Bluesky, a Twitter-style, short-post social-media site, has exploded in popularity since last week, adding 1 million users in just that time. A lot of people hate X—especially if they hate Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Nazis, or algorithmic feeds, or shadowbanning, or impersonation, or engagement farming, or porn hustling. Can Bluesky be the fix for all those woes, and a lasting replacement for the site that once was Twitter? I really doubt it.

Woe that people, myself included, have been inspired even to ask the question. Although white supremacy, scams, and porn are real and worsening problems on X and other social media, I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much. The decline of X is a sign that we may soon be free of social media, and the compulsive, constant attention-seeking that it normalized. Counterintuitively, the rise of Bluesky is also a good sign, in that so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Giving up on social media will take time, and it will inspire relapse.

For all its growth, Bluesky still trails far behind Meta’s Threads—Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that his Twitter-like app adds 1 million users each day. But numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Meta has added buttons to access Threads from Instagram, so that any of its 2 billion users can slide right over, even if they never end up posting there. Bluesky, meanwhile, seems to be drawing actual users, especially in the United States, who want to post and follow.

[Read: The age of social media is ending]

A network of any kind—social, communication, epidemiological—is only as effective as the scope of its connections. Two decades ago, when social networks were new, it was easier to develop a rich, broad network because nobody had one yet. MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn helped people build databases of the connections they already had—friends, family, schoolmates, work colleagues. Twitter was among the first social networks that encouraged people to connect with anybody whosoever—to build a following of strangers. That, as much as its distinctive, short-text format, made Twitter what it was. Among other things, it became a distinctive venue to follow live global events, and to share and engage with journalism. It also was a place for brands to interact with their customers, and for businesses to provide customer service.

Bluesky has not yet found its distinctive identity or purpose. But to me, one user among many who started using the service in earnest this week, it feels more like the early days of social networking than anything else in recent memory. The posts I have seen, and made, are dumb and awkward instead of being savvy and too online. For now, Bluesky invokes the feeling of carefree earnestness that once—really and truly—blanketed the internet as a whole. Gen Xers and Oldlennials who had already finished college when Facebook started will remember the strange and delightful experience of rediscovering lost friends on that service—people you hadn’t seen or heard from in years. Now that strange delight itself can be rediscovered: I’ve felt something like it as I watched my Bluesky migration plug-in locate and auto-follow thousands of users whom I hadn’t seen on X or Twitter for years.

But the internet’s media ecosystem is more fragmentary this decade than it was during the last. Uncertainty about social media’s future produces existential questions about the major platforms: Will TikTok be banned? Will X become state media? Will the Bluesky bubble grow beyond this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we can’t help but try to keep them going, for however long we can.

The New York Times is once again poking readers’ eyes with its needle. A little digital gauge, like the one that might indicate that your boiler or nuclear-power plant is about to explode, “estimates the outcome of the race in real time based on polling data,” as the Times puts it. As we write this, the needle is piercing the red “Likely” side of the gauge, indicating that the decision is “Likely Trump.” To validate this qualitative assessment, the needle also clarifies, again in the moment we’re writing this, that Donald Trump has an 88 percent chance of victory. That’s good to know, or bad, depending on your preferences.

The Times is not alone in offering minute-to-minute assessments, of course. On television, news anchors talk endlessly about anything, or nothing, reporting live from Nevada or North Carolina. At CNN.com, the network’s familiar election map offers live results too, in an interface now so confusing that one of us couldn’t figure out how to back out of Georgia’s results after zooming in. The whole affair is meant to provide updates on a result entirely out of our control. At some point, probably not tonight and maybe not tomorrow, we will know who won the presidential race—and all of the other federal and state contests and ballot initiatives and the like too.

There is no good way to consume Election Night information anymore, if there ever was. Cable news is the loud, exhausting, touch-screen-assisted option for those who’re looking for the dopamine of an inoffensive Key-Race Alert. Social media is the best option if you’d like all of that, but updated each second, with commentary from Nazis and people who have placed big crypto bets on the outcome. Wrangling the data coming out of more than 100,000 precincts in fits and starts, across a country that spans six time zones and upwards of 161 million registered voters, is a glorious feat. The process is not, however, conducive to the human need to actually know things. In a way, the needle is the ChatGPT aggregation of the output of toxic sludge and useful information coming out of all of it. It is the supposed signal in the noise. But it may just be noise itself … until it isn’t.

For some time now, we’ve been chuckling at an ongoing joke on X about “building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions.” (At least, we think they are jokes.) What would you do if a giant kaiju attacked the city? Make sure the dashboards are providing actionable insights into critical business functions. What do you do in your 30s? Get married, start companies, or … build dashboards to provide actionable insights. You get the picture.

The jokes are funny because they implicate a terrible everyday-life business thing called “business-intelligence dashboards.” Big data, data science, data-driven decision making, and a host of related biz buzz holds that you, me, him, them, everyone should collect as much data as possible about anything whatsoever, and then use those data to make decisions. But that’s hard, so it should be made easy. Thus, the dashboards. As if a car’s speedometer but scaled up to any level of complexity, a dashboard provides easy, quick, at-a-glance “insights” into the endless silos of data, making them “actionable.” This is a contradiction—thus the jokes.

So it is with the Times forecast needle (and the CNN map, and all the rest). Elections are ever more uncertain because they are always so close; because polling is fraught or broken; because disinformation, confusion, suppression, or God knows what else has made it impossible to have any sense of how these contests might turn out beforehand. The promise of synthesizing all of that uncertainty moments after a state’s polls close, and transforming it into knowledge, is too tempting to ignore. So you tune in to the news. You refresh the needle.

But what you learn is nothing other than how to feel good or bad in the moment. That the needle has clearly caused many extremely online coastal elites to have some gentle form of PTSD is clearly a feature, not a bug. It is a reminder of the needle’s power or, perhaps more accurately, its ability to move in such a way that it appears to usher in its own reality (when, really, it’s just reflecting changes in a spreadsheet of information). The needle is manipulative.

Worst of all, nothing about it is “actionable,” as the business-insights-dashboard fanatics would say. Dashboards promise a modicum of control. But what are you going to do, now that the polls are closed and you are in your pajamas? Cheer, or bite your nails, or attempt to lure your spouse away from the television or the needle, or eat cake or drink liquor or stare into space or high-five your buds or clean up after you ferret. There is nothing you can do. It’s out of your hands, and no amount of data, polling, chief analysis, or anything else can change that. You know this, and yet you still stare.

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

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

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield become a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG. Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people. Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.) Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.) Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.) Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are what make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

Just after college, I went to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village school in West Africa. To help relieve the loneliness, I packed a shortwave radio, a Sony Walkman, and, among other books, a paperback copy of Thomas Mann’s very long novel The Magic Mountain. As soon as I set foot in Togo, something began to change. My pulse kept racing; my mouth went dry and prickly; dizzy spells came on. I developed a dread of the hot silence of the midday hours, and an awareness of each moment of time as a vehicle for mental pain. It might have helped if I’d known that my weekly antimalarial medicine could have disturbing effects, especially on dreams (mine were frighteningly vivid), or if someone had mentioned the words anxiety and depression to me. At 22, I was a psychological innocent. Without the comfort of a diagnosis, I experienced these changes as a terrifying void of meaning in the universe. I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn’t seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.

I might have lost my mind if not for The Magic Mountain. By luck or fate, the novel—which was published 100 years ago, in November 1924—seemed to tell a story a little like mine, set not in the West African rainforest but in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, a 23-year-old German engineer, leaves the “flatlands” for a three-week visit to his cousin Joachim, a tuberculosis patient who is taking the cure in one of the high-altitude sanatoriums that flourished in Europe before the First World War. Hans Castorp (Mann’s detached and amused, yet sympathetic, narrator always refers to the protagonist by his full name) is “a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man,” a slightly comical young bourgeois.

Arriving on the mountain, he immediately loses his bearings. In the thin air, his face goes hot and his body cold; his heart pounds, and his favorite cigar tastes like cardboard. His sense of time becomes warped. Many of the patients spend years “up here.” No one speaks or thinks in terms of days. “ ‘Home in three weeks,’ that’s a notion from down below,” his ailing cousin warns. Hans Castorp’s companions at the sanatorium’s five lavish daily meals are a cosmopolitan and macabre gallery of mostly young people who fill the endless hours gossiping, flirting, quarreling, philosophizing, and waiting to recover or die. The proximity of death is unsettling; it’s also funny (when the roads are blocked by snow, corpses are sent flying down the mountain on bobsleds) and strangely alluring.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the Making of The Magic Mountain]

When Hans Castorp catches a cold, the sanatorium’s director examines him and finds a “moist spot” on one of his lungs. That and a slight fever suggest tuberculosis, requiring him to remain for an indeterminate time. Both diagnosis and treatment are dubious, but they thrill Hans Castorp: This hermetic world has begun to cast a spell on him and provoke questions “about the meaning and purpose of life” that he’d never asked down in the flatlands. Answered at first with “hollow silence,” they demand extended contemplation that’s possible only on the magic mountain.

The director’s assistant, trained in psychoanalysis, explains in one of his biweekly lectures that sickness is “merely transformed love,” the body’s response to repressed desire. Fever is the mark of eros; the decay of a diseased body signifies life itself. Mann had ventured onto this terrain before. In his novella Death in Venice (1912), the famous writer Gustav von Aschenbach, infatuated with a Polish boy at his hotel, stays in the plague-ridden city while other visitors flee. Hans Castorp stays too, obsessed with his own temperature chart, and with the entrancing Clavdia Chauchat, a young tubercular Russian with “Kirghiz eyes,” bad posture, and a habit of letting the dining-room door slam behind her. Almost half the novel goes by before Hans Castorp—who has by now been on the mountain for seven months—talks with Clavdia, just as she’s about to depart. On the night before she leaves, he makes one of the most bizarre declarations of love in literature: “Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down—oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!” Clavdia leaves Hans Castorp with a framed X-ray of her tubercular lung.

I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music. The climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”

Hans Castorp remains on the mountain for seven years—a mystical number. The Magic Mountain is an odyssey confined to one place, a novel of ideas like no other, and a masterpiece of literary modernism. Mann analyzes the nature of time philosophically and also conveys the feeling of its passage, slowing down his narrative in some spots to take in “the entire world of ideas”—a day can fill 100 pages—and elsewhere omitting years. Reading this dense yet miraculously seductive book becomes an experience like Hans Castorp’s interlude on the mountain. As I made my way through the novel by kerosene lamplight, I took Mann’s bildungsroman as a guide to my own education among the farmers, teachers, children, and market women who became my closest companions, hoping to find myself on a journey toward enlightenment as rich and meaningful as its hero’s. That was asking too much of even great literature; afraid of my own suicidal thoughts, I went home before the end of my two years. But on a few particularly dark nights, The Magic Mountain probably saved my life.

I recently returned to The Magic Mountain, without the intense identification of the first time (you have to be young for a book to inspire that), but with a larger sense that, a century later, Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization. The Mann who began writing the novel was an aristocrat of art, hostile to democracy—a reactionary aesthete. Working on The Magic Mountain was a transformative experience, turning him—as it turned his protagonist—into a humanist. What Hans Castorp arrives at, lost and asleep in the snow, “is the idea of the human being,” Mann later wrote, “the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.” In our age of brutal wars, authoritarian politics, cultures of contempt, and technology that promises to replace us with machines, what is left of the idea of the human being? What can it mean to be a humanist?

Mann conceived of The Magic Mountain in 1912, when he was 37, after a three-week visit to a sanatorium in Davos where his wife, Katia, was a patient. “It was meant as a humorous companion-piece to Death in Venice and was to be about the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished,” he later wrote. He soon discovered that his story resisted the confines of a comic novella. But before he could realize its possibilities, World War I broke out, in August 1914. With Hans Castorp still in his first week at the sanatorium, Mann abandoned the manuscript as Europe plunged into unprecedented destruction. In a letter to a friend in the summer of 1915, he left a clue as to where things stood with his unfinished novel: “On the whole the story inclines towards sympathy with death.” And he now saw an ending—the war itself.

Mann published no fiction for the duration of the war. Instead, he became a very public defender of imperial Germany against its adversaries. For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief. The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values. This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered.

Mann scorned the notion of the writer as political activist. The artist should remain apart from politics and society, he believed, free to represent the deep and contradictory truths of reality rather than using art as a means to advance a particular view. In his wartime nonfiction writing, he mocked “civilization’s literary man,” a self-important poseur who takes sides on public issues and signs petitions. Mann was aiming at his brother Heinrich, a novelist and an essayist of nearly equal renown, whose liberal politics led him to support Germany’s enemies, France and Britain. The brothers exchanged indirect but caustic volleys in print, and their fraternal dispute became so bitter that they didn’t speak for seven years.

Before setting aside The Magic Mountain, Mann had created a version of this writer figure in a character named Lodovico Settembrini, another patient at the sanatorium, who is an irascible and hyper-articulate advocate for all things progressive: reason, liberty, virtue, health, the active life, social improvement. He declares music, the most emotionally overpowering of the arts, “politically suspect.” Mann at his most satiric has Settembrini contributing an essay to a multivolume project whose purpose is to end suffering. In short, Settembrini, like Heinrich, is a “humanist”—but in Mann’s usage, the term has an ironic sound. As he wrote elsewhere, it implies “a repugnant shallowness and castration of the concept of humanity,” pushed by “the politician, the humanitarian revolutionary and radical literary man, who is a demagogue in the grand style, namely a flatterer of mankind.”

Settembrini becomes a philosophical tutor to Hans Castorp, who listens with respectful interest but resists the liberal catechism. He responds more powerfully to the erotic allure of Clavdia Chauchat, the careless door slammer, who believes in “abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us.” Yet Settembrini also has the wisdom to warn our hero against the seductions of the sanatorium, which separates young people from the society “down there,” infecting them with lassitude and rendering them incapable of ordinary life. As an artist above politics, Mann didn’t want simply to criticize “civilization’s literary man,” but to show him as “equally right and wrong.” He intended to create an intellectual opponent to Settembrini in a conservative Protestant character named Pastor Bunge—but the war intruded.

Mann spent the war years making his case for the German soul, steeped in the “passion” of Wagner and “manliness” of Nietzsche, amid a global catastrophe that remained bloodlessly abstract to him at his desk in Munich. He published his wartime writings in the genre-defying Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in October 1918, one month before the armistice. Katia Mann later wrote, “In the course of writing the book, Thomas Mann gradually freed himself from the ideas which had held sway over him … He wrote Reflections in all sincerity and, in doing so, ended by getting over what he had advocated in the book.”

When Mann unpacked the four-year-old manuscript of The Magic Mountain in the spring of 1919, the novel and its creator were poised to undergo a metamorphosis. The war that had just ended enlarged the novel’s theme into “a worldwide festival of death”; the devastation, he would go on to write in the book’s last pages, was “the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates,” soon to become a German soldier. It also confronted Mann himself with a new world to which he had to respond.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the making of The Magic Mountain]

Defeated Germany was in a state of revolution. In Munich, demobilized soldiers, right-wing paramilitaries, and Communist militants fought in the streets, while leaders of the new Weimar Republic were routinely assassinated. A local war veteran named Adolf Hitler began to electrify crowds in cramped halls with speeches denouncing the “traitors”—republican politicians, leftists, Jews—who had stabbed Germany in the back. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was born in Munich; Hitler’s attempted coup in November 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, took place less than two miles from the Mann house.

Some German conservatives, in their hatred of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, embraced right-wing mass politics. Mann, nearing 50, vacillated, hoping to salvage the old conservatism from the new extremism. In early 1922, he and Heinrich reconciled, and, as Mann later wrote, he began “to accept the European-democratic religion of humanity within my moral horizon, which so far had been bounded solely by late German romanticism, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner.” In April of that year, in a review of a German translation of Walt Whitman’s selected poetry and prose, he associated the American poet’s mystical notion of democracy with “the same thing that we in our old-fashioned way call ‘humanity’ … I am convinced there is no more urgent task for Germany today than to fill out this word, which has been debased into a hollow shell.”

The key event of Mann’s conversion came in June, when ultranationalists in Berlin murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Jewish foreign minister. Shocked into taking a political stand, Mann turned a birthday speech in honor of the Nobel Prize–winning author Gerhart Hauptmann into a stirring call for democracy. To the amazement of his audience and the German press, Mann ended with the cry “Long live the republic!”

Mann the novelist had meanwhile returned to The Magic Mountain, and his work on it took a swerve in the same crucial year of 1922. His hero would have to struggle with the political battle that had beset Mann during the war. Abandoning Pastor Bunge as outmoded, he created a new counterpart to Settembrini who casts a sinister shadow over the second half of the novel: an ugly, charismatic, and (of course) tubercular Jesuit of Jewish origin named Leo Naphta. The intellectual combat between him and Settembrini—which ends physically, in a duel—provides some of the most dazzling passages in The Magic Mountain.

Just when you want to give up on their high-level dialectics, one of them, usually Naphta, says something that shocks you into a new way of thinking. Naphta is neither conservative nor liberal. Against capitalist modernity, whose godless greed and moral vacuity he hates with a sulfurous rage, Naphta offers a synthesis of medieval Catholicism and the new ideology of communism. Both place “anonymous and communal” authority over the individual, and both are intent on saving humanity from Settembrini’s soft, rational humanism. Hans Castorp calls Naphta “a revolutionary of reaction.” At times sounding like a fanatical parody of the Mann of Reflections, Naphta argues that love of freedom and pleasure is weaker than the desire to obey. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego,” he says. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.” Mann understood the appeal of totalitarianism early on.

It’s Naphta, a truly demonic figure—not Settembrini, the voice of reason—who precipitates the end of the hero’s romance with death. His jarring arrival allows Hans Castorp to loosen himself from its grip and begin a journey toward—what? Not toward Settembrini’s international republic of letters, and not back toward his simple bourgeois life down in the flatlands. The answer comes 300 pages before the novel’s end, when Hans Castorp puts on a new pair of skis and sets out for a few hours of exercise that lead him into the fateful blizzard and “a very enchanting, very dreadful dream.”

In it, he encounters a landscape of human beings in all their kindness and beauty, and all their hideous evil. “I know everything about humankind,” he thinks, still dreaming, and he resolves to reject both Settembrini and Naphta—or rather, to reject the stark choice between life and death, illness and health, recognizing that “man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.” During his years on the mountain, he’s become one of death’s intimates, and his initiation into its mysteries has immeasurably deepened his understanding of life—but he won’t let death rule his thoughts. He won’t let reason either, which seems weak and paltry before the power of destruction. “Love stands opposed to death,” he dreams; “it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.”

The Magic Mountain makes no clear political statement. The novel remains true to Mann’s belief that art must include everything, allowing life its complexity and ambiguity. But the vision of “love” that Hans Castorp embraces just before waking up is “brotherly love”—the bond that unites all human beings. The creation of this novel, which won Mann international fame, is “a tale of two Thomas Manns,” in the words of Morten Høi Jensen, a Danish critic whose The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” is due to be published next year. The Mann of wartime could not have written the sentence that awakens Hans Castorp from his dream.

[From the October 1944 issue: Thomas Mann’s “In My Defense”]

Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis. A Nobel Prize winner in exile, he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”

He was speaking at a moment when the dignity of man was locked up in Nazi concentration camps, liquidated in Soviet show trials, buried under piles of corpses. Yet Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”

Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt. We’re hardly surprised when our leaders debase themselves with vile behavior and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud. It takes a constant effort not to accept this as normal. We might even feel, without acknowledging it to ourselves, that we deserve it: After all, we’re human, the lowest of the low.

In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we, too, grant death dominion over our thoughts. We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices.

The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time. But Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Magic Mountain Saved My Life.”

Why has this election season featured so many stories about animal cruelty? The 2024 campaign has contained many remarkable moments—the Democrats’ sudden switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris; the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the emergence of Elon Musk as the MAGA minister for propaganda; the grimly racist “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden. But the bizarre run of stories about animal abuse has been one of the least discussed.

In late October, the National Rifle Association was supposed to hold a “Defend the 2nd” event with a keynote address by Trump, but it was canceled at the last minute, because of what the NRA described as “campaign scheduling changes.” Here’s another possible reason: Earlier last month, the NRA’s new chief executive, Doug Hamlin, was outed as an accessory to cat murder.

In 1980, according to contemporary news accounts unearthed by The Guardian, Hamlin and four buddies at the University of Michigan pleaded no contest to animal cruelty following the death of their fraternity’s cat, BK. The cat’s paws had been cut off before it was set on fire and strung up, allegedly for not using the litter box. “I took responsibility for this regrettable incident as chapter president although I wasn’t directly involved,” Hamlin wrote in a statement to media outlets after the Guardian report appeared.

In April, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s Republican governor, scuttled her chances of becoming Trump’s running mate when her memoir revealed that two decades ago, she shot her wirehaired pointer, Cricket, in a gravel pit after the puppy had attacked some chickens and then bit her. (“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, adding that she later killed an unruly goat in the same spot.) More recently, during his only debate with Harris, Trump painted immigrants as murderers of American cats and dogs, repeating unsubstantiated internet rumors that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating “the pets of the people that live there.”

[Read: The link between animal abuse and murder]

American political figures have long showcased their pets to humanize themselves—remember Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and Socks, Bill Clinton’s cat? But the relationship between animals and humans keeps growing in salience as our lifestyles change. Domestic animals have moved from being seen as ratcatchers, guards, and hunting companions to pampered lap dogs that get dressed up as pumpkins on Halloween. Half of American pet owners say that their animals are as much part of the family as any human, and many of us mainline cute videos of cats and dogs for hours every week. These shifting attitudes have made accusations of animal abuse a potent attack on political adversaries—and social media allows such claims to be amplified even when they are embellished or made up entirely.

At the same time, we make arbitrary distinctions between species on emotional grounds, treating some as friends, some as food, and some as sporting targets. Three-quarters of Americans support hunting and fishing, and the Democratic nominee for vice president, Tim Walz, was so keen to burnish his rural credentials that he took part in a pheasant shoot on the campaign trail. Similarly, only 3 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and 1 percent are vegan, but killing a pet—a member of the family—violates a deep taboo.

Noem, who seemed to view Cricket purely as a working dog, was clearly caught off guard by the reaction to her memoir. “The governor that killed the family pet was the one thing that united the extreme right and the extreme left,” Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor who studies human attitudes toward animals, told me. “There was this moral outrage. She was just oblivious.”

Herzog, the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, has been interested in how people think about animal cruelty since he researched illegal cockfighting rings for his doctorate several decades ago. He told me that the people who ran the fights, who made money by inflicting great pain on the roosters involved, “loved dogs and had families. But they had this one little quirk.” Politicians can trip over these categories—our deep-down feeling that some animals can be killed or hurt, and others cannot—without realizing it until it’s too late.

I had called Herzog to ask what he made of someone like the NRA’s Hamlin—a prominent man who was once involved in the torture of an animal. Should a history of animal cruelty or neglect—or just plain weirdness—be disqualifying for a politician, a corporate leader, or an activist? In his media statement, Hamlin maintained after the fraternity story came out that he had not done anything similar again. “Since that time I served my country, raised a family, volunteered in my community, started a business, worked with Gold Star families, and raised millions of dollars for charity,” he declared. “I’ve endeavored to live my life in a manner beyond reproach.” Could that be true—could someone be involved in such a sadistic act without it being evidence of wider moral depravity?

“What strikes me about animal cruelty is that most people that are cruel to animals are not sadists or sociopaths; they’re everyday people,” Herzog told me. A review of the literature showed that a third of violent offenders had a history of animal abuse—but so did a third of the members of the control group, he said. Then Herzog blew my mind. “To me, the greatest paradox of all is Nazi animal protection.”

I’m sorry?

“The Nazis passed the world’s most progressive animal-rights legislation,” he continued, unfazed. The German regime banned hunting with dogs, the production of foie gras, and docking dogs’ tails without anesthetic. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, “wrote that he would put in a prison camp anyone who was cruel to an animal.” When the Nazis decreed that Jews could no longer own pets, the regime ensured that the animals were slaughtered humanely. It sent their owners to concentration camps.

[Read: A single male cat’s reign of terror]

The Nazis dehumanized their enemies and humanized their animals, but Herzog thinks that the reverse is more common: Many people who are good to other humans are often cruel to animals. And even those who claim to love animals are nonetheless capable of causing them pain. Circus trainers who whip their charges might dote on their pets. People who deliberately breed dogs with painfully flat faces to win competitions insist that they adore their teeny asthmatic fur babies. “These sorts of paradoxes are so common,” Herzog said.

The lines separating cruelty from the acceptable handling of animals have a way of shifting. I’m old enough to remember the 2012 election cycle, when Mitt Romney was reviled for having driven his station wagon with a kennel strapped to the top containing the family dog, Seamus. Midway through the 12-hour drive from Boston to Ontario, the dog suffered from diarrhea, obscuring the rear windshield. Like Noem, Romney was also blindsided by the scandal: Animal activists described his actions as cruelty, and a Facebook group called Dogs Against Romney attracted 38,000 fans. By the standards of a dozen years ago, Seamusgate was a big story, but it’s mild in comparison with this year’s headlines. When Romney was asked about Noem’s memoir earlier this year, he said the two incidents were not comparable: “I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.”

One of the most reliable sources of strange animal stories this cycle has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmentalist with a lifelong interest in keeping, training, and eating animals who has frequently transgressed the accepted Western boundaries of interaction with the natural world. In July, Vanity Fair published a photograph that it said Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, had sent to a friend. In it, he and an unidentified woman are holding a barbecued animal carcass up to their open mouths. The suggestion was that the animal was a dog. “The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness,” the magazine reported. (In response, Kennedy said that the animal was a goat.)

A month later, Kennedy admitted that he had once found a dead bear cub on the side of a road in upstate New York and put it in his trunk. He said he had intended to skin it and “put the meat in my refrigerator.” However, that never happened, because, in NPR’s glorious phrasing, Kennedy claimed to have been “waylaid by a busy day of falconry” and a steak dinner, and instead decided to deposit the carcass in Central Park. (He even posed the dead bear so that it appeared to have been run over by a cyclist.) “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he later told the comedian Roseanne Barr in a video that he released on X. He was 60 when the incident occurred. What made the idea of picking up a dead bear sound so strange to many commentators, when the falconry would have caused, at most, a raised eyebrow—and the steak dinner no comment at all?

Kennedy’s animal antics still weren’t finished. In September, he released a bizarre video in which he fondled an iguana and recounted how in some countries, people slit open the lizards’ stomachs to eat the eggs inside. Then another old anecdote surfaced: His daughter Kick recalled a trip home from the beach with parts of a dead whale strapped to the roof of the car. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told Town & Country. She added that this was “just normal day-to-day stuff” for her father. Not everyone was so quick to minimize Kennedy’s conduct. “These are behaviors you read about in news articles not about a candidate but about a suspect,” my colleague Caitlin Flanagan observed.

[Pagan Kennedy: New York’s grand dame of dog poisoning]

I’m as guilty as anyone of making illogical distinctions—though I would like to stress that I have never murdered a cat or dismembered a dead whale. Having recently driven across Pennsylvania, where I counted three dead deer by the side of the road on a single trip, I support the right to hunt—population control is essential. Yet the infamous photograph of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump posing with a dead leopard on a safari trip more than a decade ago disturbs me far more than the unproven assertion that one immigrant, somewhere, has eaten a dog or cat for sustenance. You can tell from the Trump sons’ expressions that they are extremely proud of having killed a rare and beautiful creature purely for their own entertainment. The image is grotesque. It reminds me of Atticus Finch’s instruction that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, because “mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

As it happens, hunters, many of them animal lovers in their everyday life, have a complicated code of ethics about what counts as a fair chase. Hence the backlash over the former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s support for shooting Alaskan wolves from an aircraft. Most of us are okay with killing animals—or having them killed on our behalf—as long as the process does not involve unnecessary cruelty or excessive enjoyment.

In the end, arbitrary categories can license or restrict our capacity for cruelty and allow us to entertain two contradictory thoughts at once. We love animals and we kill animals. We create boundaries around an us and a them, and treat transgressors of each limit very differently. In a similar way, some of Donald Trump’s crowds applaud his racist rumors about migrants—when they might not dream of being rude to their neighbor who was born abroad. “What we see in animals,” Herzog told me, “is a microcosm of the big issue of how humans make moral decisions.” In other words, illogically and inconsistently. The same individual is capable of great humanity—and great cruelty or indifference.

The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website with a history of spreading lies about election fraud, recently posted something out of the ordinary. It took a break from its coverage of the 2024 presidential election (sample headlines: “KAMALA IS KOLLAPSING,” “KAMALA FUNDS NAZIS”) to post a three-sentence note from the site’s founder and editor, Jim Hoft, offering some factual information about the previous presidential election.

In his brief statement, presented without any particular fanfare, Hoft writes that election officials in Georgia concluded that no widespread voter fraud took place at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020. He notes specifically that they concluded that two election workers processing votes that night, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, had not engaged “in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.” And he explains that “a legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”  

Indeed, the blog post appeared just days after the Gateway Pundit settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Freeman and Moss, who sued the outlet for promoting false claims that they had participated in mass voter fraud. (These claims, quickly debunked, were focused on video footage of the mother-daughter pair storing ballots in their appropriate carriers—conspiracy theorists had claimed that they were instead packing them into suitcases for some wicked purpose.) The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but after it was announced, almost 70 articles previously published on the Gateway Pundit, and cited in the lawsuit, were no longer available, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

Even so, the site—which has promoted numerous lies and conspiracy theories in the past, and which still faces a lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former executive at Dominion Voting Systems, for pushing false claims that he helped rig the 2020 election—shows no signs of retreat. (The Gateway Pundit has fought this lawsuit, including by filing a motion to dismiss. Although the site filed for bankruptcy in April, a judge tossed it out, concluding that the filing was in “bad faith.”) The site has continued to post with impunity, promoting on a number of occasions the conspiracy that Democrats are “openly stealing” the 2024 election with fraudulent overseas votes. A political-science professor recently told my colleague Matteo Wong that this particular claim has been one of the “dominant narratives” this year, as Donald Trump’s supporters seek ways to undermine faith in the democratic process.  

This is to be expected: The Gateway Pundit has been around since 2004, and it has always been a destination for those disaffected by the “establishment media.” Comment sections—on any website, let alone those that explicitly cater to the far-right fringe—have never had a reputation for sobriety and thoughtfulness. And the Gateway Pundit’s is particularly vivid. One recent commenter described a desire to see Democratic officials “stripped naked and sprayed down with a firehose like Rambo in First Blood.” Even so, data recently shared with me by the Center for Countering Digital Hate—a nonprofit that studies disinformation and online abuse, and which reports on companies that it believes allow such content to spread—show just how nasty these communities can get. Despite the fracturing of online ecosystems in recent years—namely, the rise and fall of various social platforms and the restructuring of Google Search, both of which have resulted in an overall downturn in traffic to news sites—the Gateway Pundit has remained strikingly relevant on social media, according to the CCDH. And its user base, as seen in the comments, has regularly endorsed political violence in the past few months, despite the site’s own policies forbidding such posts.

Researchers from the CCDH recently examined the comment sections beneath 120 Gateway Pundit articles about alleged election fraud published between May and September. They found that 75 percent of those sections contained “threats or calls for violence.” One comment cited in the report reads: “Beat the hell out of any Democrat you come across today just for the hell of it.”

Another: “They could show/televise the hangings or lined up and executed by firing squad and have that be a reminder not to try to overthrow our constitution.” Overall, the researchers found more than 200 comments with violent content hosted on the Gateway Pundit.

Sites like the Gateway Pundit often attempt to justify the vitriol they host on their platforms by arguing in free-speech terms. But even free-speech absolutists can understand legitimate concerns about incitements to violence. Local election officials in Georgia and Arizona have blamed the site and its comment section for election-violence threats in the past. A 2021 Reuters report found links between the site and more than 80 “menacing” messages sent to election workers. According to Reuters, after the Gateway Pundit published a fake report about ballot fraud in Wisconsin, one election official found herself identified in the comment section, along with calls for her to be killed. “She found one post especially unnerving,” the Reuters reporters Peter Eisler and Jason Szep write. “It recommended a specific bullet for killing her—a 7.62 millimeter round for an AK-47 assault rifle.”

The CCDH researchers used data from a social-media monitoring tool called Newswhip to measure social-media engagement with election-related content from Gateway Pundit and similar sites. Although Gateway Pundit was second to Breitbart as a source for election misinformation on social media overall, the researchers found that the Gateway Pundit was actually the most popular on X, where its content was shared more than 800,000 times from the start of the year through October 2.  

In response to a request for comment, John Burns, a lawyer representing Hoft and the Gateway Pundit, told me that the site relies on users reporting “offending” comments, including those expressing violence or threats. “If a few slipped through the cracks, we’ll look into it,” Burns said. He did not comment on the specifics of the CCDH report, nor the recent lawsuits against the company.

The site uses a popular third-party commenting platform called Disqus, which has taken a hands-off approach to policing far-right, racist content in the past. Disqus offers clients AI-powered, customizable moderation tools that allow them to filter out toxic or inappropriate comments from their site, or ban users. The CCDH report points out that violent comments are against Disqus’s own terms of service. “Publishers monitor and enforce their own community rules,” a Disqus spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “Only if a comment is flagged directly to the Disqus team do we review it against our terms of service. Once flagged, we aim to review within 24 hours and determine whether or not action is required based on our rules and terms of service.”

The Gateway Pundit is just one of a constellation of right-wing sites that offer readers an alternate reality. Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told me that these sites pushed the range of what’s considered acceptable speech “quite a long way to the right,” and in some cases, away from traditional, “fact-based” media. They started to grow more popular with the rise of the social web, in which algorithmic recommendation systems and conservative influencers pushed their articles to legions of users.

The real power of these sites may come not in their broad reach, but in how they shape the opinions of a relatively small, radical subset of people. According to a paper published in Nature this summer, false and inflammatory content tends to reach “a narrow fringe” of highly motivated users. Sites like the Gateway Pundit are “influential in a very small niche,” Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the paper, told me over email. As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

I asked Pasha Dashtgard, the director of research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, what exactly the relationship is between sites like Gateway Pundit and political violence. “That is such a million-dollar question,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.” By that, he means that it’s hard for researchers and law enforcement to know when online threats will translate into armed vigilantes descending on government buildings. Social-media platforms have only gotten less transparent with their data since the previous cycle, making it more difficult for researchers to suss out what’s happening on them.

“The pathway to radicalization is not linear,” Dashtgard explained. “Certainly I would want to disabuse anyone of the idea that it’s like, you go on this website and that makes you want to kill people.” People could have other risk factors that make them more likely to commit violence, such as feeling alienated or depressed, he said. These sites just represent another potential push mechanism.

And they don’t seem to be slowing down. Three hours after Hoft posted his blog post correcting the record in the case of Freeman and Moss, he posted another statement. This one was addressed to readers. “Many of you may be aware that The Gateway Pundit was in the news this week. We settled an ongoing lawsuit against us,” the post reads in part. “Despite their best efforts, we are still standing.”