The Baffler no. 80

American Vendetta

September 2025

Masthead

The Baffler

234 5th Ave
New York, NY 10001

Editor in Chief

Matthew Shen Goodman

Deputy Editor

Wes Enzinna

Managing Editor

Bidi Choudhury

Art Directors and Designers

No Ideas

Senior Editors

Jess Bergman

Dave Denison

Web Editor

Zachariah Webb

Editor at Large

Chris Lehmann

Literary Editor

J.W. McCormack

Staff Writer

Jess McAllen

Assistant Editor

Arielle Isack

Editorial Fellow

Grayson Scott

Photo Editor

Chris Maggio

Contributing Editors

Susan Faludi

Evgeny Morozov

Ann Neumann

Liz Pelly

Rick Perlstein

George Scialabba

Jacob Silverman

Astra Taylor

Catherine Tumber

Kate Wagner

Eugenia Williamson

Publisher

Noah McCormack

Executive Director

James White

Strategic Director

Bidi Choudhury

Marketing and Social Media Manager

Kelly Dickinson

Web Developer

Michael Gardiner

Administrative Coordinator

Leila Markosian

Past Publishers

The MIT Press, 2012–2014

Conor O’Neil, 2009–2011

Greg Lane, 1993–2007

Founding Editors

Thomas Frank

Keith White

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Alma Beauvais, Warren Hildebrand, Jasmine Liu, Federico Perelmuter, and Jonathan Truong for their help crafting Baffler no. 80.

We’d also like to thank departing senior editor Jess Bergman for her immeasurable contribution to the magazine.

Guy vs. Guy

Matthew Shen Goodman

© Martin Groch

Gauche, in my opinion, to settle a grudge worthy of the name with money. (Did you not nurse that grievance? Would you sell your child?) But when the payoff grows big enough, cooler heads prevail, or just ones more venal. From Sam Altman to Ted Cruz, political, corporate, and tech elites have put aside previous objections—Trump’s resemblance to past dictators, his willingness to insult your wife—to profit and empower themselves.

The arc of domestic animosity bends toward dollars and nationalism. The Hatfields and McCoys have museums, romance novels, and a document announcing a truce to their century-and-a-half-old feud in the star-spangled aftermath of 9/11, as Lauren Fadiman writes in “American Vendetta,” our issue on domestic grudgery. Equally historical is the labor unrest at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Tadhg Larabee reports from Steel City on the newspaper workers carrying out the longest ongoing strike in the United States.

Journalists are on the scoreboard of this country’s resentments, but the nearly fifty million immigrants in residence seem to have taken first place. Belén Fernández leads readers into the Darién Gap, that treacherous stretch of jungle traversed by many recent arrivals, where smugglers serve as de facto U.S. border guards. Nick Tabor describes how Denver attempted to navigate these surges of immigration with little assistance from the Biden administration and open hostility from its successor—a vehemence Trump has extended toward the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, as Pooja Bhatia reports. And Nicolás Medina Mora writes on the cultural legacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which devastated Mexico such that both farmers and fiction writers sought a new life north of the border.

Elsewhere in the issue, contributors consider a feud old as time: man against nature or, increasingly, its replacement. Piper French asks whether RICO lawsuits against OnlyFans creators or the automation of pretending to be a nubile all-American natural blonde will put low-paid “chatters” on the platform out of a job. Facing a future of employment made uncertain for all by artificial intelligence, Jennifer C. Berkshire ponders why the idea that our schools might teach values besides corporate growth has been ceded to right-wingers. Those touting “patriotic education” have included Pete Hegseth, whose long-running war against women inside the military and out is chronicled by Jasper Craven.

But what of the youth? They’d call me ancient for remembering Nas’s “Ether,” the song nearly a quarter-century old. (The homophobia remains silly and indefensible but accusing Jay-Z of being a man in his mid-thirties who takes karate holds up.) As Adrian Nathan West writes in his essay on drill music in Philadelphia, rap beef now can involve a degree of violence perhaps unimaginable to previous generations, conflicts stoked in impoverished environs between a select but vocal few dissing one another on Instagram Live and modifying Glocks to be capable of fully automatic fire. “All they soldiers getting touched,” rapped the scene’s figurehead and self-described “Mr. Disrespectful” YBC Dul, months before he was shot and killed at the age of twenty-five. Gauche is gauche, maybe, but one wishes there were a dollar amount that could have kept any of these men—some so young as to be in high school—alive.

Tit for Tat

Prosecuting the sex chat racket

Piper French

© Brittany Gudas

Beginning in late 2023, users idly scrolling X might have been startled by a targeted ad with an ominous message: “The OnlyFans creator you think you are talking to is LYING.” The warning was the work of Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman, which had also set up a bare-bones website called Save the Fans. “Have you ever talked to an OnlyFans model?” it asked. “Did you expect or were you promised personal interactions? . . . She’s NOT talking to you. . . . We are working to get justice for all subscribers who have been lied to and defrauded.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the public got hip to the deception baked into OnlyFans’ business model. The platform, which debuted in 2016, hosts both famous and anonymous creators who sell subscriptions to photo and video content ranging from fully pornographic to banal but suggestive—think zaftig fitness influencers doing dead lifts, or a Texan who has described herself as “your All-American, all natural blonde next door” volunteering for “Earth Day Trash Pickup.” The widespread accessibility of free online smut has devalued images of sex or nudity, but OnlyFans promises something distinct: direct engagement. Creators’ bios and official OnlyFans posts abound with references to “1 on 1 contact.” “We can chat every single day. Who knows where we’ll take this?” one reality TV star promised in a promotional video. You can send the same nude to a million subscribers, but a private conversation offered the promise of direct attention, even if just for a fleeting moment. One former fan neatly—if a bit crassly—summed up the platform’s value add: “Why would anyone go on OnlyFans in the first place, when you can get content almost anywhere (free in most cases)?”

Anyone who thinks about this for roughly the length of a single exclusive custom video might notice that the math doesn’t add up. Top creators have millions of subscribers, and some are mainstream celebrities. Cardi B was not about to pretend to care what even a tiny percentage of her fans were eating for breakfast. If the illusion was sustained longer than it should have been, surely there was an element of willful self-delusion at play. Is it any wonder that, given minimal scaffolding, men tend to swallow the fantasy of a woman who is both fantastically hot and always ready to exchange fantasies with them?

The tipping point came after a barrage of lawsuits against an OnlyFans management company called Unruly Agency and a wave of high-profile media coverage. The secret was out: many of the platform’s top creators employed third parties to help manage their interactions with fans, and these companies often either impersonated their clients or outsourced that labor to someone living in, say, Venezuela or the Philippines. “It’s a business preying on vulnerable, mostly lonely men and misleading them about the services that are being offered,” said Camron Dowlatshahi, an attorney representing two creators in their claims against Unruly. The women allege that the company used a worker, or chatter, to engage in explicitly sexual dialogue with fans behind their backs and without their consent.

It’s not just Unruly facing litigious blowback. During its not-quite decade of existence, OnlyFans has been the target of several lawsuits. This is hardly a surprise: the company’s focus on explicit content and its move-fast-and-break-things ethos leave it vulnerable to litigation. But the Hagens Berman suit is aiming higher, setting its sights on the heart of the chatter model and taking aim at both OnlyFans and the top management agencies. To do this, the firm reached for a singular statute: the RICO Act.

RICO, which stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, was passed in 1970 in order to do something very specific: dismantle the American Mafia. In recent years, though, it has become known for its absurd malleability. The law’s key innovation was in allowing prosecutors to build a single criminal case against an organization rather than an individual, enabling the introduction of otherwise-inadmissible evidence, like past criminal acts or allegations. Prosecutors have responded to this leeway by exercising it at every opportunity: RICO has lately been used in criminal court against Diddy, drug-trafficking operations, and Stop Cop City protesters in Atlanta.

RICO grew out of its author G. Robert Blakey’s observation that the structure of mob families aped that of respectable organizations: “They were the mirror image of American capitalism,” he realized. Accordingly, he fashioned RICO to attack a targeted organization’s economic underpinnings. The statute also has a civil component, which empowers private individuals to sue racketeering entities and recover three times the damages they can prove. “It’s a very, very good payday,” Oliver Rocos, one of the attorneys defending Moxy Management in this suit, told me. Beyond criminal cases, civil litigators have deployed RICO in complex business disputes and lawsuits against major companies.

“The whole reason for RICO is that you’re going after the godfather figure—the person that doesn’t get their hands bloody committing actual crime,” Jeffrey E. Grell, an expert on civil RICO, told me. “They stand back, and they have other people commit a crime on their behalf.” Picture Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, nodding almost imperceptibly at the messengers who come and go in his study. It’s not like OnlyFans’ owner, Leonid Radvinsky, is personally catfishing some poor schlub who lives in his mom’s basement; he’s not even that catfisher’s boss’s boss. He’s just raking in the profits (enough to have allegedly promised $11 million to AIPAC in 2023). The privilege of operating at a remove from the business offers plausible deniability: “OnlyFans is kind of sitting up here, sitting in its smoky office—it’s not doing anything, it’s just providing a platform for all of these content creators to make money,” Grell said. “That’s kind of the scenario that RICO was designed to get around.”

Another twist to the Hagens Berman suit was that it was a class action. Its plaintiffs were not business competitors but customers. (It should go without saying that there are OnlyFans creators and fans of all genders and sexualities. Since this lawsuit’s anonymous main plaintiffs are all men, all of the creators mentioned in the suit are women, and the majority of chatters impersonate female creators, this piece will generalize along those lines.) “The entire publicized premise of OnlyFans is authentic direct messaging,” Robert Carey, the attorney heading up the suit, told me over email. “I’ve yet to come across a Fan who thought he was paying [for] a fantasy connection.” The scales had finally fallen from their eyes and they were livid. “This is a complete betrayal of trust,” one fan fumed in an online post. “To say that I feel violated would be an understatement.” Despite the United States’ robust litigation culture, you still can’t sue someone for breaking your heart, but things change when there’s money involved. One way or another, the jilted bachelors of OnlyFans would have their day in court.

The Girlfriend Experience

The revelations of OnlyFans’ subterfuge have spawned a glut of truly hilarious, bizarre portraits of the hustlers scheming to defraud hapless wallet holders. In GQ, a woman using the pseudonym Emma Francis dished about her time as an OnlyFans model’s ghostwriter, confessing, “What I also provided was a girlfriend experience. They wanted someone who could listen. They’d blow entire paychecks so they could see and hear all of her and fall in love in the process. I was there to facilitate it, on demand.” For Wired, the journalist Brendan I. Koerner went undercover as an aspiring chatter and detailed the absurd bromides he was taught over the course of his training:

Luka distributed a link to a Google Doc that contained his collected wisdom on the subject of chatting. It included a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who was identified as an American president: “The potential is untapped, dealing with PEOPLE, you may never know what’s awaiting behind the next chat.”

One reason that these scams have proved so captivating is that no one can figure out precisely what they are. The tendency to reach for old terms and models to try to capture this very new phenomenon serves only to underscore the inadequacy of those frameworks. Is this a romance scam, as the lawsuit alleges? Is it catfishing? Is it a typical offshoring model, like an IT support line staffed by workers in Delhi or an IBM call center in Rio?

One word used again and again to describe the management agencies employing chatters is pimp, a strange locution given that these agencies are hired by the creators, not the other way around. The lawyers have used it; Cosmopolitan has used it (“Watch out for the OnlyFans pimps: can they really make you millions?” ran a headline from 2024); legal scholar and antiporn crusader Catharine A. MacKinnon has definitely used it. “I mean, what do you call someone that does that?” asked Dowlatshahi, one of whose lawsuits alleges that Unruly “functions as nothing more than an online pimp.” “That’s kind of the word for it, right?”

It’s possible that Hagens Berman’s invocation of RICO invites the comparison. The mobsters the statute was originally intended to target controlled and profited from New York’s sex trade, including the peep shows, massage parlors, and topless bars that populated Times Square. A New York Times Magazine exposé on chatters prominently featured Jayson Rosero, a Miami-based manager and gym bro whose personal hero was securities fraudster Jordan Belfort—didn’t this hustler resemble nothing so much as a latter-day Gambino brother, a capo for the internet age? Rosero himself used the word e-pimping to refer to his profession, a coinage that ended up in the article’s title. And both civil and criminal RICO statutes have been deployed against websites including Backpage.com, where sex workers advertise their services.

These cases are usually built around instances of sex trafficking, however, or illegal content like rape or the sexual abuse of children. While Dowlatshahi’s clients allege that Unruly pressured them to post increasingly sexual material, most management agencies seem to be following the creators’ lead. Mike Stabile, the public-policy director of the Free Speech Coalition, which lobbies on behalf of the adult industry, argues that, far from being coercive, these agencies are basically doing the work of a personal assistant or a celebrity’s team. “One of the issues that antiporn groups have had with platforms like OnlyFans is that they’ve disrupted this narrative around sexual exploitation [because creators] operate their own businesses and sell their own content and profit from their work,” he said.

OnlyFans has made some people rich beyond their wildest dreams, and this promise sustains the whole enterprise, reeling in fortune seekers looking to ply their wares and agencies eager to cash in on their ambition. (One lawyer who has worked with creators told me that her clients are always trying to get her to start her own page. “I’d probably make more money doing it too,” she said ruefully.) Despite what media coverage might have you believe, however, the vast majority of OnlyFans creators don’t employ agencies, perhaps because they take a hefty cut on top of the platform’s 20 percent commission—or because it simply doesn’t fit with the image they’re cultivating. In a survey of four hundred or so creators that Stabile ran last year, under 6 percent disclosed employing a chat team, and even fewer reported using a management agency. Katie (not her real name), a thirteen-year veteran of the adult industry who’s in the top 1 percent of OnlyFans creators, has cut out the middleman: she now hires and trains a team of chatters directly. “My chat team is just for my pages only, and across all my pages for continuity, which is something agencies can’t provide,” she told me.

Jamie Peck, who runs her own page, says that creators “can do the cost-benefit analysis for themselves and decide if they think it’s worth it.” Peck is a writer and podcaster whose income from OnlyFans has allowed her to work as an unpaid spokesperson for the Stop Cop City movement, currently facing its own RICO suit in Georgia State Court. She always turns down the agencies that contact her to offer representation, skeptical that they could impersonate her convincingly enough to satisfy a fan base that flocks to her page for her views on social reproduction as much as her nudes. “They just seem like really normie porn companies—they don’t know about anarcho-syndicalism,” she told me. Still, the whole thing makes perfect sense to her from a Marxist perspective: “If you’re a worker, and you can automate part of your job and still make the same amount of money as before, of course you’re going to do that,” she said.

Another way in which the chatter phenomenon resembles more traditional outsourcing is that it may eventually be automated out of existence. In Stabile’s survey, more creators reported using AI than they did a human chat team.

$500 on Your Best Day

If the mob was the mirror image of twentieth-century American capitalism, the chatter phenomenon may be its purest expression in the twenty-first. OnlyFans is a British company run by a Ukrainian billionaire, but the lion’s share of its customer base resides in the United States, and every management agency named in the suit is American. The whole thing registers as a particularly homegrown marriage of delusion and deceit: the seller’s hustle to make their small business ever more scalable colliding with the consumer’s desire for better goods and on-demand services for less money—not to mention the middleman’s commitment to profiting on both ends while doing very little. Despite the narrative being advanced by Hagens Berman, everyone’s taking advantage of everyone else. No one is above reproach: certainly not the management agencies; not the creators who condone trickery in order to maximize their earnings; not OnlyFans itself, which turns a blind eye to the scam in exchange for a hefty cut; and not the customers, who seem to feel that they are owed a helping of real human connection alongside their ass shots, all for bargain-basement prices. (Even the lawyers have their role to play. What’s a more time-honored American hustle than civil litigation?)

You might assume that if anyone has standing to sue, it’s the chatters. Emma Francis’s boss chose to forgo the use of a management agency and hired her directly; her coworkers were all North American. But the larger management agencies mostly employ anglophone chatters overseas because they can pay them less. “They are farming out this labor to people in places that do not have as high a minimum wage or as many worker protections,” Peck said. The RICO suit, while not directly representing the chatters as harmed parties, does make mention of their labor conditions. It quotes a chatter who “spoke in graphic detail about the psychological toll of the job” and references a subreddit where “posts have included chatters discussing the labor abuses they suffer at the hands of agencies, such as being forced to work seventy-hour weeks or being fired for missing shifts for circumstances outside their control.” One chatter, the suit relays, “lamented the fact that chatters are being treated like ‘robots,’ and felt the need to assert: ‘We’re humans, we feel.’ ” These experiences, however, are instrumentalized to bolster the fans’ case, all the better for the lawyers to present the chatters as exploited workers and management agencies as sleazy go-betweens bent on squeezing everyone else dry.

That’s not necessarily a false impression. Based on her conversations with other creators, Katie estimated that there are only around five “reputable” agencies in the industry. One of the reasons she foreswore them herself was their mercenary approach toward customers. “They try to extract as much revenue as humanly possible. They don’t build any relationships. There’s no goal of retention of the fan,” she said. “Some of my fan base has been with me for over a decade.”

And some chatters do seem alienated by their labor: “Talking to hundreds of weirdos per shift while looking at their d***s and telling them how big it is (even if it’s not) is not that easy” is one choice quote from the RICO complaint. “They have become a common occurrence in my life,” a Filipino chatter told El Pais regarding unsolicited dick pics, the sort of quote you can easily picture being delivered alongside a haunting thousand-yard stare. Unruly has also been sued by former employees who alleged workplace abuses like wage theft and unlawful termination.

But the prurient interest the chatter phenomenon stirs—my suspicion is that the gender confusion of predominantly male chatters pretending to be women is really to blame—suggests it’s more unconventional than it actually is. “It just felt like working in a call center. But instead of trying to get people to buy, like, Wi-Fi, I was trying to sell another woman’s nudes,” Francis said. “I burned out from that job really quickly and was completely uninterested in trying to do it again. . . . It felt kind of thrilling for three weeks, and then it felt really boring and irritating.” She writes in GQ that “it’s the kind of job you can’t take a real break from”—a textbook labor violation in many sectors, as anyone who’s ever gotten a UTI from working a Sunday morning brunch shift can attest.

As with other forms of sex work—or sex, or work—some chatters frame their task in the language of empowerment. “You work from home or in a coffee shop and you can make $500 on your best day,” another Filipino chatter told El Pais. That’s around fifty times the local minimum wage. Katie pays her chatters, who are also based in the Philippines, a base wage of $10 an hour, more than the federal minimum wage in the United States; some of her chatters have bought property with their earnings. Meanwhile, for every top creator’s get-rich-quick story, there are many more who struggle to make a living. Writing in The New York Times Magazine in 2021, Charlotte Shane reported that 90 percent of creators earn less than $12,000 annually. It’s the American dream: someone is always winning, but almost everyone else is losing. Some people are just bigger losers than others.

Escape from Cuck Island

Which brings us to the men. What should we make of someone who seeks to redress his sense of grievance at this subterfuge in court? Anecdotally, most reactions have been spirited and contemptuous: “Hahahahaahhhahahahaha you fucking cucks” is one fairly representative response I received. It is hard to have too much sympathy for men who believed that women like 1990s sex symbol Denise Richards, who joined OnlyFans in 2022, were really chatting with them about their day. We have a word for this type of guy: he’s a mark. “I’m telling you, this is a group that’s been defrauded a lot of times, and it’s just the latest round,” Jeff Grell said. “I mean, just watch 90 Day Fiancé, right?” (Grell is a huge 90 Day Fiancé fan; he once wrote an exam that almost uncannily prefigured this RICO suit based on a hypothetical romance scam scenario from the show for one of his law classes.) “Unless you witness what is happening firsthand, you cannot comprehend how sophisticated these systems and schemes are for convincing even questioning Fans that the communications are authentic and from the woman they found attractive or interesting,” Robert Carey wrote when I asked him about the general perception of gullibility that might attach to his clients.

Journalistic accounts of the chatter phenomenon often foreground pathos. A recent Reuters investigation featured a German man who fell so hard for a Hungarian OnlyFans model who resembled an old girlfriend that he got her birth date—or at least the birth date she gave him—tattooed over his heart. “I trusted her,” he said. The piece details his Orphean quest to track her down after the scheme was exposed, eventually becoming a chatter himself. (He didn’t last long, reporting that he found the gig “emotionally draining.”) Nearly every piece on the chatter phenomenon mentions that some of the men seeking to interact with creators merely want to talk about their day, a pattern that is also regularly remarked upon in tales of more traditional sex work. Reading some of these stories, easy mockery gives way to sorrow at just how much lonely men are willing to close their eyes to in the desperate search for human connection.

But these fans are hardly marooned on some island of sincerity as the rapacious sharks of capitalism circle, jaws snapping. User demand drives the chatter machine as much as anything else, and an undercurrent of market logic courses through fans’ wishes for kinship. OnlyFans subscribers tend to flock to the most marketable creators by virtue of their age, gender, and conformity to Western beauty standards—the ones least likely to have the time to engage. Carey himself acknowledged this in a sense, writing me: “99% of Creators provide real communication, as chatters are only used by those Creators represented by agencies—and only the top 1% or so use agencies.” Fans are, of course, not unique in that respect: the same thing happens on dating apps, part of a renewed phenomenon of young people framing the search for sex and romance in bluntly transactional terms. With stifling novelties like “high-value” discourse and height filters on Tinder Platinum—just $39.99 a month!—modern dating conventions make Regency England look like the Summer of Love.

We live in a world in which it is possible at any moment to summon a human to your doorstep bearing tools to assemble your Ikea furniture or the exact banh mi you desire from several neighborhoods away. It is perhaps unsurprising that people extend this same logic to women on OnlyFans, from whom they expect quick and enthusiastic responses at any time of the day or night. One podcast went so far as to describe the platform as “DoorDash for pussy.” In the process of detailing his OnlyFans loss of faith, a fan quoted in the RICO complaint writes: “I was stalled for over 20 minutes before the creator returned with an answer.” It’s unclear if he was upset that someone was impersonating the model he thought he was speaking to or peeved that they made him wait. During Francis’s stint as a chatter, she worked the 6 a.m. shift, one of five or six employees who together maintained the illusion of perpetual horniness (they used a group chat to coordinate). The “girlfriend experience” is half a dozen possibly underpaid workers hiding in a trench coat; real girlfriends need to sleep and eat. “It’s like the Temu principle,” Stabile remarked of the chatter phenomenon. “If you’re paying $1 for something, you don’t have all that much right to get angry if it’s not very good.”

It can be hard to parse where exactly the expectation of instant gratification that app culture encourages ends and old-fashioned misogyny begins. The creators themselves are not actually listed as defendants in the RICO lawsuit; you get the sense the lawyers understand this could register as caddish. But they are mentioned as “unnamed co-conspirators,” and it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that they are the real targets. (In response, Carey wrote me: “Creators are certainly real beneficiaries of the scheme but suing each Creator isn’t feasible due to their sheer number. . . . The agencies—who conceived of this scheme and sold it to mostly young women—bear the greatest culpability.”)

By his own admission, Stabile spends too much time in the grimier corners of the internet, where resentment at the very concept of OnlyFans is pervasive. He paraphrased a typical X comment: “Alpha men don’t pay for this type of thing, and these e-whores are taking our money, and they’re making us submissive.” When he first noticed the Save the Fans ads circulating, he immediately thought that this was a way for aggrieved men to get their revenge. “It just fits in a larger idea of what women owe men,” he said. For men who feel entitled to women—their bodies and their time—it’s not surprising that the prospect of paying for it and not getting the real thing registers as a double betrayal, an expensive reversal of the natural order. As the Involuntary Celibate X account has posted: “Top 3 biggest scams for men in 2023: - Marriage - Therapy - OnlyFans.”

Maybe this is why there’s such an investment in the mystification of the business relationship at the heart of OnlyFans, a mystification that the platform undeniably encourages and profits from with its promise of “authentic connections.” That promise is at the core of the RICO complaint: the word authentic, or some variation, is mentioned thirty-five times in 122 pages. But what does authenticity look like in the context of sex work? “They don’t want a guy in the Philippines faking that they care about you. They want you faking that you care about them,” Peck said.

While the growing awareness of the chatter model might seem like a threat to the company’s bottom line, it’s only increased the premium on real, whatever that even means. Francis wrote in GQ that men would message her things like: “Usually on OnlyFans all the girls on here are actually like some fat dude who lives in his mom’s basement. I can tell you’re real.” Creators like Peck who forego chatters can distinguish themselves that way: “I’m one of a kind, baby,” she said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.” Still, she added, “The idea that they’re getting the real you in the first place is sort of silly.” Those like Katie who find themselves in OnlyFans’ rarefied top 1 percent will benefit most financially if they can find ways, as she has with AI, to more convincingly and consistently impersonate themselves.

Despite the RICO suit’s references to romance scams and catfishing, its very existence is proof that its plaintiffs recognize OnlyFans is selling a product. By taking their grievance to court, the fans are asserting their rights not as forsaken lovers but as consumers who didn’t get what they paid for. Ironically, their retaliation has once again confirmed the notion that money can’t buy love. In real life, you can’t recoup damages when it’s gone, either. All you can do is walk away.

Stop the Presses

A newsroom on strike in Pittsburgh

Tadhg Larabee

© John J. Custer

When NewsGuild staff organizer Jacob Klinger picked me up outside Pittsburgh in his battered truck, he couldn’t wait to talk about the cease and desist he had just received from a small private school in northwest Ohio. It was the 922nd day of the Guild’s strike against the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and we were driving to Toledo, where the paper’s workers had plans to picket the school’s annual fundraiser. The protest was for the benefit of one graduate whose vote could help end the seemingly endless dispute: Diana Block, a board member of Block Communications, the 125-year-old family company that owns the Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, as well as TV stations, cable companies, and internet service providers throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois. In the back seat of the truck hung a linen blazer and a collared shirt. The gala was Kentucky Derby–themed, and the strikers intended to follow the dress code; two of them had even bought tickets so that they could mingle with Block and her fellow donors.

As we left town, Klinger told me about his life before the Guild, which included stints as a sportswriter, a tenant organizer, a janitor, and a candidate for Pittsburgh ward constable (his platform, he explained, was to do nothing except obstruct evictions until he got removed from office). The conversation came back to the strike after we picked up a copy editor and designer named Erin Hebert. Hebert, it turned out, was involved in a key aspect of the Post-Gazette’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting: its October 29 front page, where the victims’ names were printed on a stark black background. The journalists had been working without a contract for over two years when they brought home the Pulitzer, and Hebert was fed up. Her grievances included unpredictable scheduling and workplace harassment, issues union members described as endemic in a newsroom that hadn’t seen an across-the-board raise since 2006. As her colleagues celebrated the Pulitzer, Hebert said, “I felt like everything I had gone through there had been worth it.”

Later that afternoon, a community supporter remarked that “a Pulitzer should get you a raise of fifty cents an hour” while the strikers handed out leaflets across from the fundraiser’s venue, a converted stable surrounded by farmland and forest. Veteran transportation reporter Ed Blazina stood next to the country road, sporting a smart vest and cherry-red Converses. Decades ago, when Diana Block was learning the family business, he had briefly been her editor. “I took her out . . . to show her the kinds of communities we dealt with,” he remembered. “There was no air about her at all.” What would he say to her today? Simple: “Settle the strike.”

In the end, none of the workers got the chance to deliver their message. The school canceled their tickets at the last second, and a trio of sheriff’s deputies lounged near the gala’s entrance, bickering with demonstrators about the precise location of the property line. Car after car drove past, the candy hues of derby hats muted by tinted windows; only one stopped to see what the fuss was about. The strikers decided to leave when the sun started to set. Trudging to the campground where they had parked, some workers wondered whether this, or any of the similar actions they had staged since walking out in 2022, had made a difference. Still, nobody seemed to doubt that they would be at the next one.

Block Is Cheap

Two and a half years is a long time to be on strike. In summer 2024, the strike became the longest ongoing labor action in the nation; it was already the longest in the history of American newspapers and of any Pittsburgh industry. A lot can happen in two and a half years. Strikers have gotten married, bought houses, battled cancer, and sent their kids to college. Multiple workers had taken up—and then quit—smoking on the picket lines before I met them. At first, nobody thought the strike would last more than a few weeks; then nobody expected it go on past six months, one year, two. The journalists are exhausted and eager to get back to work.

The fact that the strikers are still standing is the product of a once-in-a-generation collision between an exceptionally dedicated union and an eccentric family unwilling to accept anything short of the union’s dissolution. Both owners and workers are acutely aware that print news isn’t what it used to be, especially in the Rust Belt. The Post-Gazette, which once subsidized Block Communications’ other enterprises, now costs the company millions each year; its journalists have witnessed the deaths of nearby papers in McKeesport, Monessen, and Youngstown. Meanwhile, hedge funds and national media conglomerates are gobbling up family-owned papers. Something has to give. Will it be the workers or the Blocks?

“I’m a typical Pittsburgher,” Blazina told me. “I’m real stubborn. . . . I could walk away at any point, and I’m not going to—not a chance.” The Blocks are also a headstrong bunch. Their rise began with Paul Block, a Lithuanian Jew who immigrated to upstate New York in 1885 at the age of nine. While his father worked as a ragpicker, Block took a job as a newsboy at the Elmira Telegram. From these Horatio Alger origins, Block moved to New York City, where he founded the company now known as Block Communications in 1900, becoming a regular captain of industry and befriending President Calvin Coolidge as well as various power brokers of the roaring twenties. Block’s firm was early to the field of national advertising; as papers sprouted up across the country, he connected them with newly consolidated retailers and manufacturers that hoped to reach an expanding base of middle-class consumers. With his growing fortune, Block bought newspapers of his own: the Newark Star-Eagle and the Detroit Journal in the mid-1910s, followed by the Toledo Blade and some ten more over the next few decades. In 1927, he met William Randolph Hearst in Chicago to plot a takeover of the Pittsburgh newspaper market. When the press barons’ private Pullman railcars left the city, each was on his way to owning two of Pittsburgh’s four leading papers; Block would combine his to form the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

It seemed like a great time to invest in Pittsburgh. The city had been the physical and economic center of U.S. industrialization, connected to the iron mines of the upper Midwest via the Ohio River and situated amid the rich coalfields of Appalachia. In its vast mills, Pittsburgh turned these raw materials into steel, which became railroads, automobiles, weapons, skyscrapers, and all the other trappings of American modernity. The Pittsburgh of 1920 was nearly seven times more populous than it had been fifty years prior, its factories full of black workers from the South and European immigrants; U.S. Steel, based in the city, was for decades the world’s largest corporation. But something was already rotten in the Steel City. Dependent on basic manufacturing and a small number of gargantuan employers, Pittsburgh saw few plants open or expand after 1920. The jobs were still there, but the progress had slowed: between 1930 and 1960, Pittsburgh’s economy grew at around half the national rate.

The Block newspapers did not escape the twentieth century unscathed. Block spent much of the Great Depression so depressed that he literally couldn’t get out of bed. Outside his Park Avenue apartment, his empire, which once stretched from Brooklyn to Duluth, was shrinking; he would be left with just his advertising firm, the Blade, and the Post-Gazette. Block entrusted what remained to his sons Paul Jr. and William, homegrown American aristocrats with degrees from Hotchkiss and Yale. Their prosperity likewise sat on a steel foundation. When the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s hit an industry facing stiff overseas competition, it meant economic crisis for Pittsburgh’s steel producers and social crisis for the city. The Post-Gazette’s readership declined with Pittsburgh’s population and plummeted during a series of strikes in the early 1970s that halted distribution of the paper.

By the late eighties, when Paul Jr.’s twin sons, Allan and John Robinson, got into the business, both Pittsburgh’s population and the Post-Gazette’s circulation were down more than two hundred thousand from their heights—and that was before the internet destroyed the advertising model their grandfather had helped pioneer. But the legacy of Paul Block, penniless immigrant turned press baron, loomed large for John Robinson, or “J. R.,” now publisher of the Post-Gazette and the Blade. As a Yale undergraduate, J. R. made notes for a history paper about his grandfather: “Was Paul Block a man with a message?” he asked. “Was he considered . . . an extraordinary human being?”

While the Iron’s Hot

Joe Knupsky, a Post-Gazette copy editor, is the same age as J. R. and Allan Block. Their families have been on opposite sides of the region’s class war for generations, and Knupsky is proud of it. “My grandfather worked in coal mines . . . and he was one of the first to have a union card,” Knupsky told me. When management caught his grandfather organizing, he was evicted from his company-owned housing. That didn’t stop Knupsky’s dad from becoming a union steelworker in Glassport, Pennsylvania, about ten miles south of Pittsburgh. Knupsky, for his part, took a few years of journalism classes before dropping out and accepting a job at his father’s plant. His first strike lasted three months. “That company was owned by the Rothschilds of France,” said Knupsky, and in 1978, the boss “shut the plant and moved it to Tennessee . . . a right-to-work state.” Knupsky’s next stop was Richeyville, where he worked for seven years in what was once the largest underground coal mine in the world. The mine closed too, but not before Knupsky went on his second and third strikes. After that, he returned to college and escaped Pittsburgh’s industrial hinterland as it was crumbling around him. A chance encounter with Bill Block Sr. led to a position at the Post-Gazette. Twenty-seven years later, Knupsky is on strike number four, the most bitter one of his life.

Sometimes Knupsky worries that “what we’re striking for may be dead.” But he nevertheless sees the fight as part of the “tradition from Homestead, to the radical mine riots, to the tent cities,” a tradition of standing up to people like Paul Block and his grandsons. “Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Ohio are the heart of unionism,” he insisted. “That’s why twenty-seven idiots are still out on strike after two and a half years.” Knupsky wasn’t the only worker to describe the strike in historic terms. “This is where the AFL and the CIO were founded,” emphasized Pittsburgh NewsGuild president Zack Tanner, a Post-Gazette designer. We were sitting around a conference table in the United Steelworkers headquarters as Klinger, Blazina, and several other strikers brainstormed Kentucky Derby–inspired slogans for the Toledo action: “Stop Horsing Around,” “Take Off the Blinders,” and the like. The modern Post-Gazette, Tanner noted, emerged from a protracted 1992 strike at the Pittsburgh Press that ended with the paper’s sale to the Blocks. “I almost feel like I’d be doing those folks from ’92 a disservice if we didn’t see this whole fight through.” Several journalists who were around for the 1992 strike nodded in agreement.

Back in 2022, however, it wasn’t clear that there would be a strike at all. The Post-Gazette’s union contract expired eight years ago, and since then, the company has sneered at the very idea of negotiating a replacement. After the Guild put up a poster reading “Shame on the Blocks” in 2019, an irate and possibly intoxicated J. R. stormed into the newsroom with his teenage daughter in tow. She cried as her father berated the staff, only for J. R. to allegedly thunder at her, “You’re a Block! You’re not one of them!” The following year, management shunted the workers onto a more expensive health plan and tried to take their jobs out of union jurisdiction. Finally, in 2020, the unit authorized a strike. Nothing came of it. The local’s president resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations a few weeks later, and the NewsGuild’s parent union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), refused to endorse the work stoppage.

What forced the unit’s hand was a separate standoff involving the Post-Gazette’s three production unions. In October 2022, the production workers went on strike after the Blocks allowed their health care coverage to lapse, and the CWA told the Guild that editorial staff had to do the same. A tense Zoom meeting ensued. Page designer Natalie Duleba described how she got into a shouting match on the call, which lasted six hours and yielded a razor-thin vote to strike. The next day, a bare majority of the newsroom walked out. More would join, but thirty-five people kept working—including, crucially, the sportswriters who cover the Steelers. The Post-Gazette was able to keep publishing, and as the strike dragged on, others would cross the picket line, find new jobs, or quit journalism altogether.

Over two and a half years, even journalists’ memories get foggy. Many strikers I interviewed struggled to place events: Was it in 2023 or 2024 that they considered renting boats for a nautical protest outside J. R.’s Maine vacation home? Yet almost everybody in the Steelworkers’ building remembered the day they picketed J. R.’s wedding reception in November 2022 as the first sign that this wouldn’t be a normal strike. “We had Scabby the Rat out there in a taped-up veil,” Tanner said. Such disruptive tactics had worked for the Guild elsewhere, but they only made the Blocks more recalcitrant. The next few bargaining sessions were so icy that after three months an administrative judge ordered the Post-Gazette to negotiate in good faith.

The hardest thing for the workers to do has been nothing. “When we do have small victories . . . it feels great, but then it’s like, ‘Well, we’re still on strike,’” said Emily Matthews, a photojournalist. The empty hours weighed on Tanner as well. “It’s a matter of feeling helpless, feeling like no action we do can move those people,” whether that’s parking a video truck in front of J. R.’s house, flying a banner over the Harvard-Yale game, or tossing complaints into the void that is the glacially slow legal system. The company’s lawyers have insisted on starting each bargaining session at section one, line one, word one, much to the annoyance of strikers; Tanner blew up a recent meeting by throwing a chair at the wall. To photographer Alexandra Wimley, management’s strategy was transparent: “If we just wait this out . . . eventually there will be so few people that the union can and will dissolve.”

PUP and Away

Into this tedium came the Pittsburgh Union Progress (PUP), a strike paper whose coverage has sprawled far beyond the journalists’ grudge match with the Blocks. Features editor Bob Batz Jr. was asked to lead the PUP minutes after walking off the job, and he recruited his staff right there on the picket line. “I love being a photojournalist,” Wimley said, “so having that outlet for still doing your job has been very helpful.” The Post-Gazette’s editorial line has veered to the right in recent years, but the PUP decided to stay away from opinion. Its mission wasn’t to win a political argument; it was to compete with the Post-Gazette by reporting on everything that had disappeared from its pages as it shrunk, from high school sports to underrepresented communities in and around Pittsburgh. “We wrote about trans people. We wrote about labor stuff. We went to the black neighborhoods where a lot of people hated the Post-Gazette,” Batz said. During the second-longest newspaper strike in history, Detroit News and Detroit Free Press workers took a similar approach, and their strike paper—the largest ever by circulation—ran for over two years after the strike ended in 1997.

I met Steve Mellon, one of the PUP’s main contributors, at a church in Homestead for a panel on the East Palestine train derailment. Leaning across the pews, Mellon pointed out the survivors—Carly, who had lost her hair; Ashley, who had been displaced to a camper; Christina, who had studied toxicology so that she could test the water in her creek. “Why isn’t the Post-Gazette here?” Mellon wondered. “This is a huge story.” When a Norfolk Southern freight train crashed in February 2023, dousing East Palestine in hazardous chemicals, the PUP was still figuring out whether it would be a strike bulletin or something more. But Mellon said, “Well, we’re a fucking newspaper, aren’t we?” and got in his car. He would come back weekly for more than two years, and today he’s one of the only journalists still embedded in East Palestine. “We were able to build that trust because we were able to commit to the story.”

Mellon and I continued our conversation on the steps of the church. It was an eerily quiet evening in Homestead, a town built to accommodate the 20,000 who inhabited it in the 1920s rather than the 2,885 who live there now. Before the Post-Gazette hired him in 1997, Mellon shot photos for a book on deindustrialized communities like this one. “The tectonic plates of the economy were shifting, and this is where they were grinding, right along the Mon Valley,” he said. “You had all these people going to the Rainbow Kitchen up here with their food bags . . . because they were laid off. And on the other side of the street, you had all these rusting steel mills.” Mellon kept covering Pittsburgh’s neglected outskirts for the Post-Gazette, but eventually the assignments dried up. It’s heartbreaking, Mellon said, to see these vital institutions collapse. “You combine the newspaper with all these other places that shifted, closed one way or another, and you see the town changes.”

Mellon and Batz watched the Post-Gazette conduct several rounds of buyouts and slowly reduce its print run to twice a week. Yet Batz “always felt it was kind of cool to be one of the last family-owned papers,” given the alternatives: incorporation into a chain, gutting by a hedge fund, or closure, the fate of roughly two American newspapers per week. Klinger grimaced when he recalled his prior experience organizing at the Tribune family under Alden Global Capital, a shadowy hedge fund known for buying up papers, hollowing them out, and squeezing the husks for profit. It was nearly impossible for him to track down Alden’s Florida-based owners, whereas you can knock on J. R.’s door and listen to his excuses or approach Allan at a rest stop and get hit with a Wendy’s bag. At least “the Blocks are around,” Klinger sighed—perhaps all too around.

For three decades, the Post-Gazette unions were willing to accept cutbacks so long as the bosses didn’t ask too much. The Blocks turned on their workers amid their rightward lurch, during which the paper barred a black reporter from covering Black Lives Matter and endorsed its first Republican presidential candidate since 1972: Donald Trump. J. R. remains enamored with the lifestyle of the gentleman publisher, but he has referred to Guild members as “malcontents” grieving “the fact that their mother didn’t love them when they were five.” Allan, who has overseen the business’s expansion into TV, cable, and other emerging sectors, seems as if he would be happy to shutter the Post-Gazette, in his view a “hard-left organ” and a charity case.

For workers, the upside of family owners is their willingness to absorb losses. The price is their ability to rule as mad kings. With the Blocks doubling down on their sovereignty and their margins, some strikers have begun to see the PUP as a model for a different kind of newsroom. “We’re all workers, and nobody owns the Union Progress,” Tanner said. Still, they are realistic about the PUP’s capacity to remake the media world and remain focused, above all, on winning back their jobs.

The Media Empire Strikes Back

One of the strike’s great puzzles is that, in theory, Pittsburgh and its news market are on an upswing. The city has undergone a much-heralded “rebirth,” replacing steel with health care and tech. And as Batz put it, Pittsburgh is “the opposite of a news desert,” with a healthy gaggle of independent outlets that share office space through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. If the Blocks wanted to, they could fully fund the Post-Gazette, which costs a company with roughly $1.1 billion in revenue around $15 million a year. Meeting the workers’ demands would certainly have been cheaper than replacing the strikers and retaining King and Ballow, the industry’s premier union-busting law firm since the newspaper wars of the 1990s, when it represented owners in the record-setting Detroit strike. After all, the union is asking only to reinstate the contract that expired in 2017; Batz estimates that the whole nasty affair could have been avoided for an annual total of $66,000. Plus, he said, “nobody wants to be on strike for two and a half years.” So why is this still happening?

Some workers blame their protracted struggle on the Blocks’ peculiarities and reactionary views. Outsiders might point to the fact that the remaining strikers are mostly under forty or over sixty—radical millennials accustomed to precarity and grizzled unionists fighting a last battle before retirement. But there’s also the grinding of the economy’s tectonic plates that Mellon heard three decades ago, rumbling beneath Pittsburgh once again.

The city is no longer an emblem of the industrial order, as it was in the 1920s, or even of that order’s disintegration, as it was in the 1990s. Yet its reinvention reflects many of the contractions of twenty-first-century America’s service-led economy. As historian Gabriel Winant argues in his book The Next Shift, Pittsburgh’s new working class arose to manage the suffering of its old one, with nonunionized nurses in the city center caring for former union workers throughout the surrounding region, where most steel mills were located. In Pittsburgh proper, the poverty rate and population have stabilized, though neither indicator has shown absolute improvement. More than three-quarters of the area’s impoverished, however, live outside city limits, and Allegheny County’s population declined from 2020 to 2023. Tech hasn’t saved Pittsburgh, either. The jobs are too scarce, and those who take them are too often temporary residents, arriving alongside higher rents and tax breaks for their employers.

The rebirth narrative, while true for some, evidently rang hollow to the outlying counties that form Greater Pittsburgh, which followed similar jurisdictions across the country in swinging toward Trump in 2016 and 2024. The story of Pittsburgh media has parallel complications. As the economic and demographic gulf between cities and everywhere else—and between cities like New York and Pittsburgh—widens, virtually every newspaper that’s not called the New York Times is under pressure. Ad revenues aren’t coming back, and there was no meaningful “Trump bump” in subscriptions after the president’s second victory. Billionaire owners such as the Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong are pivoting rightward while cutting jobs and curtailing newsroom independence, just as the Blocks did in 2016. Standing in their way is an increasingly confrontational NewsGuild, fresh off an organizing spree that has added over 8,500 members and 120 shops.

Put together, these are the conditions for an unprecedented strike in Pittsburgh—and for future showdowns across regional markets where owners have gotten tired of their unions. They are also reminiscent of the forces that drove the Detroit papers and the Pittsburgh Press to the picket lines in the 1990s. Newspapers were profitable then, but not profitable enough for the oligopoly of publicly traded news chains that had emerged in the 1980s. Wall Street wanted more, and the companies delivered via acquisitions, budget cuts, and union-busting, the last of which was in high style after Ronald Reagan smashed the air traffic controllers’ union. According to the National Lawyers Guild, the Detroit papers’ parent companies believed that “if they could break the unions in a labor center such as Detroit, they would demonstrate the power to break unions anywhere in the country.” An executive at the Press’s chain mused that “Pittsburgh was never earning back for its shareholders a fair return on the dollar” because of “the stranglehold by the Teamsters.”

It is remarkable that the Post-Gazette has survived as a family-owned union paper. And the city’s crop of upstart outlets, the PUP included, is a welcome sign of Pittsburgh’s appetite for journalism. The harsh reality, however, is that Pittsburgh is among the major American cities that currently lack a daily paper, and the newcomers haven’t been able to sustain a large workforce. The Blocks have shown that family ownership is at best the lesser evil, yet the Post-Gazette may still be the only Pittsburgh institution capable of providing what the strikers, and some of their parents and grandparents, once enjoyed: a journalistic career in a city whose ongoing economic transformations have kept civic life on the brink for decades. “This is about our basic workplace rights and the existence of a union in the future,” Wimley said. “It’s a privately owned thing,” as Tanner acknowledged. “But how can we make the best out of that privately owned thing in this capitalistic world?”

Rank and Trial

I began writing this piece during a period of utter deadlock for the workers. The only news was bad news: the production unions had disbanded in mid-March, ending their strike in exchange for buyouts. That left the NewsGuild as the last union standing at the Post-Gazette. Then, suddenly, the journalists started winning. In the final months of the Biden administration, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed for a rare injunction that would effectively settle the strike by compelling the Post-Gazette to restore the expired contract. On March 24, the Third Circuit granted part of the injunction in an order that required the paper to come back to the table and reinstate the workers’ original health plan. The same court will soon rule on the NLRB’s full request, and failure to comply with its decision could lead to the Post-Gazette being held in contempt and charged escalating fines.

When I asked strikers how they imagined their first day back at work, I got a couple of concrete answers. An education reporter had been growing his hair and beard since the beginning of the strike, and what could be more natural than shaving it in the middle of the newsroom? Mostly, though, they found it almost too surreal to picture, perhaps because a court ruling would feel like a muted conclusion to their long struggle.

Such a win would be historic, but no reprieve. If the initial walkout had shut down the paper as the Press workers did in 1992, the strikers might not have needed to rely on the NLRB, a body that often acts tepidly and too late. The unit will have to confront these organizational weaknesses as it renegotiates its contract in a workplace down three unions and full of scabs. Should that lead to another strike, the journalists won’t be able to count on the NLRB, which Trump has deprived of a quorum; nor can they necessarily depend on the new Pittsburgh for solidarity, even as banners in the city center trumpet its traditional identity as a union town. Five thousand people came out to prevent the Press from printing in 1992, Blazina remembered. “We can’t get five hundred at a rally today.” One journalist told me that they’re afraid of ending up in the history books as the last gasp of New Deal labor law.

In retrospect, Tanner thinks that from 2017 onward, the Blocks’ goal was “to bust every union at the paper [and] make it a nonunion shop.” They might still succeed, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop trying in an environment of political reaction and persistent deficits. If more owners follow suit, the only way to preserve a livelihood for reporters in the Rust Belt may be to refuse the demand that journalism make a profit—through either worker-run publications like the PUP or a public-funding regime that improves on those already passed in half a dozen states. Toward the end of the two-year Detroit newspaper strike, as workers considered returning under their old contract and then bargaining for a better one, a Free Press reporter pondered many of the same questions that the Post-Gazette union may soon have to confront. Winning the strike would be “a symbolic victory over corporate greed. But the corporate giants, even in defeat, would gird for the next battle,” he wrote in 1996. “Instead of merely fighting to get back our old jobs,” he continued, “we could be fighting to create our own jobs.”

Shortly after I came home from Pittsburgh, Klinger texted me. The court had rejected the company’s bid to appeal the injunction. It was a satisfying moment, one that inched the union closer to victory, with all its elation and uncertainty. The workers had been on strike for 925 days. Now they just needed to wait a little while longer.

The Path Is Made by Walking

Entering the Darién Gap

Belén Fernández

© Hokyoung Kim

Hanging from the ceiling at the open-air albergue, or shelter, in the Colombian village of Capurganá—one of the jumping-off points for traversal of the Darién Gap—was a sign featuring “general information,” in both Spanish and English, for the migrants who had gathered in the hopes of reaching the United States, more than three thousand miles away. The English version read:

Darién jungle crossing Colombia–Panamá
“Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking”
Generating more hope, to achieve the American Dream

A U.S. flag occupied one section of the sign, atop which were perched a pair of rain boots and four dirt-caked children’s shoes, one of them bearing the Nike swoosh. The albergue is where refuge seekers from around the world pay Colombian “guides” for passage to Panama, a journey that can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Said guides do not chaperone the entire trajectory—a detail that is often not made clear to migrants at the outset and revealed only when their smugglers turn back prior to reaching the Panamanian border. The sixty-six-mile Darién Gap is notorious for its lethal perils, ranging from rushing rivers to armed assailants to hostile wildlife, and a countless number of those who have set out “to achieve the American Dream” have ended up corpses in the jungle. (Lest anyone underestimate the intellectual credentials of Colombian organized crime, it bears noting that the inspirational quote directed to the walker is a line from a poem by Antonio Machado, who died in French exile from Spain in 1939, the year that Francisco Franco forged his path to the Spanish dictatorship.)

This was the prevailing scene when I entered the Darién Gap via Capurganá in January 2024, a year before the Donald Trump administration broadcast its intent to close the jungle down, with incoming U.S. border czar Tom Homan declaring ahead of Trump’s reinauguration, “Shutting down the Darién Gap is going to protect our national security. It’s going to save thousands of lives.” In 2023, more than 520,000 people made the crossing, opting to risk their lives and travel thousands of miles rather than remain in existentially precarious situations at home. As a Washington, D.C.–born bona fide gringa myself—and someone who has spent more than two decades in self-imposed semi-exile from the country—I had obviously already been sufficiently disabused of such notions as “the American Dream” and was staging a brief incursion into the Gap for journalistic purposes.

More specifically, I was preparing to write a book on the subject, and I was doing my best to live up to the late and far more intrepid Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s dictum that “it’s wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through.” I had not tried to secure the usual permission to enter the Darién Gap as a reporter, which has allowed many a member of the U.S. press to access the jungle to relay the plight of people on the move while rarely ever mentioning the outsize role of the United States in concomitantly fueling and criminalizing migration. Instead, I entered as a “migrant,” for which effort I had selected a Palestine soccer jersey with the intention of pleading Palestinian-ness if questioned by any of the smugglers—which I indeed was. The young man found my alibi less than convincing and henceforth referred to me, with a roll of the eyes, as “Palestina.”

I was accompanied on my expedition by a twenty-two-year-old Venezuelan named Johan, whom I had met the previous year when he exited the jungle on the Panamanian side of the Darién Gap in the first of his various attempts to reach the United States. In April 2023—forty-one days after I had met him in Panama and one day after we had rendezvoused for far too much beer in Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border—he made it as far as El Paso, Texas, before being detained by immigration authorities for a string of showerless days and then flown, cuffed at the hands and feet, to Arizona, where he was dumped back into the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Months later, Johan took another stab at existence in Caracas and found it still unsustainable—thanks in no small part, of course, to U.S. sanctions, one of the global hegemon’s many tools for making life miserable for folks around the world. As of 2020, sanctions had already caused upwards of one hundred thousand deaths in Venezuela, to say nothing of the less life-threatening but still highly annoying effects of coercive economic measures like shortages of electricity and cooking gas. In August 2023, 77 percent of the record 81,946 people who crossed the Darién Gap were Venezuelan. Against this backdrop, Johan figured he might as well earn a few bucks escorting me in and out of the Gap; his twenty-five-year-old brother, Kelvin, signed up for the excursion too, as I reckoned the more machetes, the better.

Johan, Kelvin, and I met up on January 11 in Medellín, Colombia, and took a nine-hour bus ride to the northern coastal city of Necoclí, which had recently hosted New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, who descended upon the port to warn migrants against travel to the United States because conditions were rough “on the streets of New York.” From Necoclí, it was a two-hour, spine-shattering boat ride to Capurganá, where migration through the Darién Gap was managed by the Clan del Golfo, currently Colombia’s leading drug-trafficking outfit. In Capurganá, we were given complimentary transport by motorized rickshaw to the albergue, where a man in flip-flops charged us $280 apiece and requested our identifying documents. This put me in a momentary bind, as I had intentionally left my passport behind, but “My face?” proved a satisfactory response to the question of what I had to identify myself with after Johan announced that I had lost my documents. I was marked down on a piece of paper as Maria Velen Hernandez, and colored bands were affixed to our wrists to indicate that we had been properly extorted. The human smugglers of the Darién Gap tend to cast their activities in a resolutely humanitarian light. And as one of the guides would later tell me with impassioned altruism, migration was going to happen whether anyone liked it or not—at least on the Colombian side of the Gap, the guides were making it “safe.”

At the albergue, I spoke in English with a pair of Yemeni men who expressed approval at my Palestine shirt and did their best to assuage my apparently visible terror at the prospect of entering the jungle: “If you need anything, we are here.” These, of course, were people who were well acquainted with literal terror, courtesy in part of my actual country of origin, whose covert action program against Yemen, launched in 2002, basically consisted of bombing Yemeni civilians without publicly acknowledging the campaign because it was, you know, covert. In addition to hands-on destruction, the United States also provided key logistical support over the years to the military coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that had dedicated itself to giddy bombardment of the country, along with a blockade that stimulated famine and helped kill some eighty-five thousand malnourished Yemeni children between 2015 and 2018 alone.

In Yemen, as in so many countries across the planet, the United States is more than happy to wantonly violate other people’s borders both militarily and economically while insisting on the sacrosanctity of its own frontier—which is why so many humans have been forced to contend with the horrors of the Darién Gap as they seek refuge from what are often U.S.-backed horrors at home. Because the United States simultaneously wreaks havoc worldwide while criminalizing migration by the world’s have-nots, two men from Yemen had to travel halfway around said world only to reach the entrance of a deadly jungle that, if navigated successfully, would leave them with thousands of hazard-ridden miles still to go to reach the U.S. border. Throughout the length of Central America and Mexico, migrants suffer assault and extortion by state security forces and criminal groups alike—often operating in concert—while being prey to robbing and kidnapping at the hands of gangs and cartels. In Mexico, many migrants board La Bestia, the country’s infamous “train of death,” another frequent site of armed assault—not to mention mutilation and worse when weary passengers traveling atop the railroad cars fall onto the tracks. Survivors of the journey are deposited at the front lines of the war on migrants: the U.S. border itself.

And yet the Yemenis and other international guests at the albergue that day—which included mainly exhausted Venezuelan families with young children and wailing babies—were, for all intents and purposes, already smack up against the U.S. border right there in Capurganá. The death trap of a jungle having failed to adequately deter desperate migrants with nothing to lose, Joe Biden’s administration had set about harassing the governments of Colombia and Panama to support a militarized crackdown on migration through the Darién Gap, with helicopters and other goodies provided by the imperial benefactors for use in anti-immigration efforts. Still, migrant movement persisted through the jungle, though the helicopters did make for some good photo ops.

In February 2023, U.S. officials met with Colombian and Panamanian counterparts and “committed to close coordination” on migration management, as per the press release from the U.S. embassy in Bogotá. The same communiqué affirmed that the United States continued to “combat illegal human smuggling and trafficking operations that promote and facilitate the dangerous crossing through the Darién Gap”—operations that, mind you, owed their lucrative existence to U.S. policy in the first place. To some degree, extortion-happy smugglers essentially served as de facto U.S. border guards, blocking the passage of the lowest ranks of the have-nots, who were unable to muster the smuggling fee. Many of these migrants were condemned to indefinite limbo sleeping on the streets of Necoclí, where they remained Colombia’s problem and not Eric Adams’s.

The Zone of Interest

Now, Trump’s recent threat to seize the Panama Canal makes all this metaphorical talk about U.S. borders in Central America a little less lofty. While the president of course specializes in being an egregious caricature not only of himself but also of American entitlement, it’s worth recalling that until 1979, the United States presided over a straight-up colony in the middle of Panama in the form of the Panama Canal Zone. In addition to emphasizing the utter unimportance of other people’s borders, the Canal Zone also enabled the colonial administrators to replicate and maintain the metropole’s racist oppressions—think segregated schools, drinking fountains, and so forth—long after such things had gone out of style in the United States proper. The nation of Panama had itself been midwifed into being by none other than the United States, which under the charitable supervision of Theodore Roosevelt sponsored the country’s forcible severance from Colombia in 1903, once the Colombians had been deemed too much of a pain in the ass in terms of negotiating the proposed U.S. Canal Zone. (Incidentally, the Darién region of Panama was on the U.S. radar long before Panamanian “independence.” In 1854, the American Navy dispatched the U.S. Darién Exploring Expedition under the leadership of Lieutenant Isaac Strain to check out prospects for an interoceanic canal on the isthmus of Darién; Strain’s men became hopelessly lost in the jungle, where some died and others lost their minds, clothing, and tooth enamel, the last as a result of a disproportionate consumption of palm nuts.)

The colonial enterprise kicked off immediately, and over ensuing decades it became nearly impossible to maneuver in the Canal Zone without tripping over one or another U.S. military installation. As the headquarters of U.S. Southern Command, the Canal Zone was used as a base from which to assist in terrorizing other countries in the region in the interest of making the world safe for capitalism—causing wreckage that naturally helped pave the way for future migration patterns. From 1946 until 1984, the territory also hosted the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), which produced such illustrious alumni as Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who would make a name for himself dropping thousands of suspected leftists from airplanes, and Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, a key player in the country’s civil war of 1979–92 that killed some seventy-five thousand people. That war also drove countless folks to flee north to the United States, the very nation backing the alliance between the right-wing military and death squads responsible for the vast majority of wartime atrocities in El Salvador.

In December 1989, ten years before the United States formally ceded control of the canal to Panama, the diminutive Central American nation got to experience U.S.-inflicted terror firsthand when the gringos suddenly turned against their longtime buddy (and CIA asset) Manuel Noriega, the ruler of Panama and an SOA graduate himself. During the brief and perversely titled Operation Just Cause, the U.S. military bombed the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City barrio of El Chorrillo and killed up to several thousand civilians. The spectacle earned the neighborhood the moniker Little Hiroshima, and even U.S. General Marc Cisneros would later admit that “we could have done it with less troops and less destruction. We made it look like we were battling Goliath. . . . We are mesmerized with firepower. We have all these new gadgets, laser-guided missiles and stealth fighters, and we are just dying to use that stuff.” At any rate, the stunning U.S. victory over destitute Panamanians living in wooden shacks helped the American public kick that pernicious affliction known as Vietnam Syndrome and set the stage for the unleashing of even more “new gadgets” against Iraq in 1991.

Of course, decolonization is easier said than done, and Panama continues to this day to host an aging population of “Zonians”—the denomination for U.S. citizens from the Canal Zone—many of whom never quite got around to learning Spanish or viewing Panamanians as equal human beings. Even in the postoccupation era, the names of U.S. military officers have been preserved in Panamanian geography, as in Panama City’s Albrook Mall and the upscale residential area of Clayton. The mall is located on none other than Roosevelt Avenue, although the Panamanian capital’s former Fourth of July Avenue has since been renamed Martyrs’ Avenue in honor of the at least twenty-one Panamanians killed by U.S. forces in the Canal Zone in January 1964, after local high school students attempted to raise Panama’s flag next to the U.S. one.

Nor has Panama been able to shake the tradition of being bossed around by its former occupiers. While Biden repeatedly badgered the Panamanian government to crack down on northbound migration through the Darién Gap, Trump promptly augmented his signature deportation spree by roping the country into serving as a sort of black hole into which the United States might disappear migrants whose deportation to their own countries would have been “more challenging,” as the Associated Press put it in a March dispatch. Per the AP’s write-up, hundreds of deportees from Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, and China had been “dropped into limbo in Panama,” where some had consented to return home voluntarily “but others refused out of fear of persecution and were sent to a remote camp in the Darién jungle for weeks.” In other words, the old U.S.-Darién border remained very much in business.

Return to Sender

The U.S. border today persists in its long habit of extending itself wherever it pleases; U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), for example, maintains a presence in no fewer than twenty-six countries. This projection of the border is not, ultimately, done with an eye to fully halting U.S.-bound migration, which would leave the country with a shortage of the undocumented, exploitable labor upon which its economy depends. Rather, the ubiquitous frontier is designed to render the pursuit of refuge so physically complicated and deadly that those who do eventually “achieve the American Dream” aren’t tempted to expect any sort of rights on the other side. In his aptly titled 2019 book Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World, journalist Todd Miller notes that the U.S. border model has been “paramount to the scaffolding of the current order of the globe, managing the antagonisms . . . between the haves and have-nots.” Without these managed antagonisms, global capitalism would naturally be up a creek. Key to this scaffolding, Miller writes, is the “enormous chasm between those who have freedom of movement and those who do not.” After all, the perpetuation of elite tyranny would be far more onerous if just anybody could pick up and fly to the United States instead of having to walk there from Colombia or engage in similarly unfree movement.

In her 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, scholar Harsha Walia asserts that “in addition to migration being a consequence of empire, capitalism, climate catastrophe, and oppressive hierarchies, contemporary migration is itself a mode of global governance, capital accumulation, and gendered racial class formation.” And on that January day in Capurganá, systemic oppression played out on human bodies as Johan, Kelvin, and I set out with our group of more than twenty people and an assortment of guides that would be reduced to one and then none. The first order of business was to scale a steep ascent in asphyxiating heat, after which it was time to slide down a mountain of mud. At one point during our exercise in ensuring proper global capital accumulation, an older Venezuelan woman who was traveling alone asked some of her compatriots if this first day in the jungle counted as one of the three she had been told it would take to get to Panama. When she was informed that, no, today didn’t count, the response was swift: “Coño de su madre”—literally, “Cunt of your mother.”

My plan had been to walk for a day and return to Capurganá rather than complete the trans-Darién trajectory, as I did not feel like finding out what the Panamanian protocol was for dealing with gringos who turned up out of the jungle sans passport. More importantly, I was scared shitless of being raped or digitally penetrated, practices that had become par for the Darién course but now mainly occurred on the Panamanian side of the Gap. A few months later, the New York Times would report that sexual violence against migrants in the Panamanian stretch of jungle had reached a “level rarely seen outside war.” But with this in fact already being war and the Gap a fortified U.S. border in its own right, I took advantage of being on the grotesquely privileged side of those with freedom of movement; when our group stopped for the night, Johan, Kelvin, and I turned back to confront the mountain of mud in the opposite direction.

Johan would face the Darién Gap once again in March, in another bid to reach the United States; this time, he was robbed and beaten in the jungle, and women in his group were raped. Having opted this time around to solicit a CBP appointment that would allow him “legal” entry into the United States, he spent a full year stuck in Mexico, the entirety of which had been converted into one big U.S. border unto itself as Biden pressured the Mexican government to make life as hellish as possible for northbound refugee seekers—an open invitation for the Mexican police, National Guard, and every other branch of the state security apparatus to engage in continuous and unabashed extortion and abuse of migrants. When the newly reinaugurated Trump then effectively closed the official U.S. border in January to the more than a quarter of a million people who had been waiting in Mexico for a response from CBP, I began preparations to get Johan back to Caracas.

The spontaneous cancellation of the right to seek asylum at the border made it quite a bit easier for Trump to make good on his promise to shut down the Darién Gap, since it makes little sense to undertake a deadly odyssey only to end up at a sealed-off frontier. In March 2025, Panamanian immigration authorities registered just 194 arrivals via the jungle from Colombia, compared to 36,841 in March 2024 and 38,099 in March 2023. This did not, however, represent a noble U.S. victory against those “illegal human smuggling and trafficking operations that promote and facilitate the dangerous crossing through the Darién Gap,” as outlined in the Bogotá embassy press release. The Clan del Golfo and other organized-crime outfits continue to capitalize on reverse migration, which entails all the same dangers as its counterpart—and often even greater extortion.

Johan’s possession of a Venezuelan passport meant that he was able to fly from Mexico City to Caracas on an Avianca ticket purchased by me for approximately half of my monthly income. The majority of migrants stuck in Mexico did not have this option and instead had to scrape together the exorbitant funds necessary to retrace their steps through Mexico and Central America; in most cases, the renavigation of the Darién Gap is now avoided in favor of equally risky transport by boat from Panama to Colombia. Among the various migrants I’ve spoken to who have made this journey, the consensus has been that the return trip is much uglier. And in the end, forcing a whole lot of people back to places they left precisely because life there was unsustainable is nothing but a recipe for unremitting misery—but that, anyway, is the entire point.

Poem

Abraham Adams

Light burns the books of light.

They hang a black wreath on

the page, a door snowed shut.

Stars spaced like cries at night,

the words of wind in fire’s ink,

fill up the lungs’ black skies.

Eyes in the words shine back.

The voice in letters like light

in an empty house is heard.

Teeth in white ashes, black

stars on the page shine down

like pain’s word in the mind.

Dilemma in Denver

Did Biden abandon a city and its migrants?

Nick Tabor

© Michael Houtz

Denver was still recovering from a heavy spring storm when Maria Chavez and Adrian Rivero arrived in town. Their bus rolled in on a cloudy evening in May 2023, dropping them off near a Latino neighborhood beside Federal Boulevard. After two full days of travel, the Venezuelan couple were glad for the chance to get out and move.

They had been in the United States for only a week, but Denver was their third American city. After crossing the border in El Paso, they had taken a bus to New York, where a friend had promised they’d be able to find jobs and an apartment. These assurances turned out to be wrong. The couple stayed at a shelter near Madison Square Garden and spent several days roaming Manhattan, looking for food pantries and work. Most people they encountered seemed curt, if not bigoted. Someone at a church suggested they try Denver instead; she thought they might have an easier time there.

They immediately felt more at ease in the Colorado city than they had in months. Denver seemed lively but not hectic like New York. Tranquilo is how Chavez describes her first impression. (Names and other identifying details have been changed.) They had no friends in town, no tips about where to spend their first night. But finding Spanish speakers was easy. A stranger told them about a Spanish-speaking church that rented out bunk beds. It took them several hours to find the place, but when they arrived sometime after midnight, they were welcomed inside.

Chavez and Rivero had left their homes in rural Venezuela because they feared for their lives. Rivero had become a target because of his involvement in protests against Nicolás Maduro’s government; Chavez was fleeing police persecution. They were the kind of people President Joe Biden had described on the campaign trail in 2019 when he called for the United States to accept more refugees. “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million,” he said during an event that year in Iowa. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.” During a September debate, he called for a “surge” of asylum seekers to the southern border.

In 2023, that surge was happening. Chavez and Rivero say they weren’t thinking about American politics when they decided when to cross. Before approaching the border, they had spent a year in Colombia, working cash jobs and saving up. Once they had set aside $1,000, they started their passage through the Darién Gap. But tens of thousands of others were making the same journey at that time, and for them, Biden certainly played a role. His rhetoric while campaigning—if not all his policies once in office—led many to believe they’d “get a better deal” under his administration, immigration scholar Charles Kamasaki said in a phone interview. “That was just a rational thing to think.” It helped that the U.S. economy was recovering rapidly from its pandemic-era slump and that American businesses were desperate to hire.

Midway through his presidency, however, Biden was not championing these arrivals. In his 2023 State of the Union address, he briefly mentioned immigration to claim credit for increasing border security and called for a pathway to citizenship for those with temporary legal status and essential workers. Yet his administration was doing little to manage the flow of all the new arrivals: there was no plan to determine where they should go or to make sure they landed in communities with enough housing and jobs.

Much of that decision-making power had been assumed by Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas. In April 2022, Abbott announced he would begin busing new migrants to the nation’s capital. He later expanded the program to include a handful of “sanctuary cities.” Though he claimed these actions were meant to relieve the strain on border communities, Abbott clearly hoped to create problems for the destination cities. In the early months of the program, when New York City’s government asked for information about when the buses would be arriving so it could prepare, his administration refused. Like Chavez and Rivero, the migrants who boarded these buses were given a choice about where they’d be taken—but the options were limited to only a few cities. By the spring of 2023, shelters in New York and Chicago had run out of space, and immigrants were sleeping in airports and police stations and on the streets. If the idea was to create chaos and discredit the Democratic Party, the plan was working.

Although Denver was not among the first cities singled out by Abbott, it seems in hindsight like an obvious target. Over the last twenty years, the city has done a lot to earn the designation of a sanctuary. The population is largely made up of affluent white liberals, but Hispanics (mainly Mexicans) account for more than a quarter of residents. In the 1990s, this latter group launched an organizing campaign that would eventually reshape immigration policies at the municipal and state levels. In 2013, with Denver’s legislators leading the way, Colorado became one of the first states to let undocumented people obtain driver’s licenses and qualify for in-state tuition. Later, during Trump’s first term, the city and state also banned their police officers from working with ICE and refused to let the agency hold people in local jails. Only a few other states, including New York and California, have equally stringent protections.

While the immigration advocates I interviewed in Denver are proud of these laws, some stressed that politicians shouldn’t get too much credit. “We forced the city to recognize the humanity of immigrants,” said Hans Meyer, one of Denver’s most respected immigration attorneys, who has helped to write some of this legislation at both the city and state levels. “And then we forced the city to pass laws reflecting the will of the voters.”

Those ideals were about to be tested. Denver soon found itself dealing with a larger influx of migrants, on a per capita basis, than any other city in the United States. Despite Biden’s promises only a few years prior, Denver’s appeals for federal help would be met mostly with silence.

Forced Busing

On May 18, within a week of Chavez and Rivero’s arrival, a bus chartered by the Texas government dropped off its migrant passengers at Civic Center Park, an elegantly designed mall between the state capitol and city hall. It was the political equivalent of a poke in Denver’s eye by Abbott’s administration. In the weeks that followed, scores of additional buses arrived from Texas, bringing the figures to two hundred immigrants a day. The national press, preoccupied with the influx in New York City, barely took notice.

Abbott’s policies were not the only factor in this surge. Word was spreading among Venezuelans, through social media and word of mouth, that Denver had work opportunities. The local economy was booming, and even with the minimum wage set at $17.29 an hour, businesses were desperate for more workers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would report later that summer that Colorado had at least two jobs for every person seeking employment.

The mayor in office was Michael Hancock, a business-friendly Democrat rounding out his third (and final) term. To house all the migrants, Hancock’s administration converted recreation centers into shelters and leased entire hotels. Conditions grew cramped—but still, from the perspective of the migrants I interviewed, it wasn’t necessarily a crisis. Thousands received free or very cheap medical treatment, ranging from basic vaccines to critical surgeries, from Denver Health, the city’s safety-net health care system. Despite the tight market, nonprofits and churches found ways to supply longer-term housing, providing cash assistance and recruiting volunteers who had extra rooms in their houses. For migrants who wanted to move somewhere else, usually to reunite with family or friends, the city paid for bus or plane tickets.

At the same time, the promise of jobs was turning out to be a chimera. Due to federal laws, a large share of Venezuelans could only get work permits if they applied for asylum—a complicated process, requiring help from an attorney, which can cost $5,000 or more. Even in the best-case scenario, it takes another six months, after applying, to become eligible for a work permit. This delay is written into law and could be eliminated only by an act of Congress. Biden created some workarounds: granting Temporary Protective Status to six hundred thousand Venezuelans and allowing others to schedule appointments by mobile app with immigration officials at the border. While either of these pathways allowed migrants in theory to skip the waiting period for work permits, there was a massive backlog in processing, and many Venezuelans were still arriving in Denver and other cities with no paperwork at all.

For Chavez and Rivero, making rent during their first month was a struggle. The Spanish-speaking church charged them each $150 a week. In a town where studio apartments can be found for under $1,000, it’s hard to deny they were being exploited by their landlords—an increasingly common scenario for migrants. Following other Venezuelans’ lead, they started spending their days in the parking lot of a Home Depot, hoping to be hired for day jobs. Occasionally someone would offer Chavez a few hours’ worth of house cleaning, or Rivero would be picked up for a remodeling project. But many days they simply stood in the sun, hour after hour, waiting.

Meanwhile, the local government’s resources were becoming strained. On average, Denver was spending at least $800 a week on each person who needed housing. By June, it was looking at $20 million in costs it hadn’t budgeted for. In his public addresses, Hancock was downcast about the whole matter. “We are in a state of emergency,” he said in a press conference that spring. But he was careful not to blame the migrants, directing his anger toward the federal government instead.

It’s not a stretch to suggest Biden could have staved off these problems—because, in fact, he almost did. During the summer of 2022, in a barely noticed story, NBC News reported on a plan by the Department of Homeland Security to take over decisions about where migrants would be sent. By distributing the flow among a larger number of cities, coordinating with shelters in advance to make sure they had capacity, and providing the shelters with extra funds, the administration could have prevented overcrowding. At this point, DHS was already in contact with shelters in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Houston, and Dallas, among other cities. However, the agency stressed to NBC that it had not decided whether to go through with this project.

Such an approach might have played well with voters. The year Biden was elected, a record 77 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said immigration was a good thing, and more than a third thought the current levels should be increased. Moreover, during those early days of Biden’s presidency, the labor market was tighter than it had been in decades, with business owners grousing that “no one wants to work.” A federal initiative to help asylum seekers join the workforce—with full legal status, so they wouldn’t undercut other workers’ wages—could have benefited everyone. Biden’s administration had also demonstrated that it was capable of running such an operation. Under the Uniting for Ukraine program, launched in 2022, the government welcomed at least 240,000 Ukrainians who had been displaced by their country’s war with Russia. It worked with nonprofits to place them in specific communities and provide them with housing and job training. The program was almost universally considered a success.

But that was Ukraine. For Democrats, dealing with Latin American immigration proactively would have been distinctly out of character. “In general,” Kamasaki told me, “Democrats think immigration is a losing issue.” Over the years, he said, Democratic politicians and consultants have told him, “Any day we don’t talk about immigration is a good day”—a notion dating back at least as far as George W. Bush’s presidency. If the Democrats call for restrictive policies, the thinking goes, they’ll alienate left-leaning members of their coalition (and, at least historically, many of their Latino constituents); if they call for looser immigration policies, they risk losing moderates to the GOP. Reverting to this pattern, Biden ultimately did not implement the intake program, ceding immigration policy to Republicans like Abbott.

Into Thin Air

In July 2023, Mike Johnston, a forty-eight-year-old former state senator, took the stage at Denver’s opera house. Before a packed crowd, Johnston raised his hand and swore an oath, promising to serve with integrity as Denver’s next mayor. The son of a former mayor of Vail, Colorado, Johnston had carved a path through the center of the field: in the election’s first round, he came out ahead of fifteen other candidates, including two who ran solidly to his left; and in the runoff, with the support of two out-of-state billionaires in Michael Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman, he defeated a more conservative candidate, the former head of a business-lobbying group.

When he took to the microphone, Johnston was met with a standing ovation. “I haven’t done anything yet!” he said with a laugh. “Just starting.”

He kept his remarks brief. Denverites were facing hardships, he said: drug addiction, poverty, anxiety over school shootings. Instead of detailing how his policies would address these problems, he appealed to general notions of solidarity. “Our dream of Denver,” he said, “is that when you land at your lowest, without a job or a place to stay, shackled by addiction or struggling with mental illness, we will not judge you or abandon you. We will not give up on you. We will get you a home. We will get you help.”

Johnston’s chief campaign promise had been to end homelessness in Denver within a single term. It was already clear that he might have to sideline this project and make the Venezuelan migrants—the “newcomers,” as he preferred to call them—his priority. Nevertheless, his rhetoric of inclusivity clearly resonated with Denverites, suggesting that most had not become jaded by their experience with the immigrant surge thus far.

The flow ebbed a little that summer, but in the fall there was another influx, this one bigger than all the rest. By late September, the daily average had risen to three hundred people; by mid-October, despite taking out additional hotel leases, the city had run out of capacity. Every new arrival was allowed to stay in a shelter for fourteen days (thirty-seven if they had children), but after that, they had to leave and make way for others. The city was still working with nonprofits to place people in longer-term housing, but there were no guarantees. Its spending on migrants had ballooned to almost $2 million a week.

Patricia, a relative of Chavez, was among this wave, alongside her spouse and two young children. Chavez and Rivero had moved into a free apartment provided by a church congregation and had scrounged money to support the relative’s journey. When the family reached Central America, Chavez mapped out the Western Union branches along their route, wiring money every few days; when they arrived in El Paso, the church in Denver paid for bus tickets to bring them to Colorado.

The young family’s early weeks in town were chaotic. In the cold weather, there weren’t many jobs to go around at Home Depot, and Patricia’s spouse struggled to bring in more than $20 or $30 a day. Most other new arrivals found themselves in the same situation. Large numbers congregated at busy intersections, where they approached drivers and offered to clean their windshields. A crew of ten men, working twelve-hour days, often made about $70 altogether. Ashley Cuber, an immigration lawyer, told me she once saw four windshield washers squatting on a curb, passing around a single hot dog.

Denver was hit with its first snowstorm of the season that October. As much as eight inches of snow fell across the city, and cold winds blew in from Montana, bringing the temperature as low as fourteen degrees. In the Jefferson Park neighborhood, a number of Venezuelans who had maxed out their time in the shelters set up tents on the roadside. As word about the encampment spread, residents started showing up with their trunks full of warm clothing; still, the refugees found themselves burning furniture for heat.

Elsewhere, the same problems were playing out on a larger scale. By the end of 2023, more than 150,000 new migrants had come to New York City, and the local government found itself facing a $12 billion budget shortfall. Chicago had received nearly 30,000 people and Massachusetts another 11,600. In all those places, the shelters were packed by late fall; tent cities proliferated, even as the temperature dropped below freezing.

After Denver’s cold snap ended, Mayor Johnston wrote a letter to the White House, requesting an “urgent meeting” with Biden. He hoped the president would ask Congress for an extra $5 billion to reimburse the city governments most affected. Johnston also called for structural remedies: new ways to fast-track work permits for these asylum seekers so that more of them would have the means to rent their own apartments; and a national resettlement program, like the one Biden had implemented for Ukrainian refugees. DHS’s short-lived resettlement plan went unmentioned, but Johnston’s description sounded similar. He recruited the mayors of America’s four largest municipalities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston—to add their signatures.

The following week, Johnston flew to D.C., where he rendezvoused with Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago. Biden did not make himself available, but the pair were greeted by Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, and Tom Perez, a senior adviser. During a closed-door meeting, the mayors pleaded their case. Biden’s surrogates were polite but noncommittal. It seems that, by this time, the White House had decided that talking about immigration could only be a liability and was hoping the problems would go away on their own.

Instead, they only got worse. On a single day in mid-December, 341 people on nine buses arrived in Denver. The city removed its time limit on shelter stays for families and opened still more facilities. In January, the number of migrants housed by the local government ballooned to five thousand. When Johnston called for mayors in other cities to help, some refused, and others ignored him. The city council of Aurora, which borders Denver on the east, passed a resolution blocking migrants from being moved into their city boundaries. Denver Health reported that it had spent more than $30 million that year caring for immigrants who didn’t have insurance. To save money, the city government cut back hours at recreation centers and the DMV. “What we don’t want is people to arrive here at 1 a.m. in T-shirts and sandals with two young kids and end up homeless on the street in ten-degree weather,” Johnston told USA Today. “We don’t want that to happen, but we also know we can’t provide an infinite amount of services.” He blamed Congress for the problems—scared, perhaps, to attack Biden by name, even as he had already made clear the administration’s passivity.

Getting to Work

In May 2024, roughly a hundred migrant men and women gathered in a hotel ballroom in Denver’s Highland neighborhood. They sat in rows of folding metal chairs, some with infants on their laps, others holding thick stacks of paperwork. Before them stood an immigration lawyer the city had recently hired. “Hola, todos!” she said with a smile. It was the first day of the Denver Asylum Seeker Program, the city government’s newest initiative. With little federal support, Johnston and his staff were taking their own measures to establish the kind of integration program they wanted to see.

Over the spring, the flow of new arrivals from Texas had slowed to a trickle, now averaging just a few dozen a day. This reflected a change below the border: the White House had prevailed on Mexico to step up its own patrolling, and crossings dropped significantly. Many of the Venezuelans who arrived in Denver in 2023 had found jobs—some hired by legitimate businesses, others getting paid in cash—and had moved into apartments, while others had left town. Roughly eight hundred families remained in the shelters, compared to a peak of five thousand at the beginning of the year.

Under these conditions, the local government saw a chance to try something different. Denver had begun closing shelters and moving families into apartments. It recruited lawyers on a volunteer basis and collaborated with the Colorado Asylum Project to help the migrants apply for asylum and work permits. It brought in federal immigration officials to speed up processing. For the next six months, while these families awaited work permits, their rent and food would be paid for. Meanwhile, at least one adult from each household was required to spend twenty hours a week in WorkReady Denver, a program designed by a local nonprofit. Jon Ewing, the spokesperson for the Denver mayor’s office, described it to me as “a one-stop shop on how to live and work in the United States of America.”

About 835 migrants would join the program by the summer’s end. Part of their time was spent in English classes and resettlement courses, with lessons on everything from how to deal with American landlords to how to pay bills online and call in sick. The rest centered on job training. Career coaches interviewed them about their work experience and their ambitions. There were tracks for the service industry, construction, and childcare, fields where Denver was facing acute labor shortages.

Nationwide, this program was unmatched. Other cities provided services such as legal help and job training, but Jacob Hamburger, a law professor at Marquette University whose work focuses on the role of state and local governments in immigration, called Denver’s model the most comprehensive by far. “All the different portions of this seem to come together in the Denver program in a way they don’t anywhere else,” he said.

The program cost roughly $1,700 per person, but Denver saw this as an investment—and not without reason. A report by the state in 2018 found that 2,700 refugees had generated $611 million in new economic activity in the previous decade. It concluded that for every $1 spent in refugee services, state and local governments received $1.23 in tax revenue.

Within Denver, reactions to this program were divided. Some immigration advocates argued that the benefits that several hundred families received through the program came at the expense of other Venezuelans who were still en route to the United States or were just now crossing the border. The city government was reported to have an employee in El Paso discouraging new immigrants from coming. Johnston’s liberal critics thought the money could have been better spent by keeping the shelters open longer, which would have benefited more people. Those like Chavez and Rivero, who were no longer in the shelter system, were also ineligible.

Anything the mayor did would have required trade-offs, however, given that a city government—unlike the federal government—doesn’t have the power to print money or run a deficit. Short of establishing New Deal–type institutions to create meaningful public-sector jobs, a program like the one in Denver seemed worthy as a stopgap measure—especially for migrants wanting autonomy after depending for so long on nonprofits and public shelters. From the standpoint of political messaging, there was a case to be made for framing immigration in terms of economic benefit as well as compassion, i.e., as a means of filling jobs and reducing inflation.

Unfortunately, an approach like this had no chance of catching on at a larger scale, at least not in 2024. By the late days of Biden’s presidency, the public had shifted hard on immigration. In a Gallup poll that February, a record share of respondents—55 percent—said illegal border crossings posed a “critical threat” to the country. And that summer, for the first time in decades, a majority said they wanted to see less immigration, period. Three-quarters were in favor of hiring more border guards. (Even so, a strong majority, 70 percent, still favored a path to citizenship for people who entered the country illegally.)

The Democrats could have rejected these narratives and made a case in favor of immigration. The United States has a clear moral imperative to help people fleeing from Venezuela (and other places like it), if only because the sanctions we’ve imposed there have played a huge part in the country’s economic ruin. Granted, it’s hard to imagine the party of the Clintons and Joe Biden framing the matter in such moral terms. But Democrats also could have championed immigration as part of a plan to stave off further price increases and boost tax revenue in a year when economic inflation was at the top of voters’ minds. Instead, they fully embraced the idea that immigration was a threat and that a border crackdown was needed. In the Senate, they pushed a bill that advanced several of the GOP’s top priorities on immigration, including a $7 billion increase in ICE funding. Chuck Schumer knew Republicans would block it, but he hoped this would show voters they were hypocrites. Instead, when the legislation failed, it simply made the Democrats look like a paler shade of the GOP.

Meanwhile, the Denver area started to come up often in Trump’s rants as he campaigned that year. Late in the summer, a viral video shot in Aurora caught the former president’s attention. Filmed at The Edge at Lowry, a rundown apartment complex half a mile from Denver’s city limits, the clip showed five men carrying guns in the hallway and entering an apartment. Locally, rumors had already been swirling that the complex was overrun by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; Fox News and other conservative media outlets seized on this story, playing the scene again and again. Trump first mentioned the clip during a town hall in September, and come October, Trump was calling his whole deportation agenda “Operation Aurora,” declaring that his promised ICE raids would begin there. In response, Johnston told local press that Denver would fight Trump in the courts if he tried to deport the city’s asylum seekers, even floating the possibility of stationing police on the county line.

In November, WorkReady Denver graduated its first class. Out of roughly 330 who enrolled, almost all completed the initial phases and were successfully matched with employers, making an average of twenty dollars an hour, according to city records. And there were others who dropped out because they found jobs earlier. But after Trump’s victory, it wasn’t clear that these graduates, or the twenty thousand other Venezuelan residents who had come since 2022, would be safe from deportation under the new administration.

ICE Brigades

Trump was true to his promise about Aurora. On a cold morning in early February this year, dozens of federal agents assembled outside The Edge at Lowry. Some worked for ICE, others for the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. In a theatrical show of force, they brought armored trucks, and the agents suited up in bulletproof vests and black masks and carried assault rifles.

At 6 a.m., they set off stun grenades and burst into all five buildings at once. Banging on doors, they demanded to see residents’ IDs and immigration papers. But the officers found themselves thwarted on every floor. Groups like the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition had trained residents not to open up unless signed warrants were slipped under their doors. The agents walked back to their trucks less than an hour after their arrival without a single resident in handcuffs. Across the greater Denver area, they raided several other buildings, claiming on social media they had arrested one hundred people—but they wouldn’t release details, and there was evidence that the real number was closer to thirty.

Those raids established a pattern that has held ever since. Not many immigrants in Denver have actually been arrested or deported. There’s still a spirit of defiance when it comes to immigration policy. At the same time, however, everyone is understandably on edge.

The city and state’s refusal to help ICE with raids—whether by sharing the resources of their police departments, the spare beds in their jails, or the personal information in their databases—significantly curtails what ICE can achieve there. It also seems to infuriate the Trump administration, which is suing Denver on the claim that sanctuary laws are unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the federal government has withdrawn $24 million in federal grants to the city, and Tom Homan, Trump’s top border adviser, has threatened to put Johnston in jail.

In response, the mayor has tried to keep a lower profile. Since the raids early this year, he hasn’t given any interviews to the national press, and his staff declined to make him available for this story. His administration took some heat in March when a local TV station found that it had been using Signal to communicate about immigration matters, setting their messages to auto-delete.

One evening in April, I visited Chavez and Rivero at their apartment. It was the first week in Denver that really felt like spring. Residents were taking strolls and dining outdoors, basking in the sunshine. But inside their home, it was dim, with heavy shades drawn across the windows (a common feature at every Venezuelan home I visited in town). Chavez has been resourceful about finding free furniture and decorating. Two couches lined opposite walls in the living room, and in the middle there was a coffee table with a houseplant. Children’s toys littered the floor.

While some employers have refused to recognize their work authorization, they’ve both found steady jobs, Chavez cleaning houses and Rivero in construction. When they’re not working, they stay home and bolt the locks. Crouching on the futon, Rivero showed me how he keeps watch for ICE agents through a small glass panel in the door. He lightened the mood by making a joke of it, cupping his hands around his eyes like binoculars.

I asked the couple what kind of future they imagine for themselves: Did they want to stay in Denver? Chavez was somber. “I am afraid of this president,” she said. She noted that she and Rivero had taken pains to go through the immigration process correctly, to follow every regulation. But she felt like the laws were shifting unpredictably. This was the case even for the six hundred thousand Venezuelans who received Temporary Protected Status under Biden, which Trump has been trying to revoke. Chavez couldn’t help worrying about being sent to El Salvador or Guantánamo Bay. “I don’t have hopes,” she said. “I have fears.”

Chavez is not the only person who finds it hard to look beyond the present moment. The MAGA consensus seems stronger than we thought in 2024; the Democratic Party has almost never been more feckless; any kind of post-Trump scenario seems too far off to contemplate. It’s possible, of course, that this hostility toward immigrants will cool down. From a polling standpoint, it’s an example of what political scientists call a “thermostatic issue,” said Charles Kamasaki, the immigration scholar. In a phone interview, he explained this in simple terms: “The public tends to react against whomever is in power.”

Given the way Trump’s administration is changing this country, it’s fair to wonder how attractive the United States will seem as a destination, if and when we reach the other side of this cycle. In just one week this spring, Marines were deployed against protesters in Los Angeles, the president called for the arrest of California’s governor (with the Speaker of the House adding that he should be “tarred and feathered”), and a top Democrat in Minnesota’s legislature was assassinated. Congress approved a bill that would deprive at least eleven million people of health insurance and cut food benefits for another three million while also driving up energy prices. The country’s credit rating has been universally downgraded, and the value of the dollar is plummeting. The American century isn’t going to be revived.

On the other hand, no matter what happens in U.S. politics, more people from Latin America will be approaching our borders in the years to come. A broad swath of Central America is on track to lose at least 10 percent of its main food crops in this decade alone. Countries from Mexico to Chile are dealing with increasingly severe water shortages. If tariffs are imposed on top of the crippling U.S. sanctions that several Latin American countries already face, economic turmoil will only worsen.

The sole response that would be sensible or humane is to embrace a positive vision of immigration, emphasizing its benefits, and to deal with migrants with realistic planning. Some combination of a resettlement scheme, modeled on what we already do for designated refugees, and an integration program, like the one piloted by Denver, would be critical components. Even if this country’s future will be less prosperous, it can certainly include a place for people who weren’t born here.

As for Rivero, despite his partner’s fears, he’s more sanguine about staying in Denver. In the best-case scenario, in a year or two he would open his own business doing woodworking or construction. Before he came to the United States, he had a couple of jobs helping to build and repair furniture, and he wants to do something similar. “The more time I’m here, the more I have hope about staying,” he said. “I think I can move forward.”

This story was copublished and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Battle of the Sexes

Pete Hegseth’s war on women

Jasper Craven

© Paul Sahre

On Palm Sunday 2005, Leigh Ann Hester woke up in a tin can six hundred miles east of Jerusalem, put on her Army fatigues, and jumped into a Humvee, which drove her outside the wire and into a war zone. Back then, Pentagon policy prohibited women from serving in direct combat roles, but Hester was in Iraq, where war lines had been blurred since the beginning of the conflict. Military brass routinely placed women in putative combat environments while formally depriving them of the recognition that their roles were just as dangerous as the combat positions in infantry, tank, and artillery units, all of which were reserved for men. Among other things, these female soldiers operated dangerous checkpoints, searched towns for explosives, and provided convoy security on frequently booby-trapped roads. While these figures pale in comparison to those on the other side of the conflict, more than 1,000 women in the U.S. military were wounded in the war on terror, and 166 died.

In 2005, Hester was practically a kid—twenty-three, with traces of acne on her cheeks and blonde hair she tied tight in a bun. She was also a sergeant in a Kentucky National Guard unit known as Raven 42. Their assignment that Sunday was convoy security. She and nine other Ravens were tailing approximately thirty supply trucks on a dusty road southeast of Baghdad. Not long into their mission, they heard the faint sounds of gunfire and explosions at the head of the convoy. As they started to speed toward the sound, the Humvee in front of Hester was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade, blocking the road and, according to the military’s account, “stopping the convoy in the kill zone.” The Ravens were outnumbered five to one by Iraqi fighters, who, per the Pentagon, wanted hostages.

Hester and her squad leader, Timothy Nein, acted quickly. She ordered a gunner to fire toward the fighters’ position in a nearby orchard, then began shooting her own M4 rifle. She and Nein subsequently directed their team to a flanking position, where, over forty-five minutes, they cleared trenches and killed combatants. While three members of her unit were wounded, all survived. Three months later, in a ceremony at Camp Liberty, in Baghdad, Hester was awarded America’s third-highest combat decoration for valor: the Silver Star. She was the first woman to receive the honor since World War II and the first woman ever to receive it for combat action.

Hester’s “conspicuous gallantry,” as the military called it, came at an inopportune time for a pack of congressional Republicans then barking from the comfort of Capitol Hill about the need to statutorily restrict women from combat. The congressional language, part of the 2006 defense authorization bill, was cowritten and championed by John McHugh, a civilian Republican from New York who wanted to “protect” America’s “mothers, sisters, wives and daughters,” specifically by preventing women in support roles from advancing to combat positions—a ban the Army staff director estimated would make twenty-two thousand jobs off-limits to women.

A few months after Hester’s firefight, a brash, handsome twenty-five-year-old National Guard lieutenant named Pete Hegseth landed in Iraq, not far from where the Ravens’ convoy had been hit. He’d hustled hard to secure a slot as a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne, a division of the Army that had gone mainstream four years earlier thanks to Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers. (At least one former officer serving with Hegseth rightly predicted that he’d eventually parlay his deployment into public office.) There, he oversaw about forty men in a bloodthirsty brigade nicknamed Kill Company that tallied their body counts on a whiteboard. Shortly after he moved on from the company to a civil-affairs post, the brigade was ensnared in a war crimes case after soldiers let three Iraqi detainees loose and shot them in the back as they ran away.

People who served with Hegseth generally agree that he was a good leader and coolheaded in combat. But his conduct was not especially remarkable. Hegseth came away from Iraq with a Bronze Star to Hester’s Silver. His was given without valor, a lesser version of the medal that, according to the Washington Post, was “issued somewhat liberally” during the war on terror. (Some in the enlisted ranks joked that this decoration was little more than a “participation trophy” for needy officers.) Hegseth’s award citation is dry and formulaic, chock-full of the platitudes used by the White House to sell the public on the war. It asserts that Hegseth “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.” Hester’s citation, by contrast, reads like an excerpt from a Tom Clancy novel. It lays out the conditions that day—“75 degrees and sunny with a 10 knot breeze from the southwest”—before chronicling the “well-coordinated ambush” and Raven 42’s canny tactical response, detailing the “heavy volumes” of grenade-launcher and machine-gun fire Hester directed at “an overwhelming number” of fighters as she also fired away.

This discrepancy seems to have weighed on Hegseth. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth casts Hester’s actions as an aberration. He also takes issue with the military’s “political” awards process, musing conspiratorially over the fact that her star was issued relatively quickly, within a matter of months. “Nothing happens that fast,” he claims. “Unless there is an agenda.” Hegseth is sympathetic to his former sergeant major, Eric Geressy, who had his own grievances about women in combat. Geressy complained about Monica Brown, a combat medic who earned a Silver Star in 2008 after delivering life-saving aid in Afghanistan as “rounds were literally missing her by inches,” according to a member of her platoon. Hegseth quotes Geressy’s complaint that he found it impossible to escape Brown’s story, whining that the Army plastered her picture in chow halls and military balls. “Why is that?” Geressy asked. “None of my guys had their picture on the wall.”

Hegseth’s objections amount to more than just professional jealousy. Hester and Brown’s performances became a symbol, one that helped to effectively squelch the movement to cut off women from the front lines. In 2014, McHugh, then Army secretary, seemingly had a change of heart, formally opening thirty-three thousand combat and other roles to women, while the following year Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all units to women, including special-operations teams. What followed was a decade-long window in which military women were able to move up the ranks. Thousands secured slots in the special forces, while others broke into the top brass. Now, as defense secretary himself, Hegseth is working to reverse this progress, purging the Pentagon of numerous senior women and trans people and relitigating the issue of women in combat.

Hester is puzzled as to why the Pentagon is revisiting an issue she already put to bed once. Perhaps, she reasoned, it’s because some male soldiers had “their feelings hurt.” Hegseth certainly seems wounded by Hester’s recognition, and it’s easy to see why: she showed him up at what was supposed to be a man’s game. Throughout his life, Hegseth has perceived the expanding choices and public roles available to women, both within the armed services and without, as a threat to male authority and freedom. His devotion to the military seems to stem from the fact that it is America’s last bastion of unquestioned male power. Perfectly paralleling Hegseth’s Army career is a pattern of cruel and self-destructive personal behavior—emotionally tumultuous marriages marred by heavy drinking, rampant cheating, and alleged rape. But time and again, Hegseth’s military credentials deflected attention from his indiscretions.

While he now charges that the power structure undergirding his life of impunity has been destroyed by “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), feminism, genderism, safetyism, climate worship, manufactured ‘violent extremism,’ straight-up weirdo shit, and a grab bag of social justice causes,” nothing could be further from the truth. For a brief moment in the lead-up to Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, it did seem that Hegseth’s future was in the hands of a woman: Republican Senator Joni Ernst, herself a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor who, like Hester, did dangerous convoy security in Iraq. Ernst was clearly unenthusiastic about Hegseth’s regressive views on women and his checkered personal history. But Hegseth’s allies launched a pressure campaign against her, and she ultimately backed down, pledging to “work with Pete to create the most lethal fighting force”—rhetoric that suggests a commitment to militarism is still capable of obscuring a multitude of sins.

My Penis Is Furious

In high school, Pete Hegseth was a model student: athletic, religious, with good grades. During his senior year, in 1999, Hegseth was starting point guard of the basketball team, captain of the football team, and class valedictorian.

He also seemed to be a loving boyfriend. Hegseth’s 1999 yearbook features two photos of him and his high school sweetheart, Meredith Schwarz, in a warm embrace. The class voted them “Most Likely to Marry,” and their gushy quotes about each other in the yearbook help explain why. Hegseth says Schwarz is “as beautiful, caring, intelligent, and loving inside as she is outside.” She hails his “heart of gold.” They were bound by love and destined, it seemed, for a picturesque life befitting a couple headed to elite colleges—he to Princeton, she to Barnard.

Back then, Hegseth was also reportedly free of the vice that would later shadow his career. One former friend said that, during high school parties, Hegseth would chug only Mountain Dew. He was also singularly focused on Schwarz. As this pal recalls, the two were saving themselves for marriage.

Once Hegseth entered college, however, something changed, and he began to unravel. “He was that classic case where, in high school, he was tightly controlled as a person, because of his church and his intense desire to succeed,” Hegseth’s former friend told me. “Under all that were repressed impulses.” Among other things, Hegseth was ashamed of what he perceived as his own softness. “I didn’t get in fights as a kid and shied from confrontation because, frankly, I was scared of it,” he writes in his 2016 book In the Arena. He goes on to hail his father, Brian, for his “integrity” and “Scandinavian work ethic,” while evincing regret that Brian failed to teach him the art of aggression. “My father was—and is—an incredible man,” Hegseth insists. “But confrontation isn’t necessarily his forte.”

The military would succeed where his father had failed. As a boy, Hegseth had stared admiringly at vets in local military parades. In In the Arena, he tells of a mythic, unnamed Vietnam war veteran he met at nineteen. The vet’s advice was simple: “Whatever you do, don’t miss your war.”

Many young men seek strength but ultimately confuse it for the Pentagon’s brand of violence and domination. Hegseth seems to be one such case, though he was surely enticed by other perks, too, like class mobility and prestige. He grew up middle class but dreamed of money, wishing in his yearbook biography to one day “roll in the dough.” Between two programs—West Point and Princeton—he chose the latter, opting to attend a school that conferred not only power but proximity to capital. In addition to his involvement in the storied Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, known as the Tiger Battalion, Hegseth also distinguished himself as publisher of the hyperconservative Princeton Tory. He’s since reflected on the connection between these pursuits, noting that ROTC taught him how to “channel nervous energy into physical confrontation,” while the Tory built his ability to “stomach ideological warfare.”

College discourse back then was largely mediated through student publications, bulletin boards, and debate. Hegseth spread his voice chiefly through a Tory column called “The Rant” and via the writers he nurtured and edited there. But he had a loud physical presence too. After the 2000 election, for instance, Hegseth proudly donned a T-shirt that derided the Democratic presidential ticket as “Sore–Loserman.” He also joined a dueling society where, clad in old-style clothes, he once fired a paintball into the crotch of a Young Democrat.

Attention was Hegseth’s lifeblood, driving him to clever stunts but also frequent bouts of irrationality. In the grand tradition of campus warfare, he cast Princeton, of all places, as teeming with the “spawn-of-Woodstock leftists” and hyperradical feminists focused on “erasing the concept of . . . masculinity.” In truth, Princeton was an exceptionally friendly environment for men, military and otherwise. In 2003, the Associated Press reported on what may have been the most decorous antiwar scuffle in the history of higher education. It involved Princeton’s ROTC commander, a lieutenant colonel named Matthew McCarville, and an antiwar student, who debated for a few minutes before McCarville handed the activist his business card. “Here,” he said. “Feel free to harass me anytime.” At the same time, female students complained in the early aughts of an atmosphere of male superiority and predation. “I understand that this is a man’s world,” reflected one junior in 2000, “but here I feel that I can only succeed if I do things the man’s way.”

That year, a group of students formed Princeton’s Organization of Women Leaders, or OWL, partially as a response to a recent sexual assault in the heart of campus. Having occurred under one of Princeton’s signature stone archways, it went largely unaddressed of by school administrators. “It felt necessary to have feminist proclamations . . . because there was still such an undercurrent of patriarchy,” an OWL member from Hegseth’s time told me. “He was a huge mouthpiece for all of that.” OWL leaders identified evidence of Princeton’s patriarchal and abusive campus culture, including details of their own stories of sexual harassment and assault. They also held public events on feminism, agitated for Princeton to buy rape kits, and supported a Take Back the Night march, a global event to protest violence against women that had its beginnings in the seventies.

In 2001, the board of trustees appointed Princeton’s first female president, Shirley Tilghman. A Tory writer criticized her “monstrous” transformation of Princeton into a “Mommy University,” an environment, he claimed, that was too nurturing and emotional, with an administrative team “rife with X chromosomes.” Hegseth and the Tory also targeted OWL, often with angry outbursts of prudish revulsion. In February 2002, Hegseth became especially incensed when OWL helped mount a production of The Vagina Monologues. As part of the show’s promotion, students plastered pink posters around campus with sexually suggestive slogans, like “It’s 10 o’clock at night—do you know where your clitoris is?”

Hegseth responded with a coauthored screed in the student newspaper, charging that this band of feminist thespians had “violently hurled” a show that was little more than “pornography hidden under the cloak of artistic expression.” Around this time, OWL member Laura Petrillo caught Hegseth tearing down some posters for the show and called him out. He shot back with unsettling intensity. The former OWL member described Hegseth’s demeanor as “aggressive” and “antagonistic,” adding that he often used his military uniform as a sign of intimidation. “It really felt like he wanted to kill us.”

Hegseth and other Tory members also launched a phallic counteroperation, plastering campus with their own vulgar signs, but on blue paper. One simply read: my penis is furious, and it needs to shout. Hegseth’s posters prompted a letter to the paper from a philosophy major named Dan Wachtell. Labeling the Tory staff “misogynists,” Wachtell cut straight to the gonads, lamenting that Hegseth and his ilk didn’t watch the play with their ears and eyes open: “Who knows what then might have happened? Perhaps they even could have learned where the clitoris is.”

Two months later, Hegseth’s Tory published an inflammatory cover story entitled “Killing Feminism: OWL sabotages the women’s movement.” Written by then–managing editor Jennifer Carter, it’s a disjointed essay scolding OWL members for wearing risqué clothing and promoting sexual liberation. She also faults them for not “encouraging a more women-friendly campus dating scene”—when, in fact, they were trying to do just that. The Tory made many other boorish arguments in Hegseth’s days, including comparing gay marriage to pedophilia. Perhaps the most ghastly piece printed during Hegseth’s reign as publisher was an assertion that Princeton’s characterization of sex with an unconscious person as nonconsensual was an effort to “indoctrinate” students. “[If the] girl drank herself into unconsciousness,” the Tory argued, then there is “no duress.”

While these stories seem to foreshadow accusations that would later dog Hegseth’s career, his former friend said that back then Hegseth was “not some date rape, bro-y kinda guy.” In fact, the ex-friend insists, Hegseth didn’t even drink until he was twenty-one. Others have also said that in private settings Hegseth was curious, open-minded, even kind. One of his former female ROTC comrades told me that the program “had a lot of female cadets and female cadets in leadership while Pete was there, and I didn’t notice him treating female cadets any differently. He was professional and friendly and organized.” For all four years at Princeton, Hegseth also maintained his relationship with Schwarz, one which surely included him visiting her at Barnard, a Seven Sisters school and bastion of feminism.

The year after they graduated, Hegseth and Schwarz married at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota. They had fulfilled their yearbook prophecy, and yet Hegseth seemed to be disappearing into his military identity. There was clear evidence of this transformation at the wedding. While Schwarz donned a traditional white dress, Hegseth wore his formal Army blues.

© Paul Sahre

Martial Bliss

Hegseth speaks about his military service with the sort of intoxicated emotion generally reserved for intimate relationships but, conversely, tends to describe personal bonds with the detachment of a battle-hardened soldier. In one recent podcast interview with former Navy SEAL and best-selling author Jack Carr, Hegseth revealed that it was only after he went overseas that humanity truly opened to him. “That was the real education, Jack, that was the real moment when you found yourself, where you understood human nature, fear, courage, love—all the deepest and rawest emotions that change you and forge you.” Compare this to Hegseth’s description of his mother, Penelope, as a “prayer warrior,” or his second wife, whom he described as “a total patriot” and “an absolute saint and trooper.”

Hegseth first got serious with his true love, the U.S. Army, at Guantánamo Bay. It was 2004, and he was overseeing detainees as part of the New Jersey National Guard. “It was a long year,” he told Carr. “At least there was a little bit of booze, but you can imagine how well that played sometimes.”

The National Guard is a particularly strange military structure, one that bifurcates life more than others. Its roots date back to the ad hoc militias of American Revolutionary skirmishes, and it is today composed of citizen soldiers, part-timers who drill one weekend a month, two weeks a year, then return home to their families and day jobs. Hegseth and Hester had this in common, although their civilian lives looked much different. When she wasn’t serving as a Raven, Hester managed a shoe store in a strip mall. Hegseth’s day job was as an equity markets analyst at Bear Stearns. Culturally, his two professions were not as far apart as they might seem. Wall Street firms are not unlike the Army or the National Guard—at least in a few respects. Both workplaces are marked by hard work alternating with hedonism and reckless sex, much of it inappropriate or predatory. “You’re so close to the people you work with, it blurs lines,” one former Bear banker told me. “I bet the divorce rate in military families and finance is very similar.”

Both finance and the military are also exceptionally hostile to women, and in similar ways. Specifically, men in both arenas tend to crudely sexualize women while simultaneously denigrating their ability to keep pace with men at work. In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, Maureen Sherry, a former managing director at Bear Stearns, writes that women at the firm were expected “to avoid stereotypical female behavior” and were discouraged from marrying or having kids. When Sherry herself returned from maternity leave and went to the nurse’s office with a breast pump, her male colleagues mooed. Later, on a dare, one banker drank a shot of her breast milk.

Amid this debauchery, news of the Iraq War was blaring from televisions and the pages of the Wall Street Journal. One morning, Hegseth was reading the Journal with his coffee when he came across a story of a suicide bombing in Baghdad that had killed eighteen children and a twenty-four-year-old American soldier. He tucked the newspaper clipping in his wallet—a reminder, he wrote in 2016, of the “stakes of our fight against Islam.” Hegseth’s emergent hatred of Islam was, like his misogyny, intense and compounded by alcohol. According to The New Yorker, he once ended a night of heavy drinking at a bar in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, by chanting, “Kill all Muslims.”

In the weeks after he read the Journal story, Hegseth pulled every string he could to get a slot in the 101st Airborne. His 2005 deployment wasn’t as intense as Hester’s, but he suggests it still changed him. He once said that after returning to New York in 2006, where he worked a bit longer as a banker, “I drank a lot trying to process what I had been through while dealing with a civilian world that frankly just didn’t seem to care.” He sometimes ghosted friends and stayed out late. “He had been my most reliable buddy until he got back from Iraq,” his old pal told me.

Such postdeployment struggles are tragically familiar. Hester wasn’t immune, either. “Back in the day, I reached for the bottle,” she told me. “But the answer never was in the bottom of it.” Troops are more likely to abuse alcohol than civilians, especially if they’ve seen combat. They have the highest divorce rate of any profession, and service members may also engage in more frequent domestic violence, though official data on this issue is elusive. A 1999 congressional dictate ordered the Department of Defense to collect and analyze data on domestic violence within their ranks. Two decades later, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Pentagon had grossly flouted the directive, securing only scattershot data that made it impossible to fully assess the problem.

Hegseth and Schwarz divorced in 2009, after he admitted to repeated infidelity. A friend of hers indicated to Vanity Fair that the marriage might have ended sooner had Hegseth not been so skilled at bifurcating his life and conjuring his prewar veneer. “[Schwarz] was gaslighted by him heavily,” she said. The next decade of Hegseth’s personal life was tumultuous. In 2010, within a year of finalizing his divorce, he married Samantha Deering, then a coworker at a pro-war astroturf group called Vets for Freedom, which was funded by a rogues’ gallery of conservative megadonors.

The group’s advocacy seemed largely intended to obscure the war’s body count and silence its protesters. Hegseth and his colleagues grasped for evidence of progress in Iraq while casting any legitimate criticism as an affront to soldiers. During one 2007 American Veterans Center Conference panel, Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavia, Hegseth’s colleague and longtime confidant, expressed unbridled anger that public scrutiny was polluting his righteous war. “I take great offense to someone telling me about all the things that Blackwater contractors are doing, or one rape per five hundred thousand troops in Iraq,” Bellavia scoffed, adding that the D.C. establishment was actively ignoring the war’s many triumphs: “I can show them water turning into wine, and they won’t believe it.” Once the war became impossible to defend and after his departure from Vets for Freedom, Hegseth would pin many of its failures on women and other constituencies he deemed insufficiently “lethal”—an argument contravened by the self-evidently excessive lethality of the war on terror, in which American troops killed seven hundred thousand opposition fighters and civilians in the service of uncertain aims.

In 2009, Hegseth matriculated at Harvard’s Kennedy School, then was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. In 2012, after running an unsuccessful Senate bid against Amy Klobuchar, he joined another astroturf group, this one bankrolled by the Koch brothers and called Concerned Veterans for America. Hegseth carried their message of veteran health-care privatization to cities across America in what was called the Defend Freedom Tour. According to an internal email obtained by The New Yorker, Hegseth used pit stops as “little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.” He once brought his coworkers to a Louisiana strip club, got trashed, and tried to dance onstage. His behavior appears to have set the tone for the whole organization. Male staff repeatedly pursued their female colleagues, which, according to The New Yorker, they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” One of these women told me about numerous pickled work parties where Hegseth and his deputies were “treating women like pieces of meat.”

Hegseth was then also moving up the ranks at Fox News. In August 2017, while still married to Deering, Hegseth fathered a daughter with a Fox News producer named Jennifer Rauchet. Two months after that, he delivered remarks at the fortieth convention of the California Federation of Republican Women in Monterey. The record of his comments that evening isn’t available, though what happened later is less surprising than the fact that he deigned to speak at a women’s conference. After his speech, Hegseth hit the hotel bar, flirted with female attendees, and drank late into the night. At 1:30 a.m., hotel surveillance footage shows Hegseth arguing at the pool with a thirty-year-old Republican organizer about what she regarded as his inappropriate treatment of women, as she later told police. The woman said that she’d ended up in Hegseth’s room, and later suggested that she might have been drugged. She tried to leave, at which point he allegedly snatched her phone, blocked the door, and raped her. The incident was investigated by local police and referred to county prosecutors, who declined to pursue the case. Hegseth subsequently paid the woman a settlement, and both sides signed nondisclosure agreements.

His behavior during this period was well known to many of his friends and family. In April 2018, Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, tore him to shreds over email, labeling her son an “abuser” who uses women for his “own power and ego.” By her account, his warmer side seemed to have evaporated entirely. “Is there any sense of decency left in you?” she asked. In public, however, the family put on a united front. On Mother’s Day a year later, Fox News ran a surreal segment on Hegseth’s family that doubled as a sort of televised mediation. Hegseth appeared in studio with his parents, and Penelope was asked to recount what he was like as a kid.

“Pete was a spitfire,” she said, before quickly clarifying, “in a good way.” Tellingly, she could draw only on professional achievements, namely his academic prowess and military service. “Most of all, I love the way he loves his country,” she said. “I don’t know anyone who loves his country more than Pete.” At that point, the female Fox host pointed to a pink-and-peach bouquet on the table. “We have these beautiful flowers for you!” she said. Hegseth was taken aback. “Oh, are these for Mom?” He paused. “Mom, I got these for you,” he said, with a bemused smirk to the camera. “Just for you.”

Demoting Women

In 2019, Hegseth was married for the third time to Rauchet, the Fox News producer. Wedding photos show him in a white suit with a camouflage pocket square. They also feature his seven children and stepchildren, including five young boys: Gunner, Boone, Rex, Jackson, and Luke. Hegseth has publicly stated that he expects them all to join the military—specifically, to become certified killers, as Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, or Green Berets. Unlike his father, who avoided confrontation, Hegseth is severe and unsparing. “You are men,” he’s written to his boys. “Act like it.”

The War on Warriors, published seven months before his ascension to secretary of defense, sketches out his theory for reinvigorating the military’s masculine ethos, often through aphorisms that could fit on a Ford F-350 bumper. Sprinkled in are longer myths, most of which have Hegseth or another aggrieved white guy at their center. They include the noncommissioned officer who called “bullshit” on unisex bathrooms for service members and was forced to apologize and the Green Beret who claims he was unfairly accused of touching a woman inappropriately when, in fact, he was simply helping her train on “leg tucks for the new PT test.” The military has become so woke, Hegseth writes, that it has diluted standards to allow women in combat while simultaneously kicking out “good soldiers for having naked women tattooed on their arms.” In his eyes, these pinup girls rendered in ink are the only women who belong on the front lines.

Hegseth’s uncompromising opposition to women in combat contrasts with the views of many military men, including Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL charged and later acquitted of violent war crimes. In an interview, Gallagher reckoned that women “have a place” on the battlefield. As he sees it, potential problems arise not out of a female inability but male misbehavior. “I have no doubt a woman can make it through BUD/S,” he said, referring to the ultragrueling six-month SEAL training course. “My concern is when she’s thrown into an operational unit, will that unit maintain or fall apart?” Gallagher worried that men would, due to their sense of honor, view women as the “top priority to protect”—or, conversely, that warrior units would debase women, leading to “a rise in sexual assault cases.”

Hegseth feels differently. A friend recalled that, during his Princeton ROTC days, he fretted that his female peers “didn’t have the ability, if he was shot, to pick him up and carry him off the battlefield. That rubbed him the wrong way.” Or perhaps his objections to Princeton’s female cadets stemmed from petty jealousy. In an uncanny foreshadowing of his Iraq War record, Hegseth earned a single, vague-sounding military award at his 2003 commencement, for “distinguished leadership,” while cadet Kathrin Conlin McWatters netted four commendations, including one named for legendary Defense Secretary George C. Marshall.

As he occupies Marshall’s former office, Hegseth is exacting his revenge by scrubbing public histories of female service members, squashing female leadership and integration programs, and disassembling the military’s sexual assault prevention programs. (In his unyielding quest to juice lethality, Hegseth also eliminated an Army office meant to minimize civilian casualties.) Hegseth has removed at least three top female military leaders and installed good old boys from his nonprofit party days. They include his top spokesman, Sean Parnell, who, during his intense 2021 custody battle, was accused by his estranged wife of domestic violence. Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, who has subsequently left his post, reportedly derailed an April meeting about veterans’ issues to recount a night spent in a D.C. strip club. Mix all this in with Hegseth’s sloppy Signalgate scandal, in which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was included in a group chat discussing war plans, and his personal brand of alpha-male lethality is baldly exposed as lacking substance, seriousness, or strategy. (That applies, as well, to his nonsensical ban on transgender troops, whom Trump accused of “expressing a false gender identity” in an executive order in January.)

Hegseth has used his many perches, from Princeton to the Pentagon, to agitate for a kind of trickle-down masculinity, laying any number of societal ills at the feet of women and arguing that a “tough, manly, and unapologetically lethal” military is the only way to ensure future generations “live in an America that honors God, cherishes freedom, celebrates families, and lives in peace.” And yet Hegseth himself exudes at least one trait not usually included among the masculine ideals: vanity. He loves posting his workouts on social media; loves accenting his musculature with ink; loves his tight, tailored suits. In April, he ordered the installation of a makeup studio next to the Pentagon’s pressroom. CBS News reported that, in a cost-reduction measure, Hegseth would be “doing his own makeup ahead of TV appearances, not paying for a makeup artist.” It makes sense that Hegseth knows his way around a powder brush. He’s always been aware of the gift that is his face—how to use it, and what to hide.

Bambi

I am not got to be kidding you

Sophie Dubber

© Firpal

In the big, black Mediterranean Sea, in which a thousand breastfeeding pilot whales click their teeth and whistle and fill their cheeks with black water, and the dogfish growl and whine and beg for scraps, where the sloe-black water churns dense with a darkness as thorough as the inside of a bomb or a belly, where the sand at the bottom is black as ash and the stingrays bury their black, flat bodies deep, where the white sharks, also black, half-waking, blend their dreams with the night water, dreaming of the nursehound, the little sleepers, longnose spurdogs, velvet belly lanterns, small eyes, fried eggs, the sphinx, the cardinal, the damsel, the seabream, white, common, and silver sided, in the big, black Mediterranean Sea, Renata and Pat sit drunk and drinking in a vat of white-hot hot-tub water. It is the last night of the cruise.

They lean against the hot-tub walls and tilt their blushing, sweat-slicked faces to the night sky. Pat’s sunglasses are fogging up on a chain round his neck. Renata’s sun hat is off and upturned on the hot-tub rim. Her phone lies in it, ringing. She reaches for it with a prune-ridged, dripping-wet hand.

“It’s Bambi,” Renata says to Pat and doesn’t touch it.

“Don’t,” Pat says and sucks his straw. It is the last night of the cruise; it is the last night of the cruise.

Pat and Renata have been married for thirty-three years. They look up at the night sky and forget the sea. The sky is wider and brighter, with a thousand nameless stars like flecks of powdered milk. Pat looks at Hercules without knowing it. His leg, his arm, his right elbow, his sword, his bat, his hammer, his nightstick drawn back in the act of killing Lyra, Draco, Ophiuchus.

Ophiuchus, who lays on his stomach in the grass, kicking his feet and letting his skirt ride up, took breakfast from red-and-green snakes, and stuck it in the stiff-jawed mouths of dead children until they jumped up alive and danced through the streets and wore their little sandals to ratty scraps.

The French Canadians are straddling each other on the other end of the hot tub. They are young and rich and wearing tiny bathing suits. The boy slides off and wipes his mouth. He wipes the girl’s mouth. Renata watches them without looking.

“Your phone is ringing,” the boy yells over the jets. It is again.

“Don’t, Renata,” Pat tells her. He sucks his straw, and all the ice is melted.

Renata slides closer to her husband and puts her arm around him. His back is split with shreds of curling, flaking sunburn skin. She peels a little piece up and the skin underneath is new and pink as teeth gums. She lays it back down where it was.

“Are you sad to be leaving?” the French Canadian girl asks.

“We are,” Renata calls over the water. “We love it here.”

“The five days have gone so short here, no?” the boy says, hooking the girl’s bikini straps with his fingers. “I will not like to be walking on the ground with no water moving.”

“To me,” Renata says, “it feels as though we’ve been here for a hundred years. We don’t get much time away. Pat won our tickets in the sweepstakes.” Renata laughs. Her face is sweat-shiny and red like a jewel. “I told him it was our last trip before being grandparents. Then we’ll be old! Ha ha!”

From the side of the hot tub on which the French Canadians sit, Pat and Renata seem unbelievably old already. Some gray hair, wrinkles, fat and sixty, sweaty like jewels. To them, Renata seems a witch, une sorcière. The hot tub is her chaudron, she cackles and cooks them alive.

The boy throws up his arms and they are very strong and dripping water. “Grandparents? Very good!” he shouts. “We should very celebrate! Apolline,” he nods at the girl, and she knows what it means. She reaches behind her and picks up a highly refractive, silver-studded clutch that shoots the underwater hot-tub lights in a million tiny directions, into the sky, between the stars, Ophiuchus’s cheeks and knees. She pulls out a tiny bag of baby-blue pills and smiles as she shakes it.

“No, no,” Pat finally addresses them. “No. Thank you, but no.”

“No?” The boy says, still having to shout. He opens the little bag. “It is only benzodiazepine. Like, medicine? Sleeping medicine?” The boy pretends to snore and then smiles. “For sleeping,” he says, and takes two pills out and puts them on his tongue and swallows them. Some blueness sticks on his wet fingers, but he washes it off in the hot-tub water.

Renata looks at Pat and raises her eyebrows. She turns back to the boy. “I take those,” she says. “What kind is it?”

“Rohypnol,” the girl says and takes two pills, eats them, and smiles.

Renata looks at Pat again and shrugs. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” she says.

Pat looks at his wife and shakes his head. He takes her hand and wills her to say no with his eyes, but it is the last night of the cruise, and everything around him won’t be there tomorrow.

Renata reaches across the tub to the French Canadian boy and says, “I’ll take one.” Renata takes one and swallows it.

“I’m glad!” the girl says. “You as well?” she asks Pat.

“No,” he answers. “Not me as well, no.”

Since finishing his drink, Pat feels as though the insides of his mouth have become drier than paper. You could write on it with pencil. His tongue feels like a towel.

“These pills,” the boy says after the girl takes the little bag and puts them back in her clutch. “They are very rare. None America.”

“Really?” Renata asks. She leans back and imagines the world growing louder and quieter. She imagines the water breaking at the surface is gritty and sharp.

“They are very expensive. They cost eight hundred for a bag.”

“Really?” Renata asks.

“Eight hundred for a bag,” the girl says. “Two hundred for a pill.”

“Two hundred?” Renata asks.

Pat’s paying attention again. He looks over to the boy disbelievingly and shouts, “You don’t mean you want us to pay you for the drugs?”

“Of course you pay us for the drugs!” The boy is still smiling, still laughing and smiling. “Two hundred you pay us!”

“You’re not serious,” Pat says, dry mouth.

“Oh, very, very serious.”

“Honey, it’s no big deal.” Renata looks around for her purse, but it’s in the room. Her phone is ringing again.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Pat is shouting at the boy.

“I am not got to be kidding you. I am not got to be kidding you.”

Renata, suddenly in need of a reason to change the subject, picks up her phone and turns away. She plugs her other ear with a wet finger, and the sensation is unlike any she’s felt before. Her finger feels to her like a child’s finger, her ear like a numb toy. She is sleepy and slurs her speech. “Hi, Munchkin,” she says. “Hi Bambi-doll. Wait, wait. Say it again. Hey, wait, no, no. Wait, no. No, no, no! No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no! No! No! No!” She screams, she cries. She is crying, shaking her head, grabbing her head, grabbing her hair. “Oh, no, no, no, my baby, no!”

Pat is trying to get hold of her arms. The French Canadian girl is sliding away from her, and the French Canadian boy is half-standing with an angry face.

Pat says, “What? What? What?”

Renata hands him the phone and then crawls over the edge of the hot tub. Scrambling, slipping, gagging, she runs to the side of the cruise ship and bends over the railing. She vomits into the gigantic, black ocean. Blacker than the sky, blanker than nothing. It does not begin or end. It blends with the horizon. It blends with the bottom of the ship itself. It does not reflect the stars, it deletes them. It deletes Renata’s vomit. She clutches the slippery railing and cannot remember if she really threw up or not. She cannot remember if the call was real or not until Pat comes up behind her and gives her back her phone. Renata holds it to her ear, but they’ve hung up.

Somewhere suffering deep beneath them are a thousand trillion krill, delicious with black eyes bigger than their hearts, who swim in droves into the half-parted lips of lazy fish and do not remember being born, who will not remember dying, who will remember the snakelocks and the beadlets, the inverted canopies of red and green algae and the plankton, zoo, phyto, copepods. The krill live seven years, and their language has only the words mother and cruise ship.

Auto Icon

Sasha Burshteyn

“My body I give to my dear friend Doctor Southwood Smith to be disposed of in a manner hereinafter mentioned . . .”
—from the will of Jeremy Bentham, 30th of May, 1832

Sam, I am in a box

watching the centuries pass.

There’s a round object on the floor

between my feet—after some years

I realize that this had been my head.

When my dear friend the doctor

dissects my cadaver, I feel

nothing but crystalline joy—

lungs and bladder touched by light,

layers of skin peeled to reveal

the body’s secrets.

A wax head

plugged with glass eyes

tops the apparatus of my body,

a sculpted mausoleum

meant to resemble flesh

in the attitude in which

I sat in life.

I know my head is out there—

like a phantom limb I feel when it is touched,

once a year, a sensation like brisk wind.

Where are you, Sam?

My eyes are cold.

No, Maybe

By

Jason Fulford, Thomas Prior, Daniel Arnold, Farah Al Qasimi, Annie Collinge & Rottingdean Bazaar, Bobby Doherty, Molly Matalon, John Wilson, and Rosie Marks

Jason Fulford: I think of a grudge as a stubborn obstacle, a thorn, an ugly word. I’ve talked to photographers about this before, in a book I edited called Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph. Consciously or not, most of us have topics that are off-limits—subjects we stay away from for different reasons, whether moral, aesthetic, or personal.

But it’s better not to have rules, especially in the creative process. Makes you less open. I know this, but still I can write up a short list of my hang-ups without too much thought:

One-liners
My family and friends
Coney Island
Self-portrait, crying
Signage
Out the airplane window
Wigwam Motel
Eyes in the rearview mirror
My lunch
The crumbling Old World
People from behind
The Alps

There are probably many more. My editor suggested that if I confronted my obstacles it might be possible to move past them. (“Take a begrudging photograph,” he wrote, “of something you’re averse to capturing.”) That sounds healthy. He invited eight other photographers to try as well.

To start it off, here’s a three for one. It’s a little blurry because I took it fast (I knew I was being bad). It’s my wife . . . painting signage . . . from behind.

Thomas Prior: I hate that I always photograph low-hanging fruit. I’ll see one of these jokes, photograph it, and then take the exact same photo again two years later.

Daniel Arnold: Protests and parades. So moved by the energy, so bored by the pictures.

Farah Al Qasimi: I’m enamored by sunsets, but they’re too beautiful to make interesting pictures. I think most photographers share this sentiment—beauty needs to be offset.

Annie Collinge & Rottingdean Bazaar: We find photographing groups of people a challenge. The more people you add, the more complex the puzzle is.

Bobby Doherty: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but I need four hundred photos of single gloves that have been run over before I’ll like one of them.

Molly Matalon: I want control, to make sure things look how I saw them. But moving too fast might produce the truly candid picture.

John Wilson: Caves. I don’t like being on guided tours, and I started to feel very claustrophobic after I saw The Descent.

Rosie Marks: I avoid making work directly about myself. My photography is already a reflection of who I am. But when you’re exhausted and suffering from a photographic writer’s block, sometimes the personal is the only thing you can muster up.

Uniform Policy

The right turns against education by corporation

Jennifer C. Berkshire

© Brittany Gudas

In September 2020, during the waning days of his first term, Donald Trump announced the creation of a task force to get to the bottom of what had gone so wrong with the nation’s education system. In the months since Covid-19 shuttered schools across the country, a story had quickly taken shape on the right in which parents, afforded a view into the classroom via Zoom, witnessed a steady stream of horrors from their kitchen tables: as rainbow and Black Lives Matter flags fluttered in the background, blue-haired Marxists taught “gender ideology” in science class and Critical Race Theory in history. “Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse, the truest sense,” Trump declared in a speech. Intended as a counterweight to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which Trump characterized as “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison,” the 1776 Commission was tasked with promoting so-called patriotic education as a course correction for the nation’s youngsters.

The commission handed in its homework assignment, “The 1776 Report,” less than two weeks after Trump’s supporters laid siege to the Capitol, with just two days remaining in his presidency. The document, its forty-one pages padded with images and pull quotes, was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old “administrative state” controlled by leftist radicals.

The charges of shoddy scholarship and plagiarism that dogged the report obscured a less heralded accomplishment. The commission may have fallen short in producing a definitive conservative rendering of American history, but buried in its appendixes was an answer to the question of how, and when, the nation’s schools had gone off the rails. While Trump himself ordered the “restoration of American education” in response to recent threats—what conservatives disparage as the “Great Awokening”—his commission identified an older villain.

The “pronounced decline” of education in the country had actually begun not in this century, or even the one before, but in the late 1800s, the commission declared. In this account, schools had once been great, with students learning the sorts of “transcendent knowledge and practical wisdom” that were handed down generation after generation. But then came the same progressives who’d ushered in a tyrannical shadow government via child labor laws and meatpacking plant regulations. Virtue and transcendent truths were out; “skills-based, jobs-orienting training” that subordinated “America’s students to the demands of the new industrial economy” was in.

Original Sin

A rising chorus of influential conservative voices has since joined the 1776 Commission, which was killed by Joe Biden and then revived by Trump as soon as he retook office, in locating the real source of the trouble for American education. “It’s easy to think that the problem was just remote school,” warns Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts in his recent book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. “But the truth goes much deeper.” While Roberts isn’t sure of exactly when things went wrong—sometime between the Old Deluder Satan Law, the 1647 Massachusetts act ensuring that young colonists would learn to read and write, and the twenty-first century—he eventually settles on a century ago. That’s when progressives began their hundred-year march through the institutions—public schools, universities, teacher-training colleges—systematically eliminating anything that smacked of philosophy or religion in favor of the sorts of “useful” skills favored by the modern industrial economy. “For more than a century, the Party of Destruction has zeroed in on the education system as the key institution of social transformation,” writes Roberts. The goal: to “create generations of obedient drones.”

Trump’s beleaguered defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, makes a similar claim in the 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, coauthored with David Goodwin, editor of The Classical Difference, a magazine about Christian schools. Long before he was group-chatting U.S. bombing plans or clear-cutting banned books from Department of Defense libraries, Hegseth was “uprooting a century of miseducation” about the nation’s schools, to quote the subtitle of his book, which spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. What Hegseth describes as “the unauthorized history of American education” dates back 120 years, when “Progressives had big ideas to change the cultural and economic order while dissolving old reliances on Christianity.” The point of the plot is essentially the same. “Behind a smokescreen of ‘preparing students for the new industrial economy,’ early progressives had political control in mind,” a promotional synopsis for the book reads.

While these accounts differ in particulars—you say Progressive, I say progressive—the sweeping story of decline they tell, not just of America’s schools and students but of the nation, is identical. Whereas schools and churches once produced spirited and spiritual citizens, that ended when vocationalism trumped virtue, and education became synonymous with preparation for future employment. “They successfully hollowed out America’s vision of education into nothing more than job training,” writes Hegseth. “A lifelong search for greater meaning in life” was replaced by the “search for a job.” It’s a critique that would sound perfectly at home on the left, save for one key detail. The kids who’ve been on the receiving end of this conspiracy for the past century-plus are presented as simultaneously corporate stooges and Marxist revolutionaries—“ideal cogs in a globalist, Uniparty economic system,” as Roberts would have it. “The problem is that our schools have been transformed from institutions designed to cultivate children’s souls into godless assembly lines meant to shape obedient little comrades who think morality is a construct and nature is an illusion.”

Skill Issue

Roberts and Hegseth are wild for the conservative cause du jour, the so-called classical education that, as Roberts defines it, seeks to form virtuous students by grounding them in the best of the Western canon, typically represented by a selective mélange of Greek and Roman texts, early Christian writing, and U.S. founding documents. Hegseth couches his case for classical Christian education in military terms. Yes, students will be immersed in the great books—books that have contributed original ideas to “the conversation about Truth, Goodness, and Beauty that descends from at least three millennia of the Western Christian tradition”—but only after an insurgency defeats the monopoly of “government schools” and “woke” private institutions. “First we survive, then we regroup and reorganize while weakening the control and legitimacy of our foe,” writes Hegseth. “And finally we replace their power structure with reconstructed schools based on freedom and faith.”

But was there ever a time when American schools weren’t somehow bound up with the economy? It can be hard to find an idyllic stretch in which education existed free from the demands of employers, when parents weren’t already steering their offspring away from letters and toward numbers. In The Irony of Early School Reform, his seminal 1968 account of the origins of public schools in Massachusetts, historian Michael Katz describes mid–nineteenth century education boosters as seizing on the practical economic benefits of schooling, not just for laborers but for the state. The industrial and commercial success of Massachusetts was dependent “on the intelligence of the laboring classes upon the land and in the shops and mills,” proclaimed George Boutwell, the state’s education chief from 1855 to 1861. “Thus we connect the productive power of our state with its institutions of learning.”

Such early rhetoric equating education with economic growth went hand in hand with warnings to manual laborers that they needed to skill and school up or else. “Whole classes in our community who, not a generation ago, would have been content to earn their living by unskilled labor, are now thrust from that lower market, and forced to add knowledge and intelligence to the labor of their hands,” cautioned the Brookline School Committee, outside Boston, in 1855. The committee was making the economic case for more schools and schooling, but their dire prediction that entire groups of workers faced imminent obsolescence has more or less driven education policy ever since. The farmer needed scientific knowledge of the soil, insisted these early school reformers, while the construction workers of yore, tasked with erecting the structures of the future, would no longer be able to rely on practical experience—the “ ‘rule of thumb’ of an ignorant mechanic.”

Roughly a century and a half later, the XQ Institute, a corporate-minded school fix-it group cofounded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s billionaire widow, was back with a nearly identically ominous prophecy. In a report from 2018 on the future of work, the group conceded that American high schools had done a fine job preparing youngsters for an industrializing society—but that was then. Today’s students are has-beens before they’ve even begun, asserted the group, ill-equipped for a world of “innovation, customization, globalization, and automation” and almost certain to be replaced by robots. That is, unless high school is transformed. While the precise nature of this transformation was left vague, the rat-a-tat of questionable statistical claims—e.g., that the average young American will hold more than eleven different jobs between the ages of eighteen and fifty—left no doubt as to its urgency. If the vision of education as job training is as old as American schools, the insistent demand that we fix the schools or risk economic collapse has never been far behind.

The right’s portrait of radicals slowly and steadily laying siege to the nation’s education system across the decades en route to socialism also obscures just how thoroughly bipartisan the project of tethering schools ever more tightly to the needs of employers has been. In From the New Deal to the War on Schools, his sweeping 2022 history of federal education policy, political scientist Daniel Moak describes a stifling consensus regarding the purpose and function of education as skills acquisition. The GOP and conservative-minded business groups have long invoked “efficiency” as their sales pitch for this vision, argues Moak: meeting the needs of employers, tying individual earnings to skills, and dominating global economic competition. Liberals have embraced a similar view of schooling but for a very different rationale: that employment-minded education is the best vehicle through which to realize individual success, social mobility, and racial equality. “Elites from across the political spectrum,” concludes Moak, “promote the idea that the public education system should be focused on imparting skills that offer individuals the potential for future success within the existing social and economic order.”

Rotten to the Core

The high-water mark for this consensus view regarding schooling as skills acquisition arrived in the Obama era in the form of the Common Core standards. Kicked off in 2009 by an assortment of governors and state-level education leaders, the effort to enact uniform math and reading requirements across the country commanded a level of bipartisan support that is unimaginable these days. By the end of 2011, forty-five states, more than half of which were led by Republican governors, had signed on. The sweeping endeavor attempted to ensure every American high school student would graduate ready for college or the workplace. But at the heart of the Common Core was a familiar premise: today’s employers should determine what the workers of tomorrow will need to know.

Corporations were happy to push this sentiment down the public’s throats, even interrupting coverage of the scramble to win the coveted Masters green jacket by running advertisements during the famously commercial-averse golf tournament in 2012. Common Core standards were “unlocking a better way to prepare our children for college and their careers,” intoned the ad’s narrator, a cartoon book. Its pages fanned across the screen, full of STEM iconography—test tubes, beakers, planets. “Because when our kids do better, America does better.”

If an overhaul of educational standards was an unlikely topic to stir the ranks of golf enthusiasts, the advertisement’s sponsor was even more surprising: ExxonMobil, the multinational behemoth better known for extracting natural resources and belching carbon into the atmosphere than for unlocking the career potential of young Americans. But as business reporter Peter Elkind chronicled for Fortune in 2015, the Common Core was a thoroughly corporate undertaking from its inception. Big business had been bemoaning the state of the U.S. public education system since at least the release of “A Nation at Risk,” the incendiary Reagan-era report suggesting that “a rising tide of mediocrity” had engulfed schools. Steeped in Cold War rhetoric, the report famously stated that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” While many of the document’s claims regarding the deterioration of U.S. schools would be debunked, its central argument that failing schools were a threat to the nation’s economic and global competitiveness would inspire successive waves of school reform, including the Common Core.

Here was an opportunity to solve the problems that CEOs insisted were holding the country back—middling international test scores, a lack of skilled workers—by going to the source: what was taught in every classroom in the land. Bill Gates would chip in more than $200 million for the cause via his foundation, while the Business Roundtable, the CEO-lobby group started in 1972 to counter the power of labor unions, used its political heft to urge states to get with the new program. As Elkind describes, businesses essentially identified the skills that they wanted future employees to have, then worked backward to determine what students should learn. The English Language Arts standards, for example, largely phased out fiction as students got older in favor of so-called informational texts. What good would knowledge of plays and poetry do future workers, after all, in a world of corporate speak and PowerPoints?

The Common Core even had a corporate pitchman: Rex Tillerson, then CEO of ExxonMobil and member of the Business Roundtable. Before going on to serve briefly as secretary of state during Trump’s first term (after firing him by tweet, Trump ascribed the breakup to bad “chemistry”), Tillerson gave speeches, called legislators, and lobbied other CEOs in support of the standards, and ExxonMobil went so far as to cut off campaign contributions to politicians who refused to get on board. For Tillerson, the sales pitch was obvious. Businesses were customers of the public schools, and the students who graduated from those schools were the product, he explained in a 2014 panel discussion. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?”

Today, the Common Core is largely recalled for the education revolt it triggered. Teachers, whose response to the standards was initially mixed, would mutiny against another Obama education policy: get-tough evaluations that tied their jobs to students’ standardized test scores. Parents, already souring on testing, had no love for assessments that seemed intended to demonstrate that their children weren’t as “brilliant as they thought they were,” as Obama’s education chief, Arne Duncan, put it. Among conservatives, Obama’s signature education reform, which used billions in government largesse to get around the constitutional limitation of federal control over what’s taught in schools, smacked of federal overreach.

The uprising against “Obamacore,” as it was branded by grassroots conservative activists, was an early portent of the populist revolt against corporations. While the blue chips made the business case for school reform, activists—often aided by the Koch brothers’ ecosystem of advocacy organizations—smelled a corporate plot. They packed legislative hearings and deluged the offices of state officials with phone calls, threatening to vote out anyone who supported the standards. In 2013, demonstrators from FreedomWorks, the conservative Tea Party group that got its start with funding from the Kochs, showed up at the annual General Electric shareholder meeting to protest the company’s support for the Common Core. It didn’t help that the most prominent companies steering the way for the new standards were global giants such as GE. All the more evidence, charged activists, that the plot was global in nature, aimed at batch-processing serfs to serve a New World Order.

The Common Core’s role in ushering in our current era of burn-it-down populism is arguably underrecognized today. Writing in The Federalist in 2016, editor Joy Pullmann described the Common Core as a classic case of corporate cronies doing what cronies do: “using government to force their low-quality products on everyone rather than getting their butts out into the market and earning the dollars they get from us through a willing exchange.” No wonder most Americans don’t trust big business, Pullman concluded, name-checking ExxonMobil. “They don’t play fair, and we know it. They use their power to cheat us out of honest government and a level economic playing field.”

By 2016, the GOP had officially denounced the cause, even congratulating the states that had repealed the standards in its party platform. Among today’s conservative education activists, the Common Core is recalled as, at best, a well-intentioned initiative gone awry. The 1776 Commission report shoehorns it into a couple of paragraphs devoted to “a few reforms of note,” concluding that “we learned from the failed Common Core experiment that one-size-fits-all national models are a blueprint for trivializing and mechanizing learning.” Roberts credits the backlash against federal overreach and centralized control of classrooms with supercharging the push for school choice, for which he is a vocal proponent. But it is Hegseth who best embodies the right’s evolving thinking on public education. The Common Core, he claims, was yet another conspiracy to “push radical left-wing ideas into the minds of our kids—future voters, to boot.”

STEM the Tide

These days, the Business Roundtable, which led the CEOs’ charge for the Common Core, is a rudderless relic, ill-equipped for a world in which corporations are disparaged as the next phase of socialism. The Republican Party has tilted, as political theorist Melinda Cooper argued in 2022, toward its small-business wing of private, family-owned companies and away from the sorts of multinational corporations represented by the likes of ExxonMobil and the Roundtable. The small-business conservatives have committed to an “antiestablishment insurrection,” writes Cooper, hostile to both the New Deal state with its labor unions and social welfare programs and the big businesses that enable it. “Behind the mask of supposedly capitalistic corporations lies the specter of social control and the destruction of our liberty,” warns Kevin Roberts, calling for the corporate purveyors of woke capitalism to be burned down and broken up.

As corporations have fallen from favor on the right, so, too, has the sort of corporate-minded education reform that the Common Core epitomized. In Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth mocks a New York Times column in which Nicholas Kristof fretted that young Americans’ slumping test scores would render them unable to compete in a globalized economy—precisely the argument that school reformers have been making for the past forty years. Hegseth dismisses Kristof’s analysis as shallow, listing the various gaps—cultural, civic, patriotism, and faith—that he argues matter far more than metrics of academic achievement. Posits Hegseth: “What if you are creating workers who don’t love their country for a future economy that doesn’t exist?”

Not only has the project of national academic standards been junked, but the GOP has now made a sharp turn against any standards at all. Donald Trump’s top education priority, dismantling the federal Department of Education, is premised on exactly the sort of let-the-states-do-as-they-like logic that once so infuriated the CEO set. The Department of Government Efficiency chain saw, meanwhile, has eviscerated the federal government’s ability to track student progress. The Trump-era GOP’s vision of education, clad in the rhetoric of parents’ rights and the free market, centers on giving tax dollars directly to parents to spend on whatever flavor of school they like: private, virtual, homeschool, for-profit microschool. In a growing number of red states, so-called universal voucher programs are open to even the wealthiest families. Some of these states have allowed parents to use education savings accounts to pay for any expense that might be considered “school”: indoor trampolines for gym class, ski resort passes, or flat-screen TVs for general education.

“Anyone know of a flat earth curriculum?” That query, posted in earnest last year in an online discussion group for recipients of school vouchers in Arizona, unleashed a torrent of mockery, including from the state’s governor. “The Earth is round, evolution is real, gravity exists. Arizona taxpayers should not pay to teach our children junk science,” Governor Katie Hobbes opined on X. But as the state’s top education official would make clear in an interview, while the Department of Education could potentially refuse to pay for such a curriculum on the grounds that it is an “unreasonable expense,” Arizona law is emphatically hands-off when it comes to any public oversight of what students in its voucher program are learning. Indeed, to advocates of rules-free education, the ability for parents to choose learning materials that align with their values is the point, even if those values include belief in a flat Earth.

Boosting student proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and math has been a national obsession since the Soviets fired Sputnik into space in 1957. But the right’s turn against public education and any kind of standards also extends to STEM. In the rendering of Hegseth et al., the focus on STEM has been a decades-long error, the latest iteration of the progressives’ fiendish attempt to replace the wisdom of yore with practical skills, subsuming schools and students to the demands of the industrial economy. “America’s classrooms have been centralized, technicalized, and scientized—with the aim of pumping out workers, not thinkers,” writes Hegseth, who admits, regrettably, to having written his Harvard graduate thesis on the topic of STEM schools. “Foolish schools, foolish theses.”

The conservative hostility toward STEM has rapidly been translated into policy. The Trump administration has slashed spending on science, cuts that have fallen with particular savagery on STEM education research. A little more than a decade ago, corporations made the case that the imminent arrival of a skills-heavy future necessitated an urgent overhaul of American schools. Despite the technological demands of the administration’s economic vision, including reshoring high-tech industries in order to outcompete China, the right’s schooling priorities are now decidedly backward-looking, romanticizing a time not just of less science but of less education.

Left Behind

It is striking how contemporary critiques of this narrow vision of education as job training come almost exclusively from the right, given that criticism of public education’s cozy intertwining with capitalism used to be dominated by scholars on the left. Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis made left-wing analyses of public education cool for generations of scholars with their 1976 classic Schooling in Capitalist America. The authors, who came out of 1960s-era campus political movements, provided a bracingly Marxist take on the role that class plays in undermining the democratic potential of education. They were unapologetic that true education reform required a far-reaching economic transformation. “An educational system can be egalitarian and liberating only when it prepares youth for fully democratic participation in social life and an equal claim to the fruits of economic activity,” they argued. In the book’s final chapter, “Education, Socialism and Revolution,” Bowles and Gintis contended that schools would never achieve their liberating, equalizing capacity as long as the economy itself was rigged. “The people of the United States do not need a doctor for the moribund capitalist order,” they wrote. “We need an undertaker.” In 1980, sociologist Jean Anyon published her eye-opening account of the “hidden curriculum” at five elementary schools where fifth graders of different class backgrounds were already being prepared for their respective ladder rungs. While students at what Anyon called an “executive elite school” were developing their analytical intellectual powers en route to becoming lawyers and doctors, those at working-class schools were engaged in the sort of rote, mechanical training prized by factory bosses.

Fifty years later, our public education system is arguably even more committed to what Bowles and Gintis identified as “capitalist production.” Forget the talk about blue-haired Marxists indoctrinating children; these days, despite the populist outcry, schools are focused on career readiness and not much else. In a recent essay, teacher and writer Annie Abrahams argues that although the Common Core brand may be diminished, its emphasis on aligning education with the demands of industry is woven through state-level standards that determine what students are taught. Abrahams’s inventory includes Pennsylvania, which, starting in 2026, will require kindergarteners to learn about the importance of work ethic and entrepreneurial traits, while middle schoolers will have to “identify ways to market yourself as a job candidate.” In New York, suggested activities for elementary-school students include making a diorama showing a person engaged in work or telling a story about how a cafeteria worker uses math and English on the job.

This past spring, the influential lobby group Democrats for Education Reform called on the party to develop a clear national education vision and “reconnect with our own core values.” The document was notably heavy on greatest hits—the combination of red-tape slashing, test-based accountability, and charter schools that has held sway since the Clinton era, with a new openness to private-school vouchers. Other than nods to “education excellence” and the need to create “better” and “different” schools, the group had nothing at all to say about the purpose of school. The right today has plenty of answers to the “why” of education: patriotism, piety, virtue, “great books.” But Democrats are still wedded to a vision of neoliberal school reform that reduces the entirety of schooling to job preparation.

Classical education, the liberal-arts-heavy brand of schooling favored by conservatives these days, is explicitly positioned as an alternative to soulless workforce development. Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum for K–12 schools, for example, frames its emphasis on great books and primary sources as education for liberty, rather than corporate interests determining what students should learn. “At the heart of classical education is its view of the human person,” writes Kevin Roberts. “It sees students not as learning machines or future cogs in some great industrial gear but as precious beings made in the image of God.” As education writer Nora De La Cour has observed, while classical education may be right-coded, its goals—of cultivating wonder in children, encouraging students to get lost in the magic of storytelling and to wrestle with profound questions—can seem like a refreshing alternative to the scripted curricula and test prep that rule in too many public-school classrooms. Students, notes De La Cour, a former teacher herself, rarely encounter whole works of fiction anymore: “They’re more likely to encounter these as decontextualized excerpts in corporate-produced test prep materials.” Our effort to make young Americans career ready, she concludes, has left students alienated from reading and parents, who “want good and beautiful things for their kids,” alienated from public schools.

If public education is to survive, Democrats will have to come up with an explanation for why we have public schools that goes beyond bloodless workforce preparation. They would do well to revisit the left-wing scholars of an earlier era for whom education was a terrain of possibility. “We must press for an educational environment in which youth can develop the capacity and commitment collectively to control their lives and regulate their social interactions with a sense of equality, reciprocity, and communality,” Bowles and Gintis argued. Imagine that.

Of course, our public schools may ultimately have no choice but to embrace a purpose beyond job training and getting ahead. If and when that happens, schools will be responding not to right-wing critiques that STEM and career readiness are the latest iteration of a century-long plot to pump out obedient corporate drones but to said corporations’ use of AI to eliminate, well, all the jobs. In a recent interview, AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, who coauthored the terrifying manifesto AI 2027, explained that it would soon make little sense to raise kids to be economically productive given that “they won’t really be participating in the economy in anything like the normal sense.” As for how he planned to educate his own kids, Kokotajlo said that he’d be prioritizing values like wisdom and virtue. “I will do my best to teach them those things because those things are good in themselves, rather than good for getting jobs.”

Mouse Song

Yongyu Chen

After the dream of a white bed topped with a pool of water,

where in that dream I took photos of the white bed & the water,

look at the crushed flowers afloat in the water . . .

that same night I dreamt I was a child again, I threw a fit, I

rolled on the carpet of the governmental office, in front of both

officials, I beat my water bottle on the ground

     I was

last in line at the close of day, they skipped me though

       I saw

there was time.

Sing with me, sing with me the mouse song . . .

All Saxony a flood through which the chilled leaves of nettle rose,

heavy with water—coins!, coins!—I give you half, you lend me yours,

I buy horses & briny, French hair bows . . . the shopkeepers smile—

who will counterdict us?

Though we danced we watched the better dancers bend out of shape,

these separated, moved toward the corners,

the strands of their hair tore apart, we held them & though

they did not cry, we made pain.

I deserve nothing? I? I?

There is so much intuition left on the exposed outcrops. Won’t we scrape it off the

  beams, the split plinths, until nothing is left?

You are not a streak of grease on a larger tongue, my long, loose children. You are

  unstuck. You coat the mechanism of the clock tower with a muddy glow.

  Go. Go. You smooth the passage of blank hooves into heaven.

The NAFTA Novel

Mexican fiction, made in America

Nicolás Medina Mora

© Nick Dahlen

In the summer of 1988, while Margaret Thatcher destroyed a society she insisted didn’t exist, Deng Xiaoping synthesized Mencius with Hayek, and Mikhail Gorbachev unmade the Soviet Union, the Mexican bourgeoisie partook of its third-favorite pastime after binge drinking and short selling: literary blood sport. The historian Enrique Krauze—a sycophantic surrogate of Octavio Paz, the poet-dictator who traded antifascism for anticommunism as he angled for the Nobel—had taken a hatchet to the novelist-caudillo Carlos Fuentes, arguing in a long essay that the writer who had become “everyone’s favorite Mexican” in the United States was “a foreigner in his own country.”

The takedown was vicious even by the standards of the Mexican Republic of Letters, where feuds reach levels of animosity unthinkable in countries where criticism is understood to be about writing, not writers. To his credit, Krauze admitted that his “discomfort with Fuentes” was no longer “intellectual or literary, but moral.” The novelist, he explained, was “a gringo child of Mexican origin.” Having grown up in a diplomatic family in Washington, D.C., Fuentes saw Mexico “refracted through a North American perspective.” That last phrase sounds odd in English but is only mildly retro in Spanish: norteamericano as a demonym for the United States was still common in the 1980s. But why not say una perspectiva estadounidense, angloamericana, yanqui, even gringa? Wasn’t Mexico also part of North America?

The Pazian-Fuentista Conflict was so overblown that even the Los Angeles Times felt compelled to cover it, noting some of the writers involved had “ceased speaking to each other.” That’s because Krauze’s essay was an unwitting expression of the political anxieties of the moment. While the idea of a free-trade agreement with the United States had yet to seduce the Harvard PhD who was about to become president of Mexico, the political unconscious of the Mexican Republic of Letters already sensed that it would confront an unsettling question: Can one still conceive of Mexican literature independently of the United States?

Krauze’s hatchet job was published simultaneously in Paz’s Vuelta and Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic. The English rendition was the work of Edith Grossman, the translator of Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. Krauze’s broadside, in other words, was processed by the same machinery that transformed his bête noir’s dense Spanish prose into a delicacy fit for palates reared on Iowa corniness. Consider two telling deletions from this line, which quotes Fuentes:

México “el país imaginado e imaginario”, no era una nación tangible, histórica. Era sólo una víctima de los Estados Unidos y una lengua por conquistar.

A literal-minded translator might render the passage as follows:

Mexico, “the imaginary, imagined country,” was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of the United States and a language waiting to be conquered.

Yet the translation published in The New Republic reads:

Mexico, the “imaginary, imagined country,” was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of imperialism, an instrumental reality, a language.

Even though Krauze is describing Fuentes’s view, The New Republic wouldn’t print a sentence in which the United States is identified as Mexico’s oppressor, perplexingly replacing the nation’s name with the vague “imperialism.” Likewise with the deletion of “conquered,” which in the original figures Fuentes the gringo as a colonial adventurer, pillaging Mexico’s linguistic wealth. The process of being translated into English had refracted Krauze’s views through a U.S.-centric perspective, turning him into what he despised: a North American writer.

The irony was lost on Krauze, but his “discomfort” contemplating a Mexican writer’s turn toward the United States proved prophetic. Over the course of the 1990s, Mexicans would experience the traumatic metamorphosis known as the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the end of that decade, Carlos Salinas—president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994 and one of the architects of NAFTA—would title his memoirs México: un paso difícil a la modernidad. But the future into which this reader of Mao and Gramsci plunged his country looked strangely like the era before the Mexican Revolution. Peasants lost the communal lands their grandparents had clawed back from haciendas; workers discovered that labor rights were meaningless if industries went bankrupt. Nurses became nannies; artisans, gardeners; smugglers, kingpins. Salinas and his mandarins—the bureaucrat-intellectuals who had ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century—promised that NAFTA would mark the nation’s triumphant entrance into the first world. Instead, the Mexican economy’s sudden exposure to American capital, along with the financial meltdown that ensued from its leaders’ shortsighted attempt to hold onto power, drove millions of Mexicans to migrate to the United States.

Most went because they didn’t want to starve, but a small minority left of their own accord. Not all of the latter camp were wealthy, but none were destitute. They had sufficient English and cultural capital to secure admission to American universities. After graduation, many stayed. Four decades after the Pazian-Fuentista Conflict, some of the most accomplished contemporary Mexican novelists—among them Yuri Herrera, Valeria Luiselli, and Álvaro Enrigue—live and work in the United States. The experience of having their subjectivity decentered by a comfortable migration forced them to embrace a contradictory position that allowed them to face the United States and Mexico at the same time: the North American perspective.

A superstructural byproduct of Mexican neoliberalism, the fiction that resulted from this schizophrenic point of view was more stylistically interesting than the bulk of American literature produced alongside it—and, for that matter, of much Mexican writing as well. Consciously or not, these writers became interpreters, translators, and mediators who could explain Mexico to America and America to Mexico. The NAFTA Novel—how else to call it?—gives voice to an antineoliberal cosmopolitanism born from the historical forces set in motion by neoliberalism.

While the vision of a united North America that emerges from this paradoxical politics is beautiful, it is a utopia predicated on violence. Far from inaugurating a new era of transnational fraternity, NAFTA only heightened the hostility that has poisoned interactions between Americans and Mexicans since the U.S. Marines raised the Stars and Stripes over Mexico City in 1847. The postnational literature these writers produced was not a roadmap to a more just future; it was nothing but a dream, a fantasy—a fiction. Enrigue, Luiselli, and Herrera were among the first, and last, true North Americans: the organic intellectuals of an imagined community that never became real.

The North American Boys

The month after Krauze’s essay was published, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) declared that the Mexican people had chosen its candidate, Salinas, as the “Standard Bearer of the Mexican Revolution.” It was the conclusion to a fraudulent election. For decades, the PRI had managed to raise Mexicans’ standard of living, even if the party sometimes found it necessary to shoot at students and peasants. The bargain was simple: the Standard Bearers would make the people prosperous; in exchange, they asked the people to leave government to them.

Salinas’s ascension came at a delicate time for the party. The PRI’s program of state development depended upon oil exports—and thus on high prices for petroleum in the global commodities markets. In the 1970s, the Arab embargo in solidarity with Palestine had made crude oil expensive, allowing the PRI to borrow from international lenders and quell unrest with social spending. After peaking at $156 per barrel in April 1980, however, the U.S. oil benchmark plummeted to almost $34 in July 1986, triggering a series of economic crises and shattering the compromise that kept the party in power (both figures are adjusted for inflation).

The party’s apparatchiks panicked—until they remembered the cadres they’d sent to the United States to study economics. These young technocrats lifted their heads from reports on the urgent need to end milk subsidies for young mothers and said they could fix this mess. The model to follow, they explained, wasn’t Gorbachev but Deng: instead of trying to placate economic discontent with political reform, the party should placate political unrest with economic reform. After a power struggle that led the PRI’s left wing to quit the party, the older apparatchiks decided the next Standard Bearer would be one of these North American Boys, namely Salinas.

The North American Boys had three goals: renegotiate the national debt, reduce state involvement in the economy, and diversify exports. Their brand of neoliberalism had little in common with that of Augusto Pinochet’s Chicago Boys, but for our purposes we can reduce their ideas to a vulgar slogan: Free markets at home; free trade abroad! But trade with whom? The sister republics of Latin America were broke. Europe was uninterested. China was a competitor. The only option was the empire Mexicans regarded with the most mistrust: the United States.

The North American Boys had broken with the long tradition of bourgeois Mexicans getting their doctorates in Europe and had gone to graduate school at Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Going north to study neoclassical economics was for them a form of rebellion against older PRI apparatchiks, whose mishandling of the economy struck them as idiotic. Like rock music and psychedelics, the cult of the market was American and thus a forbidden fruit. They returned home ready to work through what Fuentes had christened as the Tremendous Texan Trauma, dreaming of an imagined community where Mexicans and Americans would at last be friends.

NAFTA was supposed to be the first step toward this utopia. But when formal negotiations began, Salinas stumbled on a problem: everyone hated the idea. The PRI’s nationalist old guard worried economic integration would entail sacrificing sovereignty; the internationalist left warned free trade without development aid guaranteed disaster; the petit bourgeois businessmen feared competition with Americans would bankrupt them; the unions feared wages would fall; the peasant organizations had nightmares about a flood of Iowa corn; and in the mountains of Chiapas, a group of philosophy students from Mexico City concluded they had to accelerate their plans to muster an insurgent army. To appease these concerns, the North American Boys secured protections for Mexico’s nationalized oil industry—a symbol of the revolution’s struggle against foreign extractivism. In exchange, they agreed to exclude provisions guaranteeing the free movement of people across the U.S.-Mexico border.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how that bargain gave birth to contemporary American fascism. Between 1994 and 1998, the first four years when NAFTA was in effect, tens of thousands of Mexican small businesses went bankrupt, many of which were replaced by deregulated sweatshops. Farms located on communal lands redistributed in the wake of the revolution had been protected from predatory investors by the country’s constitution, but Salinas struck down those safeguards to get the Americans to negotiate. Then, between the early 1990s and 2006, corn imports from the United States grew by over 400 percent. The subsidies the United States paid American farmers meant that corn was sold in Mexico for an average of 19 percent less than its cost of production. The millions of Mexicans who lost their livelihoods were forced to take their labor to the United States. And as the number of Mexicans living in America nearly tripled over two decades, gringos who already hated them in the abstract found concrete reasons for their hatred: they now had to compete for ever-lower wages with undocumented Mexicans. Two decades later, these resentful Americans would cheer Donald Trump as he interned children in concentration camps.

Since most Mexicans were broke, nearly everything made or processed in Mexico—avocados, auto parts, cocaine—fetched higher prices north of the Rio Grande. (Today, exports to the United States account for around one-third of the Mexican GDP.) Crucially, Mexican art could cross the border as easily as avocados; under NAFTA, there was no difference between a film by Alejandro González Iñárritu and a case of Corona. Before long, successful Mexican artists and filmmakers discovered they had an easier time emigrating than most of their fellow nationals, even if they still faced more barriers than a car or a television set. Writers, however, could not count on the well-funded immigration lawyers retained by Hollywood studios and Manhattan museums. They flocked instead to the American institution that until recently had the legal prerogative to endow any foreigner with the right to live and work in the United States: the university.

The North American Novelists

In order to leave their home country to study or teach in America, the NAFTA Novelists needed to be proficient in English and to have undergraduate degrees—two forms of distinction that point to their common origins in Mexico’s middle and upper classes. But if these writers were born relatively comfortable, why did they uproot themselves to try their luck in the United States? To best answer the question, we’ll have to retrace the path that led one of the pioneers of the NAFTA Novel to emigrate.

Álvaro Enrigue was born in 1969 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, but grew up in Mexico City. His father was a mid-level bureaucrat at the Secretariat for Finance; his mother was a Catalan chemist, one of tens of thousands of refugees who immigrated to Mexico after the fall of the Spanish Republic. These public-sector jobs afforded the family a middle-class lifestyle, but their long hours meant that Enrigue spent much of his time alone in his parent’s apartment, reading through their well-curated library.

Around the time the young Enrigue fell in love with literature in the early 1980s, the Mexican economy began coming apart. The Mexico of those years, Enrigue told me over email, looked more like “communist Poland” than what comes to mind when we think of the country today. Negotiations for NAFTA began while Enrigue was finishing his communications degree at Universidad Iberoamericana, and by the time the agreement was ratified, he and his partner were working as hard to get ready for their first child as his parents had worked to support four. The couple’s white-collar jobs, Enrigue told me, were demanding—he wrote copy for news, science, and arts-and-culture segments at ABC Radio; his partner did translation and media analysis for a public relations firm—yet so poorly paid that the new family felt as if they “were always treading water.”

When NAFTA finally went into effect on January 1, 1994, Salinas woke up with a pleasant hangover. He’d thrown a legendary party in the presidential palace the night before to celebrate the New Year—as well as his own entrance into history. But then the unthinkable happened, again and again and again. First, the Zapatista uprising. Months later, the PRI’s presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, was assassinated. Then, in December, the mandarins of Colosio’s substitute, Ernesto Zedillo, discovered that their predecessors had made a mistake by availing themselves of one of the oldest tricks in the party playbook: increasing social spending during election years to pacify the masses for a few months. To fund this vote-buying racket, they issued short-term Treasury bonds that sounded like a sweet deal: lend the Mexican government your pesos and the government would repay you in dollars. But the Zapatistas and Colosio’s killer had spooked the foreign investors that NAFTA was supposed to attract. This sudden capital flight threatened the fixed exchange rate between the peso and the dollar—which in turn posed an existential risk to an economy that had just opened its doors to American capital.

Faced with this oncoming catastrophe, Salinas’s mandarins reversed course: they borrowed dollars to buy pesos, making the Mexican currency artificially scarce and thus propping up its value in the foreign exchange. But the world’s financiers called their bluff and declared the peso overvalued, which accelerated capital flight. The mandarins were forced to buy their own dollar-denominated bonds, until the Mexican Treasury all but ran out of dollars. By then Zedillo was in office, but there was not much to be done. The new administration took a deep breath and pulled the plug, devaluing the peso, crashing the economy, and almost causing a global meltdown.

In the wake of the December Mistake, the radio station made dramatic cuts to Enrigue’s hours—and thus to his income. But there was an upside: he finally had time to write. While the broke publishing industry put out few new literary titles that year, Joaquín Mortiz, a press known for taking risks, announced a contest for first-time novelists. Enrigue finished his entry hours before the end of the submissions period. The farcical tale of an installation artist swept up in the orbit of a wealthy collector who fancies himself an artist but turns out to be a psychopath, the novel was bad, Enrigue thought. But he was desperate to bury his dreams with a good conscience before focusing on finding work.

The bad novel, however, won the prize and was released to instant acclaim, transforming the twenty-seven-year-old Enrigue into one of Mexico’s best-known writers. Its more consequential effect was creating the conditions for a new literature. Consider a passage from an interview that Enrigue granted to nexos in 2021:

La muerte de un instalador was critical of the transformation unleashed by Mexico’s opening to the world—but also overwhelmed by it. I think that novel was a direct consequence of the brute-force globalization that NAFTA came to represent. It reflects the fear and dazzlement of a kid who grew up in the deeply provincial world of Mexico’s post revolutionary nationalism.

By the time Enrigue’s novel became a success, his first child had been born. He and his partner concluded that raising their son in the midst of the crisis would be too difficult and decided to emigrate. “There were two possible destinations: Europe or the States,” Enrigue told me. The couple decided to go to the United States because two of their literary friends, the editor Marcelo Uribe and the poet Coral Bracho, had enrolled in the doctoral program in Spanish at the University of Maryland at College Park, where a number of well-known Mexican authors taught at the time. Besides, Enrigue’s partner was an American citizen, so he was able to apply for permanent residency. The family moved to Maryland in 1998. Enrigue returned to Mexico a few years later and wouldn’t receive his degree until 2012, but he had become an early adopter of the North American Perspective.

While Enrigue was not the first Mexican writer from his generation to pursue graduate studies in the United States—Cristina Rivera Garza completed her PhD at the University of Houston in 1995—he was far from the last. In 2003, the University of Texas at El Paso awarded Yuri Herrera an MFA in creative writing. By the time Valeria Luiselli’s cohort was graduating from college, New York had dethroned Paris as the dream destination for aspiring Mexican writers.

The North American Archive

After his MFA, Herrera went on to earn a doctorate in Spanish in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research centered on the mining industry in Hidalgo, the landlocked state where he was born. When Herrera was young, his parents had relocated to the state capital of Pachuca, one of the most important mining hubs in Mexico. The experience of living among a bona fide industrial proletariat shaped Herrera’s radical politics and writing. His dissertation was unorthodox by the standards of literature departments; instead of focusing on literary texts, it drew on oral history to dismantle the “historical lie” told by court records related to the 1920 mining accident that killed eighty-seven workers in Pachuca. After a fire broke out in a mine owned by an American company, the administrators had collapsed all entrances and exits to the tunnels, hoping to choke out the fire by cutting off oxygen and claiming that the miners inside were long dead. That story was difficult to square with the fact that, when they finally opened the shafts days later, several workers were still alive. For Herrera, a critique of capitalism in Mexico is by definition incomplete without an account of its imperial relationship with the United States—hence his adoption of the North American Perspective, in both scholarship and fiction.

Herrera’s most recent novel is set in New Orleans, where he has been a professor at Tulane since 2011. Season of the Swamp is about a minor episode in the biography of Benito Juárez, the Zapotec lawyer who became Mexico’s first Indigenous president. Historians, journalists, hagiographers, poets, and novelists have written about every aspect of his life, but there’s a small gap in the record. Long before he became president, Juárez’s Liberal Party was defeated by Conservative rivals; like so many Mexicans during hard times, he moved to the United States. Juárez and his liberal comrades arrived in New Orleans in 1853, eight years before the Civil War. That he returned home eighteen months later is about all we know for certain.

Herrera decided to fill the factual gap with fiction. In that sense, Season of the Swamp is a conventional Latin American historical novel, a close relative to Gabriel García Márquez’s book about Simón Bolívar, The General in His Labyrinth. As the Cuban literary theorist Roberto González Echevarría has argued, the literature of the Hispanic New World emerged from the tradition of legal and notarial writing of the Spanish Empire, whose lawyerly bureaucracy produced mountains of documents on nearly every aspect of life in the colonies. Authors were immersed in this archive from the start, which González Echevarría calls the “origin myth” of Latin American literature. This figurative archive grew to incorporate nineteenth-century naturalism and twentieth-century anthropology, culminating with the Latin American Boom. The novels it produced, such as García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, aspired to become archives themselves.

Herrera’s innovation consists in setting one of these Latin American novels in the United States and filling it with material drawn from an anglophone archive—specifically, newspapers published in antebellum Louisiana. The novel consists to a large extent of passages taken from the press, a gesture reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: “That a fisherman grabbed his dagger and stabbed an officer in the chest after being fined for the fifth time for selling bad fish. That two engineers on a steamer got in a knife fight over a woman. That a powder keg was found on Canal, on neutral ground, as if anyone needed more fire.” New Orleans becomes so vivid that Juárez himself at times seems a perspective without a perceiver. If he is rather taciturn, however, his comrades in exile sound like Mexican revolutionaries, declaring that “the people should have the land, that’s fair and just.”

Here, Season of the Swamp’s status as a NAFTA Novel becomes clear. Mexican readers know enough about Juárez that the man need not say much to serve his narrative function as a familiar proxy exploring a place as unfamiliar to him as to the reader. An American readership, by contrast, knows enough about New Orleans that it can serve a reciprocal function as a familiar setting for characters as foreign to the reader as to the city. The novel is neither Mexican nor American, neither a Latin American archive fiction nor a U.S. documentary poem.

Nowhere is the aesthetic and political richness of the North American point of view clearer than in a passage where the man who will become first Indigenous leader of Mexico since 1521 is mistaken for an enslaved person. The exiles are walking in the street when they are approached by a cop. “Who’s this one belong to?” he asks. “You do know he can be here after eight only in the company of his owner or with written permission.” When the exiles don’t answer, the cop grows confused: “Wha . . . ? You ain’t . . . Wait, all dressed like that . . . What are you?” One of Juárez’s friends replies: “Mexican.”

This encounter proves transformative. Confronting the alienation of being mistaken for chattel, Juárez realizes that history has a task for him. Similarly, Mexican readers are invited to consider that most American history—slavery—is also their history; if Mexico as we know it would be unthinkable without Juárez, Juárez would be unthinkable without New Orleans. For their part, American readers are invited to consider the possibility that Mexico’s past might be the future they should aspire to reach. The two histories meet halfway, and suddenly we see that the border is a fiction, that neither side can exist without the other, that we share a past, present, and future—none of which can be contained by the concept of “nation.” In this way, we all become North Americans.

© Nick Dahlen

The North American Mediation

If one of the NAFTA Novel’s signature characteristics is to enact and thematize a mediation between Mexico and the United States, then Valeria Luiselli is an archetypal interpreter. Born in Mexico City in 1983 into a wealthy family, her father was an adviser to President José López Portillo and, later, the Mexican ambassador to South Korea and South Africa under Salinas. Her mother, however, was an activist for Indigenous rights; Luiselli credits her in an early essay with instilling in her “a certain class guilt.” In 1994, when the future novelist was ten years old, and NAFTA had just begun, her mother decided to leave the family to live and work with the Zapatistas.

After graduating from an international boarding school in India, Luiselli moved to Mexico City and studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional. She began writing for Krauze’s magazine Letras Libres, where she met Enrigue. The two began dating, and they moved together to New York for her graduate studies in literature at Columbia in 2008 (they have since divorced).

Luiselli’s first years in America were busy. After publishing a first book of accomplished, if bloodless, essays about subjects such as bicycles and maps, she had a child and wrote two novels in Spanish: Faces in the Crowd, a Borges-meets-Duras number about a Mexican literary translator living in New York who engages in forgery to please her American employer’s insatiable appetite for “the next Bolaño,” and The Story of My Teeth, an art-world routine that is neither about teeth nor much of a story. Both books were well received in New York and earned the author deserved accolades, including a teaching position at Bard College—and a green card awarded on literary merit. Luiselli’s early reception in Mexico, however, illustrates the risk of adopting the North American Perspective: to be called a foreigner in your own country. About the nicest thing the head critic at Letras Libres had to say about her first two novels was that “Luiselli . . . owes more to North American poetry [la poesía norteamericana] than to Spanish-language fiction.”

In 2019, after a transformative experience volunteering as an interpreter at an immigration court, Luiselli published Lost Children Archive. In a first for the author, who perhaps concluded that her fellow Mexicans would never forgive her for capitulating to the American gaze, it was written originally in English—and therefore addresses an American reader much more directly. As a result, the novel represents a radicalized approach to the North American Perspective: having previously written about a literary translator struggling with the expectation that she import her Mexicanness to New York, Luiselli has decided to translate herself.

The plot—a couple on the verge of divorce take their son and daughter on a road trip from their home in New York to a remote part of Arizona—is a framing device for the novel’s central concern: the large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to reunite with family members. This decade-plus humanitarian crisis elicits Lost Children Archive’s central philosophical question: How could a writer like Luiselli hope to tell the stories of these children without becoming a “ventriloquist” of those “most silenced peoples,” the accusation she once levied against Toni Morrison in an unfortunate early essay for a Letras Libres issue devoted to undeserving Nobel laureates?

As with the NAFTA Novelists in general, moving to the United States shifted Luiselli’s perspective; the experience of being transformed into a subaltern, however privileged, raised her political consciousness. Suddenly Morrison’s novels made more sense (which perhaps explains why her essay has been scrubbed from the Letras Libres website). The novel is her attempt to work through the structural conditions that underwrote her earlier dismissal. The dilemma of ventriloquism is that of the unnamed Mexican mother narrating the novel’s first half. Like her husband, an American, she records soundscapes for a living. He’s a quasi-situationist who conducts “no direct interviews” and instead prefers “just walking around listening”; she comes from the world of “hard-core political journalism” and “pragmatic storytelling.” The couple joke that she is a “documentarist” and he a “documentarian.” They met while working on an NYU-sponsored project recording a sample of every language spoken in New York City—which could just as well be an approving representation of liberal diversity sentimentalism as a parody of the same.

Luiselli, however, writes from the North American Perspective, so she knows that the bien-pensant platitudes of Manhattan are not the whole story. As a child, she had a front-row seat to the historical cataclysm that brought the speakers of many of those languages to New York—including, unbelievably, herself. Toward the beginning of the novel, the narrator declares that “new families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time.” The suggestion is that the marriage between the Mexican documentarist and the American documentarian has given form not just to a new family but also to a young nation—or, more accurately, a supranational imagined community. But in acknowledging that the North America personified by the “little tribe” is the product of “violent wars” and “social revolutions”—words that are common enough in bourgeois Mexico but have no place in liberal America’s melting-pot fantasies—Luiselli proves that she is one of the greatest exponents of the NAFTA Novel. The narrator’s happiness, much like the sentimental diversity fantasy parodied in her and her husband’s work, has come at the price of the suffering that neoliberalism has unleashed on the continent.

When the couple finally finish the project that brought them together, they realize that their approaches, like their personalities, are less compatible than they thought. He begins plotting an “inventory of echoes” about the Apache; she develops an obsessive interest in the “children’s crisis at the border” after the mother of one of her daughter’s classmates, an Indigenous woman from Oaxaca, asks for her help translating legal documents to secure the release of her children from a Texas detention center. She applies for a grant to produce a “sound documentary” that, unlike most media, will “cover the situation from the perspective of the children.”

Soon, however, her project presents her with a long list of impossible dilemmas. Politically, she wonders, “how can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum?” Ethically, she wrings her hands about why she would think that she “can or should make art with someone else’s suffering?” Her other anxieties sound like Bari Weiss in reverse: “cultural appropriation,” “micromanaging identity politics,” “the correct use of personal pronouns.” The list is funny but elides the most important problem: other than the cries, sobs, and testimonies she records while volunteering as an interpreter in a New York immigration court, she is unlikely to have a chance to record any of the “lost children.”

But then the documentarist’s husband drops an unexpected bomb: his project about the Apaches will require him to move to the Southwest, effectively ending their marriage. Yet the couple aren’t ready to give up, and so they agree on a compromise: the family will drive to Arizona together. Along the way, she and her husband will work on their respective projects. After that, she reflects, they will probably split up, and she will return to New York without her husband.

The bulk of the book is the story of this road trip: a long succession of descriptions of landscapes, motels, diners, gas stations; short vignettes that register the family’s interactions with strangers both friendly and hostile; conversations, arguments, and reconciliations; inventories of the audiobooks and music they play, the books they read, the Polaroids the boy takes with his stepmother’s camera. Interspersed throughout are bits and pieces of Apache history, fragments of radio dispatches about the “crisis at the border,” and chapters of a modernist prose poem about the medieval Children’s Crusade. Luiselli manages these modes by putting González Echevarría’s theories into practice and structuring the novel as an archive, a collection of documents that aren’t so much a single story as narrative building blocks for any number of stories. Since none of these narratives is definitive—because all exclude part of the collection—the archive becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of telling a story that isn’t partial.

And yet, the novel sometimes indulges in too-easy catharsis. After hearing from the radio that migrant children are set to be deported on a billionaire’s private jet, the family takes a detour to the airfield. By the time they get there, the children are being loaded onto the plane. After a breakdown worthy of a Hallmark movie, the mother asks the boy, watching the scene through his binoculars, to describe what he sees. He narrates the scene as if the lost children were astronauts in a starship out of the David Bowie record his parents have been playing in the car.

Critics have noted that this reassuring fantasy absolves Luiselli’s American readership of their guilty conscience. I would add that it does so by adopting their point of view, abandoning the North American Perspective. The children of these affluent, liberal readers will never be lost. But just as our narrator’s children can imagine that a flight carrying other kids back to hell is Ziggy Stardust’s spaceship, even Barack Obama, who included the novel in his annual list of recommendations despite personally approving the deportation of millions, can imagine what it would be like to lose his own daughters to a government as cruel as his own.

The North American Catastrophe

For all its utopianism, the NAFTA Novel remains the literary form of a diminutive bourgeois class: the lettered colonials tasked with mediating between the elites of Mexico and the United States. But the latter elite no longer has use for such cosmopolitan intermediaries. In the summer of 2025, as Luiselli prepared to teach her fall classes at Bard, Trump attempted to ban international students from attending Harvard, where she’d previously been a visiting professor. While a court soon issued a stay on that outrageous order, one wonders whether Luiselli’s successors will be able to convert their student visas into green cards.

The current phase of North American neoliberalism has given rise to situations whose moral ugliness exceeds the Obama-era identity liberalism that makes up the ideological substratum of Lost Children Archive. Every day, the Mexican American children of peasants displaced by NAFTA put on the U.S. Border Patrol’s green uniform—or the gray-and-white fatigues of the branch of the Mexican Army that enforces immigration policies imposed by the United States—and head into the desert to hunt children born on the wrong side of the southern Mexican border. History has its ways of reminding us that even those whom we’ve grown accustomed to seeing as the oppressed are capable of wielding imperial violence.

Perhaps that’s why Enrigue, that early adopter of the North American Perspective, came to terms with recent events by writing a book about the moral ambiguity that inevitably colors interactions between two imperial elites on the brink of an alliance that would benefit their ruling houses—thanks to postnational translators who are at once subaltern intermediaries and among the most privileged people in North America—while condemning the rest of the continent to even harsher oppression. Published in Spanish in 2022 and in English last year, You Dreamed of Empires is a NAFTA Novel about the death of the NAFTA Novel. Set largely over the course of November 8, 1519, with a few flashbacks and one wild flight of fancy that rushes through the following five centuries, the novel is a hallucinatory account of the day Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma Xocoyotzin met for the first time in the floating metropolis of Tenoxtitlan (Enrigue renders the capital of the Mexica Triple Alliance, inaccurately known as “the Aztec Empire,” as it appears in sixteenth-century documents) on the site that is now Mexico City.

Much like Herrera’s and Luiselli’s novels, You Dreamed of Empires features a North American Archive, the contents of which are partially enumerated in the epilogue. The collection includes colonial texts familiar to any cultured Mexican—Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain, Cortés’s own Letters of Relation—as well as canonical literary works ranging from the baroque dramas of Calderón de la Barca to the postmodern stories of Borges. It includes contemporary Mexican historiography, as well as scholarship produced in American universities: the groundbreaking work of anglophone authors such as Camilla Townsend and Matthew Restall. More compelling than the archive are the book’s gestures of mediation, the most complex and least hopeful of the genre. But for nearly two hundred pages, as we read the opening chapter of one of the best-known narratives in the world, we are able to believe that, thanks to translators, another world is possible.

In sharp contrast to recent American books about the period by authors so desperate to atone for their country’s imperial arrogance they wind up painting condescending portrayals of Indigenous people as innocent sheep awaiting slaughter, Enrigue depicts the Mexica as human beings with the capacity for both good and evil. The members of the Mexica court are presented not as victims but as imperial noblemen who wouldn’t be out of place in Rome. Indeed, the Spaniards are humbled by the beauty of Tenoxtitlan, a clean, bustling New World Venice, larger than any city they have seen. It isn’t clear which dream of empire—the Spaniards’ or the Mexicas’—is about to end and which to come true.

The most sympathetic Indigenous character in Enrigue’s narrative is the translator Malinche, whom Mexican nationalism has traditionally portrayed as a traitor to her people. A Nahuatl-speaking princess from the coast, she is enslaved and given in tribute to a Maya warlord, who in turn gifts her to Cortés. Suddenly transformed into the most powerful woman in the world by nature of being the only one who understands the languages of both sides, at first she pretends not to speak Spanish and communicates with Cortés through a second interpreter. But she eventually reveals her secret to Cortés, who has no idea that the Mexica refer to him as the consort of his translator. There is a moment between them that seems to echo the metaphor of the binational family as a new nation that we found in Lost Children Archive. Malinche, floating amid flowers in a palace pool, wonders why Cortés wants to give the empire to the distant king of Spain. “All she had to do was steer him right,” she thinks, “make him understand that if he played his pieces in the most practical way, they could take a city for themselves.” That capital would be neither Mexica nor Spanish, and yet both at once: a North American Rome.

In the final scene of the novel, however, the pure potentiality of Malinche’s imagined community meets a gruesome end. Moctezuma, very high on mushrooms, calls Cortés to the throne room. An elaborate ceremony follows. The emperor convinces Cortés to take mushrooms too, and the conquistador has a vision of the coming course of history: war breaks out; the Mexica are defeated; Spain gains an empire; Mexico becomes independent; and Enrigue writes his novel. But then Cortés wakes up, still in the throne room, and Moctezuma orders one of his men to break his neck. Nobody will stop the Mexica now: they have horses. Their imperial dream has come true.

Though the Mexica and the Spaniards are obvious stand-ins for Mexico and the United States, the allegory is ambiguous. The Spaniards of You Dreamed of Empires are foreigners at the mercy of an empire ruled by a cruel and frivolous despot, yet well positioned to destabilize the tenuous equilibrium that sustains the imperial ruling class—which suggests the Mexica could in fact represent the Americans. Likewise, Moctezuma talks in contemporary Mexican slang, but he dances to rock music in English. Cortés is a blond beast and a rapist—but he’s also an idiot, easily duped and murdered. The translator is the most powerful woman in the world but also enslaved: a fallen princess and an empress in the making, a victim of sexual violence and a Machiavellian opportunist.

Unlike Luiselli, Enrigue has no patience for diversity sentimentalism; unlike Herrera, he does not believe in historical heroes. Here, I think, is the heart of his critique of the neoliberal utopianism that animated the Mexican architects of NAFTA. Consider this quote from a nexos interview with Salinas for an oral history of the treaty:

We Mexicans are the product of so many different mixtures, aren’t we? Hernán Cortés recounts that, when he met Moctezuma for the first time, the Aztec ruler said to him: “You are welcome here, because in this land we’re all foreigners.” Why do I bring this up? Because that’s part of the reason why we decided to open things up. When we first took steps to negotiate the agreement, people who had valid concerns would say: “Hey, this is bringing us too close to the outside world.” But we came from outside. The great thing about Mexicans is that we’ve managed to assimilate the different currents that flowed into the origin of our country, those brought by the Spaniards, yes, but also the Jewish, Arab, and African currents, the currents of those who arrived here against their will, brought as slaves. That was what gave me enough confidence to take such a momentous step.

Perhaps this is the cipher that unlocks Enrigue’s allegorical critique of the North American Perspective: Moctezuma is Salinas, a man who, by dreaming of empires, opened the doors to the imperialists. But what are we to do with that? The NAFTA Novel has no answers. Running under the polished surface of Enrigue’s novel is a barely suppressed anxiety. For all of their class privileges, he, Luiselli, and Herrera remain Mexican nationals living in the United States under the second Trump presidency. The way things are going, the NAFTA Novelists—and younger generations of Mexican writers—may soon be obliged to follow the advice Jorge Luis Borges offered the other Jorge Luis Borges: leave behind the form that has served them so well and “imagine other things.”

Perhaps the Post-NAFTA Novel will abandon its predecessor’s sometimes neurotic insistence on transnational legibility and embrace the erudite obscurity that disappeared from North American letters when admiring Ezra Pound ceased to be acceptable. Perhaps it will reject as tiresomely sentimental all notions of writing as mediation between cultures and instead thematize the impossibility of translation, embracing formal devices that punish monolingual readers or telling bitterly pessimistic stories about transnational conflict at the level of interpersonal relations. Perhaps it will accept the challenge posed by Enrigue’s latest novel and repurpose the hallucinatory affect of late empire as the driving force of fiction in which history is so out of joint that even the wildest conspiracy theories seem coherent by comparison.

Speculation about the novel of the future is little comfort to the novelists of the present. But setting aside the woes of bourgeois Mexican immigrants, the current moment has revealed that, even at its most idealistic, the North American Perspective envisions a postnational region—not a borderless world. The two migrant children who haunt the background of Lost Children Archive are Indigenous girls from Mexico, but for years the migrants who have suffered most from the cruelty of the American government—and increasingly the Mexican government—have been citizens of nations such as Guatemala, Haiti, and Venezuela, where the sort of hardship brought about by the December Mistake has been the rule for decades rather than a transient exception. North America, it turns out, is not an island.

Home City, USA

The economic and spiritual effects of mass deportation

Pooja Bhatia

© Diego Mallo

Throughout the years, boosters of Springfield, Ohio, have chosen nicknames that suggest a welcoming, prosperous city. “Champion City” pays tribute to the nineteenth-century farm-implements company that made the Champion reaper and later became part of International Harvester, helping to seed an economic boom that lasted into the 1920s. “City of Roses” comes from the same era, when Springfield grew more roses than any other city. “Home City” alludes to the charitable homes for orphans and the elderly built by the turn of the twentieth century—casting Springfield as a kind of refuge.

But Home City became a cruel misnomer during the 2024 presidential campaign, when Springfield was targeted by Republicans and white nationalists who incited public hostility toward its growing community of Haitian immigrants. Having escaped violence and persecution in Haiti, many of the newcomers mistook Springfield for a safe haven. The inauguration of Donald Trump, who seems to harbor special animus toward Haitians, ended that. By April, when I visited the city, thousands of Haitian residents were lying low or in hiding or had fled, fearing the prospect of a state-sponsored purge. Mass deportations would come, they and others in town believed; the only question was when. Uncertainty became a terror unto itself.

I’d been following the city’s saga for a year before last September’s second televised presidential debate, when a heinous lie dripped from Trump’s lips and, by some awful alchemy, turned the city into a magnet for hate and moronity from all over the country. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.” The lie became a meme, a TikTok craze, a canard celebrated by replacement-theory paranoiacs. On the ground in Springfield that month, the struggle was existential. Haitians kept their children home from school; some were attacked, some fled. A rash of bomb threats forced evacuations and closures of buildings all over town. Citizens who had publicly supported immigrants were singled out for hostile treatment. They faced death threats, harassment online and off, defamation, slander, doxing, and a type of swatting involving a gay dating app.

As president, Trump has continued to lie about Haitians in Springfield—almost every word he’s uttered about them is the opposite of the truth. He’s inflated their numbers, misrepresented their legal status (most are documented), and accused them of having “destroyed” a previously “idyllic” city. Local officials have tried to fight disinformation with facts, but that hasn’t worked. What national Republicans unleashed here was less like an infection than an autoimmune disease, the body politic attacking itself for reasons no one really understands. Facts seemed to make the inflammation hotter, more painful. “The greatest hardship we have faced in the past six months is the mischaracterization of our city,” Republican Mayor Rob Rue said in a statement after Trump again cited Springfield as an example of “migrant occupation” in an address before a joint session of Congress in March.

On one matter only, Springfielders could believe what Trump said, whether they saw it as a promise or a threat: that he was targeting their city for a mass deportation of its Haitian residents. Some fixated on August 3, when, barring a stay of Trump’s executive orders ending their Temporary Protected Status (TPS), many of Springfield’s Haitians would be subject to removal. Many had already received intimidating and false communiqués from the federal government ordering them to self-deport. Some residents told me they believed that Trump had plans for a mass deportation there this summer. A June 12 post by Trump, name-checking Springfield and claiming a “Historic Mandate” for mass deportations, triggered another wave of terror. “The fact that the president cannot keep our city out of his mouth means that I know he’s not forgotten us, and so I’m concerned what the outcome will be,” Rue said afterward. “We want to live in peace and freedom, and we do the best we can.”

I was nervous to visit. Springfield’s residents had been exploited, terrorized, and shamed, and many now faced the prospect of state-sponsored violence. And here I was, another journalist on the scene to examine their wounds, not to salve or soothe but to tell outsiders yet another story about them. I anticipated wary stares, pursed lips, and possibly even racism directed at me, a brown person on her own. Perhaps some of Trump’s lies had seeped into my consciousness, despite my defenses, because I imagined Springfield as a downtrodden place, an ugly, dangerous landscape full of loss and hate.

Backward Together

That’s not what I found. I drove into Springfield gawping through the windshield. The houses were gorgeous. There were imposing porticoes and fanciful turrets, mansards whose shingles looked like fish scales, and countless architectural fancies I lacked the vocabulary to name. Some houses resembled bigger versions of San Francisco’s storied Victorians—tall, wooden, whimsical. On High Street, there was a low-slung, red-roofed abode designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1906. It lay in disrepair for decades until 2001, when a local foundation began its painstaking rehabilitation.

A few blocks down, a hulking stone pile loomed over a wide, sloping setback. A revival Romanesque built in the 1880s for Asa S. Bushnell, a farm-equipment magnate who became Ohio’s governor, the house served for a time as the de facto governor’s mansion. But no one has lived there in ages. Today, like several other storied properties, the Bushnell mansion is a funeral home.

Venturing farther, you can see the decline the city has been through. Springfield’s south side is filled with otherwise magisterial houses that are now dilapidated: dandelion lots, peeled paint, soot stains, broken or boarded-up windows. The ramshackle houses give the wide, optimistic avenues a ghostly air, as if their edifices were specters of Springfield’s millionaires past, haunting and taunting the living as they drive to their second shift, school pickup, or one of the city’s dozen dollar stores.

I’d read about the city’s housing crisis. Rents surged after Haitian newcomers agreed—credulously, vulnerably—to pay far more than the going rate. The angry longtime residents who attend meetings at city hall every other week sometimes acknowledged that the high rents were not the fault of the newcomers, that both the white working class and precarious black migrants had gotten screwed by greedy landlords. But a lot of those who spoke out still didn’t want the Haitians around.

Throughout the week, I learned of heroic efforts at downtown revitalization: old factories and historic markets have been turned into breweries, restaurants, a snazzy coworking space. I toured the Wright house. Every day, I drove past a certain High Street mansion, cheerful yellow with tall shutters, that is an object of local controversy. It’s now an employment agency. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., its parking lot fills with cars, and Haitians pass in and out. Here are people trying to move “forward together,” as Springfield’s omnipresent city motto has it. They’ve come, per the phrase chache lavi, to look for their lives.

Unceasing the Crisis

Though there has never been a reliable count, officials estimated last year that between twelve and fifteen thousand Haitians were living in Clark County, which includes Springfield, adding about 17 to 20 percent to its population since the last census in 2020. The city was not prepared. There weren’t enough interpreters at schools or at the public-health clinic. Longtime tenants faced a dramatic affordability crisis; with Ohio prohibiting rent control, there were few available measures to address the skyrocketing rents. Roads grew crowded with erratic drivers.

On the morning of August 22, 2023, a Haitian drove over a median and struck an oncoming school bus. The bus swerved, flipped, and tumbled down an embankment. An eleven-year-old boy was pronounced dead at the scene; twenty-six others were injured, one of them seriously. It was the first day of school.

Aiden Clark’s death opened the floodgates of grievance. During the public-comments portion of the next week’s city commission meeting, residents barraged officials with anger, fear, and frustration in three-minute increments.

“Did we become a sanctuary city?”

“Who’s bringing ’em in?”

“Are they getting money from the city?”

“Who allowed the Haitian flag to be flown at our public building back in May? I didn’t know that we honored other countries’ flags on their flag day, especially when they fled a country that was so scary they couldn’t stay.”

“How do we know we’re not getting criminals, rapists?”

“When you say that there’s nothing we can do at the city level—how do you take a bunch of immigrants, put ’em on Martha’s Vineyard, and the next day they disappear?”

“How many more children have to die or be hurt?”

“Illegals!” a man shouted from the audience a couple of times.

By October 2023, the deceased boy’s parents were begging fellow citizens not to use their son’s name in connection “with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings.” Forced to pivot, outrage found new forms. At commission meetings, residents accused their leaders of profiting from the immigrants; implied that resident Haitians, who had fled a land laid low by gangs, were themselves criminals; and invoked internet research to claim the newcomers had IQs lower than animals. The claims were as wildly absurd as Clark’s death was grave—travesties of sublimation, perhaps. They created a cesspool of paranoia and hysteria from which the monstrous dogs-and-cats lie rose.

I wanted to ask the commission why it tolerated all this invective. “We are not taking interviews on this matter at this time,” a city spokesperson wrote to me. Maybe officials reasoned that even deranged comments offered a chance to correct the record, that the appearance of censorship would fuel conspiratorial thinking. Or that the meetings were a release valve on a pressure cooker. The city’s guidelines against “rude, vulgar, offensive or disparaging comments” haven’t stopped scantily coded rhetoric about “an invasion,” “heritage citizens,” and “replacement.” A private Facebook group, Stop the Influx into Springfield, Ohio, is where some go to say the quiet parts out loud. The commission’s only black member, Krystal Brown, announced in February that she’d not be seeking reelection in part because of the “vileness” some citizens expressed.

Public comment at the commission meetings is technically open to anyone who lives in Clark County. But very few Haitian residents have spoken at them. And only a minority of residents has taken to the dais to urge kindness and humaneness. One consistent voice of welcome belongs to Pastor Carl Ruby, who believes that welcoming and protecting immigrants and other vulnerable people is central to Christianity. “Carl Ruby is a piece-of-shit coyote who should be run out of town,” an anti-immigrant resident posted on Facebook, according to Ruby. He was able to get that comment taken down, but the nastiness soon resumed.

Over the course of my reporting in Springfield, I learned that the lopsided views in the public comments aren’t proof of majority hostility among residents, many of whom have shown courage and generosity in other ways. But there was a painfully won understanding among those who support immigrants that their three-minute speeches were likelier to put a target on their own backs than to change minds or soften hearts.

One of Ruby’s primary worries is for the safety of his congregation, given other episodes of violence at houses of worship. Ohio doesn’t require permits for gun ownership, open carry, or concealed carry. A sign on the door of Ruby’s church prohibits firearms inside.

A Piece of the Continent

Emigration and exile have been part of Haiti’s cultural fabric for decades, at least since the start of François Duvalier’s dictatorship in 1957, when people fled in search of safety and a better shot at a decent life. During periods of hope—as after the fall of the dictatorship in 1986, the first democratic elections in 1990, and reconstruction efforts after the 2010 earthquake—Haitians have returned to their fallen paradise to try to rebuild. But its people are increasingly diasporic. Over the past fifteen years, the money migrants send home, a good indicator of emigration, has accounted for a rising portion of Haiti’s GDP.

Most Haitians in Springfield arrived after the worst of the pandemic, in 2021. They did not, in general, come directly from Haiti but had spent years beforehand on the move—from Florida to Indiana to Ohio, say, or from the Dominican Republic to Brazil to Chile to Mexico. Haiti had been falling into an abyss of violence and anarchy for several years, a fragile state tipped over the edge by a U.S. government that propped up compliant, corrupt leaders despite robust opposition.

In retrospect, 2021 was pivotal in the saga of the United States’ and Haiti’s mutual entanglement. Stimulus spending intended to keep the U.S. economy afloat during the pandemic was winding down, and Americans were losing federal unemployment benefits and other relief. That July, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, whom the United States had steadfastly supported despite his corruption, autocracy, and violent repression of dissent, was assassinated in his bedroom. That September, in Del Rio, Texas, Border Patrol agents drove out more than ten thousand asylum seekers, most of them Haitian, who had been sheltering beneath an overpass, in foul conditions, as they waited to make their claims at the border. A photograph showed a mounted Border Patrol officer who appeared to be lashing a Haitian man with a whip. The man, later identified as Mirard Joseph, was carrying plastic bags, knotted at the handles, filled with Styrofoam containers of food for his family.

The episode outraged Americans. The right seized on it as evidence of border chaos and insecurity. Others saw resonances of our country’s long history of antiblack and anti-immigrant violence. Then-President Joe Biden called the photographs “horrible,” as though his own administration’s policies hadn’t helped create the conditions at Del Rio in the first place. Chief among them was its extension of Title 42, a public-health order that the first Trump regime used to deny entry to asylum seekers at the border. Sealing off the border, or trying to, was what led to the debacle at Del Rio. Masterfully, the xenophobic, anti-immigrant right twisted the situation in Del Rio to accuse Biden of championing “open borders.”

The Del Rio debacle was significant to Springfield, not because the poor souls stuck under that bridge ended up there (many were deported to Haiti or “voluntarily” returned to Mexico) but because it was a PR disaster for Biden. He needed to end the spectacle of black migrants congregating at the border. In quick order, his administration ended Title 42 and launched a “humanitarian parole” program for Haitians. This enabled more than two hundred thousand Haitians to legally reside and work in the United States, usually for periods of two years. Those who entered the United States before June 2024 were also eligible to apply for TPS, which had been renewed for Haitians, mostly in eighteen-month increments, since 2010. (The first Trump administration’s attempt to end TPS for Haitians, in 2019, was snarled in litigation and, eventually, mooted by Biden’s election.)

Parole and TPS have amounted to shoddy jury-rigging, workarounds for a busted immigration system. Parole, which makes its recipients sound like criminals, provides entry through the back door. TPS can be renewed for a lifetime, so long as the president has enough humanity to refrain from stoking his base’s worse instincts. Both allow beneficiaries to apply for work permits, but neither provides a path to citizenship or, as we see in Springfield, durable protection. Instead, they allow Haitians to exist in the United States as laborers. When their labor is no longer needed or wanted, the laws provide for their removal.

The greatest tragedy of Springfield may also be the oldest: a failure of sight and solidarity that has let politicians get away with anything they want. Nativist Springfielders decrying an immigrant “invasion” may not notice the state is cutting back on funding to municipalities and opioid treatment in order to fund tax breaks for the rich. They may not dwell on federal cutbacks to food pantry programs like Second Harvest. “It’s disheartening how effective some of the politicians have been in creating these wedges around race, place of origin, you name it,” said Hannah Halbert, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio. “There’s so much common suffering and struggling in a lot of these communities across those lines of difference.” The anti-immigrant right cannot see that they and Haitians are in the same boat.

Vows of Parity

Casey Rollins taught in Springfield’s schools for thirty-four years, and though she’s been retired for almost a decade, it’s still easy to imagine Mrs. Rollins as the cool teacher. She has lively eyes, a rebellious streak, and pinkish cheeks that redden when she gets verklempt. “Reflecting is the hardest part,” she said. “Handling it is easier, because you’re tough, and you got to get in there and do it. But when you want to reflect on it, it gets pretty emotional. I always lose my voice.” It was symbolic of something, she figured.

Rollins is the longtime director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society—an unpaid volunteer, she clarified, hinting at some of the mud slung at her. The charity has helped countless Haitians in Springfield get on their feet with work permit applications, job connections, civic education, and emergency supplies, and both the organization and Rollins have lately been on the receiving end of threats. Menacing is the word she prefers, because “threat feels too concrete.” Rollins was waiting by the window bank when I drove into the parking lot of the building. In an attempt at discretion, she rushed me into her office.

St. Vincent de Paul used to have an open-door policy, she said when we were alone. Now it has locks on the doors and a doorman who checks IDs. The staff explains to immigrants, “We’re not afraid of you. We are protecting you from outsiders.”

We sat in her windowless office. A thick black binder sat on her desk; it was a kind of scrapbook of the past couple of years. Rollins hesitated to show me the contents. “I don’t want to endanger St. Vincent de Paul any further than what’s already happened.”

Most of the information inside is public. Rollins is one of eight plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe filed in February. Other plaintiffs include the City of Springfield, Mayor Rue, several commissioners, and a local litigator. The complaint alleges that in the fall of 2024, the Blood Tribe menaced or incited menacing calls over the phone and attacked Rollins on social media as a “crass, self-centered race traitor.” The neo-Nazis doxed her and urged followers to send her hateful messages; in the words of the lawsuit, “Rollins was subjected to numerous threatening telephone calls. . . . She has received messages calling her a ‘N----- lover’ and asking if she was ‘part of the importation of N----- invaders.’” Rollins was swatted. A hacker broke into her email account and used it to send a bomb threat.

When Haitians began arriving in Springfield, Rollins recalled feeling that it was a blessing “the way this whole community has stepped up and come together in love of service and love of humanity. It is just second to none. It is just—so wonderful.” Rollins has never seen her work as political but as a calling to serve the vulnerable. She is still flummoxed by the “angry mob reaction” St. Vincent de Paul provoked. She theorizes that “there is a faction of our community that is very angry that we are helping the wrong people and we are stripping them of their resources, and that we are focusing in the wrong direction, and we are not helping them when we could be.”

Rollins mused on the nature of action and reaction, progress and backlash, blessings and curses. The Supreme Court was soon to hear oral arguments in a case that would end birthright citizenship, and she’d be watching and worrying on behalf of more than a thousand babies born to Haitian mothers in the area.

At one point Rollins broke into sobs. Her head was in her hands, and I patted her back. “What these people have endured,” she said. She looked up. “I just want to hide them all. Then everybody keeps saying, ‘Stop saying that.’”

Neighborhood Devitalization

At the city commission meeting on September 24, 2024, a self-proclaimed childless cat-lady millennial named Amanda Richardson stood up at the podium and began on a note that her anti-immigrant neighbors may have mistaken for fellow feeling. “I was born in Springfield, and I’ve lived here most of my life, and I just want to say that I’m so angry about the changes in Springfield,” she said in the pious, how-dare-they tones of NIMBY indignation. Richardson then described Haitian contributions to the city: raising average wages, paying taxes to fund police and fire departments, restoring condemned houses and improving property values. “How awful,” she said. “I can’t believe they’re helping to fund our government and beautify our neighborhoods.”

Richardson is six feet tall with pale blonde hair. Always the tallest kid in school, she said she took to standing up for underdogs against bullies. She is extremely online, occasionally totes a giant cross-stitch supply bag with her, and describes herself as a denizen of the “ninth circle of nerd hell.” Over potato wedges and crab cakes at the Courtyard Marriott restaurant, Richardson told me how she became fed up with the tone of Springfield’s public comments against immigrants. She described a woman at a meeting decrying signs in Kreyòl. “I just went, This is the dumbest thing. You guys want to call liberals snowflakes who need their safe space, and she sounds like she’s about to be in tears over these signs in other languages.”

Richardson was speaking for “anybody in our community who saw the farce for what it was.” She didn’t expect a wider audience, but her speech went viral. Threats followed. Richardson was doxed, with harassers publishing her home address, phone numbers, and other contact information online. Ohio Homeland Security informed her that someone had posted a video on Gab, a neo-Nazi social network, threatening to pay her a visit. Richardson installed security cameras at her residence, scrubbed her online presence as best she could, and alerted local law enforcement that her address might be the subject of swatting calls. She’s spoken at the commission three times since. “Someone needs to push back against this crap,” she said.

Even for those who want them out, Haitians’ contributions to city and county coffers are undeniable. Throughout the pandemic and well into its aftermath, Haitians worked at Amazon warehouses, stamped doors and cut windows for manufacturers of car parts, and processed fruits and vegetables at Dole. Local employers have consistently praised the performance of their Haitian workers.

Their labor had ripple effects. Businesses relocated to the area or expanded their operations. Job growth was robust—the second highest among Ohio’s small cities from 2020 to 2024. The taxes Haitians paid on their wages shored up the city’s general fund. Their sales taxes helped fund county infrastructure. And their dollars came at a time of accelerating state cutbacks. For years, Ohio has been slashing municipal support in order to deliver tax cuts to the rich, “balanc[ing] its budget on the back of local government,” a Springfield commissioner noted at a finance meeting last year.

Before September, when both Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, promoted the pet-eating propaganda, “Springfield and Clark County were the strongest that they’ve been in my lifetime,” said County Commissioner Melanie Flax-Wilt, who is forty-eight. The city had begun to reverse decades of brain drain, in which young people left for college or other opportunities, never to look back. “It seems like we’re retaining those folks now.”

Many longtime residents believe that Haitians brought the city back to life. As Richardson attested in her sardonic remarks, the immigrants bought and fixed up neglected old houses and started businesses. Portions of the economy grew around them, from ESOL partnerships with the community college to grocery stores that found ways to import a Haitian bounty: Rebo coffee, Barbancourt rum, plantain chips, cassava bread, a dried mushroom called djon djon, a leafy green called lalo, and no fewer than five types of malanga, a potato-like tuber.

“They hold up our economy here, in my personal opinion,” real estate agent Amanda Mullins told me in May. She has lived in Springfield for ten years and has been selling houses for four. Half of her clientele is Haitian, people who work several jobs at a time and scrimped and saved for down payments. They were eager to put down roots and escape the predations of the rental market. Mullins estimates she’s sold twenty-five to thirty houses to Haitians. “When I first got to Springfield, boy, it was just run-down. A lot of drugs and things like that.” When she looks at it now, Mullins said, she marvels at how nicely the Haitians have fixed up these houses.

Mullins hired a Haitian partner, a former accountant who promptly got his real estate license. Together they created systems for translating complicated legal documents, guided clients and lenders through mortgage approvals, and educated clients on the intractability of deadlines. “And then September happens—cats and dogs. Immediately business stops.” Prospective homebuyers turned chary, Mullins said, as they waited to see who would win the election, and then how Trump would behave after his inauguration. Mullins’s business experienced an uptick in March, when the administration announced plans to eliminate Federal Housing Administration loans for immigrants without green cards.

Mullins loves Springfield, but she is not hopeful about its future. “You know, our city was just now starting to be revitalized. It’s so much different than what it was—a city coming alive,” she said. “When that goes away, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I feel it’s going back to the drugs, and the houses decaying.”

Many Haitians have already left, Mullins told me, as did employers and community workers. In April, the Springfield News-Sun reported that thousands of Kreyòl-speaking county residents had dropped off the rolls of federally funded Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare programs since July 2024. There are several possibilities: Haitians are leaving Clark County, they are no longer in need, they are no longer eligible for benefits, or they need the services but are lying low. Some have left out of indignation. From the perspective of some Haitians, their efforts to resuscitate Springfield are being repaid with hate.

I visited Lindsay Aimé at the Haitian Support Center, which he cofounded. The building is small and unmarked, apart from a small sign for the evangelical church with which it shares space, and Aimé was the only person inside. There was less activity than usual at the center, he said, because its staff was preparing for a benefit later that week. It was intended to raise funds and to share Haitian culture with Springfielders. A Haitian historian would give a lecture, Aimé said, and there would be delicious food from one of the two Haitian restaurants in town. To finish, the Haitian pop stars Michaël Brun and J. Perry would play.

Aimé wore a silver cross over a dark sweater and sat at a long folding table with his laptop. On the wall behind him was a mosaic of signs in Kreyòl and English, drawn by community members, he said. nou kanpe avek w nan difikulte yo (We stand with you amid the difficulties), we are happy you are here, love. On my side of the desk there were pamphlets and laminated cards with Kreyòl-language instructions on handling ICE encounters. pa louvri pòt la si yon ajan imigrasyon frape pòt la, said the first instruction: Don’t open the door if an immigration agent knocks.

Aimé grew up and was educated as a lawyer in Saint-Marc, about sixty miles north of Port-au-Prince. He started practicing in 2015. His nonimmigrant visa allowed him to visit the United States for business and tourism, which he said made him a target for kidnapping by gangs seeking large ransoms. He was in the United States in October 2019, planning to stay for a week, when his family warned him not to come home; the situation had gotten too dangerous.

After a stint in Indiana, Aimé settled in Springfield. Back then it was like “a ghost city,” he said, but there were jobs for those who wanted them. He hasn’t visited Haiti since. Plenty of Haitians have left Springfield over the past year, Aimé told me. They’ve gone back to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, “wherever they were before.” Or they’ve headed north, to Canada. Aimé pointed to the windows behind him, at the compact SUV in the parking lot. “I bought my car from someone who had to leave,” he said. It’s much better in Canada, the seller told him. “He couldn’t afford all the stress. People kept treating him as a criminal.”

Many of the Haitians who settled in Springfield had good lives in Haiti before violence forced them to leave, Aimé said. They’d come to Springfield, worked hard and well at jobs locals wouldn’t take, and helped revitalize the local economy. “They’re not gonna let people treat them anyhow.”

Aimé said he hoped to stay in Springfield, but he felt a disappointment with federal policy in the United States. It was supposed to set an example for the rest of the world—“the mother of justice, the mother of democracy”—but now its leaders were behaving as though it were a tin-pot dictatorship. He likened the United States’ treatment of Haitian immigrants to the Dominican Republic’s, where infants born to Haitian mothers have long been denied birth certificates. Now the Dominican Republic is deporting Haitians from hospitals, cracking down especially on maternal wards.

The Light Fantastic

“We are Haitians—and we are here to stay on our planet Earth!” the historian called out from the stage. The audience whooped and cheered.

It was Saturday night, my last in Springfield, and some 250 people had assembled at the John Legend Theater for the Haitian Support Center benefit. The turnout was better than Aimé anticipated, and most of the audience had arrived on time, though the event took a while to get going. I was looking forward to hearing from Aimé’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Viles Dorsainvil, who has been a prominent Haitian leader in Springfield these past few years. He was also a named plaintiff in a suit against the Trump administration for its orders attempting to shorten TPS for Haitians. On my right sat Amanda Mullins, the real estate agent. She and her Haitian partner had developed educational materials for their clients on powers of attorney and trusts, in the event they were deported. Pastor Ruby was on my left. He showed me a photo he’d just received, a selfie of five or six people grinning in the sunlight: congregants at Champion City Church had accompanied one of their Haitian members to a check-in with Citizenship and Immigration Services, fearing the worst, but the man was given another year.

The historian, Bayyinah Bello, looked like a forest queen in a green robe and turban. Her hour-long talk focused on Haiti’s founding as a land of freedom for all, not just the kidnapped Africans who threw off their enslavers. Afterward, a gifted saxophonist played a solo. A group of Haitian students at the local high school performed traditional dances, their limbs graceful, their hair in Afros, their timing mostly in sync. The emcee stalled charmingly; it seemed clear the musicians J. Perry and Michaël Brun weren’t ready to go onstage yet. The audience laughed when the saxophonist was called upon to play yet another tune. Dorsainvil came to the podium, wearing a black linen shirt painted in tropical colors, and the audience settled into an expectant hush.

When the music finally started, the auditorium exploded with palpable joy: people young and old, Haitian and not, bopping, pogoing, and booty-shaking to a three-song set. After the buffet was served and festivities ended, Ruby would go home and prepare to deliver the next morning’s sermon, the second of a two-part talk on civil disobedience. All across Springfield on Sunday, pastors would consult with their congregants about sanctuary efforts to protect and defend Haitians from deportation. Casey Rollins would attend a five-kilometer fundraiser race arranged by the local honor society, proceeds to benefit St. Vincent de Paul.

In the weeks to come, the Supreme Court would issue an unsigned order allowing Trump to revoke humanitarian parole for more than half a million people. Anti-ICE protests, most of them peaceful, would break out in Los Angeles; Trump would send in the National Guard and seven hundred Marines over local and state officials’ objections. Back in Springfield, officials would sound budgetary alarms: stagnant and even declining income-tax revenues portended strain on the general fund and service cutbacks. The Court would allow the United States to deport migrants to countries they’d never seen while taking seriously the Trump administration’s attempts to ignore the constitutional protections for birthright citizenship. Brun, one of the musicians, would lead his first arena show, at Barclays Center in New York, at which the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, would take the stage, promising to stand up for Haitians. The following Monday, June 30, a district court would block the Trump administration’s attempt to end TPS for Haitians on August 3—giving its beneficiaries a reprieve of six months.

For now, at the John Legend Theater, the moment belonged to Dorsainvil. He stood at a podium, stage left, and gave an oration that was probably off the cuff and half-intended to stall but perhaps more moving for it. Things looked grim, he said, but the audience’s support allowed him to “see some light in the tunnel.” He said he wanted the Haitians in attendance to know they weren’t alone in their struggle. Alluding to the threat of mass deportations, Dorsainvil said, “When you go home, remember that there are folks in Springfield who used to stand with you. No matter what happens, we love Springfield, we’ll continue to love Springfield, and we’ll continue to work in Springfield. Because Springfield is that beautiful city, where we want to see everybody moving”—Dorsainvil paused before quoting the city motto—“forward together.”

The crowd reaction was emphatic. Some in the audience must have known that Dorsainvil was at risk of losing his immigration status in August. When the applause finally ended, Dorsainvil said, “I hope that those young ladies are ready.”

The high school dancers returned with another number.

Blood Complicated

The feud over the Hatfields and McCoys

Lauren Fadiman

© Sam Whitney

Twelve hours into my drive from Connecticut, I knew I was nearing the site of America’s signature feud when the density of Hatfield and McCoy-themed businesses suddenly amounted to a veritable theme park of mundanity. The southwestern corner of West Virginia boasts an HVAC service, a real estate agency, a convenience store, a dentist, a moonshine distillery, a bar, a grill, a hotel, an outdoor theater, a bowling alley, an appliance store, cabin rentals, airboat tours, and personal-injury lawyers, all bearing the name of the vaunted belligerents. This is West Virginia in the wake of coal, trying its hand at tourism: the Eastern Panhandle has Harpers Ferry, and the Kentucky border has a family feud that puts Family Feud to shame.

I met Jackie “Jack” Lee Hatfield Jr. on the land where his great-great-great-grandfather, the infamous Hatfield patriarch William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield—his sobriquet, depending on the legend, was either an invention of the newspapers or bestowed in childhood to distinguish Anse from his cousin, Anderson “Preacher Anse” Hatfield—died after a lifetime of grievance. The original house Devil Anse erected on the site, long since burned down for insurance money by an uncle deep in gambling debt, was a palace of paranoia: a wooded refuge to which Hatfield and his family retreated after two decades of lethal bickering with their McCoy neighbors. The bloody back-and-forth had left at least twelve dead by 1888, when Devil Anse resettled in the unincorporated community of Sarah Ann. He chose the new site for its proximity to the rushing Island Creek, across which he built a single retractable drawbridge that could be pulled back at the first sight of danger. From the bluffs that overlook the site, Devil Anse’s sharpshooters could survey the road in either direction. Now the bluffs overlook a gravel parking lot, a midcentury prefab, and a modular memory box containing what little is left of a bygone Appalachia: the Devil Anse Hatfield Homeplace & Museum, which the prodigal Jack—formerly an insurance executive at a faraway outpost of Blue Cross and Blue Shield—has come home to build.

I drove into Sarah Ann, West Virginia, a couple of hours before Jack and I had planned to meet, thinking I would kill time wandering the museum, but there wasn’t much to see: shards of pottery, corroded coal scrip, and a handful of anonymous black-and-white photographs. The Hatfield working the front desk, Cher, told me that a big part of the homestead’s labor is debunking would-be claimants to the Hatfield legacy, who sometimes go so far as to break into Jack’s little prefab house and settle into his massage chair under the mistaken impression that this was the bona fide family home. Cher is accordingly strict with her family tree, meticulous with birth and death records. When I asked her if she knew the history of her family before they made it to America, she replied that, on her non-Hatfield mother’s side, she’s gotten all the way back to Adam and Eve.

Jack arrived at about 3 p.m., his arm bandaged around the elbow as if he’d just donated platelets to the Red Cross, and I was tempted to make a joke about the ceaseless spillage of Hatfield blood. But I had the distinct impression it would be too soon—even though the feud ended more than a century ago. Time moves slower in Appalachia, and history, like the mountain range over Island Creek, casts a long shadow. Jack and Cher talked about their long-dead family members like living friends, but when Cher was out of earshot, Jack confided that she is technically only a Hatfield by marriage—a descendant of Devil Anse’s grandfather’s children from a second marriage in the late 1700s.

There are not too many Hatfields with a direct line to Devil Anse left in Logan County, and the living are outnumbered by those at rest in the family plot uphill from the museum. But everyone wants to be a Hatfield. A Reddit post on r/West Virginia from last year seeking out members of the feuding families garnered dozens of positive responses. “We’re descendants of both families,” reads the typical comment on the thread. “We’re, like, 30th cousins,” runs a more cautious one. Other posters posit ties thicker than blood: “I had my first beer with Charlie Hatfield, Devil Anse’s nephew, when I was six months old,” claims one such poster. “It was the 1950s, so things were really different.” The fact is that, in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, everyone is obliged to be a Hatfield, a McCoy, or both. From the outside, there is something quintessentially American about it. For the actual family members, their lineage—and inheritance—is considerably more complicated.

There is social currency to being a Hatfield but little actual cash. Jack had already been in town that morning to spar with county bureaucrats—a recurring state of affairs that has led to the early retirement of fellow Hatfields and McCoys from what another cousin calls the “feud industry.” The city of Pikeville, Kentucky, has been particularly keen to profit off yesterday’s problems, long playing host to the annual Hatfield and McCoy family reunion. But it’s been years since the last. And despite the tourism money the Hatfields and McCoys bring into the region, Jack has found it challenging to secure grant funding for the museum—largely because the surrounding parking lot remains in the private possession of a Hatfield aunt anxious to keep the land in the family. It is for that reason the building structure must be portable (so it is not technically on private land) and remains dependent on a random assemblage of youth and professional development groups for pro bono maintenance.

“I came here to preserve the history,” explained Jack. “It’s all come out of my pocket.” Repairing damage from recent flooding along Island Creek was the latest in a long line of expenses. The donation box outside the Hatfield Family Cemetery was little help, having been installed by a totally unrelated neighbor who saw, among the headstones, cheap means for collecting quick cash. Capitalizing on the dead is the name of the game: over the years, a range of Hatfields and McCoys have tried their hands at museums like the one Jack is struggling to keep afloat. The latest to fold is the Hatfield & McCoy Museum in Liberty, Kentucky, though I overheard Jack tell another visitor he thinks their “family heirlooms” were mostly forgeries by a cousin with an opioid addiction.

The feud has long since veered into postmodernity; the contemporary clash is between the Hatfields and the narrative into which they have been born. At least some of today’s many living descendants want the conflict—long a metonym for intracommunal violence—to act as a lesson in civic morality, a testimony to bilateral patriotism. And so, in 2003, live on CBS’s The Saturday Early Show, out of respect for American troops deployed for the Iraq War, the Hatfields and McCoys signed their first and only official truce. What began as a conflict in coal country between Confederate veterans thus concluded as a parable of post-9/11 American nationalism—the metanarrative almost more American than the narrative itself.

There Will Be Blood

I have yet to mention the Hatfields and McCoys to an American who has not heard of them. The feud was most recently dramatized by the History Channel’s three-part docudrama from 2012 starring Kevin Costner, but it has been retold, reimagined, and rewritten countless times, with spoofs starring everyone from Buster Keaton to Betty Boop to Bugs Bunny. The books Jack has collected for the museum include steamy midcentury pulp novels, like Harry Harrison Kroll’s Their Ancient Grudge (1956)—whose cover promises a tale of “hillbilly feuding and loving”—and contemporary literotica, like Heather Graham’s Hatfield and McCoy (1991).

Despite the glut of media, folks generally know the names Hatfield and McCoy in the same way they know Paul Bunyan, John Henry, or Johnny Appleseed: through the osmotic absorption of American folklore. It is via such stories that the past becomes real to us denizens of the present, and how places like Appalachia take sorry, stereotypical shape in the eyes of city slickers who refuse to leave New York. In the mainstream account, the feud is a fable about the backwardness of the backcountry: a fight over a stolen hog that resulted in a decade of bumblefuck warfare until the government intervened to restore peace to the Tug River Valley. But history rarely bequeaths us so straightforward a story.

To recount the history of the feud is also to produce the history of the feud, whose participants—mostly illiterate—left little record. The few extant academic works debunk and deconstruct what little else remains. The one Jack cited most often was Altina L. Waller’s 1988 stripped-down social history, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900, which locates the conflict’s impetus in economic inequality and opportunism. But far outnumbering the academic texts are the lurid potboilers. Dean King’s particularly maximalist 2013 account opens with a description of the people of the Tug River Valley as having “bloodthirst in their veins” and an “inescapable urge to behold a man hang by his neck.” Two distinct camps of writers emerge: those who believe the tall tales and those who doubt a single, coherent feud occurred at all.

Feud or not, trouble started when the Tug River Valley was still the frontier—which remains in evidence if one squints past the Taco Bells and Little Caesars that clutter Logan today. The steep mountains block out most of the midday sunlight, making agriculture impossible in all but a few narrow strips of creek-side flatland. In the early 1800s, when the Hatfield and McCoy families arrived in Pike County, Kentucky, and Logan County, land could be purchased for as little as 2.5 cents an acre because only about a third was arable. They hunkered down one family per holler. By 1840, westward-bound settlers began taking routes that bypassed the mountains, and Pike and Logan Counties became increasingly insular. “A remarkable homogeneity developed,” writes Waller. “There was little reason to fear—or to hope for—any change in the physical, economic, or social environment.”

As the country arced toward the Civil War, that inertia became apparent. Logan County was rechristened part of the Union-aligned West Virginia in 1863; in practice, it remained sympathetic to the South. But more than anything, the locals were loyal to their little neck of the woods: the Hatfields deserted the Confederate States of America almost as quickly as they enlisted, returning home to a Tug River Valley in the crosshairs of combat. In 1865, a Confederate guerrilla group known as the Logan Wildcats targeted Asa Harmon McCoy—brother of the McCoy family patriarch, Randolph “Old Ranel” McCoy—who, despite being one of the only slaveholders in the region, had enlisted in the Union. Asa Harmon was stripped naked and shot dead by the group after they found him hiding out in the woods. His murder, supposedly committed by Devil Anse’s close compadre James “Crazy Jim” Vance, is considered the feud’s inciting event, though more than a decade would pass before the next clash. Waller cites the lag as evidence that most of the McCoy family disapproved of Asa Harmon’s Union ties, but this time it is King who disagrees. “It is not unusual in a feud to see a decade or more pass between events as sons come of age and avenge the killings of fathers,” he claims. And once Asa Harmon’s boys came of age, vengeance would be their calling.

If Waller’s account is a story of the extreme political and economic circumstances that put the feud in motion amid the static inertia of Appalachian culture, then King’s is of the difficulty in stopping an active landslide as it rushes downhill toward civilization. But both Waller and King agree that growing economic inequality made everything worse; Devil Anse saw an opportunity in the demand for timber in a rebuilding South and, in 1869, formed a logging crew that began to uproot the virgin forest. In 1872, he sued several of his neighbors, including Perry and Jacob Cline (brothers-in-law of Asa Harmon) and won Perry’s five thousand-acre inheritance in a settlement, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the region. Meanwhile, the McCoys struggled to eke out a living. In 1878, Asa Harmon’s brother, Ranel, purportedly accused Devil Anse’s first cousin, Floyd Hatfield, of stealing one of his razorback hogs. The case proceeded to trial before a jury, said to consist of six Hatfields and six McCoys, and things swung in Floyd’s favor when juror Selkirk McCoy, a former Confederate who worked with his two sons for Devil Anse’s logging crew, crossed family lines to refute his cousin’s claim to the hogs. It was a blow to the economically precarious Ranel’s pride and pocketbook.

According to King, things became even more personal for Ranel when his daughter, Roseanna, asked for permission to marry Devil Anse’s handsome eldest son, Johnson “Johnse” Hatfield. “Was it [this] misbegotten love affair . . . that caused a fury so fierce that it raged out of control?” he mused. Though Ranel begrudgingly blessed the union, Devil Anse refused, prompting Ranel to change his tune and—supposedly—demand that Roseanna return home rather than live in sin under his rival’s roof. But, in fact, it was common for couples in antebellum Appalachia to live together outside marriage, and Waller contends that Ranel may have just been angry that Roseanna had failed to legally seal the deal with the wealthier Hatfields.

Violence between the families did not reach folkloric heights until 1882. Amid the drunken festivities of Election Day, Ranel’s son, Tolbert McCoy, attempted to collect a small debt from Devil Anse’s son, Elias “Bad ’Lias” Hatfield. Devil Anse’s brother, Ellison Hatfield, tried to defuse the mounting tension, but then changed tack and allegedly pulled out a jackknife, and Tolbert promptly sank his own blade deep into Ellison’s side. When the dust settled, Ellison was half-dead with twenty-seven stab wounds and a bullet in his back. Tolbert and two of his younger brothers were headed to prison in Pikeville when Devil Anse and his posse overtook them on the road, brought the McCoy boys back across the Tug River, and held them hostage in an abandoned schoolhouse while Ellison’s life hung in the balance. The Hatfields settled on a verdict: if Ellison lived, so, too, would the McCoys—and if he died, so, too, would the McCoys. When Ellison died the following afternoon, Devil Anse had Tolbert, Pharmer, and Randolph “Bud” McCoy Jr. hauled back across the Tug again and tied to pawpaw trees just over the Kentucky border. The Hatfields shot them dead from the West Virginia side of the river.

Seeking justice for their own, the McCoys turned toward increasingly violent efforts to apprehend the Hatfields responsible for the boys’ execution, setting the stage for the penultimate act of the feud, which took place on the evening of New Year’s Day, 1888. Led by Crazy Jim Vance and William Anderson “Cap” Hatfield Jr., a posse of Hatfield associates stormed the McCoy homestead in Blackberry, Kentucky, by cover of darkness. There, Crazy Jim lit the cabin on fire while Cap and the others killed two more of Ranel McCoy’s children and beat his wife, Sally, unconscious while she attempted to reach her dying daughter’s side. A two-hour shootout along Grapevine Creek ended in a stalemate. In the fallout, Devil Anse’s intellectually disabled nephew, Ellison “Cotton Top” Mounts, was arrested. The Hatfields and their supporters went on trial in 1889, each receiving a life sentence—except Cotton Top, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Ranel’s daughter, though it was well-known among the McCoys that Cap, not Cotton Top, had been responsible. Thousands traveled to Pikeville to witness the first hanging in Pike County in four decades.

First Blood

Given the two Hatfield-perpetrated massacres, many are inclined to side with the McCoys. However, sensationalist retellings neglect certain key events. If Waller and writer Tom Dotson (a descendant of both families) are correct in their theory of the feud—that it was less a struggle between two mountaineering families than one between local elites and mountaineers—then it is only with 150 years’ worth of hindsight that we can grasp its effect: the clearing of Appalachian land for coal mining. Waller is cautious in her assessment, but Dotson, not bound by academic convention, pulls no punches:

The feud story was a creation of the big city newspapers. The immediate purpose for its creation was to devalue the people and thereby facilitate the transfer of ownership of the wealth of the Valley to the same big city financiers who controlled those newspapers. The ultimate purpose was to transform the independent mountaineers into docile and willing wage workers.

According to Waller and Dotson, the “feud” was actually two separate periods of violence. The first, limited to the Hatfields and McCoys, culminated with the pawpaw tree massacre. The second was dominated by Ranel McCoy’s powerful new ally Perry Cline and the Pike County deputy sheriff, Franklin “Bad Frank” Phillips. Cline, whose land Devil Anse had taken back in 1872, was a prominent Pikeville attorney with his own vendetta against the Hatfields; for one thing, his would-be inheritance had grown in value pending the construction of the Norfolk and Western Railway. Cline guaranteed the continuation of violence when he put a price on the head of every man who had participated in the pawpaw tree massacre: a hundred dollars a pop. When Deputy Sherriff Phillips and his men rode into West Virginia to take the perpetrators into custody, he left two men dead in the bargain—Crazy Jim Vance and the governor’s deputy, Bill Dempsey—which in turn motivated the Hatfields’ reprisal at Grapevine Creek.

The men captured by the Phillips posse were held in prison while the slow gears of justice turned. A precedent-setting Supreme Court case, Mahon v. Justice (1888), found 7-2 that the illegal abduction of the West Virginia men would not prevent them from standing trial in Kentucky. The ruling in Mahon inspired a new wave of bounty hunting, at which point a bloody family feud became a nationwide bonanza as dozens tried to get rich off reward money. But no one stood to get richer than the men behind the whole operation. Both Cline and Phillips were former wards of John R. Dils, the wealthiest and most aggressive land buyer in the Tug River Valley. When not suing his neighbors for debt, Dils was an outspoken booster for Pikeville, attempting to bolster its fortunes by damming the Tug in the 1870s in order to secure a railway line through the valley. By the mid-1880s, all that stood between Dils and rich timber and coal were the land’s actual owners. While word of the feud threatened to sabotage certain economic prospects, it also provided an opportunity: if the Hatfields could be removed from their land, a strong message would be sent to other mountaineers who, at the time, refused to sell their land in the name of “progress.”

The yellow journalism of the era was responsible for the jaundiced version of the feud we know today. Newspaper stories were quick to claim, for example, that Devil Anse’s brother, Valentine “Wall” Hatfield, had five wives and thirty-three children. In far-flung cities like Chicago and New York, incidents were invented out of whole cloth, such as the allegations that a Hatfield girl and a McCoy boy were shot at the altar in 1889. The uncomplimentary assessments of local elites bookmarked tales of brutal assault: “I do not know much about these people,” a wealthy Kentucky distiller told the San Francisco Chronicle, “but they live in the neighborhood of Tug River and that is sufficient to show their character. . . . Most of them are desperate wretches who fear neither man nor devil.” For East Coast writers, the feud was both an embarrassment and, conveniently, a form of natural selection.

If the goal of the Dils-Cline-Philips cohort was to oust the Hatfields, they succeeded. Both the Hatfield and McCoy patriarchs moved their remaining families following the New Year’s Day Massacre. Devil Anse settled on the same patch of land on which his great-great-great-grandson Jack now lives, where he spent three more decades keeping a watchful eye out for bounty hunters, at least one of whom is supposedly buried on the property in an unmarked grave. Meanwhile, after their home burned down in the massacre, Ranel and Sally McCoy moved permanently to Pikeville. The myth seemed only to grow as its actual victims and perpetrators died out. By the time Ranel expired in 1914 and Devil Anse seven years later, their names had taken on lives of their own.

© Sam Whitney

In Cold Blood

Following Cotton Top’s hanging, the feud came to an end—at least officially. Dean King claims that the Hatfields and McCoys became preoccupied with other conflicts, though none were of the same scale, nor did any require another alliance with the forces of emergent industrial capitalism. What the conflict lacked was a satisfying narrative conclusion: neither a photographed handshake in 1928 nor an appearance of representatives of both clans in 1979 on an episode of Family Feud, replete with fake rifles, managed to meaningfully close the curtain. In her steamy 1991 chick-lit opus Hatfield and McCoy, Heather Graham imagines two descendants of the feuding families united in the present as they investigate a series of kidnappings. “Let’s end this feud right now,” FBI agent Robert McCoy says to police psychic Julie Hatfield before planting a passionate kiss on her lips.

It is an ending possible only in fiction. In fact, the afterlife of the feud is just as politically tangled as its life was. Prominent descendants of the two families include labor hero William Sidney “Sid” Hatfield, progressive West Virginia Governor Henry D. Hatfield, conspiracy theorist and mass murderer Charles Manson, and Vice President James David “J. D.” Vance. The first and last represent one very real arc in West Virginian history: its transition from stalwart pro-union territory to one of the most conservative states in the country. While Sid died in 1921 defending the right of Matewan coal miners to organize with the United Mine Workers of America, J. D. pays mere lip service to organized labor while serving in an administration actively hostile to the working class. Lost somewhere between Sid and J. D. is the transformative possibility implied by organizing against corporate empire. The default cultural narrative about Appalachia is a declensionist melodrama of romantic squalor. One of its premier peddlers is J. D. himself: his critically acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016) makes the case that Appalachia’s problem is not poverty so much as its acceptance—which he alone managed to transcend by bootstrapping himself the hell out of the holler. If the Hatfields and McCoys could be fairly accused of the narcissism of small differences, then J. D. would seem to be suffering from the narcissism of small ideas. His bold solutions to the challenges facing Appalachia amount to little more than cosmetic adjustments to Section 8 housing vouchers—far from the radical reorientation for which Sid gave his life.

The manufacture of peace between the Hatfields and the McCoys is perhaps the feud’s only canonical legacy. The latest détente was hatched in the early aughts, not long after Ranel’s great-great-great-grandsons, cousins Bo and Ron McCoy, hosted the first annual Hatfield McCoy Reunion Festival, which brought an estimated five thousand family members home to Pikeville. At the third annual reunion in 2002, the McCoy cousins awarded their Real McCoy prize to a Hatfield, local businessman Reo, who had deployed his logistics company Reo Distribution with four tractor trailers’ worth of goods to New York City following the 9/11 attacks. It seemed like the right time to announce the truce—live on CBS in June 2003. “United we stand as Americans against an opposing foe to our freedom,” the document, now hanging in the Hatfield Homeplace & Museum, declares. “Our families stand as a symbol of unity to let the world know that we will not allow our freedom to be taken from us.” Reo’s thoughts on the truce boil down to the sentiment, “When national security is at risk, Americans put their differences aside.”

It is a fascinating place for the feud to have come to rest. If the Hatfields and McCoys were merely characters in a moral allegory, the message would be clear: even the deepest divisions between men must be bridged so that peace might prevail. But the Hatfields and McCoys are not talking animals in an Aesop fable, and such an epilogue to the family feud only obscures its historical reality. The economic circumstances of the past survive as the economic incentives of the present; there is good money to be made in the feud industry, so long as one sticks to the legend. And many do: “I’m not convinced that the railroad or coal mining industries had that much of an impact on the feud itself,” said Bob Scott, owner of the now-defunct McCoy Museum in Hardy, Kentucky, to the Pikeville County tourism blog in 2019, “but rather the stealing, killing and unrelenting thirst for vengeance between the two families.” It is inexplicable, irrational violence that holds our attention, not the violence carried out by those with little recourse. And so, retellings of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict often consist of senseless killing punctuated by mountainside coitus.

Jack is trying to preserve a different narrative. It doesn’t take a conspiracist or a revisionist to see that the feud, regardless of its origins, was exacerbated by class tensions and ideological differences during a moment of enormous contingency in American history. By the 1880s, both families—even as they fought for their own interests—were being exploited by local elites whose interests had more to do with coal, timber, and railroads than righting past wrongs. There were real reasons to fight, even if the Hatfields and McCoys had been duped into targeting each other by local barons of industry. Whatever legitimate economic and ideological factors once differentiated the Hatfields and McCoys from one another—and from the likes of Perry Cline and John Dils—have been lost to time, sacrificed to the political consensus that industrial capitalism demanded as it reshaped Appalachia for the benefit of a handful of elites. That their descendants have participated in such a consensus is a historical irony that even the authors of horny historical bodice rippers would consider far-fetched. If the violence of the past feels senseless to us, it may be because we are pacified by an economic system that is constantly posited as natural—not the conditional outcome of a particular set of circumstances.

The New Blood

I had driven into Sarah Ann to the sound of “America” by Simon & Garfunkel. I wanted to time it so that I would be humming along to the refrain, “I’ve gone to look for America,” just as I arrived—mostly because I thought it would be poignant to say so in this article. And maybe it would have been, if America were indeed what I had found. But the grove of pawpaw trees where the McCoy boys died has less to say about America than even the Family Dollar across the street. Both the feud and the truce, after all, were byproducts of the historical processes that brought that Family Dollar into being. Maybe I can be forgiven for my optimism. What is more American than killing the shit out of someone? And then renouncing that violence in order to further a war effort overseas? Not that I was going to say as much to Jack Hatfield. You really can’t go around telling people that their family fought and died so Family Dollar could someday be pretty much the only store in town.

Besides, there was pathos in Jack’s version; he told me that the Department of Justice sometimes brought juvenile offenders to the homestead for a lesson on the perils of violence and possibilities of peace. The lesson we settled on, sitting on the porch in the late-afternoon sun while his neighbors drove past honking and waving, is that it takes a village to resist (in)justice. “Devil Anse was hunted like a dog,” Jack explained, “and his neighbors and his community helped the man hide for thirty years.” It is, in some ways, the story’s most incredible aspect. Despite the hefty price on Devil Anse’s wizened old head, his neighbors never sold him out. “That is community,” said Jack, though I doubt he says so to the juvenile delinquents. “That doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, you don’t even know your neighbors, right? Until I moved back here, I didn’t know my neighbors either.”

No one involved in this mystery play of Confederate murderers is a particularly good person by any historical or modern metric. But Devil Anse’s community recognized that selling him out to a bounty hunter who would transport him across state lines for politically biased prosecution fell short of justice. Community lends us both peril and protection—and perhaps, in retelling the feud, we are too quick to focus on the former over the latter. And so, in the version of the feud that Jack and I imagine, it is instead a strange parable of community solidarity. Perhaps that is the spin the feud needs in an era when it seems increasingly likely that we will be called upon to shield our neighbors from ICE.

Is it out of resistance to the more suspect folkloric traditions surrounding them that the Hatfield ghosts are so restless? At one point during our conversation, Cher described an experience she had maintaining the nearby Hatfield family plot and its surrounding graves, which are located so steeply uphill that I had to hit my inhaler twice on the walk. The weather had been bad, Cher explained, and she, too, had struggled on the slope, cursing the family impulse to build there. “You Hatfields and your mountains,” she muttered under her breath and promptly took a terrible fall, as though one of her ancestors had reached out from the past to grab her by the ankle. She told me she is more careful about what she says nowadays. I was only more convinced by the thought of restless ghosts after I returned home to Brooklyn to learn that my roommates had acquired two pawpaw saplings from the New York Parks Department and planted them outside my window, where they now stand swaying in the wind that blows out of the bloody past and into a no-less-contentious present.

Fatigue Performance

Noah Falck

Music held the

middle part of

summer

as she jump-roped the

rain out of the sky.

We watched from the car,

windows all the way down,

the clouds serious,

maybe even a bit severe.

The air may be a risk

for some people, the radio repeated.

The air may be

a risk for some

people.

Your gaze inherited all the gray of the

day, rain silenced the margins.

I Will Disrespect You

YBC Dul and the tragedy of Philly drill

Adrian Nathan West

© Harrison Carter

On August 22, 2024, YouTuber Brandon Buckingham, whose gimmick is traveling to dangerous neighborhoods and posing alongside their residents holding guns, posted a video, “The Most Hated Rapper in Philadelphia: Life as Mr. Disrespectful,” about a young man named Abdul Vicks, more popularly known as YBC Dul. In it, Dul and his friends show off their weapons and the abandoned house where they used to sell drugs. At one point, he takes Buckingham for a ride near the block of his “opps,” or enemies, in a “striker,” or stolen car; they hear gunshots. Ominously, Dul boasts of being “feet on land,” or out in the street. “I never got robbed,” he says, “I never got touched, I never got shot at in the city yet.”

The next day, Reddit user BigMoneySw posted “RIP DUL” on r/PhillyWiki, the subreddit for Philadelphia street culture. Users reacted in disbelief, but as is common with murders in the city, social media had the story well before the news. Reports would soon confirm that Dul and his manager, Baby 35st, had been stopped behind a bus on Olney Avenue when a white SUV pulled up beside them and fired several times into their vehicle, striking Dul in the chest and hand. After stopping at his nearby home, Baby 35st drove Dul to the local Albert Einstein Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

The killing wasn’t a surprise. Dul’s gang, the Young Bag Chasers, had been warring with a slew of rivals. Tied to dozens of shootings, YBC had taken so many losses that their foes had begun taunting them as the Young Bullet Catchers. In Philadelphia’s drill rap scene––where songs ridicule the dead, describe slayings in explicit detail, and dare opps to try and seek revenge––Dul’s affronts were one of a kind: he threatened to slap the grieving mother of one of YBC’s victims, crowed about YBC shooting an opp’s six-year-old sister, and filmed himself digging up the grave of a murdered fifteen-year-old, laughing maniacally about how the teenager still didn’t have a tombstone. After Zyir Stafford, a.k.a. Booga, was shot and killed while leaving his job at McDonald’s, Dul dropped the video “McButtons and McNuggets,” which shows him placing an order at the fast-food restaurant before dragging a body from a car, tossing it in a pit in the ground, and slowly sprinkling out a box of french fries, as if pouring out libations for the dead.

To understand Dul and today’s Philly drill, you have to understand the Chicago drill of the early 2010s, and to understand Chicago drill requires a revision of received wisdom about gangs and their motivations. In the popular imagination, gangs are organized, hierarchical criminal enterprises, a source of profit and protection, guarded by secrecy and nearly impossible to escape. This notion is a blend of half-fictions gleaned from rap music and crime movies and fails to register the long-standing decline of the corporate gangs of the crack era, which used murder and extortion to establish monopolies on drug distribution. In reality, even organized crime is disorganized; gangs tend to be overlapping, permeable, small, and short-lived. As crack use has declined, drug markets have moved toward an independent-operator model, often facilitated by the anonymity of the internet; street dealing, for all but the most successful, has become a dangerous and unprofitable enterprise. This is not to say modern gangs don’t do it, but it rarely provides sufficient motivation for group cohesion.

The typical gang is a group of boys aged fourteen to twenty-three who met through school or have family ties and identify with a tightly circumscribed area, sometimes as small as a single block or corner, anchored by a takeout Chinese restaurant or a corner shop of the kind Philadelphians call a papi store. Many still live at home, with single parents or grandparents; most smoke weed and drink lean, and, at least in Philly, they pop percs. They have guns, often shared, that they like to hold up in photos, along with real or fake money, fanned out or in thick stacks. They have a penchant for three-letter monikers––CTS for Courtois TrapStars in Saint Louis, FBG for Fly Boy Gang in Chicago––and these often precede members’ nicknames: CTS Luh Wick, FBG Duck. They tend to have disciplinary problems and have often cycled through correctional facilities, Department of Health and Human Services programs, or alternative schools for disruptive youth. They want what seemingly everyone wants: to get rich and famous on social media.

In 2012, Chicago rapper Chief Keef did just that with “I Don’t Like,” a viral track that brought drill music to a nationwide audience and landed him a multimillion-dollar record deal. A drill is a targeted murder; the term had been current in Chicago for a couple of years at that point, popularized in 2010 by Pac Man’s “It’s a Drill,” which hit the airwaves a few months before Pac Man’s own fatal shooting. As much as a sound, Keef’s innovation was an aesthetic: where Drake, Rick Ross, or Lil Wayne had pushed a fantasy of opulence piled upon opulence, with private planes, pimp cups brimming with Ace of Spades, and bronzed beauties in bikinis, Chief Keef showed his fans grim alleyways, housing projects, and abandoned homes. The bass was heavy, the melodies grim in minor keys; no one was dripped up in Louis Vuitton or Rick Owens. Instead, a crowd glared menacingly into the camera, throwing gang signs, smoking blunts, brandishing pistols and AR-15s.

This was a new response to a paradox at the heart of gangster rap, where success is based on a constantly challenged, constantly threatened authenticity inseparable from forms of criminality that must be represented but can never be explicitly acknowledged. (Many of these videos include disclaimers that the guns are merely props. The clips of real bullets and any number of arrests at drill video shoots say otherwise.) For the first gangster rappers, allusion sufficed: Schoolly D’s, Ice-T’s, and Eazy-E’s tall tales set in the hood or on the corner sparked a moral panic in the eighties; by the mid-nineties, as rap’s market share grew, real rappers distinguished themselves from fake through increasingly explicit references to drugs, gang life, and killings. Lines like UGK’s “Cut a fifty up into a nice fat boulder / Cut it to a nice fat pile of hover tens” were incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t know a cocaine dealer; Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, released at the tail end of the most violent period in New York’s history, gave listeners a tour of the city’s criminal geography, from Central Booking to Queensbridge Houses to Rikers. Denise Herd of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health attempted to measure the increase in violent content in a corpus of the 340 most popular rap songs from 1979 to 1997 and claimed an increase from 27 to 60 percent. In her reliance on Billboard data, however, Herd missed the enormous body of violent nineties underground music on labels such as Rap-A-Lot, Suave House, No Limit, and Hypnotize Minds.

Perhaps the decline of violent crime, which would reach a forty-year trough in 2014, incentivized bolder expressions of violence; perhaps it was the discovery that Rick Ross, who took his name from a cocaine kingpin, had previously worked as a corrections officer; perhaps it was simple market pressure, which, as Georg Simmel notes in his writings on fashion, requires that one somehow distinguish oneself by doing the same thing as others but differently. At any rate, Chief Keef threaded the needle, helped along, ironically, by Joseph “Lil JoJo” Coleman, a brash young rapper from a gang called Brick Squad 069 who relentlessly disparaged him and rappers Lil Reese and Lil Durk on social media. In “I Got Dat Sack,” Lil JoJo addressed the three directly, bragging, “Fuck this rap / I ain’t gone talk / I’m a leave it in the street.”

JoJo would soon post a video on Twitter of himself chasing Lil Reese through traffic, followed on September 1, 2012, by a picture of himself in Keef’s gang’s territory. Finally, on September 4, after driving by a group of rivals and taunting them, he would tweet to Lil Reese, “I am out here on my 2 feet wya bitch” and, soon afterward, “Im on #069 Im out here,” referencing Sixty-Ninth Street on Chicago’s South Side. At 7:30 that evening, JoJo was riding on the handlebars of a friend’s bicycle down Seventieth Street when three vehicles approached and one opened fire. JoJo ran but was struck in his right side and fell dead.

The next day, Chief Keef tweeted, “hahahahahhahahahahahahahaahhAAHAHAHAHA” and “Its Sad Cuz Dat Nigga Jojo Wanted To Be Jus Like Us #LMAO.” He would later deny knowing JoJo and allege that his account had been hacked, but JoJo’s mother and brother blamed Keef, and on Facebook, Keef’s cousin Tadoe Bey would attribute the murder to three Keef associates before deleting the post and likewise claiming his account had been hacked. One of the men he mentioned was shot to death in apparent retaliation two weeks later; one died from cardiovascular disease and epilepsy aggravated, according to speculation, by a lean and Xanax addiction; the last is serving a prison sentence for the drive-by shooting of a fourteen-year-old boy on the 6100 block of South Vernon Avenue, six days after which he posted a photo of himself holding a Nerf gun with the caption “DEM BULLETS FLY NO NERF BOY GO POP A G ON VERNON STREET.”

This is, in nuce, the tragedy and barbarism, the absurdity and wastefulness, of drill culture. It made Chief Keef rich, it probably made his labels and the platforms that host his music even richer, and it spawned hundreds of bandwagon hoppers, foes, peers, and wannabes, not just in Chicago but across the globe, from San Juan to Jacksonville to Brixton to Rotterdam.

There are now academic studies of drill; YouTubers like Trap Lore Ross make a living picking apart drill lyrics to keep fans cued in to who’s killed whom; there is drill fanfic on Wattpad, including “basically a gay book of different drill rappers or maybe just any rapper being gay” and a novel about YBC Dul so inane I couldn’t finish it. There is even an academic book: Ballad of the Bullet, a drab deployment of criminologically questionable boilerplate about “structural causes” welded to a passable memoir of the author’s time among an aspiring drill crew. The only substantive thing I learned from it is that there are well-to-do white kids out there willing to fly drill rappers to their homes and pay them to shoot a video together for the privilege of claiming opps on some block in a city they may never even visit.

Street Literacy

It’s impossible to say when drill arrived in Philly because it’s impossible to clearly separate drill from street rappers like AR-Ab who paved the way for it, but for convenience’s sake, we’ll say 2019, when SimxSantana dropped the video for “FLEXIN N’ FLASHIN’.” The spare, droning beat, the pounding bass, the lack of a chorus, the unrelenting litany of violence, the filtered lighting, the association with a crew (D4M) whose members would kill and be killed: everything that would be trademark in Philly drill for the next six years is there, apart from the surgical masks and shiesties that gave a sanitary cover to anonymity seeking when Covid hit the following year.

On March 16, 2020, Pennsylvania schools closed. On March 17, ostensibly to protect the health of her officers, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw issued a directive instructing them not to detain suspects for narcotic offenses, theft from persons, retail theft, theft from auto, burglary, vandalism, car theft, fraud, and prostitution. On March 23, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf issued a stay-at-home order, and Philadelphia’s streets emptied out. The predictable consequences to public order almost immediately ensued.

Alongside the progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, Outlaw had taken it for granted that decriminalization would redress historical injustices while reducing crime. Studies existed that bolstered the wisdom of this approach; studies existed that would have contradicted it. This is the risk of “evidence-based” approaches to social problems: in the research they are based on, random samples are rarely so, confounded factors are excluded, results are frequently irreplicable, and motivated reasoning is omnipresent.

But even when this is not so, the base assumption of sociological research is that the future will by and large resemble the past, and in prepandemic Philadelphia, this assumption was a poor one. Krasner’s purging of the prosecutor’s office and push for more lenient sentences or outright dismissal of charges for illegal gun possession and a host of other offenses took for granted that the city’s crime had reached a steady state. And of course, at the time, nobody was talking about drill.

Shootings began to rise the same month the lockdowns hit and by the end of the year had nearly doubled to forty-six per week, with 499 murders, one body shy of the record set thirty years before. Two rarely mentioned points seem relevant to the unprecedented rise in violence during the pandemic. First, young people had lots more time to film rap videos and snipe at one another online. Second, emergency assistance money put a lot more guns on the street. Sales rose 49 percent in Pennsylvania between 2019 and the end of 2020 and remained well above the historical average for the next four years––how many buyers were intermediaries is unknown, but Pennsylvania is notorious for straw purchasing scandals, with an analysis by Brady, formerly the National Council to Control Handguns, finding that 1.2 percent of the state’s licensed dealers accounted for 57 percent of firearms that ended up in the hands of criminals. Newspaper readers could be forgiven for assuming that gun buying was driven by Second Amendment–obsessed rednecks and frightened residents in poor neighborhoods looking for protection, but it’s difficult to watch the evolution of drill videos over the past five years and not notice how one pistol or two becomes five or ten, plus AR-15s, AK-47s, Dracos, hundred-round drums and extended clips, auto sears, and laser sights in red, blue, and green.

Drill has given new life to a long-standing and asinine debate about whether rap music is a cause of violence or merely reflects the violence in society. Imagine asking such a question about the vase, the cellphone, or the ballistic missile, and you’ll see the folly of supposing that cultural artifacts can ever be born into an ether of pure contemplation. I cannot prove that drill music incites violence in the same way that no one can prove anything, because causation is inductively observed and cannot be deductively verified; but if drill music celebrated real instances of child abuse or ethnic cleansing instead of the socially fraught issue of violence in poor communities, there would surely be less opposition to the notion that these people mean what they are saying. The British scholar Jonathan Ilan has proposed that “street illiteracy” informs the linkage of drill music to violence, countering with his own “street literate” methodology of watching hundreds of drill videos to arrive at the vague and predictable conclusion that they are an empowering “hybrid of fictional artistic expression, loose autobiography and calculated social-media-style performance.” One wonders what his peculiar form of street literacy would make of the striking but not unrepresentative sequence of events that follows.

On the afternoon of December 23, 2022, Philadelphia police responding to a report of a person with a gun found Ramir Parrish in the parking lot of the laundromat in Germantown where he worked. Parrish, or PNB Chucky, was an aspiring rapper affiliated with a gang that had been feuding with the Westside Mafia, or WSM, since 2016. Video showed two shooters firing on Parrish. When he fell, the larger of the men approached, stood over him, and “overcooked” him, firing several times into his head.

On March 23 of the following year, the account Pugga6500 (in reference to the 6500 block of Berdan Street, WSM territory) posted a video on YouTube, since removed, called “Let Them Tell It,” which opens with a hand stamping a blunt out on the head of a Chucky doll (a perennial feature of drill rap is the boast of “smoking on” dead opps, a sublimation of the cannibalistic rituals associated with aggression toward out-groups since the dawn of time). Pugga then appears on a sidewalk holding a pistol to the Chucky doll’s head. In this frame, the doll is wearing a ski mask; though there’s no mention of it in Pugga’s eventual arraignment, I suspect this detail, coupled with the last words of the song (“I was tryna kill that nigga way before he got a deal / When they hit his face his ski mask got connected to the ground”), was incriminating. According to Chucky’s family, he had recently signed a recording contract.

On April 6, Pugga posted another video, “OK OK.” Early on, he raps a line that anyone might have rapped: “Nigga talkin’ all that hot shit, now his fuckin’ face missin’.” Its possible significance in connection with Parrish’s fatal wounds becomes clear in the later verse, “It’s that laundry duty / It’s that super-easy wash and fold / Once we get that lo.” On June 17 of this year, I listened to Pugga apologize in court, and tell Chucky’s family, “I didn’t mean to put you through no hurt.” He had pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and possessing an instrument of crime, and was sentenced to eighteen to forty years.

Philly drill has been well-documented, for those willing to look around, for the past four years. On YouTube, there’s Box 29 News, Phillyscoreboard, and the standout American Confidential, which blends deep background on gang members and their feuds with a historian’s sensibility. PhillyWiki has the vices of every rumor mill, but when a shooting happens, it’s the first place those interested turn to find out who did it and why. On Instagram, apart from the accounts of rappers and gang members themselves, the anonymous Tommy Hood Figure is a chronicler of street wars in Philly present and past. Then there’s Philly Death Row and the sinister Philly ESPN, which uses basketball terminology to tally shootings in a supposed league, referring to the dead as retired players and to bullets as dropped points and tracking which crews are up on which:

phillyespnllc Fastbreak ⛹🏾‍♂️ Drops Points On Wackers 🏓 At Busstop 🚏 After School After Phat Dame 🕊 Was Caught At The Busstop 🚏 A Week Before After School By Wackers 🏓 Players... In The Following Week Kris 🕊 (Wackers) Was Retired And 8 Other Students Injured With Nearly 50 Points Dropped 📈

I can’t say whether these pages directly encourage drillers; I can say they use the lingo, and I’ve watched them argue about their “scores” on Instagram Live. If a page gets the story wrong, someone always jumps in to correct it (despite the scorn the culture heaps on self-snitching, for many, the temptation of glory outweighs the threat of incarceration, and a lot of them just don’t seem to realize the cops are watching). Aiden Waters, one of several Fastbreak members arrested for a string of murders, including that of YBC Dul, referred in a phone call to shootings as “scrimmages” and called a resulting death a “slam dunk.”

American Confidential has paid subscribers on YouTube and on Patreon; Tommy Hood Figure has a paid Close Friends group for more sensitive stories; less reputable pages exploit the carnage to drive followers to their weed business or lure them into CashApp and credit card scams. Some seem to be in it for the perverse pleasure of egging young people into killing one another. But what about those who follow them? What about myself? I have proposed to write a book about crime in Philadelphia, and I justify this as research, but after you’ve seen fifty murders caught on Ring and corner store security cameras, what do you learn from seeing the fifty-first? What general principles am I meant to derive from the endlessly expanding file on my computer, in which names, dates, and street corners bleed together into one unfathomable tragic mass?

Shoot, Troll, Get Shot

An investigator I know told me recently how he’d interviewed a boy who had shot and killed one of his opps on a bus. (I’m not worried about blowing his cover, because every year there are several shootings on Philly public transit.) This man, who has a past of his own, tried the sympathetic approach to get the boy to open up––I’ve been there, I know what you’re going through, and so on and so forth. This only elicited apathy. And so he spoke of how difficult it was to actually shoot a person, how few people can bring themselves to commit murder, how many balk at the last second, and asked, “What was it that made you able to pull that trigger when so many others can’t?”

This question roused the boy. He thought a long time, looked the investigator in the eyes, and responded, “I don’t know.” There is more truth in this I don’t know than there is in any number of theories about the causes of violent crime. Criminology has made at least theoretical advancements with group-based modeling, which attempts to disaggregate and gauge the impact of various risk factors on the chances that given persons will turn to crime; Adrian Raine’s Anatomy of Violence details how finer-grained insights into congenital, developmental, and environmental factors linked to criminality have begun to enrich the gross generalizations of root-cause hypotheses. These are an improvement on the notion that x amount of poverty + y of trauma and z of structural inequality almost inevitably give rise to crime, and on the essentially Calvinist view of those who would reduce wrongdoing to bad choices made by self-possessed agents with a vicious or misguided character; but anyone overly confident in their understanding of the whys of delinquency, or in their belief that such whys are ascertainable or even exist, will find chastening a recent paper by Matthew J. Salganik in collaboration with 160 research teams. “Measuring the Predictability of Life Outcomes with a Scientific Mass Collaboration” used exhaustive data sets, machine learning, and expert appraisals to investigate the extent to which life trajectories were subject to forecasting. Despite thousands of data points, researchers were found to be largely incapable of predicting individual outcomes; instead, their prognoses clustered in such a way as to suggest that expertise in the social sciences represents, above all, competency in modeling the beliefs of fellow experts.

This complicates the search for push factors, but what about the pull––what is it about killing an opp and celebrating it in a video that makes it so alluring that people will risk death or incarceration to do it? What compelled Ameen Hurst, a.k.a. Lil’ Scatted, a prison escapee facing four murder charges, to rent a studio in Manhattan and record a song about his crimes? What was so funny when he messaged a friend of one of his victims, laughing and ordering him, “Pick ya mans up,” before scornfully repeating the boy’s last words, “I’m hit! I’m hit in my neck!”?

The answer cannot be––however much the heart and conscience compel it––that this isn’t really happiness, that there is something else going on here; to affirm such is to fall into the same error as Descartes, who thought that because animals didn’t possess a soul, their howls of pain when being vivisected were a mere mechanical effect. Psychological approaches, which retain the methodological glow of Freud even as they draw more patently on Rousseauean ideas about society and bad parenting perverting the innately pure human essence, crumble in light of the extreme rarity of murder even in the worst lives and the most wretchedly deprived communities. René Girard comes closer to the truth with his theory of mimetic rivalry: prerationally, preconsciously, we perceive an advantage in others’ doing things, and we try to top them to steal this advantage for ourselves. Especially among young men, who have an outsize compulsion for what Erving Goffman calls the “ephemeral ennoblement” of risky activities that prove their mettle, mimetic contests are likely to take a violent form.

There is nothing all that new about this. Drill has distinctive parallels in history, in medieval Iceland’s blood feuds and in the fashion for dueling that reigned for centuries in Europe. Even Jojo’s posting up in his opps’ hood hearkens back to the duel’s predecessor, the pas d’armes, in which knights would announce their intention to hold a designated terrain and linger there, waiting for someone to come challenge them. Wherever personal honor is favored over the status conferred by society, honor-based violence will remain a source of prestige; and if you have the unsettling sense that the contemporary world offers too few opportunities for dignity, especially for young black men and boys in America’s poorest big city, you may note the relevance of Kevin McAleer’s assertion, as easily applied to drillers as to his subjects in Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany: “Destitute of noble values by which to live, duelists embraced a set of aristocratic guidelines by which to die.”

Only a small proportion of violent offenders are primarily and immediately motivated by the suffering of others. A self-selection for such individuals does occur in settings of generalized violence––in drill, these are disproportionately likely to become shooters. But enjoyment of violence can be cultivated and is a somewhat elastic quality: not everyone can become a sadist, but almost everyone can learn to relish another’s pain. In a study of genocide, Ervin Staub tells the story of a Vietnam gunner who initially refused an order to murder but capitulated when threatened with court-martial. “The veteran reported that in a fairly short time firing at civilians became like an experience at a target-shooting gallery, and he began to enjoy it.” Endless documents on atrocities committed in war or under the aegis of authoritarian regimes confirm the reality of this habituation process.

Nor is an opp innocent in the eyes of a driller. The endlessly repeated cycle of drill rap––shoot an opp, troll his gang, get shot in turn––speaks to an uncomfortable but ironclad fact of criminology: many crime victims, especially murder victims, share biographical traits with those who prey on them. A study of shootings in Philadelphia in 2020 found the following:

Oﬀender and victim demographics resemble each other: for the arrested shooters, 94% were male, 95% were people of color (74% Black Male), and the peak age was in late adolescence and young adulthood (18-30 years old). Similarly, for victims, 86.5% were male, 88.5% were people of color (61.5% Black Male), and the peak age was in young adulthood to mid-thirties (21-35 years old). . . . Previous shooting victimizations are fairly common among both victims and oﬀenders. . . . Previous involvement in crimes is also common among both oﬀenders and victims. 50% of the arrestees had a Violent Felony charge in their criminal history, as did 33% of the shooting victims. 38% of the arrestees had a “Violation of Uniform Firearms Act” (VUFA) charge, as did 29% of the shooting victims. 37% of the arrestees had a “Narcotics Possession with Intent to Distribute” (PWID) charge, as did 30% of the shooting victims.

We should note that things are worse than the numbers show, as the clearance rate in 2022 for fatal and nonfatal shootings in Philly was 36.7 percent and 18.9 percent, respectively.

Drill contributed to a spike in violence above all because it made conflicts sticky. There was a permanent, public record of these beefs, and a chorus of strangers in the comments section became a virtual peer group demanding retaliation. Pandemic conditions introduced novel contingencies. But there remained an upper limit on the number of people willing to commit murder, and logic dictates that if a large number of those murdered were themselves potential murderers, their death would cause the homicide rate to decline on its own (one Redditor called this, poetically, a “self-cleaning oven”). QED: after a mean 496 homicides per year from 2020–23, that number was almost halved in 2024, and 2025 is on track to see murders hit historic lows. What this means for ordinary policing is difficult to say, but at the least, assertions that policy is responsible for a sudden drop in crime should be viewed with skepticism.

Bodies and Clout

To return to YBC Dul: his killing was momentous enough that numerous friends texted me about it, and I texted numerous friends in turn. It sounds silly to compare his death to John Lennon’s or Kurt Cobain’s, but there was something of that there, too, just as there was something of the mingled solemnity, scorn, relief, and reluctant admiration when a notorious bank robber is finally shot down. In a genre saturated with callous irreverence, Dul had distinguished himself as the most relentless. It is hard for me to conceive of something more succinctly inhumane than him rapping about K.J. Johnson, a sixteen-year-old basketball player killed by two YBC members: “K3 can’t make no more jump shots.” I read Dul wasn’t offed over drill beef but because a weed customer put a bounty on his head. I’ll never know, but if it’s true, it would be like Houdini dying of a burst appendix after hundreds of death-defying stunts.

Online, many asked if this was the end of Philly drill. It just seemed too insane to go on: dozens of people had been locked up, some for the rest of their lives. My notes record 130 deaths affiliated with the scene, but there must be many that I’ve missed: just yesterday, I learned a crew I’d barely even heard of was up on their opps by nine bodies. On September 6, 2024, the first arrest came for Dul’s murder: then-sixteen-year-old Aiden Waters, who is now tied to six shootings, four fatal. Waters is aligned with Fastbreak, which Larry Krasner described with the awkward but not misplaced term “shooting group.” Critics have long accused Krasner of denying the gang problem through such euphemisms; be that as it may, Fastbreak’s raison d’être is bodies and clout. They have rappers, but the music seems calculated to reinforce the rep and not vice versa.

As the Fastbreak plot continued to play out—with more arrests, the dropping and refiling of charges, and the indictment of Aiden Waters’s mother, who was seen on her home security footage handing a Fastbreak member the rifle allegedly used to kill Dul—Noah Scurry, a star student and basketball standout, was shot to death outside his family home. What seemed a senseless tragedy took a turn within days, as two drill videos posted to YouTube, “Swing My Door” and “Switches and Dracs,” began to circulate. In both, a rapper in a sinister Joker mask flashes pistols with extended magazines, boasts about bodies, and disses opps from Fastbreak and other gangs. It’s taken for granted now that Noah Scurry was the Joker; on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast, local media personality Gillie da King claimed that Philadelphia detectives had told him Scurry was responsible for the murder of his son, YNG Cheese. Internet sleuths soon found TikToks of Scurry walking the streets with guns; in another, he boasts, “I’m a athlete with a whole body count.” He is said to have had between three and six killings to his credit. Inevitably, another rapper in a Joker mask has since appeared.

Who knows how many heads the hydra has? As I was bringing this piece to a close, there was a shooting in Fairmount Park, a short walk from where I live, with nine injured and two dead. One of the crews that lost someone, Harleyville in the city’s northeast, has allegedly been putting belt to ass, in the local patois, ever since. Their main rapper, SMG Nas, has a track out dissing Joker called “TMZ.” As of this writing, it has twenty-four thousand views.

From Opera Fever

Chelsey Minnis

Darling, it was a single, unsmashed fish tank..

Well, it had the same effect as a lip scar..

Anyway, his voice was like four brandies in the tropics

I was on my best behavior that autumn…

A poem was pawing at the door..

Bafflomathy

(no. 80)

© Martin Groch

Abraham Adams (“Poem”) is the author of Ambulance Chasers (MIT Press).

Daniel Arnold, Annie Collinge & Rottingdean Bazaar, Bobby Doherty, Jason Fulford, Rosie Marks, Molly Matalon, Thomas Prior, Farah Al Qasimi, and John Wilson (“No, Maybe”) contributed to the exhibit.

Jennifer C. Berkshire (“Uniform Policy”) is the host of the education podcast Have You Heard and the author, with Jack Schneider, of The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual.

Pooja Bhatia (“Home City, USA”) has been writing about Haiti for many years. She lives in California.

Sasha Burshteyn’s (“Auto Icon”) work appears in The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, and Copper Nickel. She is a 2025–26 Visiting Scholar at the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

Yongyu Chen’s (“Mouse Song”) work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including The Paris Review, Poetry, and the Washington Square Review. Their debut collection of poems, Perennial Counterpart, was a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.

Jasper Craven (“Battle of the Sexes”) is a freelance reporter covering the military and veterans’ issues for outlets including Politico, The New Republic, Harper’s, and the New York Times. He’s currently at work on a book about military education in America.

Sophie Dubber (“Bambi”) is a writer from Toronto. She recently graduated from the Written Arts Program at Bard College and will be joining the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall. This is her first published story.

Lauren Fadiman (“Blood Complicated”) is an assistant editor at Jacobin, a PhD student in history at Yale University, and a practicing folklorist. Her writing can be found in Current Affairs, Orion, and Real Life.

Noah Falck (“Fatigue Performance”) is the author of Exclusions (Tupelo Press) and the coauthored collection Prerecorded Weather (SurVision Books), winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize. He lives in Buffalo, New York.

Belén Fernández (“The Path Is Made by Walking”) is an opinion columnist for Al Jazeera and the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey Through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among other outlets.

Piper French (“Tit for Tat”) is a writer and reporter who focuses on politics and the criminal legal system. Her work can be found in the New York Review of Books, New York, Aperture, Lux, and Bolts.

Martin Groch (covers) is a cartoonist and graphic designer. He published his first book of cartoons with Abyme in 2024. He currently lives in Brussels.

Tadhg Larabee (“Stop the Presses”) is an assistant editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in history at the University of Chicago.

Chelsey Minnis’s (“From Opera Fever”) books include Bad Bad, Zirconia, Poemland, Baby, I Don’t Care, and the upcoming Opera Fever (Wave Press).

Nicolás Medina Mora (“The NAFTA Novel”) is a Mexican novelist. His first novel, América del Norte, was published in English last year and is forthcoming in Spanish.

Nick Tabor (“Dilemma in Denver”) is a freelance journalist and the author of Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created.

Adrian Nathan West (“I Will Disrespect You”) is a literary translator, essayist, and author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and My Father’s Diet.

Art Contributors

Harrison Carter

John J. Custer

Nick Dahlen

Firpal

Brittany Gudas

Michael Houtz

Hokyoung Kim

Diego Mallo

Paul Sahre

Sam Whitney

The front and back covers of this issue of The Baffler are by Martin Groch.

Submissions

The Baffler welcomes submissions. We encourage authors to read our most recent issues and online coverage before submitting to familiarize themselves with the magazine. Nonfiction should be submitted in pitch form (no complete manuscripts, please), consisting of two paragraphs that describe your project. Poetry and fiction are welcome; our preferred length for prose is between 2,200 and 5,000 words. All contributions to The Baffler are paid. Submit at https://thebaffler.com/about/submissions.

The Baffler (ISSN 1059-9789 E-ISSN 2164-9266) is independently published five times a year. Subscription orders and address changes should be sent to: The Baffler, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001. Telephone: 212-390-1569 or email: subscriptions@thebaffler.com. An electronic, full-text version of The Baffler is available online at http://thebaffler.com.

Subscription rates are: Individuals: Print and Electronic ~ $50, Canadians ~ $60, Outside the U.S. and Canada ~ $80. Electronic only ~ $30. Institutions: Print and Electronic ~ $88.

Single Issues: Print ~ $14, Outside the U.S. ~ $24. Claims for missing issues will be honored free of charge if made within three months after the publication date of the issue. Claims may be submitted to subscriptions@thebaffler.com.

Postmaster, send address changes to: The Baffler, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001.

Permissions: To request permission to photocopy, republish, or otherwise reproduce content from The Baffler, please visit our Rights & Permissions page at https://thebaffler.com/about/permissions, or contact the permissions manager directly at The Baffler Foundation, 234 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001. Email: permissions@thebaffler.com.

Phone: 212-390-1569.

thebaffler.com.