David Hockney, Contrejour in the French Style, 1974. Etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint.
David Hockney, who died at 88 in June, became famous as a young artist for imbuing 20th-century life with the formality and stasis of early Renaissance painting. His sharp-edged figures stand by the pool or sit by a coffee table in spaces as orderly as those in a Fra Angelico annunciation. The real world does not look so tidy, symmetrical, and enchanting. Except, very occasionally, when it does.
Contrejour in the French Style depicts a window at the Louvre that Hockney encountered shortly after moving to Paris in 1973. With its shade partly drawn, shutting out unwanted sunlight while giving a glimpse of garden, it was, he thought, “a picture in itself.”
Working from a drawing and some photographs, he rebuilt the found scene—tugging here, flattening there. His pathways and parterres are a streamlined echo of the nearby Tuileries, just as his balustrade is a compass-and-protractor enactment of the elegant original. The way the two receding diagonals intersect the wall, window, and walkway to converge at the tree line is an almost perfect diagram of single-point perspective. Hockney used visibly different etching techniques in different territories of the image—soft mats of color for the window blind, meticulous linear hatching for the floor, and splotchy, translucent color for the surrounding wall.
The formal garden, the parquet, the deep window setback, and the dappled wall (a nod to the pointillism of Georges Seurat) all wave the flag of “French Style,” with its distinct history of rules developed in the pursuit of beauty. Soon after Contrejour, Hockney’s own style shifted toward fragmented space, expressive brushwork, and episodic motion. This print, however, still exerts its wistful invitation to bask in quiet emotional weather, and notice the pictorial machinery he was about to dismantle.
This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Contrejour in the French Style.”
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
We often associate wonder with the faraway and the exceptional. But some of the planet’s most extraordinary spectacles unfold every day, largely unnoticed.
For a recent Atlantic story, the senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II traveled to Mexico to witness one such phenomenon: the annual arrival of millions of monarch butterflies after a migration spanning thousands of miles. The journey still puzzles scientists, but perhaps the most remarkable part is that it continues at all. After decades of decline, monarch populations are showing signs of recovery, thanks in part to years of patient conservation work across North America. It’s a reminder of how much the natural world still has left to teach us about not only what it can do, but what it can survive as well.
Today’s newsletter explores the many ways that nature continues to surprise and inspire us to look a little closer.
On Our Living Planet
The Return of the Monarch
By Vann R. Newkirk II
After years of decline, butterfly populations are rising—for now.
Do animals have fun?: Scientists want an evolutionary explanation for animal play. But maybe the answer is simply that it brings them joy, Sallie Tisdale wrote in 2024.
My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I was hesitant to go to Antarctica because I thought it would be uncomfortably cold. Heaven forbid! It turns out, I was so entranced by the landscape, the wildlife, the sounds that I was willing to stand on the open deck for hours,” Jessica D. from Phoenix, Arizona, shared.
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
Truth is under threat today from two opposing impulses. The first is subjectivism, or relativism: the denial of the existence of objective truth or the possibility of ever attaining it. This proposition may seem abstract, but it has direct consequences for our civic life. Contrary to what one hears at cocktail parties or in freshman philosophy classes, relativism is the predicate not of tolerance but of repression.
The other impulse poses no less a threat to liberty: the refusal to reckon with our fallibility. All of us, at every conscious moment of our lives, hold in our head some false beliefs. Even when we do our best to be attentive, informed, judicious, and honest, we can still be wrong about profoundly important questions—questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. We can, for example, be confident that we are on the side of justice, yet profoundly mistaken about what justice demands of us.
Fallibility is a feature of the human condition. Although we can’t eradicate it, we can make progress toward replacing many of our false beliefs with true ones. But to do that, we need to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility, open ourselves to challenges to our convictions, and rebuild our capacity for civil discourse. Genuine civil discourse recognizes not only that objective truth exists but that it’s often best pursued by engaging with people who are convinced we’ve got it wrong.
Civil discourse is not mere politesse. It does not consist of listening patiently while someone articulates a view contrary to one’s own. Rather, each party considers the opposing argument in its most favorable light, sincerely entertaining the possibility that their own view is incorrect and should be abandoned. Their goal—a shared goal—is not winning a victory for their tribe; it is getting to the truth.
Achieving civil discourse is hard for us frail human creatures, particularly in our era of ideological partisanship, polarization, identity politics, and conspiracism on both the left and the right. It requires resisting the nearly universal human tendencies to embrace ideological tribalism and fall in love with our opinions. We often regard some of our beliefs—especially moral, political, and religious ones—as so integral to our identity that we experience even good-faith challenges as attacks on our very selves. In other words, we tend to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions.
In a certain respect, this is helpful, even necessary. We have to be emotionally invested in our convictions if we want to accomplish anything, especially things that require strenuous effort, courage, and sacrifice. It’s important for even mundane matters too. A parent can have a bare belief in the usefulness of getting the kids up, washed, dressed, fed, and sent off to school in the morning. But the belief by itself—as any parent will attest—is not enough. Without some emotional investment, the kids aren’t getting to school on time.
We shouldaspire to be people of conviction—people who are prepared to act, take risks, and bear burdens for what we believe is good and true. And yet, we need to put some distance between ourselves and our convictions. If we wrap our emotions too tightlyaround our convictions, we lose the ability to contemplate the possibility that a critic of our view might be right. We then find ourselves descending into dogmatism, if not fanaticism.
Dogmatists and fanatics purport to uphold the truth, but in reality they jeopardize it. They undermine freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties—the prerequisites of truth seeking—because they see no reason to entertain challenges to their beliefs. They know the truth more or less completely, or so they suppose, and therefore have nothing to learn from those with whom they disagree. They regard their critics as enemies of the truth and thus forces to be defeated, even destroyed.
Relativism may seem like the antidote to this kind of thinking, but it leads to the same result. Relativists claim that there is no truth to be attained, and therefore none to be sought; that there is merely “your truth” and “my truth,” but no such thing as the truth, at least about questions outside the domain of empirical inquiry. In this worldview, people have no good basis for respecting one another’s freedom of speech, thought, inquiry, conscience, or religion. Why should we try to reason with one another about our competing desires or perspectives when there is no truth to reason about or toward? When there is nothing to reason about, there is no rational warrant for civil liberty. There is only power. “Truth” becomes the rule of the strong.
People of goodwill—intellectually and morally serious people of many shades of belief—share a desire to know the truth and live by it, even if that means giving up comforting or cherished convictions that fail to withstand critical scrutiny. To honor this fact is to reject relativism and absolutism. It is to regard reasonable people of goodwill with whom we disagree as friends who can help rescue us from false beliefs and better understand the truth.
This near collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life. Restoring it depends on our capacity to practice civil discourse, which in turn requires us to acknowledge our fallibility—deeply, existentially, and not merely formally. Without such an acknowledgment, it is impossible for people to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility on which our civil liberty depends.
In one of my favorite videos of the singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, who died this week at the age of 56, he is standing in a small backyard in Cologne. It’s 2015, and he’s playing “Say It to Me Now,” which he performs in the opening scene of the breakout 2007 indie film Once; it’s a raw, wrenching plea of a song that explodes in its second half. In his guitar is a gaping hole: Hansard’s trusty cedar-topped Takamine—nicknamed “the Horse,” for its endurance—had been with him through many years of busking in Hansard’s hometown of Dublin, where he’d strummed it with sufficient force to cut through the din of the street.
Like its owner, the guitar had little varnish—hence the gash, which exposed its interior. Just as the performance begins to take off—mid–raspy belt, mid–resolute strum—the Horse’s G string snaps, and knocks some of its neighbors out of tune. Hansard coolly flings the limp string to the side, adjusts the tuning pegs with a grin, and sings on.
The sum of the video’s parts—the unassuming backyard, the battered Horse, the mishap taken in stride—tells you everything you need to know about Hansard. Many people might know him only as “the guy from Once,” which won him and Markéta Irglová, his co-star and musical collaborator, the Oscar for Best Original Song. But in this stripped-down performance, we witness the mastery and lack of artifice that defined his music and his life.
The simple scene also harkens to his origins as a street musician. Hansard said time and again that this vulnerable and often trying vocation, which he left school at 13 to pursue, turned him into the artist he was. Busking made him egoless, unflappable—the people’s troubadour.
The tributes to Hansard from every corner of the music industry show the profound mark he left over his four-decade career. Songwriters cited his influence on them; collaborators recounted his generosity; his fellow Irishman Bono hailed him as the “voice of the streets.” Other artists recalled how he’d made time for everyone: He’d befriended legends, paid tribute to peers who had passed, mentored those coming up behind him. He gathered his fellow musicians, and they gathered around him.
It’s no coincidence that Hansard shot to fame in the United States with Once: He starred as an Irish busker who falls for a Czech pianist, played by Irglová. The film begins with an unbroken shot of Hansard on a dark, nearly deserted street, guitar case propped open at his feet, singing “Say It to Me Now.” It’s a vocal tour de force, by turns tender and volcanic, that immediately establishes him as a rugged bard roiling with emotion. When he was invited, with Irglová, to perform their poignant, Oscar-winning ballad, “Falling Slowly,” at the following year’s Academy Awards, he put on a nice suit—but still played his beat-up old Horse.
Hansard’s brush with Hollywood was relatively brief. He had many other pursuits: He was the front man of the Frames, one of Ireland’s most successful rock bands, and one-half of the heart-on-its-sleeve folk duo the Swell Season, with Irglová; he also put out a number of solo records. He was recording new music up until the end of his life, and had been busking for decades. His final, two-volume album, a career-spanning retrospective, was called Don’t Settle. He never did. He had just finished work on another record, which he’d hoped to release next spring. Knowing the amount of music he still had in him—that he was nowhere near done—makes his sudden death all the more devastating.
Even as his profile grew, he remained a street musician at heart. He toured with Eddie Vedder, performed with Bruce Springsteen, and earned four Grammy nods, but he appeared to have no interest in hoarding the spotlight; after all, in the parks and streets he had long frequented, there was no spotlight. Music, he believed, was a communal experience, something to be shared and reveled in. “The thing with busking,” he once said, “is, it has to be inclusive—it has to be an open act.”
His life’s work, it seems, was to bridge the distance between performer and spectator. He often played surprise or impromptu sets in bars, clubs, or the street. At concerts, he could make a large venue feel as intimate as a pub; the amps, lights, and stage were all accoutrements. He invited friends to join him onstage, often doing a number with the opening act or local artists. The audience became his drinking buddies as he regaled them with stories and entrusted them with what felt like secrets. He often encouraged them to join him, and one another, in song; many of his shows included an a cappella sing-along of the Irish folk ballad “The Auld Triangle.”
Everyone who knew Hansard—and most of his fans didfeel that they knew him—has their own story that captures his big-tent ethos. I have many. This is one of them: In August 2023, Hansard and Irglová took the stage at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, a stop on a reunion tour celebrating the 15th anniversary of Once. Toward the end of the night, Glen appeared onstage solo and said that the night before, he had met a young musician named Gabriel busking on the streets of Boston, and had invited him to tonight’s show. “Come up and sing with me!” he shouted into the orchestra.
Gabriel emerged from the darkness; Hansard threw a reassuring arm around him and handed him a guitar. They stepped away from the microphones, their instruments unplugged; the two men were buskers again. They played “Say It to Me Now.” Strumming in unison, they traded beaming smiles, assuring glances. It was clear that Hansard believed that they both had an equal right to be on that hallowed stage—professional, amateur, old, young, educated, uneducated, it made no difference. It was the music that bound them to each other, and Hansard to those who loved him.
On July 8, Spain’s supreme court issued a seemingly reasonable decision, unaware that by the end of the month, it would contribute to the deaths of at least 57 people, many by drowning. The court ruled that people who had migrated illegally could be sent back summarily only if they’d circumvented a physical barrier at the border. If no barrier exists—if they’d walked across open ground, say, or swum—then the government must go through a much more complicated process to deport them.
And if you’re trying to swim to Europe from Africa, there may be no better destination than Ceuta, a speck of Spanish territory in North Africa, surrounded by Morocco on its western edge and the Mediterranean elsewhere. Every year, some migrants try to swim to Ceuta, especially in the summer, when the waters are relatively calm. Ceuta has a facility that can process about 500 people at a time. But Thursday, 100 times that number—an estimated 50,000 people—made an amphibious attempt to swarm Ceuta and emigrate illegally from Morocco.
This was evidently a coordinated attempt, assisted by social media. One Facebook group, the now-defunct “Hraga Ceuta,” reportedly featured exact maps of the three-hour maritime journey from the Moroccan town of Fnideq, which bypassed the land border with Ceuta and ensured that anyone who arrived alive would break no barriers and would land on sand or rocks rather than at a fence or turnstile. People showed up with fins, wet suits, and floaties. They discussed going in together on kayaks and coordinating their departures. Their conditions on arrival were not all dire. An El País reporter in Ceuta met an unaccompanied 16-year-old girl, still wet from the sea, her mascara runny, wearing earrings and a gold necklace, “as if just back from clubbing.”
Europe will probably spend weeks trying to figure out exactly what led to Thursday’s catastrophe. (Danish and Italian leaders havecalled for suspending Spain from Schengen, the free-movement zone that allows someone to travel from Córdoba to Copenhagen without passing through border control.) But one contributing factor is that the supreme court effectively directed migrants to choose life-threatening routes. People saw their shot, and took it. Spain has alleged that human traffickers were among these opportunists. Morocco has been blamed for encouraging the migrants, to cause trouble for Spain. However, the Moroccan king happened to be giving his Throne Day speech nearby in M’diq, and it would have been an odd choice to spring a disaster of this magnitude so close by.
Another possible factor is socioeconomic: the long-term trends in Morocco that make life there miserable and send young people into the sea in search of opportunity. The youth-unemployment rate in Morocco is roughly one-third, and years of drought have led to a farming bust.
This second factor needs scrutiny, however. The past 25 years have been, droughts aside, good for Morocco’s economy. Indeed, its shift away from agriculture and mining and toward modern industry has powered consistent growth, led by such sectors as automotive manufacturing and phosphate processing. Youth unemployment is high, but it’s not much better in Spain, where it is currently about 25 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in 2013. So the migration is from a poor country without jobs to a rich one without jobs. I, too, would prefer a rich one, but the faster-growing economy of Morocco and the not-exactly-healthy labor sector of Spain complicate the picture.
In none of the accounts I have read from journalists in Ceuta do the migrants claim to be refugees—that is, people who fear persecution if they return to their home country. Some Moroccans have protested government policies, and according to reports, at least some of the migrants are sub-Saharan; some of them may have a legitimate asylum claim. But most of the Moroccans seem to be economic migrants, moving away from a country with economic problems but no economic catastrophe. In that sense, they are rational people seeking a better life, as anyone would. Because Spain has officially given swimmers a pass, it is also rational for them to have chosen that route, if they thought they could make it.
Far-right Spanish leaders are calling the incident an “invasion,” and even Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described it as an “attack.” What I think perturbs Spaniards, and not just those on the right, is the combination of so many migrants’ awareness of the rules—knowing exactly how they work, and acting upon that knowledge for personal advantage—and their brazen unwillingness to submit to those rules when they prove disadvantageous. The name of the Facebook group that coordinated migrants used the Arabic-dialect word hraga. It means “burners,” and refers to the common practice of destroying one’s identity documents upon arrival in the intended country, to thwart even lawful efforts to detain, track, and deport their bearer. This combination of being a stickler for the rules and trying to evade them will leave a bitter taste for many Europeans.
The strongest case for mass immigration has always been that some people have no home to go back to, and need help. But the events in Ceuta seem very far from this category. They will empower right-wing parties that see Ceuta and say: Not a millimeter closer.
Wisconsin has been the nation’s most closely divided state for a quarter century. Since 2000, only one presidential candidate—Barack Obama, twice—has carried the state by more than a single percentage point. But despite its status as a battleground, America’s Dairyland has never been a bastion of milquetoast moderation. Wisconsin has produced both a father of progressivism, Robert La Follette, and the red-baiting conservative Joseph McCarthy. More recently, its voters have backed the liberal stalwarts Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin as well as the right-wing Republicans Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.
Francesca Hong is keenly aware of this history. Indeed, she’s relying on it as she tries to persuade Democratic voters to trust her with the party’s nomination for governor later this month. “We’ve been a laboratory for democracy and a petri dish for conservatism,” Hong told me during an interview last weekend at a brewery in Appleton, a small city near Green Bay where she had drawn more than 200 people for a rally.
A state legislator and former restaurateur, the 37-year-old Hong wants to make Wisconsin the country’s biggest lab for democratic socialism. She’s running on an expansive platform that includes creating a public bank and public grocery stores; providing universal child care and free school lunches; paid leave and a $20 minimum wage; and many more favored policies of the progressive left. Hong has filmed campaign videos in restaurant kitchens and on soccer fields, and she’s often wearing a red bandana that evokes Rosie the Riveter and labor solidarity. Her rallies are punctuated by profanity—a fellow state legislator who introduced her on Sunday wore a T-shirt that said Fight the Fuckery—earthy musical acts, and hearty endorsements by like-minded local progressives.
With innovative ads and a grassroots network of more than 7,000 volunteers knocking on doors across the state, Hong’s campaign has shot out far ahead of more experienced and well-known Democratic rivals. (Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, dropped her bid for the top job amid a campaign-finance scandal; its previous lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, suspended his candidacy on Thursday and effectively conceded to Hong.) The most recent survey from Marquette Law School—the state’s most reputable pollster—found Hong with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with more than twice the support of her nearest competitor.
Naturally, Democratic grandees are nervous. Republicans, eager to run against a far-left candidate in the fall, have pumped more than $2.5 million into ads aimed at boosting Hong’s profile across the state. David Axelrod, an architect of Obama’s two victories, likened the Democratic primary on August 11 to “a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff.” Whoever captures the Democratic nomination will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump loyalist elected in 2020 from the northern part of the state.
The primary race has alternated between unusual sleepiness and extreme volatility. David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, suspended his campaign early in July for lack of support, but then jumped back in after Rodriguez dropped out a few weeks later. Wisconsin’s outgoing Democratic governor, Tony Evers (who, if not quite milquetoast, is far more moderate than Hong), stayed on the sidelines for months. Then, with Rodriguez out, he passed over both Hong and his former second in command, Barnes, to back Crowley, who was far behind in the polls. “There’s been a lot,” Kendra Koeppen Mulwana, the director of the statewide group Badger Youth Action, told me with a laugh. “It feels like there’s something new that’s happened everyday.” A few hours after we spoke, Barnes’s withdrawal jolted the race again.
With so much uncertainty, many Wisconsin Democrats have yet to make up their mind even after months of campaigning—a dynamic that, with Barnes out, could give Crowley an opportunity to make a late run at Hong. During a televised debate on Tuesday, none of Hong’s rivals went after her very aggressively. “It’s hard to understand,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “There was not really a sense of urgency from the other candidates that you would expect.”
In a phone interview the day before, Crowley also declined to criticize either Hong’s record or her electability, telling me he was focused on “reintroducing” himself to voters. Yet that has also proved difficult with so little time left in the primary. On the day we spoke, Crowley had been scheduled to greet voters at the same Appleton venue where Hong appeared a day earlier, but he canceled the event after a tornado tore through the city. Christine Sinicki, a state representative and former chair of the Milwaukee County Democrats who is backing Crowley, told me that for Crowley to win, Evers would need to campaign across the state with him—something that has yet to happen.
The stakes of this election year are high for Democrats across the country, but particularly so in Wisconsin. The party has a chance to end years of Republican dominance in the state legislature and, if they also hold the governorship, secure a trifecta for the first time since 2008. Such an outcome could have ripple effects in Washington, because Democrats would then have the power to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional map and reverse a GOP gerrymander that has given Republicans all but two of the state’s eight House seats. That is one reason Sinicki is worried about nominating Hong for governor. “This is not the time to take a risk,” she told me. “2026 should be a Democratic year.”
When you ask Hong and her supporters how a socialist from Madison can appeal to independent and conservative voters across a state that Trump carried in 2024, they have a ready reply: AI data centers. Hong has proposed a one-year moratorium on their construction, going further than any of her rivals to crack down on development that, according to polls and interviews, is unpopular with voters of all political ideologies.
“I’m willing to stand up to bullies on both sides because I’m fighting for you” is how Hong summarized the pitch she’d make to Wisconsinites who voted for Trump. She told me, “I think that folks want someone to take a firm stance on another massive entity that’s trying to take control of people’s lives right now when people already are so uneasy about rising costs and feeling that it’s not enough.”
Data centers came up repeatedly as I spoke with Hong supporters at the Appleton event. Treston Kaepernick, an 18-year-old who’ll be enrolling at UW in the fall, told me he’s seen Hong signs pop up in his conservative hometown of New London and that he’s encountered Republicans who cite her opposition to data centers as a reason for their support. A Hong canvasser, Matthew Hennes, told me he brings up Hong’s proposed moratorium early in many of his conversations with voters. “That usually gets them very interested,” Hennes said. “From my personal experience knocking on doors and talking to the community, nobody wants data centers constructed in their backyard.”
The question for Hong, should she win the primary, is whether her crossover appeal on the issue of data centers can overcome what will surely be millions of dollars worth of ads from Republicans highlighting other positions of hers that might not go over as well with middle-of-the-road voters, such as her past calls to defund the police and abolish prisons. During last week’s debate, she said she did not support “the full platform” of the national Democratic Socialists of America and that although she is a DSA member, she is not running with its endorsement.
Hong is not quite as outspoken in interviews as she is on the stump. When I asked her how she differentiated herself as a democratic socialist from a progressive Democrat, she replied with a fairly anodyne answer that might have fit most Democratic officeholders. “Democratic socialist means that I want there to be more power for working-class people and the workers,” Hong said. “That the mega corporations and the billionaires pay their fair share. That we're unapologetic in taking on corporate interests and the status quo.” As for defunding the police? “I can’t defund or abolish the police as governor, and I won’t,” Hong told me.
Hong addresses what she calls “the E-word”—electability—head-on at her rallies. She cites her sprawling volunteer network and the people who tell her that their “Republican uncle” is supporting her, and the fact that she has more donors and more individual donations than Tiffany. “We’re already beating him!” she exclaimed at one point. “I truly think that in this moment, the more that folks doubt our power, the more power we can actually reclaim,” Hong said later in her speech. “When I hear from folks that there’s only a certain group that’s supporting our campaign, or that it’s fringe or left, one word comes to mind: bullshit.” The crowd roared.
But Democratic voters in Wisconsin are clearly thinking about the E-word too. As I followed Hennes on his canvassing route through Appleton, several people told him they liked Hong’s policies or were leaning toward her. But they also expressed some pause. “I like what she has to say,” Bob Molitor, a 75-year-old retiree, said, “but we’ve got to get a winner.”
Wisconsin’s history suggests the concerns about Hong’s statewide appeal could be overstated. Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, pointed me to research showing that voters do not punish more extreme candidates. Her chances might be better still in a midterm election when turnout is expected to be lower than a presidential year, he said. “An ideological extremist can absolutely win a statewide election in Wisconsin,” Wagner said.
Democrats such as Sinicki, the former Milwaukee party chair, remain nervous about Hong because so much is at stake for the party. But for others, the favorable political environment for Democrats is reason enough to take the chance. “There’s not a better year to go all out than this one,” Kaepernick told me. With just slightly more than a week to go before the primary, most Wisconsin Democrats seem to agree.
As government prosecutors examined the Reflecting Pool to build their case against a three-time Olympic canoeist accused of violently ripping the lining with his bare hands, everything fell apart. They found that damage was consistent all around the pool, even in the middle, “where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.” This evening, the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked to drop the case against David Hearn, whom she had excoriated after his indictment 29 days ago.
In a striking 19-page legal document filed late this afternoon, her office undermined everything that President Trump has been saying about the damage to the Reflecting Pool for the past six weeks, including the claim that vandals had used a box cutter to slash the floor of the pool. “The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” Pirro’s office wrote in a motion to dismiss the case.
Taken as a whole, the court filing acknowledged what has been obvious to anyone who has spent time at the Reflecting Pool in recent weeks and watched the president’s $16.4 million project deteriorate in full view. Almost immediately after its reopening in June, the shallow pool filled with the green algae that the expensive renovation was supposed to have prevented. As park workers rushed to combat the algae, the pool’s sealant began to peel away in chunks. It was surprising to see outlined in legal language how Pirro’s office claims it felt duped. Rather than continue with evidence it acknowledged is not there, it is dropping the case.
“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” his legal team—Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin—said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirro’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the legal filing.
The filing largely blamed Department of the Interior officials for supplying information that was used to present evidence to a grand jury and obtain an indictment. Only afterward did prosecutors realize that they had been misled, and that Interior officials “provided less than fulsome information.” A large amount of data and documents that Pirro’s office later received “strongly suggest that a rushed and botched installation” is to blame, her office stated.
“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” the filing stated. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—did not immediately respond to messages. Weather delays hampered installation, the filing stated, and rain meant more delays. Internal notes said that the project was “significantly behind schedule,” which caused further urgency to complete the project before the president’s promised deadline of July 4. A quality-control inspector noted blistering in the finished portions of the liner, requiring further repairs.
A final inspection was done on June 9, the filing stated, and crews cleaned the site. But only two days later, on June 11, an engineer at the National Park Service was alerted to peeling in the lining. The fact that officials were scrambling and identifying problems eight days before Hearn was arrested was likely going to cause legal problems in the case.
An open question remains as to how and whether the project, one of the most high-profile priorities for the president, will be completed. The pool has been drained, and the latest legal filing indicated uncertainty over why exactly the lining failed in the first place—and whether problems will emerge again when water is pumped back in.
I attended Hearn’s court hearings, and they often attracted a crowd of supporters. Some dressed as canoeists; others held signs. At one of his recent hearings, four people wore inflatable-frog costumes. The charges seemed ridiculous to his supporters. But when I recently spoke with Hearn, he told me that the case was hurting his ability to sleep at night. He had once carried the Olympic torch for his country, and he was now worried about being the center of a political firestorm. “It’s unsettling,” Hearn told me, “to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.”
Earlier today, I used Google Earth to conjure images of terrible things: office buildings on fire, mass destruction in San Francisco, a smoldering crater in place of the Eiffel Tower. I was able to because Google had just decided to integrate its AI image generator, Nano Banana, into the service, which has historically been used by people seeking satellite or aerial imagery of real-world locations.
Just open the site, “pick a spot on the map, and start bringing your ideas to life,” Google wrote in a press release announcing the update some 24 hours ago. So I did.
I was easily able to generate those violent images simply by searching for a location on Google Earth, clicking the “Create image” icon, and typing in a few words. The feature also readily doctored stills of less spectacular, and likely less immediately falsifiable, events: a homeless encampment on the White House lawn, protesters outside the Mar-a-Lago resort, immigrants streaming over the U.S.-Mexico border.
Google initially responded by directing people to check any suspicious images themselves. As fake images generated with this new Google Earth feature began circulating around the web, the company stated that it takes “misinformation seriously” and that “every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated.” At first, Google did not remove or restrict access to the tool. But today, shortly after I reached out with a request for comment, the company reversed course and announced that it is “rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.”
Google Earth An AI-generated image of a fabricated explosion at the Mar-a-Lago resort, created with Google Earth
Google Earth This AI-generated image from Google Earth falsely depicts a plane striking One World Trade Center.
Before it allowed people to create fake imagery, Google Earth was a unique resource for researchers, journalists, and intelligence officials, particularly those studying armed conflict and natural disasters. Satellite and aerial imagery can be used to monitor crop failure or deforestation, the creation of mass graves, and the results of bombing campaigns. Especially in conflict zones and other areas that are hard for people to reach, satellite imagery is a go-to method for establishing some sort of ground truth. After Google Earth rolled out the AI feature, though, one investigative reporter wrote on LinkedIn that the tool could be used to easily and rapidly create images of drone strikes that look “very close to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, and other war-torn conflict zones.” And instead of requiring malicious actors to find a screenshot and then get around some AI model’s safeguards, Google rolled everything needed for a misinformation farm into one smooth user interface. It took me all of four seconds to generate a rendering of a Trump Hotel on the Gaza Strip.
The problem should have been obvious to Google, whose other products already forbid such edits. I was able to create an aerial image on Google Earth of a plane flying into the new World Trade Center building, but when I tried to do this directly through Nano Banana, the tool refused to edit an image of the building to depict a terrorist attack. Indeed, 9/11 and other high-profile events are well-known, even classic, subjects for AI-image trolling.
This is not Google’s first time launching an AI feature, and in particular an AI image-editing feature, without serious safeguards. Last year, the company released an AI shopping tool that allows you to visualize what clothes might look like on your body by uploading personal photos. As my colleague Lila Shroff and I reported at the time, “With little friction, anyone can use the feature to create what are essentially erotic images of celebrities and strangers. Alarmingly, we also discovered that it can do this for minors.” In 2024, Google Gemini was ridiculed for generating images of a racially diverse group of Nazis but not of any white Wehrmacht soldiers. And Google’s most prominent AI feature, the chatbot-powered answers in its flagship search engine, were an utter disaster upon their rollout—the AI overviews told people to eat rocks and gave other potentially dangerous health advice. Only after tremendous public pressure did the company make a substantial change, and two years later, the AI responses in Google Search continue to be inconsistent and unreliable.
Google is, of course, not alone in releasing AI features that have had embarrassing, dangerous, and avoidable consequences. See, for instance, Elon Musk’s Grok generating more than 1 million sexualized images, including of children, over just a few days, or any number of embarrassing errors made by ChatGPT releases throughout the years. Again and again, the AI industry undercuts its rhetoric about safety by launching products with little or no due diligence. If, as every major AI executive has pronounced, this technology really could upend human civilization, their companies should perhaps start taking that responsibility seriously.
Speaking to reporters today about the war with Iran, President Trump delivered an inspiring pep talk praising the courage and resilience of a brave nation retaining its fighting spirit in the face of adversity. Alas, the subject of his praise was the Iranians.
“Their entire navy is laying at the bottom of the sea,” he said. “They had 200 airplanes—they’re all gone. Every one. They don’t have one airplane. They had anti-aircraft weaponry, very good, but it didn’t work, and it’s all gone. Their radar is all gone. Their leaders are all gone. Everything is all gone! But they’ll fight onward.”
It was probably the most Churchillian rhetoric Trump has managed to muster throughout the entire conflict. Iran shall fight on the beaches, they shall fight on the landing grounds, they shall fight in the fields and in the streets, they shall fight in the hills; they shall never surrender.
This is not just a mystifying rhetorical move, but also a peculiar analysis of the military situation. If Iran’s military is gone, how exactly is it continuing to fight? An extant military of some kind is generally seen as a precondition for waging war.
Trump’s comments might be chalked up to spin or confusion. But his contradictory appraisal of Iran’s capabilities turns out to be very similar to the doctrinaire assessment of leading Iran-war hawks.
Marc Thiessen, the former Bush-administration speechwriter and frequent Trump adviser, recently wrote a Washington Postcolumn that, having been published the evening before the president’s remarks, seemed to anticipate Trump’s case for why the war has been a success and must continue.
“After the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Jordan, the time has come for President Donald Trump to take a good, hard look at the advice he is getting on Iran—what has worked, what has failed and who is responsible for those successes and failures,” he begins. This is an audacious way to frame the question, given that Thiessen’s own advice helped bring Trump to the current impasse. But his argument is that the hawks’ strategy in Iran has actually worked, and needs only to be followed a bit longer to produce victory. Thiessen praises the military’s “stunning success on the battlefield—entombing Iran’s nuclear material, destroying more than 85 percent of its defense industrial base, sinking its navy, grounding its air force, decimating its ballistic missile capability, annihilating its conventional military forces and imposing a crippling blockade on its ports.”
Alas, Trump tried to turn this victory into a negotiated deal. Big mistake: “Result? Iran fired five ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan,” Thiessen writes. The same Iranian military that Trump had already destroyed took advantage of his cessation of hostilities to attack us.
This seems to suggest that destroying Iran’s military does not mean that it will stay destroyed. Indeed, a recent Wall Street Journal report found that Iran has quickly rebuilt much of its infrastructure and military capability. The same principle would imply that “entombing Iran’s nuclear material” is useful only if Iran cannot dig it back out again, which it likely can. The natural conclusion is that bombing Iranian military installations has limited, reversible effects, and requires endless application.
No, no, no, Thiessen counters. “No one is advocating indefinite war,” he proceeds to argue. “What many are advocating is completing the military plan that was paused in April when the ceasefire took effect—executing the final few weeks of the campaign the U.S.-Israeli combined force was carrying out.” Just a few more weeks of bombing will finish the job permanently.
Those of us who closely study Thiessen’s columns for clues as to what Trump is likely to say next will notice something familiar here. After the April cease-fire, Thiessen wrote, “U.S. military commanders had about two weeks’ worth of targets left,” and allowing just two more weeks of strikes would leave Iran “fully crippled militarily.” He repeated this claim at the end of that month. “If he decides to resume major combat operations and finish the job, Trump is just 14 days away from a decisive victory in Iran,” he wrote.
The cease-fire has since crumbled, and Trump has had more than three weeks to attack remaining targets. Yet now the final destruction of Iran’s military is “a few weeks” away.
One barrier to once again finally re-destroying the Iranian military is that the United States’ capacity to sustain combat operations is finite. A week ago, journalists reported that Trump held back from carrying out bigger strikes owing to a shortage of munitions, especially interceptors to defend against the inevitable Iranian counterattack. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz went on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday to insist that this was untrue. The military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he insisted. Also, he added, “the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”
Threatening prison time for people who leak information that he claims isn’t even real about the American military seems like overkill. But when you are as passionate about operational security as Waltz, no measure is excessive. And he seems to have transposed upon our military the Schrödinger’s-cat state of military preparedness that we have projected onto our adversary, depleted yet dangerous. The two combatants, in their paradoxical states, appear to be well matched.
Later in Trump’s remarks, a reporter asked him if Americans should expect Iranian attacks to continue. Called upon to inspire his countrymen to endure ongoing sacrifice, he replied: “They’ll get weaker. They’ll get a little stronger, maybe, now. But they’ll get weaker, and then they peter out. Uh, yeah, sure. I think so.” Churchill could not have put it better.
In the summer of 1985, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the treaty they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought “solidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,” forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.
Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe’s most popular policies among people who benefit from it—those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.
The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn’t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, decried the situation as an “attack” and a violation of his country’s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain’s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. Sánchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.
The political blowback for Sánchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News.
The most notable reactions, however, came from other European capitals, which once committed themselves to freedom of movement as a basis for cross-border solidarity, an integral part of shared European Union membership that also includes a common trade policy and, in most cases, a shared currency. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, called for the suspension of Spain’s Schengen membership (for which there is no formal process), and her foreign minister blamed the Spanish government for the chaos, labeling its plans to grant legal status to more than half a million migrants “profoundly wrong.” In response, Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador, accusing foreign leaders of “partisan demagoguery.”
Other countries backed Meloni. Finland’s interior minister argued that Spain had “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,” adding in a post on social media, “This cannot continue.” France increased checks at its border with Spain, and the chancellor of Austria, which is about 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula, said his country was weighing whether to close its borders.
There is no evidence that any of the new arrivals in Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Transiting the strait typically requires a ferry or plane, and involves border and identity checks that validate whether passengers have the relevant visas. Meanwhile, there aren’t legal mechanisms to suspend a country’s Schengen membership, especially unilaterally. What other countries can do is reintroduce controls at their borders. The authority to do so was written into an implementing convention approved by the signatory states in 1990, and they’ve made liberal use of it. Italy had already reimposed checks at its land border with France because of the anticipated presence of “radical activists” at a festival in Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, and earlier today, Meloni’s government halted passport-free travel at air and sea borders with Spain. Austria had already reintroduced controls at borders with four of its neighbors, citing irregular migration through the Balkans, the burden of migrants on its asylum system, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
But these piecemeal steps to police borders aren’t grandiose enough when there’s political hay to be made of immigration. Meloni can’t be outdone by her deputy prime minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, who has taken to social media in recent days to urge, vaguely yet repeatedly, “Suspend Schengen.” Marine Le Pen, the far-right firebrand in France and a candidate for president in next year’s elections, vowed today to restrict the agreement if she came to power. Le Pen’s party, now called National Rally, has expertly channeled anger about Schengen. Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people crossed into Europe, mostly in flight from the Syrian civil war, party representatives performed death rites on the riverbank near where the agreement was signed 30 years earlier. They laid a funereal wreath on a star-etched monument to the system of free movement created there.
The corps of mid-level diplomats who created Schengen gave little consideration to its political consequences. “We did our job as junior ministers,” the French representative, Catherine Lalumière, told me as part of research for my book on the history of the agreement. They thought that borderless travel would fulfill promises made by the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of European integration, and advance both the development of a common market and the cultivation of solidarity among member states.
Except there were signs of a potent backlash already at that time. In 1983, the National Front, as Le Pen’s far-right party was then known, came to power for the first time in French municipal elections, in a small town called Dreux. A year after Schengen’s creation, the party entered the national Parliament for the first time, in elections held in 1986. As anti-immigrant populism gained influence in France, the government in Paris helped lead the drafting of Schengen’s implementing convention, trying to pair internal freedom of movement with security at Europe’s external borders. Language about “solidarity” present in the original agreement was nowhere to be found in the 1990 document. Instead, more than half of the convention’s 142 articles dealt with security and the exchange of data necessary to crack down on unwanted immigration of the kind now seen in Spain’s offshore exclave.
The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe’s reaction to a surge of immigration is to isolate individual states, rather than to use the tools it created to protect freedom and manage human displacement in a globalized world, Schengen really is at risk.
The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.
Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.
In the face of right-wing resistance, the United States fully vaccinated only about 66 percent of the population by the end of April 2022. Had the U.S. achieved full vaccination within the first 16 months that the shots were available—as was materially feasible—the death rate from COVID could have been cut in half, according to some estimates, and more than 300,000 lives could have been saved.
If you are hunting for a COVID villain or villains, then, there are many beckoning targets. Investigate the crooks who promoted quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for profit or plain crackpot mania. Investigate the sources and pathways of anti-vaccine disinformation. Investigate the pattern and funding of Russian support for anti-vaccine disinformation by following the map already provided by the U.S. State Department’s work on the subject. Investigate the response by U.S. public-health agencies, including the CDC, to better prepare for the next pandemic.
But the present Congress is investigating none of that. Instead, a Senate committee has fixed on Anthony Fauci, the physician and pandemic-era chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Senate obtained his diary—reportedly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claims to have found it on a government server—and then, outrageously and gratuitously, published 1,100 pages of it for the world to see.
Regarding the many accusations and insinuations hurled at Fauci, the first thing to be said is this: Even if any of them were true, none would have made the slightest difference to the immediate and urgent problem—what to do to save lives from a deadly new virus.
Senator Rand Paul and others want Americans to believe that Fauci was aware of the possibility that the coronavirus was intentionally created in a Chinese lab, even as he insisted in public comments that the virus had a natural origin. He may not have been forthcoming; the scientific verdict remains uncertain. But whatever its origin, the virus really killed people. The U.S. scientific community’s first and supreme job was to protect people. It did. Scientists discovered and developed the COVID vaccines that brought the pandemic to an end. It’s the anti-vaxxers, not the scientific community, who should stand indicted in the light of 2026.
Did scientists, including Fauci, sometimes speak with excessive certainty about the extent of their knowledge in the early weeks of the pandemic? Perhaps. That seems a lesser offense, however, than the president putting American lives at risk by consciously telling lies for personal advantage.
When the pandemic struck, President Trump’s immediate concern was that it might depress the stock market. Trump had started a trade war with China in February 2018. That trade war tumbled U.S. capital markets; at the end of that year, The Wall Street Journalreported that U.S. stock indexes had suffered their steepest annual drop since the global economic crisis of 2008. Trump’s priority in 2019 was to negotiate a face-saving exit from his failing trade war. That December, Trump unveiled a “Phase One” deal —but markets remained nervous and skeptical. When reports spread about a lethal outbreak in China, Trump appointed himself chief international cheerleader for the Chinese government. CNN counted 37 separate compliments by Trump to Chinese leaders in the opening months of 2020. That February 7, for example, Trump tweeted: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.” Nothing must interrupt Trump’s hopes for a trade deal that would boost the stock market and thus—he assumed—get him reelected in 2020.
As it became apparent that the virus had escaped China and reached the United States, Trump minimized the danger—although in private conversations with the reporter Bob Woodward, the president revealed that he expected a mass-casualty catastrophe for the United States as early as February 2020. He admitted to Woodward that his deception was intentional: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” In early March that year, Trump resisted allowing passengers to disembark from a virus-stricken cruise ship because once the people were on U.S. soil, their cases would augment the number of recorded infections. He said he would rather not let them off, because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
Trump allies made it explicit that to recognize the danger of COVID was to commit a thought-crime against Trump. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on February 24, 2020: “Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus.” He continued, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Trump declared at a White House event at the end of the month that the virus would soon disappear on its own. (Trump reasserted his prediction of spontaneous disappearance repeatedly through the spring and early summer of 2020.) In early March, Trump dismissed COVID as far less deadly than the common flu.
As infections and deaths surged in March and April, two imperatives gripped the MAGA world. The first was to fix blame for the mounting disaster on an external hate object. Far-right websites introduced claims that COVID had originated as a Chinese “bioweapon” in January. By late February, the bioweapon language spread among Republican members of Congress. On March 16, Trump tried to rebrand the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.”
But “blame China” took MAGA only so far. If China was to blame, whether because of malice or accident, then Trump looked all the greater a fool for having courted China so hard through 2019 and into 2020. And “blame China” did not offer any exit from the shock that was killing Americans, had shut down the U.S. economy, and was threatening to defeat Trump in November.
Thus, the second imperative: Find a fast-and-easy miracle cure. The first candidate was an antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, touted on Fox News nearly 300 times in March and April—and cautiously endorsed by Trump at a press conference on March 19. When hydroxychloroquine flopped, it was replaced as the great right-wing hope by a deworming drug, ivermectin. After the podcaster Joe Rogan contracted COVID in the fall of 2021, he told his fans that ivermectin, vitamins, and other home remedies had cured him.
Trump lost the presidency and—after the failure of his attempted coup d’état—left office in January 2021. By then, vaccines had been developed. Now two new imperatives gripped right-wing America.
The first was to sabotage COVID recovery to do to Joe Biden’s new presidency what someone (but who?) had done to Trump’s. The second was to profit financially and politically from the reservoir of COVID paranoia that had accumulated on the American right.
If the vaccine rollout could be stalled or thwarted altogether, the Biden presidency would be blighted. At the same time, influencers and Republican politicians bidding for followers could use vaccine hesitancy to their personal and career advantage.
The arc of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID response is illustrative. DeSantis began as a highly responsible actor on vaccines. Through the first half of 2021, he promoted vaccination in his state. He argued—correctly, in hindsight—that the state could combine a vaccination program with the abolition of lockdown mandates and an early return to in-person classroom teaching. Florida children went back to school in August 2020—and soon were outperforming their peers in Democrat-governed states that deferred to teacher-union wishes to postpone classroom reopenings.
Sometime over the course of 2021, however, DeSantis seemed to have decided that he could exploit COVID conspiracy thinking to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In September 2021, DeSantis appointed the vaccine opponent Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Although DeSantis prudently accepted the first-round COVID vaccination in spring 2021, he turned evasive when asked months later whether he had taken the recommended booster. “I’m not going to let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.” DeSantis never quite repudiated his past support for vaccination. But he aligned himself with the ever wilder ideas of vaccination adversaries. In December 2022, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to investigate harms allegedly caused by COVID vaccines.
The gathering anti-vaccination movement battened on anti-Semitism, racism, and general looniness. Viral TikTok campaigns in the fall of 2021 promoted the label “pure blood,” implicitly associating unvaccinated status with white-nationalist identity. Republican officeholders generally refrained from endorsing these more extreme fantasies. But Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among others, still traffics in the false claim that thousands of people have died because of injuries from COVID vaccines.
This is the route that has brought Fauci to the Senate hearing.
Democrats and liberals have their own post-COVID soul-searching to do. Blue states kept schools closed too long. They showed hypocrisy when they pivoted from demanding lockdowns in the spring of 2020 to welcoming mass George Floyd protests in the summer. Their analysis of lockdowns may have underweighted harms, especially to small businesses and otherwise healthy schoolchildren. Continued masking after the advent of vaccines could have enabled anti-social and even criminal behavior. The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 exploited the genuine need for post-pandemic recovery to pass lavish spending bills that probably accelerated inflation. Americans should, as best as they can, delve deep into the exact degree of Chinese-government culpability for the coronavirus—not because it makes (or would have made) any actionable difference to the COVID response, but because it may serve as guidance for future dealings with China. The fullest obtainable history of COVID will reveal much that Americans need to know about the truthfulness, competence, and danger of the Chinese regime.
Fauci may have misjudged, mishandled, or misstated many particulars. He was a scientist and bureaucrat unaccustomed to—and dazzled by—celebrity. History will judge his actions with more dispassion than the present day can or will. One thing that people should keep in mind, however, is that Fauci was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s shameful and deadly dereliction of duty. Trump’s record of dishonesty, callousness, and selfishness during the pandemic is a documented reality. The imputations against Fauci are mostly fantasies.
No mistakes by blue America or by the scientific community begin to compare with the brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans—and the betrayal of their own cruelly deceived supporters—that disgraced MAGA and the broader right wing in the pandemic years. Their consciences should be heavy. They seek now to transfer their own burden of guilt onto Fauci. The reckoning is a lie. The transfer is a fraud.
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