Category: Recommended

Since the defeat of Donald Trump, voter-suppression efforts have emerged in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country. But the campaign in Georgia has particular resonance, in part, because it is so blatantly egregious. Republicans argue that the bills are necessary in order to “secure” elections, but the November ballots were scrutinized exhaustively, and no significant instances of fraud were found. Because Raphael Warnock, the first Black U.S. senator ever elected from Georgia, won in a special election and has to run for a full term next year, control of the Senate could again depend on the state. Last Wednesday, Warnock delivered his first speech on the Senate floor, and tied the cause of voting rights to the fight over the filibuster. “It is a contradiction,” he noted, “to protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society.”

One morning in the spring of 2019, I entered a pastry shop in the Ueno train station, in Tokyo. The shop worked cafeteria-style. After taking a tray and tongs at the front, you browsed, plucking what you liked from heaps of baked goods. What first struck me was the selection, which seemed endless: there were croissants, turnovers, Danishes, pies, cakes, and open-faced sandwiches piled up everywhere, sometimes in dozens of varieties. But I was most surprised when I got to the register. At the urging of an attendant, I slid my items onto a glowing rectangle on the counter. A nearby screen displayed an image, shot from above, of my doughnuts and Danish. I watched as a set of jagged, neon-green squiggles appeared around each item, accompanied by its name in Japanese and a price. The system had apparently recognized my pastries by sight. It calculated what I owed, and I paid.

Developing an effective response to this crisis of extremism requires an understanding that the modern Internet is an inherently radicalizing mechanism, and that no amount of moderation can effectively halt the sweeping polarization of Gen Z. “The one single trend that is easily identifiable across these young political spaces is that, over time, no one moves back toward the center,” Citarella said. “They all move out toward the extremities.” In this light, he believes that scrubbing radical content from the Internet is throwing away the single best opportunity to reach vulnerable teen-agers. “You have to look for opportunities to move these people in one direction or another,” he said, “but instead we’re ceding the Internet as space to send them toward a different kind of politics.”

So what does today’s counter-hegemonic culture look like? It’s not particularly interested in being seen—at least not in person. It gets no thrill out of wearing leather and a mohawk and walking past main-street shops, which are empty now anyway. But it does demonstrate a hunger for freedom—freedom from the attention economy, from atomization, and the extractive logic of mainstream communication. We can imagine collectively held physical spaces reclaimed from empty retail or abandoned venues hosting esoteric local scenes, a proliferation of digital gangs in dark forests who hold secrets dear, and a new desire for scarcity in cultural objects—deeper and closer connections made between people even while rejecting the platform’s compulsion to “like and share.” In the internet era, true counterculture is difficult to see, and even harder to find—but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Multiple people told me that they began therapy and antidepressants for the first time in their lives while working for Cuomo. Ana Liss said that she “started pursuing mental-health services when I was there because I thought I was going crazy. My parents thought I was going nuts. I was angry and crying all the time, and I went on Lexapro.” At one point, she said, “I did call in to a suicide hotline because I felt like such a friggin’ nobody.”

“Get hold of yourselves,” a shaken Patrick Gallagher—then the director of the college-counseling office—wrote to the 12th-grade parents in a December email. You could tell what these people must have been up to by the new policies that Gallagher outlined. They included: not placing calls from blocked numbers or sending anonymous letters; not meeting with counselors to spread gossip about other students; not secretly recording counselors’ conversations.

Vance’s investigation, which appears to be focussed largely on business practices that Trump engaged in before taking office, may seem picayune in comparison with the outrageous offenses to democratic norms that Trump committed as President. But the New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose recent book “Strongmen” examines the characteristics of antidemocratic rulers, told me, “If you don’t prosecute Trump, it sends the message that all that he did was acceptable.” She pointed out that strongmen typically “inhabit a gray zone between illegal and legal for years”; corrupt acts of political power are just an extension of their shady business practices. “Trumpism isn’t just about him,” Ben-Ghiat went on. “It’s a whole way of being in the world. It’s about secrecy, domination, trickery, and fraud.” She said, of Vance’s probe, “It’s symbolic for the public, and very important to give the public a sense of accountability.”

She turned around and recognized with horror the man who had kidnapped her one year earlier. Ruth ran for her car, but before she could unlock the door the man came up from behind and grabbed her wrist, then shoved her head against the window. “Get in,” he ordered, saying he wanted to take her to a bridge near August Airport Road. He threw a brown paper shopping bag through the partially open rear window onto the back seat. The bag held clothesline rope, white tape, a red bandana, and a half empty bottle of wine. “We’ll go to a nice little place where it says ‘Keep Out,’” he said.

Beaudette had been shot through the head. The autopsy report, which was released nearly a year later, showed that a copper-jacketed lead bullet had entered just below his hairline and penetrated his brain. It was a homicide, but an utterly baffling one. The weapon’s make and model were unknown. There were no eyewitnesses, no suspects, and no motive. Rumors flew around Malibu. Had his vaccine work made him a target of “Big Pharma” or “the government”? Was the perpetrator a disgruntled former park worker? Someone associated with an illegal marijuana grow? None of it made sense; it felt both terrifyingly random and shockingly precise. Beaudette had been killed while he slept beside his children, and no one knew why.

When I asked Milley about what Trump had said, his reply was clear. “As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if there was an order for ten thousand National Guardsmen, I would like to believe I would know that,” he said. “I know that was never transmitted to me by anyone—the President, the Secretary of Defense, or anyone else—for the 6th of January.”