If it’s happening to Lorenz, it will be happening to everyone downhill from her, too. Certainly, there are plenty of people who will attest to that. Most of them have noticed an obvious problem with the business model: there are only so many paid subscriptions a reader will spring for. Eventually, Substack was going to hit a demand ceiling.

Back in 2017, Substack solved a particular problem for a particular type of journalist at a particular time. We were a few years into Black Lives Matter, and, of course, the first year of Trump’s first term. The Great Awokening was well underway, and over the next few years, culminating in the summer of 2020, the media industry would come to resemble a grumpy religious sect, with its theological dogma and mechanisms for punishing dissent. It became a suffocating place for anyone who wanted to think the least bit freely.

In Substack, journalists who refused to bend to the new rules had a refuge to escape to. That is the story of how Bari Weiss founded the biggest media outlet on the platform, The Free Press. Substack served that early generation of writers well: they became its poster children and its evangelists.

But while it solved a problem for journalists, it did not solve the problem of journalism: which is that its business model was shattered two decades ago and is yet to be fixed. In the 20th century, journalism was propped up by mass advertising, which, as Andrey Miroshnichenko has pointed out, was effectively a tax on corporations to sustain the jobs of journalists. Companies couldn’t find their customers without getting their brand names in front of them, and the only way to do that was by running advertisements in the newspapers that showed up on everyone’s doorstep each morning and on the TV shows that were piped daily and nightly into their living rooms.

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Inside the capture of the BBC

By Rob Burley

This was the marketing equivalent of trawling: it caught a lot of fish by casting a net wide enough to scoop up everything in its path. It was inefficient and expensive, and it produced enough revenue to sustain an entire profession of reporters, editors, producers, and news anchors. The peak of profitability for The New York Times was at the cusp of the emergence of the internet — 1999, when it reported net income of $447 million. Last year, conversely, that figure was $334 million.

But along came Facebook, and suddenly, instead of trawling, advertisers could fly fish, but on an industrial scale. Targeted advertising allowed them to individually pick their customers from the teeming mass of humanity on the internet, and for a sliver of what it cost to run a TV commercial or run a newspaper ad. Today, digital advertising costs from $3 to $10 for every 1,000 customer “impressions”, versus $22 to $1,300 per person reached via traditional media. Moreover, it’s far harder to find your most receptive consumers with a billboard or TV commercial than a social-media ad, and far, far harder to measure its impact in real time.

Mass advertising quickly became a relic of the 20th century, and the economic floor it was holding up for the journalism industry collapsed. By 2017, The New York Times‘s net income was just $4 million, and that wasn’t even its worst year (in 2011, it actually lost money). In the 12 years following 2008, newsroom employment dropped by more than a quarter. Laid-off reporters were as mundane a part of this new landscape as the 20-something software engineers making doctors’ salaries.

Substack created an alternative to this business model by shifting the journalism tax from advertisers directly onto consumers. Now, instead of indirectly subsidizing reporters’ careers by buying products from the companies that market them through print ads and TV spots, readers could pay them directly via the online marketplace of journalism that is Substack.

The problem with this model is obvious: it will never come close to producing revenue on the scale that mass advertising generated for media corporations. From the perspective of advertisers, of course, that’s a good thing: their profits aren’t being siphoned off by an industry they have nothing to do with. From the perspective of news consumers, though, it sucks. It means less journalism, and journalism of a much lower quality.

The upside, some might argue, is that journalists are now truly independent. When you’re not controlled by editors and producers who answer to corporate bosses who answer to shareholders, you can report candidly without fear of professional repercussions. There isn’t an upper floor of suits to stop you from running a story on the corruption of defense contractors because the toothpaste company that’s the network’s biggest primetime advertiser owns an overseas subsidiary that manufactures land mines. Or, to take a real example, a parent company that censors your reporting on the tobacco industry out of fear of a potential lawsuit that could disrupt a pending corporate merger.

Your only bosses are your readers, and what they expect of you is honesty and integrity. The incentive to do good journalism aligns with the incentive of making money. That’s the theory, at least.

But that theory both overstates the level of corporate control over the old model and understates the malign influences insinuated into the new one. Noam Chomsky might have you believe that New York Times editors and NBC News producers once quaked in fear of the punishment they would face from their industrially polluting advertisers if they reported too honestly about industrial pollution. As Chomsky wrote in his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: “Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers”.

But the nice thing about mass advertising was that there was so much of it that individual advertisers rarely had that kind of clout.

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How Murdoch rewrote the rules of power

By Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky

There may have been some vague sensibility among media professionals about not wanting to fall too far afield of the establishment, but that wasn’t rooted in anxiety over advertiser boycotts; it was rooted in publishers sharing the same alma maters as Congressmen and corporate executives and their kids going to the same private schools. In an exception that proves the rule, the 2017 Steven Spielberg movie The Post portrayed former Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham as a national hero for putting the public interest ahead of her personal relationship with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when she approved publication of the Pentagon Papers.

If anything, the pressures that the new model exerts on journalists are more direct and specific. Journalists who work for major media outlets are salaried employees; journalists who sell Substack subscriptions are small-time entrepreneurs. At least in establishment media outlets, there are institutional divisions between the editorial side and the business side. When you’re selling your reporting directly to readers, by contrast, there is no firewall in your brain that separates the part that’s thinking about what you’re reporting and how you’re reporting it from the part that is thinking about how this story will affect your subscriber base and thus your bank account.

Altogether, this makes Substack ripe for audience capture. You have very good reasons not to report on stories that might upset your readers or to arrive at conclusions that might anger them. You have equally good reasons to serve them slop that confirms their priors. After years of watching your subscriber graph go up and down, and the Stripe payments to your bank account get bigger and smaller, eventually you shape your newsletter into a product. And since your newsletter is, effectively, you, you have made yourself into that product. You might not have to worry about some corporate suit telling you what you can or can’t say, but that’s only because you are that suit and you’re telling it to yourself. The call is coming from inside the house.

If Taylor Lorenz’s experience is indicative of a larger pattern, these perverse incentives are only going to get worse as people’s paid subscriber bases dry up. Substack’s executives would have you believe that the consumer market for email newsletters is only getting bigger. But it’s easy to imagine another possibility. As Scott Carney has written, Substack is growing its user base principally by attracting more people to Notes, its Twitter knock-off. The theory appears to be that people will come for the social media and stay for the paid newsletters.

But that doesn’t seem to be working out, particularly for Substacks that aren’t already on the leaderboards (why do they even have leaderboards?). People who like to scroll aren’t necessarily people who pay to read long-form essays. My own paid subscriber count has proceeded along the same downward path that both Lorenz’s and Carney’s have, even as my tallies of free subscriber and “followers” (whatever that is) have stacked up. If that’s happening for many others, we can expect that as paid subscribers become scarcer, the incentives to gain and retain them will become harder to resist. More and more Substack writers will conform to the demands of the market by flattering their readers, avoiding risky topics, arriving at prefabricated conclusions, and repeating formulas that have worked in the past. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

In other words, Substack hasn’t fixed the broken media model: it hasn’t even attempted to. All it has done is giggify it. That has given some established reporters the freedom to do their own thing and made a handful of already famous and wealthy journalists even more famous and wealthy — good things, I guess. But it has also likely further degraded the already broken-down institutional structure of the journalism profession. That might bring joy to a few nihilists who simply despise the establishment media, but that doesn’t make it progress. It just makes it another step towards the death of the craft.

***

This essay was adapted from Leighton Woodhouse’s Social Studies Substack.

If there is a foundational dogma to America’s civic religion, it is that the United States is an exceptional country. The reason we emerged as the world’s first modern democracy, the reason we became the most powerful country in history, the reason we defeated fascism and communism and remade much of the world in our capitalist image, is that we’re somehow special. 

For those inclined to see the world through Christian prophecy, we are ordained by God. For those who prefer to see Enlightenment-style “reason” as the engine of civilization, it was the genius of our Founding Fathers that set us on our path to greatness. For those who are more anthropologically minded, it was the curious Tocquevillian habit of Americans to come together in voluntary associations that set us apart. But all agree that we are a uniquely favored nation.

A wider view of history reveals a more mundane explanation: the reason America became a democratic superpower was its abundance of land. 

The long arc of Western history that led to the birth of the United States did not “begin” at any particular moment, but the collapse of the Roman Empire was certainly a major inflection point. The new kingdoms founded by Germanic tribal warlords on the wreckage of the Empire were less sophisticated than the society they had replaced. They lacked the bureaucracy necessary to tax their subjects as effectively as the Romans had, and without that revenue, they could not raise standing armies. Instead, they relied on volunteer soldiers, and compensated them with the spoils of war and pillage. This included plundered treasure as well as, more importantly, land.

Out of this exchange came the military order of feudalism. The power of a medieval king was measured by the military might of the volunteer soldiers pledged to him — otherwise known as his vassals. These men tended to be experienced warriors who could fight on horseback and who could conscript peasants who lived on their land, by force or by payment, to serve as foot soldiers. Generally, the more land a vassal held, the larger his annual revenue and the greater his army. He agreed to wage war on behalf of a more powerful magnate in exchange for the right to rule over a share of the newly conquered lands that military victory would bring. With that new wealth and power, he could, in turn, attract less powerful vassals into his own service.

But this compensation scheme created an intractable problem for the king, who, in the early Middle Ages, was merely the most powerful warlord in a given region at a given moment. The more land he distributed to his vassals, the stronger and more independent they became. Thus, every vassal was a potential rival, and every fief the king granted to them increased the threat they posed to his hegemony.

The remedy only made the problem worse. The king could secure his throne against the predatory ambitions of his rivals only by waging new wars and conquering new lands to distribute to his vassals as fiefs. It was a vicious cycle: staying ahead of one’s opponents in the short term meant increasing the threat they posed in the long term. On top of that, vassals waged their own wars to amass their own retinues of lesser vassals, and were also constantly trying to build their own military dynasties. Political competition created the conditions for endless war.

The militarized politics of feudal Europe produced an intricate vertical social structure: a long chain of vassals and liege lords connected the lowliest peasant to God. At the same time, however, the competition between warlords created a countervailing ideological force: republicanism.

The core region of feudal Europe was the area that was conquered by Charlemagne in the ninth century, stretching from the south of present-day Italy to the Baltic Sea, and from Bohemia to the Pyrenees. In the early days, aspiring conquerors swarmed to this relatively populated landmass, whose large peasant class could be easily forced into serving in infantries. But eventually, the core became overheated. The power of the incumbent lords became too strong to contest, and competition shifted to the more sparsely populated and up-for-grabs lands of the east and the north.

To effectively exploit these peripheral domains, their new rulers had to encourage settlement — and not just by agricultural laborers. Centuries of military competition in Europe had steadily generated new technologies: plane and chainmail armor, long bows, stone castles and siege weaponry like trebuchets. Artisans were needed to manufacture these products, and they in turn required trading centers. In this way, towns became indispensable to the long-term security of any throne.

Sometimes rulers transferred populations to their territories by sheer force, but more often, they were compelled to offer attractive terms to prospective immigrants. Colonists were granted enhanced property rights and civil autonomy. In the 12th century, the charter of Dublin allowed its residents to administer their own local affairs and judge their own legal cases. They were allowed to form guilds and to build as they wished within the city’s boundaries. Legal innovations spread like mushrooms: a charter in a town in today’s Germany would become a template for the founding of a new one in today’s Poland. A transnational legal network began to emerge, bestowing certain rights and privileges upon urban inhabitants, who became known as “burgesses”, or “the bourgeoisie”.

As the kingdoms of the old Carolingian lands spread to the farthest northern and eastern reaches of the continent, new riverine and overland trade routes emerged, criss-crossing Europe. Trade produced wealth, which kings could tax. These new sources of revenue, along with the development of bureaucracy, began to resolve the problem of the conflicting political interests between lords and vassals. Now, instead of exchanging land for military service, monarchs could pay mercenaries to fight their wars, and even raise standing armies. The Hundred Years’ War of the late Middle Ages was fought largely by mercenaries. But at the end of the war, Charles VII created the first European standing army since the Roman Empire by bringing France’s private military companies, which were typically contracted by feuding lords, into the direct service of the king. The move ignited a brief civil war with much of the aristocracy, as the crown was consolidating at their expense.

Over time, to use Max Weber’s terminology, the crown began to monopolize the use of legitimate violence. Royal domains were internally pacified, and warfare became a matter of conflicts between great kingdoms. Something resembling the modern nation-state became dimly perceptible. 

Pacification was good for trade, and the chartered townships prospered. The republican-minded burgesses flourished with them. But the old feudal class structures didn’t simply evaporate. Warrior knights slowly transformed into domesticated aristocrats orbiting the king’s court. These aristocrats continued to control the land, even while fulfilling no obvious social purpose. Stripped of their military function, they became a parasitical remnant of a social order that no longer existed. Peasants, laborers and lesser aristocrats found themselves socially immobile.

The stage was set for class conflict. The newly consolidated political power of the crown, at its apotheosis in the age of Absolutism, began to chafe against the burgesses with their democratic values.

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But for the discontented burgesses, farmers, and lords without prospects there was the promise of America. In the American colonies, there was arable land for anyone with the gumption to venture into the wilderness and take it. If you could tolerate the backbreaking work of clearing forests and the threat of being massacred by Indians, you could escape the economic stranglehold of early modern Europe’s vampire class. Here, the republican values incubated in medieval European towns and cities were free to spread unencumbered by the dead weight of aristocracy. 

Take, for example, those who would come to be known as the Scots-Irish, though they thought of themselves simply as Irish. Their ancestors, largely Presbyterian, had been transplants from Scotland to Ulster, recruited by Queen Elizabeth I as English-aligned colonists meant to displace the native-born Catholic Irish. Conditions were dismal in Scotland, and the land much better in Ireland, so they came in droves. But once there, they found themselves under the thumbs of absentee English landlords, who leveraged the improvements the new tenants had made to their lands to double and triple the rents they charged them. Feudalism had long since passed, but the laboring classes were still being squeezed by the nobles. 

In the 18th century, the Scots-Irish fled Ulster as readily as their grandparents had once fled Scotland, this time to the east coast of the United States. After landing in Philadelphia, they beat a hasty path into the back country, where they chiseled crude farms out of the mountains and hollows of the Appalachians. Once the nation was unified following the War of Independence, the Scots-Irish pioneers, for better and for worse, became the tip of the spear of American expansionism. 

The conquest of western North America entailed a different kind of warfare than their distant European ancestors had waged in the Middle Ages. The Americans faced fierce resistance from an indigenous population skilled in warfare, but not of the sort that medieval conquerors had encountered in Europe. Indian tribes had not constructed stone castles nor built trebuchets. The Americans could take their land without fielding armies in the tens of thousands, and without reordering their society to produce a warrior class and a servile population that could be conscripted as cannon fodder. The settlers who marched west of the Appalachians to conquer Indian lands largely did the fighting themselves, with the US Army playing only an ancillary role. They furnished their own weapons, and put their own lives at risk. They believed not in oaths of loyalty but in liberty, independence, and natural rights. It was a form of conquest and colonization that was entirely compatible with the old republican values of the European bourgeoisie.

After the West had been settled, the bourgeois ideology continued to prosper. Just as the medieval warlords on the peripheries of Europe needed new settlers to secure their power, the United States had a bottomless appetite not only for laborers but for skilled workers, educated professionals and entrepreneurs to develop the economy of a newly conquered continent. As for the burgesses in the medieval European towns, it was a buyers’ market for labor. And the US government attracted laborers in the same way: by offering economic opportunity as well as political liberties the newcomers were denied at home. With the obvious, colossal exception of blacks in the South, who were still ruled by the vestiges of a European aristocracy that would only be subdued in the Civil War and ultimately defeated in the Civil Rights Movement, American democracy flourished under these material conditions. It continued to do so in the 20th century, as America’s economy boomed, increasing the bargaining power of workers, professionals and entrepreneurs with the state. 

Those conditions, however, have vanished. In an age of urbanization and industrialized farming, land is no longer a productive source of wealth to be exploited at the level of the household. Far from needing to coax migrants into the United States to develop our booming economy, we are stanching the flow to prevent them from competing for scarce jobs. And with Artificial Intelligence rapidly displacing human cognitive labor, the incentives for governments to grant new civil liberties to people in order to secure their commitment to the nation and enlist their participation in the economy is becoming non-existent. Humans are losing their leverage over the institutions that rule them as their labor becomes cheap and superfluous. 

At the age of 250, the United States has long ceased to be exceptional. There is reason to question whether its republican spirit will persist much longer. Far too much emphasis is placed on vague notions of some uniquely American commitment to “freedom” to explain the success of American democracy, and far too little on the material conditions that have historically made democracy here possible: abundant land without a landed gentry. Without these conditions, democracy persists in America merely as a matter of inertia. We should be cautious not to assume it will last. 

Having done nothing illegal, Yana is bewildered, but also confident that it’s a mistake that will be sorted out by the courts. With each passing day that assumption becomes more far-fetched. She’s informed that she’s a dangerous drug dealer, because the chemical she has sold legally for a decade has suddenly been deemed a narcotic, even though it isn’t one. She’s transferred from the police station to prison. Days become weeks. With every failed bail hearing, her sentence is extended. She serves seven months, until she is at last found innocent and released.

Behind her arrest were the machinations of bureaucrats. The head of the Russian security agency tasked with drug control was attempting to shake down the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. A tranche of formerly legal chemicals had been re-listed as narcotics. Veterinarians were being imprisoned for having prescribed ketamine to cats. The point was to terrorize the industries into submission to the gangster state.

Those same bureaucratic designs lurked behind her exoneration, too. The head of the agency that had targeted Yana coveted the job of the director of Russia’s premier spy agency, the FSB. The two administrators despised each other. So when the FSB chief heard Yana’s story, he engineered her very public release and exoneration to embarrass his rival.

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Will MAGA survive its civil war?

By Leighton Woodhouse

This is a signature trait of Russian authoritarianism: laws exist as weapons to be wielded by politicians, bureaucrats and oligarchs in their conspiracies against one another. Ordinary Russians are routinely ensnared in these power games, their lives turned inside out for reasons they could never imagine. One day you’re living a normal life, following the rules, keeping your head down, making a living. The next moment you’re a high-value target of the state.

Earlier this month, after the shooting of Renee Good, American columnist David French suggested that the United States under President Donald Trump is being transformed into a similar regime. He relies on a different analogy — Nazi Germany — but the pattern is the same. Borrowing a concept from a Jewish refugee and lawyer, Ernst Fraenkel, French describes what is emerging in America today as a “dual state”. The dual state is made up of the “normative state”, which is the sovereign system of law and order we’re all taught to believe in, and the “prerogative state”, which is the parallel system of hazy and ephemeral laws and procedures that is entirely subordinate to the arbitrary will of those in power.

One might presume that tyranny depends upon the displacement of the former by the latter, but, in fact, it works best when the two systems operate in tandem. Under a dual state, most of the population carry out their lives within the ordinary framework of the normative state system. They know they can sustain a more or less normal existence if they keep their disagreements with the government largely to themselves — and don’t, like Yana, have a stroke of terribly bad luck. Things aren’t perfect but they don’t feel dystopian either. Should they step over an invisible line, however, they will find themselves in a topsy-turvy world in which the familiar old rules become twisted, amorphous and incomprehensible.

As French pointed out in his piece: “You can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide. But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state.”

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Since French wrote, the intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis, and that faint line between the two states has become much clearer. Pretti, like Good, was acting well within what were, just a few weeks ago, his rights. But, then, suddenly, he found himself face-to-face with the prerogative state.

His death is shocking, but the conditions have been ripe for weeks for such an incident to occur — again. In Minneapolis, ICE routinely pulls over American citizens who dare to follow them in their cars, film their activities, and blow whistles to alert neighbors of their presence. On an episode of the New York Times Daily podcast last week, an activist described having followed an ICE vehicle for about 40 seconds before the agents stopped the car, got out, surrounded her, pepper sprayed her vehicle’s ventilation system, smashed her front windows, pulled her and another activist out, handcuffed and arrested them, only to release them later with no charges. The activists are operating in a world straddling the two sides of the dual state. What are the rules now? Are you safe if you’re not blocking traffic? From what distance can you follow ICE? Is it OK to film from across the street, where you’re clearly not impeding? Is there even a policy to discern at all, or is it whatever the agent in front of you decides it is at a given moment?

If you’re an American citizen and you keep your nose out of ICE’s business, you can keep living a normal life in Minneapolis — albeit deprived of some of your former political freedoms. But not always. You might get questioned at the bus stop. You might have your door kicked in and be pulled out into the cold in your underwear. The van that takes your kids to school might get pulled over. You might choose to keep your kids at home, just in case.

A few weeks ago, it was pretty clear what counted as constitutionally protected activity. Documenting law enforcement actions fell squarely within that category. Now it’s contested terrain that could plausibly lead to your death. Until this month, if you were a US citizen in Minneapolis, it wouldn’t have crossed your mind to carry your passport with you to the grocery store. Today, it’s unclear whether agents are now allowed to stop you randomly and demand your papers. Minneapolis now exists in a purgatory in which neither regular people nor federal agents know what they are and are not allowed to do. But the agents have badges as well as guns. By default, they get to decide what the rules are at any given moment.

The new rules are inscrutable, because they’re dictated not by statutes or facts on the ground, but by the whims of sycophantic office holders competing for Trump’s ever-shifting favor. Like Yana’s imprisonment and release in Putin’s Russia, it’s all a show for others. One of the audiences is you: you and your neighbors need to be adequately intimidated in preparation for the day when the White House turns its attention to your state or city. The other audience is the President, who rewards those who humiliate his enemies in ways he can watch on TV.

So you have to just keep licking your finger and sticking it in the air, to see which way the breezes are blowing. You don’t quite know what you are and are not allowed to do anymore in protest of your government. You can only guess at what you’re still allowed to say. Or you can play it safe, and say nothing at all.

The TPUSA conference in Phoenix, which continues through Saturday, was the first since Kirk’s assassination, and easily the biggest in its history. The corridors and escalators were packed like a subway at rush hour. As befit the campus-based organization, there were zoomers everywhere, but there were also middle-aged moms and dads and seniors wearing hearing aids. The crowd of about 30,000 was way too large for the main event space, so thousands of people stood and sat on the floor of the exhibit hall watching the speeches on a Jumbotron.

As Erika’s speech anticipated, infighting took the front stage almost at once, reflecting what is commonly described on the Right as a burgeoning “civil war” in the conservative movement over America’s relationship with Israel. The two sides of that war are personified by two personalities, both of whom spoke at the event: Carlson and Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro followed Kirk on stage. The biggest threat to the Right, he told the audience, is not just the Left, but “charlatans”, “frauds”, and “grifters” within the conservative movement. He wasn’t coy about who he was talking about. The first of these “grifters” was his former colleague at the Daily Wire, Candace Owens. Owens’s contract with the outlet was terminated in March 2024 after she stridently criticized Israel for its war in Gaza and made remarks Shapiro and groups like the Anti-Defamation League deemed to be antisemitic. Owens was close friends with Kirk, and since his assassination she has devoted her extremely popular podcast to questioning the FBI’s account of the crime. With scant evidence to offer, she has wondered if, among other things, the Israeli government was behind it.

In his speech, Shapiro condemned not just Owens, but also those on the Right who have refused to criticize her. He named Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson.

Jonathan Choe, a reporter with TPUSA’s news division, Frontlines, was having dinner with his team while all this was going on. “As we’re ordering tacos, we’re glued to our phones,” he told me. “Half the table was shocked and angry, not so much by the content of what Ben Shapiro said, but how divisive it was.” Choe said he was expecting the speakers to focus on Kirk’s legacy, in order to build a base of unity upon which to move forward. Shapiro had done the opposite.

“Ben Shapiro is among the most annoying human beings on the face of the planet,” Joe Allen, who co-hosts the War Room podcast with Bannon and who attended the conference, told me. “He has the gall to gaslight anyone who points out his obvious, self-serving agenda.”

Just over an hour after Shapiro’s speech, Carlson came out on stage. “To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event,” he cackled, “I’m like what?”

Shapiro has railed against Left-wing “cancel culture” for years. But recently he has been calling for Carlson to be exiled from the conservative movement over his political beliefs and over his relatively friendly interview with the openly racist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. At a speech at the Heritage Foundation a few days ago, he referred to it as “ideological border control”. Carlson equated the tactic to leftists calling everyone they disagree with bigots. “‘Shut up Nazi’ is the same as ‘shut up racist’,” he told the TPUSA crowd.

Carlson also told the audience that political machinations were behind the civil war on the Right, a split he believes is “fake”. Shapiro has openly questioned the wisdom of nominating JD Vance to inherit the MAGA movement, whose purported values are more closely aligned with the Carlson faction than his own. “A lot of people don’t want JD Vance,” Carlson said. “They’re stirring things up to push him out. Why? Because he’s America First.”

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The San Francisco school sacrificed to equity

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The phrase “America First” has been under strain in the MAGA movement for the past two years. Since Israel began its war in Gaza, there has been simmering discontent within the Right-wing nationalist movement about the degree of Israel’s influence over the United States and the brutality of Israel’s military campaign. Carlson, Owens and congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have spoken about it openly. Some spectators at the Turning Point conference agreed.

“I’ve been to Israel and to Palestine,” said Joe Allen. “I don’t have a dog in that fight. But the Israel lobby forces me to address it. What I see in Israel is a sophisticated, technically advanced nation exhibiting extraordinary cruelty to its less advanced and developed neighbor. I don’t want a dollar of my taxes going to fund it.”

When Shapiro took aim at Carlson, Ricardo Taqueno, a 47-year-old father who lives near Portland, Oregon, yelled “Get off the stage, Ben!”. Taqueno, by his own admission, is no expert on Israel. But recently, he told me, he has begun noticing how much power the country exerts over the United States. He was once a Shapiro fan, but now believes he has become a tool for a foreign interest. He doesn’t rule out Owens’s theory that Israel may have been behind Kirk’s murder.

Noah Sanders, a high-school senior in Tennessee, told me he grew up in a conservative Christian household, and was taught from childhood to revere Israel. Now, he said, some young Christian conservatives are seeing the country differently.

Another young man who wouldn’t reveal his name told me that skepticism about Israel has become a consensus opinion among American zoomers. Young people have watched the carnage of the war on TikTok and Instagram, whereas older generations have seen a more sanitized version of it. He compared it to young people in the Sixties watching the Vietnam War unfold on TV. “We’re seeing the horrors in Gaza,” he said. “We’re seeing people talk so highly of another nation, a nation that may be carrying out horrific war crimes, while we’re supposed to be America First.”

Carlson resonates with these young conservatives. “Killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” he told the crowd, “… and you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise.” He told the audience that he regularly reads the Beatitudes, from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. “And killing tens of thousands of children, and then making excuses for it on behalf of a foreign government is not in there. It’s antithetical to that.”

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On the second day of the convention, Bannon and Kelly each took the stage and threw barbs at Shapiro. “I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement, which shows a willful blindness about his position in it,” Kelly said.

Carlson described the split in the conservative movement as “jockeying for position” for who will replace Trump, and, accordingly, which faction will hold sway over the next Republican White House. And it’s certainly that, but it’s also a more substantive split. In a breakout session at the conference on Generation Z, one of the panelists told the audience that, after watching members of the Millennial and Gen X generations die in Iraq for nothing, “we don’t want to fight in foreign wars that the American people don’t have a stake in.” He was stating what was, until just a few months ago, a core value of America First, but which has now, with war with Venezuela on the horizon, been swept under the carpet.

Trump himself has almost entirely abandoned the America First agenda. Instead of waging economic war on China, he is overriding national security concerns by expediting sales of American microchips to Chinese companies. Instead of creating a human-centered industrial policy, he is returning to free-market orthodoxy, championing the complete deregulation of Artificial Intelligence. And instead of keeping the United States out of foreign entanglements and focusing on problems at home, he’s trying to provoke a new regime-change war. The only major plank he has stuck with is immigration, so he’s supercharging it by stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship so he has something to show his base. At this moment, Trump’s priorities look more like those of Ben Shapiro than those of Tucker Carlson. No wonder Shapiro wants to prevent the larger debate from happening.

Despite these abominable conditions — or perhaps because of them — a nine-story apartment building called “La Maravilla” has been approved for construction next door to the school. It will contain 135 units to house formerly homeless people. Neighbors, school staff and parents of Marshall students fear it will make conditions around the school even worse. Yet in response to their concerns, supporters of La Maravilla have called them “Nimbys” (“Not In My Back Yard”) and accused them of bigotry.

In a meeting before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last July, Sam Moss, the executive director of the Mission Housing Development Corporation, the non-profit affordable housing development firm leading the project, lit into critics of La Maravilla. A group of neighbors opposed to the new construction, which is slated to begin in December, had appealed its approval, and that appeal was before the board to consider.

“This appeal isn’t about protecting the neighborhood,” Moss said, his voice tense with anger and brimming with contempt. “It’s about protecting privilege. It’s about using bureaucracy to block equity. It sends a clear message to low-income and housing insecure folks in San Francisco: you don’t belong here.”

His acerbic language reflected the rhetorical tenor of the Yimby (“Yes In My Back Yard”) movement. It’s a moniker proudly claimed by the pro-housing activists who oppose Nimbys — the pejorative used for neighbors who criticize and hold up new housing construction projects. Moss’ wife, Laura Foote, who also testified on behalf of La Maravilla that day, is one of the founders of the Yimby movement. (Moss declined to speak to me for this story and Foote did not respond to an interview request.)

Nimbys, in the minds of Yimbys, are affluent homeowners so pampered by their comfortable neighborhoods that they become feverish reactionaries in the face of any proposed change to the status quo. The caricature of a Nimby is encapsulated in a video from a 2017 Berkeley City Council meeting in which a neighbor held a zucchini aloft and declared that it could never have grown in the shade that would be cast over her vegetable garden by a couple of two-story buildings slated for construction next door. Yimbys often claim that concerns invoked by opponents of new development projects over traffic, parking, shadows and neighborhood character are not merely frivolous; they’re smokescreens for the real objective of keeping poor people out of the area. “I am ashamed at this classist and hostile behavior from some of my neighbors,” said one supporter of La Maravilla at the Board of Supervisors meeting.

But the stereotype is an odd fit for those who oppose Moss’ project, especially those affiliated with Marshall. The school’s students are overwhelmingly low-income. Many of them are the children of immigrants. The complaints of their parents and educators are not about zucchini gardens; they’re about surrounding a school with an open-air drug market. Neighbors have seen open prostitution in the area during school hours. One school employee told me about a man masturbating on the sidewalk in front of the playground in view of the kids. A teacher had seen shirtless young men walking out of a nearby station carrying machetes. “It’s unsafe at a hygiene level,” the Marshall employee, who asked not to be named, told me. “People are defecating on the street daily.”

Yet their grievances have been described as those of Nimbys even by Jackie Fielder, the supervisor who represents the neighborhood, on her Instagram page. (Fielder did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s a trope that plays well in San Francisco,” said Ali Gilmore, who lives across the street from the school.

Neighbors and parents fear that the new project will bring even more chaos and disorder to the vicinity. Plans for La Maravilla include three buildings. All of them will be affordable housing, but only one of them — the nine-story structure that will break ground in December — has been funded. That building will be permanent supportive housing. “Supportive housing” means housing with services for formerly homeless people who are mentally ill or drug-addicted.

San Francisco incentivizes the development of this type of housing. Thanks to a ballot measure passed in 2018 that raised taxes on huge companies in San Francisco to fund homeless services, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in city funding available for the construction of permanent supportive housing. And thanks to recent Yimby-supported legislation, residential development projects that include supportive housing are streamlined for approval in California, especially when they’re near transit corridors, as La Maravilla is. Instead of going through the tedious process of gaining the approval of public officials, developers whose projects meet a list of prerequisites can dispense with public hearings and costly environmental reviews and cut the permitting process down to months instead of years. The rules are meant to prevent Nimbys from blocking the construction of housing desperately needed to address the state’s affordability crisis. It was this streamlined process that allowed the Mission Housing Development Corporation and its partner on the project, the Mission Economic Development Agency, to push La Maravilla through.

Moss has described his opponents’ appeal against La Maravilla as “a greatest hits of Nimbyism” and “chock full of bigotry and segregation”. For people in wealthy Pacific Heights or on the low-slung west side of  San Francisco who for decades have stubbornly resisted affordable housing construction and upzoning — changing construction codes to allow for denser development — that’s a charge that might stick. Those were the kinds of homeowners the Yimby movement was built to confront, not moderate-income and working-class families whose neighborhoods are already inundated by blight. “I follow what’s happening in the Sunset,” Naomi Fox, who heads the Marshall Parent Teacher Association, said of the west side neighborhood. “I see Mayor Lurie begging them to allow an upzoning plan. We would have no problem with that.”

The Inner Mission is, in fact, already upzoned, and no one I spoke to in the neighborhood had a problem with affordable housing being constructed next to Marshall. Marc Solomon, another neighbor, told me they’d be fine with a building for homeless families, who tend to be higher-functioning than homeless individuals. The issue he and other neighbors have is with what La Maravilla is offering: permanent supportive housing for formerly incarcerated and chronically homeless single adults, which in San Francisco means drug addicts.

The part of the Mission that surrounds Marshall is already clogged with services for this population. About a block and a half south of the school is a free medical clinic for the indigent. A couple of blocks west lies a charity that distributes socks, blankets and hygiene kits to the homeless, and provides them with foot care and back massages. About a block southwest is another affordable housing complex called La Fénix, also built by the Mission Housing Development Corporation, with a quarter of the units set aside for the homeless. The site that La Maravilla will be built upon was, until recently, a homeless shelter.

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Neighbors believe that the dense concentration of housing and services for the homeless, mentally ill and drug-addicted has turned the Inner Mission into a containment zone for highly unstable and sometimes dangerous people. On the first day of the school year, around pick-up time, there was a shooting at La Fénix. A Marshall employee told me the police never informed the school’s staff, who may have decided to go into lockdown. Another time, someone being pursued by a gunman ran onto school grounds while kids were being dropped off. “The people that live in this neighborhood are dealing with the most difficult conditions in the entire city, alongside the Tenderloin and SoMa,” said Aaron Wojack, who lives across the street from Marshall. “The burden on this neighborhood is already tremendous.”

Yet at meetings with the community, numerous people who attended them told me, the non-profit developers treated neighbors as if they were bigots. “Whenever there was any talk of the community not wanting this, we were told, ‘you don’t care about unhoused people,’” a neighbor with a son at Marshall told me. “It was their cause, their cause, their cause. Everyone who opposes it is bad and doesn’t care about poor people.”

“They were just telling us the bare minimum to say we met with community,” said Todd Eng, who lives a few blocks away and whose daughter graduated from Marshall. “It’s, we’re going to proceed forward with this, we don’t care what the community thinks.”

Development in the Inner Mission fits a pattern in San Francisco, in which just three neighborhoods shoulder the brunt of the city’s addiction crisis. Even more than the Mission, the Tenderloin District and parts of SoMa are crammed with single-room occupancy hotels for the homeless, as well as food pantries, free medical clinics, drug courts and distribution sites for free, city-funded drug paraphernalia. Sidewalks are often clogged with drug users and dealers. As in the Mission, the poor immigrant families who live in the walk-up apartment buildings of the Tenderloin routinely have to dodge feces and meth smoke on the street. A child of one family, who immigrated from Yemen, was attacked.

To many residents, it seems by design. Earlier this year, a group of Tenderloin residents and businesses sued the city for turning their neighborhood into a drug containment zone. Among the plaintiffs is an immigrant mother who says drug users have threatened her with knives and hammers. Like the parents and teachers and neighbors of Marshall, these San Franciscans don’t want an open-air drug market in their proverbial back yard, which is already overflowing with the city’s worst problems. Does this make them Nimbys, too?

There’s no question there’s a housing crisis in San Francisco and throughout the entire state of California. Nobody questions the need for more housing construction of every sort, including permanent supportive housing. But the burden is not evenly spread. A few neighborhoods are expected to absorb the fallout of concentrating hundreds of drug-addicted and mentally ill people in buildings next to their kids’ schools, while the rest of the city enjoys clean sidewalks and safe playgrounds. It’s not a coincidence that these neighborhoods are also where the most powerless families reside.

The fight over the fate of the neighborhood around the proposed La Maravilla development belies the simplistic picture of Yimbys versus Nimbys painted in the national media. Sometimes there are real issues at stake in projects such as these, and the compromises made to address them are messy and divisive. The Nimby caricature papers over these complexities, dismissing anyone who objects to any new housing construction as selfish and entitled, whether their worries are about blocked views or about the risk of their kids being shot. This is what passes for “equity” in San Francisco.

You could contrive many different ways to interpret this tweet, but in the context of American politics, one of them is impossible to ignore. Both the language of the tweet and the aesthetics of the painting evoke a gauzy, nostalgic white nationalism that has become a subculture of what used to be called the “alt-Right”. Whether this was the painter’s intention is irrelevant. To anyone steeped in the vocabulary of the online culture wars, it’s obvious what the tweet is meant to convey.

Naturally, DHS doesn’t come right out and say it. Like any good shit poster, it leaves just enough room for ambiguity to allow it to answer its accusers with feigned shock and ridicule: how could you possibly infer racism from this wholesome depiction of our common American heritage? But this trolling doesn’t fool anyone. What’s being said is this: some Americans are more American than others. Specifically, those who can trace their lineage in the United States back many generations are more American than naturalized US citizens, or even the native-born American children of immigrants.

The word “heritage” is the giveaway. Among nativist-leaning American nationalists, the term “Heritage Americans” refers to those who can trace their lineage in the US back to the genetic stock of colonial America. To its proponents, Heritage Americans constitute an “American ethnicity” — basically WASP, with a smattering of German, and a sliver of Scandinavian. Some would also count black descendants of slaves as Heritage Americans, though others would not. Those who cannot claim this lineage are presumed to be somehow less American than those who can.

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While DHS can’t say this outright, MAGA influencers such as Jack Posobiec can. A few days ago, at a Turning Point USA conference, Posobiec, aping Trump, claimed that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a naturalized US citizen, is not, in fact, an American. “This idea that if you just hand someone a piece of paper that makes them American,” he said, referring to US citizenship, “guess what, it’s failed. It’s wrong. It’s not true.” “You are fake Americans,” Posobiec growled, “and we are going to smoke you out, every single one of you.”

A couple of days later, Posobiec’s “fake Americans” net grew even wider. Referring to Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, he tweeted: “This is clearly not an American.” Fateh was born in Washington, D.C., to immigrant parents from Somalia. There is no question of his citizenship status, though Trump’s executive order purporting to repeal birthright citizenship could conceivably change that. (When I asked Posobiec to explain exactly what separates a real from a “fake” American, he replied: “Everyone knows what an American is.”)

What Mamdani and Fateh have in common is that neither of them are “Heritage Americans” — a term that isn’t just legally meaningless, but also historically delusional. The conceit behind it is that the early Americans shared a common culture and set of values. This is because they were mostly English and universally Christian. Therefore, the narrative goes, they were united in their belief in such core Anglo-American virtues as democracy, rule of law, and limited government. Later waves of migrants, like those who went through Ellis Island, were further removed from these shared Anglo-American folkways, but not entirely so, as they were almost entirely from Europe. Since Americans opened their country to the rest of the world in the later 20th century, however, the nation has been inundated with people who are completely alien to American political and moral culture. From that began the dissolution of American society. This is roughly JD Vance’s point of view.

This is all ahistorical mythmaking. There was little that was culturally unifying across Colonial America. Just because the colonists were English and Christian didn’t mean they all got on — in fact, it meant the opposite. In the Old World, Christianity had been the source of endless fragmentation and war for 100 years, while England had been torn apart by those divisions more than perhaps any other country in Europe. These hatreds found their apotheosis in the bloodbath of the English Civil War, whose ripples spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the American eastern seaboard. There, the colonists of Virginia and the greater Tidewater region were faithful servants of the deposed King — many of them had fought for him as Cavaliers. Meanwhile, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay shared the Puritan faith of those who had chopped off the King’s head. What the two colonies had in common wasn’t “shared values”, but deep mutual contempt.

In the Old World, the various regional populations of England despised one another. In the American colonies, they could live apart in mutual disdain. With their newfound isolation and political autonomy, the differences between them became even more pronounced. In New England, the Puritans established a flat, communitarian social order topped by a strong and sometimes authoritarian government. Meanwhile, the Tidewater gentry reproduced the fixed hierarchical order of the English aristocracy as best they could. They in turn were loathed by the anti-statist Ulster Scots of the Appalachian backcountry, who for centuries in Britain had fought for what they regarded as their natural, God-given liberties against the constant oppression and predations of the English and Scottish crowns. The Deep South idealized a Roman-style slaveocracy ruled by oligarchs, while the Quakers of Pennsylvania established a pacifist society based on tolerance and Christian love.

These disparate cultures could not have been more hostile to each other. The unification they achieved under the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights was the result of painstaking horse trading and compromise in the face of a common enemy. Even that wasn’t enough to prevent secession and an American civil war a century later. What finally cohered American civilization, if anything, was the dilution of regional and sectarian identities in the bloody mess of westward expansion — a historical process that involved not just Americans of European ancestry but people from all over the world, from Sweden to Peru to China.

“Heritage Americans” would have you believe that America’s founding was easy, due to the natural cultural affinity and brotherly affection of its people. But this is an affront to America’s history, whose exceptionalism is found in the yawning fissures it overcame, against the odds, through its commitment to democracy. This may sound like postmodern revisionism to the Right, but the fact is that the United States has always been a multicultural society. It’s only through the distortion of our modern eyes that we fail to perceive the cultural and political diversity out of which we forged a nation.

“Heritage” is a relic of feudal Europe, in which social status was a function of one’s bloodline. America was founded specifically to leave all that behind. What united us was not a common history or language or tradition, but a shared drive to seek prosperity for our families through hard work, rather than resign ourselves to our stations of birth. In this commitment, the immigrants who seek opportunity in the US today are as American as those who landed on the Mayflower. It’s those who would replace this American self-conception with an anachronistic caste system based on ancestry who betray the founding ideals of the country.

The letter arrived a few days after Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and revoked his green card. Now, they are trying to deport him over his political speech. The same week, DHS searched two student dorm rooms and arrested another international student who was involved in the campus protests against the Gaza war for overstaying her visa. Going forward, the State Department will be deploying artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of tens of thousands of international students to search for pro-Palestinian sympathies.

The dragnet isn’t limited to the foreign-born. Under pressure from the White House, Columbia University is looking into an American student for writing an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel. On Friday, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the Columbia protests to determine whether they violated federal terrorism laws; 59 other universities are also under investigation.

These are the actions of a President who claims to be restoring free speech to America after four years of online censorship orchestrated by the Biden administration. “This is the most significant threat to free speech in modern United States history,” civil rights attorney Jenin Younes, who sued the Biden administration for censorship in the Supreme Court case of Missouri v. Biden, tells me. “There is almost no precedent for deporting people in the United States merely for voicing dissent from the government’s foreign policy.”

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For years, conservative politicians and “heterodox” writers (myself included) have complained incessantly about the threats to free speech posed by the social justice-oriented Left. About a decade ago, an authoritarian, schoolmarmish ideology took hold within Left-wing academic and activist circles. It then percolated into elite American institutions, including the media, the government, the nonprofit sector, and the human resources departments of major American corporations.

This ideology equated speech with violence. The thinking was that because spoken and written expressions of disfavor toward “marginalized communities” can lead to real-world discrimination and even physical attacks, such speech should be suppressed. Mobs of activists “de-platformed” speakers at public venues; universities enacted speech codes, created safe spaces and instituted trigger warnings; employers forced workers into training sessions on what to say and how to think.

Over time, this ideology began to shape government policy too. During the Covid pandemic, the federal government pressured social media platforms to suppress posts that questioned vaccine efficacy and criticized lockdowns. Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by not censoring the expression of views that the government disagreed with.

The Right baulked at this culture of censorship, as did some on the Left. The annihilation of “woke” ideology became the animating cause of the Republican Party, and may have won Trump the 2024 election. But all the while, a conservative strain of the exact same ideology was gestating on the Right, until October 7 unleashed it.

When the Gaza war erupted and militant student protests mushroomed on campuses all over the country, Republicans suddenly began to talk exactly like the social justice activists they so despised. In precisely the same way that Left-wing ideologues condemned every opinion that failed to conform to social justice dogma as “racism”, “misogyny”, or “transphobia”, the Right vilified not only the excesses of the pro-Palestinian movement, which were considerable, but declared just about any expression of opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as “antisemitism”. The very expression of those views, they insisted, put Jewish students in physical danger. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned Students for Justice in Palestine from the state’s public university campuses. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that promised to make campuses into “safe spaces” for Jewish students. House Speaker Mike Johnson stood alongside students from elite private universities who claimed to be victimised by the political beliefs of their classmates.

For 18 months, the pro-Palestinian narrative has been systematically demonized. And now, to Republicans and many Democrats, pro-Palestinian activism has become synonymous with antisemitism, promoting terrorism, and endorsing Hamas. This narrative is taking on the force of law. In an NPR interview last week, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Troy Edgar described Mahmoud Khalil’s participation in pro-Palestinian protests as ipso facto support for Hamas. He called Khalil’s advocacy “antisemitism activity” and compared it to terrorism.

This isn’t mere political rhetoric; it’s the legal basis for the administration’s case against Khalil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly declared that he was arrested for being “a supporter of Hamas” and for “ril[ing] up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities”.

Even if he had explicitly declared an allegiance to Hamas and a hatred of Jews, his views would still be protected by the Constitution. But no evidence has emerged that he holds either of these beliefs. Khalil has explicitly disavowed antisemitism in his movement, telling CNN that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other”.

Yet in the Right’s imagination, there is no distinction between supporting Palestinians and supporting Hamas. Just as, on the Left, concern for preserving women-only spaces can only indicate deep-seated transphobia, on the Right, criticizing Israel can only suggest a genocidal hatred of Jews. As such, to the movement’s critics, pro-Palestinian speech must be criminalized and suppressed, even at the cost of America’s commitment to free speech.

Trump’s stifling of free speech won’t end with Khalil. “The administration has indicated that its next strategy will be to go after US citizens for ostensibly engaging in terrorist activities,” Younes says. “Given that pro-Palestine activism is defined as terrorism, this is an absolutely horrifying prospect.”

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Nor are Trump’s brazen attacks on free expression limited to pro-Palestinian speech. In its mission to expunge “woke ideology” from the federal government and those entities funded by it, Trump and Elon Musk have directed the National Science Foundation to do keyword searches of disfavored terms (such as “women” or “diverse”) in its grant database to determine where to make cuts. Other agencies have scrubbed references to such terms from their websites, as have their contractors in the private nonprofit world. Trump’s de-wokification campaign has begun tracing the outlines of China’s censorship apparatus.

The will to silence the political opposition is neither a specifically Republican nor Democratic predilection. Rather, it’s the irresistible impulse of whoever happens to be in charge. Those with the power to censor their ideological opponents will tend to do so; this was true of Biden’s administration and it’s just as true of Trump’s. But as with everything Trump does, it’s dialed up to 11.

If the courts don’t stop him, Republicans should prepare for a future in which they reap what they sow, just as the Democrats are doing now. The Right won’t be in power forever. When their ideological adversaries next return to the White House, the full force of the state could be turned against anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxies, eclipsing what transpired even at the height of The Great Awokening. The scale of that suppression will make Biden’s Covid censorship subtle by comparison.

In their race to restrict each other’s right to free expression, both parties have contributed to this catastrophe. We’ll be fortunate if American democracy survives it.

Marquise S. sat in the driver’s seat of an old black Honda on Oakland’s Foothill Boulevard with white powder spread out over his knees. A slender young black woman sat in the passenger seat; a young black man with braids sat in the back. Marquise, a black man, looks like he’s in his early thirties. Rolling a piece of paper into a straw, he offered me a bump.

I declined, but he was willing to talk to me about the recent election anyway. “I voted for Trump,” he said, before I had the chance to ask.

Across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland is the African-American cultural capital of the West Coast. As the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, its politics are famously Left-wing. Kamala Harris was born here and claims it as her hometown. She even kicked off her 2020 presidential campaign in front of Oakland City Hall.

Yet from what I can tell, among black voters in Oakland, there’s never been an overwhelming sense of loyalty to Harris. I interviewed black Oakland residents both before and after she became the presidential nominee. Since she lost the election, I’ve interviewed several more. The lack of enthusiasm she inspires among black voters speaks to her weakness as a candidate. But more importantly, it indicates the long-growing disillusionment of black Americans with the Democratic Party, which was borne out in Donald Trump’s successful courtship of the working-class black vote during the election. In particular, Trump doubled his support from young black men.

“I don’t care about Kamala. Who’s Kamala? She’s just a woman,” a young woman in West Oakland named Sakai told me. She voted for Trump, and insisted that gas and grocery prices were already going down as a result of the election. “Life is going to go back to what it was before 2020 took place.”

Even the black Oakland residents I spoke to who had voted for Harris had done so without much enthusiasm. Dionne, a middle-aged black woman who works at an OB-GYN clinic in East Oakland, voted for Harris despite aligning more closely with Republican values — especially when it came to abortion. “I feel like [the Democrats are] leaning way in a direction that I’m not ready for,” she told me. When I asked her what issues she had in mind, she spoke of the Democrats allowing biological men to use the women’s restrooms, and how that could open the door for predators to go after kids.

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But the most immediate factor driving black voters away from the Democrats is the one driving voters of all races away: immigration.

Michelle is a 60-year-old black woman who grew up in Harris’s neighbourhood in Berkeley before moving to Oakland at the age of eight. She’s deeply involved in local politics. And over the years, she has gone from being a lifelong Democrat to  a Trump supporter. “We’ve always had a messianic complex,” she said of black American voters and their loyalty to Democrats. “There were always figures who could dazzle us with bullshit.”

The final straw for Michelle was the Democrats’ “insane” policies on immigration. Democratic politicians “blatantly drop like 10 or 15,000 immigrants into a black neighborhood, blatantly giving them resources they don’t give us,” she said. The wave of new immigrants under Biden, she believes, is driving down working-class wages. Moreover, she said, “a lot of the young males are dangerous”. She knows older immigrants who have been in Oakland for decades who feel the same way about the new arrivals.

Marquise felt a similar way. When I asked him why he doesn’t support the Democrats, he replied: “To tell the truth: immigrants.” “There’s too many in California.” He said that there are no jobs available. The woman in the passenger seat agreed, describing overcrowded classrooms filled with immigrant children who weren’t required to be immunised. She complained about teachers “speaking Mexican” in class.

When I asked Marquise what he liked about Trump, he replied that the President-elect would “get rid of all the Mexicans”. He also believed that Trump would let a lot of people out of prison. “He’s an asshole, but not that bad,” he explained.

There’s another, more subtle factor eroding loyalty to the Democrats: the party’s failure to improve economic conditions for working-class black Americans. The Democratic Party’s long history is littered with broken promises to black voters. The disappointments span the decades, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Barack Obama’s promise of Hope.

Michelle’s older brother, Cardell Watkins, doesn’t particularly like Trump. But when he heard Trump speaking in 2016 about how bleak conditions were for black Americans under Democratic governance, his ears pricked up. “You’re living in poverty,” Trump riffed. “Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed.” The speech touched a nerve.

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Watkins, 62, has been a longshoreman for two decades. He currently works at the Port of Oakland. We, longshoremen, he said, “work ourselves to death”. The average longshoreman retires at about 70 years old, he said, and only lives to the age of 73 or 74. His granddaughter is a longshoreman, too. He’s constantly telling her to get out and go to school.

That said, as a union worker, Watkins has done well for himself. He’s been making about $150,000 a year for the better part of the last decade, with only a high-school diploma. He moved out of Oakland and now lives in Fairfield, a Bay Area suburb. “I’m around white people,” he told me. “I’ve never been so happy in my life. The front yards are clean, there’s no constant blaring of sirens.”

“I don’t want my grandchildren growing up in Oakland,” he said. “All the trash on the street, all the undocumented people coming in, all the lies.” He said he understands “white flight” now.

Watkins believes that local politicians, who are almost entirely Democrats, “have failed us”. “The Nancy Pelosis. Do you know how wealthy they are now?” The Democrats inherited San Francisco and Oakland, two cities with thriving maritime industries, he said, and “[ran] them into the ground”.

“They’re not interested in changing, in making America better. They’re interested in power and influence. They can live on Martha’s Vineyard, they can move to Switzerland, where there’s no crime or dirt in the streets. Once you become infinitely wealthy, the whole world is your neighbourhood.”

When he was a kid, Watkins was raised to believe in Democratic leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young, who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. “They were able to tell us who to endorse and support,” he said. “We were in lockstep.”

But over the years, he saw those leaders betray ordinary black Americans, putting their careers before their constituents. “Once they got what they wanted from us, they didn’t have our best interests at heart,” he said. “We were being used.” His sister, Michelle, agrees.

When Obama first came on the scene, the siblings were exuberant. Michelle described Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention as “magic”. But by the end of his presidency, they felt used all over again. By then, “[Obama] didn’t even really believe the shit he was saying no more,” said Michelle.

Michelle recalls the moment she lost faith in the Obama project. It was during the Great Recession, when Michelle was doing loan modifications for a bank called World Savings, trying to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. At the time, Senator Elizabeth Warren favoured a policy called “cramdown”, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce people’s mortgage debts to bring them into line with the reduced values of their homes. “This was going to be a lifeline,” Michelle said. “It could have saved so many people.” She believes that Obama killed it, helping the banks facilitate what she described as “the greatest transfer of black wealth in the history of the country”.

These days she sees Obama as just another condescending politician. “He’s made a cottage industry of always talking down to black people.” “He’s uplifting for every other race. But always kind of negative toward black people.”

This year, both Michelle and her brother thought Kamala Harris was just more of the same. “She doesn’t care about black people,” Watkins told me. “She just wants to be president — another Rolex in her jewellery box.”

Such scepticism was widespread among the voters I spoke to, but it was especially pronounced among the younger ones. Watkins and Michelle’s generation was raised in the shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Its heroes became elected leaders who basked in history’s heroic glow as they operated the levers of the Democratic machine. Yet the lives of younger black Americans today have been shaped by what that movement failed to reverse: enduring, racialised poverty; urban blight; and endemic violence.

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The rise of California's vanlords

By Matt Feeney

Michelle’s support for Trump has made her somewhat of a pariah among African Americans of her generation. But she believes that among younger black people the partisan loyalty that was so deeply ingrained in her is entirely absent. “The Democratic Party has lost the young black generation,” she told me. “They’re gone. And that’s in liberal Oakland. They want no part of it.”

Marquise’s views confirm her suspicions. “She full of shit,” Marquise said of Harris. When Harris kicked off her campaign, her team seemed to assume that young voters would flock to her. When Charli XCX tweeted that Harris was “brat”, her campaign revelled in the approval, rebranding her online presence to match the pop artist’s album cover.

But on the topic of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion performing alongside Kamala during her campaign, Marquise said “It’s hella ghetto. Unprofessional.” He marvelled that Kamala Harris would put someone like Cardi B on stage with her while Trump was campaigning with Elon Musk.

The only reason the Democrats selected Harris, Marquise believes, was because she was a “minority”. But for black voters like him, appeals to identity politics are no longer enough to ensure their loyalty. Instead, they want to see real change — Michelle pointed to things like student reading scores, poverty, and crime. She said that the Democrats’ appeal to black voters was always “emotional, never practical”. She was tired of the “paternalistic attitude the party has taken toward black people”.

Nowadays, Watkins said that the workers at the union hiring hall, who are mostly black and Latino, are “flying their colours” for Donald Trump. Like him, they’re tired of being told what to think and who to vote for.

“I don’t have anything against her or anyone else,” Watkins said of Kamala Harris. “Just don’t tell me I have to support her, or that Trump’s been associated with white supremacy so I can’t vote for him. I’m tired of the bullshit. If it takes a white supremacist to get things done, so be it.”

In San Francisco, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as “progressive”.

What California does, the rest of the country tends to follow. In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?

We can start by tracing its roots to medieval England. In his 1989 book, Albion’s Seed, the historian David Hackett Fischer describes four distinct American political traditions that originated in four waves of migration to the New World, each from different regions of England. The most famous of these groups were the Puritans from East Anglia, who believed in community and the power of the state. Then there were the “Scots-Irish” from the Scottish-English borderlands, who shunned any form of authority whatsoever. Together, these two groups would come to shape the politics of contemporary California.

The Puritans who sailed into Massachusetts Bay in the early 17th century were pious middle-class artisans and yeoman farmers fleeing religious persecution in England. Their leaders dreamed of establishing a Christian utopia in America. The Puritans had a bleak view of humanity. They believed in Original Sin, and in mankind’s infinite capacity for evil. But this cynicism was offset by their reverence for community, through which people could be steered toward godliness. Their faith in the common good manifested itself in the town hall, a centuries-old institution that the Puritans brought from the Old Country. Every adult male could participate in a town meeting, where the goal was to achieve consensus, rather than a mere majority. New England townships voted for high taxation, and their level of public spending was two-to-four times that of other North American colonies.

All this meant that the modern American understanding of “liberty” was alien in Puritan New England, where individual rights were not really rights at all, but privileges bestowed by the commonwealth. Puritans spoke not of liberty, but of liberties: discrete permissions granted by the government, such as the liberty to fish in a particular river. Fischer describes these liberties as “specific exemptions from a condition of prior restraint”, suggesting that the natural state was one of state discipline, not personal freedom. In other words, it was the role of the government to regulate the behaviour of its citizens, not vice versa.

In the centuries that followed, the Puritan social ideal would spread from New England across the continent and become one of the foundational elements of American politics. This was no accident: the Puritans believed it was their God-ordained duty to expand Christian civilisation and save lost souls. Their evangelical spirit became part of the secular worldview of the Yankees.

This worldview would eventually come to embed itself in California. The Yankees were the first Americans to explore the Pacific Coast by ship, as fur traders. They feared that, without their spiritual example, California would be lost to the Catholicism of French rival fur trappers and Spanish-speaking “Californios”. That threat only grew with the discovery of gold in 1848, as Americans flocked West seeking anything but Christian enlightenment. Yankee ministers began preaching against the Gold Rush in New England, discouraging their kinfolk from making the trek; then, they took to the road themselves, spreading the Word in the saloons and brothels of California. By 1849, almost half of the vessels docked in San Francisco’s port had arrived from New England.

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The Yankee elite dreamed of turning California into a Massachusetts on the Pacific, and New Englanders into “the founding race of California”, in the words of the historian Kevin Starr. They went about founding civilising institutions, through which they could assert their influence. New Englanders poured money into new Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches all over San Francisco. They founded the city’s public school system. Across the Bay, they established the College of California, which would later become the University of California at Berkeley. But while the Yankees dominated the state’s emerging cultural establishment, they did not make up a majority of California’s population. This meant they were denied the political hegemony they had achieved in the Northern states, from Boston to Minneapolis.

According to the US Census, less than 30% of Californians in 1860 were born in Yankee-dominated states. A third were born in California, and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”. And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures: the Yankees and the Scots-Irish emigrants of Greater Appalachia.

Unlike the community-minded Puritans, the Scots-Irish were fierce defenders of personal liberty. Their love of freedom was born in the rugged borderlands between England and Scotland, a contested region of unremitting warfare throughout the Middle Ages. Vicious military raids on behalf of a stream of duelling Scottish and English monarchs were a routine part of life. The poor grew used to watching their homes razed to the ground, their family members tortured or killed. Without a government to lean on, families aligned themselves into warrior clans and waged blood feuds to settle disputes. So despised were the inhabitants of this border region that in the 16th century the parliaments of both Scotland and England passed a law declaring that “All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock.”

In the 17th century, with the two kingdoms unified under James VI, the borderlands were finally pacified through a campaign of state-sanctioned mass murder. Many of the borderland’s ruffians headed to Ireland, from where they were banished once again to the colonies. Many more fled voluntarily, seeking freedom in America.

These fugitives arrived primarily through the port of Philadelphia, but quickly fled to the backcountry. In the mountains and hollows of the Appalachian wilderness, they could at last enjoy their independence — and continue in their violent folkways. Fischer describes one traditional Scots-Irish “rough and tumble” match between a Kentuckian and a West Virginian. Even after the Virginian gouged out the eyes of the Kentuckian, Fischer narrates, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the “Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears and nose, gave in”.

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, as America drove relentlessly West, the Scots-Irish acted as the new nation’s advance guard. Instead of waiting for the US military to defeat the Indians before moving onto their land, as the Yankees did, the backcountry settlers waged war upon the natives by themselves. They were driven, however, less by a desire to expand American civilisation than to escape it. Fleeing the government’s encroachment upon the frontier, they pushed West — and eventually wound up in California, Oregon, and Washington.

They brought their belligerent folkways with them. California in the 19th century was one of the most violent places on the continent. As the historian Elliott West has noted, this was a period of racial re-ordering in the state, during which Anglo-Americans asserted their place at the top of the hierarchy. In the middle decades of that century, lynchings in California — of Hispanic Californios, principally — were at least as common as lynchings of black people in the Jim Crow South. In 1854, the murder rate in Los Angeles was 56 times that of New York City.

As on the Atlantic seaboard, the Scots-Irish settled in the mountains and valleys rather than in the coastal port cities. To this day, their individualistic worldview continues to shape the politics of rural California, with its populist agrarian politics, its small-government conservatism, and its distrust of the coast-dwelling liberal elite. But their influence wasn’t limited to the inland regions. The Scots-Irish pioneers infused California’s hegemonic brand of progressivism — which one might describe as fundamentally Yankee — with a touch of backcountry libertarianism, and in doing so, transformed the politics of the state.

Perhaps the clearest example of this ideological fusion was the apotheosis of California progressivism: the Sixties. The closest the Yankees ever got to uncontested national political power was the New Deal era, which brought the entire country into alignment with the Yankee vision of liberty. Yet the Sixties saw a generation of young people seek to dismantle the social and political machinery that the New Deal had built — and that spark was lit on the campus of that hallowed Yankee institution, the University of California, Berkeley.

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The Berkeley student revolutionaries were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, but after facing resistance to their civil rights activism from university administrators, their cause transformed into something more personal. The University of California system was the pinnacle of Yankee social engineering: a massive, egalitarian government institution that transformed the individual into the ideal citizen. Against the backdrop of Jim Crow and then the Vietnam War, however, that system became odious to the post-materialist, middle-class agitators of the New Left. Mario Savio’s plea in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in 1964 was an explicit rejection of Yankee social conformity:

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be […] made into any product! Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organised labour, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”

Over the next decade, Berkeley’s libertarian strain became ever more central to the evolving counterculture. Activists resisted not just the politics and the mass industrial economic structures of the era, but mainstream American culture altogether. They grew their hair, renounced all forms of authority, and eventually fled the cities to establish self-sufficient agricultural cooperatives in the countryside. In this, they followed the well-worn path of the Scots-Irish settlers of the Appalachian backcountry. The conservative, rural Californian communities that those settlers had established a century before may have had little affection for their new hippy neighbours, but they were, in fact, animated by the same American spirit and the same animosity for Yankee authoritarianism.

As the New Left faded in the Seventies, its anti-establishment zeal was absorbed into Silicon Valley’s startup culture, and into a distinctly West Coast style of progressivism. This is reflected in liberal California’s instinctive contempt for the police, its high tolerance for visible social disorder, its celebration of cultural non-conformity, and its theatrical embrace of hedonism, all of which are antithetical to the Puritan ideal. At the same time, Californian progressivism has retained its Yankee predilection for top-down social regulation, government activism, moral surveillance, and cultural evangelism.

From time to time, as in the Sixties, this ideological hybrid yields a politics that is vital and new. But more often, it manifests as a distinctively dysfunctional kind of progressive politics that sets the state apart from its Yankee cousins. There is no better example of this than the way that the state manages its mental health crisis. California once ran a vast Department of Mental Hygiene, but in 1967, shocked by conditions in its 14 asylums, state legislators all but banned involuntary commitment of the insane in a law they characterised as a “Magna Carta” for California’s mentally ill. In doing so, the state swung from an excess of Yankee-style social control to the opposite extreme: a hardcore civil libertarian regime that has left the mentally ill languishing on city sidewalks. This right to suffer from drug addiction and psychosis on the street without intervention from the government may constitute “freedom” in the Scots-Irish backcountry, but a traditional Yankee would not recognise it as such.

Drug policy is another case-in-point. California’s libertarian attitude toward recreational drug use began in the Sixties. Today, its ramifications can be seen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and South of Market districts and Skid Row in Los Angeles, where not only drug use but open drug dealing is decriminalised, in part as a result of Proposition 47, a progressive ballot initiative that California voters passed in 2014. In San Francisco’s influential activist circles, drug-dealing is hardly considered a crime at all, and drug enforcement is deemed an act of state repression against the poor. The assumption, which would be right at home in the Appalachian backcountry, is that the government is nothing more than a malign apparatus of coercion. Those same activists, however, also believe in the government’s responsibility to provide expansive services and treatment to those who want it — reflecting the political philosophy of colonial New England.

California’s convoluted policies toward drugs and mental illness have combined to exacerbate its colossal homelessness problem, setting it apart, once again, from progressive Yankee states. California has the highest rate of unsheltered homelessness, followed by Oregon, whose settlement history and politics are very similar to those of Northern California. By contrast, New York City, whose upstate region was settled by Yankees, has the third lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness in America. Its success in bringing its homeless population indoors is thanks to its “right to shelter” law — a classic top-down Yankee solution to an urgent social problem. Neither California nor Oregon has such a law. What’s more, homeless advocates on the West Coast fight to prevent city governments from infringing on homeless people’s freedom to sleep in tents on the street, a liberty that would be easily understood by the Scots-Irish of Appalachia but would perplex the Puritans of New England.

The result of this inscrutable ideology is a state that fails to fulfil the most elementary obligation of government: the provision of basic social order. You see it everywhere in California, in the tent encampments that line the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica and the dusty sidewalks of Fresno and Bakersfield. California is where two fundamentally incompatible Anglo traditions merged, yielding a unique kind of social dysfunction that’s as indelible a part of the state as the coastal cliffs and the redwood forests.

Even more than its neighbour San Francisco, Oakland is known for its extraordinarily high levels of crime. The city’s police force is understaffed by hundreds of officers. Only 35 are on patrol in the city of nearly half a million at any given time, and they’re limited by rules that prevent them from, for instance, pursuing drivers fleeing crime scenes. The situation is so extreme that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has deployed state highway patrol officers to do city police work.

But the crime that seems hardest to stop is also the most inane: sideshows. In the Eighties, the earliest sideshows were largely benign: young men would cruise through the neighbourhood in swanky cars in a kind of impromptu parade, like something out of the film American Graffiti. “I used to go to sideshows as an 18-year-old,” former Oakland police chief LeRonne Armstrong tells me. “It was just guys from the community showing off nice, restored cars.”

In time, drivers started performing tricks in the intersections. This was not unusual for California low-rider culture — but since then, these sideshows have evolved into something more threatening. “Now it’s a speed exhibition. It’s lawlessness,” Armstrong says.

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Today’s sideshows are typically organised through text chat and WhatsApp groups. But if you’re not in the loop, they appear spontaneous: dozens of cars will suddenly appear at an intersection, often in the middle of the night, surrounded by hundreds of boisterous onlookers. Cars do doughnuts and burnouts with passengers hanging out of the windows, while the crowds film them to post on YouTube and Instagram. People launch fireworks, fire their guns into the air and torch abandoned vehicles. If the cops show up, the crowds just jeer at them.

Sometimes bystanders are hit by drifting cars. Last weekend, a swaggering red Mustang crashed into the crowd, running over a woman. Residents living near the crime scene told me that sideshows have been a problem for years. “It’s every other Friday or Saturday night,” Joel Everett, a 63-year-old church member, tells me. People park on his residential street to join the crowd of spectators, leaving trash, bottles and cans everywhere, and pulling in and out of his driveway to make three-point turns. Everett worries about his car getting stolen or broken into. “You can’t sleep. There’s gunfire,” he says.

Another neighbour, Marcos, who declined to give me his last name, is a 65-year-old truck driver who works at night. One early morning, returning home from work, he had to sit in his car for an hour and a half waiting for a sideshow to disperse just to drive the last block to his house.

In the past few years, Oakland’s sideshows have become more diffuse: according to the city, several hundred intersections are regularly used for sideshows. Spiralling skid marks stain streets all over town. And nowadays, you’re as likely to hear the screeching of tires at 10am as you are at midnight. A single car will do a spontaneous intersection takeover in broad daylight, without a pre-warned crowd gathered for the spectacle. Affluent neighbourhoods aren’t safe, either: one of the most popular intersections is on Skyline Boulevard, on the ridge of the Oakland Hills, alongside a regional park used by hikers, joggers and equestrians. Sideshows have also spread to other cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco.

Even though sideshows began in Oakland, they now tend to be organised and attended by a marauding group of participants from all over northern California. “I would say 70% are from out of town,” Armstrong says. “It’s a group that’s causing havoc throughout the East Bay.”

With their drunk and hopped-up crowds, sideshows are often preludes to other crimes. Last month, five people were shot during one in East Oakland. In July, a sideshow mob ransacked a convenient store near the airport, racking up $100,000 in damages. In June, 15 people were shot in a gunfight following a sideshow.

With no faith in the city authorities or the police, tormented residents have taken matters into their own hands. Last month, Salcedo and his neighbours put up impromptu barriers in the worst-hit intersections in Oakland’s San Antonio district to discourage the mayhem. They dragged tires into the road, filled them with rocks and dirt, and painted them in bright colours. They installed speed bumps and Botts’ Dots pavement markers purchased on Amazon. And they did all this without the city’s permission or knowledge.

Users on one Oakland subreddit applauded the intervention. “I’m tempted to do something similar,” wrote one user. “The city has failed us so might as well take matters into your own hands.”

For a while, the San Antonio neighbourhood’s guerrilla installations worked. But a driver speeding in a stolen Lexus hit one of the tires and flipped it over. City workers came in one morning soon after and removed the tires, leaving some of the smaller, less hazardous impediments in place.

After that, residents lost patience with the city. At an outdoor meeting with a council member, a city engineer lectured the neighbours about Oakland’s liability for their handiwork. He told them that the impediments were a fire code violation as they blocked the egress of fire trucks, and that the risks they posed to drivers was “non-negotiable”.

“Your liability is more important than my kid being hit by a car?” one neighbour asked. The residents complained of cars running up on sidewalks where kids play; one of the worst intersections is between a park and a middle school. A Brazilian man named Odelson Souza said his two-year-old was once nearly run over. From the neighbours’ perspective, the city is more worried about the hypothetical safety risks posed by their DIY obstacle course than the real risks posed by daily sideshows.

The city is currently testing new hardscape solutions such as bollards and traffic circles, but at the tectonic rate of about one intersection a month. The police, meanwhile, are powerless to shut down sideshows when they involve hundreds of people, many of them armed — though Armstrong told me that they have had some success embedding undercover officers in the crowds, taking pictures of cars and licence plates, and impounding the vehicles in the days that follow. Last year, the county made it illegal to attend a sideshow as a spectator, though that law is being challenged in federal court.

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Besides being annoying, dangerous and occasionally deadly, sideshows have come to embody Oakland’s surrender to brazen criminality. Not far from where Salcedo and his neighbours put up their road blocks, there is open sex trafficking, day and night. Pimps and prostitutes operate outside schools. Meanwhile, the streets alongside Oakland’s 880 freeway are filled with tarp and tent encampments, and decaying RVs clog miles of sidewalk on either side of the Oakland Coliseum, which the city’s last professional sports team will soon abandon.

The defiant screech of the sideshow is a constant reminder to Oakland residents that when it comes to public safety, they’re on their own. But to the residents of San Antonio, it’s even worse than that: they’ve learned that even when they improvise their own fixes, the city will remove them. “Right now, they protect the criminals,” Salcedo told his neighbours at their meeting. “They need to protect us.”

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, wondered whether “people with guns” should even be responding to mental health calls. Pilot projects were launched all over the country to replace police with civilian response teams for 911 calls involving mental health, drugs and homelessness. Congresswoman Katie Porter introduced a bill to pay states and cities to set up more such units, while her colleague Cori Bush introduced a bill that does much the same. In many cities, “decriminalisation”, long a rallying cry for progressive critics of policing, became standard operating procedure.

The activists are right that police cannot be the “solution” to mental illness and drug abuse, which overlap in about 50% of cases. But the programmes developed to replace law enforcement have had mixed results. That’s because in many of America’s progressive enclaves, the problem isn’t that it’s the police who are responding to these emergencies. It’s that there is little the police can legally do once they get there.

Lejon Butler is a tall, lean, black man who lives in Rodeo, a bedroom community in the North Bay Area. As a kid in the East Bay in the Eighties, he recalls going to school and being taught to “Just Say No” to drugs, then coming home and smelling the familiar chemical odour of freebased cocaine wafting through the air.

Lejon’s mother, Martin, who is now deceased, and his stepfather, Craig, were drug addicts. But Craig was such a high-functioning addict that he was able to conceal his use from his family for years. He ran a successful landscaping business while getting high every day, even trading services with one of his clients for Oxycontin. But a few years ago, he overdosed. After that, dementia set in.

By now Craig was living in Richmond, a working-class residential city in the East Bay. A few months before Lejon’s mother passed away, Craig had started to become violent towards her. When she died, in April 2021, he fell into a deep depression. He became aggressive and unpredictable. He threatened to kill his grandson with a samurai sword. He put a dagger to his own stomach and threatened to gut himself. On January 5 this year, he started a fire in his kitchen and then refused to leave the house, acting like nothing had happened. His family called 911.

The responding officer was Brian Lande, who, as part of the county’s Mental Health Evaluation Team, specialises in handling these sorts of calls. Officer Lande had spoken to Craig only a few days earlier. He makes a point of checking in on people with mental illness and addiction issues when they’re not in crisis. That way he’s able to get to know them as they really are, and not just when they’re sick.

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When Lande arrived at Craig’s house, Lejon, his wife, and his niece Dnaya were already outside. Lande intended to put a psychiatric hold on Craig, which would allow a hospital to keep him for up to 72 hours. He also recommended that Dnaya fill out an application for a restraining order, which might help persuade the hospital to keep him there instead of just releasing him within a few hours.

The family had been through this drill many times before. Craig fell neatly through a gap in the system. He had dementia, but that didn’t count as a “mental illness” for the purposes of institutionalisation. He threatened his relatives’ lives, but he rarely actually attacked them, so the criminal justice system wasn’t inclined to take him seriously. “Someone’s going to have to get killed for them to do anything,” Lejon told me.

An ambulance pulled up, and the EMTs walked over to get a rundown from the cops. Then they went inside with two of the officers and came out with Craig on a gurney. Craig is in his seventies, and looks, if anything, older. He’s a small, stout Japanese-American man with sheet-white hair and an unkempt beard and moustache. His belligerence with the family stopped as soon as the first responders arrived. Suddenly he was compliant and reasonable.

This, according to Lejon, was a tactic of his stepfather’s. “He’s a very intelligent man,” Lejon said. His antics cease the moment he’s interacting with the authorities. Craig was deemed stable and released back to the family that evening, at which point the chaos flared right back up again.

It’s a pattern Officer Lande has seen time and again. “People have crises, they go to the hospital, they get stabilised,” he said. “They agree to a treatment plan. Then there’s no follow-up.” He continued: “Having a system of coercive mental healthcare that’s limited to emergency psychiatric crises that’s wedded strictly to voluntary participation — you’re condemning people to not getting the level of care they need. You’re condemning them to never get better.”

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Craig is drug-addicted and psychologically debilitated, but he at least has a house to sleep in and a family to keep tabs on him. Hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering mental illness and substance addiction lack even that basic structure to their lives. In recent months, we’ve seen what happens when the most violent among them are left to their demons: America’s cities have been struck by a series of grisly, unprovoked murders of women committed by homeless men.

The deceased in these homicides were not the only victims. The acutely mentally ill and drug-addicted are prisoners of their sicknesses, and despite all the money we’ve thrown at homelessness, our policies have amounted to a wholesale abandonment of these broken people to their grim fates.

In San Francisco, that chronic failure has become the city’s official policy. An entire downtown neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city, has been effectively ceded to drug dealers, addicts and the mentally ill, all in the name of compassion. Users in the Tenderloin smoke fentanyl and shoot heroin on the sidewalks in broad daylight. When it rains, the train station there becomes a huge underground shooting gallery.

Following the spectacular failure of the War on Drugs, the prevailing ideology in the addiction treatment world became “harm reduction”. Harm reduction aims to respect the rights and dignity of drug addicts by destigmatising their drug use; to minimise the social harms that accompany drug addiction such as crime, incarceration and discrimination; to save lives by providing safeguards against overdoses; and to offer detoxification but not to require it as a condition for social services and subsidies. The motto of harm reduction is “meeting people where they’re at”, rather than compelling abstinence as a one-size-fits-all-solution.

But the approach has its critics, who view it as well-intentioned but ineffective. “There are aspects of harm reduction that I support, and there are aspects that blur the lines between harm reduction and enabling,” said Tom Wolf, a former addict in San Francisco. “The most important thing is to have a full continuum of care that focuses on recovery, not an indefinite maintenance of one’s addiction.”

“Out of thousands of people I saw maybe two get clean,” said Ginny Burton, a former addict in Seattle, describing her work as a case manager employing the harm reduction model. “What I’ve seen actually work, and experienced myself, is separation. Separate the person from the destructive environment. Maintain that separation long enough for the person to get clarity. Then implement services based on priority of need.”

This is how she got clean. “Thank God I was arrested,” she said. But in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, the enforcement policies that resulted in her arrest don’t exist anymore. “If I was loaded today, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself out,” she said. “I wouldn’t be arrested.”

Tom Ostly, who was a prosecutor under the former San Francisco District Attorney, agrees that the state’s coercive powers are what are needed to jolt drug-addicted people into making the commitment to go clean. He once prosecuted a man who had walked up to a random man on the street, punched him in the face and broke his nose. The whole assault was caught on video. With his priors, the defendant was facing 12-15 years in prison.

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It turned out the man’s son had died, and the grief had turned the father into a drug addict. The day of the assault was the anniversary of his son’s death. He had been on a self-destructive spiral. Facing 15 years in prison, he agreed to go to intensive drug rehab instead, where he received counselling for PTSD. He’s now taking classes to be a drug counsellor and will soon graduate from college.

Those kinds of prosecutions just don’t happen anymore in San Francisco, where it’s considered more humane to allow people to continue killing themselves with drugs than to force them to stop. “The current administration lets everyone out and gives them no services,” said Ostly. “It’s bullshit.”

Jail is a lousy place to get clean, and drug use in and of itself should not be treated as a crime. Those lessons have come across loud and clear from the failed War on Drugs. But in rejecting the politics of mass incarceration, we’ve also thrown out the very idea of coercion. And without that, we’re empty-handed in the struggle against addiction and the rampant crime that it engenders.

Drug addiction itself is coercive. Giving an addict the “choice” to continue to use or to voluntarily get clean is as illusory as pushing someone off a roof and giving them the choice to either fall or fly. The current approach in cities such as San Francisco, Officer Lande said, “assumes people exercise full voluntary volition over their behaviour, and they don’t”. The decision to get clean has to be as non-optional as an addict’s “choice” to continue using. It has to be forced.

That doesn’t have to mean jail — in fact, it shouldn’t. Ginny was incarcerated repeatedly, but she finally got clean not through the criminal justice system but through her diversion to drug court and mandated rehabilitation. Nevertheless, coercion was an indispensable element in that successful intervention. The certainty of consequences is what finally broke through the fog of addiction.

“You don’t want to overly criminalise people,” said Officer Lande. “But you have to have some non-carceral way. Some judicial process beyond what the current system has.”

“Right now it’s very black or white,” he continued. “You’re either a psychotic or you’re not. You’re either a grave danger to others or you’re not. We don’t have anything in that grey area. We just have to wait until people are hitting rock bottom before we can do something.”