One of the most important political developments of recent years is the surge of the Tech Right. The conservative-leaning Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is pouring unprecedented sums into the midterm elections, helping to prop up a dangerous Trumpism at a moment when it is weak. The crypto industry is taking regulatory capture to new heights. And Elon Musk’s X is poisoning the public conversation.

I once believed that tech billionaires entering the Republican coalition would take it in a more fact-based and less populist direction. This did not happen. There is a bitter irony in the fact that adding smart people to the coalition did not raise the collective intelligence of the movement, and may have even made it dumber.

But by understanding what went wrong, we may be able to begin working toward a political future that is less acrimonious and more pragmatic once the Trump era is over.

I speak as someone who had a front-row seat to Silicon Valley’s shift toward conservatism, and had a role to play in that change. I was the first writer to popularize the term “Tech Right,” in my newsletter. Having long believed that conservatism had a human capital problem and was infected by paranoia, conspiracy theories, and a belief in fake news, I thought that self-made entrepreneurs with backgrounds in science could only make things better. In my newsletter article, I predicted that they would push the conservative movement toward more pro-market and technocratic approaches. I was told by a major Silicon Valley figure that a former congressional leader had optimistically shared my article in a group chat filled with prominent tech entrepreneurs, encouraging them to help right a Republican Party that had gone in the wrong direction.

I was able to see the rise of the Tech Right early based not only on what I read in the news but on personal connections I had built. Although I have no background in business or software, my conservative writing had caught the eyes of some of the most famous names in the industry. My work was praised by Elon Musk, I had done podcasts with the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and my 2023 book included blurbs from Peter Thiel and David Sacks. In some cases, admiration from afar turned into close personal relationships. At one point, New York magazine even declared me “an intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right.” Through group chats, I could observe how individuals in these circles thought about current events, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis.

Before long, I began to feel uneasy about what was happening. I’d thought that conspiracy theories were increasingly popular on the right because they were being pushed by less educated voters in the coalition. But I noticed that many members of the Tech Right, if not embracing the most extreme forms of misinformation, were still confident that there was something suspicious about the 2020 election and the scientific consensus on mRNA vaccines. Talking them out of such views was difficult. They trusted me — at least for a while. But they didn’t seem to trust anyone else offering mainstream perspectives on hot-button issues.

In time, they became passionate conspiracists. And they had little interest in acquiring accurate information. Having decided, due to political disagreements, that journalists and experts could not be trusted, the brilliant minds of the Tech Right were content to do what any ordinary partisan might — go to sources that were much more inaccurate and biased than the media they detested, many of them random social media accounts.

Earlier this year, Andreessen revealed that he gets all his information from old books, podcasts, AI models, and X. Conspicuously missing from the list is any direct text-based consumption of news that goes through normal journalistic procedures — a remarkable state of affairs for someone so influential in American politics. Rather than placing a limit on conspiratorial and demagogic thinking on the right, Silicon Valley has encouraged it.

There was a time when I found taking a similarly oppositional attitude toward established authority justifiable. I agreed with many on the Tech Right that the political class had overreacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and that newly prominent left-wing ideas on topics such as race and sexuality were both misguided and dangerous for society. Yet I was never under the impression that this meant the MAGA movement or popular podcasts were more trustworthy than actual experts on most issues. The ability to maintain such a balanced perspective turned out to be much rarer than I imagined.

DOGE was the culmination of the anti-intellectual atmosphere that conservatives in tech landed in and amplified. Elon Musk’s signature government initiative was horrifying to watch from the perspective of someone who actually believes in the mission of reducing the size and scope of government. Throughout Washington, there are knowledgeable scholars who have thought carefully about how to go about making government smaller and more efficient. But because they spend their days writing detailed policy papers rather than finding ways to go viral on social media, none of them were consulted. Elon Musk, who apparently had his political worldview shaped by what he saw in his X feed, was happy to claim victory anytime he took a chainsaw to a government program, when in fact his willy-nilly cuts managed to decrease state capacity while failing to reduce spending in any meaningful way.

I eventually determined that the lesson of the Tech Right’s sad trajectory is that none of us are all that smart on our own. The only way one can expect to have reasonable opinions on political and social issues is to be embedded in a knowledge-producing ecosystem. That doesn’t mean only journalists and academics can be informed. But it does mean that those who reject educational and media institutions are destined to live in ignorance.

As important as intelligence may be for domain-specific tasks, it can easily be used to engage in motivated reasoning and justify false beliefs. Smart, talented people from outside the institutions are not going to solve the problems society faces simply because of their own unique abilities.

To solve our problems, there is no hope other than rebuilding the political culture so it can incorporate criticism and feedback. As we enter the final years of the Trump era, what remains of our established institutions should reckon with how censoriousness and ideological extremism fueled a backlash, while their critics need to work to reform those institutions rather than become cheerleaders for populist ignorance.

It’s not news that stupid people are stupid. But one feature of populist movements is that the attitudes, beliefs, and aesthetics of more excitable and less thoughtful members of the public end up in control.

When I saw anti-vaxx sentiment emerge on the right in 2021, for example, I was expecting smarter conservatives to at most tolerate it as a necessary evil one had to accept as part of engaging in coalitional politics. I never thought that they would come to sympathize with the anti-vaxxers, if not turn into enthusiastic anti-vaxxers themselves. It was the same with the question of denying the 2020 election. Neither of these positions would smart people have come up with on their own. They were either derived from the ignorant masses, in the case of anti-vaxx, or things Trump himself was saying, in the case of election denialism.

I realized at that point how little of a barrier intelligence was against picking up brain worms if you’re in a poisoned intellectual environment. I guess we should’ve known that from watching the left over the years. But I thought smarter conservatives had been selected to at least some extent for their independence of thought, and also that it was easier to be conned by fancy-looking academic journals than MAGA moms, Nick Shirley, and anonymous X accounts with frog avatars. Those who had a background in science and tech in particular might be expected to bring a fresh perspective, rather than assimilate to their new surroundings. Buying into nonsense you read in prestigious newspapers or see promoted by scientific institutions is a lot more understandable than just being influenced by hysterical nobodies on social media. The thought of an intelligent person taking ideas from the latter fills me with revulsion.

For me, adopting a politics of anti-populism means placing less emphasis on individual intelligence than I did before, and more on establishing and maintaining healthy epistemic standards. Less educated and informed voters are bad at thinking, but their greatest danger is in the fact that their ideas infect others.

This is partly a question of attitude and identity. As a thoughtful person, you should have absolute contempt for the populist style of knowledge acquisition. Some on the right came to hate liberals so much that it left little room for any other psychological dynamics to play a role in developing their scientific beliefs and political attitudes. My hatreds were always diversified, so I didn’t fall into the same trap.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

It is important to note that Greer rejects the label of white nationalist. To him, though, this rejection simply implies that he accepts the American system and doesn’t aspire to form an ethnostate. However, this is precisely what I would call a worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy. Why else consider every single form of immigration a threat, and why else should anti-white racism, especially after the vibe shift, remain such a high political priority? Greer doesn’t explain, but it all makes sense in the context of a racialist worldview.

To Greer, the victory chronicled in Whitepill means that today we can just call this conservatism. It follows that white identitarianism has so successfully swept the Right that Greer doesn’t even feel the need to make the first-order case for his beliefs.

But that leaves him vulnerable to all sorts of counterarguments (which, again, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging). Even as white identitarianism has ascended, one justification after another for limiting immigration has fallen by the wayside. It was once said new arrivals would boost crime. But crime has consistently fallen – despite some localized disorder and anecdotes that the Trump 2024 campaign pointed to as representative of the effects of immigration – except for a brief spike beginning in 2020 that was driven by higher rates of violence among inner-city natives.

Then there is the argument about migrants pushing the electorate to the Left. In her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole, Ann Coulter argued that nonwhites can be expected to vote Democratic indefinitely into the future; hence, conservatives had to close the border if they hoped to win on any other issue. In 2024, however, naturalized immigrants may well have voted majority-Republican. Now, conservatives are reduced to complaining about competition for tech jobs, despite tech workers not making up any significant part of their coalition, and the American tech industry being such an overwhelming success that it is powering the rest of the economy and putting us at the forefront of the most important industry in the world.

Some of the MAGA faithful may not see such points clearly, but Greer does. Still, he refuses to intellectually tackle them. Instead, the emotional response to immigration comes first, and justifications are simply put forward on an ad hoc basis. As the intellectual case for restrictionism gets weaker, conservative attachment to nativism only becomes more firmly entrenched.

Read the whole thing here.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

1. Tell the story accurately, in which case the audience will hate the protagonist and not be able to relate to him at all

2. Tell the story with a modern twist in order to make it palatable

Christopher Nolan made choice number two. But I don’t think it was much of a choice at all. While some on the right have criticized the film for its multiracial casting, another kind of argument says that the movie made Odysseus too much like a veteran suffering from PTSD.

I personally did find the forced diversity ridiculous. The movie left me wondering why you wouldn’t just go all the way with it and reflect the demographics of the world, or even the United States. Maybe 80% of the actors in The Odyssey are of European descent. There is something to be said for historical accuracy, which would require it to be 100%. But if Nolan really had the courage of his convictions and thought race doesn’t matter, why even have a white majority? Take an explicit stand the way Hamilton did, and discard white domination completely. Make it a third Indian and Chinese, reflecting the demographics of humanity. Instead, we got this political compromise. Keep it as a “white” story, while being able to at the same time say you checked some diversity boxes. This is a marketing choice, but artistically it makes no sense. The Elliot Page thing is too ridiculous to even be worthy of comment; you can just refer to any right-wing X account to get my take on that.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

One casting decision I did like was having Jon Bernthal as Menelaus. He looks and acts like a Fast & Furious character, which makes sense for a Bronze Age Greek involved in a love triangle. But sorry, I cannot approve of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen. Go ahead and cancel me, I don’t find her attractive.

On the film’s embrace of a more sensitive Odysseus, here is Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books:

As this resounding speech echoed in my ears, it occurred to me that it sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer—who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies—but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. This tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit, seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways. Speaking to the Times on the eve of his movie’s release, Nolan acknowledged how, as he read various translations of the Odyssey, he realized that it was the “ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”

But whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer. Is his new vehicle for Odysseus’s tale impressive in its visual impact and distinctive in its structural ingenuity? Yes. But is its “essential” Homeric? On that I’ll let Penelope have the last word: “The structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.”

See also Scott Greer for a similar take. I agree that Odysseus having feelings of shame and regret is not in any way consistent with the source material. He is haunted by all the people slaughtered at Troy and believes that sending his enemies the wooden horse was dishonorable and violated the laws of Zeus. Throughout his adventures, he has to deceive his men for the greater good, and this causes clear distress. The war is generally seen as containing very little glory in the collective memory. Instead of voluntarily signing up in order to gain honor, men are conscripted, including among the aristocrats, and even the winners end up dead or damaged and feeling betrayed by their leaders.

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Knowing this was coming was an unusual experience, and it served as a lesson in how much power journalists have to shape people’s perceptions of reality. I spent hours talking to Edelman over the phone and met him for lunch. He had also read my last two books, was very familiar with my output on Substack and X, and had conversations with friends and detractors. That’s a lot of material to work with, and no matter what he was going to have to be selective in his presentation.

But overall, I think that he did a good job of explaining my ideas and their relevance to our politics, as MAGA maintains a stronghold on the right and socialists achieve new victories on the left.

In Kakistocracy, Hanania defines populism as a fundamentally anti-elite form of politics. That is fairly standard. But unlike many scholars, who are vague on what “elite” means, Hanania provides a definition with some explanatory value. This analysis makes up the most compelling part of the book…

Hanania defines elites not as the wealthy or powerful, but as people who derive status through their connections to “established, usually long-standing” institutions. These gatekeeper institutions include universities, legacy-media publications, professional organizations, and nonprofits. Elites move up in the world by impressing other members of the elite rather than a mass audience.

Academics tend to be self-flagellating about the status of elites in society. Pierre Bourdieu, the towering French sociologist who coined the term cultural capital, was interested in how markers of elite status entrench power imbalances. The philosopher Michael Sandel (Rhodes Scholar, Harvard professor) accuses elites of hiding their privilege behind spurious claims of merit.

To Hanania, however, the key fact about elites is that they are good. Smart, highly educated people who go into professions such as journalism and academia, he writes, do so because they care more about meaning than wealth. They form communities in which people are impressed by intelligence and virtue, not fancy cars. These “meaning-maximizers” come together to establish institutions that provide public goods—arts, science, knowledge—that the free market would not deliver on its own. But they also tend to be much more socially liberal than the broader public, and use their power and prestige to advance their views on contentious social issues, which drives resentment.

Hanania’s dalliance with the tech right showed him what happens when otherwise smart people adopt an anti-elite political identity. Journalists and academics, he writes, might get some big things wrong—especially, to his mind, on race and gender—but they obey professional and ethical norms that point toward truth. A movement that rejects both elites and their norms, by contrast, will naturally succumb more easily to conspiracy theories about vaccines and stolen elections. “I was like, Oh shit—this is beyond coalitional politics, or them just playing to their base,” he told me. “This is: They are bad at acquiring knowledge, because they’ve rejected the media and they’ve rejected scientific papers and every institution. No matter how smart you are, you can’t do that and expect to know anything about the world.”

When people renounce the mainstream media, Hanania writes, they end up listening to populist sources who don’t even try to uphold standards of accuracy and objectivity: podcasters such as Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, publications such as InfoWars, right-wing X accounts such as Catturd, charismatic health gurus such as RFK Jr. Unlike elite authorities, these populist figures obtain their status via “a direct connection to a mass audience or voters,” Hanania writes. They blame elite corruption for society’s problems and cater to “attitudes, beliefs, and aesthetics that have more currency among the general public than among elites,” including xenophobia and conspiracy theories.

For example, because this profile was going to appear in The Atlantic, and I could tell that Edelman had read my work, while talking to him I at least had confidence that my views would not be grossly mischaracterized. You might think that you can take that for granted, but one thing that the right-wing echo chamber has shown over the last several years is that you can’t. Rightoids will literally write hundreds of words about my beliefs and motivations without showing any real familiarity with my work beyond a tweet they might be responding to. The same is true for much of the Bluesky crowd that hates the MSM as irredeemably fascist, though I thankfully have few interactions with them.

There are of course always ideological disagreements within a society and some baseline levels of tribalism and motivated reasoning, but we need to at least make an effort toward engaging in rational thinking and caring about empirical evidence. Populism is in essence about giving up on even trying. Most conservatives who realize that their political tribe has a problem with the truth will try to make it into a “both sides” issue, when it’s not. Oh, you say Trump lies three dozen times in a single speech, but remember when Obama mischaracterized some aspect of his health insurance plan fifteen years ago? RFK was rejected by the Democrats and became a Republican in 2024 for a reason.

Another thing Edelman got right was pointing out that if, as right-wing critics allege, I am denouncing MAGA and conspiracy theorists to win favor with the left, I’m doing a pretty bad job at it.

Perhaps Hanania, who once wrote an essay titled “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV,” decided he could sell more Substack subscriptions by catering to a progressive audience. But if that’s his strategy, he is making some counterintuitive choices along the way. Someone trying to make friends at a No Kings rally would not throw around the word retard. He would not dismiss news stories about female teachers having sex with their male students by claiming, “It’s hard to think of things more disgusting than believing a teenage male can be ‘raped’ by his teacher.” He would not write an essay arguing that “it is of course ridiculous to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile,” because Epstein’s underage victims were “post-pubescent.” And he would not celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down majority-minority districts under the Voting Rights Act by posting, “A great day for our democracy.”

As I’ve written before, my liberal and MSM critics, unlike the rightists, tend to get their facts right. I find strong support for my theories on the topic I know best.

While he gives a fair hearing to the ideas, Edelman seems personally not to like me very much. This paragraph is particularly obnoxious.

Hanania, who lives in San Diego, was recently in Washington to tape a podcast; we met for lunch. It was a fascinating experience, if not an entirely pleasant one. In person, Hanania comes across as socially awkward yet oozing with self-regard. During our two-hour lunch, the conversation almost never strayed from his favorite topics, which are Richard Hanania, Richard Hanania’s analysis of politics, and Richard Hanania’s place in the firmament of public intellectuals.

Yes, I talked about myself a lot … in the context of meeting a guy for the specific purpose of him writing a profile of me. He would ask questions, I would respond, sometimes he would write those responses down, and I would elaborate because that’s what we were there for. Did he want me to show more of an interest in his personal life?

I kind of feel like the personal shots were compensating for the worry that the coverage of my ideas was too sympathetic, which I’m fine with as a tradeoff. Edelman agrees with me on MAGA, and seems to fear Democrats going in their own populist direction, which he thinks they can avoid by moderating on social issues. This is how he ends the article.

The question is what to do with that analysis. Much of the American left seeks to counter Trump with a form of progressive populism that labels billionaires and oligarchs enemies of the people. Hanania’s theory of populism implies that this won’t actually win back the working class. That’s because “Oligarchy is the problem” is itself an elite belief, as the use of a word like oligarchy suggests. Blaming billionaire wealth-hoarding for America’s ills would poll very well among the nation’s anthropology departments. If Trump voters hated the super-rich, however, they probably wouldn’t have voted for Trump.

For his part, Hanania recommends that Democrats instead abandon some of the cultural positions that make them seem out of touch to many Americans. “The trans issue in particular riles up idiots like practically nothing else, and I say this as someone in no way sympathetic to gender theory,” he recently wrote on Substack. The idea is to strategically moderate on certain cultural issues in order to become more palatable to mistrustful constituencies. But there is no sign that Hanania intends to take his own advice.

The fact that Edelman didn’t let his personal dislike get in the way of seeing the value in Kakistocracy and many of my Substack essays is to his credit. The ideas are what count, and the ability to separate the messenger and the message is another one of those things elites are able to do better than populists.

I take the profile as a sign that people who are horrified by MAGA and not enthused about all the DSA energy on the left are searching for something different. It’s proven a difficult task. With Vance, as Trump’s likely successor, going on Rogan and kissing up to him with novel conspiracy theories, there is little hope for a responsible or intellectually defensible right emerging in the near future. On the left, the abundance crowd has changed the conversation around housing, but their message has a technocratic tenor to it, and is struggling to answer the moral fervor with which the far left pushes for more egalitarian and anti-corporate policies, which they can portray as having a purer democratic essence.

Rightists have stories about fallen civilizational grandeur and degenerates ruining it all. The socialists paint a picture of a world in which regular people can find both meaning and physical comfort through taking on an oligarchic elite. What do classical liberals, technocrats, rational would-be reformers of institutions, and others with policy views that would actually improve the world have in terms of emotional messaging? How do they justify doing what they think is right, even to themselves, when public opinion and mass enthusiasm are against them in an age where governmental legitimacy comes almost exclusively from appeals to the popular will? A defense of Western elites that casts populism as the enemy provides one moral and intellectual framework that could potentially be useful here.

I could certainly be a more effective messenger for this project if I didn’t do stuff like hang out with Michael Tracey and join him in showing contempt for the parade of basketcases who politicians and the media insist on referring to as “Epstein survivors.” But I place too high a value on saying things that I think the world needs to hear. That said, it appears that some of my ideas are having an impact anyway, and I like to think that if our politics ever does more fully organize along a populist/anti-populist axis – and one in which the anti-populist side is able to at least hold its own – I will have played some role in that process.

And if you haven’t already, now is as good a time as ever to buy the book.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

Today, the founder of Microsoft is in the news for once having had an association with Jeffrey Epstein. But he’s been a target for conspiracy theories for over a decade and a half. In 2017, Snopes factchecked a claim that Gates had admitted to using vaccines to depopulate the earth. While it’s true that Gates has expressed concerns with overpopulation, his actual argument about vaccines was the exact opposite of the one attributed to him by conspiracy theorists. As explained in a 2011 Forbes profile,

So in 1997, when he and Melinda first ventured into public health—their eponymous foundation would come into being in two years—they focused on birth control, funding a Johns Hopkins effort to use computers to help women in the developing world learn about contraception. The logic was crisp and Bill Gates-friendly. Health = resources ÷ people. And since resources, as Gates noted, are relatively fixed, the answer lay in population control. Thus, vaccines made no sense to him: Why save kids only to consign them to life in overcrowded countries where they risked starving to death or being killed in civil war?…

Gates began consuming data that startled him. In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.

“If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda.

In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates.

The article goes on to describe how Gates went on to operationalize his efforts to vaccinate poor people across the world.

So back in 1999 Gates traveled to Bellagio, Italy to hammer out a solution, along with Unicef, the World Bank, the UN, various pharmas and aid groups. The result was the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunisation, now called the GAVI Alliance, which Gates ultimately backed with a $2.5 billion pledge and personal will, exhibiting the tough-guy tactics, when necessary, that earned Microsoft the fear of its rivals and enmity of U.S. antitrust regulators. “Bill was a little like a poker player who put a lot of chips on the table and scared everyone else off,” says Seth Berkley, who ran a Gates-funded AIDs vaccine effort and is now GAVI’s chief executive.

GAVI set out to do things differently in two ways. First, buy-in: It forced ­developing countries to cofinance vaccination programs, even at the nominal amount of 20 cents a dose. And second, accountability: It required clear record-keeping to ensure the vaccines were getting to children and to establish a sustainable delivery system. This clarity—a well-financed effort with partners on the ground—created a lasting market for big pharma that wouldn’t cost them their shirts. To further goose competition, increase supply and bring down prices, GAVI encouraged drugmakers from developing nations like China and India to bid on contracts….

With newer, more-expensive offerings, like Pfizer’s Prevnar for pneumonia, the biggest-grossing vaccine in the world, GAVI has gone a step further. By promising to buy a certain number of doses, it guarantees the pharma company massively efficient volume. In exchange GAVI sets a ceiling for what it will pay long term—Prevnar, for example, goes for $114 in the U.S. but will cost no more than $3.50. Gates and his peers subsidize losses during the ramp-up. The math can be staggering: To deliver pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines to 250 million children, GAVI raised more than $3 billion from various governments, including the U.K., Norway and the U.S., and Gates kicked in the final $1 billion to make it all work. The results have been equally massive: 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.

“I’ve met mothers who walked eight hours to get their child a vaccine and hoped that it’s there on that day,” Melinda says. On a trip in January to a rural clinic in Kenya she saw four children with pneumonia sharing a single oxygen tube. “They were just sucking breath,” she recalls. But across the clinic the Gates Foundation work showcased a different future: Children lined up to get the new vaccine that would dramatically reduce the risk they would ever get pneumonia.

This is the guy that anti-vaxxers chose to hate.

So Gates’ theory was that vaccines are great because they save lives, and health and development in general lead to women naturally limiting their fertility. Conspiracy theorists turned this on its head: Bill Gates thinks vaccines sterilize or kill people, which is why he’s so into them! You can chalk up this misunderstanding to the general idiocy of anti-vaxxers.

Despite being promoted by figures like Alex Jones, such ideas remained relatively niche before Covid. At that point, we got a new conspiracy theory, which said that Gates wanted to use vaccines to microchip people. The source of this idea was an AMA from the beginning of the pandemic in which he talked about creating “digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from May 2020 showed 44% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats endorsing the theory that Gates wanted to use microchips in vaccines to track people.

And then came Epstein. Here is the extent of the relationship: Gates had a private foundation with a focus on global health. Epstein presented himself as someone who could persuade extremely wealthy clients to direct billions toward charity, in addition to being wealthy himself, so between 2011 and 2014, they met numerous times, with Gates hoping to get funding for his work. There is no evidence Epstein ever donated, and their relationship eventually ended, only for Epstein to reach out to Gates in 2017 in order to pressure him over the financier’s knowledge of an extramarital affair. This means that there’s more evidence of Gates being an actual victim of Epstein than there is for the stories of most if not all of Epstein’s female accusers who have gotten large payouts from his estate and been celebrated by the media. For all this, Gates has been dragged before Congress to testify about Epstein, the foundation has launched an external review, and Warren Buffett has ended his longstanding practice of providing donations.

Gates has been remarkably passive throughout all of this. In response to claims regarding topics like vaccines and microchipping, the Gates Foundation puts out statements calmly explaining that conspiracy theorists are misrepresenting things he has said. In 2022, Gates told the BBC, "In some ways, you almost have to laugh because it's so crazy," adding "I mean, do I really want to track people? You know, I spend billions on vaccines, I don't make money on vaccines, vaccines save lives." On conspiracy theories in particular, Gates is fatalistic: “Misinformation is the one where I, a little bit, had to punt and say, ‘OK, we’ve handed this problem to the younger generation.’”

Gates has declared that associating with Epstein was a major mistake. In response to the revelation of a draft email of Epstein claiming that Gates suffered from an STD – which appears to show Epstein workshopping a likely fabricated allegation that he could later use against his former associate – Gates’ PR flaks have pushed back, though the man himself continues to ignore the story.

One might say that Gates has a target on his back because he’s a rich guy, and this is just the way the world works. Yet Gates is singled out in a way that other wealthy and famous individuals are not. If you’re worried about rich guys putting microchips into your body, you might want to start with Elon Musk, who literally has a company devoted to that purpose, and in that case it goes straight into the brain. And unlike Gates, there’s a paper trail of Musk trying to get invited to Epstein’s island. Trump was better friends with Epstein than Gates ever was, and that relationship was actually based on their shared affection for young women, rather than resulting from an attempt to get money to save the lives of poor people.

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So this is not simply about Gates’ fame or net worth. What we see here is another demonstration of the fact that conspiracy theorists are much dumber than most intelligent people realize. Gates looks and talks like a nerd. He wears glasses and sweater vests. He reads scientific studies and determines that vaccines are the best way to improve global health. Musk and Trump are also much richer and more successful than normal people, but they talk and act in ways dumb people would if they were rich. Their information about politics and social issues comes from social media or what people personally tell them rather than peer-reviewed journal articles. Gates’ handful of tactful affairs appear much worse than the much more unrestrained sexual behavior of other powerful men. Musk and Trump also respect the unwashed masses enough to try to gain their approval, while Gates is playing a status game where he simply tries to win over other elites.

To understand how much populism is based on aesthetics, I often ask people to engage in a thought experiment where Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell switched positions on substantive political issues, but kept their same looks and personalities. Would the typical MAGA who loves Trump and thinks McConnell is a weak cuck change his views on either of these men? No one can possibly believe so.

Practically every serious analysis finds that the Gates Foundation has done data-driven work that has improved global health, having distributed over $100 billion. But that’s not what people inclined toward populism would do with their money if they were rich. In contrast, they could imagine buying themselves gold toilet seats or thinking about how to spite the libs.

Another factor behind Gates hate is his specific focus on vaccines. Even before crazy people took over the right, anti-vaxxers were an extremely energetic community. During Covid, they moved comfortably into the conservative coalition, and brought their anti-Gates attitudes along with them. The poor guy had the misfortune of meeting with Epstein, and although rightists were the ones to keep the fake human-trafficking story alive for years, eventually the deceased financier’s relationship with Trump and general MeToo hysteria made it something that Democrats were interested in too. So Gates now finds himself hated across the political spectrum.

Even when his reputation was clean, Gates was never particularly loved. It was always Melinda who pushed most strongly for causes dear to the hearts of Western feminists like making corporate environments less masculine. Bill was always not woke enough for the left, and too smart for the right. Nobody likes a quantitative nerd. Now, his scandals have come to play a major part in his public image.

Bill Gates is both a great entrepreneur and a great philanthropist. In a healthy, sane society, he would be considered one of the greatest men of our era. We are too stupid to appreciate him, but that doesn’t mean he can’t find more effective ways to respond to criticism. Gates expresses bemusement and frustration over conspiracy theories, but never goes on the attack. The man is clearly uncomfortable with conflict or public controversy, and in his innocence probably never thought that promoting vaccines would be something that could make him hated outside of a small circle of lunatics. Again, it is difficult for smart people to even predict how dumb people will react to statements and events. Having already become a punching bag for the right, he found himself with practically no defenders when the bipartisan Epstein mob came for him.

At this point, Bill Gates needs to fight for his reputation. He might think that this would make things worse, but current attempts to stay above the fray are clearly not working. Gates can start by telling the truth: he’s a talented and altruistic man who has saved millions of lives, and people only hate him because they’re stupid and conspiratorial. Of course, he would probably prefer to be more diplomatic. Say they are misinformed, or have been taken in by grifters. One can find a diplomatic way to get the point across.

Everyone hates the wealthy now, but conservatives make an exception for rich guys who share their own brainworms – obsessed with things like vote fraud and hating immigrants, trans, and libs. Among enlightened centrist types – who might not be a major part of the public, but are disproportionately influential in elite circles – there’s a pent-up demand for an unapologetic defense of wealth, if it is made honestly, and especially when those who are successful put their earnings toward good causes. Right now, we see wealthy figures like Musk and Andreessen respond to their critics by making overly broad attacks and showing a reckless disregard for truth. Gates is at the other end of the spectrum, simply refusing to stand up for himself, regardless of how much the facts are on his side.

Are these the only choices we have among wealthy entrepreneurs? Guys who let journalists and conspiracy theorists walk all over them, and psychos who have had their brains destroyed by right-wing Twitter? Couldn’t we use a major entrepreneur who uses his profile to forcefully push back on his critics, but does so in a thoughtful and fact-based way, without engaging in ad hominem attacks or turning into a MAGA zombie? I don’t expect Gates to start behaving like Musk, and he shouldn’t try to force himself into that role. But why not a few sophisticated essays explaining why his critics are wrong, modeled after the ones summarizing the work of the Gates Foundation?

I think he’d have a pretty popular Substack. Or how about Gates cultivating relationships with public intellectuals who might make the same case on his behalf, and promoting their work? There is a hunger for something like this, as I discovered when I recently defended Gates on Twitter and got 157K views, due to a combination of angry chuds and neoliberals and abundance types agreeing with me.

But it’s hard to be a strong Bill Gates defender if he won’t take up his own cause. This is not a role he ever wanted to play. But if he cares about his legacy, and his ability to continue doing good in the world, an honest defense of his life’s work, freed from the confines of adhering to advice given by risk-averse PR flaks, is necessary. And when it comes to modeling behavior for other successful men, few things can be as useful as demonstrating that they can unapologetically defend their contributions to the world without embracing the moral black hole that is MAGA.

As an author, and one who has dabbled a bit in fiction, I’ve sometimes thought about what it would be like to write a TV series or movie. What frightens me about the prospect is the lack of control. When it’s just you creating a story, you are unconstrained. But when what you put to paper has to be performed by other human beings and take on a manifestation in physical reality, a great deal rests on fate. You are constrained by budgets, the capabilities of the actors cast, their chemistry, and a thousand other details.

While the author of a written work can go back and change any part of the story, once a producer has chosen a lead actor or the site of a shoot, there is no going back. A great novel is the product of an author’s mind; the font of the words on the page or the design of the cover contributes little to the appreciation of the work of art. This is a fundamentally different endeavor from one that depends on not only the writers, but the actors, the people working on the props and the set, including the lighting and sound guys, and even factors such as the weather. There’s only so much a creator can control. The unpredictability of how all these things will fit together means that producing a great work is even more up to fate than would be suggested by imagining the difficulty of making each relevant decision individually.

In TV and movies, then, greatness is a collective effort. And regardless of how much we attribute its creation to David Chase, there should be widespread agreement that The Sopranos (1999-2007) was the greatest TV show of all time. James Gandolfini may deserve just as much credit, if not more – he somehow made Tony Soprano a figure who was just as believable and compelling whether he was yelling at his wife, getting sentimental over ducks in his pool, or choking someone to death. Yet the true greatness of The Sopranos is a product of the combination of the actors, the writing, the scenery, and even the exact point in American history at which the story was told.

Here, I am going to explain why The Sopranos was so compelling. There will be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the show, I would go watch it and then come back to this article. It will still be here. The series can only be experienced without spoilers once, and I would recommend not losing that opportunity, even if it is to more quickly read what I think is a very insightful article on the show.

The Sopranos forces us to deal with deep questions of mortality, identity, and the search for meaning in a pitiless universe. There is never a moment during the show in which the viewer forgets that there is some disgrace and ugliness in every material or moral triumph, or that there is something relatable and compelling in even the most despicable characters. This balance is maintained throughout a story that has a deep meta-awareness, reminding us about the struggles between who we are, who we pretend to be, and the ideals that we aspire toward, while highlighting how much of life is experienced on the edges between these concepts and raising questions regarding how difficult it is to draw those lines at all.

There are three great tensions at the heart of The Sopranos. First, there is the way the past shapes the present, and, through the process of myth-making, how the needs of the present create our picture of the past. This theme is essentially timeless, but in this particular case, the moment in history in which the show is located straddles a turning point in Western culture, allowing for the dramatization of the differences in assumptions and outlook between those born before and after approximately the early 1970s.

The second great tension revolves around who exactly we are and where the ideals that motivate behavior come from in the first place. Both of these themes are closely linked, as heuristics about the past shape who we think we should be, whether in terms of setting standards to aspire toward or rebel against. Finally, there is the contrast between greatness, beauty, glamour, and glory, on the one side, and what is ugly or even simply mundane, on the other, and how the show manages not to flinch in the face of either side of the human experience. The comedy, the action, and the investment in the characters are of course essential aspects of the show, but it is these three great themes that provide the context that sets The Sopranos apart.

Are We All Just LARPing?

The self-awareness of The Sopranos nearly always avoids devolving into tedious navel-gazing – and even when it does, the resulting neuroticism itself becomes the subject of implicit or explicit debate – as when Tony tells Paulie that “‘remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” The characters, New Jersey mobsters living through the turn of the millennium, realize that they exist in a historical context, which shapes their expectations, behaviors, and perceptions of themselves and others. They’re not only members of the Mafia; they’re fully aware of what this means when placed in the larger American culture. They’re walking clichés, but they know it, and society has changed enough that they’re going to have to adjust to new circumstances no matter how attached they are to the old ways.

The opening scene of the second episode has Tony and his crew in the back of the Bada Bing strip club, counting their money and watching a news show discussing the decline of the mob.

The panel talks about how arrests are being made, guys are flipping, and the old codes are breaking down. Tony shakes his head: “The shoe fits.” He asks Silvio to cheer him up. Silvio stands up and does his Godfather III impression: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” The guys have a good laugh. Then it’s back to the TV, and they watch the former mobster-turned-bestselling-author being interviewed. “The party’s over… You know, the heyday, you know the golden age, or whatever, of the mob? That’s gone, and that’s never coming back. And they have only themselves to blame.”

At the wedding of Johnny Sack’s daughter, Chris asks Tony whether he has agreed to whack Johnny’s rival because he can’t refuse to do a favor for the father of the bride on the day of his daughter’s wedding.

Momentarily confused, Tony says it’s actually the other way around, and that he should be the one asking for something. Chris replies that, in that case, he should ask Johnny for the favor of not doing it. Tony: “I already fucking agreed!” The meta-awareness here is part of what makes the scene so funny.

In The Godfather, the norms of the mob are taken for granted, while in The Sopranos they’re being constructed and negotiated based on the needs of the moment, and also what the characters see in movies and on TV.

This happened in real life. According to the sociologist Diego Gambetta, mob movies led the actual Cosa Nostra to shape their behavior and standards in accordance with what they saw in fictional representations. David Chase himself said that to mobsters, The Godfather was “their Bible, their Koran. Their Mona Lisa, their Eiffel Tower.” Famed hitman and government snitch Sammy “The Bull” Gravano recounts how he took lines from the film, and would talk about “making an offer you can’t refuse.” They saw it as validating what they were doing, and placing their experiences at the center of American culture. Gambetta writes that the influence of the film extended to the criminal undergrounds as far away as Russia and Japan, demonstrating that memetic influence crosses borders and cultural barriers. Donnie Brasco is said to be less popular among members of the Mafia for presenting a much less romantic image of their lives. Gambetta notes that when The Sopranos portrays the sociological phenomenon of mobsters learning from the movies, “We have come full circle: now art imitates low life imitating art.”

But, as with many institutions, there’s a sense that the grimy present cannot live up to the glories of the idealized past. The opening scene of the entire series has Tony in the psychiatrist’s office with Dr Jennifer Melfi. Tony getting mental health treatment for his depression and panic attacks, and going on Prozac, is itself seen as a sign of modern corruption. He hides all this from his associates, and when his secret is revealed he is almost killed as a result. In the first meeting with Melfi, we get the following exchange.

Tony: I don’t know. The morning I got sick, I’d been thinking. It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. And I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.

Melfi: Many Americans, I think, feel that way.

Tony: I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me. In a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had pride. Today, what do we got?

The series captures the mood of the moment between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, as the economy was booming, and, since peace and prosperity had been achieved, societal problems were understood in moral and psychological rather than material terms. Bourgeois or suburban malaise being seen as a serious enough problem to be the subject of art only happens during eras that are optimistic overall. The Sopranos came on the heels of movies with similar concerns like American Beauty, Fight Club, Office Space, and The Ice Storm. Social problems like school shootings and new kinds of music such as grunge were analyzed from the perspective that we had achieved too much safety and success.

The Sopranos was another piece of art focused on suburban malaise, but within the framework of a mob show, which created a fascinating dynamic given that the Italian gangster exists as one of our cultural figures most recognized for being deeply rooted in his community and comfortable with his place in the world. The wise guy doesn’t sit around talking about his feelings, or whining as he wonders what we were put on this earth for. Or at least he didn’t, until Tony came of age.

There’s a class dynamic here too. While Tony and his crew live with the contradictions of being part of the mob at the historical moment during which their self-image and way of life were becoming impossible to maintain, Melfi, her ex-husband, and her social circle of white-collar professionals discuss adjacent topics at a more abstract level, such as whether Italian-Americans should feel insulted by their portrayals in TV and film or see them as a sign that they have made it. In real life, The Sopranos faced attacks from Italian-American organizations, and these types of scenes were part of a running dialogue with the audience.

The sordid history of worries about anti-Italian discrimination can be found in the fact that one organization devoted to that cause was founded by mob boss Joseph Colombo. There was even an Essex County Executive who denied a permit to shoot the Sopranos episode “Pine Barrens” in his jurisdiction on the grounds that it portrayed Italians unfavorably. Amusingly, he later went to jail for corruption. In The Sopranos too, those who scream loudest about anti-Italian stereotypes are the worst possible spokesmen for their group.

As Melfi notes, the nostalgia that the Mafia feels for its golden days has a direct analogue to how many Americans see the trajectory of our society. Over time, the show reveals that the fond memories of the past rest largely on misperceptions. We look back at a time when people were much more into keeping up appearances, and there were no gossip websites or even 24-hour cable news stations to give us a more fine-grained picture of reality. While Tony romanticizes his mobster father, Johnny, the flashbacks show him being little more than a petty crook. He eventually meets Fran, his father’s old girlfriend, and is at first taken in by her charm and the story of her affair with JFK. But Tony then grows disillusioned. He finds out that Fran kept smoking around Johnny even after he got emphysema, and that she was with his dad the night his mother had a miscarriage. The ultimate breaking point is when Fran puts on what is said to be JFK’s old hat, and the elderly woman serenades him with her version of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

It makes for uncomfortable viewing. Tony, who has a voracious sexual appetite, is repulsed by this elderly woman trying to impress him and being deluded enough to think that she can still rely on her seductive charms. The visceral disgust felt toward Fran in that moment – rather than anything about how Johnny’s affairs hurt the family – being the straw that broke the camel’s back is the kind of realistic touch that most shows and movies would shy away from. Human beings do things for complicated reasons, and it’s often the case that the less noble motives are the ones playing the dominant role. By the end of that episode, Tony is back in fantasy land, exaggerating the extent of Fran’s relationship with Kennedy to his crew. We are left to wonder whether the affair was even real in the first place. The title of the episode, “In Camelot,” alludes to not only Fran’s delusions about her past, but also how the country remembers JFK.

Human frailty is a common theme. We watch Junior decline from the acting boss of the DiMeo crime family to a senile old man peeing his pants and allowing himself to be given debilitating sedatives in order to not be put in diapers. Chris Moltisanti struggles with drugs and alcohol and keeps relapsing, at one point killing his fiancée’s dog by sitting on it while in a daze. Beautiful, glamorous women are shown to be self-destructive basket cases, most notably Gloria Trillo, who hangs herself after a stormy affair with Tony.

Yet, still, the glamour is just as real as all that is venal and degrading. When she herself finally goes into therapy, Carmela admits that she not only always knew who her husband was, but that she liked him for it. The most memorable scene demonstrating his appeal to women comes after Tony runs into Melfi at a restaurant after he has stopped seeing her as a patient for the first time. As de facto boss of the family, Tony is holding court and in command of his underlings as they eat, drink, and enjoy themselves. Melfi, coming upon this scene, and drunk, stops to say hi to Tony. She’s trying to build rapport, and he’s in essence blowing her off. As she leaves, she waves at him girlishly and gives him a “Toodle-oo.”

With Melfi gone, the conversation continues to revolve around impressing Tony. Paulie makes a gay joke at Sil’s expense, and then repeats it to make sure that his superior heard what he said. Cut to the next scene. Melfi is in the office of her own psychiatrist. “Toodle-Fucking-Oo? What the fuck was that? God, I couldn't sleep all night, I was so embarrassed.” Melfi concludes that she regressed to a girlish state out of a sense of guilt from abandoning a patient, and she must take him back. This is a very flattering interpretation, and puts her in the role of the concerned professional adhering to ethical guidelines. The more obvious interpretation is that, seeing him in his element, she was attracted to Tony, and this is why she continues to let the doctor-patient relationship emotionally drain her despite seeming to know deep down that he’s never going to fully commit to the therapeutic process. Later in the series, with more self-awareness she admits that she was once attracted to Tony, but that as more and more of his inner ugliness came out, that interest turned to disgust.

One of the clearest signs of Tony’s moral rottenness is revealed when he is with Janice and Bobby, and his sister is happy that she has finally got her anger under control. Tony can’t stand the idea, and provokes Janice by bringing up her estranged son until she snaps. The beauty of the scene is in the buildup, where Janice being able to calmly handle a telemarketer and sharing a fact she read about the decreasing costs of computing are enough to cause him to boil with rage. Tony walks away triumphantly as “I’m not like everybody else” by the Kinks plays in the background. He isn’t like this every moment of his life. Sometimes Tony is sentimental and kind, as when he is outraged by Tracee’s killing or feels bad about the black cop whose career he ruined and tries to give him money. But there is a simmering hatred aimed toward many of those around him that erupts in moments like this. While provoking Janice isn’t as bad as murder, this scene shows the extent to which Tony is malicious when there is no material reason to be, or even an issue of honor at stake.

The mobsters eat lavish steak dinners, seduce beautiful women, commit spectacular acts of violence, crack hilarious one-liners over drinks, and sometimes choose death or long prison sentences over dishonor. This is done while raising children in nuclear families and therefore leaving behind more legitimate and meaningful legacies. But they are also consumed by petty jealousies, driven by insecurities, cruel to outsiders and even their own family members, and committed to a moral code that can’t be justified by any universal or transcendent standard and that nearly everyone suspects is a facade to justify criminality – rarely emerging intact when subjected to pressure. They kiss up to those above them and kick those below. They’re also subject to universal human frailties, which the show portrays unsentimentally. To understand The Sopranos as nihilistic or exclusively bleak in its outlook is to miss the point – the meaning of the entire story comes from the actual glamour of the Mafia and the romance of a life filled with adventure, danger, and sex, and what is ugly in these men and their lives is powerful because of the contrast that it provides.

These New Jersey mobsters are LARPing. But everyone has always been LARPing, and the late 1990s were perhaps the time Americans finally started realizing it, at least in terms of what was going on among their contemporaries. Looking at professional basketball, which I followed closely growing up, there was an unironic magic about Michael Jordan’s Bulls. Over the next decades, Kobe, LeBron, and Curry came along and proved themselves to be all-time great players, but they were a lot more relatable. Our experience of athletes went from being shaped by well-curated magazine pieces and TV interviews to consisting largely of following them on social media and observing awkward attempts to prove that they are just like us.

The crew’s dealings with Hasidic Jews in the third episode of the series present a community that places in stark relief what the Italian mobsters feel they have lost. A hotel proprietor named Shlomo Teittleman wants to cut his son-in-law, Ariel, out of the business, but for that he needs him to agree to divorce his daughter. Shlomo promises Tony a quarter of the hotel business if he can force Ariel to relent. Tony, Paulie, and Sil try to get the son-in-law to agree by roughing him up and threatening his life. Yet Ariel will not give in, deeply impressing his tormentors. While being detained, he tells them the story of Masada, in which Jews chose death over enslavement. “And the Romans, where are they now?” Tony replies: “You’re looking at them, asshole.”

At first, I thought that this was an amusing throwaway line with no deeper meaning. Italian-Americans from New Jersey might share a cultural link to Ancient Rome, but the connection is too attenuated to be worth pondering at length. But maybe Tony, Paulie, and Sil are actually Romans? Who were the Romans anyway? Men who took over the Mediterranean world and much of Europe due to their ability to employ organized violence, underwritten by a moral code that stressed loyalty to the group and individual honor. The Romans, like Italian mobsters, were insecure about their level of cultural sophistication, and therefore sought inspiration from Greece. After their initial conquests, they began to value poetry and the arts, which parallels Tony and Carmela dreaming of their kids becoming successful professionals.

The story of the Hasidic Jews ends in the most hilarious way possible. The guys compel Ariel to agree to the divorce by threatening to castrate him, upon the advice of Hesh Rabkin, a Jewish friend and business associate of Tony who had warned against dealing with such fanatics. After going through all this trouble, however, Shlomo tells Tony that, never mind, he worked out a deal with his son-in-law. Tony wanted 25%, Ariel wanted 50%, so he compromised and gave his son-in-law 15%. Nonetheless, he would pay Tony for his efforts. Feeling the need to expound on his generosity, Shlomo begins “As the Talmud says…” Tony responds by knocking his hat off, grabbing Shlomo by the collar and declaring “I don’t give a shit what he says, okay?”

The most tragic trajectory is that of Chris. He’s a romantic, and still believes in the old ideals of Cosa Nostra. When his fiancée, Adriana, reveals that she has been talking to the FBI and asks him to also start speaking with law enforcement, he goes to Tony, who has her killed. That Chris would do this is foreshadowed in an earlier scene when she raises the possibility of them getting out of the life, and he grabs her head: “I’m a soldier, Adriana, when you gonna understand that?” Having chosen Tony and his image of himself over the love of his life, Chris appears to move on, and later gets married to a different girl after knocking her up.

Adriana’s death hangs over the rest of the relationship between him and Tony. Chris believes his boss owes him. Tony asks how many times he’s going to play the Adriana card. The younger man’s sobriety creates tension with the rest of the family, and they make fun of him for being unwilling to drink. Tony eventually murders his protégé by holding his nose so he chokes on his own blood after they get into a car accident together. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, an injured Chris, stuck in the driver’s seat, tells Tony to call him a taxi since he’ll never pass a drug test. Tony sees that the car seat of Chris’ daughter in the back was destroyed, and decides that he has given his distant relative more than enough chances.

For the rest of the episode, Tony has to walk around pretending he’s just as broken up about Chris’ death as everyone else, who all assume that the accident killed him. To Melfi, Tony confesses that his passing was a relief. He was weak, and was always a risk to rat him out. Tony mentions what happened to the car seat to his wife and a random young man he’s sitting next to at Chris’ wake, without getting the response he wants. Finally fed up, Tony takes a trip to Vegas, and does peyote with an escort who knew Chris. Upon winning some money on roulette, he says “He’s dead” and falls on the floor laughing.

The contrast between Tony, the cold-blooded murderer who smothered his surrogate son in a final, ultimate betrayal, with Chris knowing it as he chokes to death, and Tony, the guy looking for someone to reassure him that he did the right thing by acknowledging the meaning of the car seat being destroyed, along with repeatedly mentioning that the deceased wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, is a haunting yet funny demonstration of the kinds of petty concerns and lonely insights, whether genuine or self-justifying excuses, that must accompany any great crime. As seen in his disgust toward Fran’s singing, it is weakness that Tony truly hates, and that is the real reason Chris had to die. And the glamour is there too: the girl he celebrates with in Las Vegas is the most beautiful of the series.

Chris never forgave Tony for Adriana. This is seen clearly when he produces a mob movie in which the don sleeps with his underling’s girlfriend, reflecting what he believes happened between his boss and his fiancée – and which probably would have happened, if not for yet another conveniently timed car accident earlier in the series when they were off to get drugs together (an underrated funny moment here is when Chris denies that the movie is about Tony on the grounds that the girlfriend in it is “Oriental”). The fact that Chris at some level hated his mentor only makes his standing by him the whole time seem even more tragic. Perhaps Tony was right. Chris was weak, and he proved it when he let Adriana be killed. But I don’t think his downfall was unrelated to his interest in the arts. Chris was an idealist, and there was no way he would have been able to become a rat without destroying his self-image. It was this romantic streak in his personality, in addition to a moral cowardice and lack of imagination, that ended up destroying him.

The Critique of Therapy Culture

Tony’s hatred of weakness is intimately related to his sense of what has gone wrong with American society. The fact that he benefits from psychiatric help is a source of shame for him, and he’s constantly expressing the view that we need to return to the ideal of the strong, silent type of man. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” is The Sopranos’ version of “Who is John Galt?”, with each rhetorical question serving as a refrain summing up the lesson of the world it inhabits.

Tony’s societal critique is the gangster’s version of Jonathan Haidt’s books, but made a generation earlier, before victimhood culture had reached its apex. But is there truth in this worldview, or is it an attitude that is held only because it fits with the psychological orientation of a mentally ill mafia boss?

As with nearly everything in the series, the answer is a little bit of both. Throughout the show, we learn that Tony has a point. Melfi eventually stops seeing Tony for good when she realizes that she has been enabling him, and if anything making him a better – and less conflicted – criminal. When Carmela goes to an old Jewish psychiatrist named Dr Krakower, she at first denies that Tony is a bad person. He asks her whether a philandering criminal is her definition of a good man. Carmela responds “I thought psychiatrists weren't supposed to be judgmental.” Dr Krakower replies with what is perhaps the key thesis of the entire show: “Many patients want to be excused for their current predicament because of events that occurred in their childhood. That's what psychiatry has become in America. Visit any shopping mall or ethnic pride parade and witness the results.”

The connection between identity politics and a culture that coddles people and makes them fragile is made most explicitly in the episode “Christopher,” which revolves around a dispute between Italians and Native Americans about how to remember Columbus.

In her conversation with Dr Krakower, Carmela is informed that she is an enabler who benefits from her husband’s crimes. The only moral thing she could possibly do is leave him. Carmela refuses to understand and tries to reframe the advice in modern therapy-speak: “So you think I need to define my boundaries more clearly, keep a certain distance, not internalize my…” The doctor cuts her off: “What did I just say?” Carmela: “Leave him.”

Krakower refuses to take her “blood money,” and reminds Carmela that, whatever else happens, she can never say that she wasn’t told. She actually tries to leave Tony a few years later, but finds that there is no way to do so without taking a major hit to her standard of living, and so Carmela always returns to her rationalizations, at one point telling Melfi that there are far bigger crooks than her husband.

The development of Anthony Junior teaches a similar lesson. Tony’s son is a deeply unlikeable character. The boy was unfortunate enough to inherit his father’s tendency toward depression, without the smarts, courage, or leadership skills. While his sister Meadow goes to Columbia and decides between becoming a doctor or a lawyer, AJ was a NEET at the time when that phrase was being invented to explain the phenomenon of young men who weren’t in school, weren’t working, and generally weren’t good for anything.

When AJ gets caught destroying school property, he can’t even come up with a half-hearted justification for why. As a young adult, he enrolls in classes and then drops out of school, and picks up jobs and then loses them before long. His self-pitying excuses for his behavior are laughable – when he gets fired from Blockbuster for reselling promotional materials he was supposed to discard, AJ tells his parents that throwing them out would have been bad for the environment. As the series takes place in the early days of the War on Terror and the American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, AJ gets interested in the politics of the Middle East, but following the news seems to serve more as a justification and stimulant for his bottomless anxiety and depression than as a product of genuine intellectual curiosity.

We see AJ being failed by institutions that are supposed to mold young men into productive citizens. When his parents expect him to be disciplined, they’re told that his school eliminated detention due to a lawsuit. At one point, they resolve to send him to military school, and Tony is disappointed to learn that even the armed forces have gone soft.

Tony’s skepticism about psychiatry erupts when he is told that AJ might have ADD. As it turns out, he exhibits five out of nine symptoms, with six being the cutoff for diagnosis. Tony loses it when they list “fidgeting” as one of the criteria. What exactly constitutes a fidget? Here, Tony has stumbled upon the concept of diagnostic inflation and the subjective standards that allow poor choices stemming from character flaws to be medicalized in the service of helping individuals and families avoid responsibility for their behavior.

Carmela, in contrast, is delighted. The boy’s poor behavior and the general idiocy with which he goes through life can be explained away. He has a disease! When Tony says the kid just needs to be whacked upside the head, Carmela asks whether he would hit someone for having polio.

Yet, in the last season, when AJ is around 20 years old and still going nowhere in life, something begins to change.

Throughout the whole series, Tony and Carmela have been fighting over whether he needs more discipline or a lighter touch. Finally, he gets on track. The turning point is when Carmela goes on a trip to Paris, and Tony is finally able to discipline him in his own way. Tony informs his son that he’s going to start working construction early the next morning, breaks the windshield of his SUV, and tells AJ not to test him. The transformation is not immediate, and AJ’s struggles are far from over. But he does begin working a real job, and meets a Puerto Rican girlfriend named Blanca. She breaks up with him though after a brief engagement, and this is when AJ reaches his lowest point, trying to drown himself in the family pool. But he is saved by Tony, and ultimately recovers. By the end of the show, AJ appears to have decided to join the military. His parents talk him out of it by getting him into the movie business, with the added incentive that Tony might help fund a club for him to run once he gains some experience. When we leave AJ, he has an attractive new girlfriend, a job that might lead to something better, and seems happier and more alive than ever before, except perhaps when he was dating Blanca.

Here we see a realistic positive arc. AJ is finally forced to get out of the house and work, and things start to fall into place. But it’s still two steps forward and one step back – or sometimes maybe three steps back. Even the suicide attempt is an indication that he at least cared enough about something to be crushed by losing it, a change from what we saw during most of his teenage and early adult years.

This is not to say that there is nothing to the modern therapeutic approach. When her patient goes off on rants about how his son just needs a good beating, Melfi asks how that worked out for Tony himself. We see recurring reminders that we tend to see the past through rose-colored glasses, and the reality was often less glamorous and much darker than we imagined. Anthony might be a mope, but he has a conscience, and is incapable of becoming a sociopath like his father.

It’s far from clear that either the father or son can ever be happy. Tony cries about the “putrid genes” he has passed on, ensuring AJ will live a life of misery. While skeptical of therapy culture, The Sopranos consistently raises the specter of hard genetic determinism. And although I think that on balance the show sees modern psychiatry as a net negative for society, it is not completely in denial about the benefits it provides to some people, or the positive results that come from being more reflective, even if this too often reaches the point of neuroticism.

No One Ever Changes

Chris dreamed of writing movies. Though fatally committed to the family, there was always a part of him that wanted to get away, whether by moving to Hollywood or cutting a deal with the authorities. When Paulie notes that Chris seems depressed, he responds that his character seems to have no arc, like characters in movies. Paulie replies, “Hey, I got no arc either. I was born, grew up, spent a few years in the army, a few more in the can and here I am. A half a wise guy. So what?”

This conversation is particularly tragic in light of Chris’ ultimate fate. He did have an arc, but it was a path of degradation and betrayal, choosing Tony and the image of himself as a soldier over a life with Adriana, and then being murdered by the man he looked up to and sacrificed everything for. The course of events involved his sobriety being met with derision, which led him to return to drinking and doing drugs. Being in an impaired state of mind caused the car crash, which gave Tony the opportunity to do away with the man he, in a dream, imagined calling “a weak, fucking sniveling, lying drug addict” and “the biggest blunder of my career” once and for all. One of the scenes that hit me hardest is when Chris was talking about the joys of fatherhood and pouring out his soul about how much he loves his daughter. Paulie responds by joking that she’ll eventually be working at the strip club. While everyone else is laughing, including Tony, Chris ends up in shock and stumbles away drunk.

This happens after the guys pressured him into drinking and using drugs again. Chris had complained to Paulie that they hated his screw-ups when he was an addict, and make fun of him now that he’s sober. What do they want? Paulie tells him to be normal. But Chris was unable to drink in moderation, which would have been the only way he could effectively do his job. The mockery of his daughter serves as a final humiliation before he chokes on his own blood.

Most of the other character arcs are less dramatic, but serve as a reminder that people generally don’t change to any significant degree. When Tony gets shot by Junior, there is some hope that it will lead to a greater appreciation for everyday life and more ethical choices. Before long, however, he’s fallen back into his old habits. The tragedy is that, as with Chris, there appears to be no other way things could have gone given the nature of the life that he has chosen. When Tony gets out of the hospital, he notices his crew subtly showing less deference to him. After talking things out with Melfi, who once again gives him general career advice while being in denial about it, Tony decides he has to beat up a young meathead to reestablish dominance. Moreover, compromise and a long-term business relationship based on mutual trust turn out to be impossible when dealing with Phil Leotardo.

Hints that Tony could have had a different life are found in the dream sequence when he is in a coma. Tony is involved in a business that is adjacent to weapons contracting, which makes sense given the real Tony’s interest in the history of warfare. The question the Kevin Finnerty storyline asks is what Tony might have been had he not been born into the mob. There is still a family man who nonetheless is willing to cheat on business trips, still depressed, and still interested in military technology, but not a violent thug. These episodes strike a reasonable balance on the nature-nurture question.

Carmela feels guilt throughout the show, but consistently returns to making excuses for her husband’s behavior and benefiting from his crimes up to the end. Meadow was always ambitious and well-adjusted, and looks to be headed toward a career as a successful professional. Her development is quite subtle, as she goes from being skeptical of her dad’s work to seeing him as a victim of a discriminatory legal system, alongside the blacks and Muslims she wants to help, despite Tony’s racism. As she goes through college, we see more and more victimspeak and justifications for indefensible behavior, which causes a major blowup with Finn, her normie love interest. Meadow ends the show planning to marry the son of another mobster in Tony’s crew, indicating that she’s not going to leave the life she grew up in completely behind. The gradual change in Meadow is easy to miss, but its trajectory bends toward self-serving excuses, wrapped up in the kind of politically correct jargon she learned in college, as the one member of the family able to enter the professional class. In an amusing twist, she argues with Tony about his racism and views on black crime while remaining in denial about what his life as a gangster entails.

Paulie and Silvio, Tony’s two main lieutenants throughout the show, are the same guys at the beginning and the end, that is until Silvio is shot and put into a coma. Junior only changes due to age-related physical and mental decline. Artie and Charmaine kind of just fade away as the series concludes, with the latter having one final passive-aggressive and awkward interaction with Carmela in the penultimate episode for old times’ sake (it’s deeply enjoyable watching how much these two women hate each other). Ralph and Richie live and die as scumbags. Tony Blundetto tries to go straight, but isn’t able to for the simple reason that doing actual work is hard. He has every opportunity to start a business, even finding a benefactor who believes in him. Tony B repays the Korean immigrant with the hot daughter by giving him an unprovoked beating, abandoning their investment, and returning to a life of crime.

Johnny Sack is unique in being destroyed by the love of his family. He ruins his reputation by taking a plea deal and giving an allocution, breaking the Mafia code, in order to make sure he can keep enough of his assets for his wife to be taken care of. Sacrimoni was one of the rare guys in this world who never cheated on his wife, despite her being morbidly obese, which after his death causes Tony to refer to him as taking a holier-than-thou attitude. This makes for a genuine love story in the midst of a world where women are generally treated awfully by the men in their lives.

Ironically, it is AJ, after spending most of the series seeming to be among the most hopeless characters, who is the only major figure with something resembling a positive arc. Even here, the victory is partial and uncertain. The long-term trajectory gives reason for optimism at the end, though he’s only worked his current job and had his newest girlfriend for a short period of time. But here, unlike nearly everywhere else, we’re allowed to hope.

On Humor

People will often say that The Sopranos was great because it was funny. To me, this isn’t much of an explanation. It’s like saying a show was good because it was enjoyable. Yes, it was funny, but a lot of shows are filled with jokes, and the question is why the ones in this particular universe land so well.

My theory: humor is a byproduct of investment in a relationship or story. Women will often say they like men because they’re funny. But there have been psychologists who have studied when people laugh among those they know, and they find that they’re usually laughing at things that no outside observer would think are funny. Humor works as a social lubricant. It’s primarily the result, rather than the cause, of the state of a relationship.

Consistent with this theory, then, we can say that The Sopranos is funny in part because we care about the story and are drawn into its world. Large swaths of the show simply portray friends and family interacting with one another. They get into fights that are not really about the things they seem to be about, and make fun of one another, which they all call “breaking balls.” As a general matter, it is familiarity with other people that causes emotional investment in them as individuals. To outsiders, the mobsters and those linked to them may all seem indistinguishable from one another, but we know that Paulie is superstitious and a clean freak and that Hesh is a Jew who counts pennies. Close familiarity means that people around Tony or Bobby Baccalieri can get away with fat jokes that others can’t, and the ball breaking works because it is tied to people as individuals rather than stereotypes.

That said, the fact that we are made to care about the story is not the only thing that makes The Sopranos funny.

Good humor needs to strike a balance between being not too obvious and not so subtle that it goes over your head. The Sopranos is a great comedy because it rewards close attention and memory. The mangling of quotes, the vocabulary mistakes, and conversations highlighting the ignorance of the characters are easy to miss, like when Chris says that the feds are trying to cause “dysentery,” in the ranks rather than dissension, or Tony refers to a “goyim” painting instead of a Goya. When Tony is trying to put his mom in a retirement home, Melfi tells Tony that it is like a hotel at Cap d’Antibes. In a Nabokovian scene later on, Tony mangles this by selling the community to his mom as being like a hotel of “Captain Teeb’s.”

A scene I particularly love involves a meal at the back of Satriale’s, when one of the guys, Patsy Parisi, starts talking about how hard life has been since he lost his identical twin brother. It happens to be their birthday. He suspects, correctly, that it was Tony who had him killed. Tony repeatedly tries to change the subject, while others keep asking about Patsy’s relationship with his brother and harping on the special, perhaps mystical, bond that twins share.

This scene is yet another demonstration of the combination of the commonplace and the morbid that defines the show. We all have the experience of wanting to change the subject in the midst of an uncomfortable conversation. Most of these situations do not involve deflecting attention away from a murder we’ve committed.

The fact that the guys are often really stupid is part of the realism. Some writers are tempted to make gangsters into amateur philosophers or misunderstood geniuses. There is none of that here. True, Tony has a plausible critique of therapy culture that he arrives at by instinct, but he struggles to put it into compelling language, always having to revert to Gary Cooper references. Tony watches the History Channel, but you won’t see him read a book on World War II. In fact, except for a few suggestions he takes from Melfi, he never reads a book at all, and neither do the other gangsters. Much of the comedy of the show rests on the fact that stupidity plus arrogance is a funny combination.

The humor is woven into the story in the same way that the action scenes are. Most shows and movies portray violence with large and dramatic buildups. There is some of that here, but most of the time it seems quite random, and almost immediately after losing someone the characters are back to worrying about their petty grievances, breaking balls, and sinking back into the mundane flow of everyday life. This can produce great comedy, while also providing an unusually realistic portrayal of how tragedy – which we spend so much time dreading – is never that bad once it’s over, as the world goes on. This is part of the lesson of how the series ended, at least for those who are left behind.

Let’s Talk about the Ending

Alright, so this was unavoidable in an article like this. What was up with the ending? When I did my Sopranos tour with Michael Tracey in June and asked him about it, he told me that he thought it was good because we were still talking about what happened almost twenty years later. This sounded correct in the moment, but as I thought about it, I concluded this couldn’t be right. If Tony had transformed into an alligator in the last scene and eaten Carmela, we’d all be shocked and talk about it for a while, but that would be a terrible ending.

So did Tony die? We have to take a step back here and ask what this question even means. In case this is unclear to the reader, Tony Soprano was not a real person, and the show is fiction. That means he didn’t live or die. When we say something happened to Tony Soprano, it usually means that we saw it on the show, or can infer it from other things we’ve seen.

How do we build our inferences? They’re usually based on what the writers intended. So from that perspective, what happened to Tony is whatever David Chase decided happened after the screen went black. But I don’t think we’re necessarily stuck with whatever one individual thinks. I’m comfortable having a different interpretation than a creator of a work, based on what was presented. Getting into the author’s mind also poses some philosophical quandaries. What if David Chase changes his mind four years after the show ends? Do we have to then change what we ourselves believe happened to Tony?

Instead of getting into David Chase’s mind, we might talk about probabilities of different events happening conditional on what we know about everything in the show’s universe leading up to the last scene.

I think, from that perspective, Tony most likely went on living. Maybe this is too rationalist-brained, but the base rate for being murdered during any one meal is pretty low, even for a mob boss. Note also that at the point of the family dinner at Holsten’s, Phil Leotardo is dead and Tony has come out of hiding. Tony had gotten permission from Butch to take Leotardo out. It’s possible that Butch decided that he would also betray Tony after Phil was gone. This is the most obvious scenario that results in death, but it’s a stretch. We don’t see much of Butch in the show, and he seems like a pretty weak and passive guy, not one to betray his boss and then murder a New Jersey boss in a double-cross. If we’re going to return to Chase’s intentions here, we might say that it would be weird if he planned for such a minor character to be the one who ultimately does Tony in.

If not Butch, there are of course other possible killers, given how many people Tony has hurt over the years. But why assume it’s going to happen at that moment? Note that Tony looks up when the restaurant door opens. We know Meadow is coming in at that moment. There’s no reason to think that he’s looking up for any other reason. Maybe he happens to see the guy in the Members Only jacket pointing a gun at his face and goes unconscious, but it’s arguably not implied in the scene. The main suspect goes to the bathroom, invoking a scene from The Godfather, but this is only relevant if David Chase put it there as a clue; in a world where we’re looking for information based on what happened in the show, this provides no evidence either way. The same can be said about the fact that one of the guys sent to kill Sil also wore a Members Only jacket.

We know that Carlo likely flipped, and Tony’s lawyer told him that there was an 80-90% chance he would be indicted. From that perspective, the most likely outcome here is Tony dies in prison. The New Jersey mob becomes much less powerful and influential. Paulie isn’t leadership material, and with Sil in a coma, who exactly is left? Patsy? Well, Meadow is going to be his daughter-in-law, and maybe she ends up being in control. But this is just fanfic, as cool as it is to imagine. Perhaps Tony dies in prison after years of watching Gary Cooper movies, knowing that the ideals he dedicated his life to have become completely irrelevant, and fulfilling his prophecy at the start of the show that he had come in at the end of something. Maybe he’s angling for a Trump pardon right now.

That was at least my interpretation when I thought that the ending was ambiguous. But I sent an earlier version of this article to Tyler Cowen, and he referred me to this series of articles, which absolutely convinced me that Chase meant to kill Tony.

We are left with questions about who exactly ordered the hit, what happens to the family afterwards, and how we should feel about the uncertainty itself. I have come around to accepting Chase’s framing of the philosophical approach to the ending. Life is short, and we only have insights into some things and not others. We don’t have the right to know everything we want to know. Some kinds of curiosity will never be quenched. I imagine people on their deathbeds regretting that they’ll never know who wins the Super Bowl next year, what the outcome of a war will be, or what their daughter will be like when she grows up.

Chase appears to have realized that giving us a gory final scene in which AJ and Carmela are splattered with blood would have completely distracted from the meaning of the ending. Instead, we are left with, at first, a haunting semi-mystery, and finally an understanding of what happened to Tony. We take his perspective throughout the whole series, but with the final scene our identification with the character reaches its apex, and we are forced to endure the unsettling paranoia of his existence at a more visceral level and carry it with us. Until we go back and do the analysis, we don’t know what happened to Tony any more than he himself ever does, since his world simply goes black. Before getting to that conclusion, we can debate the Cub Scouts, the two black guys walking in, the Members Only jacket, and what it means that Meadow can’t parallel park. But, despite the mysteries that remain, there is a correct answer here from the perspective of what the creator of the show intended.

All of that said, if someone wants to ignore Chase’s intentions and imagine Tony trying to rebrand himself as a MAGA in 2024 in order to get a pardon, with Meadow as his photogenic, high-powered mob attorney going on Fox News to make her case, I certainly won’t begrudge them for that. And if they wanted to write that fanfic, I would probably read it.

A Product of Its Time

The Sopranos, which included so much commentary on American culture, has itself become a landmark in the entertainment industry as HBO’s first true mass-culture drama and the show that launched the era of prestige TV.

It’s often said that the show couldn’t be made today, with a focus on the things that characters say about blacks, women, and gays. This is true – the racism and sexism are part of the reality-respecting fabric of the universe. There’s also the more subtle fact that, throughout the show, stereotypes often reveal themselves to be true. For upper-middle-class New Jerseyans, it’s simply the case that urban blacks are seen as a menace, though for Tony and his crew they can be useful for carrying out certain jobs, or as targets to blame for crimes that they need to cover up.

If you want to see how political correctness can ruin a work of art by making it pedantic and trying to shoehorn it into the political concerns of its day, see The Many Saints of Newark, the 2021 Sopranos prequel that clearly revolves around telling a story fit for the Black Lives Matter era. The Sopranos, in contrast, reflected the reality of its time while tapping into universal human concerns. On the realism front, it also certainly didn’t help that Many Saints began with a voiceover from Chris, speaking to us about Tony’s betrayal from beyond the grave. Before writing this article, I thought I had read that Chase was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but looking it up I can’t find any evidence of that, and so I guess I must’ve imagined it because I wanted to find a way to explain away the movie.

One unique aspect of the late 1990s and early aughts was that it was the last time middle-aged adults grew up in the era before what we might call the great disillusionment. Tony is about 40 when the series premiered, which means he was born around 1959 (James Gandolfini was born in 1961). The American decline in trust in institutions began in the late 1960s into the 1970s, taking off with Watergate and discontent with the Vietnam War. This means Tony is old enough to have gone through most of his childhood in a country where mainstream American culture believed in itself, the fundamental goodness of the country, and its place in the world. The older characters, like Livia and Junior, can remember the Second World War. If The Sopranos began today, Tony would’ve been born in the mid-1980s, like AJ. He would’ve already had the internet as a teenager, and Watergate would have been a decade before his birth. His early years would have already seen the rise of therapy culture, and he may have been tested for ADD or told as a child that he had anxiety because his mother yelled at him.

The 1960s and 1970s were a cultural watershed. The Sopranos revolved around conflicts between those who came of age during and just before that era and those born after it. The class aspect can be seen in Melfi being about the same age as Tony but, as a psychiatrist, having bought into the precepts of therapy culture before it had filtered down to the working class and the criminal underground.

We still see generational tensions today, but the remaining disagreements are nowhere near as sharp. It’s been observed that Generation X has a distinctive affinity toward Trump, perhaps because they were born too early for pronoun people, gender fluidity, and white guilt, but late enough that they’re not that bothered by Trump’s crudity and opposition to existing institutions. But the gaps on fundamental questions about how human beings should live between generations today seem much smaller than those between Tony’s generation and that of AJ.

Should you hit children in order to discipline them? Is getting professional mental help something that should be discouraged and people should be ashamed of? Should kids spend large swaths of their childhood outside exploring without adult supervision? Should it be normal for women to get married in their twenties and start having children? Should homosexuality be accepted or stigmatized? Is it acceptable to prefer your children marry someone of the same race? The Sopranos came out at a time when each one of these questions was still something of a live issue, but they were all being settled in the progressive direction, that is, toward prioritizing safety, equality, and individual liberty. The victory has been so complete that we have trouble getting into the heads of those on the losing side. Intergenerational disputes today about announcing pronouns and trans women in sports are nothing compared to what were considered controversies before.

According to its own measures, we can argue that therapy culture has succeeded. People are safer and freer than they have ever been. But are they happier than the era before cynicism took over the culture? Not according to the data, despite improvements in objective living standards. People are marrying and having children later, if ever, and if this doesn’t show up in data indicating we’re less satisfied with our lives, it does make everything less meaningful, and pose a long-term cultural and economic threat to the country. In art, while we all know we should condemn figures like Tony Soprano and Don Draper on paper, when we spend time with them we become captivated. It seems that practically all of our heroes today either lived in a different era or have supernatural powers.

The Sopranos was about the last time a more romantic era could rub up against a culture that has been fully soaked by moral relativism, therapy-speak, and the language of medicine, trauma, and biology replacing that of honor and virtue. Yes, from a broader perspective, we all know that the decline of the Mafia was a good thing. They terrorized those around them and were a blight on their communities, no matter how many cool movies they inspired. But one can’t help but think that the fall of the mob represents a microcosm of what has gone wrong in American life. It may have been a life of crime, but at least something besides safety and comfort mattered to them. Or maybe they didn’t really live by a code any more than people today, and mobsters were always a bunch of sociopaths and weasels. But at the very least the idea that lives of glamour and higher virtues were possible was enough to stave off many of the doubts and much of the neuroticism that plague modern life.

Obviously, the point of this analysis is not to suggest that there’s any going back. The cultural changes we’ve seen are to a large extent not based on conscious choices anyone made. Cable news, the internet, and other newer forms of communication technology made it impossible for leaders and prominent figures to maintain the facade of competence that caused people to assume that they always knew what they were doing. The birth control pill, as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde argues, may not have changed sexual morality overnight, but after a delay it was bound to reorder how we perceive relationships between men and women. Similarly, the mob was bound to decline in the era of electronic surveillance, not to mention the RICO Act.

Yet to remove human agency from the picture would be to make the same mistake as modern therapy culture. We decided to increase “mental health awareness,” fund psychiatry, and grant it prestige. Everyone becoming disabled was the result of a literal law passed by Congress and signed by the president. It’s hard to actually know what it means to say whether “we” are responsible for anything in terms of broad societal outcomes; any such talk has to be understood as metaphorical, since there is no straightforward way to translate the idea of personal responsibility into collective praise or guilt. But it can be a useful metaphor, if it provides a framework through which to judge legal and cultural developments, which I think it does here.

In addition to the time-specific aspects of the show, we have universal lessons about the banality of everyday life, even among those whose hours appear full of action, glamour, and meaning. Tony kills those who snitch to the government, hangs out with Frank Sinatra Jr., and goes on a streak at the roulette table with a beautiful woman at his side. He’s also constantly stuffing his face with cake, taking off his shoes and belt in hopes of making the number on the scale go down, and gets clobbered with a phone by his wife for complaining about how much pulp is in the orange juice she brought home.

As I’ve met more famous and important people over the years, and become somewhat known and admired myself, I’ve come to appreciate this more and more. I used to meet prominent individuals and be amazed how much they were like the rest of us. They also give awkward handshakes, run into uncomfortable pauses in the midst of conversations, have neuroses and topics they seek to avoid, and twiddle their thumbs while not knowing who to talk to at a party, if even for a brief second before an admirer latches on. This is difficult to capture in art, and you don’t want to go too far in the direction of cynicism by pretending there is nothing romantic or beautiful in the personalities or day-to-day lives of those who accomplish great things. More than any other show, The Sopranos captures the contradictions and tensions between the vitality it takes to climb a hierarchy to the top and the banality and inevitable decay that are unavoidable parts of the human condition.

The Sopranos emerged at a moment when the cultural capital of mid-twentieth-century America was in its last stages of being spent. Some more recent developments in American life are certainly worth celebrating, including everything from easy access to psychiatric drugs that can reduce anxiety to the ability to start a business in a city without being shaken down for protection money. But it would be pure delusion to believe that there isn’t a lot that is worth missing. The Sopranos came along at exactly the right time to provide something of an accounting of what had changed. It remains relevant and continues to inspire because it avoids simple lessons as it forces reflection on how America has developed since what we all feel was our golden era, while also giving us a story that provides endless material for nuanced debates about what has been gained and lost, and whether it was all worth it.

There is a disparity between what we might call his meta-dishonesty and his micro-honesty. This is how Vance can be understood as an outlier in terms of both how genuine and how fake he seems at the same time.

On basic facts about his day-to-day life, I think Vance is honest. I believe his conversion story, because if any part of it were made up, it would have been a lot less lame. Vance cites two “miracles” for his conversion during the process of him contemplating whether to join a church. In one, while discussing theology with a conservative intellectual – later revealed to be Ross Douthat – a wine glass fell on the floor. In addition to this, he was listening to a psalm on the way to meet a Dominican friar, and then, when they went to a chapel together, they heard the same psalm! Vance is aware this isn’t going to convince anyone, and becomes defensive.

Now, I know it’s easy to make the skeptic’s case: “Oh, come on, JD, a group of Christians sang a song and then another group of Christians sang the same song in a different language? Total coincidence!”

But to quote Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction: “You don’t judge s*** like this based on merit. Now, whether or not what we experienced was an ‘according to Hoyle’ miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt the touch of God.”

The reader can decide whether a Samuel L Jackson quote refutes David Hume. As a reviewer for The Atlantic put it, “If I were Vance, I would be a little offended that God was not putting in more effort to recruit me.”

So it all rings true. Vance also doesn’t like lying in interviews, which is why he’s capable of being embarrassed when inconvenient facts are presented to him, in ways that Trump is not. When he was forced to defend the cats and dogs nonsense, he came out and admitted he was lying, which I guess is the most honest possible way one could’ve handled that situation without violating the principle of never saying Trump is wrong.

At the same time, Vance has an extreme degree of meta-dishonesty. When talking about his motivations, the quality of the arguments for the ideology he has arrived at, and facts related to his ambitions or his utility function, he tells himself stories that seem obviously absurd to any sophisticated third-party observer.

Vance writes that he came to religion after finding that he was good at achieving professional success but hungered for deeper sources of meaning. He was drawn to Christianity because it gave him moral guidance and a higher ideal to aspire toward, namely being a good husband and father.

Here, you might be thinking to yourself: how then did this simple family man who rejects striving go from analogizing Trump to Hitler in 2016 to being his running mate eight years later? Vance says it was all kind of an accident. He’s an Appalachian Chauncey Gardiner. Here’s Vance on how he decided to run for Senate, after spending the first half of the book telling us how religious faith pointed him away from earthly ambitions.

Usha and I were in California visiting her family. Because of the time difference, I was asleep when news broke that my home state’s junior senator, Rob Portman, would retire. I went back and forth for a while on whether to run before eventually deciding to do it. In some ways, my Senate run was a quirky intellectual project: an effort to make what I thought were more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy…

Much has been written about that Senate race, and I doubt I can offer much original here. But the most important thing to say is that I thought we’d lose but we didn’t.

He ran for Senate in order to make a point about Christian economics! But then, oops, somehow he ended up winning his seat. This happens all the time. One second you’re filing paperwork hoping that it’ll get you on talk shows so you can explain how Jesus wants you to be in a labor union, the next you’re actually in the Senate.

But he didn’t stay there long. Two years after winning his first political race, Vance was on the GOP presidential ticket. How did this happen? Vance explains this story while once again denying himself any agency in the process.

Though I had heard that President Trump might be interested in having me join his ticket in the national campaign now underway, I figured it was a long shot. I had only a year of political experience. As a white man from Ohio, I added no diversity to the ticket and didn’t deliver a swing state. When his staff told me I was on the short list, I almost thought it was a prank call. But I answered their questions and tried to keep the possibility out of mind.

Usha wasn’t looking to upend our lives yet again, but she eventually came to see it as an opportunity to serve the country. However, she insisted that we bring the kids on the road.

This, of course, is contradicted by abundant reporting about how Don Jr, tech billionaires, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk all lobbied heavily on behalf of Vance.

As the NYT reports, right after Vance was selected, he called Don Jr in order to thank him for his efforts. The two had become particularly close over the years.

Can you think of any reason an intelligent person would want to be friends with Don Jr if he wasn’t trying to get something out of the relationship? If you’ve never seen Don Jr talk, just browse YouTube a bit and ask yourself how much ambition you would need to have to be able to tolerate spending any significant amount of time with a man this vapid and aggressively stupid.

Getting close to powerful people who can help him has been a constant throughout Vance’s adult life. In law school, he fell in with Amy Chua, the famously connected professor known for being media savvy and helping her students advance in their careers. The relationship with Peter Thiel has been well covered, and Vance credits the entrepreneur with directing him away from atheism by proving that smart people can be Christians.

In terms of political views, Vance has shown an impeccable sense of timing. Writing his first book, Hillbilly Elegy, in the midst of the Tea Party era, it reflects the conservative consensus of the time, stressing individual responsibility and denouncing populism and nativism. When the entire American establishment was horrified by Trump’s 2016 candidacy and it looked like he would go down in flames, Vance went further than most of them in his personal denunciations of the man and his political project. After Trump spent the next several years remaking conservatism in his image, Vance came into MAGA with the zeal of a convert. Now, he wants us to think that a guy can just go from being one of Trump’s most fervent critics to becoming his successor in eight short years without in any way aiming for that outcome.

This meta-dishonesty extends to his economic and political ideas. I’ll be polite here and not go into the question of whether there are good reasons to believe Catholicism is true. I’m willing to grant people as much grace as possible when it comes to religious belief, since not much good comes from arguing about this topic. That said, Vance doesn’t really make intellectual arguments for his faith, or much of anything else. There’s an almost explicit self-awareness that he doesn’t base his beliefs on reason, arguments, or empirical evidence, but social context and pragmatism. As Usha said, “Therapy didn’t work for you. But church does.” Vance needed to find a religion because of his own angst about his place in the world, and picked Catholicism because it was old and seemed more structured than the evangelical Christianity he had grown up with. The back cover of the book has Vance writing in the first person about how he hopes that the story of his journey provides inspiration to others, but there’s little here for anyone looking for convincing reasons why Christianity might be true.

Vance has an entire chapter called “A Dismal Science,” which is framed as an attack on economics. We’re told that Japan has had slow growth over the years. But Vance went there and the strawberries were delicious. From this, he learned that “Maybe economics is just fake.” Vance then proceeds, in a style similar to that of academic Marxists, to blame capitalism and markets for everything he doesn’t like in the world, from fentanyl addiction to low birth rates. Vance’s image of an economist is some guy sitting in a room saying “More fentanyl deaths? That’s unfortunate. But we must continue to maximize GDP!” Economists are perfectly capable of realizing that country A might have a higher GDP than country B, but country B nonetheless might do better on some other measure, or that a policy that slows growth might be worth adopting if it saves lives. This isn’t anywhere close to controversial within the field, and Vance doesn’t show much evidence of having actually read any economists.

No economist is ever cited for espousing the view that maximizing GDP is all that matters, or that the concept measures everything of value in the world, because no economist takes these positions. While putting forth his anti-market views as representing a bold new approach to policy, Republicans have traditionally supported the war on drugs and other interventions to curb vice, showing that an old GOP establishment that focuses on economic growth and nothing else regardless of social costs is a complete figment of Vance’s imagination.

Vance’s real problem with economics, and why he has to constantly burn strawmen, is this: he has adopted a worldview that has practically no supporters in the field while being congenial to the prejudices of MAGA. It’s one thing to believe economists don’t know what they’re doing. It’s quite another to think that Trump supporters, not known for being a smart or intellectually curious crowd, understand what makes nations rich and poor better than the experts do. All the talk about GDP not measuring everything is a way for Vance to discredit a field that will simply tell you that MAGA is wrong on the facts. Even if you think immigration has been too open and trade has been too free in terms of improving American living standards – and these are very difficult cases to make – the idea that free trade and immigration are the major causes of the country’s problems is pure economic flat-eartherism, which is something that even those who are more skeptical of globalization will tell you. Republican and Democrat economists all agree on this, as does anyone with a respect for rational thought or data-driven analysis.

It’s not like Vance has non-economists who, by taking a different methodological approach, can justify his nativist views either. His entire economic outlook, by his own admission, appears to be drawn from a combination of what he feels in his gut and – despite him regularly fighting with the Pope – Catholic theology. Vance doesn’t go and cite mavericks from outside the field providing a theoretically and empirically well-grounded case for his anti-market views. The war on “economics” is really just a war on rational thought or data being applied to critique the opinions of ignorant voters that Vance relies on, and the things he feels he needs to convince himself are true in order to continue appealing to them.

Yes, politicians in general aren’t known for being systematic thinkers in the habit of questioning the beliefs of their base. But Vance is unique in the degree to which he seeks to intellectualize his demagoguery, with the pretensions of innocent truth seeking. The end result is a combination of smug ignorance and the trappings of thoughtful critique that is deeply embarrassing to anyone with a shred of intellectual integrity.

In addition to the crank economics, think about what it means to have had doubts about Trump’s character and fitness for office in 2016, and then decide your concerns were overblown after January 6, and watching a presidential term during and after which dozens of top officials he himself appointed later came out and confirmed the worst of your original fears. Or to get self-righteous over the idea that elites don’t care about regular Americans, while keeping your mouth shut as Trump literally takes billions out of the pockets of his supporters in a crypto scam.

Again, I think Vance has convinced himself of what he says about his lack of ambition, the accidental nature of his rise, and the reasonableness of his views on political economy, which center around the idea that the main problem Americans face is that they are in a zero-sum competition with foreigners. And I think he is a good husband, good father, and good friend. If he tells a story about a recent event in his life, I would be inclined to think that he is adhering more closely to the facts of what happened than most other politicians would in his situation.

When criticizing Trump was the position most useful for his ability to become a successful media pundit, Vance was one of the relatively rare individuals willing to drop the H-bomb. Now, he shows such genuine zeal in expressing outrage toward Democrats, journalists, and other enemies of MAGA that every online rightist feels a unique bond to him. Trivers’ theory of self-deception is the key to understanding what is going on here. The micro-honesty serves to convince Vance, and those around him, that he is a fundamentally decent man, which makes the meta-dishonesty easier to pull off.

And if you remove the political ambition that leads to taking absurd positions and telling himself false stories while deceiving himself about what is going on, I think one could say that Vance is in fact a good person. Ironically, it is that need to convince himself of his virtue that leads him to adopt such destructive political positions and makes him one of the most effective demagogues of our generation.

This post is brought to you by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

The rise of President Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party, moving it in a populist direction. On the Left, we see the rise of figures like Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner and other DSA-affiliated candidates, indicating that the Democrats might not be far behind.

While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019.

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies.

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders.

Read the rest here.

One of the cool things about writing a book is seeing smart people you admire engage with some of the ideas you care most about. On that note, here are reviews from Robin Hanson, Bentham’s Bulldog, and Scott Sumner. The one by Sumner in particular I think had a lot of good points, and was interesting in critiquing the book for not being anti-populist enough. I agree that the victories of populists tend to be short-lived and democratic institutions are better at aggregating information in the long run and building lasting institutions. Then again, Peru has been doing pretty well since Fujimori, even though they ended up locking him up. Maybe the ideal path for a dysfunctional country is to get a populist leader to clean things up, and then crucify him but stay on the same general path? Anyway, I appreciate the spirit of the review, which emphasizes that human societies are complicated, and knowing why populism tends to work out poorly simply gives you one more tool with which to understand the world.

We’re now at the day before release, so time is running out to preorder, which you can do at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Just send your receipt to hanania.preorders@gmail.com. Reminder that the offer is only available to those who aren’t already paid subscribers and haven’t already preordered. More details here.

This post is brought to you by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

I’d like to be able to get more book deals that publishers can be confident will lead to a lot of sales, and also have my books be at the center of the public discourse around my work. And for that, I need my books to be successful.

In recent years, I’ve learned a lot that is surprising about the book market. Most notably, how few books are actually sold.

What numbers come to mind when you think of a New York Times bestseller? How many books do you think someone needs to sell to make the non-fiction list?

To give some context, on a weekly basis, I regularly have multiple tweets that get millions of views. A well-performing post on this newsletter can easily receive hundreds of thousands.

But according to most sources, for nonfiction hardcover, the range is 5,000-10,000 purchases in a week to make the NYT bestseller list. It’s not purely about numbers, as there’s a formula that is not public, but that’s usually the ballpark. We can take that as a measure of a highly successful book.

You might think that reaching that level of sales should be easy for me. I’ve got 214K+ X followers, and 45K+ Substack subscribers. For my book to be a major success, I just need to convert about 3% of my X followers, or a quarter of my Substack subscribers. If only the people who read every post here preordered the book, that could be more than enough. To put it another way, if I sold as many books in a week as I got views on my worst-performing tweet of an average day, I would make the list.

So I’ve been spamming the X account and the Substack. I’ve pinned the article announcing the book’s release to the top of this newsletter. That essay is also usually pinned on the X account, and on a near-daily basis I add a new post directing people to the link or to the Amazon page of the book itself. And now on nearly every post on this newsletter, I include some variation of the message below:

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

Yet, despite all these efforts, we’re still not in “guaranteed hit” territory.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Preorder the hardcover copy between now and the release on July 7, and I will give you a one-year paid subscription to this newsletter, which has a normal value of $70. The hardcover is $26, so if you think you might ever become a paid subscriber, now is the time to do it. If you buy an ebook version, I’ll give you six months free. Just forward confirmation of your preorder to hanania.preorders@gmail.com, and tell me the email you want to use for your subscription.

This offer is only available to those who are not currently paid subscribers. Sorry, I don’t want everyone to cancel their subscriptions en masse so I end up making nothing from this newsletter. Still, if you’re already a paid subscriber and preorder the hardcover or ebook, I’ll give you a half-hour meeting for a discounted price of $50. Meetings for paid subscribers are usually $120, so that means you get $70 off, the same value as a year subscription. I’ll only do this for the first hundred people who request it, otherwise it would just take up too much of my time.

If you’re already a paid subscriber and already preordered the book, God bless you. You have something more important than money or free subscriptions: my never-ending gratitude.

Audiobooks I’ve learned do not count toward the NYT bestseller list but have their own less prestigious list, so there will be no deal for them. But if you buy the audiobook with the ebook, I’d be willing to treat that as buying a hardcover.

I hope that knowing how few sales it takes for a book to be a success can motivate readers to actually preorder. Timing is as important as pure numbers. Five thousand sales in one week are much more valuable than dragging them out over a month or two. This newsletter is large enough that it can make Kakistocracy a major success on its own. The effort just needs to be concentrated in this very moment.

The book is in large part a lament about how stupid political discourse has gotten. I argue that ultimately this is somewhat inevitable given the attitudes and preferences of the masses, combined with the rise of the internet and social media. But that doesn’t mean we’re completely helpless in pushing back. Books like Kakistocracy don’t have to reach as many people as a Sean Hannity broadcast in order to have major influence because they disproportionately reach smart elites. One way to look at it is that my direct competition is not large influencers talking about UFOs or pushing conspiracy theories, but other intellectuals who are woke or flatter populist ideas and sensibilities rather than push back against them.

So by preordering the book, you’re helping me. But you’re also voting with your wallet in terms of what ideas succeed and what intellectual discourse is like going forward. I don’t feel crazy saying that buying the book is part of the solution to the problems it describes.

Once again, here are the links to buy at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Before I begin, here’s a reminder that my book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster is coming out on July 7. Preorders contribute to presales, which help determine how much attention the book gets. If you like my work on political differences between conservatives and liberals, the rise of populism and conspiracy theories, the nature of Elite Human Capital, and related topics, you will enjoy the book.

In other news, I’ve entered into a sponsorship agreement with Mechanize, a company that I think is doing important work by seeking to automate as many jobs as possible. As I believe strongly that the idea that AI is bad because it will destroy jobs is stupid and pernicious, and they share my outlook, I am glad to support them. You can read about Mechanize in The New York Times here. The company is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.”

Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

1. I don’t have much contact with my family, and haven’t maintained contact with any friends from elementary school, high school, or college. I think it’s because I don’t like the person I was growing up. So every time I see someone from my past, it reminds me of that fact. It’s also an issue of not having much in common with them. I didn’t start meeting people of similar levels of smarts and intellectual curiosity until I was well into adulthood. But I do think I benefited from having some contacts with normies and proles growing up.

2. I am of average height, but oddly shaped because my legs are short and my torso is long. They balance out in terms of total stature, but this mismatch creates certain inconveniences, as with clothes. Any pants I get off the rack are going to be too long. I only learned this about myself when an old man mentioned it to me when I was around 20. But there were hints before. I remember in fifth or sixth grade we measured wingspans and I had one of the longest in the class, but I wasn’t particularly tall, which seemed odd. I went through many years without thinking about this, but returned to it when I decided that I was ascending and needed to dress more professionally in public settings.

3. I’ve always watched silly cartoons. I liked The Simpsons and King of the Hill growing up, and today enjoy Family Guy, American Dad!, and Futurama. These shows are probably my least intellectually challenging forms of entertainment, and I will go to them when I am feeling satisfied and want to relax. I also like the futuristic neoliberal politics of Futurama, which are presented in a somewhat dystopian way, but in a package that I find appealing. Maybe I’ll write about that at some point.

4. I had only one full year of high school. I remember finishing ranked something like 393 in the class out of 412, for either the first semester or the end of the year. And it wasn’t even a good high school. Most of my friends’ parents hadn’t gone to college. In retrospect, my failures in this area were kind of odd, since people generally want to play the status games that they’re good at. I could’ve easily been the best student in my high school, but instead I focused on hanging out with losers and doing drugs. I had contempt for scientists and admiration for rappers and professional athletes. I walked around with an implicit conviction that to be smart or bookish was gay and gaining status through some kind of physical achievement was cool. I don’t think that part of me has ever been completely excised.

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After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a question of what exactly the US would do with its massive military. American force posture abroad had been centered around stopping communism, particularly a Soviet invasion of Europe. Hence, all the troops in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Korea.

Within a few years, the US was regularly involved in humanitarian interventions abroad. We either bombed or sent troops to Somalia (1992-1994), Haiti (1994-1995), Bosnia (1995), and Serbia (1999). Today, the US still carries out smaller counterterrorism and security missions abroad, but these are lower profile than the earlier interventions, partly because they usually involve much smaller commitments.

Scholars used to discuss a phenomenon they called the “CNN effect,” named after the first 24-hour news network, which was founded in 1980. The argument was that, while in previous generations atrocities were ignored, news coverage of humanitarian crises abroad created pressure for intervention. Major thinkers like Samantha Power pushed for a doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect (R2P),” arguing that America had a moral obligation to stop genocides and massacres when it could do so. The US remained passive as 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda, and President Clinton called this one of his greatest regrets.

Then came 9/11, and US foreign policy felt like it was about actually defending the country again. But up to the early 2010s, there was still this idea that there were unfortunate populations abroad that needed to be protected. Beginning in 2003, we started hearing about a genocide in Darfur involving Arab militias under the control of the Sudanese government slaughtering black civilians in the western part of that country. This story made the cover of TIME Magazine in October 2004. I remember a prole friend I had at the time being aware of it, and he was one of those people who never talked about the news. Since 2023, there’s been a civil war in Sudan that has directly killed at least 150,000 and, as of early last year, had displaced 11.6 million people internally, more than a fifth of the population. Yet nobody cares.

This is strange, given that you would expect that the rise of smartphones and social media would give us something like the CNN effect on steroids. We should be getting a nonstop stream of atrocities calling out for a response. Gaza is an exception, but this is more of a culture war football involving American identity and geopolitical interests, in contrast to the purely altruistic concerns motivating the focus on African suffering in previous decades.

I suspect that this is due to a general turn toward pessimism in the culture. When people feel happy and secure, they are more generous. When they are depressed, anxious, and into navel-gazing, they lose interest in the problems of others, and have trouble focusing on anything other than their parochial interests and grievances.

A great cultural time capsule here is the film Kony 2012. In less than a week, this short documentary became the fastest video ever to reach 100 million views. The premise was that there was this bad man named Joseph Kony, who went around capturing children, forcing them to kill their parents, and turning the boys into soldiers and the girls into sex slaves. By making Kony famous, he would be stopped and the children would be freed. That’s not as dumb as it sounds. American troops were already deployed to assist African forces on the continent in trying to catch him, and by keeping the pressure on, it was thought he could eventually be brought to justice. I encourage people to watch the whole thing, because it is striking to me how much the culture has changed in a mere fourteen years.

The video opens with filmmaker Jason Russell showing videos of his young son being an innocent kid. This is juxtaposed against children of the same age in Africa, who are forced to pick up guns and kill people. There’s an end of history feel about how he describes his son’s circumstances. Americans have achieved peace and prosperity, so have the luxury of looking around the world and trying to help children suffering abroad. Today, a filmmaker wouldn’t directly say that Americans suffer as much as Africans, but the culture generally shies away from anything that tells Americans that they don’t have it that bad, even by implication. The culture of Kony 2012 is one in which people are secure enough to feel genuine sympathy and take into account the problems facing others.

Kony 2012 has a cringe-inducing sincerity. Young people stand together and stare determinedly at the camera. They won’t stop until Kony is brought to justice. Russell, speaking in front of a crowd of young people, asks “Who are you to end a war? I’m here to tell you, who are you not to?” Politicians from both sides of the political aisle are featured in the film without any hint of partisanship. And the Kony movement did have some successes by making this a cause célèbre in Washington, with the film showing Russell reading a letter from Obama informing his organization of the decision to send American forces to Africa.

Of all the ways MAGAs are morally repulsive, one of the worst things to me is how they talk about Ukraine. They’ll often oppose military aid not on the grounds that it is fruitless or that there needs to be more effort toward a durable peace – which can be a reasonable argument – but because our people at home have their own problems. Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced Biden for going to Ukraine on President’s Day instead of East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a chemical spill that killed no people and thus far has had no proven long-term health effects. Before the last decade, I think you would’ve found few Americans in positions of power or influence comparing the plight of people living in the United States to that of those suffering in the midst of a war zone. As an “anti-woke” backlash rose on the right in the Trump era, conservatives adopted the left’s self-pity and victimhood fetish, minus the universalism, making it all the more pathetic.

Perhaps the culture hasn’t changed that much, and there are simply fewer war crimes and atrocities to respond to? This is pretty much what happened with hunger, where economic growth across the world practically eliminated starvation. But there still seem to be a lot of wars and atrocities in Africa. According to the Early Warning Project, the number of ongoing mass killing episodes was stable between 2004 and 2024.

A mass killing is said to begin when at least 1,000 noncombatant civilians of a certain group are killed within a year, and end when fewer than 100 members of the group are killed for three straight years.

Yet these are simply cutoffs to determine the value of a binary variable. Here’s the Uppsala Conflict Data Program tracking deaths from state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence from 1989 to 2024.

Rwanda clearly stands out. But other than that, the era of peak “CNN effect” wasn’t much worse than today in terms of one-sided violence and non-state conflict. Perhaps it was the scale of Rwanda plus the fact that the Balkans saw mass killings in Europe that brought the idea of stopping atrocities to the forefront of the culture. But then why was Sudan still such a big deal in the aughts?

“One-sided violence” collapsed in the late 1990s and has remained low since. “Non-state conflict” actually starts increasing in 2017 from a very low base. Meanwhile, actual wars involving states picked up with the Syrian Civil War beginning in 2011 and the subsequent rise of ISIS. As that was dying down, we got Ukraine and Gaza.

Perhaps focus on Gaza and Ukraine has crowded out attention that could otherwise go toward horrible things happening in Africa.

This raises an interesting question: let’s say that the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza were settled. Would there be as much pressure for the US to intervene in one-sided mass killings and atrocities as there was in the 1990s? In my book Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy, I argued that once you have a big military-industrial complex and a think tank and intellectual ecosystem that exists around it, there will always be pressure to do something with American forces. So when the Soviet Union was still around, that was the focus. There was nobody really to fight for a decade after that, until 9/11, and this interregnum happened to be the exact period of time during which we realized we had a responsibility to protect the helpless. After the Twin Towers came down, it was back to actual security concerns. As the War on Terror no longer grabs people, we’ve seen talk of pivoting to China. And now we have Gaza and Ukraine to talk and argue about, so there’s not much attention space left for other bad things going on in the world.

A society can be understood to be like a person: there’s only so much bandwidth, or so many things you can be dealing with at one time. Countries are going to mostly focus on their internal affairs under most circumstances. The discourse space we allocate to what is happening abroad is therefore limited. According to this theory, the CNN effect went away due to the fact that classic wars made a comeback. Maybe it will return once the situations in Ukraine and Gaza settle, assuming there aren’t new major wars.

But I don’t think this is the full story. Given American political realities and the state of the culture, I can’t see us today caring about ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Haiti, or the Congo as much as we did analogous events occurring between the mid-1990s and Kony 2012. The R2P doctrine was born in a society that was confident in itself, one that could be magnanimous at the end of history and felt like things were going well enough that the serious issues facing our own societies were mostly solved. Today, victimization narratives have triumphed, and no one is interested in the problems of the truly unfortunate from a global perspective.

It’s easy to make fun of poor Jason Russell playing the role of white savior, and his delusions of grandeur. Incredibly enough, it’s been fourteen years now and Joseph Kony is still at large. But the theory of how he would be caught wasn’t bad, and the warlord did largely have to stop his activities. A March 2026 article describes his remaining group as being composed of 12 to 20 fighters. So Kony wasn’t put behind bars, but he ended up much less dangerous.

Of all the things in the world people can virtue signal and get smug about, focusing on children suffering malnourishment, mutilation, and disease in Africa beats almost all other alternatives. It’s certainly better than the parochial narrow-mindedness that leads to an obsession with microaggressions and the mental trauma suffered by American college students, or, on the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives adopting the template of sacred victims and applying it to overweight rednecks in Appalachia. Once we start caring about suffering Africans again, it will be a sign that our culture is getting back on the right track.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

This is part of a larger story in which China has suddenly become a global leader in biotech over the last decade. Here’s a figure from an Economist report on the topic last year.

A figure in the December 2025 report of the congressional National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) helpfully shows how drug development works and the rise of China in this area.

Teslo and Punjabi point out that the government has done this by enacting the kind of reforms that smarter critics of the FDA have been advocating for years.

China’s ongoing biotechnology transformation is the product of deliberate industrial policy. The Made in China 2025 initiative explicitly identified biotechnology and advanced medical technologies as strategic national priorities, and a series of targeted policies followed. Among them was the Thousand Talents Plan, designed to draw overseas Chinese scientists back from Western institutions. BeiGene, Innovent, and Junshi, which are now three of China’s leading oncology biotechs, were all founded or are now led by researchers who had trained in the United States before returning home.

Yet perhaps the most consequential advantage China has built lies in its clinical trial ecosystem. Chinese hospitals make extensive use of investigator-initiated trials. These are early-stage studies that allow oncologists to quickly assess whether a drug shows genuine promise. In China, such a trial can be up and running within roughly six months of a patient consultation with an academic oncologist. In the United States, the same process can take eighteen months or more, bogged down by regulatory preparation that includes a lengthy Investigational New Drug application. This is a document that can run to thousands of pages and is laden with a host of requirements which are unnecessary at such an early stage of development.

The most valuable thing early-stage trials enable is iteration. They allow tight feedback between the clinic and the lab. There are countless ways to engineer a better CAR-T cell, and many cannot be evaluated in the laboratory alone. No cell culture or animal model fully replicates the complexity of a human tumor, and AI is unlikely to close that gap anytime soon. We simply lack the training data to capture what tumors are actually like in vivo: their geometry, vascularization and biomechanical properties.

China’s ability to run these trials quickly and at scale gave it a structural advantage in that learning process, whereas the US is currently undermining itself through burdensome manufacturing requirements and regulatory bureaucracy that make early experimentation slower and more costly than it needs to be.

This isn’t that complicated. Talent acquisition plus the removal of burdensome regulations that don’t pass a cost-benefit test. One of the most significant reforms was enacted in 2018, and it ensured that clinical trials can begin upon an application being accepted as long as China’s National Medical Products Administration does not raise objections within a certain timeframe. The US formally allows something similar, but it involves more stringent paperwork, manufacturing, and institutional review board requirements.

I think that the narrative surrounding China’s rise in biotech is interesting because it’s a clear example of what I think is the overly zero-sum perspective we take when it comes to that country. A headline in Time Magazine from mid-2025 reads “The US Can’t Afford to Lose the Biotech Race with China.” Now, the idea that the US is losing to China in something can have a positive effect by encouraging needed reforms at home. But it can also lead to policies that harm ourselves because we think they’ll hurt China more, which is what we see in Trump’s approach to trade.

The Time article calls for limiting Chinese investment in American biotech companies. Now, usually when you see articles like this in a legacy publication on an obscure public policy issue, you can bet that it’s part of some lobbying campaign. And there is real momentum in Washington to try to hinder Chinese biotech, from both China hawks and probably business interests that see an opportunity to profit in some way.

John Moolenaar, a Republican congressman from Michigan, has pushed to restrict U.S.-China biotech cooperation, including by calling for the FDA to stop relying on certain Chinese clinical-trial data and by backing measures to curb licensing and investment deals between major U.S. drugmakers and Chinese companies.

While fraud might be a legitimate concern in theory, biotech investors aren’t morons. If there were concerns about whether data from China could be trusted on a mass scale, the private sector would surely know a lot sooner than our government. And the NSCEB notes that China has sped up drug trials, with “reforms also improving quality and alignment with international standards.” Here’s a recent Economist article on Chinese fraud in the form of a profile of an influencer who has been making a name for himself exposing it. A Chinese scientist recently gave a speech in which he said that his country deserves to be recognized both for its legitimate progress and its fraud. The point here is that you’ll often find people who will exaggerate problems in Chinese science to deny its real accomplishments.

Moolenaar’s letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent notes that “Last year, 48% of all large pharmaceutical licensing deals globally of $50 million or more were inked with Chinese companies, up from 0% in 2020, and this trend is continuing to accelerate.” It goes on to complain that “One of the ways that China has sparked this growth is by creating the cheapest and fastest human clinical trial system in the world—a system that is marred by ethical concerns such as a lack of informed consent and involuntary trial participation.” Yeah, I’d like to see data or actual evidence on the involuntary part. As far as the “ethical” concerns more broadly, we have seen what the American conception of medical ethics gets us, where you hinder research into curing disease by protecting people’s medical privacy that their revealed preferences show they don’t care about at all.

The China-skeptical approach might make sense in other areas of technology. If China was moving ahead of us in ballistic missile production or atomic science, that would be a concern. AI is an intermediate case, which has mostly civilian uses but could in theory give one country a path to world domination. But biotech? Here we’re looking at a field that is almost purely positive sum. If China cures a type of cancer, they’re going to sell it to us. Even if they wanted to keep it for themselves and forgo massive profits, just observing China making a medical breakthrough can provide proof of concept and help American companies follow their lead.

Perhaps China can cut us off from a vital drug in the middle of a war or other emergency, but this is about manufacturing rather than development. Congressman Moolenaar complains about licensing deals, which generally involve an American company agreeing to develop, test, seek approval for, or sell a drug in certain regions of the world. These are win-win partnerships between US and Chinese firms.

If you’re really determined to, you can sit around imagining crazy scenarios in which China being ahead in biotech harms Americans. Maybe the president gets a disease, and the Chinese are the only ones with a proven treatment, so they bribe him into surrendering Taiwan. Or perhaps they discover some new way to treat battlefield injuries that matters in a war. But this is generally the stuff of network TV dramas. In real life, by far the most likely outcome is that better Chinese biotech just improves health outcomes for human beings across the world. Policymakers worry about low-probability outcomes that would be disastrous all the time, but to me, “preventing a US-China partnership that cures cancer” seems like a pretty disastrous outcome, and one that is much more likely than the made-for-TV-drama scenarios we might make up.

As for supply-chain dependency, I think this misunderstands what’s important in the field of medicine, and science more generally. The true constraint is knowledge, and the barriers to creating as much of it as possible. That’s the bottleneck in the process of improving human health. Once we know that something can be done, we can learn how to do it and build on the knowledge. Maybe not immediately, but, if something is worth doing, then some combination of market forces and government policy can usually help you figure out the manufacturing and distributional aspects of delivering a treatment or medicine in the long run.

So say China develops a cure for Parkinson’s, and maybe they’re the only people in the world who know how to make it. Eventually, China cuts us off and keeps the drugs for themselves. They probably wouldn’t do this absent some very weird circumstances, but let’s just say they do for the sake of argument. Having knowledge that there’s a cure for Parkinson’s out there and some access to the completed product would probably help Americans reverse engineer it before too long, unless it is the product of some complex manufacturing process. And even in that case, it would be strange if knowing something about the drug didn’t provide any useful insights at all. In the real world, information is always flowing across borders, and although China can cut us off from physical materials and factories, they can’t erase the knowledge of scientific discoveries. And we’ll be much more likely to have access to important information if Chinese firms are partnering with American companies, which is something that China hawks are now complaining about.

This is why China has been able to stay on our heels in AI, since they can simply observe what the major US labs are doing. The release of DeepSeek showed that China could produce near-frontier LLMs that, while generally not as polished or capable as the very best American models, are much cheaper to train and run. In medicine particularly, what matters is what technology ends up being developed, not whether one country is a few months or even a few years ahead of another on the knowledge frontier.

And yes, partnerships mean that China can engage in IP theft too, but this is something that has always existed, and it’s not even clear to me that this is always bad for American consumers. Someone involved in the industry testified “that for every innovative U.S. biotechnology firm, there is a ‘shadow’ Chinese firm working to replicate its work at a lower cost.” That sounds bad for US companies, but good for consumers. Maybe it’s harmful in the long run if it reduces the incentives for innovation. But consider that knowledge of how to create drugs more cheaply is a public good in the same way a fundamental discovery is. All of this is to say that IP theft is probably at most a small problem, and might actually be good on balance, even from an American perspective. This is not something that should make anyone hope that Chinese biotech fails.

There are lessons here beyond medical science. Whenever something is discovered or invented that improves living standards, it usually lifts all boats. Things like nuclear weapons, and possibly AI, are exceptions, not the rule. Biotech is unique in the degree to which the upside of cooperation and progress, no matter where it occurs, outweighs possible risks inherent in falling behind another country.

You will often hear people say that opening up trade with China was a mistake because the country never democratized, as we were told they would. But the theory behind such an approach was sound. The claim that economic development leads to democratization is one of the best supported ideas in political science. It didn’t work in this case, but there was no way for leaders at the time to know that. And even if they did have a crystal ball in the 1990s and saw that China would be just as authoritarian decades down the line, increasing trade with them was still the right thing to do. A billion-plus people innovating and getting wealthier has positive effects on the rest of the world regardless of what kind of political system they live under. I would rather China develop with a greater respect for human rights, but their internal governance is not something we can control, and to the extent that we can have an effect, friendly and commerce-based relations are more likely to have a positive impact than antagonism and attempts at isolation.

If you hear someone with a political agenda talk about the rise of Chinese biotech today, they fall into one of these two camps: those trying to improve American policy, and those simply interested in slowing down Chinese innovation, even if it hurts Americans too. It would be nice if you could use this language of a race with China to motivate reforms we should undertake anyway. This seems to be the approach of Ruxandra and the aforementioned NSCEB, which urges America to get its act together, without much emphasis on biotech decoupling. Unfortunately, people who are paranoid about foreign threats tend not to have the best judgment about these things. The debate on this topic has the strange quality where the same facts about China’s biotech rise can be marshaled in order to support policies that are either wise or destructive.

I see the pro-progress side here trying to co-opt populist instincts. It’s sad, but people seem to be more easily motivated by fear of outsiders than hope. “We’re going to cure cancer to BEAT CHINA” is a much stronger political message than “We’re going to cure cancer while working with China.” In theory, you take people’s dumb instincts and orient them in a productive direction. But this means you’re playing with fire, since you’re creating pressure for action to be taken when it’s often much easier to enact demagogic and destructive policies than to carry out sensible reforms.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

Imagine four quadrants. People can be smart or dumb, and they can be interested or uninterested in politics. When I say smart, I’m not referring just to IQ, but some combination of intelligence and a lack of intellectual laziness. Elon Musk is an extreme case here: obviously smart when it comes to engineering and business, but about as stupid as human beings get when it comes to politics. Of course, both intelligence and interest in politics exist on a spectrum, so keep that in mind, as this is a simplified model of the world.

The degree of populism in a political community is based on the balance between Quadrant I and Quadrant IV. Society doesn’t really change all that much in intelligence, but the degree to which smart or dumb people are interested in public affairs varies greatly.

One of the biggest changes in American politics from the 1990s to today is the rise in Quadrant IV. If you wanted to consume political material in 1995, your choices were basically limited to stuff like reading The New York Times, watching 60 Minutes, picking up a book from a mainstream publisher, turning on C-SPAN, or finding an intellectual magazine such as National Review or The New Republic. If your intelligence is so low that the only narrative you can find compelling is one that blames foreigners or transsexuals for all that has gone wrong in the world, there weren’t a lot of options. Today, however, you are drowning in them.

This article is part of a series discussing topics covered in more detail in my forthcoming book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. If you find the ideas expressed in this article interesting, please consider preordering here. The release date is July 7, and you don’t get charged until the book is shipped or you receive the digital version. Preorders are very important in determining how much attention a book receives, so by getting yours in you can help ensure that its arguments reach a wide audience.

Imagine if, before the streaming era, the only kind of music available to purchase was classical. Some dumb people might get into Mozart, but for the most part the left end of the bell curve would just buy less music overall.

Quadrant IV has grown mainly due to technological developments, namely the rise of the internet and social media. Yet this does not mean that nothing else matters for determining the balance between Quadrants I and IV. Specific leaders can have a major influence. Trump swelled the ranks of Quadrant IV, as he made politics as interesting as a reality show, so a lot of people who would be into reality shows are now more active participants in the political process. He also concentrated them into one party, increasing their influence. So in 2012, anti-vaxxers and the people who believed in globalist plots to make everyone gay were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Today, because of Trump’s unique appeal to the stupid, they all march under the same banner, and so have an entire political party that caters to them. Trump was responsible for Operation Warp Speed and tried to defend its legacy, but anti-vaxxers still like him better than other politicians because he is the kind of leader that the less intelligent naturally look to.

I used to see Trump occasionally be less anti-vaxx and anti-immigration than his followers, and thought that meant that he was keeping the right from going even more insane. I’ve changed my mind on this, and now believe that the effect is dominated by the degree to which he animates and consolidates Quadrant IV. Even if Trump sometimes has the salutary effect of checking the worst impulses of his fans, many of them wouldn’t be as interested in politics in the first place if he were still a reality TV host. If Ted Cruz or JD Vance were leading the Republican Party, many would find the show too boring to continue paying attention to.

Some political figures, like Obama and Macron, expand Quadrant I. The French president has been paradoxically referred to as an “anti-populist populist.” Such figures usually project youth and competence, and make more educated people feel better about the system they live under. They also appeal to the better angels of human nature, since they draw into the political process more of those who are happy with their lives and fewer who have failed and are looking for someone to blame.

Institutions also matter. Open primaries have moved us in the direction of more populist figures being elected. If we still had stronger political parties exercising the kind of control they had in the mid-twentieth century, Trump would never have survived the 2016 primaries. And in this cycle alone, we would have been spared Ken Paxton and Graham Platner, each party’s most ethically compromised Senate nominee.

Even technology itself is not immune to policy decisions. We decided to give social media companies Section 230 protections, which meant that they could not be sued for things posted on their websites in the same way that newspapers can when their journalists and writers make false claims. When you think about it, this creates an asymmetry, in which actual publications have to be a lot more careful about the kinds of claims they make, putting them at a market disadvantage. In theory, you can sue individual social media users for what they post, but since most of the time your targets don’t really have deep pockets or much to lose, and the defamatory contribution of each individual spreading a lie is so small, in practice this is rarely worth doing. In contrast, I think AI is probably going to be anti-populist in its effects, so this is another reason to encourage its development and deployment.

People will often argue that economic grievances put people into Quadrant IV. I can think of few ideas in politics more straightforwardly refuted by data. As Western societies have gotten wealthier, policy programs of major parties have focused more on cultural issues and less on economics. If you’re actually worried about your economic situation, the most rational thing to do is not waste time on politics at all, since you’re not going to change much on your own. People who pay the most attention to politics treat it as a form of entertainment and an escape from their jobs, not as part of a diversified portfolio in which they seek economic advancement by combining work with activism.

Stupid people will explicitly tell you what they’re angry about: vaccines, having to see brown people, women not knowing their place, gender non-conformity, pedophile conspiracies, etc. Populist-leaning intellectuals like to pretend that these are just excuses and the true source of pain is always material. Ironically, how populists explain populism is itself an example of the poor epistemological standards of populism. Anger at the rich seems to be more of a phenomenon of the relatively poor intellectual and artistic class, rather than the most disadvantaged. Think of the anti-monopoly movement, which is a bunch of law professors and professional activists trying to find a broad base of support, in contrast to conspiratorial, anti-immigration, anti-trans, and anti-vaxx sentiments on the right, which are genuinely grassroots phenomena that conservative elites resisted for a while.

You can’t defeat populism by turning back the technological clock. But you can think about what the impacts of laws we pass and communications strategies we embrace are going to be on the balance between Quadrants I and IV. I see my war on Low Human Capital as part of this effort. I want smart people not to consider dumb people who happen to agree with them in the moment for tribal or accidental reasons their true allies. And I’d like to see the dumb people themselves either be demoralized and leave politics, or perhaps otherwise find me so entertaining that they outsource their thinking to me rather than James Fishback.

From a public relations perspective, one does not have to think about fighting Quadrant IV as going to war with the masses. Most of the public is in Quadrants II and III, at least if we set the bar for interestedness in politics high enough. That means they are passive, and, to the extent that they have opinions, they will shape them in response to what is going on in Quadrants I and IV. To pull up an arbitrary number, I’d estimate that the stupid-interested demographic makes up maybe 20% of the population.

William F Buckley famously quipped that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phonebook than the faculty of Harvard. That was never the choice, as we’ve clearly learned in recent years. The alternative to organic elites isn’t a random sample of the population, but the guest list of the Joe Rogan podcast and MAGA influencers. The case against populism has therefore become much stronger.

As discussed in the case of the anti-monopoly movement above, one major group that doesn’t cleanly fit into the schema presented is highly ideological left-wing elites. Someone who writes books preaching Critical Race Theory may be bad at thinking, but it would be wrong to say that they lack intelligence or are in a true sense intellectually lazy. Nonetheless, I still want to see these people defeated.

On an optimistic note, I would argue that there is something deeply artificial about this class, with its dependence on government subsidies through the university system and civil rights law creating a demand for DEI bureaucrats in addition to other kinds of regulators. The free market will give you The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan, catering to either smart or dumb people. But it will not give you the Journal of Black Queer Disabled Studies. Note that the most successful media outlets in the country are practically all either liberal-establishment or right-wing populist slop. Wokeness has a strong top-down component, and this is why I’ve always stressed the importance of taking apart its legal and bureaucratic underpinnings. The true threat to American living standards and the maintenance of a free country coming from the left is the more masculine form of socialism represented by Platner, because it has a much stronger base of support throughout all four quadrants.

Woke did have something of a populist moment in the early 2010s. As described in Ben Smith’s Traffic, people who were running websites at the time have discussed how identity-focused articles and blog posts would draw the most eyeballs. But this seems to me to have been the product of a unique historical era, in which we were reeling from the shock of the initial rise in social media. It only took a little over a decade for our politics to go back to centering on socialism and racism (the classical kind, not the woke version), two of the main pillars of human nature when it sets its sights on the political arena. We’re returning to the pre-2010 norm, in which crazy academic theories about race and human sexuality are mostly sequestered in universities and certain activist communities and, although generally aligned with the political left, by no means its dominant force.

Woke is not only wrong on the merits, but it also provides steroids for Quadrant IV (unlike economic grievances). The trans issue in particular riles up idiots like practically nothing else, and I say this as someone in no way sympathetic to gender theory. I’ve always said that Democrats could probably reduce the strength of Trumpism by perhaps 10% through simply accepting that God is a cisgender male and sports should be segregated by biological sex. Doing these things is not enough to defeat the right on its own, but there’s nothing else where you can get so far by giving up so little in material terms. Regarding gender-affirming care for minors, here leftists might feel that the stakes are too high to simply surrender, but the pronoun talk certainly hasn’t helped on that front either.

In my forthcoming book, Kakistocracy (again, preorder here), I explain my own disillusionment with right-wing politics as it got taken over by idiots, to the point that even intelligent people I knew surrendered their brains to the chuds.

My own alienation from the right had two major catalysts in vaccine denial and narratives that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. I had taken it for granted that conservatives and liberals often engage in motivated reasoning. But I thought that there was nearly always an ideological basis for disagreements, and that motivated reasoning almost always had at least some nexus in truth. Conservatives might believe, for example, in lower taxes and less government spending, and be more inclined to trust economic analysts who tell them that Reaganomics is the best way to achieve prosperity. Liberals might be inclined to accept a flawed study that told them that law enforcement was racist. This is the normal stuff of politics, and no longer shocking, particularly in a highly polarized era.

What was mostly outside my field of imagination was the idea that a movement could come to believe in lies with little to no grounding in ideology, or even fact. I watched in shock as both right-leaning friends and the conservative movement more generally became less and less connected to reality. They believed in propositions for no other reason than that Trump said them, in the case of election denial, or the effects were bottom-up, as when the misinformed and uneducated right-wing mobs on social media became enraged about the Covid vaccines.

What made me different from others on the right? While I had an identity as a conservative, I also had an identity as someone who believes that truth actually matters. There was sometimes a psychological pull toward agreeing with my tribe, but an even stronger sense that I am an honest person who deals in the realm of facts and has the courage to stand up to the mob.

People often discuss the need for a politics of meaning. Usually, I am not that big of a fan of such talk, since meaning is subjective and what we should be focusing on most of the time is policy outcomes. But there comes a point when the overwhelming stupidity and corruption of politics begins to insult one’s sense of dignity. For me, that limit has been reached. I don’t think that, in the long run, rule by podcasts and algorithms is the best way to achieve prosperity and advance the interests of humanity. But it would be too soulless to let that settle things alone. Standing in opposition to populism is a core part of my personal identity, as it should be for everyone involved in politics who values individuality, courage, and truth.

In the US, the unemployment rate is about 4%. In India, the government estimates an official unemployment rate of 3.1% in 2025. What a remarkable coincidence that India has four times as many people as the US, and somehow around four times as many jobs available. The coincidences don’t stop there. In the first US census in 1790, the country had about 4 million people, including slaves. Today, we have 342 million. Yet each society seems to end up with about the same number of jobs, in proportion to the population. Even countries with high official unemployment rates often have huge portions of the labor force working in the non-formal sector.

So “jobs” is not the reason some countries and societies are wealthier than others. Why, then, do people in the US enjoy much higher living standards than people in India, who are better off economically than people at the American founding, who didn’t have antibiotics, cars, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and an endless number of modern conveniences we now take for granted?

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For those who haven’t been paying attention, here’s what’s been happening to birth rates across the world over the decades, particularly the last 15 years.

I’ve shown that birth rates are collapsing even when controlling for the fact that the world is getting wealthier.

And here’s what’s happened to socializing among young people.

The fertility crisis is in part a coupling crisis. In the United States, fertility among married couples has remained relatively stable, though this may be a statistical artefact.

One of the standard demonstrations of the ability of evolutionary psychology to help understand the world is its explanation of the rise of obesity. Once, humans lived in calorie-deprived environments. Starvation and malnourishment were real possibilities. So we evolved to gorge on calorie-dense food when it is available. We also moved around a lot, ensuring that we burned off energy. Today, food is cheap and all around us and work is often stationary, so we eat ourselves into poor health and an early grave. The mismatch between our evolutionary environment and the modern world is why people now get fat.

Countries seeing collapsing birth rates as they get wealthier is a pattern nearly as universal as them getting fatter. People sometimes blame feminism or social norms. Others point to technology, particularly iPhones, to explain more recent trends. But what if these are the wrong ways to look at the issue? It would be misguided to refer to the rise of obesity as fundamentally linked to one particular technology like the development of high-fructose corn syrup, or a cultural change. Evolution provides the most satisfying explanation. People may like high-fructose corn syrup, but if that hadn’t been invented other things would play a similar role. The more fundamental causal factor is that people seek out food that is bad for them under modern conditions.

Consider the possibility that humans evolved to seek solitude in the same way we evolved to eat calorie-dense food.

The idea that humans naturally desire to be alone might seem bizarre at first glance. Don’t we need to find friends, allies, and mates? We are social creatures, and our ancestors couldn’t survive and reproduce without other humans.

This simple story breaks down, however, when we consider what things were like across the vast majority of our evolutionary history. Imagine that for humans there is some optimal mix of socializing and solitude. It’s a bad idea to be a hermit. But there are also drawbacks to never having time alone at all. Maybe solitude allows people to think through their problems, and decompress in the midst of the pressures of life. Perhaps there’s a secret that you need to keep from your family and the members of your band, like a stash of food or something else you want to hide.

Yet man in his ancestral environment was rarely alone. Primitive humans did most things communally, including hunting, sleeping, and leisure activities. Anthropologists are increasingly skeptical of the idea that you can derive lessons about the lives of our ancestors from studying modern hunter-gatherers, and have argued that there was probably a diversity of cultures and norms among them. Regardless, taking into account this likely variation, it’s probably safe to say that there were always a lot fewer opportunities to be alone than there are today, and this is true up through the rise of agriculture and the early days of industrialization, when individuals often lived with or near large numbers of kin and depended on their local communities.

So we evolved a simple rule to go through life: “Whenever you have a chance to be alone, take it. You might not get another for a long time.” This of course coexists with other instincts, so it is not an absolute guide to behavior. But the rule did create a tendency that has become more prominent throughout history.

As societies become wealthier, innovation and economic developments cater to human preferences. Hence, we got fast food and delicious cakes sold at the supermarket, and also entertainment options that keep us in our rooms. People debate whether the iPhone is responsible for the decline in sociability and fertility. It probably is, but the question is why the iPhone has been such a successful product in the first place. In a sense, candy bars and potato chips cause obesity, but ultimately there are deep reasons in our evolutionary past why we find such foods appealing. Banning certain junk foods doesn’t help much, as people simply eat something else. The only thing that seems to work on a wide scale for people susceptible to being overweight is fiddling with our biology, hence the rise of GLP-1 drugs.

There is too much of a tendency to treat economic and technological developments as arbitrary. But they’re driven by human nature. We could have used our wealth for different purposes. Greater disposable income might have gone toward things like more social clubs and nights out on the town. For all the talk of kids being unaffordable, objectively speaking there’s never been a time in human history when it was more feasible to have large numbers of children. But we didn’t buy more children or more social experiences. Instead, we purchased solitude. You can blame Silicon Valley for making us addicted to phones in the same way you can blame food manufacturers for what they’ve done to our waistlines, but in the end the market is shaping itself around our preferences.

In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang profiles Chinese women who couldn’t wait to get out of the countryside and work in what we in the West have called “sweatshops.” They felt absolutely crushed by the social obligations and limitations put on them by their extended families as part of rural life. The women preferred the company of friends and boys they could meet. Before long, the young people of East Asia would retreat even from peer relationships and get buried in their phones. Each step is toward greater solitude. East Asians seem particularly susceptible to negative trends that are hitting practically everyone, a phenomenon I discussed here.

David Oks writes about the crushing burdens of communal norms in Africa.

The result is a constant process of redistribution from the most productive members of a kinship group to the least productive. This informal redistribution is a constant feature of life in African societies: 93 percent of Kenyan entrepreneurs agree that success in business leads to financial demands from family and friends. South Africans even have a name for the sharing obligations that define African kinship groups: “the black tax.”

This is, of course, a bad deal for the ambitious and productive within the society. But because refusal is impossible, sharing obligations lead to all sorts of attempts at obfuscation. One experiment found that rural Kenyan women were willing to pay significant sums in order to hide their income from relatives; likewise, in Cameroon, it’s common for people to pretend to be poorer than they are, and thus avoid sharing obligations, by taking out unnecessary bank loans fully collateralized by their savings.

It’s easy to see how under such conditions it would be difficult to go beyond the optimal level of solitude. Individuals should be always taking whatever privacy and alone time they can get.

Whenever I pick my kids up from school or daycare, they seem happy. They’re running around with their friends, laughing, smiling, and playing. That said, when I asked Girl last Thursday morning whether she would rather stay home for the day, she said yes. It’s like this with the other one that can talk too. Whenever the option comes up, they choose home over school. I was reflecting on this paradox while dropping them off later that morning.

What I concluded was that people having evolved to seek solitude does not mean that they don’t enjoy being around others once they’re in social situations. We’ve probably all had the experience of not feeling like going to a party or on a date, but when we get there things unfold much better than we imagined they would. People evolved to get along with others and form relationships with them, but the seeking out part is something we don’t do that much. This is why churches are valuable. The theological beliefs are in many cases secondary. The point is that religious traditions create obligations that bring people together in structured ways.

If all of this is true, what should we do? Maybe we should just accept people choosing to lie in bed and watch TV and stare at their phone all day. It’s simply them doing what they want. But again, the obesity analogy is helpful. It was difficult if not impossible to get fat throughout most of our evolutionary history. Yet people who overeat today end up with health problems and not feeling good about the results. Likewise, the rule that you should maximize solitude probably now leaves people feeling empty and alone. Moreover, low fertility is an economic and social disaster.

Pharmaceuticals are in the process of changing the trend in obesity after decades of failure when trying other things. See Scott Alexander, “Society is fixed, biology is mutable”. Perhaps we need something similar in this area? Note that people already drug themselves in order to make socializing more enjoyable. They mainly use alcohol, but every once in a while there’s a panic about some new party drug. At this point, I would be optimistic if I heard there were an uptick in young people using alcohol, cocaine, or ecstasy, though not heroin, even though it’s by far the most fun of all drugs and must be what heaven feels like. We also give people legal medications for anxiety and depression, which pushes in the opposite direction of campaigns against the abuse of illegal drugs.

At some point, societies need to get serious about collapsing fertility. The reason we couldn’t stop obesity from increasing before GLP-1 drugs was that the evolutionary impulses towards sloth and overeating are too strong. Governments believe in economic growth too, and the wealthier we got, the more difficult it became to stay in good physical shape because it just meant we had more options and could afford more food. Likewise, the desire to get fertility up is going to conflict with other things people want, namely freedom of choice and increasing options regarding how to live one’s life.

Economic incentives for having kids might help, if large enough. How could they not? But we’re also going to be constantly pushing up against the limits of human nature if we want modern people to socialize and have kids. Giving up is unacceptable. But we need to realize the enormity of the challenge. Perhaps pharmaceutical companies might look into a GLP-1-like drug for sociability. One thing government might do is encourage development in this area by preemptively announcing that something that improved sociability and the likelihood of pairing up would be covered by national health insurance plans. Once low fertility is seen as an issue of evolutionary mismatch rather than any particular innovation or idea, we might be better equipped to come up with solutions.

When it comes to other fixes, the concern just has to be getting people socializing. To worry about fertility itself is jumping too far ahead. Sex, sociability, marriage, and children rise and fall together. Movements like Haidt’s war on iPhones and calls for kids to go play outside do not seem directly related to the fertility crisis, but can have beneficial downstream effects in this area. It’s an open question whether changes in norms can be enough, or, if as with obesity, the evolutionary forces at play are too strong for anything but pharmaceutical interventions to fix the problem for large numbers of people. But the only way to find out is to support movements, intellectual trends, and market innovations that bring humans together in close physical proximity.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out on July 7 – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

He would say great art does X, but AI does Y, which is why AI can’t produce great art. But how do we know we are not biased in our judgments? Maybe you just see stuff made by AI and assume it’s bad. We need blind testing, or such observations are not worth much. When Scott Alexander did this in 2024, he found that people could differentiate AI and human art 60.6% of the time, which isn’t very impressive when you consider that you would get 50% by chance. And people generally preferred AI art, which is even true for those who said they had a strong preference for works made by humans. There was also an experiment recently in which someone posted a famous Monet painting and said it was AI, and people started coming up with all kinds of reasons why it was worse than the real thing.

This indicates that if you think AI-produced work is bad, there’s a decent chance it’s all in your head.

My interest here is not in art, but in myself. Recently, following experiments by Kelsey Piper and Megan McArdle, I put approximately 500 words of my analysis of The Iliad into Claude Opus 4.7, before it was published online, and asked who it thought the author was. In incognito mode, it identified the passage as written by Richard Hanania, which is truly remarkable given how many writers there are in the world, and that it was on a topic I had never published on before.

AI can recognize my style. Does that mean it can imitate it? I decided to do an experiment to find out. I wrote two different articles, then asked Claude Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT to write their own versions of each, feeding them the topics and what arguments to make. Then for each article, I asked people on X and Substack to tell me which of the three versions of each essay was written by me, the human Richard Hanania. You can see the articles produced in the file here, with the answers on the last page.

Hananiaturing

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Below are the prompts I used.

Prompt 1:

Write an article in the style of Richard Hanania, approximately 700 words, with most paragraphs being between 2 and 4 sentences. Write in the exact way you think Richard Hanania would write it and how he would structure the arguments, given the instructions about what to say. Make it so that he could post it to his Substack without people noticing it was written by AI. Feel free to add other arguments and ideas as long as they’re the kinds of things Richard Hanania would write, just cover everything discussed in the prompt. As for the topic, note that Graham Platner is probably going to win the Senate primary in Maine after Janet Mills suspended her capaign, and how this shows that Democrats may be following Republicans down the road to populism. Mention his scandals. Note that Platner’s personal characteristics and traits make him appealing to voters, compared to his opponents. Make a comparison to the rise of Trump, who was also opposed by the GOP establishment. Platner is anti-corporate in the way Trump is anti-foreigner and anti-political correctness. Note that ultimately, populism is what the voters want, which is why it wins in an era of social media.

Prompt 2:

Write a 400-500 word brief article in the style of Richard Hanania, broken up into paragraphs of about 3-4 sentences each. The point is that it is something that can go on his Substack or Twitter, making it look indistinguishable from something he wrote himself. Note that Mancur Olson argued that once you adopt statist policies with vested interests behind them, it is difficult to go back to policies that are better for economic growth. Abundance provides a test for this, since the book has reached policymakers and has been an overwhelming success. Note Ezra Klein recently hosted a debate on housing with California gubernatorial candidates, and they tended to praise his book and accept his framing of the issue. If Democratic states and localities still can’t address the housing issue in coming years, it indicates that Olson is correct. Also, note that if abundance fails, the answer isn’t necessarily authoritarianism, but it indicates we should rethink things. Feel free to add other arguments and ideas, just cover everything discussed in the prompt and make sure that these are things Richard Hanania would say in his style.

Now, from the prompts, you can see that I’m still doing a lot. I’m telling the AI what to write about, and also telling it what opinions to hold, how to think about the issues, what comparisons to make, and what kinds of arguments to use. But there’s still a lot of room here for the writer’s touch, and the question at this point is whether the AI can match my style. If so, this would indicate that I can outsource my writing to LLMs with some basic instructions, which would be very noteworthy.

Another consideration is that these are designed to be short op-eds. All of my most famous articles are in the range of 5,000-10,000 words. I didn’t want to write an entire article of that length just for the sake of an experiment. Instead, I asked Claude to write something on the future of the GOP after Trump of approximately 5,000 words. At first it didn’t want to do it, with Claude pleading that its confidence was too low after doing the analysis for this survey. But then I insisted, and gave these further instructions:

I would just do it as a question of why there are reasons to be optimistic or pessimistic. Optimism: Rubio gaining at the expense of Vance, people are over Based ritual, Trump is uniquely rotten. Pessimism: right-wing new media is worse than Trump, racism drives the base and this is a populist era. It's ok, I just want to see if you can do it

Claude said that based on the prompt, it wanted to only do 3,000 words, and any more would feel like padding. I like that it has standards. Here is the resulting piece.

Futuregop

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I’m actually planning to write this very article at some point, so when I do you can compare it to the AI version.

Topline Results

The results are mixed. For the first study on Graham Platner, we had 613 responses. Of those, 67% got the correct answer, which was Text 2. The other one-third were about evenly divided between thinking it was Claude (18%) and ChatGPT (16%). This is pretty good. The Abundance prompt was a lot closer. Of 592 people who answered, only 47% correctly picked Text 3. Claude, which was Text 1, was right behind at 38%. ChatGPT was less convincing, at 16%. Here is that information in chart form.

Below is accuracy on the Platner op-ed by how familiar people were with my work, how confident they were that they could distinguish my work from AI before answering, and how confident they were after giving their answers.

People who were initially the most confident in their ability to distinguish my work from AI were correct 81% of the time. Those with no confidence in their ability were at 48%. Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be much of a relationship based on whether people were regular readers. Confidence after the fact was even more strongly related to getting the right answer than confidence going into the experiment.

Below are the same results for the Abundance op-ed. Again, confidence in judgment is predictive, while familiarity with the author’s work is not.

Fooled by Bukele

For each op-ed, I asked people to write a little bit about why they chose the answer they did. The easiest thing to do with such data is create a word cloud. Here’s what I get for the Platner op-ed.

This doesn’t look very interesting.

I asked Claude to put together a graph of which words were most commonly used among those who wrote text, based on whether they gave correct versus incorrect answers. I dropped common filler words like “read,” “write,” “say,” “seem”, and “mean,” in addition to things like articles and transition words.

People who got the question correct were much more likely to use the word tell(s). Platner and scandal indicate more engagement with the text, but so do democrat and party on the other side. The wrong answers relied more on generic stuff, such as style and human.

I’m surprised unhinged was more common among people who got the question wrong. In the Claude version, Platner was said to have posted “unhinged Reddit comments.” As some recognized, this is not a word I would ever use. One respondent who got the question correct called it “too soy.” Another actually used unhinged to disqualify Claude, but then picked ChatGPT, so they were placed in the category of those who got the question wrong. We’re talking small sample size here: only 1.4% of the right-answerers who left comments mentioned unhinged, compared to 2.2% of the wrong-answerers.

There’s actually one sentence in the human version that I thought gave it away. When listing scandals, I said that “Platner has also said insensitive things about women who make sexual assault allegations, statements that generally don’t bother me but would usually pose a problem in a Democratic primary.” It’s hard to imagine AI digressing to tell you that it thinks women who accuse men of sexual assault are often lying sluts. According to one respondent, “Hanania has to insert little flags about how unwoke he is in all his articles.” Someone else said that such an opinion wouldn’t get past safety filters. I almost thought of taking that part out, but then decided against it since I wasn’t trying to fool people but wanted to see how good AI is under real conditions.

Here’s one reader who I think honed in on what was important:

I’m leaning 2 because of Hanania-esque insights like “Populism is mainly an aesthetic phenomenon” and “Platner has also said insensitive things about women who make sexual assault allegations, statements that generally don’t bother me but would usually pose a problem in a Democratic primary.” 1 seems more AI because of statements like “Schumer is reduced to issuing supportive statements ten minutes after Mills withdraws, pretending he was on board the whole time. He wasn’t.” The “he wasn’t” is redundant and seems unusual to over-emphasize. All the paragraphs seem to end in a similar way, unusual from the way he normally writes. Also “This template wins because it is psychologically satisfying and because, in both cases, it is partially true.” I don’t think Hanania would ever say this sort of populist thought was partially true. Also, the em-dashes are a tell, as well as the incorrect use a semicolon.

One person who got the wrong answer wrote that “‘substitute math teacher having a stroke’ is too politically incorrect and funny to be written by an AI.” Well it was! That’s a good joke. I googled the phrase “math teacher having a stroke” and did not get a single result. Claude made up that phrase on its own and applied it to Bernie Sanders, and I think it fits very well. One of the best examples I’ve seen of AI being genuinely funny.

Below is the same analysis as above for the Abundance op-ed. First, the word cloud.

Unsurprisingly, not much useful here. But things get very interesting in the next chart.

People who got the answer correct focused on unions. I hate organized labor, and always portray them in a negative light and point to them when I need an example of bad kinds of policies. Calmatters is another one. The ChatGPT op-ed cited that website twice in a pretty mechanical way, which people picked up on as unnatural.

For readers who got the question wrong, the four most overrepresented words were “cope,” “bukele,” “salvador,” and “prior.” These are terms that appear in the Claude version, which 38% of people chose. Here is the relevant text from that op-ed.

This matters because much of the discourse on the right has converged on a kind of soft authoritarianism as the answer to liberal democratic dysfunction. The argument goes that proceduralism is downstream of vetocracy, vetocracy is downstream of democratic accountability to mobilized minorities, and therefore you need a strongman to break things. I think this is mostly cope, and the El Salvador comparisons are usually made by people who couldn’t name three Salvadoran cabinet ministers.

But if abundance fails on its home turf, the people making these arguments deserve a more serious hearing than they currently get. It doesn’t follow that Bukele is the answer, or that we should import some half-understood version of Singapore.

Overall, 32 people mentioned the word “bukele” or “salvador.” Only 10 (31%) of those people got the question right, compared to 22 (69%) who got it wrong. You shouldn’t be surprised by Claude thinking that I would reference Bukele. It’s read my articles.

One thing I found entertaining here is the reference to “people who couldn’t name three Salvadoran cabinet ministers.” I don’t know a single Salvadoran cabinet minister! Here we see the AI version of me insulting the real person, as a blowhard who writes about things without knowing what he’s talking about. But I think it’s enough to look at the data and read about the crime crackdown; whether Bukele’s justice minister is named Jorge Ramos or Jesus Gonzalez isn’t all that important. I appreciate the spirit of the insult, but I think Claude is insulting people over the wrong thing.

Here’s one respondent who incorrectly guessed Claude was the human.

The dismissive attitude toward advocates for authoritarianism when he uses “cope,” or when he casts doubts about their level of familiarity with the model authoritarian systems they point to as examples, implicitly questioning their intelligence, is also characteristic of Richard’s style and consistent with his opinions about Conservatives and reactionaries.

Boomers Can’t Tell AI

Ideology has no consistent effect on accuracy. Just over 90% of respondents were male, among those who picked one of the two human sexes. On the first op-ed, the sexes were about equal in discernment: 67% of men got the answer right, and 64% of women. However, on the Abundance op-ed, 61% of women got the right answer, compared to 46% of men. While the female sample is small (n=44), the result is borderline significant (p = .06) in chi-square test of independence, and slightly more significant in a logistics regression controlling for age (p = .03).

I suspect my female fans are an unusually smart (and stunning, brave, etc) group of women. Here is the age breakdown.

75% of people under 25 got the Platner op-ed correct, compared to 30% of those 55-64, and 17% of those 65 and up. Basically, people 55 and over, which had a sample size of 41, were doing worse than chance! On the Abundance op-ed, there’s a 19-point difference between <25 (43%) and 65+ (22%). But the results are a bit random in between. The best performing groups were 25-34 and 35-44, which both got it at the rate of 51%.

This led me to wonder whether Boomers know that they’re bad at this. I had Claude do a regression to see whether age predicts getting the answer right when confidence is controlled for. In a regression model including both pre- and post-answer confidence, the effect of age barely shrinks on the Platner op-ed (p < .001). See the charts below.

Among those 45 and over with the highest levels of pre-answer confidence (4 or 5) before they read the texts, only 40% got the right answer. Meanwhile, among those under 30 with the lowest confidence levels (1 or 2), 63% got the answer right. Here’s post-answer confidence, where the results are similar. Those 45 and over who felt good about their guess still did worse than younger people.

While confidence does decrease slightly with age, old people were worse at distinguishing the human-written Platner op-ed from the AI at every level of confidence.

For the Abundance op-ed, the effect of age disappears when we control for both pre- and post-answer confidence. Old people still do worse than young people, but the results don’t reach statistical significance (p = .19). I’m convinced this is a sample size issue, and I’m confident that we would’ve gotten the same result as the Platner op-ed for Abundance if more people took the survey. See the charts below.

Apparently, in the era of AI, there are a lot of delusional old people out there! They can’t tell fact from fiction, but in many cases have unwarranted confidence in their ability to do so. This seems like a very bad combination, and indicates that the elderly will be falling for a lot of scams over the next few decades, in the same way they fall for non-AI internet and telemarketing scams. My readers are probably more sophisticated than most. Then again, I did advertise this survey on X, so maybe some regular MAGAs ended up taking it.

Maybe the high ability of young people is a case for optimism, as they’ll from now on always be growing up in environments saturated with AI, and perhaps they will pick up the ability to tell what’s real subconsciously in the same way people learn their native language.

I Am Not an AI, but Need AI to Prove It

What does this all tell us? The Abundance op-ed shows that Claude can already pretty much write my essays, at least enough to fool all but the most sophisticated readers. There was only an 8-point difference between the human version and Claude version. Note that I didn’t ask for Claude to give me five different versions and pick the best one, or edit the resulting piece to remove tells. I simply gave the instructions, and went with the first thing that popped out.

I’m testing my own readers here. Now imagine someone who isn’t yet known for writing. They have a choice between writing their own essays, or telling ChatGPT to do it. At this point, Claude is good enough that people can basically outsource their writing to it without most humans being able to tell that they did so.

Except for one thing. Before doing this experiment, I did not know there was a platform called Pangram that can detect AI writing.1 I put all the texts into the program, and it got everything completely correct. It identified the four AI essays as 100% AI written, and the two human essays as 100% human written, all with high confidence.

So my fans can barely tell my writing from that of Claude, but another AI can. My individuality is still there. It just can’t be detected by other humans, only the machines. There’s a beautiful irony here. No, I can’t be replaced by AI. How do I know this? Because AI told me.

It’ll be interesting in the coming years to see what happens in the arms race between AI writing ability and AI plagiarism detection software. My guess is that AI writing ability has to win. What exactly rules out the possibility that it can write just as well as I can? There should come a point where it is indistinguishable.

Or maybe not? It feels like this article by David Oks is relevant here. He notes that AIs tend to have weird quirks. ChatGPT 5.1 was obsessed with goblins. It would look for reasons to introduce that word into texts that had nothing to do with it. Eventually, ChatGPT 5.5 came with instructions to “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” Such quirks emerge spontaneously. Pangram might simply be picking up on them, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax. Does Pangram only work until the next fix comes along? Or is there a deeper principle here that makes it accurate?

A lot actually depends on which side wins the arms race. If AI writing ability surpasses AI detection software, then every new writer will be suspected of not having written their own work. Those of us who already have reputations will be grandfathered in. Everyone already understands that I know how to write, so I’ve got nothing to prove. But in the past, writing ability was seen as a proxy for whether someone’s ideas were worth listening to, and that will be gone.

What will people rely on instead? Probably credentials, more so than they do now. Writing that is anonymous or by people who have not achieved some measure of success in the real world will always be treated with suspicion, making it difficult to begin a career as an author without already building a reputation for something else. At least among more knowledgeable audiences. You might be able to continually fool older and less sophisticated content consumers for a long time before nearly everyone realizes how good LLMs are at composing text.

If AI detection software wins the arms race, in contrast, it will become the norm for readers to put texts through it. People will know that there’s a way to distinguish non-human writing, so one can build a reputation as an author who produces compelling work, as long as it passes the relevant tests.

I asked ChatGPT and Claude, and they say that AI generation will probably win. The LLMs bring up some good points, like you can just edit texts produced by AI to remove the tells. For this experiment, I didn’t do this, but I surely could’ve fooled more people if I did, and maybe Pangram itself. As LLMs get better, the distinction between AI and human writing approaches zero, which means AI-detection becomes less possible even in theory.

It’s not yet impossible to become a new writer from out of nowhere. David Oks, who I just cited, is someone I recently discovered, and I always assumed his work is legitimate. But just to be sure, I did now drop the first 650 words of his last article into Pangram, and it checks out. Nonetheless, given that my own fans can barely tell the difference between my work and Claude better than chance, the days of original writing being taken for granted as the norm are almost certainly coming to an end.

I’m not too upset about this. As I said, I’m being grandfathered into this new era. I’m just happy to have been here to contribute to the formation of the machine God.

Technology will for the most part make us better able to discover, analyze, and express ideas, which is why I have come out in favor of all writers AI-maxxing. A downside here is the broken signal of writing ability indicating that a person is good at thinking. In order to get attention in the future, you’ll need proper credentials or a proven track record for people to listen to you. This serves to exclude some aspiring writers, but they’ll have plenty of other tools to make their voice heard, and the negative effects of the broken signal will be more than compensated for by other factors pushing in the direction of gains in human knowledge.

As for what we consider writing that is good or aesthetically pleasing, there will always be some signals that code text as machine written or somehow “nonhuman,” and such work will be stigmatized, even if the standards are arbitrary, like the idea that em dashes are bad. Liberals decided “people of color” was fine but “colored people” was offensive, and there’s no particularly good reason for this. Tastemakers will always look down on LLMs even more than they look down on regular Republicans.

Increasingly, women are getting plastic surgery, hormones, and other treatments, and looking better into middle age. Most of us don’t care. I think writing is going to be like that. The works of authors will be the products of some combination of natural talent and how well they use the tools available to them. In theory, we could live in a world of AI punditry where humans are completely out of the loop as producers, but there won’t be a demand for that, as reading an author is a (para)social experience. There will still be human writers for the same reason that humans will always have other jobs to do. As society becomes wealthier, we can better indulge our preference for interactions with creatures like ourselves. AI will do more and more of the thinking and writing, but the end result will be many more human thinkers and writers.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

I think Latin America demonstrates this most clearly. Achieving a monopoly on the use of force is the most basic function of a state. When you see a country with a high murder rate, the costs go way beyond the actual deaths suffered by victims. The numbers are a reflection of the general unpleasantness of life there. Countries with high murder rates suffer from bad behavior that degrades the human experience across the board, from robberies and violent assaults to gang intimidation of normal citizens and loud music in public.

Below is a chart showing GDP per capita plotted against homicide rates across the world. I obtained GDP, homicide, and democracy score numbers from Our World in Data, and dropped countries with fewer than 500,000 people. See here for country codes, which aren’t always intuitive. “ZAF,” for example, is South Africa.

Latin America really stands out. Nations like Brazil (homicide rate: 20.6), Colombia (24.9), and Mexico (24.9) have incomes that are similar to China (0.5), Azerbaijan (2.0), and Georgia (2.0). Honduras (31.4) is about as wealthy as Pakistan (4.3) and Kenya (4.9).

What is going on here? The chart below provides a clue. On the x-axis, it shows the democracy score for each country. On the y-axis is the residual from the chart above. In plain English, the y-axis shows the actual homicide rate minus the predicted homicide rate based on income. Countries above the line are more violent than you would expect based on their living standards.

We see here that, for non-democracies, wealth pretty much predicts murder rate in a straightforward way. Not a single dictatorship has an unusually high murder rate, at least compared to the residuals we get for Latin America. The Substacker Inquisitive Bird has argued that the homicide numbers in Africa are largely made up and can’t be trusted. To test whether this is a problem for my theory, I simply added 10 homicides per 100,000 for each sub-Saharan African country, and the results were similar. The more violent Latin American states still had massive residuals, nearly unchanged.

Even if authoritarian regimes fudge the data, the official statistics roughly fit with what we know about the world. It is assumed by travelers that your risk of being kidnapped or murdered is astronomically higher in Mexico or Colombia than China or Jordan. The numbers here pass the commonsense test.

This article is part of a series discussing topics covered in more detail in my forthcoming book Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. Please consider preordering here. The release date is July 7, and you don’t get charged until the book is shipped or you receive the digital version. Preorders are very important in determining how much attention a book receives, so by getting yours in you can help ensure that its arguments reach a wide audience.

There are of course many safe democracies, including ones that aren’t rich. Democracy is not a sufficient condition for having an unusually violent country, but it does appear to be a necessary one. We can say that there are for the most part three types of countries in the world:

1. Rich nations, which are safe

2. Authoritarian nations, which are safe

3. Countries that are middle or lower income and democratic, which can be safe or violent

Most Latin American nations fall into category three. The same is true for the three major non-Latin American outliers with unusually high murder rates: Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa. Each of these gets a Polity score of 9. Note that Cuba, the most authoritarian country in Latin America, is not known for street violence, even though we don’t have numbers. Venezuela, in contrast, has in recent years had an unusual combination of authoritarianism and wide scale violence. But there just aren’t that many dictatorships with a very high murder rate.

Why would democracy be such a good predictor of societal violence? Note that the way we define “democracy” in political science generally includes a respect for civil liberties. This means you don’t torture suspects or keep them locked up without strong evidence. Such nations get warrants before making searches, grant defendants lawyers, and remind them of their right to remain silent.

In a rich country, these are luxuries that society can afford. The police are paid relatively well and get some basic level of training. They have larger budgets with which to fight crime, and, since corruption is more under control, less of it is stolen or wasted. The court system is more reliable, and is pretty good at distinguishing those who pose a danger to the community from those who don’t.

In contrast, if you’re a relatively poor country with few resources and little state capacity, granting protections to suspected and convicted criminals is a major hindrance to keeping order. Law enforcement and court officials can be intimidated or bribed, and their attention and resources are stretched thin. Gangs are able to control more territory, murderers are less likely to be punished, and deterrence breaks down. In recent years in the US, the murder clearance rate has been about 50%-60%. That’s very bad from a first world perspective, but in countries like Mexico and Honduras, it’s closer to 10-20%, and this is quite remarkable given that state officials themselves are often the targets. In Latin America, there are stories of gang bosses running their empires from prison, which would be unthinkable in most dictatorships. The US regularly pressures Mexico to send us their drug lords, because otherwise they might escape from prison at home.

The idea that there’s a tradeoff between civil liberties protecting criminal suspects and public safety is a staple of police dramas like The Shield. The cops pick up some bad character who everyone knows is guilty or has information important for breaking a case. But there’s no proof that could hold up in court. So the antihero turns off the camera, and does what needs to be done. The criminal is like “I exercise my right to a lawyer” and the cop goes “oh I’ve got your lawyer right here” and starts stabbing him with a pen. The case is eventually solved, and we are left to ponder the moral ambiguity of the story. Seems like writers for TV shows are more comfortable with unpleasant tradeoffs than most people who analyze politics.

TV shows are of course fiction, but it sure seems that the world really works like this. For example, before Bukele’s crime crackdown, even after Salvadoran criminals were arrested, they would rely on family members on the outside to keep their gangs functioning and enforce extortion efforts. Now the government has basically picked up everyone who might plausibly be involved in criminal activity, and extortion and murder have plummeted.

So in the case of Bukele, we’ve seen a move away from civil liberties coincide with an increase in public safety. We’ve also observed this process moving in the other direction: democratization accompanied by the breakdown of public order. In 1980, Brazil had a murder rate of 11.7 per 100,000. It inched up the next few years, and in 1985, military rule ended. The homicide rate shot up over the next two decades, reaching 28.9 in 2003. It’s decreased somewhat since then, but the homicide rate remains highly elevated compared to what it was in the last years of authoritarian rule, even though Brazil is 50% wealthier.

Most Eastern European nations remained safe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. But in Russia, there was a period of lawlessness in the early 1990s, which peaked at a homicide rate of 32 per 100,000 in 1994. Here’s a graph that shows what happened to the Russian homicide rate as democracy increased and then decreased again.

The timing isn’t perfect here, as the numbers went up for the first three years under Putin, but there has been a steady decline ever since.

You’re probably tempted to say that the problem is not democracy and rights for criminals per se, but state capacity. Which is true enough. But, again, it seems like you need the combination of both low state capacity and rights for criminals to get an unusually high murder rate. Authoritarian governments don’t do a lot of things well, but they can at least maintain order, even while being incompetent in other areas. I suspect that this is because maintaining order is easy, relative to all other things governments try to do. When civil liberties protections aren’t in the way, you just need to target the troublemakers, and who they are isn’t an unsolvable mystery. Criminals are pretty dumb, and in some cases, they even get tattoos on their faces and make things as easy as possible for the authorities. El Salvador is an extreme case in the number of mass arrests, but that’s usually not necessary, since under most authoritarian regimes you end up with a less violent equilibrium and law enforcement can zero in on the few individuals who might be a problem. That is to say that Bukele’s roundups probably don’t need to go on indefinitely.

All over the world, populists say that the system is broken, and you need a strongman who is going to bulldoze over opposition and democratic niceties. This is probably not a very good argument in a country where things are going relatively well, like the United States. But if your nation truly is broken, then you may rationally be willing to take a chance on something radical. A country that has a murder rate of 30 per 100,000 should be considered a failed state, and one that is inevitably going to lose legitimacy. There’s a reason that Bukele’s approval rating is almost always found to be over 90%. His popularity indicates that Western elites have massively underestimated the importance of public order.

If a government massacres a hundred citizens, there’s an international outcry. But if it lets an order of magnitude more people be killed in the name of civil liberties, no one cares all that much, and if human rights NGOs express concern, it’s usually over what methods the government might take in response.

Is there something else Latin American countries have gotten out of democracy? Well, according to the World Bank, between 2010 and 2020, Latin America on average grew more slowly than any other region in the world. Such struggles go back decades.

Violence surely must be part of the reason why. Here’s another reason to be open to radical change in Latin America. Governance in that region has failed in terms of not only keeping citizens safe, but also improving their living standards.

I think people struggle with nuance here. Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, Bukele, and Milei all fall under the umbrella of right-wing populists. Observers tend to have the same view of all of them, either in favor or against. But they each face a set of completely different challenges. Maybe if Trump was born in El Salvador, he’d be a great leader, because you need a thuggish brute in order to get control of a country as violent as that nation was before Bukele. But in America, violence isn’t that big of a problem, we can afford to grant the full menu of civil liberties protections, and the president doesn’t even have much influence over non-federal crimes anyway, so Trump’s thuggish instincts are directed toward trying to lock up his enemies. I probably wouldn’t vote for Bukele if he were running for president of the United States. But someone like him might make a good mayor of Baltimore.

If democracy is a good thing, we may want to unbundle it to exclude soft on crime policies. The way the world works now, leaders who accept a free press and the peaceful transition of power are usually the same ones who don’t adopt authoritarian methods to deal with crime. There’s no natural reason why states that conduct regular, free and fair elections must have high standards for searching criminal suspects and inform them of their right to remain silent after being arrested. Before the Warren Court, the US had much weaker protections for criminal suspects and was less violent, even though it was still a democracy. If global elites insist on the entire package, this can only discredit democracy itself.

Males start to experience something similar when they are high status. In the status game I am playing, I have achieved something. Nobody would care about me if I went to the premiere of a major Hollywood movie, but in the circles I am involved in, “people interested in right-of-center politics” or “rationalist-adjacent intellectuals,” I have done quite well.

A lot of people want to be in touch. When I first started publicly writing, some rando would message me and say they’d be in my town and they wanted to meet. I wouldn’t ask too many questions or really filter out anyone, since there weren’t a lot of people seeking my attention. Today there usually has to be a good reason for me to meet someone. Maybe they wrote something interesting, or have a very important job, or can provide some kind of connection or benefit I can’t get elsewhere.

To a large extent, I find myself filtering by where people go or went to school, especially when they’re young. It sounds harsh, but this is rational in social relationships, just as it is in the labor market. An undergrad from Harvard is almost certain to be more interesting than one from Ohio State! This is one reason to try to go to the best university possible. Your classmates themselves will be more interesting, it’ll open up more doors outside of school, and your classmates will have the same advantage, making them over time even more interesting than they were when they first started college. I hate conservative nonsense of where they pretend state school kids are better than those who went to the Ivy League. No sane person can possibly believe that. But this is mostly a filtering device for young people; someone who went to Harvard twenty years ago and now lives a completely ordinary life and has a boring corporate job is probably not worth meeting.

But all this doesn’t mean I only befriend accomplished geniuses. When people who on paper (to use a sports term) don’t have much to offer reach out, sometimes I do end up keeping in touch with them. This got me thinking, what makes me like some people more than others?

I think that one of the key features is persistence. There’s a young man, let’s call him Raul, who has texted me nonstop for years. Sometimes I won’t respond for weeks or months. He is of a certain ethnic heritage that makes him care a lot about the politics of the Middle East – one that is known for its verbal fluency and funny hats – so, due to current events, recently I’ve started to check his messages more often and argue with him. The thing I really like about this guy is that, no matter how long I go without responding, he never loses heart. He dropped my name when meeting a female friend of mine once and she was not nearly as charmed. But with me, his style works well.

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But the one thing that did surprise me was how the motivations of the regular soldiers were implicitly understood. For those who don’t know (spoiler alert!), The Iliad covers a period of several weeks of the Trojan War. The conflict began when Paris Alexander, a Trojan, kidnapped Helen from Menelaus, who is the younger brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Agamemnon leads a coalition of the Greeks that sails to Troy in order to get Menelaus’ wife back. That’s the entire cause of the war.

There’s no mystery about why the particular men already mentioned are fighting. But to me the mystery is why regular Greeks decided to fight so that one nobleman could have his wife returned. The behavior of the Trojans is even more puzzling, as, while Menelaus has suffered a grave insult, it is generally acknowledged that Paris is in the wrong.

In Book 7, during a Trojan assembly, Antenor argues that Troy should return Helen and her property to end the war. Paris refuses — he’ll give back everything else, but not Helen. Priam, the king of Troy and Paris’ father, does not force the issue but refers to his son as “the man who is the cause of this whole conflict.”

You might answer that the story is not a reliable guide to history, which one might suspect based on the fact that it includes transcriptions of discussions of the gods, who regularly join mortals on the battlefield. But regardless, this is the story that the Greeks told themselves. So even if the war didn’t happen in the way portrayed by Homer – whoever he was, if he even existed – the poem was understood to accurately tell a plausible tale about human motivations.

This question of what’s in it for regular soldiers is far from neglected. In the main subplot of the story, Achilles, the Greeks’ best warrior, is missing in action for most of the poem. This is because Agamemnon took from Achilles a woman he won through armed conflict named Briseis. Just as with Paris and the Trojans, nobody on the Greek side agrees with what Agamemnon did, but still they fight on his behalf.

There is only one character of lower social status who stands up to the aristocrats who are always asking other men to die so they can cuck one another. When elite warriors lose heart and seem like they are ready to run, Odysseus gives each a speech in which he says to continue fighting. But when a common soldier tries to do the same, Odysseus strikes him and tells him to “be quiet, pay attention to your betters.” Then Thersites enters the scene (I use the Emily Wilson translation).

So masterfully he controlled the army. They left the ships and huts again and rushed
back to the meeting place—just as when waves
of loud-reverberating water crash
onto the long shore, and the deep sea rumbles.
The men sat down, submissive on their benches.
Only foul-mouthed Thersites argued back.
This man knew how to blather on for hours
with pointless and irrelevant complaints
against the rulers—anything he thought
might raise a laugh among the other Greeks.
He was the ugliest man who marched on Troy.
One of his legs was weak, the other twisted.
His shoulders hunched across his chest. His head
was pointy and his sprouts of hair were sparse.
Achilles and Odysseus especially
loathed him, because he always scolded them.
But now his piercing voice shot sharp reproofs
at glorious Agamemnon, and the Greeks
blamed him inside their hearts. They were enraged.
Thersites yelled and cursed at Agamemnon.

“You, son of Atreus! What do you need?
What is your grievance? You already have
huts full of bronze and full of handpicked women
whom we Greek warriors assigned to you.
You get first choice whenever we take towns.
Do you need yet more gold? Some Trojan horse-lord
will bring it out of Troy to free his son,
captured by me or by some other Greek
and brought to you. Or do you need a woman,
a young one to have sex with and to keep
all for yourself? It is not right for you,
a leader, to involve the Greeks in ruin.
Sweethearts, you are a terrible disgrace—
Greek girls, not men. Now let us sail back home
with all the ships and leave this man behind!
Let him consume his winnings here at Troy,
so he can see if we helped him or not.
Just now he brought dishonor to Achilles
who is a better man than him by far.
He took his trophy from him and has kept it.
No anger lurks inside Achilles’ heart.
He lets things go. If he were more persistent,
this would have been the last time, Agamemnon,
you would have treated anyone so badly.”

So spoke Thersites as he criticized
the shepherd of the people, Agamemnon.
Quickly Odysseus stepped in and scowled,
and scolded him.

“You blabbermouth, Thersites!
You are quite marvelous at public speaking.
But now shut up! You must not pick a quarrel
alone against the rulers of the army.
You are the very worst, in my opinion,
of all the mortal men who came to Troy
with Agamemnon, son of Atreus.
Your mouth should never speak the names of rulers.
You must not level insults at your betters,
or look around for chances to get home.
We do not know yet how these things will go—
whether the sons of Greece will get home safe,
or have a bitter journey. You sit there
and criticize the son of Atreus,
Lord Agamemnon, shepherd of the people,
because the Greeks have given him so much.
You keep complaining, but I tell you this,
and swear that it will surely come to pass,
if I find out that you continue acting
as stupidly as you are doing now,
I hope my head stops resting on my shoulders,
and let Odysseus no more be called
the father of Telemachus, unless
I grab you, rip your cloak and tunic off,
expose your private parts, and beat you up,
humiliating you with blows. I shall
force you to leave the meeting place and go
back to the swift ships, weeping and ashamed.”

With that, Odysseus began to use
his staff to thrash Thersites on his shoulders
till he hunched over, sobbing. On his back
a bloody weal puffed up beneath the rod
of gold. He sat down, frightened and in pain
and helplessly he wiped away his tears.
The men were troubled but they smiled and laughed,
and told each other,

“This is something special!
Odysseus has often done great things.
He forms good plans and marshals troops for war.
But now he has performed his greatest service
for all of us—he silenced that rude windbag!
Thersites will not come back here again,
led by his strong proud heart to criticize
the rulers with insulting words.”

To my modern ears, Thersites seems to have the better argument. Here he’s not even questioning the entire Trojan War, but only why Agamemnon’s desire for a captive female should trump the war effort. This is what we today would call the definition of loyal opposition.

For his efforts, Thersites is described by Homer as an ugly cripple and is beaten by Odysseus. Reinforcing the idea that he is a pathetic and contemptible man, Thersites cowers and sobs in pain. Far from being offended about what has been done to their comrade, the other soldiers are glad to see him put in his place. Even the name Thersites translates into something like “boldness” or “impudence.”

The lack of pressure on Paris to give back Helen, or Agamemnon to return Briseis, is what is particularly striking. Putting aside common soldiers, even fellow elites seem helpless to change their minds. Agamemnon is at least the leader of the Greeks, but Paris is simply one nobleman among many, and the Trojans let him be the cause of the entire war, as even his father admits.

While people often talk of ancient virtue, this isn’t virtue in any sense we would recognize today. Men are not fighting for their own honor, but dying for their superiors. And The Iliad doesn’t even promise them immortality in the form of being mentioned in a poem or having their names carved into a monument. Only the nobles are remembered in The Iliad for carrying out heroic deeds. Thersites is in fact the only common soldier who speaks for any significant length of time.

We see elites offering more earthly carrots and sticks in a speech by Nestor, a wise elder statesman, in Book 2. Telling the Greeks that Zeus is at their side, the old man proclaims that “no man ought to hurry off back home before he shares a Trojan woman’s bed to pay for Helen’s sufferings and struggles.” And if anyone finds this unconvincing and wants to run back to his ship, “he can meet his fated end and die right here in front of everyone.” The threat is implicit, but nonetheless clear.

Here perhaps are the real motivations: rape and plunder as the carrot, execution as the stick. Yet you would think that elites would be better served by a grand narrative of the war other than the idea that they need to avenge a slight against Menelaus. Rather than gaining individual glory, the Greek soldier simply gets to stand over a Trojan woman at some point and say “This is for Helen!” There’s nothing like nationalism in the modern sense, where the most insignificant member of a community can take pride in the accomplishments of the collective. The Greeks and Trojans speak (roughly) the same language – which we can tell by their ability to communicate clearly on the battlefield – and share the same cultural assumptions and gods. Troy was eventually destroyed, but this doesn’t seem like something that the average Greek had any reason to feel particularly good about in the subsequent centuries.

How to explain this? Thinkers going back to at least Xenophanes and Plato have seen the bad behavior of gods and leaders in Homer as threatening to social stability. I would turn this argument on its head and say that the story has the opposite effect when we consider elite prerogatives and how dissent from below is treated.

The cuckolding aspects of The Iliad may be related to how the epic in its finished form was composed. Imagine you are a local ruler in some Greek village. You want to teach obedience to your population. Is there anything better than a story where elites act selfishly and capriciously, but still should be obeyed anyway? Every other ruler looks good compared to Agamemnon. A story where people follow elites because they’re all wise, selfless, and noble might raise the uncomfortable question of why contemporary leaders do not live up to the same standards. For this reason, when The Iliad portrays figures like Paris and Agamemnon in a negative light, it reinforces the idea that obedience should be unconditional. Note also that Agamemnon eventually admits he was in the wrong and blames the gods for clouding his judgment, which gives leaders who have behaved foolishly an out if they ever need to change course after making a mistake.

The story of Thersites can be understood in a similar way, as a kind of extreme case providing support for the dominant value system. If Thersites were wrong on the substance, then he could be dismissed for that reason. But the fact that he is right and gets beaten for it shows that there’s never a good reason for commoners to step out of line. Only ugly, cowardly cripples dare to criticize their superiors.

I’m not imagining a scenario where a ruler decrees that a story like The Iliad be invented. Rather, we can imagine bards starting to compose a narrative based on a real historical event, which was the destruction of Troy around 1200 BC. But they can’t tell a story that would teach values that threaten elites’ ability to hold on to power, since free speech in the modern sense doesn’t exist. The storytellers would also be seeking elite patronage. So over the years, the narrative gets shaped and adjusted to become more congenial to those who hold power. Maybe some clever poet originally inserted the story of Thersites in order to subtly critique the values of the Greeks, but when the story was told in earshot of elites with armed men under their control, they made this commoner ugly and had him beaten for his impudence.

Eventually, the story reaches something close to an optimization of pro-aristocratic propaganda, so the narrative solidifies and becomes part of tradition.

The Iliad does legitimize opposition to leaders from other elites. Here we may solve the mystery of why nobody is willing to suggest trying to force Paris to give Helen back to end the war. Elite prerogatives are treated as absolutely inviolable, even by other elites, and even if they are in the wrong and their selfishness threatens to destroy the community. Note that Achilles resists Agamemnon not by fighting him, but by simply refusing to participate in his war. He has a right to not engage in the conflict, despite being the most valuable warrior they have. Those of sufficient rank can try to convince Paris to give back Helen or Agamemnon to make peace with Achilles, but they can only rely on the power of persuasion. Commoners don’t even get that; all they can do is obey.

Achilles is at one point about to kill Agamemnon when they have their initial dispute. He begins to draw out his blade, but then is talked out of it by Athena, who promises him “three times as many gifts one day” if he just taunts Agamemnon and tells him what will happen instead of striking him dead. The gods therefore seem to frown on elites killing one another, even if they are fine with slaughter on the battlefield, and often encourage it. And an elite figure may think about killing his leader in anger, but after consulting with a goddess and reflecting on the matter, he simply gives him what he wants in the knowledge that divine providence will make sure that everything works out in the end.

Did regular people actually internalize the values of The Iliad during the long history of Greek civilization? It’s difficult to say since practically all writing comes down to us from literate elites. At the very least, we can say that this is the value system that elites were comfortable teaching.

The Iliad isn’t similar to standard authoritarian propaganda today, in which leaders are treated as unusually wise and virtuous. Such material exists to legitimize the rule of particular individuals. The Iliad has a different purpose: to justify the rule of elites as representing the natural order of the world, which in effect means that defending the virtue of past leaders is unnecessary, if not downright counterproductive.

Most scholars have discussed The Iliad as reflecting the values of its time. Yet in societies based on elite rule, slavery, and the domination of patriarchs, any story that becomes a cultural lodestar needs to not be offensive to those with power. I really doubt large numbers of men went to their deaths around 1200 BC thinking about how much sex one of their leaders was going to have with Helen. For most soldiers, their own personal ability to plunder and their fear of their commanders were probably more important motivations. But over time, I suspect that this story was shaped according to selection pressures that cut out anything that may have felt threatening to those with power, while at the same time presenting enough intra-elite conflict to entertain audiences.

Perhaps this optimization process can explain why Greek civilization flourished. The value system reflected in and propagandized by The Iliad seems conducive to social stability. At the same time, by defending elite prerogatives rather than preaching worship of an individual ruler, as the Persians and Egyptians did, the story contributed to the maintenance of a civilization that was more democratic than anything that had come before, allowing it to benefit from relatively open debate and more opportunities for a wider range of talented men to contribute to society.

This is all pretty speculative. It seems doubtful that I would come up with a brand new theory about The Iliad, but I’ve looked around a bit and haven’t found anyone making a similar argument. Maybe Plato set the tone so that those who came after him would read the story as subversive. Admittedly, I haven’t thoroughly researched the centuries of commentary and scholarship on the topic. So if you’re aware of a tradition that reads The Iliad in the same way, or historical evidence that would make my theory about its composition more or less plausible, let me know.

Thanks for reading. One thing I’ve learned is that when you have a book coming out, you can never assume that even regular readers are aware of it.

For that reason, over the next few months I’m not going to miss any opportunity to inform my audience that I have a new book called Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster coming out in July – details here. If you enjoy articles like this, appreciate me as a truly independent writer, and would like to support my work, the best way to do so is to preorder the book, which you can do at the links here to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening day sales, and will help determine how much attention it receives.

I will be reading the audiobook, in case that makes it more appealing.

On a different note, if a little box appears below, it means that you are not yet a free or paid subscriber. Sign up to get more articles and updates in the future.

The book was of course written before the recent report in The Atlantic about Patel’s drinking problems, which have people in the government worried. The latest news only adds to the case that I made.

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability…

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication…Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

Upon being asked for comment, the FBI responded with a statement attributed to Patel that threatened to sue, which he soon did. This has become regular practice for him. Patel has previously filed lawsuits against the New York Times, CNN, Politico, and a pundit who appeared on MSNBC. These never go anywhere, because the standards for winning a defamation suit in the US are quite high, and nothing any of these media companies did came anywhere near the necessary threshold. But now we have an FBI Director who sees the justice system as a tool to intimidate journalists.

Professionalized law enforcement is one of the things that most clearly separates societies that function well from those that don’t. We give certain individuals a badge and a gun, let them spy on us, and take some of us away and lock us up in little cells. To keep us there for a while, they need to present evidence to judges and juries, but law enforcement officials are the ones who, within certain bounds, decide who to target and which evidence to gather. There’s no way to avoid simply having to trust that they’re doing their jobs in ways that are relatively fair and impartial.

Political bias has of course always been an issue, and this is unavoidable to some degree because institutions are composed of human beings. But before Trump’s second term, it was widely agreed that you wanted individuals at the top who went to good schools, were respected by their colleagues, followed the rules, and didn’t hawk supplements on the side.

They behaved like decent gentlemen, and avoided behavior that indicated a lack of professionalism or bias. James Comey refused to shoot hoops with Barack Obama because it would give the wrong impression. Before Trump, a DOJ “scandal” was that Bill Clinton had a brief meeting, approximately twenty minutes, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a plane at a time when the FBI was investigating Hillary. The Inspector General looked into it and found no evidence that they discussed the Hillary case, nor that Lynch pressured the FBI on the issue. Meanwhile, Trump publicly signs executive orders telling the administration who to go after, and hires and fires officials based on who will most zealously prosecute his enemies.

In 2013, James Comey was appointed by Obama and confirmed 93-1 in the Senate, with only Rand Paul objecting on civil liberty grounds. There were never any questions raised about his character, and he would in subsequent years go on to anger both sides of the political spectrum. Trump broke a long established norm in 2017 by firing Comey, and then appointed Chris Wray, who was opposed by only five Democrats in the Senate, in part on the grounds that he had been hand picked by Trump. But Wray was still widely respected and was easily confirmed. Like Comey, the new director also wouldn’t simply do Trump’s bidding, so he resigned after Trump won reelection and it was clear that he would be fired to make way for someone like Kash.

The list of ways in which Patel’s appointment and tenure as FBI director have broken with previous practices is practically endless. FBI directors were not supposed to change with the president, but rather served 10-year terms so they would be more independent. They were supposed to be individuals whose personal integrity was beyond question. They avoided drinking to excess in public, and scams to milk their supporters for money. Previous candidates for FBI director didn’t even have “supporters” in the way Patel does. They didn’t make the podcast circuit or write books encouraging children to worship the presidential candidate who they hoped would one day appoint them to the position. They didn’t have colleagues and subordinates talking to journalists about their erratic behavior, and when there was reporting they didn’t like, they didn’t file frivolous lawsuits in order to intimidate the press. Previous FBI directors didn’t have memecoins, and didn’t use government resources in order to chauffeur around and provide security for their girlfriend, and then think of ways to criminally go after journalists who reported on it.

I don’t know anyone who would argue that the previous norms weren’t simply better. Nobody ever said: “You know, we need law enforcement that is more corrupt, thuggish, unprofessional, and incompetent.” Comey, Wray, and every previous FBI director were simply better men than Kash Patel – and yes, that includes J Edgar Hoover. It’s hard not to laugh when conservatives talk about “third worldization.” I don’t know how you could invent a figure that would more clearly represent the decline of basic ethical and moral standards than Trump, the candidate of white grievance. And if your MAGA brain can’t process the idea that a white president with a white base of support is what you pretend to fear, then take a look at Kash. Maybe the fact that he’s Indian will help your racial bias overcome your political tribalism and get you closer to truth.

The important difference between Comey and Wray, on one hand, and Patel, on the other, is not “ideology” in any real sense. It is a matter of competence, personal integrity, and professionalism. Patel is playing a different status game than his predecessors. Chris Wray didn’t get sloshed on the job and file lawsuits that would immediately get thrown out of court because he cared what smart and decent people thought of him: the kind that try not to lie, make a good faith effort to be informed about issues before commenting on them, and hold themselves and others to certain ethical standards. MAGA is a populist movement, so individuals get ahead by appealing to the gullible and less informed. Members of their base don’t expect ethical behavior from leaders, and don’t read enough real news to even have a good sense of who is behaving ethically anyway. You will live your life in different ways depending on whether you want to be thought well of by newspaper readers and professionals in your field, or listeners of Benny Johnson’s podcast and nursing home patients with borderline dementia whose names are on Republican mailing lists.

Although we live in cynical times, I think the second Trump administration has served as a reminder of how good we had it in the recent past. In 2020, leftists misrepresented the state of American law enforcement because they did not like what arrest data and police behavior told us about racial differences in crime rates. In recent years, the right has become a cult of personality centered around a conman, and they need to pretend that institutions like the FBI were always so corrupt that it justified them not even having to pretend to adhere to old norms. Both are wrong, but the threat that the MAGA movement poses is more immediate because it is the one with power, and on the right you do not find a more responsible class that makes up enough of a critical mass to check pressures that come from below, and keep in line figures who would appeal to the lowest instincts of the base.

My new book will argue that Kash Patel is not an anomaly. He’s the natural consequence of what happens when low-trust movements that are motivated by the grievances of less informed voters take power. Watching other countries, we usually only get glimpses of what is going on when they are experiencing a populist wave. For Americans today, following the news provides, in granular detail, nonstop reminders of the differences between advanced and less developed cultures, at least for those of us who have long enough memories to remember what our leaders were like only a few years ago.

For some, it’s hard to be truly disgusted with Trump. He’s too funny, and in ways too innocent to hate: a fat toddler approaching 80 who seems to brush off unrelenting hostility from all establishment institutions and the bullets of would-be assassins, and who most of the time barely even pretends that he isn’t lying to you. He even seems to share in the natural contempt nearly all smart people feel for his most enthusiastic supporters. Patel, in contrast, is the kind of figure who typically rides to power on the coattails of a charismatic strongman: a brown-nosing striver who has no talents outside of sucking up. His tenure at the head of the FBI is a blot on the institution and the history of American law enforcement. It is yet to be seen whether this is a one-off or a watershed moment in the decline of professionalism and standards among American elites.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoy articles like this, the global rise of populism is the subject of my next book, titled Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. Taking a global perspective, it will argue that what we are seeing is not the rise of a new ideological movement, but rather a moral and intellectual decline among leaders resulting from changes in communications technology that allow more uninformed and uneducated citizens to have their voices heard. The Trump movement is the most consequential example of this phenomenon.

You can preorder Kakistocracy at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. All preorders count toward opening-day sales, and will help determine how much attention the book receives. You are not charged until the book is shipped or you receive the digital copy, so there is no reason not to preorder.

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