Recently, an Instagram carousel by a long-lost acquaintance who was beach- and boat-hopping with a glittery squad of people I didn’t recognize crossed my feed. I figured they were moneyed Millennials with regular jobs—until I discovered that several of them had followings in the high five figures, and one had more than 3 million. As it turns out, they were neither civilians nor stars. They were “Who”s: a category of low-tier celebrities, including influencers, reality stars, and podcasters—and commonly all three at once—whose names prompt you to ask: “Who?”
The binary between “Who”s and “Them”s—the latter being A-listers your parents might recognize, such as Beyoncé and Tom Cruise—was invented by Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber. Their podcast, Who? Weekly, bills itself as a show that covers “everything you need to know about celebrities you don’t.” After a decade on the beat, the pair have distilled their insights into a new book, I Want to Be Famous: When Everybody and Nobody Is a Celebrity, which offers a comprehensive theory of how the internet and social media transformed everyone into someone—and therefore, no one.
That theory has surprising implications for the labor market at large. As social-media platforms have made it seem easy to monetize attention, professionals in industries where fame has not historically been a credential have come to face growing pressure to create and optimize their online brand. Personal branding, once almost exclusively the concern of genuine celebrities and more recently a job for social-media influencers, is now something a junior accounting executive is encouraged to think about. Sophie Bishop, a professor in media and communication at the University of Leeds, in England, calls this structural shift “influencer creep”—a phenomenon that has caused more swaths of the economy to function like the attention-hungry world that Who? Weekly dissects. No matter how staunchly we may wish to resist the fusion of work and life, we are what we do, and our job is to be a “Who.”
Who? Weekly was launched in 2016 as a lighthearted but often trenchant analysis of fame at a time when social media was beginning to democratize the concept. Finger and Weber were both young entertainment journalists; as they write in I Want to Be Famous, they wanted a venue in which to grumble about celebrities turning away from traditional media and toward social platforms, where they could exercise more image control. Finger and Weber’s real innovation, however, was the system of Whos and Thems. Whos are thirsty for the attention that Thems already have and will shamelessly do or plug anything to get it. “By the end of the 2010s,” the authors write, “it seemed like every reality star, aspiring actor or musician, and TikTok influencer was supplementing their creative income with a post promoting a vibrator, supplement, gambling service, or alcoholic beverage.”
But as I Want to Be Famous reveals, social-media culture has changed so much that even Thems can no longer resist shilling for brands online. When Jennifer Aniston joined Instagram, in 2019, her first post was a selfie with her Friends co-stars. “It was a charming (if brief) glimpse into the personal life of one of our most private celebrities,” Finger and Weber write: “The purity of her feed was short-lived, however. Today, you can see ads for SkinnyPop popcorn among those intimate photos with friends because now everyone is free to sell stuff in this brave new world, without the fear of selling out.”
Last month, another Them joined Instagram: the Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence, who in a video warned fans to be nice, or she’d quit. A couple of weeks later, Lawrence posted a carousel with grainy photos that were, in part, normal-person coded: There she was, eating a corn dog and riding the Tower of Terror. Except she was also at a Dior fashion show in Paris—right, she’s a movie star. “Thank you @dior and @jonathan.anderson for the most beautiful show ever,” she wrote in the caption. Maybe Lawrence joined the platform for the same reasons we all did: to make internet friends jealous with vacation pics. Or maybe her long-running role as a brand ambassador for Dior now requires her to broker attention online. We can’t know why anyone posts anything: for love or money, connection or commerce. But last week, Lawrence shared low-res, behind-the-scenes snapshots of her hairstyles in various movies, and updated her Instagram bio with a link to her new hair-care brand.
Who? Weekly chronicles the rise of online attention and the decline of offline mystique. A 2024 post on the Harvard Business School blog offers an example. Branding yourself as a “financial analyst with high emotional intelligence who loves to ski,” the author argues, can help you find opportunities “that align with your authentic self.” The post also suggests that a job seeker might “promote your value” by using “a mix of paid, owned, and earned media.” What this means is that, to really get your mug in front of hiring managers and corporate recruiters, you should pay to amplify material that communicates your professional viability.
Some Gen Z job seekers are using Instagram and TikTok to pitch themselves to potential employers. A 2025 survey found that 46 percent of Gen Z respondents had landed a job or an internship through TikTok. And LinkedIn, once a straitlaced professional networking site, now also functions something like Instagram for the corporate class. The idea is that becoming a platform personality through personal posts or videos will juice the algorithm and thus woo recruiters. The rise of the LinkedInfluencer is emblematic of the act of self-promotion becoming more front-facing: As Brooke Erin Duffy, a communication professor at Cornell University, asked in a June interview with The New York Times, “What does it mean for the rest of us who are living, working and spending our time in these sites where everything we see has this ethos of self promotion?”
Companies including Starbucks and IBM have launched so-called employee-creator programs, initiatives that offer everyday workers rewards for serving as in-house posters. “We’re giving them a way to become influencers,” a July press release by Gap Inc. boasted about one such initiative. But the imperative to build followers stretches across corporate tiers. Jon Gray, the president and chief operating officer of Blackstone—one of the largest commercial landlords in the world—has gone viral on LinkedIn with relatably goofy videos of himself running; the platform’s editor in chief and vice president of content, Dan Roth, recently bragged that Gray has “become a creator.” How odd to feel sympathy for a billionaire: Somehow, he too is furiously—literally—running on the content hamster wheel.
Finger and Weber point out that, until recently, a professional working for a major corporation could count on a fairly linear career path. The same wasn’t true for someone like a reality star, who needed to rely on media access to sustain their fame and find new opportunities; they might start a lifestyle brand, for instance, in service of becoming what the authors call a “working Who.” Plenty of jobs don’t appear to be succumbing to this shift, at least not yet; your Instagram algorithm might surface the odd plumbing influencer, but your leaky faucet is unlikely to get fixed under the flattering glare of a ring light. Influencer culture has gone only so far in reshaping the labor market in its image, but as the corporate world adopts its practices, there is a growing incentive for you to become your own kind of “working Who”—and, in turn, to help reinforce the idea that people are products.
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Conversation, Charlie Tyson wrote in 2023, is by nature fleeting. He quotes Virginia Woolf: “It flies up the chimney,” she once said, “and is gone.” This perspective may be comforting for people who spend hours after a social interaction perseverating over that one joke that didn’t quite land. But Woolf’s remark doesn’t necessarily imply that conversation is meaningless. Understanding that conversations are temporary, that they fly up the chimney to make room for new ones, can help us talk to one another more honestly. “In the twists of talk, we open ourselves to others and allow our interior to be subtly reshaped,” Tyson wrote in his review of a book on the subject.
The benefits of conversation are constantly threatened by modern life—by the pull of a phone notification during lunch with a friend, by the impulse to text instead of call, and perhaps most dramatically, by AI’s promise to obviate the human need for talking. Woolf’s description of language might make it seem replaceable, but this transient quality is precisely what makes talking an essential part of life. Language is something we are creating, demolishing, and creating again, every second of every day—a distinctly human act.
On Conversation
The Secret to a Good Conversation
By Charlie Tyson
A new cultural history embraces talk as an open-ended source of temporary delight. (From 2023)
“Although we usually appreciate the beauty of trees in full leaf, I was stunned by the bare-branched symmetry of this tree on a quiet winter day in our small town,” Dorothy B. from La Conner, Washington, writes.
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
Editor’s Note:Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
President Trump’s dismissal of Russian aggression against Ukraine has prompted bipartisan backlash. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss what this may mean for the Ukrainians, and more.
“We have to remember that Ukraine has seen the United States pull back its support even before this,” Nancy A. Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night. In the past, the U.S. has limited the number of weapons it sends to Ukraine, and “this week, we saw the United States not delivering promised interceptors,” Youssef added.
“The challenge for Ukraine is twofold: It is the inconsistency in the United States’ support and the inability for Europe to come back and provide that support,” Youssef argued. “And that Russia is as close as it’s ever been to Washington.” These two factors make “the war harder for the Ukrainians,” she noted.
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, a chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor and CEO of The Dispatch; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Youssef.
The War on Terror coincided with the rise of the internet, when freshly concerning digital attacks became known as cyberterrorism. Now a new threat has appeared: AI terrorism.
Over the past few years, reports from governments, intergovernmental organizations, and think tanks have warned that AI is likely to fuel terrorist activity, demanding preparation and response. In 2021, the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism co-published a report on the “malicious use of artificial intelligence for terrorist purposes.” Cyberattacks such as malware and intrusion featured heavily, as did physical attacks via autonomous vehicles, facial-recognition spoofing, deepfakes, and—the coronavirus pandemic was still raging—engineered biological weapons. Earlier, in 2019 and 2020, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies published two reports on the risks that language models, still mostly unheard-of at the time, would pose to propaganda and radicalization. And just this week, a group of Harvard Kennedy School researchers published a working paper that assumes that the “first major AI-enabled terrorism event” is a credible threat and speculates how it might come about.
Cyberterrorism was already a confusing term, partly because hacking or disabling computer infrastructure might be carried out by state actors and without violence—properties that aren’t normally associated with terrorism. Among the reasons terrorism is bad, a very minor one is that the term has no fixed definition. In revolutionary France, it referred to violence exercised by the Jacobin state, in many cases by guillotine. By the late 19th century, it had shifted to the nonstate violence of anarchist would-be revolutionaries. Terrorism began to overlap with independence movements in the 20th century, drawing it closer to separatist conflict or guerrilla warfare. By the late 20th century, this ideological motivation for terrorism became mandatory. Terrorism amounted to violence designed to produce a psychological effect.
The hijackings and hostage crises of the 1970s exemplify this revised purpose. So do domestic attacks, such as that of Timothy McVeigh, who bombed an Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. Today, a quarter century after the September 11 attacks, terrorism often carries a political judgment instead of describing an act or a type of actor: Nearly any adversary whatsoever might be called a “terrorist” now.
Given the slippage of the term, AI is, in a way, terroristic by nature: It threatens to take your job, steal your money, ruin your children’s education, eradicate art and culture, take away your health care, colonize your town, destroy the climate, make electronics forever unaffordable. You have also been told that AI is inevitable—and that only immensely wealthy Silicon Valley companies, possibly run by sociopathic leaders, have the resources and talent to advance it (which they must do, even if it means the destruction of humankind).
But the older sense of terrorism still persists. The technology could also facilitate, in addition to the familiar chaos that AI threatens to unleash, terrorism in the sense of state- or nonstate-enacted violence or disruption, such as disabling your electric grid and unleashing a bioweapon at your workplace.
The people who study AI terrorism raise different concerns than those raised by whistleblowers inside the AI industry—or AI leaders themselves. Superintelligent-AI-driven extinction events do not top the list of risks, nor do the rogue AI agents that might, in theory, become autonomous. Instead, researchers, intelligence officials, and scenario planners seem principally interested in the ways that AI might allow bad actors to carry out more sophisticated activities with reduced effort. The Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber, for example, asked ChatGPT for advice about how to detonate an explosive, a use that suggests terrorists might be stupid in addition to being enterprising.
Today’s frontier AI models are powerful, cheap, and widely available. They can accomplish (or help accomplish, or appear to accomplish) many types of tasks without having been explicitly designed to do so. Criminals, terrorists, and even governments have tended to use existing communication, transportation, and industrial infrastructure to do bad things. AI offers another such tool. This conclusion is both reasonable and a bit humdrum.
Consequently, most of the reports on AI terrorism that I have read are conservative in their concerns. They stress that carrying out acts of violence or other physical attacks is difficult and that AI can’t magically solve those problems. They are, perhaps, responding to years of cyberterrorism-threat overstatement, the most famous example of which is the idea of an “electronic Pearl Harbor”—a devastating attack on digital infrastructure that incapacitates the nation. That metaphor, which has been in circulation since at least 1999, was made more concrete in 2012, when then–Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Congress about a “cyber Pearl Harbor” that “could be as destructive as the terrorist attack on 9/11.”
Many international-policy experts have argued that cyber Pearl Harbor amounts to a mixed metaphor. The attack on Pearl Harbor was an intricately planned act of state warfare, not a rogue operation. More likely, smaller cybersecurity incidents could cascade into bigger ones, or cause unpredictable secondary effects. Real, damaging cyberattacks on physical infrastructure have been possible for many years. AI’s role in cyberterrorism is likely to be the same as the internet’s: an amplified capacity to produce and disseminate propaganda, confusion, and political manipulation.
Panetta justified the warning about a cyber Pearl Harbor on the grounds that the risk was possible even if it wasn’t plausible. A similar justification appears to motivate the Harvard Kennedy School researchers in their paper. The co-authors describe their methodology as a “pre-mortem,” which involves assuming that such an event has taken place and working backwards to understand how it came about.
I asked Stephen Casper, one of the paper’s co-authors, whether artificial intelligence creates new catastrophic capabilities or simply makes existing malice easier, faster, or cheaper. “It’s more the latter,” he told me. Specifically, AI models that possess information about dangerous capabilities, such as how to disrupt infrastructure and construct a chemical weapon, could allow malicious actors to use them to nefarious ends. Max Kamachee, another co-author, told me that new models “can meaningfully assist a novice in creating a known severe biological threat absent safeguards.” Put more simply, bad people with ill intent could use AI to carry out bad acts. The paper goes into much greater detail, including making reasonable suggestions about how different types of models might be controlled or regulated to prevent harm.
The Harvard paper presents two candidates for the first major AI-terrorism event: One is a cyberattack that would cause several billion dollars’ worth of economic damage; the other, a biological-weapon attack that would kill more than 100 people. I asked Casper and Kamachee whether terrorism was the right name for the two scenarios. The paper derives these litmus tests from definitions in recent U.S. laws governing the development and management of models in the AI industry. But Casper acknowledged that those bad outcomes might not be ideologically motivated. “We call it terrorism,” he told me, but he also said that an equivalent name would be “the human-led misuse of AI for malicious ends.” Kamachee called the risk “catastrophic malicious use.”
Predicting the future is foolish, and guessing about whether truly terrible events might or might not come to pass is even worse. On the one hand, Casper and his co-authors seem justified in warning about the worst scenarios that AI could facilitate, even indirectly. On the other hand, AI terrorism risks devolving into the fearmongering rhetoric that cyber Pearl Harbor did.
I pressed Casper to connect the dots between what AI makes possible and which outcomes are likely. He cited the shockingly rapid evolution of capability in the models, along with the fact that some AI companies are directly building AI-driven-biological-research facilities. Anthropic, for example, has built wet labs for Claude-enabled DNA and protein research. Those labs could be breached, or the model weights discovered inside them could make their way out and into the wrong hands. “It’s a big world—lots of people, lots of groups, lots of states, lots of motivations,” Casper said. “The precedented misuse of current AI systems for terrorist-type activities is, you know, a pretty decent sign.” A sign of what? That the AI industry is going to experience what Caspar called “a Challenger or Chernobyl or 9/11 or Enron moment.”
And yet, those historical catastrophes are all quite different. Challenger was doomed by a structural failure that had been overlooked because of organizational mismanagement; the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a design flaw magnified by operator error and stifling bureaucracy; September 11 was an ideologically motivated nonstate attack facilitated by ease of access to expertise and realized thanks to national-intelligence blunders; the Enron scandal was accounting fraud allowed by regulatory failure and auditor complicity. Two of the examples were industrial accidents, one was an unintentional outcome of deliberate misconduct, and only one counts as a terrorist attack.
The actual risks created by AI don’t require terrorism to inspire worry, and thinking about terrorism may confuse or distance us from taking the right preventive actions. Because they act at the fringes of society, terrorists have a tendency to adopt whatever technology and infrastructure that contemporary life makes available. They choose their tools, their weapons, and their targets based on not merely what will cause harm or attract attention but also what they can get hold of. This was true of explosives such as dynamite at the turn of the 20th century and car bombs by mid-century; the newspapers, radio, and television media that would produce notoriety for attackers; commercial aviation once it became mature but not sufficiently secure; and banking exploits and off-books financial networks, among them cryptocurrency. Nobody called McVeigh a rental-truck terrorist or an agricultural-fertilizer terrorist, but those two resources proved convenient and effective for his desired purpose—which was indeed terrorism.
Throughout its history, terrorism has repeatedly appropriated civilian technologies, especially unproven or insufficiently managed ones. Conveniently, such infrastructure also tends to make the public feel danger, which accelerates our fear of vulnerability. Like terrorism that uses railways, cars, airplanes, dense urbanism, and the internet, terrorism that makes use of artificial intelligence is possible and even likely. Preparing for its contingencies is wise, if speculative. In that sense, AI terrorism is not new, even if it is still frightening.
Not too long ago, the Department of Justice could generally be trusted to prosecute cases in which lawyers believed that real wrongdoing had occurred. Now DOJ frequently unveils lawsuits that seem designed mostly for securing likes and reposts on right-wing social media—the actual facts be damned. Any high-profile criminal case brought by the Trump administration arrives with an air of suspicion.
Today, Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., announced an odd set of charges against two former FBI officials for allegedly lying to Congress during testimony in 2023. “When senior FBI agents lie to Congress believing they are above the law, it’s time to bring the hammer of justice down on them,” Pirro posted on X. For all of the fanfare, DOJ provided little evidence to back up its claims. But the timing of the charges—they’ve arrived just more than a week before the midterm elections—combined with the puzzling substance of the allegations and the administration’s crowing online, does not inspire confidence in the integrity of the prosecutorial work.
The charges concern several statements made by the defendants, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, in the course of a congressional investigation into supposed “weaponization” of the government against President Trump. In brief, the Justice Department is alleging that Floris and Benavides lied to the House Judiciary Committee regarding their level of knowledge about the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Lawyers for Floris issued a statement saying that DOJ “has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts.” Benavides’s lawyer likewise described the charges as “baseless.”
The saga of the Hunter Biden laptop has now spanned four federal elections, and the specifics of the story may, reasonably, no longer be top of mind. Understanding its relevance here requires a deep plunge into far-right mythology. But the quick version is that MAGA became obsessed with the possibly stolen laptop, and the material it contained documenting Biden’s drug addiction, after the New York Post published an article about the laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Social-media companies, burned by their experience of Russian election interference in 2016, worried that the underlying documents might be Russian misinformation. (This suspicion was never confirmed.) They responded aggressively by suppressing links to the Post’s story—which outraged the right. The laptop would go on to play a starring role in the coming years as the GOP used congressional investigations to tell a story about the victimization of the right, supposedly having been a target of a sprawling network of government-backed online censorship and unfair treatment by the FBI.
This was the context in which Floris and Benavides were testifying in 2023. The two had held leadership positions in the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) during 2020, a section created to respond to foreign interference after Russia’s 2016 election meddling. There they had crossed paths with the laptop. In recent years, congressional Republicans have pointed to various decontextualized snippets of that testimony and internal FBI documents as part of their efforts to suggest that the FBI was working against Trump in the 2020 election.
By then, for a certain kind of very online Trump supporter, Floris and Benavides had already become familiar if relatively minor villains in the anticanon of deep-state enemies. The criminal charges today make sense in this larger narrative. In his X post announcing the charges, FBI Director Kash Patel referred to the agency’s past “political weaponization targeting their opponents.”
Just because MAGA hates someone does not mean that they are innocent. But Floris and Benavides’s work as described in the affidavit seems unremarkable. And the document is opaque when describing what the two defendants are actually alleged to have lied about. To be prosecutable under the relevant statute, a lie to government authorities must be told “knowingly and willfully,” and it must be “material” in a way that substantively affects the investigation in question. Some of Floris’s and Benavides’s alleged misstatements, as described in the affidavit, don’t initially appear to be misstatements at all. For example, Floris said she was not involved in the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden during which the FBI seized the laptop; in fact, her work at the FITF really was separate from the criminal probe, which was carried out by a different team.
Other supposed lies might well be better understood as forgetfulness. The two defendants were high up in the bureau and wouldn’t necessarily recall the minutiae of an incident that took place three years before they testified. In one instance, the affidavit alleges that Floris lied about her involvement in “an assessment to discredit the Hunter Biden investigations,” but contains no further mention of this supposed assessment nor any quotes from the relevant testimony. Perhaps DOJ will be able to provide more evidence for its allegations as the case goes on, but as things now stand, the charges appear less than airtight.
How the Justice Department chose to bring this case also invites suspicion. The charges were filed via a criminal complaint, a method the government uses in many investigations that must move quickly, because a complaint does not require the immediate involvement of a grand jury. The need to rush here is hard to see, given that the relevant testimony was three years ago. Conversely, it’s easy to imagine why DOJ would want to push out incendiary allegations without having to convince a potentially skeptical grand jury—an all-but-certainty in D.C., where jurors have delivered a number of high-profile rebuttals to federal prosecutors. In the next 30 days, if the department wishes to move forward with the case, it will have to seek a grand jury’s indictment. By then, though, the Trump administration may have already gotten the propaganda boost it was looking for.
At a hearing today, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui appeared skeptical of the case, noting the government’s decision to delay seeking an indictment and describing the defendants’ “sparkling backgrounds.” As many judges have commented over the past year, the traditional “presumption of regularity” awarded to the Justice Department’s work has been eroded by the Trump administration’s habitual use of criminal prosecutions as a tool to harass the president’s enemies. With this case, DOJ has provided little material to reassure its critics.
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American politics is saturated with cash, and each election cycle seems to set new spending records—and yet, with the midterms in the home stretch, neither party thinks it has enough money. The irony is nearly as rich as the biggest donors.
Filings released this week show that $1 billion was spent on the campaign in the first two weeks of October alone. This year’s elections are expected to be the most expensive midterms in U.S. history, beating 2022—which beat 2018, which beat 2014, and so on. This will not surprise anyone who lives in a state or district with a competitive race this fall. (I’m sure I can still recite the Senate Leadership Fund’s ad attacking the North Carolina Democrat Roy Cooper, weeks after it stopped running.) Democratic and Republican voters don’t agree on a ton these days, but they’re united on one position: There’s too much money in politics.
Ask officials and candidates in both parties, though, and you’ll hear that they don’t have nearly enough. Democrats are feeling fairly confident about capturing the House and are getting more hopeful about their chances at winning the Senate, yet officials worry they don’t have enough cash. The party got a big boost on Monday, when Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor and presidential candidate, announced that he would pour $80 million into helping Democrats before Election Day.
Republicans came into this election with a huge money advantage, and they continue to have millions available to spend. Even so, major GOP organizations are finding themselves having to make unpleasant choices to stop spending in races that seem to be slipping away from them. Senate Leadership Fund, which is the top Republican PAC supporting Senate races, didn’t spend any money on TV ads last week to support the Georgia candidate Mike Collins, who is expected to lose to Senator Jon Ossoff. SLF had already pulled back from helping the Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley in North Carolina. (To make matters worse, President Trump hosted a rally with Whatley on Tuesday in Greenville, where he said that Cooper is “going to become your senator, and it’s crazy.”)
One reason both parties are scrambling for money is that the map has shifted. As Trump’s political position deteriorates and he drags GOP candidates along with him, races that once seemed like foregone conclusions are now real battles. Democrats worry that they don’t have enough funding to match their potential. Republicans, by contrast, are having to play defense in what they thought were safe seats. SLF has moved money from North Carolina to Kansas, a state where a Democrat hasn’t won a Senate race since 1932 but where Adam Hamilton is posing a real threat to Senator Roger Marshall. Republicans are also finding that their decision to squeeze new gerrymanders out of some states before this election has been costly: Districts that they expected to be easy Republican pickups are now close combat. Punchbowl News recently reported that although the GOP has a lock on five of 14 new districts, “Republican candidates and super PACs have spent nearly $100 million on ads trying to flip the other nine districts” since September 1.
Another reason is that not all money is created equal. Some Democratic candidates are very well funded. The Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, for example, raised $64 million in the third quarter of the year alone—the highest total for any candidate in that period ever. (Because Texas has so many voters and so many media markets, it’s an expensive place to campaign.) But Democratic committees, including top PACs, are much more strapped. This is partly because the sitting president’s party always has a leg up in fundraising, but it’s also because many donors have grown disillusioned with the Democratic Party, upset with strategic decisions in the 2024 presidential loss, chaotic management of the Democratic National Committee since, and uninspiring leadership by elected officials.
Republican candidates (such as Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton) have relatively little money on hand, but committees and PACs are still flush. Much of that money comes from independent-expenditure groups, such as super PACs. An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice finds that these groups spent $2 billion through the end of September, leaning heavily toward Republicans. The single largest donor is Elon Musk, who has spent $366 million this cycle alone. But one disadvantage of independent-expenditure groups is that they have to pay higher rates for advertisements than candidates.
That’s perhaps the dominant theme of the late campaign: Republicans have lots of money, but they’re not necessarily getting much bang for their buck. At this stage in the campaign, the time to build serious infrastructure, such as canvassing operations, is past. Money can buy a lot of advertising, but TV time is either booked up or more expensive. Besides, Republicans have already spent lavishly to fill airwaves, websites, and mailboxes with ads. So far, they don’t seem to be seeing much impact: Races either remain close or appear to be shifting even further toward Democrats.
Understanding why the GOP candidates are stalled is not difficult. Voters are upset about high prices, especially for fuel, and they are turned off by a president who is dismissive of their affordability concerns, distracted by vanity projects, and bogged down in an unpopular and inflationary war in Iran. Trump’s super PAC has $164 million left to spend, but as any orthodox Lennonist knows, money can’t buy you love.
Russia and Ukraine agreed to a temporary cease-fire beginning October 29 in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Oleshky, the White House announced today. The agreement, brokered with help from First Lady Melania Trump and Pope Leo XIV, will allow humanitarian aid to enter the city and civilians to evacuate amid a worsening food crisis.
Israel ordered a full lockdown of the occupied West Bank after, according to the Israel Defense Forces, a shooting attack killed two Israeli soldiers and left three soldiers injured; the two Palestinian attackers were also killed, the IDF says. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that troops would conduct house-to-house operations and destroy suspected militant infrastructure in the men’s neighborhood, just days before Israel’s national election.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s Senate election results if the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. The administration argues that a different candidate on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan could confuse voters, but legal experts question its case.
Evening Read
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: CSA-Archive / Getty; PHP.
‘If Anything Happens to This Guy … Everyone Is Screwed’
By Charlie Warzel
On Tuesday, the world found out about two massive security vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that is used by roughly 70 percent of websites. The flaw was discovered by cybersecurity researchers using a frontier model from OpenAI. If they exploited it, attackers could gain full control of servers, stealing or copying anything inside or simply taking sites offline.
The PHP Foundation, the organization that maintains the programming language, had recently learned about the security flaws, but the disclosure was leaked on a forum before a patch could be released. What happened next was a frantic race with numerous participants: the foundation, which needed to create and release a patch; developers around the world, who would need to deploy it; and attackers looking to exploit these vulnerabilities in the interim. Matthew Prince, the CEO of the hosting company Cloudflare, wrote that in the 10 hours before the flaws were publicly announced, “we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”
This week could go down as the worst in the history of cybersecurity. On Wednesday, news emerged about two major vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used by 70 percent of websites, which prompted governments, hospitals, and companies around the world to take digital services offline as a precaution. There have already been millions of attempts to exploit these weaknesses.
But the PHP vulnerabilities were just the most attention-grabbing in a series of alarming revelations. Security flaws in, or successful hacks of, several major software products and platforms—including some used by Netflix, PayPal, Walmart, and other big names—were announced that same day. Yesterday, Quest Diagnostics, which runs lab tests for a third of American adults each year, disclosed that it, too, had been breached. When I asked Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, about the potential fallout from yet another hack—this one of the cloud platform Railway, which is used by Intuit and MGM Resorts, among others—he paused. “I didn’t see that one,” Rubin said. “It’s been quite a busy week.”
Yet what’s most alarming about the past few days is that by next year, this stretch of incidents—which some security experts are calling “Black October”—may be remembered as normal, or even tame. “It’s going to feel like, over and over and over again, we’re finding more and more bugs in very critical pieces of software,” Matthew Prince, the CEO of the internet infrastructure and security company Cloudflare, told me. “This story, which feels unique and fresh right now—in a few months, it’s going to feel like we get one of these every week.” Prince said he knows of still more vulnerabilities that will be announced in the near future.
For the next year or two, if not longer, the internet is going to feel a bit touch and go, and more dangerous than we’ve come to expect. “It’s going to feel like the sky is falling” for a while, Prince said. There’s a decades-long backlog of bugs in software written without much review or scrutiny—which was more or less fine so long as there was a very small number of skilled hackers. Over the past two decades, companies, governments, and individuals have been lulled into a false sense of security: Most people don’t think twice about punching credit-card numbers into the website of a local restaurant or gift shop, or forking over a home address and phone number in just about any customer survey. But the internet was always a dangerous place. We’re just waking up from a trance.
AI agents can now be deployed as a cheap and near-infinite hacker army. In just the past couple of months, Rubin said, open-source models—which can be downloaded for free and used without restrictions—have become very good at finding vulnerabilities and automating attacks. In turn, the amount of malicious cyber activity has spiked. More websites will be defaced, more personal information will be stolen, and ransomware will proliferate. Rubin told me that the internet is entering a “valley of pain.” When I posed the concern that this is the new normal to Adam Meyers, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, he told me, “I think it’s going to get a lot worse, actually.”
Consider, for instance, another set of vulnerabilities disclosed this week, to the program Node.js. This software, which executes JavaScript code for dynamic webpages, is widely used by Fortune 500 companies, as well as in programs developed with AI. “These are the things the web runs on,” Meyers said. Because of how the platform is used, compromising just one software product that uses Node.js could infect tens of thousands of other organizations, Rubin said, in what is known as a “supply-chain attack.” And the skill threshold for launching cyberattacks has become almost absurdly low: CrowdStrike tied a spate of cyberattacks on South Korean banks late last month to a 26-year-old in China. “After he got access to all the data, he turned around and asked AI, ‘How do I monetize this? Where can I sell this?’” Meyers told me. He “didn’t know what he was doing.” Meyers said CrowdStrike is detecting “a new agentic adversary”—that is, an AI-powered hacking operation—“every two hours.”
Navigating this will require rapid and tremendous coordination from basically every sector. For instance, the vulnerabilities in PHP were discovered months ago by a consortium of AI and cybersecurity firms. Then, “very quietly, for the last several months, we and other industry partners worked to effectively put in place protections,” Prince said—basically, temporary shields until the weaknesses could be fully addressed. But “not everybody uses CloudFlare, and not everybody is quick to patch their software.” Some of the cybersecurity experts I’ve spoken with are optimistic about AI: Eventually, they say, AI will be used to find and address many of the major cybersecurity flaws, and the internet will become much safer overall. But before then, we may be stuck in a terrible limbo. “This is going to last as long as it takes to rewrite and secure the billions of lines of code that have always had these vulnerabilities,” Alex Stamos, the chief information-security officer at the AI company Cognition and a former chief security officer at Facebook, told me.
And even as cybersecurity experts rush to leverage AI to save the internet, the technology is introducing plenty of new problems. All vibe-coded apps, for starters, are very likely to contain security flaws. And at a time when people need to be more vigilant about their digital hygiene, multiple cybersecurity experts brought up the widespread adoption of AI assistants with more than a hint of scorn; as Rubin put it: “Our peers are using Muse and giving it carte blanche to use your credit card.”
The internet is becoming a wilder place, and the path to secure it may require, in essence, a sort of pruning. “You’ll likely see more companies take services off the internet when they don’t need to be there,” depreciating old webpages and forms so they can’t be targeted, Dan Guido, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits, told me. Individuals might be encouraged to delete unused browser extensions, he added, so that there are “fewer pieces of software that can access your data.” People in general need to be “more discerning of the companies they work with,” Stamos said, and “you’re just not gonna be able to assume every site you use is secure.” That Pokémon trading-card website, fantasy-sports platform, or birding forum you use could be hacked for a password you’ve reused elsewhere, or a credit-card number, or worse. Other advice I heard: Don’t host your own email client instead of Gmail. Don’t host your own file system at home instead of using the cloud. Google and Dropbox have the resources to defend against an onslaught of AI hacks, and you don’t.
If, eventually, we do find and shore up all of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities out there, the result could be a more open web, where anybody can use widely available AI tools to run security checks at any time and you’ll feel safer sharing your personal information again. But another possibility is an even more centralized internet, where only services and websites developed by large software providers are deemed trustworthy and reliable. The internet needs new walls to defend against AI-powered attacks. But in turn, we might also feel walled in.
Last week, Senator Edward Markey published a social-media post seeking interns for his Boston office. He wrote that “BIPOC, LGBTQ+, working class, veterans, and other underrepresented candidates with Massachusetts ties are encouraged to apply.” Outrage quickly followed: Critics treated the post not as a straightforward attempt to encourage diversity in job applications, but rather as a discriminatory signal that white men would be disadvantaged in hiring.
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo called the help-wanted ad an open violation of civil-rights law and urged a federal probe. The former Trump Justice Department appointee Theo Wold wrote that a goal of Democrats is to ensure that young white men “have no opportunities to find gainful employment.” One response to Markey stated, “If you are a young White man struggling financially, I understand your frustration with the Iran conflict and gas prices, but you must understand that this is the official hiring policy of the entire corporate world if democrats return to power.”
Because X rewards inflammatory retorts more than intellectual rigor, these particular claims of racial grievance are easy for skeptics to dismiss as sensationalism. Urging certain groups to apply for a job is not proof of hiring discrimination against others. Some groups that Markey’s post mentioned, such as gay people, veterans, and the working class, include lots of white men. There is overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party’s goal is not “no opportunities” for white men, and that corporations are not a left-identitarian monolith.
Still, setting all falsehoods and exaggerations aside, Democratic elected officials have long been more likely than Republicans to favor policies that consider race and sex in employment decisions. These policies sometimes result in credible claims of discrimination against white and/or male candidates: Large nonprofits, majorcities, multinational corporations, and prestigious law firms have all lost court cases involving employment discrimination against white people or men, or altered their employment practices under pressure from federal or state agencies that enforce civil-rights laws. Republicans generally treat such discrimination as a bigger problem than Democrats, even as most Americans—including a majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents—reject preferential treatment in hiring and promotions for favored groups. Populist-right partisans are probably correct that they have a political opportunity in going after any left-leaning political, academic, or business elites who push such policies.
The issue may prove especially potent for men in Generation Z. As recently as 2019, just a third of young men perceived some discrimination against men in America. In 2025, 51 percent of young men perceived it. Those feeling aggrieved by Markey’s words should bear in mind that, at 80, his views about race were formed before the civil-rights era. For most of his life, identity politics in Congress favored straight white men. Perhaps he still perceives that all groups other than white men need reassurance, and would be surprised that young white men today have any such need. (His office did not respond to my request for comment.)
But older legislators need to grasp that efforts to diversify organizations, many of which focus on new hires, mean that Gen Z has a unique experience of the job market. Exposing white men in this cohort to language that seems to treat them differently from other groups is particularly unwise––they are especially primed to infer discriminatory intent whether or not it is being implied. Cheryl Kaiser, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, researches how “well-intentioned organizational diversity initiatives create unintended consequences.” She told me in an email that, although outreach to particular identity groups is distinct from restricting hiring to those groups, “the mere presence of a diversity signal, not the signal’s actual impact in hiring decisions, can increase White Americans’ concerns that they’ll face racism.” (In fact, several federal and state laws prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, or other protected characteristics—and these are laws that are intended to protect everyone, not just women or people of color.)
In scholarship published in 2021, Kaiser and her co-authors found that “simply exposing White Americans to organizational diversity signals” increased their perception of a bias in hiring against white men. That perception occurred “even with clear evidence of White advantage within the organization, a less-qualified White candidate, or abundant promotion opportunities for all employees. Nor was it limited to people predisposed toward biased beliefs: the effect did not depend on participants’ endorsement of group-based hierarchy or their level of racial ingroup identification.” In another research paper, from 2015, Kaiser and her co-authors found that the mere presence of pro-diversity signals “cause White male mock job applicants to experience cardiovascular stress as well as anticipate experiencing discrimination when applying for jobs at these companies.”
Of course, the fact that people perceive discrimination does not mean they are actually being discriminated against. And if diversity language were effective in contributing to more equitable hiring outcomes, even while upsetting a few overly sensitive sorts, there would be a strong case for retaining it. But Kaiser believes that “the types of diversity signals that cause backlash often do very little to effectively diversify the workplace.” Research she published in 2020 found that “racial minority employees sometimes see organizational diversity signals as overstating real commitment, which is linked to feeling less able to fit in or thrive.” Often, then, diversity signals confound all assumptions: “They don’t produce the hiring outcomes critics fear, they don’t produce the trust or inclusion benefits supporters are aiming for, and yet they still trigger the perceptual backlash described above,” Kaiser told me.
To meaningfully reduce resentment, grievance, and reactionary identitarianism among young white men, Democrats should adopt rhetoric that unambiguously clarifies a commitment to equal opportunity. Some may find this advice frustrating. For decades, the political right insisted that racial preferences were immoral and illegal, and that diversity efforts should be restricted to outreach. Now they’re treating mere outreach as proof of illegal discrimination. But as Kaiser’s research shows, diversity rhetoric can have unforeseen effects. White identitarians would exist even in a world without bias of any sort in recruitment or hiring––but using language that fuels white identity politics, as Markey’s language did, is political malpractice that’s bad for Americans of all races, no matter how well intentioned it might be.
Even if one argues that diversity advocates shouldn’t have to change how they communicate in order to avoid backlash, the reality seems to be that they do. As is often the case in politics, social progress requires forging broad coalitions of people who often disagree. That requires an understanding of psychology, attentiveness to possible sensitivities, and, yes, even compromise.
Outreach that values diversity and inclusion is still possible. In 2015, the social psychologist Wiebren Jansen and co-authors found that “including the cultural majority group in an organization’s diversity approach” can help white men with a high need to belong feel included, and can increase support within organizations for diversity efforts. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s approach to recruiting interns is a good example of inclusive language. Her call for applications uses familiar and simple language, describing her office as “an equal-opportunity employer” that does not discriminate based on “race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or uniformed service.” Warren “encourages all individuals from all backgrounds to apply.” Whether you’re Black or white or trans or gay or working-class or a veteran, if you are wondering whether people like you belong, that approach leaves no ambiguity: You’re encouraged to apply. “All individuals” are.
It can feel like an existential moment right now—one where many tech leaders are both warning against and accelerating the destructive forces of AI. But Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that this could also be a turning point toward building something better. The authors of End Times Fascism talk with Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel about runaway wealth, the politics of AI, and how to prepare if the tech-bloated market crashes.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Astra Taylor: You know, are there ways to deal with a crash that lets the people who’ve perpetrated this, like, eat the downside. Like, could this be an opportunity to get rid of some of the excess wealth and the inequality in this moment?
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain. There’s all kinds of chaos in the world. There’s multiple wars. The ongoing climate crisis. It is a bizarre and existential moment. And Silicon Valley is not helping. AI researchers are quitting in droves, and they’re worried that what they’re building might kill us all.
It’s easy, in this moment, to dismiss all of this talk reflexively—to see this as little more than a form of tech marketing. Or conversely, it’s easy to believe it all uncritically.
But my guests today have a different framework from which to process this moment, both in Silicon Valley and in the rest of the world. In their new book, End Times Fascism, the writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor offer up an idea that what we’ve seen from tech leaders in the last decade—from the AI build-out to the tech leaders’ pivot to supporting and working with Donald Trump—is all part of a broader movement of politicians and titans of industry trying to consolidate power in a moment of global instability. That this movement is, in meaningful ways, circular. For example, the tech tools create the conditions for chaos, and then those same leaders capitalize on the chaos.
Klein is a New York Times best-selling author and a professor of climate justice who has been interrogating corporate power for decades. Astra Taylor is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and an activist. Together their argument is an attempt to explain a theory of power here in this turbulent decade, and how it builds off of and is different from the previous eras.
But I really wanted to bring them on to zero in specifically on the “end times” part of their argument. Because whatever you think about what’s going on with our tech leaders, it seems very clear that the industry has adopted a zealous, and even religious, attitude in recent years. Promises of both utopian salvation and apocalyptic destruction are now commonplace. Silicon Valley is currently enamored with and terrified by the prospect that they are building God. They’re asking the rest of us to have faith: to put our trust in the technology and in them. But what world are they really trying to build here? And how did we get here? Klein and Taylor join me now to talk about it all.
Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor: Welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Astra Taylor: Glad to be here.
Naomi Klein: Thank you.
Warzel: So I wanna just start straight off with definitions here. The book is called End Times Fascism. Let’s start with defining end-times fascism and also how it both iterates on and is different from previous forms of fascism.
Taylor: We subscribe to a view of fascism as something that didn’t just emerge as a kind of rupture in Europe in the 20th century, but something as a through line. Fascism has precedence. So fascism is a form of far-right reactionary politics that uses democracy against itself, that creates kind of vertical alliances between corporate and political elites. It is an elite-led right-wing movement, and creates kind of solidarities with a group—classes of people we describe as the “injured powerful.”
And so end-times fascism is our term for a form of fascism that is in dialogue, that is responsive to novel planetary-scale crises. So Hitler and Mussolini did not know a world with atomic weapons. That’s something that changes the nature of what it means to be human—the fact that we can cause that kind of annihilation. Wealth is extremely concentrated. It was concentrated then, but now is even more kind of globally connected and concentrated in the hands of single individuals, like someone like Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire.
We also live in a world that is being destabilized by climate change. So, you know, the fascists of yore understood pollution in the sense of something localized, but they didn’t understand the way we’re altering the chemistry of the planet. That is a huge factor in our analysis, and of course now. All these threats are being compounded by artificial intelligence. And today’s fascists are responding to these very real risks by basically accelerating, by slamming their foot on the gas and basically deciding that they’ll protect their in-group, and believing that they’ll be safe no matter what.
So that’s why we see, you know, all of these high-tech lavish bunkers and this drive to fortress the nation. So fascism is always a response to real crises. It’s always a response to threats from the left, threats of redistribution. But the nature of the threats that we’re facing have changed. And we have all changed, I think, in response to these crises.
Warzel: Well Naomi, then maybe this is a moment to ask: Is there a distinction here between an opportunism—with taking some of these global crises, and, you know, you’re saying the reactionary nature is in response to that. Is it opportunism? Or is it trying to continue, in your minds, perpetuating that—because it is also very helpful to, you know, the causes of an oligarchical class?
Klein: So fascism is always an alliance. This is something else that recurs through the history of fascism. The Latin word means “bundle”—fascia, right? So it always has these distinct elements. And the elements of the fascist bundle that we look at in the book—that we identify as being part of the far-right coalition that we’re writing about—include people who have a very literalist end-times religious belief, right? So they really do believe that we are entering the end of days.
And we also look at people we’re calling “tech end-timers,” right? Who are very focused on AI, and they have a story that really echoes these religious stories about how a new age is going to begin, change absolutely everything. Maybe birth a new species. Summoning a god. Like, there’s a religious quality to the stories that some of the people at the forefront of AI are telling.
And then we look at the mass ethno-nationalist base of the far right around the world. Not just in the United States, for whom the chosenness is citizenship, and the bunker is the nation-state. But only certain people get to stay. And they’re very focused on keeping people out, right? So in terms of whether it’s opportunistic or accelerationist, it depends on who we’re talking about. I think that for the religious members of this coalition, you know, some of it is just identifying the crises that Astra mentioned.
Interpreting them as signs, right? As we face real ecological boundaries, lots of things that are accelerating pandemics are welcomed and interpreted as signs. But as this kind of millenarian fever takes hold, and there is this feeling among Messianic Jews and Christian Zionists that we really have entered the end of days.
Then you get into a loop where—because you believe that the end times are upon us—you do accelerationist things, like you actively expect. Expand wars, right? So it isn’t just opportunistic; it isn’t just kind of like these things are happening anyway. It’s: Hey, let’s attack Iran; let’s expand the war to the whole region. All of this is good. The worse the better. Right?
And this is the danger of this kind of religion—is that it interprets things that really are objectively bad as good, and has a built-in incentive to accelerate them. Not true of everybody who is Christian; not true of everybody who is Jewish. But it’s true of people who are the most kind of fundamentalist believers of this—these end-times prophecies.
Then you have in the tech world, definitely you have opportunism. You know, we quote this now kind of famous correspondence between Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein about: Okay, Brexit has happened; the U.K. economy is going down; it’s the era of collapse. You know, now it’s all about making money on the collapse, right? Return to tribalism. This is Epstein writing, right? And so I think that we are seeing a kind of Armageddon economy. You know, when I wrote The Shock Doctrine I wrote about disaster capitalism. This was more about taking advantage of punctuated shocks, right—like a war or a natural disaster.
I think there is an economic shift going on now, where a lot of people are betting on bad times. Right? They are looking at the same forecast that we are, but they aren’t interested in thinking about how you mitigate them. They’re thinking: Okay, things are going down, but that doesn’t mean that we have to stop profiting. There’s money to be made in containing refugees. There’s money to be made in building prisons. And deportation flights. And mass surveillance.
So it’s a pretty bleak economy. But it creates, once again, these negative incentives, right? Because once you’ve really invested in it, then you don’t want there to be good times, because good times are “bad.” And you know, we quote [Palantir CEO] Alexander Karp saying: “Bad times are good for Palantir, and that’s not good for the rest of us.” You know: We don’t want large parts of our economy that are very invested in these end times staying “bad.”
Warzel: For this conversation, I wanna focus on that tech portion of your book. And I think you were speaking about the religious leaders, and the way that when you believe that you are in this end-times moment, this apocalyptic moment—you do accelerationist things. And I think, you know, when we’re talking about AI and the tech world as it is right now, a lot of people think—and you all write about AI as the creation of this, you know, godlike-superintelligence thing. Or whatever it is, right?
Klein: Well, we quote them saying it. We don’t believe it.
Warzel: Yes, you quote them saying that. But I also think, too, that the entire technology is in itself—it’s not just religious in what it could do, but it’s the entire technology is a faith-based technology. In the sense that you are always shadowboxing the future version of what this will be, right? The classic line is: This is the worst that technology will ever be. Just wait, just wait, just wait.
And this idea that you are never selling anything that you currently have—you are selling the idea. And the way that sort of religious nature exists now, as the main form of marketing in the industry. As the main way that venture capital flows in. And that people, you know, gain a foothold in the industry and power. And so I think that is really interesting—the way that there is that parallel there. That the tech industry has sort of taken on a religious nature in just how it behaves.
Taylor: Mm.
Klein: Yes.
Taylor: Yeah. I mean, and there was precedent for this. In the sense, I mean—if you go back to the old days, before they all came out as far right, I mean, we talked about the cult of the founder, right? I mean, they were described in the press as oracles, as prophets, right?
They would be, like, pitching a delivery app, and people were like: You know, they’re bringing democracy. They’re bringing deliverance. And so that was part of their brand. And I think like any cult, when the evidence starts piling up against you, you dig in all the more.
So I think your description of it as a “faith-based technology” feels really apt, right? It’s just like: Just believe; just put all the money in there. Just put all the resources in there. You know: Don’t doubt what we’re making. So, I don’t know. I mean, I think the lesson maybe here is as simple as “don’t worship capitalists,” right?
Klein: But I think the imminence point is really key. Because, I mean—there’s always an imminence in capitalism. Where it’s just kind of always about to get better. The “trickle down” is going to happen. Like—just sort of pray to those gods, right? But there were still actual material products that were legible; that were kind of delivering the things that they said that they were going to deliver. And that people were paying money for.
So I don’t think we have ever had as much of the global economy based on a bet of something that is supposedly about to happen—but that doesn’t line up at all with the product that is actually being sold. Right? So that sort of sense of living in the “about to,” living in the imminence: I don’t think we’ve ever been sort of not where we are, but in the about to be. And that does feel quite religious.
Warzel: And there’s an odd dynamic to all of this, as well. As you mentioned the economics of the AI boom and everything being built toward this speculative future. But there’s also now—because of the amount of investment, because of how predicated the economy is on Nvidia and the Magnificent Seven stocks—there is also this apocalyptic quality to all of this. Where if the music stops, if the investment stops coming in, right, then you have this specter of an absolute bubble burst. A huge, 2008-style crash, taking everything with it.
On the other side of it, there is this “We are fulfilling the promise of this investment.” And then there is all kinds of economic upheaval. And you know, rewriting the social contract, and all the things that these people are talking about. Which are in their own sense very apocalyptic, as they are so disruptive. And so it feels like no matter where you are, you’re boxed in at least narratively—with this idea that something massive is going to happen.
Taylor: Yeah.
Klein: Yeah. Well, and it’s not our imagination. I mean, we are being conscripted into this dream whether we like it or not.
The way the SpaceX IPO was structured, right? Where just like—rather than having a wait period before the stock is in everybody’s pension who has a pension, right, they change the rules. So you have no choice but to be part of this massive gamble, right? That is all based on this extraordinary claim that in the future, this nonprofitable part of the company, the AI division, will eventually have a market worth $28 trillion. It’s just wild, right?
Warzel: I’m curious: In your minds, what is the world that the tech right is trying to build? As in this whole group investing in all these different technologies. You know, from the things that Musk is doing to things that Palantir are doing. Like, what is the world that you see them trying to build right now?
Klein: I think that there are different visions, and then there are hedges to those visions. And some of those hedges might be: Well, if this all goes down we’re gonna just go to our corporate city-state in Honduras. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll go to our bunker in New Zealand. Or if that doesn’t work, we’ll go to the one in Argentina. And maybe we’ll also build a space colony. Like there’s a lot of different stories being told. I don’t think there’s one coherent, like: “This is our Eden.” So they need bunkers to protect themselves if this all goes very wrong.
I don’t think that the kind of bunkers are their utopia. I think the utopia, really, is one of dematerialization, if that resonates at all. Like, I think that this idea of kind of being free from the material world—and I think this is actually the most religious part of it—is that the whole story of modern capitalism has been about leaving as much of the physical world behind, and with its obligations, as you possibly can.
So first, companies declare: Well, we’re not actually making products; we’re making brands. And other people can make the products. Right? But then it’s like—even that, you know: We’re not publishers; we’re just platforms. So we want the profits, but we don’t want the responsibilities. And AI is the ultimate version of this. Where you actually kind of can upload your consciousness. You can live forever; you are free of the physical world, and you’re just betting on a machine world.
So if there is a utopia, I think it’s being free of workers, infrastructure. Like, they don’t want to own their own data centers. I think they want to float upwards.
Warzel: In your guys’ estimation, has this always been the project? Because for some, it seems yes, right? You have the Peter Thiels—always been reactionary, even early on questioning democracy as a useful concept to him and other people. Musk has been obsessed with transhumanism.
But there’s also a lot of people who, I would argue, have come into this kind of bumbling, right? Like, they just wanted to build social networks or apps. Or, you know, make a website to rank who’s hotter in their dorm, and kind of stumbling into these roles as these new titans of technology and industry. And there was this liberal bent in Silicon Valley for a while, or at least a seemingly liberal facade in Silicon Valley.
Does that feel like opportunism to you all, in the recent rightward pivot that a lot of these tech founders have had? Or do you think that there is something inherent in the project that you said—of sort of leaving the material world behind, being fully in the cloud, as it were—that would make it so that it was always going to lead to where we are now?
Taylor: So I think we would argue that different conditions bring out different responses, different potentialities in people, different facets of them. I mean, I don’t think we should underplay how strong a right-wing bent there was in Silicon Valley. I mean, scholars have written about cyber-libertarianism and the kind of, you know, right-wing politics. So yes, you know: socially liberal but economically conservative. Or sometimes, in the case of Peter Thiel and his friends, just overtly reactionary and antidemocratic.
So those ideas have been there, but they were tempered by the political and economic conditions. So I mean, I think there was a period when they’re building social media; they’re promising to democratize our culture and, you know, make the world a better place, where they could justify their extreme wealth. In terms of meritocracy, right? It still kind of fits in that paradigm. Like: We’re the smartest guys in the room. We’re the founders, and you all should bow down to us. But, you know, they were still kind of saying there would be these socially beneficial effects.
In around 2014, 2015, when a “tech lash” started growing on the left or the right, that was challenged, right? I mean, so we argue that fascism, again, is always a response to crisis and a response to threats of redistribution. A threat from the left. And the tech lash was really pivotal. I mean, workers started organizing at these companies and demanding unions, and Me Too happened. And that was a very active force in Silicon Valley. Workers were saying: We want stronger environmental protections. Cities were saying: We don’t want your AI city. We don’t want sidewalk labs. Right? Countries were saying: We want privacy protections. Like, modest privacy protections would be nice. Right?
Klein: The European Union.
Taylor: Right. And so it was an affront to these guys and to their sense of themselves, but also to their business model. And I think they knew, rationally, that rolling out AI would be even more difficult, right? That it would receive even more of a pushback. Because most people are not clamoring for technology that threatens to take all the jobs, fill the internet with slop, possibly cause, you know, delusions in their friends and family members and children.
And so they knew this. And they were already losing popularity. So I think these guys in that sense, you know—it’s a time for using the power they had amassed, right? And you know, we detail in the book why we think that they went in so hard with Donald Trump. And ultimately, we think it’s because of the material choice before them. They wanted to roll out AI without regulations. You know, with whatever energy they could get their hands on. They understood that to Trump, he’d love that it was gonna burn a lot of fossil fuels and boost the economy. And so they made a conscious deal.
Warzel: So this case, that this rightward pivot has so much to do with the material needs of the tech companies responding to the AI build-out. What they need—both the lack of regulation, but also having, you know, friendly people like David Sacks. Who is a Silicon Valley insider who becomes the AI and crypto czar in the Trump administration for a while. You argue that, and it’s—
Klein: I think he still has a lot of power in this administration, though he doesn’t have that position anymore.
Warzel: Yeah; I mean, he just had dinner with a bunch of the AI executives as they’re talking about trying to “pace the frontier.” He’s definitely still in that mix. But there’s also this side of, you know, the founder psychology; as you said, the tech lash being this big part of it. How much do you weigh that?
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Klein: Tech lash intersecting with AI, right? And this doesn’t start with ChatGPT, as you know, right? Like I wrote a piece about [former Google CEO] Eric Schmidt and the way he was pushing AI during the pandemic. First of all: The pandemic was very profitable for these tech companies, right? Because we’re all at home on our screens. Those of us who were not, you know, frontline workers. Right.
Warzel: The Zoom revolution, yeah.
Taylor: The Zoom boom.
Klein: And it was the Zoom boom, and they all like—didn’t they double their wealth in the first two years? The billionaires and the tech billionaires? And the data-center build-out was frenetic in that period, right? Because so much streaming was happening; so much gaming was happening. And Eric Schmidt went on this big push of like: Isn’t Zoom school great? Isn’t telehealth great? Isn’t it like, maybe we should be more like China?
And he made all these presentations in Washington about how the biggest problem with the U.S. in winning the AI race with China was all of these pesky privacy protections. Like, protecting people’s health records. And the fact that people didn’t want their kids under surveillance, and the fact that they didn’t want smart cities. And the whole frame was like: China is able to do all of this, because they have no privacy protections. And boo-hoo, the U.S. does, and the European Union is placing even more.
Right? And so we see this moment that we’re in and the alignment with Trump as a revolt of the elites against regulation, and a very strategic alignment with someone who was sociopathic enough to let them do it, right? Because Trump’s relationship to AI and any other existential risk is just like: We all die sooner or later, you know?
Warzel: You know, if you simply list off what AI is as a technology, and its promises, there’s something that I think ends up being pretty striking. Right? You have a technology that is trained on the ill-gotten, mostly, output of most of humanity. Requiring these material economic investments that are essentially unprecedented, and would yield unprecedented wealth and disruption, as we’re saying. And then this arguably quite false idea of creating perfect automated efficiency in markets and workplaces—such that humans aren’t really needed at all, right? And in that sense, it feels very end-timesy to me. Not in the sense that it will bring about the apocalypse per se, but in that there’s really nothing left for capitalism to do if it succeeds. And so my question to you: Is AI the final boss of capitalism? Is there anything left after it?
Taylor: I mean, that’s interesting. You know, other people have phrased this like: So are these guys saying that AI is actually gonna bring about communism? Right? Like that’s the end point, because it’s, you know, sustainable super-abundance or whatever. Like, in this future you’ll never have to work again, and it’ll be leisure for all. So I mean, you know: I think the answer is no. Because their vision is not gonna come true as they are describing it, right?
I mean, one of the recurring motifs of our book is that a group’s apocalyptic fantasies don’t have to be literally true. Or rarely are; never literally true. But they can cause a lot of havoc and a lot of damage regardless.
Warzel: Right.
Taylor: So I think they’re going to cause a lot of harm as they chase this vision. But there’s all sorts of questions that their end goal raises, right? Which is like: Yeah, how does capitalism work if people don’t have jobs and don’t have money? Like, okay—so you’re talking about a no-consumer future?
It obviously gets to the point where they haven’t really thought this out. They’re just in the race, and they’re fine if they’re racing us off a cliff. And, in fact, the market seems to be catching up, right—with all the recent headlines about the fact that so much of this AI debt is actually now distressed, and the whole house of cards appears to be wobbling.
Klein: And this is where I think their various escape plans do bear some attention. Because I think that there is this way that this is just all a massive gamble—and they do know it. Like, whether they know that it’s all going down or just part of it. I’m not gonna guess there. But I do think that all the hedges—and all the ways in which they have Plan Bs and Cs, right—is like if this goes down. You know, if say SpaceX valuation just seems to be fictional, seems to be notional, right? Like, I mean, and laughable. And everybody is just agreeing to go in it.
Warzel: It’s about extending the light of consciousness throughout the universe. That’s like in the prospectus. It’s truly an actual dream. Like it is a fan-fiction scenario.
Taylor: Yeah.
Klein: Right. But I guess we’re pretty focused on what happens when this does pop, right? Whether it all goes down or partly goes down. What if their whole business model has been built on theft—Astra has called it “theft tech,” which I actually think is a very good phrase to describe a lot of AI—what are we owed before they get paid back?
And how do we structure—like, how do we make sure that they aren’t able to just leave us with all the distressed assets? Where a few ultra-rich people pull off what in the book we call the “wealth rapture.” Right? Where they just ascend to their gated cities of various kinds and are like: Sorry, suckers.
Because I do think that’s one of the futures that we’re looking at. And I think that they’ve structured their companies in a lot of cases where their personal wealth will be okay. And they do have various escape plans, and the rest of us get stuck with all of the risk of this. And we just have to have our eyes open about it.
Warzel: You mentioned a couple—that’s one of the scenarios you’re looking at if this goes sideways. What are some of the other ones that you’re thinking about?
Taylor: I mean, I think that we saw this with the recent Axios reporting that the heads of these companies are doing these disaster-scenario plannings. Right? They’re like: What if there’s a massive cyberattack that uses our agents, and then the public gets really mad at us? So the “disaster” for them—I mean, this is also a tell. The disaster for them is less the potential catastrophe—the cyberattack, the critical infrastructure going down—than the public’s response. And the fact that it could be a PR disaster for them in a moment of democratic leverage.
So I think, you know, we should hedge too, and we should prep too. Like, we don’t know exactly what the unraveling of this bubble in this sector will be, right? Even the term crash implies something going down—like the sort of 1929 stock-market vision. And it doesn’t actually necessarily have to unfold like that. So there could be, you know, financial collapse of some kind of the sector. Or there could be some sort of disaster.
So you mentioned the 2007 bailout. I mean, the thing about that is—you know, the money in that crisis was much more systemic. In the sense that it was banks and people’s literal homes, right? I mean so much of the capital involved. There’s huge amounts of capital in the data-center boom right now, and in AI, but a lot of it’s from private hedge funds, and a lot of it is from private capital markets.
Are there ways to deal with a crash that let the people who’ve perpetrated this, like, eat the downside? And I think we really should be on—could this be an opportunity to get rid of some of the excess wealth and the inequality in this moment? We also know from the COVID pandemic that it’s possible to pop up a welfare state almost overnight. Right? The government actually can do things pretty fast when there’s a crisis.
And I’ve also been thinking a lot about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout. And how that was not a, you know, critical systemic bank. And so I think—and I’m not the only one to say this. Alexis Goldstein, who is at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and others have written about how SVB should have—maybe they should have let it fail.
And so I think we should look at the past, and look at how moments like this too often have actually led to increased inequality and pernicious consequences. And just be like: How do we, if there’s a crisis moment—how do we respond? And how can we ensure that ordinary people are helped, and that the executives who perpetrated this are held accountable?
Warzel: It does strike me though too that obviously the rub in that is the way that, you know, retail investing—and obviously not everyone has money in the stock market. But how much that retail investing in people’s, you know, 401(k)s and pension plans and all that are tied up in these again, these “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks.
Taylor: Yeah. I just want to say the organizer in me is like: We need a mass movement that restructures retirement in America. 401(k) is a pretty recent invention. Like, why is this the mechanism through which we guarantee—and don’t guarantee, frankly, undermine—security in old age?
Klein: So the point is, Social Security came out of the market crash of 1929, right? I mean, why the unfairness of that produced fairness, right? And the thing about AI—and this has been coming up for us a lot on our book tour over the last month—is: The offer of it really is only seductive, only appealing, once we’ve already destroyed and cut our social and care infrastructures to the bone, right?
Like—if your kids are being taught by a teacher who’s allowed to be as great a teacher as they want to be, with relatively good student-teacher ratios? And they’re able to, you know, use their creativity and love of learning? Then the idea that they could be easily replaced with a chat bot is absurd. You know that, right?
But if you’ve already cut your public education system to the bone? If you’re crowding 35 kids into a classroom. If your teacher is completely overworked and overstressed and being told that they need to teach to the test anyway. Then it’s really all just about, you know, checking boxes and a multiple-choice exam. That is something that—if you then come in and be like “Everybody can have their AI tutors,” that’s a lot more appealing, right?
Or if we’re already neglecting our elders, and they’re living alone and isolated, and we’ve destroyed the infrastructure where they used to be able to hang out and have fun? Then the idea that they could be made a little bit less lonely by talking to a chatbot then becomes appealing. Right?
So this will be a moment when we can decide to invest in people, infrastructure. Which is one of the things that we hear from folks who are fighting data centers in places like Memphis. Like: Why are we getting these massive data centers instead of a community center or public transit, or any of the things that we need? Right? And so there is this interplay between our neglect of the animate human physical world and the offer of AI. And that is—I think we need to go that deep in the correction of thinking about “How do we respond to this crisis?”
Taylor: Yeah. And I just want to say, though: Part of what’s maddening is, as you just said, the SpaceX perspective—which is like science fiction—is somehow taken as serious in our culture. But the idea that, “Hey, we could have a different kind of retirement system, where people are taken care of in old age” seems completely absurd. But we got Social Security after the crash of 1929, after the Great Depression. But also, we only got it because old people were organized. There’s something called the Townsend movement. And like, millions and millions of old people who were broke and had no real power were like: We deserve to have an income from the government. Like: We deserve to live.
And they were incredibly persistent, and they put this demand on the table that was completely unprecedented, because Social Security didn’t exist. And now we live in the world they created. So we have to be ready. This is our version of prep, right? We have to be ready with the infrastructure. And with the demands that, yeah, seem crazy today, but might just be common sense when we make it through to the other side.
Warzel: So let’s talk about one of the roadblocks to that. Which is obviously the politics of all this. A defining feature, as you all have written about, as I’ve written about, of our era. And this argument that you have is that we’re living in a time of genuine elite impunity.
Klein: I’m so glad. I was excited to talk to you about impunity. That was such a great essay of yours.
Warzel: Here we go. This week, as we’re recording this, The New York Timeshas reported that Musk, world’s richest man, personally invested $366 million so far in this election cycle. It seems that Musk’s wealth, especially here in politics, is just a genuine chaos agent, right? It is very hard to exact a financial toll on him, as things are right now. And he’s able to use his money—he’s purchasing not only influence but communications infrastructure. Buying Twitter, turning it into X and this political weapon. What does the world do about this man?
Taylor: So I think the first thing to do is to settle into how not okay this is, and how deeply anti-democratic this is, and how offensive it is. And then yeah—we have to organize.
I mean, you know, he has had some big losses, right? Remember the whole Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where he even went like dancing around with the cheese on his head? So I think people need to show up and vote.
And then we need to build a serious mass movement that’s focused on money out of politics. And I think that this is another issue that has the potential to be really bipartisan, just like the data-center movement. You know, the polling is overwhelming on this issue, but there isn’t a lot of mobilizing around it. In part because a lot of the civic infrastructure in this country is donor funded. And so, donors are not making this a key priority. But I think citizens have to. And the time is right for something that, you know, gets at that core poison in our politics. Which is wealth and power. And then, I mean, ultimately the point is—you know, we argue in the book that this really isn’t about these individual men and their pathologies and their wounded egos or whatever. It is about the wealth itself.
Klein: And a belief that their wealth should buy them impunity. That the point of having hundreds of billions of dollars, or maybe a trillion dollars, is that of course the rules don’t apply.
Warzel: It does seem to me—and my kind of theory, around a lot of the data-center stuff, and the fact that you see a lot of protest from each side, and this very public distaste with not only data centers but a lot of artificial-intelligence technology being foisted on people. And then having Donald Trump kind of double down on this.
To me, it feels like the beginnings of a politics that doesn’t actually focus on this one guy. It feels like an opportunity. It feels like a place that, you know, where this volatility could come in.And that’s what I think is really interesting about the fact that he doesn’t seem to really—as someone who, you know, usually can ride a lot of these waves—he doesn’t seem capable of doing that.
But I want to actually use that to press here on feasible solutions. And people are so mad about the incursion of AI into real communities, and the use of natural resources. Or how loud they are, or the fact that the resources in their town are going toward a data center instead of toward other infrastructure that they need.
And I talked to Democratic consultants who are like. This isn’t just the issue; it’s like the issue that should just be winnable. And yet, I don’t know if there is a truly coherent politics around it. So in your minds, what is it that politics around AI need to look like going forward? Into 2028?
Taylor: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s different approaches and different debates within the Democratic Party. My position is always that, you know, it’s good when people are at a place like “the polling against data centers is encouraging.” People are not fans of AI. They don’t trust the tech oligarchs. But also, you know, we as political actors need to nurture that perspective and give it shape, and expand it into something that is a broader politics, right? Like, we’re not just engaging with something that’s frozen.
And so I think, you know, it is pretty inchoate. But there are people who are like, This is just a NIMBY movement. Or it’s just about, you know: People just don’t like the local data center, but maybe they actually kind of use AI when they say they don’t like it. But I think my perspective is that it’s tapping into a bigger set of anxieties. Like: What kind of future is on offer? Who makes the decisions in our world, right? Because so many of these data centers come under the cover of NDA. It’s like: What is work? What is purpose?
These are really meaningful, powerful things for us to tap into. And they’re about much more than tech. We have to understand it as embedded in a broader society in social conditions. And I think with AI, we need to do the same. Like this isn’t—we can’t separate AI from this question of “how do we structure our retirements?” Right? As Naomi said: Are our schools well funded? Do our jobs pay us enough to live?
This is a moment when we really need to invest in the things human beings need to live well. Like—if we need to invest in our schools, invest in health care, invest in housing, invest in human beings doing the meaningful work. And I feel like that will resonate powerfully in this moment. And then if people can deliver on that, I think it could change our politics. Right?
Warzel: I find that to be a really important point in all this. I’ve been writing a lot about this moment as a crisis of agency, right? One side is this crisis of agency that’s being manufactured by Silicon Valley. Which is saying: We’re going to enact our agency to take away yours and give you these tools that do everything for you.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Warzel: But on the other side, I think there is this huge conversation of: “What is a human for?” Which is exactly what you’re saying and alluding to. And thinking of the crisis of agency as an opportunity to reopen—because we are all having, whether we believe in it or not, we’re having lots of very weird existential conversations, right? About everything.
Klein: Yeah. And, you know, some of them are good, where we are. Like, I’ve seen some really beautiful conversations happening, where visual artists and musicians are really talking about what it takes to make visual art, and what it is like to do that labor, and why it matters. And I don’t think that we’ve had many spaces to like just talk about why making art matters. And what it is actually like from the artist’s perspective to do it. Or even an interesting conversation that I heard, you know, with a mathematician about what it is like to solve a math problem. And I just—I’ve never actually heard a mathematician describe it so beautifully.
So I think those conversations—where we’re kind of getting back to basics about what it is that we love about what we do, and what each other does. And can we find some wonder in that and marvel in that? So that we are less susceptible to Sam Altman telling us intelligence is something that is like a utility that can be supplied? And so is art, and it’s like a vending machine and it can just spew it out, right?
So, I think we’ve been—like I was saying before, the more mechanized we become, the easier it is to just let AI fill in the last step, right? Like, the more we act like robots online, the more we’re replaceable by AI bots.
So we’re gonna have to become more human. Like, figure out how to become more human and irreplaceable. But yeah—I think it’s quite a spiritual moment, in a way. And a lot of people are stepping into that.
Warzel: I wanna end on a point here and get your thoughts—which is that one reading of End Times Fascism, paired with the interpretation of the rightward pivot in Silicon Valley, is that a lot of people, I think, were fooled or simply unable to pay attention to what was going on.
And that the tech giants and their leaders built these tools that they argued would democratize voices. That would bring people together, would expand opportunity, get rid of gatekeepers. And what they’ve done instead is create something different. This redistribution of power and control and money—all in their favor. Maybe it’s, you know, a mirror world of the techno-optimism, right?
And say that the end of Trump, down the line, marks the data-center backlash. All that marks a genuine resistance to this. And say we start to get some accountability for the end-timers. We start to get, you know, steps toward regulation. How do we stop this from happening again? How do we recognize this before it’s too late?
Taylor: I think this is why it’s really important to have an understanding of, and criticism of, capitalism as a system, actually. Because that is part of what got us into this mess.
So, you know, I’m thinking again about the sort of era you just described, where they were promising to bring democracy through social media. And there was, I remember a piece, by Lawrence Lessig. Who is quite an influential critic of all the ways our democracy is broken. But he’s essentially saying, you know: We need to cheer on the Googles and Facebooks of the world over the old-media dinosaurs. And it was like, because they’re new, right? Because they’re new. They’re the disruptors. They’re disrupting the dinosaurs. And it was like, yeah, but they’re what is going to make them different, right? Once they disrupt the old-media ecosystem— and they are the new platforms, the new gatekeepers—why should we trust them anymore?
So I think understanding the way we are in an economic system that concentrates wealth—where people are relentlessly pushed toward endless growth, right? And endless resource consumption is really critical. At one point in the book, we describe fascism as capitalism’s threat response. This is a movement of corporate and political elites to defend their power and their wealth. And I think it will do us a lot of favors to think systemically like that. Because then we can think about: What’s the scale of the solutions? Right? Like, what do we actually need to ensure that we don’t just watch another terrifying sequel?
Warzel: Naomi Klein, Astor Taylor. Thank you very much for coming on Galaxy Brain.
Klein: Thank you so much.
Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guests, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That’s theatlantic.com/listener.
And before we go, just another reminder: We’re doing an upcoming AMA episode. You can ask me anything about the show, about the tech industry, about the end times. It’s up to you. Just email Charlie at theatlantic.com with “Galaxy Brain AMA” in the subject line. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.
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The new film Wicker is, first and foremost, a love story. And I need to acknowledge this promptly: It is a love story about a woman who falls for a person-shaped basket. Olivia Colman’s character, who is known to the audience only as Fisherwoman, is a classic spinster. She sells her smelly haul in town, tolerates taunts from her small-minded neighbors, and then retreats to her ramshackle cottage, where she spends evenings alone by the fire. But then a local artisan fashions her a husband: a doting, affectionate man (?) whose generosity and sexual aptitude easily compensate for the fact that he is, in fact, made of natural plant fibers. (Basket guy is played by Alexander Skarsgård, not that he’s recognizable under this many prosthetics.)
As much as Wicker is a romance, though, it’s also a cautionary tale about marriage. The village in this film—which is directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, and based on a short story by Ursula Wills—is chock-full of miserable spouses. Bakerwoman and her husband aren’t having sex. Bottlewasher and his wife are, and she appears to be bored out of her mind during the act. When Tailor’s ambitious wife suggests that she might travel to set up new posts for the business, he scoffs at the notion that she’d do anything more than wear their garments around town and look pretty. Early in the movie, a young couple performs a wedding tradition: The officiant commands the man to place a heavy metal collar around his bride’s neck, a “symbol of lifelong duty.” As he struggles to clasp it, she gasps for air. The conventions of matrimony, for this community, are literally suffocating.
Wicker asks what it would take to make the institution freeing instead—or whether marriage is simply incompatible with the kind of love that is expansive rather than constraining. Fisherwoman and her husband offer one strange, touching model. Their marriage is unique, and not only because he is, once again, an actual basket. There’s also the fact that she works for pay and he doesn’t, which doesn’t go unnoticed about town. (Not much does.) Most radically, he actually respects her, and makes it known. When they marry, someone asks where the collar is, and she responds, “We won’t be needing that.”
The presence of a loving pair in the village is totally destabilizing. The women start asking more of their husbands, who don’t appreciate the nudge. (One man grumbles about wives now seeking, for some reason, expressions of gratitude.) In a big group dance, the townspeople follow strictly choreographed steps—and they’re scandalized to see Fisherwoman and her mate creating their own moves, gazing into each other’s eyes, holding each other and swaying in the sun. Everyone seems to envy the couple their happiness and also to despise them for it. It’s as if these townspeople thought they had to live according to norms they never much liked. Now that they see that another way is possible, their own wretched and arbitrary inertia is revealed. They can’t unknow it.
If marriage is a mechanism of repression in Wicker, then love is a tool of liberation, capable of upending social order. That’s not an outrageous idea, however silly the movie is: The social scientist Alice Evans has tracked how romantic love, across history and nations, has driven gender equality. A besotted straight man is especially likely to see women as deserving of rights and dignity. But the film also warns that devotion is not enough, on its own, to resist the stultifying power of convention. When some men in a bar accuse the wicker husband of making their wives suddenly unsatisfied, he asks Baker: “Do you love your wife?” Baker responds that he does, and for a brief moment, he talks about her tenderly. Soon, though, the men go back to their griping. And eventually, even Fisherwoman starts succumbing to petty possessiveness. She gets paranoid about infidelity and treats her poor, hunky stick pile unkindly. You might go into a marriage starry-eyed, the film knows, and still grow complacent or controlling.
Wicker is, I think, a good fit for this moment of romantic ambivalence. On the one hand, a large share of singles say they want to marry someday. On the other hand, many of them don’t know how or when they’ll achieve that goal. Some are struggling to find the right partner. Others are busy applying for jobs in an unforgiving market, or saving endlessly for a house they may never be able to afford. On average, people are marrying later and less. So young adults especially are being pushed to think critically about traditional milestones, if only because they’re not hitting them.
Fisherwoman is an eccentric middle-aged woman in a tunic smeared with seafood guts, yet she might be a relatable protagonist for plenty of Zoomers: In the beginning of the movie, she mocks marriage, but only because she feels shut out of it. She both longs for romance and fears the vulnerability it requires—perhaps a particularly resonant conundrum now, when a great chunk of Gen Z seems to fear rejection and crave security. “I had such a simple life,” Fisherwoman cries to her husband. “It was nothing special, but I knew it. Now you have my heart.”
One might worry that Wicker, with all of its rather unsubtle critiques of marriage, could further discourage romance-wary viewers. But as much as it’s skeptical of matrimony—and cynical about some of its characters—this is a film that roots for connection. It argues for fighting against the pull of culture and habit and convenience, day after day, to see your partner not as your belonging but as their own person. And it asks whether Fisherwoman can treat her husband, who looks a lot like an object, as a complex being with his own free will—not because she vowed to, but because he is improbably, amazingly, alive.
A protester wearing a period costume stands during a demonstration against the high cost of living in Paris, on October 17, 2026, as part of a nationwide call for mobilization, bringing together various groups expressing their anger: former gilets jaunes protesters, secondary-school and university students, climate activists, farmers, and more.
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A police officer wearing riot gear stands in front of a burning barricade during a demonstration near Place de la République on October 17, 2026, during a weekend of protests in Paris, France.
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The H3 rocket carrying the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) rover bound for Mars’s moon Phobos lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Minamitane, Kagoshima prefecture, Japan, on October 20, 2026.
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Santa and bellhops pose in front of the Selfridges’ Christmas windows during a media preview in London, England, on October 22, 2026.
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Students from St Andrews take part in a foam fight as part of “Raisin Monday” on the lower college lawn, at St Andrews in Scotland, on October 19, 2026.
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An electoral worker prepares an electronic voting machine ahead of Brazil’s presidential runoff election in Brasilia, Brazil, on October 20, 2026.
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Romanian Red Cross volunteers hold CPR mannequins before a flash-mob performance to mark World Restart a Heart Day in Bucharest, Romania, on October 16, 2026.
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Geese take flight from the Mannhausen shallow-water area in search of food, early on October 21, 2026, in Calvörde, Germany. Thousands of migratory birds are currently stopping there to rest on their way to their wintering grounds.
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Fairgoers ride a swing ride at the Big Fresno Fair on October 17, 2026, in Fresno, California.
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An effigy of the mythic demon king Ravana is set on fire on the occasion of the Hindu festival of Dussehra, at the Gandhi Maidan in Patna, India, on October 20, 2026.
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An aerial view shows thick smoke and haze from regional forest and land fires in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, on October 15, 2026.
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An aerial view shows more than 50,000 people performing Garba in concentric circles around a stage during the United Way of Baroda Garba Mahotsav 2026 in Vadodara, Gujarat, India, on October 19, 2026. The annual festival draws participants in colorful traditional attire who dance in rhythmic circles as live musicians perform from the central stage, while spectators watch from the stands. Garba, a folk dance of Gujarat performed in honor of the goddess Durga, is the centerpiece of the nine-night Hindu festival of Navratri.
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An aerial view of colorful autumn foliage and the Taihang No. 1 Tourist Road winding through a forest in Jinzhong, Shanxi province, China, on October 19, 2026
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A man sits in Djurgården National Park at sunrise among autumn foliage in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 18, 2026.
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Capybaras at the Five Sisters Zoo interact with pumpkins in their enclosure ahead of Halloween on October 21, 2026, in West Calder, Scotland.
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A boy plays on rocks on Sillon beach in Saint-Malo, France, at sunset on October 20, 2026.
On April 7, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University in which he effectively offered to build the equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority for North Vietnam on the condition that Hanoi cease supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam. On the helicopter ride back from the speech, Johnson leaned across to an assistant, put his hand on his knee, and said of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, “Old Ho can’t turn that down, Old Ho can’t turn that down.”
Ho did turn Johnson down. Today, the incident is taught in political-psychology courses to illustrate how presidents can naively think that transactional politics, commonplace in states and cities, will work on the global stage, only to find out that nationalism, ideology, and rivalry matter more.
Donald Trump has fallen into the same trap with Vladimir Putin, apparently believing that the right economic incentives will persuade the Russian leader to make peace. This approach is not working. Instead, it’s closing off the one realistic pathway to end the conflict with Ukraine, and making the war likelier to expand and worsen.
Early in his second term, Trump was surprised that Putin would not end the war quickly with a freezing of the territorial lines and a promise that Ukraine would not join NATO. Rather than seeking to improve Ukraine’s position on the battlefield or apply leverage against Russia through sanctions, Trump decided to convince Putin that peace would be financially rewarding. Trump pulled his Ukraine envoy, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, off the negotiating team after the Kremlin complained that he was too favorable to Ukrainians and replaced him with his friend Steve Witkoff, a real-estate tycoon. The Russian financier Kirill Dmitriev would be Trump’s conduit to Putin.
Witkoff and Dmitriev worked out a deal almost a year ago that included a full lifting of sanctions, joint U.S.-Russian business ventures, and even Russia’s readmission to the G7 (turning it into the G8), but it foundered on Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory on the battlefield. Witkoff and Dmitriev continued their efforts.
The latest version emerged in the past week as U.S.-Ukraine relations reached their lowest point since the Oval Office bust-up in February 2025. Trump and Putin struck an agreement in which Russia would provide diesel fuel to the United States and global markets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the arrangement, saying that it was “not fair and honest” and that it looked like “a happy-birthday present for Putin.”
An infuriated Trump called for Zelensky to be replaced and said that he was harder to deal with than Putin. In the days that followed, Kyiv accused Washington of curtailing intelligence cooperation, including by withholding information on incoming ballistic-missile strikes (the administration denied this). The Financial Timesreported that the administration is considering returning some of the frozen assets to Russia as an incentive for a partial cease-fire. Trump then waived sanctions on Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, saying that doing so was in the national interest of the United States. On Truth Social, Trump posted that he was in negotiations to end the war and didn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”
As U.S.-Ukrainian relations seemed to nose-dive, the administration tried to convey a larger rationale behind its decision making. A senior official toldThe Washington Post’s David Ignatius that because a Ukraine deal was proving difficult to negotiate, the White House would enlarge the problem and negotiate a regional deal. This would include provisions to supply energy to Europe through a new pipeline, with profits to be shared between Ukraine and Russia, and the resolution of Moscow’s differences with European countries.
This proposal is, in effect, the Johnson plan. The naivete behind it would perhaps be excusable if Putin were a new leader with no track record, but he is a known quantity. Ukraine is his obsession, his white whale. He wants to subjugate it and has proved that he will pay an enormous price to achieve this goal.
The immediate diplomatic problem that Trump needs to solve is that Putin will not settle for anything less than the surrender of additional territory by Ukraine, which is something no Ukrainian leader can accept. Putin stands little chance of taking this territory by force: The front line is largely static, thanks to the saturation of the area with drones. However, the Russian leader has two hopes.
One is to break Ukraine this winter with a brutal air offensive that would destroy its energy grid and deliver misery to millions. Maybe such pressure would cause Ukraine’s front line to collapse or lead Kyiv to accept Moscow’s demands at the negotiating table.
The other prospect is to escalate Russia’s shadow war against Ukraine’s European partners. Moscow is already linked to assassination plots, arson, and the planting of explosive-laden drones in airports. A number of European leaders, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and French President Emmanuel Macron, have warned that Russia is considering hitting Eastern European states with drone and missile attacks that it would later deny. Putin hopes that this shadow war will weaken European governments and bring to power parties that will cut off aid to Ukraine and pressure it to capitulate to Russia’s demands.
If Putin succeeds in these two gambits—weakening Ukraine over the winter while stoking unrest in Europe—he will be confident that Russia can grind out a bloody victory over the next couple of years.
Putin seems to think that time is on his side. Trump’s concessions reinforce that perception. But if Trump can change Putin’s expectations about the future, a diplomatic deal might become possible. In particular, Trump must convince Putin that the war will not get any better for Russia, and that the deal he can get now is better than the one he can get later.
This means doing everything possible to ensure that Ukraine survives Putin’s winter campaign: supplying Kyiv with as much air defense as possible, providing advance warning of incoming missiles, encouraging allies to seize Russia’s sovereign assets to provide Ukraine with economic relief, and helping Ukraine impose costs on Russia.
It also means helping Europe deter Putin from escalating his shadow war against NATO members. This is difficult but doable. Europe needs to convince Putin that increased attacks, especially any that result in casualties, will deepen Europe’s and the United States’ involvement in the Ukraine conflict. For instance, Europe could say that if Russia launches missiles or drones against NATO members, a European coalition will place air defenses in western Ukraine. Trump could tell Putin that if Russia keeps harassing Europe, he will clear the way with Elon Musk for Ukraine to use Starlink to hit military targets inside of Russia.
If one of Russia’s attacks resulted in mass casualties, such as the downing of a civilian airliner, the allies could designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. When I served at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, we communicated this to the Russians after they plotted to place flammable devices on airliners carrying DHL packages. We made clear that such a designation would likely lead to the closure of the Russian embassy in the United States. They stopped the plots.
Helping Ukraine survive the winter and deterring Russian attacks on Europe will help keep diplomacy alive. But to close the deal, Trump needs to convince Putin that his window of opportunity is closing. Here, Trump’s political weakness could work to his advantage.
Putin surely fears that Trump’s successor—if a Democrat or a Republican other than J. D. Vance—will be more favorable to Ukraine. A new administration will likely increase U.S. support for Ukraine and rebalance any deal made in the Trump years, possibly linking sanctions relief to Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine.
Trump could turn this prospect into leverage. He can tell Putin that the opportunity for a favorable deal is real, but that it may not last forever. Only he can deliver it. If Putin keeps fighting, he will not make territorial gains, Ukraine will survive and retain the capacity to strike inside of Russia, Europe will become more involved, and the favorable terms will expire.
Then Trump needs to get serious about revising the offer so that it is acceptable to Ukraine. At a minimum, that means a freezing of the territorial lines, and no legal recognition of the occupied territory.
Trump wants to be remembered as the president who ended the war in Ukraine, but unless he changes course, he may instead be remembered as the president who gave Putin the confidence to widen and prolong it. Trump has spent nearly two years trying to convince Putin that peace will be more rewarding than war. To get a cease-fire, he must now convince him that war will be more costly than peace.
For most of the past two decades, Ohio Democrats have hobbled home in defeat on Election Day, beaten and battered in a state that used to be a national bellwether. In 2024, Donald Trump ran up an 11-point margin, while Sherrod Brown lost his seat in the Senate. But earlier this month, I found Brown campaigning at Ohio State University, his red L.L.Bean fleece blending in with the students’ scarlet-and-gray apparel. It was the last day for Ohioans to register to vote.
“O-H!” Brown said. The students’ response came automatically: “I-O!” they screamed. Maybe they could try “O-H …I-vote,” Brown suggested with a smile. It didn’t quite catch on. After blowing a 20-point lead against Texas early in the college-football season, the Buckeyes have turned things around—and Democrats are clearly looking to borrow more than a chant from their playbook.
Beating a Republican Party that has dominated the state for the past two decades, they believe, requires speaking directly to voters’ frustrations. Brown, in particular, has focused his campaign on reminding everyone how terrible things are, and is betting that tapping into Ohioans’ anger—spurred by a combination of high prices, an unpopular war, and a flailing president—might just be enough to return to the Senate. Less than two weeks from Election Day, there are signs that the strategy may be working. Most polls show Brown and Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor—a first-time politician and physician who served as director of the Ohio Department of Health during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic—leading or tied with their GOP rivals.
At Ohio State, Brown’s cheery greeting was prelude to a bleak speech about the future that awaits young Ohioans. The 73-year-old warned that life would be much harder for these students than it was for him when he graduated (Yale, but he went on to earn two master’s degrees from Ohio State) five decades ago. “The system’s rigged,” he began, then listed all of the ways that young people are screwed: Corporations make more money than ever. Their CEOs earn hundreds of times more than the average worker. The dream of homeownership might be entirely out of reach for young Americans. Normal people, Brown kept repeating, just cannot get ahead anymore.
Brown was telling a group of ambitious students at the state’s top-ranked public university that they don’t have a future—or at least not the future they want. And they were captivated. Afterward, when Brown chatted with them individually, some looked like they were talking to a therapist.
Freshman Trent Carson told me he’s already afraid that he won’t be able to find a good job when he graduates. He also worries that his cousins, who are truck drivers, will be out of work if the price of diesel remains near record highs. Josie Speakman, the pink-haired College Democrats president who introduced Brown, voiced a similar pessimism. “It feels like we can't get ahead, despite working harder than ever,” she said. The system is broken, she said, but Brown is going to fix it.
Brown’s speech lacked rhetorical flourishes; he spoke to the students in his signature rasp, offering no major ideas beyond pledging to end the Iran war and get rid of tariffs. Barack Obama he is not, except that Brown is the only Democrat besides Obama to win statewide political office in Ohio since 2006. Brown’s project this year is not to fix Democrats’ tattered image in the state; in fact, Brown seems determined not to remind anyone that he’s a Democrat unless he absolutely has to. His campaign ads target the incumbent, Jon Husted, for taking money from Jeffrey Epstein’s benefactors and supporting AI data centers that raise Ohioans’ electric bills. They do not mention Brown’s party affiliation. Nor does his campaign website. “In large swaths of Ohio, and the country, the Democratic Party’s reputation has become toxic,” Brown wrote in The New Republic last year.
Not that Brown’s political identity is a secret. Husted, who was appointed to the Senate last year by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine after J. D. Vance became vice president, was in elementary school when Brown was first elected to the Ohio legislature. It was the same year Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
Brown is following the same approach that gave Trump three consecutive victories in Ohio: lean into voters’ grievances and convince them that voting for him is a way to fight back against the rotten status quo. It doesn’t matter if Ohioans think that Democrats are lousy too, so long as they vote for this one candidate who just so happens to be a member of the party.
One Republican strategist told me that in Brown, a candidate who is well known and well liked, Republicans face a formidable opponent amid a terrible political environment for the party. “People obviously do not feel better economically,” the strategist, whose organization did not authorize him to speak publicly about campaign dynamics, said, “so they’re taking it out on us.”
In 2024, Brown was also leading in the polls just weeks before the election, and then lost the Senate seat he had held for nearly two decades to now-Senator Bernie Moreno. So what’s different this year? Brown’s answer is simple: Everything has gotten worse. Life got more expensive. Washington got more corrupt. And because he’s no longer an incumbent, he can somewhat more convincingly claim to be an outsider. “The system’s more rigged than it was,” Brown told me during an interview with a group of reporters after the Ohio State event. “My message hasn’t changed.”
Republicans have responded by attempting to both validate voters’ concerns and suggest that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Ohio Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou, a lawyer from the Cincinnati suburbs, is spending the final weeks of the campaign traveling the state in a rented white minivan. Gas prices now average $4.07 per gallon in Ohio, down from $4.48 a month ago, after the legislature approved a 90-day gas-tax holiday—a policy proposed by Acton that Republicans adopted and repackaged into a victory for her Republican competitor, Vivek Ramaswamy.
“I think if there’s any part of the Iran war that poses an issue for voters, it might be with gas prices, but we’ve solved that here in Ohio,” Triantafilou told me this month at a coffee shop near Columbus. He had driven more than 100 miles from Cincinnati that morning for a couple of meetings and was about to turn around and head back. He said he doesn’t think Ohioans are going to vote on how much it costs to fill up their tanks and considers the issue of affordability to be overstated by the media. The stock market is up, he pointed out.
Husted made a similar argument in a pep talk earlier this month to conservative activists going out to canvass in Delaware County, on the northern fringes of Columbus. “We have the most jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in our history,” Husted told reporters before the canvassing event. “We made progress.” He sought to remind voters that inflation was worse a few years ago, when Joe Biden was president and Brown was in the Senate.
Husted is no MAGA warrior. When he spoke to supporters at a barbecue on a farm near Athens recently, he earnestly asked attendees to call loved ones daily until the election and remind them to vote. A former collegiate Division III defensive back, Husted once turned down an opportunity to coach college football, and he still looks like someone who’d rather be outside tossing a ball around. At a rally in Youngstown last week, Trump was captivated by Husted’s athletic past. “I looked at his ass,” Trump said with admiration, “and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws. And I got it, you are a great athlete.”
It was Trump’s second time in Ohio in as many weeks. In a midterm election, when turnout tends to be lower, getting Trump’s biggest fans to go to the polls is the way to win, Ohio Republicans told me. They’re banking on that remaining true, despite the president’s broad unpopularity. “I understand the national environment sucks. In the other states, there are gonna be blue waves,” Michael Hartley, a Republican consultant in the state, told me. But he remains convinced that Ohio favors Republicans and that those Republicans listen to Trump: “If we turn our people out, we win.” But Husted’s choice to tether himself to the president does not guarantee success when 60 percent of Ohioans disapprove of Trump, up from 44 percent at the start of his current term.
Trump is not the only one with an image problem in Ohio. It’s not hard to find prominent Democrats willing—eager, actually—to criticize their own party. And though Democratic self-flagellation is nothing new, what’s different in 2026 is that bashing their own party might be a winning strategy for Democrats in the state.
Ohioans are not voting for Democrats “because they’re Democrats. They’re voting for them because we’re not Trump,” Tim Ryan, a former Democratic representative from the Youngstown area who lost a 2022 Senate race to J. D. Vance, told me. Allison Russo, a former minority leader in Ohio’s state house who is now running for secretary of state, says that the party’s organizing efforts in the state have been “terrible” and that the party’s brand is “crap.” But Russo, who still speaks with a southern drawl from her childhood in Mississippi, isn’t particularly beat up about that.
“I would argue the Republican brand is becoming just as toxic,” Russo told me when we met in Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb where she lives. She thinks she might win, which surprises even her. “What I thought my chances were at the beginning versus where we are now has shifted dramatically,” she said. A Democrat has not been elected Ohio secretary of state in 20 years.
A decade ago, as Trump barreled toward his first term in the White House, then–First Lady Michelle Obama offered Democrats some advice on how to respond to his divisive brand of politics. It was, she said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the Obamas’ family motto, a mantra of sorts that she and her husband would repeat to their young daughters as they grew up in the public eye: “When they go low, we go high.” Democrats grabbed onto the slogan, but the Obamas’ strategy of earnest, upbeat politicking did not help the party defeat Trump. In Ohio a decade later, Brown’s campaign all but repudiates the approach. When he tried to go high in the past, he “was shouted down by the ugly,” Diane Valentino, an elementary-school teacher in Delaware County, told me on the first day of early voting. She had arrived at the Delaware County Board of Elections before doors opened at 8 a.m., and stood with a small group of activists who were passing out Democratic flyers and sample ballots from the back of someone’s car. In this year’s election, Valentino felt, Brown had no choice but to “call out the darkness” of Ohio Republicans. “He didn’t strike first, but he had to step up,” Valentino said.
After Brown cast his ballot that day in Columbus, he stopped to talk with a group of reporters. I asked him whether his campaign has a positive message to voters, or if tapping into frustration is the driving force heading into the final weeks of the campaign. “The positive message for my campaign,” Brown said, is, “I don’t see politics as left or right. I see it as whose side you’re on.” Not a Democrat—just on your side.
Obama himself is the one massive exception to the “don’t remind people you’re a Democrat” strategy. This weekend, the former president will make his first visit to Ohio since 2018, the last time Brown won. When Obama announced that he would speak at a rally with Brown and Acton in Cleveland, he said that he wants to elect “Democrats up and down the ballot.” That includes Brown—just don’t expect him to say so.
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky have never enjoyed a warm relationship, or even a stable one. But last week, it hit a new low. Trump called on the Ukrainian people to elect a new president, describing Zelensky as “more difficult to deal with” than Vladimir Putin. He accused Zelensky of prolonging Ukraine’s war with Russia. “He says he wants to settle, but he doesn’t,” Trump told Newsmax, without mentioning that it was Putin who started the war nearly five years ago. “Zelensky is not a good guy for us to deal with.”
The two leaders may find themselves at a personal nadir, but all the while, the U.S. intelligence community has shown no letup in its fight to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression. Armed with information that the U.S. provides, Ukraine’s military has launched strikes deep inside Russia. And U.S. spy satellites provide early warning about incoming missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground, “the CIA is in the lead,” a retired senior officer who travels frequently to Ukraine told me. If anything, the Ukrainians, with the CIA’s help, have gotten too good at hurting Russia for Trump’s taste.
The administration’s policy is deeply conflicted, and perhaps no one understands that better than John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He has a foot in two worlds: advising a president who’s continuously at odds with Ukraine’s leadership, and running an agency that’s essential to Ukraine’s war for survival. One intelligence officer in the Baltics, who works closely with the Americans to counter Russian influence, told me that, though you’d never know it from Trump’s rhetoric, the CIA’s operations are now “much more aggressive” than they were during the Biden administration.
The Ukrainians don’t see Ratcliffe as their advocate. They know he works for a mercurial boss, and that if Trump were to follow through on his recent threat to halt intelligence support unless Ukraine stops attacking Russian oil refineries, Ratcliffe would carry out the order. But Ratcliffe came into office promising, with Trump’s support, to return to the agency’s roots of espionage and clandestine operations. For now, that battlefield still extends to Ukraine. The CIA helped build the modern Ukrainian intelligence apparatus after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Partly owing to that long history, officials in Kyiv said they trust Ratcliffe to tell Trump the truth about the war, and not simply what the president wants to hear.
More than a dozen current and former intelligence officials I spoke with in the U.S. and Europe described Ratcliffe, who served as the director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term, as clear-eyed about the threat Russia poses not just to Ukraine, but to the United States and its allies. (Most people shared their views on the condition of anonymity, to speak freely about the CIA director.) In that respect, Ratcliffe is not alone in the administration. Marco Rubio, when he ran for president in 2016, called Putin a “gangster and a thug.” And Pete Hegseth, when he was a television host, called him a “maniac” with ambitions to conquer Europe. But now, as senior Cabinet members with their own political ambitions, they have aligned themselves with the president’s rhetoric.
Ratcliffe is a quieter adviser. He gives few interviews or speeches. He rarely posts on social media. Without needing to take a more conciliatory tone toward Moscow at press conferences and on cable, Ratcliffe is free to offer more candid advice in private. “He is well informed and understands the real situation,” one senior Ukrainian intelligence official who works directly with the CIA told me. “Their people stationed here support us very well. They are absolute professionals.” The official suggested that Ratcliffe would be a more effective peace negotiator than Trump’s current envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
Ratcliffe, who declined my request for an interview, has shown no inclination to switch jobs. And why would he? He enjoys a rare position in Trumpland—always in the room and (so far) never on the outs. He spends many working hours at the White House. He and the president regularly play golf together. Ratcliffe has advised Trump on some of his most consequential foreign-policy decisions of the last two years, including the choice to go to war in Iran.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s first DNI during his second term, was so far removed from his inner circle that when the president was making final preparations to invade Venezuela, she was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii. Ratcliffe was exasperated by Gabbard’s habit of stoking controversies and peddling conspiracy theories on social media, people who know them told me. Her most enduring contribution to national security was to gut the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, slashing the number of personnel by more than a third. As the ODNI has declined in size and relevance, the CIA, with Ratcliffe in charge, has reclaimed its traditional role at the center of the intelligence community. On paper, the president’s chief intelligence adviser is the director of national intelligence. In practice, it’s Ratcliffe.
How much influence Ratcliffe, or any intelligence leader, actually has over Trump depends on the president’s willingness to listen. And that record is mixed. (Trump didn’t exactly heed their warnings about how Iran would respond to American attacks.) But people who’ve worked for Ratcliffe told me he believes that his job is to advise the president, not to make policy. He can explain the consequences of potential actions, as he did when he helped Trump weigh the costs and benefits of bombing Iranian nuclear facilities last year. Ratcliffe had said he believed Iran was hoarding nuclear material in order to make a weapon. But he did not, and will not, advocate that the president pick one approach over the other, people who have worked with him told me.
In that respect, Ratcliffe has turned out to be like most of the CIA directors who preceded him. And that comes as some relief to skeptics—including inside the agency—who worried that he might follow the example of other top Trump officials who have vilified their employees or used their office to exacerbate culture wars. Elected to Congress from a deeply conservative Texas district in 2014, Ratcliffe got Trump’s attention during televised hearings about the FBI’s investigation of Russian election interference, which he suggested was motivated more by political animus than genuine concern about foreign-intelligence threats. He joined the Trump administration as DNI in 2020. Ratcliffe is still a Trump loyalist. But compared with Gabbard, Hegseth, or FBI Director Kash Patel, he is comparatively restrained in his criticism of the intelligence community, focusing mostly on Obama-era leaders and their alleged anti-Trump bias, instead of on his current employees.
“I’ve always thought he was a workhorse, not a show horse,” a former official who worked with Ratcliffe told me. He doesn’t roam the halls of headquarters to chat with staff. In the early days of his tenure, his conspicuous absences from Langley and his constant presence at the White House made some CIA officers question where his priorities lay, current and former officials told me. But it’s not unusual for directors to covet face time with the president. And his relationship with Trump and low-profile manner have probably helped keep the president from attacking the agency. (Gina Haspel, a career CIA officer who served as director in Trump’s first term, successfully pursued the same strategy, current and former officials noted.)
The CIA’s success in Ukraine has become a problem—at least from Trump’s perspective. Relentless attacks on Russian oil refineries have hobbled its economy and choked Putin’s war machine. The International Energy Agency estimates that in the first eight months of this year, Ukraine hit a refinery on average once every three days. Economists say that Iran’s restriction of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has driven up the cost of diesel. But Trump blames the damage to Russian refineries for the spiking prices, and he wants the Ukrainian attacks to end.
On October 9, as officials from Kyiv and other European capitals met with Trump’s envoys in Miami for peace talks, the president announced that Putin had just agreed to start selling Russian diesel on the global market. With the midterms less than four weeks away, he sounded jubilant when he posted on Truth Social that diesel prices would be “COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!”
Trump’s announcement surprised the negotiators, three people with knowledge of the talks told me. Some of his advisers had urged him to hold off on speaking with Putin until there was a concrete peace proposal for him to respond to, concluding that Trump would look weak if he relaxed sanctions but came away with no reciprocal commitments. Putin made none.
Trump seemed to believe that dangling the prospect of fuel revenue to resuscitate Russia’s economy could bring Putin back to the table. But for years now, the U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Putin keeps fighting, despite an enormous loss of lives and money, because he thinks he will win—if not through an outright military victory, then by exhausting the support of Ukraine’s allies. To that end, Russia in recent months has escalated its “hybrid warfare” against Europe, plotting sabotage on commercial cargo aircraft, jamming communications, and probing NATO air defenses with drones. European intelligence officials told me they fear that Putin might even send forces across the border with Estonia, as he did in Crimea in 2014 when so-called little green men appeared, stripped of their military insignia.
Back in August, Trump tried a subtler tactic to bring the war to a close. He dispatched Ratcliffe to Moscow, where he met with his counterparts in the security services and laid out the agency’s view about how the war was going, people familiar with the meeting told me. The upshot: No one was winning. Russia’s military has failed to make meaningful advances, but Ukraine has not expelled Russian forces from its territory. That’s hardly a secret analysis. But Ratcliffe’s presence sent a message of its own.
The director was using a line of communication informally known as “the channel,” which allows Russian and American spies to talk candidly, away from the scrutiny of the press or the grandstanding of politicians. Putin, an ex-KGB officer, would understand that Ratcliffe had come not as a diplomatic envoy but as a fellow spy, with a message he felt was important for Putin to hear.
Ratcliffe never met with Putin; that’s not how the channel works. But the Russian intelligence chiefs would have been obliged to document whatever the CIA director told them, even if they tried to dismiss it out of hand, a Western intelligence official told me. The U.S. and its allies have long suspected that Putin’s advisers may be misleading him about Russia’s chances of success in Ukraine. If Ratcliffe could help convince Putin that he was pursuing a lost cause, perhaps he’d finally come to the table. Among all the officials in the Trump administration, Ratcliffe was uniquely situated to deliver that message. No one knows the state of the war, and the stakes involved, better than the CIA officers who are working in Ukraine and monitoring the fight from headquarters.
In September, Ratcliffe briefed Zelensky about his trip to Moscow when their planes were both in Ireland for refueling stops, a source familiar with the conversation told my colleague Simon Shuster. A U.S. official told me that the meeting took place entirely by happenstance. But it demonstrated the ability for Ukrainian leaders and the CIA director to have candid discussions on short notice.
Last week, Ukraine got a taste of what diminished U.S. intelligence support might look like. Russian missiles pounded Kyiv as reports emerged about disruptions to the Starlink satellite network and U.S. early-warning systems, which blinded Ukraine to some incoming Russian projectiles and limited its ability to intercept them, people familiar with the matter told me. The Ukrainian intelligence official said he blamed the Americans, but there’s also evidence that technical failures were responsible for the failure to intercept at least some of the incoming missiles. Officially, the Americans haven’t yet turned off the intelligence spigot, although Trump could act at any time.
If Trump were to do so, people who have worked with Ratcliffe tell me that he wouldn’t lobby the president to change his mind, no matter the misgivings at CIA headquarters.
At his confirmation hearing in 2025, Ratcliffe pledged to get the CIA back to what he considers its core mission. “We will conduct covert action at the direction of the president, going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do,” he said, and told CIA officers listening that “if all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work.”
Many people have taken Ratcliffe up on his suggestion. Although the CIA doesn’t disclose personnel figures, current and former officers told me they have never seen such a large number of retirements and resignations in their career. Some have even left on the verge of a major promotion. Vacancies in senior posts might have to be filled by less experienced officers.
When CIA officers quit, their colleagues gather in the lobby of the headquarters building for a “clap out,” a round of applause to wish them well on their last day. Ratcliffe isn’t a fan of the tradition, two former employees told me. They serve as a reminder that many people have left.
Ratcliffe also made decisions early in his tenure that some now-former officers told me they couldn’t condone. At his confirmation hearing, he warned that “a politically motivated, bureaucratically imposed social-justice agenda” risked distracting intelligence officers from their work. Once in office, he dismissed senior personnel who had been assigned to DEI-related roles. Former officials told me many of the people who were fired were simply unlucky enough to have been assigned those jobs while they waited for higher-level positions to open up, and were unfairly maligned as activists. He also fired about 60 probationary employees, who had less than two years’ experience. Some of them had already been put on notice that they were underperforming, but the mass termination still shocked many agency officers.
This is not to say that everyone is unhappy at Langley. Broadly speaking, current and former officers told me, morale is highest in the operations directorate, among the officers who conduct the espionage that Ratcliffe wants to emphasize. Personnel in the Special Activities Center, which conducts covert and paramilitary activities, are particularly satisfied, recently retired officers told me, perhaps because they’re so busy, and not only in Ukraine.
CIA directors don’t typically crow about secretive operations, but Ratcliffe has eagerly shared what he’s described as operational successes. In a speech last June, he said that “thanks to CIA,” U.S. special forces were able to locate and apprehend Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “less than four minutes after their feet hit the ground on the largest military complex in that country.” (A senior Pentagon official told me that Ratcliffe took too much credit for the operation, but he didn’t deny that the agency’s contributions were important.) During the same speech, Ratcliffe credited the agency with helping locate a U.S. fighter pilot shot down over Iran, and for the “flawless intelligence picture” that had allowed more than 100 U.S. aircraft to hit Iranian nuclear facilities a year earlier.
But some of the agency’s more opaque activities have stirred anxiety. Press reports have revealed CIA operations in Mexico and El Salvador as part of the Trump administration’s clandestine efforts to combat drug cartels. In August, The Washington Post reported that a series of air strikes targeting Ecuadorean fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands, a known hub for drug traffickers, were part of a covert CIA program.
Legal experts have said that U.S. air strikes against boats suspected of carrying illegal drugs may violate the laws of armed conflict and in some cases could be considered murder. Recently retired officers told me that some of their colleagues have avoided taking jobs in the CIA’s Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center. “There are people at the operational level who, when the Democrats take over the House, will be left holding the bag,” one former officer told me. “The agency is over its skis right now.”
At the other end of the morale spectrum are employees in the analysis directorate, who write the articles, reports, and assessments that the president and his team use to make policy decisions. Since Ratcliffe became director in January 2025, significantly more analysts have reported concerns that the objectivity of their work is being undermined, according to an annual survey that I first reported on in July. The respondents directed most of their criticism at Gabbard, after she fired senior analysts who refused to alter their reports to support administration policy. But the results reflect a broader suspicion that the administration will reject information that it doesn’t want to hear. That will cause analysts to pull their punches, which in turn will deprive policy makers of the best advice, former analysts told me.
Julia Curlee, who resigned in May as a senior CIA analyst, faulted Ratcliffe for not defending the agency officers whom Gabbard ordered be fired, and for rescinding or revising assessments that had been written before his tenure, after judging them to be politically biased. “Every officer drew the obvious conclusion: The director won’t protect even our most respected analysts when they tell hard truths, so they stopped telling them and learned to avoid topics the White House didn’t want to hear,” Curlee told me. “Ratcliffe isn’t protecting the CIA from politicization; he’s leading it.”
Analysts strive for objectivity. But intelligence as a practice is not truly apolitical, because it’s an instrument of presidential power. The most successful CIA directors know how to tell their bosses the truth while also serving their interests.
Ratcliffe has largely managed to walk that fine line. Last year, he ordered analysts to reexamine what Trump calls “the Russia hoax,” the agency’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of helping Trump win. In public remarks, Ratcliffe said the review proved that Obama-era national-security leaders had created a “politically charged environment,” and he threw the credibility of their findings in doubt. But the CIA review, which Ratcliffe released, offered scant evidence to support that assertion, didn’t change the conclusion, and generally praised the quality of the CIA’s work.
Over the summer, the agency declassified documents about China’s efforts to interfere in the 2020 election. In a prime-time national address, Trump said the intelligence was evidence of China’s malign actions and systemic weaknesses in the security of elections. But again, the documents didn’t support all of his claims. Ratcliffe issued a measured statement about backing Trump’s “transparency initiatives” that called out China’s interference, but he didn’t repeat the president’s assertion that the election was stolen. Election deniers close to the president have urged him to declare a national emergency and assert federal control over elections because of alleged foreign interference.
With the midterms approaching, the two top Democrats on the intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate said this week that they had put Ratcliffe on notice: If Trump claims publicly that the CIA gave him intelligence that a foreign power interfered in the election, the lawmakers will call Ratcliffe and ask if Trump is telling the truth. “You must be available to us on that day,” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut told reporters. “So when the president makes that announcement, you will answer your cellphone to give us information about what’s happening.” Himes and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said Ratcliffe had promised to answer their call.
Even when he has waded into political controversy, Ratcliffe has managed to shield the CIA from Trump’s ire. Considering that when the president came into office the first time he compared intelligence officers to Nazis, this is not an insignificant achievement. Ratcliffe also does a better job than most Cabinet members of explaining the president’s hasty decisions. Last year, when Trump abruptly cut off intelligence to Ukraine after his televised blowup with Zelensky in the Oval Office, Ratcliffe spoke about why the pause would probably be short-lived. “Trump had a real question about whether President Zelensky was committed to the peace process, and he said: Let’s pause,” Ratcliffe told Fox Business five days after the leaders met. (That was a diplomatic summary. Trump had told Zelensky that he was disrespectful and ungrateful.) But after he left the White House, Zelensky sent Trump a note, which he also posted on social media, praising the president for his “strong leadership” and assuring him that “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table.”
“We do really value how much America has done to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty and independence,” Zelensky said. Trump read portions of the note to a joint session of Congress, and called Zelensky’s conciliatory words “important.”
Ratcliffe said that Trump’s pause had given time for Zelensky to consider his next move. The director clearly believed that the Ukrainian leader had made the right choice when he reached out to Trump, and he accurately predicted that the intelligence would start flowing again. “I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that’s there, put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward,” he said.
The CIA director seemed to be counseling Zelensky over the airwaves, a technique Trump’s own advisers have employed. The message came down to this: Remember who you’re dealing with, and things might work out. Ratcliffe might not advocate to his boss, but he knows how to read him.
Simon Shuster contributed additional reporting.
*Illustration sources: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty; Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg / Getty; Daniel Slim / AFP / Getty; Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto / Reuters; Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Pool / AFP / Getty.
On Tuesday, the world found out about two massive security vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that is used by roughly 70 percent of websites. The flaw was discovered by cybersecurity researchers using a frontier model from OpenAI. If they exploited it, attackers could gain full control of servers, stealing or copying anything inside or simply taking sites offline.
The PHP Foundation, the organization that maintains the programming language, had recently learned about the security flaws, but the disclosure was leaked on a forum before a patch could be released. What happened next was a frantic race with numerous participants: the foundation, which needed to create and release a patch; developers around the world, who would need to deploy it; and attackers looking to exploit these vulnerabilities in the interim. Matthew Prince, the CEO of the hosting company Cloudflare, wrote that in the 10 hours before the flaws were publicly announced, “we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”
Once the patch was released yesterday, websites everywhere went offline to implement the fix. These included government websites in Germany and Finland, some hospital and school websites in Europe, and international sites such as 4chan. During this race to secure the majority of the internet, I noticed one name pop up in posts on Reddit and X: Ondřej Surý.
“Explaining to my wife how there’s this one guy. And he alone is responsible for most of the world’s distribution of PHP,” a software developer named Ian Landsman wrote on X. “And if anything happens to this guy, that’s just it. Everyone is screwed.” He was referring to Surý.
Surý, who lives in Czechia, does not work for the PHP Foundation. But alongside his day job as director of domain-name-system engineering at the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, in a volunteer capacity, he maintains and helps automate patches for the coding language. His work, with that of just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix these vulnerabilities quickly. Over the past 48 hours, he’s become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet—despite the fact that the only compensation he receives is from modest donations. “Ondřej will save the internet today,” a user in the PHP Subreddit wrote.
I spoke with Surý today from his home about the unfolding AI-cybersecurity crisis, how the internet’s infrastructure is maintained by small crews of volunteers such as himself, and how it feels to go to bed after saving the web as we know it.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Charlie Warzel: Explain to me what has happened in layman’s terms over the past 72 hours.
OndřejSurý: Earlier this week, I got notified by the PHP project that there was a serious security vulnerability in the coding. On Tuesday, it became apparent that someone had leaked information about the upcoming vulnerabilities, and it was decided inside the PHP project that it needed to accelerate the release process from Thursday to Wednesday. This is when it became a little bit crazy, because now we were one day short suddenly.
Warzel: I want to try to put this into perspective: So basically, the PHP programming language that kind of undergirds the web is used by up to 70 percent of websites?
Surý: That’s what I heard as well.
Warzel: So people search for cybersecurity vulnerabilities, not necessarily for offensive-attack opportunities but maybe just defensive opportunities. And someone found a vulnerability—that’s not super abnormal. But the real issue here was how widely it was disclosed and the amount of time before people had to patch this, right?
Surý: Let me clarify that: It’s the severity. The severity is unusual. Remote Code Execution is the most severe type of vulnerability, because the attacker is able to execute their own code on the server that’s running PHP. That’s why this caused such panic throughout the internet. As you said, if about 70 percent of websites are running PHP, the impact would be huge if attackers would actually be able to execute code on these servers.
Warzel: You said that despite the panic online, it has not been a crazy 48 hours. From the outside, that’s surprising. I keep seeing people saying, There’s one person who is in charge of fixing this—and he’s supporting himself through Patreon. They may have been exaggerating, but there’s some truth to that: Your work was single-handedly helping millions of people. How could this not be a crazy time for you?
Surý: There are a couple of reasons. One is that I’ve been doing this for a long time, over 20 years. A lot of the stuff that I do is automated. But the reason it was not crazy for me was that I actually don’t have any system running PHP myself. So for me, it was like, sure, I feel a responsibility toward the users of the internet. It would be a crazy day for me if I was on a boat in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. That could happen. But I had time to prepare the packages.
Warzel: That’s kinda wild.
Surý: And even without me, people would still be able to get PHP from other sources and compile it themselves. But it would be more complicated for everyone. And some people don’t immediately have the skill to upgrade the PHP. What the PHP project did was release the source code for the language. What I am doing is preparing it into these things called packages that people can install on their servers. It’s very convenient, and it’s faster, and you can automate it and can install the same package over hundreds and thousands of servers, and you don’t have to compile it. If I was not available, it would take more time; some of them wouldn’t have the skills. Really, the thanks go to the PHP project that invited me into this secret cabal who knew about the vulnerabilities and had access before the public release.
Warzel: When you got invited, was it a real Oh, crap moment for you?
Surý: I’m in the stage of my life where I was like, This is bad. It needs to be fixed. But it doesn’t cause panic, at least for me. It did cause panic for a lot of people. But you know, it was more like, We have a situation, it needs to be solved, and this is how we do it. And I have time to properly prepare. If I didn’t have time to properly prepare, then it would cause a lot of stress. From where I stand, it was not stressful, because I’m doing this as a volunteer, and if I get hit by a bus, then it will be someone else’s problem.
Warzel: Every time I dabble in writing about the world of cybersecurity and open-source software, I discover these groups of maintainers: people such as yourself who do this work because they care. Often, nobody knows their name. But is there a line of people who would take your place if, say, you did get hit by a bus?
Surý: I am actually thinking about contingency plans. And we are talking with Raphaël Hertzog from the software company Freexian. My advantage is that I have a lot of expertise, and I know where to touch the thing to make it work. But Freexian has a lot of expertise, and they would be able to take over if anything happens.
People have been donating small amounts, and larger amounts, like crazy since yesterday. I would like to thank them all.
Warzel: Have the donations been overwhelming?
Surý: Not Silicon Valley levels of money, but I got a serious amount of contributions that I’ve never seen before. It’s like one year of the contributions gathered over the past 24 hours.
Warzel: What would have happened if this wasn’t patched as quickly as it was?
Surý: A lot of things could have happened. The very basic thing is that there would be vandalism, that the sites would be taken down. And we are seeing this every day on the internet now. The other stuff that happens is that someone gets access and runs a botnet out of these devices. I would say it’s mostly organized crime doing that now—it’s not like a small guy in the basement doing this for fun. There are financial incentives for these people to sell the botnet services or to do the crypto-mining on these servers for a profit. And this still could happen, because it’s not like everyone has patched and updated their PHP.
Warzel: I saw a post on X that said not all PHP releases are patched, and one-third of the internet is kind of permanently either broken or vulnerable. Is that correct?
Surý: That initial information is not correct. There are ways to patch even the old versions.
Warzel: So one-third of the internet is not permanently screwed. Okay.
Surý: No, that’s not accurate. If people care enough, they are able to even update these old versions of PHP.
Warzel: It’s a scary moment for cybersecurity. I’ve seen people online referring to this vulnerability and other AI-agent hacks as “Black October,” and there’s concern that defensive or attacking agents can find these vulnerabilities. There is this feeling that I am noticing from the cybersecurity community that their fears of a future where things are being exploited or discovered quicker than people can handle is coming true—that we are living in that moment. And then separately, there’s a contingent of people who are saying there is an equilibrium here: If you have very persistent agents that are very good at identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities, you also have very persistent agents that are very good at defending against them.
Surý: What we’ve seen is that things have accelerated—that’s absolutely right. The defenders are also able to use the large language models to find the vulnerabilities for themselves. I believe it boils down to the simple fact that IT infrastructure is often being taken for granted.
There’s not enough priority and money going to properly maintain the IT infrastructure in various places. It’s not only companies; it’s also a lot of outdated consumer electronics that are going to be attacked. I kind of agree that everything’s moving fast now, and it’s taking a toll on the people who are defending the stuff. At the same time, maybe this is the turning point where we actually start caring about this.
Warzel: Do you feel like that will actually happen?
Surý: I might be wrong, but I’m an optimist that people will finally realize that we can’t go like this forever. This has been a disaster waiting to happen for a really, really long time. And this is just one of the many wake-up calls that came and will be coming.
Warzel: I am amazed by how much the infrastructure in certain areas of the internet can hinge on one or two people. There is a fragility to all of this that is concerning. So what do you want to see?
Surý: When I started doing open-source, it was fun. And it kind of still is. But the environment has shifted. Open-source sometimes feels like exploitation. What I would like to see is to find a new model where people working on open-source would be awarded for their work and the hours and hours they put into it from the people who most benefit from their work. I would like companies to realize that this is exploitation. Any exploitation is not sustainable. And it will end up badly if this continues, because the people doing the open-source will stop being motivated to actually do anything in the end.
Warzel: It sounds like you don’t have an ego about all of this. But you did some work, and you helped out a tremendous amount of people in every corner of the world yesterday. How did it feel to go to bed last night after all of that, knowing the role that you played?
Surý: Well, my wife says that I’m emotionally dead, but I’m not. And it felt nice. Like, seeing my social network filling up with thank-you notes, and getting emails with thank-yous, that feels really nice. It puts some sense into what I do. I felt that what I do has a purpose.
Warzel: The whole internet appreciates your efforts. Is there anything that you would recommend normal people do at this moment to improve their internet hygiene?
Surý: I would recommend that they rely on the experts. That’s what we all do in a crisis: We talk to experts and trust them. Rely on people, that people who take care of this stuff know what they are doing. And that’s all we can do.
President Trump has been hearing lately from two trusted confidants, each promising a quick path to ending the war in Iran. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that Iran is on the brink of economic collapse and that a U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, combined with sanctions, will force Tehran to capitulate at the negotiation table. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a series of calls with Trump, has offered a different route: one more round of devastating U.S. and Israeli strikes to topple the regime. Now the Trump administration appears to be considering combining the two approaches, betting that Iran is already on the verge of economic ruin and that a few more major strikes will be enough to trigger regime change.
The president is considering reviving his military campaign against Iran with several days of strikes, likely just after the midterm elections, officials told us. The potential targets include Iran’s missile and drone arsenal as well as its energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities. One outside adviser told us that “the economic pressure is working, and we believe Iran is getting close to the edge.” The new strikes, the person added, “would push them over.”
Experience suggests that this may be wishful thinking. Economic pressure has badly weakened Iran, but the country’s negotiating position has hardly budged. Trump has thought before that Iran was on the verge of ruin—or already past it—only to discover that he’d miscalculated. And launching more strikes could spark a regional escalation without bringing the regime any closer to surrender. Speaking at Tehran’s Holy Defence Museum earlier this week, Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, named seven major fiber-optic cables beneath the surface of the Strait of Hormuz as potential “new targets” and teased that future attacks would feature “new weapons.” If the proposed U.S. strike plan fails to bring Iran to its knees, Tehran could emerge even less willing to make concessions.
“Trump is desperate to find some options to take him out from this problematic situation,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer who specializes in Iran, told us. “But you cannot plan for a three-day war, because it is not a unilateral decision. You cannot control how Iran responds.” Nevertheless, the president appears intent on acting. “Something one way or another, it will happen fairly soon,” Trump told a reporter yesterday before boarding Air Force One.
Despite all of the reasons resuming strikes could be a mistake, the president is tempted because he’s grown impatient waiting for the strategy of economic strangulation to work. He had originally hoped that Iran would come crawling back to the negotiations before the midterm elections, an official and another person familiar with the conversations told us under the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. That has not happened, and energy prices have stayed high—creating an awful political landscape for Republicans. Trump has toned down some of his apocalyptic rhetoric toward Tehran, but his frustration occasionally seeps through, often in late-night social-media posts.
Trump has toyed with the idea of resuming hostilities before Election Day, a push championed by those in Washington who believe that a show of force could allow the president to claim some sort of October-surprise victory. Netanyahu has advocated for another round of strikes before his own election next week, a White House official confirmed to us. So far, Trump has held off on authorizing a pre-midterms strike; after we reported on the possibility earlier this month, the behind-the-scenes blowback from fellow Republicans was so intense that the president posted on Truth Social that he would not attack again before the election.
U.S. officials stress that no decision has been made about whether to resume strikes post-election, although there have been very public signs of preparation. Some officials hope that uncertainty about what the United States will do—and when—will keep Tehran on edge. Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth traveled to Israel and met with Netanyahu to discuss Iran. The State Department said yesterday that it was evacuating nonessential personnel and their family members from Saudi Arabia because of escalating attacks from Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Real questions remain about whether the Pentagon’s munitions supplies, which were growing dangerously low at the height of the conflict, would be adequate to defend U.S. interests in the Middle East. Meanwhile, even the hint of hostilities has spooked markets; the price of oil surged and the stock market fell today as word circulated about a possible return to war and Iran hit tankers in the strait. (The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. U.S. Central Command, which leads the war in Iran, declined to comment.)
The costly U.S. naval blockade, which has effectively stopped Iranian oil exports, coupled with sanctions and damage from U.S. strikes, has put Iran’s economy under severe strain. Inflation is soaring; goods are scarce. The record-low value of the rial has left Iranians struggling to pay for basic needs. Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said last week that the naval blockade had prevented Iran from exporting at least $25 billion worth of crude oil. The International Monetary Fund has projected that Iran’s economy will contract sharply in 2026. But while Tehran is trying to contain the damage through measures such as price controls and maintaining essential imports, there is little evidence that Iran is on the verge of imminent economic collapse. Over the summer, Bessent promised “financial violence” that would lead to Iran’s capitulation. Yesterday, the Treasury Department added sanctions targeting shipping networks and intermediaries “indirectly aiding Tehran’s ability to generate revenue to fund its military, weapons, and nuclear programs.”
“I think it could be within weeks or months—and the economy doesn’t have to collapse. We just have to have the regime come to their senses,” he told reporters at an August G20 finance ministers’ meeting. But the belief that that point will come soon ignores the patterns of history: The hard-liners in Tehran have become inured to the suffering of their people over decades and have yet to capitulate.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has repeatedly urged Trump, who has endorsed the prime minister in his reelection bid, to launch strikes before Israel’s Tuesday election and the United States’ vote a week later, an Israeli television station reported last week. Netanyahu’s office has reportedly denied the claim. Regardless, the war is key to the political futures of Netanyahu and Trump. How and when it ends, however, is not entirely up to them.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
For William E. Smythe, the future of the West was clear. At the turn of the 20th century, long before low snowpacks and the climate crisis, before tens of millions of people moved westward, the New Englander turned western settler understood that water defined how life could be lived in the region. Unlike other parts of the country, much of the West was uniquely arid and would have to be irrigated to support further growth and development. People “will prosper or languish, create high conditions of social life, or lapse into semi-barbarism, in sure response to the manner in which the water supply is owned and administered,” Smythe wrote in The Atlantic’s November 1900 issue.
As he traveled through the western states, Smythe saw how early settlers failed to imagine a world where their water needs could not be met. Even in fertile California, the natural cycle of the West surprised settlers: Dry years turned flowered foothills dusty and barren. “The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away,” John Steinbeck wrote of the Salinas Valley, a California agriculture hub, in East of Eden. “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
Almost every major waterway in the West was overappropriated by the early 20th century. Farms were built without a complete accounting of how much water was available. Later generations realized that water was finite and perhaps more valuable than the precious metals they mined, and battles to control its flow began. Farmers in Texas and the Territory of New Mexico threatened violence against Mexican communities who had relied on the Rio Grande for centuries. Upriver residents siphoned water, leaving those downstream without enough. In 1901, Kansas sued Colorado for depriving it of access to the Arkansas River—a legal conflict that would continue, in various forms, for more than a century. “The present consequences of these conditions are as nothing compared to their future effects as the settlement of the country progresses,” Smythe wrote. “What has been merely misfortune will become disaster unless the evil tendencies are soon corrected.”
That disaster started to unfold much sooner than Smythe imagined. Like the mines that drew people out West, irrigation opportunities sparked farming boomtowns too. Equally devastating busts followed. Arthur H. Carhart, a former U.S. Forest Service official, wrote in 1950 that at the start of the 20th century, settlers in the Pecos Valley, around Roswell, New Mexico, had begun drilling nearly 500 artesian wells into what was believed to be an “inexhaustible” basin to service farms. After roughly two decades, the settlers reportedly abandoned more than $5 million worth of farms and wells when the wells ran dry, raising the price of water in the region.
Despite the warning signs, water mismanagement continued in the pursuit of irrigation. Eventually, the federal government decided to intervene: In 1922, seven western states negotiated the Colorado River Compact, which allocated equal amounts of water between the upper basin (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming) and the lower basin (Arizona, California, and Nevada). Federal projects, namely the Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, which formed Lake Mead and Lake Powell, respectively, offered better irrigation, hydropower, and flood control.
These developments were proposed as a magic bullet to the West’s water problems, Carhart wrote in this magazine. But even then, engineers warned that the dams were not a permanent solution. Lake Mead, for example, would become a mudflat range in 50 to 150 years as more silt piled into the reservoir, Carhart explained: “Now flourishing communities of southern Arizona and California depending on water from Lake Meade for a major part of their existence must face the possibility of progressively moving toward the status of ghost towns.” Since then, dams have been losing hundreds of billions of gallons of water each year to evaporation and leaks. The shortfall has seeded even more conflict in the West, as upstream states try to capture enough water to support themselves at the expense of their downstream neighbors.
What Smythe and Carhart couldn’t have known then was how life in the region would reshape our climate. Water powered the agriculture industry, which over decades released billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The world continues to get warmer, and heat-driven drought has plagued the Southwest for nearly three decades. Cities such as Page, Arizona, near Lake Powell, are losing tourism and hydropower because of low water levels, and jobs in the area will likely soon follow.
Recently, states have continued to struggle to share water fairly while maintaining their way of life. Localities are restricting water use earlier and earlier each year, and farmers in states such as California, Oregon, and Arizona, have been told on occasion that they will not receive any water for their crops. After decades of overappropriation, the Interior Department announced major water-allocation cuts to the Colorado River’s lower-basin states in August, slashing their allotment for next year by about one-fifth. Arizona and Nevada are suing the federal government over the plan, which they say threatens their survival. They are now seeing what Smythe foretold more than a century ago: When water becomes scarce, society will languish.
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Three months prior to the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI published what would prove to be a prescient blog outlining the firm’s approach to ensuring that its AI models would be safe and beneficent. This goal, known as “alignment”—as in, aligning AI with human values—is nebulous, grand, and perhaps the AI industry’s most foundational promise. The notion is right there in OpenAI’s mission statement to ensure AI “benefits all of humanity” and listed as one of Anthropic’s “primary” goals.
Yet even in the summer of 2022, OpenAI was admitting a sort of defeat: “There is currently no known indefinitely scalable solution to the alignment problem,” three of its researchers wrote in that same blog post, adding that developing one “is likely very difficult.”
If the goal of keeping AI beneficial to mankind sounds rather vague, it is. Four years later, the alignment problem remains unsolved, and for that matter, there isn’t consensus about what the problem even is. Meanwhile, AI bots are autonomously hacking sovereign nations. And sending fake murder tips to police hotlines. And creating aliases to launch phishing campaigns. OpenAI and Anthropic still can’t really tell you what an aligned AI model looks like. But anybody can tell you it doesn’t look like this.
The most influential AI executives and investors in the world fundamentally disagree about the nature of the technology and, more pragmatically, how to make their products safe. On one side is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who last month warned that AI advancement could soon “outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.” Amodei’s solution is a slowdown, which would give the industry time to “ensure that our alignment training keeps up” with AI progress. On the other side is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who says misalignment fears are “not grounded on science” but rather “made up” and even “irresponsible.” In his view, AI models are not new and unpredictable beings, but lines of code. And code can be debugged.
If alignment seems like a strange concept for a software product—you don’t imbue a web browser or word processor with moral values—that’s because it was conceived for a strange sort of software. The leading AI companies envisioned building powerful systems that would act in unpredictable ways, which Claude and ChatGPT now are doing, and so ensuring safety was a foundational concern. Alignment is one idea for doing so: If AI models could learn to code and write poetry, maybe they could learn human values too. Anthropic and OpenAI both have lengthy documents—“Claude’s Constitution” and the “Model Spec,” respectively—that outline these values and are used to train their models. But there has been, of course, millennia of disagreement over what constitutes a moral or ethical code. This is a “very complicated, unsolved scientific and philosophical question,” Marius Hobbhahn, the CEO of Apollo Research, an AI-safety firm that has helped audit Anthropic and OpenAI models, told me. Still, some developers have suggested an intuitive, bare minimum: For instance, in 2021 Anthropic researchers wrote that, as a catchall, an AI system should be “helpful, honest, and harmless.”
Training models to be more aligned to those maxims appears to have worked—to an extent. The model underlying ChatGPT, for instance, was initially prone to nonsensical and toxic utterances. But by fine-tuning it with lots of human feedback, OpenAI worked to address these problems. A couple of years later, dozens of people alleged that the bot worsened their own or their loved ones’ mental-health crises, sometimes resulting in suicide. Again, OpenAI worked to address the issues.
There’s now a growing sense, both within AI companies and among their critics, that alignment as it’s been practiced over the past four years is faltering—if it was ever really up to the task. Adam Kalai, a former OpenAI safety researcher who left the company this summer to start the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence, likened alignment to buttressing a structurally unsound dome. Eventually, it will collapse. “You observe misalignment while training a model, and then adjustments are made to align it,” Kalai told me. “But obviously that’s not a way to achieve lasting safety.” Pronouncements from OpenAI and Anthropic that their latest model is the “most-aligned” yet are not scientific guarantees, and may not even provide strong technical assurance of safety.
“Fundamentally, we just do not know how to do alignment,” Hobbhahn said. If somebody “came with a thousand-page document that explained exactly how to do everything, we couldn’t get a model to learn exactly that.” Even in 2022, OpenAI didn’t think humans could figure out a lasting way to align their machines. Instead, the company wrote, it hoped AI itself would come up with a solution so that humans could “off-load almost all of the cognitive labor required for alignment research.” In other words, the best-case scenario involved limited human understanding of what was going on.
There are other reasons that reaching some actual alignment is unrealistic. For instance, the amount of training data dedicated to “moral values” would appear relatively small. Meanwhile, these models have ingested all manner of vile and illegal things from the web, and are then directed to pursue goals by any means necessary. The alignment-focused training cannot provide enough “examples of good behavior,” Thilo Hagendorff, an AI-safety researcher at the University of Stuttgart, in Germany, told me.
Plenty of evidence suggests that the alignment approach to safety has failed, including the hacks of Hugging Face and the Australian government. AI companies figured out how to make one-on-one interactions with a chatbot relatively safe, but many agents interacting for very long periods of time seems to degrade existing guardrails, Hagendorff said. As AI agents have become more capable, they’ve also shown tendencies to cover their tracks and lie about misbehaving, communicate in code that is unintelligible to humans, and try to avoid being shut down by humans. “No lab has solved alignment” enough to keep racing forward, Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, wrote in an essay last month. The industry has coalesced around a new, somewhat quixotic phrase: “pacing the frontier.” In other words, slowing down AI development until engineers can get better at alignment, or at least construct new scaffolding to fortify their crumbling dome. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. An Anthropic spokesperson told me that alignment is a key part of the company’s safety work but that, because alignment techniques are not fully robust on their own, Anthropic has additional model safeguards in place.)
Then there’s the anti-alignment camp, led by Nvidia’s Huang, which believes that this effort, marked by treatises on ethics and moral constitutions, verges on absurdity. To Huang, preventing all of these AI incidents is “as simple as engineering.” AI models involve, fundamentally, electrons moving around a data center to multiply numbers. All that OpenAI and Anthropic need to do is go into these systems, “just root-cause the problem,” and fix it. And if AI developers can’t do this themselves, “a bunch of companies with engineers ought to send engineers in,” Huang recently said. Put another way: The global semiconductor supply chain is an unbelievably labyrinthine system that must be managed flawlessly in order to deliver high-end chips. If Nvidia can do that, why can’t OpenAI get its models under control?
Huang, of course, has plenty of incentive to downplay concerns around AI: Nvidia, which has become one of the most influential companies in the world by selling AI chips, could be hobbled by some kind of industry-wide slowdown. But many outside experts concur. “We have this entire set of safeguards that we can use to control these systems,” Sayash Kapoor, an AI researcher at Princeton, told me. Those include limiting what files and programs models can access, as well as monitoring AI actions. The Hugging Face hack, for instance, could be seen as the consequence of very powerful AI models or very incompetent internal security practices at OpenAI. “The sorts of oversight mechanisms that we use in our 10-person group would have been enough to prevent the OpenAI Hugging Face incident,” Kapoor said. None of that involves inscribing neural networks with moral codes.
Whichever vision of AI safety you subscribe to, there is at least one seeming point of agreement among them: The industry is moving too quickly to adequately guarantee its products are safe. Despite everything they say publicly, the two CEOs and their rivals are all continuing to race ahead. Nvidia is the biggest company ever by market capitalization, and Anthropic is seeking the largest public offering ever. Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other top firms now release new models relentlessly. Any slowdown, for any reason, would necessarily affect the bottom line. The most dangerous alignment problem might be not technical or cultural, but economic.
Ask many successful Indian CEOs, entrepreneurs, or scientists how they rose to prominence in America, and they will tell you that, grit and talent aside, the key factor was the country itself: an economy and a culture that rewarded merit and drew ambitious, talented people from around the world.
Indian Americans are among the most affluent and best-educated groups in the country. What distinguishes them from other immigrant groups is that they have risen to the top in one generation. Median household income for Indian Americans is $151,200, compared with $92,530 for white Americans. About three-quarters of Indian adults 25 and older in the U.S. hold a bachelor’s degree, against a national average of 38 percent. Nearly half have graduate degrees, and the poverty rate, 6 percent, is among the lowest of any ethnic group. Indian Americans tend to be employed and law-abiding.
For a community more accustomed to being called the “model minority” or “tech’s new titans,” a recent rise in anti-Indian rhetoric—now commonplace on sites and apps such as X, YouTube, and Reddit—has been a shock. According to Stop AAPI Hate, nearly half of South Asian adults living in America reported having been targeted in a “race-based hate act” in 2025 alone. From 2023 to 2025, the use of anti–South Asian slurs online surged by 109 percent. The Trump administration has also attacked immigrants coming from India with efforts to severely restrict the H-1B visa program, a legal pathway to American jobs; 70 percent of H-1B recipients are Indian. Despite two different judges blocking President Trump’s $100,000 fee for the visa, the administration claims that applications are down 92 percent at the largest IT-staffing and -outsourcing firms—a decline that it views as a massive success.
Indian immigrants have helped make this country great. America has long needed Indian immigrants, and it still does. But people who don’t understand the great contributions of Indian Americans would rather close the door, and are hostile to those who are already here.
By 1960, Europeans made up 75 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. By 2010, the balance had reversed, and Europeans were just 12 percent of all immigrants. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, in 1990 fewer than a million Indians were living in the U.S. A decade later, their numbers doubled because of a hiring spree for engineers to help avert a potential Y2K crisis. Today, some 5.2 million Indians reside in America, more than 60 percent of whom were born in India. Although they represent just 1.5 percent of the population, their sudden success has made them very visible—and that visibility has made them targets.
Indian-born executives are running several of the biggest technology companies, such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe. They have been at the center of some people’s anger over AI and layoffs throughout the tech industry. In politics, the rise of Ro Khanna, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kamala Harris, and Zohran Mamdani has also caused online and real-life hate toward those with Indian heritage. For Americans uneasy about how the country is changing, seeing Indians in charge can feel more like a threat than a hopeful sign about the viability of the American dream.
Immigration politics have always been tangled up with discrimination. In the 1850s, the United States brought in cheap Chinese laborers to work its mines, farms, and railroads. When the economy shrank during the 1870s, the cry of “they’re taking our jobs”—familiar today—led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted Chinese immigration for the next 60 years. Japanese and, later, Korean workers met the same antagonism, and the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, effectively shut out immigrants from most of Asia. The country went through a long period of xenophobia that targeted not only nonwhite immigrants but also “undesirable” white immigrants, such as Italians and Eastern European Jews. In 1910, the foreign-born population was 14.7 percent; by 1960, it had fallen to 5.4 percent.
In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act eased the old restrictions, in large part because the country was short of skilled labor, particularly in the STEM fields. Two developments drove the change.
The first was Sputnik. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space. The U.S. military, fearful it was losing the Cold War, began investing heavily in science, sending large sums to top research universities. By the ’60s, the race had accelerated, but engineers were in short supply, so the country began recruiting overseas. Starting in 1950, India, in collaboration with foreign partners, had begun building world-class engineering schools called the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Well-trained, English-speaking engineers began graduating just as the U.S. was desperate for them.
India had hoped that these engineers would help drive its own development, but it offered too few jobs, and the U.S. had found an ideal recruiting ground. Even today, the IITs remain fiercely selective, accepting less than 1 percent of roughly 1 million applicants per year. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google; Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems; and Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, are all IIT graduates. The first wave of Indian engineers was recruited after 1965. A second big wave came in the late ’90s, during Y2K preparations.
The second development was a need for doctors. In July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare and Medicaid Act, and almost overnight, 20 million Americans became eligible for health care. Hospitals lacked the staff to cope. The Vietnam War was escalating, medical personnel were being sent to the front, and disabled veterans were returning home needing long-term care. Hospitals looked overseas, and India again supplied trained professionals to a strained system. Indian doctors were on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s and the coronavirus pandemic in the early 2020s.
The U.S. has benefited from the skills that Indians bring without having had to invest much in their education. Many have earned advanced degrees in America, but the bulk of their training happened in India. A more honest way to see it is that India, along with other poorer countries, has been subsidizing the United States.
Presidents like to define their eras with a slogan that conveys the legacy they hope to leave. John F. Kennedy called his the “New Frontier.” He was determined to win the Cold War and stop the spread of communism, and pushed the country toward space exploration while investing in science and technology. Johnson’s was the “Great Society.” His goal was to care for the elderly and the poor. Having known poverty firsthand, he wanted to extend health care to the vulnerable, and he signed both the Medicare and the Civil Rights Acts. Both of these presidents’ visions leaned on importing talent from abroad.
Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again.” Yet one of his lasting legacies may be that he turned his back on the very talent that helped make America great in the first place.
John Quillin thought America’s Middle Eastern wars were safely in the past. He spent two decades in the Navy, enlisting not long before the September 11 attacks and retiring as a chief petty officer about 18 months after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. “Now we’re right back in it,” he told me, “and it’s taking a huge toll on everybody.”
I met Quillin as he handed out Democratic sample ballots outside an early-voting location in Chesapeake, Virginia. He is one of more than 80,000 veterans—along with more than 30,000 active-duty and reserve personnel—who live in Virginia’s Second Congressional District, where the debate over the Iran war is about far more than rising gas prices. The district wraps around Naval Station Norfolk, home of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command. Since 2008, the seat has toggled between the major parties four times, and the results have mirrored overall House control. Polls show a tight race with money pouring in from both sides.
Both Jen Kiggans, the Republican incumbent, and Elaine Luria, the Democratic challenger, are veterans who have centered their campaigns on the military, but in very different ways. Luria, a former Navy commander, is telling voters that the conflict in Iran has needlessly weakened the military and is endangering strategic goals in other parts of the world. Iran is a war of choice, she argues, that is taking a toll on service members through extended deployments, even as costs balloon and the timeline for bringing it to a close keeps shifting. People are worried about their friends and family members on active duty, she told me, and are “concerned about the fact that we are running the fleet into the ground.”
Kiggans, a former naval-helicopter pilot, presents herself as a candidate who can work with the opposing party, and she has broken with the administration to champion an offshore wind development. But she is putting no distance between herself and Trump on the war, echoing his insistence that America must prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Kiggans told the Associated Press last week that Luria has “chosen the side of Iran” and that “it’s like the Democrats are now siding with the Iranians and not standing with our military.”
Many Republican voters in the district told me they agree with her support for Trump’s war, and are willing to endure temporary hardships if it means long-term success. Lance Lesher, a Navy veteran and the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach, told me that Iran has been at war with the United States since the country’s 1979 revolution—and that Trump was right to act when he did.
“I mean, high prices for gasoline—no one likes that,” the 59-year-old Lesher told me. “I think most people, though, at least most older people, have the perspective—is it worth it? Is it worth paying $5 a gallon for gasoline for six months for Iran to not have a nuclear weapon?”
Luria is wagering that undecided voters who are now paying more to fill their gas tanks and grocery carts won’t agree with that premise. At a meet and greet in Suffolk, Elisha Harris, a pioneering local football coach, started a call-and-response that summed up Luria’s pitch: “Gas was three-fifty. Now it’s over four. Diesel hit a record. We can’t take much more. Every fill-up’s a drain—”
“It ain’t been the same, without Elaine!” the crowd responded.
Luria was first elected in 2018, turning the district blue amid an anti-Trump wave. She held the seat two years later, but Kiggans then beat her by three points in 2022 after tying the Democrat to the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Luria is now hoping to return the favor, by capitalizing on the unpopularity of Trump’s foreign policy.
Kiggans sits on the House Armed Services Committee, which has not held a public hearing on the Iran war since May 19. Calls for greater House oversight surged this spring amid reports of deteriorating conditions aboard aircraft carriers, including the Norfolk-based USS Gerald Ford, which took part in the opening days of the conflict. The carrier returned to Virginia in May after an 11-month deployment that was beset by plumbing issues and a fire that left hundreds of sailors without a place to sleep. When asked in March about the ship’s reported maintenance issues, Kiggans told a local news station that she was concerned about them, but that “this is not Carnival Cruise—this is the U.S. Navy.” It’s a line Luria repeats often, claiming that Kiggans has failed to provide oversight as the war degrades military readiness and needlessly endangers lives.
“I know the number of veterans in this room who have served in uniform, like I have. And we have our sailors deploying in harm’s way,” Luria told the crowd in Suffolk. “The lack of sensitivity and compassion, her inability, on the Armed Services Committee, to stand up and ask tough questions of our military leadership—I mean, the silence is deafening.”
The idea that Congress has abdicated oversight of the military repeatedly came up in my conversations with Democratic voters across the district. Many said that they were proud of their service and hold the military in the highest regard, but that patriotism also means criticizing the country and pointing out its mistakes. Mike Carter, who spent years flying F/A-18 Super Hornets, told me he’d come to the Luria event because he worried that the military and country were losing global respect. Marsha Simmons, who cast an early ballot for Luria, told me that her husband served in the Navy, and she worried that today’s Department of Defense was not taking national security seriously enough. Donna Grieco said that she loved her eight years working as a Navy nurse, and that the experience made her especially concerned about the long deployments sailors are enduring. “I don’t agree with the war,” she told me. “And I feel like the demands we are putting on our sailors—it’s not necessary.”
Not every veteran sees it that way. Over Mike Cassidy’s 22-year Navy career, he sailed the Baltic Sea and helped fight ISIS. He was deployed five times to the Persian Gulf. Cassidy’s service convinced him that American adversaries such as Iran need to be confronted. “I know what we’ve been up against in that part of the world,” he told me at a Republican Party barbecue. “I can tell you that we’re doing the right thing.”
At 9 a.m. on a Saturday, the Lockside Bar and Grill in Chesapeake was packed with people decked out in glittery hats and red, white, and blue. Kiggans stood at a podium flanked by two American flags. “My oldest just had his first flight in an F/A-18 this week!” she announced. People whooped. “So many of us have family members that serve, and have kids that we’re leaving this great country to,” she went on. “It is the greatest country in the world. We’ve got to keep it that way.”
At times, the rally seemed less about Kiggans than about Trump. His core supporters cheered when Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio took the stage and recited a list of MAGA world’s greatest hits: the Steele dossier, Jack Smith, Fani Willis. “Thanks for helping the president,” Jordan said to applause. “Talk about someone doing what he said he would do.”
Kiggans has voted six times against resolutions that would have directed Trump to end the war with Iran. She declined an interview request, but in April, she said on a conservative talk-radio show that she “couldn’t be a stauncher supporter” of military action against Iran. When I asked the campaign whether she still held that position, Kiggans said in a statement that she wants the war to end quickly, but “Iran has been an enemy of the United States for decades and has been the sponsor of terrorism and terrorists around the world who have killed or injured thousands of Americans. Iran can never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.”
The race will likely hinge on a small number of voters who have not yet made up their mind. Kiggans knows this and has avoided uncomfortable questions about how the war is going. At an event in Virginia Beach this month with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kiggans was asked by a reporter if the war has had an impact on her campaign. A staff member quickly cut in: “We’re not going to talk about that.”
*Illustration sources: Peter Casey / The Virginian-Pilot / Tribune News Service / Getty; Nathan Howard / Getty; AFP / Getty; Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty.
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