Brutal weather forces schools to close in several cities and raises the risk of heatstroke for people working outdoors.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Malcolm Ferguson, an assistant editor who has written about the case for Kwanzaa, and why he wishes his family would take up the holiday again.

One of Malcolm’s favorite art pieces is Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence, an exceptional example of the artist’s “dynamic cubism.” Lately, he and his friends have been discussing the merits of Challengers, and he recently started his first watch of Sex and the City. The Carrie-and-Big situation remains as confounding as ever, but he’s enjoyed learning about “the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women”—a perspective he admits knowing “very little about.”

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Inside the decision to kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani Mad Max’s George Miller is taking on the apocalypse (again). The big AI risk not enough people are seeing

The Culture Survey: Malcolm Ferguson

A painting that I cherish: Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence. Like most people, I was more familiar with Lawrence’s famous Migration Series, a much more raw, somber collection depicting mass African American flight from the South to the North. But Pool Parlor takes the same grim artistic elements—the dark shading, the rigidity, the aggressive and overstated angles of Lawrence’s “dynamic cubism”—and converts them into an easy, effortless work. I’ll probably hang this painting on my wall someday soon.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I can’t bring myself to say that I’m fully enjoying this show, but Sex and the City currently has a surprisingly firm hold on me. As with The Sopranos, I initially felt that I’d already consumed much of the series passively, via memes and pop-culture references. But from the very beginning, it was obvious why Sex and the City has maintained such relevance, especially among Gen Zers such as myself. It’s like if a soap opera was actually cool and well produced. I’m currently at the start of Season 5, and I’ve noticed that the ensemble cast develops well; I appreciate that the focus slowly shifts away from Carrie as the seasons progress. (Speaking of, Big and Carrie are about as insufferable together as a main pairing could be. Why are they still friends?)

Samantha’s and Charlotte’s converse storylines—Samantha giving in to love, Charlotte (temporarily) reclaiming her singlehood—are much more compelling to me right now. And the wardrobe is unreal: great fits all around. But more than anything, the show is an interesting study of the pre-smartphone romantic landscape, the pre-smartphone version of New York City, and the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women—a perspective I know very little about. [Related: And Just Like That addresses its Che Diaz problem.]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Although Reddit still has its fair share of dark and scary corners, I find that the sports Subreddits are a quick, accurate, and entertaining way to check the temperature of the most painfully obsessive and devout fans. The NBA Playoffs are happening right now, and a team’s Subreddit will have a live “game thread” for each game, where fans can gather and comment in real time. When a team I’m rooting against starts to collapse, I go straight to the Subreddit game thread to hate-watch fans’ lamentations from afar. It’s truly fun to witness internet communities of spoiled Lakers, Suns, and Heat fans go through the five stages of grief, especially when my team is too horrendous to even stress over. (Go Wizards.) I’ll be doing the same for the NFL when the Ravens start playing.

The culture product my friends are talking about most right now: My friends shifted seamlessly from the Drake-and-Kendrick-beef discussion (Kendrick won) to the Challengers discussion. Everyone wants two boyfriends now … I thought that movie was about tennis! [Related: A sexy tennis thriller—yes, really]

The last debate I had about culture: I wouldn’t call it a debate, but my roommate and I have been discussing how collective memory functions among historically persecuted groups, and it came up again at her Seder meal. She’s Jewish, and I’m African American, so there are plenty of catastrophic events and experiences between us to be memorialized and remembered each year. But what is the line between remembrance and self-victimization or self-othering? Does centering a history of pain and loss obscure the achievements? And what will we tell the generations that come after us, who are even further distanced from that suffering?

I might be thinking about this forever. But right now, to me, the pain will always be important to remember and teach. We wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t be here—without the scars of others. They inform us and our gains whether we like it or not. And although those scars fade, they never really disappear; they can often be reopened. To decenter them just doesn’t feel right.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I visited the National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City, last month. It was startlingly beautiful inside and out, and there was a real emphasis on the traces of precolonial Mesoamerica in modern Mexico via art, food, and fashion. I was also struck by the concept of the Tlaltecuhtli, or “Earth Monster.” Some early Mesoamericans believed that the Earth was neither round nor flat, but a gargantuan turtle or alligator whose back they were riding on. I think that’s a very interesting way to perceive Earth, as this sentient, moving creature that we’re just clinging on to. (Honorable mention goes to the Simone Leigh sculpture exhibit, which I saw when it was at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C.)

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a blockbuster that feels like everything a kid’s superhero movie is supposed to be: well paced and wonderfully animated, with some real meat to it plot-wise. The dynamic of choosing versus creating your own fate plays out over a diverse gaggle of Spider-people from many dimensions, and the cliff-hanger ending actually surprised me. [Related: A spidey sense we haven’t seen before]

A thought-provoking art film is Nashville, directed by Robert Altman, the guy who also did M*A*S*H. This movie is hard to describe. It’s dense, sharp, grim yet funny, and incredibly American. It features about an hour’s worth of live folk, gospel, and country music, and 24 “main” characters, some of whom are gathered for the political fundraising of the presidential candidate for the Replacement Party. His character is unseen but heard, as his political messaging—and the film’s thesis—blares loudly throughout the city: All of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Roy Ayers, perhaps the most important figure in modern Black music. His work is a convergence of all my favorite genres. From his early, groovy stuff such as Stoned Soul Picnic and Vibrations to his ubiquity in early hip-hop sampling and his generation-linking feature on Tyler, the Creator’s 2015 track “Find Your Wings,” Ayers has made his mark on seemingly every stage and sound of Black music since the 1960s. I’m not sure where my taste would be without him.

The Week Ahead

Eric, a psychological-thriller miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a devastated father and puppeteer who searches for his missing 9-year-old son (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Young Woman and the Sea, a film based on the true story of the first woman to swim across the English Channel (in theaters Friday) Housemates, a novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg about two artistic housemates who go on a road trip of self-discovery (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Sources: Fred Mullane / ISI Photos / Getty; Tullio Puglia / Getty; Matteo Ciambelli / Getty; Dan Istitene / Getty.

The Unbearable Greatness of Djokovic

By Scott Stossel

What is perhaps most intimidating about Djokovic is the steeliness of his nerve. The ice water in his veins gets chillier as the stakes get higher: The more important the point, the more likely he is to win it. The ATP keeps track of what it calls “pressure stats,” which measure performance on the highest-value, highest-stakes points (break points, tiebreakers, etc). Djokovic, unsurprisingly, has the highest ranking on the pressure-stats list among current players. But he also ranks highest all time by that metric, ahead of Pete Sampras, Nadal, and Federer. Before he lost a tiebreaker to Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon championship last summer, Djokovic had won a staggering 15 straight tiebreakers in major tournaments. When everything is on the line, he rarely falters.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s money problems are becoming a crisis for the entire country. The British prime minister bowed to the inevitable. New 9/11 evidence points to deep Saudi complicity.

Photo Album

A bear-safety demonstration at Yellowstone National Park (Jennifer Emerling)

The photographer Jennifer Emerling had been to 22 national parks by the time she was 12 years old. Since then, she hasn’t stopped returning to photograph them. Here are some images from her many pilgrimages to the natural scenes of American beauty.

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A decade ago, Mark Robinson had a dead-end job and a nasty habit of posting anti-Semitic, homophobic, and sexist screeds on Facebook. Today he is North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. This November, he could become the state’s first Black governor.

“There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Robinson wrote on Facebook in 2017. “There is also a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million PEOPLE they murdered throughout the 20th century.” He also blasted the movie Black Panther as “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist [sic],” adding, “How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?” He had a recurring bit about Michelle Obama being a man. He said Beyoncé’s music sounds like “satanic chants.” He’s no less inflammatory offline, where he has called homosexuality “filth” and endorsed corporal punishment for children.

These views are awful but hardly unusual. What is unusual is that the man professing them won North Carolina’s Republican primary for governor in March. He will face Josh Stein, a Democrat and the current state attorney general, in November. Robinson’s fringe positions have led some to assume that he can’t win, but polls indicate that the race is very close. Robinson could reshape the politics of North Carolina, which has tried in recent years to attract newcomers from around the country. He also provides a test of how extreme a MAGA Republican can be and still win office outside deep-red states—of what, if anything, is too extreme in contemporary politics.

[David Frum: The GOP is just obnoxious]

Robinson declined multiple requests for an interview, but I read his memoir, Facebook posts, and statements, and spoke with North Carolina political insiders, to understand how he went from anonymity to the top of the party’s ticket in less than a decade. His rise is reminiscent of Donald Trump’s: Republican leaders thought they could use him for their ends, but he had his own vision. Should he lose, the GOP will miss out on a seat that a generic Republican could have won. Should he win, Republicans will have the challenge of dealing with Governor Robinson.

Back in the days before his political rise, Robinson’s Facebook friends mostly responded to his political opinions with semi-affectionate eye-rolling or annoyed sniping. These interactions might have been a nice distraction from Robinson’s bleak prospects in his job: In 2014, the office-furniture company Steelcase announced that the plant in High Point, North Carolina, where Robinson worked would soon close. He still carries a note he wrote on an employee suggestion card: “At 12:02 on 7/15/15, I sat at my desk at Steelcase and wondered what I would be doing in 5 years.”

The moment that answered that question came three years later. In April 2018, following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the Greensboro City Council considered canceling a local gun show. Robinson, then employed unloading trucks and moving finished furniture, delivered a stem-winder in defense of gun rights at the council’s meeting.

“I didn’t have time to write a fancy speech,” said Robinson, a gregarious mountain of a man with a shaved head, a neatly trimmed beard, and a broad drawl. He may have been nervous, but he showed a natural talent for public speaking. “What I want to know is, when are you all going to start standing up for the majority?” he said. “And here’s who the majority is: I’m the majority. I’m a law-abiding citizen who’s never shot anybody, never committed a serious crime, never committed a felony.”

Representative Mark Walker, a North Carolina Republican, shared the speech on Facebook, and it went viral. Three days later, Robinson was on Fox News talking about gun rights. Soon, Republicans were pushing Robinson to use his newfound fame to run for office in 2020.

He was an unusual recruit: He’s Black in a very white party. He is an unapologetic culture warrior in a diversifying and purple state. He is also a blue-collar worker in a country (and party) where most candidates and officials are well-to-do. But grassroots conservatives and party officials urged him to stand for lieutenant governor. His viral moment showed his politics and his ability to get attention. The lieutenant governor of North Carolina doesn’t have many formal duties, so the self-appointed adults in the party would remain in control.

The plan worked, at first: Robinson defeated his Democratic opponent, even though the Republican lost the governor’s race. As lieutenant governor, Robinson has frequently missed meetings of the state Senate, over which he nominally presides, and of the state board of education, on which he sits. His signature initiative, an inquiry into supposed indoctrination in state public schools, seemingly broke open-records laws and then quietly issued a report that was merely a compendium of vague and unsubstantiated anecdotes. (Robinson’s office contends that the commission wasn’t a “public body” subject to transparency laws.) Regardless, Robinson took advantage of the soft power of his office to raise his profile like no lieutenant governor before.

By the time he declared his candidacy for the GOP gubernatorial primary, Robinson was a strong favorite, despite the deep reservations of many Republican leaders. He defeated Dale Folwell, a staid old-school conservative who has served as state treasurer for years. Walker, the representative who’d shared Robinson’s city-council speech, had broken with Robinson and launched a campaign for governor, but got nowhere. A well-funded late-game attempt by the attorney Bill Graham fell short too. Now Robinson is the Republicans’ standard-bearer, like it or not.

Robinson’s rise has perplexed many observers. State GOP leadership, perhaps shy after an anti-trans law backfired, has tended toward more traditional right-wing legislative goals—restricting voting rights, siphoning funds away from public schools, and undoing environmental regulations—than the loudly antagonistic culture war that Robinson wages. For example, Robinson has repeatedly called abortion “murder” and proposed a total ban; GOP leaders in the legislature have denied they want to ban abortion outright and have sought to present their limitations as a “compromise.” But Robert Korstad, a historian at Duke University, told me that although Robinson is an outlier today, he’s a throwback to the state’s previous notoriously conservative national figure.

“He's a contemporary Jesse Helms in many ways, just this kind of bombast,” Korstad said, referring to the late U.S. senator. “Helms said things that were equally vicious and off the wall for many years, going back to the 1950s, so it fills a gap in North Carolina politics that has been there for a long time.”

Although Helms railed against elites, he was a white man from a prominent small-town family, attended the prestigious Wake Forest University, and rose to prominence working at a newspaper and a Raleigh news station. Robinson, by contrast, had a poor and violent childhood in Greensboro, didn’t finish his degree until 2022, and rode social media to political stardom. No prior North Carolina governor and no sitting governor in the United States went straight from a blue-collar job to that office.

The Duke political scientist Nicholas Carnes has calculated that working-class people have never constituted more than 2 percent of Congress, and they currently represent roughly the same portion of state legislatures. Carnes concludes that this is because blue-collar people are simply not running, given the time and financial burdens of campaigning and a lack of recruitment by parties. “Working-class Americans are less likely to hold office for some of the same basic reasons that they’re less likely to participate in politics in other ways: because often they can’t, and nobody asks them,” he writes in his book The Cash Ceiling.

Robinson’s politics are conservative but idiosyncratic and not always coherent. He complains that red tape made it difficult for his wife to manage a day care, but he has demanded more intrusive state regulation of what teachers can and can’t say in the classroom. He rails against “government ‘charity,’” but his wife’s nonprofit received $57,000 in Paycheck Protection Program cash. He preaches fiscal conservatism, but declared personal bankruptcy three times, failed to file taxes for five years, and lost a house to foreclosure. (This is a delicate issue for opponents to bring up, because it may endear Robinson to voters who relate to living in a precarious financial situation.) He laments being bullied by classmates as a child for being poor—“They had all adopted a superior attitude toward me for something I could not help”—but doesn’t seem to empathize with other marginalized people, including LGBTQ people, who may well have had comparable experiences.

His views are atypical among working-class voters, too. Blue-collar voters support a stronger social safety net, more business regulation, more progressive tax policies, and more worker protections. These are typically Democratic goals, but even working-class Republicans are also far more supportive of welfare programs, government health care, and business regulations, and more opposed to income inequality, than Republican business owners, Carnes notes. Robinson is on the other side of each of these issues.

Robinson with former President Donald Trump during a rally on April 9, 2022, in Selma, North Carolina (Allison Joyce / Getty)

Under Trump’s leadership, the Republican Party has made some inroads with white working-class voters. Robinson has sought to bind himself to Trump, though the former president was notably slow to endorse his would-be protegé. He finally gave Robinson the nod just three days before the primary election, somehow catching Robinson’s rivals by surprise. “Looking at his remarks, he seems unaware that he’s endorsing a lawless, AWOL individual who denies the Holocaust, hates women and continues to fleece the taxpayers and donors of North Carolina,” his opponent Folwell posted on X. (The irony that Trump matches much of that description seems to have been lost on Folwell.)

When Trump endorsed Robinson, he inevitably labeled him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” That’s especially cringey because Robinson has criticized Martin Luther King Jr. Day and called King an “ersatz pastor” and a “Communist.” Most Black voters in North Carolina, like those nationally, are heavily Democratic—a fact usually attributed to Democratic support for civil rights. (Four years ago, 92 percent of them supported Joe Biden, according to exit polls.) Some Republicans have argued for years that Black voters hold more conservative views than their voting record would suggest, and that they could be amenable to advances from Republicans. In 2020, Trump made small but significant gains among Black men. Robinson writes in his memoir, We Are the Majority, that he’d accepted the received wisdom in the Black community that Rush Limbaugh was a racist until a friend goaded him into giving the radio host a shot. Robinson found himself nodding along with Limbaugh’s ideas.

Republicans hope that Robinson can bring along more Black voters. His attacks on the civil-rights movement may complicate that. “So many freedoms were lost during the civil-rights movement,” he said in 2018. He has also criticized the famous sit-in at a Woolworth’s in his hometown (“That’s not what you do in a free-market system”) and blamed Communist provocateurs for a 1979 Ku Klux Klan shooting that killed five people in Greensboro.

Robinson’s views more closely echo southern white working-class politics than any strain of Black conservatism, Jarod Roll, a historian of working-class politics at the University of Mississippi, told me. He pointed to Robinson’s affinity for guns, his religiosity, and his emphasis on traditional gender roles. Like Robinson, many workers across North Carolina lost jobs as the textile and furniture industries closed factories or moved them offshore. Among them, Black voters have mostly remained with the Democratic Party, if they vote, while many white ones have moved toward the GOP.

“I don't think he's representative of a new brand of Black conservatives,” Theodore Johnson, a senior adviser at the liberal think-tank New America who studies Black politics, told me. “Robinson is a very particular kind of Black Republican, and it’s a version that’s more partisan than it is ideological, more sensational than it is substantive.”

Minority candidates who tack to the far right, like Robinson, have experienced notable success in the Republican Party since 2008. They may not attract many voters of color, but their conservative views validate them in the eyes of voters who might otherwise assume that, because of their skin color, they are moderates or liberals, Johnson said. At the same time, he said, their race may serve to disarm accusations of racism against the GOP.

This past October, Robinson was acting governor while Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, traveled to Japan. Robinson announced a press conference, setting the North Carolina political world abuzz over what he had in mind. Would he announce some major initiative or try to overturn some of Cooper’s policies? Was this some sort of coup?

Robinson arrived at the legislative building in Raleigh flanked by a clutch of young male staffers and wearing the Trump uniform of a boxy suit with a red tie. His big news, it turned out, was a day of prayer and solidarity with Israel following the October 7 attacks. The announcement was plainly intended to neutralize Robinson’s past remarks about Jews, but he seemed unprepared for questions.

“There have been some Facebook posts that were poorly worded on my part and did not convey my real sentiments,” he said, later adding, “I apologize for the wording, not necessarily for the content.” The answer was nonsense: What would it mean to regret the wording but not the content of the claim that Black Panther was a ploy by Jews to take money from Black people?

In his book, Robinson had offered a different excuse: “I was a private citizen. I had a right to say it. You may not like it, but that’s the way it works.” He’s right: He had a right to say it, and many people may not like it. The sophistry illustrates Robinson’s dilemma. He’s risen to prominence thanks to a freewheeling style and far-right views that could turn off the swing voters and moderate Republicans he needs to win.

Democrats in North Carolina, like Democrats everywhere, plan to make abortion central to this year’s campaign. Robinson has in recent months tried to soft-pedal his position. Rolling Stone reported that he’s said that he’s avoiding “the a-word.” His team, wary of Robinson going off script, has granted mainstream media outlets few interviews with him. That may be the only way to keep him from making inflammatory remarks. As with Trump, separating the crazy from the charisma is difficult.

“There’s no danger of Mark Robinson being boring,” Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University (and no relation to the governor), told me. “You could put him in a tweed coat and give him a cup of chamomile, and he’s still going to be engaging.”

[Derek Thompson: The Americans who need chaos]

Josh Stein, Robinson’s Democratic opponent in the governor’s race, is less dynamic. He’s racked up consumer-protection victories in office and cleared a long-standing rape-kit backlog, but altough Stein has styled himself as a successor to the popular Cooper, he lacks the governor’s drawl and common touch. He also hails from Chapel Hill, long derided by conservatives like Helms as a den of dangerous liberalism, and he would be the state’s first Jewish governor.

Republicans hope that the race shapes up like the 2016 presidential election, with voters taking a chance on an unorthodox conservative over a plodding progressive. Although Biden’s campaign says it plans to compete in North Carolina, Republicans expect the president’s unpopularity to dampen Democratic-voter enthusiasm. Democrats prefer to look to the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race, in which Attorney General Josh Shapiro defeated MAGA Republican Doug Mastriano by emphasizing his opponent’s extremism, as a template. Stein and progressive allies have stockpiled money for what’s expected to be a brutal offensive against Robinson.

“I see Mark Robinson as a problem for Republicans in North Carolina across the board,” Paul Shumaker told me. A longtime strategist for more traditional Republicans, Shumaker worked for Robinson’s opponent Graham during the primary. According to Shumaker, Stein and his allies will benefit from the fact that the most effective attacks on Robinson are all quotations of things he has said, which could overcome typical voter skepticism about claims made in attack ads. “They’ll have him destroyed by Labor Day,” he said. “Then you start going downballot and start making him a liability for people who hitched a wagon to him.”

Polling suggests that Robinson’s support is already suffering as the barrage begins, though Robinson still has a good chance to win, especially if Trump takes the state by a good margin. (The former president won in North Carolina in both 2016 and 2020.) Shumaker’s point that Robinson is the Democrats’ own best messenger against himself reminded me of a passage in his memoir. Robinson was at a Junior ROTC drill meet in high school when his team was crossing some railroad tracks to get pizza. When a train approached, his comrades wisely moved off the tracks, but Robinson lingered as the engineer laid on his horn. Finally, Robinson jumped—barely dodging the Amtrak, which was moving much faster than the trundling freight that he’d expected.

Robinson waited in a ditch just long enough to convince his friends he’d been killed, then popped out to surprise them. Some were so angry at his prank that they wanted to beat him up: “They’d all thought I was a goner. So, for a moment, did I.”

It’s a strange story—the sort of anecdote that might have seemed pretty funny to a 14-year-old, but is a little weird for an adult to be repeating in a barroom or barbershop in his sixth decade. It’s even weirder for a politician to include in a campaign autobiography, but Robinson sees a moral. “Obviously I don’t condone it,” he wrote. “Yet that energy within me and the desire to take chances, once harnessed to sane and proper ends, have served me well in adulthood.”

Everyone’s entitled to a little youthful indiscretion. The problem in Robinson’s case is that he hasn’t given North Carolinians much reason to believe he’s found those sane and proper ends yet—or ever will.

Test how closely you have been paying attention to what has been going on over the past seven days.

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.

When patients start on the latest obesity drugs, they find that their food cravings drop away, and then the pounds do too. But when patients go off the drugs, the gears shift into reverse: The food cravings creep back, and then the pounds do too. Within a year of stopping semaglutide—better known by its brand names Wegovy or Ozempic—people regain, on average, two-thirds of the weight they lost. Tirzepatide, also known as Zepbound or Mounjaro, follows a similar pattern. And so the conventional medical wisdom now holds that these obesity drugs are meant to be taken indefinitely, possibly for a lifetime.

To pharmaceutical companies selling the blockbuster drugs—known collectively as GLP-1 drugs, after the natural hormone they mimic—that might be a pretty good proposition. To patients paying more than $1,000 a month out of pocket, not so much. Most Americans simply cannot afford the cost month after month after month.

This has forced some doctors to get creative, devising regimens to sub in cheaper, if less well-known, alternatives. GLP-1 drugs do work remarkably well, inducing more weight loss more quickly than any other obesity medication on the market, but some doctors now wonder whether patients need to be on GLP-1 drugs, specifically, forever. “​​What if we do a short-term investment, use it for six months to a year to get 50 pounds off?” asks Sarah Ro, an obesity-medicine doctor and the director of the University of North Carolina Physicians Network Weight Management Program. Then, as she and other doctors are now exploring, patients might transition to older, less expensive alternatives for long-term weight maintenance.

In fact, Ro has already helped patients—she estimates hundreds—make the switch out of financial necessity. Few of her patients in rural North Carolina have insurance that covers the new obesity drugs, and few can afford to continually pay out of pocket. In April, many also lost coverage when North Carolina’s health insurance for state employees abruptly cut off GLP-1 drugs for obesity. Ro switched her patients to older drugs such as topiramate, phentermine, metformin, and bupropion/naltrexone, plus lifestyle counseling. It’s not exactly an ideal solution, as these medications are generally considered less effective—they lead to about half as much weight loss as GLP-1 drugs do—but it is a far less expensive one. When prescribed as generics, Ro told me, a month’s supply of one of these drugs might cost as little as $10.

Jamy Ard, an obesity-medicine doctor at Wake Forest University, has also switched regimens for patients who lost coverage of GLP-1 drugs after retiring and getting on Medicare, which currently does not pay for any drugs to treat obesity. (Like many researchers in the field, Ard has received grants and consulting fees from companies behind obesity drugs.) Doctors I spoke with didn’t know of any studies about switching from GLP-1 drugs to older ones, but Ard says this research is a practical necessity in the United States. With GLP-1 medications exploding in popularity, more and more patients taking them will suddenly lose coverage when they hit retirement age and go on Medicare. “Now I’ve got to figure out, well, how do I treat them?” he told me.

Long-term data on the older drugs themselves are, in fact, pretty sparse, despite the drugs having been available for years and years. Until Ozempic came along, obesity drugs were not a lucrative market, so companies weren’t interested in funding the long and very expensive trials that follow patients for several years. “Studies like that cost a fortune,” Louis Aronne, an obesity-medicine doctor at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me. Some of the longest-term follow-up data about these drugs come from patients at his practice in Manhattan—not a representative population, he admits—which he published in a five-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health. (Aronne has also received grants and consulting fees from the makers of obesity drugs.)

How patients do after switching from GLP-1 to older drugs is entirely anecdotal, but so far outcomes do seem to vary quite a bit. A small minority of patients who stop GLP-1 injections are actually able to maintain their weight on diet and exercise, without any additional medications. Others may find that the older pills are simply not effective for them. In Ro’s experience, about 50 to 60 percent of her patients have so far successfully kept the weight off using one or more older drugs, on top of lifestyle changes such as cutting out fast food and sugary sodas.

The best drug to switch to may also depend on the patient. Each of the older medications works differently, hitting different biological pathways. The combination of naltrexone and bupropion, for example, makes food less pleasurable and seems to work especially well in people with a tendency toward emotional eating, Ard said. Topiramate, meanwhile, makes carbonated drinks unpleasant, which could help patients who drink a lot of soda. The older drugs also have different side effects. Aronne rattled off for me a list of health risks that might rule out a particular drug for a particular patient: seizures for bupropion, or glaucoma for topiramate. Finding the most effective and best-tolerated drug for a patient may take some trial and error.

Doctors are now discovering that some patients can maintain the weight they lost on lower or less frequent doses of GLP-1 drugs. “For the first time in my career, we’re lowering the dose of medicines,” Aronne said. Just reducing the dose doesn’t save money, though, as lower-dose injection pens cost the same as those with higher doses. However, by instead extending the time between doses from the standard seven days to a longer 10-day interval, doctors told me, some patients have been able to stretch their supplies.

But tapering off obesity medications entirely, GLP-1 or otherwise, will probably not be possible for most patients. Weight loss tends to trigger a powerful set of compensatory mechanisms in the body, which evolved long ago to protect us from starvation. The more weight we lose, the more the body fights back. The fight never quite goes away, and most patients will likely require some kind of continued intervention just to stay at a lower weight. Long-term weight maintenance has always been the “holy grail” of obesity treatment, Susan Yanovski, a co-director of the ​​Office of Obesity Research at the National Institutes of Health told me. The best maintenance strategy—whether it involves GLP-1 drugs, and at what dose—may ultimately be pretty individual. What works best and for whom still needs to be studied. “These are really good research questions,” Yanovski said. But they are not necessarily the questions that pharmaceutical companies focused on developing new meds are most keen to answer.

In time, the current crop of GLP-1 drugs will eventually become available as generics, too, and cost may no longer drive patients to seek out cheaper alternatives. But for now, it very much does.

Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that, he escalated a policy begun during the Trump administration, and marked the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that had dominated American policy making for nearly half a century. The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.

Since the 1980s, American economic policy has largely been guided by the belief that allowing money and goods to flow with as little friction as possible would make everyone better off. So overwhelming was the agreement on this point that it became known, along with a few other free-market dogmas, as the “Washington Consensus.” (You may know the Washington Consensus by its other names, including neoliberalism and Reaganomics.) According to this way of thinking, free trade wouldn’t just make countries rich; it would also make the world more peaceful, as nations linked by a shared economic fate wouldn’t dare wage war against one another. The world would become more democratic, too, as economic liberalization would lead to political freedom. That thinking guided the trade deals struck during the 1990s and 2000s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the decision to allow China into the World Trade Organization in 2001.

A few voices on both the left and the right had long criticized these theories, but they were outside the mainstream. The first major rupture took place in 2016, when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in part by railing against NAFTA and attacking America’s leaders for shipping jobs overseas. The same year, a landmark paper was published showing that free trade with China had cost more than 1 million American manufacturing workers their jobs and plunged factory towns across the country into ruin—a phenomenon known as the “China shock.” The coronavirus pandemic further undermined the Washington Consensus as the United States, after decades of letting manufacturing capacity move overseas, found itself almost entirely dependent on other countries for supplies as basic as face masks and as crucial as semiconductors.

[Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves]

These shifts strengthened the position of critics of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. The Biden administration, stocked with Elizabeth Warren disciples, entered office eager to challenge the free-market consensus in certain areas, notably antitrust. But on trade, the administration’s soul remained divided. In the early years of the Biden presidency, trade skeptics such as U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai frequently clashed with trade enthusiasts like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Biden quietly kept in place the tariffs Trump had imposed on China (which Biden himself had denounced on the campaign trail), but he focused his economic agenda primarily on boosting the domestic clean-energy industry.

Then China’s aggressive push into clean energy forced Biden’s hand. As recently as 2019, China barely built electric vehicles, let alone exported them. Today it is the world’s top producer of EVs, churning out millions of high-quality, super-cheap cars every year. An influx of Chinese EVs into the U.S. might seem like welcome news for an administration fighting to lower both inflation and emissions. But it could also devastate the American auto industry, destroying a vital source of well-paying jobs concentrated in key swing states. A glut of discounted solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile—China currently produces the majority of the world’s supply of each—would undermine emerging American industries before they could even be built.

To the administration, this presented a nightmare scenario. Already struggling parts of the country would experience a second China shock. The U.S. would become dependent on its biggest rival for some of the most important technologies in the world. Republicans would seize on the issue to win elections and potentially roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate change. (Trump has made the threat of Chinese EVs central to his 2024 campaign, talking about the “bloodbath” that would ensue if they were allowed into the country.)

Economics, political science, geopolitics, electoral math: Many of the administration’s incentives seemed to point in the same direction. Which brings us to the tariffs imposed this week. In addition to the 100 percent EV duty, the U.S. will apply 25 to 50 percent tariffs to a handful of “strategic sectors,” in the words of a White House fact sheet: solar cells, batteries, semiconductors, medical supplies, cranes, and certain steel and aluminum products.

A president announcing a new policy does not mean that the political consensus has shifted. The proof that we are living in a new era comes instead from the reaction in Washington. Congressional Democrats, many of whom vocally opposed Trump’s tariffs, have been almost universally supportive of the increases, while Republicans have been largely silent about them. Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that “Biden finally listened to me,” and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent. Most of the criticism from either side of the aisle has come from those arguing that Biden either took too long to raise tariffs or didn’t go far enough. What was recently considered beyond the pale is suddenly conventional wisdom.

The old Washington Consensus was built on the premise that if leaders got the economics right, then politics would follow. Cheap consumer goods would keep voters happy at home, trade ties between nations would destroy the incentive to wage war, and the desire to compete in global markets would encourage authoritarian regimes to liberalize. Reality has not been kind to those predictions. Free trade upended American politics, helping to elect a spiteful kleptocrat initially opposed by his own party. The immense wealth Russia amassed by selling oil and gas to Europe may have actually emboldened it to invade Ukraine. Access to global markets didn’t stop China from doubling down on its authoritarian political model.

The new consensus on trade taps into a much older understanding of economics, sometimes referred to as “political economy.” The basic idea is that economic policy can’t just be a matter of numbers on a spreadsheet; it must take political realities into account. Free trade does bring broadly shared benefits, but it also inflicts extremely concentrated costs in the form of closed factories, lost livelihoods, and destroyed communities. A political-economic approach to free trade recognizes that those two forces aren’t symmetrical: Concentrated economic loss can create the kind of simmering resentment that can be exploited by demagogues, as Trump long ago intuited. “Back in 2000, when cheap steel from China began to flood the market, U.S. steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” Biden said in his speech announcing the new policy, pointing out that nearly 20,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in those two states alone. “I’m not going to let that happen again.”

[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]

A more cynical way to put this is that Biden’s tariffs are a form of pandering to a bloc of swing-state voters. There’s truth to that, but it isn’t the whole story. The political-economic approach also acknowledges that foreign adversaries behave in ways that bear little resemblance to the rational economic self-interest presupposed by mathematical models. They pursue their own geopolitical agendas, market forces be damned—and so America must do the same. China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies is not a product of free markets at work; it was carefully engineered by Beijing, which for decades has poured trillions of dollars of state money into building up industries that it sees as vital to its national strength. To simply accept cheap Chinese exports under the banner of free trade would solidify that dominance, giving Beijing effective control over the energy system of the future.

The shift on trade is part of a broader realignment that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has aspirationally called the “new Washington consensus.” What unites Biden’s tariffs with the other core elements of his agenda, including massive investments in manufacturing and increased antitrust enforcement, is the notion that the American government should no longer passively defer to market forces; instead, it should shape markets to achieve politically and socially beneficial goals. This view has taken hold most thoroughly among Democrats, but it is making inroads among Republicans too—especially when it comes to trade.

The details of this new consensus, however, are still being worked out. Trump favors a blunt approach; he has proposed a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods from any country, including allies. Biden argues that Trump’s plan would sharply raise prices for American consumers without much benefit. His administration instead favors what officials call a “small yard and high fence”: major restrictions on a handful of essential technologies from particular countries.

These are the terms on which the debate is now being waged: not whether to restrict free trade, but where, how, and how much. That is a very big change from the world we were living in not long ago. The precise consequences of that change will take years to reveal themselves. But they’re sure to be just as big.

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.”

In a recent scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we only know as the Captain (played by Hoa Xuande) sits outside a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the man he’s planning to kill. His target is a former senior military officer, Major Oanh, who fled with him from Vietnam to the U.S., and who is starting over as a mechanic. When the Captain learns that Oanh is importing expired Vietnamese candy as a side hustle, he confronts him. To his shock, the man embraces him. “It’s a new world here,” Oanh tells the Captain. “If you fully commit to this land, you become fully American. But if you don’t, you’re just a wandering ghost living between two worlds forever.”

Adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer follows a protagonist who seems perennially trapped in this between. The Captain is a North Vietnamese secret-police agent embedded high up in the Southern Vietnamese military. As a biracial, half-French man, the Captain is at once strikingly visible in public and yet socially invisible; he’s been, as he says early in the first episode, “cursed to see every issue from both sides.” But what vexes him even more is the realization that he uses his identity as an excuse to avoid taking firm moral stances. By circumstance and by choice, he moves through society as a specter.

Although The Sympathizer isn’t a literal ghost story, this is a compelling prism to view the adaptation through. The series, created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, introduces the Captain after he’s been captured by the North Vietnamese army (which he’s spying for), sent to a reeducation camp, and stuck in a room to write his confession. He begins by writing words we hear in a voice-over: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” a nod to the opening of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, whose similarly unnamed narrator unpacks feeling adrift and anonymous “because people refuse to see me.” In The Sympathizer, the word spook takes on a dual meaning, describing a spy—a job that hinges on being imperceptible—and also a disembodied presence that’s neither dead nor alive.

The Captain narrates his imperfectly detailed memories, which span decades and move between Vietnam and the U.S. He jumps back and forth through time, revealing a man caught as much between physical and psychic worlds as between loyalties. The two people he cares most about in the world—his best friends and “blood brothers” Man and Bon—were on different sides of the war: the former was a higher-up in North Vietnamese leadership, the latter was a South Vietnamese paratrooper and assassin.

[Read: Viet Thanh Nguyen on why writing is a process of “emotional osmosis”]

But unlike in many traditional ghost stories, the Captain isn’t an omniscient figure narrating from the afterlife. He is wrestling with competing political and cultural ideologies and with Vietnam’s legacy of colonialism and war. He is a frequent subject of derision as a mixed-race man: In one scene in Vietnam, the Captain explains that he’s long endured acquaintances and others “spitting on me and calling me bastard,” dryly adding that “sometimes, for variety, they call me bastard before they spit.” Even those who the Captain believes respect him see his humanity as conditional. In the novel, his longtime boss—known only as the General—fires him for flirting with his daughter: “How could you ever believe we would allow [her] to be with someone of your kind?” the General asks.

This sense of alienation is exacerbated in the U.S., where the Captain embeds within the exiled South Vietnamese community. There, he and his fellow countrymen are, as he describes in the novel, “consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.” At one point in the show, a fellow émigré and journalist named Sonny (Alan Trong) tells him, “Arguably, I’m more Vietnamese than you … biologically”—and yet the Captain is regarded as being too Vietnamese by many of those he meets in the U.S. In an especially atrocious scene after the Captain’s arrival in Los Angeles, a former professor he connects with (Robert Downey Jr.) gives him the dehumanizing assignment of writing down his “Oriental and Occidental qualities” side by side. Afterward, the professor pressures the Captain to read the list aloud to university donors at a cocktail party.

[Read: The Vietnam War, as seen by the victors]

Not even the Captain’s Marxist proclivities can anchor him after he moves to America, a bastion of capitalism that he's been taught to hate but secretly enjoys. Though he technically identifies as a Communist, in the series he doesn’t come off as an active, passionate believer. He also becomes involved in American pop culture, when he's asked to be a cultural consultant on an Apocalypse Now–esque film. Yet the Captain is frustratingly static in these Hollywood scenes. He’s unconvincing when he implores a movie director named Niko Damianos (also played by Downey Jr.) to hire Vietnamese actors in speaking roles. Even the way he pushes back against the inclusion of an unnecessarily violent scene feels tepid; when the director fires him, the Captain walks away in indifferent silence.

In interviews, Nguyen has said that hauntings are inextricable from stories about war and the trauma it leaves behind. He has also noted that Vietnamese culture is full of ghost stories, whose spirits bear both malicious and benevolent intent. The visual language of The Sympathizer takes care to point out that those hovering in the afterlife stay close to the living. Shrines to the deceased, many adorned with fruits, incense, and vases full of flowers, pervade the show’s world, including in the Captain’s home and in the General’s office. Later in the series, literal ghosts also take shape: Major Oanh and another person the Captain murders constantly reappear to taunt him and offer unsolicited opinions.

As the series progresses, the Captain becomes more and more numb, stymied by the realization that neither communism nor capitalism—nor either of the two countries, or racial identities, or best friends he’s torn between—will make him whole. The Sympathizer drives home the salient point that social invisibility has a way of hollowing someone until they’re unrecognizable, even to themselves. It gestures toward a haunting truth: To stand for everything is akin to standing for nothing.

The United States Congress took six months to approve a supplemental spending bill that includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The drama, legislative maneuvering, and threats to remove a second speaker of the House of Representatives have left reasonable people asking what, exactly, is going on with Republican legislators: Have they recognized the perilous state of the world and the importance of U.S. leadership? Or was the difficulty in securing the aid the real signal worth paying attention to—making Republican support for the assistance just a last gasp of a conservative internationalism that is no longer a going concern?

In the breach between these two narratives lies the future of the Republican Party—whether it has become wholly beholden to the America First proclivities of Donald Trump or can be wrenched back to the reliably internationalist foreign policy of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

Former President Trump has long questioned the value to the U.S. of international alliances, trade, and treaties, and involvement in global institutions. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, who propounds the Trumpian view, recently said of the fight over the supplemental spending bill: “Notwithstanding some lingering Cold Warriors, we’re winning the debate because reality is on our side.” And Vance may be right about who’s winning: 22 of the 49 Republicans in the Senate voted for the supplemental when it was presented in February, at a time when Trump was agitating against it; Speaker of the House Mike Johnson persuaded Trump to stay on the sidelines for the April vote, and five more Republican senators opposed the legislation anyway. That suggests a rising, not ebbing, tide.

If Vance is correct, this could be the last aid package for Ukraine—meaning that Ukraine will ultimately lose its war with Russia. Republicans will have the U.S. pull away from alliance commitments in Asia and Europe and withdraw from participating in trade agreements and international institutions.

[Anne Applebaum: The GOP’s Pro-Russia caucus lost. Now Ukraine has to win.]

But Republican lawmakers and voters are far from united around this worldview. Despite the onslaught against internationalism, Republican voter support for NATO has decreased only marginally, from 44 percent in 2015 to 43 percent currently. And despite some radical party members’ fulminating that Republicans who’d voted for the supplemental would be hounded by voters, no backlash actually took place.

Some Republican legislators who supported the supplemental spoke of it in terms redolent of the internationalist Republican tradition. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, said: “This House just showed tyrants and despots who wish harm upon us and our allies that we will not waver as the beacon of leadership and liberty.” Johnson, who’d formerly voted against aid to Ukraine, put his job on the line to get the bill passed, in the name of doing what he said was “the right thing.” Representative Mike McCaul of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, described the speaker’s reversal as “transformational … he’s realizing that the world depends on this.” And if that is indeed where Johnson stands, he does so in the company of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has indicated that he will commit his final two years in the Senate to restoring Republican internationalism.

Ultimately, the Republican Party’s direction will become clear based on the policies it chooses to oppose or support. The supplemental was one test; some of the others are less high-profile but at least as consequential, if not more so, because they concern the very building blocks of a conservative international order. Given that the leader of the Republican Party does not favor these ideas, creating policies to advance them will be difficult. But difficult is not impossible, as the success of the supplemental shows.

For example: Will Republicans fight to increase defense spending? The past four presidential administrations have failed to spend even what was needed to carry out their own national-security strategies—and this at a time when the world has been growing more dangerous, as U.S. adversaries have coalesced into an axis of authoritarian powers. Defense spending is popular with the public: In a Reagan Institute poll, 77 percent of Americans said that they favored bumping it up. But doing so will require a reordering of priorities, whether through reforming entitlements, raising taxes, shifting money from domestic to defense budgets, adopting policies that speed economic growth, or allowing deficits to continue to balloon. Republican willingness to make these hard choices in order to spend more on defense—particularly on ship building and munitions stocks—will be a leading indicator as to whether the internationalists among them are gaining ground.

So, too, will the Republican stance toward the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes rules for navigation and boundaries for the exploitation of maritime resources. The convention commits countries to recognizing that territorial waters become international 12 nautical miles from shorelines, and it delineates countries’ exclusive national zones for mining and fishing. In 1994, the United States signed the convention, which has also been signed by 168 other nations and the European Union. But the U.S. Senate has so far refused to ratify it. Conservatives are concerned that the convention impinges on U.S. sovereignty; even the urging of former President George W. Bush, when he was in office, failed to convince them otherwise.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea sets terms that the United States already abides by and enforces on other countries. Without it, America may be forced to comply with the rules its adversaries—chiefly Russia and China—prefer to establish, or else to spend time and money protecting itself and its allies against those countries’ maritime activities. Every living chief of naval operations advocates the convention’s passage. And countries contending with Chinese claims in the South China Sea view U.S. ratification as an indicator of American commitment to the rules-based order on which they rely. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and Democrats Mazie Hirono and Tim Kaine have introduced a resolution to ratify the convention. Republicans will have to decide whether they will provide the votes to pass it or make hostility to treaties a hallmark of their party.

[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]

Similarly, the GOP will need to decide exactly what its posture will be on international free trade. Efforts to integrate China into the global economic order on equal terms failed; as a result, both American parties lost their appetite for international trade agreements and turned instead to imposing punitive tariffs on China and restricting its market access. This approach has not been successful either. In fact, the bipartisan retreat from global trade agreements as a lever of international power comes at a time when more Americans—eight in 10—view international trade as beneficial to consumers such as themselves than at any other time in the past 50 years. My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors have argued for updating trade agreements in the Western Hemisphere—as the Trump administration did with the North American Free Trade Agreement—while prioritizing new agreements with Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. A truly internationalist Republican Party will pursue such a policy, which would strengthen the trade links among Western nations.

In recent years, the United States has withdrawn from dominant roles in numerous international institutions. Neither the Trump administration nor the Biden administration bothered to nominate judges for the World Trade Organization, greatly weakening that body. Meanwhile, China secured leadership roles in Interpol and in the UN agencies that regulate international telecommunications, air routes, and agricultural and industrial assistance. China nearly assumed leadership of the UN’s international maritime organization, which would have allowed it to rewrite the rules for freedom of navigation. Perhaps Republicans can be persuaded that ceding such positions to China is damaging. Much as with the Convention on the Law of the Sea, Washington and its allies can either lead the institutions that set and enforce rules or work to shield their interests from the reach of them. Setting the rules is more cost-effective.

How the Republican Party addresses these nuts-and-bolts national-security policies will reveal its true direction—whether it will continue to lurch toward Senator Vance’s America First policies or return to the values it came to embody after World War II. Even if Donald Trump—the avatar and motive force behind America First—returns to the presidency, Speaker Johnson’s adroit management of the supplemental bill shows that Congress is not powerless. By reasserting its constitutional prerogatives, the legislature can constrain the executive. But for that to happen on national security, Republicans have to believe that American security and prosperity require active engagement in the world.