Social Studies

A few years ago, I sat in a small conference room at the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter with maybe a dozen other reporters, poring over thousands of emails and Slack messages from the people who ran the company before Elon Musk bought it. We were looking for evidence that there was a years-long, orchestrated campaign of political censorship on the platform, carried out at the behest of the US government. We found plenty. The screenshots and timelines of those communications became the Twitter Files.

The Twitter Files were part of the basis for the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. I was among several writers who co-signed an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs. The case laid out how the Biden administration, working through the tech platforms, had systematically censored people who dissented from the administration’s positions on Covid, the 2020 election, and other controversies.

I’m still friendly with everyone who was in that room, as far as I know. I have ongoing working relationships with several of them. I’m not interested in starting any professional or personal drama with anyone, so even though it’s easy enough to google at least some of those who were there, I’m not going to name anyone in particular at this moment. I still like and respect them all, and hopefully they like and respect me and will continue to after I hit publish on this post.

That said, it is amazing how few of the people who were in that room (which included others who, like me, were not bylined authors of any of the Twitter Files threads) have had anything to say about the attacks on free speech coming from the current administration. Some, I think it’s safe to say from what they’ve written and tweeted in the recent past, outright applaud it. I’ve felt like this needs to be said for a long time, but it’s reached a level of absurdity that I feel weirder not pointing it out than I feel anxious about potentially antagonizing a few friends and allies.

Glenn Greenwald is somewhere on the planet traveling with his kids, and turned over the mic this week to my friend and colleague Lee Fang to guest host his show, System Update. I joined Lee yesterday for a discussion in our usual Le Pod format, but for a bigger and hopefully not more discriminating audience.

Please listen or watch!

—LW

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“You see before you the wrath of the Lord breaking forth. . . .There is naught but towns emptied of their folk, monasteries razed to the ground or given to the flames, fields desolated. . . .Everywhere the strong oppresseth the weak and men are like fish of the sea that blindly devour each other.”

These words were written by the bishops assembled at the Council of Trosly in the year 909 in what is today northeastern France. It had been about four-and-a-half centuries since the fall of the western Roman Empire, and about 100 years since the Viking invasions of the region had begun. The bishops were desperate to curtail the mayhem brought by the Northern barbarians. Such desperation was a hallmark of this era of extreme violence and disorder in Western Europe, a continent besieged from the North by the Vikings, from the East by the Hungarians, and from the South by the Muslim invaders.

The Vikings were among the original Germanic tribes, predating even those of what is now Germany proper, which was populated by Celts before they were conquered by the Germanic warriors of Denmark. The Vikings were, famously, a seafaring people, whose ships could cross oceans and then sail down rivers hundreds of miles into the interior of the European continent. Over generations, their raiding excursions took on a more permanent character, evolving into conquest and settlement. The Vikings became as much the vanquishers of the soil as of the sea.

As the invaders adapted themselves to their new roles as territorial rulers and settlers, they assimilated into both the gene pools and the folkways of the peoples they subjugated. In the east, they married Slavs and birthed a new people called “the Rus” — meaning, from their Viking heritage, “men who row.” In the West, the Angles of Denmark settled Northumbria and East Anglia, the region of the British isles that would expand over the centuries into the nation of England. And they conquered a vast region of the Frankish kingdom, putting the fear of the end of the world into the bishops at the Council of Trosly. A couple of years after the Council, the Norsemen would be granted sovereignty over the region, which would be come to be called “Normandy” in their name. The Normans would exchange their native Scandinavian tongue for the French language, adopt Frankish customs and agricultural practices, marry into Frankish families and become, in every way, “French.” Then, a century-and-a-half later, the Normans would cross the Channel, conquer their Anglo-Saxon cousins and rule England as well.

This was a particularly violent stage in the evolution of feudalism in Europe, a social order characterized by fragmented sovereignty and private war-making. For a thousand years it prevailed over the continent, until it evolved into the system of modern nation-states we live in today.

This is my debut opinion piece for the San Francisco Standard. I’ll be writing for them semi-regularly going forward.

President Donald Trump’s executive order to defund the Presidio Trust is already legitimizing a preposterous idea that’s been floating around tech circles: converting the park into an autonomous city devoted to unregulated capitalism.

Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, which promotes “deregulated new cities,” co-wrote an article published last month in Palladium magazine in which he advocated turning the Presidio into a “Freedom City” modeled after Shenzhen in China. Shenzhen was founded in 1980 as a “Special Economic Zone” with the autonomy to set its own rules — specifically, minimal regulations on business. Its lack of regulations made it a mecca for investment and transformed what was once a bunch of fishing villages into a colossal metropolis and a center of global production.

The notion of turning the Presidio into a Freedom City percolated in the tech world last year after Trump announced a plan to create 10 Shenzhen-style Freedom Cities in the United States. Patri Friedman, a founder of The Seasteading Institute and the grandson of Milton Friedman, applauded Trump’s proposal, tweeting in November that “my dream is to turn part of the Presidio (federal land) into a neo-Tokyo of LED-accented skyscrapers and Make San Francisco Great Again.”

The Freedom Cities proposal was an awkward fit for the MAGA/America First agenda as most people understand it — it’s literally the opposite of economic nationalism. But it’s perfectly suited to the long-standing aspirations of one of Trump’s first converts from Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel.

It’s a pathetic spectacle: New York City Mayor Eric Adams sits on a couch next to Trump’s “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, on the set of Fox & Friends. The point of the joint interview is to demonstrate how closely the mayor is collaborating with ICE on immigration enforcement in the city. As the hosts close out the segment, Homan leans an arm over the Mayor, trying to get a last word in through the banter. Smirking, he declares, “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch, I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying where the hell is the agreement we came to?” Mayor Adams sits there chuckling, as if it’s just a friendly ribbing.

But it’s not. It’s a threat and a public display of domination. The Trump administration now owns Eric Adams. The Department of Justice dropped its corruption case against him while maintaining the right to resurrect it in the future. It did so explicitly to secure the Mayor’s cooperation with deportations, and, implicitly, with whatever else the administration might want from New York between now and the Democratic mayoral primary in June. Homan was reminding Adams and everyone else watching that he held a sword of Damocles over the Mayor’s head.

This is what the Trump administration has gotten out of the deal it made with Adams. What it has cost the President is the continuing service of Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, and four other DoJ lawyers. All six resigned rather than go along with a scheme to exchange impunity for political loyalty.

The Department of Justice has always occupied a precarious position within the executive branch. It’s expected to be both loyal to the President and independent of politics at the same time. This is tricky enough under a normal presidency, and impossible under Trump. The President expects fealty, and he will get it.

But the rot will run deep.

It took very little time following Barack Obama’s election victory 16 years ago for the new president to begin jettisoning the populist promises he had run on and start showing his true colors. Just three weeks after Election Day, he announced his intention to appoint Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Geithner was confirmed less than a week after the inauguration.

Geithner, who was the President and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve before he joined Obama’s cabinet, was an ambassador for Wall Street and barely pretended not to be. Recall that this was 2009, the year following the start of the global financial collapse. The selection of a Treasury Secretary was perhaps the most consequential of all of Obama’s cabinet choices, on par with choosing a Secretary of Defense at the height of the Iraq War. Obama was sending a comforting message to Wall Street at the moment when he could have mobilized public anger at the banks to build an entirely new architecture of financial oversight and accountability, something of FDR-level proportions. For the next eight years, Obama would govern as a corporate-friendly centrist technocrat, following the counsel of such champions of financial deregulation as Larry Summers and his mentor, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. He would scoff at the idea of holding the top bankers criminally liable for their role in causing the global financial meltdown, and would administer and champion the bank bailouts.

Now we see history repeating itself. Like Obama’s Hope and Change, Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda was always something of a reflection of whatever its most ardent supporters wanted it to be. To populists, it was the heralding of a new conservatism founded on working-class nationalism and industrial policy. Its anti-elite aesthetics, they hoped, expressed an actual commitment to the welfare of American workers and a real contempt for a corrupt and ossified political and corporate establishment.

That was before Elon Musk emerged as easily the most consequential and energetic figure in the administration to date. That’s not to say that Trump didn’t warn us; DOGE’s mission and Musk’s leadership of it was one of his central campaign promises. But there were ways of explaining away the gaping contradiction between this promise and the populist spirit of Trump’s campaign. One was by assuming it was little more than just another instance of Trump’s famously transactional practice of politics; Musk gave him his support and a lot of money, and in return got himself a title and a vanity project in the new administration. Another was to regard DOGE as Trump’s well-earned counteroffensive against the “Deep State.” He had been openly undermined in his first term by his own middle management. Why shouldn’t he make it a priority to root out those who sought to sabotage him?

In fact, those probably were among Trump’s reasons for creating the new initiative. But Musk has his own purposes, and if you believe for a second that they have anything to do with empowering workers and taking down the corporate oligarchy, then you’re in the same boat as those who continued to believe Obama’s empty promises even as he turned over the keys of his administration to the clique of executives at Citibank, JPMorganChase, and Goldman Sachs.

We examine the pros and cons of recent steep cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, weighing the agency's history of spreading propaganda and subverting foreign governments against its vital humanitarian work.

We also analyze the swirl of misinformation on social media as citizens scrutinize public records of government grants an…

I just finished reading Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake. It was the second most profound experience I’ve ever had reading a novel, the first one being The Road, which I happened to read immediately before it. (Kingsnorth’s Alexandria, the third in the trilogy that begins with The Wake, is also pretty high up there.)

The Wake takes place in eleventh century England, at the time of the Norman conquest of the hitherto Anglo-Saxon country. It’s the story of an apocalypse. Society has collapsed under the brutal violence of the invasion. Once sedentary people have been driven into the wilderness, turned into nomads. A guerrilla insurgency arises against the French. The main character, a man who was already resentful of the cultural changes brought by Christianity, is driven by the disintegration of traditional society into an obsessive and violent embrace of the old, pagan ways.

The story is about what the story is about — I wouldn’t pretend or wish it to be an allegory for anything else. But by sheer coincidence, it did bring to mind certain broad themes and discontents that are swirling around in the current right-wing American political zeitgeist: nationalism, dogmatic traditionalism, and the sense of a lost collective heritage.

I’m not steeped in “New Right” philosophy. I’ve never bothered to read Curtis Yarvin or Adrian Vermeule or Patrick Deneen. I couldn’t explain to you the differences between National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism, other than one being more religious than the other. So I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the intellectual debates within the broader MAGA universe.

But you don’t have to be James Pogue to know that for years, the right has become increasingly characterized by a deep distrust of modernity and a yearning for what one might call the authenticity of traditional folkways. In one sense, that’s nothing new — since the time of Edmund Burke, being a conservative has always meant being resistant to rapid, radical change and protective of the timeworn institutions of the past. But in its contemporary manifestation, the sentiment is deeper than the “back in my day” chauvinism that comes naturally with age and economic security. The contemporary right’s nostalgia and its rejection of the modern human condition is more spiritual than that; it’s almost mystical. It appeals to the young even more than to the old. And the impulse feels less reactionary than revolutionary — a mobilizing vision that appeals not to mere political or economic self-interest, but to a pervasive hunger for new meaning in life. Like all revolutions, it seeks to wipe away the profane, fallen world we have inherited so as to resurrect a purer one that was lost to the corruption of some earlier time. This is not the conservatism of William Buckley, Ronald Reagan, or Paul Ryan. Underpinning it is an alienation that should not be mistaken for the mere antagonism to changing norms that characterized those earlier iterations.

I saw it first with the “Alt Right,” about whom I have directed both a short and a feature documentary. By invoking that ignominious label, I don’t mean to smear MAGA or the New Right with its white nationalist associations. The American conservative movement is as riven with factionalism and ideological rivalries as the left is; I have reported closely on the sectarian divisions and infighting even within the narrow spectrum of the far right. Much of the New Right rejects racial essentialism as much as it does multiculturalism, and, likewise, in its prime, the Alt Right loudly disavowed the non-racialist right, whom it derided as “the Alt Light."

But just as leftists as disparate as communists and neoliberal technocrats are bound by a broadly shared disapproval of structural inequality and faith in enlightened social engineering, there are common variables that have catalyzed very different — and often mutually antagonistic — political movements on the right. In the case of the Alt Right, the catalyst was a sense that modern consumer capitalism had corroded the ancient social ties that bound men to men, cheapening human existence. To Richard Spencer and his ilk, racial solidarity was the most elemental form of human connection and the remedy to the anomie of modernity. This isn’t my interpretation; I’ve heard them say this explicitly — I even have video of it. Their answer to the problem was genocidal, not to mention nonsensical, as race itself is a modern construction, unknown to the primeval societies the Alt Right projected it upon. But the problem of our alienation from one another is a real one, and not just for the right. It has historically concerned many leftist movements, from revolutionary socialists to back-to-the-land hippies. And it is today informing much of the conservative reaction to the modern world.

America is not being invaded by a conquering army. Our towns and cities are not being massacred and pillaged and burned. But, like the Anglo-Saxons of eleventh century England, we are a proud society experiencing the dislocations and humiliations of national decline. That decline is reflected in our dwindling literacy rates, the erosion of our nuclear families, the offshoring of our industrial base, our growing street addiction crisis, and a dozen other indices. Our extended families are dispersed, our neighborhoods are atomized, our trust in one another has dwindled, and in place of the community that once coalesced out of our sharing of physical space and time, we have the predatory, ersatz virtuality of social media. We see our old civil society and sense of national community crumbling around us, and like Kingsnorth’s protagonist, some are reacting to it by embracing a mythical heritage that promises to bind us closer to each other by drawing a clear line between those who belong to our nation and those who lie outside of it. It’s a kind of existential nationalism.

The most obvious example of this tendency is nativism, but it’s not the only one. Another is the growing conviction within the conservative movement that America is not merely an “idea,” but, like France or Japan or Denmark, a nation with a common heritage, history, culture, and language. I’ll get into whether that conviction is right or wrong, but what’s revealing is the growing cultural hunger for it in twenty-first century America. In an earlier era, this kind of backward-looking national self-conception wasn’t very American at all. It was a relic of the Old World, at home in Europe but anachronistic in the emerging United States.

The old European societies that the colonists of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries left behind were, in the main, nascent modern nation-states, but ones that were burdened with the dead weight of their feudal pasts. The social structure of the feudal system had persisted for a millennium before Europeans landed on the shores of the American continents. It didn’t just vanish when the political and economic conditions in Europe that favored its perpetuation evolved beyond them. This was especially the case in the main source of colonial settlement, England.

The feudal social order was comprised of long, vertical chains of mutual loyalty and obligation that bound the peasant, on the very bottom rung, with the king at the top of it, with many intermediate layers in between. The arrangement was unmistakably hierarchical, but it would be a mistake to regard it as purely one of domination and subjection. The lord, to be sure, exploited the peasant, both for his agricultural produce and his military service, but he also owed him physical security and was obliged to recognize his traditional rights, such as the right to use common fields and pastures. The lord, in turn, was the vassal to his own, greater lord, but his loyalty, too, came with the guarantee of certain rights and commitments owed to him by his master. These reciprocal obligations weren’t mere formalities. When duties went unfulfilled, they could result in shifts of allegiance, which could, in turn, precipitate wars or peasant uprisings. The social scaffolding was brittle. A precarious social order of changing loyalties and violent contests for power was inherently prone to balkanization and resistant to centralized authority.

The feudal ties of loyalty and obligation were the consequence, in a sense, of the absence of the centralized authority of the nation-state. They were the makeshift “order” that organically emerged from the anarchy of a vast territory governed by competing warlords. As nation-states formed in Europe for reasons I’ll leave to another essay, these feudal structures lost their political function. But that didn’t mean they evaporated. Where social revolutions failed to wipe them away, they remained stubbornly intact as a vestigial social class system. A useless aristocracy lingered within a modern, capitalist system that no longer needed it, retaining some of its hereditary rights and privileges while providing no service to anyone in return.

Migration to the American colonies offered discontented Europeans a fresh start. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy — the inheritors of the status of the peasantry — eagerly exploited it, but so did some prosperous members of the bourgeoisie, and even some members of the lesser gentry. In North America, prior to the industrial age, they found themselves on more or less equal footing — by European standards, at least — especially in the flattened social landscapes of bourgeois New England and the provincial Appalachian backcountry, but also even amidst the aristocratic pretenses of the Tidewater colonies. Foreign visitors to the colonies were taken aback by the lack of deference in social relations between what in Europe would have been members of unbridgeable social classes. Even indentured servants could eventually find their way to prosperity and respectability, if they could survive their tenures in bondage. Only African slaves were condemned to permanent subjugation, and Indians to perpetual outsider status.

Nowhere was this social leveling more apparent than on the frontier. In the eastern cities, with their luxury commodities and specialized divisions of labor, the social classes of Europe gradually re-appeared, at least superficially, and later, industrialization would create an entrenched urban proletariat and a capitalist nobility. By contrast, on the frontier, where the son of a lord and the son of a peasant were for the most part equal in their frailty before the privations of the wilderness, a prestigious family lineage may have earned a pioneer a respectful nod from a neighbor but little more. And as the frontier moved ever westward and the distant memory of one’s ancient European ancestry faded from one generation to the next, this rough sense of equality became more and more a character of the expanding American nation. The “rugged individualism” of the frontier meant this, if nothing else.

From the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, that culture of casual egalitarianism was coupled with an increasing centralization of power in the federal government. We became bound together within what was increasingly emerging as a clearly unitary nation-state. These two factors together made fertile ground for the rooting of a common identity as citizen before all other competing claims on one’s self-conception: class, ethnic origin, colonial allegiance, family title, etc. Whatever other social status we could claim for ourselves was, in the eyes of other Americans, an abstraction from another continent that we had left behind generations ago. We were Americans because we didn’t define ourselves that way.

As the U.S. evolved into a global superpower, the esteem attached to our common status as American citizens rose like the value of a Fortune 500 stock. But that era is now over, and the stock has plummeted. In the twenty-first century, it’s no longer quite so special to be an American. Mere common legal membership within a polity that was once but is no longer exceptional in the world is too weak a source for national pride. We must now invent new foundations upon which to base our nationalism, so we have turned to the old mythologies: ethnicity, heritage, historical ancestry. This is the baggage the pioneers shed from their feudal European pasts; it was their very absence that once defined us as Americans. Now they’re back again as siren songs to the American right.

The left has offered nothing but sectarian identity politics and the antiquated class consciousness of a prior industrial era to contest the return of these ancestral forms of nationalism. These tired ideologies can’t address the problem of our alienation from one another because they’re categories of division, not multiplication. Their entire purpose is to mobilize constituencies to struggle for advancement against other constituencies. These are useful tools for political warfare but they do little to address our spiritual yearning for a new basis upon which to renew our flagging social solidarity. Indeed, they only aggravate it. They are anti-nationalist identities at a moment that demands a new sense of national selfhood.

At the dawn of this new “Golden Age,” it’s unclear what, beyond physically sharing a geographical territory and existing under a common federal bureaucracy, binds us together as Americans. It’s only clear what divides us. We are becoming a country that is no longer a nation. The MAGA movement and the New Right have only wrong answers to it, but at least they’re asking the question.

Update: The Trump administration has clarified that SNAP will not be impacted.

01/28/25 12:30pm PT

Recall wokeness at the pinnacle of its power. A random utility worker getting fired for accidentally making an OK hand sign. A social justice influencer shaming a father for his white privilege after his child was eaten by an alligator. The President of the United States solemnly meeting with a domestic abuser and would-be kidnapper after he was justifiably shot by police. A vice presidential nominee applauding rioters burning down a city in response to that justified shooting.

Now picture if it had gone one step further: say, if President Biden had suspended the operations of all federal criminal courts until the government could complete an audit of racism in the criminal justice system. What will we do with the accused in the meantime? Won’t this encourage more crime? Why should crime victims have to pay the price for the alleged flaws of the courts? Biden doesn’t say; he doesn’t seem much to care. The important thing is to root out white supremacy, whatever the cost.

At 5pm eastern tonight, the White House will pause almost all federal financial assistance for some temporary but indefinite period, until the new administration can root out all traces of “Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering.” In typical Trump fashion, the order is preposterously short on detail, but the consequences will clearly be enormous. It will certainly impact education, health care research, and government services provided by third party nonprofit contractors. It could impact Head Start, SNAP, infrastructure maintenance, disaster relief, small business loans, and just about everything else the federal government distributes money for, aside from Medicare, Social Security and student loans. And it’s all being done in the name of fighting the “elite.”

We still don’t know what started the fires in the Pacific Palisades. Theories abound. One speculates that an inadequately extinguished brush fire ignited by New Years fireworks smoldered underground for a week before reigniting. Another blames (without evidence) a glamping entrepreneur and his trail-running friends who …