those same ideas also for decades.

I mean, this story goes back probably 20 years, so this is nothing especially new, but it became much more turbocharged in 2014 during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Rosin: It sounds like what you’re saying is: We are vulnerable. I mean, it seems like their propaganda war is winning, the autocrats. Like, I feel like the Americans are duped in this scenario.

Applebaum: I mean, first of all, it’s not clear yet that they’re winning.

I mean, again, a majority of Americans support Ukraine, and a majority of Americans support the idea that the U.S. should be a democracy. So, we’re not finished yet. It’s a very delicate thing.

I mean, are we being manipulated and duped by foreigners? Or is it elements in our own society that are seeking to manipulate us and dupe us?

In other words, the farthest thing I want to do is say that somehow the Russians are intervening in our politics and changing it. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think we have a very important element of U.S. politics that believes the same things and uses the same tactics and is very happy to be amplified by the Russians for its own ends.

So usually what happens is that Russian propaganda doesn’t invent things that are new. So, for example, in France, the Russians did not invent Marine Le Pen, who’s the French far-right leader. She’s been part of French politics for decades. They just amplify her. In her case, they gave her some money.

In Spain, there’s a Catalan separatist movement, which has also been supported by the Russians in different ways. Did they invent that? No. It was already there. It’s been part of Spanish politics for decades.

What they do is they take an existing fault line or an existing division, and then they help it get worse. So whether that’s through, you know, social media campaigns, in some cases through money, in some cases through helping particular individuals, they seek to amplify.

Rosin: So it’s almost like there’s this coalescing global division and on one side a sort of autocracy and nostalgia.

Applebaum: Except that it’s—

Rosin: And the other side is what, like, freedom and democracy?

Applebaum: Except that it’s more complicated because there is no—it’s not the Cold War. There’s no geographic line. There’s no Berlin Wall, and good guys are on one side and bad guys are on the other.

These are struggles that are taking place within each democracy and actually within each autocracy. I’m leaving out the fact that there are democrats in Russia and movements in Iran and in China, for example, that have also wanted greater freedom, greater autonomy, rule of law.

A lot of it’s about transparency. You know, We want to know where the money is. How did our leaders become so rich? That’s what the Navalny movement was about, for example, in Russia.

Rosin: Right, right.

Applebaum: And so there is a battle going on between two worldviews, but the divisions aren’t geographical. They’re in people’s heads.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so with Ukraine and this whole propaganda war in mind that you’re describing, what are the stakes for the 2024 election?

Applebaum: I think the stakes for the 2024 election are really stark. Is the United States going to remain allied with other democracies? Is it going to continue on the path of the struggle against kleptocracy, which is finally beginning to gain a little bit of traction? So against money laundering and anonymous companies and so on. Is the United States going to militarily resist Russian incursions in Europe? And this is a package of things. Is the United States going to maintain its alliances with Japan and South Korea and Taiwan?

Or is the United States going to become a transactional power whose friends one day might be Russia, another day might be North Korea, who no longer leads a recognizable democratic alliance, either on the ground in the world or mentally?

I mean, are we still going to be seen as a country that stands for a set of ideas—as well as a country that respects language about human rights and human dignity and so on—or are we going to become a transactional power like so many others?

And that’s one of the questions that’s on the ballot in November.

Rosin: Well, that is very clear. Anne, thank you for helping us put all these pieces together. That was very helpful.

Applebaum: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: To read more of Anne Applebaum’s work, check out her June cover story of The Atlantic, “The New Propaganda War.” And look for her upcoming book, Autocracy, Inc., this summer.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

You may think you know stories like this one, but it’s important not to become numb to their evil and horror. Hersh Goldberg-Polin was attending the Nova music festival on October 7 when the Hamas terrorists descended. He and three others rushed to their car and tried to escape by heading north. But the terrorists were shooting drivers on the road, so Hersh and his friends instead sought refuge in a nearby bomb shelter.

More than 25 young people were crammed into a 5-by-8-foot enclosure. The Hamas fighters, filming themselves with GoPro cameras, began lobbing hand grenades into the shelter. Seven times, Hersh’s friend Aner picked up a grenade and threw it back out before it detonated. The eighth grenade exploded while he was still holding it, killing him.

The terrorists continued to spray the shelter with grenades as well as gunfire. When the attack was over, 18 concertgoers in the shelter were dead, seven were alive but hidden under the pile of bodies, and Hersh and three others were slumped against a wall, exposed.

Hersh was taken at gunpoint to a pickup truck and in one video can be seen hoisting himself onto the truck bed. His left arm had been blown off at the elbow, leaving a stump with a bone protruding from it.

Later that day, his parents learned what had happened. Over the ensuing seven months, Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin have become the most visible faces of the hostage families, relentlessly advocating for the release of all the hostages. If you’ve followed this story at all, you’ve probably seen one of their interviews, or their visits to Congress or the United Nations.

The political and social issues that surround all of this are complex, but as I watched the Goldberg-Polins’ interviews, the questions that preoccupied me were simple: How do two people endure this much agony and still manage to get out of bed in the morning? How are they able to keep up this remorseless schedule when their child has had his forearm blown off and now sits imprisoned by terrorists underground somewhere in a war zone?

[Graeme Wood: A close read of Hamas’s hostage-taking manual]

The resource guides for parents whose children have been abducted in various circumstances are rich with compassion and advice on how to practice self-care: Make sure you eat properly, find time for physical exercise, give yourself some personal space, focus on your emotional well-being, keep a journal. In this paradigm, the parents are the victims, passively trying to cope.

But Hersh’s parents have embraced an entirely different paradigm: They have found that the best way they can endure trauma is through direct action. They will travel anywhere, lobby anyone, talk to anyone who might possibly be able to help them liberate their son. The hostages don’t get a day off, the Goldberg-Polins told me recently when I interviewed them via Zoom, so they don’t get a day off. They have found in the horror an all-consuming sense of purpose, a determination that is striking to behold.

“I have never in my life, nor has Rachel, nor have most people, been on a mission that is so clearly focused on literally life-or-death matters,” Jon said. “And it’s a good thing that most of us don’t have this experience.” He adds that this mission is binary: Their son’s safe return is success; anything else is failure. For them, there is no such thing as a partial victory.

They’ve been at this now for more than half a year. “We both struggle with the challenge of self-care,” Jon said. “My head says to me, You’ll be more successful on the mission if you eat well, if you get your sleep. And I know that to be true, but it’s so hard to do. I tried four or five times over the last 222 days to get some exercise, but when I’m in the middle of it, I think, No, I’ve got to answer three emails and make two phone calls.”

“The only time I feel okay is when I’m working to help save Hersh or the other hostages,” Rachel said. “I’m not feeling good, but I’m feeling like I’m doing what it is that I’m supposed to be doing.”

The Goldberg-Polins have not watched TV or listened to music since October 7. Rachel hasn’t put on makeup or worn her hair down, or done the New York Times crossword puzzle, which she used to do with Hersh. “There can be no normalcy,” she says. “It is not acceptable. And I don’t want to feel good. Feeling good does not feel good. The only time I feel okay is when I feel bad.”

Every day begins with a decision—the decision to get out of bed and run to the ends of the Earth to help the hostages. Each day, the Goldberg-Polins write the number corresponding to the length of Hersh’s captivity on a piece of masking tape and put it on their shirts, over their heart. I spoke with them on day 222. They have a team working with them on their mission to help them free Hersh, but they have found that they have little time for those who just want to offer comfort. A friend asked Rachel if she could come over and give her a hug. “That’s the absolute worst thing you can ask me,” she told me. “I had to say, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do that, because it’s not comfortable for me.’ The only time I’m comfortable is when I’m working.”

Rachel describes experiencing moments of extreme pain, both emotional and physical. Twice, she says, she went to gatherings with large numbers of family members of the hostages and suddenly it was like she was feeling all of their pain at once. “It’s like someone has shot me in the lower back, and I fall to the ground and I’m in agony.”

“I feel like I’m inhaling the trauma of hundreds of people, and my body can’t bear it,” she told me. “It is an absolute physical reality even though I know it’s through a spiritual and emotional portal that it is entering me.”

Social encounters can be hard. Jon says he sees people’s eyes go wide when they see him and his wife, or they start to cry. “I understand it,” Rachel said. “I understand that we are everyone’s worst nightmare and so we are very scary. It’s like we have leprosy. I know that my presence makes people uncomfortable, and that’s a really challenging place to be.”

The worst is when people come up and ask how they are doing. “It feels like I have a meat cleaver sticking out of my chest,” Rachel said. “Please don’t ask me how I am. It feels so inappropriate—and yet I know that it is without malice, so I need to be more compassionate.” Jon consulted a rabbi who reminded him that they are enduring an experience so rare that nobody knows what to do or say. Much of what people tell them is inappropriate, but they don’t mean harm.

[Listen: ‘Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.’]

Nonetheless, the Goldberg-Polins have been fortified by the thousands of people who have contacted them. “It’s amazing, the strengthening power of hearing from strangers every day who reach out from every country of the world, Rachel said. “They often mention their religion—‘I’m Catholic’ or ‘I’m Hindu.’ To get that from people every day is both strengthening and it’s a responsibility.”

A childhood friend whom Rachel had not seen in 40 years and who now has breast cancer reached out. She reminded Rachel that in the Book of Job, things begin to turn around for Job when he begins to pray for others, rather than just agonizing about his own fate. So she asked Rachel to pray for her in her cancer battle, and they have become prayer partners. Being involved in a mutual relationship in which succor is exchanged has turned out to be easier than just being on the receiving end of someone else’s pity. This is an elemental reminder of one of the crucial laws of effective compassion: Don’t do things for people; do things with people.

On day 201, Hamas released a video showing that Hersh is still alive. He looked pale and worn, his left arm ending in a nub in the middle of the forearm. In the video, which was obviously directed by Hamas, he condemned the Netanyahu government, and expressed love for his parents and sisters. Jon and Rachel were overwhelmed to see him for the first time in more than 200 days. They listened to his voice, not the words he was compelled to utter, and they heard his toughness and conviction. As parents, they also noticed things that might have been invisible to the rest of us—for instance, the possibility that he might be under the influence of mind-altering drugs.

“People have a hard time swallowing it when we say we feel blessed,” Rachel said. “We say to each other in bed at night, ‘It’s shocking how you can have such trauma and unity at the same time.’ We have had so much benevolence and grace showered on us. It is truly grace. This undeserved generosity of spirit, of kindness and thoughtfulness, gives us a lot of strength.”

Hersh is a big soccer fan, and his favorite Israeli team has a sister team in Bremen, Germany. Hersh had visited fans in Bremen three or four times in the six months before he was kidnapped. During games now, fans display giant signs supporting Hersh, and Rachel recorded a video expressing her gratitude to them..

Hersh was named after his great-uncle Herschel, who was killed in the Holocaust. “It gives me hope to think that 80 years from now, Israeli and Palestinian children will be at a soccer stadium together enjoying a game,” Rachel said. “Right now, that’s unthinkable—but in 1943, the idea that Germans would be honoring a Jewish hostage would also have been unthinkable.”

When I logged on to Zoom to talk to Jon and Rachel, I had expected to feel pity and compassion. And, yes, those emotions were there. But I was also struck by the strength and determination that emanate from them. The way the Goldberg-Polins have handled their situation reminds me that while we don’t always get to control what happens, we do get to control our response. They demonstrate that it’s possible to retain an inner strength and a firm rebuttal to dark forces, even in the face of life’s worst.

Charlie Kirk is worked up. “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” the conservative influencer said during a recent episode of his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show. “But it can’t and won’t ruin my day,” he continued. “Why? ’Cause I start my day with a hot America First cup of Blackout Coffee.” Liberals have brought about economic Armageddon, but first, coffee.

Listening to Kirk’s show—which is among the most popular podcasts on the right—can be unsettling, even if you are a conservative. In the past year, the founder of Turning Point USA has uploaded episodes with titles such as “The Great Replacement Isn’t Theory, It’s Reality” and “The Doctors Plotting to Mutilate Your Kids.” He has also conducted friendly interviews with a blogger who once described slavery as “a natural human relationship,” and discussed crime stats with the white supremacist Steve Sailer in a way that veered toward race science. (Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Kirk, declined to comment for this story.)

But the advertisements Kirk reads are sometimes more dire and polemical than what he and his guests talk about during the show. “Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits. These ads espouse conservative values and talking points, mostly in service of promoting brands such as Blackout Coffee, which sells a “2nd Amendment” medium-roast blend and “Covert Op Cold Brew.” The commercial breaks sounded like something from an alternate universe. The more I listened to them, the more I came to understand that that was the point.

Some brands, of course, speak the language of Democrats, touting their climate commitments and diversity efforts. But when I listened to left-of-center podcasts, including Pod Save America, Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast, and MSNBC’s Prosecuting Donald Trump, I mostly heard ads from an assortment of nonpartisan brands such as Ford, Jefferson’s Ocean Aged at Sea Bourbon, eHarmony, and SimpliSafe. The closest equivalent I found was Cariuma, a sustainable shoe brand that sponsors Pod Save America.

The right, meanwhile, has long hawked products that you don’t typically see advertised on mainstream outlets and shows. In 2007, the historian Rick Perlstein chronicled a far-fetched investment opportunity involving stem cells and placentas advertised on the far-right website Newsmax. Supplements and gold have become part of conservative-advertising canon, as the writer Sam Kriss summed up in his recent essay on the ads that appear in National Review’s print magazine: “The same apocalyptic note [ran] through all these ads. The hospitals will shut down, the planet will freeze over, you personally are getting old and dying—and now your money might be worthless if you haven’t put it all in gold.”

Some of Kirk’s ads hit the same beats. At times, they sound a little jarring: “You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply.com. Yet as the world of right-wing-coded products has expanded, so has the weirdness of ads for them. “For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America’s only Christian-conservative wireless provider,” started another ad. Switching to Patriot Mobile, Kirk explained, would mean that “you’re sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, our military veterans and first-responder heroes” while getting “the same coverage you’ve been accustomed to without funding the left.” How? By renting access to “all three major networks” via a business deal with T-Mobile, a company that has positioned itself as at least nominally left of center on some issues.

If listeners are feeling charitable, Kirk has options for them too. “Hey, everybody, exciting news. Very, very important. Uh, we are saving babies with PreBorn,” Kirk opened up a dollar-matching promo for a group raising money for ultrasounds, apparently having managed to quantify the precise dollar amount it would take to stop a woman from having an abortion. “For a one-time, $15,000 gift, you’ll provide not just one ultrasound machine, but two, saving thousands of babies for years to come; $280 saves 10 babies; $28 a month saves a baby a month, for less than a dollar a day.”

Conservative podcasts have become mega popular in recent years, and are some of the most trusted sources of news on the right: Kirk’s show ranks as the 12th-most-popular “news” podcast on Spotify right now. The show is also syndicated on radio stations across the country and posted on YouTube, where Kirk has 1.7 million subscribers. And although conservative influencers including Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, and Jack Posobiec also promote gold or supplements (or both) on their own shows, Kirk’s ads were the most varied of the conservative-podcast ads I listened to. Some conservatives, however, want no part of these kinds of ads. Earlier this month, the right-wing YouTuber Steven Crowder made fun of his contemporaries for hawking “shitty supplements.” Most of it is “selling you crap you don’t need from people who don’t care about you!” Crowder yelled at the end of a four-minute rant on the matter.

The ads reflect the new paradigm of advertising. In previous decades, ads had to appeal to whole segments of the population—and products were made with that in mind. That some readers of Vanity Fair might want a Givenchy handbag, and some readers of Sports Illustrated might want Callaway golf clubs, was as targeted as ads could get. Now the country has fractured into partisan subgroups, and companies have access to reams of analytics that enable them to target ever more precise demographics. Through shows like Kirk’s, brands such as Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile can reach their relatively niche audiences more easily than ever. (Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But something else is happening too. Kirk and the rest of the conservative-podcast ecosystem aren’t just selling wares. The ads, with some exceptions, are not like ads for beer or pickup trucks that detract from the action while one watches, say, a football game. Rather, conservative ads are constitutive. They enhance and reinforce the arguments that Kirk and others are already making on their podcasts—that Black people are prone to crime, whiteness is getting excised, abortion is murder, and the United States is unstable and on the verge of collapse. The commercial breaks are the final screws needed to construct a self-contained conservative chamber. Kirk has ensconced himself in a world in which he’ll likely never face external pressures to self-moderate in the way that, say, Rush Limbaugh occasionally did when he went too far beyond the tastes of mainstream advertisers.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t read this if you were a Rush Limbaugh fan]

When you’re listening to Kirk talk about Blackout Coffee, you can also look down and see the steam coming off your own cup of Blackout Coffee, and relax while its caffeine helps you “be awake not woke.” You can open a new browser tab and check in on your portfolio, whose wealth managers are endorsed by Kirk, and then look at the price of gold and think about your own supply procured from a company that Kirk himself vetted “from top to bottom.” You can even stop listening to Kirk, go out to your backyard, and make a call, knowing that you’re doing so as a freedom-loving conservative with your Patriot Mobile phone plan.

On The Charlie Kirk Show, there is no longer a gap between the real world and what is playing inside listeners’ headphones. Kirk’s fans can make fewer and fewer compromises on their views and burrow themselves more deeply in the womb of reactionary politics. And with the coupon code “Charlie,” listeners can get a discount to buy something else that will allow them to further immerse themselves inside of it.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

As I watch my friends grow older and enter new phases of life, I’ve noticed a common thread: Year after year, many of us happen upon questions we wish we’d asked the loved ones who are no longer with us. Some of these questions are capacious: What kind of friend were they in their youth? Others focus on the everyday: What was the one song they couldn’t live without? And what, exactly, was that famous chocolate-cake recipe?

It’s not realistic, of course, to ask every single question while we can. But sometimes our loved ones need a nudge to share a bit more than they might’ve otherwise: “You may be surprised by how much your parents and grandparents haven’t told you, perhaps because they thought you wouldn’t be interested, or they weren’t sure how you’d judge them,” Elizabeth Keating wrote in 2022. Opening that door can lead to insight you never knew existed.

On Oral History

The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families but Should

By Elizabeth Keating

Many people don’t know very much about their older relatives. But if we don’t ask, we risk never knowing our own history.

Read the article.

The Underestimated Reliability of Oral Histories

By Stephen E. Nash and Sapiens

Not only written narratives have stood the test of time.

Read the article.

What Ordinary Family Photos Teach Us About Ourselves

By Syreeta McFadden

A new book honors unsung figures who have for generations captured the most delicate moments of Black life. (From 2023)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Learn your family’s history: Ordinary photos and stories can connect you with your roots, Kate Cray wrote in 2023. What kids learn from hearing family stories: Reading to children has education benefits, of course—but so does sharing tales from the past, Elaine Reese wrote in 2013.

Other Diversions

The strange ritual of commencement speeches Six books that explore what’s out there The godfather of American comedy

P.S.

Courtesy of Antoine A.

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Antoine A., 28, from Versailles, France, sent a photo of Solalex, “a small hamlet in Switzerland, at the foot of the Diablerets mountains.”

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— Isabel

Photographs by Olivia Joan Galli

Last fall, on an overcast Sunday morning, I took a train from New York to Montclair, New Jersey, to see Auntie, my mother’s older sister. Auntie is our family archivist, the woman we turn to when we want to understand where we came from. She’s taken to genealogy, tending our family tree, keeping up with distant cousins I’ve never met. But she has also spent the past decade unearthing a different sort of history, a kind that many Black families like mine leave buried, or never discover at all. It was this history I’d come to talk with her about.

Auntie picked me up at the train station and drove me to her house. When she unlocked the door, I felt like I was walking into my childhood. Everything in her home seemed exactly as it had been when I spent Christmases there with my grandmother—the burgundy carpets; the piano that Auntie plays masterfully; the dining-room table where we all used to sit, talk, and eat. That day, Auntie had prepared us a lunch to share: tender pieces of beef, sweet potatoes, kale, and the baked rice my grandma Victoria used to make.

When Auntie went to the kitchen to gather the food, I scanned the table. At the center was a map of Mississippi, unfurled, the top weighted down with an apple-shaped trivet. Auntie told me that the map had belonged to Victoria. She had kept it in her bedroom, mounted above the wood paneling that lined her room in Princeton, New Jersey, where she and my grandfather raised my mother, Auntie, and my two uncles. I’d never noticed my grandmother’s map, but a framed outline of Mississippi now hangs from a wall in my own bedroom, the major cities marked with blooming magnolias, the state flower. My grandmother had left markings on her map—X’s over Meridian, Vicksburg, and Jackson, and a shaded dot over a town in Hinds County, between Jackson and Vicksburg, called Edwards.

I wondered whether the X’s indicated havens or sites of tragedy. As for Edwards, I knew the dot represented the start of Auntie’s story. Following an act of brutality in 1888, my ancestors began the process of uprooting themselves from the town, ushering themselves into a defining era of Black life in America: the Great Migration.

I first learned about the lynching of Bob Broome in 2015, when Auntie emailed my mother a PDF of news clippings describing the events leading up to his murder. She’d come across the clippings on Ancestry.com, on the profile page of a distant family member. Bob was Victoria’s great-uncle. “Another piece of family history from Mississippi we never knew about,” Auntie wrote. “I’M SURE there is more to this story.”

I knew that her discovery was important, but I didn’t feel capable then of trying to make sense of what it meant to me. As I embarked on a career telling other people’s stories, however, I eventually realized that the lynching was a hole in my own, something I needed to investigate if I was to understand who I am and where I came from. A few years ago, I began reading every newspaper account of Bob Broome’s life and death that Auntie and I could find. I learned more about him and about the aftermath of his killing. But in the maddeningly threadbare historical record, I also found accounts and sources that contradicted one another.

Bob Broome was 19 or 20 when he was killed. On August 12, 1888, a Sunday, he walked to church with a group of several “colored girls,” according to multiple accounts, as he probably did every week. All versions of the story agree that on this walk, Bob and his company came across a white man escorting a woman to church. Back then in Mississippi, the proper thing for a Black man to do in that situation would have been to yield the sidewalk and walk in the street. But my uncle decided not to.

A report out of nearby Jackson alleges that Bob pushed the white man, E. B. Robertson, who responded with a promise that Bob “would see him again.” According to the Sacramento Daily Union (the story was syndicated across the country), my uncle’s group pushed the woman in a rude manner and told Robertson they would “get him.” After church, Robertson was with three or four friends, explaining the sidewalk interaction, when “six negroes” rushed them.

All of these stories appeared in the white press. According to these accounts, Bob and his companions, including his brother Ike, my great-great-grandfather, approached Robertson’s group outside a store. The papers say my uncle Bob and a man named Curtis Shortney opened fire. One of the white men, Dr. L. W. Holliday, was shot in the head and ultimately died; two other white men were injured. Several newspaper stories claim my uncle shot Holliday, with a couple calling him the “ring leader.” It is unclear exactly whom reporters interviewed for these articles, but if the reporting went as it usually did for lynchings, these were white journalists talking to white sources. Every article claims that the white men were either unarmed or had weapons but never fired them.

Bob, his brother Ike, and a third Black man were arrested that day; their companions, including Shortney, fled the scene. While Bob was being held in a jail in nearby Utica, a mob of hundreds of white men entered and abducted him. Bob, “before being hanged, vehemently protested his innocence,” The New York Times reported. But just a few beats later, the Times all but calls my uncle a liar, insisting that his proclamation was “known to be a contradiction on its face.” Members of the mob threw a rope over an oak-tree branch at the local cemetery and hauled my ancestor upward, hanging him until he choked to death. A lynch mob killed Shortney a month later.

[From the May 2022 issue: Burying a burning]

In the white press, these lynchings are described as ordinary facts of life, the stories sandwiched between reports about Treasury bonds and an upcoming eclipse. The Times article about Bob noted that days after his lynching, all was quiet again in Utica, “as if nothing had occurred.” The headlines from across the country focus on the allegations against my uncle, treating his extralegal murder simply as a matter of course. The Boston Globe’s headline read “Fired on the White Men” and, a few lines later, “A Negro Insults a White Man and His Lady Companion.” The subtitle of The Daily Commercial Herald, a white newspaper in nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi, read: “Murderous and Insolent Negro Hanged by Indignant Citizens of Utica.”

The summary executions of Bob Broome and Curtis Shortney had the convenient effect of leaving these stories in white-owned newspapers largely unexamined and unchallenged in the public record. But the Black press was incredulous. In the pages of The Richmond Planet, a Black newspaper in Virginia’s capital, Auntie had found a column dismissing the widespread characterization of Bob as a menace. This report was skeptical of the white newspapers’ coverage, arguing that it was more likely that the white men had attacked the Black group, who shot back. “Of course it is claimed that the attack was sudden and no resistance was made by the whites,” the article reads.

The author and her aunt at her aunt’s home in New Jersey (Olivia Joan Galli for The Atlantic)

The newspapers we found don’t say much more about the lynching, but Auntie did find one additional account of Bob Broome’s final moments—and about what happened to my great-great-grandfather Ike. A few days after the lynching, a reader wrote to the editor of The Daily Commercial Herald claiming to have been a witness to key events. “Knowing you always want to give your readers the correct views on all subjects,” the letter opens, the witness offers to provide more of “the particulars” of my uncle’s lynching. According to the letter writer, when the lynch mob arrived the morning after the shooting, the white deputy sheriff, John Broome, assisted by two white men, E. H. Broome and D. T. Yates, told the crowd that they could not take the prisoners away until the case was investigated. Bob, Ike, and the third Black man were moved to the mayor’s office in the meantime. But more men from neighboring counties joined the mob and showed up at the mayor’s office, where they “badly hurt” Deputy Sheriff Broome with the butt of a gun. The white men seized Bob and hanged him, while Ike and the other Black man were relocated to another jail. The witness’s account said the white Broomes “did all that was in the power of man to do to save the lives of the prisoners.”

I don’t know whether or how these white Broomes were related to each other or to the Black Broomes, but unspoken kinship between the formerly enslaved and their white enslavers was the rule, rather than the exception, in places like Edwards. I believe that whoever wrote to the paper’s editor wanted to document all those Broome surnames across the color line, maybe to explain Ike’s survival as a magnanimous gesture, even a family favor. If the witness is to be believed, the intervention of these white Broomes is the only reason my branch of the family tree ever grew. As Auntie put it to me, “We almost didn’t make it into the world.”

Each time I pick up my research, the newspaper coverage reads differently to me. Did my uncle really unload a .38-caliber British bulldog pistol in broad daylight, as one paper had it, or do such details merit only greater skepticism? We know too much about Mississippi to trust indiscriminately the accounts in the white press. Perhaps the story offered in The Richmond Planet is the most likely: He was set upon by attackers and fired back in self-defense. But I also think about the possibility that his story unfolded more or less the way it appears in the white newspapers. Maybe my uncle Bob had had enough of being forced into second-class citizenship, and he reacted with all the rage he could muster. From the moment he refused to step off the sidewalk, he must have known that his young life could soon end—Black folk had been lynched for less. He might have sat through the church service planning his revenge for a lifetime of humiliation, calculating how quickly he could retrieve his gun.

In the Black press, Bob’s willingness to defend himself was seen as righteous. The Richmond Planet described him in heroic terms. “It is this kind of dealing with southern Bourbons that will bring about a change,” the unnamed author wrote. “We must have martyrs and we place the name of the fearless Broom [sic] on that list.” Bob’s actions were viewed as necessary self-protection in a regime of targeted violence: “May our people awaken to the necessity of protecting themselves when the law fails to protect them.” My mother has become particularly interested in reclaiming her ancestor as a martyr—someone who, in her words, took a stand. Martyrdom would mean that he put his life on the line for something greater than himself—that his death inspired others to defend themselves.

[From the September 2021 issue: His name was Emmett Till]

In 1892, four years after my uncle’s murder, Ida B. Wells published the pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in which she wrote that “the more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.” In that pamphlet, an oft-repeated quote of hers first appeared in print: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” After the Civil War, southern states had passed laws banning Black gun ownership. For Wells, the gun wasn’t just a means of self-defense against individual acts of violence, but a collective symbol that we were taking our destiny into our own hands.

The gun never lost its place of honor in our family. My great-grandmother DeElla was known in the family as a good shot. “She always had a gun—she had a rifle at the farm,” my mother told me. “And she could use that rifle and kill a squirrel some yards away. We know that must have come from Mississippi time.” My mother’s eldest brother, also named Bob, laughed as he told me about DeElla’s security measures. “I always remember her alarm system, which was all the empty cans that she had, inside the door,” he told me. “I always thought if someone had been foolish enough to break into her house, the last thing he would have remembered in life was a bunch of clanging metal and then a bright flash about three feet in front of his face.”

The lynching more than a decade before her birth shaped DeElla and her vigilance. But as the years passed, and our direct connection to Mississippi dwindled, so did the necessity of the gun. For us, migration was a new kind of self-protection. It required us to leave behind the familiar in order to forge lives as free from the fetter of white supremacy as possible. My northbound family endeavored to protect themselves in new ways, hoping to use education, homeownership, and educational attainment as a shield.

After we studied my grandmother’s map of Mississippi, Auntie brought out another artifact: a collection of typewritten pages titled “Till Death Do Us Join.” It’s a document my grandmother composed to memorialize our family’s Mississippi history sometime after her mother died, in 1978. I imagine that she sat and poured her heart out on the typewriter she kept next to a window just outside her bedroom.

According to “Till Death Do Us Join,” my family remained in Edwards for another generation after Bob Broome’s death. Ike Broome stayed near the place where he’d almost been killed, and where his brother’s murderers walked around freely. Raising a family in a place where their lives were so plainly not worth much must have been terrifying, but this was far from a unique terror. Across the South, many Black people facing racial violence lacked the capital to escape, or faced further retribution for trying to leave the plantations where they labored. Every available option carried the risk of disaster.

[The Experiment Podcast: Ko Bragg on fighting to remember Mississippi burning]

A little more than a decade after his brother was murdered, Ike Broome had a daughter—DeElla. She grew up on a farm in Edwards near that of Charles Toms, a man who’d been born to an enslaved Black woman and a white man. As the story goes, DeElla was promised to Charles’s son Walter, after fetching the Toms family a pail of water. Charles’s white father had provided for his education—though not as generously as he did for Charles’s Harvard-educated white half brothers—and he taught math in and served as principal of a one-room schoolhouse in town.

A newspaper clipping from 1888 that
mentions Bob Broome’s killing (The Boston Globe)

Charles left his teaching job around 1913, as one of his sons later recalled, to go work as a statistician for the federal government in Washington, D.C. He may have made the trek before the rest of the family because he was light enough to pass for white—and white people often assumed he was. He was demoted when his employer found out he was Black.

Still, Charles’s sons, Walter and his namesake, Charles Jr., followed him to Washington. But leaving Mississippi behind was a drawn-out process. “Edwards was still home and D.C. their place of business,” my grandmother wrote. The women of the family remained at home in Edwards. World War I sent the men even farther away, as the Toms brothers both joined segregated units, and had the relatively rare distinction, as Black soldiers, of seeing combat in Europe. When the men finally came back to the States, both wounded in action according to “Till Death Do Us Join,” DeElla made her way from Mississippi to Washington to start a life with Walter, her husband.

Grandma Victoria’s letter says that DeElla and Walter raised her and four other children, the first generation of our family born outside the Deep South, in a growing community of Edwards transplants. Her grandfather Charles Sr. anchored the family in the historic Black community of Shaw, where Duke Ellington learned rag and Charles Jr. would build a life with Florence Letcher Toms, a founding member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Occasionally, aunts would come up to visit, sleeping in their car along the route because they had nowhere else to stay. The people mostly flowed in one direction: Victoria’s parents took her to Mississippi only two times. According to my mother, Victoria recalled seeing her own father, whom she regarded as the greatest man in the world, shrink as they drove farther and farther into the Jim Crow South.

Later, after receiving her undergraduate degree from Howard University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Victoria joined the faculty at Tennessee State University, a historically Black institution in Nashville. During her time there, efforts to desegregate city schools began a years-long crisis marked by white-supremacist violence. Between her own experiences and the stories passed down to her from her Mississippi-born parents, Victoria knew enough about the brutality of the South to want to spare her own children from it. As a grown woman, she had a firm mantra: “Don’t ever go below the Mason-Dixon Line.” Her warning applied to the entire “hostile South,” as she called it, though she made exceptions for Maryland and D.C. And it was especially true for Mississippi.

Keeping this distance meant severing the remaining ties between my grandmother and her people, but it was a price she seemed willing to pay. My mother recalls that when she was in college, one of her professors thought that reestablishing a connection to Mississippi might be an interesting assignment for her. She wrote letters to relatives in Edwards whom she’d found while paging through my grandmother’s address book. But Victoria intercepted the responses; she relayed that the relatives were happy to hear from my mom, but that there would be no Mississippi visit. “It was almost like that curtain, that veil, was down,” Mom told me. “It just wasn’t the time.”

Yet, reading “Till Death Do Us Join,” I realized that maintaining that curtain may have hurt my grandmother more than she’d ever let on. She seemed sad that she only saw her road-tripping aunts on special occasions. “Our daily lives did not overlap,” my grandmother wrote. “Sickness or funeral became occasions for contacting the family. Death had its hold upon the living. Why could we not have reached into their daily happiness.”

I sense that she valued this closeness, and longed for more of it, for a Mississippi that would have let us all remain. But once Victoria had decided that the North was her home, she worked hard to make it so. While teaching at Tennessee State, my grandmother had met and married a fellow professor named Robert Ellis. He was a plasma physicist, and they decided to raise their four children in New Jersey, where my grandfather’s career had taken him. My grandparents instilled in their children, who instilled it in my cousins and me, that you go where you need to go for schooling, career opportunities, partnership—even if that means you’re far from home.

My grandfather was one of the preeminent physicists of his generation, joining the top-secret Cold War program to harness the power of nuclear fusion, and then running the experimental projects of its successor program, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, after declassification. His work has become part of our family lore as well. My mother has her own mantra: “Same moon, same stars.” It appears on all of the handwritten cards she sends to family and friends; I have it tattooed on my right arm. It signifies that no matter how far apart we are, we look up at the same night sky, and our lives are governed by the same universal constants. The laws of physics—of gravity, inertia, momentum, action, and reaction—apply to us all.

In 2011, when I was 17, Victoria died. She’d suffered from Alzheimer’s, which meant that many things she knew about Mississippi were forgotten twice: once by the world, and then in her mind. Auntie and I shared our regrets about missing the opportunity to ask our grandmothers about their lives, their stories, their perspective on Mississippi.

But Victoria’s prohibition on traveling south also passed on with her. The year Victoria died, my mother took a job in Philadelphia, Mississippi, as one of two pediatricians in the county. Two summers later, she started dating the man who became my stepfather, Obbie Riley, who’d been born there before a career in the Coast Guard took him all over the country.

Mom and I had moved quite a few times throughout my childhood, but this relocation felt different. I was surprised by how quickly Mississippi felt like home. Yet the longer we stayed, and the more I fell in love with the place, the more resentment I felt. I envied the Mississippians who’d been born and raised there, who had parents and grandparents who’d been raised there. I’d always longed to be from a place in that way.

My stepfather has that. With a rifle in his white pickup truck, he spends his Sundays making the rounds, checking in on friends and relatives. He’ll crisscross the county for hours, slurping a stew in one house, slicing pie in another, sitting porchside with generations of loved ones.

This is what we missed out on, Auntie told me in her dining room. If our family hadn’t scattered, we would better know our elders. To keep all my ancestors straight, I refer to a handwritten family tree that my grandmother left behind; I took a picture of it when I was at Auntie’s house. Every time I zoom in and scan a different branch, I’m embarrassed by how little I know. “The distance pushed people apart,” Auntie said. “I think there is some strength from knowing your people, some security.”

[Read: They called her ‘Black Jet’]

The traditional historical understanding of the Great Migration emphasizes the “pull” of economic opportunity in the North and West for Black people, especially during the industrial mobilizations of the two world wars. Certainly such pulls acted on my family, too: The lure of better jobs elsewhere, as my grandmother put it, gave Ike Broome’s son-in-law the chance to make a life for himself and his family in Washington. But this understanding fails to explain the yearning that we still have for Mississippi, and the ambivalence my grandmother had about shunning the South.

Mississippi had its own pull, even as violence of the kind visited on Bob Broome made life there grim for Black families. A 1992 study by Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck indicated that a main predictor of migration by Black people from southern counties before 1930 was the cumulative number of lynchings in those counties. The collective memory of those lynchings was a force that compounded over time. Hope and despair commingled for my family, as it did for so many others. As the physicists in my family might describe it, these forces worked in tandem to push my ancestors north, and tear them from the South.

Only after I learned the details of Bob’s death did I feel that I truly comprehended my family’s path. In returning to Mississippi, my mother and I were part of a new movement of Black Americans, one in which hundreds of thousands of people are now returning to the states where they’d once been enslaved. I think of this “Reverse Great Migration” as a continuation of the original one, a reaction, a system finally finding equilibrium. I feel like we moved home to Mississippi to even the score for the tragedy of the lynching in 1888, and for all that my family lost in our wanderings after that. We returned to the land where DeElla Broome hurried between farmhouses fetching water, where Charles Toms ran the schoolhouse.

It took well over a century for my family to excavate what happened in Edwards, buried under generations of silence. Now we possess an uncommon consolation. Even our partial, imperfect knowledge of our Mississippi history—gleaned from my grandmother’s writing and from newspaper coverage, however ambiguous it may be—is more documentation than many Black Americans have about their ancestors.

[From the November 2017 issue: The building of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice]

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates lynching victims; it is the nation’s only site dedicated specifically to reckoning with lynching as racial terror. Bob Broome is one of more than 4,000 people memorialized there. I’ve visited the memorial, and the steel marker dedicated to those who were lynched in Hinds County, Mississippi—22 reported deaths, standing in for untold others that were not documented. Although those beautiful steel slabs do more for memory than they do for repair, at least we know. With that knowledge, we move forward, with Mississippi as ours again.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The History My Family Left Behind.”

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It’s common, in criminal court, for a defendant’s friends and family to join them in the courtroom as a show of love and support. That’s not exactly what’s happening in Manhattan this week. More, after these three stories from The Atlantic:

Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves. The art of survival The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable.

Trump’s Courtroom Groupies

Donald Trump’s hush-money trial was already strange enough. A former president and a porn star walk into a Manhattan courtroom. But an additional cast of characters have recently inserted themselves into the drama. During this week’s testimony from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, Republican politicians of many different ranks donned their courtroom best and headed downtown to put on a show for the boss. Although these particular charges could be the weakest of the many indictments Trump faces, one got the sense that none of his party allies was there to discuss the finer points of the law.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who quite famously opposes pornography on religious grounds, nevertheless accompanied the man accused of cheating on his wife with a porn star to his trial yesterday. Outside the building, Johnson told reporters that the case is a “sham” and a “ridiculous prosecution.” At Monday’s session, Senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and J. D. Vance of Ohio apparently adopted the roles of Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot for the event, each offering running commentary on the “dingy” courtroom, with its “depressing” vibes; the disturbing number of mask-wearing attendees; and the “psychological torture” being inflicted on Trump (who, as a reminder, has been charged with 34 felonies in this case alone).

The former presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum took turns bemoaning the state of the justice system. Even a few bit players wanted in on the action, including pro-Trump Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, who flew all the way from Des Moines to stand before the news cameras and remind viewers that “politics has no place in a criminal prosecution.”

You might be wondering: Don’t these people have anything better to do? The answer is that, in today’s Republican Party, prostration before Trump is as much part of the job as anything else.

All of this showboating has been happening for several reasons. “At its most tangible level, what we’re seeing is a work-around to the gag order,” Sarah Isgur, a former senior spokesperson for the Trump-era Justice Department, told me. The ex-president was warned by the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, that if he talks or posts any more about the jury or the judge’s family, he could face jail time. So, just as in a political campaign, Trump’s surrogates are stepping up to stump for him.

Legally, Trump can’t ask these politicians to violate the order on his behalf. But why would he have to ask when they know exactly what he wants from them? “The playbook that Trump expects party members in good standing to follow is in public,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer and now an editor at Protect Democracy, told me. Trump’s given these acolytes their cues with his posts on Truth Social, and they’re dutifully following them.

Lower Manhattan has, over the past week, become a pilgrimage site for those vying to be in Trump’s inner circle, with a court appearance carrying the promise of a holy anointing. You could also think about this courtside display as another audition in the early veepstakes. For Ramaswamy, Burgum, and Vance, in particular, this moment is a chance to demonstrate their abiding loyalty to Trump in the hopes of being selected as his running mate. Others may have reasoned that a little time in front of the cameras yelling “Sham trial!” will go a long way toward snagging a plum Cabinet position in a second Trump administration. (A virtual unknown such as Bird, of course, probably doesn’t expect to get either of these things. But, as every climber knows, one must never miss an opportunity to ingratiate oneself with the boss.)

Which brings us to one final observation. “There’s a larger, more philosophical reason they’re all there,” Isgur said. “That’s what the Republican Party stands for now.” There is no real platform, no consistent set of principles. There is only Trump, and degrees of loyalty to him. These courtroom groupies are simply responding to the obvious incentives—“If you didn’t know that the Republican Party is now focused on Trump,” Isgur said, “I’ve got an oceanfront property to sell you in Arizona.”

That’s their deal, but what about the boss’s? Trump no longer appears concerned only with shielding himself from political accountability. Now that he has almost clinched the nomination, he’s using the party to shield himself from criminal accountability, too. This has given the GOP a new rallying cry. “The Big Lie in 2020 was that the election was stolen,” Carpenter said. “The Big Lie 2.0 is that justice has been weaponized against him to deprive him of the presidency.”

Related:

Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial What Donald Trump fears most

Today’s News

Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, was shot several times in an assassination attempt. He has been hospitalized and is undergoing surgery. President Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to two presidential debates. The first one will be hosted by CNN on June 27, and the second will take place on September 10, broadcast by ABC. A barge slammed into the Pelican Island Causeway in Galveston, Texas, causing a partial collapse and spilling oil in the bay below.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: This week, Google and OpenAI announced competing visions for the future of generative AI, Matteo Wong writes.

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Evening Read

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Alamy.

The New Workplace Power Symbols

By Michael Waters

If you walked into an office building during the second half of the 20th century, you could probably figure out who had power with a single glance: Just look for the person in the corner office. The corner offices of yore were big, with large windows offering city views and constant streams of light, plus unbeatable levels of privacy. Everyone wanted them, but only those at the top got them. Land in one, and you’d know you’d made it.

Fast-forward to today, and that emblem of corporate success is dying off. The number of private offices along the side of a building, a category that includes those in the corner, has shrunk by about half since 2021, according to the real-estate company CBRE. But today’s workplace transformation goes beyond the corner.

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P.S.

For the past few months, it wasn’t exactly clear whether President Biden and Trump would meet on the debate stage before November. (Some, including The Atlantic’s David Frum, argued that they shouldn’t.) Well, folks, it looks like they’re doing it. The two presidential contenders agreed today to participate in two debates. The agreed-upon rules stipulate that neither event will have a studio audience—a welcome development for viewers who would rather watch a political debate than an episode of Jerry Springer.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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