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Americans keeping close track of political news may have been toggling their screens today between Senate confirmation hearings: the second day of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for secretary of Health and Human Services, and the first for Tulsi Gabbard’s for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel’s for FBI director. But each of those three hearings deserves the public’s full attention: Donald Trump’s nominees offered new glimpses into their approaches to policy, truth, and loyalty to the president.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Day Two

Ahead of Kennedy’s first day of hearings, our colleague Nicholas Florko noted that the HHS nominee is no stranger to conspiracist statements: “RFK Jr. has insinuated that an attempt to assassinate members of Congress via anthrax-laced mail in 2001 may have been a ‘false flag’ attack orchestrated by ‘someone in our government’ to gin up interest in the government preparing for potential biological weapon threats. He has claimed that COVID was ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,’ and that 5G is being used to ‘harvest our data and control our behavior.’ He has suggested that the use of antidepressants might be linked to mass shootings.”

“If Republican senators skirt around [Kennedy’s] falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings,” Nicholas wrote, “it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights … He’s capable of rattling off vaccine studies with the fluency of a virologist, which boosts his credibility, even though he’s freely misrepresenting reality.” But Kennedy’s sleights didn’t serve him quite as well today as he might have hoped.

At several points, senators encouraged Kennedy to acknowledge that vaccines are not the cause of autism, but instead of confirming what numerous studies have shown to be true, Kennedy insisted that he would need to “look at all the data” before coming to any conclusions. “The room went silent today during Senator [Bill] Cassidy’s closing questions,” Nicholas noted when we spoke this afternoon. “Cassidy was practically begging Kennedy to recant his previous statements on vaccines. Kennedy, like everyone else in the room, had to know this was a make-or-break moment for his confirmation. But despite the potential fallout, Kennedy refused, promising only that he would look at any studies presented to him disproving a link between vaccines and autism.”

The nominee for HHS secretary also showed, for the second day in a row, his lack of understanding about basics of the Medicare system, fumbling his answers to a series of rapid-fire questions from Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire. Hassan also shared that she is the mother of a 36-year-old with cerebral palsy, and accused Kennedy of relitigating settled science on the fact that vaccines do not cause autism. “It’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward, and it freezes us in place,” she argued.

Cassidy, whose vote could prove key to whether RFK Jr. is confirmed, said after today’s hearing that he is “struggling” over whether to confirm Kennedy.

Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard came into her confirmation process with a history that raises questions about her commitment to national security (she has, among other things, met with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and expressed sympathetic views toward Russian President Vladimir Putin). As our colleague Tom Nichols wrote in November, “Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize for Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of warning lights. If she is nominated to be America’s top intelligence officer, that’s everyone’s business.”

The topic that ultimately received much attention in her confirmation hearing today was her refusal to say whether Edward Snowden is a traitor. Despite pressure from Democratic and Republican senators, Gabbard refused to answer the question, repeating that Snowden had broken the law and that she would take steps to make sure whistleblowers know how to properly make a complaint. Gabbard also revealed that she was unable to extract any concessions in her 2017 meeting with Assad. “I didn’t expect to,” she said.

Gabbard’s potential confirmation will depend on how her somewhat incoherent set of policy views sits with Republican senators. Last week, our colleague Elaine Godfrey explored the one through line—besides ambition—that has guided Gabbard’s otherwise inconsistent political career.

Kash Patel

Donald Trump is not always clear about what he means when he refers to “DEI,” but presumably it involves how someone’s identity is taken into consideration during the hiring process. In this morning’s press conference addressing the tragic plane crash last night, Trump asserted, without evidence but crediting his “common sense,” that DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration was at fault.

It was odd, then, that a few hours later, Republican senators used Patel’s confirmation hearing to highlight his identity: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked about examples of racism Patel has experienced, and Senator Mike Lee of Utah acknowledged the struggles Patel and his father must have faced as racial minorities in the United States and Uganda, respectively. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as if he were reading from a book report about the Gujarati people, lauded the religious diversity in Gujarat, India, where Patel’s family is originally from, omitting the state’s extreme tensions and violent history. Patel opened his own remarks by acknowledging his family’s journey from abroad. He invoked the phrase Jai Shri Krishna, a standard greeting for a sect of Hindus seeking blessings.

Patel was calm and still—he became riled up only when questioned by Senator Amy Klobuchar about his past suggestion that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’” But he was walking a tightrope. Today’s hearing may be the rare instance when Patel has publicly broken with Trump, to whom he has otherwise been unequivocally loyal. He refused to explicitly state that Trump lost the 2020 election, but he also said, “I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement.”

Overall, Patel seemed to be trying to carefully toe a line, answering questions about the culture-war issues that Trump and congressional Republicans care about—Senator Marsha Blackburn, for example, asserted during the hearing that the FBI prioritizes DEI and “counting Swiftie bracelets” over conducting investigations—while attempting not to alienate the employees he hopes to lead. Pressed by Blackburn, Patel made a vague statement about the “high standards” FBI employees must meet.

Related:

RFK Jr. has a lot to learn about Medicaid. What everyone gets wrong about Tulsi Gabbard

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The memo that shocked the White House The near misses at airports have been telling us something. Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold. Jonathan Lemire: “What I saw at Trump’s first press conference”

Today’s News

Officials announced that there are no survivors in the crash last night between a U.S.-military Black Hawk helicopter and a regional American Airlines passenger jet landing at an airport near Washington, D.C. Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter, and 64 people were on the flight from Wichita, Kansas. Donald Trump appointed Christopher Rocheleau as the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency had not had an administrator since the start of Trump’s new term. Eight hostages were released from Gaza by Hamas, and Israel released 110 Palestinian prisoners.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Don Peck interviews Nicholas Carr about h​​ow online life has rewired our brains.

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“The ‘exciting business opportunity’ that ruined our lives” Trump’s war on meritocracy If Iranian assassins kill them, it will be Trump’s fault, Tom Nichols writes. Don’t politicize aviation safety. The return of snake oil Why Meta is paying $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Your FOMO Is Trying to Tell You Something

By Faith Hill

I feel deeply haunted by the thought that if I don’t go to the party or the dinner or the coffee stroll, my one wild and precious life will be void of a joyful, transformative event—one I’d surely still be thinking about on my deathbed, a friend at my side tenderly holding my hand and whispering, Remember? That time we went bowling and the guy in the next lane over said that funny thing? Every year, my New Year’s resolution is to keep one night of the week free from social plans. Almost every week, I fail.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

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Put on the spot, a lot of Americans might hesitate over the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. People who aren’t affected by one of these programs, which together enroll about 150 million people in the U.S., don’t generally have a need to be well versed in their intricacies, and the two programs sound quite similar. The names don’t really hint that Medicare is a federal program that covers older Americans and Americans with disabilities, and that Medicaid covers low-income people in the United States.

Most Americans, though, are not nominated to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is. And yet today, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he made clear that he also does not know very much about Medicare and Medicaid.

As HHS secretary, Kennedy would oversee a suite of government agencies, including the FDA, CDC, and National Institutes of Health, that are focused on improving American health. He also would oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which, as the name implies, manages those two programs. HHS services, in other words, touch the lives of every American—and Medicaid and Medicare are, in particular, two of the most common ways for people to directly benefit from the government’s services.

During the three-and-a-half-hour hearing, in which the Senate committee pressed Kennedy on a range of issues—his anti-vaccine views, endorsements of conspiracy theories, stance on abortion, potential financial conflicts—senators grilled Kennedy on various aspects of the two government programs. In his new role, Kennedy could be charged with overseeing substantial changes to one of them. Donald Trump has pledged to preserve Medicare. He has made no such promise about Medicaid, which health-policy experts anticipate may be targeted for spending cuts. (On Tuesday, Medicaid reimbursement portals abruptly stopped working after the Trump administration ordered a freeze on federal grants and loans; states have since regained access to the portals.) Some Republicans have argued that an increased focus on public-health insurance in the U.S. won’t make Americans healthier, and Kennedy appeared to echo that viewpoint today when he criticized Medicaid, saying “our people are getting sicker every single year,” and lamented the program’s expansion to people with higher incomes. “The poorest Americans are now being robbed,” he said.

But Kennedy also seemed to mix up the two programs when he described them. Part of the issue with Medicaid, he said, is that “the premiums are too high, the deductibles are too high.” The majority of people enrolled in Medicaid don’t pay premiums or deductibles; federal law actually prohibits premiums for the program’s lowest-income enrollees. (He did seem better versed in Medicare Advantage, a program that provides private insurance coverage for older Americans and that he himself is enrolled in.)

To be fair, Kennedy was in a high-pressure situation. But being HHS secretary is a high-pressure job. Kennedy had time to prepare in advance of today’s hearing. If confirmed, he won’t need to master every minute detail of Medicare and Medicaid, but he will need to be able to navigate both programs—their differences, their weaknesses, and how they might evolve. People who are eligible for both programs, for instance, have created sticking points in the health-care system, in part because coordinating coverage between the two is difficult and can complicate care. When pressed by Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana on how to deal with that issue, Kennedy suggested that the programs should be “consolidated” and “integrated”—but when asked how that might happen, said, “I’m not exactly sure.”

Kennedy struggled with other policy specifics, too. One of his goals, Kennedy said, is to fulfill Trump’s directive to improve the quality of care and lower the price of care for all Americans. But he was vague on any plans to reform Medicaid, explaining that he’d “increase transparency” and “increase accountability.” When pushed by Cassidy to clarify, Kennedy said, “Well, I don’t have a broad proposal for dismantling the program.”

Nor did Kennedy have a clear sense of how he would approach one of the more contentious and legally sensitive health questions of the past few years: whether women whose lives are threatened by pregnancy should be able to receive emergency abortions under EMTALA, the law that requires emergency rooms that receive Medicare funding to provide care to anyone in a life-threatening situation. The Biden administration argued that this federal law supersedes state abortion bans, and in 2024, after the Supreme Court demurred on the issue, the administration made clear to doctors, in a letter co-authored by Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, that abortions could qualify as emergency treatment. Kennedy admitted this morning that he didn’t know the scope of the authority he’d have to enforce the law in his new job.

Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, a clinical pharmacist at UC San Diego, told me that Kennedy's apparent failure to understand the intricacies of the two programs wasn’t just a harmless fumble. If the health secretary is not well versed in the programs he’s tasked to run, he might not appreciate the impacts of his decisions. Should health coverage for some of the most vulnerable Americans be altered—perhaps even taken away—then health disparities in this country would likely widen. And if any part of his agenda does include increasing transparency, as Kennedy described in today’s hearing, expertise will have to be a prerequisite. “You can’t increase transparency on something you don’t have clarity on,” Abdul-Mutakabbir told me. (Kennedy’s press team did not immediately return a request for comment on his performance at today’s hearing.)

During the hearing, Kennedy’s more radical views on vaccines and infectious disease did come up. He copped to describing Lyme disease as “highly likely a militarily engineered bioweapon.” (The bacterium, which has been around for at least tens of thousands of years, is not.) He stood by his assertion that the measles vaccine killed two children in Samoa in 2018. (The vaccine did not; those children died following the administration of an improperly mixed vaccine by two nurses who were ultimately sentenced to five years in prison for the act.) He said that young children are at “basically … zero risk” from COVID-19. (Young children are at risk, especially babies under six months of age, who have similar hospitalization rates from the disease as adults 65 to 74 years old.) Kennedy’s falsehoods about infection and immunity were already well known, though. What the country learned today was that he may lack basic competency in some of the most wide-reaching aspects of his future job—and didn’t take the time to prepare answers for Congress, which he’ll ultimately have to answer to.

Just outside New York City’s Central Park Zoo, not far from where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once stealthily deposited a dead bear cub, stands a bronze statue to another animal: Balto, the husky that, 100 years ago this month, played a leading role in a daring and perilous rescue that captured the world’s attention.

Nome, a small town in the northwestern reaches of the Alaskan territories, had been hit with an outbreak of diphtheria, a highly contagious and cruel respiratory infection that can be particularly deadly to the young. As the children of Nome and surrounding communities fell ill, and some died, the town’s one doctor sent a desperate plea to state and national officials for a fresh supply of the antitoxin serum needed to treat the infected and stem a larger epidemic.

But Nome, with its subarctic climate, was icebound in winter and nearly unreachable. With little time to waste, locals organized a relay of dogsleds to transport the needed doses across 674 treacherous miles of Alaskan wilderness in temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero. In all, 20 heroic men and 150 dogs braved the unsparing elements to deliver the lifesaving serum. Balto anchored the final lap.

The centennial of this heroic expedition is particularly timely, coming as the United States Senate considers President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, a serial purveyor of dangerous disinformation about vaccines, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

[Read: We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines]

It is not too obvious, in 2025, to state that vaccines work. In 1921, before the scientific breakthrough that led to the Tdap vaccine, approximately 200,000 Americans were infected with diphtheria, and 15,000 died. By the turn of the century, thanks to compulsory vaccination of schoolchildren, the number of cases dwindled to almost nothing. From 1996 to 2018, America experienced an average of fewer than one case a year. Polio, measles, and many other potentially deadly diseases also were virtually eradicated by vaccines.

Yet a rising anti-vax movement, fueled by click-hungry demagogues and a growing populist revolt against experts, institutions, and mandates, threatens to drag America backwards. The movement was turbocharged by political resistance to the COVID vaccines, whose development Trump helped speed and deservedly heralded. Near-universal vaccination rates among America’s schoolchildren are dropping. Even slight declines threaten the herd immunity that protects entire communities from the spread of disease. Predictably, potentially deadly childhood diseases are becoming more common again.

For two decades, RFK Jr. has stood at the forefront of this anti-vaccine movement. In books, speeches, and social-media posts, he has championed a widely discredited theory that certain vaccines promote autism and suggested that life under America’s COVID-vaccine mandates was worse than under Hitler’s fascist regime (he apologized for the latter remark).

In 2021, The New York Times recently reported, Kennedy’s Children Health Defense organization petitioned the FDA to withdraw its authorization of the COVID vaccines, which already had saved hundreds of thousands of people and would allow Americans to resume their normal lives. In the petition, Kennedy’s organization argued that the vaccines were not only harmful but unnecessary, and embraced disproven and dangerous theories about alternative treatments.

[Read: What going ‘wild on health’ looks like]

In 2022, the attorney Aaron Siri, a top Kennedy adviser, filed a petition asking the FDA to rescind its approval of the polio vaccine, which, since its inception in the 1950s, has been used by billions of people and has helped subdue that dreaded scourge. For a time, Siri reportedly helped Kennedy screen candidates for future HHS positions and was thought to be in line for one himself, but a transition spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal last week that he was no longer involved.

Kennedy presents the Senate with an interesting dilemma. He bears the name, if not the outlook or gravitas, of his famous father. His emphasis on healthy eating and physical fitness to combat obesity is as sensible now as it was when First Lady Michelle Obama championed those causes in the previous decade, to the scorn of many Republicans. His environmentalism is so pronounced that Trump has publicly assured the “drill, baby, drill” crowd that Kennedy won’t “touch the oil and gas.” His anti-corporate bent and deep suspicion of government bureaucracy appeal to populists on the left and right. And government bureaucracies, which are particularly prone to inertia and special-interest influence, should be challenged.

But their renewal must be guided by facts, not exotic, debunked claims. If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee the FDA, which approves vaccines. He will have authority over the National Institutes of Health, which funds and underwrites essential research that leads to vaccines and cures, and the CDC, which plays a central role in quelling public-health threats. It is an awesome responsibility and a crucial platform, dangerous in the hands of a charlatan who places conspiracy theories over science.

[Read: RFK Jr. is in the wrong agency]

Vaccines and medications should be rigorously tested and scrutinized for their efficacy and side effects, free of pressure and lobbying from the firms that develop them. The public needs and deserves that confidence. But those tests and standards should be based on proven science and not quackery.

Kennedy will face intense questioning about all of this, as well as his stability and judgment, at his confirmation hearing, which is slated for Wednesday. If he is confirmed, his promotion of junk science and vaccine hesitancy could prove as threatening to American public health as the barriers posed by an unforgiving, frozen Alaskan wilderness were to the desperate children and parents of Nome a century ago.

At the foot of Balto’s memorial in Central Park are three words: Endurance, Fidelity, Intelligence. Can enough United States senators overcome political pressure and demonstrate those same qualities in the coming days?

Photographs by John Francis Peters

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

The clips were created by Jubilee Media, a booming entertainment company that has built a huge young following by turning difficult discussions into shareable content. Launched in 2017, it has produced videos with titles including “Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science?” (29 million views), “6 Vegans vs 1 Secret Meat Eater” (17 million views), along with hundreds of others in which delicate subjects—Middle East politics, parenting strategies, penis size—are explored by strangers in gamelike scenarios. During an era of ideological chaos, when all consensus seems in flux, Jubilee has become a phenomenon by insisting that it’s okay, even fun, to clash. In doing so, it represents a challenge to traditional media: Jubilee’s founder, Jason Y. Lee, told me he’s hopeful that the company can host one of the presidential debates in 2028.

Jason Y. Lee (left) watches a taping of Surrounded. He relaunched Jubilee in 2017 as an effort to bridge national divisions revealed by Donald Trump’s election. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

That idea shouldn’t sound far-fetched. The 2024 election demonstrated the influence of YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and other online forums in fostering discussion that’s less regulated than what journalistic norms allow. Gen Z’s rightward swing since 2020, combined with its high rate of independent party identification, suggests a remarkable openness to persuasion from across the political spectrum. Basic policy shibboleths, such as the efficacy of vaccines, are being questioned by all sorts of constituencies; once-predictable public-opinion trend lines—regarding feminism, LGBTQ rights, democracy itself—are going wobbly. As Jubilee’s former creative director John Regalado told me, the internet is “updating our tolerance for disagreement—and disagreement on a lot of things that we thought were in the can.”

Jubilee has proved adept at mining this new paradigm for views. Its video with Shapiro was the fifth-most-watched bit of election-related content on YouTube, just a few spots down from Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump; that “1 Woke Teen,” the fledgling TikTok commentator Dean Withers, was invited to the White House after his performance. The company’s offerings also include dating shows, a forthcoming dating app, and a card game to provoke interesting interactions with friends. Students at high schools and colleges have held Jubilee-inspired events to mimic the debates they see on-screen. Lee said he’s trying to build “the Disney of empathy”: a media empire that teaches people how to connect, listen, and healthily disagree—an ambitious, even fanciful-sounding notion in a time of cultural fracturing and political polarization.

Pursuing that goal has meant emphasizing seemingly old-fashioned media ideals—neutrality, fidelity, hearing from all sides—in ways that can seem extreme. Moderators, when they’re involved at all, take only the lightest touch in steering conversations, which can mean letting misinformation and misdirection fly. (Fact-checks happen after filming and are provided by another start-up, Straight Arrow News, which pitches itself as “Unbiased. Straight Facts.”) Cast members tend to seem like regular, if colorful, folks who speak off-the-cuff. The point isn’t to change participants’ minds—full-on ideological conversions almost never happen in the videos. Rather, Regalado said, Jubilee thinks of its efforts as a “practice” or a “ritual.” The awkward or upsetting moments that inevitably arise are part of the product. “That rawness and that authenticity is what young people desperately are seeking,” Lee told me.

Jubilee’s critics, however, contend that the company is simply manufacturing ragebait and platforming dangerous ideas in order to pull eyeballs. Regalado noted that angry viewers often leave comments joking that Jubilee might do “Holocaust Survivors vs. Holocaust Deniers” next—but in the company’s logic, that’s really not an outrageous idea. “Internally, Jubilee has argued about whether or not we would do that episode,” Regalado said, adding that he himself would “want to see that dialogue happen” so long as the Holocaust survivors understood what they were getting into. “I don't think it’s good for society to deny an opportunity for discourse.”

Jubilee’s headquarters have the rumpled, run-and-gun energy of a newspaper office. The ceiling panels are scuffed, the walls are decorated with movie posters, and the desks are dotted with equipment, knickknacks, and struggling houseplants. I visited on a Friday, when most of the staff was working from home, save for a casting director making calls from a private booth. Lee explained that, because Jubilee makes around 200 videos a year, finding participants is a constant chore. “One day we’ll be like, ‘Hey, we need to get nuns,’” he said. “The next day we’ll be like, ‘We need 50 gang members.’”

Lee took me into a corner office with a sweeping view of the Los Angeles International Airport’s tarmac. Using a dry-erase marker to write on the glass tabletop we were sitting at, he drew a graph. One axis was labeled “value” (as in social value) and the other “savvy” (as in business savvy). He wants most of Jubilee’s content to fall in the top-right quadrant, meaning it’s highly benevolent—informative, uplifting, helpful—but also highly entertaining and, therefore, profitable. He pointed to a sign on one wall that said Provoke Understanding and Create Human Connection. That’s Jubilee’s mission statement, whose acronym, PUCHC, is pronounced puke, so people “actually remember it,” he said.

Participants crash into one another while rushing to the debate chair. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

Sporting a tastefully mussed mullet and canvas pants, Lee sounded like a start-up founder who has delivered countless pitches about his company’s significance. Clearly, however, his desire for impact is deeply rooted. Raised in Kansas by Korean-immigrant parents, Lee is a devout Christian. His résumé bears the hallmarks of can-do Millennial idealism: an internship on Barack Obama’s 2007 primary campaign; five months in Zambia working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Lee said that he grew up wanting to be a police officer in order to help people.

On Lee’s 22nd birthday, in 2010, he saw news reports about an earthquake devastating Haiti and felt a need to contribute in some way. He went to a New York City subway station and started busking for donations to relief efforts while filming himself. He came up short of his $100 goal for the day. But when he posted the video of his busking online with a pledge to donate a penny each time the video was viewed, something strange happened: He went viral, or at least more viral than any random guy warbling Coldplay on shaky footage could have expected. He then founded the Jubilee Project, a nonprofit to create socially conscious videos; two years later, he quit his six-figure consulting job at Bain & Company to run the project full-time.

The early version of Jubilee was very much a product of its time—a moment when the internet was widely assumed to be a force for progress. The Arab Spring, Kony 2012, the Ice Bucket Challenge: All were early-2010s mass mobilization efforts for a better world, fostered by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Peppy infotainment start-ups—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Vox—were proliferating, and legacy brands were “pivoting to video,” believing that traditional journalistic values could persist in new shapes.

Really, though, those values were being tested. The dynamics of the internet in those days encouraged newsgatherers to communicate with a clear point of view; the ability to drive traffic by targeting specific audiences, who could in turn orchestrate social-media backlash to coverage, helped make so-called both-sidesism distinctly unfashionable. The rise of Donald Trump, campaigning on what would be later called “alternative facts,” added to the widespread sense that media organizations would play a more active role in refereeing democracy. Traffic boomed, but cultural fracturing worsened as MAGA created its own information ecosystem via independent outlets and forums like Facebook.

After the 2016 election, Lee was disturbed by the divisions he noticed among his acquaintances. Back home in Kansas, people couldn’t fathom why anyone voted for Hillary Clinton; in L.A., they couldn’t do so for Trump. He felt pained to realize that the Jubilee Project’s PSA-like content—about topics including school bullying and global poverty—mostly seemed to be preaching to people who already thought as he did. He relaunched Jubilee as a for-profit company, pitching it as an effort to bridge ideological silos.

Lee and his team devised a set of “shows”: repeatable formats that could liven up discussions about any topic. Middle Ground asks two seemingly opposed factions—minimum-wage workers and millionaires, sex workers and clergy—to try to come to some sense of agreement through discussion. In Odd One Out, a group of similar people tries to root out a mole, thereby examining individual stereotypes (for example, a group of straight guys tries to identify the secretly gay one). Jubilee’s dating videos force people to “swipe” through potential mates in real life, which highlights biases, preferences, and the general inhumanity of apps such as Tinder. Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado said.

At best, the videos are eyeball-scorching documents of human behavior. The 2024-election hit “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative? (Feat. Charlie Kirk)” had a carnivalesque feel, showcasing all sorts of people trying out all sorts of rhetorical strategies—nitpicking; filibustering; even, from time to time, building logically sound arguments. Conversations got cut maddeningly short and insults flew to and fro, but that made it all the more satisfying when, for example, a nose-ringed student named Naima incisively landed a complex point about structural racism. Over 90 minutes, an odd kinship seemed to develop between Kirk—a slick and buttoned-up pundit who’s made a career out of “owning” liberals—and his opponents, almost like they were all in on a joke.

Sometimes the chemistry among Jubilee participants becomes poisonous. Last year, the company posted one of its most controversial installments, “Is Being Fat a Choice? Fit Men vs Fat Men.” It featured Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster, who repeatedly referred to overweight people—four of whom were in the room with him—as “fat asses” who should be put in a fitness “concentration camp.” Social media lit up with outrage directed toward Jubilee for giving voice to a vicious troll. Lee told me he felt that criticism was fair: Strong voices are good, but voices that hijack the conversation with an agenda and dehumanize other participants are not. “Every year, we put over 2,000 people in our videos,” he said. “I’m not gonna lie; there have been certain videos [where] I’m like, Oh, we might have gotten this balance off.”

Participants in Surrounded can raise red flags, signaling a vote to replace the current debater with someone else from their side. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

Balance is a word that comes up often in the many, many takedowns that have been aimed at Jubilee over the years. Every issue may have two sides, but not all sides are equally valid, and some are even dangerous. Lee told me that Jubilee has a “harm clause” against featuring groups that openly want to hurt other groups. Harm, of course, is a relative—and ever-expanding—term. Jubilee’s team mostly resolves contentious programming decisions through internal discussion and debate, which seems fitting. For example: Lee told me he disagrees with Regalado about potentially doing a “Holocaust Survivors vs. Deniers” video. Certain topics are just “beyond the realm where people will give us any benefit of the doubt.”

Yet Jubilee’s success suggests why deplatforming—the strategy of blocking bigots and liars from public stages—has proved ineffective. Audiences can always follow provocateurs to alternative platforms; a billionaire can buy the old platform and raise up once-canceled voices. “An anti-vaxxer is about to be part of the Trump administration, and that’s not because of a Jubilee video,” Regalado said. “That’s because information is accessible to people in a new way, and ideas are being resurrected because of our relationship to the internet.” (He was referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump selected to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Lee declined to comment on his own political beliefs, but he said that his staff generally leans left; Regalado, who exited his full-time role at the company in 2023 but still contributes as a consultant and podcaster, told me he’s “a little bit more liberal than conservative.” Both men suggested to me that progressive critics of Jubilee, who believe that political debates on the platform tend to end up favoring the conservative side, may be reacting to an imbalance in the wider political culture. In the pugilistic, digressive arena of a YouTube debate, advocates for the right are just more experienced at getting their point across.

“Something that people will ask us quite a bit is like: You featured Ben Shapiro and you featured Charlie Kirk. Why aren’t you featuring those people on the left?” Lee said. “And usually the question I ask is, Who are you talking about?” The only establishment Democrat to sit down for a Jubilee video this past cycle was Buttigieg; other liberal Surrounded anchors were a TikToker (Withers) and a video-game streamer (Destiny). Of course plenty of other camera-tested Democrats exist, but they tend to be native to mainstream TV news, which hasn’t been a forum for robust, sustained argument since Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire off the air 20 years ago. Regalado characterized liberals as suffering from “a reluctance to meet the moment that we have.” He added, “Their ideas have suffered for it.”

The day after I visited Jubilee’s offices, I arrived at an industrial building in South L.A. for a taping of Surrounded that would pit 25 Christians against one atheist. In a circle of folding chairs sat youthful theologians with tattoos, a midwestern pastor in a fleece vest, and one blond-bearded Mormon in a suit. At the center was a blue-blazered 25-year-old named Alex O’Connor, who had come to argue that God probably wasn’t real and that Jesus probably didn’t rise from the dead.

At first, the mood was tense. O’Connor would state an assertion, and Christians would sprint up to debate him, sometimes crashing into one another on the way. A large countdown clock enforced 20-minute time limits on each round; as the conversations went on, the other participants started to raise red flags, signaling a vote to kick out the current champion of their faith and install a new one.

And yet, despite the gladiatorial trappings, the discussions turned out to be heady and technical—largely focused on disputes over interpreting specific biblical passages. At one point, the shoot’s director, Suncè Franičević, tried to create some sparks by urging participants to not be afraid to share personal experiences. Lee, watching the shoot alongside me, referenced the graph he’d drawn at Jubilee’s headquarters. This episode was shaping up to land high on the do-good side of the spectrum but possibly lower on entertainment value. “The question is,” he asked, “do you think people will watch it?”

Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado says. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

As civil as the debate was, I felt the same thing I always feel while watching Jubilee content: squirming discomfort with confrontation but also amazement at the eagerness of the young participants to dive into thorny subjects. I’ve long thought that what Stewart said on Crossfire was correct—that bickering on camera just feeds division and sows confusion. But I’m also of a generation whose worldviews about religion and politics and so much else were, for many of us, set long ago, in the TV-news era. We then gorged on the internet’s wealth of sharp and smart commentary designed to tell us what we already thought. Jubilee, however, is largely being consumed by people who came up in the fractured aftermath, scanning comment-section flame wars and social-media controversies, trying to figure out where they fit.

I spoke with O’Connor afterward. He’s a rising YouTube star and podcaster who has participated in rollicking discussions with the likes of Piers Morgan, Jordan Peterson, and Richard Dawkins. Many of the Christians at the shoot recognized him from the internet and said they were, in spite of his atheism, big fans. He started his influencer career as a teenager ranting at the camera, but over the years, he told me, he’s learned to tone down the vitriol and show more humility. Commenters on his channel sometimes grouse that he’s gone soft, but his viewership numbers keep going up: He just hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

O’Connor’s trajectory made me think of something Lee had told me. In the time since the company was founded, online discourse has hardly become more empathetic, and America’s divisions haven’t healed. But Lee has faith that Jubilee’s influence will be felt in years to come, in the words and deeds of people who grew up watching the company’s videos, honing their sense for what productive—and not-so-productive—conversation looks like. “I am confident that we are nudging us towards better,” he said.

I asked O’Connor whether he bought into the idea that Jubilee really was teaching people how to become better thinkers and speakers. “I don’t know,” he said, choosing his words with the same care and precision that he had during the taping. “I think that kind of is an empirical question.”

The only evidence that he could offer was this: He’d been an atheist arguing with a room full of Christians, “and afterwards, we all went out to the pub—and we had a wonderful conversation.”

The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.

This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”

The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it is.

Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.

One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.

Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.

With a wishlist so long, and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”

[Read: What Trump did to law enforcement]

During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini-concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, cause Daddy’s home.”

The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”

When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”

That history begins at noon.

Last week, President-Elect Donald Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus, a longtime State Department official, to serve as a deputy special envoy for Middle East peace—and immediately undercut her. “Early on Morgan fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson,” Trump wrote when he announced her hire on Truth Social. “These things usually don’t work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them.”

It might seem bizarre for an executive to employ someone they consider at odds with their agenda. But there is a design behind this seeming dysfunction, and it reflects one of Trump’s strengths: He is a nakedly transactional coalition leader with few, if any, core beliefs. This enables him to balance the demands of opposing constituencies without alienating them. Because Trump has few real commitments, he can take contradictory positions and appease rival factions—in this case, hiring a member of the GOP establishment that he has assailed as “freaks,” “warmongers,” and “neocons”—without paying a price for inconsistency. On the contrary, Trump’s unapologetic amorality is a proven electoral asset that allows him to do things other politicians cannot.

Trump’s transparent transactionalism permits him to assimilate the anti-vaccine support base of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into his camp while simultaneously trumpeting the success of Operation Warp Speed, with both sides believing they can leverage the president-elect to their advantage. It enabled Trump to deliver anti-abortion Supreme Court justices for the religious right but then declare on the 2024 campaign trail that he wouldn’t ban abortion—and to have voters believe him, because they rightly surmised that Trump genuinely doesn’t care about the issue. In the same way, Trump was able to say that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “for the evangelicals” and then appeal to Dearborn, Michigan, as the “peace” candidate who might one day do something for Muslims.

[Read: The real reason Trump picked Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel]

On most issues, Trump has no principles, and even on subjects where it seems like he might—such as China—he has shown remarkable flexibility, as when he moved to ban TikTok in his first term but then about-faced after one of the platform’s chief investors became a top donor. Because Trump believes nothing, he holds out the tantalizing prospect that he could do anything, and many people are willing to take him up on the offer.

Such overt double-dealing allows Trump to manage the many contradictions of his coalition by giving something to everyone: evangelical Zionists and Muslim anti-Zionists; Jewish conservatives and anti-Semitic white nationalists; devout Christians and libertine Barstool bros; elite Silicon Valley moguls and working-class union members. Outsiders look at Trump’s supporters and see an unruly rabble riven with irreconcilable tensions. But they miss what makes the entire operation tick.

By contrast, Democrats and most traditional politicians sell everything they do under a banner of moral conviction and coherence, which makes deviations from ideology hard to countenance, difficult to sell to the base, and unconvincing to the people they’re meant to reach. Vice President Kamala Harris was dogged throughout her decidedly moderate 2024 campaign by past progressive stances precisely because voters expected her positions to be consistent and reflect a principled worldview. As a result, she reaped the worst of both worlds: The left was disappointed in her defections from orthodoxy even while many swing voters did not buy them.

Likewise, presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and John Kerry were branded as flip-floppers for their shifts on key issues such as abortion and the Iraq war. Successful politicians avoid this fate by presenting their policy pirouettes as authentic “evolution,” but thanks to his unabashed reputation as a self-interested cynic in it for his own advantage, Trump is relieved of the need to even pretend.

[Read: Why Kamala Harris’s politics are so hard to pin down]

Of course, we demand moral consistency from our politicians for a reason. A politics empty of principle, in which everything is for sale, breeds corruption and public nihilism about the ability of democracy to deliver on its promises. That said, today’s politicians might take a less corrosive lesson from Trump: that there is value in honestly acknowledging the compromises inherent in governance rather than concealing them behind a mask of sanctimony that will inevitably slip. Balancing competing interests is what politics is about. The problems arise when those trade-offs are made in service of the leader, not the people.

Regardless of whether Trump’s mercenary approach to politics is good for the country, it has undoubtedly been good for him. Ironically, after failing as a businessman in Atlantic City, the president-elect has finally succeeded in creating a casino at the White House where everyone wants in on the action.

In the world of nutrition, few words are more contentious than healthy. Experts and influencers alike are perpetually warring over whether fats are dangerous for the heart, whether carbs are good or bad for your waistline, and how much protein a person truly needs. But if identifying healthy food is not always straightforward, actually eating it is an even more monumental feat.

As a reporter covering food and nutrition, I know to limit my salt and sugar consumption. But I still struggle to do it. The short-term euphoria from snacking on Double Stuf Oreos is hard to forgo in favor of the long-term benefit of losing a few pounds. Surveys show that Americans want to eat healthier, but the fact that more than 70 percent of U.S. adults are overweight underscores just how many of us fail.

The challenge of improving the country’s diet was put on stark display late last month, when the FDA released its new guidelines for which foods can be labeled as healthy. The roughly 300-page rule—the government’s first update to its definition of healthy in three decades—lays out in granular detail what does and doesn’t count as healthy. The action could make it much easier to walk down a grocery-store aisle and pick products that are good for you based on the label alone: A cup of yogurt laced with lots of sugar can no longer be branded as “healthy.” Yet the FDA estimates that zero to 0.4 percent of people trying to follow the government’s dietary guidelines will use the new definition “to make meaningful, long-lasting food purchasing decisions.” In other words, virtually no one.

All of this is a bad omen for Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. As part of his agenda to “make America healthy again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to improve the country’s eating habits by overthrowing a public-health establishment that he sees as ineffective. He has promised mass firings at the FDA, specifically calling out its food regulators. Indeed, for decades, the agency’s efforts to encourage better eating habits have largely focused on giving consumers more information about the foods they are eating. It hasn’t worked. If confirmed, Kennedy may face the same problem as many of his predecessors: It’s maddeningly hard to get Americans to eat healthier.

[Read: Everyone agrees Americans aren’t healthy]

Giving consumers more information about what they’re eating might seem like a no-brainer, but when these policies are tested in the real world, they often do not lead to healthier eating habits. Since 2018, chain restaurants have had to add calorie counts to their menus; however, researchers have consistently found that doing so doesn’t have a dramatic effect on what foods people eat. Even more stringent policies, such as a law in Chile that requires food companies to include warnings on unhealthy products, have had only a modest effect on improving a country’s health.

The estimate that up to 0.4 percent of people will change their habits as a consequence of the new guidelines was calculated based on previous academic research quantifying the impacts of food labeling, an FDA spokesperson told me. Still, in spite of the underwhelming prediction, the FDA doesn’t expect the new rule to be for naught. Even a tiny fraction of Americans adds up over time: The agency predicts that enough people will eat healthier to result in societal benefits worth $686 million over the next 20 years.

These modest effects underscore that health concerns aren’t the only priority consumers are weighing when they decide whether to purchase foods. “When people are making food choices,” Eric Finkelstein, a health economist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told me, “price and taste and convenience weigh much heavier than health.” When I asked experts about better ways to get Americans to eat healthier, some of them talked vaguely about targeting agribusiness and the subsidies it receives from the government, and others mentioned the idea of taxing unhealthy foods, such as soda. But nearly everyone I spoke with struggled to articulate anything close to a silver bullet for fixing America’s diet issues.

RFK Jr. seems to be caught in the same struggle. Most of his ideas for “making America healthy again” revolve around small subsets of foods that he believes, often without evidence, are causing America’s obesity problems. He has warned, for example, about the unproven risks of seed oils and has claimed that if certain food dyes were removed from the food supply, “we’d lose weight.” Kennedy has also called for cutting the subsidies doled out to corn farmers, who grow the crops that make the high-fructose corn syrup that’s laden in many unhealthy foods, and has advocated for getting processed foods out of school meals.

There’s a reason previous health secretaries haven’t opted for the kinds of dramatic measures that Kennedy is advocating for. Some of them would be entirely out of his control. As the head of the HHS, he couldn’t cut crop subsidies; Congress decides how much money goes to farmers. He also couldn’t ban ultra-processed foods in school lunches; that would fall to the secretary of agriculture. And although he could, hypothetically, work with the FDA to ban seed oils, it’s unlikely that he would be able to generate enough legitimate scientific evidence about their harms to prevail in an inevitable legal challenge.

The biggest flaw in Kennedy’s plan is the assumption that he can change people’s eating habits by telling them what is and isn’t healthy, and banning a select few controversial ingredients. Changing those habits will require the government to tackle the underlying reasons Americans are so awful at keeping up with healthy eating. Not everyone suffers from an inability to resist Double Stuf Oreos: A survey from the Cleveland Clinic found that 46 percent of Americans see the cost of healthy food as the biggest barrier to improving their diet, and 23 percent said they lack the time to cook healthy meals.

If Kennedy figures out how to actually get people like me to care enough about healthy eating to resist the indulgent foods that give them pleasure, or if he figures out a way to get cash-strapped families on public assistance to turn down cheap, ready-to-eat foods, he will have made significant inroads into actually making America healthy again. But getting there is going to require a lot more than a catchy slogan and some sound bites.

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Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”

This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.

Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.

Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.

Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.

When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.

This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.

[From the October 2024 issue: Kash Patel will do anything for Trump]

Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.

Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.

Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.

Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”

Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

[Autocracy in America: The end of democracy has already begun]

For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.”