Cretella was delivering a keynote speech at the first in-person conference in four years of the Alliance, which describes itself as a “professional and scientific organization” with “Judeo-Christian values.” Its purpose: to defend and promote the practice of conversion therapy by licensed counselors.

Not that they’d call what they do “conversion therapy.” That term lacks a precise definition, but it is used colloquially to describe attempts to shift a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. In the 1960s, some psychologists tried to make gay men straight by pairing aversive stimuli, like electric shocks or chemically induced nausea, with images of gay porn—techniques that ran the risk of causing serious psychological damage even as they failed to change participants’ sexual orientation, researchers eventually concluded. Today, “conversion therapy” generally takes the form of verbal counseling. Participants are typically conservative Christians who engage voluntarily—motivated by internalized stigma, family pressure, and the belief that their feelings are incompatible with their faith. Others are children, brought into therapy by their parents.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has concluded that conversion therapy lacks “sufficient bases in scientific principles” and that people who have undergone it are “significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression.” Similarly, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a report concluding that “none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation. Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation…are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

Related

Learning to Love My Trans Self After Conversion Therapy

Accordingly, the Alliance and the ideas it promotes have been relegated to the scientific and political fringes. In the 2010s, as acceptance of gay rights grew rapidly, 18 states and dozens of local governments passed laws forbidding mental health professionals from attempting conversion therapy on minors.

Yet by 2020, a new front had opened in the war against LGBTQ people. Republican state legislatures started passing laws targeting transgender and nonbinary children at school—restricting their access to bathrooms, barring them from participating in sports, and stopping educators from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity. The most intense attacks have banned doctors from providing the treatments for gender dysphoria backed by all major US medical associations. Nearly 114,000 trans youth live in states where access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy has been wiped out.

Last year, I received leaked emails illustrating how these laws are crafted and pushed by a network of anti-trans activists and powerful Christian-right organizations. The Alliance is deeply enmeshed in this constellation of actors. Although small, with an annual budget of under $200,000, it provides both unsubstantiated arguments suggesting LGBTQ identities are changeable and a network of licensed counselors to lend their credibility to these efforts. Among the collaborators were David Pickup, the Alliance’s president-elect; Laura Haynes, an Alliance advocate; and Cretella, the former executive director of an anti-trans pediatrics group who described gender-affirming medical care at the Las Vegas conference as “evil” and part of a “New World Order.” (“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” she assured attendees. “I’m just someone who has been in the battle of the culture of life versus the culture of death long enough to see the big picture.”) All three have testified before state legislatures against gender-affirming care. When a US senator introduced a pair of bills to restrict trans youth health care in 2021, his press release quoted Cretella calling gender-affirming treatments “eugenics.”

What I couldn’t see from those leaked emails was how the Alliance is resurrecting conversion therapy from the ash heap of history. Its signature fight, to overturn laws prohibiting conversion therapy for minors, is being fueled by the rise of anti-trans politics, which maintains that trans teenagers are simply troubled and need help to embrace the sex they were assigned at birth. In a handful of states, they’ve started winning: Conversion therapy bans have been blocked in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Indiana. Nebraska now requires minors interested in transitioning to undergo therapy that doesn’t “merely affirm” their gender identities.

The Alliance has “suddenly become a more prominent force in the anti-LGBTQ movement again,” says Emerson Hodges, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which documents extremism of various sorts. Backers of anti-trans laws have adopted “the conversion therapy premise,” he says, “that being LGBTQ means you experienced some terrible trauma, or some sort of aberrant disorder, and therefore, it’s an illness—which means we can cure it.”

I wanted to get a deeper insight into those who not only see transness as a problem, but also see conversion therapy as a solution. How have they shifted their approach, given the wealth of professional literature undermining their practices? What is their “treatment” like for trans youth? And who are these people?

So when I saw that the Alliance was holding a one-day conference, it seemed like an opportunity to find some answers. I requested media credentials; receiving no response, I bought a regular $203.98 ticket using my Mother Jones contact information. The day before the conference, I received a packet of materials from Alliance board member Keith Vennum, a psychiatrist who specializes in “helping men develop their heterosexual potential,” according to his profile on Focus on the Family’s Christian Counselors Network. They included an article by a gender care specialist who turned against youth medical transition, reading suggestions from Cretella on how to “heal” “transgender belief” in children, and an essay by Fresno psychiatrist Avak Howsepian arguing that supporting “diversity and inclusion” means supporting pedophilia. I packed my bag and flew to Las Vegas.

When I first arrived at the Hampton Inn, a woman smiled and welcomed me to a quiet meeting room where mostly white men in businesswear chatted in small groups like old friends. I signed in and sat next to a large camera pointed at a lectern. The day’s presentations would be available for purchase online and count toward continuing education credits for licensed counselors.

Not that the education on offer would be seen as credible by most therapists. Since the group’s beginnings in 1992, the Alliance has rejected the now-dominant understanding of LGBTQ identities as normal, healthy expressions of human diversity. Its trio of founders includes psychiatrist Charles Socarides, who helped lead the unsuccessful campaign to keep homosexuality classified as a mental illness in the DSM, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses; psychiatrist Benjamin Kaufman, who’d pushed for nonconsensual, nonconfidential HIV testing in Sacramento, California, during the height of the AIDS epidemic; and psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, who ran a clinic in Los Angeles that specialized in “curing” gayness. They started the Alliance, then named the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), to fight what they called the “scientific censorship” imposed by the “pro-gay lobby.” “As clinicians, we have witnessed the intense suffering caused by homosexuality, which we see as a ‘failure to function according to design,’” one of NARTH’s early policy statements said. “Homosexuality…works against society’s essential male/female design and the all-­important family unit.”

Within a few years, NARTH was claiming hundreds of members. In conferences and publications, it used its members’ status as licensed clinicians to project an ethos of scientific expertise, helping to prop up the “ex-gay” movement of religious groups like Exodus International, which urged LGBTQ Christians to “pray away the gay” in support groups and counseling. Nicolosi, in particular, brought anti-gay pseudoscience to the public, publishing books like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. He proclaimed that same-sex attraction came from childhood trauma, distant fathers, and overbearing mothers, and called his work “reparative therapy.”

The veneer of scientific rigor was peeling by 2009, when the APA published a landmark report finding no compelling evidence supporting the idea that sexual orientation could be altered with psychological interventions. Robert Spitzer, a leading psychiatrist, apologized for a major study he’d authored that had claimed to show NARTH’s and Exodus’ methods were effective, admitting that he didn’t really know whether anyone in his study had changed their sexual orientation. Then, NARTH board member George Rekers was caught in the Miami airport returning from a vacation to Europe with a gay sex worker he’d hired on Rentboy.com. (He resigned from NARTH and insisted that he had “not engaged in any homosexual behavior whatsoever.”)

Public awareness was growing about the damage conversion therapy could inflict. In a lawsuit against a New Jersey clinic called Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, former clients alleged that they’d been made to strip naked, touch themselves in front of a counselor, or reenact sexual abuse scenes as part of their treatment. (A jury would eventually hold the clinic and its NARTH-affiliated founder liable for consumer fraud and “unconscionable commercial practice.”) In 2012, California passed the country’s first ban on conversion therapy for minors. Exodus President Alan Chambers acknowledged that its methods had hurt people and that “the majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9 percent of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation.” Exodus folded soon after.

Yet NARTH persisted. In 2014, it rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity. The group soon began to shed loaded terminology for more neutral euphemisms about its work. “The board has come to believe that terms such as reorientation therapy, conversion therapy, and even sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) are no longer scientifically or politically tenable,” Christopher Rosik, a clinical psychologist in Fresno, California, wrote in an Alliance statement in 2016. These descriptors sounded too coercive and categorical, he wrote, and “imply that sexual orientation is an actual entity.” Instead, the board endorsed a new phrase: “Sexual Attraction Fluidity Exploration in Therapy”—a.k.a. the inelegant backronym SAFE-T.

Getting the new name to stick has been a losing battle. During a presentation at the Las Vegas conference, Rosik—a small, intense, bespectacled man who speaks at a rapid clip—shared that he couldn’t get the term SAFE-T published in an APA journal. Mainstream psychologists tend to use a technically accurate term for conversion therapy, “sexual orientation change efforts,” which Rosik has appropriated into “self-initiated sexual orientation change efforts,” to underscore that the individuals he studies are choosing to participate.

During Rosik’s talk, Joseph Nicolosi Jr., the son of the Alliance’s now-deceased co-founder, was seated in the front row in a sharp black suit. At his side was his wife, with whom he occasionally held hands. “We shouldn’t even use the word ‘orientation,’” he argued when Rosik finished. Sexual orientation couldn’t be measured or disproved, he continued, but sexual attractions or feelings could. “They talk about pseudoscience. That term—orientation—is a pseudoscience.”

“I agree,” Laura Haynes, the Alliance advocate, broke in from the back. “We should not reify it.”

“Could the same thing be said of the term ‘gay’?” someone else wondered.

“Possibly,” Nicolosi Jr. said. “At what point is a person gay? Do they have one homosexual thought a year? Fifty? One thousand?”

Earlier in the day, Nicolosi Jr. had told colleagues that he’d registered his own term, Reintegrative Therapy®, with the US Patent and Trademark Office. His website contains a 12-point chart on how Reintegrative Therapy® differs from conversion therapy. The chart makes clear that changing sexual orientation is not the objective; rather, the goal is to “resolve trauma.” “Spontaneous” changes in sexuality are a “byproduct,” the website says. In 2021, Nicolosi Jr. sued a pair of Canadian academics for defamation over a paper that listed “reintegrative therapy” as one of several pseudoscientific practices that fell under the conversion therapy umbrella. (The suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. He is appealing. Neither Nicolosi Jr. nor anyone else from the Alliance responded to my requests for comment on how this article characterizes their work.)

Yet Nicolosi Jr.’s website is full of testimonials about clients’ sexual attractions changing. And it repeatedly cites a study that purports to show Reintegrative Therapy® decreasing clients’ same-sex attractions and improving their overall­ ­wellbeing.­ The study’s publisher? The Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality.

Another euphemism in Alliance circles is “change allowing therapy”—a phrase whose gentle ambiguity suggests openness to personal growth. In a similar vein, Michael Gasparro, one of the youngest Alliance board members, told attendees about a technique he and Nicolosi Jr. called “mindfulness,” which they became interested in “because of its ubiquitousness in the mental health field as a term that is generally just accepted carte blanche,” Gasparro explained.

They then showed us a “mindfulness” video in which a young adult client, played by an actor, sits nervously across from Nicolosi Jr. in a room filled with books. Nicolosi Jr. asks him to describe his ideal sexually attractive man. The client responds that the man would be strong, confident, informal. “I would definitely say a guy who’s like, um, on the taller side,” he says.

Then, Nicolosi Jr. asks the client what he would change about himself: Shorter or taller? Stronger or weaker arms? More or less confident? He urges the client to compare himself to the imagined man, and the client says he feels inadequate. “How do you feel about the fact that you feel that inferiority, weakness?” Nicolosi Jr. asks.

“Sadness,” the client says.

“Feel your sadness as you continue looking at that guy,” Nicolosi Jr. urges. “And as you hold them together right now, zero to 10, how strong is your sexual attraction toward him?”

It was Nicolosi Jr.’s dad who championed the idea that queerness comes from childhood trauma, one of the same narratives weaponized today to explain why kids come out as trans. The APA has slammed both ideas as unfounded.

Yet these kinds of claims are familiar to trans survivors of conversion therapy interviewed by Mother Jones. “The idea was that you don’t find boys and men to be safe, and so in order to protect yourself, you want to become a boy or a man,” recalls Myles Markham, who participated in group conversion therapy in high school and college, when they were struggling with their feelings around sexuality and gender. Yet to Markham, those explanations “never resonated,” they say: “I’m not a person who has experienced acute or direct misogynistic violence. I grew up with emotionally intelligent and gentle masculine figures.”

Other survivors say their therapists tried to attribute their transness to negative childhood experiences. “For me, it was daddy issues,” says Arielle Rebekah, a diversity, equity, and inclusion trainer in Chicago, recounting how counselors at a residential boarding school for troubled teens tried to force them to abandon their trans identity. “They basically tried to pin it on, ‘You’ve never had a positive male role model.’” Lillian Lennon, a 25-year-old organizer in Alaska, says her parents sent her to a similar residential program after she told them she was trans at age 14. According to an affidavit she filed in a custody lawsuit involving another LGBTQ student, the therapist Lennon was paired with at the school said her transness was a form of “lashing out” and “seeking attention” in the face of turmoil at home, such as financial problems and her parents separating.

None of this therapy “worked.” Today, Lennon, Rebekah, and Markham have all transitioned and have become activists or consultants supporting other LGBTQ people. Yet they all still deal with nightmares, panic, and other mental health struggles they attribute to the conversion efforts. “A lot of thoughts [were] placed into my head about how disturbing and gross and creepy people like me were,” Lennon says. “I internalized a lot of these projections.” Today, she deals with depression and loneliness. “I’ve never shaken the consequences of my time there,” she says.

Still, multiple counselors I met at the Alliance conference endorsed the concept that queerness and transness are the result of trauma or bad parenting. After the morning’s sessions, David Pickup, a towering man who identifies as a “reintegrative” therapist, approached the table where I was sitting with a group of clinicians. Pickup mainly practices in Texas and says he only works with clients who truly want to change their sexuality or gender identity. He has publicly attributed his own same-sex attractions and discomfort with his gender in part to sexual abuse. Pulling aside a chair from a neighboring table and folding his lanky frame into it, he patiently explained his belief that being trans is the same as being gay, except with “more severe” trauma, from earlier in life, and worse family environments. “I have yet to see one case where there’s not been trauma underneath every single homoerotic or transgender issue.” His theory on trans youth: “Basically, what happens is those kids don’t attach to their same-sex parent, and so they don’t attach to themselves in their own biological sex.”

At her session, “Healing Gender Incongruence in a Hostile Environment,” Cretella also urged attendees to focus on parenting and underlying trauma when working with trans teenagers. She described trans identity as a “maladaptive defense mechanism” in response to events like divorce and sexual abuse.

Her evidence: a 2018 Pediatrics study that examined medical records from youth enrolled in Kaiser Permanente health plans in California and Georgia. The researchers identified 1,082 minors between the ages of 10 and 17 whose records indicated that they were trans. Some 70 percent had mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and attention disorders that predated the first sign of gender dysphoria in their medical record. “They are not suicidal because of us,” Cretella said, giggling before hitting a somber note, “but because they are traumatized beforehand.”

Cretella’s interpretation of the research—that poor mental health led people to identify as trans—relies on a “fundamental” error, according to Michael Goodman, an Emory University professor and one of the study’s authors. Researchers, himself included, didn’t know when their subjects first identified as trans, only when they talked to their doctors about it. “It takes years, usually, before the child or adolescent, or an adult, presents to the health care provider with gender dysphoria issues,” Goodman told me. “It might as well be the other way around: The gender dysphoria leads to all of those mental health problems, which is a far more reasonable interpretation.”

Yet Alliance affiliates have been using Goodman’s research to lobby against conversion therapy bans and gender-affirming care. In 2019, Laura Haynes distributed his paper to colleagues working on anti-trans legislation. “It may be the first research that found onset dates of psychiatric disorders and first-evidence date of gender non­conforming identity,” she emphasized.

“Laura, thank you! I’m testifying soon for a case in Colorado and this data will be very useful,” replied psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, a senior fellow at the anti-trans group Do No Harm. A group co-founded by Pickup called the National Task Force for Therapy Equality drafted letters to legislators citing Goodman’s study to claim that “gender dysphoria may have pathological causes.” And when Pickup testified in support of an early gender-affirming care ban in South Dakota, he said there was a “rapidly growing body of literature suggesting that psychological issues play a crucial role in many young people’s trans identification.”

This isn’t the only example of scientific spin from Alliance figures. Last year, in what he called an “adversarial collaboration” with queer researchers, Rosik got a study published in the peer-reviewed APA journal Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. The paper looked at attempts to “reduce, change and/or eliminate” same-sex attractions, behavior, or orientation, either on one’s own or with a counselor, and found that 326 people currently undergoing conversion therapy had greater depression than those who’d stopped or never tried it. Yet Rosik and his co-authors concluded that the differences “may be of uncertain practical significance and interpretive meaning.”

It didn’t take long for others to point out the contradiction. “Basically, what they were saying is that even though there’s [evidence] of harm, the harm isn’t grave enough to be concerned about,” explains David Rivera, a psychology professor at Queens College in New York who co-authored a rebuttal to the Rosik paper. Soon, with the authors’ agreement, the journal retracted the study, saying it wanted to provide “greater accuracy and interpretive clarity to sensitive findings that might be misused.”

Rosik is used to fighting criticism: He edits the Alliance’s Journal of Human Sexuality. The very first issue, in 2009, was devoted to rebutting the APA report on the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation change efforts. Since then, its articles, interviews, and book reviews have defended “SAFE-T” and attacked the anti–conversion therapy consensus. At the conference, Rosik asserted that mainstream research institutions are “ideologically captured.”

Indeed, many of the Alliance speakers seemed to take it as a given that the medical and scientific communities were in thrall to LGBTQ activists. In a question that seemed intended to ridicule, Pickup asked during one of Cretella’s talks if the doctors who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth are personally “suffering from a disorder of some kind.” Appreciative laughter scattered throughout the room.

“Yes,” she replied, becoming serious. “Many of the physicians who are in leadership positions are themselves on the LGBTQ spectrum.” Then she referred to the disorder in which a caregiver imposes an ailment on a child to gain attention for themselves: “I would hypothesize that we were dealing with Munchausen by proxy in many cases.”

Outrageous claims like these are a common weapon among anti-trans activists and their right-wing political allies, who often describe trans health doctors as butchers mutilating kids. In 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton classified gender-affirming care for minors as a form of child abuse and equated parents who sought such care for their children with those suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Using this theory, Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services opened at least nine investigations into parents before an ACLU lawsuit put a halt to them.

Similarly extreme language also comes from the small cohort of paid expert witnesses often called upon to support gender-affirming care bans—like endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, who compared such care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee syphilis study when testifying for anti-trans legislation in South Dakota. (In a court case about Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care in Florida, a federal judge concluded that Laidlaw was “far off from the accepted view” on transgender issues, in part because Laidlaw had said he wouldn’t use patients’ correct pronouns.)

To Cretella, the solution to gender dysphoria is obvious: Transition people’s minds, not their bodies. She described this project in religious terms. “In a Judeo-Christian worldview,” she explained during her talk, “one of the functions of the brain is to accurately perceive” the physical reality created by God.

“If my thinking is contrary to physical reality, that’s the abnormality that must be understood,” she continued. “We try to ­understand the abnormal thinking and come to help the person attain flourishing, by analyzing and shaping thinking to embrace the physical reality.”

In other words, if a person’s sense of self doesn’t match their physical body, their sense of self requires fixing.

During the break after Cretella’s presentation, I overheard two women chatting on their way into the restroom. “Talk about a wealth of knowledge,” one remarked.

“True science will always back up true religion,” the other replied. “God’s truth and science, if it’s true, will always match up. That’s what I tell my students.”

If the Las Vegas conference made one thing clear, it’s that conversion therapy is alive and well, even in places where it’s been banned. One counselor told me he makes it a habit not to document his treatment plans in writing to avoid getting in trouble and simply treats “family dynamics” in states with conversion therapy bans.

In a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans adults, nearly 1 in 7 said that a professional, such as a therapist, doctor, or religious adviser, had tried to make them not transgender; about half of respondents said they were minors at the time. By applying this rate to population estimates, the Williams Institute at UCLA projects that more than 135,000 trans adults nationwide have experienced some form of conversion therapy.

Despite the data, lawmakers frequently don’t believe that conversion therapy is still happening in their community, says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide prevention group. “We’re constantly running up against this misconception that this is an artifact of the past,” she says. So, five years ago, the Trevor Project began scouring psychologists’ websites and books, records of public testimony, and known conversion therapy referral services, looking for counselors who said they could alter someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

As the research stretched on, Pick noticed webpages being revised to reflect changing times. “We saw many folks who seemed to leave the industry entirely,” she says. “But others changed their website, changed their keywords, [from] talking about creating ex-gays to talking about ex-trans.” Last December, Pick’s team published their report documenting active conversion therapists. They found more than 600 were licensed health care professionals and an additional 716 were clergy, lay ministers, or other unlicensed religious counselors.

According to Pick, some conversion therapists have embraced a new label for what they do: “gender exploratory therapy.” It’s a term that Cretella used to describe the approach she recommended, and unlike the other euphemisms thrown around at the conference, this has gained traction. In 2021, a group of therapists, who ranged from conflicted about medical interventions for kids with gender dysphoria to skeptical of the very concept of transgender identity, formed the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association (GETA) to promote an approach they characterize as neither conversion nor affirmation.

Some current and former leaders of the group, which claims a membership of 300 mental health providers, have been involved in influential organizations lobbying against gender-affirming care across the world, such as the Ireland-based Genspect and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a nonprofit registered in Idaho. They’ve notched some big wins: In November 2023, the UK Council for Psychotherapy—the nation’s top professional association—declared that it was fine for counselors to take GETA’s “exploratory” approach to gender. This April, a long-awaited review of gender-related care for youth in England’s National Health Service endorsed exploratory therapy, according to Alex Keuroghlian, an associate psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. And in the United States, in cases in which families of trans children have sued states for banning gender-affirming care, the state often calls expert witnesses who endorse “exploratory” psychotherapy as their preferred alternative treatment.

After all, the idea of “exploring” one’s gender identity sounds benign. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which issues guidelines on gender-­affirming treatment, recommends that clinicians working with teens “facilitate the exploration and expression of gender openly and respectfully so that no one particular identity is favored.” Yet, as with mindfulness, “that term has now been hijacked by folks on the other side,” says Judith Glassgold, a clinical psychologist who chaired the APA task force that in 2009 documented the lack of science behind conversion therapy.

GETA’s guidelines instruct therapists to dig deep into “the entire landscape of the young person’s life and subjective experience,” probing all possible reasons they might identify as transgender. The catch, says Glassgold, is that “exploration” means “trying to find negative reasons why someone’s diverse.” Last year, SAMHSA issued a report saying that “approaches that discourage youth from identifying as transgender or gender-diverse, and/or from expressing their gender identity” are sometimes “misleadingly referred to as ‘exploratory therapy.’” These approaches are “harmful and never appropriate,” the report concluded.

GETA rebranded as Therapy First late last year, saying exploratory therapy was really no different from standard psychotherapy. The group’s membership statement still disavows conversion therapy. But its co-founder Stella O’Malley told me she believes bans on conversion therapy should apply only to sexual orientation. And in Las Vegas, Cretella drew a direct connection between the old work of the Alliance and the new work of gender-exploratory therapists. “It truly is very similar to how the Alliance has always approached unwanted SSA [same-sex attraction],” she told the assembled therapists. “You approach it as ‘change therapy’—or, even less triggering, ‘exploratory therapy.’”

At lunch, I headed over to a discussion convened by Robert Vazzo, a red-faced man with a buzz cut. While picking at his rice pilaf, he recalled working with a trans-feminine 14-year-old. Vazzo referred to them as a “young man” who “complained of being trans.” He complimented their biceps and tried to get them to be “more assertive” with their mother. The goal, he explained, was to get the teen to connect with some inner masculinity. “The bulk of our work is trying to get people to value who they really are,” Vazzo told me. “Who they really are,” in this view, is cisgender.

In 2017, Vazzo filed a lawsuit against the city of Tampa, Florida, after it imposed a fine on licensed counselors who attempt conversion therapy on minors. Vazzo says he was represented pro bono by the Christian-right law firm Liberty Counsel, which also represented Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses for gay couples in 2015. Liberty Counsel argued that the city was infringing on Vazzo’s right to free speech, because his treatment consists of talk therapy. In late 2019, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump agreed with Vazzo and overturned the Tampa ordinance, concluding that the state, not the city, should determine health care regulations and discipline.

Between 2012 and 2023, the Alliance and connected groups filed a combined 11 federal lawsuits challenging conversion therapy bans in eight states. Vazzo’s was the first to succeed. The next year, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals shut down a similar ordinance in Boca Raton, Florida, which had been challenged by former Alliance President Julie Hamilton and another therapist. The court concluded that it violated the First Amendment. The decision blocked youth conversion therapy bans in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

So far, the 11th Circuit is the only federal appeals court to agree with the idea that conversion therapy is protected by the First Amendment, says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Minter notes that federal courts have previously considered clinicians’ words in mental and medical health care settings to be a form of professional conduct and fair game for state regulation.

At the time of the conference, the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear a similar case brought by Brian Tingley, who sued Washington state with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful conservative Christian legal organization behind many recent anti-trans bills and attacks on abortion, in order to practice conversion therapy. The Supreme Court declined to take the case, but a similar lawsuit, also filed by ADF, is making its way through the Colorado court system.

In his dissent to the court’s decision not to take the Tingley case, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, described bans on conversion therapy for minors as “viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.” Thomas even foreshadowed a future ruling overturning conversion therapy bans: “Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again. When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here…consider what the First Amendment requires.”

Meanwhile, the fight over conversion therapy bans is continuing in state legislatures. In 2023, Indiana passed a law halting enforcement of local bans. This year, legislators in two more states, Iowa and West Virginia, introduced similar bills.

The West Virginia bill went further than the one in Indiana—attempting to stop mental health professionals from providing anything except conversion therapy to trans minors. The bill, which suggested trans people have “delusion[s],” would have prohibited providers “from attempting to induce or exacerbate gender dysphoria in a minor…with no intent of cure or cure-pursuing recovery.”

That measure failed. But in Nebraska, a similar—though less explicit—bill has already become law. The “Let Them Grow Act,” passed last year, mandates that trans kids receive therapy before they get any medical treatments for gender dysphoria. On its face, the law appears to preserve some access to treatments; its language emphasizes the need to protect kids. “What we got was a version that ends up sounding more compassionate,” says Abbi Swatsworth, the executive director of OutNebraska, an organization that coordinated community opposition to the bill. “But in actuality, it is much worse.”

After it passed, Nebraska’s health department was tasked with issuing guidelines on implementing it. The state’s chief medical officer, Timothy Tesmer, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, assembled a team of “experts”—but didn’t include anyone who specialized in transgender medical care, local practitioners and advocacy groups say.

The rules crafted by Tesmer’s department require that trans kids receive 40 hours of therapy that “do not merely affirm the patient’s beliefs” before the kids can move forward with medical interventions like puberty blockers. The therapy recommendations are “not in the standard of care, they’re not in any of the pediatrics or psychiatry literature,” says Alex Dworak, a family physician who works with trans youth in Nebraska. Florence Ashley, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto who focuses on trans issues, points to the regulations’ instruction not to “merely affirm” a client. “What does that mean, in the actual therapy room?” Ashley asks. “Does that mean they can’t use your name and pronouns? Because then that’s very much privileging a specific outcome.”

Camie Nitzel, the founder of Kindred Psychology in Lincoln, is wondering the same thing. “If the artwork in my office reflects gender-­diverse faces, is that overly affirming?” she asked Tesmer in a letter opposing the regulations. Nitzel, who has been working with trans Nebraskans for 29 years, uses the clinical approach recommended by the APA. Under the Nebraska regulations, therapists “are going to be forced to choose between practicing ethically and practicing legally,” she warns. Already, some other providers have begun to refuse to see trans youth because of the risk. “We’re now getting referrals from providers who have worked with trans youth before, but they’re sending their clients here because they don’t feel comfortable,” Nitzel says. “Providers are faced with the decision about the safety of continuing to do work.”

Meanwhile, the trans community in Nebraska is just plain scared. Andrew Farias, a lobbyist in Lincoln, is so worried about the possibility of future restrictions on adult trans health care that he temporarily stopped testosterone just to see if he could bear it. “I want to make sure that I’m prepared in terms of my own safety and mental health,” he says. “I wanted to test myself and see: Could I do this?…Or do I have to move?”

I left the last session of the conference with my head spinning. In the world of the Alliance, down was up, harm was help, expert conclusions were lies—or were they? As I made my way out of the hotel lobby, where the therapists were gathering to walk together to a nearby diner, I had the feeling of exiting an alternate reality.

No one had distilled that feeling better than the Alliance’s incoming leader, David Pickup. “There is such a thing as a man born in a woman’s body,” he’d declared in a speech, delivering the line with sarcastic bravado. “There is such a thing as homosexual marriage.” Then he parodied what was happening in the Hampton Inn: “The small conferences that are held by these fringe groups across the country are all right-wing, unscientific, no-research-given, closeted Christians who try to prod and force people to do therapy.” The audience laughed with uncertainty. Had their comrade gone soft on them?

No one need worry; Pickup cut to his point: “The Alliance tells you the truth. And none of those statements I just said—even though the world tends to now believe in that—has anything to do with truth,” he assured them. In Pickup’s view, “the transgender movement is actually crumbling. In part, that’s due to the Alliance.” Then he asked the audience to take out their phones and laptops to donate. “Good things are coming,” he promised. “I think the truth will one day win out, more than ever.”

There is an urgency behind Pickup’s words. His truth must win out because the opposite would be devastating. To concede that trans people are real, let alone happy, would strip away the Alliance’s last best hope of a comeback. 

Read more about Myles Markham’s story of surviving conversion therapy—and finding self-love—here.

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

Correction, May 17: A previous version of this story misstated Alex Dworak’s medical specialty.

Shortly after moving in, they noticed water damage in their kitchen and dining room. Soon, the family started falling ill with respiratory illnesses and other ailments. Dudek was afflicted with respiratory problems that their doctor said were “very likely” related to mold exposure, as well as severe skin issues and increased anxiety. After their daughter was born that spring, the newborn was frequently sick and had trouble breathing at night. She too began having severe skin problems. “The only times where she wasn’t sick was when we went on vacation,” Dudek says.  

Dudek suspected that the root cause of all these health problems was mold from the water damage; official Army guidance indicates water damage should be addressed within 48 hours to minimize the risk of mold. Soon, he began what he describes as a year of fighting with Fort Bliss Family Homes, a development of the international real estate conglomerate Balfour Beatty, which oversees a vast swath of military housing across the country.    

First, an employee at Fort Bliss Family Homes denied there was any mold problem at all and told him that black mold doesn’t grow in El Paso, recalls Dudek. At one point, after Dudek made multiple requests for the company to remediate the water damage in their home, the family was temporarily displaced while the company tried to address the issue. When they moved back in, the company said their water damage had been addressed. But Dudek says they were skeptical.  

While the family was displaced, Dudek says the housing company capitulated on their request to test the home’s dining room wall for mold; a contractor hired by the company reported that none had been found. (Dudek claims the company refused to test other parts of the house.) This seemed at odds with the findings of a separate company Dudek later hired to perform its own testing of a kitchen cabinet that was re-installed after the company had supposedly remediated the water damage. That company found multiple types of mold that have been linked to respiratory illnesses, skin infections, and cancer, according to medical experts. 

“Fighting with Fort Bliss Homes cost me my military career,” says Dudek, who left the Army in 2023 after serving 12 years and now is in the Texas National Guard while training to get certified as an EMT. He said his experience soured his opinion not only of military housing, but also of the military itself, after facing a “toxic and unsupportive” response from his unit during the year he spent battling the housing company. “I was basically forced out of my job, because all of my time was dedicated to dealing with this problem,” he says. He is preparing to sue over his housing issues.  

The housing issues that Dudek says derailed his military career were not news to the Defense Department. The same month the Dudek family moved into their home at the end of 2021, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to defrauding the US military of millions by falsifying maintenance records on military housing. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco described Balfour’s scheme as the result of a “broken corporate culture,” and the company was ordered to pay over $65 million in fines. 

But Balfour continues to hold lucrative military housing contracts across the nation. It is one of 14 private companies that own and operate 99 percent of military family housing in the US, controlling 78 developments. It also isn’t the only company that has faced accusations of work order fraud: Hunt Companies, Inc., the largest of the military housing providers, agreed to a $500,000 settlement with no admission of guilt in a similar federal fraud case in 2022.  

Roughly 700,000 service members and their families live in privatized military housing, where they could be subject to dangerous living conditions created by substandard landlords.  

A spokesperson from Balfour Beatty declined to be interviewed but provided a statement saying the company takes the Dudek family’s concerns seriously and emphasizing the strides that have been made in improving the quality of military housing. The spokesperson also said the company “embraces oversight.”  

Hunt Military Communities did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement released following the fraud claim settlement, the company’s president said Hunt Military Communities’ top priority was “serving our military families as well as our partners with honesty, integrity, and transparency.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of service members and their families have joined lawsuits against military housing companies after their lives were turned upside down by substandard and in some cases hazardous housing conditions like dangerous mold, lead-based paint, and rodent and insect infestations. 

Their ordeals have been made possible by the federal government: Contracts obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) as part of a yearlong investigation reveal the devil’s bargain the Defense Department struck when it handed over responsibility for military housing to the private sector in order to offload the expensive burden of maintaining these homes. These agreements include provisions that make them nearly impossible to terminate and that allow companies to evade some environmental, tenant rights, and consumer protection laws.  

Military housing advocates, legal experts, and lawmakers interviewed for this investigation say the lopsided terms woven into these contracts—which provide few mechanisms for accountability—helped cause the nightmarish housing conditions service members like Dudek have faced.  

Among the nearly two dozen service members and their families who spoke with POGO, recurrent themes emerged. Multiple families said they lost all their household belongings due to mold contamination. Several said family pets either died or became seriously ill under circumstances that the families suspected were due to toxic housing conditions. They reported severe pest infestations, rampant health and safety hazards, and told harrowing stories of young children with respiratory, skin, and stomach problems allegedly linked to mold. Service members interviewed by POGO said they faced pushback, incompetence, and sometimes outright deception by military housing companies when it came to housing maintenance and work orders.  

Following national media attention about substandard housing conditions for military families, in 2019, Congress took steps to address the issue by adding protections in the 2020 and 2021 National Defense Authorization Acts, including a “Tenant Bill of Rights” for service members. But according to legal experts and military housing advocates, those efforts have proven inadequate, largely because these new protections can’t escape the ill-conceived contracts underpinning the privatized military housing system—and the powerful players pushing to maintain the status quo. 

“These houses aren’t taken care of—they’re held together with popsicle sticks and bubblegum,” Dudek says. “Because despite our immense military budget, our government has sold off maintaining these homes—taking care of our soldiers and their families—to [companies that do] the minimum amount of work for the maximum amount of profit.”  

The privatization of military housing dates back to 1996, when the Defense Department’s housing stock suffered from a $20 billion maintenance backlog. Privatization offered lawmakers a solution: a massive infusion of capital into military housing. But it also promised an incredible deal for the companies poised to enter the military housing business, says Jean Coffman, executive director and board chair of the Safe Military Housing Initiative, a national military housing advocacy organization. “You had guaranteed tenants, a continuous flow of tenants, and no way for tenants to…fail to pay the rent,” Coffman says, since rent is often automatically deducted from service members’ pay.  

These private companies would go on to invest roughly $32 billion into maintaining the nation’s military housing stock, helping to build 75,000 new homes and renovate another 50,000, according to a coalition of military housing companies. 

But in exchange for their investment, these companies pushed for contracts that would ensure their involvement for decades—often 50 years—and lock the government into favorable terms that now shield the companies from having to adhere to new tenant protections established since these contracts were originally drafted. (Among the legal agreements obtained by POGO, most aren’t set to expire until the 2050s.) 

A spokesperson for the Military Housing Association, a lobbying organization for military housing providers, said the amount of private capital these companies were willing to spend was contingent on obtaining lengthy contract terms.  

THIS GROUND LEASE is granted subject to the following Conditions:
1. TERM
a. The initial term of this Ground Lease of all lands described in Exhibit A-1 is for a period of fifty (50) years, commencing on the Effective Date and expiring September 30, 2053. The initial term of this Ground Lease for the Future Barracks Parcel described in Exhibit A-2 is for a period commencing on the Effective Date and expiring December 31, 2006. Notwithstanding the initial term of this Ground Lease, upon written notice from the Secretary to the Lessee, this Ground Lease shall be modified to exclude the Future Barracks Parcel described in Exhibit A-2 and the Lessee will quitclaim (or cause to be quitclaimed) the Improvements located on the Future Barracks Parcel to the Secretary, free of the Sublease and/or Building Lease. Unless the parties agree to the contrary, the Future Barracks Parcel shall be released from the Ground Lease and deeded to the Secretary no later than December 31, 2006.

When Congress passed new oversight measures, including the Tenant Bill of Rights for service members, the housing companies were involved in the process of drafting them, according to Elizabeth Field, a director at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) who specializes in military housing. Their input was necessary, she says, because the Tenant Bill of Rights would ask the companies to voluntarily go beyond their preexisting contractual obligations. Despite that, many of the contractors still don’t seem to be following the protections they helped write: In September 2022, the Department of Defense’s inspector general reported that more than a third of housing companies weren’t complying with the Tenant Bill of Rights.  

Pentagon spokesperson Jeff Jurgensen said in an email that the department believes all military installations will be fully compliant with the Tenant Bill of Rights in 2024. But according to a recent POGO investigation and a GAO report, implementation of these rights has been problematic, even among the housing companies that the Defense Department deems fully compliant. 

For example, the Tenant Bill of Rights entitles military families to a “formal dispute process,” providing a third-party mediator if there’s a housing problem that the service member can’t get resolved by working directly with the housing company. Military housing advocates say few service members use this option because it is so convoluted. A GAO report found widespread confusion across military branches about the mediation process for housing disputes; the number of families who had actually used the process was in the single digits for most branches of the military as of November 2022. (The Department of Defense declined requests from POGO to provide an updated tally on the number of service members who had used this process.) 

Bernard Rostker, a former undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness during the early days of privatized military housing, said that when this system was implemented in the 1990s, he pushed for alternatives until he was “blue in the face,” arguing that the profit motive would create perverse incentives for military housing companies.  

“In Australia, there is a government entity which manages military housing,” Rostker says. “There is no reason that could not have been done here. But it wasn’t.”  

Rostker, who prefers to call the current arrangement “a public-private partnership” rather than “privatization,” said this system misguidedly relied on the hope that the private sector would take a long-term view when it came to maintaining the houses. 

The Pentagon’s logic had been that the companies would be motivated to maintain good conditions to compete with off-base housing markets. Rostker has been skeptical of that premise. In many places, service members may not be able to afford to live off-base using the military’s basic housing allowance, making them a captive market for military housing, he said. 

Coffman, of the Safe Military Housing Initiative, shares Rostker’s concerns about the built-in incentives for the private sector to neglect homes. The result, she says, is pervasive problems in military housing that are not limited to one company; her organization has helped thousands of service members and their families around the country who are facing the consequences of these companies’ harmful practices. 

Laura Pugh and Stephen Stewart, one of those families, live in military housing on Fort Riley in Kansas that is managed by Corvias, another military housing company. They decided to live there because they couldn’t afford off-base rent with Stewart’s roughly $1,200 monthly allowance, Pugh says. While her husband was deployed overseas, she often had a hard time getting Corvias to address housing maintenance issues, including, Pugh says, structural problems that resulted in warped doors and sagging flooring and a moldy space that she couldn’t be in for more than 20 minutes.  

Like many military spouses, Pugh wasn’t even listed as a tenant on her lease—a problem that Coffman says is common in military housing and can create myriad problems for military spouses. As Pugh notes, “The [housing company] supervisors always…have the attitude of ‘you’re just a dumb wife.’” (Pugh and Stewart moved out of that house in early 2023.) 

Corvias did not respond to a request for comment.  

Coffman argues that tenants like Pugh and Stewart need to have a real choice between on- and off-base housing for the rationale of market competition to motivate housing companies to provide better maintenance. Instead, she said the unique conditions of military housing—service members who have constrained housing options and are acculturated to obeying authority rather than questioning it—only further the status quo of poor upkeep and barriers to holding housing providers accountable. 

The military culture of loyalty and obedience has helped make military housing a lucrative business opportunity for decades, according to Mahlon “Sandy” Apgar, a real estate consultant who is considered the “father” of the privatized military housing system. A 2004 Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Apgar focused on this particular quality to describe the advantages of investing in military homes. Military consumers, he wrote, are a “large and loyal market,” and the group’s defining characteristic is “an affinity for the military that is rooted in institutional culture.”

There is yet another factor unique to military housing that stacks the odds against service members: Present-day environmental, housing, and personal injury laws don’t always apply on military bases. This is because of a little-known legal concept—called the “federal enclave doctrine”—that’s being used as a defense in military housing cases around the country.  

Few know the legal peculiarities of this argument better than Ryan Reed. A San Antonio-based commercial litigator and a landlord himself, Reed got interested in military housing cases four years ago after agreeing to help a friend of a friend on Randolph Air Force Base with a moldy and pest-ridden home. (A federal judge recently awarded the family more than $91,000; the housing company, Hunt Military Communities, has said it is considering appealing.)  

Reed is now representing 12 military families in a federal court case against Balfour Beatty, alleging the company ignored dangerous housing conditions that included sewage backups, toxic mold, cockroach infestations, and violations of a law meant to reduce lead paint hazards in homes. He is also working on similar cases brought by military families against housing providers Hunt Military Communities and LendLease. 

Reed says the federal enclave doctrine has contributed to his clients’ subpar housing conditions by making it harder to protect military housing tenants. A “federal enclave” is territory a state has ceded to the federal government; most military installations fall into this designation. These enclaves are typically governed by the laws that existed when the land was handed over to the military, no matter how much those laws have changed in the years since to offer stronger safeguards. 

The result is that military housing providers have a legal justification to operate outside the bounds of present-day protections, Reed says. In 2014, for example, after a 7-year-old drowned at a military housing unit, the housing company attempted to fend off a wrongful death lawsuit by arguing that personal injury law did not apply because the land the base was built upon was ceded to the federal government in 1917, before such laws existed. The case was eventually settled out of court. 

8. APPLICABLE FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY AND MUNICIPAL LAWS, ORDINANCES AND REGULATIONS

a. The Lessee shall comply with all applicable Federal, state, county and municipal laws, ordinances and regulations.

b. The Lessee shall comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended (the “ADA”), and the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards to the extent each may be applicable to the Project and the use thereof.

c. Each Party shall have the right to contest the applicability or enforcement of Federal, state, county and municipal laws, ordinances and regulations and, upon Lessee’s request, the Lessor shall reasonably cooperate with Lessee in Lessee’s taking such actions as may be necessary, in accordance with such applicable Federal, state, county and municipal laws, ordinances and regulations, to contest applicability, enforcement, or otherwise minimize or assert any exemption which may be available with respect to applicable Federal, state, county and municipal laws, ordinances and regulations or otherwise dispute the validity of any applicable Federal, state, county and municipal laws, ordinances and regulations. The Lessor shall not be required to join in any such action brought by Lessee except to the extent required by applicable Federal, state, county and municipal laws, ordinances and regulations in order to make such action effective.

Where Reed works in Texas, residents at Laughlin Air Force Base benefit from current Texas landlord-tenant laws because of that land’s enclave status when it was ceded to the federal government. But service members at neighboring Randolph Air Force Base are subject to pre-1952 state laws, before a range of consumer protection and landlord-tenant laws had been passed. 

These complexities make oversight that much harder: The military can’t effectively enforce the rights of tenants when it’s so difficult to nail down what rights apply where, Reed says. He pointed to the first piece of the Tenant Bill of Rights set forth in the 2020 defense bill—it promises “the right to reside in a housing unit and a community that meets applicable health and environmental standards.” 

“What in the world are the ‘applicable health and environmental standards’?” Reed asks. “That, in and of itself, exemplifies the problem.”  

Balfour Beatty Communities—the company that owns the Dudeks’ former home—oversees military housing on 55 Army, Navy, and Air Force bases around the country. Between 2013 and 2019, the Department of Justice found that the company engaged in an $18.7 million fraud scheme in which it lied about making repairs to the houses it was contractually obligated to maintain. The fraud meant that military families experienced lengthy delays in housing repairs while the company pretended the problem had already been solved, falsifying property maintenance data and resident comment cards. It did this to gain lucrative incentive fees awarded by the DOD for timely maintenance of the houses, according to the plea agreement.  

Four months after the company was ordered to pay millions in criminal fines as punishment, a Senate probe found that Balfour Beatty had continued to engage in similar misconduct into 2022, after it had already pleaded guilty to the DOJ’s charges. In an April 2022 Senate hearing, an Army captain testified about the potentially lethal dermatitis his young daughter developed while living in a Fort Gordon home with toxic mold that Balfour Beatty had inadequately remediated. 

During the hearing, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who led the investigation, asked if military housing companies that engage in wrongdoing could simply lose their contracts: “Why should a company convicted of major criminal fraud, that engaged in a scheme to defraud the United States, remain in a position of trust, responsible for the safe housing of the heroes—service members and their families—on installations across the country?” he asked. 

But whether canceling contracts is an option for military housing companies is a question that even some congressional leaders haven’t been able to answer. 

“What would these companies have to do in order to cause enough damage in order for you to consider terminating their contracts?” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) asked the Department of Defense’s head of housing during a 2022 House subcommittee hearing, emphasizing that the department has not only maintained, but actually expanded its business partnerships with Balfour Beatty and Hunt even after both companies’ fraud cases. 

Pentagon Chief Housing Officer Patricia Coury responded that terminating housing company contracts is “a very complicated process” and would be “extreme.” In fact, the Defense Department has never canceled a contract with a military housing company. A 2023 GAO report cited unnamed Pentagon officials saying that “the likelihood of project termination is low.” And a senior DOD official who asked not to be named said that doing so, while possible, would compromise the ability of the government to provide quality housing to service members. 

That is in part due to the role third-party lenders play in the military housing landscape. These firms provide military housing companies with financing for capital improvements and maintenance in exchange for a return on their investment. Because of that role, military housing contracts typically give these investors the ability to intervene to protect the housing companies’ agreements with the Defense Department from being terminated.  

9.5 Right of the Leasehold Mortgagee To Cure Before Termination.

9.5.1 Notwithstanding any provision of this Lease to the contrary, if any Event of Default shall occur under this Lease, then the Government shall have no right to terminate this Lease or the Lessee’s rights hereunder, unless, following the expiration of the period of time given the Lessee to cure such default pursuant hereto (or, if the Lessee has no right to cure same, following such default), the Government shall deliver a written notice (the “Proposed Termination Notice”) to the Leasehold Mortgage of the Government’s intent to so terminate. Any such Proposed Termination Notice must state in reasonable detail the uncured Event of Default and must be received by the Leasehold Mortgagee (a) not less than [redacted] in advance of the proposed effective date of such termination (the “Proposed Termination Date”), if such Event of Default is a Monetary Default, or (b) not less than [redacted] in advance of the Proposed Termination Date if such Event of Default is a Non-Monetary Default, as applicable.

9.5.2 The Government shall not have the right to terminate this Lease or the Lessee’s rights hereunder, if during such [redacted] or [redacted] period (as applicable) the Leasehold Mortgagee (or its nominee, assignee or designee), at the Leasehold Mortgagee’s option, shall: (i) notify the Government in writing of the desire of the Leasehold Mortgagee or its nominee, assignee or designee to nullify the Proposed Termination Notice; (ii) cure or cause to be cured all Monetary Defaults identified in the Proposed Termination Notice during such [redacted] period; and (iii) cure or commence to cure during such [redacted] day period with reasonable diligence and continuity all Non-Monetary Defaults identified in the Proposed Termination Notice (it being acknowledged and agreed, however, that the Leasehold Mortgagee shall not be obligated to cure or attempt to cure Lessee Specific Defaults and nothing in this Lease shall be construed to require any Leasehold Mortgagee to cure or attempt to cure a Lessee Specific Default as a condition to preserving this Lease or to obtaining a replacement lease).

During the House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said it would cost at least $40 billion to terminate existing military housing contracts and buy out the creditors. And companies like Balfour Beatty, she said, understand this; their contracts are virtually untouchable, which make potential penalties for wrongdoing seem like just the “cost of doing business.” She added: “They basically can act with impunity.”  

Balfour Beatty Communities disputed this characterization. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” a spokesperson wrote in an email to POGO. “We care deeply about our military housing projects, our ongoing partnership with the U.S. Government, and our commitment to provide high-quality housing to our residents.” 

But former tenants such as Johny Dudek, who is working on taking his family’s housing disaster to court, don’t see it that way. “I want justice for myself, my family, and all of the other families…that Balfour Beatty has ruined,” he says. He expressed his anger and frustration that the military passed off responsibility for military housing to private companies, forcing service members to battle multinational corporations to protect their families.  

“The thing that kills me is these people are under contract to do a thing,” he says. “They are not doing the thing. Why do they still have the contract?”

Correction, May 9: A previous version of this story paraphrased a tenant’s quote misstating where in her residence a moldy space made it hard to withstand remaining for more than 20 minutes. The tenant has clarified that she was actually referring to the home’s crawl space.

A day ahead of the third anniversary of January 6, President Joe Biden traveled to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania—where George Washington encamped during the Revolutionary War—before delivering what he described as a “deadly serious” speech framing the stakes of the 2024 election. Biden wanted to show how Donald Trump, by inciting the insurrection and trying to overturn the 2020 results, had violated the most basic principles in a democracy: free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

“Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions,” Biden said. “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.” The alternative, Biden said, was “dictatorship—the rule of one, not the rule of ‘We the People.’” That fundamental tenet of American democracy was gravely imperiled, Biden warned: “We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”

That’s undoubtedly true. But the crisis Biden described—and the choice facing the nation this November—is much older and deeper than Trump. A determined minority has been trying to shape the foundations of American governance for their own benefit since the inception of the republic. For more than two centuries, a fierce struggle has played out between forces seeking to constrict democracy and those seeking to expand it. In 2024, the country is once again immersed in a pivotal battle over whom the political system should serve and represent.

From childhood, we are taught to venerate the Constitution as a civic religion, but the truth is that America’s democratic experiment has been defined since the nation’s founding by a central tension over whom the government should favor. The United States has historically been a laboratory for both oligarchy and genuine democracy. And to grasp the present-day fight, one must understand the long-standing clash between competing notions of majority rule and minority rights.

The founders, despite the lofty ideals in the Declaration of Independence, designed the Constitution in part to check popular majorities and protect the interests of a propertied white upper class. The Senate was created to represent the country’s elite and boost small states while restraining the more democratic House of Representatives. The Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of small states and slave states. The makeup of the Supreme Court was a product of these two undemocratic institutions. But as the United States has democratized in the centuries since, extending the vote and many other rights to formerly disenfranchised communities, the antidemocratic features built into the Constitution have become even more pronounced, to the point that they are threatening the survival of representative government in America.

The timing of our modern retreat from democracy is no coincidence. The nation is now roughly 20 years away from a future in which white people will no longer be the majority. New multiracial coalitions are gaining ground in formerly white strongholds like Georgia. To entrench and hold on to power, a shrinking conservative white minority is ­relentlessly exploiting the undemocratic elements of America’s political institutions while doubling down on tactics such as voter suppression, election subversion, and the censoring of history. This reactionary movement—which is significantly overrepresented because of the structure of the Electoral College, Congress, and gerrymandered legislative districts—has retreated behind a fortress to stop what it views as the coming siege.

To justify a deep hostility to broad-based political participation, conservatives have long pointed to the notion that the United States was never intended to be a true democracy. But those cries have gotten more pointed. “We’re not a democracy,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tweeted on October 7, 2020. It was not “the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens,” he maintained. Three months later, a mob that explicitly presented themselves as heirs to the American Revolution stormed the US Capitol to ­overthrow the will of a majority of voters.

And now they want to finish the job. “Welcome to the end of democracy,” far-right activist Jack Posobiec snarked at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

Our government was built upon a series of compromises that were meant to hold the new nation together. These decisions, however, ultimately laid the groundwork for the divisions that are ripping the country apart today, when extreme forces are openly talking about destroying democracy. The founders, in ways they could not have anticipated, placed a ticking time bomb at the heart of American politics. The structural inequalities built into the system have exploded before, most notably leading to the Civil War. But like a law of physics, these problems are accelerating, with one inequity exacerbating another. The country is again at a major inflection point ­concerning race, political power, and representation. If the framers once feared what James Madison called “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority,” the central threat now facing American democracy is minority rule.

In the late spring of 1787, 55 of the most illustrious men in America gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new constitution for the United States and, in Madison’s words, “decide forever the fate of Republican Govt.”

Standing at the back of the Pennsylvania legislature’s assembly room, Edmund Randolph, the tall and handsome 34-year-old governor of Virginia, took aim at the governments of the 13 states, which in the minds of nearly all of the delegates had led the country to the brink of collapse by being too solicitous of the common man. “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions,” Randolph said. “It is a maxim which I hold incontrovertible, that the powers of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches. None of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.”

The purpose of the convention was for the Articles of Confederation—the country’s original constitution ratified in 1781—to be “corrected and enlarged.” But in order “to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy,” Randolph laid out a ­blueprint­, conceived by his fellow Virginia delegate Madison, for a new national government to replace the Continental Congress and counter the power of the states.

Under what was dubbed the Virginia Plan, the House of Representatives would be elected by the people, like the state legislatures, but would be accompanied by an upper chamber, the Senate, whose members would be nominated by the state legislatures and chosen by the House. (It wasn’t until 1913 that senators were elected by the voters.) The new national legislature would choose the country’s president and appoint its judiciary. That meant the public would directly elect only one house of one branch of the federal government.

This marked a radical turnaround from the Declaration of Independence that had been signed in that very room 11 years earlier. The declaration held that governments derived “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It was “the mother principle” of the revolution, said Thomas Jefferson, that “governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.” The state constitutions subsequently drafted in 1776 placed the bulk of power in popularly elected legislatures that were expected to reflect and encourage democratic participation. Legislators were elected annually, with the slogan “where annual elections end, tyranny begins” so that they would be as accountable as possible to the public. Ordinary citizens clung fervently to the notion of “vox populi, vox dei”: “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Of course, many people were still excluded from the political process. Property requirements made more than a quarter of white men ineligible to vote, women could vote only briefly in New Jersey, and free Black men were allowed to cast ballots in just six states. The 700,000 enslaved people had no legal rights, and Native Americans were not even ­considered­ US citizens. Still, by the standards of the time, the postwar legislatures were far more reflective of everyday society than the colonial ones, which had been dominated by wealthy merchants and lawyers.

This new democratic egalitarianism might have defined America’s political system for decades if an economic crisis hadn’t hit in the 1780s. To pay off their staggering war debts—and a $3 million requisition in 1785 from the Continental ­Congress, which could not generate its own revenue—states enacted tax increases that fell most heavily on farmers, who made up 90 percent of the country’s population.

This devastated the economy, leading to a depression not surpassed until the 1930s. Tens of thousands of people had their farms repossessed. Jails filled with debtors. In eight states, impoverished citizens rioted. In Massachusetts, angry farmers tried to overthrow the state government. Citizens petitioned their legislatures for tax and debt relief, and politicians responded by forgoing tax collection and allowing debtors to repay their obligations with paper money instead of gold and silver coins, which were in short supply, causing massive inflation.

To the country’s economic and political elite, it appeared that the state governments were favoring the poor over the rich and debtors over creditors.

When he arrived in Philadelphia in May 1787, Madison said the “evils” of popular democracy in the states “had more perhaps than any thing else, produced this convention.” The erudite Virginian believed that majority rule was inevitable and, indeed, preferable in a democratic society. But he also worried that rash and impulsive majorities could trample minority rights and threaten the viability of self-government.

While most American citizens came from modest means, virtually all of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned large amounts of land, many were extremely wealthy, and nearly half were enslavers. Their views unapologetically reflected this class bias. The framers of the Constitution had no conception that white people would one day become the minority, but they were keenly aware that they themselves were a distinct minority who needed to be shielded from the masses. If a majority were to control all branches of the government, John Adams wrote, “debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a ­downright­ equal division of everything be demanded, and voted.”

In 1776, the prevailing view of the founders had been that people were meant to be as close to the government as possible. Now, in order to rescue the new American experiment, Madison strove to create a system that he hoped would result in “the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, from any share” in governing the country.

A day after Madison spoke against the excesses of majority rule, the convention considered the Virginia Plan for a new upper house. In every state except Maryland, the upper house was elected by the people, but Randolph and Madison proposed that members of the US Senate be nominated by state legislatures and selected by the House, with no involvement from the public. They suggested that both houses of the legislature be apportioned according to the population of each state, which would insulate the new Congress from popular majorities while striving to maintain the government’s legitimacy by ensuring that it represented the greatest number of people.

But the country was narrowly split between large states and small ones. To protect their power, representatives of the smallest states argued that each state should have an equal number of senators. On June 30, Gunning Bedford Jr., the attorney general of Delaware, confronted the delegates from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the three largest states in the union. “I do not, gentlemen, trust you,” he said. “If you possess the power, the abuse of it could not be checked; and what then would prevent you from exercising it to our destruction?” He issued a startling ultimatum: “The large states dare not dissolve the Confederation. If they do, the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice.”

To prevent a rebellion among the small states, the delegates narrowly agreed to their demand while maintaining proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Equal representation became known as the Great Compromise, but as Daniel and Stephen Wirls write in The Invention of the United States Senate, “The Great Concession is perhaps a more apt moniker.”

The new Senate made minority rule not just likely, but inevitable. It was another stick of dynamite strapped to the foundation of American democracy. Even those who wanted to curb the power of the masses expressed trepidation. Madison presciently warned that equal representation in the Senate would only worsen inequities over time as sparsely populated Western states joined the union, allowing “a more objectionable minority than ever” to control the federal government. But the level of inequality in the Senate today—by far the worst of any upper chamber in an advanced democracy—would have shocked even him. In 1790, the country’s most populous state, Virginia, had 12 times as many people as its least populous, Delaware. Today, California has 67 times the population of Wyoming. Fifteen small states with 41 million people combined now routinely elect 30 GOP senators; California, with 39 million residents, is represented by only two Democrats.

This imbalance is growing more lopsided: By 2040, roughly 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30 percent—who are whiter, older, and more rural than the country as a whole—will elect 70 senators.

Adding diverse areas like the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as new states would make the Senate more representative of the country overall, but congressional Republicans have flatly rejected this. And the underlying structure of the chamber is practically impossible to fix, because doing so would require the assent of those who benefit from its inequity. As one of the last acts of the Constitutional Convention, the framers specified that no amendment could deny a state equal representation in the Senate without that state’s consent. It’s unimaginable that any sparsely populated state would voluntarily give up this massive overrepresentation.

The composition of the Senate also significantly underrepresents voters of color. White people make up 46 percent of the population of the five most populous states but 78 percent of the five least populous states. Overall, white voters are overrepresented in the Senate by 14 percent compared with people of color.

Not surprisingly, the Senate significantly overrepresents Republicans, especially as the GOP’s advantage in smaller, whiter, rural states has become more pronounced. Senate Republicans haven’t won more votes or represented more Americans than Democrats since the 1998 election, but they’ve controlled the Senate for half the time since then.

The math is especially daunting for Democrats in 2024. Republicans can flip control of the Senate by winning Democrat-held seats in two of the nation’s least populous and whitest states—West Virginia and Montana. That would give Republicans a majority despite representing just 42 percent of the country’s population.

Even when Democrats manage to overcome the Senate’s structural bias and win a majority, the rules of the chamber make it difficult for them to govern effectively. During the Biden administration, as few as 41 Republican senators representing just 21 percent of the population have used the filibuster, which is not in the Constitution, to block legislation supported by large majorities of Americans on issues like gun control, abortion, and voting rights.

Trump’s impeachment trials vividly illustrated the skewed nature of the Senate and its implications. In 2020, the 48 senators who voted to convict him on the first article of impeachment represented 18 million more Americans than the 52 senators who voted to acquit him. When Trump was impeached again for inciting the insurrection, the 57 senators who voted to convict him represented 76.7 million more Americans than their colleagues.

But if the Senate has evolved to be an institution that protects conservative white power, the House was designed to be one. After the small states threatened to oppose the Constitution if they were not given excess power in the Senate, the slave states did the same with the House. The minority’s extortionist tactics worked a second time. To broker a deal, Scottish-born lawyer James Wilson proposed that an enslaved person be counted as three-fifths of a person, a figure that derived from how the Southern states were taxed in 1783. The near-complete acquiescence of the Northern majority was again called a compromise.

The three-fifths clause increased the Southern states’ representation in the House by one-third, greatly strengthening their power. Equal representation in the Senate and the three-fifths clause in the House warped the country’s most powerful new institution: the presidency.

When Wilson proposed that the president be directly elected by the people, the small states and the slave states contended that a popularly elected president would threaten their influence. So he floated a complicated alternative where “electors” selected by the states would choose the president.

The number of electors a state received would be equal to their total representation in both houses of Congress. This meant small states received a disproportionate number of electoral votes compared with large ones, and slave states triumphed over free ones. Virginia and Pennsylvania had roughly equal free populations at the time, Jesse Wegman writes in Let the People Pick the President, but Virginia’s 300,000 enslaved people gave the state six more House seats and presidential electors.

The North had double the free population of the South, but due to the combined weight of equal representation in the Senate, the three-fifths clause, and the Electoral College, 10 of the first 12 US presidents were enslavers, as were the speakers of the House for most of the country’s first four decades and 18 of the first 31 Supreme Court justices.

Even though electors now generally follow the will of their state’s voters, the Electoral College remains biased toward the same groups it favored at its inception, much like the US Senate. And it continues to depress voter turnout by depriving millions of citizens of a meaningful vote in presidential elections.

The structural inequities built into the Electoral College have other ripple effects. The tiny handful of battleground states are whiter and more Republican than the rest of the country. Eighty-three percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election were white, according to the New York Times, compared with 69 percent of voters elsewhere. Wisconsin, the tipping-point state in 2020, is also 3.5 points redder than the country as a whole. University of Texas political scientists estimated in 2019 that in a 50–50 popular vote election, the Republican candidate had a 65 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

And the number of competitive swing states in 2024 is projected to be smaller than ever, comprising just six major battlegrounds (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) with 15 percent of the country’s population. That leaves 85 percent of Americans with little incentive to vote for the nation’s highest office, which affects down-ballot races as well.

Because representation in the Senate helps determine the number of electoral votes, smaller states also have more power than large ones to determine the president. The vote of a Wyoming resident, for instance, counts 3.7 times more than that of a Californian in a presidential election.

Like dry rot on a decaying house, the imbalances built into the electoral system keep getting worse. Things that once seemed to be an aberration, like a ­candidate losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College, are now routine. Before the 2000 election, only three times in US history had the loser of the popular vote won the Electoral College. But that’s happened twice in 16 years since then. It almost occurred a third time in 2020, when Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes but Trump lost the three closest states in the Electoral College by just 44,000 total votes. Trump never could have attempted to overturn the results—and there would have been no ­insurrection­—if the United States had a system in which every vote mattered equally in presidential elections.

If Trump poses an existential threat to the political system, he is also a product of the flawed compromises made by the founders. The Electoral College handed him the presidency in 2016. The Senate protected him and advanced his radical agenda. The GOP’s advantages in these two branches allowed them to entrench minority rule in the third branch of government: the courts. The full conservative takeover of the Supreme Court during Trump’s presidency was the product of a bare-­knuckled, decades-long strategy by Republicans. Now they’re relying on their allies on the bench to make their power irreversible.

The courts were designed to protect minority rights from the other branches of government. Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that an independent judiciary was intended to “guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals” and prevent “serious oppressions of the minor party in the community.” Thurgood Marshall stated that the court’s legitimacy stemmed from its reputation as “a protector of the powerless.”

Yet, for much of our history, the courts have defended powerful minorities instead of vulnerable ones. The Supreme Court infamously upheld the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow in decisions like Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson and sided with wealthy economic interests during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

That changed in the 1950s and ’60s. The court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren embarked on a “minority rights revolution” that embraced a broad conception of equal protection and expanded civil rights and civil liberties, from Brown v. Board of Education to the “one person, one vote” cases that established rights to publicly funded counsel, privacy, and reproductive choice.

In the 1980s, to counteract the power of this Second Reconstruction, key members of the Federalist Society deployed a new legal theory, originalism, arguing that the Constitution must be interpreted as it was understood at the time of its drafting. This aggressively reoriented the judiciary from safeguarding the rights of less powerful minorities to once again protecting the priorities of more powerful ones, such as wealthy GOP donors and partisan political interests that favor white conservatives.

The current supermajority on the Supreme Court has selectively deployed originalism to freeze the Constitution in the country’s undemocratic past, when a majority of Americans were excluded from political participation, in order to take away core rights and freedoms on issues like abortion and voting. A court constructed through a series of antidemocratic maneuvers by Republican senators like Mitch McConnell—who owe their own power to minority rule—has in turn made the country less democratic.

The extreme direction of the court is emblematic of how the countermajoritarian distortions in American politics have worsened. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, but for the first time in US history, five of six conservative justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators elected by a minority of Americans.

Under Trump, this “superminoritarian” exception became the norm. Sixty percent of his appellate court picks were confirmed by senators elected by fewer votes or representing fewer people than the senators opposing them.

Much like Republicans in the Senate, the Supreme Court justices nominated by Trump are playing a critical role in boosting his chances of returning to the White House. The court reinstated Trump to the ballot in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois after state officials disqualified him for violating the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. The justices also slow-walked the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution, delaying the federal election subversion case brought by special prosecutor Jack Smith, possibly until after the 2024 election. That means Trump could face no legal accountability for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection before voters go to the polls. It is the most brazenly political act by the court’s conservative majority since it decided Bush v. Gore, which handed George W. Bush (who also lost the popular vote) the presidency in 2000.

When the delegates adjourned the Constitutional Convention in September 1787, the final document 39 of them signed benefited small states over large ones, slave states over free ones, and the country’s wealthy over the average citizen, collectively protecting elite white power in all three branches of government. It represented a stunning counterrevolution against the principles of the ­revolutionary era and paved the way for oligarchy to triumph over democracy.

Some of these objections were noted at the time. “The change now proposed,” wrote the pseudonymous Federal Farmer (believed to be New York’s Melancton Smith), “is a transfer of power from the many to the few.” The new Constitution would “swallow up all us little folks,” predicted Amos Singletary, a gristmill owner from Massachusetts, “just as the whale swallowed up Jonah.” Even those who strongly supported the Virginia Plan had grave doubts about some of the concessions they were forced to make.

The Constitution, despite its notable antidemocratic features, was still a remarkable document for its time, creating a strong central government and robust system of checks and balances that became a model for democracies across the globe. It prevented the country from sliding into anarchy, set up durable governing bodies, and restored elites’ faith in democracy. Yet it remains a fundamental contradiction that the nation’s most important democratic document was intended to make the country less democratic, and that a system of government founded on principles of majority rule would create institutions that facilitated minority rule instead.

Even as the political system was slowly democratized in fits and starts following the ratification of the Constitution, the belief that popular majorities needed to be constrained rather than encouraged, and that privileged minorities should be protected over excluded ones, persisted in American politics. So many of the antidemocratic elements from 1787 stubbornly persist, partly because the Constitution is so difficult to revise, with amendments requiring two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of states to approve them. This makes the flaws in the Constitution self-perpetuating: The more unfair the country’s governing institutions become, the harder they are to change.

Of course, Trump is not just a creation of America’s undemocratic political foundation; he’s an active accelerant of it. He’s exploited institutions like the Electoral College, US Senate, and Supreme Court that benefit him and his MAGA coalition while pushing harder than any other previous president to dismantle the constitutional roadblocks that stand in the way of autocracy­­—weaponizing the 2020 census to protect a conservative white minority, trying to undermine the postal system to stop mail voting, threatening to imprison his political opponents, and even calling for the “termination” of the Constitution when his ­attempt to overturn the 2020 results failed.

Trump’s vow to be “a dictator” on “day one” and his larger project for the second term—mass deportations, purging the federal bureaucracy, voter suppression on steroids—are so alarming precisely because his authoritarianism, combined with the conservative takeover of the other branches of government, could make minority rule impossible to reverse. This could be the year that the compromises the founders made finally cause American democracy to crumble.

But America’s preeminent property rights activist, Margaret Byfield, sees these parks differently. They were created at the behest of 19th-century robber barons, she says, who wanted to ensure that no one else could match their wealth or power. And that was just the beginning. Now a new generation of robber barons is “coming for the rest of the land,” she warns a collection of ranchers, lobbyists, and politicos gathered in Dallas last September.

I am one of several hundred attendees at the second “Stop 30×30” summit, a conference sponsored by Byfield’s nonprofit, American Stewards of Liberty. Upon checking into a towering Marriott hotel the night prior, I’d received a keepsake tote bag that featured a silhouette of a hard-riding cowboy atop the words “Land & Liberty.” The phrase offers a succinct summary of ASL’s gospel: Liberty is paramount, and can only be achieved through ownership of land. “Either you own property or you are property,” Byfield likes to say.

To help ward off what they perceive to be such threats to American independence, ASL has spent decades building a grassroots coalition. They’ve counseled local officials on how to slow the implementation of federal projects, whether the designation of a new wilderness area or the imposition of a highway. And they’ve waged aggressive campaigns to delist endangered species, whose presence can limit owners’ use of their land.

But this summit represents a new—and potentially more lucrative—turn for the group. Byfield and her husband, Dan, have capitalized on a growing MAGA-inflected backlash to Biden’s effort to conserve wild lands through their creation of a sideshow to the Trumpian political circus. My ticket to the show cost $225.

Behind the podium, Byfield favored pantsuits and dark dresses, the cool attire of a corporate executive. She spoke in calm and measured tones, but her urgency was palpable. “What do we want our country to look like?” she asks the crowd, her head flanked by no fewer than six American flags. “Do we want it to be owned and run by the environmental community? And the wealthy elite? Or do we want it to be owned and run by the people, which is how it was meant to be?”

I consider myself a nature critic, which is to say I write about the human relationship with the environment. So for several years, I have been tracking the Biden administration’s campaign to conserve 30 percent of US land and water by 2030—“30×30,” as the goal is typically known. Gradually, I came to realize that more interesting than the campaign itself (which has felt, at times, halting and disorganized) was the opposition to it. The tale spun by American Stewards of Liberty can feel like a James Bond movie without the glamour, with Biden and his wealthiest supporters cast as villains who aim to conquer and shackle the natural world. But it’s also got the appeal of an episode of Yellowstone, invoking the halcyon days of the rugged American frontier.

That frontier rhetoric is why I’m not surprised when, after an obligatory pledge of allegiance, Dan Byfield—a professorial, white-haired Texan who serves as ASL’s CEO—opens the conference with a brief history lesson. The Texas Revolution, the war that helped Texas split from Mexico, he says, was an example of “true bravery.” (He fails to note that those brave Texas soldiers helped protect and expand the institution of slavery.)

He could have hearkened back even further since the feud over public acreage goes back to the birth of the nation itself. After the Revolutionary War, states begrudgingly gave up territorial claims west of the Appalachian Mountains. The new federal government needed this land for military bounties and to sell to farmer settlers. In her opening remarks, “Assault on America,” Margaret fast-forwards the narrative to the moment a century later when new laws set aside some landscapes as symbols of the nation’s beauty. That’s how we got Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872, and, soon afterward, other parcels that were designated “forest reserves” and carefully managed to ensure an endless supply of timber. But it wasn’t until 1976 when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act that Washington moved to fully end the land sales. Congress charged several agencies with managing the more than 650 million acres that remained for, among other uses, science, archeology, wildlife, water, and recreation.

This turned out to be an astoundingly popular decision. Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans support the country’s public lands and parks, and favor safeguarding even more ground. But in some rural counties—where large portions of land remained federal property, thereby putting a damper on development and the local tax base—the end of land sales sparked what became known as the Sagebrush Rebellion.

The movement, which had coalesced before the Federal Land Policy and Management Act even passed, aimed to have federal land transferred to the states. This was in part an expression of earnest populist fury. But according to Yale historian Greg Grandin, it also doubled as a lobbying front for extractive industries, including “big ranchers, land developers, miners, lumber companies, and independent oil ranchers.” The rebellion’s spirit lives on most prominently in the cowboy antics of the Bundy family, who have repeatedly spearheaded armed standoffs against federal authorities—actions that many see as precursors to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Margaret Byfield’s passion for property rights almost seems predetermined. Her father Wayne Hage’s family had been ranching out West since before the Civil War. According to an obituary, Hage himself dropped out of high school in 1952 to help his neighbors weather a bad winter. Nonetheless, he was erudite and ambitious, eventually passing a high school equivalency exam and earning a master’s degree in animal husbandry from the University of Nevada. Hage dismissed the Sagebrush Rebels as lacking a “real philosophy.” They were too motivated by antagonism toward the federal government, he believed, and naive in imagining that state ownership of federal lands would be preferable. At the behest of a friend, he wrote a 1989 book titled Storm Over Rangelands, an extended argument as to why ranchers like him ought to be granted ownership of the public rangelands. He had a stake in the fight: In 1978, Hage had spent $2 million on a ranch that sprawled over 7,000 acres in Nevada and included rights to grazing another 750,000 acres of federal lands.

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ASL is selling copies of Hage’s book at the summit, so I spend a few spare hours in Dallas skimming it. Some of his arguments had merit: For all the democratic appeal of national parks, it seems likely that wealthy capitalists and industrialists supported the creation of Yellowstone mostly out of self-interest. By locking up land sales, they’d ensure no one out West could accumulate enough capital to compete; by controlling the one railroad to the park, they’d profit from the new tourism business.

But Hage’s legal theorizing was less convincing. He argued, based on little more than wishful thinking, that ranchers who grazed cattle on public land and had earned water rights had thereby developed a legal claim to own the full estate. Hage was confident enough in his theory that, in 1991, after federal agents seized 100 of his cattle grazing in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, he took the government to court. The ensuing lawsuits would not end until 2017, after the 9th Circuit Court emphatically rejected the heirs pressing his argument. The case was sent back to district court, where a judge ruled that the family owed the government more than half a million dollars. By then Hage had been dead for more than a decade. The ranch went into foreclosure; Hage’s son, Wayne Jr., who’d taken over the operation, packed up and moved out.

Hage had five children, including several daughters who launched political careers advocating for property rights. Margaret (then Gabbard) had graduated from the College of Idaho a few years before her father’s lawsuit dropped—she’d earned a degree in music and English—and quickly organized a raffle fundraiser to help him pay his legal fees. The prize was a cowboy painting by a friend of the family titled Stewards of the Range. By 1994, that early effort had grown into a formal nonprofit, also called Stewards of the Range, which aimed to “promote and defend” property rights.

By the late ’90s, Margaret was looking beyond the West, fighting a Clinton administration plan to designate the Upper Mississippi as an “American Heritage” river. “The power it would give the president is almost untouchable,” she told reporters at the time. Her key tactic was what she called the “Liberty Matters News Service.” By fax machine, she disseminated inflammatory disinformation, including a claim that the federal government planned to use satellites to spy on nearby property owners.

In 2002, Margaret married one of her allies, a Texas lobbyist named Dan Byfield. He also led a property rights group, the American Land Foundation, and the couple eventually merged the nonprofits, retaining elements of both their names. Thus, American Stewards of Liberty was born.

The Byfields, who did not respond to my requests for comment after the summit, soon began to market seminars and conferences where they promulgated the disputed idea that federal officials must always defer to county-level policies. That the theory has rarely been tested in courts hardly matters; the real point seems to be stoking NIMBY reprisal, creating a wave of controversy that can slow down proposed projects. Kane County, in Utah, has paid ASL nearly $1 million for such trainings. Still, compared to Margaret’s earlier antics, ASL was a quiet operation—one that, as Dan said in a 2015 newspaper profile, sought to avoid publicity. That way, he put it, they could avoid “political backlash of any kind.”

But by the first day of the Biden presidency, two weeks after the January 6 uprising, Margaret Byfield seemed ready to step back into the spotlight. She dusted off her “Liberty Matters” brand and inaugurated a biweekly email newsletter. “Liberals have been eroding our property rights for environmental causes…and inoculating Americans against truth and freedom for decades,” the first edition declared. To fight back, the newsletter suggested, conservatives had to build their own information ecosystem. And the information that she found most pressing to share was a warning: Now that Biden was in charge, a “massive land grab” was imminent.

Six days later, in an executive order, the president instructed the Secretary of the Interior to begin consulting with tribes, agencies, and private landowners to identify strategies that would allow the United States to conserve 30 percent of its lands and waters by 2030. Officially known as the “America the Beautiful” Initiative, the 30×30 initiative is in line with a global diplomatic and conservation project that envisions all nations making the same commitment. Before the initiative was launched, Byfield had already queued up the language she’d use to try to stop it—and positioned herself as a leader of the far right in the West.

Within weeks, the Byfields had produced a “Guide to Fight 30×30.” Our welcome packet at the summit included the latest edition, which claims that the Biden administration was using “the politically motivated climate crisis agenda to gain control of American’s [sic] land.” On stage, Byfield explains how the land grab supposedly will work: The government will foist restrictive easements onto those unaware of the rights they’re giving up. Then, “when they finally get enough of the landowners enrolled in these programs, they’ll start pulling the string on the net,” she says. The implication, as I understand it, is that the government will seize the territory from those who refuse to comply.

The guide also points readers toward the model resolution that the Byfields have drafted, which allows counties to express token opposition to 30×30. ASL boasts that over the past three years, 70 Western counties have passed versions of it. Biden’s program would, according to the language in the resolution, “replace the decision-making of independent Landowners who have been caring for these lands for generations” and “cause dramatic and irreversible harm” to local economies. This even though in a May 2021 report that outlined the guiding principles of the initiative, the Biden administration has promised to honor property rights and maintain ranching on public lands in the West.

Byfield reportedly advised former Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts on an executive order he signed opposing 30×30. ASL’s talking points were also cited in the 30×30 Termination Act, which was introduced in May 2021 by far-right Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert. In the accompanying press release, Boebert suggested that 30×30 was meant to pander to “extremist enviros funded by George Soros that believe the federal government should control every aspect of our daily lives.” The measure, which never made it out of committee, would have nullified the original 30×30 executive order and forbid any expansion of federal holdings in states where the government already holds more than 15 percent of the land.

At the summit in Dallas, Byfield contrasts the bill with federal environmental policies: The federal government works to ensure no net loss of wetlands; under Boebert’s law, they’d have to ensure no net loss of private property. But, Byfield notes, the fight in Congress is “a long-term plan.” The real war is at the local level. And for the rest of the morning, she turns the stage over to her local warriors.

Byfield introduces speaker Vicki Marquardt and describes her as “a pistol.” A district commissioner in Otero County, in New Mexico, Marquardt holds the audience rapt with a quiet, biting sarcasm. She notes that a recent wildfire, the biggest in her state’s history, was made possible thanks to the US Forest Service, which allowed a controlled burn to blow out of control. “Who knew that would ever happen?” she asks, after noting the hot, dry, windy conditions of those days. A ranger from the Forest Service later acknowledged the agency’s culpability and apologized. But that was hardly enough for Marquardt, who found it appalling that the federal government still wants more land “when they can’t even control and take care of what they have.”

Over lunch, the day’s keynote speaker—Richard Thompson, the executive vice president of United Country Real Estate, which specializes in rural land sales—laments that too many Americans have become disconnected from nature. It’s a sentiment I agree with, which is why I think it is good to protect some land by keeping it public. But Thompson has drawn a different conclusion: This separation explains why federal bureaucrats are so bad at managing land. The bureaucrats can’t understand what landowners do; they have no feeling for the land, he says at one point: “They’re trying to dictate based on theory. They’re trying to dictate to us what we do for land use.”

That us, and its implicit them, captures the tone of the day. At one point, some errant sound—microphone feedback, by my guess—prompts Dan Byfield to speculate that leftist protesters might be encircling the building. I suffer a flash of nerves; so far as I can tell, I am the closest thing to an enemy in the midst. (I registered for the conference under my own name, and, per journalistic ethics, divulged my identity and purpose to anyone who asked.) But later, during that night’s dinner, my anxiety peaks.

The Byfields have advertised the dinner as the red-carpet premiere of No Farmers No Food: Will You Eat the Bugs?, a documentary produced by the Epoch Times, a right-wing newspaper affiliated with Falun Gong, a religious organization that strongly opposes the Chinese Communist Party. The film offers a whirlwind investigation into a global conspiracy, carrying viewers from New York City to Sri Lanka to the Hague. According to its narrative, the UN is trying to shut down family farms so they can better control the world’s population, a program ultimately ending with everyone eating crickets and mealworms. Whenever I stifle a chuckle at what sounds like satire, I notice most of the other diners nodding earnestly. During the Q&A that follows, it becomes clear that most of the several hundred viewers in this packed ballroom are not only convinced but enraged: One attendee asks the director how we might go about prosecuting the people behind this conspiracy for war crimes. When someone asks a slightly critical question—noting that many cultures have long traditions of eating insects—there is angry muttering from the crowd. I am glad I have decided to wait until the next day to ask any of my questions. 

Byfield is featured prominently in the documentary, where she drops that favored line: “We either own property, or we are property.” She will repeat the charge, to applause, when she speaks on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2024. There, she will celebrate her latest victory: The New York Stock Exchange had recently given up on a proposed plan to create a new kind of company that could hold the rights to ecosystem services. It’s a riff on carbon credits, and an idea that raised ire on the left, from activists who also detest corporations and prefer public, communal control of natural resources. Byfield, though, does not miss a chance to stoke the culture war and keep her brand in the headlines. The concept for these companies, she said, proves that environmentalists are only after “power and money.”

The next morning, for a bit of relief from this hotheaded rhetoric, I head out for a jog at dawn—or try to. The conference venue, an airport hotel, is so ensnared in highways that I’ve got nowhere to range. Yesterday, everyone was talking about landowners as stewards, but this landscape feels like an indictment, the too-common outcome of private ownership. They’ve paved the Texas cowboy paradise and put up a parking lot.

Later, over lunch, when I reveal my journalistic identity to my tablemates, everyone is willing to chat, haltingly. One man tells me that he lives off the grid in Texas and that he and his wife bought tickets for the summit at the last minute, after hearing Byfield on Glenn Beck’s radio show. He is a self-described conspiracy theorist—but “most of mine have come true,” he says—and turns prickly when I ask for his name.

Alfredo Herrera is kinder, and softer-spoken, a young rancher whose ancestors first homesteaded their family plot in northern New Mexico 100 years ago. Now he has to be cautious not to disturb an endangered species, the Jemez Mountain salamander, that he and his family have never managed to see.

Their land is near Valles Caldera, which I later look up. It was once a privately owned ranch; the government bought the land in 2000 and turned it into a national preserve. The commissioners of the surrounding county have passed ASL’s anti–30×30 resolution, though they’re not the only ones dissatisfied with the federal government’s actions. Environmentalists contend the National Park Service has failed to keep out roving cattle. Then there’s a lawsuit that was decided a few months before this summit, awarding title to a portion of the preserve to a local Indigenous tribe, who asserted that they’d never given up the land in the first place. Valles Caldera is a reminder that most of the nation’s small-time farmers and ranchers benefited from an actual land grab.

Still, Herrera’s struggles sound real to me. Ranchers offer a powerful symbol of that cherished American ideal: rugged individualism. In 2018, the Wall Street Journal produced a romantic video about Wayne Hage’s struggles; another daughter noted that Hage allowed his cattle to range freely across rangeland, “very similar in many ways to the way cattle were run 150 years ago.” Even more liberal voices have acknowledged that if beef is to be raised sustainably in the West, by “mom-and-pop operations,” access to public land is necessary. Otherwise, the scale of rangelands required will price out anyone but the uber-wealthy.

I can’t help but wonder how much Herrera will be served by ASL’s anti-federalist agenda. I think of how cattle ranchers in southern Florida have embraced a very different approach: They’ve partnered with the federal government to keep out the concrete, selling conservation easements that entail giving up some of their land rights. They figure that if the land is kept intact to save the endangered panther, the encroachment of condos and residential neighborhoods will be blocked.

When I ask what he’s gotten out of the ASL summit, Herrera tells me, “It’s comforting to know you’re not alone.” All weekend long, there has been talk of “grassroots.” At the time, ASL’s website declares that 54 percent of its hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenue comes from small donors. (The vast majority of that money is spent on the couple’s salaries.) But that note will disappear at some point in the months after the conference. The group’s 990s tell a different story: “Service fees”—money that comes presumably from their county-level consulting and, lately, their summits—make up more than two-thirds of ASL’s revenue. The most prominent sponsor of both of the group’s summits has been the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a think tank funded by, among other donors, ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers. And what is their opposition to the federal government? It strikes me as more likely about keeping the oil flowing than keeping cowboys on the land.

Over our final lunch, a CFACT employee, Marc Morano, shouts his way through a rapid-fire PowerPoint detailing his Tucker Carlson–approved theory. It’s a riff on the same ideas we heard in the documentary the night before: Globalist elites. Climate hoaxes. Suppers of mealworms. Herrera and our tablemates listen attentively, but I keep returning to Margaret Byfield’s opening talk: “When you’re not fighting from the premise of truth, you are vulnerable.”

Do operators as savvy as the Byfields really believe Morano’s outlandish claims? Who do they want to own this country? If I squint a bit, this conference starts to look like a front on behalf of the oligarchs who pay the bills—the people who, if our public lands are ever privatized, will wind up the new owners. But maybe I’m just prone to conspiratorial thinking.

Nuclear war is madness. Were a nuclear weapon to be launched at the United States, including from a rogue nuclear-armed nation like North Korea, American policy dictates a nuclear counterattack. This response would almost certainly set off a series of events that would quickly spiral out of control. “The world could end in the next couple of hours,” Gen. Robert Kehler, the former commander of US Strategic Command, told me in an interview.

We sit on the razor’s edge. Vladimir Putin has said he is “not bluffing” about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction should NATO overstep on Ukraine, and North Korea accuses the US of having “a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war.” For generations, the American public has viewed a nuclear World War III as a remote prospect, but the threat is ever-present. “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” cautions UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “We must reverse course.”

So far, we haven’t. The Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war remain firmly in place.

The US government has spent trillions of dollars over the decades preparing to fight a nuclear war, while refining protocols meant to keep the government functioning after hundreds of millions of Americans become casualties of a nuclear holocaust, and the annual budgets continue to grow. The nation’s integrated nuclear war plan in the 1960s was utter madness. It almost certainly remains so today.  

Related

Annie Jacobsen on the horror, and unwinnability, of nuclear war

The plan being secretly shown at Strategic Air Command headquarters in 1960 had been a year or so in the making, ordered for the president by the secretary of defense. Fifteen years had passed since the two atomic weapons were dropped on Japan, each one killing tens of thousands of people in an instant, with thousands more burning to death in the ensuing firestorms.

Back in August 1945, the US had a third bomb ready to be shipped out, and enough nuclear material in its arsenal to produce a fourth bomb by the end of the month—the plan of action had Japan not surrendered. “The original atomic bombs were like school science projects,” says Dr. Glen McDuff, a long-serving Los Alamos nuclear weapons engineer and the former historian-curator of the laboratory’s classified museum. “Nineteen out of every 20 pieces of scientific equipment they had,” he explains, “they designed and built themselves with only about 80 common vacuum tubes.”

With World War II finally over, the fate of the Los Alamos National Laboratory was anyone’s guess. “After the war, with just one atomic bomb in the stockpile, the Los Alamos lab and town infrastructure crumbled,” reflects McDuff. “It was a daily struggle just to keep the lights on. Half the Los Alamos staff left. Things looked bleak. Until, that is, the Navy got involved.”

The US Navy was by far the most powerful maritime fighting force in the world. Deeply worried about its looming obsolescence in this new age of atomic warfare, it planned a live-action series of three atomic bomb tests for all to see.

Operation Crossroads was a grand, celebratory affair. A massive, public relations–based military test designed to demonstrate how 88 naval vessels could survive—even thrive—in a future nuclear battle at sea. More than 42,000 people gathered at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. World leaders, journalists, dignitaries, heads of state—they traveled to this far corner of the Pacific to witness the live-fire atomic explosions. This was America’s first use of an atomic weapon since the war. A demonstration of what lay ahead.

“For a crumbling Los Alamos in 1946,” says McDuff, “the Navy was their savior.”

Operation Crossroads injected the atomic bomb program with new life. By mid-1946, the American nuclear stockpile grew to nine bombs. After the test, the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested an evaluation of the “atomic bomb as a military weapon” to determine its next move. The report—classified until 1975—set the burgeoning military-industrial complex alight. The details were alarming.

Atomic bombs were “a threat to mankind and to civilization,” warned the group of admirals, generals, and scientists who authored the report—“weapons of mass destruction” able to “depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface.” But they could also be very useful, the group told the Joint Chiefs. “If used in numbers,” they wrote, “atomic bombs not only can nullify any nation’s military effort, but can demolish its social and economic structures and prevent their reestablishment for long periods of time.”

The board’s recommendation was to stockpile more bombs. Russia would soon have its own atomic arsenal, the report made clear, and that made America vulnerable to a surprise attack—later dubbed a “bolt out of the blue” attack.

“With the advent of the Atomic bomb,” the board warned, “surprise has achieved supreme value so that an aggressor, striking suddenly and unexpectedly with a number of atomic bombs, [could] ensure the ultimate defeat of an initially stronger adversary”—meaning the United States.

What America had created presaged its own potential demise. “The United States has no alternative but to continue the manufacture and stockpiling of weapons,” the Joint Chiefs were advised. They took notice and approved.

By 1947, the US stockpile rose to 13 atomic bombs.

By 1948, there were 50.

By 1949, 170.

From declassified records, we now know that military planners agreed among themselves that 200 nuclear bombs provided enough firepower to destroy the entire Soviet empire. But that summer, the US monopoly on nuclear weapons came to its inevitable end. On August 29, 1949, the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb, an almost exact copy of the one the US had dropped on Nagasaki four years earlier. The bomb’s blueprints had been stolen from Los Alamos by a German-born, British-educated Communist spy, the Manhattan Project scientist Klaus Fuchs.

The race to build even more atomic bombs now accelerated dramatically. By 1950, the US had added 129 atomic weapons to its stockpile, bringing the total to 299. At the time, the Soviet Union had five.

The following year, in 1951, the number climbed to an astonishing 438 atomic weapons in America’s arsenal—more than twice the number the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been told could “depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface leaving only vestigial remnants of man’s material works.”

The next year, there was a near-doubling of the near-doubling.

By 1952, there were 841 atomic weapons in the US stockpile.

Eight hundred and forty-one.

With the US monopoly on nuclear weapons now over, the race for supremacy had taken on a new urgency. Halfway across the world, the Soviets began building atomic weapons at a frenzied pace. In just three years, the USSR grew its arsenal from one bomb to 50.

But the atomic bomb—its extraordinary power, its mass-killing capacity—would pale in comparison to what was coming next. American and Russian weapons designers each had radical new plans on their individual drawing boards. What followed was the invention, in 1952, of “the most destructive, inhumane, and indiscriminate weapon ever created,” in the words of a group of Nobel laureates. A climate-altering, famine-causing, civilization-ending, genome-changing, newer, bigger, and even more monstrous nuclear weapon—one that the scientists involved called “the Super.”

Indeed, the Super “works better in large sizes than in small sizes,” its designer, Richard Garwin, told me in an interview, confirming that, yes, “I am the architect of the Super…of this first thermonuclear bomb.” Edward Teller conceived it and Garwin drew it at a time when no one else knew how.

The Super was a two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon, also called a hydrogen bomb, uses an atomic (fission) bomb as its triggering mechanism—as an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s explosive power is the result of an uncontrolled chain reaction in which the nuclei of hydrogen isotopes combine under extremely high temperatures, releasing tremendous energy.

An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people immediately (and tens of thousands later, from follow-on effects), as did the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whereas a thermonuclear bomb detonated on or over a city like New York or Seoul will kill millions of people in a superheated flash, followed by millions more from blast, firestorms, and radioactive fallout.

Garwin’s 1952 prototype had an explosive power of 10.4 megatons—the near equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding all at once. It was an atrocious weapon. Garwin’s mentor, the Manhattan Project physicist Enrico Fermi, experienced a crisis of conscience at the very thought of such a horrifying weapon being built. Fermi and his colleague I.I. Rabi temporarily broke ranks with their weapons-building colleagues and wrote to President Truman, declaring the Super “an evil thing.”

As they put it: “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”

But the president ignored the plea to stop building the Super, and Garwin was given the go-ahead to draw the plans. “If the hydrogen bomb was inherently evil, it’s still evil,” Garwin told me.

The Super was built. Its code name was Mike. The series was Ivy. “So it was the Ivy Mike test,” he said.

On November 1, 1952, it was test-fired on Elugelab island in the Marshall Islands. The Ivy Mike prototype weighed around 80 tons, an instrument of destruction so physically enormous it had to be constructed inside a corrugated-aluminum building 88 feet long and 46 feet wide.

Ivy Mike exploded with an unprecedented yield. The crater left behind was described in a classified report as being “large enough to hold 14 buildings the size of the Pentagon.” And while there is much to say about the inhumanely destructive power of thermonuclear weapons in general, two aircraft photographs—before and after shots of the Ivy Mike bomb test—tell the story.

In the top image below, Elugelab island appears as it had since its geological origin. In the bottom image, the island is gone. In its place is a crater two miles in diameter and 180 feet deep. Scorching the Earth with mass extermination weapons had just been one-upped by an order of magnitude. The invention of the Super brought with it the existence of a weapon that can vanish land.

What happened after America’s war planners saw what 10.4 megatons could instantly destroy simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad, mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands.

In 1952 there were 841 nuclear bombs. The next year there were 1,169.

“The process became industrialized,” historian McDuff explains. “These were not science projects anymore.”

By 1954, there were 1,703 nuclear weapons in the stockpile. The military-industrial complex was now churning out (on average) 1.5 nuclear weapons per day.

1955: 2,422. Almost two bombs per day, with 10 new systems introduced, including three new styles of thermonuclear bombs.

1956: 3,692 bombs. With production levels soaring, these mass destruction weapons were now coming off literal assembly lines at an average pace of 3.5 nuclear bombs per day.

1957: 5,543 nuclear bombs in the US stockpile—1,851 new ones in a single year. More than five per day.

And the numbers kept growing.

1958: 7,345.

And growing.

1959: 12,298.

By 1960, when the US war planners met in the underground bunker in Nebraska, the stockpile contained 18,638 nuclear bombs.

By 1967, it hit an all-time high: 31,255.

One nation. Thirty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty-five nuclear bombs.

Why stockpile 31,255 nuclear bombs when a single bomb the size of Ivy Mike, dropped on New York City or Moscow, could wipe out 10 million people? Why continue to mass-produce such weapons when the use of a single thermonuclear bomb will almost certainly ignite an unstoppable, civilization-ending nuclear war?

 

A new term was afoot.

A figure of speech known as “deterrence”—to keep something from happening.

But what does that even mean?

 

A plume of radioactive smoke rises after a blast at Nevada's Yucca Flat, part of a series of US nuclear tests dubbed Operation Buster-Jangle, November 1, 1951.Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty

As the nuclear stockpile multiplied out of control, so did each of the US military branches’ plans for nuclear war. As crazy as this now seems, before December 1960, each Army, Navy, and Air Force chief had control over his own nuclear stockpile, delivery systems, and target lists. In an attempt to rein in the potential for mayhem from these multiple, competing plans, the secretary of defense ordered them all to be integrated into a single plan, which is how the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for General Nuclear War got its name.

In 1960, Strategic Air Command (now US Strategic Command) had 280,000 employees. To work on this new plan, 1,300 of them were corralled into a Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, men and women whose sole job was to integrate all the individual target packages into a single deck. This amalgamated plan is what John Rubel—an avionics expert slated to serve as an assistant secretary of defense under President John F. Kennedy—and his colleagues learned about that December day in the bunker beneath Offutt Air Force Base. The secret plan that, if activated, would result in the deaths of at least 600 million people on the other side of the world.

The SIOP showed how the entire US military force would be launched at Moscow in a preemptive first strike. How defense scientists had carefully calculated that 275 million people would be killed in the first hour, and that at least 325 million more people would die from radioactive fallout over the next six or so months. Roughly half of these deaths would be in the Soviet Union’s neighboring countries—countries not at war with America, but that would be caught in the crosswinds. This included as many as 300 million Chinese.

In 1960, the world’s population was 3 billion. What this meant was that the Pentagon had paid 1,300 people to compile a plan that would kill one-fifth of the people on Earth. This number did not account for the 100 million or so Americans who would almost certainly be killed by a Russian counterattack. Nor did it account for another 100 million or so people in North and South America who would die from radioactive fallout over approximately the next six months. Or the untold numbers of people who would starve to death from the climate effects of a world set on fire.

After the briefing was concluded, a second classified plan of attack was demonstrated, one that Rubel described in his 2008 memoir as being an “attack on China given by a different speaker.” It involved similar theatrics, with ladders and pointers and plastic sheets. “Eventually [this speaker] arrived at a chart showing deaths from fallout alone.” The fatalities added up to “300 million, half the population of China,” Rubel wrote.

The following morning, Rubel participated in another meeting, smaller this time. It included himself, Secretary of Defense–designate Robert McNamara, each of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the commandant of the Marines.

Rubel recalled that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lyman Lemnitzer, “told everyone they had done a very fine job, a very difficult job, and that they should be commended for their work.” He recalled the Army chief, George Decker, expressing similar congratulatory remarks, and remembered how the chief naval officer, Arleigh Burke, “took his customary pipe out of his jaw and repeated the same message—hard job, well done, should be commended.” The last man to speak, General Thomas White of the Air Force, “ground out a comparable stream of the platitudes favored that morning in his gravelly voice, always filled with a certain air of authority.”

No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of 600 million people in a preemptive, US–led first-strike, Rubel wrote. Not any of the Joint Chiefs. Not the secretary of defense. Not John Rubel. Then, finally, one man did: Gen. David Shoup, the Marine Corps commandant, who’d been awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War II.

“Shoup was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a schoolteacher from a rural mid-American community,” recalled Rubel. He remembered how Shoup spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered the sole opposing view: “All I can say is, any plan that murders 300 million Chinese, when it might not even be their war, is not a good plan. That is not the American way.”

The room fell silent, Rubel wrote. “Nobody moved a muscle.”

Nobody seconded Shoup’s dissent.

No one else said anything.

According to Rubel, everyone just looked the other way.

Decades later, Rubel confessed that the SIOP had reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide. In his memoir, he referred to a time when a group of Third Reich officials met at a lakeside villa in the German town of Wannsee. It was there, over the course of a 90-minute meeting, that this group of allegedly rational men decided among themselves how to move forward with the genocide in a war they were presently winning—World War II—so as to ensure total victory. Millions of people needed to die, these officials agreed.

Millions of them.

Finally, when Rubel was in his late eighties, he articulated the key similarities he perceived between that Nazi meeting and the meeting beneath Offutt Air Force Base. “I thought of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942,” he wrote, “when an assemblage of German bureaucrats swiftly agreed on a program to exterminate every last Jew they could find anywhere in Europe, using methods of mass extermination more technologically efficient than the vans filled with exhaust gases, the mass shootings, or incineration in barns and synagogues used until then.”

Nearing the end of his life, Rubel had decided to tell the world what he could not back in 1960: “I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the Earth’s surface.”

The Final Solution called for the extermination of all of Europe’s millions of Jews and millions more people the Nazis considered subhuman. The plan for General Nuclear War that Rubel and his colleagues signed off on—the SIOP—called for the mass extermination of some 600 million Russians, Chinese, Poles, Czechs, Austrians, Yugoslavians, Hungarians, Romanians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Finns, Swedes, Indians, Afghans, Japanese, and others whom US defense scientists calculated would be caught in the crosswinds.

The Final Solution was enacted. The SIOP never has been—not so far. But a similar, still-classified plan exists today. Over the years, its name has changed. It is now simply the Operational Plan (OPLAN).

When the SIOP was created, there were just two nuclear-armed nations. Today there are nine: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Several of these countries are in direct conflict with one another. There is great instability between Pakistan and India.

Since January 2022, North Korea has test-launched more than 100 missiles, including nuclear-capable weapons that can hit the continental United States. Iran may soon have a nuclear bomb. Historians have documented at least six terrifying, nuclear close calls—each one based on early-warning data that turned out to be wrong. The possibility of a nuclear accident triggering a nuclear exchange, well chronicled by Eric Schlosser in his book Command and Control, never goes away. Nuclear command and control is a mechanized system; all systems have the capacity to fail. With the perilous introduction of AI, these threats ratchet up exponentially.  

For the Nuclear Information Project, in consort with the Federation of American Scientists, project director Hans Kristensen and senior researcher Matt Korda have identified the current Operational Plan for nuclear war as OPLAN 8010-12, consisting of “‘a family of plans’ directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.” But like all the Exceptionally Controlled Information in the nuclear command and control domain, the details of what, exactly, these war plans entail are off limits to the public.

The number of nuclear weapons in the US stockpile today is smaller now than it was in 1960, but there still are 1,770 deployed weapons, a majority of which are on ready-for-launch status, with thousands more held in reserve, for a total inventory of more than 5,000 warheads. Russia has some 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons, most on ready-for-launch status, with thousands more in reserve, for a total inventory about the same size. These weapons, if used, would result in the kind of mass extermination John Rubel heard about decades ago, and that Nuclear War: A Scenario is based upon.

To insist that nuclear war is “unimaginable” is a failure of imagination. Presidents have been asking us to contemplate nuclear holocaust since the SIOP first came to be. “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” President Kennedy told the world in 1961. Four years later, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev declared in a joint statement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” And President Joe Biden, in 2022, warned that “the prospect of Armageddon” is at a terrifying new high.

So here we are. Teetering at the edge—perhaps even closer than ever before.

Nuclear war is the only scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end civilization in a matter of hours. The soot from burning cities and forests will blot out the sun and cause a nuclear winter. Agriculture will fail. State-of-the-art climate modeling predicts five billion humans will die. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, “the survivors will envy the dead.”

I wrote this book to demonstrate—in appalling, minute-by-minute detail—just how horrifying a nuclear war would be. Join the conversation. While we can all still have one.

This article was adapted from Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen. If you purchase the book using this Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism. Click here to read an interview with the author.

Jump to all the photo projects

The American public seems to have emerged from the initial jolt of the pandemic with a newfound clarity familiar to survivors of catastrophes. Many people experienced an evaporation of the things that lent their lives the illusion of stability. Jobs disappeared and the social safety net’s holes loomed large. For scores of working people, it was—though they might not use this term—a radicalizing experience. Millions suddenly confronted the fact that if we didn’t protect ourselves, nobody else would. “I don’t really know if any amount of money would make working in this environment and being exposed to this level of risk feel worth it,” one grocery worker said early in the pandemic. For “essential” workers, it became clear that the work and the risk were a package deal.

This realization supercharged public interest in organized labor, bolstering a surge of support for union activity, which had already been growing slowly since the Great Recession in 2009. Polls show that public approval of labor unions is now at its highest point since 1965. This is unsurprising. Since the start of the Reagan era, wages for average workers have stagnated, astounding wealth has flowed to a tiny percentage of society, and the resulting rise in economic inequality has destabilized our political landscape. When this slow but steady erosion of the American Dream met the shock of Covid, it became all but impossible to avoid the conclusion that “Organize or Die” could be a literal slogan.

In 2020, we saw the launch of the (ultimately unsuccessful) union drive at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama­—at that point the most serious organizing effort against the Bezos empire. The addition of Covid’s burden to the weight of algorithmically driven warehouse work was the tipping point for fed-up workers unwilling to risk their lives for $15.50 an hour. That effort was followed in 2021 by a series of victories: a successful union vote at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, the launch of the still-growing Starbucks union organizing campaign, and a mini-wave of strikes dubbed “Striketober.” The drumbeat grew louder in 2023, with major strikes in Hollywood and at the Big Three automakers. In September, Joe Biden spoke at a picket line in support of United Auto Workers, the first sitting president in history to do so. It was clear that something was happening.

But what, exactly? The long-overdue return of unions to the spotlight is not the sea change that it can appear to be. In the middle of the 20th century, when American unions were at peak membership, about one in three workers was in a union. By 1980, the number had fallen to one in five, and by 2005, one in eight. This unrelenting decline in union density—the percentage of workers who are members—is the biggest problem facing organized labor. And since strong unions tend to improve wages and conditions even for nonunion employees, and make politics more worker-friendly, low union density is a problem for the entire working class and, more broadly, anyone with a job. Each success is meaningful to individual workers. But the wins do not add up to a transformative movement unless they can reverse decades of decline—which has not yet happened.

In 2022, even as the popularity of unions hit a generational high, union density fell to 10.1 percent, the lowest on record. The inability to channel all this excitement, during the most pro-union administration of most voters’ lifetimes, into an economy wide barrage of large-scale organizing drives, should put a lump in the throat of anyone who cares about the class war. The traditional analysis of union decline cites two main causes. The first is the devastating effects of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act—which restricted how unions could strike; outlawed “closed shops”; and enabled states to pass “right to work” laws, which under the guise of worker freedom allow a member of a unionized workplace to opt out of paying fees. The second cause is corporate America’s decades-long project to perfect its union-busting tactics.

But you can’t just chalk up organized labor’s woes to the old saws of union-busting businesses and hostile laws. They also reflect the atrophied state of labor’s institutions, a lack of adequate organizing ­infrastructure and budgets, and, in many cases, an attitude of resignation that decades of decline inflicted on some union leaders who should, right now, be rushing to capitalize on the favorable conditions.

From the very earliest days of worker organizing, there have been two fundamental competing visions. One side, rooted in the craft guilds of skilled workers, says that unions exist to take care of their members. The other, rooted in the mass industrial unions, argues that the labor movement exists to serve the wider purpose of helping all workers. It is the first philosophy, that of the self-declared realists, that has historically dominated the union world. The most vivid example of this divide came in 1938, when crusading United Mine Workers of America leader John L. Lewis, dissatisfied with the staid attitude of the American Federation of Labor, became the first leader of the more radical Congress of Industrial Organizations, which successfully pursued broad organizing in steel, auto, rubber, and other fields before merging back with the larger, more conservative AFL in 1955. While the first camp looks at a group of workers and decides whether it is in a union’s interests to organize them, the second camp looks at the unions and wonders why they are failing in their responsibility to organize everyone. It is the former outlook that prevailed.

Today, surrounded by centibillionaires and trillion-dollar corporations and a depressing private sector union density of 6 percent, we can safely look back on the past half-century and say: Well, that didn’t work.

Declaring that organized labor is poised for a resurrection is a dangerous prediction. It has been wrong often. Yet now, things may just be lined up. The failure of the union world’s narrow-mindedness in the face of the rising inequality and corporate power is running up against a general public that is tired, pissed off, and ready for action. To put it plainly: Work sucks, and people know it. Inequality taunts us from above, and crappy jobs taunt us from below. Unions are the path to salvation and, incredibly, people seem to have realized it. Now we find out whether the labor movement can meet the challenge of turning rage into rebirth.

 

UAW members and supporters participate in a rally at the UAW-Ford Joint Trusts Center on September 15, 2023, in Detroit.Sylvia Jarrus

Last year, we asked photographers to document this knotty moment for American labor. Their projects show both new organizing and the reinvigoration of old institutions. In March 2023, reform-minded Shawn Fain was elected president of the UAW by a margin of less than 1 percent. He proceeded to don an “EAT THE RICH” T-shirt and lead the boldest strike in the union’s history, shutting down all of the Big Three automakers and winning record wage gains for workers. Instead of resting on these victories, he announced an aggressive plan to ­organize nearly 150,000 nonunion autoworkers across the country.

In less than a year, Fain proved that unions already possess the most potent ingredient necessary for their rejuvenation: ambition. Images of the UAW on the frontlines empowered workers beyond any individual contract fight. In Los Angeles, something similar happened: So many workers went on strike last year—hotel workers, public school workers, and Hollywood actors alike—that the entire city seemed to morph into a living demonstration of the way unions lend power to everyone, from janitors to movie stars. Every labor victory serves as a giant billboard to nonunion workers: Organize, and you can have this too.

But there is much ground to make up. Horse-trading to pass foundational labor laws has left some of the most exploited classes of workers behind. In 1935, the Wagner Act, which gave private sector workers the right to unionize, explicitly excluded farmworkers and domestic workers, among others. And decades of “War on Crime” politics have created a vast pool of formerly incarcerated people who find themselves excluded from stable employment, easy prey for bad bosses and low wages. (If the labor movement won’t take on the task of helping them, who will?)

After decades of globalization, America’s industrial jobs have been lost. Millions of service and retail workers—for many, the only jobs left in the wake of neoliberalism’s offshoring—have thus far been nearly impossible to unionize. This is particularly true in the South. If unions cannot find a way to effectively organize the retail chains that dominate American commerce, it will not just be bad news for all of those underpaid, disrespected workers; it will be an ominous sign that businesses can leverage global changes in the economy to purge unions and keep them out indefinitely.

The invigorating moment we are now living through has the potential to propel unions back into the center of American life. Fully capturing this burst of energy is necessary if organized labor ever wants to fulfill its larger purpose: restoring the balance of power between capital and humanity. Beyond material gains, people want to change what jobs are—to transform these weird, necessary evils into a tolerable part of our lives. Without scrutiny, the workplace, where we spend many of our waking hours, can become a dark and dictatorial haunt. The labor movement seeks to shine a light in these spaces. “Don’t quit, organize,” goes the rallying cry. That has, for most of our lifetimes, been a difficult ask. But things change.

The zeitgeist is, for now, in our favor. These images capture the spirit of those trying to seize it.

City on Strike

By Sara Terry

In 2023, Los Angeles experienced an explosion of strikes across almost every sector of the economy. This project looks at how the city’s Justice for Janitors organizing in 1990—a historic and unexpected victory—laid the groundwork for organizing today. View the full project here.

Another Chance

By Jeff Rae

In New York City, low-income workers, especially those recently released from prison, are often recruited to work for so-called body shops—low-wage construction firms with few labor protections. Jeff Rae documents a program that offers an alternative: a paid pathway to apprenticeships that can lead to union jobs. View the full project here.

The Almighty Dollar

By Rita Harper

Working at a dollar store is often low-paid and dangerous—according to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 660 shootings have occurred in such stores since 2014. In the South, dollar store workers are organizing to improve their lot. Rita Harper photographed the fight by Step Up Louisiana to organize retail workers to push for better conditions. As blue-collar workers continue to migrate from the factory floor to the retail aisle, fights like this could determine whether a working-class job can still provide a decent life in America. View the full project here.

Eat the Rich

By Sylvia Jarrus

Last year, under the leadership of Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers conducted a historic 46-day strike that harkened back to the union’s militant roots. Sylvia Jarrus’ photos take us to the front lines to show the impacts of one of the most consequential labor fights of the 21st century. The new contract, Fain promised in his post-victory speech, is no less than “a turning point in the class war.” View the full project here.

Lessons in Class War

By Octavio Jones

As Gov. Ron DeSantis battles to reshape education in the state, the culture war is part of a class war: Unions are on the front lines of the fight over what educators can or (more often) cannot do. View the full project here.

Home Work

By Chloe Aftel

Domestic workers perform grueling work with few protections. Infamously, the group was excluded from the labor agenda during the New Deal. And, since then, workers have had to fight to catch up to standards enshrined for others in the law. Such care work can be hard to see and even questioned as work at all. Chloe Aftel’s photos highlight the day-to-day demands of the workers caring for those who struggle to care for themselves. View the full project here.

The call normally comes in when a survivor of sexual assault has arrived at the hospital and is preparing to undergo a sexual assault forensic exam, used to collect DNA evidence. Williams’ role is to be at the survivor’s bedside, providing emotional support—by offering words of comfort or holding their hand—and giving the survivor information about the resources they could turn to for further help, like reporting to the police or seeking therapy.  

But one day last year, she encountered a new challenge: For the first time in her three and a half years on the job, Williams watched as her client got the news that she had become pregnant after being raped by her ex-partner.

“She just sat there, frozen, and then just starts crying,” Williams recalled. Everyone in the room tried to comfort her, hugging her and telling her, “It’s okay, you’re gonna get through this.”  

But privately, Williams wasn’t so sure. 

If her client had gotten the pregnancy result about a year before, Williams would have told her she had options: Abortion used to be legal in Oklahoma up to 20 weeks’ gestation (though it was difficult to access; there were few clinics, and patients were required to wait 72 hours and have an ultrasound before having the procedure, among other barriers). Nearby states like Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico—where abortion is still mostly legal—also have clinics Williams’ client could have traveled to in a pinch. But in May 2022, Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, passed two citizen-enforced, near-total anti-abortion bills—both of which the Oklahoma Supreme Court later found unconstitutional. After the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, overturning the constitutional right to abortion first established in Roe v. Wade, Oklahoma enacted a law banning abortion, with an exception only to save the life of the mother. The law threatens abortion providers with two to five years in prison on a felony charge. So by last summer, when Williams’ client found out she was pregnant by her rapist, there was nowhere left in Oklahoma for her to get a legal abortion.

If Williams didn’t have to worry about the consequences, she might have told the woman where else she could still get a legal abortion, or referred her to a local reproductive rights organization that could provide more information. But she hadn’t even researched where abortion is still legal, because she was afraid of saying something that would put her at risk, given that her state has also made “aiding and abetting” an abortion illegal—though it’s unclear what, specifically, that means. (A spokesperson for Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond didn’t respond to my questions about whether advocates could be prosecuted for mentioning abortion as an option to survivors or giving them information on where it is still legal.) 

“Her only recourse,” Williams recalled thinking, “is either she’s gonna keep it or adopt it out.”

In 2018, staff at Williams’ agency took their first course with Provide, a national nonprofit that gives free trainings to domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention organizations on how to offer what’s known as all-options counseling to pregnant people. This includes information on carrying to term and parenting, putting their baby up for adoption, or having an abortion. The lessons emphasized that “we are not to insert our own values, judgments, or opinions on what someone believes is best for themselves,” Margaret Black, the agency’s vice president of clinical services, told me.

But that’s easier said then done when state lawmakers are forcing their morals on everyone else. It’s ultimately up to individual advocates like Williams to decide how much information to give to a pregnant survivor—and, in the process, how much legal risk they’re willing to shoulder if they do discuss abortion. Since Dobbs, 16 states have banned abortion almost entirely or at six weeks’ gestation, which is before most people know they’re pregnant. Nine states have laws that prohibit helping someone get an abortion, whether by mailing them pills, assisting a minor in accessing abortion, or otherwise “aiding and abetting.” New data shows the scope of the problem faced by advocates like Williams, who are often underpaid and already tasked with emotionally grueling work. A study published in February in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons found that, under Roe, pregnant and postpartum people in states with abortion restrictions had a 75 percent higher rate of homicide than those in states that protected abortion access. Another study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine in January, estimated that there were more than 64,500 pregnancies as a result of rape in 14 states with abortion bans after the Dobbs decision, with the majority—nearly 59,000—occurring in nine states with abortion bans that lack exceptions for rape or incest.

Across the country, domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention programs are run by state-led, federally funded coalitions tasked with overseeing organizations in their state. These groups, in theory, should be grappling with how to incorporate information about state abortion bans into advocates’ daily work. To better understand how that was playing out, I contacted the 24 coalitions in the 16 states with near-total bans (some states have separate coalitions for domestic and sexual violence agencies, while others are combined). Just 13 of those coalitions told me they’d discussed the details of their state’s ban with the advocates providing services to survivors. Most others declined to comment or didn’t respond to my inquiries, except for a representative for the Mississippi coalition—their state prohibits abortions with exceptions for the life of the pregnant person or in cases of rape and incest reported to police—who was the only one who admitted their coalition doesn’t address the issue with advocates at all. And Kentucky—where abortion is banned except to save the pregnant person’s life or prevent serious health risks—was the only coalition of the 13 that said they’ve discussed the ban whose spokesperson admitted to me that the agency advises their member organizations not to discuss abortion with survivors. 

Ondine Quinn, the director of program development at Provide, the organization that provides trainings on offering counseling, told me she sees not addressing the bans head-on as a dereliction of duty: “They have to put out guidance to their staff, they just have to—they can’t just ignore the issue and allow people to then individually make decisions about whether they can or cannot say something.”

So far, no advocates have been prosecuted for giving survivors information on how to access abortion—which Sara Ainsworth, senior legal and policy director at the national reproductive justice legal advocacy nonprofit If/When/How, attributes to the fact that “it’s not illegal to share information about abortion in any state under the First Amendment protected rights [to free speech].” But in states like Oklahoma and Texas, where it’s a crime to “aid and abet” someone seeking an abortion, some advocates worry that neither the First Amendment nor the confidentiality statutes that protect communication between advocates and survivors in many states would prevent them from potentially facing prosecution if they share information with a survivor on accessing abortion. 

“We don’t know,” said Alicia Aiken, director of the Confidentiality Institute at the Danu Center, a strategic advocacy organization where she trains service providers and advocates on protecting the privacy of survivors of violence. Whether advocates face prosecution for discussing abortion with survivors “is likely to play out very differently depending on the local conditions,” including the strength of a state’s confidentiality protections—which vary widely—and whether local prosecutors are motivated to pursue such cases against advocates, Aiken added.

Experts say the lack of clarity around what advocates can tell pregnant clients about abortion without putting themselves at legal risk can cause what academics and doctors have described as “moral injury,” the emotional turmoil that results from feeling forced to act contrary to one’s internal or professional code of ethics.

Advocates aren’t the only ones caught in the middle: Administrators at both the agencies that employ them and the state-level coalitions that are supposed to act as leaders and resource hubs are often unsure of what’s legal and what’s not, and worry that issuing clear guidance to their service providers could put their funding at risk. “We’re hearing a lot of anger from people who have gone into this work because they care deeply about supporting survivors and their lives and making sure people have dignity and access to care,” said Quinn, from Provide. “They feel that their hands are tied.” 

Williams, the advocate in Tulsa, is a 47-year-old former cop who wore her hair pulled back tight and her face makeup-free when we met a few weeks before Christmas; on her days off, she said, she indulges in Botox and salon visits to decompress from the intensity of work. She likens herself to a “bulldog”: “I will fight for my victims like there’s no tomorrow,” she told me. But when she’s working with survivors with unwanted pregnancies, she’s become more cautious. “I think it’s just so new to us that we’re all so afraid to even touch it,” she said of discussing abortion in light of the state’s ban. Agency administrators said that Williams speaks only for herself and not for the organization as a whole, and that advocates can always seek guidance from, or refer their client to, another team member. 

But for Williams, the uncertainty can feel overwhelming: “I ain’t trying to lose my whole livelihood because I’ve given someone this advice.”

The roles of domestic and sexual violence advocates can take many forms. They may answer calls on a hotline; accompany a survivor at a hospital as they undergo a sexual assault forensic exam; help them file a police report or access a shelter; go with them to court; and work with them to create a “safety plan” to minimize their risk of future danger from an abusive partner.

This work is both emotionally and logistically difficult, as a report published last spring by the National Network to End Domestic Violence outlines: The average starting salary for a full-time domestic violence advocate is just over $40,100. The low pay, combined with “the ongoing impacts of factors like burnout, vicarious trauma, irregular hours, and continued exposure to COVID-19,” has made it especially hard to retain advocates in recent years, the report notes. And the Dobbs decision hasn’t helped: Advocates “must now also navigate an uncertain legal landscape that may criminalize them and the work they do to ensure survivors have control over their own decisions and lives.” 

Since October 2021, federally funded reproductive health care organizations such as Planned Parenthood have been required by law to provide all-options counseling, though they’re not permitted to encourage abortion. There isn't an equivalent legal requirement for domestic and sexual violence–focused organizations that receive federal funding, according to spokespeople for the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services, which fund them. Still, many of these agencies offer advice on parenting, adoption, and obtaining abortions, because most advocates believe that survivors deserve to have accurate information about all of their options. “I think people sometimes don’t understand the brutality of what sexual and domestic violence is, and how it removes autonomy,” said Sara Barber, executive director of the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. “So if you’re responding to somebody, it’s a really important part that you restore that sense of autonomy.”

“If somebody decides they want to keep a child, that, too, is a valid decision,” Barber added. 

But for people trapped in abusive relationships, that decision isn’t without risk. Domestic violence often starts or intensifies during pregnancy, when abusers may begin or increase their abuse if they don’t have the tools to cope with stress about finances, an unplanned pregnancy, or jealousy about the attention a pregnancy will take from them, according to March of Dimes, a maternal and infant health advocacy group. Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people in the United States, CDC data shows—a fact that researchers attribute to the prevalence of both firearms and intimate partner violence; a 2020 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that more than half of the 189 pregnancy-associated homicides—characterized as occurring during pregnancy or in the first year postpartum—that occurred that year happened at home. 

A 2015 review of studies on the relationship between intimate partner violence and maternal and neonatal health, published in the Journal of Women’s Health, notes that pregnant people who are abused by a partner are less likely to receive timely prenatal care and more likely to report symptoms of depression both during pregnancy and after giving birth. It’s also risky for the fetus, increasing the likelihood of low birth weight, preterm birth, and even fetal death. After a baby is born, sharing a child can also make it harder for a victim to cut ties with an abusive partner: A 2014 study published in the journal BMC Medicine found that women who were unable to get wanted abortions were more likely to experience “sustained physical violence” and “sustained contact” with an abuser over time, while those who were able to obtain abortions experienced less physical violence and ended their relationships with their abusive partners sooner than those who gave birth.

Some abusers use repeated, forced pregnancies as a tactic to keep victims under their control, experts say. “We’ve had a few patients come in saying that [their abusers] just keep the patient pregnant so they can’t leave,” Kasey Magness, forensic nurse administrator at the Tulsa Police Department, told me. Crystal Justice, the chief external affairs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, recounted the story of an 18-year-old caller who'd told a hotline advocate she became pregnant after her abusive partner refused to let her use contraception and threatened to kill her; another, also an 18-year-old woman, reported getting pregnant after her abusive partner sexually assaulted her in a state with an abortion ban.

Refusing a victim access to birth control is another common tactic of abusers, experts say. These practices—as well as preventing someone from getting an abortion, or, less commonly, a partner forcing them to have one against their will—are all forms of reproductive coercion, which the National Domestic Violence Hotline defines as “threats or acts of violence against a partner’s reproductive health or reproductive decision-making.” While reproductive coercion itself isn’t explicitly outlawed, “some conduct that would be considered reproductive coercion is already a crime,” such as sexual assault, according to Ainsworth, the senior legal and policy director at If/When/How. 

The little data that exists shows that reproductive coercion is increasing alongside rising abortion restrictions. The National Domestic Violence Hotline says 2,441 callers reported experiencing some form of reproductive coercion in the year after Dobbs, compared with 1,230 callers who made those reports in the year before the Supreme Court decision. That’s a 98 percent increase—and it’s likely an undercount, given that domestic and sexual violence remains underreported overall, according to Justice. 

The impact disproportionately affects marginalized communities. While about 41 percent of women and just over a quarter of men have experienced sexual or physical violence or stalking from an intimate partner, people of color in particular experience especially high rates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Nearly 64 percent of multiracial women and more than half of Native and Black women (about 58 and 54 percent, respectively) reported experiencing those forms of abuse in their lifetime, compared with 48 percent of White women and 27 percent of Asian or Pacific Islander women. Research shows that LGBTQ people also face elevated rates of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse compared with cisgender and heterosexual people, with bisexual women and transgender people experiencing especially high rates, according to a 2015 report from the Williams Institute, a think tank based at UCLA Law.

Liz Tobin-Tyler, an associate professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University who has written about the interactions between abortion restrictions and intimate partner violence, told me she isn’t surprised that reproductive coercion is increasing as abortion restrictions rise. “When the state is saying, ‘You do not have choices [about reproductive health care],’” she said, “in a way, that signals to an abusive partner, ‘The state’s not giving you this choice, I already have this under control, so I therefore do not need to give you this choice either.’” 

Some of those who oppose abortion see it differently. Darrell Weaver, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma—where Williams works—has been a staunch advocate for victims of domestic violence. Last year, he successfully pushed a bill making the first offense of domestic violence against a pregnant woman a felony rather than a misdemeanor, and increased the punishment for perpetrators from one year to five years in prison.

But Weaver is opposed to abortion, and has consistently voted in favor of abortion restrictions. He declined to tell me whether he’d vote in support of rape or incest exceptions, and said he doesn’t see a connection between abortion access and the domestic violence issues he’s taken up.

He does, though, have something in common with some of the domestic violence advocates I spoke with who support abortion rights: Weaver worries that discussing a “hot topic” like abortion in conjunction with domestic violence could curtail support for efforts to tackle the latter. 

“If we clutter up these concepts,” he said, “then it’s going to diminish what we want to do.”

Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action, a national nonprofit anti-abortion organization, said in an email that while “domestic abuse is a horrific and tragic crime that must be taken seriously...killing a child through abortion is not the answer.” She noted that Live Action does not support rape or incest exceptions to abortion bans.

As an attorney and director of law and policy for the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence, Lourdes Matsumoto has gotten a lot of questions from advocates in her state about navigating the total abortion ban that took effect in August 2022. Many of their concerns, she said, highlight the same fundamental fear: “What can I even say without having to go to jail?”

“People want to know, ‘How can I give out information but keep myself safe from prosecution?’” added Matsumoto.

Idaho has some of the most stringent abortion restrictions on the books. Performing the procedure is punishable by up to five years in prison, except when “necessary to prevent the death of a pregnant woman” or in cases of rape and incest reported to law enforcement or child protective services. Matsumoto is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, alleging that the state’s so-called abortion trafficking law—which says an adult who helps a minor obtain an abortion without parental consent can be charged with a felony—violates constitutional rights to interstate travel and freedom of speech and association. A federal judge temporarily barred that law from taking effect in November while Matsumoto’s lawsuit works its way through the courts. 

But for advocates, the rapidly shifting legal landscape can make it harder to know what they’re allowed to tell survivors about accessing abortion at any given time, and more difficult for legal experts to give organizations advice, Matsumoto said. “It makes it very difficult to safely be like, ‘Go ahead and say this today,’ because tomorrow, I might call you and say, ‘No, don't say that,’ and you might miss my call, and then you might actually break the law,” she said, adding that the coalition has held several meetings to discuss what advocates can safely tell pregnant survivors about their options, as well as what kind of conversations would be riskier and could benefit from a lawyer’s input.

Idaho is one of the states with a law that protects communications between advocates and their clients. Such laws vary widely nationwide but most seek to reduce the likelihood that an advocate could be legally forced to divulge what a survivor has shared with them. How this would ultimately play out in states where abortion is now illegal remains unclear, said Aiken, from the Confidentiality Institute. She pointed out that other forms of privileged communications—between lawyers and their clients, for example—historically haven’t protected professionals who have committed a crime within the context of those relationships. Initially, after Idaho’s law passed in 2022, Matsumoto said she and others at the coalition “were hopeful” that it could provide “some protections” to advocates post-Dobbs. But with the passage of the abortion trafficking law last year—combined with the 2021 passage of a law prohibiting employees of agencies that receive public funding from promoting or referring people to abortion—the confidentiality clause could be practically meaningless: Those other laws may supersede it if an advocate was suspected of having helped a client obtain an abortion, Matsumoto said. (The Idaho AG’s office declined to respond to my questions.) 

Bills that propose prohibiting public dollars from flowing to agencies that provide abortion information or referrals also appear to be on the rise. Last year, three states—Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee—enacted legislation that bars public funds from supporting abortion access, and similar bills were introduced in 18 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion policy research and advocacy organization. For domestic and sexual violence organizations—which typically subsist on a combination of state and federal funding and private donations—such legislation can effectively stop staffers from discussing abortion options with pregnant clients, or at least make them fear doing so. 

In Kentucky, a law passed in 2022 makes it illegal for agencies to use any public funding to “directly or indirectly” refer people to abortions or counsel in favor of them. According to a spokesperson for ZeroV, the statewide coalition focused on intimate partner violence prevention, that law effectively bans their programs from presenting abortion as an option to survivors, since about 30 percent of their funding comes from the state. “Our programs abide by that law and do not make referrals for abortion so that they can continue to get state funding, which they need to keep their doors open,” Angela Conway, senior communication programs specialist ZeroV, said in a statement before declining to respond to follow-up questions. 

Someone who works in domestic and sexual violence prevention in Missouri, and also declined to be named for fear of retaliation, said that a similar bill limiting public funding, proposed last year, “raised a really big concern for our advocates, because it's a limit on conversations they could have with survivors [about abortion]—even if survivors were bringing it up and requesting the information.” That bill didn’t become law—but “even when things like that are proposed,” the source added, “it can cause a freezing effect with advocacy agencies.” 

Some coalitions, however, are openly fighting back. A few months after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, Barber, the executive director of the South Carolina coalition, argued in an op-ed for the Post and Courier how “removing access to abortion care is devastating to victims of sexual and domestic violence.” The coalition also issued a statement outlining the stakes of abortion restrictions for survivors. And she and the coalition’s staff talked with their 22 member organizations throughout the state about the specifics of South Carolina’s restrictions on abortion, which include a six-week ban, and urged them to make internal policies about what information they’d provide to survivors about abortion. She sees this proactive approach as her duty: “My job is to speak to the needs of survivors,” she told me. 

Tonia Thomas, a team coordinator of the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, feels similarly. West Virginia—which has a total ban on abortion, with exceptions only for nonviable pregnancies, medical emergencies, and rape and incest if a survivor reports to law enforcement—is “probably the reddest state in the nation, and we still had the conversations” about how advocates should navigate abortion restrictions, Thomas said. Last January, the coalition partnered with WV Free, a local reproductive justice organization, to co-host a webinar on “counseling in the new landscape of abortion legality.” Nearly two dozen advocates from across the state attended. Representatives of coalitions in Indiana, Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia told me their agencies had made similar training efforts. 

Not all the state coalitions have taken these measures, though. A representative for the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence acknowledged that the coalition doesn’t have discussions about the impacts of abortion restrictions on survivors. “That’s not something we talk about,” Tara Steverson, the Mississippi coalition’s communications and membership specialist, said. 

But Stephanie Piper, the sexual assault program manager and victim advocate at the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence in Biloxi, Mississippi, does talk about it. Piper has continued to provide all-options counseling to pregnant survivors, including information on accessing abortion if that’s what someone wants. Having worked as an advocate for 13 years, Piper has seen enough survivors who resort to buying wire hangers or drinking bleach and ammonia to try to terminate a pregnancy to know that “if someone has been a victim of domestic violence or sexual assault and they do not want to continue to be pregnant by the person that had injured them, the risks are necessary,” she said. But still, she added, guidance from the Mississippi Coalition “would be a nice conversation starter, just to see where everybody is.”

Williams, the advocate in Tulsa, remembers getting an ultrasound during her own pregnancy more than 20 years ago, and hearing what would become her daughter’s heartbeat. That day came after five years of trying to get pregnant, she said, and that long, hard road to becoming a mom is part of what shaped her own views on abortion: “It’s not something I feel like I could ever do,” she told me, “but I'm not going to tell someone else what they can do or what's right for them.” 

“I wish it was still available,” she added, “because there are some people that could use it.”

Williams doesn’t know what happened to the woman who found out she was pregnant by her rapist last year. Following up with clients can be difficult, Williams said; doing so can present dangers for the survivor, and some survivors don’t want to revisit discussing the trauma that led them to cross paths with her in the first place.

As a result, Williams said, “it’s so easy for people to fall through the cracks.” 

Those are the people she wishes anti-abortion lawmakers had to answer to. “I wish they had to comfort them,” she said. “I wish they were the ones that had to tell them it’s going to be okay.” 

This article was supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 National Fellowship.

At the time, Pollard was eager to help elect Biden over President Donald Trump, hoping a Democratic victory would lead to meaningful differences in health care and student loan reform. Four years later, she has mixed feelings about what many would consider an impressive bullet point on a young politico’s resume. “I feel incredibly embarrassed for having worked for him,” says Pollard, who was 20 when she started the job during a gap year in college. “I’m glad I did the work, but it’s really hard to have my name attached to him now.”

She was one of more than 500 former Biden 2020 staffers who in November signed an open letter imploring Biden to call for an Israeli ceasefire. As of mid-February, at least 28,000 people—including thousands of children—have died in the ongoing conflict. Roughly 2 million people have reportedly been displaced.

Some of the signers, like Pollard, believe Biden is complicit in the destruction. They cite his failure to pressure Israel to de-escalate its assault on Gaza and his administration sending unconditional military aid to Israel, bypassing congressional approval in the process.

“Mr. President, you have spoken intimately about the unbearable pain and grief of losing a child—we were shocked and saddened to see you justify the death of Palestinian children as ‘the price of waging a war,’” read the letter Pollard signed.

The sentiment that Biden is blundering the crisis in the Middle East is widely shared within Pollard’s age cohort. A New York Times poll in late December revealed that only 3 percent of voters between 18 and 29 strongly supported the president’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war; nearly half of these voters strongly disapproved. Even among Democrats, Biden is increasingly at odds with one of the party’s largest voting blocs: the youth. Between October and November, the proportion of young Democrats who viewed Biden as “too pro-Israeli” doubled, increasing from 21 percent to 42 percent, according to a University of Maryland–Ipsos poll.

But the political issue Biden faces in 2024 isn’t merely that young people might not feel compelled to vote for him. Young people like Pollard—often childless and more able to take on low-paid or even unpaid entry-level campaign work with unconventional hours and an abrupt end date of November 6—might not feel motivated to campaign for him. 

“Personally, I would have a harder time going to work for them,” remarks Gwen Schroeder, who says at 40 she was the oldest member of a Biden 2020 video team. She adds, “We have missed the opportunity to save countless lives, and to do literally anything to pressure Netanyahu to take a different approach.” Schroeder signed the letter from 2020 Biden campaign workers, but says she will still support Biden over Trump because she feels Trump is more dangerous.

In addition to those Biden 2020 staffers who have protested, 17 current Biden 2024 staffers recently urged the president to press for a permanent ceasefire in an open letter. Several prominent young TikTok and Instagram influencers who have promoted Biden’s policy agenda through White House events are also growing disillusioned with the administration, citing Biden’s position on Israel and Palestine as a primary factor. And more than a half-dozen current and former leaders from large, youth-centric grassroots political organizations, such as March for Our Lives, GenZ for Change, and the Sunrise Movement, penned their own letter in November calling on Biden to restrain Israel.

“Young people are a cornerstone of a winning Democratic coalition, and the vast majority of young people in this country are rightfully horrified by the atrocities committed with our tax dollars, with your support, and our nation’s military backing,” these activists wrote. “We did not spend hours upon hours knocking doors and making calls to turn out the vote so that you could support indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and violations of international law.”
 

 

Democratic campaigns rely on young staffers.

But Biden’s backing of Israel has made some question working for him.

 

Derek French/SOPA/ZUMA

 
The open letters may be the tip of the iceberg of the eroding support among young progressives. Conversations with more than a dozen former Biden 2020 staffers, senior aides from other past Democratic presidential campaigns, leaders of political canvassing networks, and content creators with large youth followings suggest mounting outrage with the president’s longstanding deference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will cause young foot soldiers who typically do much of the work to turn out the Democratic vote to sit this election out. Some will neither vote for Biden nor do the pivotal work of encouraging other voters to turn out. 

“Increasingly, our democratic elections are extremely reliant on young people,” Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which helps elect progressive leaders such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, tells Mother Jones. “Not only are we talking about the staff of these campaigns, but we’re talking about the people they’re mobilizing.”

Few people understand the importance of young people in campaign apparatuses as well as Kunoor Ojha, who served as the director of student organizing for the 2016 bid of Bernie Sanders, and later, Hillary Clinton.

Sanders’ Nashua, New Hampshire, office, where Ojha started the 2016 cycle, was, in her words, “like basically every office on every Democratic campaign, staffed by almost entirely young, under-25-years-old, field organizers.” At the time, Ojha herself was 25.

There, Ojha oversaw field workers who hosted nonstop phone banks in the evenings and did marathon door-knocking stints on weekends. “You’re bundling up in the cold knocking doors for hours with volunteers. You’re staying in the office late at night, tallying up everyone that you talked to that day, and everyone that your volunteers talked to over the phone,” she says. “You’re meeting with volunteers in coffee shops and restaurants to try and understand their passion and if you can get them more engaged.”

The volunteers included “high school students and young people working part-time jobs at coffee shops and restaurants who were drawn to Sanders’ economic message.

The work of Ojha’s young field workers—and the volunteers they recruited—paid off big for Sanders in the Granite State. He bested Clinton there by more than 22 points, with exit polls showing 83 percent of Democrats aged 18 to 29 supporting Sanders. 

Relatively insufficient youth engagement may have contributed to Clinton’s 2016 loss in the general election. When Ojha joined Clinton’s team in the summer of 2016, she says, she was the first national staffer dedicated to mobilizing student and campus voters in the general election. Clinton ultimately received 55 percent of votes among people age 18 to 29; Obama received 66 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2012.

Youth engagement also played a significant role in Biden’s 2020 victory. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement estimated that roughly half of adults under 30 cast ballots in 2020, matching the proportional turnout for Barack Obama’s first presidential election. 

Biden’s win was assisted by progressive youth-led groups, like Sunrise Movement, whose 3,000-plus volunteers engaged with 3.5 million young voters encouraging them to vote for Biden after his campaign heeded the group’s calls to beef up his climate positions. Biden’s 2020 campaign also worked with more than 90 social media influencers who landed 264 million “impressions” and 2.1 million “engagements.” 

Fast-forward to Biden’s current campaign against Trump, and there’s little involvement from progressive grassroots groups such as Sunrise and Justice Democrats, which helped defeat Trump in 2020.

“Biden’s policies have made our jobs a lot harder,” says Michele Weindling, Sunrise’s political director. “There’s a lot of questioning and silence [within Sunrise]. There just isn’t a clear path forward to seeing Biden as a candidate that people feel speaks to them and represents them. And that makes it really hard to build a robust strategy that accounts for his election.”

Beyond volunteer groups, the Biden campaign may face headwinds in recruiting enough field workers. The campaign’s jobs page currently shows more than six dozen openings, including one listing for a “youth engagement intern” spot that’s open in multiple states.

“I would not want to be in the shoes of a young or mid-level staffer running a field office this year,” says Ojha. “I think it is already a pretty tough year for hiring. There are hundreds and hundreds of jobs that this campaign needs to fill. Several hundreds of those would usually be filled by twentysomething field organizers. I think it’s going to be hard to fill all those roles. And if they can’t do that, that just makes the whole situation a lot scarier in those states we know are going to be field-margin states: the Pennsylvanias, the Arizonas.”

Even among the TikTok and YouTube thought-influencers the Biden administration has sought to work with, inviting them to bill signings and special press briefings, more and more have begun to speak out against Biden’s positions on Israel and Palestine. 

Consider George Lee, an internet personality and educator whose “Conscious Lee” TikTok channel has 2.5 million followers. In 2020, Lee says, he used his platforms to support local Democratic candidates and oppose Trump. In 2022, Lee was invited by the Biden White House to attend a State of the Union watch party and share his experiences from that event online. By the end of 2023, Lee was posting multiple videos pointing out times he believed Biden had lied about the Israel-Hamas war. 

“If you told me that there would be genocide whether we have Trump or Biden…That whether Trump or Biden was in office, the Supreme Court was still going to overturn Roe v. Wade. That whether Trump or Biden was in office, they would still overturn affirmative action—I think that there will be a lot more individuals that do not participate in this election,” Lee says.

V Spehar, a content creator whose UnderTheDeskNews channel has 3 million followers on TikTok, thinks Biden could learn from the young creators who have expanded their platforms through authentic content. Spehar says Biden would make huge leaps with young people by leveling with them about policy mistakes in the Middle East.

“If he came out on TV right now and was like, ‘Fuck Netanyahu. That Motherfucker punk’d me so bad.’ Oh my god. I’m trying to be cool with him and he comes out here and says this crazy-ass thing,'” says Spehar, who was invited to the White House to see Biden sign the Inflation Reduction Act. “I think people would be like, ‘Yo, okay, yeah, we’ve all had a friend betray us, I can understand that.'”

Biden allies are far from considering the brazen approach Spehar suggests. But some acknowledge there’s a disconnect between older and younger Democrats.

In November, a group of top Biden campaign aides and Obama alumni converged in Chicago to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Obama’s 2008 election victory. While there, dozens of them gathered in a Sheraton conference room to discuss Biden’s 2024 campaign. 

At the meeting, previously reported by New York magazine, Obama alumni had questions for the Biden camp. “How might third-party candidates affect youth turnout? What’s your precise understanding of how to reach voters with inscrutable media-consumption habits?” New York reported.

An Obama alumnus who was in the room had another question. “Where are the young people?” this person, who requested anonymity, said to Mother Jones. “They’re not here. They’re not in this room.” 

But other experts in Democratic politics suggest the erosion or absence of youth in Biden’s campaign might not be as high of an obstacle to Biden’s reelection as pundits and left-wing progressives paint it to be.  

“There is just a functional reality of the political numbers that there are more Boomers in this country than there are Gen Z,” says Christopher Hale, a staffer of the Obama-Biden White House and Obama’s 2012 campaign, who also ran for Congress in southern Tennessee.

The Biden campaign could also try to make up for the lack of young volunteers with paid canvassers. “Of course it’s helpful when the people that you’re engaging to do the work are passionate and driven,” says longtime Democratic strategist Melissa DeRosa, “but at the same time—not to be cynical—you can also do a lot of paid canvassing. As long as you can raise the money to get the bodies on the street to pull the identified voters, it almost doesn’t matter. You’re never going to recapture the magic in a bottle that we had in 2008 with someone like Barack Obama, where the interest and the enthusiasm were so pure and so mission-based. You didn’t see that before and you haven’t seen it since.”

Further, there’s a concern among some Democratic strategists, Hale says, that doing too much to sway young voters, who tend to be far more liberal, would vex middle-aged and older moderate voters, especially former Republican or swing voters who dislike Trump more than they dislike Biden. 

Recent Quinnipiac University polling on Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) offers some reassurance that a more pro-Israel policy stance is being well received among older cohorts—though not so much among the youth. Fetterman, whose metamorphosis from a progressive gym-short wearing populist to a (still-gym-short-wearing) pro-Israel hawk has riled young liberals who helped him get elected, has only 28 percent of registered voters in Pennsylvania age 18 to 34 now expressing a favorable view of the senator. But among voters age 65 and above, 56 percent have a positive perception.

“At the end of the day, this campaign does not want to win over MSNBC hosts,” says Hale. “And it doesn’t want to even win over young progressives. It wants to win over reliable voters. And young progressives, for better or worse, are not reliable voters right now.”

If that’s the calculus, it’s working. Darcy Pollard, the young progressive from Maryland, doesn’t feel particularly won over. Nor is she doing much to convince people to vote for her old boss. When her peers mention they are considering not voting for a presidential candidate in November, the former Biden 2020 staffer offers a somber expression of understanding: “I see where you’re coming from.”

Any super-rich schmuck can buy a yacht. Or a mansion. Even Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire, owned a mansion and a yacht. Multi-millionaires and billionaires can buy many things that (loudly) telegraph their wealth, from Lamborghinis to Birkins to Rolexes. But instead of asserting the prosperity, taste, and exclusivity the titans of the world assume, these possessions signal that this super-rich person is, in fact, an unsophisticated super-rich schmuck.

But, if a wealthy person aspires to be more than just another Kardashian, one asset transcends all of this and changes the very identity of its owner, notably in the eyes of society. That luxuriously special, quintessentially refined asset is art. I’m not talking about art from a local gallery or poster shop or Etsy or eBay. I’m referring to the most expensive art in the world; by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso,  Monet, Warhol, Pollock, Koons. These are the preferred investment vehicles for really smart and/or really insecure oligarchs. 

The planet’s power brokers know that society will accept the recently wealthy—but only up to a point. When a person wants to take the next step up the food chain, when they want to stick out beyond the others in high society, they buy art. Rich people who become art collectors are no longer viewed by society as simply rich, or (God forbid!) nouveau riche. When a mogul collects art, a whole new set of adjectives is used to describe them: refined, cultured, urbane. Indeed, they have graduated. Art is the way the rich buy legitimacy.

And oligarchs, who are further tainted by the whiff of corruption and undue privilege, need to legitimize themselves more than anyone else. Their art collections soften their image. Surely a person who appreciates beautiful things can’t be that bad. Like Al Capone in The Untouchables, who cries at the opera, an appreciation for art humanizes even the most vicious real-life Bond villains.

Before we continue, let me dispense with a formality. I happen to know all this because, as a high-end art dealer, I’ve personally interacted with oligarchs from all over the world. I’ve sold them Lichtensteins, Rothkos, Matisses, Dalis, and  others at the highest level. Art is a business of discretion and secrecy, qualities that oligarchs prize. But, unlike all my colleagues in the art business, I’ve decided to tell it like it is. Why? I suppose you might say that I am in a unique position. I got busted for wire fraud some years ago and was imprisoned for more than a year in Otisville, a minimum-security camp in upstate New York.

To save my gallery from financial ruin, I had desperately resorted to lying about payments and taking loans on things that weren’t ours. That is until my partner got spooked and turned me in. I admit that I feel guilty about it all; I didn’t want to fuck anyone over—but inadvertently, I did.

I also feel a bit salty for having become the poster boy for corruption in the art business, when most of the industry is about hiding money, misrepresentation, and general malfeasance. But now, the world is a beneficiary of my fuckup, as I’ve decided to share my arcane knowledge so that less-rich people can learn about the shit that goes down with the ruling elite. And shit does go down—all over the world.

We think of oligarchy as a foreign concept, but the truth is that American oligarchs abound, and many of them collect art. It’s a time-honored strategy. The robber barons of old took time between amassing their wealth and industrializing our cities to build world-class museums—the Frick, the Carnegie, MoMA. We can only hope that the new oligarch collectors follow suit.

Should you happen to speak to former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, ask him if he’ll donate his Magritte collection to a museum. Ronald Lauder, a huge Republican donor and confidante of politicians, has a phenomenal collection of Austrian Secessionist art, some of which he displays in his own first-rate museum. The late Ambassador Donald Blinken (Antony’s father) owned four wonderful Rothkos. Even Donald Trump claims to own a Renoir, though an identical one hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, making one of the two a fake (guess which?). One day there may be a Donald Trump museum; his “Renoir” can hang there.

I had high-end galleries in New York and in Moscow for years, and so I got to understand oligarchs pretty well. Over plenty of champagne, or vodka, they explained why they loved buying art. 

“Did you see the ARTnews list of top collectors?” one ultra-wealthy American hedge fund manager asked me many years ago. He had been collecting for about a year, just starting to explore the Impressionists and early moderns—an easy entry point for newbies. But this guy was so rich that he’d bought some very expensive entry-level paintings.

“Are you in the top 200?” I was at once surprised and happy for him.

“I’m in the top 10!” he said, equally dumbfounded.

Simply by buying some expensive art, this really rich guy immediately was transformed. He was no longer one of many in a growing list of lucky, brash, crass billionaires, but a man of culture, sophistication, and taste. Never mind that, as he confessed to me, “I don’t know the difference between Monet and Manet.” He had completed his metamorphosis and emerged a beautiful (social) butterfly.

This instant identity upgrade is a dream scenario and the top reason, psychologically and sociologically, why oligarchs collect art.

The problem is that public adulation of a wealthy new collector attracts a swarm of art insects (dealers, advisors, curators) who are so relentlessly obsequious that the newly minted collector eventually begins to believe the buzz.

“I want to be a tastemaker,” my rich friend told me soon after his ARTnews star turn, indifferent to the fact that any member of the cognoscenti should at least be able to differentiate between two of the most famous Impressionist masters. But you can hardly blame him. After having been enthusiastically fêted and honored, he had to believe that his talents extended beyond the stock ticker and onto the walls of the world’s top museums—where his paintings would occasionally be displayed on loan with the quiet acknowledgment of ownership.

“I want art that fits in my suitcase,” a wealthy Russian collector I’ll call Yevgeny (no real names—I don’t wish to fall out of any windows) told me. “That way, if something crazy happens, I can take my art and get the fuck out of here.”

This sentiment is not unique. One of the draws of art is that it is easily transportable and thus easy to smuggle. Yevgeny could put his small Kandinsky, which is worth $10 million, in a hardshell rollaway bag, and take it on his plane to Malta or Macau or even New York or London. Nobody would know that he just moved all that money across borders. By doing this, Yevgeny would take full advantage of the esoteric nature of the asset and the lack of international regulation. 

If you’ve ever traveled internationally on a private plane (sorry, art dealers can be snobs), you would likely notice the lax enforcement of rules most fliers take for granted. As we mere mortals battle the lines and red tape at airports, for those traveling in the private air corridors, inconveniences like passport control or customs officials are batted away like insignificant bugs. Nobody declares much, and less than nobody checks the cargo onboard.

Authorities’ ignorance about art is another secret weakness in the chain. I often have traveled with art, and I’ve never once had anyone realize that what I was bringing in was, say, a Miró, and not something my young nephew made. This lack of expertise extends to valuations. How could a customs agent know that the work I’m transporting is worth $10 million, and not the $10,000 I may declare? Indeed, the legal import and export channels can become quite porous for art. If you’re wondering whether I’ve ever taken advantage of these weak links to smuggle art, corner me in a bar somewhere and inquire discreetly.

But it is the supreme globalism of the art trade that makes regulation impossible. These are borderless transactions, wherein a deal might close in New York, the funds are transferred in the Bahamas, and the painting is delivered in a Swiss or Singaporean free port. Which jurisdiction would be in charge of such a deal? Nations have little incentive to step in, because strengthening regulation in the US, for example, would just move the trade elsewhere.

Put simply, there is no better vehicle than art with which to hide and transport funds. It is no secret that famed Russian collector Dmitry Rybolovlev amassed his collection of priceless masterworks quietly. The art world buzz was that he aimed to stash the bulk of his wealth into something his soon-to-be ex-wife could not easily track—a buzz confirmed by the Panama Papers. Unfortunately for Rybolovlev, suing his adviser (long story) in a very public fashion, buying a supposed Leonardo (longer story). and now initiating a giant lawsuit against the storied auction house Sotheby’s has brought him enough notoriety to scuttle his original plan

Note to oligarch collectors: If you’re trying to avoid attention, don’t buy Salvator Mundi, the most expensive painting ever sold. I’m talking to you, MBS. (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman is its current owner.)

But this is just a very public example of art being used sneakily. Privately, I’ve seen collectors hide assets from their siblings, parents, wives, mistresses, children, the government, and the public. Mostly these shenanigans remain secret, but plenty have come to light: Imelda Marcus, the Philippines’ former First Lady and current First Mother, and convicted Malaysian financier Jho Low each used their respective countries’ public funds to adorn their homes with Monets. Bernie Madoff’s lieutenant, Ezra Merkin, famously sunk his ill-gotten wealth into a collection of Rothkos. Anita Halpin, chair of the Communist Party of Britain, became fabulously rich when she quietly began to sell off her inherited collection of Nazi-looted-then-restituted pictures. And she would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling journalists.

We know oligarchs exist in every country. The ones in the US are often referred to as “philanthropists,” but they also enjoy their access to the levers of power. At this point, most major Russian oligarch collectors, including some of my former clients, have been sanctioned and thus stopped collecting. One client even was indicted and has since fled back to Russia. Let me pause to send him a private message: I understand what you’re going through, comrade, but I recommend you come back and face the music. Club Fed wasn’t that bad.

But the art world is resilient, and when one set of oligarch buyers dries up, we move on to the next. I’ve lived through periods of mania over billionaire buyers from Japan to the Middle East to Wall Street to Russia to China—and back to the Middle East. There will always be billionaires somewhere searching for something to do with their cash. Whether your name is Abramovich or Lauder, Koch or Zhukova, as long as you have money and influence, I humbly recommend, as any good dealer would, you consider art as a (mostly) legal means to protect your wealth and get you invited to lots of parties—communist or otherwise. 

“I did not enter the Capitol on January 6. I did not commit any violence, vandalism, theft or destruction,” Straka told Ramaswamy. He’d been prosecuted, he claimed, because of the success of his #WalkAway Campaign, which tries to convince liberals to leave the Democratic Party. “My life was torn apart by the United States Department of Justice and the FBI. The majority of my case was a complete and total lie. I was put in a position where I had to take a plea deal as opposed to going to trial, and potentially facing years in prison for things I did not do.”

Straka has been spinning this version of history ever since he left home detention in early 2022. His social media feeds and public appearances like the one in New Hampshire brim with commentary alleging his prosecution was part of a liberal conspiracy designed to silence him. “The left coordinated a massive effort to take me out that included the FBI, the DOJ, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Soros-funded lawfare, the entire Democrat Marxist state media, antifa, and more,” he tweeted in December 2023.

He claims he was forced to plead guilty because he couldn’t get a fair trial in DC, tweeting in August, for instance, that “Saying that a conviction of a Trump supporter by a DC jury is proof of guilt is no different than saying an all white jury in 1935 Mississippi convicting a black man is proof of his guilt.”

But there is a voluminous record— including court records, texts and depositions obtained by the House January 6 committee, and his own copious social media posts and videos he streamed—that tell a very different story from the one Straka now tells publicly.

While it’s true that he didn’t commit any violence on January 6, Straka wasn’t exactly a neutral bystander. He’d been an underappreciated player in the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to overturn the 2020 election results and helped lay the groundwork for the insurrection. As part of his plea agreement, Straka admitted under oath that when he entered the Capitol grounds on January 6, he knew he was doing so illegally. He also admitted that he’d gone there “with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress.” Once on the Capitol grounds, according to his plea agreement, Straka yelled “Go! Go! Go!” to encourage other protesters to go inside the Capitol while police tried to hold them back. He also admitted to chiming in with the crowd yelling, “Take it! Take it!” to a group of rioters as they seized a shield from a Capitol police officer.

Ever the influencer, Straka took video of the whole episode and posted it on social media. He later deleted the footage, but not before someone sent it to the FBI. He was arrested about three weeks after the riot. During his sentencing hearing in January 2022, Straka appeared contrite. “I’m sorry that I was present in any way at an event that led anybody to feel afraid, that caused shame and embarrassment on our country, and that served absolutely no purpose other than to further tear away at the already heart-breaking divide in this country,” he told the judge.

Prosecutors, though, urged the judge to consider the larger context of the insurrection, quoting US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who wrote in another J6 case, “A mob isn’t a mob without the numbers. The people who were committing those violent acts did so because they had the safety of numbers.” The judge sentenced Straka to three months’ home detention and three years’ probation.

If the liberal deep state prosecution was supposed to silence Straka, as he’s alleged, the conspiracy has surely failed. Today, he is one of the most high-profile January 6 convicts seeking to recast himself as a victim of political persecution and the insurrection as simply a protest gone wrong. “I don’t believe there was an insurrection,” he told me. “There just wasn’t.”

Straka’s views aren’t unusual among January 6 defendants. In a report published in September 2022, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) found that very few of the people prosecuted for J6 crimes have rejected the anti-democratic goals of the attack on Congress. Of the 217 defendants in the study who’d been sentenced by mid-July 2022, only 48 had repudiated the political goals of the riot. Of those, only 10 admitted the 2020 election wasn’t stolen.

Straka is a stark example of why, despite the prosecution of more than 1,200 riot participants, the number of Republicans who believe that the events of January 6 constituted serious political violence designed to overturn a legitimate election has fallen sharply over the past two years. A poll conducted in May by Monmouth University found that the percentage of Republicans who believe that those events are accurately described as a “riot” fell from 62 percent in June 2021 to 44 percent in May 2023. Only 15 percent say it is appropriately described as an insurrection, down from 33 percent two years ago.

“Two years ago, most [Republicans] felt the violence of January 6 was taking things too far, even if it did not rise to the level of an insurrection in their minds,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, when the poll was released. “Now, that view has changed, which raises the question of what actions are acceptable when you are unhappy with a political outcome.”

CPOST director Robert Pape noted his surveys reveal that since January 6, as much as 20 percent of the American public has become supportive of political violence. “This is not just a problem of a handful of hate groups,” he says. “That’s why Trump is promising to pardon people on January 6 and gaining votes. This is a movement that is coalescing.”

When I spoke with him, Straka was determined to contextualize his prosecution. “I was arrested and charged and ultimately convicted of a Class B misdemeanor,” he said. “I feel that I have expressed an appropriate amount of contrition for that.” Straka remained annoyed with expectations that he should repent for going to the Capitol to try to “overthrow the government,” because, he said, that’s not what brought him there. “I meant the words I said at my sentencing,” he told me. “But I am not sorry for an insurrection I did not participate in.”

Before he became a MAGA influencer, Straka, 47, was “Sick Blowouts with Brando,” a New York City hairstylist whose YouTube videos netted him fewer than 50 viewers a piece. The gay son of cattle ranchers in O’Neill, Nebraska (population 3,581), Straka had dreamed of becoming an actor. In 2000, he moved to New York, did community theater, and scored a 2013 spot as a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. Somewhere along the way he picked up a substance abuse problem but sobered up in 2015. He subsequently got a cosmetology license that may have helped pay the bills, but it left him far from the spotlight he craved. In 2016, he performed a one-man theater show for his birthday, riffing off the musical Avenue Q. “When I was little/ I thought I would be/ a famous actor/ on prime-time TV,” he sang. “But now I’m 39/ and as you can see/ I’m not. Oh well/ It sucks to be me.”

The next year, Straka staged a self-financed jukebox musical that foreshadowed his move into conservative politics. In promotional materials for “Resist: A Rock Revolution,” he appears dressed like an armed revolutionary. Video of the production has been deleted from YouTube, but the Daily Beast described the show as a “bizarre collision between the political controversies of the Trump era and decades of pop music.”

Eventually, Straka, a lifelong Democrat, figured out the time-honored strategy of getting noticed: He switched sides. In 2018, with help from his friend, the gay anti-trans activist Mike Harlow, he made a Facebook video declaring that he was “walking away” from the Democratic Party. 

“Once upon a time, I was a liberal,” Straka says in the dramatic six-minute video. “For years now, I have watched as the left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded and, at times, blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric…So I am walking away, and I encourage all of you to do the same.”

About a month later, the #WalkAway hashtag took off, with some help from Russian propaganda outlets like RT, which did some of the first news segments about his video. Donald Trump Jr. and other MAGA luminaries used the hashtag in tweets, and Straka’s video eventually tallied up more than 2 million views on Facebook and YouTube.

Hundreds of people took to Facebook to record their own #WalkAway stories as evidence that traditional Democratic constituencies—minorities and LGBT folks—were following Straka’s lead. But his core audience appeared to be the usual MAGA types (including “Anthony Devolder”—i.e., George Santos, who, before running for Congress, declared Straka “an idol to all of us” at a 2019 #WalkAway event in New York City). As Karlyn Borysenko, a 2022 libertarian candidate for New Hampshire governor who once worked with Straka’s group explained in a September tweet, “Most of the people in #WalkAway aren’t ex-Democrats. They’re conservatives who’ve always been conservative. They’re called ‘Walk Withs.’”

Almost immediately after his political conversion, Straka connected with fringe far-right extremists, many of whom would become key players in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results. When he inevitably started a GoFundMe to kickstart his campaign, one of its biggest early donations came from far-right conspiracy theorist and Infowars mogul Alex Jones, who chipped in $10,000. The fund ultimately raised almost $327,000. In late 2018, Straka formalized his fundraising by creating the #WalkAway Foundation, which raised nearly $2 million in 2020. Of that, $100,000 came from the #FightBack Foundation, which was co-founded by the lawyer L. Lin Wood, who helped Trump challenge the 2020 election results in court. (The federal government also gave Straka and the #WalkAway Foundation more than $30,000 in Covid relief loans that were forgiven.)

When Straka held his first #WalkAway march in DC in October 2018, one of the speakers was Owen Shroyer, the InfoWars host who was later sentenced to 60 days in prison for unlawfully entering and remaining on the Capitol grounds on January 6. And the 1^st Amendment Praetorian militia—a group of former military members close to former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn—got its start by providing security at Straka’s events.

Straka eventually caught the attention of Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who was working to woo people of color and LGBT people to counter attacks on Trump’s discriminatory agenda. She interviewed him in 2019 at Trump Tower for a video featured on the campaign’s Facebook page, which the president then promoted to his millions of followers.

Subsequently, by the summer of 2019, Straka was firmly affixed to the Trump campaign. He was part of the White House “pundit prep” operation, which supplied him with pro-Trump talking points to include in his public speaking events. And in August 2019, he opened for Trump at a rally in Cincinnati. His speech attracted national attention—but not because of his #WalkAway message. Hours before the rally, news broke that in an intelligence briefing, the FBI had flagged the growing QAnon presence in the MAGA movement as a potential vector for violence.

QAnon followers adhere to a convoluted conspiracy theory that claimed Trump was engaged in a global battle against satanic Democratic pedophile rings. The Capitol rioters included many believers, including Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by Capitol police as she tried to climb through a shattered window into the Speaker’s Lobby.

People sporting QAnon gear had been increasingly spotted during campaign rallies. At that point, Trump had never directly addressed these fans, but Straka did, concluding his speech with the QAnon rallying cry: “Where we go one, we go all.”

Straka denied invoking the conspiracy. “I was not making any references to QAnon whatsoever,” he told Talking Points Memo. “Obviously I’m disappointed that the media has chosen to focus on this.” His denial, however, rang hollow. One of the #WalkAway Foundation’s first and current board members is Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, a former Republican operative and an early and prominent QAnon promoter. (Straka told me he has never been a QAnon supporter and does not fully understand the movement. “I just liked the phrase,” he said.)

Straka’s connection with Trump supercharged his social media following. In late November 2020, the New York Times reported on new research identifying Straka as one of a small group of conservative social media personalities who were “superspreaders” of misinformation about election fraud. His “Stop the Steal” social media posts rivaled Eric Trump’s as the most trafficked interactions between mid-October and the two weeks after the November election. By the time he joined the mob at the Capitol, he had more than 600,000 Twitter followers, and his #WalkAway Campaign Facebook group had more than half a million members.

“I certainly don’t consider myself a superspreader of misinformation,” Straka told me. He said the “Stop the Steal” hashtag was simply a way of sharing information about the election, which he and many people believed was plagued with “suspicious activity” driven by hatred of Donald Trump. “My goal, and I think most people’s goal, was always to learn the truth,” he said.

After Trump’s early 2020 lead in Michigan vaporized with the counting of mail-in ballots, Straka helped promote a “Stop the Steal” rally in Detroit outside the convention center, where election workers still were counting votes. He riled up protesters with an expletive-laden speech. “I voted for that stupid bitch Hillary Clinton in 2016,” he yelled through a bullhorn. “I voted for the greatest president in my lifetime in 2020, Donald J. Trump…People are out of their fucking minds if they think we’re going to sit back quietly and allow them to steal this election.”

From Detroit, he moved on to Georgia, joining Alex Jones and other Stop the Steal luminaries who had organized “Stop the Steal” rallies in late November after Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certified the election for Biden. Straka led a protest in front of the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

In early December, his tweets grew increasingly inflammatory: “We can not allow a transition to Biden under these circumstances,” read one; “we are in a civil war,” said another. On January 5, 2021, Straka was in Washington, speaking at a rally at Freedom Plaza with dozens of election deniers, including Roger Stone and MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell. “Patriots! Welcome to the revolution!” he shouted, as if he were back in his musical, “Resist: A Rock Revolution.”

The next morning, when Trump spoke at the Ellipse, Straka was front and center in the VIP section along with Michael Flynn and Black conservative influencer (and #WalkAway Campaign regular) David Harris Jr. Afterwards, Straka was scheduled to speak near the Capitol at the “Wild Protest” organized by Stop the Steal instigator Ali Alexander, but after Trump encouraged the rally attendees to march on the Capitol, the speech got canceled. So Straka and Harris walked to the Willard Hotel, where they were staying. (Federal Election Commission records show that his #WalkAway Campaign PAC paid the Willard Hotel almost $3,000.) The Willard is also where Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and other Stop the Steal organizers had set up their “war room,” which became the subject of intense focus by the House January 6 investigation.

At a November 2023 #WalkAway event, Harris said that on January 6, he saw what was happening at the Capitol on the TV in his hotel room and his wife insisted he stay put. Straka, however, got on the Metro and headed into the fray. Prosecutors produced messages showing that Straka was informed about the Capitol breach, but he went there anyway.

When he arrived at the east side of the Capitol, according to court documents, he pushed his way up the steps toward the massive bronze Columbus Doors that open into the Rotunda. Straka’s video of those moments does not show a peaceful protest. Alarms were going off and police officers were trying to repel the angry crowd, which included Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs, who in August was sentenced to 17 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. You can hear people on the video  talking about plans to “take a shit” in Nancy Pelosi’s office as they try to push towards the door. It shows rioters seizing the officer’s shield. Two guys directly in front of Straka are wearing combat helmets, goggles, and full-face gas masks—ready for war.

Prosecutors said the only reason Straka didn’t go inside the Capitol was that he got tear gassed near the East Rotunda door. “I was quite close to entering myself as police began tear gassing us from the door,” Straka tweeted afterwards to his hundreds of thousands of followers.  “I inhaled tear gas and got it in my eyes.”

The House January 6 committee obtained text messages showing that, in the midst of the chaos, Michael Coudrey, one of the Stop the Steal movement leaders, texted a group chat that included Straka, recommending they leave the Capitol. “Fuck no!!” Straka responded,  “I’m at the Capitol and just joined the breach!!! I just got gassed! Never felt so fucking alive in my life!!!”

(Those memories have apparently dimmed over time. Fast forward to July 2023, and Straka is on Twitter saying, “One of the hundreds of lies the government told was that I didn’t enter [the Capitol] because I got gassed… I did not get gassed.”)

Eventually, the crowd started to leave the East Rotunda, and Straka returned to the Willard, where he tweeted encouragement to others still at the building. “Patriots at the Capitol – HOLD. THE. LINE!!!!” He also batted down suggestions that Antifa had caused the riot. “I’m completely confused. For 6-8 weeks everybody on the right has been saying ‘1776!’ & that if congress moves forward it will mean a revolution! So congress moves forward. Patriots storm the Capitol,” he tweeted, “now everybody is virtual [sic] signaling their embarrassment that this happened.”

His bravado quickly evaporated. Records obtained by the House January 6 committee showed that, like so many J6 participants, Straka started erasing his social media history, and his conversations with other Stop the Steal activists moved to encrypted channels on Signal. But the former liberal had alienated a lot of people close to him with his transformation to MAGA mouthpiece. According to an affidavit in his case, at least one family member reported him to the FBI which, on January 25, 2021, burst into his Omaha apartment and arrested him.

For a while, it looked like Straka’s influencer days were over. Facebook took his #WalkAway page down. PayPal and other mainstream payment platforms he used to solicit donations dumped him, as did his spam email providers like Constant Contact and MailChimp. In 2021, his foundation raised only $463,000, a fraction of the previous year (though it still paid Straka $121,000). He claims his landlord evicted him because of all the media coverage and that he was put on a terrorist watchlist so that he was tied up in airport security for hours for extra screening. (TSA may have other reasons for scrutinizing Straka at the airport: In 2020, when he was en route to a Trump rally, American Airlines booted him off a flight for refusing to wear a mask and banned him from the airline until the mask requirement was lifted. Naturally, he posted a video of the skirmish online.) 

Congressional Republicans initially condemned the January 6 events and sought to distance themselves from the people involved. House Democrats created a committee to investigate, holding their first hearing in the summer of 2021. For a brief moment, it looked as though the country was united in its condemnation of the Capitol riot. But, as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who served on the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, told me, “The effort to whitewash the violence and recast an insurrection against the Constitution as a peaceful demonstration began at the very inception.” 

Donald Trump first floated the idea of mass pardons for the J6ers in January 2022, just a week after Straka was sentenced. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he said at a rally outside Houston. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”

Just as federal judges were trying to hold people like Straka accountable for their actions, Trump was turning them into martyrs. Straka would be at the vanguard of that effort. He was still in home detention in Nebraska when, a few days after Trump’s pledge, he told the Washington Examiner, “I had a huge following, and they thought I needed to be taught a lesson through deterrence. They took a well-known conservative public figure and made him disappear for an entire year, and now I’m back.”

Once he finished home detention in April, Straka began reviving his influencer career, only this time as a champion of justice for his fellow defendants. He dove into raising money for the WalkAway political action committee, amassing nearly $300,000 for the 2022 election cycle—none of which was actually spent on candidates or elections, according to federal election records. (Some of the PACs biggest expenditures were for hotel and airfare expenses.) He campaigned for other “Big Lie” candidates like Kari Lake, who lost the 2022 Arizona governor’s race.

Telegenic and charming, Straka was the perfect spokesman for the insurrectionists. His case highlighted many of the legitimate issues liberal criminal justice reformers have been criticizing for years, like coercive plea bargains and overzealous FBI investigations. And he sounds so reasonable when he argues that he was prosecuted for his political views. “The things I was accused of by the DOJ were clearly grossly exaggerated,” he told me, calling it “theatrical nonsense.”

“I’m not a rioter. I’m certainly not an insurrectionist. I’m certainly not a terrorist,” he said. Even the worst of the disorderly conduct allegations against him, he said, were just about “words”—meaning tweets he sent before and after the riot, or his yelling “Go! Go!” at other rioters. None of that, he thinks, merits the suffering he’s endured since his arrest. He’s not alone in that view. As NBC reporter Ryan Reilly acknowledges in his new book, Sedition Hunters, “[Had] it not been for his public profile, Straka probably would not have been charged.”

The right-wing media ecosystem, with its well-funded convention circuit and influential propaganda outlets, loves nothing better than a conservative persecution story. It happily amplified Straka’s version of January 6. One of his first big interviews after leaving home detention was on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show. Straka had sworn under oath as part of his plea agreement that he yelled “take it!” to rioters grabbing a shield from police. But he told Carlson the voice on his video saying “take it!” wasn’t his. “I vehemently denied that was my voice, to my attorney,” Straka said, explaining that he only “confessed” to those things to resolve the case.

In true Trumpian fashion, Straka also went after his critics in the media. In December 2022, he filed a lawsuit against MSNBC and hosts Chris Hayes and Ari Melber, alleging that they had defamed him by suggesting on air that he had “storm[ed] the Capitol” and that he’d egged on the mob to take a police officer’s shield. Straka’s suit claimed that because of MSNBC’s reporting, he was subjected to harassment and threats and his media invitations had dried up. It accused the network anchors of deliberately trying to end Straka’s influencer career. He demanded $25 million in compensation.

US District Court Judge Joseph Bataillon was not persuaded. Straka had admitted in his plea deal that he knew he was illegally on the Capitol grounds on January 6. “Whatever differences there are between statements that Straka committed the federal crime of storming the Capitol and the conduct that forms the basis of his plea amount to semantic hair splitting,” he wrote in his August order throwing out the case. 

Even with all Straka’s activism, the campaign to rebrand insurrectionists as persecuted protesters didn’t initially take off. “For a long time, I was really the only person out there talking,” Straka told me. At first, Republican members of Congress wanted to pretend as if the riot had never happened. It didn’t help that some of the most prominent J6 activists were in fact guilty of violence. Shane Jenkins, for instance, started the website “The Real J6” where he portrayed himself as just another peaceful protester. “I went to the Capitol on January 6th to voice my 1st amendment right as an American citizen & support President DJT,” he wrote on the site, leaving out the fact that, according to court documents, he’d smashed a window at the Capitol with a tomahawk. (In October, he was sentenced to seven years in prison.)

But Straka continued to push the GOP establishment towards Trump’s view of the rioters as victims rather than perpetrators. In August 2022, he appeared at the Conservative Political Action Convention in Dallas on a panel with Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) called “You’re Next: The Rise of the Democrat Gulag,” where he bemoaned the “silence on the right” about the injustices suffered by J6 defendants. Biggs, who described the prosecutions as “Soviet,” appeared at a loss when Straka pointedly asked him: “What are you guys going to do about it?”

During the conference, Straka also engaged in a little performance art in the exhibit hall. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit and a red MAGA cap, he sat weeping in the replica of a jail cell. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) stopped by to pray with him, ensuring a flurry of media coverage. The publicity seems to have paid off. In 2022, the #WalkAway Foundation raised more than $600,000, a jump of more than 30 percent over the previous year, according to the group’s most recent IRS filing.

In early 2023, Straka rented a room at CPAC in DC for a panel discussion, “True Stories of January 6: The Prosecuted Speak.” Joining him were two prominent right-wing conference characters: Simone Gold, the anti-vax doctor and lawyer who was sentenced to 60 days in prison for entering the Capitol on January 6 and John Strand, her alleged boyfriend, who is now serving a 32-month sentence for the same thing. Also on the panel was a former West Virginia legislator who livestreamed himself inside the Capitol yelling “Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!” (Evans ended up being sentenced to 90 days in prison as a result.) Before a standing room only crowd, Straka wept convincingly as he described the two days he spent in jail after getting arrested.

From there, he moved on to a college tour and more rallies. Straka relentlessly pushed his version of events on social media and to conservative outlets. And over the last two years, January 6 has gone from a Republican embarrassment to a cause célèbre. In May, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis joined Trump in promising to pardon those who’d been unfairly punished by the Justice Department. In June, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) invited Straka to return to the Capitol, this time to testify at a field hearing on the “weaponization of government” in relation to “unjust prosecutions of January 6^th, 2021.”

In his testimony, Straka catalogued the injustices he’d suffered since being arrested, not the least of which was TSA canceling his pre-check. The hearing was evidence of how much the narrative on the right had shifted towards Straka’s point of view of January 6.

“Did I have a part of that?” asks Straka. “I believe that I probably did.”

Straka’s rehab tour may have helped to reframe the public’s view of the insurrection, but it wasn’t entirely unnoticed by the authorities who’d punished him. In August 2022, US District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich raised the issue during a hearing on the accidental release of a sealed document in Straka’s case. “It’s also been brought to my attention that Mr. Straka has been making questionable comments regarding the truth of his plea,” Friedrich said. “It makes me question every statement he made to me at the time of sentencing, every single one of them.”

She asked his lawyer, Bilal Essayli, if Straka wanted to withdraw his plea and come back to court for an evidentiary hearing to address the claims he was making on TV and elsewhere. “No, your honor,” Essayli replied. The judge said Straka “needs to understand that he faces exposure for making false statements to federal law enforcement officers. I suggest that you tell him to exercise some discretion that he didn’t show before January 6, during January 6, and apparently after January 6.”

Judges and prosecutors alike have been frustrated by some of the J6ers’ post-sentencing behavior. The day after Derrick Evans expressed remorse in his sentencing hearing, he went on a West Virginia radio show to disown it all. “I’m never going to regret standing up to tyranny and standing up for the people who believe in me and standing up for the future of my children,” he said when asked if he regretted going to the Capitol. Prosecutors filed a futile memo of protest with the judge citing the radio interview and noting, “The speed and degree of Evan’s about-face warrants this.” Evans regularly appears in public events with Straka and is now running for Congress.

As the prosecutors conceded in Evans’ case, once people have been sentenced, there’s not much the legal system can do to hold them accountable for their rhetoric. “This is America,” says Dan Richman, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Columbia law school. “You get to lie to the public.”

Straka’s reemergence as an influencer highlights the court system’s difficulty in punishing individual rioters without treading on their free speech rights. “In our system of laws, we punish people for their conduct and not for their politics,” Rep. Jamie Raskin told me. While not referring to Straka specifically, he explained, “A lot of the most extreme authoritarian zealots were guilty of relatively minor offenses. They were not necessarily the most daring insurrectionists. A number of those people have been able to weasel their way through court and get off with relatively light sentences and then go right back to the polemical wars against American democracy.”

For Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, much of the problem is rooted in the fact that “we don’t have a criminal code for inciting insurrection. [The legal system] just isn’t set up to deal with ‘Yeah, I stormed the Capitol to threaten members of Congress to overturn the election.’”

Instead, he says, judges are viewing the individual cases narrowly, sticking to the federal sentencing guidelines, which don’t consider whether someone spent the weeks after the election trying to convince people to start a civil war. And, of course, most of the defendants are white, middle-class people who often get off lightly in court. “If that had been a group of 2000 ISIS supporters that had broken into the Capitol,” Pape asks, “do you think we’d only be prosecuting them for trespassing?”

Last April, on the day Trump was indicted in New York for falsifying business records, Straka was outside Mar-a-Lago with other Trump fans who’d gathered  to show their support for the ex-president. Across the road, a single counter-protester, lawyer Victoria Doyle, held a sign that read: “Fuck around, find out. Nation of laws, not men.”

Straka took the opportunity to “interview” her, claiming to be a journalist. Doyle, who had no idea who he was, told me she eventually tried to walk away. “Straka got in my face and was just hurling invective and questions at me: ‘You call yourself a lawyer? Did you pass the bar?’”

Straka posted the video on Twitter and Truth Social. Then the Gateway Pundit, a notorious source of hoaxes and conspiracy theories, reposted the footage, which included Doyle’s name and the webpage from her law firm. Social media users responded by circulating her email address and work phone number. In response, Doyle was inundated with threatening messages. “What’s up cunt?” said one caller from Tennessee. “I’m gonna call your office every day.”

When Doyle learned that the person responsible for her doxing was still on probation for a January 6^th related charge, she wrote prosecutors to complain. “He’s all but disavowed his plea agreement and his confession,” she told me. “It’s outrageous. He’s turning the justice system upside down.” (Straka says he was unaware of the abuse Doyle suffered but notes unsympathetically that this is what happens if you “leave your house to troll Trump supporters.”)

As Doyle discovered, while liberals have largely been fighting the insurrectionists in government institutions, like Congress or the courthouse, the MAGA world has turned January 6th into one more front in the culture war. And as a former actor, Straka is exquisitely well equipped for that battle.

Today, there are TV shows, movies, and at least one docudrama produced by Dinesh D’Souza, all recasting January 6 prosecutions as a deep state conspiracy to criminalize Trump supporters for their political beliefs. Straka has made cameos in many of them. Meanwhile, none of the hundreds of court proceedings against J6ers have even been televised because federal rules ban cameras in the courtroom.

“A lot of people thought if you just throw them in jail or you just prosecute them, then justice will be served and we’re done with this. But that’s not true,” says Danielle Tomson, a researcher working on a book about conservative influencers. “Even once they get out of jail, they can continue to spin their own counterfactual when everyone else has moved on.”

Doyle did find a way to fight back. In August 2023, Straka filed a cheeky motion asking the judge to reduce his probation for good behavior. Prosecutors included Doyle’s letter with a motion opposing it, along with two others from people documenting his public rhetoric that conflicted with what he admitted to in court. “[H]e has continued to use social media to belittle the severity of his plea and the pleas of other rioters,” prosecutors wrote.

The judge agreed, writing, “Although the defendant has a First Amendment right to make public statements, his minimizing of his and others’ unlawful acts on January 6 evinces a continued lack of remorse and an ongoing need to protect the public from future crimes.” Straka will remain on probation until January 2025.

“Nobody worked harder for President Trump than I did” in the last election, Straka bragged at CPAC in 2022. But he told me in December that he has no immediate plans to get involved in the 2024 campaign. It’s hard to imagine he will resist the siren song of the Trump campaign and its associated publicity and fundraising opportunities, however. Trump, after all, has turned Straka’s crusade into his own.

Tomson attended Trump’s speech before the New York Young Republican Club in December and was struck by how much the January 6 prosecutions infused it. A lot of the rhetoric that night, she says, was about, “If we don’t win, we’re going to jail.” Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s most sycophantic supporters, even joked that he and Trump and other MAGA Republicans were going to be known as “Cellblock A” if Trump didn’t get elected. In the face of his many indictments, Tomson says, Trump has been able to point to J6ers as proof that “If they can do it to me, they can do it to you.” 

In November, Straka, who had spoken at dozens of right-wing confabs, decided to hold one of his own called “Walk-a-Con.” For three days, he and about 600 of his fans hung out in an airport hotel in West Palm Beach near Mar-A-Lago and heard from B-list MAGA stars like Rudy Giuliani and Lara Trump. The marquis event was titled, “Disorderly Conduct: The roast of Brandon Straka,” in which a lineup of MAGA celebrities trash-talked Straka, who sat on a throne wearing a sequined jacket.

One of the roasters was Shawn Farash, a guy who makes a living impersonating Donald Trump. Straka told the small crowd that he really admired Farash because, “I think he represents the very best of what it means to be MAGA: making as much money as you can hanging off Donald Trump until he goes to prison.”

Straka may have inadvertently said the quiet part out loud, explaining why the big election lie and the revisionist history of January 6th persists. As long as there is money and clicks to be had, even 1,200 prosecutions seem unlikely to change that. I recently asked Straka whether he thought Biden had been legitimately elected. “I don’t think about it anymore,” he replied. “I just look forward. There’s another election next year. I’m much more interested in that.”

Images from left: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty; Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, John Rudoff/Sipa/AP, Lev Radin/Sipa/AP, Andrew Harnik/AP; Selcuk Acar/NurPhoto/Zuma