You can track QAnon’s arc, like most things in America, through its relationship with corporate brands. Although the conspiracy movement emerged out of fringe imageboards in 2017, its first viral successes came on Facebook and YouTube, where its lore envisioning Donald Trump fighting an elite cabal of liberal pedophiles was honed and refined. When Covid came in 2020, QAnon ballooned under lockdowns, putting it in the mainstream, but leaving it short of actually being mainstream.

Call it the Wayfair era. In July 2020, followers of QAnon began spreading a particular pedophilic panic: the absurd notion that the online furniture retailer was selling children for sexual abuse via armoire orders. Non-Q masses took the bait: “Mentions of Wayfair and ‘trafficking’ have exploded on Facebook and Instagram over the past week,” the Associated Press wrote at the time, noting that related TikTok hashtags “together amassed nearly 4.5 million views.” A national human trafficking hotline issued a press release warning that a flood of calls about the conspiracy had distracted them from genuine work. 

While it was widely peddled, it was also widely derided. Surely, something so absurd could not keep going. And looking back on the uproar from two years later, Wayfair seemed like the death of Q. By late 2020, major Q adherents had been purged from the platforms. Its influencers and weird hoaxes almost never broke into broader consciousness, except to be debunked. Its galvanizing messiah, Trump, was on his way out of the White House. Q was no longer inspiring people to murder mob bosses, kidnap their own children, or show up heavily armed at the Hoover Dam. 

But far from being the end, Wayfair was a sign of what the movement was turning into—one confirmed in late November 2022, when the Balenciaga panic happened. The genesis point was a TikTok video posted by Brittany Venti, a right-wing provocateur and influencer with a history of aggravating culture war fights. While displaying pictures from a Balenciaga ad campaign showing small children with purses made to look like teddy bears wearing bondage straps, she complained that a “worldwide, internationally known brand” was “advertising their purses by having a child hold kink fetish gear.” 

“To me, it’s about sexualizing children,” Venti concluded in the video, which garnered millions of views. Popular YouTuber Shoe0nHead relayed the complaint on Twitter, adding the claim that the photo shoot had “included a very purposely poorly hidden court document about ‘virtual child porn.’” Her tweet took off, boosted by large right-wing accounts, including the notoriously transphobic LibsofTikTok. Together, these influencers—none of whom maintain explicit links to the Q movement—galvanized masses of people to throw up their arms in disgust. As right-wing influencers like Candace Owens and Andrew Tate seized on the Balenciaga panic and dolled it out to their audiences, it became one of the biggest stories on the internet.

For some, the conversation moved beyond the ads and into accusations that the campaign somehow captured a reality that children were being abused by Balenciaga. A Twitter user accused Balenciaga of “getting even sloppier about their underworld.” “Pedophiles telling us they’re Pedophiles RIGHT IN OUR FACES,” another wrote. 

It was Wayfair again, but bigger. And like Wayfair, it didn’t make sense and wasn’t true. Bondage may have been intractable from BDSM in the ’70s, but it had long since been co-opted by other subcultures, like techno ravers, artists, high fashion, and anyone interested in cosplaying as subversive. The court documents hadn’t appeared in the campaign alongside the children, but in a separate one featuring adult women. And of course, there was no child abuse. The photographer who did the shoot was well known for his not-at-all-lewd documentary work, and his subjects were the kids of Balenciaga employees who were on set supervising.

The episode revealed that the paranoid thinking of QAnon hadn’t disappeared, but that its logic was influencing people far beyond the reaches of the conspiracy theory. The Wayfair panic had been partially incepted and egged on by QAnon boosters. The Balenciaga panic was not. But their contentions were the same: Liberal elites were molesting kids and were brazen enough to leave clues in plain sight.

The Balenciaga panic can be seen as QAnon by other means—a mainstreamed version that imagines threats to children lurking just about everywhere. The long history of moral panics has often centered on seeing attacks to “the family” as social progress reaches schools, libraries, and hospitals and challenges old moral foundations. To prove it, they say, one need only need to pay attention, and to stand by is to allow an attack on children. Think of the Christopher Rufo–bolstered critical race theory panics, drag brunch panics, transgender panics, LGBTQ panics. They’re all at least partially incubated in the same petri dish as Q: paranoid nightmares dreamt up during moments of a changing social order.

It would be easy to cast all this aside as the horrific, confused ramblings of the stupid. But that ignores a central, uncomfortable fact: Many of us act like Q adherents now. While the movement itself has been thrown away, its styling is now dominant. We are in an era of obsessive, odd, and sprawling fear of pedophilia—one where QAnon’s paranoid thinking is no longer bound to the political fringes of middle-aged posters and boomers terminally lost in the cyber world. 

Yes, many of those people thought that Balenciaga was advertising an actual role in a child sex cabal. But others did, too, as elements of the Balenciaga panic attained a level of mainstream acceptance that the Wayfair scandal never had. Cooper Kupp, the 2022 Super Bowl MVP and a generally apolitical wide receiver for the Los Angeles Rams, encouraged his Twitter followers to “please make yourself aware of the attack against our young ones,” accusing Balenciaga of  “advertis[ing] evil.” Yashar Ali, a prominent left-leaning writer and journalist, called the campaign “gross” and praised an organization for revoking an award it had given to the Spanish fashion house. Kim Kardashian, who had never complained about any issues regarding child abuse or pedophilia over the years as she wore Balenciaga to high-profile events and its fall 2022 runway show, began hammering the brand. “As a mother of four,” she wrote in a statement, “I have been shaken by the disturbing images.” 

Caroline Busta is a writer and critic who, with her partner and pseudonymous fellow critic Lil Internet, runs New Models, an internet community, website, and podcast. They closely watched Balenciaga-gate ensnare their interests—the intersection of fashion, the internet, politics, and media studies—a moment Lil Internet said felt like a breaking point. “It was the first time I saw the far right pull off a troll campaign that actually just got all of mainstream media—and even, like, progressives,” he said during a joint interview with Busta. Venti’s role kicking off the controversy, he added, “should be all the evidence anyone needed to question it.”

The Balenciaga uproar was a clear marker of Q’s successful diffusion, but it wasn’t the only one. Around the same time, decades-old drag brunches and the over half-a-decade-old drag queen story hour were suddenly identified as loci of child sex crimes. Instances of hospitals that treat transgender children being inundated with threats, libraries closing, schools calling off events, cafes canceling drag brunches, and things as odd as butterfly sanctuaries having to close because of threats over human trafficking conspiracies became commonplace. Such occurrences are now so regular that they barely register beyond the communities where they happen. 

Or, as Travis View, a host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast and an independent researcher of the conspiratorial right, puts it, “There is a sense in which QAnon won.” 

Indeed, Republicans who assiduously avoided QAnon during its initial runup now find it expedient not only to make overtures to it, but to pursue attacks and policies that jibe with its obsessions.

Last June, after Trump had already taken to donning a QAnon lapel pin and amplifying the conspiracy on social media, the Conservative Political Action Committee’s foundation launched the Center for Combating Human Trafficking. While competing for the GOP’s 2024 nomination, Trump floated the death penalty for human traffickers and insinuated that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was a pervert and possibly a pedophile. During Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s 2022 confirmation hearings, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) smeared her as having a “pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook” as a judge. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s entire career trajectory from being an ostracized QAnon congresswoman to cementing a position as one of the most prominent right-wing politicians in the country is itself a demonstration of the mainline GOP coming to terms with the conspiracy. 

“QAnon made space for more popular conspiracism on the right,” says View, explaining that it gave an opportunity for people like Chaya Raichik, the woman behind LibsofTikTok, to present conspiracies more palatable to the mainstream. Take so-called “groomer narratives,” View says, which “aren’t quite as crazy as QAnon” even though they are destructive and libelous.

The idea that left-wing child sex predators are omnipresent in schools has obvious echoes with the idea that lefty elites are running a massive pedophile ring. And both have a kernel of truth: Wealthy liberals were in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit, and occasionally teachers are outed as predators. But neither has happened to the degree that Raichik et al. and QAnon allege—nor do they happen along the rigid lines they imagine. Epstein’s contacts spanned the political spectrum, and few are under suspicion of being involved in his abuse; and, of course, the majority of offending teachers are not gay or trans. 

This paranoia has real effects: In 2023, legislators in 37 states introduced 142 anti-trans bills—a threefold increase from 2022. Every year since 2021 has set new records in the number of books banned, with many titles being contested over perceived pro-LGBTQ stances. The authors are often baselessly accused of being “groomers.” It’s a practice that jibes with how, as QAnon’s ethos spread to other forms, people began to “find” pedophiles in all sorts of places they verifiably weren’t. 

It has even happened to me. 

Last July, I opened Twitter to see that I had nine notifications. I hadn’t posted anything of consequence recently, but when I clicked through the alerts, I saw people calling me a pedophile and saying they wanted to do violent things to pedophiles. Someone using the handle 1776andBeyond (1777?) tweeted at me that “the only good pedophiles are dead ones.” A guy named Simeon tweeted that I was “legit pedo” (as opposed to a fake one?). Someone had photoshopped me onto a figure kneeling in front of an SS officer with a Pepe face and a pistol pointed at the back of my head. Another person tagged me in a post with the words “PEDOPHILES BELONG IN WOODCHIPPERS” over the image of a stick figure being fed into a machine with pink mist coming out. Similar emails came in from people who wanted to threaten me, but were too shy to do so in public. 

After some clicking and scrolling, I found the inciting post: An account called End Wokeness that boasted 1.4 million followers had tweeted a screenshot of the headline on an article I wrote in 2019 (“Why Are Right-Wing Conspiracies So Obsessed With Pedophilia?”), next to photo of a small child holding a rainbow flag, interacting with some men dressed in dog fetish wear, possibly at a pride event. I had entered a Stoppardian, play-within-a-play situation: In my work writing about the right hallucinating about there being pedophiles everywhere, I briefly became a right-wing pedophile hallucination.

A smaller version happens to me every couple of months, as other accounts post mocking screenshots of the same story. As my repeated experience shows, at some point between the first Q drop on 4chan in 2017 and last summer, people, including many who didn’t believe or endorse the QAnon movement’s fantastic claims, had nonetheless become so primed to find pedophiles that anyone who came across their feed was potentially abusing children. 

QAnon’s spread was aided by its conjoining—beneath hamfisted and lurid conspiracies—of transphobia and the Q faithful’s fear of losing their position in a changing social order. A key part of the QAnon eschatology is “The Storm,” also known as “The Great Awakening”—a fantasized judgment day that ushers in mass arrests of liberal elites and a purge of their deep state minions, opening the path for a new golden age of conservative government that embraces the nuclear family and the return of classic, white, Christian family values. 

In 2019, while reporting that essay about the right’s obsessions with pedophilia, I reached out to View, who had recently started his podcast observing the Q phenomenon. LibsofTikTok didn’t yet exist, armed gunmen weren’t showing up to drag brunches, and DeSantis, just elected governor, had yet to launch his harshest attacks on Florida’s trans community. 

Against that backdrop, Q felt confined to its conspiratorial fringe. View explained that there was “a great deal of anxiety” in the QAnon community about LGBTQ rights and trans rights in particular. “They’re concerned generally on the sort of accep­tance of trans people and the over-sexualization of children,” View said, explaining that the movement hadn’t quite figured out how to integrate the issue into its attacks on liberal elites and its fantastic claims about underground pedophile rings. 

We also discussed the QAnon economic vision. “One thing they often talk about after ‘The Storm’ is that they imagine that the economy will be restored so that a single income can support a family again,” View told me. “They imagine traditional gender roles and norms will be upheld and how children are raised will return to what used to be.” 

It was one of the first times we spoke, and neither of us understood just how far QAnon would go, or that its adherents would eventually help establish a messy new grammar with conjunctions that, in a time of economic and cultural anxiety, combined all of these things: a cabal of liberal elites running a child trafficking ring. This same group of people was also pushing a “gay agenda” and “gender ideology” that elevated trans people, who were “grooming” children, with the verb’s meaning flipping as convenient between literal pedophilic grooming and indoctrinating kids to be trans, or to simply be okay with people who are. 

Public figures who embrace the traditional atomic family—like DeSantis, Raichik, and Rufo—smoothed out the grammar that Q established into more palatable versions, as people wholly unconnected to QAnon used this echoing rhetoric. Serial plagiarist Benny Johnson likes to call President Joe Biden a groomer. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham has claimed public schools are sites of grooming. Republican lawmakers introduced anti-grooming legislation. Roger Stone recently accused 2024 GOP Senate candidate Larry Hogan, Maryland’s former governor, of having a “record of involvement with pedophiles.” This language now extends beyond politics. When rapper Kendrick Lamar puts out diss tracks accusing his rival Drake of being a pedophile, he makes the connection explicit: “I’m lookin’ to shoot through any pervert that lives, keep the family safe.”

QAnon’s clearest precedent was the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, another set of lurid beliefs about child endangerment that surfaced amid a changing social order in response to perceived threats to the nuclear family. Four decades ago, it happened at preschools—a tool aiding women transition away from homemaking and into the workforce—as caregivers were accused of waging demonic abuse against children.

Today, QAnon exists in a vastly more complex media ecosystem and seems to be addressing a wider, more amorphous set of concerns. But its rough function is the same: The family order is again seen as being threatened, this time by attacks on gender norms. Q gives people a way to feel they are protecting the traditional atomic family. By devouring fresh posts from QAnon influencers, donning Q gear, or spreading word online about the impending arrest of the cabal, Q faithful felt like they were doing everything they could to support the welfare of children and usher in a new era of conservative family values that would put them in charge. 

The primacy of family in contemporary American reactionary politics made this sentiment appealing to non-Q-pilled conservatives, once the weirdest, most absurd parts were pushed into the background. The family is often assumed to be self-evident—especially on the US right—as the ideal social formation of a proper Christian nation. Instead of being bound together by a government helping us all, the belief goes, we are better served by little kin units tending to their own. The roots of the idea lie much further back than Margaret Thatcher, but a line she said in 1987 makes the point: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” 

She and Ronald Reagan spent their tenures as heads of state pursuing policies linked to this credo, but their belief in the family didn’t only stem from Christian religiosity. They understood that an atomized society with weak ties beyond the family is better for business. 

As the UK’s prime minister, Thatcher stoked interclass hostilities by pushing private homeownership. As historian Melinda Cooper explained in her 2017 book, Family Values, by owning a home, swaths of the British white working class had a stake of capital instead of being at odds with it—a nest egg that would “would teach the working class the value of inherited wealth and wean them off public services.”

In the US, Cooper notes, advocates for the privatization of Social Security “explicitly sold these instruments as vehicles of familial wealth accumulation.” These capital-aligned forces argued that Social Security pushed individuals toward the state and away from free markets—unlike stock market wealth, which they saw as “inheritable and would therefore serve to strengthen rather than undermine the bonds of family dependence.” By turning nuclear families into portfolios of housing equity and stocks, the right hoped to lock in votes favoring markets over the state. (Investors and money managers also expected to profit from their new, unsophisticated competition.) 

Thatcher’s claim that there are only “men and women” is not an accident. Restrictive gender roles were, and still are, necessary to the world she envisioned. “The single biggest off-the-books investment that keeps stripped-down neoliberal economics working is free female labor,” historian Bethany Moreton told me. American women average over four hours a day of unpaid labor; some estimates put the annual value of this work at $1.5 trillion. If those hours were reduced or paid out, there would be massive cultural and financial repercussions. Men’s lives would be upended, as things stopped happening and they either faced the consequences or had to pick up the slack. Such changes would rewrite what it means to be a good wife and caring mother or, more fundamentally, popular visions of being a woman. Many people naturally will go to great lengths to not have to reimagine the fundamental basis of their lives. 

“You’ve got a huge resource at stake: the continued ability to pass off gender as natural,” explained Moreton, a Dartmouth College professor and the author of Perverse Incentives: Economics as Culture War, a forthcoming book. Her point is that debates over gender binaries are also material claims and not just cultural ones. When people on the right declare increased acceptance of trans and nonbinary people as evidence of moral decay and the fall of the West, it is bigotry, but it is also because ending strict gender norms would demolish society as they conceive it. “They’re not shitting you when they say the world would come to an end, because their world would come to an end,” Moreton said.

Calling LGBTQ teachers “groomers” strikes a nerve, and claiming that trans indoctrination or critical race theory is getting in the way of learning important subjects like math and science strikes another at a moment of ever-increasing inequality, and as class struggle plays out on the field of college acceptances. If trans vitriol leveled at high school athletics hit in a broader way than the original bathroom-ban bills did, it may be because a kind of person would go crazy over the idea (however unlikely) of a woman losing an athletic slot at an elite college or a sports scholarship to a man they thought was indoctrinated into being a trans woman. To the white reactionary, it is the destruction of gender binarism, the sanctity of sports, and the myth of meritocracy all at once. 

Fighting acceptance of trans people offers the potential to turn the clock back on traditional gender values and retreat toward the traditional nuclear family-based society that the right values—and that values them—and the free female labor that came with it. And it provides a field of argument where conservatives don’t have to baldly argue a system that operates on women’s unpaid labor should persist for the benefit of men.

While DeSantis, Rufo, and the like railed against elites they detested, the elites that they do like stand to benefit from socioeconomically isolated families and strained social ties of weakened labor power. If QAnon might have looked like a movement toward some bizarre future, it and the mainstream version that came after are, in truth, attempts to return to the past.  

“And we all must understand who all is to blame,” Harris, who has become the Biden administration’s most vocal official on abortion, said. “Former President Donald Trump did this.” She said that a second Trump term would produce even more abortion bans and adversely affect reproductive care for women. 

Harris calling out Trump comes as the former president appears to be carving out distance between himself and anti-abortion policies. Over the past week, he has repeatedly said that there is no longer a need for a federal abortion ban, because “we broke Roe v. Wade.” On Wednesday, he said he would decline to sign such a ban, and on Monday, he claimed that abortion policy should be left to the states. He also released a statement opposing the Arizona ban. 

Democrats, including President Biden, have accused Trump of lying as he attempts to avoid the political fallout of being associated with strict anti-abortion policies, which consistently poll as extremely unpopular among voters. 

Trump has moved back and forth on abortion as it has been politically expedient—prior to running for office, he both claimed to be “very pro-choice” and then “pro-life.” In 2016, he said he would attempt to defund Planned Parenthood and then try to provide “some form of punishment” to women seeking abortions. In 2017, he supported the 20-week abortion ban that the House passed, saying that he would sign it, though the bill never made it through the Senate. 

Trump then blamed the GOP failing to meet its expectations in the 2023 midterm due to the “abortion issue” and started slightly softening his position from his previous statements, reportedly discussing a 15- or 16-week abortion ban, shortened from the 20 weeks he had previously advocated for. Political observers have widely seen the Supreme Court’s decision to end Roe v. Wade, enabled by Trump’s nominees to the court, as perhaps the key factor in hurting Republicans in the midterm elections. 

Data backs up the notion a lot of people see gloom on the horizon. As of January, 63% of the country believes the economic outlook is worsening. Under a quarter of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction; over 40% believe that a civil war is at least somewhat likely within the next decade.

The Russian-American academic Peter Turchin doesn’t think this outlook is just a vibe. Turchin, who helped develop an area of study known as “cliodynamics,” which attempts to scientifically quantify how history moves forward, predicted in 2010 the US would see a significant uptick in political violence by 2020. Today Turchin’s cliodynamic models remain pessimistic. In his 2023 book End Times, Turchin says political violence and societal instability have already increased, a condition that is here to stay for another five to 10 years, even if we started trying to fix things.

Turchin posits that the operation of what he terms a “wealth pump” has disproportionately benefited the top sliver at the direct expense of every other socioeconomic band. With too many people aspiring to join the top echelons and not enough slots—as Turchin argues in End Times, citing an array of historical examples—the structures holding society together start to get a bit shaky.

People get more radical in the name of political ends: They do things like storm capitol buildings, threaten federal judges, and take part in ominous convoys. And if the conditions that are generating surges in violence are left unresolved, he warns they start to get substantially worse. Turchin and I spoke last month about this cycle of wealth capture and resentment that he sees at play not only across history, but in my generation.

Can you explain what cliodynamics is and what you were trying to achieve in developing it? 

We live in large-scale complex societies, which are quite recent in our evolutionary history. That’s one big question: How did this happen in the last 10,000 years? But also, the states in which we live periodically experience social breakdown and fragmentation, and even worse things like civil wars.  So the other question is: Why are our societies so fragile?

History has a long and detailed record of thousands of states over the past 5000 years. And historians, when they write books, they offer explanations. We can treat them as scientific hypotheses, but they are not compared with each other using data, which is the essence of science. Science is not only about erecting theories, it’s also about testing them and rejecting them, like in physics or other natural sciences. This is what cliodynamics does. 

Human social systems are complex systems with nonlinear dynamics and without mathematics, you cannot really understand what is going on in them. And why is that necessary? Because without understanding why societies go into these end times, periods of social instability and potentially political collapse, we cannot avoid them, or at least resolve them in a way that is less costly, in terms of human lives. 

You used cliodynamics in 2010 to predict political instability in 2020. What did you see in your models that forecasted this?

It was not a prophecy. Predicting the future with any accuracy is essentially impossible. What scientists use prediction for is to separate good theories from bad theories. Good theories make good predictions, bad theories make bad predictions.

What I did in 2010, there was a theory called structural-demographic theory. It has been built on studying about a couple dozen examples. In the past, it suggested the mechanisms of why societies go into social instability and potential collapse. In around 2007 and 2008 I looked at the trends, which by that point had been developing for a couple decades in clearly bad directions. 

I was drawn to your work because the arc of my life sort of falls onto the arc of your work. When you made that prediction, I was about to graduate high school. I don’t know if I was aware of your prediction at the time, but I remember listening to an NPR interview about how my generation will live in smaller houses and experience more economic uncertainty and inequality. 

There are tons of people like that who are your age, experiencing huge pressure and anxiety. Everybody I talked to in this generation is extremely, extremely stressed. I thought it was hard when I was in the job market in the 1980s. God, it’s just got so much worse.

A lot of my friends in college, the ones that could, just went into finance and consulting to avoid that uncertainty. To the point of End Times though, there weren’t enough slots in those secure, elite jobs for everyone that wanted in. Why is this kind of elite overproduction so destabilizing? Also, what is your definition of elite?

Elites are a small proportion of the population who have social power, which means that they have coercive power, economic power, administrative or political power, and ideological power. Typically, there are always more elite wannabees than there are positions for them. Some competition is good because it allows better people to move forward. But the problem that many people don’t realize is that excessive competition is extremely corrosive for social cooperation and for the capacity of a society to function well. 

I use the game of musical chairs in my book as a metaphor for elite overproduction. But instead of removing chairs, you keep the number of chairs the same and you keep increasing the number of players. As the number of players becomes 2, 3, or 4 times as many as there are chairs somebody is going to start breaking rules. Then the rule-breaking spreads. In history, that typically escalates into a spiral of violence and counter-violence that ends up in some kind of revolution or civil war. 

But until that happens, as long as elites are unified and the state strong, states can endure very large levels of popular discontent. In the past, peasant rebellions would be easily destroyed by a small number of mounted and armored knights. Today, you have all those robocops in the streets that look like Martians who quite handily disperse demonstrations and things like that. That’s why intra-elite conflict is the most important ingredient in predicting social fragmentation and social collapse.

Even if there is tremendous economic inequality, unless you have an immiserated elite class, it’s not possible to pull off revolution or civil war?

In our theory, inequality is not the driving force, because 99.9% of people cannot measure the degree of inequality. How do you experience a Gini index of whatever, right?  The actual driver is something that people need to feel on their own skin.

There’s a semi–fictional character in my book who basically grew up in a household with parents that were lower middle class, but were doing quite well. But he cannot approach that status. That’s how people become disenchanted and even radicalized. They see that they’re living worse than their parents. They feel a sense of injustice as society becomes wealthier and wealthier, but they’re falling. It’s not just a rational-agent type thing, although some people are rational agents. They are the ones that become revolutionaries, because a revolution is 10,000 new positions. But most people are driven by emotions.

To come back to your question, what is important is not economic inequality itself but how it creates the feeling of immiseration in the majority. And then via intra-elite competition, it creates huge winners and huge losers. Inequality strikes in between the elites as much as it does between the elites and the rest of the population. That’s even more important. That is what creates the feelings of injustice and a burning desire to set them right.

So then they become counter-elites and revolutionaries. Is economic inequality necessary at all for the counter-elites to have a mass to tap into to help with revolutionary activity?

Let me introduce another key concept from my book: the wealth pump. It’s the perverse mechanism that takes the riches from the poor and gives them to the rich. In medieval societies, this would be accomplished by means of coercion: the lords would just extract wealth from the peasants. In capitalist societies, it is done in a more gentle way.

It happens when the wages of the median, typical American, or a member of some other population, starts to decrease with respect to the overall level of wealth, which we can measure with GDP per capita. When this measure of relative wage declines, that creates the wealth pump, because all that extra wealth that society is producing goes right up to the economic elites.

This has three bad consequences for society, particularly in regard to stability. First of all, it creates immiseration, and the majority of the population loses faith in institutions and the governing order. 

Secondly, it bloats the number of wealth holders. From 1980s, in the United States, the numbers of deca-billionaires—people who have $10 billion or more—increased tenfold. I mean, it’s unbelievable. The population only grew by 40%.

The third consequence is people in your situation. When you grew up, you had a choice, you could have gone to work in some not terribly demanding profession. You could have worked your 40 hours, come back home, raise a family. At least that’s what people did, one or two generations ago. The problem is that because of the general immiseration, many people realize that they cannot do this if they just go in the normal way. They will not do as well as their parents. So you have to escape precarity. 

How do you do that? You obtain an education. Which college did you go to for your degree?

This was also a big point of stress. I went to the University of Texas at Austin, but I was weighing private schools where I would have incurred lots of debt.

Okay, that’s actually a good school. But if you went to Stanford or Yale, then clearly you would have a much better gig. The way to get out of precarity, if you don’t inherit a lot of wealth, is to go the education route. That’s why the number of of high school graduates who expected to go to college exploded. That creates an overproduction of degree holders.

All three of these are consequences of the wealth pump. They’re all destablizing and they all work together. In history, societies ended these periods by turning the wealth pump off. Unfortunately, in many cases, this was done by a revolution or a civil war that exterminated a substantial chunk of elites, or produced downward social mobility. This is a process that is often very painful for elites. 

One thing that especially free market-minded people might struggle with is the idea that money is not zero-sum. Some might push back and say, “Well, the wealth pump is something that can benefit everyone, not just elites.” How would you respond?

Before the Industrial Revolution, the economy had grown so slowly that it was essentially a zero-sum game. Now it’s a positive sum game. If all segments of the population, including the owners and managers of corporations and their workers, if their wages grow together with the economy—this is what happened in the thirty glorious years, from 1945 to 1975—everybody is happy.

Even though it’s a positive sum game, since the 1980s all of the gains have gone to the top 1%, or even the 0.1%. This tide did not raise all boats. In fact, many of the boats have been sinking, especially for those of the 10% of the poorest, less advantaged segments of the population. We see this very vividly in the explosion of deaths of despair and also in biological standards. Disadvantaged segments of the population have been shrinking. Life expectancy is shrinking, especially in disadvantaged segments of the population. This is a Malthusian factor that I did not expect to see in this world. So most of the population is becoming immiserated, despite the whole economic pie growing. 

There has already been an uptick in the kind of political violence you talk about, mostly from the right. Not from counter-elites or the elite aspirants, but from this group of people who are often from the interior of the country. Some are local elites, and some aren’t. What’s happening there?

On the path to social breakdown, we see these conflicts happening at all levels. For example: the late medieval crisis in France. At first, there was a whole bunch of very local violence. Knights were killing each other. In a province, two contenders would fight for a count position. And then at the top, there was a conflict for the crown. 

What we see now looks very much like that. The first time I wrote about the epidemic of indiscriminate mass killings in the US was in 2008. This was a very clear sign of growing social pressures because it’s essentially suicide terrorism. People would go out and kill random people—or random people in their firm, or random people in their school—and then either commit suicide or get killed by cops. I saw designs of this social pressure building up back then. We are now having a breakdown at the very top level. 

In the past, elite aspirants would actually kill each other. One of the hopeful signs is that people now use character assassination instead of actual assassination. And instead of bringing your followers to go kill your rival and their followers, what we see now is lawfare.

You’re saying when like Chrissy Teigan gets canceled, or Bill Ackman tries to get Claudine Gay fired, that’s a sublimated duel?

Yeah. Much of the me-too culture has been canceling rivals. Not necessarily directly rivals, but it has often been directed at people who already work in an established elite position. You cancel them and then that position becomes available.

I’m having a little bit of trouble seeing it in cases where they’re not direct rivals. Claudine Gay and Bill Ackman aren’t in competition. I guess they’re sort of in competition for the ideology of Harvard. I don’t think that Harvey Weinstein’s accusers are aspiring to take his position or anything like that.

No, I agree. I think that in the majority of cases, what drives counter-elites are is not a calculation that “Okay, I’m going to free up so many vacancies in positions.” It’s the sense of injustice. The injustice has been taking the form of a struggle against racial, sexual, and other types of inequalities. But I believe that at the base of it is the feeling amongst the great majority of elite aspirants that they are losing ground, and somebody has to be blamed, instead of realizing, what are the deep causes, like the wealth pump.

I looked at your Twitter, and the many people that are following you that I also follow anecdotally are people who are dissident-elites and counter-elites. 

I follow a lot of counter-elite journalists, people like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté. I think you’re making a very interesting general point here. Let me step back. One of the ways we can get out of this situation is to use modern technology more intelligently. Glenn Greenwald left his job at The Intercept and now he is extremely successful, and this is thanks to new technology. 

I wrote a popular book in 2015 called Ultrasociety. I went to several different agents, nobody wanted to take me on, and no publishers wanted it. So I started I started my own imprint, it’s called Beresta Books, and published it. This new technology is actually really empowering people to achieve things without the gerontocratic, set in their ways established elite. Now with End Times I have an agent and a publisher, but I’m not going to abandon my business either. 

Are you a dissident-elite?

No, no. I’m not a counter-elite. My role to be dispassionate and nonpartisan because I want my message to reach all the different factions. 

To do that, I have to stay very strictly neutral in this in this struggle, so, I’m not either elite or counter-elite. 

Don’t your affiliations with the University of Oxford sort of make you some kind of elite?

Let’s go back to the definition. Elites have social power. I wield no coercive power. No economic power. And no administrative power. My only power is ideological. And here, yes I admit that one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I want its message to influence people and that is the definition of power. 

What you advocate for, I assume, is something that would dissent against establishment views, in at least the United States?

America’s established elites actually go through these cycles. We had a really great set of elites, especially from the New Deal, but actually even a little earlier. By the ’70s all of that was gone. Yes, today, in order to speak truth to power, you sort of have to become some kind of a dissident. But my message is very much to the established elites also: don’t bring things to the point where you will have a revolution, where you to lose your power, and maybe even worse.

What is the way out of impending violence? In the book, you talk about how this is a cycle that we’re sort of damned to for at least a decade, but it’s reversible.

I have no detailed agenda because detailed agenda would have to be hammered out in the political process, and I’m not a politician. I can only point to the root problem: the wealth pump, which we need to turn off.  There are many different ways to do that: giving more power to workers, maybe taxing wealth more, increasing the minimum wages, changing social norms, and so on and so forth. And we should not expect quick results. I already have a computational model that suggests it takes five to 10 years once the wealth pump turns off before positive effects start.

Veteran corporate lawyer Brendan Sullivan, who was Oliver North’s attorney during the Iran-contra scandal and who now chairs the RBG Award, noted, “The honorees reflect the integrity and achievement that defined Justice Ginsburg’s career and legend.” And the chair of the foundation, Julie Opperman, a big Republican donor and the widow of publishing titan Dwight Opperman, who once was CEO of Thomson Reuters, remarked that the award embraces “the fullness of Justice Ginsburg’s legacy.”

Attaching Ginsburg’s name to Musk, who has amplified racist and antisemitic posts and ideas on X, and Murdoch, whose Fox News purposefully spread Trump’s disinformation about the 2020 election and has repeatedly deployed falsehoods to challenge and undermine the values that Ginsburg fought for her entire life, seemed an odd and inappropriate choice. That’s what Ginsburg’s family believes. 

It has released a statement denouncing the awards:

The decision of the Opperman Foundation to bestow the RBG Women’s Leadership Award on this year’s slate of awardees is an affront to the memory of our mother and grandmother, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her legacy is one of deep commitment to justice and to the proposition that all persons deserve what she called “equal citizenship stature” under the Constitution. She was a singularly powerful voice for the equality and empowerment of women, including their ability to control their own bodies. As it was originally conceived and named, the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award honored that legacy by recognizing “an extraordinary woman who has exercised a positive and notable influence on society and served as an exemplary role model in both principles and practice.” This year, the Opperman Foundation has strayed far from the original mission of the award and from what Justice Ginsburg stood for.

The Justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the Justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse this award.

The statement noted that the Ginsburg family—the Supreme Court justice died in 2020—”fully supports the sentiments expressed” in a letter Trevor Morrison, a professor of law at New York University and a former clerk for Ginsburg, sent to Julie Opperman on Friday. He wrote that he was “appalled” by the news of these awards. Morrison pointed out:

Given the boundless and ill-defined nature of politics, his plan seems nearly impossible to implement. Mosseri did not say the plan was to tone down “content involving electoral politics,” or even something as vague as “turning the volume down on toxic politics.” He referred only to leashing the vast but vague category of  “political content.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban did ask Mosseri on threads what Meta means when it says “political content.” But Mosseri never replied. When CNN’s Oliver Darcy pressed the company, he received a written reply: “Informed by research, our definition of political content is content likely to be about topics related to government or elections; for example, posts about laws, elections, or social topics,” with the caveat that “global issues are complex and dynamic, which means this definition will evolve.” 

In effect, Mosseri was asking users of Threads to stick to dumb posts—nothing that would, actually, have to be moderated. It reminded me of the edict at the old Deadspin to “stick to sports.” Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of the blog’s new parent company, demanded that of staff, telling them to not write about politics. Apart from bad business, it quickly didn’t make any sense. Sure, you can write a story about Tiger Woods without contextualizing what it means for a Black man to dominate the whitest sport, but it would be stupid. And the only way to avoid politics in writing about the scandal that ensued when the then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protests would be not to write about it at all.

The cynical read is that politics being ill-defined is the point. Anything annoying for them to deal with, that could even tenuously be described as “political,” can be contained by limiting its algorithmic boost.

But we all know how quickly that paradigm will fall. It has been said so much that it’s almost trite to note, but opting out of politics altogether is not, really, possible.

What a tech platform says is, for example, politics. Did Mosseri make sure to not “proactively amplify” his own post? And, for many on the right, the existence of queer people teaching kids amounts to politics. Something as simple as existing as a person who is homeless, poor, a woman, transgender, queer, Black, Asian, or working class can be dubbed “political content.”

The even more cynical read is that Meta is trying, metaphorically speaking, to preemptively kill a digital Oedipus by preventing, Threads, the app it spawned, from being weaponized against it. If we can just keep politics off here, we won’t have all those politics to deal with—like our company’s CEO being humiliated by a right-wing Congressman. 

But during question sessions on his 2019 campus speaking tour, Kirk repeatedly found himself facing critics from the right. Groypers—what acolytes of Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist, call themselves—showed up to pepper him with thinly veiled white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and homophobic questions, sometimes even using explicitly Nazi terms. In what became known as the “Groyper Wars,” Fuentes would watch livestreams of the events, and egg on his followers, who even published guides on 4chan and in the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, on how to properly troll a Kirk Q&A: “Dress nice, be polite, remain calm, cool AND DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS RELATED TO [the Jewish question].” 

At the time, Kirk was irritated, but did not yield and refused to be dragged to the right by the Groypers’  leading questions. But more recently, Kirk appears to have shifted, embracing racist and white nationalist rhetoric and figures with little hesitation. In the past year, he’s hosted far-right and white supremacist figures on his podcast and has tweeted in support of whiteness, earning praise from white supremacists who have long campaigned to mainstream such rhetoric.

In October, he invited veteran white supremacist Steve Sailer, whose bonafides include writing for overt white nationalist publications including VDare and the Unz Review, on his podcast. During their interview, Kirk called Sailer his favorite “noticer”—a word frequently used in internet conservative spaces as a euphemism for individuals willing to publicly draw bigoted conclusions linking race and criminality. Sailer did exactly this during their conversation, insinuating that Black people commit crimes because of innate characteristics: “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites… it’s not just all explained by poverty.” 

“Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk gushed.

In January, Kirk hosted Curtis Yarvin, a neo-reactionary, anti-egalitarian who has described slavery as “a natural human relationship” and argued the biological roots of intelligence vary between populations. (He has tried to walk such claims back.) While Kirk seemed uncomfortable when Yarvin’s expressed his affinity for monarchy, he mostly remained effusive and praised his guest for “thought-provoking ideas” that “I love.” 

Others associated with Turning Point USA are also giving voice to white supremacist positions. In a tweet last week, right-wing internet figure Jack Posobiec, a TPUSA contributor with his own history of ties to white nationalists, slammed Nikki Haley’s financial backers as “rootless cosmopolitans,” an established antisemitic euphemism, while arguing the same “monied class” wrote the recent failed immigration bill. When asked for comment, TPUSA spokesman Andrew Kolvet pointed to a tweet about a pro-Israel event that had been hosted by one campus chapter.

Just a few years ago, Kirk was not the type of conservative who would give space to far-right figures like Yarvin and Sailer. His Twitter feed focused on espousing the neoliberal conservatism that had been the dominant strain of right-wing ideology since Reagan. While Turning Point USA went viral for touching third rails on race—as one chapter did in 2017 for an “affirmative action bake sale” offering differently priced baked goods to different races—they often retreated, firing employees or excising members who went too far into extremism. In 2019, for example, the organization severed ties with a student ambassador after she appeared in a photo with white nationalists.

But today, Kirk and his organization no longer seem to care. Indeed, they are starting to say the kinds of things that they used to cut ties with people over. Jared Holt, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who focuses on hate and extremism, has noticed the organization’s increasing willingness to go there. “You’d see them dip their toe in it,” Holt said. “They would talk about demographic shifts, but say it was about voter turnout, instead of it being about a White America. At some point, it seems like they gave up doing that.”

Kirk’s Twitter feed has matched this shift. Between 2016 and 2019, Kirk sent dozens of tweets praising “free markets,” calling them a “cure to poverty,” which brings “out the best in individuals,” the thing that “built our cities,” and so on. These tweets fizzle out by 2020. In that same time period he tweeted about whiteness just once, in response to a 2018 New York Times story, when Kirk seemed to affect a form of racial blindness in response to an article on white women’s privilege, by complaining that “the left is obsessed with race” and that the Times writer’s use of the term “whiteness” was “highly racist.”

But in the past year, Kirk has shifted from fetishizing free markets to fetishizing whiteness, authoring tweets on how “whiteness is great,” that there is an undeniable “War on White People in The West,” and about various innovations like “[o]wning property” and “[a]bolishing slavery” that he claims “you can thank the White European for.” If you search Kirk’s tweets for mentions of “white,” you’ll find a similar transition. Prior to 2020, the majority are mentions of the White House. After 2020, they tend to refer to white people or rail against perceived instances of “anti-white” bias.

The far-right has been approvingly watching Kirk’s overtures. His tweets praising whiteness and European heritage are often mobbed by gleeful replies from Groypers claiming victory for their racist politics. Fuentes himself even reposted Kirk’s “War on White People” tweet to brag about how it was “a testament to how thoroughly Groypers have taken over the conversation.” And in January, Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute—a think tank that has tried to provide intellectual ballast to the far-right—tweeted in praise of Kirk’s platforming of Sailer and Yarvin, saying that Kirk, “arguably the most influential leader for young conservatives, is quietly expanding the range of voices that can be heard on the mainstream right and its great to see…”

Kirk’s sway with young conservatives is harder to parse than Carl suggests, but his reach is certainly far wider than those of people like Fuentes—even if the Turning Point base lacks the Groypers’ reverence and fervor. But despite his prominence, it might be better to see Kirk not as an influencer, but as a window into shifting right-wing permission structures.

“TPUSA has very deep pockets, which makes them adopting this rhetoric more consequential than your random internet personality shock jock,” Holt said. Indeed, if someone as reliant on right-wing mega-donors and as connected to the top of the party as Kirk is can say these things with little internal pushback, it’s probably because the bigwigs are fine with it in private. (Turning Point USA took in some $80 million in donations last year, a 20 million increase from 2021. Kirk purchased a $4.7 million estate in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2023).

The year before the Groyper wars, Kirk faced a similar public humiliation when he interviewed Tucker Carlson at a Turning Point USA conference, and the then-Fox News host spent most of the 50 minutes mocking Kirk for his free-market tendencies. When Kirk tried to establish that it is “not the state’s role to incentivize or de-incentivize individual behavior,” Carlson laughed at him and dryly said “hilarious.”

“If you start with these inflexible theories,” Carlson said minutes later, talking about Kirk’s libertarian-esque rejection of regulation, “you wind up where are now: in a country where a small number of people are taking all the spoils and you guys are shafted.”

“Tucker, we’re not getting shafted,” Kirk responded. Carlson cocked his head back and laughed. The crowd laughed with him. Online, commenters crowed. “Embarrassing effort Charlie,” one wrote. “Nationalism really throws both leftists and rightists for a loop. Great job by Tucker as always.”

Kirk might have spent that day arguing back. But this June, Kirk hired Blake Neff, who had spent years as a key producer and writer on Carlson’s Fox News show, helping spread his nationalist politics. “Anything he’s reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me,” Neff once boasted, before he resigned from Fox in 2020 after he was caught having posting misogynistic, homophobic, and racist content to an online forum. 

According to Media Matters, Kirk welcomed Neff to Talking Point USA during a live stream, saying “we’re honored to have Blake on our team—he’s great.”

Last spring, Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson documented Kirk’s growing appreciation for Christian Nationalism. But since then, Kirk has gone beyond that already extreme ideology to make his recent overtures to racists on the right. The reasons behind Kirk’s ideological drift are unclear. He may be reacting to changes among young GOP supporters; many campus conservatives—the audience he’s built a career claiming to represent—have also shifted to the right; last year, I was able to find roughly 30 schools where Fuentes followers had taken over once mainstream conservative student groups. 

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for both Kirk and Turning Point, insists Kirk is not a white supremacist, nor is he making overtures to them. “We reject the darkness of those [far-right] movements. It’s negative and anti-human,” he added, before defending TPUSA’s record. “It’s critically important for observers to not conflate a legitimate and forceful pushback against radical Marxism with White Nationalism.”

Similarly, Kolvet argues Kirk’s praise of whiteness is justified by the term being “used as a pejorative” by “certain professors” and others on the left. 

Kolvet waved off Kirk’s conversations with people like Sailer and Yarvin as an example of being “willing to engage with forbidden topics…He’s not endorsing everything they believe.”

“Kirk might have agreed with everything Sailer said that interview,” he added, “but Sailer has also written a ton of things. It’s not a wholesale endorsement of everything he has written.”

Even if you’re uninclined to take him at his word, Kolvet is correct about at least one thing: Kirk is not the vanguard of the far-right. But as a political operator, he sees value in adopting more of their positions—and the why doesn’t much matter to the outcome. Either way, it moves the window of acceptable discourse to a space more favorable for extremists. I told Kolvet this. He disagreed.

Public records reviewed by the outlet showed that police said that they planned to open a “threat assessment” and were trying to trace the number that made the call. Haley’s office did not issue a statement about the incident. 

In the past, the tactic was generally employed by extremely online people, often directed at extremely online targets, like Twitch streamers. The highest profile incidence took place in August 2022, when trans Twitch streamer Keffals was swatted likely by users of the transphobic internet forum Kiwi Farms. 

Incidents of swatting politicians and government officials, however, have increased significantly over the last few months, generally following an uptick in an individual’s public visibility. Reuters reported that it had documented at least 27 cases of such swatting on politicians, elected officials, prosecutors, and judges including Democratic Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Rep. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.), Sen. Rick Scott (R. Fla.), trial Judge Tanya Chutkan—who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s federal election interference case—and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (D) among others. In January, Judge Arthur Engoron who is presiding over Trump’s civil trial in Manhattan, received an early morning swatting call. The surge is also occurring amid an uptick in bomb threats on statehouses and courthouses around the country. 

The calls are often hard for law enforcement to trace because callers will use services to hide their phone numbers. When caught, though, perpetrators can face stiff penalties. In 2017, after a man was killed by police in a swatting incident, the hoax caller was sentenced to 20 years in prison. 

Extremist activity on the right is also linked to swatting calls. Most of the violent incidents that Reuters and other researchers have tracked, especially the deadly ones including the 2022 shooting at a Buffalo grocery store in which a white supremacist killed ten people, have been perpetrated by individuals claiming sympathies to the right.

A separate Reuters investigation found that the hoax calls coincided with the highest rates of political violence since the 1970s.  According to the report, there have been over 200 documented acts of politically motivated violence following the Jan. 6 2021 Capital Riots. 

In the 1970s, however, the focus of violence was different and more frequently carried out by the left. “There were many, many bombings, but usually at night, or after called-in warnings,” Rachel Kleinfeld, who studies political conflict and extremism at the Washington, DC, think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Reuters. “The goal was not to kill people; it was to affect decisions.” 

Blankenship explained to WV News that he switched parties because of personal animus: the Republicans pushed false stories about him, according to his telling, and were not properly focused on his state’s opioid crisis. West Virginia has the highest rate of deaths from opioids in the country.  

State Democrats did not cheer his announcement. “I don’t care what letter he has after his name this week,” West Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Mike Pushkin wrote in a statement to news outlets, “Don Blankenship is not a Democrat and does not represent the values of our party.” 

Blankenship once called himself “The most hated man in Mingo County.” As the head of Massey Energy, a massive coal company, Blankenship helped lead a program of mountaintop removal—an extreme form of strip mining that involves destroying mountain tops and ridgelines to be able to mine coal more cheaply. Mountaintop removal has dire consequences for the environment and for anyone who doesn’t have equity in the company doing the mining. These can include poisoning nearby drinking water sources, and increasing the likelihood of flooding—both of which happened in Mingo County (large floods happened multiple times).

As my colleague Tim Murphy revealed in a 2015 profile, after Blankenship was indicted “for allegedly conspiring to commit mine safety violations, conspiring to cover up those violations, and providing false statements about his company’s safety record,” the magnate worked overtime to make sure that the damage he inflicted on the state extended far beyond environmental devastation.

Blankenship crushed the mine workers union that was baptized in his backyard. Voluminous court records and government investigations show that he presided over a company that padded its profits by running some of the most dangerous workplaces in the country. 

This, predictably, resulted in the worst mining tragedy in decades:

A mascot of the coal industry’s worst excesses, Blankenship pumped millions of dollars into West Virginia’s political system to promote an anti-regulatory agenda and curry favor with state lawmakers and officials. But Massey’s pursuit of profits at any cost ultimately proved to be Blankenship’s downfall. When, on April 5, 2010, an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 workers—the worst mining disaster in the United States in 40 years—prosecutors began slowly building a case against the powerful mogul.

Blankenship was sentenced in 2016 and spent a year in prison after being found guilty of conspiring to violate mine safety regulations.

Now, eager for a new challenge, the senatorial hopeful told WV News, that he was running for office in order “to help residents realize that ‘our enemy is the government and the politicians, and which party you’re in doesn’t really matter.'” Former miners and family members of those who were killed while he was in charge of Massey Energy have criticized the newly-minted Democrat, AP reports. For others in the state’s coal community, he’s “assertive” and a “man of integrity.”  

Following weeks of public statements by Arab American and Muslim activists, advocates, and voters that they would not support Biden in 2024 because he backs Israel as it lays siege on Gaza, his campaign attempted to connect with community leaders in the Detroit area, where one of the largest Arabic-speaking populations in the country is located. The campaign hoped to discuss these concerns and had scheduled a meeting between leaders and campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez. 

“We’re dumbfounded,” the National Executive Director of The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Abed Ayoub, told ABC News. “Why does this administration still believe that we’re just going to be willing to meet with them with no movement on their part on our demands? And they’ve been the same demands since October, and nothing’s changed.”

Biden had publicly dismissed the likelihood that Arab and Muslim Americans would not vote for him in the 2024 election if he continued to remain silent about the relentless attacks by the Israeli military on Gaza, in what some have described as an act of genocide on Palestinians (the United Nations is currently hearing a case on this now).  

“The former president wants to put a ban on Arabs coming into the country,” said Biden earlier in January, referring to Trump’s 2017 directive that had banned people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. “We understand who cares about the Arab population.”

This may have once been true during the 2020 election when Biden received 70 percent of the vote in Arab and Muslim-American counties in Michigan, but polls have shown that since the Hamas attack and the Israeli response, two-thirds of Arab and Muslim-American voters would vote against the incumbent president.

Following the Hamas attack on October 7,  in which 1,200 Israeli civilians were killed and approximately 240 people were taken hostage—around 132 of them remaining in captivity— Israel’s military assault on Gaza has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians, including more than 10,000 children and 83 journalists. The Biden administration has declined to intervene, maintaining U.S. aid to Israel. Though recurring stories have been published about the administration’s leaked internal frustrations with Israel, it has hesitated to publicly express concern about the air strikes and military actions within Gaza—an approach that my colleague, Noah Lanard, has noted is unique by the standards of recent American presidents.

Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud who had been slated to attend the meeting, expressed his frustration with the Biden administration on X (formerly Twitter), writing, “Our immediate demand is crystal clear: the Biden Administration must call for a permanent ceasefire to a genocide it is defending and funding with our tax dollars. Dearborn residents have tirelessly protested and organized in demand of a ceasefire. As their mayor, I follow their lead.”

In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has also enjoyed a growing base of support and power. On Wednesday, German investigative reporters published a bombshell report indicating how they intend to use it.

The German publication Correctiv detailed a secret resort meeting in which AfD politicians sat down with right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis to discuss a strategy for mass deportations, including of naturalized German citizens, should the party come to power—a “masterplan,” according to an invitation reviewed by both Correctiv and the Guardian.

Attendees included Roland Hartwig, a former AfD member of parliament who serves as a personal aide to the party’s co-chair; one current AfD member of the Bundestag; two lower-level AfD politicians; Hans Christian Limmer, part owner of a German burger chain; and two members of the mainline conservative Christian Democratic Union party.

Martin Sellner, a far-right Austrian extremist, spoke at the meeting. Sellner founded the Identitarian Movement of Austria, which is a part of a pan-European far-right movement of the same name. Sellner has also been associated with Generation Identity, a similar European far-right group whose French faction has carried out attacks on Arab women. He’s established himself as a figure on the European far-right by building a significant social media following, though he has since been banned from many mainstream platforms. He remains active on Telegram and alternative social media sites with limited reach.

Miro Dittrich, a far-right researcher based in Germany, says Sellner and his rise illustrate important currents shaping the far-right in Europe. “His idea is to influence politics through culture. If you change the culture, politics will follow,” Dittrich explains, adding that extremist researchers have been attracted by Sellner’s open discussion of his attempts to gain influence. “The meeting shows he’s still sought after by rich people and thought leaders,” Dittrich adds.

Sellner is married to the American far-right figure Brittany Pettibone, and maintains an interest in U.S.-based extremism. He has seemed to imitate Patriot Front, getting his own group to don facemasks and hat costumes and similarly load up into box trucks to stage protests. Sellner also had ties to the Christchurch shooter who killed 51 people at a mosque in New Zealand. The two communicated over email in 2018, and the shooter sent Sellner’s Austrian identitarian organization 1,500 euros, according to The Guardian.

In the recently revealed meeting, Sellner argued that “metapolitical, pre-political power” must first be built to “change the climate of opinion” in Germany before deportations could be carried out targeting three large groups: asylum seekers, foreign residents, and “unassimilated citizens.” Sellner floated creating a “model state” in Africa where 2 million people could “remigrate.” 

Correctiv (via Google translate) noted the dark history Sellner’s ideas rest on:

What Sellner designs is reminiscent of an old idea: in 1940, the National Socialists planned to deport four million Jews to the island of Madagascar. It is unclear whether Sellner has the historical parallel in mind. It may also be a coincidence that the organizers chose this villa for their conspiratorial meeting: the house of the Wannsee Conference is almost eight kilometers away from the hotel, where the Nazis coordinated the systematic extermination of Jews.

While Correctiv framed its report, Dittrich says, “around the secret meeting and secret plan” he explains that in practice, similar AfD “plans have been in the open.”

Since shortly after the party’s 2013 inception, AfD members have recurringly met with neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, including Sellner. Some of them have been outed as working for the AfD. And party members have been exposed as neo-Nazis, though the party denies it is a neo-Nazi organization. Alongside the party’s rise, immigrants across the country have faced increased discrimination and violence, not only in AfD-supporting areas in the east, but also in Berlin.

While Sellner’s interaction with the AfD isn’t unusual, Dittrich says the presence of supporters of the Christian Democratic Union at the meeting was concerning. He also found it noteworthy that several prominent businesspeople were named on a list of donors and potential donors to extreme-right wing organizations and causes linked to the meeting. 

German Chancellor Olaf Schloz criticized the meeting on Thursday, tweeting “We protect everyone—regardless of origin, skin color or how uncomfortable someone is for fanatics with assimilation fantasies,” according to Deutsche Welle.

Sellner and other participants in the meeting tried to distance themselves from the report. Sellner told the Guardian that the discussion had not been about a “secret masterplan,” and argued his words had been taken out of context. The AfD denied to Reuters that it has plans to deport “unassimilated migrants” and said the party officials who attended were there only in a “private capacity.”