The 2020 murder surge wasn't about Covid. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Matthew Yglesias

31 Oct 2023

12 - 15 minutes

Paul Krugman wrote a column last week on public perceptions of crime versus crime realities with some analogies to and implications for public perceptions of the economy.

I’m in agreement with probably 80 percent of what he writes. But I think the remaining 20 percent exemplifies why liberals have a hard time securing the public’s trust on this issue, which exacerbates the misperceptions that Krugman is nervous about. The stylized facts about crime he is working with are that murder (and non-fatal shootings, but murder is the best-measured offense) went up a lot in 2020 and up a bit more in 2021. We then had a decent murder drop in 2022 and another one in 2023 that is now on track to leave the 2023 murder rate lower than the 2020 rate. Dark Brandon reversed the Trump crime wave.

So what happened in 2020?

I think most people are aware that George Floyd was arrested and then killed by a police officer in Minneapolis while several of the officer’s colleagues stood around and watched. That touched off a massive and multi-dimensional social upheaval about race and racial equality that had a particular locus of concern around questions of policing and criminal justice. And then crime spiraled out of control.

Or as Krugman puts it:

    Unlike the somewhat mysterious decline in crime in previous decades, this crime wave wasn’t too hard to explain. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a lot of isolation and disruption, plus a lot of psychological stress, making it plausible that some Americans became disconnected from the social bonds that usually keep most of us law-abiding.

In other words, he not only thinks the 2020 crime wave had nothing to do with Floyd and the post-Floyd reaction, he thinks this is so obviously the case that he doesn’t even need to argue about it. The causes of the 2022-2023 murder decline, according to Krugman, are obvious — the virus went into remission. The only question is why don’t people realize murder is down.

My view is that there are, actually, a lot of valid and unanswered questions about why murders spiked in 2020, and almost all of those questions center around Floyd and the Floyd fallout. The reason there’s a fair amount of mystery is that it’s challenging to pin down exactly what about the Floyd fallout was responsible for the large increase. There were, in fact, a handful of cities that took steps to defund their police departments, but most places didn’t do this, and the crime increase was very widespread. Similarly, the handful of “progressive prosecutors” scattered around the country are not nearly numerous enough to explain the broad national trend. But I do think there’s evidence that it had something to do with Floyd and the post-Floyd fallout.

Failing to recognize that is bad across multiple dimensions. One is that it’s substantively important to try to understand exactly what went wrong and how we can do better. But the other is that progressive discomfort with acknowledging the facts here speaks to some of the broader epistemic issues in mainstream left of center politics.

Figuring out causality is always hard, because our evidence is almost always correlational and (as people on the internet are happy to tell you) correlation is not causation. So one obvious task when a hypothesis is based on a time-series correlation (crime went up during Covid disruptions) is to check for a cross-sectional correlation. After all, Covid was an international phenomenon. So if Covid disruptions caused murder to rise, we’d expect to see murder up everywhere.

But that’s not really what we see. The United States had a larger percentage increase in murders than any other developed country, and that’s from a higher base of murders.

To be clear, this relatively large percentage increase in Germany was from a base murder rate that was about half the murder rate of the safest American states — not half the murder rate of the United States, half the murder rate of Maine.

And in lots of large European countries, homicides actually fell in 2020.

If you look at the two-year span, the United States is an even bigger outlier. I think that supports the hypothesis that European countries were experiencing random variation, while the United States experienced a much more meaningful shift.

This is not to say that Covid was totally unrelated to the increase in crime in the United States. Alex MacGillis reported in 2021 from Philadelphia’s murder surge that the whole court system had stopped functioning:

    The court system stopped processing new and existing cases almost entirely. [District Attorney Larry] Krasner said in an interview with ProPublica that he questioned the extent of the shutdown and unsuccessfully urged the courts to hold more hearings remotely, even if actual trials had to wait for a resumption of in-person proceedings. “I was a little disappointed in the courts’ response,” he said. “We could have done better and we could have done more.”

That’s bad. But “let’s not process criminal cases” seems like a non-obvious response to Covid. So while this insight helps us understand why Philadelphia’s surge was especially severe, it doesn’t really explain the broader trend. I think the real impact of Covid is that it helped transform the post-Floyd protests into a much bigger deal than they otherwise might have been.

Although murder is falling nationally in 2023, it’s rising in two large cities.

One is DC, where I live, and the other is Memphis. Among crime policy people I talk to, the DC situation is considered really interesting and a little bit vexingly hard to explain, but the Memphis situation — though very sad — is easier to explain. In Memphis, police officers brutally beat Tyre Nichols after a traffic stop and foot chase and he died as a result of his injuries. This incident was in many ways one of the most obvious, least controversial police misconduct cases of all time. Both the victim and all of the officers involved were Black, so there wasn’t a huge outcry about individual-level racism. And we didn’t have a racist counter-mobilization with people arguing that Nichols got what he deserved or — as in the Floyd case — that his death was somehow unrelated to the misconduct. It was just an egregious example of misconduct and basically everyone agreed that’s what it was.

Nonetheless, not only did crime rise, experts were totally unsurprised that it rose.

And yet, even though this has become well-known and not that controversial among researchers (the controversial part is exactly why these high-profile misconduct cases lead to higher crime), my sense is that a lot of generally well-informed political observers still don’t know this.

One important piece of statistical evidence comes from a June 2020 study by Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer of pre-Floyd incidents. They find that in general, Department of Justice “pattern-or-practice” investigations of police departments for racial bias lead to better outcomes, including “a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime.” But there is an important exception: When such an investigation is preceded by what they term a viral misconduct incident, there is “a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime.” They attribute about 900 homicides (this is pre-Floyd) to the aftermath of such viral incidents.

Progressives probably recall that after Michael Brown’s death there was a spike in homicides in the St. Louis area, which led the St. Louis police chief to blame the “Ferguson Effect.” Richard Rosenfeld, a well-known criminologist who also happens to live in St. Louis, initially offered a skeptical take on that hypothesis and it became a bit of an ideological battle zone. But I think a lot of liberals who didn’t continue to follow the issue don’t realize that Rosenfeld changed his mind about this as more information accrued. There was also a pronounced rise in crime after the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore.

I think that piece of knowledge — that when a city has a viral police misconduct issue, crime rises in the aftermath — goes a long way toward explaining why we had a national surge of shootings in 2020 and 2021.

George Floyd’s death was not so different from some of these other instances, but it did involve a racial dynamic that drives the maximum amount of attention. And perhaps even more importantly, it happened in the context of Spring 2020 Covid shutdowns, which boosted rally turnout. Actual legal restrictions on Americans’ conduct were not that strict in the United States compared to those in many European and Asian countries. But progressive Americans in particular were under pretty intense social pressure to act as if the country was experiencing strict lockdown orders. One of the few real exceptions, one that was validated and valorized in progressive circles, was attending racial justice protests.

Of course, it is hard to say for sure. If you look at the time series trend of 2020 murders, you see two things that can be interpreted both ways:

    The increase in homicides did not occur in April 2020 when lockdowns began; murder was up a little relative to April 2019, but that’s because 2019 had an unusually peaceful April. If you compare to April 2018 or April 2017, there was nothing special happening. The quantitatively enormous spike was post-Floyd.

    May 2020 really was deadlier than a typical May. Not by the kind of huge margins that we saw later in the summer, but it was definitely an outlier, so the phrase “the increase in homicides started before Floyd’s death” is accurate. 

John Roman from the University of Chicago made what I think is the best effort to do what Krugman didn’t do and really make the case for why we should see this as a Covid effect rather than a Floyd effect. He argues that, especially in the summer, we saw “dense clusters of young men stuck at home with little to do carrying the burden of past trauma, knowing those with whom they hold deep grudges are close by and home too.” Roman acknowledges the Ferguson Effect research, but says this is different because those findings are always local and Covid was national.

Still, I do think that the evidence as a whole supports Floyd:

    Covid happened everywhere and the murder spike is not evident in foreign countries.

    The murder spike occurred nationally, and was more severe in big cities than in small towns or rural areas. Big cities like Dallas got hit hard even if they were in red states that had lax Covid non-pharmaceutical interventions.

    The timing of the murder surge is a little ambiguous, but it doesn’t line up with the start of stay-at-home orders, and it wasn’t alleviated by the relaxation of policy over time. Roman’s argument about summer would make more sense if the crime surge were limited to cold cities with strong seasonality (Chicago), but it happened in Phoenix and Atlanta, too. 

All you need to get to “the Ferguson effect, but national” is the belief that there was a lot more national media attention paid to police and policing in the wake of Floyd’s death than in the wake of other viral incidents. And that is clearly true.

I bring this all up not to argue with Krugman or to dunk on the left but to say that there is a pretty serious problem here that we, as a society, need to try to understand. We’re over 2,000 words at this point, so I’m not going to delve into the debate over exactly why high-profile misconduct cases lead to a surge in serious crime.

But I will note that one version of this argument, one that I associate with Heather MacDonald, essentially invokes the Ferguson Effect to suggest that nobody should ever complain about police misconduct.

If you don’t like that idea — and I don’t think that you should — then you do need to admit that something or other has gone wrong with the way we are collectively processing these events. Improving the overall quality of policing continues to be an important issue, and I think problems related to the Ferguson Effect are part of the reason that, realistically, better police forces are going to be more expensive not cheaper. We need to think harder about how to get more people, including people with different political beliefs and different preferences around urbanism, interested in careers in law enforcement. That ought to include efforts modeled on Teach for America to recruit a new cohort of talented idealists.

Reasonable people can disagree about these ideas, and I think the debate about the exact causal pathways behind the correlations we are talking about here remains unsettled.

My point for now is that the first step in solving a problem is to acknowledge that it exists. If we talk ourselves into the view that the crime surge and subsequent waning was only about Covid so we don’t need to worry about it anymore, the country is going to be caught flat-footed the next time something goes wrong in a way that’s high profile enough to attract national attention.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Political Future May Be Over. An interview with Ettingermentum

jacobin.com

21 - 27 minutes

Interview by

    Luke Savage 

On its face, Hamas’s October 7 brutal attack on Israel might have been expected to shore up support for longtime right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, polling suggests that Israelis overwhelmingly blame his government and would vote for the opposition if elections were held today.

Josh, aka Ettingermentum, is a graduate student and prolific political analyst whose Substack has quickly become among the most widely read of its kind. In the following interview, he joins Jacobin’s Luke Savage for a far-ranging discussion of his recent piece, “Life After Netanyahu,” the political origins of Israel’s current consensus, why this month’s violence represent an existential threat to Netanyahu’s entire political brand, and how Israel’s shifting political dynamics may impact the Palestinians. Their interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A Brief History of Electoral Politics

Luke Savage

The jumping-off point of your recent analysis was the formative role of Benjamin Netanyahu in establishing and solidifying Israel’s long-standing political consensus — a consensus you argue was shattered by Hamas’s attack earlier this month. Before we come to recent events, how would you characterize Netanyahu’s significance in his country’s political history? And what would you say are the fundamental tenets of the consensus he’s synonymous with?

Ettingermentum

Netanyahu has been active, and relevant, in Israeli politics for a long time. He’s been the prime minister of Israel almost uninterrupted since 2009–2010. And that wasn’t his first time as prime minister. He was first elected in 1995, and he had been the leader of the right-wing, mainstream conservative party, Likud, since 1993. When he came to power, Israel was a very competitive two-party system between the center-left, traditionally dominant Labor party, and Likud: composed before Netanyahu mostly of former paramilitary members like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.

Shamir is interesting. He was part of a group that admitted it was a terrorist group and was wanted by the British government before Israel was founded. Begin couldn’t visit some countries for a long period while he was an active Israeli politician.

So that was the state of the Likud party: they were very hard-line and violently opposed to not just the Arab existence in the country, but also the mindset of the more moderate labor Zionists who were traditionally dominant. Labor was backed by the Ashkenazi immigrant community and sort of tepidly supported by the Azi community, people who had lived in the Palestinian Territories and the Middle East before Israel was founded and across the Middle East.

Former prime minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir. (Yolene Haik / Wikimedia Commons)

Likud takes power in 1977, largely as a consequence of Israel’s initial failure in the Yom Kippur War, and then Netanyahu succeeds Shamir and becomes the leader of Likud in 1993. He’s a different kind of figure. He’s American-educated and lived in the United States for much of his life. He grew up in Philadelphia and worked at the Boston Consulting Group with Mitt Romney; he started his career as a foreign affairs guy who worked in the UN.

But he’s no less radical than his predecessors. He begins his career by virulently opposing the Oslo Accords. Infamously, he leads a number of marches where people call for Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Rabin to be killed — and he’s actually approached by Israeli intelligence services, who said he needed to turn down his rhetoric because he was causing a security risk.

He completely ignored them and Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing lunatic in 1995, which basically leads to an election. At this period, Israel had directly elected prime ministers, and Netanyahu, by 1 percent of the vote, beats Rabin’s successor and longtime rival, Labor’s Shimon Peres. So he becomes prime minister in the immediate aftermath of the Oslo Accords in 1995 and immediately begins stalling the peace process. This becomes what he’s known for.

He’s also one of the country’s leading economic liberals: Israel had a very regulated, more left-wing economy for much of its history, and he advocates privatization, deregulation, and neoliberalism. (It feels a little silly to talk about neoliberalism in a country where the top political issue is an ongoing occupation, but this has also been a major part of his career.) He flounders a bit when he’s prime minister, and in 1999, he loses to Ehud Barak, another Labor Party member (and former general).

Jumping ahead to 2009, the centrist Kadima party wins more seats, but Netanyahu and his coalition gets a majority. So he comes back, and you see the shift. After the Second Intifada [the Palestinian uprising that began in 2000], there’s this process of building the wall around the West Bank and Gaza — which was a major change in Israel’s security mindset. And then under Netanyahu, you see them really push to build the Iron Dome [Israel’s anti-missile system], with US money and supplies, and a total end of any official peace negotiations, which had still been ongoing, even during the [George W.] Bush administration.

President Bill Clinton with Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority in Oslo, Norway, November 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)

All of that ends with Netanyahu’s second term in office. He has an unstable government and has to hold a number of elections in 2013 and 2015. There are persistent issues between him and his right-wing allies. The regular far right of the party, which is very militaristic, is not a fan of the ultrareligious parties because the religious parties don’t serve in the military. But he wins in 2013, he wins in 2015, and he keeps on kicking the peace process down the road. [Barack] Obama tries to restart some framework talks, but he calls his bluff. He says: “You’re not willing to really exert any leverage on us,” and Obama’s like, “Yeah, you’re right.”

So they keep on building up security. Israel gets more and more advanced weaponry. They create the walls, which are supposed to guard them from a ground invasion. They create the Iron Dome. And that is seen as putting a lid on the issue: “You don’t have to worry about the Palestinians going in anymore and bombing buses because there’s the giant barrier. You don’t have to worry about the rockets anymore because you have the Iron Dome.”

So what’s the problem from the Israeli perspective, especially from Netanyahu’s perspective, of just letting the occupation continue? Letting Gaza starve to death and the West Bank be under direct military occupation? There are no downsides to this from Netanyahu’s perspective. Maybe the US could get angry about Israel not pushing a permanent solution. But then, in the middle of all this, you have [Donald] Trump elected and he has an insanely Zionist administration, which is on the same page as Netanyahu. They don’t care about a two-state solution even nominally, and they just say, “We’re going to give you unconditional aid. We’re going to back all your claims.”

Netanyahu has this very close, almost hand-in-hand partnership with Trump that kills off the idea of any long-term settlement. And, at this point, it’s been a decade of Netanyahu’s premiership, and the Arab countries start considering this as a solid situation too. That’s how you get the Abraham Accords, where you have countries like the [United Arab Emirates], Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan…

Luke Savage

Possibly Saudi Arabia, before recent events as well.

Ettingermentum

Yeah, that was going to be the major capstone of this process where they say, “You guys have figured out the Palestine issue. It’s over. The benefits that we could get from allying with you are greater than any possibility of Palestinian self-determination that could feasibly come.”

This is considered a done deal even when Joe Biden is elected president and he has the same diplomatic team as the Obama people — who were ostensibly pushing for a two-state solution. Hey, don’t even attempt to return to a two-state solution.

In the background of all of this, Netanyahu becomes incredibly controversial in Israel because he’s indicted on allegations of corruption and bribery in 2018. There’s an election in 2019 and by this point Netanyahu is so controversial and so hated that a lot of his traditional allies — like Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, who is his deputy prime minister for a number of years; Naftali Bennett, who was another coalition partner of his; and some of his former military staff like Benny Gantz, who starts his own party — they start turning against him.

At this point the Labor Party, and the Left in Israel, is a complete shell of itself. It’s considered to be a total lost cause. So the opposition to Netanyahu takes the form of these centrist/center-right parties that basically accept his consensus. They assume, too, that he has figured out the Palestinian issue and that there isn’t any purpose to peace negotiation.

The anti-Netanyahu opposition is led by figures like Benny Gantz, who is the former [Israel Defense Forces] chief of staff and announces his 2019 campaign with an ad talking about how he bombed the Palestinians to the Stone Age. He won’t even say that he supports a two-state solution — he says he supports a “two-entity solution.”

So the opposition sells out to capture right-wing and Netanyahu voters, and even still they cannot get a majority across several successive elections. There’s a brief proposed team-up between Benny Gantz and Netanyahu because of COVID, where Gantz would be an alternate prime minister after six months. Lo and behold, the deal falls apart before Netanyahu leaves office, which most people assume is because if he lost prime ministerial immunity, he’d be in prison.

They hold a fourth election in 2021, and the opposition is able to create this incredibly rickety coalition consisting of basically every single political element in the country besides Netanyahu. It’s led by Naftali Bennett, who is basically an American-Israeli settler, and it’s supported by military officials, centrist politicians, Arab Islamists, social democrats, and socialists.

Netanyahu is the leader of the opposition for this period, and the main purpose is just to keep him in — because, after he gets indicted, his goal is to reduce the power of the judiciary and make himself immune from prosecution as long as he’s prime minister so he doesn’t go to jail.

Luke Savage

This episode was quite interesting because it was the first time I’d seen places like the New York Times op-ed page openly express anxiety about something his government was doing.

Ettingermentum

It’s all high-level governance, upper-class concerns. But it becomes a polarizing issue, and this is a testament to how dominant he is.

That opposition coalition falls apart one year into its five-year mandate, and they hold another election in 2022, which was right before the US midterms last year. Netanyahu basically runs on a “Don’t Send Me to Jail” platform and wins his outright majority. He clears the threshold with room to spare, so he’s able to form what everybody calls — including his own coalition — the most right-wing government in Israeli history.

Former president Donald Trump at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, May 23, 2017. (Wikimedia Commons)

It includes these incredibly far-right forces — this is beyond the pale of what people even considered possible in the country, but they’re in power now. It is a watershed moment in the country, and Netanyahu is by this point at the height of his powers. He has a very solid majority, and his first priority is to pass judicial reform, which leads to tremendous outrage from the center of the country, including the military establishment. There are massive protests in the streets; some think that it is the biggest divide in Israeli society ever. There were reports of reservists saying they wouldn’t report to their bases if it were passed.

The ruling coalition starts polling below what they need to win, and the public is really turning away from Netanyahu. Then the Hamas attack happens, and the entire basis for the past thirteen years of Netanyahu’s rule, which transformed the country’s politics and foreign relations, is completely shattered in a single day. And that’s where we are now.

After the Attacks

Luke Savage

It’s generally axiomatic that wars, at least at their outset, benefit sitting governments. When we think of the climate of jingoism that prevailed after September 11, 2001 — to take an obvious example — there was a feverish rallying around not only the flag but around the figure of George W. Bush specifically.

You suggest that this hasn’t happened in Israel since the conflict began. What has the general response been of Israeli citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and what does the picture now look like for Netanyahu’s ruling right-wing coalition?

Ettingermentum

They hate him. I would compare this more to the response to Herbert Hoover and the onset of the Great Depression than I would to a figure overseeing a war.

Because this isn’t just some military problem that nobody saw coming. This was an issue they have known about for decades and has been an explicit political question for decades. This exact sort of incident was the thing this was all supposed to prevent: the worst massacre of Jews happening since the Holocaust on Israeli soil. That was the sole purpose of every single aspect of the county’s Palestinian policy. And the debate was: Is it best to do that through a negotiated settlement or is it best to suppress them through military force?

Netanyahu, throughout his entire career, has said that the negotiated settlements are naive, counterproductive, unrealistic, utopian, and has hurt Israel more than it helped them. This has been his single through-line throughout his entire life, and it turns out his entire worldview was wrong. He asked people to judge him on his capacity to bring security to the country — you can see the ads where he shows himself as a babysitter or as a lifeguard keeping everybody safe. He was the indispensable protector of the country. This sort of thing was never, ever supposed to happen.

So now people aren’t thinking, “Oh, we need to support him.” They’re thinking, “The guy who promised for decades that he could create security through his policies, the guy we’ve given a blank check to do whatever he wants for the past ten years, he’s proven to be wrong.” He’s just a corrupt asshole.

His political standing in the country has collapsed. Ninety-four percent of people in the country say the government bears responsibility [for the October 7 attacks]. A majority of people want him to resign once the war ends. They want his defense minister, who was previously very popular according to polls, to resign. His party has historically low polling numbers and would win, I think, only nineteen seats — which would be down from the mid-thirties from the past election and represent maybe less than 20 percent of the vote.

Benny Gantz — the center-right general who is currently part of the Unity government but has historically been a very anti-Netanyahu figure — is polling at near-unprecedented levels of support. He could very easily form a coalition with the numbers he’s seeing now.

Some people mock anybody who says this could all be the end of Netanyahu, because he’s come back from the dead so many times. But this is different. This is not just some scandal or some minor issue. It’s the whole point of his existence as a political figure being completely rebutted.

And he hasn’t done a good job responding to the crisis. He still hasn’t admitted responsibility. He won’t speak to anybody. He looks gaunt and terrified. He’s had to basically cling on to Biden to get any sense of legitimacy — which is part of why I think Biden visiting there was a massive favor that probably should have wrung more concessions.

But it’s the end of an era, and I think this is going to define his legacy. He can’t promise any alternative. He’s gotten everything that he wanted, and he can’t say what he’s doing is ever going to work.

And this is in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Historically, the downfall of Israeli politicians has often been getting bogged down in long and bloody conflicts. It brought down Begin after the Lebanon War, which was initially very popular. The intifada ended Ehud Barak’s career, because it was considered a security disaster and it led to Netanyahu’s rise in the first instance.

Whenever there’s an election, whether it’s next year or in five years, he doesn’t have a purpose anymore. And I don’t see how you can survive politically without a purpose.

Luke Savage

You seem to think, though, that even if there are considerable shifts in Israel’s political dynamics underway, the shift in consensus is unlikely to bring about positive change for Palestinians.

Ettingermentum

It’s tricky, because this is all in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, and there are still elements of the rally-around-the-flag mindset that might be at play. Even if there isn’t a rallying around Netanyahu, there’s general support for the security state and the repression and the military response. I saw a poll that said 65 percent of Israelis support a ground invasion.

I think that the immediate response to the attack is probably preventing people from looking at the situation through any larger lens and asking whether they made a mistake by abandoning the peace process or mistakenly assuming that this could all be solved by high-tech gadgetry. I don’t think that’s really the kind of discussion you can have in this moment.

Later on, especially if the operation is a disaster and proves that the status quo is itself a disaster, there might be an opportunity — if people are willing to listen — to re-engage with the idea that there needs to be a more permanent solution to this, which would be an ironic consequence of a major attack of this kind. You might think it would make that kind of thing impossible. But, from the perspective of an Israeli who rationally cares about their own security, what’s the other answer that you have?

Luke Savage

I want to close by asking about the United States. Beginning last week, there’s been brewing rebellion among congressional staffers, over four hundred of whom signed a letter calling for a cease-fire — and a mutiny of some kind over Biden’s policy among officials at the State Department, with one high-profile resignation. What, at this point, can be said about US public opinion in relation to the conflict?

Ettingermentum

There was one recent poll that had some pretty unexpected numbers and a narrow majority of people opposing arms transfers and armed shipments to Israel, while a majority supported humanitarian aid to both sides of the conflict. This is not what a lot of people expected, given past polling and that the general political environment in America has always been staunchly pro-Israel.

There’s sort of a desire from Biden right now to return to a unipolar moment and the post-9/11 feeling, where everybody’s united around the government and there’s a consensus around which the sitting president can boost their political standing. Biden has tried to do that with Ukraine, and he’s now trying to do it with Israel.

But it’s obvious here that you can’t return to that moment because we already lived through the consequences of it. Everybody alive remembers the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, which are universally considered to be mistakes.

And, when people come to that conclusion, it shapes how they understand conflicts everywhere else. They’re not just going to turn back to how they were in 2001 and immediately say, “America’s this beacon of global leadership. We have to be involved everywhere to save the world.” They’re going to see these conflicts, remember what happened and how it turned out twenty years ago, and ask why we should expect this to be any different.

This quest for people in Washington to use every single overseas flare-up as an opportunity to reestablish a kind of jingoistic, interventionist perspective, that is clearly from another time. And it is part of a pattern that you can see in Biden himself — who is very old and has staff who have been around since the [Bill] Clinton administration — not really adapting to the current moment.

So I don’t have very lofty expectations that they’ll be able to meet the changing opinions on this. Someone later might, though it will be tricky given the mess he’s set up for us. But that’s the point of political engagement, I guess. There’s nowhere to go but up.

Moms for Liberty: Birchers in Heels. By Robert Tracinski

Read time: 15 minutes

ROBERT TRACINSKI

OCT 30, 2023

Moms for Liberty: Birchers in Heels

This paranoid outfit is pushing rightwing censorship in schools in the name of liberty

Moms for Liberty logo/The UnPopulist illustration

Moms for Liberty, an activist organization founded and led by conservative women, has emerged in the last two years to oppose, in the name of “parental rights,” what it sees as leftist indoctrination in public schools.

There are worthwhile arguments to be had about contemporary gender ideology and about how to respond to the history and legacy of race in America—about how to address these issues in public institutions like schools and where to draw the line between necessary instruction and ideological indoctrination. In a nation with 50 million children in thousands of school districts, there will be no shortage of controversial examples to be debated.

But a thoughtful debate is not what Moms for Liberty has offered as its defining contribution. Instead, it has become the driving force behind a sweeping wave of book bans and politicized restrictions on teaching.

It is a curious outcome for a group with such a libertarian-sounding name. How did Moms for Liberty come to be one of the nation’s chief censors?

Florida Woman

The origin of Moms for Liberty was not in the culture wars over race and gender but the Covid culture war. It began in Florida as a rebellion against rules requiring masks for public school students. When Tina Descovich, the group’s co-founder, lost her bid for reelection to the Brevard County School Board in 2020 by 10 points, she acknowledged that her opposition to mask requirements “played a role” in her defeat. That fall, Descovich joined Tiffany Justice, a former school board member from a neighboring county, to start an activist organization with the purpose of opposing pandemic measures in schools. In early 2021, they formed Moms for Liberty.

It was the pandemic that provided Moms for Liberty with the opportunity to mobilize and radicalize conservative parents. Descovich explained, “If you miss this opportunity, when [parents] are really engaged … it’s going to be hard to engage them in the future.” When the debate shifted from masks to vaccines, Moms for Liberty appealed to anti-vaccine sentiment on the right. For example, a new chapter in Orange County, California was launched toward the end of the movement’s first year and cited the state’s vaccine mandate as a reason for the chapter’s creation. Anti-vax crusader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was scheduled to be a star speaker at the Moms for Liberty national summit earlier this year before backing out at the last minute.

That’s the supposed meaning of “for liberty” in Moms for Liberty: the freedom to ignore mask and vaccine mandates. The group emerged from a combination of dogmatic rejection of any anti-pandemic measures and legitimate frustration with school closures, which in some areas dragged on for a year—though Florida’s own schools re-opened quite early, in late August of 2020.

The anti-mask cause summoned a great deal of violent fury, but it was perhaps too small and temporary for a national movement that had ambitions to persist beyond the pandemic. Yet this issue established the kind of energy that has characterized Moms for Liberty ever since: an upwelling of anger, a distrust of experts, a volcanic hatred of “the establishment,” and a deep suspicion that the powers that be are out to destroy our way of life.

From masks, Moms for Liberty moved to other causes that fit with this outlook, first to the notion that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) is being injected into school curricula, and from there to policing classroom instruction on gender and sexuality. Then came a wave of state-level anti-CRT laws. Tennessee enacted rules on “Prohibited Concepts in Instruction,” a name that seems plucked straight out of a dystopian novel. Like Florida’s vaguely worded “Don’t Say Gay” bill, these were designed to empower armies of citizen enforcers to file complaints about “prohibited concepts,” a role Moms for Liberty gladly adopted. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller had warned that under the Florida bill, “silence” on homosexuality and gender “will be enforced by Florida Man.” Instead, it has been enforced by Florida Woman.

Moms for Liberty became the driving force behind a wave of challenges to school curricula and particularly to school libraries stocking books with any kind of content relating to sex, gender, and race. Some schools in Florida opened the year with empty shelves because school librarians were still sifting through them for unapproved books, and they face significant penalties if they run afoul of parent complaints.

The explanation offered by Moms for Liberty is that this was a grassroots upswell that grew out of parents watching Zoom classes over their kids’ shoulders during the pandemic. Co-founder Tiffany Justice claims, “When the whole world went virtual, it opened a window for parents into what was being taught.” But keep in mind that Florida schools re-opened in late summer of 2020. Zoom classes only happened for a few months toward the end of the prior school year, mainly in April and May. During the scrambling transition to online schooling, how many lessons actually promoted Critical Race Theory or 58 genders?

Instead, Moms for Liberty’s agenda has always been driven by the issues that dominate the wider conservative culture wars. As Descovich put it during an appearance on The Rush Limbaugh Show, the organization is based on the premise that “conservatives have neglected education for decades.” Moms for Liberty is less a spontaneous wave of popular discontent than a new wave of activism aimed at bending school curricula to promote a conservative agenda.

There have been previous waves of conservative panic about education. In the 1970s, long before “Don’t Say Gay,” Florida politics was roiled by Anita Bryant’s attempt to ban gay and lesbian teachers based on the fear that they would use schools for homosexual “recruitment.” In my youth, the big conservative cause related to education was school prayer and opposition to teaching evolution. That old wave hasn’t even fully receded. Chris Rufo, who has risen to the forefront of conservative activism in recent years by inveighing against a catchall he calls “Critical Race Theory,” did much of his early work at the Discovery Institute, a think tank formed to promote the teaching of creationism. Moms for Liberty is merely the latest wave in this broader battle to bring public schools into closer alignment with the doctrines of the religious right.

Let’s see what that looks like in practice.

Norman Rockwell, Subversive

Moms for Liberty originated in Florida, but a revealing microcosm of its national effort can be seen in a running battle over the schools in Williamson County, Tennessee, which has emerged as a particularly gaudy flashpoint in the culture war.

This was underscored in the past few weeks when Gabrielle Hanson, a populist conservative candidate for mayor of the county’s biggest town, Franklin, Tennessee, showed up at a candidates’ forum escorted by members of the Tennessee Active Club. The Club is notorious for its antisemitism, and local investigative reporter Phil Williams tracked down one of the leaders of the organization, who described himself as “an actual literal Nazi.” After refusing to disavow the group, Hanson was defeated by a huge margin in Franklin’s early election on Tuesday.

But this is just one skirmish in an ongoing conflict.

In some ways, this may seem like an odd place to expect such an intense battle over education because, like Florida, Tennessee is already a relatively conservative state, and Williamson County even more so. It is a prosperous and fast-growing semi-suburban area south of Nashville that voted almost 2 to 1 for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in 2020. In short, it is not the sort of place you would expect to find outrageous examples of propagandistic education like the ones that have been reported elsewhere—and, so far as I can tell, you won’t find them. Yet perhaps the battle is being fought here precisely because it is so conservative. In a more left-leaning county, a small minority of Moms for Liberty types couldn’t hope to get much traction. It is only because they have a realistic prospect of commanding a majority that they’ve managed to turn the politics of the Williamson County schools upside down.

They have changed the politics in a very literal sense. I talked recently with Williamson County School Board member Eric Welch, who has become a target of Moms for Liberty despite being a conservative, a Christian, a military veteran, and—as he tells me—a guy “with a dog named Reagan.” Welch, who stressed that he speaks for himself and not the board, explained that the county had never had partisan school board elections before, because education wasn’t considered a partisan issue. Not anymore. Being a member of the school board is usually a thankless job that involves a lot of tedious discussions about administrative policy and budgets. Now it has become a political hot button that attracts partisan activists.

The big Moms for Liberty demand was a letter from Williamson County chapter chair Robin Steenman demanding the removal of a list of books from the public school curriculum and changes in the manual given to teachers to accompany these readings. What are these objectionable books? They include Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story, by Ruby Bridges—the story of the first black girl to attend a newly integrated school in Louisiana. Among the complaints about the book is that it shows Norman Rockwell’s famous depiction of Bridges in The Problem We All Live With.

That’s right: Norman Rockwell is too subversive for Moms for Liberty.

The letter demands an end to the “negative psychological effect” and “emotional trauma” that might come from learning too much about the history of segregation. There is a certain irony that conservatives have spent years complaining about overly sensitive “snowflakes” who demand to be shielded from opposing views and need “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”—yet here are conservatives demanding a safe space for children from basic facts about the struggle for civil rights.

Moms for Liberty national leader Descovich has denied that Steenman made any such demands, but you can see the letter for yourself.

(I repeatedly solicited comment from Steenman and from the national Moms for Liberty group. The response was repeated demurrals, in one case a scheduled then hastily canceled interview, and then—silence. Moms for Liberty has grown accustomed to soft and credulous coverage from right-leaning outlets. An article in Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, for example, acknowledges that there is a “lunatic fringe” associated with the group but largely dismisses this as being unfairly used by the left-leaning press to smear the organization. So it is perhaps natural that Moms for Liberty would prefer to talk only when assured of this kind of sympathetic treatment.)

The upshot of the Moms for Liberty approach is to impose a heckler’s veto that empowers the most paranoid and hypersensitive. Another set of complaints evaluated by Williamson County includes a claim that the choice of a group activity for kindergartners was intended “probably to foster a communist mentality of the group being more important than the self.” The group slammed a video about seahorses, where the male actually does carry the eggs until they hatch, as an attempt to “normalize” the notion “that males can get pregnant” and “suggest that gender is fluid.” A picture book about African-American tap-dancing pioneer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, was denounced as “CRT” for referring to the realities of racial prejudice and segregation in the early 20th century. A book on Galileo, the 17th century Florentine who was tortured for promoting his scientific discoveries, was denounced because it makes the Catholic Church look bad and therefore “makes kids question tradition.” The levels of irony are very thick here.

None of the Questions and All of the Answers

What is perhaps most interesting about the report on these complaints is that it notes that a “document presented by multiple complainants was directly related to the Teacher Editions used in the state of Florida not the state of Tennessee.” This strongly suggests that complaints are being generated by the national Moms for Liberty organization, with its origins in Florida, and merely copied and pasted elsewhere. It used to be said that “all politics is local,” but these days it seems as if all politics is national, even the most local part of local politics, the school board. People get angry because they see Chris Rufo say something on Fox News, or because they see a report online about something outrageous that was done or said halfway across the country, or because of talking points handed down from a national activist group.

Yet rather than producing more parental engagement with the schools, this national culture-war approach serves as a substitute for such engagement. Welch mentioned that the complaints he heard in Williamson County often came from people who don’t have kids in the public schools, or who had never been engaged in their schools or districts before. They are the kind of people, as he put it, who “ask none of the questions but have all of the answers.”

That is particularly striking when it comes to curriculum. Just prior to these recent controversies, the state of Tennessee mandated an overhaul of its state education standards, eliminating the Obama administration’s Common Core standards which were “embroiled in political controversy over charges of federal overreach.” In response, the Williamson County school board spent years selecting a new curriculum package that would be consistent with the new standards. Then Moms for Liberty arrived, filing frivolous complaints after having participated in none of the difficult legwork of choosing the curriculum in the first place.

Yet they want their views to take precedence. Notice in this respect that most books that are even remotely controversial allow for a parental opt-out, in which a parent can choose to have a child excused from reading the book. But this is not good enough. The standards of the most sensitive must be applied universally.

“Parental rights,” as it is now being used, means some parents have the right to dictate what everybody else’s kids can learn.

The Age of Vitriol

The problem is not just the content of the Moms for Liberty complaints, but the style in which they are offered, which has turned school board meetings that used to be run on the motto “be nice” into an arena of constant ideological warfare. The word I have heard used most frequently in association with Moms for Liberty is “vitriol.”

The Moms for Liberty approach to activism is to dial every issue up to 11. Any reference to sexuality, even indirect, is labeled “pornography.” Following the lead of Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, they have taken to calling anyone who disagrees with them a “groomer”—a term borrowed from old tropes that insisted all homosexuals are pedophiles who deliberately manipulate children in order to abuse them.

But describing your enemies as pedophiles is a bald attempt to declare open season on them. Such predators are regarded as the lowest of the low, the one group against whom violence might be justified. This is the rhetoric of outright incitement.

It has certainly led to a spate of reports of harassment of school board officials. Activists call their opponents “pedophile sympathizers” and falsely accuse them of abusing their children or possessing child pornography. This is already having the effect of driving normal people out of school boards and teaching positions. Williamson County’s Eric Welch notes that his school district needs to expand, but it depends on being able to recruit teachers from across the state and across the country, and the county’s current political climate is “100% a recruitment problem.” It also keeps smart, well-qualified people from volunteering to run for the school board or get involved in the local schools, for fear of facing the same kind of targeted harassment.

In a few cases around the country, Moms for Liberty members and local leaders have made not-so-subtle threats of violence, with one declaring about local librarians that if she had “any mental [health] issues, they would all be plowed down with a freaking gun by now.” Some have connections with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits its own fantasy about rings of secret pedophiles and a violent reckoning in which they will be executed, while some are connected to the Proud Boys militia that helped organize the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

This movement has not, to my knowledge, ever resulted in actual violence. But they certainly seem like they’re trying to talk themselves into it.

The Paranoid Style in Education Politics

One particular example crystallizes both the content and style of Moms for Liberty activism. As an approved alternative to the materials on slavery and segregation that they want to restrict, Moms for Liberty recommends W. Cleon Skousen’s The Making of America. Skousen is an obscure figure, but he has a long history as a fringe character on the right, and he enjoyed a new vogue during the Tea Party years when his work was recommended by talk radio host Glenn Beck.

Skousen’s historical account of slavery and reconstruction is a sanitized and glamorized view of the Old South, in which he repeats antebellum myths about how slaves were well-treated and actually better off than free workers in the North. Consider this doozy: “Some Negroes, having been freed and sent to any Northern state which would receive them, became so miserable as to solicit a return to slavery.” Meanwhile, Skousen blamed “the interference of Northern abolitionists” for somehow “perpetuat[ing] slavery.”

These are outrageous lies, but they make more sense when you put them in the context of Skousen’s other crackpot views, including the idea that communism was actually a capitalist conspiracy foisted on the world by international bankers. More to the point, Skousen was a leading figure in the John Birch Society, which promoted conspiracy theories about communist plots for world domination, including the idea that these plots were supported from within the U.S. government, going all the way up to the top.

The Birchers were the chief example of what Richard Hofstadter famously called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and it followed a pattern we can recognize with Moms for Liberty today: a belief that there is an insidious plot to destroy American society; a catastrophist view in which the threat of tyranny and destruction is immediate and everywhere, even in the midst of the heartland; a view that the whole system is working to promote these nefarious goals; and most of all, the idea that even apparent friends, allies, and fellow conservatives are all in on it.

When I talked to him, Eric Welch seemed bewildered by the absurdity of seeing himself branded as “the left’s secret weapon.” But he’s in good company. The Birchers’ big enemy, the guy they considered a secret communist, was President Dwight Eisenhower.

In short, the Moms for Liberty look a lot like Birchers in heels—the paranoid style in education politics.

This does not mean there is no merit to some complaints about public education. Parts of the left have adopted a rigid dogma on gender, and there are a few children’s books that aim to proselytize it. There are serious complaints from mainstream historians about the promotion of historical errors that can distort our understanding of the role of race in American history. If there is a case to be made that we should oppose these trends, the reckless paranoia of Moms for Liberty will only work to undermine that case—just as the Bircher’s irrational zealotry ultimately discredited them.

In the meantime, the current poisonous politics of education imposes a cost in diminished educational opportunities from books that stay off the shelves, but also in the impaired function of the real engines of parental engagement in education: school boards and parent-teacher associations.

When I asked Welch what the Williamson County School Board would be focusing on in normal times, he cited the county’s growth, its need for new school buildings, and the difficult question of how to finance it while paying down debt. Or, he recalls, they used to spend months going over test scores to see which groups of students are doing well and which need more resources and attention.

Instead, he says, they spent most of a recent meeting talking about what some board members thought was the really important issue: a teacher who had a small pride flag on her desk.

© The UnPopulist 2023

A year later, Musk’s X is tilting right. And sinking. By Will Oremus, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Sarah Ellison, Jeremy B. Merrill

www.washingtonpost.com

12 - 15 minutes

One year after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, aiming to rid it of a “woke mind virus” that he believed was suppressing free speech, the site’s business outlook appears dire.

The number of people actively tweeting has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to previously unreported data obtained by The Washington Post, and the company — which the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX has renamed X — is hemorrhaging advertisers and revenue, interviews show.

But in at least one respect, Musk has delivered on his original promise: Twitter has become far less “woke.”

Through dramatic product changes, sudden policy shifts and his own outsize presence on the platform, Musk has rapidly re-engineered who has a voice on a service that used to be the hub of real-time news and global debate. A site that fueled social movements such as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo has veered noticeably rightward under Musk, especially in the United States, say organizers from across the political spectrum.

A Post analysis of dozens of conservative and right-wing influencers and media figures found that many saw their follower counts rise on the day Musk became owner and continue rising at a rate higher than under Twitter’s previous ownership. None of the dozens of popular liberal and left-wing accounts examined by The Post show the same pattern.

Musk has led Twitter in an explicitly political direction. He publicly endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president and hosted the launch of his campaign for the Republican nomination on Twitter Spaces. He reinstated the account of Donald Trump, who had been permanently banned for his tweets about the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

When Musk hired a new CEO, one of her first moves was to court former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to launch his new program on X, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive talks. Carlson and X signed a revenue-sharing deal earlier this month, The Post has learned.

Musk has furthered the company’s rightward turn by displacing the mainstream media from a position of authority on the site: Both X’s software and iconic “blue check” verification system now elevate the tweets of paying subscribers — many of them conservative influencers. People who have worked with Musk and his CEO, Linda Yaccarino, say they intend to turn X into a self-contained forum for creator content where people can watch original shows like Carlson’s.

Amid these shifts, the platform has become a cacophony of misinformation and confusing reports, according to new research from the University of Washington, which found that self-described news aggregators and open-source researchers far outperformed traditional media on the site during the Israel-Gaza war.

“Twitter used to be where politics and news conversations were being shaped on a minute-by-minute basis. I don’t think it’s because I’m a Democrat or on the left — it’s just no longer a place to get accurate information,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director under President Barack Obama.

Twitter’s decline has spawned or revived a host of rivals, such as the nonprofit Mastodon and Meta’s Threads. But none has replaced the pivotal role Twitter once played in global debate.

Courting the right

On June 26, Yaccarino, Musk’s handpicked CEO, eagerly welcomed Justin Wells, longtime executive producer for Carlson’s show on Fox News, to talk about a potential partnership, a person familiar with the meeting said.

It was Yaccarino’s first day in the company’s New York offices — her office was festooned with “Welcome Linda” balloons — and she was trying to strike a deal. Forced from his slot as Fox News’s top-rated prime-time host, Carlson had been posting short videos to Twitter for weeks. But Yaccarino wanted to formalize the relationship and share advertising revenue. A Republican who hailed from NBC News, she aimed to recruit top television talent to X — part of an effort to make the platform more like YouTube or TikTok: a hub for original video content.

The talks proved successful, but the broader strategy is a work in progress.

People who have worked with Musk say he isn’t rigidly partisan. He personally contacted former CNN host Don Lemon to talk about providing original content, according to two people familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private. And X expanded its partnership with NBCUniversal to show live video from the Olympic Games.

But when X launched a revenue-sharing program for creators in July, the roster of initial partners skewed hard right, including self-professed misogynist Andrew Tate, an account called End Wokeness, and several figures who had been banned from Twitter before Musk reinstated them.

Researchers say a broader political shift took shape when Musk began, in April, to dismantle the platform’s system for verifying the authenticity of notable accounts. In its place, Musk installed a new system that allowed anyone to be verified by purchasing an $8-per-month subscription. The company subsequently altered its software to elevate those accounts’ tweets and replies over those of nonpaying users.

Musk got sign-ups for the premium service, first called Twitter Blue and now X Premium, from loyal fans and conservative influencers — slightly more than 1.5 million, although about one-third of those have since canceled, according to data and estimates from Travis Brown, a Berlin software developer who has tracked the site closely. But many news organizations, journalists and liberal public figures decided not to pay. The result was that the platform tilted further right.

“Anyone who pays eight bucks a month, the algorithm now puts their opinions on the top of the news feed,” said Brandon Borrman, Twitter’s former vice president of communications. “And a lot of people who are paying happen to agree with Elon’s worldview.”

Musk quickly came to regard the mainstream media as a rival, if not an enemy, and moved to discourage the use of his site to link to content elsewhere. He routinely exhorts his followers to place their trust in “citizen journalists” who post directly on X rather than professional news organizations. A Post analysis in August found that X was secretly throttling traffic to the New York Times and Facebook, among other sites Musk dislikes. And last month, X stopped displaying the headlines of articles shared on the site, a move he said was “coming from me directly.”

The overall impact of these changes has been to degrade the public’s ability to find authoritative information, according to NewsGuard, a nonpartisan company that monitors media credibility. That failure has been particularly consequential during the Israel-Gaza war, when Twitter was central to disseminating unproven narratives, such as who blew up a hospital in Gaza.

NewsGuard found that X was a leading purveyor of misinformation in the first weeks of the conflict. And three-fourths of the most viral posts on the platform advancing misinformation came from “verified” accounts, many of them anonymous, the company concluded.

Ella Irwin, who led Trust and Safety at Twitter under Musk until she left in June, said the verification changes and the removal of headlines from articles risk denting the site’s mass appeal. “If you make it hard for people to … determine how credible content is or where it is coming from, then that really isn’t helping users,” she said. “This could drive users away.”

Musk’s motives

Musk wasn’t always so partisan. He says he supported Obama, and his business interests in Tesla and SolarCity aligned with liberal support for clean energy subsidies. But he became disenchanted with the left over its criticism of billionaires, support for labor unions, and race and gender politics. As Walter Isaacson detailed in a recent biography, Musk’s child’s transition from male to female, embrace of Marxism and rejection of Musk intensified his visceral resentment of the left.

By 2021, Musk was railing against covid-19 lockdowns and decrying what he called a “woke mind virus” that he argued was threatening the future of civilization. As he spent time on Twitter, he saw symptoms of the “virus” in the social platform’s policies on what it deemed hate speech.

Around that time, Musk began amassing Twitter stock, drawing on his personal fortune to become the company’s largest shareholder.

“Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please!?” his ex-wife Talulah Riley texted him on March 24, according to text messages released as part of a subsequent lawsuit and reporting by Bloomberg News. Musk’s reply: “Maybe buy it and change it to properly support free speech.” Three weeks later, he offered to purchase the company outright.

Anika Collier Navaroli, a former senior policy official at Twitter who testified last year before the House Jan. 6 committee, said that Musk in many ways is taking Twitter back to its “pre-2016” era, when the site took a laissez-faire approach to moderating user content. “It seems a lot like Elon Musk’s version of free speech was for him and his friends to be able to do hate speech without getting in trouble,” she said.

Intensifying business woes

In a recent talk, Yaccarino claimed Twitter’s business was on the upswing: 90 of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers had returned to the service, and the platform boasted 540 million active users, more than double the 206 million it had in 2021.

“X is a new company building a foundation based on free expression and freedom of speech,” she said.

But now that the company is privately owned and doesn’t have to file reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, there is scant reliable data about the business. Data obtained by The Post, along with interviews with people familiar with the company’s dealings, contradict Yaccarino’s rosy picture.

“The revenue has not come back, the advertisers have not come back — and a lot of it is Elon,” said a person familiar with the company’s operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. “The math doesn’t add up. I think they are on a very short runway.”

Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company, said global web traffic to X is down 14 percent year over year, and traffic to Twitter’s portal for advertisers, a website that advertisers visit to purchase ads, was down 16.5 percent. And the marketing consulting firm Ebiquity, which works with 70 of the 100 top-spending advertisers in the United States, said this month that just two of its clients are currently advertising on X — down from 31 the month before Musk’s purchase closed.

Twitter’s early woes under Musk were enough to prompt Meta to create a rival service, called Threads, which it developed and launched in just seven months — unusually fast for a brand-new social network from a company of Meta’s size. Mastodon, which launched in 2016, has seen a surge of growth. But none of the rivals yet have been able to replicate Twitter’s impact.

Sarah Oh, a former human rights adviser at Twitter who co-founded a safety-oriented social network, T2, after Musk fired her, said she’s not sure what to make of X’s troubled trajectory: “I’m surprised at the staying power of Twitter,” she said. This week, Oh shut down the site, recently renamed Pebble.

Not everyone is displeased with the direction in which Musk has taken the site.

“Elon Musk has shifted the balance of power” on X, said Christopher Rufo, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and a leading crusader against critical race theory, the academic discipline that studies how racism shapes institutions. “Previously it tilted the playing field to the left, and now I think it’s a pretty even split. On a relative basis, this is a huge advantage for the right.”

But even Rufo worries Musk could go too far in his open embrace of the right wing. “If it starts to create the perception that the platform is unbalanced,” he said, “that could diminish its value in the long term.”

Pfeiffer, the former Obama adviser, agreed. “Even if your goal was to change the ideological conversation, you’re less effective because there are fewer people on the platform” he said. “So congrats, Elon, on cutting your nose to spite your face.”

correction

An earlier version of this story mischaracterized NewsGuard as a nonprofit. It is a for-profit company. This article has been corrected.

American secularization hasn't followed the script that secularization theory would predict. By Daniel K. Williams

currentpub.com

20 - 25 minutes

This essay is cross-posted from the Anxious Bench, where it ran on Oct. 24, 2023.

“Nones” now comprise 28 percent of the American adult population, according to survey data that the Pew Research Center released this month. Sixteen years ago, in 2007, only 16 percent of Americans in 2007 said they had no religion.

But if secularization (that is, a shift away from religious affiliation among a substantial percentage of the population) is happening in the United States, it hasn’t proceeded along the lines that secularization theory predicted. According to this frequently recited theory, which was first proposed more than a century ago, educated industrial societies will inevitably become less religious, because as people adopt scientific explanations for natural phenomena, they will become less receptive to religious explanations.

This explanation was given new currency this year in Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, which was written by three sociologists (Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryant T. Cragun) who are veterans of secularization studies. Beyond Doubt presented a comprehensive study of several dozen countries from across the globe and demonstrated that in almost all of those that have religious freedom and are becoming increasingly educated, religious beliefs, practices, and affiliation are declining, just as they are in the United States. If religion is gaining adherents anywhere, the authors of Beyond Doubt argue, it’s only among the less educated or the members of a repressive society where few options for religious choice exist. In a free marketplace of ideas, with plenty of opportunities for education, religion will lose nearly every time.

But regardless of whether this theory might explain secularization in other parts of the world, it doesn’t adequately account for the experience of the United States. After World War II, in the midst of a massive surge in college education, the United States experienced a rapid rise in religious affiliation, church attendance, and the percentage of people who said that religion was important in their lives. Even though the United States led most other nations in economic growth, industrial development, access to higher education, and religious liberty and religious diversity – the ingredients that advocates of secularization theory, such as the authors of Beyond Doubt, suggest will inevitably lead to a decline in religiosity – Americans flocked to churches and expressed strong identification with religion. Only 2 percent of Americans in the late 1950s did not identify with a religious tradition.

Weekly church attendance rates declined a bit in the 1960s, once the pressures of the Cold War started to fade. But despite what secularization theory predicts, both church membership and church attendance rates remained unchanged from 1970 to 2009, even as college attendance rates and religious diversity continued to grow. Throughout the late twentieth century and even at the beginning of the twenty-first, 40 percent of Americans reported going to a worship service each week, and 70 percent said they were members of a church, synagogue, or mosque. It was not until the 2010s that the recent trend of religious disaffiliation started to take off.

But according to secularization theory, this is a rather strange moment for the sudden dramatic increase in religious disaffiliation. The past decade has not been a decade of rising college attendance rates. In fact, after decades of growth in higher education, numerous colleges and universities are starting to experience enrollment declines. Economic growth during the past decade has been uneven. Confidence in science – which proponents of secularization theory say leads to religious disaffiliation – is lower in the United States than it has been in decades. In 2022, only 29 percent of Americans said that they had a “great deal” of confidence in scientists, down from 39 percent only two years earlier. On climate change, vaccines, and COVID protocols, plenty of Americans have proven quite willing to reject scientific knowledge and embrace alternative theories that lack the support of the scientific community.

Even young-earth creationism remains surprisingly robust. A 2019 Gallup survey indicated that 40 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form, with no evolution involved – a percentage that is only slightly lower than the 44 percent of Americans who reported believing this in 1982, when Gallup first asked the question.

So, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that large numbers of Americans in the last ten or fifteen years have suddenly found scientific explanations more credible than religious claims.

But if scientific knowledge or education cannot account for the decline of religiosity in the United States, what can explain it? There is no doubt that the percentage of American adults who said they had no religion nearly doubled between 2007 and the early 2020s. What is the reason for this?

I think that the answer is that the people who are leaving Christianity are doing so primarily because they no longer find Christianity morally credible. They don’t think they need religion in order to be moral people, and they don’t think that the moral fabric of the country depends on a set of values sustained by religious faith. This is a new phenomenon, because for most of the nation’s history, large numbers of Americans did believe that the country’s moral values were inextricably tied to religion, just as George Washington suggested in his Farewell Address. But when people’s faith in the moral authority of Christianity disappears, they leave the church.

Liberal Protestantism’s Loss of Moral Credibility

The first group of Christian leaders to experience a loss of moral authority in the modern United States were the liberal Protestants (or “mainline” or “ecumenical” Protestants, as they are also often called).

In the 1950s and early 1960s, liberal Protestantism was at the height of its cultural and political influence. Liberal Protestant theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr were household names in educated circles, and their images appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy consulted with liberal Protestant church leaders when planning civil religious declarations or considering legislation of moral importance, such as civil rights bills.

Many Americans believed in religion as a moral authority because they thought that atheism offered no foundation for public morals or human rights and that it would inevitably lead to totalitarianism. After all, all of the officially atheistic states of the 1950s were Communist. As many writings of the 1950s suggested, science could solve technological problems, but it could not solve moral ones; it could create a nuclear bomb, but it could not provide a source of moral restraint to stop people from using it. For that reason, they looked to religion to provide a source of ultimate meaning, a grounding for human dignity, and principles for moral guidance. Eighty-one percent of Americans in 1957 told Gallup that they believed that religion could answer “today’s problems” – compared to only 56 percent who believed this in 1984.

But in the late 1960s, a new generation of young Baby Boomers began to leave mainline Protestantism because they viewed the church’s moral authority as irrelevant. Most often, they did not leave the church in anger, and they did not immediately begin identifying as “nones.” But as observers noted as early as the beginning of the 1970s, church attendance and membership numbers in theologically liberal Protestant denominations were starting to fall, even as membership numbers in evangelical Protestant denominations were increasing. Most of the decrease, as subsequent research showed, came from young adults leaving the churches of their youth. And as David Hollinger’s scholarship suggests, the young adults who left the church often retained the socially conscious, politically liberal values of their upbringing – they just thought that the church’s moral authority was no longer needed to sustain these values.

In my own research in liberal Christian periodicals of the 1960s, I have found that young liberal Protestants who participated in the civil rights demonstrations of the era sometimes had their faith in institutional Christianity shaken, because they saw grassroots activism as a more authentic source of moral authority than the pronouncements of church leaders. Institutional Christianity in the United States was associated with liberal platitudes, but not with moral fervor, they decided. They had grown up believing that Christianity was necessary to protect human rights and democracy, but if real human rights activism and democratic protest were taking place on the streets rather than behind a pulpit, it was time to exchange their church membership for political activity and pursue the goals of a revolutionary Jesus outside of church structures.

Nearly every mainline Protestant denomination experienced membership declines in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Methodist and Lutheran strongholds of the northern Midwest started to feel a bit more secular.

But national church attendance rates barely changed, because even as church attendance rates declined among northern liberal Protestants during the late twentieth century, the growth in evangelical church affiliation in the Sunbelt was enough to offset this. Seventy percent of Americans in the late 1990s claimed to be a member of a church or synagogue – a figure that was nearly unchanged from the 73 percent who had said this forty years earlier, in the early 1950s. The percentage of Americans who answered “yes” to Gallup’s question, “Do you believe in God?” remained well above 90 percent throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In 1999, only 8 percent of Americans told Gallup that they had no religion – a figure that was considerably higher than the 2 percent who had said this in 1959, but still hardly enough to signal a widespread secular trend.

Catholicism’s Loss of Moral Credibility

But then a church scandal occurred that led to a loss of Christianity’s moral credibility for a second group of Americans: Catholics.

The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s shook the faith of some Catholics who had never expected the church to experience changes of that magnitude, and it prompted other Catholics to become more lax in their church attendance and their observance of Catholic teachings that did not accord with their own moral vision. While 75 percent of American Catholics attended church every week in the 1950s, fewer than 50 percent did so in the late 1990s. But the fallout after Vatican II was mild compared to the anger that many Catholics felt after revelations of a massive sexual abuse crisis emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

After the sex abuse crisis, many chose not to affiliate with the church at all. By 2014, 41 percent of Americans who had been raised Catholic no longer identified as Catholics. In 1965, more than a third of all babies born in the United States were baptized into the Catholic Church that year, but in 2014, only 18 percent were. The massive wave of departures from church hit the heavily Catholic Northeast particularly hard. A 2017 report published by the Barna Group categorized 46 percent of the Boston metro area population and 45 percent of the population in Portland, Maine as “dechurched” – that is, people who used to attend church but now never go at all.

As bad as this was for the American Catholic Church, the situation would have been considerably worse if the church had not been able to depend on high immigration rates to bring in millions of new Catholics, mostly from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. In 1987, only 10 percent of American Catholics had been Hispanic and 85 percent had been non-Hispanic whites, but by 2014, the American Catholic Church was 34 percent Hispanic, with non-Hispanic whites now making up only 58 percent of the church.

But since much of the Hispanic immigration was concentrated in the South and Southwest, it did not do much to reverse the massive declines in church affiliation that the Northeast and parts of the northern Midwest experienced. In the Archdiocese of Atlanta, the number of Catholics increased from 32,000 in 1962 to 1.2 million in 2020. But in the Archdiocese of Boston, the number of Catholics dropped from 3.5 million in 1970 to fewer than 2 million today – and many of those who are still left in the church don’t attend Mass as often as they used to. Between 1971 and 2018, Massachusetts experienced a net loss of 234 Catholic parishes, even as Georgia experienced a net gain of 67.

The result has been a regionally concentrated secularization rather than a national trend. Church attendance rates have become very low in parts of the North that experienced high church attendance only a few decades ago, but church attendance is still strong in much of the South.

Has Evangelicalism Lost Moral Credibility?

Will the South and the Sunbelt, which are heavily evangelical with a growing Catholic presence, experience secularization as well? Based on my analysis, it will experience a wave of secularization only to the extent that Christianity loses moral credibility in those regions. So, we might ask: Is evangelical Protestantism currently experiencing a crisis of moral authority, or is it on the verge of experiencing such a crisis? Will large numbers of evangelicals decide that Christianity has lost its moral authority?

Among a minority of evangelicals, the answer is clearly yes. Because most of white evangelicalism has firmly aligned itself against one of the most foundational moral principles of contemporary progressives – the principle of equity for marginalized groups, especially racial, gender, and sexual minorities – this has created cognitive dissonance for evangelicals who believe in the moral principle of equity for marginalized groups. Some of those who experience this cognitive dissonance have left evangelicalism in disgust over its political alliances, as numerous books, articles, blogs, websites, and podcasts have documented.

But despite all of these publications – and despite all of the publicity given to the “exvangelicals” – the statistical evidence doesn’t seem to indicate that these departures have had as much of an effect on evangelicalism as some might have supposed. While the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, has lost several million members over the last several years – and while few evangelical denominations are growing – many of those who have left organized evangelical denominations have not left Christianity altogether but have instead joined nondenominational community churches.

In fact, the percentage of Americans identifying as “born again” Christians reached a record level in 2018, when 41 percent of respondents to the General Social Science survey answered “yes” to the question, “Would you say you have been ‘born again’ or have had a ‘born again’ experience—that is, a turning point in your life when you committed yourself to Christ?” The record level of affirmative responses to this question was driven largely by increases in the number of people of color identifying as “born again,” because 54 percent of respondents of color claimed this label, saying that they had had a “turning point” in their life when they committed themselves to Christ. With the rapid growth of charismatic Christianity among Hispanics and increases in the number of African American Christians identifying themselves as “born again,” it appears that born-again Christianity among people of color has largely made up for any declines in evangelicalism among whites.

And even among whites, evangelicalism has not declined as much as people have supposed. An evangelical-flavored Christianity remains vibrant in much of the South and parts of the rural Midwest – which is why Chattanooga, Tennessee, for instance, still has a weekly church attendance rate of 59 percent, even as the weekly church attendance rate in a few northeastern and western cities has fallen into the single digits. In Birmingham, Baton Rouge, and Charlotte, more than half of the population has been to church within the last seven days, according to the Barna Group’s 2017 report – despite the fact that in Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, more than half of all respondents say they haven’t been to church at all in the last six months.

Some of the more affluent parts of the Sunbelt are rejecting the evangelical churches that might have had widespread appeal in these regions a generation ago. The Orlando, Florida, metropolitan area is now the ninth most unchurched metropolitan region in the United States, with 51 percent of the population never attending church. But this is not true of the South.

On the whole, it appears that evangelical Christianity, at least in certain regions of the country, has not experienced the widespread moral disaffection that plagued mainline Protestantism in the late twentieth century and Catholicism at the beginning of the twenty-first. Instead, even as white evangelicalism became morally repugnant to some Americans – especially college-educated professionals in cities outside the South – it solidified its standing among a rural white population, who may have considered white evangelicalism’s growing identification with right-wing politics and Christian nationalism to be a positive development that echoed their own moral code.

And among people of color who are increasingly identifying with a form of born-again Christianity that was often associated with charismatic, multiracial nondenominational churches led by dynamic pastors, the conservative politics of some forms of white evangelicalism hasn’t seem to diminish their faith in the Christianity of their own churches. Evangelicalism may be too decentralized and fragmented for moral crises in some branches of the movement to tarnish the image of the movement as a whole in the way that the sex abuse crisis did for the Catholic Church.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Religion in the United States? 

If people decide to leave Christianity primarily because of a moral objection to the church – not primarily because they become too educated to take religious claims seriously – I suspect that religion will retain a stronger presence in at least some regions of the United States than believers in secularization theory expect. Because American evangelical Protestantism has long been heavily decentralized – and is becoming even more so, with the rise in popularity of nondenominational community churches – it may be able to continue to reinvent itself in ways that allow it to avoid the loss of moral credibility that have plagued other forms of organized religion in the United States. And because of the regional political polarization, the evangelical moral pronouncements that offend non-evangelicals in many regions of the country may solidify evangelicalism’s moral credibility among a certain segment of the population – especially in the South.

And if this is the case, the United States will probably not secularize along the lines of Canada or Britain. Instead, dechurching will hit some regions particularly hard, even as it leaves other sections of the country or segments of the population relatively unscathed. Christianity in the United States will continue to become less white, more evangelical and charismatic, less mainline Protestant, and more southern – but it will likely remain a strong influence in the United States, even if it becomes a more culturally polarizing force than it was in the mid-twentieth century.

The United States is not exactly secularizing as much as it is becoming more religiously and culturally polarized. In the 1950s, a generic public Christianity that was heavily shaped by mainline Protestantism could serve as a culturally unifying force in the early years of the Cold War, when nearly all Americans viewed Christianity as morally beneficial, at least in a general sense. But the forms of American Christianity that are likely to grow in the future are the least likely to unite disparate segments of the population who no longer agree on Christianity’s moral credibility.

Some of the proponents of secularization theory have hoped that a new set of secular values could end the culture wars and unite the population, just as they have in parts of northern Europe. But instead, we may be left in the future with an American Christianity that has regional appeal but not nationwide acceptance – and if that’s the case, the departures from Christianity that we’re seeing among some sections of the population will not lead to a resolution of the culture wars, because the American population is unlikely to become either nearly entirely post-Christian or nearly entirely Christian. We’ll instead likely see a growing division over Christianity’s moral credibility – and that division will continue to affect our culture and politics for years to come.

Elon Musk’s Outlook on Our Future Turns Dour - WSJ

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Elon Musk’s Outlook on Our Future Turns Dour - WSJ

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In many ways, Elon Musk is the world’s biggest doomsday prepper.  

The billionaire entrepreneur has made his fortune and reputation chasing a future bettered by technology. The flip side of his optimism is a fixation on worst-case scenarios he is determined to avoid. 

And these days, Musk sounds worried—everything from cyclical business jitters to existential global concerns. He choked with emotion during a recent public conference call with

analysts about the economy. This past week he warned during a forum on X about “civilizational risk” stemming from the Israel-Hamas war cascading into a wider conflict that would pit the U.S. against a united China, Russia and Iran. 

“I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War III,” Musk said Monday. 

Not exactly the jovial Elon Musk many are familiar with from “Saturday Night Live” or his X feed, where he often shares crude and childish jokes with his more than 160 million social-media followers. 

‘He’s Addicted to Risk’: Elon Musk’s Biographer on the Tesla CEO

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In a new biography about Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson shares what he learned during his two years shadowing the billionaire entrepreneur. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/The Wall Street Journal

But over the years, Musk has framed his business endeavors as striving to prevent calamity, a motivating ideal that helps inspire employees, investors and fans while inducing eye rolls among critics and rivals.

For him, Tesla is about trying to save humanity from global warming while SpaceX is about making humanity a multiplanetary species in case things don’t work out on Earth.

A year ago, with the purchase of Twitter-turned-X, Musk couched the decision as keeping the social-media platform as a bastion for free speech in what he sees as a larger battle against cultural forces trying to squash diverse thought—or, as he calls it, the “woke mind virus.”

Musk said last month: “I tend to view the future as a series of probabilities—there’s certain probability that something will go wrong, some probability that it’ll go right; it’s kind of a spectrum of things. And to the degree that there is free will versus determinism, then we want to try to exercise that free will to ensure a great future.”

Comments this past week about World War III echoed concerns Musk has raised about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. “Nuclear war probability is rising rapidly,” he tweeted last fall after months of fighting between the two countries. 

Musk has been praised and criticized for his involvement in that war, including when he said last year that Crimea rightfully belonged to Russia, a statement seen by some in Washington as being pro-Russian. He drew further rebuke after declining to activate SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications system in Russia-occupied Crimea to aid a planned attack. 

He said he worried that activating Starlink then would have further stoked the conflict. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” he is quoted as saying in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk.”  

This past week, Musk returned to calling for peace, saying U.S. policies risk pushing Russia into an alliance with China just as the Israel-Hamas war has the potential to expand. He cautioned that many people overestimate U.S. military might in such a scenario. 

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“We’re like a pro sports team that has been winning the championship for so long and so many years in a row that we have forgotten what losing even looks like,” Musk said. “And that’s when the champion team loses.” 

Over the years, employees and investors have had to learn how to interpret and navigate Musk’s emotional ups and downs. 

Shares of Tesla, where he is chief executive, are down about 15% since the electric-car maker’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 18, when he worried aloud about the threat of high-interest rates to the business and suggested a slowdown ahead.

“I apologize if I’m perhaps more paranoid than I should be, because that might also be the case because I have PTSD from 2009—big time,” Musk said, referring to a painful year for Tesla and the rest of the auto industry. Both

and Chrysler went through government-backed bankruptcy restructurings that year after credit seized up and sales collapsed. 

“And then,” Musk continued, mentioning another near-death experience for Tesla, “2017 through 2019 were no picnic either. There was very tough going.”

Those close to him know that he can become paranoid—sometimes rightfully so, other times not so much. 

In spring 2022, Musk was predicting a recession would last as long as 18 months. “Companies that are inherently negative cash flow (ie value destroyers) need to die, so that they stop consuming resources,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Tesla announced it was shedding workers. 

That predicted recession hasn’t occurred. 

“My brother believes an economic winter is coming every single day,” Kimbal Musk once told lawyers about his older sibling’s mindset during a legal procedure. 

The older Musk isn’t just worried about the fragility of markets but humanity itself. 

“To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile these days,” Musk said last year during an update on SpaceX’s large rocket development. “I’m an optimist, but I think we got to protect the downside here and try to build that city on Mars as soon as possible and secure the future of life.”

Among his stated worries, of which he has tweeted: “a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense” and “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

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His darker thoughts have influenced his consumer products. For years, Musk has touted an air-filtering system on Tesla vehicles that could defend against a bio attack and has promised the coming Cybertruck is bulletproof. 

“Things are seeming more apocalyptic these days,” Musk said in summer 2020 during an interview with Automotive News. “Let me tell you, the truck you want in the apocalypse is the Cybertruck.” 

This summer, he framed his creation of an artificial-intelligence startup called xAI in his typically grandiose terms, cautioning that the technology has the potential to spiral out of control and essentially turn on its master, something akin to “The Terminator” movie. 

“I think it’s actually important for us to worry about a `Terminator’ future in order to avoid a `Terminator’ future,” he said. 

Voicing his concerns about such calamity might be the best way for him to deal with his worries. Or, at least, that is the advice he has given others. 

“Accept worst case outcome & assign it a probability, which is usually very low. Now think of good things in life & assign them probabilities—many are certain!” he tweeted a couple of years ago. “Bringing anxiety/fear to the conscious mind saps it of limbic emotional strength.”

“Cheery fatalism is very effective.”

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