Last week in Munich, Vice President J. D. Vance scolded European dignitaries for their failure to address popular discontent. They had ignored what Vance called the most “urgent” issue of our time: the relentless flow of non-Europeans into Europe. Without naming it, Vance was defending a far-right political party called Alternative for Germany (AfD), best-known for its commitment to deporting as many immigrants as the country’s airports can process. Vance said he “happen[s] to agree” with voters worried about “out-of-control migration.” But he was aghast at the idea that governments would try to silence their citizens, whatever their views. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said. “You either uphold the principle of democracy or you do not.”

Germany’s establishment leaders have long accepted a different binary: Either you put up a “firewall” (Brandmauer) against far-right extremists, or you risk losing your democracy to literal Nazis. Accordingly, when the AfD won a plurality in last year’s state-level elections in Thuringia, the other parties cried “Nazi” and stitched together a coalition to keep the AfD out of the government. But this arrangement—even when you win, you lose—has infuriated AfD supporters, and at the party meetings I attended recently, they were in a storm-the-Bastille mood, eager to take down an old regime that they, like Vance, believe is stealing democracy from them in the guise of saving it.  

This may be the year the firewall collapses. The AfD is now polling at about 22 percent nationally and seems destined for a strong showing in Sunday’s federal parliamentary election. No other party will deign to form a coalition with it. But if the AfD performs well enough, it will be impossible to exclude altogether from decision making.

Earlier this year, I donned a flame-retardant suit and pole-vaulted over the Brandmauer into Thuringia. Like other AfD strongholds, Thuringia was part of the old East Germany, and like much of the East, it remains economically depressed. It has lost more than a fifth of its population since unification. Historically, it is a German cultural center, the home of Goethe and Schiller and Bach—Land of poets and thinkers, the banner at the state’s largest railway station announced—and, in 1929, it was the first part of Germany to vote for the Nazis.

On January 28, I attended an AfD rally in Ichstedt, a town of about 600. I would describe the place for you, but the event began at 7 p.m., which, on a moonless German winter night, in an empty countryside, meant that I may as well have traveled from the train station blindfolded. No businesses were open, and the roads were almost without streetlights. My taxi driver told me that since car factories and copper and potash mines had closed in the area, jobs were few. He asked me whether anyone had ever told me I looked like Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the most enthusiastic AfD supporter outside Germany. (I said I was not Musk and hoped to convince him by leaving a miserly tip.)

I was the last to arrive. The rally took place in a humble, rectangular community center, of the sort one might find in a small and dwindling American town. The men and women in the hall also matched the Middle American phenotypes familiar to me from my childhood in Minnesota—the heavyset men in late middle age; the younger men in caps and grimy hoodies; the women with frizzy hair, matching the men beer for beer. I bought a lager, and they invited me to sit at one of the long tables. My coaster was AfD-branded, with a play on a German adage: “Whoever dishonors the farmer, doesn’t deserve the beer.” I searched the room for anyone who looked likely to have non-German ancestry, and only when I caught my own reflection in the bottom of my glass did I see one.

[Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

A theme of the evening, rather than the need to vote for the AfD—the votes of all present were assured—was the need to proclaim one’s support proudly, so Germany knew that this movement could not be ignored or outlawed. “I became a member of the AfD in 2016,” Daniel Haseloff, a party candidate, told the crowd. “Then it was normal to vote for the AfD in secret—to come to the party meetings in the dark and say, I hope no one sees me.” Now, he said, it was time to “declare support at work, among family members, and say, Yes, I stand for the AfD; I stand for deportation, for Fortress Europe, for our great homeland, for our great culture, and for Björn Höcke.”

Höcke, the leader of the Thuringian branch, is a major figure in the AfD’s far-right wing, and one of the main reasons the party’s opponents suspect they’re dealing with real Nazis. In a 2017 speech, Höcke wondered aloud if Germany’s self-flagellation over the Holocaust might not have reached a point of negative returns. Germany, he said, “needed to make a 180-degree change in its commemoration policy.” Before entering politics, Höcke was a teacher of history, not of geometry, so the “180 degree” line left unclear whether he meant that Germany should stop agonizing over its fascist past, or come around to celebrating it. Members of the current government are already discussing banning the AfD, and the group’s supporters at the rally told me they view a strong showing in the election as the only means of survival, because the greater the following, the more awkward a ban will be to implement.

The AfD started in 2013 as an anti–European Union party, full of Germans cranky about having their hard-earned taxes go to bail out lazy Mediterranean countries. A decade on, at the Ichstedt meeting, AfD supporters were still furious that EU membership had added another encrustation of bureaucracy and taxation to an already massive state. But the issue that dominates the party’s platform is immigration, and the chant that animated the Ichstedt crowd most was “Abschieben, abschieben, abschieben”: “Deport, deport, deport!” Germany has seen net migration of more than 5 million people since 2014. More than 1 million of the new arrivals are Syrian and Afghan, and in 2023, the number of people seeking asylum jumped by 50 percent. The AfD has pledged “remigration”—deporting or encouraging the departure of as many of these newcomers as possible, as well as encouraging Germans who have left to come home.  

Party leaders say they wish to make Germany safe again; to end “climate madness” and attempts to rely on solar and wind energy, in their dark and not-always-windy country; and to keep welfare benefits out of the grabbing hands of foreigners and in the hands of Germans. They have also learned to be indignant, along with Vance, about the state of German free expression and democracy, and say that “direct democracy,” rather than democracy filtered through the establishment-party system, will remedy the AfD’s exclusion from power.

Supporters during the AfD general-election-campaign launch, in Halle,. Germany is holding a national election on Sunday. (Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg / Getty)​

Sometimes these concerns cross-pollinate with the old hostility toward the EU and its bureaucracy. A speaker at the rally compared the onerous paperwork that the German state demands from its citizens with the light burden it places on asylum seekers. Citizens are denied state services for checking the wrong box, he said, but asylum seekers can show up with no documents, and the state will provide someone to fill out the forms for them and cut them every break. If Germany had to be paperwork hell, then newcomers should be subjected to the same tortures.

[Read: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Ichstedt is so sedate that I had trouble imagining any crime there at all. The urban disorder of nearby cities, however, was vivid in the speakers’ and attendees’ minds. It seemed to have inspired equally vivid reverie of how migrants might be rounded up and sent home. Haseloff pledged that the airport in Thuringia’s main city of Erfurt, which has steadily lost passenger business over the past 20 years, would be revitalized through the construction of “deportation prisons” in the surrounding industrial zone. “Under an AfD government in Thuringia, several planes a day will take off to the home of immigrants. By doing so, we will set an example for the whole of Germany. We will make Thuringia an undesirable destination for social migrants.”

Once the Ichstedt rally ended, everyone got up to go home, and a few were already at the door when someone onstage suggested that they close with a few verses of the German national anthem. Everyone stood and sang, solemnly. Germany has had the same anthem since the Weimar Republic, and many decades ago, it was shorn of Nazi-redolent verses such as “Deutschland über alles.” But after two hours’ worth of talk of “the great German homeland” and Kultur, how could one not hear those ominous excised lines echoing distantly?

That echo was unfair to those present. Although the rally attendees definitely wanted to get rid of foreigners, they used no slurs; they did not vilify Islam; they did not use overtly racist language or tropes of extermination; and they seemed sincerely wounded by the accusations that they were fascists. Nevertheless, some rhetoric, when uttered in German, unavoidably sounds odious. The German language is a prison, and anyone who speaks it is trapped by associations that other languages have escaped. “God bless America and the American people” is boilerplate, but “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) is a Nazi slogan, and when I hear a German talking about “das Deutsche Volk” (“the German people”), I wonder if he is reaching for his Luger.

One has to ask: If I were running a far-right party plagued with accusations of sympathy for the Third Reich, would I adopt slogans that encouraged that impression, or that discouraged it? The AfD does the former. Its leader is Alice Weidel, and at rallies one often hears chants of “Alice für Deutschland”—which literally means “Alice for Germany” but sounds just like “Alles für Deutschland,” a Nazi-storm-trooper motto. Some of the party’s other leaders, such as Höcke, keep stumbling into statements that sound at best neutral about the legacy of Nazism. Höcke has warned that if Germans are not appeased, their native “Teutonic fervor” will erupt violently; he once wrote that his country will have to “lose” the part of its population that is “too weak or unwilling to resist the advancing Africanization, Orientalization and Islamization” of German society. (He later said that he meant only that those who denigrate Germany, call it a “shit” or “mongrel” country, or wish for it to be firebombed would have to go.) In the state Parliament in Erfurt last month, Mario Voigt, the leader of the current government in Thuringia, which has shut out the AfD, stared down Höcke and called his party a “Führer cult.” Höcke reacted to this speech by raising his hands in mock alarm.

On numerous occasions, the party has embraced vicious and personal campaign tactics. This year, the AfD leafleted immigrant-heavy communities in Karlsruhe with fake one-way economy-class tickets dated for election day. The passenger name was “illegal immigrant”; the destination: “safe country of origin.” “It’s nice at home too,” the tickets said, with assurances that “citizens will not be deported,” though the wording implied that all who could be legally deported should be. One after another, individuals welcomed by the party have been found to have nasty episodes in their past—harassment of Jews, minimizing statements about Hitler.

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

Complicating matters is the fact that Weidel, the actual Führer (or Führerin) of the AfD, is hardly Third Reich–compliant. She can speak in fiery tones about immigration: “On the first day in government, we will seal off the German borders,” she promised a crowd earlier this month, adding, “No one will be able to come in.” But she is also curious about the world outside Germany for reasons unrelated to conquering it; she speaks Chinese and lived in China for six years. And although she has Aryan skin and hair, she is married to a woman of Sri Lankan origin, with whom she is raising two sons. In her speeches, she stresses that Germany must comply fully with refugee law—but she adds that “asylum is temporary and ends when the reason for fleeing no longer applies.” Her opponents accuse her party of an unseemly interest in concepts like “the German people” (with all that phrase’s Nazi baggage). But Weidel herself seems most passionate when defending the elimination of carbon taxes and the return of the internal combustion engine.

Even the party’s detractors acknowledge that most AfD supporters are not personally racist, and that many have been drawn to the AfD because of their displeasure with botched or bizarre economic policies. Weidel is adept at drawing conversations toward policies that many Germans, whatever they think about immigration, can agree were foolish, and should have been recognized as such at the time. The establishment parties, after all, were in charge when Germany shifted away from nuclear power, toward wind energy and natural gas piped in from Russia—essentially volunteering itself as a hostage in case Russia ever became an enemy of Europe. (The AfD, like the Trump administration, is very friendly toward Russia, and wishes to reopen pipelines from there to diversify energy supply and lower prices.)

Weidel can dwell on these boneheaded policies in part because almost every German keen on mass deportation is already planning to vote for her, and those in the center are up for grabs. That said, the AfD knows that crime and immigration are winning issues. When I interviewed Stefan Möller, an AfD politician and a deputy to Höcke, he was filled with sensible commentary about the failed economic policies of previous governments. But his eyes really lit up when I turned to immigration, because the AfD has simply dominated all public discussion of its downsides. “Almost every day, we’re seeing reports of knife attacks, of children being hunted down in schools,” Möller told me. “We are expected to prevent things like the knife attack in Aschaffenburg, or the attack in Magdeburg, or the rampant crime. These are not acceptable. And the answer, for society and for our voters, is a consistent policy.”

By now it is impossible to ignore the crime rates of recent immigrants to Germany. In 2023, about 41 percent of crimes were thought to have been committed by foreigners. The anecdotes match the data: Several high-profile cases of bizarre public violence, such as the stabbing of random children, have involved foreigners. At a rally I attended in the town of Sonneberg, a politician named Oliver Kirchner referred to Germany as “the world’s mental hospital,” for its willingness to accept criminally insane foreigners.

Möller told me he lives on the outskirts of Erfurt, and is therefore spared having to deal daily with the crime-ridden area around the train station and main square. He told me a story about children from his suburb who went downtown for ice cream. “They made a mistake on the way home,” he said. “Instead of walking along the tramway, where it’s busy, they went on Tromsdorf Street.” There, he said, they were beset and mugged by a gang of teenage immigrants. Then he invited me to become prey myself. “Go there, and you will see what I mean,” he said. “That is where they find their victims.”

Möller must have underestimated how cheaply The Atlantic houses its reporters when on assignment, because I needed no invitation: I had already booked a hotel near the train station, at the end of Tromsdorf Street. Like almost all railway hubs in Germany nowadays, this one had Syrians and other immigrants standing idly at all hours, talking in Arabic and Afghan languages. Because I was jet-lagged, I would walk Tromsdorf Street late at night, always returning to my room unstabbed. The area seemed not so much crime-ridden as eerily vacant, my footsteps echoing in the shadows like Joseph Cotten’s in Vienna in The Third Man. The shops—many of them Middle Eastern markets—closed after dark. Once or twice I fell into step with a few young guys and wondered if I had hit the jackpot and found a gang. But I am a grown man, not a woman or a tween with an ice-cream cone, so even if they were evaluating me for a mugging, they probably thought better of it. Once, two of them got closer, and I heard them talking in Arabic about going into a pool hall.

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Standing idly is not a crime; neither is speaking a foreign language. By American urban standards, the street was extremely safe. But Möller’s anxiety stems from a predictable form of culture shock, when a very old country changes very fast. Anyone who thought ordinary Germans could cope with this shock, and even welcome it, was deluded. Those streets had been emptying out for some time as the region’s economy flagged and its population declined, and for years they had been even more silent than they are today. No one predicted that when the silence was broken, the voices to break it would be Syrian.

This surprise, unthinkable just a decade ago, has led to grotesque calumnies against vulnerable people, as well as policy proposals that are both clumsy and inhumane. But even Möller, who works directly with one of the AfD’s most incendiary politicians, would when pressed acknowledge that the ideal German future would not look like the distant, romanticized German past, of lederhosen and beer and Wagner.

I asked Möller when he thought Germany went wrong—what year he would go back to, in his Flux Capacitor–equipped Audi, to reboot his country and avert the problems he wanted to solve. He said that he disapproved of Germany’s immigration policy going back as far as he could remember—but 2000, roughly, when Germany’s borders disintegrated and its currency vanished, was when everything started falling apart. I told him that I had started coming to Germany around that time, and even then it had seemed that immigrants were integrating into German society. And it hadn’t seemed so bad to have foreigners there, doing jobs that Germans were losing interest in.

Möller mostly agreed, and noted that the AfD itself had changed its maximalist position on immigration—deport them all—to a more targeted agenda of removing welfare-claiming layabouts, unskilled laborers, and criminals. “Today even our own voters expect us to differentiate,” Möller told me, between violent criminals and “migrants who integrated very well, who are now German citizens, who do not cause any problems.” He said that “no AfD voter expects the AfD—not even in Thuringia—to deport doctors, engineers, or some mailman from Ghana.”

Bjӧrn Hӧcke, the leader of the Thuringian AfD branch, raises his hands at a campaign event in Thuringia. (Michael Reichel / picture-alliance / dpa / AP)

The true collapse happened in 2015, Möller believes, when Syrian and Afghan refugees began arriving in huge numbers. He said any cardiologists or engineers among the legal newcomers should be welcome to stay. But the suggestion that such migrants might come, he told me, is for now “awfully theoretical.” The 2015 wave of migration, he said, had flooded the country with “social migrants,” those who came to enjoy free money from a welfare state, including Syrians and Afghans poorly equipped to integrate into an economy no longer dependent on labor performed by illiterate peasants. “The people we need for [skilled] jobs are not coming,” he told me. “The Indian engineer is not coming, because the Indian engineer will go to a place where he earns more money, where he pays less taxes, where his children are taught in decent schools, and where it is safe to go into town in the evening. He won’t stay in Erfurt.”

This was a persistent theme among AfD supporters and politicians: that Germany had become a shithole country, not fit for an engineer from Delhi, and it needed to become worse for newcomers to be livable for anyone. Donald Trump’s first inaugural speech was about “American carnage,” and now the AfD described an equally awful Germany. It is a weird sensation to go to Germany—the center of what Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe,” where I once stayed near a corner bakery old enough to have served Martin Luther—and find that it feels like America’s political younger sibling.

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

But the longer history of the AfD is distinctively German, and the result of 50 years of politics perhaps too sedate for its own good. Germany, having been responsible for an eventful half century, decided to forswear eventfulness for the next half century. It was instead governed by a familiar species of cautious, credentialed bureaucrat: never younger than late middle age; usually addressed as Herr Doktor or Frau Doktor; always white, of course. Except for Angela Merkel, one would be forgiven for failing to match faces to names—and to some extent that interchangeability was a relief, considering the last time a German leader was immediately identifiable by face and mustache. The watchful conservatism was exemplified by the campaign slogan of Konrad Adenauer, leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU): “Keine Experimente!” The center-left party, the Social Democratic Party, was similarly conservative: no experiments, no funny business.

This status quo, bland as a Bavarian dumpling, faced challengers from the extreme left and right. The radical left produced violent factions—Baader Meinhof, Red Army—whose members ended up hunted and imprisoned. The radical right in Germany posed a more complicated problem. West Germany was plagued with accusations of having incompletely de-Nazified. Many politicians and business leaders had fought in the war, and a don’t-mention-the-war attitude prevailed among those of social grace—if the war was mentioned, the mention should sound disgusted, and anyone who spoke of it in any other way, including in neutral terms, faced shunning and worse. Neo-Nazi parties in Germany felt the full force of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the Verfassungsschutz, the German equivalent of the FBI), and were shut down.

Those on the far right who wriggled out of being banned confronted instead a disciplined, broad, organized political punishment: the “firewall” that Vance finds so objectionable. Their parties, up to now, have been treated as unhygienic, so that even if the far right and the center agree on something, the center refuses to court the far right’s vote and instead treats it as untouchable. The task of tending the firewall’s flame was judged so important that the parties of the center increased their cooperation with the Green Party and the old East German Left. On immigration, the CDU quietly adopted the view of the left, that Germany’s future would be as a land of immigrants and that anyone who suggested that this vision was undesirable was probably a racist. During Merkel’s long tenure as chancellor, from 2005 to 2021, her party—while nominally center-right—came to embrace certain elements of the far left. This included, fatefully, the welcoming of millions of undocumented immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries beset by war or poverty. Merkel’s line, in the face of this extraordinary situation, was “Wir schaffen das”: “We’ll manage it.”

AfD supporters gather for an election-campaign meeting in eastern Germany on August 14, 2024. (Michaela Stache / AFP / Getty)

Hans-Georg Maassen, who was Merkel’s head of domestic intelligence during this period and who was responsible for immigration law before that, has since been ejected from the CDU and started his own party, the Values Union, in part over his criticism of Merkel’s de facto open-borders policy. “For her, immigration policy was ideological,” he told me. “To let in millions of new people, without discussion: This is against the law.” The CDU, by taking this step, had become indistinguishable from the parties to its left, such as the Greens, who openly favored transforming Germany into an internationalist-left society. “People noticed,” Maassen told me. “If you vote for the Greens, you get a Green immigration policy. If you vote for the [Social Democratic Party], you get a Green immigration policy. And for the CDU, that gets you a Green immigration policy too.” That left an opening for the AfD. And as soon as Germans decided that immigration was the issue, the AfD was ready to win big for having consistently opposed it.

This history explains why the AfD directs its most bitter invective not at the immigrants, not at the leftists, but at the center-right. AfD leaders say the CDU caved to the left instead of turning back as many “social migrants” as the law allows. The process of telling refugees apart from non-refugees is extremely difficult, with dire consequences for those refugees wrongly flagged as non-refugees. Faced with that problem, Germany tried—I wrote about it for this magazine in 2018—but not, according to the AfD, hard enough.

In Ichstedt, Daniel Haseloff cautioned against being satisfied with anything but dismantling the CDU. “The CDU is our main opponent—not just here but in all of Germany,” he said. He did not even bother mentioning the left. “We will only be fully successful when the CDU in its current form no longer exists,” he told the crowd. “Trump has shown us how it’s done.” Only after the establishment Republicans were demolished, he said, was there “room for Trump, for Elon Musk.” (Some people looked my way.)

The man most likely to win this week’s election and become the new chancellor is Friedrich Merz, of the CDU. He has tried to court AfD voters and push through immigration legislation that the left viewed as too friendly to the AfD. This, Haseloff said, was a trick. The CDU just wants to peel off AfD votes—and when it does, it will do what governments have done before, and shut the party down. “Merz wants to see the party banned after the federal election,” Haseloff said. “That means he doesn’t see us as partners tomorrow; he sees us as opponents.”

It’s funny, then, that the biggest demonstrations in Germany that week were against the CDU—not by AfD supporters, but by their enemies on the left, who thought Merz had extinguished the firewall and given in to Nazis. I attended a protest outside CDU headquarters in Berlin the day after I left Thuringia, and felt as if I had traveled through time, from a small town decades ago, with its farmers and factory workers, to a gathering of modern university students in a cosmopolitan city. Demonstrators had spiky hair and sustained themselves with takeaway containers of kebabs, rather than beer and sausage. The youth of the protesters was salted and peppered with middle-aged and older people, the sorts of folks one sees at cultural events in the Bay Area or Vermont.

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

They told me that by treating AfD voters and politicians as potential friends, rather than as pariahs, the CDU had welcomed racists back into the Reichstag. “We stand together against all right-wing extremism, regardless of whether it comes from the AfD or from the CDU,” a young woman with a bullhorn told the crowd. She said the CDU had never been a friend of immigrants, and now, by reaching out to the AfD, it had shown how false its friendship had always been. No one should trust them again, and demonstrators—the people—were the only ones standing between Germany and a return to racism. She led a chant: “Wir sind die Brandmauer”: “We are the firewall.”

Most noteworthy, at this protest outside the CDU, was that none of these people were members of the center-right, objecting to their party’s change in policy. They were all members of the left fringe of a broad coalition, hectoring members of the coalition’s center-right into maintaining an immigrant-friendly policy that the left flank had insisted on, and that the rest of the coalition had accepted with reservations. At the AfD meeting I had attended the night before, the message was: Don’t trust the CDU, even when it does what you want. Tonight the message was, Don’t trust the CDU, even though it did what you wanted for almost 10 years.

To some extent, this bind is just what happens in coalition politics: Being in the center means getting pinched by parties from both sides, but also having the chance to work with those parties and steal their voters with both hands. For much of Germany’s postwar history, however, coalition politics have not played out in the manner of most parliamentary democracies, because the center and left parties have conspired to treat the far right as radioactive. Here again one would expect Germans, of all people, to understand the dynamics of walls: that if you build them up, the pressure mounts on one side, and when the wall crashes down, the equilibration can be dramatic. Even as sensible a rule as Don’t be nice to Nazis cannot repeal this dynamic of hydrostatic pressure. The far right can be suppressed only so long, but that just means a reckoning postponed rather than avoided.

By sequestering the AfD on the right, the CDU kept itself free from the contagion of the party’s most odious members. It also lost its only chance to lure the non-odious AfD members to its side, and to explain how a Germany with a generous—but not infinitely generous—policy toward beleaguered foreigners could remain prosperous, safe, and German. I found Stefan Möller much more reasonable when I could press him, and get him to exempt his Ghanaian postman from deportation. In this way he is like most people: pricklier when left alone, and more reasonable when reasoned with.

Maassen, the former Merkel colleague, had been a CDU candidate in Thuringia before he started his own party. He told me how his attempts to stand for election on the CDU line eventually became untenable, because voters came to think of the CDU as a party of scolds, and of thought-police in a new guise. He noted that people there knew, because they had lived through one-party rule in the East, what a stifled politics felt like. “In East Germany, if they were an opponent of the regime, they had to look to the left, to the right, if they were in a restaurant and talking politics, in case somebody had big ears. Nowadays they have the same feeling if they are members of the AfD.” But if you complained about this stiflement in East Germany, your punishment could be severe. Now the problems are lesser, although still real: losing your job, your freedom to associate with other far rightists. The deeper issue, he said, was the AfD members’ sense of betrayal by a system that they had been told was open. “The AfD supporters say, This is not democratic.”

There is a renewed attempt in the US, Europe and beyond to minimise and sanitise the horrors of Nazism. 

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Donald Trump has said, at different times, that he will pardon some, most, or even all of the January 6 insurrectionists. He’s also said at least once that he would do this on his first day in office, which is imminent. Given Trump’s past rhetoric about the incident (calling it a “day of love”) and the people who were jailed for acts they committed that day (“political prisoners,” “hostages”), his pardons can be understood only as part of his alarming—and alarmingly successful—attempt to rewrite the history of the day that nearly brought down our democracy. But what if the pardon were to come in a different spirit? That could move the country a long way toward healing.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we invite the author and scholar Linda Kinstler to talk about a centuries-old legal theory, embraced at calmer times in American history, of “oblivion.” When two sides have viciously different experiences of an event, how do you move forward? You do a version of forgetting, although it’s more like a memory game, Kinstler says, “a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What if President Joe Biden had pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists—that is, the 1,500 or so people charged with federal crimes related to the riot?

And yeah. I said Joe Biden, not President-Elect Donald Trump.

This is an idea I’ve heard floated around these past few weeks. And on its face, it sounds illogical. Like, why on earth would the outgoing Democratic president pardon people who damaged property or injured law enforcement officers or plotted to overthrow democracy?

Trump has said many times that he will pardon the J6ers. He said he’ll pardon some of them or most of them, or even consider pardoning all of them, at different times. He’s said he’ll pardon them on his very first day in office, which is just in a few days.

Donald Trump: People that were doing some bad things weren’t prosecuted, and people that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now. So we’ll be looking at the whole thing, but I’ll be making major pardons.

Rosin: Right. So why would Biden do that, again?

[Music]

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

The answer to that question requires you to zoom out to different countries and different periods of history to understand the long political traditions that pardons are a part of and what, at their very best, they could accomplish. And it matters who does the pardoning and their motive for doing it.

I myself did a lot of research on the January 6 prosecutions for a podcast series I hosted for The Atlantic called We Live Here Now. And as I was researching, I came across a couple of articles by author and journalist Linda Kinstler that helped me understand these cases and this charged political moment in a new way. Linda is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She writes about politics and collective memory, and she’s written for many publications, including The Atlantic.

She’s also working on a new book about the idea we’re talking about today, which is: oblivion.

[Music]

Rosin: Linda, welcome to the show.

Linda Kinstler: Thank you for having me.

Rosin: Absolutely. So the J6 prosecutions are, for the most part, unfolding at the federal courthouse in D.C., just a few blocks from where we are now. Linda, you attended some of these cases. I did also. What is your most vivid or lasting impression from these trials?

Kinstler: Oh, wow. I mean, I spent months—I mean, the better part of a year, actually—attending these trials in downtown D.C. And there are so many elements, as you have described, about the courthouse—namely, that it’s right across from the Capitol and overlooks the grounds upon which all of these crimes happened. And there were so many times I was walking through the halls of the courtroom. And some of them had little windows you can peer through, and almost on every single one—there was one day when you could see in the monitors in the courtroom, and you could see that they were all playing January 6 footage.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Kinstler: You know, different angles. You could hear the sounds of the footage that the prosecuting attorneys had assembled.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’re trying to make our way through all this.

Kinstler: And you really do get the sense there that in this building, this really pivotal event in history is being litigated and worked through in real time—kind of away from the public eye, even though these are open to anyone who wants to come see them.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: We need to hold the doors of the Capitol.

Rosin: A few of these cases have stuck with Linda, for different reasons. One was the hearing of a member of the Proud Boys: It was the juxtaposition of this violent offender and his young kids, who were playing around on the courthouse benches at his sentencing.

And the other was a woman, a nonviolent offender with no prior record.

Kinstler: She just kind of walked through the building and clearly made horrible, horrible choices that day, as many of them did who were there. And she repented before the judge. And the judge said, I’m choosing to view this as an aberration in your life, as a kind of lapse of judgment. And she cried.

[Crowd noise from January 6]

Man: [indistinguishable] We’ve lost the line. We’ve lost the line. [indistinguishable] Get back.

Rosin: And did you feel—how did you feel in that moment? Did you feel like, Oh, there’s some injustice being done? Or not quite that?

Kinstler: No. I mean, I think this is justice, right? This is actually the levers of justice working. It is absolutely that these people broke the law, and they are being brought to court because they violated public order in different ways, so it is kind of like our ur-definition of justice.

But it’s a different question—and I think this is the one that has kind of been left undealt with in public, is: Okay. This is one version of justice, but this is not a kind of public reckoning with what January 6 was. And the, kind of, how these individual offenders are being treated and punished for what they did is not the same thing as, How is the country going to deal with what January 6 threatened to, kind of, the fabric of democracy? Those are two separate questions, I think.

Rosin: Interesting. So what you’re saying is: There is a legal process unfolding. The courts can do what the courts can do. But what you’re saying is the courts can only do so much.

Kinstler: Correct.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Kinstler: Right. And there’s, in general, been an overreliance, I think, upon the legal process to deal with January 6 for, quote-unquote, “us”—for us, the public—in a way. And I don’t think there has been a broader conversation about what it means in the long haul.

Rosin: Okay. I want to take what you just said and compare it to the public conversation that is happening around these court cases—namely, from Trump, because we’re a few days from him taking office.

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.

[Recording of “Justice for All” by the J6 Prison Choir]

Rosin: And the way he puts it is that the J6ers were treated unfairly, persecuted by the justice system; they’re hostages. He’s said this in many different ways, with many different degrees of passion throughout the course of his campaign.

Trump: Well, thank you very much. And you see the spirit from the hostages—and that’s what they are, is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that.

Rosin: What do you think of that argument, and how does that fit into what you are saying?

Kinstler: Yeah. On the face of it, what they are doing is manipulating historical terminology, right, for their political ends.

Rosin: So you don’t think they were unfairly—your argument is not at all that they were unfairly persecuted.

Kinstler: No, no. I mean, I think that they broke the law, and they should be punished for what they did. I think there’s a genuine argument you could have about which offenders should be facing jail time, but I don’t think that’s the conversation we’re having right now.

But I do think what this question raises is the fact that Trump himself has not been held accountable for what he did on January 6, right? And there were many efforts to do that. And my view of this whole process is that, historically speaking, we’re doing it backwards. Historically, it was the top people in power who oversaw the crime, who would be the first to be held responsible for what they had done.

In this case, we have almost the exact opposite, right? We have the lower-level offenders—the people who are easier to find, the kind of foot soldiers of Trump’s movement—who are being the ones hauled into court. And, obviously, we have seen: The efforts to prosecute Trump himself have sequentially collapsed and now are almost certainly not going to happen.

Rosin: Do you have an example in your head of a time when, historically, it unfolded in the correct way? Like, a way that promotes a sense of fairness and justice?

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of subject that has fascinated me for many years—is, like: How have societies worked through moments in which you have a population of perpetrators or people who have violated the public order, who nevertheless must remain in the country or the city in some way? How have you dealt with that?

And so in my work, the prototypical example comes from ancient Athens after the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, where you had a population of oligarchs—30 of them—who overtook the city, stripped people of their rights and properties, killed people unjustly, oversaw all of these abuses, and then were deposed by the victorious democrats. After the fact, there was a kind of general amnesty for most of the supporters of the Thirty. But the Thirty Tyrants themselves were made to choose between standing trial and exile from the city.

So in that case, you have this prototype of the people who are responsible having to account for their crimes—verbally and in, you know, a kind of legal system—while the lower level of people were offered a different set of choices.

And, of course, the reason this is so fascinating is because this becomes the blueprint for centuries of leaders after that: if you look at 1660, after the English civil war; it kind of comes after World War II, where there’s this question of, What do we do with Nazi perpetrators? How wide and deep should the justice run? And we know that denazification failed in many ways. So I do think, in our country, we are going through something like this, in a sense.

Rosin: Can we talk about Nazi Germany for a minute? I mean, I realize we always have to be careful when we’re making historical comparisons to Nazi Germany. But you threw out this sentence, Denazification didn’t work. There were, though, a lot of higher Nazi officials who were held accountable. So how can we use what happened in Nazi Germany to inform what you’re saying we have to figure out right now?

Kinstler: Right. So yes, of course. Saying denazification didn’t work is a huge, sweeping claim, and we can argue about that a lot. But what you had there was the Nuremberg trials—of course, what we think of as Nuremberg—did hold the top brass accountable for what they had done. And then you had many, many smaller, sequential trials, both in West Germany and in the former Soviet Union.

But what I often think of—and I want to be careful about making the comparison today, of course—but I have been thinking about this line that the philosopher Judith Shklar said, which was that why denazification failed, in many ways, was because the prosecutors mistook a group of individual offenders for a social movement. So in other words, they thought that by continuing with all these trials that they would squash the kind of violent, virulent sentiment underlying Nazism itself.

Rosin: Which holds some intuitive appeal because you think, I’m holding people accountable. That’s what we’re supposed to do as a society: hold people accountable.

Kinstler: Totally. And it feels good. It appeals to all of our liberal sensibilities about how order and justice are supposed to work.

Rosin: And particularly—you say liberal, because I think right now, we do have this divide where Democrats, or maybe the left, are trusting in institutions, and the right is a lot less trusting in institutions. So Democrats are putting their faith, in this case, in this institution—the court—to go through the paces and do the right thing.

Kinstler: Exactly. We are in a very legalistic society, in that we like to talk about courts and legal cases as solving political problems. And I do think we repeatedly have seen that over the last however many years—about, you know, Oh, maybe the courts will save us from Trumpism writ large. And we have seen, of course, that the legal system is just not capacious enough to do that for many reasons.

Rosin: That’s a really interesting and concise way of looking at it. We have been relying on Jack Smith, the cases against Trump, these January 6 cases, of which there are, you know, 1,500. What’s the gap? What does the legal strategy leave out?

Kinstler: I mean, so much, in that it’s just a legal strategy, right? It doesn’t—and I think I can kind of see this in the almost allergy that people have when talk of pardons comes up, for example, right? There’s this notion that if you pardon someone, you’re letting them off the hook. But that’s not what a pardon does. A pardon confirms the crime.

And I guess I’m saying there is this paucity of a wider understanding of what happened that day because it has become this legalistic football, right? Of, like, Who was standing where? Who was part of the mob? What does it mean to be part of the mob? Who was commanding them? Etcetera, etcetera. You get lost in all these details and all these individual cases. And, of course, this is the role of historians, to say, This is what that event did that day, and this is its lasting impact.

But that’s what I’m saying—that’s the gap, right? The gap is: What is the narrative of this event? How do you protect it from manipulation, particularly when the person who’s about to be inaugurated has been one of its kind of manipulators in chief? And I do think there are answers.

Rosin: Okay. Let’s just ground ourselves in the moment we’re in. (Laughs.)

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Let’s say, on day one, Trump does what he has many times said he’s going to do: pardon the J6ers.

Trump: I’m going to be acting very quickly.

Kristen Welker: Within your first 100 days? First day?

Trump: First day.

Welker: First day?

Trump: Yeah. I’m looking first day.

Welker: And issue these pardons?

Trump: These people have been there—how long is it? Three or four years?

Rosin: Is it possible that it accomplishes any of the goals of putting this to rest? Like, any of the goals of reconciliation?

Kinstler: I mean, reconciliation, I think, is a different question. I think it’s not going to accomplish that. I think the only sense in which it “puts it to rest,” quote-unquote, is that it will, as I said, confirm their crimes, right? A pardon does not erase what people did.

It’s unfortunate, in my view, that Trump will be the one to pardon them, because I do think there was an opportunity for the Democrats to extend a kind of grace towards some of the January 6 offenders—and by no means all of them—if they had been the ones to pardon them.

Rosin: Okay. You said that casually, and there have been a few law professors who floated that idea. It is, on its face, a kind of shocking idea. Like, when you read a headline that says, Should Joe Biden pardon the J6ers? it’s actually kind of hard to get your head around. What do you think of that idea?

Kinstler: Well, I think, first of all, historically, pardons have been almost a routine thing that any new ruler or president has done upon taking office.

Interviewer: Are you glad that you pardoned those people that went to Canada, the draft evaders?

Jimmy Carter: Yes, I am.

Interviewer: Why?

Carter: Well, it was a festering sore and involved tens of thousands of young men.

Rosin: Like, I was reading about Jimmy Carter, who pardoned draft dodgers, and thinking that, like, we can look in retrospect and say they were peaceful, and the January 6ers were violent rioters. But it must have been hurtful to a lot of people whose children, or who they themselves, went to Vietnam, didn’t want to. And it was quite controversial. So to what end does a new president pardon people?

Kinstler: Well, I mean, on the face of it, it’s a gesture of goodwill. But it’s supposed to say, We are all subject to the law, and let’s start on the right foot, etcetera, etcetera.

Rosin: So it sets a national mood.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: It sets a mood of, I’m the president for all of you. We’re all in this together. And the value of this country is mercy. Mercy is a value.

Kinstler: Yes.

Carter: So after I made my inaugural speech, before I even left the site, I went just inside the door at the national Capitol, and I signed the pardon for those young men. And yes, I think it was the right thing to do. I thought that it was time to get it over with—I think the same attitude that President Ford had in giving Nixon a pardon.

Gerald Ford: We would needlessly be diverted from meeting those challenges if we, as a people, were to remain sharply divided over whether to indict, bring to trial, and punish a former president who is already condemned.

Rosin: I was looking for historical precedent and read about George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion, because that was a fairly violent rebellion—and it was hundreds of people—and he pardoned some of them. And I was wondering if that was analogous.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know about the analogy, but it is kind of an instance in which you have a violent community of offenders who nevertheless must remain in the country, right?

Ford: The power has been used sometimes as Alexander Hamilton saw its purposes: “In seasons of insurrection … when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if served [sic] to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.”

Kinstler: You can’t get rid of all of them. It wasn’t moral forgiveness. It was just a measure that allowed them to remain in the society in a way that wouldn’t cripple the society itself at this moment of extreme fragility.

[Music]

Rosin: So yes, there are presidential pardons. But if we can neither forgive nor forget something, we just may need something else to move forward: an act of oblivion.

That’s after the break.

[Music]

[Break]

Rosin: Linda, you have researched and written about what’s called “an act of oblivion.” Can you lay out the basics of what that is?

Kinstler: Yes. So historically speaking, we see that there were either acts of oblivion, laws of oblivion, or articles of oblivion that appeared in peace treaties or as legislative measures or as kind of kingly edicts that were issued in the aftermath of revolutions, wars, and uprisings. And what they were, essentially, is a kind of resetting of the legal order, where they said—and this is generally happening in the, quote-unquote, “Western world,” but we also see similar measures elsewhere.

But what they would say is: Everything that happened prior to this law—whatever it was, whether hostility, war, killing, theft, etcetera—none of that can be litigated or spoken of, quote, “in public,” which often meant: You can’t bring a lawsuit after this measure is passed.

Rosin: So it’s not actual forgetting. It’s like a public declaration that we shall all forget together.

Kinstler: Right. And in some ways, forgetting isn’t even the right word. And the interesting thing to me is that the word oblivion is the kind of Roman invention that was used to describe it, that Cicero used after the fact, and that was kind of like his spin on it, right? And everyone is telling tales about how to make a democracy work or how to make a state or a kingdom work, right? Not all of these are democracies.

But, yeah, forgetting is, in some ways—it’s not really the correct description of what’s going on. It’s more of a kind of collective agreement about how you’re going to move past something that is fundamentally irreconcilable.

Rosin: Got it. It’s almost a funny word. Like, I’m gonna blast you into oblivion. It’s a very powerful word. I don’t know if it was meant as kind of campy—probably not—by the Romans. (Laughs.) But there is something kind of, like, huge about it, you know?

Kinstler: Yeah. Oblivione sempiterna: “eternal oblivion,” to kind of wash away everything. It’s a totally beguiling word, and it kind of connotes erosion, in English, and erasure. But there’s also, in other languages: in Russian it’s вечное забвение, “eternal oblivion,” right? Eternal forgetting, in a way.

Rosin: So it’s almost so grand and big that it’s not connected to the mundane act of, Oh, I forgot my keys.

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Like, it’s almost so big that it’s on a grand, national scale. Maybe it’s something like that.

Kinstler: Yeah, I mean, like, you’re always rescuing things from oblivion or losing things to oblivion. I mean, it is in a way, right? Because you’re burying something in oblivion. It’s a physical location, right? It’s a noun, oblivion. And so to me, I think of it as, Okay, you’re burying it, but you’re not forgetting where it is, right?

Rosin: Right.

Kinstler: It’s always there.

Rosin: So what’s the difference between what you just described and whitewashing, revisionist history—sort of what we’ve seen happen with January 6 and Trump calling it a “day of love”?

Trump: But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions—it’s, like, hundreds of thousands—

Rosin: Like, sort of actively describing it as something it wasn’t. Can you compare those two modes?

Kinstler: Yeah. I would say they’re kind of fundamentally opposite, right? One is constructive, and one is malignant, right? Which is not to say that the two couldn’t be conflated. But for the sake of argument, the oblivions I have been looking at have been kind of, like, ideal types. Obviously, none of these, historically, ever work perfectly, right? It’s more about the idea that people wanted them to work, that there was this desire for reconciliation that would be operative.

And obviously, that’s not what you see at all in the language that Trump has been using and in the way he and his supporters have been framing January 6. Usually, I think, if we were to follow the framework of oblivion, what should have happened was that Biden—upon taking office and kind of restoring liberal order, we could say—would have passed an act of oblivion for the January 6ers that would have mandated that, kind of, Trump and his immediate circle would have to stand trial for their actions that day. And what we have been seeing with the lower-level offenders, that some of them would not have had to explicitly, as a kind of gesture of goodwill.

Rosin: A couple of challenges I can think of to using this approach with January 6: The first, surface one is just the sheer amount of documentation, YouTube videos. Like, what you’re describing—which is a clever act of forgetting or a memory game—I mean, if you’re a prosecutor working in the federal courthouse, this is a gift. You’ve seen these trials. Basically, what you’re doing at these trials is watching videos. Like, some Facebook video that somebody made, saying, Hey. I was at the Capitol. I did this—me. Nobody else did this.

Kinstler: Yeah.

Rosin: Literally, that’s what some of them say because they’re proud in that moment.

[Crowd noise, chanting from January 6]

Man: Whatever it takes. I’ll lay my life down if it takes. Absolutely.

Rosin: And then—I mean, there’s footage from everywhere.

Kinstler: Yeah.

[Crowd noise, overlapping screaming from January 6]

Rosin: So since you are talking about historical examples: What do you do with an era in which everything is über-documented?

Kinstler: Yeah. And it’s actually interesting. I was in a couple of trials where the judge, to the prosecutor, was saying, Listen. I’ve been to so many of these trials. You do not need to establish for me what happened on January 6 writ large. Like, I get it. Can you please fast forward?

But I guess what I’m talking about is not even about, Oh, you know, keep these videos from circulating, or, Don’t talk about what happened. It’s more about: Don’t expect the legal process to achieve something that cannot be achieved through law.

Rosin: Okay. That makes sense. You just have to accept the fact that the footage is everywhere. The footage is—in fact, maybe that makes what you’re saying more urgent. Because I do find, even with myself—like, if I hear a Capitol Police officer on the radio, if I watch that A24 movie that’s a documentary about January 6, it’s, like, right there all over again, and you just have to be, maybe, aware that that’s the age we live in.

Kinstler: Right.

Rosin: Second question I have is: I read your various articles you’ve written about oblivion. And it almost scared me, reading them, only because we live—this is the first era that I’ve lived through, as an adult, where I’ve watched the revising of history happen in real time. I don’t recall a president talking about facts the opposite of what I saw with my own eyes.

It’s a very bad feeling. So in that context, I feel nervous about even entering into a conversation about oblivion, memory games, or anything like that. And I wonder how you’ve squared that.

Kinstler: Oh my gosh, absolutely. This is what fascinates me, precisely because we are in this era of, kind of, historical revisionism, and we have been in for a long time. But the thing about acts of oblivion is that they actually, in my mind, consecrated what happened, right? They protected the historical record. They didn’t literally say, Oh this never happened. And in fact, what you see is that they’re often accompanied by records—like, historical accounts—of what happened, such that an act of oblivion was necessary, right? Like, Okay, actually, what happened here was a civil war or a tyranny or a revolution that totally wiped out the legal order, so we needed to do this extremely drastic thing if we were to reestablish democratic law.

The one that I often point to is: After the Revolutionary War, there were—because you did have the kind of legacy of British law, right—acts of oblivion came to the Americas from the European system. So there you did have, kind of, royalists who were subjected to acts of oblivion. It was individual states passing them over their royalist populations to allow them to remain, even though they had been defeated.

Rosin: So it was essentially an act of mercy saying, The royalists are going to live among us. They’re not going back. And what? How did it define—

Kinstler: It meant that they couldn’t be ostracized, essentially. They couldn’t be perpetually held accountable for what they had done, for everything that they had done against their neighbors, right? And often, it was a kind of very local, proximate question of, like, We’re not going to kick you out unless you want to be kicked out. That kind of thing.

Rosin: So you could imagine that kind of thing would be controversial at first. People would want vengeance. And so in the immediate, it would be difficult to swallow. But then in the long term, it would put things to rest. That’s the idea.

Kinstler: Yeah. And, I mean, there are a lot of failed oblivions. After the Civil War, a lot of the Southern states were, quote-unquote, “crying for an act of oblivion.” And it was a term that was circulating in the papers. And there’s this amazing quote from Frederick Douglass, who said, you know, I look in Congress, and I see the solid South enthroned, and the minute that that is not the case, we will join you in calling for an act of oblivion, but as long as they have not been held accountable, we cannot support this.

Rosin: Okay. So let’s move to the current moment. If you were King Linda—

Kinstler: (Laughs.)

Rosin: So is what you would want an act of oblivion around January 6?

Kinstler: No. No. Because I would never be so bold as to say that. But I do think it’s a useful political concept. I think that there was a missed opportunity during the Biden administration to do something concerted—that wasn’t just the Jack Smith investigation—about it. I think there could have been something really meaningful done.

Rosin: Okay. So you’re not going all the way to saying, you know, an act of oblivion. But you’ve started to eke at little things. Like, what do you mean by Biden could have? I mean, we’re in the very, very last days of the Biden administration. But if he had pardoned some of the low-level offenders, would that have been in the spirit of oblivion?

Kinstler: Yeah. I think that would have been a really potentially transformative thing to do, because it would not have done anything to jeopardize the record of what occurred that day or what it meant to participate in it.

But we are going to move beyond it, and I think we will see the narrative of January 6 begin to settle in some way, right? And as always happens, the conspiracies about it will become part of the narrative of how this is told, right—not in a kind of whitewashing way, but just in, like, it shows how volatile it is and how manipulable.

And I think there’s been this debate about how to memorialize that day, whether it’s through a physical memorial, a memorial to the Capitol officers who died, or to anyone who died that day. I think those are the questions that we haven’t kind of figured out, really.

Rosin: I see. So there is a potential that, even though we’re not figuring them out now, they’ll be figured out in a sideways way through questions down the road—like, questions about how we will ultimately remember that day—not necessarily how we’ll remember it in this charged political moment, but how we’ll remember it 10, 20 years from now.

Kinstler: Yeah. I mean, I was at the Capitol for the year anniversary of January 6 and watched all the ceremonies from the press gallery. And it just struck me how it was almost like a kind of nothing. You know, like how it was—

Rosin: What do you mean?

Kinstler: It was just so quiet, somber, of course. But there was no fan—you didn’t get the sense of the enormity of the event that was being consecrated, right? And it was almost like—and understandable because it was so close and so terrifying—there was this sense that we haven’t figured this out yet.

William Hungate: The Subcommittee on Criminal Justice of the House Committee on the Judiciary today welcomes the president of the United States, Gerald R. Ford.

Ford: As a people, we have a long record of forgiving even those who have been our country’s most destructive foes. Yet to forgive is not to forget the lessons of evil and whatever ways evil has operated against us.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.