On July 4, Wells went with a group of white friends to participate in a local institution: a massive, Independence Day teen boat party off Horn Island, a barrier island about 10 miles off the coast of Mississippi. His body was found two days later, apparently drowned; he was 18. 

There were no signs of foul play, according to the local authorities. The water around Horn Island is unpredictable; the party was large, drunken, and chaotic; an accidental drowning would be the most obvious scenario. Yet Wells’s parents, Christine Wells-Wonsley and Elmore Wonsley, rejected that explanation, and the social-media machine swung into action, claiming there was something ominous in the fact that Wells was the only black kid hanging out with a group of whites. In dreaded Mississippi no less. 

To suspicious, racially charged minds, the preliminary assumption of apparent drowning by Mississippi authorities was another cover-up, a time-honored tradition of theirs. Speculation abounded that Wells may have been the victim of race-based violence at the hands of his friends.

Legacy media institutions have lent credence to the narrative. The Wonsleys, accompanied by their lawyer, Benjamin Crump, a headline-seeking civil-rights attorney who represented the family of George Floyd, appeared on Good Morning America on July 10, where they claimed that Wells’s death was “suspicious,” and that they believed content may have been deleted from his phone. The family has stuck to talking points about wanting justice and the truth — a reasonable demand from any grieving parent. But if Wells’s death is “suspicious,” such suspicions have content, and their only possible implication is that Wells’s white friends were involved in his wrongful death.  

And people are believing it. Wells’s fate, according to a story that ran in The New York Times on Friday, has “sparked anguish among black parents about the safety of their children in predominantly white spaces.” On the surface, this may seem like the paper’s usual project of foregrounding black voices and the black experience. 

But it’s nothing so benign. The Times story contains zero statistics or hard information about real danger to black children from white ones — because, regardless of the eventual findings in the Wells case, such danger statistically doesn’t exist. Undeterred, the paper promotes the idea that it’s the enlightened next frontier of racial justice for black children to be afraid of their white peers. 

But think about it. Such a narrative undermines one of the greatest achievements in American society: the de facto, widespread daily reality of the integrated, post-racial friend group. 

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Viewed in a more rational light, Nolan Wells, prior to his tragic death, was an American triumph. His proud black parents believed in emphasizing the black heritage of Mississippi, and he had friends of all colors, yet he was also popular and thriving among the sons and daughters of the good old boys (and girls) in a wealthy, coastal town in the Deep South. Allegedly, he stayed behind on Horn Island when the boat he’d come out on departed, because he was flirting with a girl — a white girl, a matter that now goes unremarked upon, even in Mississippi. Wells’s friendships represented true American diversity and were a dramatic change from the past. Such outcomes have been the inspiring result of the civil-rights movement and a major goal of societal progress. Only, our prestige institutions seem bent on undermining them.

It’s yet another example of a racial-justice machine run amok and achieving the opposite of its stated outcomes. The grieving parents — whose motives have been questioned, but let’s not — have launched an independent investigation and flown their son’s body to Washington, DC, for a second autopsy, due to concerns about the quality of justice available locally. 

Their lawyer, Crump, is known for taking on cases much less meritorious than Floyd’s. An all-star cast of racial-justice celebrities has also become involved in the Wells case: filmmaker Tyler Perry paid for the funeral, civil-rights activist and former football player Colin Kaepernick paid for the independent autopsy, and the Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy. 

Whether it has been the family’s intention or not, what’s followed has been a perfect storm of armchair internet analysis over a murky situation involving hundreds of partying, presumably drunk teenagers, and multiple, obscure pieces of evidence. The white teenagers whom Wells rode out with returned without him, according to an interview given by Wells’s friend Warren Hudson, a member of the group, because they were having trouble with their boat. 

“Nolan decided to stay on the island with the girl that he was with. And the girl is a witness to that, too,” Hudson has said. The family, for its part, disputes that Wells would have remained behind: he wasn’t the type to remain behind, supposedly. The girl’s sister disputes that she and Wells had significant interaction. Countering, the teens and various Reddit threads say that riding out with one group to Horn Island and returning to another for ephemeral or unclear reasons is totally normal practice at such parties. 

And, on the internet, anything can become suspicious or blown out of proportion. Crump claimed that a photograph of Wells in a pool on the mainland with a group of white teenagers was taken later on July 4. If so, it would demand explanation — if Wells was back on the mainland, how did his body end up drifting off Horn Island? But the photo, ABC News has confirmed, wasn’t taken on July 4. A statement by the president of the United Cajun Navy search-and-rescue organization that Wells was “fully clothed” when its operators found him, has also been used by Crump to suggest foul play. This, despite the UCN assertions that in the context of Horn Island, “fully clothed” meant wearing a bathing suit. Crump, the UCN claims, deliberately obscured the facts. 

There is also audio of an emergency call to the Sea Tow emergency service, made by the teenage captain of the boat Wells rode out on, on its return trip. This call is an amazing document of civic dysfunction in its own right. “Hey, we’re at the West tip of Horn, and our bilge pump stopped working,” the caller says. “We’re going. We’re sinking. Can y’all please come, we have a membership?” The connection is poor, and the teenager seems distracted — you know, perhaps because the boat is sinking — while the emergency-services operator puts him through the membership-number rigamarole (he doesn’t have it), and a list of rote questions, and becomes obtuse, annoyed, and legalistic in her interactions. “Is the boat sinking or you have it aground?” she asks. “We are sinking, yes!” the teen replies (he’s said it several times already). “Is it aground is the question?” she counters. “No, we are not aground! We’re in 17, no, 31 feet of water!” he yells. Anyone calling Sea Tow better hope the boat is sinking slowly.  

Five minutes into the call, the emergency dispatcher instructs the caller to please hold (naturally), and switches lines to the captain of a rescue boat, her tone of voice changing from hostile to polite and simpering. “I apologize ahead of time, I really do,” she says, explaining that she’s sending over a “fee-for-service” job, because there is a caller without a membership number. “We’re so tied up right now, we can’t really do any non-member jobs right now,” the captain says. Eventually, the two find the membership number and proceed — just another example of bureaucracy and increasing inhumanity in our essential services. “Have a drink!” the dispatcher tells the captain. 

Internet sleuths and the gossip website TMZ have analyzed the unintelligible background noise during this call to suggest that it captures the moment of Wells’s death, and reveals teens saying things like, “Can we cover it up?”And: “You killed him.” UnHerd couldn’t distinguish any such thing from the audio garble. Reddit threads speculate that the words are there, but refer to the intake hole for the non-working bilge pump, and are “can we cover it up” and “you killed it.”

There is lots, lots more. Are the Wonsleys’ concerns realistic? Is criticism of them for seeming to be mercenary in response to their son’s death itself racist? Would Wells really have stayed behind without his phone (which, along with several other phones, returned to the mainland with the boat)? Do drunk, partying teenagers standing in waist-deep water routinely keep their phones with them? 

The most plausible interpretation of the emergency call and the conflicting evidence on all sides seems to be that Wells tragically drowned. The multiple suspicions that have emerged don’t add up to a narrative. If Wells was left behind maliciously, as the family’s statements suggest, he’d then also have to have suffered violence at the hands of a different group of malicious actors. If Wells was being accidentally killed on the boat during the emergency call, various other theories of phone-tampering or that Wells was the source of an argument heard on shore and captured on video, don’t fit in. But most important, none of even these outlandish scenarios has any clear marker suggesting that the problem was race.

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And this is the additional tragedy of Nolan Wells. 

The race question — until more information surfaces, at least — is in the eyes of the beholders. Even in the possible scenario that an investigation uncovers violence on the part of the white teenagers, and even in the worst-possible-case scenario of an investigation uncovering truly ghoulish racially motivated violence by an island of hundreds of teenagers (who are well known not to be able to keep their mouths shut about anything — so if something happened out there, everyone is covering), there is still, at this early point in the investigation, not a shred of even crazed speculative evidence that says race, specifically, was a factor. 

And if it wasn’t, the response to the Nolan Wells narrative — by the media, and by the racial-justice advocates themselves — undermines one of the strongest foundations of a diverse society: the propensity of children to be colorblind and get along until they’re told otherwise.

True American social diversity started with the integration of schools and has been successful, especially with the great leveling influence of team sports. Players are valued for their skills on sports teams, and friendships form, regardless of color. If we look merely at the obvious, there is every sign that this was the case for Nolan Wells. The supposedly suspicious pool photograph shows him jammed in with a crowd of white kids, one of whom has his arm around him. A very many other photos show him laughing and smiling with his white friends. Kids are also exposed to enormous amounts of diversity programming in schools, which they tend to recognize as inherently right. For generations, their friendships have been building the American future. 

Race-based paranoia is now undermining this great social accomplishment. Stories like the ones in the Times encourage black parents to be afraid, and to pass this fear on to their offspring. 

And for the white peers, might the effect of the Wells story be the same, fear of the other? Wells’s friend Warren Hudson told interviewer Brandon Tatum that he and his family had received “thousands” of death threats. Hudson sat down in front of the camera — bravely, if he’s innocent — to set the story straight and affirm his friendship with Wells. It isn’t impossible that he is perpetuating a cover-up, and that time will reveal him to be a master villain, but if not, his future is being derailed, thanks to his friendship with Wells. Might white parents think twice when a group of white children wants to take a black friend on a boat trip? “But what if something happens to him?” becomes an ignoble but predictable statement.  

Keeping children apart because of perceived danger, of course, has always been a tool of soft racism. No one should bow to such impulses, but people will. 

Nolan Wells graduated in 2025 from Ocean Springs High School, whose website proclaims that it has a 93% graduation rate and a 13-to-1 student-teacher ratio. He was part of an elite friend group in a wealthy town and, by all accounts, had a bright future. His racial success story is being turned into a failure by outsized paranoia about race — a situation that increasingly seems true of America writ large — to our great detriment.

The number was once unthinkable. BuzzFeed went public in late 2021 at a valuation of more than $1.5 billion. As a private company, it had been worth $1.7 billion, and was the unicorn that set the benchmark for the decade’s digital-media venture funding. Allen acquired the entire operation for roughly 7% of that peak figure. Most of the purchase price is a five-year promissory note; the cash portion was only $20 million.

Meanwhile, Vox Media has spent the past three years quietly accepting that its 2015 NBCUniversal valuation of a little more than $1 billion is not coming back. Penske Media took a controlling stake in 2023, at a $500 million valuation, half what NBC had paid eight years earlier. Vice Media, valued in 2017 at $5.7 billion (yes, billion), filed for bankruptcy in May 2023, sold to its creditors for $350 million, and by February 2024, stopped publishing on Vice.com altogether. The brand survives. The company does not.

This is not really a story about three failed startups. This is a story about a genre of media that disrupted nothing, lasted briefly, and is now being sold for parts. Each of these companies was an experiment in betting that new distribution platforms could underwrite editorial ambition. The bet was wrong, but for a few years it looked right.

Vice began in 1994 as a Montreal free magazine, founded by Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith, and Gavin McInnes; that last went on to found the Proud Boys, an awkward provenance that Vice Media still prefers to leave underdiscussed. By the mid-aughts, the magazine had relocated to New York and developed an aesthetic of irony-laced gonzo reportage: well-educated young men visiting war zones and methamphetamine encampments with their smirks intact. An HBO deal in 2013 conferred prestige. The editorial product retained its faux-outlaw posture. At its peak, the company ran 35 offices, an HBO show, an in-house creative agency called Virtue, and a record label. James Murdoch invested through Lupa Systems. So did Disney, TPG, and Technology Crossover Ventures. The 2017 valuation implied that Vice had cracked the code of monetizing youth-culture authenticity.

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It had not. What Vice had cracked was the willingness of corporate advertisers to pay premium rates to associate themselves with disreputability. When that willingness faded — and it began fading the moment the brand became too familiar to be transgressive — Vice had nothing left.

BuzzFeed’s story is more interesting, because the journalism, for a stretch, was real. Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of The Huffington Post, built BuzzFeed in 2006 as a viral-content laboratory. The famous early product was the listicle: “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.” But in 2012, Peretti hired Ben Smith from Politico to build a news division on top of the listicle engine. Smith’s bet was that the same social-platform mechanics that propelled animal-rescue videos could also propel investigative journalism. He hired aggressively, opened bureaus across the world, and soon presided over a newsroom whose international reporting on the Chinese government’s mass internment of Uyghurs won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. BuzzFeed News published the (dubious) Steele dossier in 2017. It covered Silicon Valley with greater sophistication than most of the legacy press. For five or six years, it was the most consequential newsroom in American digital journalism.

The catch was that the apparatus rested on Facebook’s referral algorithms. When Facebook decided, around 2018, that it had grown tired of subsidizing publishers, BuzzFeed’s traffic collapsed. The news division burned cash. In an April 2023 staff memo, Peretti admitted that he had “overinvested” in the news division because he loved the work, and confirmed what had been obvious for months: BuzzFeed News was shutting down. About 180 staffers were laid off.

Finally, there was Vox Media. Founded by media executive Jim Bankoff with seed funding from Comcast, the firm traveled a different route to the same destination. The Vox website launched in 2014 with two policy bloggers, Ezra Klein from The Washington Post and Matt Yglesias from Slate, joined by Melissa Bell, an editor with a digital pedigree from the Post. Vox’s premise was technocratic. Smart people were busy and confused; journalism’s job was to package the underlying expertise behind the news. The site’s design templates — an index-card-styled “explainer” footer, providing background context on stories, embedded charts, and house-style explainer videos — were copied by other publications. At its peak, Vox had a Netflix series called Explained, a billion-dollar valuation, and ambitions to be the equivalent of CNN.

Each of these companies succeeded by being native to the larger social-media platforms it depended on. Each was undone the moment the platforms changed terms. The collapses were not symmetrical. Vice went bankrupt. BuzzFeed shrank into peddling snark and lists, and shed half its workforce. Vox negotiated a soft landing inside Penske’s stable of legacy titles, which includes Variety and Rolling Stone. But the trajectory was the same.

Klein left Vox for The New York Times opinion section in late 2020. Matt Yglesias departed a week earlier for a Substack newsletter called Slow Boring, where he now earns considerably more than he did at Vox. Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, decamped in 2020 for a Times media column, then in 2022 co-founded Semafor, a newsletter platform, with the former Bloomberg Media chief Justin Smith. Semafor today employs some 80 people, has 750,000 newsletter subscribers, and generates more than half its revenue from live events. Lauren Williams, the BuzzFeed News deputy editor, left to start Capital B, a black-civic-journalism nonprofit. Other BuzzFeed alumni founded subscription products on Substack and Beehiiv. At Vice, the diaspora was wider and quieter: writers scattered to legacy outlets, independent production, freelance. 

Each departure made the same point. The value the platforms had accumulated was always portable. The audience attached itself to writers, not to the brand. When the writer left, the audience left, too. BuzzFeed could not retain Ben Smith’s authority because Ben Smith was the asset. Vox could not retain Klein’s subscribers because they were reading Klein, not Vox. These companies turned out to be temporary scaffolding around durable individual reputations.

This is, of course, what newspaper proprietors used to understand. H.L. Mencken’s name sold The Baltimore Sun. Walter Lippmann’s column ran in 250 newspapers because it was Lippmann’s column. Westbrook Pegler, Stewart Alsop, Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko: their bylines moved subscriptions. The new-media companies briefly persuaded themselves that the brand was the asset. They were corrected. The talent walked. The shells remain.

The transactions of the past three years tell a story not of media renewal, but of media dismantlement. Vice’s $350 million 2023 sale to a consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management, and Monroe Capital was a creditor takeover dressed as a sale. CNBC reported at the time that the new owners planned to hold the company for two or three years and “further shave off the business.” They did. By February 2024, the new CEO had announced “several hundred” additional layoffs and confirmed that Vice.com would cease publishing original content. The website would now syndicate or partner with others. The brand was kept alive because brands have residual value. The journalism was finished.

Vox’s 2023 deal with Penske Media was less brutal but more revealing. Jay Penske, who built his fortune in motorsports media and entertainment trade publications, took the largest outside stake at a valuation that halved Vox’s 2015 mark. Vox now sits in a bigger portfolio alongside media commentary and taste-curation outfits. These brands continue to elevate cultural trends, but they are more about vibes than news. Their editorial ambitions have been quietly downsized. This is what survival looks like.

The Byron Allen acquisition of BuzzFeed is the most candid of the three transactions — and the most instructive. Allen is not a journalist. He is a Detroit-born comedian who built a syndication and distribution empire from a foundation in 1990s television production. He owns 13 broadcast affiliates across ABC, CBS, and NBC; 10 cable networks, most prominently the Weather Channel, which he bought in 2018; four streaming platforms; and a two-hour late-night comedy block on CBS that just expanded into Stephen Colbert’s old slot. He understands the economics of distribution. 

When Allen looked at BuzzFeed, he did not see a journalism asset. We can imagine that he saw three things. He saw a recognizable brand, nostalgia for which could be monetized. He saw a content library of two decades of audience-tested digital material that could be licensed to an AI company. And he saw an integration opportunity: his BuzzFeed could feed his streaming infrastructure, with the hope of growing ad revenue. He said as much in his announcement: “Our vision is to build on the iconic foundation of BuzzFeed and HuffPost by expanding into free-streaming video, audio, and user-generated content. As of this moment, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube to become another premier free video streaming service.”

Note what is absent from that sentence: any reference to journalism, reporting, or news. Note also the AI mention. Peretti’s new title, head of BuzzFeed AI, is the giveaway. The asset Allen is buying is not the company. It is two decades of human-written content that can be used to train AI systems, plus a brand name under which machine-generated content can plausibly run. The Reuters licensing deal at $200 million annually, the OpenAI partnership announcements, and the recent Disney-OpenAI billion-dollar deal: these are not isolated transactions. They are the new revenue model. Publishers’ archives have become a training data inventory. Their brand names have become trust-laundering vessels.

For buyers of declining new-media brands, there are three distinct logics that overlap.

The first is distribution integration. A company like Allen Media Group, which owns broadcast and streaming pipes, can use a content brand to fill those pipes more cheaply than it can produce original content. The economics are roughly the ones William Randoph Hearst used in the 1920s, when his magazines fed his newspapers, and his newspapers fed his radio stations. The form is updated; the structure is identical.

The second is intellectual-property licensing. The archives have value as content libraries that can be repackaged for streaming, podcasts, or, increasingly, AI training. Vice’s old documentaries get licensed. BuzzFeed’s listicles get repurposed into vertical video. The journalism, where it ever existed, becomes incidental to the intellectual-property play.

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The third is what we might call brand-laundering. A trusted-sounding brand name carries value beyond the journalism that originally built that trust. Algorithmic content running under “BuzzFeed” or “Vice” carries credibility freight that the same content would not carry under its own name. This is why the brands survive even when the newsrooms don’t. The empty shell is the asset.

The dominant theme is that none of these logics requires the people who originally made the brand worth anything. Once the talent left, the shell still had financial value. Not as a journalism business, but as a content asset, a brand asset, and an audience asset, monetized in ways the original founders never imagined and would not have wanted.

What this tells us about the state of the media industry in 2026 is not subtle. The mid-tier digital publisher is dead. The economics that briefly sustained newsrooms of 200 or 300 journalists at outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice no longer exist. Programmatic advertising has collapsed. Google’s AI overviews have throttled search referral traffic. Facebook deprioritized news years ago. Apple’s privacy changes wrecked targeted-ad economics. The only viable models left are very small (Substack, individual subscriptions) or very large (The New York Times, with its 11 million digital subscribers, has functionally replaced the regional newspaper system as the country’s national paper of record). Everything in between is being either absorbed into the very large or stripped for parts by the financiers.

The consolidation logic has reshaped every other consumer industry over the past two decades. Private equity buys the brand, fires the staff, and runs out the residual value of the customer relationship until it runs dry. Gannett, MediaNews, Tribune Publishing, McClatchy: the American local-newspaper system was hollowed out this way over 15 years by hedge funds like Alden Global Capital. Digital media are now experiencing their own such moment, abbreviated and accelerated. What took the local papers a decade and a half is taking the new-media companies about six years.

The familiar pieties about democratization will not survive contact with this story. The new media was supposed to break the gatekeeping monopolies of legacy publishers. It did so, briefly, replacing them with venture-funded shells whose economics were never sustainable. But once those shells collapsed, the gatekeeping has reconstituted in a more thorough form than before — we used to have gatekeepers at a constellation of local papers; now there’s only The New York Times.

This is the lesson of the last decade, and it is older than the internet. Disruption is rarely what the disruptors claim it is. It is more often a redistribution of who collects the rent.

The contrast is exemplified by two of the papers’ most prominent writers: the Times’ Russian-born columnist Masha Gessen, who just won the Pulitzer for commentary, couldn’t be more different from the Post’s Marc Thiessen, who’s gaining a lot of attention these days as President Trump’s favorite print columnist. Gessen is a cosmopolitan progressive; Thiessen is a conservative Catholic and former Bush administration official. 

The two should be at odds, and in some ways, they are. But when it comes to foreign policy, they sing almost exactly the same hawkish, pro-empire song, albeit in slightly different keys.

Start with Gessen. There’s a pattern of immigrants coming to America, then asking the US government to start wars with their native lands. In 2022, for example, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov called on the West to throw Russia “back into the Stone Age.” Or take Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-born human-rights defender who spent recent years calling for a Western military attack on her homeland — only to retract her endorsement once that happened and produced predictably disastrous outcomes. 

Standing at the summit of this genre is Masha Gessen — or “M. Gessen,” as she now prefers to be called. (Gessen, who was born female, identifies as both non-binary and trans — I won’t explain how that works because I really don’t know.) Her Pulitzer citation this week lauds her for an “illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.”

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Four of Gessen’s seven prize-winning essays compare the Trump administration to Russia and Vladimir Putin. In these “illuminating” essays, Gessen argues that the Supreme Court ruling allowing Trump’s executive order to only list two sexes on US passports is just like a Russian bureaucrat who wouldn’t allow her to reclassify her ethnicity from Jewish. In another, she alleges that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s overzealous targeting of Jimmy Kimmel was parallel to Putin’s seizure of power in Russia. And in still another, she asserts that we are entering a specific authoritarian “moment” in America that recalls Putin’s abolition of elected governorships of oblasts, the war in Georgia, and killing of Alexei Navalny. Finally, Gessen compares Soviet Russia to today’s United States, contending that “it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.”

It is true that Russia is not the most “inclusive” country in the world for LGBT people like Gessen. It’s a society operating on a totally different set of mores — a reminder of the vaunted “cultural differences” respected by liberals in the case of nations they like, and only anathematized for nations they don’t like. Add to this Gessen’s fearmongering that the United States is becoming totalitarian, like Russia, and she is offering classic, 2016-style Trump Derangement Syndrome, rallying the liberal base to fight absolute evil in order to vindicate absolute good. Ironically, this bankrupt, hate-baiting approach comes at a time when there are legitimate and even bipartisan reasons to be disappointed with President Trump — the economy, the war in Iran.

Gessen-ism, then, goes something like this: Russia is terrible because it denies that I’m trans; America and liberal democracy are great because they let me be trans; Trump is turning America into Russia; so we should arm Kiev and send more Ukrainian men into a meat grinder so that I can be trans. 

Such an approach ignores the plentiful evidence of Western provocation of Russia, not to mention a pre-Trump consensus to do so: NATO’s official stance since 2008 that Ukraine will join the alliance; the fact that the late Sen. John McCain traveled to Ukraine during the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution and promised that Ukraine’s future would be with Europe and thus the West; Obama diplomat Victoria Nuland’s infamous leaked phone call boasting that Washington would be in charge of the Ukrainian transition and “fuck the EU.” There has always been a clear Washington objective to turn Ukraine, a neutral buffer state, into an American client. For Gessen, this is not relevant. The world is a big battle between Putin-style authoritarianism and Democratic Party-style social progressivism, and the latter must triumph — popular will and the realities of foreign policy be damned.

Gessen’s is a pro-war flavor that appeals to the progressive, trans-rights absolutist, still woke-ish readership of the Times. But the incredible power of the American media’s system for “manufacturing consent” — if Epstein-obsessives will forgive the Noam Chomsky reference — is that it does so in ways that are appealing to partisan sensibilities, while enforcing the same bottom line: an expansive American empire is good; war is necessary; the economic status quo should go unquestioned and unchallenged. 

Which brings us to The Washington Post — a paper that is now markedly different from The New York Times. Since Bezos took active interest in the paper he bought years ago, and influenced by his alliance with the Trump White House, the Post has become noticeably Right-coded. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Feb. 26, 2025, Bezos announced that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Since then, the Post has staffed its editorial-page with lots of establishment conservatives, while more progressive-minded staff have quit or been ousted. 

Yet notwithstanding these partisan and ideological differences, the foreign-policy bottom line at the new Washington Post is remarkably similar to the one at the Times.

Behold Marc Thiessen. Unlike Gessen, Thiessen is a native-born American, a devout Catholic, and a rock-ribbed conservative: he served as George W. Bush’s director of speechwriting between 2007 and 2009 and joined the Post as a columnist shortly thereafter. Put another way: while Bezos has made the aims of the publication narrower and more explicit, the Post was pushing a hawkish line even before Bezos’s acquisition in 2013 and his editorial interference beginning in 2025. 

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In 2014, Thiessen argued that the United States should not have pulled out of Iraq. Recently, he went on Fox News to recycle Iraq War talking points for use in Iran, insisting that America should just kill any leaders who don’t want to make a deal. Even more bizarrely, in early March, Thiessen wrote an op-ed stating that the “Trump Doctrine” — expressed via the war in Iran — somehow ends forever wars, perhaps in a vain attempt to sell this war to a New Right that has grown skeptical of foreign entanglements. 

But Thiessen is not against forever wars — he loves them, and he’s even defended torture by the CIA. He’s obviously overjoyed that Trump, who ran on a largely antiwar and populist platform, has ended up reverting to the old ways of the Republican Party and effectively destroyed, at least for the time being, any New Right governing agenda embracing restraint abroad. For instance, Thiessen declared in a Trump-lauding piece that Ukraine was one of the president’s great accomplishments in 2025. He had in mind not Trump’s early attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict, mind you, but the president’s willingness to maintain and even expand arms transfers: “He is doing more to help Ukraine than Biden ever did.” 

Browse Thiessen’s Post profile, and you will find that almost every single article is about how Trump took a hawkish stance and why it was so great. While engaged in a journalistic enterprise that looks like the diametrical opposite of Gessen’s — not Trump-bashing, but Trump-praising — he is, in fact, reinforcing the same policy agenda.  Unfortunately, the Thiessens of the world have understood just how well Trump responds to flattery. 

Because of that, Thiessen is now a frequent mention on the president’s Truth Social posts. On April 23, Trump commented on a Thiessen op-ed about how he didn’t need a deal with the Iranians: “Very true!!! President DJT.”

Thiessen and Gessen represent opposing American political ideologies, and wholly different reads on Trump. But to the hawkish uniparty, that doesn’t matter. The goal has always been a Pride Parade, whether in Tehran or Moscow (preferably both). That, we are told, is freedom. It’s why you must shut up about gas prices. Heads they win, tails you lose.

In 2022, Barrett (Shalit is her maiden name) sued The Atlantic for defamation and breach of contract. This summer, the parties settled the suit, to the tune of more than $1 million. (Some of the counts were dismissed.) Nonetheless, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports” remains retracted on The Atlantic’s website, available only in the oddly purgatorial form of a PDF, and an edited version of the original editor’s note that accompanied the retraction remains, and still represents the magazine’s core claims against the writer.

For a freelancer to sue a billionaire-owned prestige outlet and receive a decisive settlement is an unusual occurrence, and seems to suggest missteps on the part of The Atlantic. The publication prides itself on having the highest journalistic standards. Its current website displays a marketing banner touting “Accountability. Transparency. Independence.”  If The Atlantic’s claims against Barrett were so transparent and accountable, why did it settle? And if they weren’t, why did the publication make them in the first place?

At no point has The Atlantic disavowed the basic premise of Barrett’s story: high-level participation in niche sports, once a promising strategy to land a spot at an elite college, has become an arms-race among wealthy families, with diminishing results. Instead, the conflict has centered on a welter of supposed factual errors suggested by Erik Wemple, then The Washington Post’s media critic, in a series of columns about the piece. The publication has also questioned the accuracy of Barrett’s representation of “Sloane,” a Connecticut sports mom who participated in the story on the condition that she and her college-hopeful children would not be identifiable. Concerned that the publication was not honoring its commitments, Sloane misled The Atlantic’s fact-checkers in the 11th hour, and entirely withdrew her cooperation with the magazine post-publication. 

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On one side is the narrative presented by The Atlantic in current and past versions of the editor’s note that accompanied the story’s retraction, and in an internal memo to staff from editor Don Peck. In this telling, The Atlantic fell victim to a serial plagiarist and journalistic untouchable, and only realized this thanks to Wemple, who is now a media reporter for The New York Times.

On the other side is Barrett, who contends that “my niche-sports article was published in October of 2020, at the zenith of America’s great racial reckoning and at the height of social justice-infused callout campaigns,” as she told me. During this time period, elite liberal publications such as The Atlantic were highly sensitive to protecting themselves from allegations of racial wrong-think. This, according to Barrett, “created a perfect opening for The Washington Post — a publication that is unique among major journalistic outlets in allowing its pages to be used to settle scores and malign those who have hurt the newspaper — to attack me.” Wemple, reached via telephone, called this idea “preposterous.”

Nonetheless, at the time he penned a series of critical stories on a single magazine article, questioning the facts in Barrett’s story, doing re-reporting of his own, and assailing her credibility, repeating claims that she had in the past “embellished quotes and exaggerated details,” “stretched quotes and embroidered details,” and “mishandled quotes and story points.” Barrett denies all such allegations, calling them “pure innuendo and insinuation” and “made-up nonsense.” 

Barrett is known to many as a notorious media figure of the Nineties, when her meteoric career fresh out of college as writer for The New Republic and other prestige venues was marred by a plagiarism scandal. She was shown to have lifted minor, boilerplate-type sentences from other writers’ work in four brief instances. She was also an enfant terrible of sorts in the Washington of the period, and a frequent target of media-gossip columnists. Her work did draw many allegations of factual inaccuracies. These often, however, seem to be of a vague or misleading type when you really look into them. Defenders — among them, Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic’s literary editor in those years — have represented much of the controversy as a natural result of a journalist doing hard-hitting reporting.

Detractors, not least David Carr, the legendary media critic, have called Barrett “tremendously self-involved,” “not particularly self aware,” and “a one-woman journalistic disaster area.” (To be fair, she was notoriously disorganized, overcommitted, and late with her deadlines.) Carr has been posthumously canonized, but during his time as the editor of the Washington City Paper in the Nineties (where Wemple also worked), he kept up a steady stream of extremely nasty Barrett-bashing via a regular feature he called “That Darn Ruth.” Some of Carr’s commentary, such as calling Barrett “a kinder-genius, complete with frilly socks” and remarking on the color of her lipstick, seem to bear out her remarks to me that part of her negative reception was due to misogyny.

On the telephone, Barrett is an overwhelmingly voluble conversationalist, and seems to have been driven at least a little crazy, a la Bleak House or Kafka, by defending the details of her case. She provided me with hundreds of pages of documents, including her complaint, a memorandum opinion and order from the federal trial court, an “omnibus write-up” on the case, a summary of the omnibus writeup in case I didn’t want to read its 51 pages, PDFs of relevant articles, screenshots of text messages with editors, and more. These documents presented a compelling counter-narrative to the one put forth by The Atlantic.

The Atlantic editor’s note currently attached to Barrett’s retracted story on the magazine’s website begins: “After The Atlantic published this article, new information emerged that raised serious concerns about its accuracy, and about the credibility of the author, Ruth Shalit Barrett. We have decided to retract this article. We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the piece in its entirety.” 

The note goes on to explain that Barrett was complicit in a deception perpetrated by Sloane, regarding the number of children she had, which Sloane included as a masking detail. And it reports “several” additional errors: a thigh injury should have been described as a “skin rupture” rather than “a deep gash”; a lacrosse family was erroneously said to live in Greenwich, Conn., when in truth they lived in another town in Fairfield County; and some private backyard hockey rinks characterized as “Olympic-size” were “large, but not Olympic-size.”

The note also mentions incidents in “1994 and 1995 in which plagiarism and inaccuracies were found in Ms. Barrett’s reporting,” and explains that “we decided to assign Barrett this freelance story in part because more than two decades had separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic and because in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines. We were wrong to make this assignment, however. It reflects poor judgment on our part, and we regret our decision.”

In previous versions of the note, The Atlantic claimed that Barrett “left The New Republic” in 1999 “after plagiarism and inaccurate reporting were discovered in her work.” Both the previous and current versions of the note mention that the story ran under the byline Ruth S. Barrett, asserting that the magazine “should have included” the name that she used in her byline in the Nineties, strongly implying that the Ruth S. Barrett byline was an attempt by Barrett to conceal her identity.

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Barrett, in her complaint against the magazine, contended that she overlooked the deception of the magazine’s fact-checkers by the source, Sloane, in order to honor her agreement to keep her source confidential, and that her behavior was justified, given the magazine’s failure to honor its commitment to sufficiently mask the source’s identity. The court did not deny the truth of this claim, but dismissed the count regarding it.

However, the court accepted the statements of fact behind several other counts: the magazine originally misrepresented the circumstances of Barrett’s departure from The New Republic in 1999; and the author has never sought to conceal her identity via her byline. Barrett explained in her complaint that she’d written under the name Ruth Shalit Barrett or Ruth S. Barrett since her marriage in 2004. She also provided me with the receipts to prove that she added the “S.” to The Atlantic’s proposed byline of “Ruth Barrett” to render herself more identifiable. 

The court agreed with the plaintiff that The Atlantic’s statements could have been “capable of defamatory meaning,” and that “a reasonable reader could infer two negative narratives, both of which ‘imply unstated defamatory facts’: first, that Ms. Barrett sought to conceal her identity and distance herself from her work in the 1990s; second, that her history was sufficiently unsavory to warrant her doing this,” according to an opinion of the trial court allowing some of her claims to go forward before a settlement put an end to the matter.

The Atlantic settled just before Barrett’s lawsuit reached the discovery phase — that is, just before its editors would have had to start turning over their emails. In public statements it has presented the incident as a result of the magazine’s high-mindedness and high standards. 

To momentarily pierce the veil of bullshit: the factual inaccuracies revealed in the magazine’s correction are extremely minor, could easily have been corrected in an online version of the piece, and do not seem to justify a major retraction. Such things are pretty common, even in exhaustively fact-checked stories at premium outlets like The Atlantic, and are not usually the occasion of high-profile defenestrations.

The deception of the fact-checkers is a blacklisting-level offense, possibly, depending on the writer’s clout and the publication, but again, it and the other minor alleged errors don’t quite seem to warrant the total demolition of Barrett’s reputation carried out by the editor’s note and retraction. Nor does it account for the publication’s other acts of apparent bad faith. For just one example — there are many — The Atlantic editor’s note even today mentions allegations by Sloane’s attorney that Barrett made additional mistakes in her story.

In a letter presented to The Atlantic’s attorneys by Barrett’s attorneys, portions of which were made available to me, Barrett claims to have conclusively demonstrated to the publication that these allegations were unfounded. She provided The Atlantic with documentation on two details questioned by Sloane’s attorney: the existence of a beach house and a makeshift basement fencing strip; and she had receipts that editor Don Peck had received the evidence. So why is a transparent and accountable publication still mentioning these allegations in its editor’s note, except to make Barrett look bad?

The editor’s note’s declaration that “we cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the piece in its entirety” suggests an answer. A magazine article is, by definition, a quantifiable event, whose veracity is not a mystical quality, but in fact can be determined through the well-established practices of sourcing and fact-checking. The Atlantic fact-checked Barrett’s story before publication, and then again, by its own account, did so forensically, afterward. Despite Wemple’s exhaustive spit-balling and The Atlantic’s very best efforts, the only “errors” it has exposed are of a flimsy and irrelevant nature: a “skin eruption” rather than a “gash,” whatever that means, the square-footage of a hockey rink, and so on.

The writer’s “trustworthiness and credibility,” however, is a different matter. These qualities depend not on her work, but on public perception. The magazine’s suggestion is that Barrett’s history and reputation — exceedingly well known before the article was published — disqualified her from inclusion in its pages. However, it might be more fruitful to look instead at the particular conditions of 2020.

Wemple wrote multiple stories for The Washington Post about Barrett’s piece at the time of its publication. The first, entitled “Ruth Shalit Just Wrote for The Atlantic, Would Readers Know it From the Byline?,” appeared on Oct. 24, 2020, and appears to be the origin of the byline scandal. Wemple’s story also made reference to a legendary and controversial 13,000-word feature Barrett (then Shalit) wrote for The New Republic in 1995 that was critical of racial diversity initiatives in The Washington Post’s newsroom.

Barrett’s 1995 story was a tour de force, and made many well-sourced points on the divisive nature of diversity initiatives, the negative consequences of choosing applicants by race rather than by merit, and the irritating and demoralizing banalities of diversity training. The writer was 24 years old when the piece appeared, and her wunderkind-reporter status was obviously deserved. She reached the prescient conclusion that when newsrooms make the promotion of social justice a priority, they hamper the production of news and fundamentally distort its contents.

In the 1995 essay, Barrett acknowledged the Post’s troubled racial history — an all-white newsroom, protests over racist coverage — but quoted multiple staffers anonymously and one on the record with concerns that its commitment to establishing proportional representation was diluting the talent in the newsroom. Given the size of the candidate pools, she demonstrated, proportional representation with top talent was “flamboyantly unrealistic” and she confirmed this with quotations from a memo by the paper’s own recruitment expert. Moreover, these measures weren’t making anyone happy. Both white and black staff members were now complaining of discrimination. 

This is not to say that the purity police came for Barrett in 2020 as retribution for a 1995 story. However, one might suspect that she was both denounced and purged for racial wrong-think  — which is to say, purged because it was possible, and it was a fun thing to do at the time, and made the purgers feel more secure about their own jobs. The mere mention of a story like “Race in the Newsroom,” in Wemple’s column would not have been lost on editors at The Atlantic in 2020. Wemple responds that it is “simply not true” that racial politics in 2020 had anything to do with his reporting on Barrett. “I do my work the same regardless of what decade it is,” he said. 

In a Nov. 2 follow-up story for the Post, Wemple mentioned an anonymous staffer at the magazine who “raised concerns” in a meeting about the “racial implications” of a passage of Barrett’s story on teen sports, and who “pointed to a connection between that language and the mentality suffusing the author’s long-ago investigation of the Post.” A little more digging reveals a story in The New York Times in 1995, quoting a black reporter from The Washington Post as saying, “the article was the most racist piece of so-called journalism I have read in modern times.” What magazine, in post-George Floyd 2020, would have felt safe platforming Barrett?

 Bottom line: the core of Barrett’s story on niche sports was beyond reproach — and in fact her findings were validated in 2023 by a group of economists at Harvard. And her 1995 reporting was a textbook example of a lost form of hard-hitting investigative reporting. It’s The Atlantic’s failure that it published a true story only to retract it. 

It’s disappointing to see The Atlantic violate its own standards and the standards of journalism to distance itself from Barrett. The original editor’s note appears to have been written not to present a fair portrait, or even the correct facts about Barrett’s history, but in order to align with the publication’s politically motivated and cancel-culture-safe inner truth. The current version of the note does the same thing in even more disjointed fashion. Anna Bross, senior vice president of communications for The Atlantic, commented via email that “the story remains retracted and that will not change.”

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This kind of activist journalism is poor journalism, and is exactly what Barrett’s article in The New Republic predicted would happen as the profession moved to prioritize “diversity” as a social-justice cause. Muddled prose, exaggerated smears, and the weaponization of fact-checking are the tools of the trade, and present a desired truth, instead of the real one.

Barrett has been a victim of this since the beginning. For just one example, “Race in the Newsroom” has been widely reported to contain errors. And it did. Barrett lists four in one of her documents. But the errors are also widely mischaracterized.

In the most serious, she wrote that a city contractor named Roy Littlejohn “served time” on graft charges during the notoriously corrupt reign of DC Mayor Marion Berry. Wemple mentioned this in 2020, writing that “Littlejohn wasn’t even charged with such an offense.” Carr did the same in 1999, noting that “nothing of the sort happened.” Actually, something close to it did happen: Littlejohn was the target of an undercover probe for corruption. Barrett — a 24-year-old reporter, working on a 13,000 word piece, on deadline, made a regrettable error. But suggesting that “nothing of the sort happened,” without more, wasn’t quite right, either.

“The Post’s response to ‘Race in the Newsroom’ was the dawn of fact-checking as a pretext for discourse policing,” Barrett wrote to me in a text. “Rather than address the substantive critique I was making, WaPo sent legions of fact-checkers after me to assert that the piece was riddled with staggering errors. [Their] claim that my article was rife with errors was itself false. But this was the view that congealed and took hold.”

Barrett, an investigative reporter of great capacities, left Washington in 1999, after smear-level media association of her with an unrelated journalism scandal (that of fabulist Stephen Glass, also an employee of The New Republic) made her position untenable. In 2020, she was writing about sports moms — and even this wasn’t allowed. Her silencing has been a loss to the profession, and has been a forerunner of the wider silencing of discourse we see today in the legacy media. Only the bad reporters and craven insinuators are left, and they remain un-fact-checked.

In architecture, monumentalism means power and historical significance. Think of the Egyptian pyramids, which were constructed as elaborate tombs for the pharaohs, and our own Mount Rushmore. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the American-born son of Danish immigrants, conceived the idea of using jackhammers and dynamite to carve the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln into the Black Hills of South Dakota. “American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life,” Borglum said. He wanted to memorialize America’s greatness in a way that would stand the test of time.

As a political movement, monumentalism is a policy agenda that commemorates people, events, and ideas — it conserves public memory for the next generation. The current moment, more than perhaps any other point in American history, calls for aggressive monumentalism. Since at least the Sixties, progressives have waged a multi-front war on public memory. 

They have undermined our system of education, rejected Christianity’s presence in national life, and insisted that America is irredeemably flawed. Supreme Court rulings in 1947 and 1962 effectively ended the centuries-long presence of Christian ideals in public education. Thereafter, activists filled the gap left by Christianity’s absence with leftist ideology. By some estimates, Howard Zinn’s famously controversial A People’s History of the United States (1980) is now used in as many as one-in-four high school history classes. Zinn, a self-described anarchist-socialist, deliberately ignored any historical facts that would have hindered his portrayal of America as a genocidal, imperialist, plutocratic ethnostate. But even if such attacks on cultural memory had already been going on for decades, the year 2020 was the Left’s Year Zero. 

After George Floyd’s death, monuments across the country were demolished, defaced, and desecrated. Remember the enthusiastic dismantling of statues of Confederates like General Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Progressives cheered the attacks, claiming that the monuments were emblematic of “systemic racism.” But the city of Richmond, Virginia created the monuments to reintegrate the nation in the aftermath of a bloody civil war. In destroying them, progressives reopened old (and mostly healed) wounds.

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The iconoclasm that erupted in 2020 does not just target memorials to the Confederacy. In Rochester, New York, the seat of the 19th-century anti-slavery movement, a statue of Frederick Douglass, who called the city his home, was toppled. The rioters tried to throw it into the Genesee River. Why? Because when progressives attack American monuments, they aren’t targeting particular memories of history. They are trying to wipe away all of it, and replace national memories with false ones, which they conjure in the public mind by erecting new monuments to the symbols of their revolution. So, as monuments to Thomas Jefferson were felled, statues of George Floyd were raised.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project was an effort to replace the memory of the birth of our nation in 1776 with a fictitious founding in 1619, when the first ship of captured Africans came to our shores. The authors’ goal was to change America by changing how Americans remember the past. Their license to do so depended on humiliating the public, and convincing American citizens that their history had nothing worth remembering.

As the cultural revolutionaries laid waste to public memory, it wasn’t immediately clear how to counteract their efforts. While previous generations of Americans built up the nation in a monumentalist spirit, that spirit has been draining out of public life for decades. Perhaps because, in the years after the end of the Second World War, the past had been sufficiently memorialized: it lived in the hearts of all Americans. But the pride and triumphalism of one generation were replaced by the cynicism of the next. The political Left began to aggressively erase public memory — particularly through revision of school curricula. After that, many Americans no longer agreed upon what, specifically, we ought to remember. 

Donald Trump had some ideas. Trump didn’t become a monumentalist once he reached the presidency — he always was one. A teetotaler who seldom appears in public without make-up on his face, Trump is what Russians call a muzhik, a man’s man. He is brash, aggressive, and relishes a challenge. Before the self-proclaimed “builder president” was in a position to commission new monuments, he was building his own. Trump’s buildings in cities like Atlantic City and Las Vegas were maximalist in style and ambition, paying tribute to wealth, luxury, and risk. His first great works transformed the skyline of Manhattan. And, of course, Trump’s skyscrapers were also monuments to Trump himself. They were grand, gold-plated, and lavishly embellished. Before building Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, Trump purchased the air rights of a neighbouring property to prevent anyone from building a skyscraper that would block his views. He wanted “soaring picture windows versus tiny ones, an aesthetic consideration that was of the utmost importance”, as he wrote in his book Never Give Up. 

But as his political career began in earnest, Trump directed his attention to creating monuments that memorialized America itself: our heroes, our victories, and our history. Trump made tentative monumentalist gestures in his first term. The 1776 Commission, an advisory body tasked by the president with creating strategies for delivering a patriotic education, was a laudable effort to combat the damnatio memoriae embodied by the 1619 Project. As he prepared to hand the presidency to Joe Biden, Trump issued an executive order to establish a “National Garden of American Heroes” consisting of statues of the most notable figures from our history. But when Biden took office, he (or his surrogates) issued an executive order revoking Trump’s plan.

Trump’s second term puts monumentalism at the heart of the agenda. On day one of his second term, Trump signed a memorandum (eventually formalized in an executive order titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again”) which directs that federal public buildings should respect “classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Trump embraced a style of architecture that originated in democratic Athens and republican Rome, not necessarily because he prefers order, proportion, and symmetry, but because this particular style is a symbol of America’s founding principles. 

The recently-passed “Big Beautiful Bill” sets aside funding to ensure the National Garden of American Heroes will be completed. And several of Trump’s other executive actions demonstrate his commitment to conserving public memory, including one that orders the Secretary of the Interior to take action if “since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”  

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s actions have drawn criticism from progressives, who argue that he is monumentalizing a nation that no longer exists. They point out that the United States had fewer than five million people at its founding, most of them white and Christian. Today, the country’s population is 350 million people of every race and creed, and the critics claim that a coherent, common identity called “American” is impossible to achieve in such a diverse nation.

But the Declaration of Independence exposes such claims as lies. Americans are not defined by skin color, or wealth, or religion, but by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — unalienable rights which the government must secure. The commonality of American citizens remains rooted in these fundamental principles envisioned and articulated 250 years ago. 

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In America, new organizations dedicated to this work are springing up. One such group called More Monuments is explicitly devoted to hastening an “American Renaissance” by “commission[ing] landmark monuments and awe-inspiring megastructures that define a new era of American craftsmanship.” On 4 July 2026, the 250th birthday of the nation, More Monuments will unveil a 650-foot tall “Colossus of George Washington.” The public, too, seems to have a renewed appetite for monumentalism: a viral movement to clean the Statue of Liberty has been gaining steam.

The new monumentalism that is unfolding is not limited to the United States. Burgeoning political movements in Europe, represented by parties such as AfD and the Sweden Democrats, are aimed at recovering traditional European culture by remembering the history of distinct European peoples. Unsurprisingly, the iconoclasts working to erase European history read the monumentalist effort to safeguard public memory as a kind of bigotry. It’s nothing of the sort, but they are right to fear it. 

The damage wrought by the Left’s attack on memory demands that patriotic writers and artists create new monuments that are worthy of a monumental people. Their task, which we might call a Great Remembering, is to transmit the nation’s traditions and values to future generations, ensuring that young Americans and immigrants to this country can look upon our monuments and read the record we have made. In doing so, we will restore the public’s fading memory of the great lives and historical triumphs that have shaped our way of life. 

One hundred years ago, Gutzon Borglum pointed to Mount Rushmore and said: “America will march along that skyline”. What moves the country forward is not the free market or the federal government, but individuals striving after their heroes. Only time will tell if Donald Trump becomes the fifth face carved into Mount Rushmore. 

Yet Tough, throughout the article, and in later remarks in an interview with Adam B. Kushner for his morning newsletter for The New York Times, is reluctant to reach his own conclusions, and presents the material in carefully couched language such as “most researchers I spoke with believe that stimulant medications are, on the whole, a positive thing for children with ADHD.” And: “most scientists I spoke to agreed that the condition is produced by some combination of biological and environmental forces.”

This kind of hedging is understandable given the sensitivity of the topic for the families involved, and it accurately reflects the medical rhetoric, though not the science. Scientists can believe and agree to all kinds of things that aren’t based on evidence. And they have a powerful incentives to do so — institutional inertia, the difficulty of speaking out against a popular consensus, and the financial interests of their institutions and the pharmaceutical companies, to name just a few. However, if we want to slow the flood of pills — and, most important, help American schoolchildren, especially boys — we must fight the tendency to temporize.

Tough is the author of several books on education and child development, and is a meticulous researcher and long-form feature writer of the highest professional standing. He spent a year compiling the story, which is worth reading in full, and which appears to represent the most reputable, thorough, and mainstream analysis of today’s science. In it, he documents a situation that most American families are aware of — an explosion in ADHD diagnoses, which last year spiked to 11.5% (or 7 million kids), up from about 3% (or 2 million kids) in 1993.

Of those diagnosed, a disproportionate share are boys: 21% of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys officially have ADHD, according to 2024 figures. The actual number displaying the collection of symptoms associated with ADHD is probably much higher, given that not all families pursue a formal diagnosis. Tough does not provide hard numbers on what percentage of those diagnosed are taking prescription stimulants such as Ritalin or Adderall, but says that it’s the “preferred” treatment.

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Most Americans aren’t aware, however, of the sketchiness of the underlying science — which has always seemed pretty obvious to dissenters, but has now been conclusively demonstrated. The field started, Tough says, with an observation, made by a Harvard-trained psychiatrist in 1937, and since very widely replicated, that giving amphetamines to children classified as having behavioral problems has the “spectacular” effect of getting them to sit down and stay cheerfully focused on a task. Skeptics have pointed out that stimulants do that to everyone, and are popular precisely with people who wish to get through boring tasks more pleasantly (long-distance truckers, Fifties housewives, every college student unprepared for an exam).

Nonetheless, the ideas that the source of the children’s noncompliant behavior might be a physical deficit, and that the drug might correct it, has been compelling. Since the Nineties, massive amounts of research has gone into proving this attractive proposition by looking for a biomarker for ADHD (such as a gene or a correlation such as “less brain electrical activity”) and scientifically demonstrating the benefits of the treatment.

Initial results were promising, Tough writes. The Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, launched in the early Nineties and funded by National Institute of Mental Health, was “one of the largest studies ever undertaken of the long-term effects of any psychiatric medication.” In 1999, the researchers announced early results that Ritalin, their stimulant of choice, produced “significantly fewer symptoms” in children with ADHD after 14 months, compared to comparison groups of ADHD kids receiving only behavioral training or no interventions at all.

In 2017, in an effort to find a biomarker, an analysis of brain scans performed by the Enigma Consortium, a global network of scientists, announced that “patients with ADHD have altered brains; therefore ADHD is a disorder of the brain.” This was the “most ambitious” project to date, per Tough. However, his more recent conversations with the scientists who participated in those projects reveal a different story.

The brain-scan differences, he says, were either nonexistent among adults or “so minor as to be almost imperceptible” among children. Martine Hoogman, a Dutch neuroscientist who led the Enigma team, wrote to Tough in an email: “‘Back then, we emphasized the differences that we found (although small), but you can also conclude that the subcortical and cortical volumes of people with ADHD and those without ADHD are almost identical.…’ In retrospect, she added, it wasn’t fitting to conclude from her findings that A.D.H.D. is a brain disorder.”

As time passed, the MTA began to turn up different results. By 36 months on stimulants, improvements in children’s behavior had disappeared — in fact, children in all three groups demonstrated “exactly the same” level of symptoms. Moreover, careful observation of the children in question revealed a diagnosis in flux. As later studies have shown, sometimes they seemed to have ADHD, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes children in a comparison group — who didn’t have it at the study’s outset — developed it. Tough quotes Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London, as saying that “the traditional notion that there is a natural category of ‘people with ADHD’ that clinicians can objectively measure and define ‘just doesn’t seem to be the case.’”

At the same time, situational explanations for the behaviors have seemed to grow in significance. A 2016 study published by researcher Arielle Lasky and members of the MTA group, Tough writes, interviewed adults in their mid-20s who had participated in the study as children. “Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their ‘niche,’ or the right ‘fit,’ in school or in the workplace,” he says. When the subjects found pursuits that were more interesting to them than school had been, their symptoms disappeared. Given such results and the difficulties of finding a biological cause, Sonuga-Barke proposes that we view ADHD not as a medical problem, but one of “misalignment” between what he tactfully calls “a child’s biological makeup” — but could also easily be called a child’s personality and situation in life — and “the environment in which they are trying to function.”

More disturbing information has come out as well. The MTA study found that after 36 months, children in the group taking Ritalin were on average one inch shorter than children in the control groups, and that the height lost was not made up later — they were still shorter as adults. And last year, a study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that even a medium-strength daily dose of Adderall more than tripled a patient’s likelihood of developing psychosis or mania.

Several studies have also debunked the appealing assumption that better classroom behavior actually translates to better learning. Children work faster and behave better, but Tough’s conclusions are mostly reflected by the words of F. Xavier Castellanos, a neuroscience researcher at New York University, whom he quotes: “There’s a real disconnect between the almost awesome effects on behavior and the minimal effects on academic achievement or attainment.” A 2023 study on adults found subjects’ strategies for problem-solving became “significantly worse under the medication.” It shouldn’t take a neuroscientist: Most people with any experience with recreational drugs in this category have noticed the same effect.

So why is the overall consensus, as Tough represents it, still so gentle in taking on the status quo? Why do the researchers still believe or agree that the medications are beneficial? And why does someone as smart as Tough introduce paragraphs with careful sentences such as “the failure to find a clear biomarker doesn’t mean that there is no biological basis for ADHD”?

In most human affairs, the burden of proof is on those arguing for something; we aren’t required to prove a negative to move on from a bad idea. Sonuga-Barke theorizes that research priorities have been distorted by the urgency of the children’s distress and the families’ needs for a solution. “In the field, we’re so frightened that people will say it doesn’t exist,” he told Tough, referring specifically to the quest for the biomarker. “We have to double down because we’re terrified of what will happen to the kids who can’t get the meds. We’ve seen the impact they can have on people’s lives.”

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There is, however, urgency to a change of direction. For one thing, doctors who “believe” that stimulant medications are “on the whole, a positive thing” are unlikely to arm families with the information they need to make fully informed choices about their child’s health. The obfuscating language in Tough’s story surely is being replicated throughout the medical establishment. As James Swanson, a research psychologist who worked on the initial MTA study, told Tough, “If you’re honest, you should tell kids that, look, if you’re interested in next week or next month or even the next year, this is the right treatment for you. But in the long run, you’re going to be shorter. How many kids would agree to take medication? Probably none.”

And for another, the situation looks very different when you admit that the problem is not a physical deficit of some kind, but something afflicting a large share of children and, by my guess, most teenage boys. Diagnosing and possibly medicating these kids may get them through a bad time more successfully — it’s clearly a lifeline for many struggling families — but it does nothing to prevent the problem from arising, or to help the kids learn.

In his book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, which analyzes debunked science crazes in illuminating detail, the journalist Jesse Singal discovered that “at root, when society accepts a false story, it’s often because that story tells society something it wants to hear.” He also observes that it’s a pattern for junk science to be taken up when it provides “an easy way out” of a complicated problem.

In this light, we might conclude that ADHD has been an easy way to address (or not address) the vastly complicated problem that contemporary school is unsuited to the needs of a large percentage of the child population, especially boys, and desperately needs reform. We might target our attention on the long, physically confining days; the constant usage of attention-shattering screens; the stultifying conformity; the chaos-promoting soft-discipline; and the deeper questions, exacerbated by AI, of what any of it is doing and what it’s for.

Or we might target other things. But to target anything, we have to move the blame off the kids, where it never should have been in the first place. Our children’s bodies and personalities are not deficient. We are.

As for Hamas’s recent attack, the NYT has already reported that Netanyahu’s policies focused on the West Bank and neglected Hamas. Indeed, it seems that the NYT keeps one Ronen Bergman as its Staff Writer for in-depth “bad-Israel” stories, and he works hard to deliver the goods. Having actually served in the Military Police, the lowest-prestige Corps of the armed forces, Bergman claimed an intelligence background to write about intelligence operations. (He once wrote that my much-missed friend Meir Dagan, the later Mossad chief, would personally strangle captured terrorists in an elbow lock when serving in military intelligence — a physical impossibility for short-armed Dagan.)

The latest is a carefully contrived misrepresentation of the reason that Israel was caught by surprise on October 7. Headlined “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago”, it was based on a fundamental misconception — that the Israeli army is an active-duty force, as most armies indeed are. But the Israel Defence Forces is radically different: it is a reserves-centered force, one of only three in the world, along with the Finnish and Swiss armies.

Instead of consisting of active-duty forces that are up and running around the clock, the IDF mostly consists of reserve units. When mobilised for refresher training or to fight a war, the reservists go to their specific depots scattered around the country to collect their uniforms, kit and weapons — everything from pistols to battle tanks — before moving out as combat units ready for action.

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Can the media trust this doctor in Gaza?

By Nicole Lampert

That is how a country of some 7 million has more than 635,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors when fully mobilised, compared with the 2 million in all US armed forces, out of a population of some 330 million: that is, a ratio that is more than tenfold. Invented in 1948, the reserve system is the key to Israel’s military strength. Aside from allowing Israelis to work and raise their families while still being ready to fight, it also allows the Israeli troops who are on duty to train properly in unit exercises and larger manoeuvres, instead of being tied down to watch frontiers and hold outposts.

But there is a major catch: advance warning is needed to mobilise the reserves in time, and even with the best possible intelligence analysts, and all the best satellites, sensors and computers, the problem is not just hard… it is impossible. Had Israeli intelligence analysis, or the arrival of a complete war plan sold by an enterprising operative revealed Hamas’s plan for an attack on October 7, the Israelis would have sent much stronger forces to guard the Gaza perimeter. Instead of the lone Merkava tank whose capture by dozens of Hamas fighters was shown again and again in news videos, there would have been a company of 10 tanks in that position, which would have massacred the attackers with their machine-gun fire. As for the single mechanised infantry company with fewer than 100 solders that guarded a critical hinge position, there would have been a battalion or even two that would have crushed the attackers.

But then, of course, Hamas spotters would have seen Israeli troops ready to defeat them — and they would have called off the attack altogether. There is worse: once an attack warning is received and reinforcements are deployed so that the enemy calls off its planned attack, the intelligence indicators that got it right will be discredited as false alarms, while the intelligence officers who failed to heed the signs will be the ones everyone listens to the next time around.

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Israel is turning into Lebanon

By Ben Judah

That is how, almost exactly 50 years before Hamas’s recent invasion, President Anwar Sadat’s offensive across the Suez Canal caught the Israelis with only 411 soldiers holding the frontline forts. On the first day of the Yom Kippur War, they were attacked by a first wave of 20,000 Egyptian troops, with 10 ten times as many following behind them. Why were the Israelis surprised? Because they had got it right several months earlier, and had recalled reservists from their jobs and their families to take up their weapons and go to the front, which persuaded the Egyptians to call off their initial attack.

This is why, when a complete Hamas war plan was captured more than a year ago, identifying each target that would in fact be attacked on October 7 (the “rave” was a last-minute addition), there was no alarm and no mobilisation. The plan was one of many — Hamas was always fantasising about mass attacks, but would then limit itself to the launch of its rockets that Israel could reliably intercept.

In the half century between the intelligence failures of October 1973 and October 2023, the system worked so well that Israel could win its wars while still allowing Israelis to get on with their lives and build their country. That is how Israel, which started off in 1949 with a per capita income far below the European average, is now 13th in the world. Once in 50 years, the system fails — but the alternative, of mobilising in response to every possible threat, would be far worse.

“All life is an experiment,” Emerson proclaimed. “The more experiments you make the better.” Is there a lesson there for Gareth Southgate? Or should the England boss stick with the tried and trusted, and resort to his usual back five against the bigger teams? Perhaps the only answer is to trust his own judgement. For “nothing,” Emerson also said, “can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

I’m pretty confident that nobody else has ever kicked off a preview of an England World Cup game with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but that’s just because we don’t often play the United States. There may have been a match in 2010, but it was so drab that I’ve long since forgotten it; and obviously World Cups before 1966 don’t count.

But as the hours tick down until tonight’s clash with the USA, Emerson’s legacy still looms large. For more than anybody else in his country’s history, it was the comically named Waldo who insisted that his countrymen emerge from the shadow of the Old World and create their own distinct identity, not simply as traitors and tax dodgers, but as unrepentantly non-British Americans.

The occasion was a speech to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society on 31 August 1837, entitled “The American Scholar”. And as Waldo told his listeners, it was time to throw off the shackles of the past. In future, Americans must take their cue from the natural wonders of their vast continent, not the dry, desiccated clichés they found in European libraries. The true American, Waldo said, should rely on himself: to stand tall, he must stand alone. “We will walk on our own feet,” he said grandly: “we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.” Some inspiring words there, perhaps, for the catchily named USMNT.

Throwing off the Old World has been an American preoccupation from the very beginning. The first pilgrims sailed west to escape what they saw as the sinful corruption of James I’s England, and you need only glance at the world’s worst newspaper to see that their descendants’ obsession with English wickedness is as fervent as ever. Even though more than two centuries have passed since the American colonists put financial self-interest above their duty to king and country, you can still detect traces of the old resentments.

You can see them in the frequent laments that Hollywood studios are employing too many British actors — even black British actors. You can see them in, say, the New York Times’s coverage of London’s restaurant scene (“Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton”). You can see it, too, in the same paper’s complaints that too many “Britishisms” are entering American English: “Crikey, Britishisms are everywhere. Call it Anglocreep. Call it annoying.” They’re calling us annoying? Seriously?

Even on the football pitch — sorry, “soccer field” — many Americans will tell you that this fixture matters more than any other. “For any American player, this matchup is unique,” the former US World Cup striker Eric Wynalda wrote a few days ago. “While playing Brazil and Argentina is how you measure yourself as a country, playing England always feels personal.” When he played England in 1993, there was, he recalled, “an element of jealousy. The England players were rich, they had a big league and great fan support. They were cocky as hell. We wanted to be them, but in our own way. I think that still exists.” As it happens, Wynalda and co. won that day. Still, it was only a friendly.

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Stop pretending Britain is America

By Dominic Sandbrook

Alas, in recent years, as even the most John Bullish have to admit, there haven’t been many cultural arenas in which we can feel smugly superior to our American cousins. Ever since the United States overtook Britain economically at the end of the 19th century — an inevitability given their geographical advantages, so that doesn’t really count as a win either — the boot has been firmly on the other foot. As early as 1914 the young T. S. Eliot, speaking in a debate at Merton College, Oxford, reminded his listeners “how much they owed to Amurrican culcher in the drayma (including the movies) in music, in the cocktail, and in the dance”. (These are Eliot’s own spellings. Again, they call us annoying?)

But it was in the decade after the First World War that the threat of Americanisation really loomed large. Britain was a country in shell shock: grey, weary, disillusioned and divided. The United States, on the other hand, was the land of ragtime and jazz, fizzing with excitement. “I am counting the days till I can get away and have decided from now on to live in America,” wrote P. G. Wodehouse in 1923. There was, he said, something “dead and depressing about London… all I want to do is to get back and hear the American language again.”

Wodehouse was bound for Hollywood, which was no accident. With a far bigger domestic market, an American film in the early Twenties typically made ten times more money than its British equivalent, which inevitably meant larger budgets. Even in 1925, some 95% of all film tickets sold in Britain were for American pictures.

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Britain needed the Falklands War

By Dominic Sandbrook

And when, two years later, Al Jolson’s film The Jazz Singer ushered in the age of the talkies, Fleet Street’s finest wailed in despair. The terrible truth, lamented the Daily Express, was that “the bulk of our picture-goers are Americanised to an extent that makes them regard a British film as a foreign film… They go to see American stars; they have been brought up on American publicity. They talk America, think America, and dream America. We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens.”

In the decades that followed, the traffic flowed only one way. When the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941 — two years late, as true patriots will never tire of pointing out — it rapidly became the senior Allied partner. Sent to North Africa to liaise with General Eisenhower, the young Harold Macmillan predicted that his compatriots’ future lay in being “Greeks in this American empire”, and hoped they might be able to mastermind things from the shadows, “as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”. The Greeks in question were slaves, so this wasn’t a very enticing analogy. In any case, the Americans had no intention of allowing their former masters to “run” them. Britain would learn that lesson at Suez.

By the time Macmillan became prime minister in January 1957, Americanisation seemed unstoppable, epitomised by everything from Bill Haley and Elvis Presley to hamburgers and teenagers. When you read one contemporary list of outlandish Americanisms — “barbecued chickens rotating on their spits in the shop windows… parking meters… bowling alleys, glass-skyscrapers, flying saucers” — the surprising thing is that so many of them were American. Perhaps that tells its own story. “I must say,” muses Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, “it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age — unless you’re an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.”

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Why the Tories love a clown show

By Dominic Sandbrook

Then came a genuine turning point. Before 7 February 1964, the date the Beatles landed in New York, only two other British acts, Acker Bilk and the Tornados, had held the Billboard number one spot, both with instrumentals. But with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the picture changed.

In the next two years, British acts hogged the top spot for no fewer than 52 weeks, from Manfred Mann, Petula Clark and the Dave Clark Five to Herman’s Hermits, the Troggs and the Rolling Stones. The obvious irony is that they often played American music. But that didn’t make them any less British. “What made us first want to go to America and conquer it was being English,” the Who’s Pete Townshend said later. “We didn’t care a monkey’s about the American dream.”

For the next 40 years or so, the cultural relationship felt like a genuine joint enterprise. Sheer size meant the United States was always the bigger partner, but there were enough British Oscar winners, enough British number ones, to suggest that it wasn’t entirely one-way. At the height of the so-called Second British Invasion, between 1983 and 1986, British acts actually did even better than 20 years earlier, twice accounting for exactly half of all the places in the Top 40.

Even politically, British politicians could pretend, at least, that they stood as tall as their American contemporaries. Just read the hilarious transcript of Margaret Thatcher’s exchange with Ronald Reagan after British troops had landed on the Falkland Islands. Reagan suggests offering a ceasefire; she is having none of it. As the exchange goes on, Reagan’s contributions dwindle to “Margaret, I –” and ‘Yes, well —”, while hers get ever longer and more hectoring. True, he got his own back in Grenada a year later. But in Britain we’ve all forgotten about that, so again it doesn’t count.

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By Jonathan Wilson

Since then, however, there’s been a seismic technological shift, greater even than the rise of the cinema. And although we don’t really talk about Americanisation anymore, that’s surely because, since the rise of social media, we’ve become so Americanised that we no longer even notice it. Yet once you do start to notice it, you never stop. And yes, there’s a risk of sounding like the reincarnation of Lord Salisbury, but who cares?

So here we go. When did self-hating Britons start saying “mac ‘n’ cheese” instead of “macaroni cheese”? Why do 25-year-old publishers think “cliché” is an adjective? Why are there no medical systems on earth other than our beloved, sacred NHS and the cruel American private healthcare firms? Why does the BBC send 6,000 people to report on a senatorial election in Georgia but only two men and a dog to cover the federal elections in Germany?

Who decided that schoolchildren in Leamington Spa should care about Rosa Parks? Why did thousands of people take to the streets in Britain about the killing of a single black man in Minneapolis, when barely a handful bother to protest the sack of Mariupol or the incarceration of the Uyghurs? And why on earth, when a couple of half-crazed American academics announce that we must cancel the term Anglo-Saxon to describe Alfred the Great and Athelstan because it’s a racist “dog whistle” for “white, Western superiority”, do so many British historians fall limply into line?

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There’s only one answer to all this — and in an age that prizes victimhood above all else, what a richly satisfying answer it is. For it’s time we Britons recognised ourselves for what we are: a cruelly oppressed people, so brutalised by our imperial overlords that we don’t realise how badly we’ve been treated. Our idioms, our customs, even our cooking have been ruthlessly erased from history, our pies and puddings driven out by chicken wings and cheeseburgers, and we haven’t even noticed. And now they’re even coming for our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons of sainted memory!

So what would Athelstan, the first king of all England, say? I think we all know the answer to that. He’d say: “Lads, it’s time to decolonise ourselves. Who cares what the Yanks think? But first things first: the World Cup. Let’s give them such a beating they never again claim that macaroni cheese is three words. Come on, England!”

And he would, of course, be right.

What made this moment so revelatory was not just what was being said, but who was saying it. In a world of “he said, she said”, what she said finally seemed to matter. Women were breaking the silence; women were blowing the whistles; women were telling their stories, and retelling each other’s, in the press. The two New York Times journalists who exposed Weinstein were women. Women owned this narrative…

Until they didn’t.

Men laid claim to the MeToo narrative in the way that Hemingway’s protagonist in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. The shift could be observed first on social media, where men sensing the impending tectonic cultural shift began to seek firmer footing in the form of compulsive privilege-checking. They retweeted, they hashtagged, they made grovelling apologies on behalf of their sex — while also making sure to let you know that they were not among the men who needed to apologise, those troglodytes, those boors. Even the men who rushed to confess their own sins made sure to covertly congratulate themselves in the process for having always known better, been better, than the really bad guys. New York Times essayist George Yancy, suggested in an infamous piece that men atone en masse, online, under the hashtag #IAmSexist, even though “many of us, including me, have not committed vile acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse the likes of which Harvey Weinstein has been accused of”.

It’s understandable. The MeToo movement was dividing the men of the world into heroes and villains; most men, naturally, wanted to be on the right side. And in this moment, onto the national stage, the most right-sided of them all emerged: Ronan Farrow.

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Farrow was chasing the Weinstein story at the same time as the New York Times journalists, but his first report, for the New Yorker, didn’t come out until five days later. Still, he is regularly described — here in The Times of London — as “the man who exposed Harvey Weinstein”. The book he wrote about his MeToo reporting, Catch and Kill, was the same in substance if not in scale as all the men proclaiming their intent to #BelieveWomen on social media. Imagine every white-knighting male feminist ally impulse blown up to national (and extraordinarily telegenic) proportions: here was Farrow, vowing to use his position of privilege to speak on behalf of the downtrodden, to uncover injustice, and in doing so, atone for his complicity in the system that had wrecked women’s lives.

Farrow, who is gay, couldn’t claim to be a reformed cad à la the Yancys of the world, but a family connection to a famous sexual assault case — his father, Woody Allen, was accused of molesting his sister Dylan in 1992 — served the same purpose: “I once was one of those guys proximate to a woman with a claim like this saying, ‘why don’t you just shut up about it?’” Farrow said, on PBS NewsHour in 2019.

If MeToo coverage until this moment was by women, about women, Farrow injected a new perspective — and an elevated sense of drama. His reporting was very often described as “explosive”. Even as he claimed to be merely a conduit for the testimonies of courageous women, those women had a way of fading into the background of his stories, eclipsed by the jaw-dropping villainy of whichever man he accused — but also by the presence of Farrow himself, chasing leads. His quest to uncover evidence that Weinstein had hired surveillance operatives in an attempt to stop him from telling the truth is a prominent and thrilling subplot in Catch and Kill. It was all too easy to forget the female victims in the face of such a compelling narrative — one about a dogged, handsome reporter battling a conspiracy of menacing evildoers in America’s glitziest and most elite industry.

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JK Rowling sees through her enemies

By Kat Rosenfield

And from this moment, what did we think of when we thought of MeToo? Something dramatic. Something sensational. Something with movie stars in it, maybe, or at least someone who hung out with them. At the beginning, the whole point of this movement — the reason why the hashtag was MeToo and not something else — was its ordinariness. Here was an indignity to which virtually all women could relate: not just the fear of being assaulted, or harassed, or propositioned, but the sense of sex looming like a shadow over their professional lives in a way that was frustrating, and limiting, and invisible to men.

But that ordinary narrative was, well, ordinary. It certainly wasn’t winning the Pulitzer anytime soon. People didn’t want the banal injustice of women’s daily lives; they wanted Harvey Weinstein, panting and whining and banging on doors like the lecherous troll in a Grimm’s fairy tale. They wanted Matt Lauer imprisoning nubile young women in his office using a secret button under his desk, like the bad guy in a James Bond movie. They wanted Brett Kavanaugh lining up to commit high school gang rape like a real-life Gossip Girl episode. They wanted larger-than-life villains committing acts of unfathomable evil — and they wanted a blond, blue-eyed Captain America of a journalist to serve them up on a platter, at great personal risk to himself. The fact that Ronan Farrow claimed to be a victim himself — not of sexual assault but of surveillance, harassment and intimidation by a powerful cabal of men who did not want these stories told — only made it that much more exciting. And the fact that these stories often turned out not to be entirely true? It hardly mattered at all.

In 2020, New York Times reporter Ben Smith wrote what remains the most definitive dissection of the inadequacies in Farrow’s reporting, noting (among other things) that Farrow had cut corners when it came to verifying stories and checking facts, and had sacrificed nuance in his reporting in order to make his stories more straightforwardly dramatic. “The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know,” Smith wrote. “Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.”

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But Farrow’s place as the poster child for MeToo reporting is about more than the siren song of shoddy journalism. It’s about what the movement could have been, and what it eventually became instead — because in hindsight, Farrow hitching his apple wagon to the star of MeToo seems like a harbinger of all the ways in which the movement would eventually fly off the rails.

There was the emergence of grifters and hucksters like the now-disgraced Michael Avenatti, who first rose to prominence as the attorney representing Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against Donald Trump, and later promulgated explosive (and ultimately discredited) allegations of gang rape by a then-teenaged Brett Kavanaugh. He was a darling of the MeToo media — until he went to prison for extortion and embezzlement. There was the way that the everyday sexism faced by working-class women in less glamorous professions vanished from the conversation, replaced by thinly-sourced celebrity gossip and first-person essays from supermodels with books to promote. There was the way that MeToo eventually came to serve as a magnet for the romantically embittered and the professionally jealous, and allegations of sexual misconduct became a magic bullet for relegating a loathed ex or competitive colleague to the fringes of society.

It’s not that Farrow is to blame for these things; it’s that where a male celebrity reporter was able to cast himself as the true protagonist of a story about women, other sorts of opportunism would invariably also find fertile ground. But it’s also telling that today, five years later, it’s hard to think of anyone for whom the MeToo movement was better — or anyone who remains more visibly connected to it — than Ronan Farrow.

Citations of his Pulitzer prize-winning journalism almost invariably fail to note that he shared the honour with the two women who exposed Weinstein in the New York Times, women who broke the story first and yet have always been a distant second to Farrow when it comes to getting famous from it. Their book about uncovering the story, She Said, did not make headlines in Hollywood Reporter for having sold 44,000 copies in its first week, unlike Catch and Kill. Their audiobook didn’t get a Grammy nomination, unlike Farrow’s (he voiced it himself). Farrow is the one being lionised in the Hollywood press as a having “ignited the movement”. He’s the one lingering in the spotlight, long after the villains have gone to prison and the victims have moved on with their lives. The only name more closely associated with the movement, ironically, is Weinstein’s.

And the ordinary women who once saw hope in MeToo, which was supposed to transcend boundaries of industry and geography, education and class? We haven’t just forgotten their names; we never knew them to begin with.