Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We know this because she meticulously gathers and posts information about people’s personal, emotional, and sexual lives—including her own. The crying number was unusually high, she says, because of a bad breakup. For many fans, the more boggling statistic was that last year, she had sex on only 41 days, but on one of those days, she had sex with nearly 40 people. We’ll come back to that.

After years of following Aella’s online outrages and unexpected insights, I wanted to meet her for myself—to understand her unusual occupation as a cam girl turned sex researcher, and to hear her perspective on what the internet has done to human sexuality. But my first IRL encounter with her, one day last spring, involved staring at a closed front door.

Aella had invited me to her home in Austin, but then slept through our designated appointment time. Even my frantic knocking and texting didn’t rouse her. Eventually, though, once she had woken up and been for a swim in the local springs, her assistant let me into the house and made me a mushroom coffee. Explaining that she was gradually bringing order to Aella’s life, the assistant opened a closet to reveal a rail of neatly hung bras. This was a first in my journalism career—being invited to appreciate an interviewee’s underwear. Not that Aella would mind, because her entire appeal is based around her lack of filter. Polaroids of her, masked and topless, were stuck to the fridge.

[Jane Coaston: The nudes internet]

“I can’t really get canceled,” she told me when I finally met her, “because what are you gonna do?” By then she was sitting with her legs curled up underneath her on a chair, wearing only a robe and underwear, next to a giant, curved monitor of the type beloved by crypto day traders.

Aella is her longtime pseudonym; the 33-year-old keeps her birth name private. Describing precisely what she does for a living is difficult: Her X bio describes her as a “whorelord” and a “vexworker,” by which she means that she is an OnlyFans star, occasional escort, and organizer of sex parties. She is unabashedly a nerd, once describing herself as “a gremlinesque neckbeard who found himself in a hot woman’s body.” And she has turned her experience of selling sex into a large-scale research project.

Thanks to her talent for virality, she has been able to create huge online surveys that, despite the limitations of the medium, provide some of the broadest insights that we have into sexuality in the 2020s. More than 700,000 people have responded to her “Big Kink” survey. She has learned, among other things, that “pigtails” are a more popular fetish than “armpits.” She is as uninhibited about asking inflammatory questions as she is about posting nudes: She has written about whether penis size is correlated with race (“We haven’t had a good, high-n study”) and asked her followers if they would support the creation of realistic child-size sex dolls for pedophiles (77.4 percent said no).

One of the biggest problems in sex research is recruiting participants who can be induced to answer questions honestly. This is where Aella’s experience of capturing the internet’s attention gives her an advantage. The Big Kink survey takes about 40 minutes to complete—long enough to weed out trollish and spam responses. But how could she expect to keep unpaid respondents interested for that long? Her solution was to promise them a freakiness rating at the end, like a classic BuzzFeed personality quiz.

Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist who serves as the executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, sees Aella as the young-Millennial version of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex educator whose grandmotherly charm made her a disarming advocate of sexual liberation. As Dr. Ruth understood, many Americans’ lives were once blighted by their inability to articulate, much less confront, their relationship needs. Even today, people withhold details about their sexual interests from their partners, their doctors, and academic researchers. Yet they’ll spill quite a lot to a sex-positive internet personality, and all those revelations add up to a huge body of information.

Like much American social-science research, Aella’s sample skews white and college-educated. Liberals are overrepresented in her data; most of her followers are men, but most of her survey respondents are women. Online polls like hers have limitations, Garcia told me. “But,” he added, “they do tell us what people are thinking about.”

Aella was raised in Idaho in a fundamentalist-Christian family that was so socially conservative, her parents showed her and her two younger sisters a censored version of Titanic. Her father is an evangelist and a radio host who used to be flooded by hate mail from atheists and other Christians. That turned out to be a preview of Aella’s own experience of threats and abuse, and good practice for life online. On a recent seven-and-a-half-hour episode of the podcast Whatever, she was part of a panel of 10 women who were hectored and mocked by Andrew Wilson, a fellow guest and self-described Christian “bloodsports debater.” When he insinuated that she didn’t understand science, she kept her cool and calmly explained basic statistical methods to him. His argumentative tactics, she said afterward, reminded her of her father’s.

She always felt like an outsider, she says now. She remembers writing in her teenage journals that “everybody else has access to a secret script that I don’t know what it is.” She left home at 17 after an argument. Once she started seeing flaws in her Christian beliefs, her faith crumbled quickly. “I have a tendency to take things to an extreme,” Aella once told Playboy. She flipped from devout teenager to libertine 20-something, barely passing through the dull span of vanilla dating and low-key Sunday churchgoing.

After dropping out of college in northern Idaho, Aella became a cam girl—because streaming explicit content for money couldn’t be worse than her day job on an electrical-equipment assembly line, she reckoned. She both enjoyed and excelled at it, and she soon started researching what made some girls more successful than others. Her findings surprised her: Viewers liked idiosyncrasy and theatricality as much as nudity and straightforward hotness. And so she began to stage surreal scenes—dressing up as a mime, pretending to seduce a chair, doing a “dinosaur moonwalk,” playing the accordion. On an internet filled with horny nerds, the juxtaposition of weird and sexy can be lucrative. She earned more than $100,000 in her best month on OnlyFans, and has thousands of paid subscribers on Substack.

Her first moment of virality outside the camming sites came in 2013, from a series of photos that showed her undressing, before being dragged off camera by garden gnomes. The “Getting Gnaked” set was viewed more than 2 million times within a year. Aella also found that, contrary to many of the stereotypes about online porn, a physically submissive woman was not what most straight men wanted. Instead, her customers fantasized about scenarios in which they were essentially passive—a “basic hot girl” just fell into their arms. “Like, Oh, we’re the last people on Earth, right?” she told the podcaster Lex Fridman. In a conclusion that might unsettle some feminists, she finds that the proportion of women who are interested in feeling submissive is greater than the proportion of men who want to feel dominant. Perhaps my favorite Aella claim is that she can arouse her escorting clients just by expressing enthusiasm as they explain high-level concepts to her. (Her current rate is $4,000 an hour.)

During her early career, she bounced around the U.S., living in Boston, New York, and the Bay Area, as well as Portland, Oregon. She gravitated toward a scene known as rationalism, wherein self-professed nerds apply a coldly rational lens to subjects that are often clouded by emotion or dogma, such as the heritability of intelligence, whether you should altruistically donate a kidney to a stranger, and whether it’s acceptable to have sex with your sister. “once i threw a party for the bay area rationalists, and the rules to attend were you had to be wearing a full-face coverage mask, and be naked,” she wrote on X in 2021, during the pandemic. “Many came; they all bravely stripped, donned weird masks … and then proceeded to sit in a polite circle and debate global trade.” Her bracingly unfiltered posts put her in my peripheral vision years ago; while I am worried about the potential for abuse and exploitation in sex work, her originality and openness have always intrigued me.

Last February, somewhat infamously, she enrolled 42 men to have sex with her en masse via a Google Form, then rented a venue, recruited eight women to act as fluffers, and asked the men to put on matching commemorative bathrobes. The resulting Substack post is a masterpiece, starting with an epigram from Nelson Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” (She detailed how two of the attendees, waiting in line, bonded over the fact that their start-ups had received support from the same venture-capital fund.) This was how she managed to have sex on so few days last year, but with so many different people. It is also one of many, many incidents in Aella’s life that most people would regard with awe, horror, or both.

[Helen Lewis: The outrage over ]100 Men only goes so far

Aella originally felt drawn to sex research because her own sexual interests are outside the mainstream. She practices polyamory and freely discusses her fetish for “consensual nonconsent”—which is to say, scenarios in which she pretends to be taking part against her will. If she were “super normie” about sex, she told me, “I don’t think I would have the need to dissect it.” This places her in the grand tradition of American sex researchers who defied convention in their own personal life and, whether they acknowledged it or not, became advocates for greater sexual permissiveness. Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the field in the 1940s and ’50s, was married to a woman but had sexual relationships with at least one of his male students. The biologist shocked the country with his first book about human sexuality, which claimed that only half the population is exclusively heterosexual throughout adulthood. “I suspect that Kinsey’s great project originated in the discovery of his own sexual ambiguities,” the author of a 1972 Atlantic article hypothesized. Kinsey’s ostensibly objective scholarship was a concealed polemic: He wanted to expand the scope of “normal.”

In the 1960s, the gynecologist William Masters and and his research partner (and later wife) Virginia Johnson also defied prim scholarly norms by serving as consultants to Playboy, reasoning that the magazine was a good way to reach young men, and they supplied female “surrogates”—therapeutic escorts—to single men with sexual inhibitions, erectile disorder, and other conditions.

Throughout the 20th century, sex researchers willed themselves to suspend moral judgment. Kinsey had a saying, Justin Garcia told me, that is often quoted at the institute that bears his name: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” Yet the field still has taboos, just different ones. The feminist commentators Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whose work is highly influential on university campuses, have argued that pornography is inherently harmful to women. Some of Aella’s findings challenge that view. She finds that men who watch online porn, rather than being desensitized to what real-life sexual partners want, are better at guessing what women want in bed.

Aella is not familiar with the academic traditions that have shaped modern sex research. When I asked her about Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, she told me that she hadn’t read their work. This irritates some mainstream researchers: J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychology professor who studies sexual orientation and arousal, told me he was “annoyed” by what he saw as her casualness, and denied being merely territorial. “She hasn’t bothered to learn things,” Bailey told me. “Sex research is not just asking a few questions to a lot of people. If it were, we would know a lot more than we know.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t fire people for making pornography in their spare time]

Nonetheless, Bailey said, “she talks about things without worry, and we should all be doing that a lot more.” He thinks that some mainstream academic sex research has suffered from “the encroachment of ideology,” becoming queer or feminist activism by other means. (Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, which argues that some gender transitions are sexually motivated, prompted some transgender activists to accuse him of research misconduct—claims that a subsequent investigation did not substantiate.) Bailey invited Aella to join an email discussion group he runs, and he asked her to promote a survey on sadomasochism that his graduate student was running. If he thought her work was worthless, he said, “I wouldn’t have asked for the help.”

Garcia noted that, because sex research is a prime target for political scrutiny, institutions like his take great care with study design, researchers’ conflicts of interests, and gaining approval from review boards. “Aella, her work blurs those boundaries,” he told me. “But they were created by a field to protect itself, and add rigor and protection from political attacks.”

Unconstrained by such concerns, Aella has spelunked through the extremes of modern sexuality. Among them is vore, a rare fetish “around swallowing someone whole or being swallowed whole, typically by a much larger creature,” as she put it. Researching the phenomenon is tricky. Trying to find, say, 300 people who like vore within the results of a bigger survey would require a huge initial number of respondents. Recruiting participants on a vore forum solves that problem, she has written, even if it does introduce some sampling bias: “Maybe these people are less ashamed about their fetish; maybe they’re lonelier in real life; maybe they’re much more into vore than the actual population of people into vore,” Aella argued. Or, of course, they could be lying.

[Helen Lewis: Nobody should care about a woman’s ‘body count’]

Still, as Aella and others have shown, the universe of niche sexual interests is enormous. And really, this is the big change that the internet has brought to sexuality itself—not just the study of it. Anyone who grew up with a latent vore fetish 100 years ago, or even 30, might have gone their whole life without meeting a fellow enthusiast for being swallowed whole. Bailey published research on people who both desire amputees and fantasize about becoming amputees. “What’s wonderful is that, today, people with these weird sexualities find each other online,” he told me. “It’s really a heyday for studying unusual phenomena like that.”

That raises some obvious follow-up questions: What if the internet is not just connecting people with weird sexual interests, but creating them? Should there ever be a time when sex researchers say, Hang on, that’s far enough?

Aella, who considers herself a libertarian, had come to Austin in the hope of meeting like-minded people, away from the default leftism of the Bay Area. But even in America’s supposed heterodoxy capital, she felt shunned. She joined an invitation-only society for freethinkers called Based in Austin, but was quickly kicked out of the group by fellow anti-woke warriors. Her offense was to post, in a chat thread about venue suggestions, a recommendation for a space where she had once held an orgy. She also didn’t last in a support group for OnlyFans creators, because other women—who she said were “very, very, like, social justice, very leftist”—objected to her provocative posts.

Aella thinks that America still has a deeply hypocritical attitude to sex. “It feels like we simultaneously have a culture where we say sexual liberalism is good, but in action, we find reasons to not allow individual expression to happen,” she told me when I caught up with her again over Zoom, a few months after my visit to Austin. She cited PornHub’s refusal to host videos of sleep fetishes. But there was a good reason for that policy, I said—the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other French men revealed that Pelicot had recruited men to rape his unconscious wife under the pretext that the couple were indulging a consensual fetish about “sleeping beauties.”

My main point of disagreement with Aella is that she has a much sunnier vision of human nature than I do. While some people do like consensual nonconsent, others clearly relish actual violation and sadism in and out of the bedroom. Aella’s blitheness about the risks of her job—she wrote a guide to escorting, in which she describes one client aggressively biting and choking her—seems to be born from the same off-kilter approach to life that makes her such a good amateur anthropologist. In Austin, I was surprised that she invited me, a total stranger, to meet her at home. Eighteen months earlier, a man had appeared at her door and attempted to kidnap her. (Police later found a garrote at his home, alongside a knife, duct tape, and the names of two other sex workers. The man took a plea deal and is already out of jail.)

[Helen Lewis: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Ultimately, she left the Texas capital after a different episode of personal turmoil. She had hoped to have children, only to discover in August that her primary partner wasn’t interested in starting a family. When she revealed the breakup online, a predictable storm of schadenfreude ensued. For “posting publicly about being devastated from a breakup,” she wrote on X, her reward was “people laughing how you deserved it.”

She packed up her belongings and moved back to California. Her new housemate is one of the fluffers from her orgy—a woman who was also dating Aella’s boyfriend but broke up with him too, in solidarity. “We were both dating my ex, and then we’re both not dating him,” she told me. With her living arrangements sorted, Aella wants to work on a book and co-author some scientific papers, both of which might allow her to gain the respectability she needs to attract more funding. She might seek out what she calls “performative credentials.”

In the meantime, though, she still embraces the queasily intimate dynamics of internet celebrity—an openness that provides rich fodder for cruel armchair psychologists. Isn’t she just getting back at Daddy? How will she ever find love? I find something endearing about her refusal to be bowed by this kind of jeering. Aella bravely voyages to the frontiers of American sexuality, collecting data on people’s darkest desires, uncovering the hidden economics of the online sex trade, and refusing—despite all the mockery—to filter herself.

The French president is at the White House to appeal to Trump against rushing into a deal with Russia.

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Anyone with an interest in the history of political vengeance should pay a visit to the rare-book room at the Library of Congress and request the bound volume with the call number DD244.R6. Compiled by Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, Dreissig Novemberköpfe, or Thirty November Heads, is the future chancellor’s political hit list as of 1927: The book profiles government officials, legislators, judges, lawyers, journalists, academics, and one popular satirist targeted by Rosenberg for “poisoning the life essence” of the German people with democratic processes and ideas.

The title is a mendacious nod both to November 1918, the month associated with the founding of the Weimar Republic—“November Republic,” “November Criminals,” “November Traitors”—and to the 1789 French Revolution, when heads rolled from guillotines into the hands of the people.

While Thirty November Heads is perhaps the most public catalog of Hitler’s political enemies, the more sinister one was the list of communists, social democrats, and people within the Nazis’ own ranks that was being secretly  compiled  by Hitler’s Sicherheitsdienst, or “SD.” Established in 1931, this “Security Service” was run by Reinhard Heydrich, the ambitious, 20-something assistant to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Working out of a spare, upper-floor office in the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters, Heydrich assiduously collected the names of—and compromising information on—potential Nazi targets on thousands of index cards, a shadow operation within the dark realm of Himmler’s black-uniformed SS protection squads.

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

Following the Reichstag elections, on March 5, 1933, which came on the heels of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, the Nazis seized control of state and local government with a deluge of 200,000 brown-uniformed storm troopers. Local authorities were thrown out of their offices. Swastika banners were hoisted over town halls. Citizens attempting to remove these unauthorized symbols were assailed. Some were sent to concentration camps.

In the southern state of Bavaria, two of Hitler’s closest associates, Adolf Wagner and Hans Frank, were installed as state interior minister and state minister of justice, respectively. Himmler was appointed the new chief of the Bavarian state police, known as the “Green Police” because of the color of their uniforms, while retaining his position as head of the SS. Joseph Hartinger, a Bavarian state prosecutor, immediately recognized the conflict of interest. “Himmler had authority over the SS as well as the state police,” Hartinger observed, “and thus had to be obeyed whenever he gave personal orders relating to police measures in concentration camps.”

Himmler suspended Green Police authority over the recently established network of detention facilities, transforming them into black sites in the justice system, a hellish world beyond the reach of accountability or judicial recourse. Himmler also placed his assistant Heydrich in charge of Department IV, the intelligence service of the Bavarian state police. Heydrich now had access to thousands of classified police files, including the reports of police informants who had infiltrated the Nazi Party’s ranks. For people such as Herbert Hunglinger and Sebastian Nefzger, this was a catastrophe.

Hunglinger was a 53-year-old retired police major who had joined the Nazi Party in 1920, according him the honorific Alter Kämpfer, “Old Warrior,” bestowed on those who had joined the movement in the earliest years, before National Socialism had become politically fashionable. Hunglinger helped establish the Führerschule, a special school for training party leaders, and was said to have possessed the personal trust of the Führer. But recognizing the threat Hitler posed, Hunglinger was all the while feeding intelligence to Bavarian authorities. When his cover was blown, Hunglinger was subjected to brutal interrogation. He confessed his role as a police informant and was dispatched to Dachau, along with five other moles ferreted out by Heydrich via his examination of the Department IV police files.

In Dachau, Hunglinger was placed in Barrack X, a series of single concrete cells, where he was lashed and beaten at regular intervals by SS guards. The pain was such that he begged for a revolver to shoot himself. “We don’t have revolvers,” Hunglinger was told, according to postwar testimony. “Besides, you’re not worth the bullet.” In a “charitable” gesture, he was handed a leather belt and told to hang himself. When guards discovered that Hunglinger was still alive the next day, he was given a particularly severe beating. “That should do it,” an SS guard observed. The next day Hunglinger was found dead, hanged by the neck.

Sebastian Nefzger, another police informant who had infiltrated the Nazi Party, was found dead in his cell with his wrists slit. An autopsy revealed that the 33-year-old salesman, with a wife and child, had in fact “died from asphyxiation, resulting from strangulation and beating.” The flesh on his back had been flayed to the bone.

Loyalty was the sine qua non of service to Hitler and his movement. SS men swore blood allegiance to their Führer: “Treue ist mein Eid,” “Loyalty is my oath.” Treue was reciprocated with Treue, betrayal with unspeakable savagery. The pervasiveness of this blood credo throughout the National Socialist hierarchy, including among Hitler’s closest associates, is evidenced by an inscription in Hitler’s copy of November Heads now held at the Library of Congress. “To Adolf Hitler in loyal subservience!” reads the handwritten dedication.

The author of that dedication was Gregor Strasser, who—in addition to being co-owner of Kampf Verlag, the publishing house that had brought out Thirty November Heads—was in the early 1930s considered equal to Hitler by many in the Nazi Party and superior to him by some. Karl Lüdecke was a Hitler disciple who knew Strasser well. “Within Nazidom, Gregor Strasser was, next to Hitler, the most powerful man and the most effective speaker,” Lüdecke recalled. According to Lüdecke, Strasser was also the most articulate and ardent voice of “the socialist wing” of the Nazi movement, “strong-willed, independent, creative, with a mind of his own—ambitious, but unwilling to sell his soul for the sake of advancement.” Hitler was the fanatical nationalist. Strasser was the committed socialist. Together, the two men lent credence to the National Socialist Party name.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Strasser possessed a pragmatism that Hitler lacked. “The visionary genius of this man is singular,” Strasser said of Hitler. “But what good is genius that is not anchored in reality, whose brilliant ideas cannot be implemented in the real world.” Implementation became Strasser’s job. The two men had met in the summer of 1921, and across the next decade Strasser assumed growing control over the party’s evolution. It was Strasser who managed the surge in party membership from 27,000 in 1925 to 800,000 by 1931. He quadrupled the number of party chapters, from 71 to more than 270, and, most important, restructured party administration to align with voting precincts, helping drive the Nazis’ stunning electoral successes in the early ’30s. As evidence that he considered himself the chancellor’s peer, Strasser never addressed Hitler as Mein Führer, only Herr Hitler.

Hitler and Strasser divided Germany into respective political realms. Hitler commanded the south. Strasser, along with his younger brother, Otto, oversaw the north. Hermann Rauschning was a prominent Nazi in the port city of Danzig. “Hitler’s nature was incomprehensible to the North German,” Rauschning observed. North Germans preferred a man like Strasser, who was “practical, clearer headed” and “quick to act without bombast and bathos, with a sound peasant’s judgment.” When Hitler visited the Ruhr industrial region, he was annoyed by the predominance of Strasser posters.

The left-wing weekly journal Die Weltbühne took the measure of both men: “It doesn’t require much prophetic skill to be of the opinion that in the not-too-distant future Strasser will press his lord and master Hitler into a corner and take the reins of the party.” Within senior party ranks, Strasser was commonly known as “Gregor the Great.”

Despite his near-equal position within the party, Strasser placed loyalty to Hitler above all else. Rosenberg recalled that Strasser invariably ended his speeches with the declaration “I fought as a Hitler man, and I will go to my grave as a Hitler man.” But when Hitler clashed with Otto Strasser over the direction of the National Socialist movement, Gregor was forced to choose between Hitler and his brother. One day in the spring of 1928, while Gregor was away, Hitler appeared in the Strasser brothers’ Berlin office and threatened to dispatch 10 storm troopers to pull Otto into line. Otto drew a revolver from his desk. “I have eight shots, Herr Hitler,” he said. “That means eight fewer storm troopers.” Hitler stormed out of the office. But Gregor would side with Hitler over his brother. “Thank God we did not lose Strasser,” Hitler said at the time. “Loyal subservience”—treue Gefolgschaft—indeed.

But subservience did not mean permanent blindness. In 1932, when the party radicals—Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm—pressed Hitler on a “rule or ruin” strategy, Strasser spoke his mind to Hitler, urging accommodation and restraint. When the Nazis took a beating at the polls in the November 6, 1932, Reichstag election, shedding 2 million votes and 40 Reichstag seats, the party was thrown into crisis. “The Führer had misplayed his cards” was the line circulating among senior Nazi Party ranks. The game was up. Karl Lüdecke recalled that Hitler, “with his own chances diving towards zero, was rushing feverishly with his aides from place to place, fighting desperately to fend off a complete Nazi collapse.”

Strasser calmly took matters in hand. He told Hitler that the time had come for accommodation. The party should enter into a coalition with Berlin’s ultimate power broker, Kurt von Schleicher, who was a confidant of German President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler waffled, then dug in. “Strasser argued that Schleicher had to be tolerated,” Goebbels reported to his diary. ”The Führer clashed as fiercely with him as I have ever seen.”

Hitler was furious when he learned that Strasser had met with Schleicher to explore potential cooperation. He accused Strasser of betrayal. Strasser was reportedly dumbfounded. “Herr Hitler, do you really believe me capable of such a dirty trick?” Strasser asked.

“Yes,” Hitler replied.

Strasser was “deeply wounded” by Hitler’s accusation. Hans Frank met with Strasser shortly afterward. Frank knew Strasser to be one of the most “confident and pragmatic men” he had ever met. But he found Strasser completely undone, despairing that Hitler was now in the clutches of the party radicals. “Frank, this is horrific,” Strasser said. “Göring is a brutal egotist who could care less about Germany, Goebbels is a club-footed devil, Röhm is a pig. These are the Führer’s guards.” Strasser resigned his party posts, as well as his Reichstag seat, but retained his party membership, ostensibly so as not to damage the already faltering political movement he had helped build.

Strasser departed Berlin for a six-week vacation in Italy. Goering and Goebbels, as Lüdecke later recalled, “struck while the iron was hot.” By the end of January 1933, Hitler was chancellor, Göring was a cabinet minister and the chief of police of Prussia, and Goebbels would soon be minister of propaganda. Strasser withdrew from political life, devoting himself to his business interests.

[Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Hitler spoke of bringing Strasser back into the party, but no one took him seriously. Hitler had always seen Strasser as a threat and seemed to be relieved to have him out of the way. Some thought Hitler’s talk of reengaging with Strasser was tactical, to keep Ernst Röhm, who had succeeded Strasser as the second-most-powerful man in the party, off-guard. In the early summer of 1934, when Hitler feared a possible coup by Röhn and his army of storm troopers, Hitler decided to resolve any doubts about who held absolute authority.

On Saturday, June 30, he flew to Munich and dispatched Himmler and SS men on a blood purge of senior storm-trooper ranks—a killing spree code-named Operation Hummingbird. Röhm was taken into custody, handed a pistol, and told to shoot himself. “If I am to be killed,” he said, “let Adolf do it himself.” Röhm was shot dead on the spot. Dozens of senior Röhm associates were summarily executed.

That same day, the SS paid a visit to the Berlin residence of Kurt von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as chancellor. When he opened the door, he was asked whether he was von Schleicher. “Yes, I am General von Schleicher,” he said, and was shot dead on the spot. Schleicher’s wife, hearing the gunfire, rushed into the foyer and was gunned down as well. Another former chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, also received a knock on the door of a Berlin address where he was thought to be residing, while, in fact, he had already fled the country.

That same afternoon, Gregor Strasser was having lunch with his family at his home in Berlin. At 1:30 p.m., five Gestapo officers entered the house and informed Strasser that he was suspected of “treasonous activities” and that his office in Munich was to be searched. This must have come as a surprise to Strasser. On February 1 of that year, Strasser had been awarded the Golden Party Pin, one of the Nazi Party’s highest honors, inscribed with Strasser’s founding-membership rank, Number 9. Upon arrival at his office, Strasser was handed over to a waiting SS detachment. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but the most credible has him being placed in a cell at the Gestapo headquarters in the Prince Albrecht Palace, where on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders he was shot—in the neck rather than the head, to prolong the agony. He bled to death on the concrete floor over the course of an hour.

During those same hours, Strasser’s private attorney was shot in his office after refusing to surrender documents “concerning Strasser’s conflict with Hitler,” and Strasser’s former chief of staff was also shot from behind outside his Munich apartment. Strasser’s right-hand man, the Nazi military officer Paul Schulz, was seized and taken for a ride by the Gestapo before being thrown out on the road with the words “Now run, you swine!” Schulz was shot five times and left for dead, but he miraculously survived. (After dragging himself down the road, he was found by a passing car and eventually escaped to Switzerland.) In all, the Night of the Long Knives officially claimed 84 victims, but the actual number was probably much higher.

By June, all but one of Rosenberg’s 30 November heads were either dead, imprisoned, or living in exile. The first November head to go down, before Rosenberg even published his book, was Walther Rathenau, the Weimar-era foreign minister who insisted that Germany respect the “war guilt clause” in the Treaty of Versailles and adhere to the onerous war-reparation payments. In Thirty November Heads, Rosenberg observes that this “racial Jew and liberal esthete” received his just desserts when he was assassinated, in June 1922, by right-wing extremists. Another November head, Matthias Erzberger, who helped negotiate the November 11, 1918, armistice that ended the First World War, was also assassinated by a far-right group before Rosenberg’s book was published. Including Rathenau and Erzberger in the book was Rosenberg’s not-so-subtle way of nodding to the fate that awaited the remaining 28.

A few others had by 1934 already died of old age or natural causes. These included Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, and Gustav Stresemann, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who, according to Rosenberg, had as “chancellor of capitulation” and “foreign minister of subservience politics” helped subjugate all of Europe to the “reign of Jewish high finance.” Others, like the Social Democratic Party’s leader, Otto Wels, and the popular satirist Kurt Tucholsky (Hitler “has a mustache like Chaplin though hardly as funny”), had fled into exile before dying—Wels to France, where he succumbed to a heart attack, and Tucholsky to Sweden, where he committed suicide. On August 23, 1933, Robert Weismann, “a Jew and a Jurist,” was one of the first 33 Germans to be “denationalized,” their citizenship legally stripped, and deported as an undesirable alien. By 1934, most of the other remaining November heads were in concentration camps.   

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

The lone member of Rosenberg’s list to still be alive and free in Germany as of June 1934 was November head No. 18, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht was, according to Rosenberg, a central banker who learned the “dark arts” of high finance from Jewish bankers—“Goldschmidts, Mendelssohns, Wassermanns”—and brought ruin to the German economy with inflationary practices while pocketing for himself an annual, inflation-proof salary of “250,000 Goldmarks.” But while Schacht was, according to Rosenberg’s book, a “criminal abuser of the German people and the “father of the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the German people,” he would emerge six years later as one of Hitler’s most important facilitators, introducing him to financiers, hosting election fundraisers, and urging President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. For these efforts, Hitler rewarded him with a cabinet post and the presidency of the Third Reich’s central bank.

Yet Schacht soon found himself dismayed by the government in which he was now complicit. “How could you ever take upon yourself the responsibility of determining the fate of human beings without any judicial proceedings?” Schacht asked Hitler after the Night of the Long Knives. “No matter what the circumstances, you should have allowed the trials to take place, even if they had only been summary trials.” Schacht continued to quarrel with Hitler, and in 1938 went so far as to publicly rebuke him for what happened to Jews on Kristallnacht. Eventually, like the other surviving November heads, Schacht would find himself dispatched to a series of concentration camps, ending up at Dachau. Hitler reciprocated Treue with Treue. Until he didn’t.

After the bloody 1934 purge, Hitler gave a speech justifying his actions. “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this,” he said. “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people.” Hitler was as explicit as he was unapologetic. “I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason,” he said, before going on to dismiss the killing of others, such as Strasser and Schleicher, as collateral damage. “I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life,” Hitler continued. “Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.”

A vocal group of conservative intellectuals really, really wants Americans to have more babies. The movement is small, but it doesn’t lack for high-profile adherents. Vice President J. D. Vance, a father of three, recently proclaimed, “Very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.” Elon Musk, a father of at least 12, posted in 2022, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” A recent Department of Transportation memo even instructed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” It was signed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine.

If messages like these somehow do not get you in the mood to procreate, well, that’s precisely the problem.

It’s a problem, specifically, for the pronatalists: a group whose members are overwhelmingly conservative, usually religious, and almost always the parents of three or more children. They espouse the view that America’s declining birth rate is an alarming trend we ought to try to reverse. Seventeen years ago, the national birth rate was at the minimum level for a society to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. Since then, it has fallen well below that, with no signs of bottoming out. In response, a loose cohort of intellectuals, writers, thinkers, and policy makers are doing their best to make friends in high places, get a policy agenda together, and make Americans make families again.

This won’t be easy. The pronatalists combine conservative social nudges (get married, start a family) with liberal policy objectives (give parents more money, upzone the suburbs), which makes for tricky politics. At a time of increased abortion restrictions, many liberals find them creepy—busybodies at best and eugenicists at worst. And many conservatives think they’re Trojan horses for socialism, cloaking their desire to spend taxpayer money in family-values rhetoric. Like parenting itself, giving birth to a broadly popular pronatal movement will take a lot of hard work.

Until recently, the idea that humanity might be growing too slowly would have seemed absurd. During the second half of the 20th century, experts—many swayed by the book The Population Bomb—were far more worried about the opposite problem. They feared that overpopulation would lead to widespread famine and potentially even societal collapse.

Something strange happened next: None of those predictions came true. The population continued to grow, but famine was not widespread, and collapse did not come. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, fertility rates steeply declined, most dramatically in rich countries. Rather than exploding, the global population-growth curve began to level off. At first, few noticed. After all, the birth-rate decline came on gradually. A decade ago, the U.S. total fertility rate was only slightly below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Now, however, that number is 1.6 and falling fast, even as polls show Americans believe that the ideal number of children is two to three. This poses a dire economic problem. Social Security, Medicare, and other old-age programs can’t survive at their current generosity if the number of tax-paying workers continues to decline. Even economic growth itself becomes challenging once a low enough fertility rate is reached; fewer workers means a smaller economy. In East Asia, where the worldwide birth-rate drop has been most pronounced, every country faces serious economic challenges resulting from low fertility; all are now furiously trying to encourage birth. In South Korea, where the total fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.68, every 200 fertile-age adults can expect to give life to 68 children; those children will produce 23 grandchildren, who will result in only eight great-grandchildren. That’s a 96 percent population decline over the course of three generations, and that’s if fertility stops decreasing and finally holds steady.

The negative effects of low fertility at home can be mitigated to some degree with immigration, but birth rates are plummeting all over the world—Mexico’s is 1.8—and the amount of immigration sufficient to outweigh the local birth dearth would be a political nonstarter, a kind of Great Replacement theory come to life. To avoid becoming South Korea someday, America needs more babies.

Making that happen is the task the pronatalists have taken on. The effort is new, but beginning to get organized. As of 2023, there’s an annual Natal Conference, and last week, there was a panel at the U.S. Capitol featuring Representative Blake Moore of Utah, a member of the Republican leadership. Every conservative think tank seems to suddenly have an “expert” on birth rates. (Liberal and centrist pronatalists exist, too, but they’re less numerous and less vocal.)

The intellectual force behind the movement lies mainly in a cluster of culturally conservative writers. These include Bethany Mandel, a writer and homeschooling mother of six; Tim Carney, a father of six who wrote Family Unfriendly, a recent book about society’s hostility toward big families; Patrick T. Brown, a father of four and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a socially conservative think tank; and Daniel Hess, a writer more commonly known by his X username, MoreBirths. The informal ringleader is Lyman Stone, a 33-year-old father of three who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies.

[Lyman Stone: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?]

They generally advocate for a three-pronged approach to lifting the birth rate. First are cultural nudges, which mostly entail spreading the word that kids are more blessing than burden. Second are supply-side housing-reform policies, intended to make it easier for would-be parents to afford a place to raise a family. (“Want fecundity in the sheets? Give us walkability in the streets,” Carney writes in Family Unfriendly.) Finally, there are economic incentives, which resemble the types of family-friendly welfare-state policies familiar to Northern Europeans: child allowances, baby bonuses, long parental leaves.

Stone argues that implementing such policies in the U.S. would have a significant effect. He estimates that pronatal economic policies in France, including maternity leave, child allowances, pregnancy protections at work, and higher Social Security payments for parents, have boosted the French population by 5 to 10 million people. Policy matters, he argues, not just culture.

You might expect such a progressive-sounding agenda to have attracted an enthusiastic liberal following. Not so much. In fact, left-of-center Americans are more likely to be anti-natalists. According to a recent YouGov poll, twice as many people who identify as liberal, and four times as many people who identify as very liberal, think too many children are being born than think not enough are.

To the extent that they’re even familiar with the pronatalist argument, liberals seem to find it creepy and off-putting. The main cause of the global birth-rate decline was women’s growing autonomy and access to contraception. Liberals understandably fear that trying to reverse the decline might involve undoing the progress that triggered it. (This is more or less the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Margaret Atwood novel in which right-wing theocrats revolt over low fertility, and institute sex slavery and totalitarian patriarchal rule.)

Some liberals also pay attention to the context in which pronatalist messages are transmitted and who is embracing them. Vance’s “I want more babies” quote, for example, came at the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C. Liberals might even know that the birth rate is still far above replacement in much of sub-Saharan Africa and wonder whether pronatalists are worried specifically about a lack of white babies. “For many progressives and liberals, this conversation is tainted by a sense of it being reactionary, conservative, even sort of fascist,” Rachel Wiseman, an “anti-anti-natalist” leftist writer told me.

Then, as one former senior policy aide to a Republican lawmaker told me, “there’s the Elon of it all.” (He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash for criticizing fellow Republicans.) Musk, the most well-known pronatalist in the world, is also perhaps the most disliked person in liberal America after Donald Trump. Musk is known to have had 12 children with three partners. (Last week, a conservative influencer claimed to be the mother of his 13th child, born five months ago, though Musk has neither confirmed nor denied that he is the father of her child.) He had twins via IVF with an executive at one of his companies while a surrogate was pregnant with the child he was having with his longtime partner Grimes, who was reportedly furious when she found out. Having a dozen kids is good for the birth rate, but making big families look messy and dysfunctional is probably not.

The conservative pronatalist intellectuals, who seem to crave the ideological embrace of liberals, are self-conscious about their creepiness problem. Moore, who last month introduced a bill that would dramatically increase the child tax credit, told me, “Any effort to make this a right or left issue is nonsense and counterproductive.” He and his allies go to great lengths to clarify that they aren’t into eugenics or patriarchy and that they want more babies of all skin colors. “The people who give pronatalism a bad name care for it for reasons that I think are rather unseemly,” Brown told me. “And so it becomes icky because, well, those bad people are very concerned about it.”

Women of childbearing age skew liberal, so liberals’ distaste for pronatalism is a long-term problem. But, at a moment when Republicans have a trifecta in Washington, pronatalists face a more immediate issue on their own flank: Most Republicans still want to slash government spending, not increase it.

[Read: The coming Democratic baby bust]

“There’s a lot of headwinds to a pronatal conservative policy because Republicans have long distrusted urbanist talk, or talk of government supporting people in need,” Carney told me. Many traditional Republicans look at the pronatalist policy agenda (give money to parents, loosen suburban zoning rules) and wonder what happened to the party of fiscal restraint, anti-welfare politics, and the strictly zoned Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

Stone told me that many old-guard Republicans are worried about incentivizing single motherhood. “On some level, we have to be able to say, ‘Look: Supporting people having families is worth it,’” even if that means money flows to unwed parents, he said.

Anti-welfare Republicans aren’t the only intra-coalitional enemy. Pronatalists also face resistance from the so-called Barstool Right, the class of epicurean, anti-woke young men, usually thin in ideology but thick in leftward-pointing resentment. “This is fucking idiotic,” Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder, wrote on X above a video of Vance clumsily arguing for lower tax rates on parents. “If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.” (Neither Vance nor Portnoy signaled any awareness of the fact that, thanks to the child tax credit, the tax code already favors parents.)

Still, the pronatalists think they are winning, if slowly. Stone told me he understands there to be “a few” Vance staffers tasked with getting Congress to raise the child tax credit in this year’s reconciliation bill. Whether or not that happens, the pronatalists feel they are operating on a longer time horizon.

“Short term: maybe; long term: yes,” Brown told me when I asked if he was optimistic. But they had better not move too slowly. If convincing people takes too long, there might not be enough people left to convince.

Donald Trump has done Europe a favor. During a press conference last week, the president blamed Ukraine for triggering Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of its territory, and for having the temerity to continue fighting a Russian army bent on wiping out Ukrainian national identity. Trump had previously noted that Russia has lost a lot of soldiers in the invasion, as if that gives Moscow’s army a right of conquest over the parts of Ukraine that it seized. He paid no heed to the massive number of war crimes that Russia committed along the way.

In doing all this, Trump was disabusing European democracies of the illusion, widely held among such countries’ leaders, that the United States was a reliable defender of freedom on the continent and could be trusted in a crisis. In the days before his anti-Ukrainian rant, Trump’s defense secretary said that the U.S. will reduce its military footprint in Europe, his vice president promoted the cause of pro-Putin far-right parties in Europe, and his Ukraine envoy pushed a plan for elections on Ukraine that mirrored Kremlin thinking.

In short, Trump is with Putin far more than he is with Europe’s democracies.

[Anne Applebaum: The end of the postwar world]

Perhaps this realization will lead Europe to act in its own interests in a way that it so far has found impossible to do. Relying on the United States has infantilized European states, to the point that until now they seemed incapable of thinking, let alone acting, on their own behalf. Europe must immediately start looking out for itself, because it can no longer depend on Washington as a defense partner or even a good friend. Adapting to this new reality will require a level of effort that Europe has not shown for decades.

The first thing European states must do is replace U.S. military and economic support for Kyiv. Ukrainian victory, including the survival of Ukrainian democracy and the defense of Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, is vital to the future security of Europe. But European states have meekly allowed the U.S. to steer the war in disastrous directions. First, President Joe Biden, despite supporting Ukraine’s defense, gave in to Russian nuclear threats and withheld potentially decisive Western weapons systems at crucial junctures. Now his successor has switched sides and taken Russia’s position.

Although Europe as a whole has supplied more aid, the U.S. has provided far more than any single European country. That assistance has included a great deal of the world’s most powerful and effective military equipment. Europe cannot hope to replicate American strength in military technology. Europe itself is a consumer of the American-developed Patriot air-defense systems that Ukraine has been using. If the United States stops supplying 155-millimeter artillery shells, or the cannon barrels through which they are fired, Europe may not be able to provide anything close to the necessary quantities.

But although European states can’t just build lots of Patriot missiles and other essential American-made equipment, they can do more to provide what Ukraine needs to fight in the coming year. They can dig deeper into their own stocks; supply European weapons systems, such as German-made Taurus cruise missiles, that they have heretofore denied the Ukrainians; and even use seized Russian financial assets to purchase weapons from around the world. They can also speed up cooperation and financial support for Ukraine’s own unmanned-aerial-vehicle industry. This will both help Ukraine and significantly improve the UAV capacity of European states in the future. The Ukraine war is the greatest drone-technology laboratory that the world has yet seen.

More cooperation with Ukraine on drones should also help European countries develop their own military-production capabilities. Taken together, these democracies are among the world’s biggest spenders on military procurement. In 2024, EU states alone spent more than 320 billion euros on defense. However, this large sum was terribly spent. It yielded wild duplication of frontline weapons systems and relatively little investment in better logistics, maintenance, and supply replenishment. European governments should establish a common production system that adopts fewer designs for vehicles and equipment but produces many more of each model.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: A wider war has already started in Europe]

Furthermore, Europeans will almost certainly have to arrange for their own nuclear weapons. Since World War II, the Western democracies have been under the U.S. nuclear shield. Without reliable American protection, all of democratic Europe would have to rely on the small British and French nuclear forces to deter a much larger Russian arsenal. A further problem is that the British and French forces are partly based on U.S.-supplied technology.

To protect against Russian nuclear blackmail without help from Washington, Europe would need a crash nuclear-weapons program and to develop a command structure that would reassure all of the continent’s democracies that they are protected by those weapons. This is no easy task. Europe has the technological capacity now to build nuclear warheads but would need to develop its own intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and other delivery systems. And it would have to do all of this quickly.

To take the necessary steps—bolstering Ukraine, building up European military production, and devising a nuclear deterrent separate from America’s—Europe will need to do one more thing: create a political structure to help guide this process. Both NATO and the EU would likely be hamstrung by pro-Putin fifth columnists in Hungary and Slovakia. Another problem for the EU is that it doesn’t include the United Kingdom, one of Europe’s major military powers.

Europe should create its own strong military alliance, one that draws on the existing assets of NATO members, with the exception of the U.S., Hungary, and Slovakia. Turkey and Canada, too, could be invited to join the new European version of NATO. This organization would need teeth, including an entirely new military-command structure and the ability to help European states rationalize their weapons production. It would also have to be able to ruthlessly purge pro-Putin member states from its ranks in the future. It would use European resources to prepare to fight wars and protect European freedoms.

What the past few years have shown is that European self-infantilization has probably hastened the continent’s decline relative to the rest of the world. While the U.S. has powered ahead in technology, Europe has lagged behind. A new, emboldened Europe, looking after itself and spending its own money to invest in high-tech defense industries, could also kick-start the continent’s revitalization.

Moreover, it could provide the world with hope that democracy will not be extinguished. The United States now is on some strange, dark journey. The future of freedom in America is uncertain when the president lavishly praises dictators and fulminates against legitimately elected leaders. Europe can show the world that democratic states can, if pushed, still rally to protect themselves.

French media reported that firefighters were sent to the site in the southern port city after the facade of the Russian consulate was struck by two explosive devices.