Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further. The sequel has twice as many heroes to root for and twice as many emperors to root against, plus a wild card in the form of Denzel Washington’s conniving arms dealer, Macrinus. In lieu of tigers, battles in the arena now involve a menagerie of baboons, sharks, and a rhino. Even the opening credits have been designed to excite the audience: Key scenes from the previous film are animated in a painterly sequence, which lands on a title card that stylizes the sequel’s name as, gloriously, GLADIIATOR. It’s so grandiose, the audience at my screening started applauding before a single fight had begun.

[Read: Are we having too much fun?]

Set 16 years after the events of Gladiator, the sequel follows Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role). Lucilla secretly sent the young Lucius away to the kingdom of Numidia for his protection after Maximus’s death. In the years since, a lot has happened, which we learn through overly ornate flashbacks and exposition. Lucius has come to resent his homeland and his mother, given their time apart. That resentment grows into rage after Roman forces, led by Lucilla’s new husband, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), conquer Numidia in an opening battle that leads to Lucius’s wife’s death. In Rome, meanwhile, a pair of snotty brothers named Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have become co-emperors. Their reckless leadership has inspired a resistance led by Lucilla and Acacius, and turned the city into fertile ground for the rise of opportunistic power players such as Macrinus.

The plot, packed with so many shadowy conspiracies and cunning characters, is far less straightforward than the one in Gladiator, to its detriment. But amid the bloat, Scott homes in on how the cycle of ambition and retribution can be hard to break. Bloodshed is the cause and effect of every twist in the story, the reason behind Rome’s tumult and the apparent solution to its woes. Violence demands the spotlight, and Gladiator II draws tension from the fact that many of its characters can’t escape their attraction to brutality. In Scott’s hands, ancient Rome has never been more ruthless—or more exhilarating to watch.

The director is a master at pulling elegance out of rough-and-tumble set pieces. During the assault on Lucius’s home, embers swirl like snow, flecks of water and mud smack into the camera lens, and every strike of a sword or blow of a fist lands with primal intensity. Inside the Colosseum, despite the noticeably heavy use of CGI, Scott finds striking images in the chaos: A pool of blood blossoms underwater. An arrow zips across the field. A gladiator tosses sand into the air. These shots are mesmerizing for the viewer, and convey the strange allure of battle for the combatants themselves.

These energetic fight scenes are matched by a collection of flashy performances, with those playing the villains stealing the show. Mescal and Pascal embody their roles’ gravitas and become almost feral when they’re forced into the Colosseum. But Quinn and Hechinger have much more fun leaning into their characters’ boyish petulance, echoing Joaquin Phoenix’s work as the man-child emperor, Commodus, from Gladiator. Washington, however, runs away with the movie: Armed with a Cheshire-cat grin, heaps of jewelry, and seemingly limitless glasses of wine, Macrinus toys with Rome like it’s a massive chessboard full of pawns, and the actor embraces the script’s numerous swerves. He imbues the character with an infectious glee in every scene, whether he’s cheering on the men cutting one another down inside the arena or quietly attempting to manipulate Lucius into doing his bidding.

For all the fun it’s having, Gladiator II does require a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s flaws. The characters are more thinly drawn, with shallow motivations in spite of the plot’s contrivances. The dialogue is more stilted, packed with pat observations about the “dream of Rome” in the face of an empire that repeatedly fails to learn its lesson. And the ending puts forth the vague notion that Rome’s future relies on unifying its people—an earnest sentiment, maybe, but a rather dull conclusion to reach after two hours of savagery.

Then again, Gladiator II doesn’t claim to offer anything more than pure spectacle. The finale gestures at the idea that hope is its own form of power, but even Lucius admits to its limits as a peacekeeping force. “You look to me to speak,” Lucius says as he addresses opposing armies about to fight. “I know not what to say.” Maybe Macrinus, who believes that Rome is doomed to brutality and bloodshed, has a point when he asserts that violence is “the universal language.” After all, to borrow a revered gladiator’s words, it’s undeniably entertaining.

After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. The yet-to-be-created entity’s acronym, DOGE, is something of a joke—a reference to a cryptocurrency named for an internet meme involving a Shiba Inu. But its appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is a blueprint for a MAGA government]

Musk doesn’t always get what he wants; Trump picked Lutnick to be secretary of commerce instead. Even so, the broligarchs’ ascendancy on both the foreign- and domestic-policy fronts has taken many observers by surprise—including me, even though I wrote last August about the broligarchs’ deepening political alignment with Trump. Though some of them have previously opposed Trump because of his immigration or tariff policies, the broligarchs share his politics of impunity: the idea that some men should be above the law. This defiant rejection of all constraint by and obligation to the societies that made them wealthy is common among the world’s ultrarich, a group whose practices and norms I have studied for nearly two decades. Trump has exemplified this ethos, up to the present moment: He is currently in violation of a law—which he signed into effect during his first term—requiring incoming presidents to agree to an ethics pledge.

Trump—who infamously said of sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it”—cites his celebrity as a basis for his elevation above the law. Many broligarchs also see themselves as exceptional beings, but arrived at that view through a different path: via science fiction, fantasy literature, and comic books. Ideas from these genres have long pervaded Silicon Valley culture; last year, Andreessen published a manifesto calling for “Becoming Technological Supermen,” defined by embarking on a “Hero’s Journey” and “conquering dragons.”

Superhero narratives also appear to inform many of Musk’s more eccentric political views, including his reported belief that the superintelligent have a duty to reproduce, and may help explain why in September he reposted a claim that “a Republic of high status males” would be superior to our current democracy. Last week, Musk likened Matt Gaetz, Trump’s then-nominee for attorney general, to Judge Dredd, a dystopian comic-book character authorized to conduct summary executions. Musk seems to have meant this as a compliment. He described Gaetz—who, until his resignation from the House, was under a congressional investigation in connection with an alleged sex-trafficking scheme—as “our Hammer of Justice.”

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

Whatever its source, the broligarchs’ sense of their innate superiority has led many of them to positions on taxation quite similar to Trump’s. In 2016, the Republican presidential nominee bragged about avoiding tax payments for years—“That makes me smart,” he crowed from the debate stage. The broligarchs have quietly liberated themselves from one of the only certainties in life. As ProPublica reported in 2021, Musk paid zero federal income taxes in 2018 and a de facto tax rate of 3.3 percent from 2014 to 2018, during which his wealth grew by $13.9 billion. Thiel used a government program intended to expand retirement savings by middle-class Americans to amass $5 billion in capital-gains income, completely tax-free. The Trump-friendly broligarchs’ political ascendancy turns the rallying cry of the Boston Tea Party on its head, achieving representation with minimal taxation.

In their hostility to taxation and regulation, the men who rule Wall Street and Silicon Valley resemble earlier generations of wealthy capitalists who enjoyed outsize influence on American politics. Even some tech barons who supported Kamala Harris clamored for the firing of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who favors vigorous antitrust enforcement. But the broligarchs are distinct from old-school American oligarchs in one key respect: Their political vision seeks to undermine the nation-state system globally. Musk, among others, has set his sights on the privatization and colonization of space with little or no government involvement. Thiel and Andreessen have invested heavily in creating alternatives to the nation-state here on Earth, including libertarian colonies with minimal taxation. One such colony is up and running in Honduras; Thiel has also invested in efforts to create artificial islands and other autonomous communities to serve as new outposts for private governance. “The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level,” Thiel said of these initiatives in 2008.

Cryptocurrency is the financial engine of the broligarchs’ political project. For centuries, states have been defined by two monopolies: first, on the legitimate use of coercive force (as by the military and the police); and second, on control of the money supply. Today’s broligarchs have long sought to weaken government control of global finance. Thiel notes in his 2014 book, Zero to One, that when he, Musk, and others started PayPal, it “had a suitably grand mission … We wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” If broligarchs succeed in making cryptocurrency a major competitor to or replacement for the dollar, the effects could be enormous. The American currency is also the world’s reserve currency—a global medium of exchange. This has contributed to U.S. economic dominance in the world for 80 years and gives Washington greater latitude to use financial and economic pressure as an alternative to military action.

[Read: What to expect from Elon Musk’s government makeover]

Undercutting the dollar could enrich broligarchs who hold considerable amounts of wealth in cryptocurrencies, but would also weaken the United States and likely destabilize the world economy. Yet Trump—despite his pledge to “Make America great again” and his previous claims that crypto was a “scam” against the dollar—now seems fully on board with the broligarchs’ agenda. Signaling this alignment during his campaign, Trump gave the keynote speech at a crypto conference last July; he later pledged to make crypto a centerpiece of American monetary policy via purchase of a strategic bitcoin reserve. The day after the election, one crypto advocate posted on X, “We have a #Bitcoin president.” The incoming administration is reportedly vetting candidates for the role of “crypto czar.”

If American economic and political dominance recedes, the country’s wealthiest men may be well positioned to fill and profit from the power vacuum that results. But is a weakened country, greater global instability, and rule by a wealthy few really what voters wanted when they chose Trump?

Musk spent millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign and promoted it on X. He’s now doing everything he can to capitalize on Trump’s victory and maximize his own power—to the point of siccing his X followers on obscure individual government officials. Some evidence, including Axios’s recent focus-group study of swing voters, suggests that Americans may already feel queasy about the influence of the broligarchs. “I didn’t vote for him,” one participant said of Musk. “I don't know what his ultimate agenda would be for having that type of access.” Another voter added, “There’s nothing, in my opinion, in Elon Musk’s history that shows that he’s got the best interest of the country or its citizens in mind.” Even so, we can expect him and his fellow broligarchs to extend their influence as far as they can for as long as Trump lets them.

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On Christmas Eve of 2020, my father was admitted to the hospital with sudden weakness. My mother was not allowed to join him. She pleaded with the staff—my dad needed help making medical decisions, she said—but there were no exceptions at that grisly stage of the coronavirus pandemic. I contemplated making the trip from Maryland to New Jersey to see whether I, as a doctor, could garner special treatment until I realized that state and employer travel rules would mean waiting for a COVID test result and possibly facing quarantine on my return. In the end, my father spent his time in the hospital alone, suffering the double harm of illness and isolation.

These events still frustrate me years later; I have a hard time believing that restrictions on hospital visitation and interstate travel helped more people than they hurt. Many Americans remain angry about the pandemic for other reasons too: angry about losing a job, getting bullied into vaccination, or watching children fall behind in a virtual classroom. That legacy of bitterness and distrust is now a major political force. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on the precipice of leading our nation’s health-care system as secretary of Health and Human Services. The Johns Hopkins professor Marty Makary has been tapped to lead the Food and Drug Administration. And the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya is expected to be picked to run the National Institutes of Health. These men have each advocated for changes to the systems and structures of public health. But what unites them all—and what legitimizes them in the eyes of this next administration—is a lasting rage over COVID.

To understand this group’s ascent to power and what it could mean for America, one must consider their perception of the past five years. The world, as Kennedy, Makary, Bhattacharya, and their compatriots variously understand it, is dreadful: SARS-CoV-2 was likely created in a lab in Wuhan, China; U.S. officials tried to cover up that fact; and the government responded to the virus by ignoring scientific evidence, violating citizens’ civil rights, and suppressing dissent. In the face of this modern “dark age,” as Bhattacharya has called it, only a few brave dissidents were willing to flip on the light.

Makary, Trump’s pick for the FDA, presents as being in the truth-to-power mold. A surgeon, policy researcher, and—full disclosure—my academic colleague, he gained a loyal following during the pandemic as a public-health critic. Through media outlets such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, Makary advocated for a more reserved use of COVID vaccines: He suggested that adults who had recovered from a COVID infection, as well as children more generally, could forgo some doses; he is also skeptical of booster shots for everyone and vaccine mandates. Makary, too, thinks that public-health officials have been lying to the American people: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government,” he told Congress last year, referring to public-health guidance that emphasized transmission of COVID on surfaces, downplayed natural immunity, encouraged boosters in young people, and promoted the efficacy of masking.

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Bhattacharya, a doctor and health economist, rose to fame in October 2020 as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a “focused protection” approach to the pandemic. The idea was to isolate vulnerable seniors while allowing low-risk individuals to return to their normal lives. Much of the public-health community aggressively criticized this strategy at the time, and—as would later be revealed—NIH Director Francis Collins privately called for a “quick and devastating” takedown of its premise. Twitter placed Bhattacharya on a “trends blacklist” that reduced the reach of his posts, according to internal documents released to the journalist Bari Weiss in 2022. Among conservatives and lockdown skeptics, Bhattacharya has come to be seen as a fearless truth teller who was silenced by the federal government and Big Tech. (In reality, and despite his frequent umbrage, Bhattacharya was not ignored. He met with the Trump administration and was in communication with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.)

In response to their marginalization from polite scientific society—and long before they were in line for key government positions—Makary and Bhattacharya have each sought out a public reckoning. They both called for the medical establishment to issue an apology to the American people. Makary demanded “fresh leadership” at an FDA that had made serious blunders on COVID medications and vaccines, and Bhattacharya asked for the formation of a COVID commission as a necessary first step in “restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts.” They even worked together at the Norfolk Group, a cohort of like-minded scientists and doctors that laid out what they deemed to be the most vital questions that must be asked of the nation’s public-health leaders. The gist of some of these is: Why didn’t they listen to “focused protection” supporters such as Bhattacharya and Makary? The report wonders, for instance, why Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, avoided meeting with a cadre of anti-lockdown advocates that included Bhattacharya in the summer of 2020. (“They are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience,” Birx wrote in an email to the vice president’s chief of staff at the time.)

This sense of outrage over COVID will be standard in the next administration. Trump’s pick for surgeon general, the doctor and Fox News personality Janette Nesheiwat, has called the prolonged isolation brought about by shutdowns “cruel and inhumane,” and said that the collateral damage caused by the government’s actions was “worse than the pandemic” for most Americans. His nominee for secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, pushed for herd immunity in May 2020 and encouraged anti-lockdown protests.

[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Bhattacharya, at least, has denied having any interest in revenge. Last year he helped write an op-ed that cautioned against initiating a “Nuremberg 2.0” and instead presented scientists like himself and Makary as “apostles of evidence-based science” who are simply “calling for restoring evidence-based medicine to a pride of place in public health.”

Taken on its own, I’m sympathetic to that goal. I consider myself a fellow member of the “evidence-based medicine” movement that values high-quality data over blind loyalty to authority. I’m also of a similar mind as Makary about the FDA’s long-standing dysfunction. The COVID skeptics are correct that, in some domains, the pandemic produced too little knowledge and too much bluster. We still don’t know how well various social-distancing measures worked, what the best vaccination policy might be, or what the true origins of the virus were. I remember following the debates about these issues on Twitter, which functioned as a town square for doctors, scientists, and public-health leaders during the pandemic years. Mainstream experts tended to defend unproved public-health measures with self-righteousness and absolutism: You were either in favor of saving lives or you were one of the skeptics who was trying to kill Grandma. Nuanced conversations were rare. Accusations of “misinformation” were plentiful.

[Read: COVID science is moving backwards]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was indeed spreading misinformation with a fire hose. (For example, he has falsely said that the COVID shots are the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”) Bhattacharya and Makary have been far more grounded in reality, but they did make their own share of mistakes during the pandemic—and they haven’t spent much time rehashing them. So allow me to reflect on their behalf: In March 2020, Bhattacharya argued that COVID’s mortality rate was likely to be much lower than anyone was saying at the time, even to the point of being one-tenth that of the flu. “If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic,” he wrote, “then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible.” Bhattacharya continued to be wrong in important ways. A pivotal assumption of the Great Barrington Declaration was that as more healthy people got sick and then recovered, the residual risk of new infections would fall low enough that vulnerable people could safely leave isolation. This process would likely take three to six months, his group explained. SARS-CoV-2, however, is still circulating at high levels nearly five years later. At least 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID. Had effective vaccines not arrived shortly after the 2020 declaration, senior citizens might be in hiding to this day.

As for Makary, his most infamous take involved a February 2021 prediction that the United States would reach herd immunity within two months. “Scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. The Delta and Omicron waves followed, killing hundreds of thousands more Americans.

When I reached out to Bhattacharya, he said his early guess about COVID’s mortality rate was meant only to help describe a “range of possible outcomes,” and that to characterize it otherwise would be false. (Makary did not respond to my questions for this story.)

The incoming administration’s COVID skeptics have also expressed sympathy for still-unproved theories about the pandemic’s origin. If you want to become an evidence apostle, believing that SARS-CoV-2 came from an NIH-funded lab leak seems to be part of the deal. Kennedy wrote multiple books purporting to link Anthony Fauci, in particular, to the creation of the virus. Similarly, Makary appears in a new documentary called Thank You Dr. Fauci, which describes “a bio-arms race with China and what could be the largest coverup in modern history.” (Fauci has denied these claims on multiple occasions, including in congressional testimony. He called the idea that he participated in a cover-up of COVID’s origins “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”)

A certain amount of sycophancy toward the more bizarre elements of the coalition is also common. Makary and Bhattacharya have both praised Kennedy in extravagant terms despite his repeated falsehoods: “He wrote a 500-page book on Dr. Fauci and the medical industrial complex. A hundred percent of it was true,” Makary said of a volume that devotes multiple chapters to casting doubt on HIV as the cause of AIDS. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya called Kennedy a “disruptor” whose views on vaccines and AIDS are merely “eccentric.” (Bhattacharya has also suggested that the vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert Malone would be an “amazing leader” for the country’s health agencies.)

Anger about the government’s response to the pandemic swept the COVID contrarians into power. Resentment was their entrée into Washington. Now they’ll have a chance to fix some genuine, systemic problems with the nation’s public-health establishment. They’ll also have the ability to settle scores.