Claudia Sahm: it’s clear now who was right

Claudia Sahm: it’s clear now who was right

Robert Armstrong — Read time: 11 minutes

Claudia Sahm: it’s clear now who was right

The economist on how to temper theory with judgment

The eagle representing the US Federal Reserve

© Financial Times

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Good morning. Say what you will about the finance industry, there is one thing it can do well: stitch together barely related, marginally relevant buzzwords when naming a new product. Behold the BTC Private Credit Fund LP, billed as the “first bitcoin private credit fund”. As far as we can tell, the fund — a standard bitcoin lending operation — has nothing to do with private credit as that term is generally understood. But how, you may be asking yourself, can a self-respecting piece of financial marketing in 2023 not include a reference to AI? Well, BPCF has that box checked by having OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a backer. What a time to be alive. Email us: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com.

Friday interview: Claudia Sahm 

Claudia Sahm is, perhaps to her chagrin, best known for creating the eponymous Sahm rule, a recession marker developed as part of a discussion of economic stabilisation payments to individuals. She is almost as well known for taking a contrarian view of the policy response to the coronavirus pandemic. She argued early on that the bulk of the post-pandemic inflation was driven by supply constraints that would pass, and urged policymakers not to overreact. Below she offers views on whether the inflation fight is won, productivity, consumer sentiment, the Phillips curve and much else. 

Her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Unhedged: Have we landed softly?

Claudia Sahm: The soft landing is not here yet. But it is in the bag. Barring an unforeseen massive disruption, we are landing this plane. Now, there’ll be some turbulence as we approach the runway. I fully expect we’re going to have some disappointing reads on inflation. To me, a soft landing is 2 per cent inflation or spitting distance, say under 2.5 per cent, while unemployment stays low, right around 4 per cent or below. We’ll have it next year. You can see the landing strip. 

Unhedged: It’s true, unemployment’s great. The most relevant signals of inflation are within spitting distance of 2 per cent. But no matter how you cut it, wage growth is around 4 per cent. Is that a potential problem?

Sahm: I have not, and do not now, subscribe to the view that the inflation we have been living through since 2021 is primarily demand-driven, like Larry Summers and my friend Jason Furman did. Those folks thought we put too much money into people’s pockets and there was too much pent-up demand. If you were in that camp, you thought we needed to jack up rates and see wage growth come down. 

Wages are rising at a pace that’s better than before the pandemic, which was a very good time for the economy, but we’ve moved out of the very acute labour shortages. And obviously, we want to get workers off the sidelines. To do that, you’re going to have to pay them more! 

I look at inflation and say that’s because of disruptions from Covid and the war in Ukraine. And because those will eventually work out in some way, inflation will come down. That leads to very different policy prescriptions to fight inflation. And it leads to very different views on the things like whether the $1.9tn American Rescue Plan was a good idea; or whether waiting to raise rates was a good idea. If it’s all demand, then you’ve got to destroy demand. But I don’t think it’s all demand.

On wages, too, we have seen some good productivity numbers. If you’re more productive, you get paid more. And that’s coming after the crap productivity growth we had after the Great Recession. If we’re getting better productivity growth, we should not be using pre-pandemic wage growth as the baseline. 

Unhedged: What do you think is driving that bump in productivity? 

Sahm: Productivity is extremely hard to measure and the data is noisy. So we won’t know for sure for a while. But we have people who now work from home and some really crappy jobs are getting automated away. Maybe AI helps make workers more effective. 

The other piece is that business fixed investment has been really solid in this recovery, contrary to what happened after the Great Recession. We’re seeing R&D, we’re seeing capital investments. Doing business investment is the gift that keeps on giving. It shows up in GDP when it happens, and then it gives workers or businesses the tools or knowledge they need to produce in the next round, and the round after that. 

The Holy Grail in macro would be to get another quarter of a percentage point in trend growth. That really adds up. 

Unhedged: You had a recent Substack post called “I was right”, arguing that the US pandemic fiscal response was largely successful. But if the policy was so good, why are Americans so grouchy about it? Why is consumer sentiment so bad?

Sahm: I spent a lot of time thinking about why people are so gloomy. The unemployment rate is low and wage growth is good, but on the other hand inflation has been high. But both were worse in the 1970s, when consumer sentiment was similarly bad. Most Americans are financially better off [than before the pandemic] — whether that’s measured by jobs, wages, wealth or debt. Before the pandemic, a lot of people did not have a financial cushion; now they do. Debt burdens are at record lows.

This is not about economics. When I put my economic adviser hat on, I need to know that, because then I won’t use the sentiment data. It hurts me, because people called the Great Recession before the forecasters did. Sentiment started falling before GDP ever did. Danny Blanchflower had all this research on sentiment, and what a great forecast of recession it was, calling for a recession towards the end of 2021. I didn’t agree because the labour market recovery was gaining steam. Going into 2022, it became clear it wasn’t a recession. And at some point, I realised these [sentiment] data are basically useless to me.

Unhedged: So you’re saying you don’t quite know what it is, but it isn’t the economy.

Sahm: Yeah. I’ve gone through different hypotheses. I think it fundamentally has some relationship back to Covid. Shutting the economy down, sending people home, a deadly virus we didn’t understand — it broke people. Now we have the war in Ukraine. The most optimistic thing I can say is that bad sentiment is related to Covid and Ukraine, and once we get to the other side, that disconnect will close. It just takes time. The questions about the economy or people’s finances are so fundamental to their lives that if you’re angry and scared about one thing, like Covid, you’re going to be angry and scared about your finances, no matter what your bank account says.

There was a recent analysis in the FT, finding that the big gap between US sentiment and the economy wasn’t there for other countries. Those countries had a really hard time with the pandemic, too. Which makes me think it has something to do with processing the pandemic and lockdowns in a highly charged political environment during an election year.

Unhedged: You’ve called for banning the Phillips curve, the economic model positing a trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Now that we have a bit more hindsight, what’s your retrospective on the Phillips curve in this cycle? And if we ban the Phillips curve, what replaces it? 

Sahm: This fundamentally goes back to a view about how much of inflation is demand versus supply. If you think it’s demand-driven inflation, you can fight that with the Fed’s tools. But how do you know how much monetary tightening to do, how much unemployment you need to get inflation down? So then you march off to the Phillips curve. There are more sophisticated versions of the Phillips curve that incorporate supply shocks. No one brought those out. The versions of the Phillips curve that were brought out in policymaking circles went back to the 1950s or 1960s — essentially just inflation versus unemployment. 

The Phillips curve was used by the same people denouncing the American Rescue Plan to make statements like, “We need five years of 6 per cent unemployment.” But it goes back to why did inflation spike, demand or supply? It’s clear now who was right: it was largely supply. It was completely valid to argue in 2021 that when inflation took off, it was demand. The American Rescue Plan was big, it came after two very big fiscal relief packages and the Fed had been adamant about not raising rates. But the fact this year that inflation has notably come down and unemployment has stayed low only happens if it was mostly supply-driven.

In terms of what other model to use, backing off from the Phillips curve would have been a good idea. And then the thing that economists need to think harder about is how we think about supply shocks. Most of the effort in macroeconomic research goes into thinking about demand disruptions. The [industry gold standard] New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model has wedged into it a Phillips curve that can do supply shocks. But we don’t really know how to calibrate [these sorts of models].

A lot of this is art, not science. The academic stuff looks like science, but what actually is useful in the real world is much more judgment-based. But you ought to have tools that at least don’t do damage. The Phillips curve has done damage. 

Unhedged: There’s a lot of worry now about excessive debt and deficits. Olivier Blanchard is saying we need to get r minus g, the real interest rate paid on debt minus the growth rate, on a sustainable trajectory. What’s your perspective on debt sustainability? 

Sahm: First off, Olivier is adorable, what a great way to frame it. My view is that it’s completely misguided to have a discussion about the size of the federal debt. The entire conversation about r minus g, while maybe useful for macroeconomists to think about, ignores that it matters what we spend on. If we are on a path for higher productivity growth after the pandemic, the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure act, the Chips act, the Inflation Reduction Act — they all get a piece of that pie. 

Unhedged: Folks like Olivier are worried that if long rates are now higher, there’s simply less capacity to spend money the right way, because more of the budget is going to be spent on interest payments.

Sahm: The way I’d frame it is that the stakes are higher and higher for doing spending in a responsible way. If the government is spending in a way that is targeted and effective, say, at raising productivity, that’s money well spent. I would never want to say that spending will “pay for itself”, because that claim has a very dubious history. And yet if you do it right, it does, at least to some extent. 

The other piece is getting into the weeds of what the federal debt is: social security and Medicare. If you do not do something to pull in those expenses, you’re done. That’s a very difficult, delicate conversation. The stakes are higher to spend money well. The stakes are very high to make those entitlement programs cost-effective and well-designed. You can almost cut the whole rest of the budget and you still would have questions about debt sustainability and higher interest rates.

I don’t know that Olivier would disagree with me that entitlement programmes need to be addressed. But as macroeconomists, we’re not setting up a framework that really pushes policymakers to think in those terms. We just say, “It’s too big!”

There is a corollary to [the damage done by macroeconomists relying on the Phillips curve model to analyse inflation] within the debt sustainability debate. The profession got burned, and rightly so, for Greece. The Reinhart-Rogoff argument [that debt-to-GDP ratios over 90 per cent hurt growth] ended up being very bad advice. Macroeconomists need to learn that big numbers aren’t enough. Policymakers need better guidance.

Unhedged: As the author of the Sahm rule, you’ve made the point over and over again that it’s not a rule of nature. Still, financial markets will always want a recession forecasting rule. This time, the inverted yield curve didn’t seem to work. Now the Sahm rule is getting attention. Would you suggest Wall Street use a different rule?

Sahm: No, I won’t give them that. The market is looking for something to predict a recession. The Sahm rule has never been that. It was meant to send out fiscal transfers [as automatic stabilisers]. The typical predictors, like the yield curve and sentiment, have not performed well. You have to go back to 1947 to find a time where we had two consecutive quarters of GDP decline outside of a recession. And we had that last year. Everything is haywire! Rely on the rules of thumb at your peril. Right now, everyone wants some kind of certainty or comfort or guidepost. You ain’t getting it.

Yes, Trump's new talking point is full on Nazi. By Noah Berlatsky

Read time: 7 minutes

Yes, Trump's new talking point is full on Nazi

But it draws from American fascism too.

A scene from Trump’s rally in Reno on Sunday. (Justin Sullivan/Getty)

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Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has been more and more openly embracing fascist rhetoric on the campaign trail.

At a Veteran’s Day rally in November, he described his enemies on the left as “radical thugs that live like vermin in the confines of our country.” Then this past Saturday in New Hampshire, he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” He added, “They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

Trump reiterated his “poisoning our blood” talking point Tuesday evening in Iowa, then alluded to criticism he’s received for it, saying, “I’ve never read Mein Kampf. They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’ In a very different way.”

President Joe Biden has, accurately, noted that Trump’s rhetoric “echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.” Trump isn’t just echoing rhetoric though. He’s channeling the core emotional and thematic logic of fascism — a logic which justifies, and calls for, extreme and escalating violence.

So much for economic anxiety

It’s worth emphasizing first of all what Trump is not saying. In the past, he’s often tried to claim (with little to no evidence) that immigrants take jobs away from American citizens.

“They’re taking our jobs. They’re taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us,” he said in 2015.

Statements like this led some commenters to conclude Trump was appealing to the economic anxiety of American workers. Numerous studies debunked this theory though. An important one showed “financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump.” Trump was strongest not with poorer voters, but rather with ones who expressed high levels of racial anxiety and animus. In 2020, Biden won voters making less than $50,000 a year, while Trump won those making more than $100,000.

At the New Hampshire rally last weekend, though, Trump dispensed with any pretense. He didn’t dwell on immigrants competing for jobs. Instead, he framed them as dangerous in themselves; just by virtue of existing they are “poisoning the blood” of the country. The evil of immigration is less economic than existential, according to Trump. He uses imagery of America being overrun, penetrated, conquered. It’s not about jobs. It’s about purity.

Fascism and purity

Purity is at the center of fascist ideology and propaganda. Scholar Robert O. Paxton, whose treatment of fascism is considered the standard, defines fascism in part as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.” Jason Stanley in his book How Fascism Works notes that the central tenets of fascist ideology are “authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.”

Stanley also says that Nazism sprang out of the German ethnic nationalism of the 1880s, which was built on “a romanticized notion of ethnic purity of the German Volk.” This purity was defined in opposition to an imagined Jewish corruption; Germans were pure because they were not poisoned by Jewish blood. The Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew visualizes the link between Jews and contagion by juxtaposing discussions of Jewish immigration with images of disease-carrying rats. It also links Jewish people to sexual corruption, with the ludicrous claim that Jewish people controlled 98 percent of prostitution worldwide.

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And indeed, Trump’s “poisoning the blood” line is remarkably similar to Hitler’s rhetoric. From NBC:

The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” in which he criticized immigration and the mixing of races. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.

Fascist language about purity evokes imagery of disease and sexual violation. Trump in 2016 claimed that Mexican immigrants were “rapists”. This Tuesday, doubling down on his weekend comments, he said that immigrants could “bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country.” The goal of this kind of language is to make marginalized people seem like an existential threat just by existing.

Violence

Historically, fascist rhetoric about marginalized people, corruption, and purity has been very effective in priming followers for violence. As one example Stanley discusses, Black men in the South were invariably accused of rape and sexual assault — of violating the purity of white womanhood — as a prelude to murdering and lynching them.

“The myth of the Black rapist,” Angela Davis writes, “has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justification.”

The great replacement conspiracy theory functions through similar dynamics. It suggests there is a deliberate effort by nefarious elites (that is, Jewish people) to dilute the white race through lax immigration policies and intermarriage.

This conspiracy theory has been around in various forms for some one hundred years. But it has been mainstreamed again in part through the efforts of Tucker Carlson, who ranted about great replacement ideas constantly on his former Fox News show. Trump’s primary opponent Vivek Ramaswamy championed the great replacement theory by name during the most recent Republican presidential debate.

Again, great replacement theories play on fears of sexualized corruption and worries that the purity of the white race in general, and of white women in particular, is being violated by Jewish people, immigrants, Black people, and outsiders. And it’s led to numerous mass shootings. The Tree of Life shooter who slaughtered 11 Jewish people in Pittsburgh in 2018 referenced great replacement theory fears. So did the El Paso shooter who killed 22 Latinos in a Walmart in 2019. So did the shooter in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store who murdered 10 Black people in 2022.

When Trump tells his followers that they are under siege by a corrupting force, he is not just mouthing the words of a foreign fascist. He’s reiterating precepts of purity, paranoia, and hatred that have led to violent murders both in America’s racist past and in its racist present.

The halfhearted pushback is not good enough

As mentioned above, the Biden White House noted that Trump’s words echoed Adolf Hitler’s. Trump’s GOP primary rival, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, said Trump was “disgusting” and that his words were a “dogwhistle.”

Other responses showed a good bit less moral clarity. Fox News sycophant Bret Baier defended Trump’s remarks by saying he’s married to an immigrant, which is a bit like saying someone can’t be a misogynist if they’re married to a woman. Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville argued that Trump should have gone even further in condemning immigration. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis went on CNN and tried to cast doubt on whether Trump was really talking about immigrants, while Sen. JD Vance told reporters that Trump’s comment was “obviously true” but was actually about fentanyl — defenses Trump immediately destroyed by going on Truth Social and making very clear he was in fact talking about immigrants.

Source: Truth Social

You expect Republicans to disgrace themselves when talking about Trump. More disturbingly, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, when asked about the comments on Tuesday, waffled.

“What Donald Trump said and did was despicable,” Schumer said — a promising start. But then he backpedaled, trying to find common ground.

“But we do have a problem at the border,” he said, “and Democrats know we have to solve that problem, but in keeping with our principles.”

Instead of explaining to voters and constituents that Trump is pushing fascist conspiracy theories which have already led to multiple murders, Schumer felt he needed to cosign a kind of fascism lite, pretending that Trump is addressing a real problem, or has any interest in addressing one. This effort to find a way to turn blatant fascist propaganda into some sort of consensus talking point is an ominous sign for the border security deal that Democrats are currently negotiating with the GOP. If Schumer isn’t able to unequivocally denounce what is in effect a call to violence against immigrants, how is he going to craft a deal that treats immigrants fairly or compassionately?

This is the real danger of Trump. Yes, his words echo Hitler’s (even if Trump claims he never read Mein Kampf.) But what’s just as bad is they draw on America’s own fascist traditions and purity paranoia. Trump’s language is the language of lynching, of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and of course of Fox News. Denouncing him means denouncing America’s own myths of pure (white) community and spotless American heritage. Politicians like Schumer are reluctant to do that unequivocally, either because they themselves buy into those myths or, in Schumer’s case, because they believe voters do. Even Trump’s enemies are afraid to fully confront his hate; that’s what he’s counting on.

People Feel Negative Because Donald Trump Wants It That Way. By Brian Beutler

Read time: 5 minutes

People Feel Negative Because Donald Trump Wants It That Way

He’s a big source of the bad vibes, and if you give in to dread, you're playing into his hands

(Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

The liberal political world is abuzz about vibes.

What are vibes? Are the vibes bad? Can they be controlled? Shifted? For the most part, the vibes discourse has centered around perceptions of the economy, posited as an explanation of why the relationship between economic sentiment and economic fundamentals has broken down. But the bad vibes aren’t limited to perceptions of the economy. 

The broader vibes are almost as bad now as when inflation peaked over a year ago, hovering close to where they were in mid-2020, when Donald Trump’s COVID-19 failures had killed tens of thousands of Americans and confined tens of millions of people to their homes for months. Something significant is clearly at work on the national psyche if people feel no more optimistic now than they did in the depths of the pandemic. 

But even that observation is enough to divide left of center. Many feel the whole concept of vibes is fatally imprecise; others think it’s the most important one in politics right now. Everyone is probably, to some extent, tired of hearing the word. 

In the interest of bringing the conversation back down to Earth, and of reaching those who want a clearer sense of how non-material things can affect people’s relationship with the material world, I’m going to posit a simple hypothesis that can at least partially explain why people feel so bad that isn’t primarily material. 

The hypothesis is: Donald Trump is still a very important public figure; for different reasons this upsets people in ways that bleed into other aspects of our lives; and that is his design.

Obviously Trump doesn’t upset his supporters the way he does the rest of the country. They love him! But his effect on their attitude toward society is obvious and uncontroversial. Republican voters have been heavily primed by Trump and right-wing media to believe (or to tell pollsters) that everything about the world sucks the instant a Democrat takes power. Some of them are surely just good soldiers, and will say whatever they believe is helpful to the cause. But others are genuinely agitated because they believe Democrats stole the 2020 election or that deep-state sabotage unraveled his presidency. Others know he lost but are simply sore losers. Many in both camps believe Joe Biden has presided over a bunch of disastrous failures, because Trump, in his capacity as a high-profile public figure whom they trust and worship, keeps telling them that. 

Republicans may be energized to vote the bums out, but the vibes are still bad because Biden is president and they imagine threats to their way of life lurking everywhere.

But Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP is also very distressing to the 55-60 percent of Americans who see him rightly as a blight on the country and believe he should be a national pariah. 

They mobilized the largest protest movement in American history to resist the depredations of his presidency;

They voted in record numbers to end his governing trifecta in 2018, and did the same thing in 2020 to drive him from power;

They did these things successfully, in large part because life in Trump’s America felt to them like being trapped in a house with an abusive family member;

Then Trumped literally trapped them in their houses, including those who lived with actual abusers. 

And yet: 

Trump got more votes in 2020 than in 2016 and increased his share of the two-party vote;

In defeat, Trump attempted a coup d’etat, and nearly succeeded;

He was not swiftly brought to justice;

Senate Republicans refused to disqualify from seeking the presidency again;

His imitators were not chastened;

They continued to subvert elections and heap abuse upon his non-supporters, including leading Democrats, election workers, judges, and jurors; 

The Supreme Court, which he stole, eliminated the right to abortion;

On his orders, Republicans in Congress have subjected Biden to bitter obstruction, hostage taking, and slander, poisoning public opinion and bringing the country repeatedly to the brink of disaster.

The Trump resistance was called upon to end Trump’s fascist threat, and having done all they could with their diffuse power, Trump remains poised to overthrow U.S. democracy in a comeback.

Now, ask yourself: Do you feel good reflecting on that? Does it improve your vibe?

Much has been made of the fact that Biden fares most poorly among young people, who inhabit media milieus like TikTok where gloom goes viral and Biden is a constant source of mockery. What’s that got to do with Trump? Not much directly, but consider also: 

Trump and his online loyalists (domestic and foreign) feed and echo these same viral ideas constantly; 

Biden’s election created only short- to medium-run progress on issues like democracy protection, student loans, and climate change, all of which, young people are constantly reminded, will grind to a halt if Trump comes back to power. 

Donald Trump loves this more than anyone. He and his Republican allies don’t really try to hide that fomenting chaos and engaging in subterfuge and sabotage are their means. They’re quite open about the fact that making right-wing Americans feel besieged, and liberal Americans feel hopeless, are potent sources of their political viability.

Think one man couldn’t possibly have that much sway over the national mood? Well, imagine Donald Trump felt so betrayed by the official Republican Party that he decided to sabotage it, and he resolved to do this simply by dropping out of the race for president and turning his ire on Nikki Haley: “Joe Biden has been a disaster for the economy, but Republicans would be so much worse!” Nothing about material conditions would have changed. You’d probably feel better about things though. Who’d deny that such a development would have no effect on public opinion?

Trump is a blight on the United States. If he makes you feel dread every time he darkens your door, you probably already have an intuitive sense of how a specter can affect your sentiment about day-to-day life. 

A Re-elected Trump Will Unleash Unspeakable Cruelty Toward Immigrants. By Linda Chavez

Read time: 8 minutes

A Re-elected Trump Will Unleash Unspeakable Cruelty Toward Immigrants

His first-term crackdown is child’s play compared to his second term plans

Shutterstock. David Peinado Romero

It is fair to say that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly by whipping up anti-immigration hysteria. So it is hardly surprising that his campaign is dusting off the same playbook for 2024. Trump has already promised to round up asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants in what his hardline anti-immigration guru, Stephen Miller, promises would be “the most spectacular migration crackdown” in the nation’s history. Indeed, Trump and Miller want to scale-up by a factor of 10 the insultingly named Eisenhower era program, Operation Wetback. That program, considered a dark chapter in American history, swept up migrants in the Southwest who’d come to pick crops after World War II and deported them en masse.

Trump’s dreams would have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy and, even more importantly, constitute a gross violation of human rights. To understand what is at stake, some facts and history are in order.

Manufacturing a Crisis

When Donald Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, illegal border crossings were actually at a 50-year low. That year, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended only about 337,000 migrants, marking a steady decline since 2000 when apprehensions had peaked at almost 1.7 million. But that didn’t stop Trump from deploying racist tropes to depict a crisis on the border. Mexico, he accused, was not “sending their best” to the U.S. “They're sending people that have lots of problems. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.”

He promised to build a wall, delusionally asserting Mexico would pay for it. But that, ironically, only accelerated a flow of migrants hoping to enter before its construction. Analyzing historical data, it is clear that during the 2016 campaign, illegal border apprehensions increased by almost 25% and by fiscal year 2019, they had surged by more than 150%.  The pandemic and Trump’s implementation of emergency health measures such as Title 42 that returned migrants and would-be asylum seekers to Mexico without a hearing to which they were legally entitled brought the numbers down again in 2020.

The economic rebound that followed the end of the pandemic spurred a flood of new migration to the southern border—and not just from Mexico and Central America but from around the world. Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans fled political repression and collapsed economies; Haitians fled natural disasters and corruption that crippled the island. But others showed up by the thousands as well, including Afghans who had not made it out during the U.S. withdrawal, Ukrainians and Russians fleeing war, Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, and Chinese desperate to escape poverty, violence, and discrimination in their homelands. Our outdated immigration laws make it nearly impossible for immigrants who lack advanced degrees or close relatives in the U.S. to immigrate legally. As a result, many take their chances crossing our southern border without permission in the hopes they will evade detection.

But many of those who’ve come in the last two years have taken advantage of current asylum laws by turning themselves in when they cross the border. Under existing law, individuals may claim asylum only when they are present in the U.S., regardless of how they got here, and may even do so when they are already in the removal process.  

The Biden administration tried to modify the process by issuing regulations that would prevent individuals from claiming asylum at the southern border or in certain coastal areas unless they had first availed themselves of legal pathways to migrate or sought protection in a third country if they had traversed it on their way to the U.S.

Our Broken Immigration System

Meanwhile, the existing backlog of cases pending in immigration courts stands at nearly three million. But when courts can’t hear asylum cases in a timely manner, they have to release the migrants till their hearing is scheduled. This generates an incentive for migrants to simply to show up at the border, claim they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries and take their chances that they will be quickly released into the population to wait years before they must appear in court to defend their claims.

This, along with other push and pull factors, has resulted in, 2.4 million newcomers arriving in fiscal year 2023— numbers not seen since the early 20th Century, before the advent of broadscale American immigration restriction. Of course, the better solution would be to hire more immigration judges and process claims faster, and, most importantly, admit more legal immigrants. By one estimate we need at least 370,000 more immigrants than the approximately one million to whom we hand resident status annually just to offset the effects of an aging population. But Republicans want only to clamp down on immigration. Pre-Trump they at least used to say that they liked legal immigrants. Now they don’t want them either.

The result is a system that is broken, with politicians refusing to fix it, and a sense of chaos at the southern border. Predictably, a backlash has ensued. Republican leaders sensing that this is a political winner for them are rearing for a fight with the Biden administration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot just yesterday signed a new bill that allows state authorities to arrest unauthorized migrants. Given that immigration enforcement is a federal function, he is deliberately baiting the administration into suing his illegal plans and scoring political points.

Political Backlash = Trump’s Opportunity

But it’s not just MAGA states that are spooked. Democratic mayors from El Paso to New York to Chicago have complained that they simply cannot handle the unregulated flow of asylum seekers who end up in their cities.  Both Trump’s Republican backers and his Democratic critics—such as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira who blame immigration for alienating working class voters (even though there is precious little academic literature for such worries)—believe that this issue may once again put him in the Oval Office.

But once Trump returns in 2025, he is virtually guaranteeing an assault on every category of immigration. He will try and stop the flow of all asylum seekers. He will also try to drastically reduce, even totally slam shut, other channels for legal immigration, a radical move that he promised last time around but couldn’t fully implement.

Among the other channels he’ll close are the Temporary Protected Status program that 610,000 foreign nationals fleeing countries mired in war, natural disaster, or facing some other extraordinary circumstance are availing. He would also end humanitarian parole that the Biden administration has used to permit Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians to apply for entry from outside the U.S. so that they can be processed in an orderly fashion rather than showing up at the border to claim asylum. The program also saw a big drop in the number of migrants from these countries attempting to cross without permission. (Parole also ensures U.S. sponsors assume financial responsibility for parolees.) This was the primary vehicle that allowed 70,000 Afghans to come to the U.S. after being evacuated following the 2021 fall of Kabul, as well as admitting Ukrainians while the war with Russia rages in their country. MAGA forces in Congress have thwarted legislation to give these groups more permanent status, which will leave them vulnerable.

Trump would also, once again, end protections for Dreamers, young adults brought to the U.S. as children who’ve been given temporary legal status to live and work here. The Supreme Court stopped Trump’s previous attempt to revoke Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, largely on procedural grounds, but subsequently courts have ruled DACA is invalid unless Congress enacts the protections into law, leaving some 600,000 current participants subject to future deportation.

Some immigrants stripped of permission to live in the U.S. will leave on their own. But the vast majority who have put down roots here won’t. In all, Trump would attempt to remove some 12 million people, two-thirds of whom have lived here for a decade or more, often in households that include American spouses and children.

Cracking Down on the Huddled Masses

What would Trump’s plan to remove them look like in practice? According to extensive reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere, the Trump’s campaign envisions large scale raids across the country conducted by federal immigration enforcement agencies, supplemented by National Guard troops from Republican-controlled states. (Texas’ Abbot would go to town!) Detainees would be herded in tent encampments along the southern border—to be built with re-programmed military funds to avoid having to obtain Congressional approval or submitting to oversight—pending their deportation. Indeed, current negotiations over supplemental funding for Ukraine and Israel, include proposals to expand expedited removal of unauthorized immigrants without hearings before immigration courts. Under the proposals being discussed, expedited removal would set up the legal framework for Trump’s planned sweep.

These are the exact same methods used in “Operation Wetback” except on a much, much larger scale. That program removed an estimated 250,000 to 1.5 million people—even though thousands returned­ to Mexico before being apprehended as a media frenzy ensued. But the program resulted in many deaths, including 88 Mexicans who died from heat exposure while being detained.

Economic Devastation

Unauthorized immigrants reside heavily in just six states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, and, as of 2021, they constituted  almost 5% of the workforce nationally.  It is difficult to imagine the pain and disruption that Trump’s deportation scheme would unleash on immigrant communities across the country. Imagine small towns in, say, Texas, home to some 1.7 million unauthorized immigrants,  two-thirds of whom are employed adults and 37% are home owners. Whole communities would be routed, adults rounded up and sent to camps, their minor children, many of them citizens, put in state care, their employers left without workers.

Most of these unauthorized immigrants pay income and payroll taxes and all pay real estate and sales taxes as homeowners or renters and consumers. A mass deportation scheme would hollow out communities, leaving vacant houses and abandoned businesses as well as destroying individual lives and families. Donald Trump may relish the suffering of those he claims are “poisoning the blood of our country,” but most Americans would be horrified to see such a plan in action.

It's tempting to dismiss Trump’s rhetoric and to believe mass deportation on this scale and this level of cruelty in this land of immigrants. But the first Trump term already gave us a taste of what could happen.

We ignore what Trump says he intends to do at our own peril. Trump’s admiration for the likes of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping tells us something about his desire to assume authoritarian power—and he’ll use it “on Day One” to shut the border, as he told Sean Hannity during a recent interview.

But it’s the days after we most have to worry about.   

© The UnPopulist 2023

Follow The UnPopulist on X (UnPopulistMag), Facebook (The UnPopulist), Threads (UnPopulistMag), and Bluesky (unpopulist.bsky.social).

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Senior Fellow at the National Immigration Forum author and former director of public liaison in the Reagan White House. The views expressed are her own.

Bigots use AI to make Nazi memes on 4chan. Verified users post them on X. By Will Oremus

Read time: 8 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Bigots use AI to make Nazi memes on 4chan. Verified users post them on X.

The ecosystem for explicitly racist and antisemitic memes starts on a fringe site, but ends up in the mainstream through Elon Musk’s platform.

Updated December 14, 2023 at 1:43 p.m. EST|Published December 14, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

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It looks like a poster for a new Pixar movie. But the film’s title is “Dancing Israelis.” Billing the film as “a Mossad/CIA production,” the poster depicts a caricatured stereotype of a dancing Jewish man whose boot is knocking down the World Trade Center towers — a reference to antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Posted to X on Oct. 27 by a verified user with about 220,000 followers who bills himself as an “America-first patriot,” the image garnered about 190,000 views, including 8,000 likes and 1,500 reshares. Content moderators at X took no action against the tweet, and the user posted it again on Nov. 16, racking up an additional 194,000 views. Both tweets remained on the site as of Wednesday, even after researchers flagged them as hate posts using the social network’s reporting system.

An antisemitic post on Elon Musk’s X is not exactly news. But new research finds the site has emerged as a conduit to mainstream exposure for a fresh wave of automated hate memes, generated using cutting-edge AI image tools by trolls on the notorious online forum 4chan. The research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), shared with and verified by The Washington Post, finds that a campaign by 4chan members to spread “AI Jew memes” in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack resulted in 43 different images reaching a combined 2.2 million views on X between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, according to the site’s publicly displayed metrics.

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Examples of widely viewed posts include a depiction of U.S. Army soldiers kneeling before a Jewish man on a throne; Taylor Swift in a Nazi officer’s uniform sliding a Jewish man into an oven; and a Jewish man pulling the strings on a puppet of a Black man. The latter may be a reference to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which was cited as motivation by the 18-year-old white man who slaughtered 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y, grocery store in May 2022, and which Musk seemed to endorse in a tweet last month.

More than half of the posts were made by verified accounts, whose owners pay X a monthly fee for special status and whose posts are prioritized in users’ feeds by the site’s algorithms. The verified user who tweeted the image of U.S. Army soldiers bowing to a Jewish ruler, with a tweet claiming that Jews seek to enslave the world, ran for U.S. Senate in Utah as a Republican in 2018 and has 86,000 followers on X.

The proliferation of machine-generated bigotry, which 4chan users created using AI tools such as Microsoft’s Image Creator, calls into question recent claims by Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino that the company is cracking down on antisemitic content amid a pullback by major advertisers. In a Nov. 14 blog post, X said it had expanded its automated moderation of antisemitic content and provided its moderators with “a refresher course on antisemitism.”

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But the researchers said that of 66 posts they reported as hate speech on Dec. 7, X appeared to have taken action on just three as of Monday. Two of those three had their visibility limited, while one was taken down. The Post independently verified that the 63 others remained publicly available on X as of Wednesday, without any indication that the company had taken action on them. Most appeared to violate X’s hateful conduct policy.

Several of the same AI-generated images also have been posted to other major platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and Facebook, the researchers noted. But the CCDH said it focused on X because the site’s cutbacks on moderation under Musk have made it a particularly hospitable environment for explicitly hateful content to reach a wider audience. The Post’s own review of the 4chan archives suggested that X has been a favored platform for sharing the antisemitic images, though not the only platform.

X’s business is reeling after some of its largest advertisers pulled their ads last month. The backlash came in response to Musk’s antisemitic tweet and a report from another nonprofit, Media Matters for America, that showed posts pushing Nazi propaganda were running alongside major brands’ ads on the site.

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Among the companies to pull its spending was Disney, whose brand features prominently in many of the AI-generated hate memes now circulating on X. Speaking at a conference organized by the New York Times last month, Musk unleashed a profane rant against advertisers who paused their spending on X, accusing them of “blackmail” and saying they’re going to “kill the company.” He mentioned Disney’s CEO by name.

The most widely shared post in the CCDH’s research was a tweet that read “Pixar’s Nazi Germany,” with a montage of four AI-generated scenes from an imaginary animated movie, depicting smiling Nazis running concentration camps and leading Jewish children and adults into gas chambers (Pixar is owned by Disney). It was one of the few posts in the study that had been labeled by X’s content moderators, with a note that read, “Visibility limited: this Post (sic) may violate X’s rules against Hateful Conduct.” Even so, as of Wednesday, it had been viewed more than half a million times, according to X’s metrics.

Another verified X account has posted dozens of the AI hate memes, including faux Pixar movie posters that feature Adolf Hitler as a protagonist, without any apparent sanction from the platform.

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Musk, the world’s richest person, has sued both Media Matters for America and the Center for Countering Digital Hate over their research of hate speech on X. After the latest wave of criticism over antisemitism, Musk announced strict new policies against certain pro-Palestinian slogans. And he visited Israel to declare his support for the country, broadcasting his friendly meeting with the country’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yaccarino, who was appointed CEO by Musk in May, said in a November tweet that X has been “extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination.” The company did not respond to an email asking whether the antisemitic AI memes violate its policies.

4chan is an anonymous online messaging board that has long served as a hub for offensive and extremist content. When Musk bought Twitter last fall, 4chan trolls celebrated by flooding the site with racist slurs. Early in October of this year, members of 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” message board began teaching and encouraging one another to generate racist and antisemitic right-wing memes using AI image tools, as first reported by the tech blog 404 Media.

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The 4chan posts described ways to evade measures intended to prevent people from generating offensive content. Those included a “quick method” using Microsoft’s Image Creator, formerly called Bing Image Creator, which is built around OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 software and viewed as having flimsier restrictions on sensitive content.

“If you add words you think will trip the censor, space them out from the part of the prompt you are working on,” one 4chan post advised, describing how to craft text prompts that would yield successful results. “Example: rabbi at the beginning, big nose at the end.”

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the focus among 4chan users on antisemitic content seemed to sharpen. Numerous “AI Jew memes” threads emerged with various sub-themes, such as the “Second Holocaust edition” and the “Ovens Run All Day edition.”

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Microsoft’s director of communications, Caitlin Roulston, said in a statement, “When these reports surface, we take the appropriate steps to address them, as we’ve done in the past. … As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in unintended ways, and any repeated attempts to produce content that goes against our policy guidelines may result in loss of access to the service.” Microsoft did not say how many people have been denied access to its imaging program because they violated its rules.

The ability to generate extremist imagery using digital tools isn’t new. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop have long allowed people to manipulate images without moderating the content they can produce from it.

But the ability to create complex images from scratch in seconds, whether in the form of a Pixar movie poster or a photorealistic war image, with only a few lines of text is different. And the ability of overt hate accounts to be verified and amplified on X has made spreading such messages easier than ever, said Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO. “Clearly the cost of producing and disseminating extremist material has never been lower.”

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Sara Aniano, disinformation analyst at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said AI seems to be ushering in “the next phase of meme culture.”

The goal of extremists in sharing AI hate memes to mainstream social media platforms is to “redpill” ordinary people, meaning to lead them down a path of radicalization and conspiracism, Aniano added. “You can always expect this rhetoric to be in fringe spaces. but they love it when it escapes those spaces.”

Not all of the AI memes flourishing on X are antisemitic. Ashlea Simon, chair of the United Kingdom’s far-right Britain First party, has taken to posting apparently AI-generated images that target Muslim migrants, suggesting that they want to rape white women and “replace our peoples.”

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The party and some of its leaders, boosted by Donald Trump on Twitter in 2017, had been banned from Twitter for hate speech under the previous ownership. But Musk reinstated them soon after buying the company, then gave the party its gold “official organization” verification label in April.

While Musk has said he’s personally against antisemitism, he has at times defended the presence of antisemitic content on X. “Free speech does at times mean that someone you don’t like is saying something you don’t like,” he said in his conversation with Netanyahu in September. “If you don’t have that, then it’s not free speech.”

Ahmed said the problem is that social media platforms, without careful moderation, tend to amplify extreme and offensive viewpoints, because they treat people’s shocked and outraged responses as a signal of engagement.

“If you’re Jewish, or if you’re Muslim, and every day you open up X and you see new images at the top of your timeline that depict you as a bloodsucking monster, it makes you feel like maybe these platforms, but also society more broadly, might be against you,” he said.

Trump won't make lobster tails cheaper. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Dec. 17, 2023

11 - 14 minutes

Last Wednesday, we got an amusing intervention into the “real economic pain” vs “bad media vibes” debate from Sean Trende, who observed that it now costs about $125 dollars to have a multi-course restaurant meal featuring steak and lobster tails delivered to your home.

I think this illustrates an important subsidiary point in this dialogue: Leftists talking down the economy does not help progressives causes. Trende is not a leftist. He’s a Republican who wants Joe Biden to lose the election, Mike Johnson to expand his House majority, and Republicans to gain control of the senate. Like most partisans, he has sincerely held and deep-seated beliefs about American politics that have nothing to do with the ups and downs of the business cycle, and he believes — rightly — that emphasizing the negative aspects of the Biden’s economy will serve those ends. And that’s what he’s doing here.

Looking on the brighter side, I think what we’re seeing here, at least in part, is life in a society where incomes and spending power are high. Like everyone else, I prefer a cheap lobster tail to a pricey one. But we’re talking about a scenario in which a restaurant is charging its customers a high price for meal because it believes its customers can and will pay.

Inflation-adjusted spending on food services and accommodations is at an all-time high. We saw something quite different during the Great Recession — people spent less on restaurant meals in 2008 than they did in 2007, and restaurant spending fell even further in 2009. It rose in 2010, but was still below the 2007 level. Not until the third quarter of 2011 did inflation-adjusted restaurant spending exceeded its Q4 2007 level.

I don’t think it makes sense for me to tell people how to feel about the economy.

What I can say is that there’s a clear difference between “people are so flush with cash that they are dining out more than ever despite higher prices” and “people are so squeezed financially that they’re cutting back on dining out,” and to me, the former feels like a better economic situation than the latter. If you feel differently, that’s fine — you do you. But if your idea is that you want to inspire people to be frustrated with longstanding features of the American social and economic model and interested in advocating instead for a more comprehensive European-style welfare state, then I don’t think this whining about the cost of DoorDash is really going to help. If Democrats defy the polls, win back the House, hold the Senate, and keep Joe Biden in the Oval Office, they will expand the welfare state at least a little bit (maybe more, depending on what happens). If they lose, Republicans will pare it back to some extent (maybe a lot, depending on what happens).

But if you have no ideological motives and just sincerely wants to pay less for lobster tails at Outback Steakhouse, it’s important to understand that electing Donald Trump isn’t going to help with that.

Most of the attention paid to immigration in recent years has focused on the over-clogged system for dealing with people arriving with no visa at the southern border and claiming asylum status.

This generates a fundamental dilemma for policymakers:

    You can let people with asylum claims work, which is economically beneficial but incentivizes more people to come make asylum claims.

    You can ban them from working, which creates a burden on public services and/or encourages the claimants to do illegal stuff to get money. 

This is all very bad, I agree with people who are frustrated with this situation, and I will only note that I wrote way back in March 2021 that Democrats should admit to themselves that they didn’t particularly want to welcome a flood of asylum claims and adjust policy accordingly.

Trump’s immigration vision, by contrast, is a lot more expansive than “we should shut down asylum claims,” though it does include that. For a flavor, here’s Steven Miller, trying to sound like a badass:

    “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

What does this mean in practice? According to Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage, and Jonathan Swan, Trump wants to do the following:

    Revoke Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole for over 600,000 people who legally reside in the United States but are not green card holders.

    “[S]cour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year,” obtaining the logistical resources to achieve this by “reassign[ing] other federal agents and deputiz[ing] local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.”

    “To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.”

Their piece on this is very good and looks at the issue primarily through a lens of authoritarianism and the rule of law.

What I want people worried about the price of lobster tails to do, though, is think about it through the lens of economics. Trump is talking about spending a bunch of money on some big construction and federal personnel undertakings. That’s going to tend to be inflationary. Not necessarily massively so. But directionally, building a series of huge detention camps raises the price of construction labor and construction materials. The way the National Guard works is that personnel mostly hold full-time civilian jobs and volunteer for the Guard part-time. Mobilizing them reduces the labor supply available in the civilian economy and tends to worsen inflation. Not a huge deal, obviously, but the sign of the change is clearly inflationary.

But the big impact comes from getting rid of the immigrants themselves.

Even though many people pretend to have a big disagreement about this, it’s pretty clear that the economic impact of foreign-born labor is to raise GDP, raise GDP per capita (by a smaller amount), and shift relative wages. In other words, if you made it easier for foreign-born doctors to move here and practice, then the average wage of native-born doctors would fall and the average wage of everyone would rise, because the price of medical services would fall.

So what do immigrant workers do? Well, lots of things, but more than anything else they work on farms. Of course, Trump isn’t promising to deport all immigrants, but unauthorized immigrants are especially concentrated in farm work. For those with TPS who Trump wants to deport, construction is the number one sector and food service is number two.

The absence of those agricultural workers is going to have two impacts on food prices. One is that because the availability of labor is a factor in determining how much land goes into cultivation, fewer workers means fewer crops will be grown and food will be more expensive. The other is that the cost basis of producing the food that is grown will be higher, leading to higher prices.

Restaurants like Outback Steakhouse will be dealing with higher food costs and higher labor costs due to their smaller labor force. Again, prices will rise.

You could argue for framing this is a policy success story. I don’t believe that hostility to immigration is driven by economic concerns, but some people claim that it is. If you want to raise the wages of farm workers relative to the wages of cops, teachers, nurses, and factory and office workers, then this mass deportation will accomplish that. It’s arguably a form of agrarian populism. And again, it’s not my place to tell people how to feel. If that’s what you want, that’s what you want. But if what you want is a cheaper meal from Outback, this policy mix is not going to give it to you. The good news for people who eat food, of course, is that agricultural commodities are traded in a global marketplace. So it’s not like you’re going to have a scenario where Americans are all starving due to lack of farm workers. We can import. But of course, Trump hates trade. His plan for 10 percent across the board tariffs — tariffs not just on food but on agricultural machinery, fertilizer, and other farm inputs — isn’t going to make food cheaper.

I feel a little bit silly having spent so many words explaining why electing Donald Trump won’t help Sean Trende get cheaper lobster delivered to his house, since as I said at the top, it’s pretty clear that Sean Trende doesn’t particularly care about this.

But I do think it’s important for people who don’t want Trump to become president again to ask this question, both of Republicans in your life who are complaining about the price of Outback and of political (not economic) journalists who mention inflation. Some people are voting for Trump because they want more restrictions on abortion and fewer on handguns. God bless. But some of those people are out there telling the world that if you want cheaper steaks, you should vote for Trump. But should you? I think this is a more important and ultimately more definable question than “is the economy actually bad or is it just bad vibes?”

The economy is what it is. It has certain features. The results of the election could alter some of those features. If Joe Biden wins, for example, the relative price of prescription drugs will fall, whereas if he loses, Republicans will try to rescind the policies responsible for that.

Will Donald Trump make your DoorDash cheaper? I’m deeply skeptical.

To be clear, I can absolutely think of a conservative policy idea that would accomplish this: steep cuts to Social Security and Medicare. These two programs exist to help older people live comfortable lives without working. That sounds like a nice idea to a lot of people, but it reduces the supply of workers available to do unpleasant and unglamorous jobs. Now, Trump says he doesn’t want to do this; he says he’s just going to cut taxes without addressing the major elements of spending, raise the budget deficit, and push interest rates and inflation up. Personally, I would rather address public discontent with food prices by expanding legal immigration, but that’s not Trump’s bag.

So what’s the plan? Trump is not a particularly rigorous thinker, but it’s worth asking the question. A big thing Trump is doing now is pretending gasoline costs $8/gallon when the correct number ranges from about $2.50 in Texas to about $4.60 in California.

This is a convenient lie for Trump, not just because it paints an unrealistically bleak portrait of the national economy, but because he pretends to have a plan to address it by ending Biden’s fake crushing of the American oil and gas industry. The high price of groceries, by contrast, is real.

But does he even have a fake plan on this? Ask people about it and see what they have to say. Because if you are sincerely motivated by worries about the price of food, you should vote for a candidate who will make it better. And if you’re just bullshitting, the people you’re talking to should know that.

Before Elon, Twitter was an idealist’s workplace

Before Elon, Twitter was an idealist’s workplace

Extremely softcore

Twitter put people over profits, until it didn’t.

The old, pre-Elon Twitter was a workplace full of idealists who believed they were making the public conversation healthier. But were they just naive?

By: Zoë Schiffer

Illustrations: Charles Desmarais & James Kerr

Dec 12, 2023, 11:00 PM JST

n

In

the early ’10s, Twitter was at the height of its power. The company had yet to turn a profit, but it had played a crucial role in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, which was nearly as effective for recruiting. While it would never reach the scale of its competitors, the platform dominated in terms of cultural and political relevance. Twitter was fast, its reach was far, and its influence was shaping the world in ways that seemed progressive. 

Menotti Minutillo, an engineer from Long Island with dark hair and a warm smile, was working as an analyst at Goldman Sachs when he decided to apply for a job at Twitter. At Goldman, there was no illusion about what employees were there to do. The company’s mission was to make money. Minutillo worked punishing hours with a near-constant fear of losing his job. During the financial crisis, as banks raced to cut costs, employees joked that executives were shrinking the size of the coffee cups to save a few cents on amenities. 

Minutillo was struck by the relaxed, collegiate atmosphere that greeted him at Twitter’s headquarters when he flew to San Francisco for an interview. There, cold brew ran freely and granola bars tumbled off the kitchenette shelves. Employees worked hard, but they didn’t work all the time. “It wasn’t like laziness, it was more laissez-faire,” Minutillo said. As summer 2012 drew to a close, Twitter offered Minutillo a job as a program manager on the information security team, and he accepted. 

“Twitter took the happiness of its employees seriously, almost to a fault,” said a former engineer who joined nearly a decade after Minutillo. “And that appealed to me, frankly. I didn’t want to work 80 hours a week. I liked the idea of spending time with my kids.”

While much has been made of Twitter’s tangible amenities — the salad bar, the yoga rooms, the Eames chairs — what set Twitter apart was always the intangibles: the accessibility of its executives, the cultural influence of the platform, and the overwhelming sense that, for better or worse, money wasn’t the focus. 

(“We weren’t communists,” a former executive told me. “We had houses and mortgages like everyone else.”) 

Still, many employees appreciated the fact that, particularly in recent years, Twitter focused on improving the health of online conversations rather than growth at all costs. That might sound naive for a business, but at least for a time, the company embodied the idealistic promise of Silicon Valley: that you could get paid to make the world a better place.

“We were at Twitter because of the mission.”

a section break image of a twitter bird

hauna

Shauna

Wright was a Twitter power user. As @goldengateblond, she had well over 300,000 followers, which she’d amassed from tweeting constantly (and, in the eyes of some Republicans, controversially) about politics. 

In 2018, she direct messaged one of her followers, Twitter’s chief marketing officer and head of people, Leslie Berland. “Hi Leslie!” she wrote. “I hope you’ll excuse me getting all up in your DMs when we’ve never actually met…But damn, WHAT DOES A GIRL WHO LOVES YOUR COMPANY and REALLY REALLY WANTS TO WORK THERE need to do?”

“Shauna!” Berland replied. “I’m so, so glad you DMed me…”

The following month, Twitter hired Wright as a content strategist. 

Wright wasn’t sure if her following would be an asset or a liability at Twitter. CEO Jack Dorsey seemed increasingly sensitive to accusations of political bias. A few years earlier, Wright had been interviewing for a job at a utility company when they asked if she’d take her Twitter account private. “Any place that isn’t comfortable with me tweeting is a place I don’t want to be,” she said. 

Luckily for Wright, one of Twitter’s core values was to communicate fearlessly to build trust. Employees were given lots of latitude to speak their minds both inside and outside the office. While Facebook had an employee-only version of the app, Twitter’s employee-only version was the same public Twitter everyone saw. 

“They gave me absolute carte blanche to do whatever I wanted to do on Twitter,” Wright said. 

Like many Twitter employees, Wright didn’t take the job for the money. Twitter didn’t pay as well as Apple or Netflix. But for workers like Wright who used (and loved) the service, there was no comparison. “Don’t get me wrong, we were spoiled. You could choose between six to seven different cuisines at lunch,” she explained. “But salary-wise, we could’ve gone somewhere else and made more money. We were at Twitter because of the mission.”

Around the time Wright joined, Twitter’s culture was changing. The company was in the middle of a heated debate about content moderation. Despite all evidence to the contrary, conservatives were convinced that Twitter was “shadowbanning” their accounts. The Bay Area’s tech workforce was famously left-leaning and outspoken about politics. It was easy to see how the right wing had become paranoid. 

Meanwhile, the other side of the aisle was unsatisfied, too. Democrats were equally appalled, arguing that the platform wasn’t doing enough to combat misinformation, including from then-President Donald Trump. The vibe inside Twitter grew more tense as employees disagreed about how and when to intervene. 

“We became a simulacrum of our platform,” said a former high-ranking employee. “We became the public. People were exaggerating their views, not listening, and forgetting that our role was to facilitate the conversation. We didn’t have a good sense of where our work begins and ends.”

“People were like, ‘Why aren’t you pulling Trump’s account?’” Wright recalled. “On the inside, we were like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? We’re pulling our hair out; we agree with you.’”

a section break image of a twitter bird

ack

Jack

Dorsey sat onstage at the TED2019 conference in Vancouver. The Twitter CEO was sporting a black beanie, a nose ring, and a long beard the approximate texture and weight of a tumbleweed. The event had all the trappings of a fireside chat — Dorsey perched casually on a modern couch across from TED CEO Chris Anderson and current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers — but in reality, it was the culmination of a monthslong apology tour. In interviews, in tweets, and now onstage, Dorsey reached for an earnest mea culpa and landed on a series of meandering excuses. 

Jack appeared to be miserable, like he needed a friend in the worst way

“What would be your top worry about where things are right now?” asked Anderson. “The health of the conversation,” Dorsey responded without hesitation. “Our purpose is to serve the public conversation, and we have seen a number of attacks on it. We’ve seen abuse, we’ve seen harassment, we’ve seen manipulation, automatic and human coordination, misinformation … What worries me most is our ability to address it in a systematic way that is scalable.” 

Roger McNamee, a tech investor who attended the conference, thought Dorsey’s speech fell spectacularly flat. “Jack appeared to be miserable, like he needed a friend in the worst way.” 

But some tech workers were inspired. Many still wanted to believe that social media could be a force for good. Facebook’s reputation had been spoiled since 2018’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, one of the largest data controversies in history, fueling Trump’s presidential campaign. Mark Zuckerberg might be willing to move fast and break things, but here was Dorsey, publicly committing to going slow and getting things right. The attributes that later made Twitter an easy target for Elon Musk made it an attractive workplace in 2019. What Dorsey had built felt thoughtful and idealistic, even as the CEO mumbled through his TED interview with vague promises and broad pronouncements.

“That was the moment that convinced many of us to come work at Twitter,” a former health researcher told me.

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January 2020, more than 4,000 Twitter employees converged on Houston, Texas, for a space-themed offsite event. Over the course of three days, there was a party at the space center, drinks at the Houston Astros stadium, and a panel discussion with Jameela Jamil and writer Shea Serrano.

“The work you do directly contributes to our ability to reach our followers in a very personal way,” said astronaut Jessica Meir on the opening day, her image projected on a giant screen from her location inside the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth’s orbit. She let go of the mic, which disconcertedly floated toward a colleague. “From all of us at the International Space Station, thanks for what you do, and have a great night,” another astronaut said. Twitter employees cheered.  

In 2017, Houston was devastated by catastrophic floods caused by Hurricane Harvey. Twitter was critical to the relief efforts. If the offsite seemed ostentatious, even wasteful, Leslie Berland promised the company was offsetting its carbon footprint and eschewing single-use water bottles and plastic straws. 

Dorsey closed out the festivities by FaceTiming a special guest onstage. “Give us some direct feedback, critique, what are we doing poorly, what could we be doing better, and what’s your hope for our potential as a service?” he asked his friend Elon Musk. “If you were running Twitter — by the way, do you want to run Twitter? — what would you do?” Musk suggested differentiating between bots and real users. 

It was the last time Twitter’s global teams would ever meet in person. During the pandemic, Twitter went all in on remote work. The offsite was a pre-pandemic phenomenon, a zero-interest-rate phenomenon, and certainly a pre-Musk phenomenon. 

We all know what happened next. In 2021, Dorsey stepped down, and the following year, Musk bought the company for $44 billion. 

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recall Musk’s arrival at Twitter with the top of a porcelain sink in tow, likely because it was a stunt designed to be a viral joke. But less remembered is that he brought his son X Æ A-Xii to the office that day, too. In fact, the toddler was around Twitter headquarters frequently during the early months of the acquisition. Tweeps knew Musk had arrived to make Twitter a more aggressive business and realign the company around protecting free speech. That would mean upending a lot of Twitter’s existing culture. But did it mean the benefits would go away? The perks?

It seemed deliberate that Musk was bringing his kid to the office. Employees relayed to me a scene of him sitting in a conference room at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters talking to a group of engineers, X Æ A-Xii perched contentedly on his knee. The toddler was watching something on an iPad. Then he started to fuss — he needed help with the volume. Musk complied. X Æ A-Xii settled down again, satisfied. It was a small moment, a nonevent compared to the chaos of the next few months, and yet, to those present, it was humanizing. Whatever else Musk was — an erratic boss, a Twitter troll, a visionary — he was also a parent.

I was in a vulnerable moment when I heard this story, having recently had a child of my own. I looked up videos of Musk at a conference carrying X Æ A-Xii. “He seems like a good dad,” I mused.

Twitter executives snapped me back to reality. “We were in meetings at like 11, 12 at night, and X Æ A-Xii would just be there…” one told me, noting that, while the situation might have been ideal for Musk, who dislikes being alone, it was probably less ideal for a toddler.

Later, Musk would slash the company’s parental leave policy from 20 weeks to the legal minimum plus a two-week top-off.

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Menotti Minutillo was drawn in by Twitter’s inclusive atmosphere, Musk had the opposite response. The term “psychological safety” made him recoil, according to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. 

“We realized we worked under capitalism.”

In November, he was looking around the office when he came across a supply closet that housed stacks of shirts branded with the phrase “#StayWoke.” The swag dated back to 2016, two years after police shot and killed Michael Brown. In 2014, Dorsey flew to Ferguson, Missouri, to join the protests. The platform had been instrumental in exposing police violence and allowing organizers to spread the word, helping turn Black Lives Matter into a national movement. 

When Musk discovered the T-shirts, he was ecstatic. To him, the tees weren’t artifacts of Twitter’s cultural and political influence. They were proof of the company’s left-wing bias. “Found in closet at Twitter HQ [for real] ” he tweeted triumphantly, alongside a video of the shirts. 

Nine days later, Musk laid off Shauna Wright, along with roughly half the company. She wasn’t sure if the CEO knew that she was @goldengateblond, but it seemed clear that his views on free speech didn’t extend to his own workforce. Dozens of employees would soon be fired after criticizing Musk, either internally on Slack or publicly on Twitter. “I knew my days as an employee were numbered,” Wright said.

Less than two weeks later, Musk sent his first companywide email as CEO, ending remote work. “The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed,” he wrote. Soon after, he gave his remaining staffers an ultimatum: commit to being “extremely hardcore” or leave. Minutillo chose the latter. “I’m not going to fight for my job in a Google Form,” he told me. 

Wright now posts on Meta’s Twitter rival, Threads, where she’s trying to rebuild her following. “It’s been so hard to watch all the work we did to keep people safer and keep the conversation healthier be systematically destroyed in such a short period of time,” she said. 

It’s hard to imagine the platform reaching the political and cultural relevance it once had, and it’s even harder to see how it could be the same force for progressive social movements, especially as its new owner touts a free speech policy that boils down to his retweeting antisemitic conspiracies. Dorsey had deluded himself into thinking Twitter could be the utopian ideal of a tech company. Employees wanted to believe it could last. 

“When Elon Musk took over, it was like the mask slipped,” said an engineer who left just before the billionaire’s arrival. “We realized we worked under capitalism.”

The Year Twitter DiedThe Great Scrollback of AlexandriaGoodbye to all that Harassment, by Sarah JeongHow Twitter Broke the News, by Nilay Patel

Editors Kevin Nguyen and Sarah Jeong Senior creative director William Joel Art direction and design Studio Elana Schlenker Illustrators James Kerr, Erik Carter, Charles Desmarais, and Rui Pu Engineer Graham MacAree Editorial operations Kara Verlaney Engagement editor Esther Cohen Copy editors Liz Hickson and Adia Watts Sound design Andrew Marino Creative director Kristen Radtke Fact-checker Becca Laurie Editor-in-chief Nilay PatelPublisher Helen Havlak