In pre-COVID times, I published a book about how to use data in early-childhood parenting, and one of the book’s long chapters was on vaccines and evidence for their safety. When the book was published, I wondered whether I would get questions on this topic. Breastfeeding, sleep training, and day care all came up regularly. But I remember being asked about vaccines only once. People seemed to have read the chapter, accepted it, and moved on.

Today, the world of vaccine questions has totally changed—in my view, for the much worse. I’m not just referring to the spectacle of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s likely ascension to the top of the government’s health-care bureaucracy or of Republican senators questioning vaccine safety publicly. Something is also happening among parents. I’ve continued to write about parenting, and to talk with parents about vaccines. And those conversations over the past few years—and especially the past year—have completely changed.

The first change is obvious: The parents and public personalities who strongly oppose vaccines have gotten louder. They have developed larger platforms, and faced less stigma for making hard-line anti-vaccination statements. Skepticism has gone more mainstream.

[Read: To understand anti-vaxxers, consider Aristotle]

The second change is less obvious, but more important: There has been huge growth in the number of parents who belong to what I think of as “the middle group”—parents who are not fundamentally opposed to vaccines but do have more questions, more concerns, and (often) more skepticism than parents had in the past. This group wants to do their own research, or at least hear about the details of research from people and institutions they trust—which does not include the government or the American Academy of Pediatrics.

With more parents in this questioning group, the market for vaccine misinformation is bigger than ever. Deeply flawed studies that would, in the past, have gotten no airtime are now being widely circulated, cited, and believed.

One recent example: Anthony Mawson, a well-known anti-vaccination advocate, released a new study online. The study, which was posted on a website that focuses on research critical of vaccines, has deep methodological flaws. The authors claim to have compared unvaccinated and vaccinated children in Florida, and to show higher autism rates among the vaccinated children. But the data on who is and isn’t vaccinated seem suspect: Far too many children were labeled as unvaccinated relative to the population being studied, suggesting that the researchers somehow miscategorized a large number of vaccinated children. (This is just one of several problems.)

In the past, such a study would never have been given any attention outside of the fringe communities that already bought into the view it supported. In the current climate, it was everywhere on Instagram (posted by accounts with huge followings) and in Facebook groups, and was even cited at the confirmation hearing for Kennedy, who suggested that this study was a reason for continued skepticism about vaccines.

“Is this true?” filled my inbox. “Can you reassure me?” “I’m about to vaccinate my child but now I’m not sure!” This is where we are, and where we are headed.

How did this happen? Although no trend ever has a single, simple explanation, my one-word answer is: COVID. More specifically, the ways that COVID shifted Americans’ conception of which authorities are trustworthy. It’s a cliché that trust, once lost, is difficult to regain. Less well understood is that, once gained, trust can be exploited.

The shift in trust began with shutdowns. Some people may still believe that the early-era COVID restrictions were a good idea, but many people do not, and did not at the time. Parents were angry about school closures; businesses were angry about lost customers. Many of these restrictions had a political bent—Republicans were less in favor of restrictions than Democrats. People started to lose trust in some institutions—such as the government and mainstream public-health groups—and transferred some of that trust to others, especially influencers.

[Read: What an undervaccinated America would look like]

Then vaccines arrived. I want to be clear: Operation Warp Speed was, as a scientific matter, an unbelievable success. It saved millions and millions of lives. If it had moved slower, more people would have died. However, it also made people nervous, as new technologies often do. That anxiety was an opening for people who oppose vaccines, many of whom had also opposed lockdowns. Some of them were able to use the trust they had recently gained to generate vaccine resistance.

Activists twisted facts (for example, that the vaccine was developed quickly) to imply falsehoods (for example, that it was not subject to large trials). They jumped on every misstep, such as initial overstatements about the vaccines’ effect on transmission, to sow concern and confusion.

This might have stayed in the domain of COVID except that these activists now had people’s trust, and their concerns about vaccines did not end with the new COVID shots. If you trust me rather than the public-health authorities on this one vaccine, why not on the others?

I think some loss of trust would have taken place to some extent no matter what, but in the years during and since the pandemic, public-health advice has inadvertently made the problem worse.

In particular, public-health advice continues to recommend that everyone—including healthy adults and children—get a COVID-19 booster every year. These vaccines have been shown to be safe and, certainly, I think getting an annual COVID shot is a reasonable choice. However, the universal recommendation is out of step with many of our peer countries’ guidelines, and public-health authorities in the U.S. have failed to explain why the recommendations differ.

The push for mass COVID boosters has provided a continued opening for those who oppose vaccines to sow further doubt. There has been an effective weaponization of these booster recommendations to feed the narrative that governmental authorities are blindly promoting vaccines. People’s discomfort with these recommendations, to the extent that it exists, provides another opportunity to generate mistrust in the rest of the vaccine schedule.

[Billy Ball: My 6-year-old son died. Then the anti-vaxxers found out.]

The result of the combination of public-health overreach and motivated anti-vaccination forces is a reality with lower vaccination rates for childhood illnesses. They have already started to slide, and I worry this will go further. The world without childhood vaccines isn’t one I want to live in. As measles and pertussis vaccination rates go down, kids will get those diseases. And some of those kids will die. The same is true for other vaccine-preventable illnesses.

How can trust be regained, or at least vaccination rates increased? One real, but unfortunate, avenue is disease. I’ve found in my research that when there are outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, people are more likely to vaccinate. If measles or polio vaccination rates fall to a point that those diseases begin to appear frequently in the population, vaccination rates will go up.

A more hopeful possibility lies in the role of pediatricians. People trust their pediatricians, and that group has an opportunity to help parents really understand their vaccine choices. The data do support trust in vaccines, and if that message can be delivered by someone whom parents trust, it can make a difference.

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been busy. Over the past few weeks, he’s been rooting out programs and language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The U.S. military is dutifully following his lead: West Point no longer supports those ostensibly suspicious organizations such as the Native American Heritage Forum and the Latin Cultural Club, and the Army Recruiting Command has ended its long partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards.

The new Pentagon boss also zeroed in on the pressing task of renaming Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, though it’s not exactly a reversal; Hegseth ordered that the base now honor a World War II hero named Roland Bragg (a private first class who won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge) instead of the odious Confederate General Braxton Bragg, for whom it was named in 1918. This change is little more than a clumsy stunt, one that manages to insult a loyal PFC while resurrecting the traitorous general—almost certainly after searching for a hero named Bragg, just so people could use the old name with a wink and a chuckle.

Americans might wonder what all of this performative inanity has to do with arming, training, feeding, and housing the most powerful military in the world, or how any of this showmanship makes the United States safer and more capable of deterring its enemies and fighting for its interests. But Hegseth, like most of Donald Trump’s other nominees, knows that his job is not to administer a department but to carry out Trump’s cultural and political vendettas.

[Elliot Ackerman: Bring back the War Department]

When a government department gets an appointee like Hegseth, it must still find a way to function every day, and those many tasks then fall to the deputies and undersecretaries. Sometimes, the effect is almost imperceptible. Ben Carson, for example, was tapped in Trump’s first term to lead Housing and Urban Development; he was out of his depth and it showed, but HUD slogged on despite Carson’s inexperience. The Defense Department, however, cannot run on autopilot. Mistakes made at the Pentagon can get people killed and endanger the safety of the nation. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, Trump’s current nominees to other top-tier Pentagon positions aren’t much more qualified than Hegseth. As with Trump’s nominations in other departments, the key factors appear to be loyalty, wealth, and ideological fervor, not competence.

Day-to-day operations at the Pentagon and other agencies are usually run by a deputy secretary. The previous deputy under Lloyd Austin, Kath Hicks, has a Ph.D. from MIT and years of experience in national defense, including at the Pentagon. Trump’s nominee to succeed her is the billionaire Steve Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus Capital. He has no military or Pentagon experience. (Likewise, Trump’s pick for secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, is a wealthy businessman and art collector who has never served in the military or any government position.)

Below the secretary, several undersecretaries serve as the senior managers of the institution, and the news here is also worrisome. In 2020, Trump tried to nominate Bradley Hansell, a special assistant to Trump in his first term, as the deputy undersecretary for intelligence (in order to replace someone whose loyalty came into question among Trump’s advisers), a nomination that was returned to Trump without action from the Senate. This time, Trump has nominated Hansell (whose background is in venture capital) for the more senior job of undersecretary, despite his lack of qualifications. Trump has also tapped Emil Michael, a tech investor and executive at Uber and Klout, as undersecretary for research and engineering. Michael is a lawyer; his predecessor in the research and engineering post in the Biden administration, Heidi Shyu, was an actual engineer, with long experience in defense production and acquisition issues.

One relatively conventional choice among the undersecretary nominees is Elbridge Colby, a well-known defense intellectual who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in Trump’s first term. (He’s the type of Washington fixture whom Trump’s people usually distrust, but Colby was careful never to get on the wrong side of the MAGA world.) His views, especially regarding nuclear weapons, are alarming: He once wrote that America should consider nuclear responses to a cyberattack. But Colby is a serious choice compared with his future colleagues.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The U.S. needs soldiers, not warriors]

After Hegseth, Trump’s most disturbing DOD nomination—at least so far—is Anthony Tata, the retired one-star general whom Trump has put forward as undersecretary for personnel and readiness. Tata’s views are extreme: He once referred to President Barack Obama as a “terrorist,” claimed that former CIA Director John Brennan was trying to kill Trump, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered several of their political opponents. Trump had to pull Tata’s nomination in 2020 as undersecretary for policy (the position Colby is now slated to get) just 90 minutes before his Senate hearing, after being told that the votes to confirm him were not there. The president is now going to send Tata back and humiliate the Republicans into voting for yet another unacceptable nominee.

The biggest risk is not that these nominees will do poorly in their jobs. They will have assistants—the same bureaucrats and experienced civil servants whom Trump and Hegseth are trying to drive from the Pentagon—who will make sure that things get done as much as possible in the midst of the chaos. The real danger will come during a crisis, when Trump needs the defense secretary and his senior staff to rise to the occasion and provide advice and options under difficult and perhaps even terrifying conditions. Although these nominees will likely serve up plenty of uninformed or irresponsibly sycophantic views at such a moment, few of them have the depth of knowledge or experience to offer steadier guidance—let alone to push back against the president when needed.

Maybe none of that matters: Trump’s first term showed that he is practically unbriefable and rarely listens to advice. Hegseth and his subordinates seem likely to spend much of their time conducting ideological warfare against their own department, with occasional breaks for tasteless public trolling. But sooner or later, Trump could face a foreign-policy crisis, and he will need better counsel than he can get from billionaire defense dilettantes and a MAGA television personality. At such a moment, Americans can only hope that someone with sober judgment and a healthy sense of patriotism—and who knows what they’re doing—emerges to do the job that Hegseth and others have left aside.

When I was living in West Philadelphia during graduate school, I noticed that my neighborhood abounded with ornately decorated Victorian-style porches, many of which featured ceilings painted in a calm shade of blue, somewhere between periwinkle and a light teal. When I asked a neighbor about what I took to be a trend, she regaled me with the history of a color she called “haint blue”—a story about the violence of indigo production in the South Carolina Low Country, and the never-ending Black quest for safety and protection.

I remembered this experience vividly as I read Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, which collects personal anecdotes, local and regional vignettes, and snippets of global Black history since the 15th century. Perry, an Atlantic contributing writer and a National Book Award–winning author, fills her latest work with accounts of ingenuity and Black resilience that are held together, loosely but intentionally, with threads of cerulean, sapphire, and azure. What might, on the surface, look like an arbitrary correlation coheres into a revelatory entry point for contemplating the Black experience.

Perry’s wide-ranging study seems to take inspiration from blues music, a genre that melds Black suffering with Black pride. And as I read the book, the origin story of haint blue kept flitting across my memory because it, too, evokes that duality. The color’s prevalence on porch ceilings can be traced back to the spiritual practices of the Gullah Geechee people—descendants of Africans trafficked to the southeastern United States in the 1700s who believed that hues resembling the ocean or the sky could confuse evil spirits and keep them away. At the time, haint blue could be made only by cultivating and processing indigo plants, which was a labor-intensive, often dangerous endeavor undertaken by enslaved workers in antebellum America. Crops had to be cut, stacked, and heated in vats that attracted vermin and were a breeding ground for viruses. The stench that arose from the putrefying indigo plants could be unbearable. Livestock and humans alike became sick.

Though the color was a product of enslavement, it was a “source of pleasure” too. As Perry writes, those who found comfort in this particular shade knew that “they were not mere chattel, and their lives would not be only joyless burden.” Even within the labor that degraded them, enslaved people found splendor and self-regard, something to admire in the products of their dehumanization.

[Read: Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.]

Wherever she looked in historical archives, Perry encountered vibrant tones of blue woven into the history of Black lives. She found indigo on the knife of the woman who trained Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first Haitian emperor, in combat. Hunters and riflewomen in the West African kingdom of Dahomey wore blue shorts and sometimes blue blouses as part of their uniforms. Nat King Cole’s cool emanated, at least in part, from the “turquoise-hued Newports” and “brilliant blue Kools” that he regularly smoked.

Though each chapter of Black in Blues locates the color somewhere in the story it tells—the pale blue of jasperware pots; the dark blue in the gums of those most “murderous” of Black people, according to both Black and white folklore; the cobalt blue of bottles hung on crepe-myrtle trees in the Deep South, also meant to ward off evil—the color itself often feels ancillary to the real subject of Perry’s book.

While working on it, Perry realized that she “didn’t want to write an exegesis on blue.” Instead, the form of her project more closely resembles a blues composition; reading it calls to mind one of Ma Rainey’s songs of anguish and exuberance or Miles Davis’s mercurial trumpet solos. Blues music captures the stunning complexity of navigating a freedom forever tied to a history of enslavement. As the music critic Albert Murray once argued, “Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence.”

Perry arranges her exploration of Black history in a way that may seem formless but could be described as a meticulously arranged series of “blue notes”—those tones in blues music that are played or sung slightly below what one might expect. As Perry explains, the blue note refuses stability or cohesion: “It is a flexible relation to the scale, and the most African of interventions into Western music … A blued note is so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special.” Perry suggests that the everyday improvisations of the enslaved could be described as “blue note living”: the dances that expressed bodily autonomy, the laughter that overtook immense pain, the projections of curiosity and tenderness in the face of brutality. Over the course of the book, Perry builds her case for how Black people have always functioned as blue notes—often seen as out of place or deviant but also known to wrest mellifluousness from cacophony and escape the binds that have been violently placed upon them.

Take George Washington Carver, the eccentric Black scientist who, in the early 20th century, helped popularize peanut butter and discovered many other uses for peanuts, both industrial and cosmetic. His work with the legume might be his claim to fame, but Perry chooses to pay attention to lesser-known aspects of his persona and life: his surprisingly high voice; his keen interest in the natural healing properties of various plants; the gossip he endured about his sexuality. He was also a talented craftsman who wove and embroidered intricate patterns that Perry describes as “living fractals.” He made paint from sweet-potato skins and tomato vines, and even resurrected Egyptian blue, a striking shade that had been invented in Ancient Egypt, by oxidizing Alabama clay. Born into slavery, Carver lived a simple life with global implications; he found magnificence in the ordinary.

[Read: Nikki Giovanni’s wondrous celebrations of Black life]

Black in Blues begins and ends with intimate histories of some of the people Perry admires most—her family, and those she has encountered through her academic work. One of the last chapters features a man known as Brother Blue—a performer, educator, and family friend who was a semipermanent figure in and around Harvard Square until his death in 2009. Brother Blue frequently walked the streets sharing folk wisdom with the residents of Boston and Cambridge while donning “a soft blue denim shirt and pants, a blue tam on his head, with streamers of all colors hanging off his clothes.” He pinned blue and rainbow-colored butterflies to his clothes and wore no shoes in order to be one with the earth, what he would call sacred ground.

For Perry, Brother Blue embodied “blue note living.” He served in World War II, overcame a stutter as an actor, and defended his doctoral dissertation by performing with a 25-piece jazz orchestra at a Boston prison—before being interrupted by an inmate revolt. Throughout his remarkable life, he insisted that authentic storytelling was crucial to Black life. As Perry reminisces, “He taught me that all stories are ours—meaning Black folks’—even when they came from the very people who mean to keep us down and out. What matters is the telling, meaning the integrity of our voices.”

Perry’s memory of Brother Blue’s teachings resonates with the end of Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which the poet writes that Black people must be willing to “express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” Hughes, too, saw the blues as integral to that endeavor, calling for “the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the blues” to express both the beauty and suffering of Black life. Perry’s book does just that: It is attuned to the high, the low, and the blue notes that compose Blackness—and we would all do well to listen.

Woe to the American consumer. The price of groceries, gas, housing, and other goods and services jumped 0.5 percent from December to January; the cost of car insurance is up 12 percent year over year and the price of eggs is up 53 percent. “On day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail. That is not happening. Worse, the White House’s early policies are making it more likely that the country’s cost-of-living crisis will endure for years to come.

Voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation delivered the White House to Trump; Americans cited the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as their No. 1 economic concern, and Trump as their preferred candidate to handle it. On his first day in office, Trump ordered the government to deliver “emergency price relief” by figuring out ways to expand the housing supply, streamline the health-care system, eliminate climate rules on home appliances, and expand energy production.

Each of those policies would bring down costs, if enacted, as would Trump’s deregulatory agenda. But as a general point, the White House has fewer ways to quickly temper consumer prices than it does to, say, bolster or lower demand—a problem that bedeviled the Biden administration too. The Federal Reserve controls borrowing rates. The housing and child-care shortages are the products of decades of underinvestment, the former also heavily influenced by municipal policies that Washington has no say in. The trillions of dollars spent by billions of consumers on billions of products generated by millions of firms—the gravitational forces of supply and demand, settled on liquid international markets and affected by government policies only on the margin—are what determine how much people pay at big-box stores and the gas station.

The policies the Trump White House has enacted are likely to make the cost crisis worse. Trump has described the word tariff as “the most beautiful” one to appear in the dictionary. He insists that adding levies to the goods produced by foreign companies will boost national industry and keep American households from getting ripped off. But economists from across the political spectrum agree that tariffs are taxes paid by domestic consumers. They increase prices.

Trump has backed away from the tariffs he proposed on Mexico and Canada in his first weeks in office. Yet he has implemented new levies on Chinese goods, spurring Beijing to retaliate with levies on American natural gas, oil, and farm machinery. This week, Trump also announced new steel and aluminum tariffs, raising costs for American automakers, energy companies, construction firms, and other businesses working in heavy industry. If Trump ends up implementing trade restrictions on Canada and Mexico as originally proposed, or ones of similar scale, the effective tariff rate on American imports would increase from 3 percent to 10 percent—the highest in seven decades.

Studies of the tariffs Trump implemented in his first term demonstrate what will happen. By the end of 2018, Trump’s trade policies were costing Americans an additional $3.2 billion a month at grocery stores and malls, while also reducing the variety of goods American consumers could purchase. And those tariffs were far more limited than the ones he has promised to impose this time.

On top of making imports more expensive, Trump is raising the cost of hiring workers and doing business in the United States by cracking down on the flow of migrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has amped up its raids; Trump is also attempting to end birthright citizenship and close the borders. Fewer undocumented workers will enter the country, and fewer will remain.

Undocumented workers, and immigrants in general, are crucial to millions of American businesses, particularly farms, construction firms, child-care providers, and delivery services. If you get rid of workers, production will go down and prices will spike. One new study found that the increase in deportations during the Obama administration led each average-size county in the country to forgo “the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of additional residential construction”—meaning 1,994 new homes—over three years. As a result, home prices jumped 10 percent.

At the same time, Trump is silencing the country’s contagion-monitoring system during a bird-flu outbreak, meaning farmers might end up culling millions more chickens and dairy cows. (Bird flu is the reason egg prices are up so much to begin with.) He is also rattling the markets, leading companies to pull back on the kind of investments that would increase domestic production—presenting “a compelling case for taking some chips off the table,” as Tiffany Wilding and Andrew Balls of Pimco put it in a note to investors.

All in all, Trump’s policies should add 0.5 percent to consumer costs this year, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics told me, slowing GDP growth by 0.2 percent this year and 0.5 percent next year. He said he did not expect the country’s growth to be “derailed, given the economy’s strong underlying fundamentals and Trump’s willingness and ability to pivot on policy.” But it “will be meaningfully diminished.”

America is lucky that its underlying fundamentals are strong. The stock market is high; unemployment is low; wages are going up; businesses are generating big profits. Still, people are struggling with a dire housing shortage, bruising out-of-pocket medical costs, and a severe undersupply of early-childhood-education options—as well as expensive eggs and unaffordable car and home insurance. Trump has yet to put out a policy agenda that would tackle those problems in the long term, and is backing away from his campaign promise to make America affordable again in the near term too.

He seems to be betting that voters don’t care as much about the economy as they said they did. “They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue,” Trump said after his inauguration. “I said, I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue.” He added: “How many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost?”

Today The Atlantic is announcing the hires of Nick Miroff and Isaac Stanley-Becker as staff writers, and Alex Hoyt as a senior editor. Nick and Isaac both join The Atlantic from The Washington Post: Nick covering immigration and the Department of Homeland Security, and Isaac reporting on politics, migration, and national security.

Below is the full announcement about these hires from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

I’m writing today to share the excellent news that Nick Miroff, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Alex Hoyt are joining The Atlantic—Nick and Isaac as staff writers; Alex as a senior editor. All three are immensely talented journalists operating at the top of their game.

First, Nick: Nick is one of America’s foremost reporters on immigration and knows more about the innermost workings of the Department of Homeland Security than, quite possibly, the department itself. Nick comes to us from The Washington Post, where he spent 18 years as a reporter covering Latin America, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and DHS. He spent seven years as the paper’s Latin America correspondent, based in Havana and Mexico City. He was also part of the Post team whose coverage of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech won a Pulitzer Prize. I am very happy that he has agreed to join us, and to cover immigration, at so crucial a moment in American history.

Next, Isaac: Isaac is a fantastically talented reporter and a natural magazine writer. He also comes to us from The Washington Post, where he has covered an impressive range of stories across politics, immigration, and national security with a focus on holding powerful people and institutions to account. His reporting has taken him to German border towns, where he tracked the international spread of conspiracy theories, as well as to the Arizona desert, where he revealed how a Saudi-owned company pumped unlimited supplies of the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa as feed for dairy cows in Riyadh. He was twice part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize—in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and in 2024 for documenting the role of the AR-15 in American life. Isaac holds a Ph.D. in history from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His first book, Europe Without Borders: A History, was published last month.

Finally, Alex: Alex is an extremely skilled editor who brings great literary expertise, a genuine love of magazines, and a keen eye for what makes a distinctive feature. He was most recently an editor at GQ, where he worked on profiles, essays, and reported features. Previously he was the editor in chief of Amtrak’s The National magazine, where he brought the writing of contributors including Jacqueline Woodson, Lois Lowry, and Leslie Jamison to millions of train passengers across America. Alex is actually returning to us; he started his career as an Atlantic fellow in 2010. We’re very glad to welcome him back to the team after his journalistic peregrinations.

Please join me in welcoming them to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,

Jeff

The Atlantic announced a number of new hires at the start of the year, including managing editor Griff Witte; staff writers Caity Weaver, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer; and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

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Neko Case is best known as a lead vocalist for the Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers and a solo career that doesn’t quite fit any genre (“country noir” and “odd rock” are two labels she has suggested). Her songs feature unusual protagonists, many of whom are animals, and critics and fans have been puzzling over her lyrics for years. Recently, Case published a memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which suggests possible source material for her vivid and sometimes alarming imagination. In the memoir, she writes mostly about her experience growing up as the child of teenage parents who, in her telling, never came around to wanting a child. And about finding an alternative home in the music scenes of the American Northwest and Canada.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Case about men, music, her own sliding sense of gender, the impossibility of being a musician in the age of streaming, and most important, how not to suffer for your art. After a lifetime of thinking about her parents, she also has good advice on when not to forgive.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Just a quick note: This episode contains some cursing that you might not usually hear on this show.

Neko Case is one of those musicians that people have really strong personal attachments to, especially indie music lovers of a certain generation. Like, I know two people who have named a child after her.

Neko Case is a lead vocalist of the indie-pop collective the New Pornographers, and she’s also had a long solo career. But what’s most distinct about her are her lyrics, which are often oblique. Like, a song seems to be about a car crash, but maybe it’s really about incomplete grief. You have to listen a few times before you get closer to it.

[“Star Witness,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then there are lots of times when Case seems to be writing about herself, but it’s not entirely clear.

[“Things That Scare Me,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Last month, Neko Case peeled back some of the mystery. She’s written a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which shares part of the same title as one of her albums from 2013.

She writes about growing up poor and neglected. Her parents were teenagers when they had her, and her guess is that neither of them ever wanted a child. By the end of her sophomore year in high school, she asked her mom for emancipation. She writes: “She couldn’t sign it quickly enough; she didn’t even have to think it over.”

And so Case hid a lot behind her music.

[Music]

Rosin: One of my favorite scenes is you as a kid in the school library. Like, you remembered that the beanbags were corduroy. The image was so perfect. It was such a perfect image from that era. And you were hiding out with your headphones on. I think you mentioned listening to “Atomic,” by Blondie.

Neko Case: Over and over and over and over, like only a neurodivergent ADHD kid can do.

Rosin: Right. Right. (Laughs.) Like, just a million times. Do you have words for what that was like for you? Because it felt like, Okay, that’s the moment that she discovers the power of music. In a movie, that would be the scene in which you discover what music is for and what it does to you.

Case: Music was always just there. And I took it for granted, but I also leaned really heavily into it. I did not make a connection that music was something I would want to do or I would do, because I was just a girl. And I did not make a connection between myself and Blondie, or myself and the Go-Go’s. I just knew I really loved them.

Rosin: So why did it take so long, do you think, for you to open your mouth and sing? You played in bands, but you didn’t really sing for a while.

Case: Well, I was raised to be female in the United States of America so, you know, I wasn’t raised with a lot of self-confidence.

Rosin: So what was the point where you were like, Oh I can do this?

Case: It wasn’t so much deciding I could do it. It was just that I couldn’t help but to do it, because the desire was so intense.

Rosin: Now, the desire is the desire to make music, to write music, to sing? What was the desire?

Case: Even just to sit near it. Anything. Anything I could have.

Rosin: In the book, you complain about your voice. You write that it was neither pretty nor powerful. And that’s—

Case: Oh that’s not a complaint.

Rosin: It’s not a complaint. Okay, okay, okay.

Case: No, no, no. It’s not powerful, and it’s not pretty. Like, those are things that—you know, I wish it were powerful. I don’t care that it’s not pretty. I very much enjoy hearing women singing in ways other than being pretty. And singing is an incredible physical feeling. It’s like your mouth is a fire hose, and you can twist your insides and make a powerful thing come out to the point where your feet levitate ever so slightly off the floor.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Case: It gets so physical. It is so athletic, and there’s nothing else like it.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Well, even in this just few minutes that we’ve been talking, you describe a little journey from a point where the world gives you a set of expectations and tells you, you can and can’t do things. And you seem to sort of find your way out of that, either through your voice or how you experience music, or even the way you write about institutions. Like, you write the country-music institution was limiting in some ways.

Case: Oh it’s straight up misogynist and racist and hateful. We don’t even have to sugarcoat that one. The current country-music scene of radio music in Nashville is absolutely heinous. And I watch young women try to get in there, and I love them so much, and they’re trying, and I’m like, Don’t even bother. Let that thing die. That thing is poison. Come over here. Let’s make the other thing.

Rosin: And is the other thing, like, you inventing your own genres? You’ve given them names over the years that are—“country noir” or “odd rock,” and things like that. Like, is that the way out? Is that what you tell women?

Case: I think that what it is, is the gatekeepers of country music are absolutely terrified that it might evolve, whereas the gatekeepers of rock and roll don’t have a problem with evolution. But there’s something very white supremacist about how country music works. And they’re really, really dialing down on it now.

Rosin: So you don’t mean just then. You’re talking about then, and now there’s a resurgence. Because there was a great moment—

Case: I think it’s worse now. I think it’s far worse now than it has been in a long time.

Rosin: I mean, there was a good moment for women—it was a brief good moment for women in country music.

Case: There have been a couple.

Rosin: Yeah.

Case: Sometimes, people are so talented that they’re undeniable, and not even the gatekeepers can keep them out.

Rosin: Well, it’s good Beyoncé made that country album then.

Case: We’re lucky to have Beyoncé doing a lot of things. That’s all I’m saying.

Rosin: That’s true. That’s true. (Laughs.) I think reading your memoir, for me, changed how I heard your music, and I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing or not the intended thing. Is that something you explicitly thought you were doing? At times, I almost read it like, Oh this is a key to some lyrics, and I wasn’t sure if that was correct or not correct.

Case: I tried to not give away the songs as much as possible. Like, there was a couple times where I kind of went into them, but I don’t like to ruin songs for people. You know how you will hear the lyrics of a song one way, and then you find out it’s not the lyric that you thought it was, and then you’re like, Oh. It’s not as good anymore?

If you think you know what a song’s about, and it makes you feel connected emotionally to it, and it becomes a little chapter heading in your life, you don’t want to ruin that for people.

Rosin: Yeah. But I don’t know if it’s ruin it. I think it’s just complicate it. I’ll give you an example—and maybe just indulge me, and you can walk me through the process. I’m the listener. You’re the singer. When I read the book title, of course, I immediately thought of your 2013 album—

Case: Yes.

Rosin: —The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, for obvious reasons. Because of the song “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” which has run in my head for 10 years—

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —which starts with the kid at the bus stop, and then the perspective is quickly shifting, so it’s hard to keep up with who’s the you and who’s the me.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then that kind of devastating line about, “My mother, she did not love me.”

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: In your mind, is that line related to the book in any way?

Case: Well, that song was a real event. I was really at a bus stop in Honolulu, fleeing Hawaii. And I saw it happen, and I just felt so helpless.

Rosin: You felt helpless to protect the kid?

Case: Yeah. But the kid, also, was being very resilient, and she was entertaining herself. She was very spunky and cute. And her mom was just an asshole.

Rosin: I mean, reading your book, I did think, Oh that line resonated with Neko for a reason, because of struggles with your own mother. Do you mean for people to read the memoir that way?

Case: Well, I mean, I told the story. I just—I’ve never written a book before, and I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I wanted to write fiction, but it was at the height of the pandemic, and Hachette said, We’ll pay you to write a memoir, though. And I was like, Okay. A memoir it is. And that’s not a complaint or, you know, they didn’t hold my heels to the fire or anything. I just thought, Okay, well, it’ll just be a little challenging, because, you know, talking about yourself or writing about yourself to yourself isn’t the most exciting thing ever.

You spend a lot of time with yourself. So I don’t think of myself as like, Oh people are really going to want to know this. So I mean, that’s one of the reasons I tried to pick more interesting stories from childhood that were scenes, maybe, of good things, too, because I didn’t want it to just be, Oh poor me, especially because it’s not unusual. It’s most people’s experience.

I mean, my situation with my mother is pretty bizarre. But neglect or abuse or things like that—those are most people’s experiences. Or growing up really poor—that is most people.

Rosin: I think your experience is actually pretty unusual.

Case: Yeah. It’s pretty damn weird.

[Music]

Rosin: “Pretty damn weird” it is.

When Case was in second grade, her father told her that her mother had died of cancer, which was surprising because Case didn’t even realize she was sick. And then a year and a half later, her dad said to her one day: I don’t want you to think your mom’s a ghost, but she came home.

As Case recalls in her memoir, the story was that her mother had had terminal cancer and gone to Hawaii to recover but didn’t want Case to see her so ill. And Case—who, remember, was a little kid—believed her. She had her mom back. She was happy.

It only occurred to her later—after many, many years and another disappearing act from her mother—that she might never have been sick in the first place.

Rosin: It’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard. I mean, it is a little shocking and hard to forget. And I’m not sure if you knew that or recognized it in that way.

Case: I didn’t know that until I was in my early 20s, and I told somebody I knew that my mom faked her death. And then they were like, That’s the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I was like, Oh yeah. That is actually pretty weird, isn’t it? But you know kids. Kids just think what’s happening to them is what happens. So it didn’t occur to me.

Rosin: So where did it register for you? Because now I see that what I am assuming about that song isn’t actually how you move through the process. I just assumed you had that in your head when you wrote the lyrics, “She did not love me.”

Because that lyric is haunting, even the way you sing it and the pacing of it. I just assumed you had that in your head, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just had it in your subconscious somewhere.

Case: It’s in me all the time. And, you know, it’s just not my fault.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Case: She didn’t love me. And it’s just the fact.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: When you work out memories and pains in song, is cathartic a banal word to use here? Does it do something for you to work it out and learn?

Case: Only in a super-nerdy, kind of neurodivergent-slash-Virgo way where I’m like, Oh! I’m taking all the things, and I’m organizing them in this box. And so now I can put this box over here like a hard drive, so my brain has more room in it. And it’s all color-coded, and I know where it is. That’s, like, Virgo organization.

Rosin: Interesting.

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Because I feel like one glib way to read a memoir like this is, Oh from family trauma and a mother who didn’t love you comes immense creativity. How wonderful! What’s wrong or right about that interpretation?

Case: Well, the mythology of people needing to suffer to make beautiful things or just art or creative things, in general, is not true.

Rosin: You mean they don’t need to suffer? Because it feels like, reading this book, your suffering is related to how you think and work through things and organize things.

Case: No. If I had had a supportive upbringing, I would be able to read music and play instruments and would probably be a lot further along. You don’t need that.

Rosin: So to you, it just feels like pure baggage. It’s, like, a thing you’ve had to tolerate, but you could have been a singer some other way.

Case: Oh it’s an absolute trunk of shit.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Case: The things that I admire about myself are despite those things. You know, like, I still am a trusting person. I still really want to see the good in people, and sometimes I will make mistakes and trust people I shouldn’t. And I could beat myself up about that, or I could just go, No. You still want to believe people are good. And I think that’s a more important quality than whether or not you’re wily enough to spot a jerk a mile away—you know what I mean?

Rosin: Yeah, I was more thinking, like, you had this life, and you had to escape this life and find your family elsewhere, and you had a huge, strong motivation to do that, and so you found music.

Case: Yes.

Rosin: But that’s just another way of saying trauma made you a great musician.

Case: No. Music is the only thing that never let me down. But trauma did not make me a great musician. I am a journeyman, at best, and, you know, I’m broke. I don’t know—I think great musicians do other things.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wait. Did you just say you were broke?

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Do you mean financially broke or personally broke?

Case: Financially broke.

Rosin: Really? How is that possible? I think your fans would be shocked.

Case: The confluence of my house burning down, COVID, and streaming—those three things together.

Rosin: Wow.

Case: And I cannot catch up.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back—more with Neko Case on politics, on forgiveness, and a recent experience with a friend’s death that she said felt like getting on the spaceship to go to the moon.

Case:  I felt absolutely unafraid. And I was seeing an actual moment of grace in life, and I couldn’t believe it.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: I wanted to ask you about gender, because the way you write and sing about gender is very much the way a lot of people talk about gender now. And I’m curious how you have watched the evolution of how people inhabit and think about gender, like in your lyrics to “Man”—

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —you don’t mean that literally. What do you mean by “I’m a man”?

Case: I do mean it literally.

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Case: I mean, I am of the species. I am a man. Like, whatever’s going on downstairs doesn’t matter. I have all my faculties. You can call a female or a male lion a lion, and they’re still a lion. I’m a man in that same way.

And I am so thrilled and proud and excited by generations younger than mine who are not backing down from who they think they are and the idea that they get to be who they are. That has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever witnessed, and it has given me so much more insight into myself because I never felt like a girl or totally a guy. I’m more of a gender-fluid person.

Rosin: And when you say it’s taught you so much about yourself, what do you mean? Because in the book, there is one way in which you very much inhabit the experience of a woman of that generation, just at the hands of careless and arrogant and brutal men, like a teacher, older brothers, fellow musicians. And then there’s a sense, I imagine, of being trapped in that.

So what have you learned about yourself in this era of gender fluidity? How do you think about yourself?

Case: As neither. I am neither. I still call myself she/her. I’m used to it. It doesn’t bother me. And partly because the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it. I just won’t. But I also understand that the world hates gender-fluid people and trans people, LGBTQ people, and I understand the importance of not abandoning that, either.

Rosin: So you see the world as making some cultural progress and how we think of what’s a man and what’s a woman in some corners, but not a lot of progress politically or socially.

Case: Politically, we are fucked. Socially, I don’t think what the president and his people represent, represents the American people. I don’t believe that Americans, in general, have a hatred or a problem with people who are not white, who are LGBTQ, who are immigrants. I just don’t think they do.

Rosin: To shift away from politics, since we get a lot of it over here in D.C., although this is related, the thing—

Case: Well, I mean, a human being’s right to be is—I mean, that’s just everyday life. Like, politics and everyday life just—they just aren’t separate, not that I want to talk about politics, specifically. Because I just refuse to be afraid.

Rosin: Do you feel like that’s something you found at this age? Because you’ve said there are times in your life where you haven’t had self-confidence, you’ve been depressed, or you’ve kind of lost your mind, even, in one section of the book. Is it easier to not be afraid now?

Case: Well, I have really benefited from menopause. And a lot of people who menstruate who don’t anymore have said the same things about, you know, the hormone shift. Like, you don’t care anymore what people think of you.

And also, I just came from seeing one of my best friends die. And sitting with her body for four days as—you know, she was an organ donor, and she had a massive aneurysm. And her partner just heroically did CPR, and then the paramedics came and kept her pulse going and got her to the hospital, and they stabilized her, despite the fact that she had no brain activity.

And you cannot be an organ donor unless you die on a respirator in the hospital. Like, it’s very, very specific. And then you have to wait for all the tests. There are barrages of tests that happened to make sure that you’re healthy and that your organs can really save someone else’s life and not be rejected. And so we spent days just with her and talking about her life and what a selfless person she was. And we joked a lot about how she was going to work, even in death. She was all about service.

And then the day came. Right on the way to the OR, what they do is they do a thing called an “honor walk.” And we went down what seemed like miles of corridors behind her hospital bed, behind the doctors. And the corridors were lined with doctors and nurses and hospital staff honoring her. And it seemed like one of those movies where you see the people going down the corridor in slow motion to get into the spaceship to go to the moon or whatever, and everyone’s saluting them, and it seems so important. And I think I actually saw that in real life.

And I just thought, All those things that I worry about and the injustices—we are so right to fight for them. And I was there watching this incredible thing happen, and these beautiful people from all over the world—many of the doctors are immigrants—and it was a mix of people of all colors from all over the world and all different cultures. And I felt so utterly galvanized against the fear and so utterly galvanized in that joy is the way forward.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Case: Loud-ass, exuberant joy.

Rosin: I mean, one of the things I took most from your book is how you write about forgiveness. It’s related to this. I mean, you definitely acknowledge the beauty of forgiveness, but then you say this other thing, and you could read this in a lot of different ways, which is the “trust your contempt” paragraph. Do you remember that? You don’t have the book in front of you, right?

Case: I don’t. But I do talk about this, occasionally.

Rosin: Yeah. Dissect it if you can. If something doesn’t stir anything but contempt in you, then there’s a reason. Don’t canonize your contempt, but don’t ignore it.

This is the part that I love. It’s so good: “Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson.”

Where would you say you are—you know, you have a lifetime of songs; you have this memoir; it sounds like you have friends—on this path? Is it different for different people? Like, forgiving members of your family, people who have hurt you in the past?

Case: Oh yeah. I mean, relationships with people are all very different, and some are very complicated, and some are not.

Rosin: So you would say you’re at different places with different people?

Case: Oh yeah.

Rosin: What about your dad? I was curious about him because he plays a kind of shadow role in the book, not quite with the extravagant cruelty of your mother. Maybe neglectful—maybe—is the right way to read that.

Case: I have a lot of compassion for my dad and a lot of sadness because I feel like his development was arrested completely. And he had to be an adult man and head of the family and all these things, and he was just a kid inside. And he didn’t know how to handle it. He maintained it with drugs and drinking for a long time, but then it catches up with you.

And the kind of pain from that—he didn’t use what happened to him to manipulate anyone. His forward path was genuine. He wasn’t doing a great job, but he was also a 19-year-old kid when he had me. And he didn’t want me, but he ended up with me.

Rosin: Yeah. And ended up raising you.

Case: Not really.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. Ended up housing you under the same roof.

Case: Sometimes.

Rosin: Sometimes. Yeah, there was that moment when you guys reconnect over a car. You speak car talk with each other—

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: —which is very familiar to me. I come from a family of mechanics and car people. And so I found that very peaceful. It was a tiny second of peace in a very rocky journey.

Case: Yeah, it was nice because when I was a little girl, I would have loved to have had him show me how to do things, because he was always fixing the car or the truck or whatever, and it would have been nice to have been included. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought he wanted a boy, and I thought he was really disappointed. But he just didn’t want any kid.

Rosin: You know, I’ve just been nonstop listening to your music to prepare to talk to you and sort of tuning into the different moods of different albums. And I wonder, from you: What’s the song you wrote when you were happiest? Or even when you listen to it now, it makes you happy. Like, it just makes you feel good.

Case: Probably “Hold On, Hold On.” It’s melancholy, but it feels very much like I am in charge of myself. And I make good decisions in it.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: So it’s, like, a song that makes you feel like all of this pain and trauma—like you can handle it.

Case: Partially. It’s a moment of actually seeing yourself clearly. It doesn’t mean the moment’s going to last.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Case: I think I also partly feel that way because I wrote it with the Sadies, and I have such a loving relationship with them. And it’s always made me feel good to play it. And my dear friend Dallas Good passed away a couple of years ago, way too young. And so now it takes on a new sort of heaviness, but it’s a heaviness that feels good to carry somehow.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Thanks again to my guest, Neko Case.

[Music]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

America’s health secretaries, almost as a rule, have résumés manicured to a point of frictionlessness. Once in a while one will attract scandal in their tenure; see Tom Price’s reported fondness for chartered jets. But anyone who has garnered enough cachet to be nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services tends to arrive in front of the Senate with such impeccable credentials that finding anything that might disqualify them from the position is difficult.

Donald Trump’s selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed today as America’s newest health secretary, was specifically intended to break that mold. Kennedy positioned himself as a truth teller determined to uproot the “corporate capture” and “tyrannical insensate bureaucracies” that had taken hold of the nation’s public-health agencies. Even so, it’s remarkable just how unimaginable his confirmation would have been in any political moment other than today’s, when an online reactionary has been given a high-level position in the Justice Department and a teenager known as “Big Balls” is advising the State Department. Kennedy holds broadly appealing views on combatting corruption and helping Americans overcome chronic disease. But he is also, to an almost cartoonish degree, not impeccably credentialed. He has trafficked in innumerable unproven and dangerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, AIDS, anthrax, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, COVID-19, sunlight, gender dysphoria, and 5G. He has potential financial conflicts of interest. He has spoken about a worm eating part of his brain and about dumping a dead bear in Central Park. He has been accused of sexual assault. (In his confirmation hearing, Kennedy denied the allegation and said it was “debunked.”)

In the end, none of it mattered. While Senate Democrats unanimously opposed Kennedy’s confirmation, he sailed through the Senate’s vote this morning after losing just one Republican vote, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor who appears to have taken issue with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. Kennedy did, however, earn the support of Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who until last week seemed to be the Republican lawmaker most concerned about the potential damage of elevating an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist to the nation’s highest perch in public health. Kennedy’s confirmation is a victory for Trump, and a clear message that Senate Republicans are willing to embrace pseudoscience in their unwavering deference to him. Americans’ health is in Kennedy’s hands.

So what happens next? Spokespeople for Kennedy did not respond to my request to talk with him about his agenda. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s first weeks in office will likely be hectic ones, adding to the chaos of Trump’s nonstop executive orders and Elon Musk’s crackdowns on numerous federal agencies. As HHS head, Kennedy will oversee 13 different agencies, including the CDC, FDA, and National Institutes of Health. Prior to being appointed, Kennedy said he believed that 600 employees would need to be fired at the NIH and replaced with employees more aligned with Trump’s views. (The NIH employs roughly 20,000 people, so such a cut at least would be minor compared with the Department of Government Efficiency’s more sweeping moves.) He has also implied that everyone at the FDA’s food center could be handed pink slips. More generally, he has said he will “remove the financial conflicts of interest in our agencies,” but he hasn’t spelled out exactly who he believes is so conflicted that they should be out of a job.

At NIH in particular, any sudden moves by Kennedy would compound changes already unfolding under the auspices of DOGE. Musk’s crew has attempted to dramatically cut the amount of administrative funding typically doled out by the agency to universities in support of scientific research. Planned meetings about those funds were also abruptly canceled last month. (The funding cuts have been temporarily halted by a federal judge, and funding meetings appear to have resumed.) It’s easy to assume that Kennedy would support these efforts, given his aspirations to fire federal bureaucrats. But the DOGE effort may in fact undermine his larger goals, setting up some potential tension between Kennedy and Musk. Research funding is essential to Kennedy’s pursuit of unraveling the causes of America’s chronic-disease crisis; he has suggested devoting more of the NIH’s resources to investigating “preventive, alternative, and holistic approaches to health.”

On the policy front, in both the immediate and long term, chronic diseases will likely occupy Kennedy’s attention the most. He has called that issue an existential threat to the United States, and it is the clearest part of Kennedy’s agenda that has bipartisan support. However, exactly what he can do on this issue is uncertain. Many of the policies he’s advocated for, such as removing junk food from school lunches, actually fall to a different agency: the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The only food-related policy he’s regularly touted that he has the power to enact is banning certain chemical additives in the food supply. Even so, banning a food additive is typically a laboriously slow legal process.

His public statements provide other, vaguer hints about issues that he will likely contend with during his term. On abortion, he has said that he will direct the FDA and NIH to closely scrutinize the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone. (Trump has previously suggested that his administration would protect access to abortion pills, though the president’s position is murky at best.) On the price of drugs, Kennedy has said that he wants to crack down on the middlemen who negotiate them for insurance companies. But by and large Kennedy has said little about how he will tackle the complex regulatory issues that are traditionally the focus of the health secretary. He might simply not have that much to say. Kennedy has implied that he cares far less about those topics than about diet and chronic disease. During his confirmation hearing, he told senators that focusing on issues such as insurance payments without lowering the rate of chronic illness would be akin to “moving deck chairs around on the Titanic."

The biggest and most consequential question mark is how Kennedy will approach vaccines. If he were to chip away at Americans’ access to shots, or even simply at Americans’ readiness to receive them, he could degrade the nation’s protections against an array of diseases and, ultimately, be the cause of people’s deaths. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy was the subject of some of the most intense scrutiny during his confirmation hearings. “If you come out unequivocally, ‘Vaccines are safe; it does not cause autism,’ that would have an incredible impact. That’s your power. So what’s it going to be?” Cassidy asked. Kennedy pledged that he would not deprioritize or delay approval of new vaccines, and not muck up the government’s vaccine-approval standards. Throughout the process, he attempted to distance himself from his past vaccine positions, which include an assertion that the federal officials supporting the U.S. childhood-vaccine program were akin to leaders in the Catholic Church covering up pedophilia among priests. But his answers to senators’ questions about his past remarks and whether vaccines cause autism were consistently evasive. And some of his plans play into the anti-vaccine camp’s hands. He has promised, for example, to push for government-funded studies to be released with their full raw data—a move that likely would please transparency advocates, though also would act as an olive branch to anti-vaccine activists who have had to sue federal agencies in recent years for certain vaccine data.

Last week, after Cassidy cast a decisive committee vote that allowed Kennedy’s nomination to advance to full Senate consideration, he said in a speech on the Senate floor that he had pressure-tested Kennedy enough to feel confident that he could rebuild trust in public health. (Cassidy did not mention that advancing Kennedy was also in his political interest. A spokesperson for Cassidy declined my requests for an interview.) Kennedy holds an almost biblical status among his supporters, and a significant portion of those people distrust federal health agencies. Cassidy’s professed belief in Kennedy’s leadership offers a soothing vision: Imagine Americans whose views on the public-health establishment have been deeply eroded over time, all with their faith restored in one of the world’s most rigorous scientific institutions thanks to a radical outsider.

But consider the logic here. By voting to confirm Kennedy, the U.S. Senate is wagering the future of our public-health system on a prayer that a conspiracy theorist can build back up the agencies that he and his supporters have spent years breaking down. A more realistic outcome may be that Kennedy leaves public health more broken than ever before. Although many Americans are skeptical of the government’s scientific institutions, polls show that relatively few have the sort of deep-seated contempt for public-health agencies that Kennedy has espoused. By pandering to that fraction of voters, Kennedy risks alienating the much larger portion of Americans who might not agree with everything the CDC has done in recent years, but also don’t think that the agency’s vaccine program is comparable to a Nazi death camp, as Kennedy has claimed.

If Kennedy did go so far as to disavow any connection between autism and vaccines, that itself might lead to trouble. Jennifer Reich, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver who has studied vaccine skepticism, told me that the autism issue is just one part of a larger, much more diffuse set of concerns shared by parents who question vaccinating their children. For RFK to disavow all of his vaccine antagonism, he would essentially have to abandon his prima facie skepticism toward science more generally. Such an apology would likely do more to turn some of his most ardent supporters against him than change their views, argues Alison Buttenheim, an expert on vaccine skepticism at the University of Pennsylvania. “People will do amazing leaps and cartwheels to not have their beliefs and their behaviors in conflict,” she told me.

If Kennedy genuinely wants to restore faith in public health, he’ll have to win over his fellow conspiracists while maintaining the trust of the many people who already thought the agencies were doing a fine job before he arrived. Perhaps he’ll try. But proclaiming, as he did in October, that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end” is not a great way to start.

Twice during his Senate confirmation hearings at the end of last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s new health secretary, brought up a peer-reviewed study by a certain “Mawson” that had come out just the week before. “That article is by Mawson,” he said to Senator Bill Cassidy, then spelled out the author’s name for emphasis: “M-A-W-S-O-N.” And to Bernie Sanders: “Look at the Mawson study, Senator … Mawson. Just look at that study.”

“Mawson” is Anthony Mawson, an epidemiologist and a former academic who has published several papers alleging a connection between childhood vaccines and autism. (Any such connection has been thoroughly debunked.) His latest on the subject, and the one to which Kennedy was referring, appeared in a journal that is not indexed by the National Library of Medicine or by any other organization that might provide it with some scientific credibility. One leading member of the journal’s editorial board, a stubborn advocate for using hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat COVID-19, has lost five papers to retraction. Another member is Didier Raoult (whose name the journal has misspelled), a presence on the Retraction Watch leaderboard, which is derived from the work of a nonprofit we cofounded, with 31 retractions. A third, and the journal’s editor in chief, is James Lyons-Weiler, who has one retraction of his own and has called himself, in a since-deleted post on X, a friend and “close adviser to Bobby Kennedy.” (Mawson told us he chose this journal because several mainstream ones had rejected his manuscript without review. Lyons-Weiler did not respond to a request for comment.)

Perhaps a scientist or politician—and certainly a citizen-activist who hopes to be the nation’s leading health-policy official—should be wary of citing anything from this researcher or this journal to support a claim. The fact that one can do so anyway in a setting of the highest stakes, while stating truthfully that the work originated in a peer-reviewed, academic publication, reveals an awkward fact: The scientific literature is an essential ocean of knowledge, in which floats an alarming amount of junk. Think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but the trash cannot be identified without special knowledge and equipment. And although this problem is long-standing, until the past decade or so, no one with both the necessary expertise and the power to intervene has been inclined to help. With the Trump administration taking control of the CDC and other posts on the nation’s science bulwark, the consequences are getting worse. As RFK Jr. made plain during his confirmation hearing, the advocates or foes of virtually any claim can point to published work and say, “See? Science!”

This state of affairs is not terribly surprising when one considers how many studies labeled as “peer reviewed” appear every year: at least 3 million. The system of scientific publishing is, as others have noted, under severe strain. Junk papers proliferate at vanity journals and legitimate ones alike, due in part to the “publish or perish” ethos that pervades the research enterprise, and in part to the catastrophic business model that has captured much of scientific publishing since the early 2000s.

That model—based on a well-meaning attempt to free scientific findings from subscription paywalls—relies on what are known as article-processing charges: fees researchers pay to publishers. The charges aren’t inconsequential, sometimes running into the low five figures. And the more papers that journals publish, the more money they bring in. Researchers are solicited to feed the beast with an ever-increasing number of manuscripts, while publishers have reason to create new journals that may end up serving as a destination for lower-quality work. The result: Far too many papers appear each year in too many journals without adequate peer review or even editing.

[Read: The real cost of knowledge]

The mess that this creates, in the form of unreliable research, can to some extent be cleaned up after publication. Indeed, the retraction rate in science—meaning the frequency with which a journal says, for one reason or another, “Don’t rely on this paper”—has been growing rapidly. It’s going up even faster than the rate of publication, having increased roughly tenfold over the past decade. That may sound like editors are weeding out the literature more aggressively as it expands. And the news is in some ways good—but even now, far more papers should be retracted than are retracted. No one likes to admit an error—not scientists, not publishers, not universities, not funders.

Profit motive can sometimes trump quality control even at the world’s largest publishers, which earn billions annually. It also fuels a ravenous pack of “paper mills” that publish scientific work with barely any standards whatsoever, including those that might be used to screen out AI-generated scientific slop.

An empiricist might say that the sum total of these articles simply adds to human knowledge. If only. Many, or even most, published papers serve no purpose whatsoever. They simply appear and … that’s it. No one ever cites them in subsequent work; they leave virtually no trace of their existence.

Until, of course, someone convinces a gullible public—or a U.S. senator—that all research currency, new and old, is created equal. Want to make the case that childhood vaccines cause autism? Find a paper in a journal that says as much and, more important, ignore the countless other articles discrediting the same idea. Consumers are already all too familiar with this strategy: News outlets use the same tactic when they tell you that chocolate, coffee, and red wine are good for you one week—but will kill you the next.

Scientists are not immune from picking and choosing, either. They may, for example, assert that there is no evidence for a claim even though such evidence exists—a practice that has been termed “dismissive citation.” Or they may cite retracted papers, either because they didn’t bother checking on those papers’ status or because that status was unclear. (Our team built and shared the Retraction Watch Database—recently acquired by another nonprofit—to help address the latter problem.)

The pharmaceutical industry can also play the science-publication system to its advantage. Today, reviewers at the FDA rely on raw data for their drug approvals, not the questionable thumbs-up of journals’ peer review. But if the agency, flawed as it may be, has its power or its workforce curbed, the scientific literature (with even greater flaws) is not prepared to fill the gap.

Kennedy has endorsed at least one idea that could help to solve these many problems. At his confirmation hearing, he suggested that scientific papers should be published alongside their peer reviews. (By convention, these appraisals are kept both anonymous and secret.) A few publishers have already taken this step, and although only time will tell if it succeeds, the practice does appear to blunt the argument that too much scientific work is hashed out behind closed doors. If such a policy were applied across the literature, we might all be better off.

Regardless, publishers must be more honest about their limitations, and the fact that many of their papers are unreliable. If they did their part to clean up the literature by retracting more unworthy papers, even better. Opening up science at various stages to more aggressive scrutiny—“red teaming,” if you will—would also help. Any such reforms will be slow-moving, though, and America is foundering right now in a whirlpool of contested facts. The scientific literature is not equipped to bail us out.

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A baffling problem in the Trump era is separating its sinister aspects from its pathetic self-embarrassments. On Tuesday, the White House turned away an Associated Press reporter from an Oval Office event. The reporter had done nothing wrong. The refusal was intended to punish the AP collectively for disobeying President Donald Trump’s edict to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”

The decree and its enforcement were indeed sinister—an effort to bend reality to one man’s whim. But they were also pathetic, a revelation of inner weakness, not national strength.

Consider how the Gulf of Mexico got its name in the first place. It was not from the Mexicans themselves. The ancient Aztecs knew the oceans to their west and east as “Sky Water.” They did not invent geographically specific names for the seas around them, because they did not need them.

The Gulf of Mexico instead got its name from 16th-century Spanish mapmakers. In the age of discovery and conquest, European mariners often named bodies of water after the destination territory on the other side of that water. The Gulf of Mexico is so called because when a Spaniard sailed toward Mexico, the Gulf was the sea that the Spaniard crossed.

Once you understand this practice, you see it everywhere. The Bight of Benin was not called that by the people of the Benin kingdom. It was named by the Europeans who sailed across the bight (an old word for bay) toward Benin.

The Indian Ocean. The Java Sea. These were not labels chosen by the Indians or Javanese, but by European seafarers en route to India and Java.

Even European home waters were named by sailors after their destination. The Irish Sea was the route from England to Ireland; the Gulf of Finland was the way taken by non-Finns on the south shore traveling to trade with the Finnish people on the north shore.

An apparent exception, the English Channel, is no exception at all.

The Romans bestowed the name “Britannic Ocean” upon the water between their continental empire and their British colony. The medieval English knew the sea by the ancient Latin name. They sometimes more loosely referred to the waters around them as “the German Ocean”—because they offered the way to the rich markets of the Rhine Valley and the German coast. But in the 1600s, the supreme naval power of northwestern Europe was the Dutch Netherlands. For the Dutch, the significance of the channel was that it guided them to England and then onward into the Atlantic. It was the Dutch who spread the term English Channel. Because the English relied on superior Dutch charts for a long time, the Dutch name stuck—despite the efforts of some English geographers to replace the name with the more romantic and less objectifying “Narrow Seas.”

Bodies of water are typically named by dominant nations not after themselves, but after the subordinate nations on the other side. To rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” is to reconceptualize the United States not as a sending point, but as a receiving point; no longer a country that stamps itself upon history, but a country upon which history is stamped.

Maybe, in that very specific sense, the attempted renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is a fitting memorial to the Trump era. Trump’s act of imperial boastfulness unwittingly reveals a disquieting self-awareness of imperial decline. As so often, Trump claims to be a winner while acting like a loser.

Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.

These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.

This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.

Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. They were supposed to measure objective reality—evidence of pollution, for example—and respond accordingly. Not all of them were good administrators or moral people, but the damage that any one of them could do was limited by audits, rules about transparency, and again, an ethos built around the rule of law. This system was accepted by everyone—Republican-voting FBI agents, Democratic-voting environmental officers, the nurses at veterans’ hospitals, the air-traffic controllers at LAX.

What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection.

The new system, whatever its ideology, will in practice represent a return to patronage, about which more in a minute. But before it can be imposed, the administration will first have to break the morale of the people who believed in the old civil-service ethos. Vought, at a 2023 planning meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised exactly that. People who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”

[Renée DiResta: My encounter with the fantasy-industrial complex]

The email Musk sent to most employees in the federal government, offering them a “buyout”—several months’ pay, in exchange for a commitment to resign—was intended to inflict this kind of trauma. In effect, Musk was telling federal workers that he was not interested in what they were doing, or whether they were good at it, or how they could become more efficient. Instead, he was sending the message: You are all expendable.

Simultaneously, Musk launched an administrative and rhetorical attack on USAID, adding cruelty to the hostility. Many USAID employees work in difficult places, risking terrorism and violence, to distribute food and medicine to the poorest people on the planet. Overnight, they were told to abandon their projects and come home. In some places, the abrupt end of their programs, for example those providing special meals to malnourished children, will result in deaths, and USAID employees know it.

The administration has not acknowledged the dramatic real-world impact of this cut, which will, if not quashed by the courts, result in relatively minor budgetary savings. On the contrary, Musk and others turned to X to lie about USAID and its alleged waste. USAID did not give millions of dollars in direct grants to Politico, did not fund the visits of celebrities to Ukraine, did not send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, and did not pay $84 million to Chelsea Clinton. But these fictions and others have now been blasted to hundreds of millions of people. Information taken from grant databases is also being selectively circulated, in some cases fed to internet trolls who are now hounding grant recipients, in order to smear people and organizations that had legitimate, congressionally approved goals. Musk and others used a similar approach during the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work.

But the true significance of USAID’s destruction is the precedent it sets. Every employee of every U.S. department or agency now knows that the same playbook can be applied to them too: abrupt funding cuts and management changes, followed by smear campaigns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which safeguards bank customers against unfair, deceptive, or predatory practices, is already suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, which mostly manages student loans, may follow. Within other agencies, anyone who was involved in hiring, training, or improving workplaces for minority groups or women is at risk, as is anyone involved in mitigating climate change, in line with Trump’s executive orders.

In addition, Musk has personally taken it upon himself to destroy organizations built over decades to promote democracy and oppose Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence around the world. For example, he described the journalists of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who take extraordinary risks to report in Russia, Belarus, and in autocracies across Eurasia, as “radical left crazy people.” Not long after he posted this misleading screed on X, one RFE/RL journalist was released from a Belarusian prison after nearly three years in jail, as a part of the most recent prisoner exchange.

Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent? A small number of people will choose heroism. In late January, a career civil servant, Nick Gottlieb, refused to obey an order to place several dozen senior USAID employees on administrative leave, on the grounds that the order violated the law. “The materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct,” he told them in an email. He also acknowledged that he, too, might soon be removed, as indeed he was. “I wish you all the best—you do not deserve this,” he concluded.

[Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again]

Others will decide to cooperate with the new regime—collaborating, in effect, with an illegal assault, but out of patriotism. Much like the Ukrainian scientists who have kept the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant going under Russian occupation because they fear catastrophe if they leave, some tech experts who work on America’s payment systems and databases have stayed in place even as Musk’s team of very young, very inexperienced engineers have demanded illegitimate access. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one government employee told my Atlantic colleagues Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost.

Eventually, though, if the assault on the civil service is not blocked, the heroes and the patriots will disappear. They will be fired, or denied access to the tools they need to work, or frightened by the smear campaigns. They will be replaced by people who can pass the purity tests now required to get government jobs. Some will seem silly—are you willing to say “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico”?—and some will be deadly serious. Already, the Post reports, candidates for national-security posts in the new administration are being asked whether they accept Trump’s false claim to have won the 2020 election. At least two candidates for higher positions at the FBI were also asked to state who the “real patriots” were on January 6, 2021. This particular purity test is significant because it measures not just loyalty to Trump, but also whether federal employees are willing to repeat outright falsehoods—whether they are willing, in other words, to break the old civil-service ethos, which required people to make decisions based on objective realities, not myths or fictions.

To show that they are part of the new system, many loyalists will also engage in loud, performative behavior, designed to attract the attention and approval of Trump, Musk, Vought, or their followers. Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., wrote a missive addressed to “Steve and Elon” (referring to Musk and his associate Steve Davis) in which he vowed to track down “individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees.” If anyone is deemed to have broken the law “or acted simply unethically,” Martin theatrically promised to “chase them to the end of the Earth.” Ostentatious announcements of bans on supposed DEI or climate-change projects will similarly threaten civil servants. Late last month, the Air Force removed videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the first Black and female Air Force pilots, from a training course. After an uproar, the videos were put back, but the initial instinct was revealing. Like the people asking FBI candidates to lie about what happened on January 6, someone at the Air Force felt obliged to deny older historical truths as well.

Eventually, demonstrations of loyalty might need to become more direct. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out that a future IRS head, for example, might be pressured to audit some of the president’s perceived enemies. If inflation returns, government employees might feel they need to disguise this too. In the new system, they would hold their job solely at the pleasure of the president, not on behalf of the American people, so maybe it won’t be in their interest to give him any bad news.

Many older civil servants will remain in the system, of course, but the new regime will suspect them of disloyalty. Already, the Office of Personnel Management has instructed federal employees to report on colleagues who are trying to “disguise” DEI programs, and threatened “adverse consequences” for anyone who failed to do so. The Defense Health Agency sent out a similar memo. NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI have also told employees who are aware of “coded or imprecise language” being used to “disguise” DEI to report these violations within 10 days.

Because these memos are themselves coded and imprecise, some federal employees will certainly be tempted to abuse them. Don’t like your old boss? Report him or her for “disguising DEI.” Want to win some brownie points with the new boss? Send in damning evidence about your colleagues’ private conversations. In some government departments, minority employees have set up affinity groups, purely voluntary forums for conversation or social events. A number of government agencies are shutting these down; others are being disbanded by organizers who fear that membership lists will be used to target people. Even private meetings, outside the office, might not be safe from spying or snooping colleagues.

[Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America’s enemies]

That might sound implausible or incredible, but at the state level, legislation encouraging Americans to inform on other Americans has proliferated. A Texas law, known as the Heartbeat Act, allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe to have helped “aid or abet” an abortion. The Mississippi legislature recently debated a proposal to pay bounties to people who identify illegal aliens for deportation. These measures are precedents for what’s happening now to federal employees.

And the fate of federal employees will, in turn, serve as a precedent for what will happen to other institutions, starting with universities. Random funding cuts have already shocked some of the biggest research universities across the country, damaging ongoing projects without regard to “efficiency” or any other criteria. Political pressure will follow. Already, zealous new employees at the National Science Foundation are combing through descriptions of existing research projects, looking to see if they violate executive orders banning DEI. Words such as advocacy, disability, trauma, socioeconomic, and yes, women will all trigger reviews.

There are still greater dangers down the road—the possible politicization of the Federal Electoral Commission, for example. Eventually, anyone who interacts with the federal government—private companies, philanthropies, churches, and above all, citizens—might find that the cultural revolution affects them too. If the federal government is no longer run by civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might seriously diverge from yours.

None of this is inevitable. Much of it will be unpopular. The old idea that public servants should serve all Americans, and not just a small elite, has been part of American culture for more than a century. Rule of law matters to many of our elected politicians, as well as to their voters, all across the political spectrum. There is still time to block this regime change, to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is happening, and why.