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CONTENTS

“Trump arrived at a time of dissociation — of unbundling, fracture, disaggregation and dispersal.”

64 THE FATE OF THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE THE GOP IS BARELY RECOGNIZABLE. WHAT’S ITS FUTURE? by matthew continetti

46 TWITTER AND THE FUTURE OF FREE SPEECH CAN SPEECH EVER REALLY BE FREE? by lee m c intyre

54 THE WAY HOME O N THE COVER: I L LUSTRATION BY P E TER GREENWOOD

HOW ONE UKRAINIAN FAMILY FOUND REFUGE FROM WAR. by kyle dunphey

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CONTENTS

MAGAZINE

“10,000 already die each year due to cold homes and many fear that the rise in energy and food prices could lead to even more excess deaths.”

LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

THE DARK NIGHT OF WINTER

30

War in Ukraine is sparking an energy crisis across Europe. by james l . walker

THE WEST

A LITTLE TOWN CALLED DEARFIELD

34

How one man’s vision became a haven for Black westerners. by george h . junne jr .

COMMENTARY

A FRESH START

15 40 THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF SKIING IN THE WEST

Can faith-based programs rehabilitate convicts?

What feels normal was once a great adventure.

by shima baradaran baughman

by heather hansman

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ON THE DOCKET

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IDEAS

76 THE NEW FIGHT AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY

Arguments for and against racial preference.

Is it time to crack down? by eric schulzke

THE STARTING LINE Civics education is dying and why that matters.

MODERN FAMILY

A QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS

THE BREAKDOWN

NINTENDONITIS: AMERICA’S DIGITAL ADDICTION

16

24

by genevieve vahl

POETRY

What to know about not knowing anything.

THE IDEA OF ANCESTRY

by ethan bauer

What an exploding gamer culture means for the future.

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82

AFTER ETHERIDGE KNIGHT by rio cortez

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

by marc nielsen

THE TRANSLATOR

20

THE MYTH OF THE LATINO VOTE

26

THE LAST WORD

ON MY HONOR

A conversation with author Reza Aslan.

Why South Texas didn’t go red in 2022.

Jack McCain on living up to his father’s legacy.

by doug wilks

by gaby del valle

by lois m . collins

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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CONTRIBUTORS

GABY DEL VALLE

GEORGE H. JUNNE JR.

LEE MCINTYRE

MATTHEW CONTINETTI

Del Valle is a freelance writer in New York whose work has been published in The Nation, The Verge and The Drift. She has worked at Vice News and Vox and is cofounder of the newsletter Border/ Lines, which focuses on immigration policy. Del Valle’s report on the myth of the Latino vote is on page 26.

Junne is a professor of Africana Studies at the University of Northern Colorado, where he was awarded the Teaching Excellence Award in 2003. Junne is also the recipient of the Champion of Higher Education Award from the Colorado Black Round Table.

The author of several books, he tells the story of a haven for Black westerners in Colorado on page 34.

McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and former executive director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. A teacher of philosophy, his forthcoming book is “Truth Killers: A Manifesto on How to Fight Disinformation and Protect Democracy.” His essay on Twitter and the fight for free speech is on page 46.

Continetti holds the Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute. A journalist, he was founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. An excerpt from his book, “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” is on page 64.

ERIC SCHULZKE

RIO CORTEZ

KAROLIS STRAUTNIEKAS

A former national politics and policy writer for the Deseret News, Schulzke is a senior producer at BYU radio and director of The Apollo 13 Project, a program dedicated to prisoner reentry awareness. He’s also working on a book about incarceration policy.

His report on the fight against obscenity in Europe and the U.S. is on page 76.

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Cortez now lives in New York City where she works at HarperCollins.

Cortez’s debut poetry collection, “Golden Ax,” was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry. She is also a New York Times bestselling author of “The ABCs of Black History” and “The River Is My Sea.” Her poem “The Idea of Ancestry” is on page 82.

Strautniekas is a conceptual illustrator from Lithuania. A recipient of several awards, Strautniekas’ illustrations have been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and Vice — among others. His clients include Air France, Disney, Forbes Japan, GQ France and Penguin Random House. His work is on page 31.

SHIMA BARADARAN BAUGHMAN

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A professor of law and former associate dean at the University of Utah College of Law, Baughman is a nationally recognized expert on bail, prosecutors and police and author of “The Bail Book.” Her work has been featured in The New York Times, National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal. Her commentary is on page 15.

THE BUZZ

OUR READERS RESPOND

For our N O V E M B E R cover story (“Bad News”), journalist and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Chris Stirewalt revealed how the news media is alienating Americans left, right and center. “Read, listen and watch widely,” Stirewalt wrote. “Hear other perspectives than your own. Try on other points of view regularly.” Reader Robert Michaelson added this advice: “Listen to both sides. Take a few days or even weeks to mull over the story (if it is important). Then as stories add up, a lot of things will be easier to see through.”

Deborah Farmer Kris, an education journalist and founder of Parenthood365, tackled the myth of multitasking and challenges both children and parents face in paying attention to each other and what’s important (“Age of Distraction”). Commercial airline pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who became famous for safely landing a disabled airliner in the Hudson River and was referenced in the article, shared it with his 250k followers on LinkedIn, saying: “Thank you (Kris) for shedding light on why multitasking is a myth, especially in a world of distractions. I highly recommend taking the time to read her piece.”

Contributing writer Bethany Mandel pondered the modern family and the trend of gentle parenting (“Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child”), questioning if just acknowledging and challenging a child’s behavior is enough to correct it. Reader Milo Peck reflected, “I didn’t ‘spare the rod’ (not enough, anyway) and my children grew up to be good productive adults. The problem is they still hate me for being strict with them.”

With Republicans winning control of the House, President Joe Biden’s second term might be defined by the same impeachment treatment then-President Donald Trump received, reported staff writer Mya Jaradat (“The United States of Impeachment”). Her story on expected oversight and possible impeachment hearings sparked a discussion among readers including Robert Michaelson, who wrote: “If there are official crimes, then so be it. I just don’t want frivolous impeachment occurring every time a new president is elected and the Senate doesn’t match the party of the president.”

Political editor Suzanne Bates’ conversation with Brookings Institute scholar Richard Reeves on the troubles plaguing males (“Of Boys and Men”) sparked a lively reader discussion on the reasons why boys are falling behind girls in education and emotional development, and the consequences for society. Reader Jed Griffin commented, “For more than 100 years feminism has been ‘putting the women forward’ as they say, coming at it from all angles and only now are some starting to wonder why men are falling behind. No great mystery here.”

“If there are official crimes, then so be it.

I just don’t want frivolous impeachment occurring every time a new president is elected.”

CORRECTIONS: A story about immigration policy (“The Huddled Masses”) incorrectly stated the number of migrants repulsed by the Remain in Mexico policy. It should be 70,000 migrants, not 700,000. • A story about the West’s role in space exploration (“This is the Space”) misstated the funding and ownership of two Mars-related research programs. The Mars Desert Research Station in Utah receives some funding from NASA for its STEM education program. The story incorrectly said that the station did not receive funding from NASA. The HISEAS program in Hawaii is privately owned and not affiliated with NASA. The story incorrectly reported that HI-SEAS was a NASA program.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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MAG AZIN E

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Deseret Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 21, ISSN PP324, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/ February and July/August.

The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Ste 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret. com/subscribe. Copyright 2023, Deseret News Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

DESERET, proposed as a state in 1849, spanned from the Sierras in California to the Rockies in Colorado, and from the border of Mexico north to Oregon, Idaho and Wyoming.

Informed by our heritage and values, Deseret Magazine covers the people and culture of that territory and its intersection with the broader world.

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

THE CROSSROADS OF THE WEST

T

wo years ago, in this space, I wrote the first of these columns.

I hoped it would serve as an introduction to this magazine and our hopes for what we could do in these pages. We humbly set out to create something worthy of the Deseret brand, a legacy that stretches all the way back to 1849 when William W. Phelps arrived in Salt Lake City with a printing press he’d bought in Boston.

Over the two years I’ve served as editor of this magazine, I’ve thought often of how that printing press arrived here and the dusty trail it traveled. As I wrote in the inaugural issue: “We hope to help readers navigate an increasingly complex world, giving them the information and insights needed to live authentic lives rooted in heritage and values.”

Hopefully, we’ve done that since our launch, and we’ll continue to do so.

Good magazines also keep evolving, and to that end we’re adding new departments to the magazine starting with this issue. With The Breakdown we take on a complex, urgent topic and make it more accessible. And with Point/Counterpoint we bring in experts on both sides of contentious issue to help readers understand differing perspectives.

With this month’s issue, we look at affirmative action, which the Supreme Court is set to rule on this year.

We’re also excited about our upcoming slate of events in 2023, beginning with the magazine’s Elevate Summit at Snowbird Resort in March. The summit will gather leaders from government, academia, business and media to discuss the toughest issues facing our society — from climate change to water in the West — and solutions to address them.

As you flip through this issue, we hope you’ll find some of what we promised to deliver when we launched: thoughtful essays on politics, culture and faith, deeply reported narratives and profiles, beautiful art and stunning photography.

But mostly we hope you’ll find a magazine that adds something missing from the national media landscape — a voice rooted in who we are, and where we come from. It’s a view unlike any other, a view from the edge of the Rocky Mountains, a view with the great interior West at our feet, looking out into the world.

—JESSE HYDE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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OPENING SHOT

TWO VIEWS FROM LINCOLN BEACH, UTAH LAKE PHOTOGRAPHY BY DONOVAN KELLY

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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A GLOBAL AFFAIRS MEDIA NETWORK

Connecting global publics to leaders in international affairs, diplomacy, social good, technology, business, and more.

Diplomatic Courier’s global network spans 182 countries and five continents.

Readers can find us in print, online, mobile, video, and social media.

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COMMENTARY

A FRESH START DO FAITH-BASED PROGRAMS WORK TO REHABILITATE CRIMINAL OFFENDERS?

BY SHI M A BA R A DA R A N B AU G H MA N

A

manda Allen was born addicted to heroin and alcohol, and became a victim of sex abuse, neglect and domestic violence.

She grew up with a drug-addicted mother in Oklahoma who “partied 365 days of the year,” according to the Prison Project. She describes fearing the sun setting and assessing “every new person who came in the room (to) try to figure out who they would molest first — me, my mom or my sister.” Amanda eventually succumbed to addiction herself and was charged with drug conspiracy, resulting in federal prison time. When she was released from prison, she was unable to find a job. She applied for 188 jobs with no success but eventually came across Renée La Montagne Dunn, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who runs the Prison Project. Dunn volunteered to coach Amanda.

Today, Amanda credits the program, and Dunn’s belief in her, with turning her life around.

Dunn was motivated by her own faith, and experiences helping a daughter struggling with addiction, to start the Prison Project, which makes faith in a higher power central to recovery. She works with people of diverse faiths, including Muslims, Hindus and Christians, and she says that through her experience in addiction recovery she has found “people are just more successful when they are accountable to their God.” As a professor, criminal justice expert and a deeply faithful person, I have to admit that realizing the principles that undergird my faith could be a viable solution to the troubles of criminal justice took an embarrassingly long

time. I started my work with inmates in 2006 and have focused much of my scholarship on how improved data, risk assessments, and constitutional and structural reform could fix criminal justice problems. Not until 2021 did I decide that I needed to dedicate more thought and research to showing how faith and religious principles could help reduce crime and incarceration, improve addiction recovery and recidivism and so many other social ills.

The problem is this is not a field of scholarship in criminal law. Faith-based solutions to criminal justice problems is not a specialty of many criminal justice scholars and data on whether these programs work is sparse. Professor Daniel Mears, of Florida State University, and his co-authors pointed out this problem in a piece in the Journal of Criminal Justice: “Precise statistics on faith-based programs in the criminal justice system do not exist, in part because relatively little attention has been given to them by the research community.” Many of my colleagues and other experts are not considering the panoply of tools faith-based approaches offer to vexing social problems like recidivism. A notable exception is that one of the most successful alcohol and drug abuse programs, according to experts, is the 12-step approach (like Alcoholics Anonymous), which is faith-based and requires “surrender to a higher power.”

Meanwhile incarceration and recidivism are endemic in our society. Each U.S. state puts more people in prison per capita than just about any other democratic country in the

world. The latest available U.S. Department of Justice statistics show that in 2005, 83 percent of prisoners released in 30 states were arrested again within nine years, and 44 percent of former inmates let out of prison were arrested within the first year. Given that most crimes go undetected by police, the number of people who are unable to leave a life of crime is even more grim than appears in the recidivism statistics. Even though national crime rates have been at historic lows since 2005 (except for an increase in murders during 2020-21), it does not appear that our criminal justice troubles are going to get better on their own. This might just be the time for divine intervention.

A divine power is what led Joseph Grenny, a New York Times bestselling author of business performance books, to shift gears and dedicate his time and resources to improve the situation of those who have been incarcerated. He has received public acclaim for founding the Other Side Academy, a two-year residential program started in Salt Lake City for people who have hit rock bottom and want to change. The people he invests in are often convicts or have served time, substance abusers or homeless and want to lead a better life.

He started this program with a “firm conviction that God wanted it done,” which helped him push past the “tremendous uncertainty” in attempting such a bold program.

Another innovative mentoring program called Inside-Out Network started by Fred Nelson, a former Lutheran pastor, aims to connect the more than 600,000 people exiting prisons each year with the approximately 300,000 religious institutions in America and provides resources in that last period in jail or prison when inmates need assistance. They also help inmates find health care, education, employment and job training. While there are substantial logistical burdens to expanding this program nationwide, he already has 5,000 inmates registered and 375 churches enrolled.

People of faith are making a difference in criminal justice. They are helping to reduce crime, incarceration and recidivism, and demonstrating how we can all make an impact. The divine tools of the faithful are not only fitting solutions for individual problems, but can also be the basis of solving endemic social problems, recidivism and addiction.

A larger institutional focus on using both secular and spiritual tools to aid with these problems could open a new field of scholarly inquiry as well as a solution to inexorable criminal justice problems.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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THE BREAKDOWN

NINTENDONITIS: AMERICA’S DIGITAL ADDICTION WHY GAMER CULTURE IS STILL EXPLODING, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE

BY MARC N I EL SEN

W

e all know a gamer: The son who boots up his Xbox to play Fortnite after school, or the cousin who spends winter break in her room playing the new Overwatch. Since the 1970s, video games have become a fixture of American culture. And we’re still grappling with what that means. Video games are often designed to keep us hooked. But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad news.

Here’s The Breakdown.

HOW BIG IS GAMING?

The gaming industry is booming, projected to surpass $257 billion in revenue in 2023 — up from $91 billion in 2019. That growth is driven by the rise of mobile apps, from Candy Crush to Call of Duty, which in 2021 accounted for more than half of all revenue.

More than 214 million Americans play video games, but only about a quarter are children; roughly half are between 18 and 44 years old.

About 1 in 10 report playing for 20 or more hours a week, with an average of 13 hours.

NINTENDO THUMB AND MORE

When gamers play for too long, many experience pain or swelling in the thumb, hand or wrist, depending on the controller they use. This is popularly known as nintendonitis, or Nintendo thumb. Excessive gaming has also been linked to attention problems, low self-esteem and poor academic performance, as well as depression — though it’s not clear which comes first.

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WHAT’S AN ADDICTION?

There is currently no scientific consensus about video game addiction. But the American Psychiatric Association has classified internet gaming disorder as an unverified potential diagnosis, while the World Health Organization lists “gaming disorder” on its roster of diseases. It’s clear some gamers became obsessed, which is problematic enough. “An obsession is a behavior we become attached to for psychological reasons,” said California psychiatrist David Reiss, an expert in character and personality dynamics. “So attached, that we begin automatically seeking and taking part in the behavior without considering the consequences.”

to exploit and manipulate the addictive nature of human psychology,” argues Hawaii state Sen. Chris Lee, a Democrat.

A SURPRISING ENDORSEMENT

UNDERWATER

THE LEVER

In the 1930s, a psychologist named Burrhus Frederic Skinner developed a research tool known as a Skinner Box. Lab rats were placed in a confined space with a lever that dispensed food. He found that if rats were rewarded with a fixed amount of food each time they pressed the lever, they’d soon get bored and quit. But if rewards were dispensed randomly — sometimes none, sometimes a jackpot — the rats couldn’t stop pressing the lever. Slot machines use this psychological tool to keep people playing and so do video games.

CASINOS FOR KIDS?

Loot boxes — virtual “containers” holding randomized rewards like new outfits or powers for a player’s on-screen character — have become a staple in many games.

These features, which keep players coming back, can often be purchased using real money. Some contend that this makes some games a form of gambling being marketed to minors. “They are specifically designed ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE E LLI N G S E N

EXCESSIVE GAMING HAS BEEN LINKED TO ATTENTION PROBLEMS, LOW SELF-ESTEEM AND POOR ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE, AS WELL AS DEPRESSION — THOUGH IT’S NOT CLEAR WHICH COMES FIRST.

Immersiveness, a major selling point in the industry, references how absorbed a player can become within the game. Advertisements often boast of immersive gameplay or game worlds. This is especially true of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft, one of the most popular titles of all time. These games provide a platform where millions of players create their own characters, build friendships with others and create an alternate life within the fantasy world — some would argue at the cost of their own.

“There are plenty of skills I’ve learned from playing video games. It’s more interactive than watching TV, because there are problems to solve as you’re using your brain.” — Shaun White, three-time Olympic gold medalist in snowboarding.

ROCK ON

“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock ’n’ roll.” — Shigeru Miyamoto, game director at Nintendo.

CHANGING OUR MINDS

Playing video games can physically change the brain and how it performs. Studies indicate that gaming can increase IQ in children, boost learning capabilities and even improve teamwork in the workplace. Gaming can make those parts of the brain involved in attention function more efficiently, and can increase the size of regions related to visuospatial skills. On the downside, researchers have also found that excessive gaming can cause structural changes to the neural reward system, analogous to those seen in patients with other addictive disorders.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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POINT / COUNTERPOINT

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ON THE DOCKET WILL SCOTUS END RACIAL PREFERENCE IN HIGHER ED?

T H E S U P R E M E CO U R T may be on the verge of ending the consideration of race

in college admissions after more than five decades of affirmative action. In two separate cases, plaintiffs suing Harvard and the University of North Carolina argue that favoring minority applicants — ostensibly meant to ensure fair treatment for applicants of all ethnicities — discriminates against Asian American and white students. With a 6-3 conservative majority, the court is expected to rule against both institutions by the end of June, scrapping the practice and potentially altering the face of higher education in America.

Here, in order to better understand what is at stake, we consider the issue from the differing perspectives of two experts.

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is that racial preferences provide cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy. The current framework is broadly unpopular, highly vulnerable to legal challenges under federal civil rights laws, disproportionately helps upper-middle-class students of color and pits working-class people of different races against one another. Yet major universities cling to the status quo because it is easier financially.

They act as if this is the only way to promote racial diversity, but that simply isn’t true. It’s just better for them.

By zeroing in on economically disadvantaged students, affirmativeaction programs could still address the effects of slavery, segregation and redlining. The wealth gap between Black and white households, accumulated over generations, is enormous. White workers typically earn 1.6 times as much as Black workers, but their household wealth is eight times higher. Housing discrimination has put middle-class Black families in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates than low-income white families. Using data on factors like these, admissions committees can identify students who succeed academically despite difficult odds.

They’re disproportionately likely to be Black or Latino, but admissions policies need not take account of their race.

T H E DIRT Y S E C RE T

A CASE FOR ENDING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

A D A P T E D F R O M “ T H E A F F I R M AT I V E AC T I O N T H AT C O L L E G E S R E A L LY N E E D,” BY R I C H A R D D. K A H L E N B E R G, I N T H E AT L A N T I C . K A H L E N B E R G I S A N E X P E RT W I TN E S S O N RAC E - N E U T RA L A LT E R NAT I V E S F O R S T U D E N TS F O R FA I R A D M I S S I O N I N I TS L AWS U I T AG A I N S T H A RVA R D C O L L E G E , A U T H O R O F “ T H E R E M E DY: C L AS S, RAC E , A N D A F F I R M AT I V E AC T I O N,” A N D E D I T O R O F “ T H E F U T U R E O F A F F I R M AT I V E AC T I O N.”

I GOT IN TO Yale University and then Harvard Law School because of affirmative action. Not only has that improved my professional life, but also, I believe my presence on campus, along with a critical mass of other Black and brown students, was a benefit to the school. We provided an integral part of the education of our white colleagues.

In law school, we read a case about the right to a hearing when welfare benefits are cut off. When the professor asked why this was important, a white woman said it probably wouldn’t make a difference in the outcome, but it would be “fun” for the person who received the benefits.

Black students schooled her that there’s nothing fun about pleading with bureaucrats for adequate food and housing. Now, as a professor, I can’t imagine teaching stop and frisk without Black male students to say what it’s like to experience that humiliation in the real world.

The Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision will likely have immediate and catastrophic consequences. Public and private universities will resegregate. Black and brown students will no longer be present in substantial numbers at selective predominantly white institutions. Every time my students of color step into a classroom, they demonstrate their extraordinary abilities. When they are no longer present, the connotation is that they are not as capable — one of the insidious lies behind white supremacy.

AN ARGUMENT FOR RACIAL PREFERENCE

A DA P T E D F R O M A C O LU M N BY PAU L B U T L E R I N T H E WAS H I N GT O N P O S T. A F O RM E R F E D E RA L P R O S E C U TO R , H E I S A LS O T H E A L B E RT B R I C K P R O F E S S O R I N L AW AT G E O R G ETOW N U N I V E R S I T Y, A L E G A L A NA LYST O N M S N B C , A N D AU T H O R O F “ L ET ’S G ET F R E E : A H I P- H O P T H E O RY O F J U ST I C E” A N D “ C H O K E H O L D : P O L I C I N G B L AC K M E N.” H E I S A PAST B E N N ET T B O S K E Y V I S I T I N G P R O F E S S O R AT H A RVA R D L AW S C H O O L .

ILLU STR ATION BY A LE X CO C H R A N

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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THE

DES ER ET INTERVIEW

THE TRANSLATOR IRAN AND THE POWER OF PROTEST

A CONVERSATION WITH REZA ASLAN

BY DO U G W I L KS

R

eza Aslan has the comfortable look of a man who knows who he is after years of personal reflection.

He is not a prophet. Yet some readers of his works hail him as a hero to true believers in God for his acceptance of faith as a universal part of life. He is not a scientist. Yet some readers offer him as a champion of the atheist, responding to the decidedly temporal parts of his bestselling book on the life of Jesus Christ, “Zealot.” Both “sides” seem to wish he would go further in supporting them. But he’s the person in the middle seeing purpose in the arguments for faith and reason.

“I suppose if I were to describe myself, I would say that I’m a public intellectual. What I want to do and what I’ve always wanted to do is to take what are sometimes complex and messy ideas, be they in politics or religion or what have you, and to try to simplify them to figure out a way to communicate these things in an accessible but also entertaining way, in order to draw as many people as possible into the conversation.”

Eight years ago he did a takedown of liberal comedian and commentator Bill Maher’s condemnation of Islamic violence and oppression, noting its use as a representation of global Islam’s 1.9 billion population is a lazy and inaccurate description. Yet he also lost a CNN show for an offensive tweet, which he apologized for, about President Donald Trump.

Call him an equal opportunity offender, a man that could make your list of the Top 20

DESERET MAGAZINE

5 People I Want to Invite to Dinner, but be forewarned, dinner conversation here will focus on both politics AND religion, to “take those private conversations, and invite as large an audience as possible into them.”

WE DO A VERY GOOD JOB OF TALKING ABOUT OUR VALUES AS A NATION. BUT WHEN IT COMES TO PUTTING THOSE VALUES INTO PLAY THERE IS AN ENORMOUS DISCONNECT.

Deseret Magazine sat down with Aslan, whose newest work, “An American Martyr in Persia,” details the life and death of Howard Baskerville, who went to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 and ended up joining in a democratic revolution. Its echoes are felt today. We discussed Iran and the religious impulse he believes exists in all of us.

YOU’VE SAID POLITICS IS ABOUT STORYTELLING. WHAT IS THE STORY IN IRAN FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF 22-YEAR-OLD MAHSA AMINI?

It’s important to understand that this is a

100-year-old story; that the fight for freedom we are seeing in Iran right now goes back to the very dawn of the 20th century. Iran has had three major revolutions in the course of the 20th century. I am one of a number of people who truly believe that this uprising that’s taking place right now has the potential to become the fourth revolution. And while in some ways, this can be a tragedy of a story — because here we are, you know, a hundred-and-something years into this, and Iranians are still asking for the most basic, fundamental human rights, which can be quite depressing when you think about it. But it’s also, I think, an uplifting story, because what we are seeing now is a new generation of Iranians, kids, really teenagers, who don’t carry with them the same burdens and the same fears of their parents’ generations, and so cannot be bought off with a little bit of freedom, with a little bit of extra space to make themselves heard.

ARE THERE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THIS AND THE ARAB SPRING?

The big difference, I think, between Iran and a lot of the Arab countries surrounding it is that Iran has had a vibrant protest culture. For more than a century, Iran has had a representative government, even if it is under the Islamic Republic. And for the last four decades, there have been opportunities for the people to voice their opinions and their ideas through the electoral process. Are those free and fair

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IRANI AN PROTESTERS SET THEI R SC ARV E S ON F IRE WH IL E MA R CHI NG DOWN A STREET ON OCTOBER 1 , 2 02 2 , IN T E H RAN, IRAN.

elections? No. But they do have a variety of choices in candidates that represent a fairly broad spectrum with different views about what the country should be like. And so over the last four decades, we have seen the Iranian people be very politically active and use the tools of government that are at their disposal, limited as they may be, in order to make their voices heard. So as you rightly point out, the difference between, say, the collapse of the government in Egypt, and the collapse of the government in Iran is that there was really no real history or experience of representative government in Egypt. Whereas the opposite is true in Iran, that it is, I would say, probably the most robust political culture in the Middle East, despite the fact that it exists in this incredibly repressive, autocratic government.

AS YOU NOTE IN “AN AMERICAN MARTYR IN PERSIA,” HOWARD BASKERVILLE SAID THAT “THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND THESE PEOPLE IS MY BIRTHPLACE.” IS THERE A REPEAT OF THIS RIGHT NOW IN IRAN?

The constitutional revolution that Baskerville fought and died in succeeded, primarily because it got the attention of the world. It succeeded precisely because revolutionaries from Russia and Georgia and Armenia and Turkey all came and joined in this fight for another country’s freedom. It succeeded because there was a

multifaith, multiethnic coalition that fought under this single umbrella of freedom from tyranny, represented by the Shah of Iran.

And of course among that coalition was this one American. And I really think there is a lesson to be learned from that success when looking at what’s happening right now in Iran. Obviously, nobody is asking for armed fighters to go and infiltrate the borders of Iran and fight alongside these revolutionaries.

That’s obviously not in the cards. But I really do believe that this isn’t just rhetoric that we have a more powerful weapon than guns, that we have the ability to make sure that the atrocities that are being committed by the Iranian government against these innocent protesters are seen, that they are responded to and that the call for freedom of these young people is heard.

States of blanket sanctions of containment and isolation, as a means of trying to change the government, or at the very least force them to change their behavior, or even to promote their downfall. That, of course, has not happened. Quite the contrary, I would argue that our policy towards Iran has done nothing more than entrench that government in place even further. So then, if you are saying, in a very literal sense, what is our responsibility?

Well, we’ve had a pretty big role in getting Iran to the place that it is today. And so one can say we should also be responsible in helping Iranians get out of the horrific situation in which they find themselves. But let’s talk about it in more global terms, more spiritual terms, if you will. What is the responsibility that we have, as citizens of a free country, to promote those same kinds of freedoms in places around the world where they don’t exist? Is that a responsibility not just of our government, but of our citizens? Do we have a moral responsibility?

Is it really true that the suffering of any one person anywhere is the responsibility of all peoples everywhere?

DO YOU HAVE AN ANSWER?

My answer is yes. We do have an individual moral responsibility. What I would say about our culture, though in our nation, is that we talk the talk. We do a very good job of talking about our values as a nation and the things that we hold dear. But every high school student knows that when it comes to actually putting those values into play as we pursue our fuller foreign policy interests, that there is an enormous disconnect. And I think that that has oftentimes come back to bite us in exchange for some short-term policy gain, which has resulted in devastating long-term consequences.

WHAT IS AMERICA’S RESPONSIBILITY THERE?

YOU WENT FROM “ZEALOT” ABOUT THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST, TO “GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY.” WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT FAITH, AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO RELIGION?

I think that our responsibility is twofold. On the one hand, we’ve had a very pernicious influence in Iran going back to the CIA coup in 1953. Because it was in our foreign policy and economic interests, we supported the dictatorship of the shah for decades, and so we bear a good measure of responsibility for the shah’s atrocities. Since the ’79 revolution, we have had a fairly consistent policy in the United

First of all, I have always been animated by stories of people who put their faith into practice, and often do so at great harm to themselves in an attempt to help other people. Whether that story happens in contemporary times, or whether it’s in ancient times, it’s a really powerful story for me, and it’s always drawn me in.

As a person of faith, I’ve spent a lot of time JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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studying not just what faith is, but where it comes from and why it exists. Religion is a manmade institution, the purpose of which is to provide a kind of language, a language of symbols and metaphors, to talk about this mysterious, ineffable individual experience that we refer to as faith. It exists in all people, in all cultures, in all parts of the world, and it has existed for all of our recorded history. And, indeed, the archaeological and material evidence indicates that whatever their religious impulse is, it has existed in species that predate ours. And so the only logical conclusion is that a religious impulse is part of our evolution.

WHAT ABOUT SOMEONE WHO BELIEVES THERE IS A GOD WHO CREATED MAN? ARE YOU IN CONFLICT WITH THAT CONCEPT?

The question of is there a God or not is to me an utterly irrelevant question, because it is absolutely unanswerable. There is no answer to that question. So what can we answer? What we can answer is that whatever this impulse is, towards belief in and let’s just use the word God, even though that word is quite a variable, whatever that is, we can answer with some clarity, that it is part of our evolution, that it is embedded in our cognitive processes, and that we are born with that idea, that belief.

The question then is why and that’s when it becomes no longer a scientific question.

At that moment, it’s a faith question. Science doesn’t have the answer. I should say, science has come up with some pretty compelling answers. Again, just as unprovable as any theological answer, the consensus view of why it is that this is a part of our human evolution is that it was an evolutionary accident, that the reason that the faith impulse is universal is that it is really just a byproduct, an echo, if you will, to have some other cognitive processes that we needed early in our evolution in order to adapt and to survive.

And my answer to that is, that is as fine an answer, and as provable an answer as well, because there is a God, and God made us to be like this. What is not in dispute? And this is what I find the most fascinating. What is not a dispute, is that we are made this way. Our brains are meant to yearn for this transcendent experience. That’s how our brains work.

One side says, “Yes, but it’s irrelevant, it’s just an accident.” And one side says, “It’s because we were made that way.” But both sides agree 22

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that this is a part of who you are, that that faith is who we are as human beings.

I LOVE THE CONCEPT OF A UNIVERSAL RELIGIOUS IMPULSE. CAN YOU EXPLORE THAT?

What we know from the admittedly very recent surveys and data that has been collected, is that human beings are born with the capacity for what is sometimes referred to as substance dualism, which is the belief that the mind and the body are separate and distinct.

And by the way, you can replace the word mind with soul if you want to. You can call it chi if you want to. You can call it, you know, prana. You can call it Buddha nature. Everybody has a different word for it. But fundamentally, what is meant is that whatever it is that we are is more than just the material self, that there is an eternal essence that is distinct from our bodily form.

WE HAVE A MORE POWERFUL WEAPON THAN GUNS; WE HAVE THE ABILITY TO MAKE SURE THAT THE ATROCITIES THAT ARE BEING COMMITTED BY THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT AGAINST THESE INNOCENT PROTESTERS ARE SEEN.

What then, what does that lead to? How does that change the way that we see ourselves in relation to the world or in relation to each other? It is interesting when you think about it, if you believe that you are more than just the sum of your material self, then it’s not that hard to believe that what I feel as my internal essence is similar to your internal essence. And so maybe our bodily forms are different, maybe our place of birth is different, but internally we’re the same. And from the perspective of evolutionary biology the reason we have this

impulse is so that when I look at you, I think to myself, you have the same basic shape as I do. So therefore, you must have the same internal essence as I do. So therefore, we must feel the same. Therefore, we must be the same.

And that can act as an adaptive advantage, you know, in our evolution.

IS THAT THE LESSON OF HOWARD BASKERVILLE?

Absolutely. Here’s a kid who was told that you are distinct because you’re American, you’re distinct because you’re a Christian.

That makes you separate from the Persians.

It makes you separate from the Muslims. And yet at the end of his life, he came to this realization that there isn’t anything that separates him from these people that he is fighting. The way they express their faith, their nationality, their ethnicity, their language — these are all external and meaningless. The fundamental aspiration of being a human is the same regardless of those things and that is precisely what allowed him to abandon all those other markers of his identity and to join with people who were “not him,” and fight in their cause.

SO IF THAT’S THE LESSON OF HOWARD BASKERVILLE, WHAT’S THE LESSON OF REZA ASLAN?

I’ve spent my life trying to learn the languages of religion of the world, so that I can become kind of a universal translator if you will. If I do define religion as just a language of symbols and metaphors, I do truly believe that if I can become fluent in all of those languages I can help people understand that fundamentally, they’re saying the same thing to each other. And I’ve built a career on that hope. It hasn’t always worked. There have been ups and downs. There’s been successes and failures. But I do believe that if we can as a human species, take the lesson of Baskerville, take the lesson of what I’m saying as the translator and to recognize the similarities that we have with each other beyond the sort of external divisions, borders and boundaries and skin color and any churches or what have you, then that’s the kind of world that I would like to live in.

And it’s the kind of world that I’m trying to create for my children.

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

23

MODERN FAMILY

A QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT NOT KNOWING ANYTHING

BY E TH A N B AU E R

T

here was a moment — I can’t pinpoint the time — when I remember feeling pretty good about my place in the world and confident about my adulthood.

I thought I had everything figured out. I thought everything would be smooth sailing ahead. But it hasn’t been.

I love my job, but there are parts about it that, in diplomatic terms, present opportunities to practice patience. I love my wife far more, but we still have arguments. I love living with her in a cool place like Utah, but I miss my family and friends back home in Florida.

In short, there’s always some missing part that can never be made whole. At first, I rebelled against that reality. I told myself it was just a matter of time until we move back to Florida and I get a new job that will have all the things I like about my current one with none of the strings attached.

It’s worth noting that, for all these gripes about aging and adulthood, I’m not 50. Or 45. Or even 35. And as any actual middle-age or elderly person is surely screaming in their head, if not out loud, one among many pieces of wisdom I hadn’t learned until recently is that there will always be friction. No job is perfect. Every city or town has its charms and drawbacks. Every relationship faces difficult moments. And once I realized that, the question became whether my (relatively blind) ambitions were still worth pursuing — and whether I could really put them aside if I chose to.

This is my personal manifestation of a 24

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“quarter-life crisis.” This phenomenon is not a psychological diagnosis or syndrome; you will not find an entry for it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But psychologists (and 25-year-olds) have been thinking (and half-joking) about it, to different degrees and under different names, since the mid-20th century. Even longer, actually, if you understand it not as a condition, but as a near-universal experience. “The drives and desires of people are always the same,” says Tess Brigham, a San Francisco-based therapist

“WE ALWAYS JUST WANT TO FEEL LIKE WE’RE ENOUGH.” WHETHER IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS, IN OUR CAREERS, OR JUST IN GENERAL — IN LIFE.

whose work with young people inspired her to write a book about launching 20-somethings into adulthood. “We always just want to feel like we’re enough.” Whether in our relationships, in our careers, or just in general — in life.

There’s a temptation, because of its associations with its more-familiar cousin (the midlife crisis), to define the quarter-life crisis in rigid terms; to make it about a realization that you

haven’t found the right partner yet and need to work on settling down, or that you’re not progressing in your career as quickly or as easily as you’d hoped. But the modern understanding of the quarter-life crisis has more breadth. It’s the moment a person truly reaches adulthood.

Not in the way that you’d expect — like a biological way or a social, moved-out-of-mom’shouse sort of way. But in a “no matter what I do or where I go, or how much money I make or how many friends I have, nothing will ever be perfect, adulthood will never be as simple as I thought it would be” way. Every human one day realizes, whether consciously or not, that the life ahead of them will be very different from the life behind them; where they must figure out, Brigham says, “what life really is.”

Erik Erikson, a father of developmental psychology, first formalized something resembling the quarter-life crisis in 1950. His acclaimed book, “Childhood and Society,” hypothesized eight “stages of psychosocial development,” with each stage carrying the weight of a specific developmental “crisis.” Two of these stages — adolescence (11 to 19) and early adulthood (20 to 44) — result in questions (and crises) of “Who am I?” and “Can I love?” respectively. But the world has changed since 1950. The average American life expectancy has grown by about 10 years, leading psychologists to identify a new stage of development known as “emerging adulthood.” During this stage, “You’re not quite there yet,” explains Kent State child psychologist and researcher Angela Neal-Barnett, “but you should be

working your way to adulthood.” Gestalt psychologists, who approach people as the sum of their parts rather than as a collection of individual pieces, label the resulting friction an “existential crisis” rather than a quarter-life crisis, but for us laypeople, the differences are negligible. The animating question in both cases is the same: “Who am I,” Neal-Barnett says, “and what does it mean to be an adult?”

Amid housing crises, a recession and a culture defined by the internet, what it means to be an adult means something different than it did in 1950 — but the definition still seems elusive and personal. Achievement? Maturity?

Independence? Neal-Barnett makes the point that everyone must confront the question.

She uses my wife, who is studying to become a psychologist, as an example. She described my wife’s attitude as follows: “When I get my Ph.D., then I’ll start my life.” I’ve certainly noticed that sentiment, at least sometimes.

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Brigham had a similar realization in her 20s. Since she was a teenager, she’d hoped to one day work in Hollywood. She got her first job in Los Angeles by 24, and by 27, she was “primed” for exactly the life she’d once hoped for — except she realized she was miserable.

So she quit and moved back to her hometown to reinvent herself and chart a new path into adulthood. She didn’t identify her experience as a quarter-life crisis until later, when she opened her therapy practice about 10 years ago. Her clientele included many 25to 30-year-old millennials who were showing up in her office directionless. They felt like they’d followed the approved script — college, marriage, professional careers — but still felt relentlessly unfulfilled. They weren’t quite the same as her own experience, but she noticed an echo. Which is why she believes it’s somewhat futile to neatly define a quarter-life crisis, except to say that it’s a point where emerging

adults begin to question their long-held beliefs and core truths. “What’s unique about the quarter-life crisis is that our brains don’t fully form until we’re 25, but we pick a major (or a career) at 18,” she says. “And you don’t know yet what it is to be an adult.” You don’t know about what David Foster Wallace described as “whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches,” including “boredom, routine and petty frustration.”

Brigham hypothesizes that our atomized existences are to blame. “There’s no time anymore,” she explains. “We don’t daydream. We never process our thoughts.” The minefield of distraction we face from our phones, from television and from social media makes asking big questions harder, so when they surface — as they inevitably will — we aren’t wellequipped to answer. We avoid them more than ever. But those questions, she says, define what it means to be 20-something in the 21st century more than any traditional barometers of success; more than getting married and buying a house and having kids. “The point (of your 20s) is to learn about yourself,” she says. “To try things. To explore. To really learn about yourself. And if you do that, I can’t tell you for sure you’ll never have a quarter-life crisis, but you won’t hit these walls.”

My wall arrived in the form of questioning success. I’m a lucky man indeed, living in an era that despite its many problems and injustices still ranks among the greatest periods of widespread flourishing in human history. And yet I still find myself falling back on a sort of mindless ambition as my default, even if that’s not what makes me the happiest version of myself. Maybe being “normal” really is what makes me happiest. There’s a freedom in acknowledging that. But there’s also a nagging sense that freedom is hindered by complacency. So I find myself again at the central question rooting my personal quarter-life crisis: What does success mean to me, and should it perhaps mean something different? Luckily, some psychological experts have reminded me that a quarter-life crisis isn’t necessarily about answering that question and others like it; it’s about acknowledging their presence. About realizing that you may not know who you are and what you’re about just yet — you may never know!

— but it’s best to discover who and what you are not. About asking yourself honestly, as you enter the adult world and confront all its paradoxes and complexities, how you want to exist.

Maybe it will be simpler in the years to come. Maybe not. All I know is that knowing isn’t as simple as my younger self thought it was.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE MYTH OF THE LATINO VOTE SOUTH TEXAS WAS SUPPOSED TO GO RED. WHAT WENT WRONG?

BY G A BY DE L VA L L E

O

n a muggy Saturday afternoon in late October, just weeks before the midterms, 200 or so people gathered in a church auditorium in Weslaco, Texas, to hear from three women they hoped would soon represent them in Congress. Mayra Flores was the last of the trio to speak, and it was clear from the standing ovation she got before taking the stage that she was the main attraction.

Flores greeted her audience in Spanish first, then English. “Buenos dias a todos; good afternoon, everyone,” she beamed. “It’s great to be surrounded by freedom-loving youth,” Flores told the mostly middle-aged audience attending the Texas Youth Summit at the Mid Valley Assembly of God that afternoon. “If you’ve been following the awakening that’s been taking place in the RGV (Rio Grande Valley), you know we’re witnessing something special — not just politically, but spiritually.”

Four months earlier, Flores had won a special election in Texas’s 34th District, making her the first Republican to hold the seat in more than a century, the first Mexican-born woman in Congress, and the first Latina Republican to represent Texas in Washington.

Now she was fighting to hold on to the seat.

Two other Latina Republicans, Cassy Garcia and Monica De La Cruz, were running in the neighboring 28th and 15th districts.

A red wave was coming, Flores predicted, but only if everyone in the room did their 26

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part. “Take your abuelitas, your aunts, tíos, tías, cousins, you name it,” to the polls, Flores urged the audience. “Spread the chisme; spread the gossip. Tell everyone to go vote on Monday — of course, for Mayra Flores — but to vote conservative.”

At the time it seemed like the odds were in their favor; it seemed possible that the histor-

THE THREE WOMEN PROMISED THAT A RED WAVE WAS NOT ONLY ON THE HORIZON, BUT ALSO THAT LATINOS WERE AT THE FOREFRONT OF IT.

ically blue Rio Grande Valley would flip not just one seat, but three. Polls suggested that Flores, who had initially been projected to lose the seat after winning it in a June special election, was catching up to the Democratic candidate. Henry Cuellar, the longtime Democratic incumbent Garcia was hoping to unseat in the 28th District, narrowly managed to defeat a primary challenger by less than 300 votes. The state legislature had redrawn the 15th District, where De La Cruz was running

against a Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressive, to favor Republicans.

Flores, Garcia and De La Cruz called themselves the “triple threat.” The New York Times called them “far-right Latinas” who represented the new face of the Republican party. The three women’s pitch to Texas voters was, essentially, that they were just like them: conservatives who speak their language, both literally and figuratively, who support Border Patrol and the police, who go to church and oppose abortion.

“Dijeron que no íbamos a ganar. Que equivocados estaban,” Flores said at the summit, two days before early voting started in Texas.

“They said we weren’t going to win. Oh yeah?

We’ll see about that.” Seventeen days later, Flores found her time in Congress short-lived.

For months, the three women promised that a red wave was not only on the horizon, but also that Latinos — specifically, Latina women — were at the forefront of it. Across the country, pundits predicted a Republican sweep, not only in swing districts but also in traditionally blue states like Oregon. It didn’t happen. Flores lost by more than 8 percentage points; Garcia by 13. De La Cruz was the only one to win her race.

“The RED WAVE did not happen,” Flores tweeted four hours after the polls closed in Texas. “Republicans and Independents stayed home. DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT THE RESULTS IF YOU DID NOT DO YOUR PART!”

TK

There have been rumblings of a rightward shift among Latinos for years. Roughly onethird of Latino voters nationwide cast a ballot for Republicans in the 2018 midterms, and Trump made gains among Hispanic voters in 2020 despite his controversial immigration policies. Trump’s gains were especially pronounced in the 34th District, which is 84 percent Hispanic and which President Joe Biden only won by 4 percentage points. But the theory that Latinos will abandon Democrats en masse has yet to come true. Democratic House candidates won 60 percent of the Latino vote in the midterms, according to one CNN exit poll.

An estimated 39 percent of Latinos voted for Republicans in House races — an improvement ILLU STR ATION BY N I C H O LAS M E N D OZ A

compared to 2020, when that figure was 36 percent, but a modest one at best.

If a political shift is happening and Latino voters really are embracing the Republican Party, albeit slowly, it’s not entirely the result of an organic awakening. In Florida, a former swing state with a significant Hispanic population, Republicans dominated at nearly every level in the midterms, thanks to a combination of conservative effort — in the form of millions of dollars in spending and gerrymandering — and Democratic apathy.

But Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida have different political motivations from Mexican-American voters in south Texas, a nuance that’s often left out of predictions

involving a single, unified “Latino vote.”

Republicans didn’t win the “Latino vote” in south Texas, where the overwhelming majority of voters are Mexican American, nor did they turn the Rio Grande Valley red. They did, however, force Democrats to compete in a part of the country where they had previously taken victory as a given.

Emboldened by Trump’s gains in the region in 2020, Republicans started treating south Texas like a battleground rather than a lost cause. Flores helped run Hispanic outreach for the Hidalgo County Republican Party in the lead-up to the 2020 election. She announced her bid to represent the 34th District in February 2021. Eight months later, the Republican National Committee opened a Hispanic “community center” in the border town of McAllen — one of four outreach centers the RNC has opened in Texas since 2021. “One of the things we heard is that they felt they had been abandoned by Democrats,” RNC spokesperson Alex Kuehler told me. “We’re really trying to reach out to folks who we think are disaffected with the Democrat Party.”

Flores didn’t have to wait until the midterms. Filemon Vela, the Democrat who had represented the district for eight years, had announced in 2021 that he would be retiring at the end of his term. Because of redistricting, Vicente Gonzalez, a Democratic incumbent in the neighboring 15th District, would instead run in the 34th against Flores. Instead of waiting out his term, though, Vela abruptly retired in March, triggering a special election — one Flores was prepared for, and which the Democrats were not.

She secured endorsements from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz and raised more than $750,000 in contributions during the special election cycle. Her opponent, Cameron County commissioner Dan Sanchez, raised just $46,000. A few weeks before the election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the House Majority PAC spent a combined $215,000 on ads for Sanchez, but it was too late.

Flores beat Sanchez by 7 percentage points — a victory some Democrats downplayed by noting turnout had been low and emphasizing the limited tenure of whoever won the special election. “If Republicans spend money on a seat that is out of their reach in November, great,” Monica Robinson, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Politico a few weeks before the special election. Local Democrats, however, warned that Flores’ victory signaled the JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

“THEY’RE CLAIMING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE ONLY CHRISTIAN PARTY, WHICH IT’S NOT.”

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extent to which national Democrats had taken victory in south Texas as a given. “Too many factors were against us, including little to no support from the National Democratic Party and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,” Sanchez posted on Facebook after conceding.

Part of Flores’ pitch to voters was the notion that Democrats have moved too far to the left, abandoning Latinos in the process — especially in socially conservative south Texas, where voting Democratic was more indicative of tradition than policy preferences. Vila’s resignation and the ensuing special election was an opportunity. Conservatives are building infrastructure in south Texas for the first time. Nikki Haley had a get-out-the-vote rally for Flores and De La Cruz, as did Abbott.

“Governor Abbott’s always in the area — he should get an apartment down here,” Javier Villalobos, McAllen’s first Republican mayor, told me.

“They saw the potential and that’s why they’re investing,” Flores told reporters at the October summit. “With funding, we’re able to spread the message throughout the district.”

The message is largely rooted in religion.

Before she was a congressional candidate, Flores was a local conservative influencer who claimed Democrats had stolen the 2020 election and posted conspiracy theories about the January 6, 2021, riots and QAnon on Twitter.

As a congressional candidate, her message was more tailored to local conservative concerns, like outlawing abortion and supporting Border Patrol families.

The yard signs Flores distributes to supporters are emblazoned with “God, Family, Country” in English on one side and in Spanish on the other. Flores borrowed another slogan of hers — “Make America Godly again” — from Luis Cabrera, a pastor in Harlingen who describes himself as Flores’ “spiritual adviser.” Cabrera has introduced Flores to other pastors, who have in turn encouraged their congregations to get involved politically. Cabrera attributes the recent rightward shift in south Texas to evangelical Christians getting more involved in politics. “We truly believe that in these elections, we’re going to see a Godly wave — not a red wave — a Godly wave of revival,” he told me in October. “We’re waking up. We’re now going to get vocal, we’re now going to hit the streets, we’re going to hit the public square.”

At an Oktoberfest-themed fundraiser for the North Cameron County Democrats,

attendees chafed at the idea that the Republican Party had a monopoly on Christian identity. “They’re claiming the Republican Party is the only Christian party, which it’s not,” Wandy Cruz-Velazquez, a member of the organization, told me. “There’s many people in this room right here that are Christians, and we’re not Republicans.”

Republicans, several attendees at the Oktoberfest fundraiser told me, were targeting Latino voters in the area. One woman showed me a flyer she had received claiming, in Spanish, that “Joe Biden and his leftist allies are indoctrinating your children into thinking biological sex isn’t real.” It had been delivered to everyone with a Spanish-sounding surname, she told me, and was paid for by America First Legal, an advocacy group founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

In south Texas, Republicans zeroed in on two messages: Democrats are too far to the left and out of touch with local concerns, and they don’t support — nor can they even understand — the hardworking families that make up your community. It’s a message that resonated at the Texas Youth Summit, where the audience groaned after Kayleigh McEnany reminded them of the time first lady Jill Biden said the Latino community is “as unique as the breakfast tacos” in San Antonio (just a few hours later, Garcia referred to herself as the “second spicy taco” onstage to cheers and applause). “I’m their worst nightmare,” Flores said of the Democrats. “I’m pretty sure the Democrat Party is now thinking, ‘Let’s send Mayra back to Mexico.’”

Democrats, Flores and her fellow speakers implied, didn’t care about Latinos — they just wanted their votes. “We’re all about God, family and hard work,” Flores told reporters.

For Sara Hinojosa Parsons, Flores and her allies represented a threat to her family. “I’m a Hispanic woman with a transgender child.

It’s do or die,” Hinojosa Parsons told me at the Northern Cameron County Democrats fundraiser. “What I find most offensive is that they think whoever’s not on the right, whoever’s not Republican, we have no claim to the American flag, we have no claim to God and religion, we have no claim to families.” This was the same assumption pundits made when they claimed Latinos would usher in a red wave: that Latinos are inherently conservative, that their politics are shaped by heritage or demography and not personal experience.

In the end, the so-called Latino vote was split along ideological lines.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

THE DARK NIGHT OF WINTER WAR IN UKRAINE IS SPARKING AN ENERGY CRISIS ACROSS EUROPE

BY JA M E S L . WA L K E R

O

n an island off the west coast of Scotland, 64-year-old Caroline Gould faces a brutal winter. Disabled, she uses a powered wheelchair to get around but now struggles to afford the electricity needed to charge it. She has to ration her heating as a consequence.

Her situation is getting increasingly precarious. “I need to keep warm because I can’t exercise to keep warm,” she told the nonprofit 38Degrees. “I can’t even lift a duvet to wrap around me.”

Caroline is one of millions in the U.K. — and across Europe — feeling the brunt of skyrocketing energy prices. This winter, many have to choose between food and heating as the war in Ukraine takes its toll.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been manipulating oil and natural gas exports to Europe for years. But amid Western sanctions, Russia has suspended much-needed supplies of natural gas, plunging Europe into an energy crisis and threatening to undermine the continent’s climate goals.

The U.K. is no exception, with over 6.7 million people already unable to properly heat their homes during the winter months, according to fuel poverty charity National

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Energy Action. And while new U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has reaffirmed the country’s climate commitments, his government — and those across Europe — are scrambling to keep energy prices down and their citizens warm.

EUROPE WAS SWIF T in implementing sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine in an effort to paralyze the country’s economy. And while the European Union

FAMILIES ARE RESORTING TO BURNING FURNITURE INDOORS, ONLY EATING COLD MEALS AND COVERING WINDOWS WITH NEWSPAPER FOR EXTRA INSULATION.

has sanctioned Russian billionaires and made commitments to phase out Russian coal and oil by the end of the year, they have fallen short of promising the same for gas.

This is because Europe has become increasingly dependent on Russia to meet its gas needs, made worse by the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions last year, which put huge demands on its depleted stocks. Prior to the war, the EU’s 27 member nations had relied on Russia for 40 percent of their natural gas, mostly from the massive Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which stretches 745 miles under the Baltic Sea from the Russian coast near St. Petersburg to northeastern Germany.

But that flow stopped in September 2022 as Russian state energy giant Gazprom, which operates Nord Stream 1, announced it had detected an oil leak and shut the pipeline completely, giving no timeline of when exports might resume. Russia has now cut its supplies of gas to Europe by 88 percent, with two smaller pipelines still operational. This has led to the price of natural gas in Europe hitting a record high of over 300 euros per megawatt-hour, 10 times higher than the United States at the time.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the leaks “acts of sabotage” and warned of the “strongest possible response” in the event of an attack on European energy infrastructure. Since, Europe

ILLU STR ATION BY K A R O LI S ST R AU T N I E KAS

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has remained on guard. Norway, western Europe’s biggest oil and gas producer, has sent troops to guard its energy installations and Italy has stepped up naval surveillance on pipeline routes.

But it’s households in the U.K. that are being hit hardest by the energy crisis, more so than any other country in western Europe, according to the International Monetary Fund.

This is despite the country only importing 4 percent of its gas needs from Russia in 2021.

Nowadays, it imports none.

This is because the U.K. — like the rest of the world — is not immune to market factors.

Russia restricting supplies to mainland Europe has led to acute shortages on the international gas market, with the price of gas in the U.K. increasing by 129.1 percent.

Caroline’s home is among the vast majority in the U.K. — 85 percent — which uses gas to provide heat compared with fewer than 50 percent in France and Germany. The U.K. dwarfs other countries in terms of the share of electricity generated by gas as well, which makes the country disproportionately vulnerable to price hikes as it has traditionally relied on North Sea gas fields, which are now in decline.

The U.K.’s leaky homes are also the least efficient in western Europe, according to one study. “It’s a huge problem,” says Matt Copeland, head of policy and public affairs at National Energy Action, “and the least efficient (and poorest) homes are sometimes paying twice as much.”

With Ofgem, the national energy regulator, predicting that the average annual household bill would rise from 1,000 to 3,500 British pounds in October, the U.K. government introduced costly support to households and businesses, setting a price cap of 2,500 pounds with energy suppliers being fully compensated for any shortfall. The cap will rise to 3,000 pounds a year from next April, however.

Britain’s gas producers and electricity generators could make excess profits of up to 170 billion pounds over the next two years, according to Bloomberg, citing unpublished Treasury analysis. “Energy companies should not be making excessive profits,” says Antony Froggatt, an energy policy expert from policy institute Chatham House, “they should also be paying more tax to help governments support the higher costs of energy 32

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to society as a whole.”

The British government is also giving every household 400 pounds off their energy bills this winter, regardless of circumstances.

Critics say this is welcome but not enough, particularly for the poorest families who are also contending with skyrocketing inflation and a cost of living increase across the board.

Copeland expects to see millions of families resorting to desperate measures this winter including barbecuing and burning furniture indoors, only eating cold meals and covering windows with newspaper for extra insulation. He has also heard reports of parents not sending their kids to school because they can’t afford the electricity to wash their uniforms.

EUROPE ’S GAS P RIC E S have fallen since a record high in August, as mild autumn weather decreased demand. Across Europe, the overall

“EUROPE IS SET TO FACE AN EVEN STERNER CHALLENGE NEXT WINTER.”

storage levels are at an average of 95 percent, according to a report from the International Energy Agency, which has fueled some optimism going into the winter.

But this is far from the end of the energy crisis. A lot depends on how much European governments are forced to deplete their gas reserves this winter due to the war in Ukraine.

And with a likely decline in Russian pipeline deliveries next year and the risk of them halting completely, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol warned that “Europe is set to face an even sterner challenge next winter.”

The energy crisis is also calling into question Europe’s climate goals. Faced with widespread blackouts and rationing, some countries have been forced to resort to coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Greece and Hungary plan to extend the lifetime of coal plants

and reopen those that have been closed.

“In the short term, we will be burning more coal,” says Michael Bradshaw, professor of global energy at Warwick Business School, “(and) emissions will be higher than they might have been.” He remains optimistic, however, explaining that “in the longer term, it’s about accelerating the pace of low carbon transition.”

The war in Ukraine has forced Europe’s hand, making renewable energy more enticing from a security perspective but also economically as the price of renewables hits record lows. In May, the European Commission unveiled a new plan, REPowerEU, that aims to mobilize up to 300 billion euros to achieve total independence from Russian fossil fuels before the end of the decade. It also expands the EU’s targets for renewable energy for 2030, from 40 percent to 45 percent of all total energy produced.

But there was a heavy price tag on Europe’s climate agenda even before the events of the past year, casting doubt on how achievable these goals are. “The amounts of money put aside by governments to cushion consumers against this crisis isn’t sustainable,” says Bradshaw, “particularly if it stimulates a recession.”

In the U.K., the situation is more uncertain after Sunak became the country’s third prime minister in three months. Sunak has recommitted to U.K.’s ambition to hit net zero by 2050, but he has fallen short of reversing his predecessor’s decision to ramp up oil and gas drilling in the North Sea under mounting pressure to somehow ease the burden on British households.

But while the U.K. government — and its European equivalents — play a juggling act between easing short-term supply issues and longer-term climate commitments, their most vulnerable citizens are feeling the (lack of) heat.

Caroline is far from the only older Briton set for a cold winter because of a war thousands of miles away. Ten thousand people already die each year due to cold homes and many fear that the rise in energy and food prices could lead to even more excess deaths.

The U.K.’s National Health Service has called it a “humanitarian crisis.” At least one health service board is already in talks with funeral directors to ensure cremations and burials can keep pace with demand.

WILFORD W. CLYDE For 45 years of Building a Better Community

Congratulations!

Enjoy your well-deserved retirement!

PROFESSIONAL HIGHLIGHTS Chairman & CEO, Clyde Companies President, Associated General Contractors of Utah President, Vice President, and Board Member, Beavers Inc. Chairman, Utah Manufacturers Association Chairman, Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce Chairman, Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce

COMMUNITY SERVICE Springville City Mayor (2009-17) Springville City Council (1989-92) Utah State Board of Regents Chairman, Board of Trustees, Utah Valley University National President, BYU Cougar Club Founding Member, UVU Wolverine Club Co-Chair, Springville Museum of Art Annual Ball Co-Chair, Utah Valley University President’s Ball Commissioner of Multiple Youth Softball Leagues

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

730 NORTH 1500 WEST | OREM, UTAH 84057 | CLYDEINC.COM | 801.802.6900

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THE WEST

A LITTLE TOWN CALLED DEARFIELD HOW ONE MAN’S VISION BECAME A HAVEN FOR BLACK WESTERNERS

BY G E O R G E H . JU N N E JR .

T

here is an abundance of information on the American West, but start digging in, and you’ll find a gap. There is little history accessible on African Americans and their lived cultural and political lives as generations moved to, settled in and shaped the West. In fact, one-quarter of the cowboys who have so profoundly defined “the West” as we think of it were indeed African American.

Across the West, a few all-Black settlements were established in the early days of westward expansion. And one of those settlements was called Dearfield, Colorado. With little-to-no farming experience, little money and no experience in homesteading, through their hard work the people became successful. The Dust Bowl and the inability to obtain irrigation water doomed Dearfield and other farming communities on the eastern high Plains to become the ghost towns that we now see scattered across the region. But even though the bricks began crumbling and the voices faded from the town, Dearfield is still a place where the true story of life in the early West lives.

O L I V E R TO USSA IN T JACKSON was born April

6, 1862, in Oxford, Ohio. He was the son of Hezekiah and Caroline Jackson, two former slaves. They named him after Toussaint L’Ouverture, the runaway slave who successfully overthrew the French in Haiti in 1804.

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Hezekiah had learned to read and made sure all six of his children did, too. At the age of 25, Oliver Jackson did what so many in generations that followed would do: Go West.

He moved to the Denver area (which had a

DEARFIELD WAS A VIBRANT BLACK COMMUNITY. BUT TODAY, IT’S DIFFICULT TO FIND ON A MAP. ITS RISE AND ITS FALL PARALLEL OTHER FARMING COMMUNITIES IN THE WEST.

population that soared from 4,579 in 1870 to 106,713 by 1890) and got a job as a caterer. He settled into the Colorado life and in 1889, he married Sarah “Sadie” Cook, a relation to the famous composer Will Marion Cook.

In 1894, Jackson made the short move from Denver to Boulder to manage the Stillman Café and Ice Cream Parlor on Boulder’s beloved Pearl Street. He became a staff manager at the Chautauqua Dining Hall in 1898,

supervising 70 people. Customers paid $5 a week or 35 cents a meal. After working in management for some years, he opened his own restaurant on 55th and Arapahoe, where the Boulder Dinner Theatre is now located.

His restaurant was famous for its seafood, particularly the oysters. Jackson made enough money that he bought a farm that he owned for 16 years. But in 1908, Republicans won the spring election, making Boulder a dry town and prompting Jackson to make the move back to Denver.

There, Jackson began a 20-year career as messenger for Colorado governors. While he was working for Gov. John F. Shafroth, Jackson was determined to make good use of his political connections and actualize his dream of starting an agricultural colony where Black Americans could own homes and control their municipal government, schools and farms. He forged ahead with his plans, using whatever support he was able to receive from Denver officials as well as the Colorado State Teachers College and the State Agricultural College (University of Northern Colorado and Colorado State University, respectively). In May 1910, he filed a homestead entry on a tract of land outside Greeley. On February 4, 1914, he purchased 40 acres of land for $400 and the community was officially born.

Dr. Joseph H.P. Westbrook, of Denver,

a physician and one of the first settlers of Dearfield, gave the colony its name. At the June 12, 1909 meeting of the founding team, he articulated the sentiments of his colleagues in these words: “We plan to make this our home. These are to be our fields and because they are ours and because we expect and hope to develop them and make them into substantial homes, they will be very dear to us, so why not incorporate that sentiment in the name we select and call our colony Dearfield.”

The first group of settlers moved to Dearfield in 1911, the same year the Denver-toNew York long distance telephone service was completed. There were immediate problems. Apart from not lending their political support for the project, middle-class Black Coloradans generally showed little interest in relocating to Dearfield. Some of the early settlers were so poor they could not afford to ship their possessions from Denver and had to walk part of the distance. Among the members of this group, only two families could afford to erect their 12-foot by 14-foot homes with a fence. The other five families had to

live in tents or in hillside dugouts. Sometimes the men had to work on other farms to earn money while the women and children worked their land. This tenacity demonstrates how much people wanted to possess their own homes and farms.

Western Farm Life interviewed O.T. Jackson in its May 1, 1915, issue, five years before Dearfield reached its peak. According to reporter Frederick F. Jackson, the Dearfield project included 40 farms of 160 acres each, with the townsite embodying 140 acres. In his judgment, “(I)t took plenty of nerve for this small group of Negroes to go out upon the barren, sage-brush prairie and undertake, without means or capital, to force a living from the unyielding soil.”

It took seven years for the town to see its first marketable crop, which included “potatoes, beans, corn, watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkin, squash, onions, turnips, cabbage, tomatoes, oats, rye, alfalfa, and native hay.”

DE NVE R PUBL IC LIBRA RY

CIT Y O F GREELEY M USEUM S

FO U R S E PA R AT E PR I N TS D E PI C TI N G LI FE I N D E A R FI E LD, CO LO R A D O. TO P LE FT, A G R O U P O F M E N , WO M E N A N D C H I LD R E N G AT H E R O U TS I D E OF THE CHURCH IN D E A R FI E LD. TO P R I G H T, O LI V E R TO U SSA I N T JAC KS O N H O LDS A C H I LD W H I LE STA N D I N G I N A CO R N FI E LD. B OTTO M LE FT, A M A N S I TS I N A WAG O N . B OT TO M R I G H T, A WO M A N A N D T WO M E N I N S PE C T C R O PS .

OL IV E R TOU SSAINT JAC KS O N

H AD C L E ARLY begun to show strong signs of prosperity. Some records state that white farmers in the area assisted their

DEA RF IE L D

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DE N VE R P UB LIC LIB RARY

JO HN EPPERSO N/D ENVE R POST VIA GE TTY IMAGE S

T HE C A F E A N D LU NC HR O O M O F T HE D E A R F IE L D CO M MUN ITY SITS ABANDONED 35 M I LE S E AST O F G RE E L E Y, CO LO R A D O, A LO N G U. S. 34.

T HE TOW N O N C E HA D A P O P ULATIO N O F 700.

D E AR F IE L D I S T H E O N LY B L AC K FA R M IN G S E T T LE ME N T I N COLO R A D O W I T H SURVIVIN G B U I L D IN GS.

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Black neighbors and, sometimes, traded goods and services with one another. Residents established the Dearfield Farmers Association and met monthly with farming agents from the Colorado Agricultural College, now Colorado State University. Residents filed for homesteading on 8,400 of the 20,000 available acres in Weld County. For that small group of Black farmers and their families, the ideals of self-reliance and self-pride appeared to be coming true. Dearfield was no longer a chimerical handful of Black adventurers nursing their dreams in the middle of nowhere, but a vibrant community whose courage and creativity were beginning to draw the attention of neighboring communities and state officials.

While there were many African American agricultural communities throughout the United States, there were a smaller number of homestead communities that had been platted, with maps usually located in county offices. Examples include one just a few miles from Dearfield — the community of Chapelton, Colorado. Although rivals, together they were touted as being the “Twin Cities of Dearfield and Chapelton.” In Otero County south of Manzanola is a homesteading site called The Dry, where a descendant of one of the founders still resides. A platted homestead community that was not able to materialize because of the lack of funds was Easyville, located near Akron, Colorado.

Some of the most famous Black communities at this time include Nicodemus, Kansas; Langston, Oklahoma; Empire, Wyoming; Dewitty, Nebraska; Sully County, South Dakota; and Blackdom, New Mexico. Other communities were located outside the United States in Canada — some which began following the Revolutionary War — and in Mexico, the southern end of the Underground Railroad.

By 1920, Dearfield had a population just short of 300 persons who worshipped on Sunday in two churches. The hotel, restaurant, school and other amenities signaled the residents’ devotion to building a functional community. There were even plans to build a canning factory. After only 11 years of its existence, the total value of the colony went clearly over one million dollars.

Following WWI, residents could afford automobiles. Jackson also reported they owned “six pianos, twelve Victrolas, four automobiles, and one truck.” Ten of the settlers pooled their money to buy a thresher and paid for it from the money they received from threshing beans.

Daily life in Dearfield seemed to reflect life in many other colonies in the state of Colorado. Women worked as hard as the men did.

While men worked the fields, the women worked at home and tended cows and other livestock. Sarah Fountain recalled, “They were that kind of women. To make a life, you endure most anything.” Olietta Moore said that her

HART VAN D ENB URG/CO LO RAD O PUB LIC RAD IO HA RT VA N DEN BURG/COLO RA DO PUBL IC RADIO

UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN CO LO R A D O PR O FE SS O R R O B E R T B R U N SW I G , R I G H T, H AS WO R K E D TO H E LP FU R T H E R T H E AWA R E N E SS O F D E A R FI E LD, I TS S I G N I FI C A N C E A N D I TS PLAC E I N H I STO RY TO DAY.

WRIT E R GE ORGE JU NNE (C E NT E R) IS A P ROF E SS OR OF AF RIC ANA ST U DIE S AT T H E U NIV E RS IT Y OF NORT H E RN COLORADO WH O H AS ST U DIE D T H E H ISTORY OF DE ARF IE L D AND WORK E D TO P RE S E RV E T H E TOWN F OR MORE T H AN T WO DE C ADE S .

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AFRICAN AMERICANS PLAYED A VITAL ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST — VOTING, RUNNING FOR PUBLIC OFFICES, MINING, HERDING CATTLE, FARMING, SOLDIERING AND OPERATING BUSINESSES.

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CIT Y O F GREELEY M USEUM S

BY 1 931 THE N E W LY CO M PLE TE D CO N C R E TE U. S. 34 I N PA R T P R O MP TE D O. T. JAC KSO N TO P R O DUC E P OSTE R S A N D PA MP HLE TS TO ADVE R TISE D E AR F IE L D. T HE Y P R O MISE D A “ VA L LE Y R E SO R T” W I T H F O O D, E NT E R TA IN ME N T, DA N C IN G , F ISHIN G A N D OTHE R R E C R E ATIO N S.

grandmother worked in the fields and raised corn. The family sold the corn in Denver and gave some away to friends. Another woman recalled night activities where people held moonlight picnics and chicken fries by lanterns.

Dearfield was a vibrant Black community.

But today it’s difficult to find on a map. Its rise and — imminently — its fall, parallels that of other farming communities around the West.

In the late 1920s, the price of wheat fell from two dollars to one dollar a bushel in the global market. Argentina, Canada, Australia and Russia began supplying wheat and meat to Europe, thereby saturating the market. Between 1919 and 1923, over 400,000 American farmers lost their farms and by 1932, almost 10 percent of all of America’s farmers lost their farms. When the rains stopped, the Depression struck in 1929 and the Dust Bowl storms swirled around the community, most of Dearfield’s residents moved away. Recalled one resident, “Most people went out there with high hopes and left with bitter disappointment. It

all dried up and blew away.” By 1936, the community was almost deserted. And Jackson’s dreams with it.

O.T. Jackson died on February 18, 1948, at the Weld County Hospital in Greeley. He was 85 years old and had lived in Dearfield for 38 years. With the colony he founded almost vacant at the time, Jackson’s demise symbolically marked the end of “the last major attempt at agricultural colonization on the high plains,” Fountain said, according to accounts from historian Quintard Taylor.

To preserve, stabilize and restore the Dearfield townsite, the Dearfield Dream Project was formed in 2013. Group members include The Black American West Museum, the University of Northern Colorado, Colorado State University, the City of Greeley Museums, Weld County Government, Colorado Preservation Inc., The Great Plains Institute of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the city of Greeley.

In the time since, scientists and researchers have conducted archaeological digs, drone mapping and other methods to better understand the community and its residents. Four Colorado State Historical Fund grants have been named to fund Dearfield’s preservation, plus a National Park Service African American Civil Rights grant. In 2021, a move began to have Dearfield designated a National Historic Site with the National Park Service. A “Dearfield Study Act” was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressmen Ken Buck and Joe Neguse in 2022. A bill with the same name was introduced by U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper.

If the bill passes both houses and is signed by the president, Dearfield will obtain its National Historic Site designation.

Many educational textbooks have omitted histories of African Americans in the West or — if at all — mention them briefly.

African Americans played a vital role in the development and settlement of the West, historically and today — voting, running for public offices, mining, herding cattle, farming, soldiering and operating businesses, plus providing many goods and services to create the infrastructure we live among today. Black Americans established communities, created economy and many prospered through their hard work. No longer should their rich tradition be ignored.

G E O R G E H . J U N N E J R . I S A P R O F E S S O R O F A F R I C A NA S T U D I E S AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H E R N C O L O RA D O.

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Open An Account for Free at my529.org Investing is an important decision. The investments in your account may vary with market conditions and could lose value. Carefully read the Program Description in its entirety for more information and consider all investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses before investing. For a copy of the Program Description, call 800.418.2551 or visit my529.org. Investments in my529 are not insured or guaranteed by my529, the Utah Board of Higher Education, the Utah Higher Education Assistance Authority Board of Directors, any other state or federal agency, or any third party. However, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance is provided for the FDIC-Insured investment option. In addition, my529 offers investment options that are partially insured for the portion of the respective investment option that includes FDIC-insured accounts as an underlying investment. The state in which you or your beneficiary pay taxes or live may offer a 529 plan that provides state tax or other benefits, such as financial aid, scholarship funds and protection from creditors, not otherwise available to you by investing in my529. You should consider such benefits, if any, before investing in my529. my529 does not provide legal, financial, investment or tax advice. You should consult your own tax or legal advisor to determine the effect of federal and state tax laws on your particular situation. A Morningstar Analyst RatingTM for a 529 college savings plan is not a credit or risk rating.

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THE WEST

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF SKIING IN THE WEST WHAT FEELS NORMAL WAS ONCE A GREAT ADVENTURE — ONE WE STILL HAVE ACCESS TO

BY H E ATH E R H A N S MA N

Y

ou head up for a day of skiing and spend most of the morning stuck in a slow-moving line, raging at the out-ofstate plates in front of you. Sweaty, frustrated, full-bladdered and over it by the time you get a (nosebleed section) spot in the parking lot. Sound familiar? In the age of mega passes and canyon traffic pileups, it can be hard to remember that skiing was once a gateway to rebellion, freedom and joy. But it was, and it still can be.

Skiing in the U.S., as we think of it now, came from Europe in the late 1800s by way of Scandinavian immigrants, who used skis as a mode of transportation. They also liked to have a good time in the long, dark mountainous winter, founding ski jumping hills at places like Howelsen Hill, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and Ecker Hill, near Parleys Summit, in Utah.

Then, in the early days of the 20th century, wealthy Americans traveled to European ski resorts on elite adventures and brought home the idea of skiing as full-fledged recreation.

Some of those ambitious Americans started exploring mountains on skis. In 1909, Fred Harris formed the Dartmouth Outing Club in New Hampshire, which became the initial hub of stateside skiing. Harris was the first person 40

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to climb Mount Washington by skis, and over the next few decades he inspired like-minded adventurers to form other outdoor groups like the Wasatch Mountain Club, whose members started climbing and skiing the high peaks of Utah. “It was just one of those fun, exciting things,” Caine Alder, who was one of the first people to summit Monte Cristo peak in the Wasatch, along with the club, said in an

EVEN IN A CROWDED COMMERCIALIZED TIME, SKIING IS STILL A WAY FOR US TO FIND OUR EDGES

interview for the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections department at the University of Utah. “I thought, ‘No one’s done this before.’”

Skiing started to seep into the broader culture, and politics. In the 1930s, as part of federal efforts to pull the country out of the

Depression, the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps cut ski trails across New England. Groundbreaking skiers like Austrian instructor Hannes Schneider, who invented a technique for parallel turns known as the Arlberg technique, and German instructor Otto Schniebs, who coined the credo, “Skiing is not a sport, it’s a way of life,” moved to the U.S. to escape fascism and Nazi Germany. They were looking for a new frontier, and skiing was a way to get out.

European influence shaped skiing in the states, but by the mid-’30s the sport had taken on its own form. In 1932, Gerhard Muller built the first-ever rope tow in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and two years later the initial American one went up in Woodstock, Vermont. From there, the sport shot out into the bigger, rangier mountains of the West.

“Perhaps no other period of time incorporated so much change for the sport of skiing than the 1940s. It is true that the 1920s and ’30s did much to ‘set the stage’ for the growth of the sport, but it was during the decades that began in the late 1930s and continued into the early 1950s that the greatest growth in skiing occurred, particularly in Utah along the Wasatch Front,” Alan Engen, son of Alta

B E F ORE THE FAMED 10TH MOUNTAI N DIV IS ION B E GAN ITS T RAINING IN COLORADO, T H E 5 03 RD INFANT RY RE G I M E N T OF THE U.S. ARMY DI SPATCHED 175 PARAT ROOP E RS TO ALTA S K I ARE A TO T RAIN F OR COMB AT IN T H E ALPS .

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KEIT H CO LE, CO URT ESY M ARRIOT T LIB RARY, UNIVE R S ITY OF U TAH

THE WEST

C A LLE D THE “DEAN OF AMERI CAN SKI PI ONE E RS ” BY T H E U.S . S K I AND S NOWB OARD H AL L OF FAME , OT TO S C H NIEB S LI V E D HIS LIF E ON SNOW — LEARNI NG TO SKI AT TH E AGE OF T H RE E IN H IS NAT IV E GE RMANY, OP E RAT ING MAC H INE GU N S I N TH E C A R PATH I AN MOUNTAI NS DURI NG WWI AND E V E NT UAL LY E MIGRAT ING TO AME RIC A TO “B E COME A F RE E MAN” — AS H E DESCRI BED I T — TO OPEN UP OTTO’S AL P INE S K I S C H OOL , ONE OF T H E F IRST S K I S C H OOL S IN T H E NAT ION .

FOR THOSE LOOKING TO ESCAPE FASCISM AND NAZI GERMANY, SKIING WAS A WAY TO GET OUT.

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founder Alf Engen, wrote in a report housed in the archive. “The reasons for this are probably tied to the exposure the sport was being given at that time by the U.S. Forest Service; press coverage; and a lot of hard work and effort put forth by foresighted individuals willing to take a chance on making a living from the sport.”

Alan Engen experienced that change firsthand. In the winter of 1935, his father skinned into Alta over Catherine’s Pass, stayed with some miners in Albion Basin for a few days and concluded after a second visit the zone would make a good ski area. He thought about slope angle and avalanche danger. Little did he know, he was operating on the same time frame as a very different kind of ski area developer. Averell Harriman, the executive chairman of Union Pacific Railroad, started Sun Valley Resort, in Ketchum, Idaho, as a ploy to get high-end traffic onto the train. He envisioned it as a fancy celebrity resort, and he brought in movie stars and a public relations team to make it happen.

Engen and Harriman had very different visions of what skiing in the western U.S. could be, but they shared an idea of exploration, and of exposing more people to the sport. But just as the ski industry was getting its footing, World War II sent many of the young men who were building it to war. A group of skiers ended up in the 10th Mountain Division, an elite force hand-selected for their mountaineering abilities and toughness. Camp Hale, Colorado, a wide valley south of what’s now Vail, became the 10th Mountain Division’s high mountain base, where the troops could train at altitude in an unforgiving snowpack.

Those skiers were only deployed for a brief period, but after the war, the 10th Mountain Division veterans returned to the U.S. excited about the future of the sport. Over the next few decades, 10th Mountain Division veterans established 62 ski schools and started some of the biggest ski areas in the country, like Aspen and Vail in Colorado, and Crystal Mountain in Washington. Unlike the elite skiers of the early

20th century, they wanted to democratize and expand the sport.

Their timing was good. A growing economy and a desire for recreation drove rapid growth in the ski industry from the postwar years into the ’60s. People had disposable income and vacation time, and the rise of skiing tracked with the baby boom — the birth of a big generation of potential skiers.

It was glamorous, exciting and accessible, depending on where you skied. The Forest Service encouraged resort development — to build up what they saw as economic value in public lands that weren’t then being otherwise used — and new ski areas popped up across the high mountains of the country.

Growth peaked in the winter of 1963 when big-name resorts like Vail, Crested Butte, Park City and Stratton started spinning chairs. Skiing grew from half a million skiers in 1956 to three million by the middle of the next decade. During the ’60s and the first half of the ’70s the sport grew at a rate of 15 percent a year, and it morphed from an outsider activity to an accessible sport, to a luxury hobby. There were places, like small-town ski areas, where it could be any of those three, but what we now think of as the ski industry directed itself toward selling

vacations instead of simply building ski hills.

Condos and real estate development crept in, starting when Bill Janss opened Snowmass, the last of the four Aspen resorts, in 1967. In the ’70s as many of the initial ski area founders aged out or moved on, mountain management largely shifted from 10th Mountain veterans to real estate developers with MBAs. Resorts began to consolidate under corporate management. Ralston Purina bought Keystone and Arapahoe Basin, in Summit County, Colorado, in 1973. The film corporation 20th Century Fox bought Aspen Skiing Co. in 1978.

From there, numbers flatlined. U.S. skier visits have been in the range of 50 million skiers a year since 1978 when the National Ski Areas Association started keeping track. By the time Beaver Creek and Deer Valley in Utah were built in 1982, they were designed with heated walkways and fancy seafood restaurants, and skiing had become synonymous with luxury.

That could feel like the end of the arc of skiing, from gritty roots to corporate ownership. But skiers have always been edge pushers and rebels, so even though the industry had broadly developed by the late ’80s, skiing as a sport changed a lot. The ’90s ushered in the era of extreme skiing and big mountain competitions. During the ’00s, snowboarding led

SKIING MORPHED FROM AN OUTSIDER ACTIVITY TO AN ACCESSIBLE SPORT TO A LUXURY HOBBY. TODAY, IT CAN BE ANY OF THOSE THREE.

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T H E WASATC H MOU NTAIN C LU B WAS OF F IC IAL LY F ORME D IN 1 92 0 WIT H T H E P U RP OS E OF C RE AT ING A COMMU NIT Y AND E DU C AT IONAL OP P ORT U NIT IE S F OR E X P LORING T H E WASATC H RANGE IN U TAH , GROWING F ROM 1 3 TO 5 0 0 ME MB E RS WIT H IN F IV E Y E ARS .

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HAR OLD VAN PE LT, COU RTE SY MAR R IOTT LIB R ARY, U NIVE R S ITY OF U TAH

A FT E R E M I G R ATI N G TO T H E U. S .

FR O M N O RWAY, PR O FE SS I O N A L S K I E R A LF E N G E N ( LE FT) H E LPE D E STA B LI S H OV E R 3 0 S K I R E S O R TS I N T H E W E ST, I N C LU D I N G A LTA , W H E R E H I S S O N , A LA N ( R I G H T ) S E RV E D AS TH E D I R E C TO R O F S K I I N G FO R M O R E T H A N 4 0 YE A R S .

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the way into park and pipe freeskiing. Now, more and more people head to the backcountry, chasing that same feeling of exploration Engen must have felt when he skied into Alta.

In October, when President Joe Biden designated Camp Hale, home to the 10th Mountain Division, as a national monument, he acknowledged the way that skiing has shaped the country, and given us freedom on so many levels. “When you think about the natural beauty of Colorado and the history of our nation, you find it here,” he said, gesturing to the peaks of the Tenmile Range.

Skiing means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It’s transportation, adrenaline, independence, bliss. Even in a crowded commercialized time, it’s still a way for us to find our edges. Skiing is one of the most objectively stupid, self-serving things we can do, but it’s also about as close as we’ll ever get to flying by our own feet. And if history has shown us anything, it’s that every generation has looked for a way to keep trying to fly.

S N OW B AS I N R E S O R T I N H U N TSV I LLE , U TA H , WAS FO U N D E D I N 19 4 0.

A FT E R WW I I H A LT E D PR O G R E SS , TH E R E S O R T’ S W I LD C AT C H A I R LI FT D I D N ’ T O PE N U N T I L 19 4 6 .

MEMBERS OF THE WASATCH MOUNTAI N CLUB SKI ED I NTO ONCE-REMOTE LOCATI ONS NEAR SALT LAKE CI TY.

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M ARRIOT T LIB RARY, UNIVERSIT Y O F UTAH

S K I RAC ING C L ASS E S H AV E B E E N OF F E RE D AT NE ARLY E V E RY S K I RE S ORT IN T H E U.S . S INC E T H E S P ORT TOOK H OL D IN T H E 1 9 40 S .

E. L.C HA PIN, CO URTE SY M ARRIOTT LIBRA RY, U NI VE RS I TY OF U TA H

T H E WASATC H M O U N TA I N C LU B PLA N N E D O U TI N G S TO S U M M I T WASATC H PE A KS S U C H AS LO N E PE A K , M O N T E C R I STO A N D OTH E R S .

TH E CAREER OF ALF ENGEN ( SI GNI N G S K IS F OR A FAN) WAS C ATA P ULTED BY HI S SKI J UMPI NG — HE HEL D MU LT IP L E WORL D RE CORDS .

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he elucidated his point on that same platform.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” he tweeted last spring. “What should be done?”

For many conservatives, Twitter had become much more than a social media platform. It had become part of a narrative. The narrative — pushed on right wing talk radio, Fox News and, ironically, social media platforms — is that Twitter was part of an informal Big Tech cabal that silences those who dare break from a prescribed liberal orthodoxy. And so it was little surprise that Musk’s purchase of Twitter in October for $44 billion was greeted with glee, even exultation for many on the right.

“Without exaggeration — the most important development for free speech in decades,” Sen. Ted Cruz told Sean Hannity of Fox News. Ben Shapiro retweeted Musk with a GIF of popping champagne; Tucker Carlson declared it a moment that might save democracy.

Musk quickly made good on his promise to open up the platform, but he did so by dialing back many of the safeguards that Twitter had put in place to protect against misinformation 48

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and disinformation. Mass firings ousted many of the content moderation team responsible for keeping prohibited material off the site.

Within hours, use of the n-word spiked 500 percent. Other hate speech rolled in, as users tested their new limits. The identity verification once needed to qualify a user for a blue check mark was scrapped, replaced with an $8 monthly subscription, even as Musk aggressively tried to purge the platform of trolls, bots and other fake accounts. Soon, though, the new owner found his own limit on free speech, instituting a permanent ban on any account that impersonated him without clearly identifying itself as parody.

At the same time, the conservative narrative that Twitter had been suppressing voices or issues on the right gained support when Musk, working with the journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, began releasing internal Twitter memos and policies that pre-dated Musk’s takeover. Dubbed the TwitterFiles, Musk positioned the revelation as a bombshell, tweeting: "teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users." This assertion, however, was quickly challenged by former Twitter employees, including founder Jack Dorsey, who made clear the practice of “shadow banning” had been announced by Twitter in 2018 and was never kept secret.

Regardless, the TwitterFiles disclosure added fuel to the fire for conservatives who believe certain stories, like the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, have been suppressed by Big Tech and media rather than given the scrutiny they deserve.

By December, roughly a month in to Musk’s tenure as owner of Twitter, early speculation that the platform would collapse under his leadership had mostly vanished. Musk also pushed back on the idea that hate speech had increased since he took over, tweeting: “Hate speech impressions (# of times a tweet was viewed) continue to decline, despite significant user growth!” “...Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach. Negativity should and will get less reach than positivity.”

Was Musk cryptically admitting that “negative speech” would get its own form of suppression or shadow banning?

As of this writing, it’s too early to tell, but the debate about the future of what exactly free speech means on the platform will

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continue. As it must: the limits of speech on social media–what Musk has aptly called the digital town square–is one of the most important questions of our time. As Musk himself has put it, free speech is “the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”

The question going forward revolves around one central tension between those who want no guardrails on free speech and those who think platforms like Twitter should police for false or misleading content. I recently talked with someone who is quite high up in content moderation at another large social media company, who said something quite prescient: “You cannot have free speech plus no censorship plus no disinformation all at the same time.” It is a trade-off. Something has to give.

SOON AFTER ELON MUSK TOOK OVER TWITTER HE INSTITUTED A PERMANENT BAN ON ACCOUNTS THAT IMPERSONATED HIM WITHOUT CLEARLY IDENTIFYING THEMSELVES AS PARODY.

let’s start with a simple question: what

is free speech? The First Amendment protects our right not to be censored by the government. This liberty is fundamental to American democracy because it prohibits the government from telling us what we can think or say. Both liberals and conservatives throughout American history have enjoyed the protection of this most basic right. This is not to say, however, that freedom of speech has no reasonable limits.

Some may reference Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s often-misquoted opinion in the 1919 U.S. Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, which said that the right to free speech would not “protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” because that would create a “clear and present danger” to the public. But that opinion was all but overturned in 1969 in Brandenburg v.

Ohio, which found that the true constitutional limit on speech was “inciting or producing imminent lawless action.”

Today, the sorts of speech understood not to be protected by the First Amendment include: fighting words, speech that incites a riot, sharing classified documents, libel and slander, certain kinds of commercial speech (such as fraudulent ads) and child pornography. Even so, such limits must be justified by a public need that is arguably greater than the need for free speech itself, and in a free society these limits are constantly tested.

But the protections of the First Amendment do not prevent private citizens (and private companies) from doing as they please.

Even if the government cannot censor you, it

does not mean that you have (or should have) any protection against a theater owner kicking you out for being disruptive (or whatever reason their freedom of speech might protect), or from Twitter de-platforming you if you violate their terms of service.

“Cancel culture” is very different from being censored or punished by your government for voicing a dissenting opinion. Consider the recent case of Kanye West, or Ye. After an antisemitic diatribe on Twitter that went viral and caused widespread outrage, the hip-hop artist doubled down on major broadcast networks, including the most watched cable news program, “Tucker Carlson.” Eventually, due to intense pressure expressed on Twitter and elsewhere, some of West’s biggest corporate partners (Adidas, Gap, J.P. Morgan, among others) severed ties and ended their business relationships with him. Twitter suspended his account. One might view this as a free market response to an odious idea that was not rooted in fact, and trampled on the values of the majority of people who heard it. The people canceled Kanye. The government never laid a finger on him.

Still, doesn’t any kind of censorship do violence to a fundamental American ideal? What about the larger value of free speech to our society? Shouldn’t all ideas be welcome in the public square? It’s a nice thought, but without some sort of guardrails, speech has the potential to cause real harm. Even a free speech absolutist like Musk won’t tolerate parodies that don’t identify themselves as such and could cause harm to his business or property. Few

would justify large platforms spreading lies that cause monetary damages or emotional distress. This is why citizens have recourse in court when they have been slandered or defamed. If this magazine publishes something we know to be false, and it causes harm to a citizen, the magazine would be sued, and if it lost, would have to pay damages.

Further, free speech without limit actually endangers free speech itself. Without content moderation, Facebook and Twitter would devolve into a sewer of pornography, spam, beheadings, terrorism and other odious content. Social media would be chaos. The ideal of free speech is often embodied by the image of a public square where anyone might claim a soap box, attract a crowd and engage them in debate, a free exchange of ideas. But on social media, we often don’t know who is this person claiming the soap box, or if it’s even a person.

The avatar we’re arguing with could even be a bad faith actor sponsored by an adversarial government.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a forum where everyone — no matter their underlying motivation or connection to the facts — felt entitled to a powerful megaphone to spread their opinions, lies, hatred and propaganda to as many people as possible. In such an environment, could the truth even be heard? The right to free speech is different than the right to immediate, unfettered access to an audience of millions, no matter the substance of one’s message.

Do you remember that scene in the film “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade,” where JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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Harrison Ford is at the end of his journey, finally confronted with the holy grail? Except that he can’t tell which one it is because it’s surrounded by more than two dozen fakes.

That’s what we’re up against today. If you can’t hide or destroy the truth, you can surround it with lies and disinformation. In the age of social media, disinformation drowns out truth. This is the new censorship.

conceivably, one might argue that dis-

information should be protected speech.

Yet this position must confront the reality that in the modern world, information is often used as a weapon of war. Here, we are not talking about misinformation, something that someone authentically believes to be true, even though it isn’t. The real enemy of truth these days is disinformation: strategic, bad faith propaganda intended at the least to pollute the information stream — by getting someone to believe a falsehood — and at worst to incite them to act upon these lies.

In April 2020, Russian intelligence operatives created and promoted the lie that any Covid-19 vaccines developed in the West would contain tracking microchips. How many people died as a result of this disinformation? We will never know. What we do know is that it was relentlessly amplified on Facebook and Twitter, to the point where — a month later — millions believed it. This of course was just the tip of the iceberg.

Disinformation is designed to exploit the right of free speech. It is weaponized communication that many adversaries of American democracy — both foreign and domestic — have used for their own nefarious purposes. This is at least in part what led companies like Facebook and Twitter to place more content warnings on misleading posts about phony cures during the pandemic and election lies during the 2020 presidential race; some were even removed.

As always, when free speech butts up against public harm, someone must make a choice.

Numerous academic studies have demonstrated that mere exposure to disinformation can be harmful and will lead to toxic beliefs in a statistically significant number of cases. The cognitive bias of the “primacy effect,” for instance, means we are more likely to believe and remember whatever we hear first. Likewise, the “illusory truth effect” (sometimes called the repetition effect) makes us more likely to believe something that we hear over and over. These biases are built in. Once disinformation is in

the information stream it will have a harmful effect on the general populace, no matter how well it is later debunked. Empirical studies have also shown that lies travel faster than truth. So without content moderation, not only will there be a higher proportion of falsehood in the public sphere, but it will stand a higher chance of going viral.

in the early days of the internet, service

providers like CompuServe and AOL merely hosted content that had been created by others, with little capacity for amplification. But now nearly half of us get our news from social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, which can

“YOU CANNOT HAVE FREE SPEECH PLUS NO CENSORSHIP PLUS NO DISINFORMATION ALL AT THE SAME TIME. IT IS A TRADEOFF. SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE.”

promote — through their powerful algorithms — any content they like. What they often like is the most divisive content, which generates the most engagement, whether it’s true or not.

It may be time to rethink whether social media companies have moved beyond “hosting” third party content to actively participating in its amplification, by promoting and profiting from material that can be dangerous.

One target for reform is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996), which is arguably what made the internet as we know it possible. Under this law, internet service providers (ISPs) are treated not as “publishers or speakers,” who create and edit content, but more like distributors or libraries, who cannot be expected to screen for offensive

content. But shouldn’t ISPs bear some liability, as publishers do, if their content is false and/ or harmful?

It’s important to note that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has a second part. Yes, it protects service providers from being sued over third-party content, but it also gives them the absolute right to remove any content they find offensive. This is rooted in the original intent of the law, which was to fight indecent material, such as pornography.

After all, should social media companies be forced to host material they find offensive? As private entities, shouldn’t they be free to remove whatever they don’t like? Whether they take something down or leave it up, providers can’t be held legally accountable.

Consider an analogy. Suppose you were a staunch supporter of freedom of speech and believed that even hate groups had the right to public assembly. Even though you may despise the message of the Ku Klux Klan, you might find yourself defending their right to get a parade permit. But would that require you to hand out flyers at their rally? Certainly not.

Refusing to amplify disinformation is not censorship. To say that the government should not be permitted to censor its citizens is one thing. But there’s nothing in the First Amendment that guarantees equal voice in the public square, or that prohibits private companies from acting in the interest of their shareholders, even if this means de-platforming voices that drive away advertisers.

in his powerful dystopian novel “1984,”

George Orwell asks us to imagine a society in which there is total censorship, not only of speech but also of thought. As one might expect, this leads to political repression and authoritarian rule. I invite you now to imagine a society that has complete freedom of speech, with no brakes or limits on what might be said — where every lie and piece of disinformation can be amplified to every corner of the globe. Might this not also lead to an authoritarian nightmare, where chaos rules, private and government propaganda is ubiquitous, and the populace is manipulated by disinformation? Where people have difficulty telling the truth from fiction? What might happen to free speech — and the quest for truth itself — if there are no guardrails? No content moderation? It would be the Tower of Babel, with information terrorists thrown in.

How do we fight this? By standing up not merely for the importance of free speech, but for facts and truth itself. Consider the case of Wikipedia. For many years Wikipedia was the JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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“THE PRIMARY VALUE OF FREE SPEECH LIES IN ITS ABILITY TO HELP US MAKE PROGRESS TOWARD TRUTH.”

not exist or that, even if it does, it is not knowable. And for my friends on the left, who tout science and reason as their lodestar, I would ask: Isn’t the point of free speech to find the truth, rather than merely allowing a forum for everyone to have a voice to speak their truth?

No less a liberal than President Barack Obama once claimed through a spokesman that the solution to disinformation was not “censorship” but to “open things up” and let more voices be heard, so that truth could win out over lies. This is a popular sentiment and sounds very fair-minded and American. The cure for bad speech is good speech. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. In the free market for ideas, truth will rise to the top. Except that it doesn’t.

As noted, the idea that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” has been backed up by decades of empirical research. Once disinformation is out there, a certain predictable percentage of people will just believe it, no matter how much it is debunked, no matter what experts may say.

Charlatans and other information terrorists like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have exploited this phenomenon to get their lies out there — preferably first — to create confusion and distrust, not only to convince people that some particular falsehood is true, but also to feed the cynical idea that maybe truth isn’t knowable after all.

Is that what Obama intended? Surely not.

Speaking in 2022 at the University of Chicago, he expressed regret over his earlier position and admitted that during his administration he underestimated the problem of disinformation and its threat to democracy.

attention. Other articles were “locked” because they already reflected current consensus. Were there complaints? Of course. But without such intervention, Wikipedia may have lost its value to the public. Today, even ardent free speech defenders like Jonathan Rauch call Wikipedia a model for the internet.

The site remains a bastion of free speech — where anyone can edit virtually any article and all changes are transparent — but vandalism is usually corrected within less than a minute.

Wikipedia benefitted from the protection of those who cared primarily about truth and accuracy, to keep it from being overwhelmed by those who had another agenda.

some are misinformed and think that we

butt of many jokes. Every claim was susceptible to editing by anyone with a nutball opinion or a grudge. The good faith efforts of those who wanted to create the most powerful open-access encyclopedia the world had ever known fell victim to special interests, ideologues and disinformation. The “wreckers” had arrived.

But Wikipedia got ahead of the problem by deciding to curate its content. According to Susan Gerbic, a longtime editor at Wikipedia, what actually happened was that around 2012 they started to have access to better technical tools, which allowed them to edit faster and more efficiently. Some articles on “controversial” topics were flagged so that any changes would immediately come to an editor’s

can fight disinformation with something less than content moderation — indeed that this tool is itself censorship. And some of this criticism has come from the left.

During a recent presentation at the 85th annual meeting of the Association of Information Science and Technology, Shannon Oltmann and Emily Knox borrowed from postmodernists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to argue that there is no such thing as objective truth and that any assertion of truth is therefore a mere assertion of power, which is ultimately used to oppress marginalized populations. Who are we to say that any particular thing is “true” or even to make the claim that the information stream is “polluted” by disinformation?

As I listened, I wondered if conservatives who have pushed for a “no brakes” Twitter would be happy with this sort of relativism and capitulation to the idea that truth does

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to protect the right of free speech we

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must confront the original dilemma framed at the beginning of this essay. One cannot have complete freedom of speech with no censorship and no disinformation, all at the same time. So what should we choose? To take off all guardrails is not merely to mix it up and wait for truth to rise to the top, it’s to create an environment where chaos thrives and truth sinks. One where we are actively choosing disinformation. And the stakes of this choice may be so dire that freedom of speech is endangered, along with many other civil liberties that we’ve taken for granted — and even democracy itself.

In recent congressional testimony, Joan Donovan — one of the world’s leading experts on disinformation — said this: “The biggest problem facing our nation is misinformation-at-scale. … The cost of doing nothing is

lose, it could take down democracy itself.

History has taught that authoritarian governments — whether Josef Stalin’s left-wing Soviet Union or Viktor Orban’s right-wing Hungary — are swift to crack down on the free speech rights of their citizens, as an essential means to the consolidation of power.

If you can control the information sphere, it is much easier to control the population. Propaganda serves its purpose not by convincing a skeptical audience that a falsehood is true, but by asserting its power to dominate reality, which may lead to the cynical idea that truth itself cannot be known. As Hannah Arendt writes: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … true and false … no longer exist.”

Is this the future we may expect, if we do not engage with the problem of disinformation at a scale that is necessary to solve the problem?

One hopes not. And we may find strength in the fact that we have conceived this before.

No less a liberal and staunch defender of free speech than Orwell recognized the need to get one’s priorities straight. In his book “1984,” he frames the ultimate threat against human freedom not merely as one against thought and expression, but also truth and reality itself.

As Orwell once put it, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

So what happens when freedom of speech undermines truth? When the weight of disinformation becomes so oppressive — because the information sphere is so full of self-serving liars, trolls, partisans, cranks, nuts and propagandists who share information only when it is distorted to serve their own selfish economic or political interests — that the truth doesn’t stand a chance? As important as freedom of speech is as a virtue all its own, its primary value lies in its ability to help us make progress toward truth. When that is at risk, we must reconsider our options. Do we nurture and protect an environment where truth is more likely to flourish — even if it means deplatforming the liars and the wreckers who are interfering with everyone else’s ability to be heard or to know the truth — or do we roll the dice on Musk’s vision?

Echoing a sentiment that stretches back through American jurisprudence, all the way to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once wrote that “the U.S. Constitution … is not a suicide pact.” Neither is freedom of speech. There have to be limits, especially

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democracy’s end.” And the response? U.S. Sen. Chris Coons said, “We don’t want to needlessly constrain some of the most innovative, fastest-growing businesses in the West.” Maybe that is as it should be. Maybe not.

Do we want the government to oversee content moderation at Facebook and Twitter?

To judge from the public’s reaction to President Joe Biden’s short-lived effort to create a “disinformation governance board” — which was aborted after just three weeks — the answer might be no (though its demise was at least partially due to an inability to get ahead of right-wing disinformation about the initiative’s purpose). Biden’s goal was NOT for the board to do fact-checking or regulate speech, but rather to advise the government on how to fight disinformation. That sounds safe enough, but once we open this Pandora’s box, what might happen when there is a change in administration, and we do not like the politics of the new set of “fact checkers” who might use this initiative for a very different purpose?

Countries like Russia and China have already leaned into the idea that the government needs to regulate “disinformation” — and the government gets to decide what that is. In China, censorship is rampant. In Russia, one can be jailed for saying anything “untrue” about the war in Ukraine. But what is true or not is defined by what the Kremlin says is true.

No matter one’s politics, we must be very careful of removing or eroding government protections of free speech, which includes protecting the right of private actors to decide for themselves how to respond to the speech of others. So should we just “allow” Musk to do as he likes at Twitter? As a private citizen, running a private corporation, can he do anything he wants? Some conservatives may be tempted to answer “yes,” but be careful what you wish for. To wish for radical freedom of speech is to welcome more disinformation. It is to wish for chaos. Is that what conservatives want? Maybe some do. Maybe the disinformers and the Trumpists, who want to continue to spread lies about the 2020 election. But is a complete, unfettered, free-for-all in the information sphere really a conservative value?

The ultimate freedom that is protected by the U.S. Constitution is the right to vote.

This is the best of the public square, where all voices may be heard. But democracy itself is now under threat. The chance to find a new market for the MAGA agenda — if not a return of Trump himself — is motivating many who are now cheering Musk’s radical free speech agenda at Twitter. But now is not the time to backslide in the fight against disinformation.

Because we are losing. And if we continue to

F OR MANY CONS E RVAT I V E S , TW I TT E R , H E ADQUART E RE D IN SA N FR A N C I S CO, I S PA R T OF AN INF ORMAL B IG TE C H C A B A L TH AT S IL E NC E S T H OS E WH O S PE A K O U T AG A I N ST L IB E RAL ORT H ODOXY.

when some are not participating in good faith. We do not have to give the liars and propagandists unrestricted means to do public harm, and that is what we are doing when we refuse to fight disinformation with the best tools available. Indeed, one might even argue that seeking to balance freedom of speech against the need to fight disinformation is a way to enhance, not erode, our civil liberties.

In Orwell’s time, the greater threat to truth was censorship. Completely on point, recall that in “1984” Winston Smith was employed as a censor at the Ministry of Truth.

Yet today perhaps the greater threat comes from the uncontrolled flow of disinformation. In a contemporary retelling of the dark future imagined by Orwell, Winston Smith might work at Twitter.

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E THE WAYWAY HOM One year ago this February, the war in Ukraine started.

For millions of families, that has meant leaving home to become part of Europe’s largest movement of refugees since World War II. This is one family’s story to find a new home.

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ME HOME

By Kyle Dunphey Photography by Kristin Murphy

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THE EXPLOSION CUT THROUGH THE STORM like a clap of thunder, drowning out the rain pattering against the windows of Elvira Karnaukh’s fifth-story apartment.

“Don’t be afraid, it’s just the thunder,” residents of Pavlohrad, a small, working-class city in eastern Ukraine, wrote on Facebook.

But Elvira knew. Thunder doesn’t shake an apartment building like that. A missile exploding a few thousand yards away does.

She dropped to her knees and screamed to her kids, “Go to the hallway!” as she crawled through the apartment.

About three weeks before, on February 24, 2022, Russian forces had invaded Ukraine. Elvira remembered the date of the invasion vividly. She had just got out of bed, ready for a day like any other: a cup of coffee, walking her two kids to school. But then she checked her phone and saw a text from her son’s kindergarten teacher. “Do not take your kids to school,” the text read. “THE WAR STARTED.” Her hands shook, and the room started to spin.

A sickening sense of dread settled in her stomach.

The next few weeks unfolded like a nightmare. Russian forces blew up the train tracks that connected Pavlohrad to the rest of Ukraine. And then, by mid-March, missiles and fighter jets split the air above the city.

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To avoid Ukrainian air defense systems, they would often fly so low that everything below them shook, including Elvira’s apartment, rattling the windows as her cookware nearly danced off the shelves.

Elvira and her husband, Oleksandr, like many Ukrainians in the early days of the war, were determined to stick it out, to not disrupt their children’s lives, if possible. But now the missiles were landing so close they could smell them as they exploded, filling the air with an acrid, metallic stench.

Now, as the rain fell and the thunder of the bombs boomed again and again, Elvira realized she had no choice. They were no longer safe. They would have to leave their home.

THIS IS THE STORY OF ONE FAMILY

caught in war, a family that’s part of one of the largest refugee crises since World War II. Elvira is one of roughly 8 million refugees who have fled the country since the war started in February 2022. An additional 6.5 million people have been displaced inside the country’s borders.

Around 90 percent of the refugees are women, and at least two-thirds of Ukraine’s children have fled. Some have returned home,

but millions more from the country’s far east remain skeptical that peace will ever come.

Those who have stayed largely had no choice and they have paid the ultimate price — 40,000 civilians have been killed since the war started, according to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff (the United Nations puts the number at 6,000). An estimated 200,000 soldiers, Russian and Ukrainian, have died.

In September, I traveled to Ukraine to document Elvira’s desperate journey out of Pavlohrad with her children. Far from the front lines, life carried on with a surreal normalcy.

The men carrying machine guns, U.N. fliers taped to bulletin boards with instructions to report war crimes, and pieces of Russian planes and ordinance propped up in the city squares seemed to blend into everyday life.

But an eerie sense of anxiety also hung in the air. At night, I felt the cold seep through my coat. I shuddered to imagine the brutality of the coming winter.

Elvira is 41. She wears her jet-black hair short and favors no frills, functional clothes, which match her personality. Stoic. Determined. Utterly devoted to her children.

And yet, just beneath the surface, there’s a crackling sense of humor, usually in the form of a witty, sarcastic joke followed by a reassuring wink. Her smile lights up the room.

She has two children: Kira, 14, and Artem, five. By the time I met Elvira, war had already made her and Kira refugees. In 2014, when Kira was just five, they had been living in Donetsk, a region in the far east of Ukraine that had become a flashpoint for unrest, fueled by pro-Russian separatists who held a referendum to secede. Most of the international community refused to recognize the separatist government’s Donetsk People’s Republic, but little quelled what became the first hot war in Europe in years.

And so Elvira packed up and moved north with Kira. They settled in Pavlohrad, where Elvira found an apartment, a job as a school janitor and met a man named Oleksandr, whom she later married.

In 2017, the couple welcomed a son into the world, Artem. Blond haired, with his mother’s dark eyes, Artem is a bubbly kid with an infectious smile. He loves Batman and the Avengers and the Minions.

His older sister Kira favors black clothes in the way many teenagers do. Kira told me she dreamed of becoming a private investigator or a police detective. She wore her red hair to her shoulders and loved pop music. Like many

Ukrainian kids, there’s an affinity for American hits, but a rendition of “Stefania” that gave Ukraine its third Eurovision victory in 2022 and often accompanies war footage and patriotic video mashups is what blares through her headphones most often these days.

When I met them, at a large brick kindergarten now serving as a refugee shelter in northern Ukraine, Elvira’s husband wasn’t with them. He was suffering from the effects of a stroke when the first bombs hit. He wouldn’t be able to accompany them on the journey out of the country. Her eyes filled with tears and she looked at the ground. Her 79-year-old mother would also have to stay behind, fearing she was too frail for the arduous journey across Ukraine.

I asked her to tell her story from the beginning, on the night the rain pattered against the windows and the thunder rolled.

Roughly eight million refugees have fled Ukraine since the war started. An additional 6.5 million people have been displaced inside the country’s borders.

IT WAS EARLY MARCH WHEN THE

thunderstorm came. The air raid sirens wailed above Pavlohrad and the family crowded into a musty bomb shelter with the rest of their neighborhood.

Seated on the cold concrete, the family huddled together to stay warm as the winter

E LV IRA KARNAU K H , RIGH T, WAK E S U P H E R C H IL DRE N K I R A A N D ART E M KARNAU K H IN T H E K INDE RGART E N C L ASS ROOM W H E R E T H E Y H AD B E E N L IV ING WIT H 1 4 P E OP L E S L E E P ING IN NIN E B E DS .

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K I R A KA R N AUK H P L AY F UL LY P UL LS HE R B R OT HE R A R TE M IN F OR A HU G IN C HE RVO N O HR AD K I ND E R GA R TE N N O. 1 2 , W H E RE THE Y LIVE D W I TH D OZ EN S O F OTHE R R E F U G E E S F O R F IVE M ON THS.

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air seeped through the walls, playing cards and singing while explosions boomed overhead. “It will all be over soon,” Oleksandr promised.

But as each missile hit, seemingly closer and closer, it became impossible to ignore the voice in her head telling her to leave home.

Later that evening, the family returned to their apartment. A storm built over the city, followed by thunder and then, suddenly, a low-flying missile that dodged Ukrainian air defense systems and hurled into her neighborhood with no warning.

Elvira realized she had no choice. “We need to save the children,” she said the next day. Oleksandr, a truck driver, nodded. They both knew what it meant. Still dealing with complications from the stroke, he would stay behind.

Within five days of deciding it was time to leave, Elvira, Kira and Artem were in Dnipro waiting to board the evacuation train taking refugees from the war-ravaged east to the quiet west. For 26 hours, they stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of others, some fleeing

towns that in the coming months would be reduced to rubble.

Elvira slept on the floor of the train with her children, and waited in a two-hour line to use the bathroom. As the train traveled west, Elvira looked out the window at a country emptying out. Highways were crammed with cars. Trips between major cities that had once been a seven-hour drive now took days to navigate improvised checkpoints set up with steel anti-tank barriers and concrete observation points. The shelves of gas stations and grocery stores along the way were emptied of food.

It was a time of desperation and panic, but there were also signs of hope, solidarity and goodness. Donations flooded the country with winter clothes. Hotels offered up rooms for free, while local business set up mattresses in any available space. A sense of unity took shape in a country that for years was plagued by an east versus west division.

That month, March 2022, one million Ukrainians were fleeing to neighboring

“When you do something like this, you express yourself and don’t bottle everything inside of you.”

E LVIR A VID E O C HATS WI TH HE R R E L ATIVE S, IN CLUDI NG HE R HUSB A N D A N D M OTHE R , WHO A R E STUCK N E AR THE F R O N T LINES DUE TO HE A LTH R E ASO N S.

countries, thanks in part to the European Union agreeing to offer Ukrainians temporary legal protection to live and work for up to three years. The United States made a similar vow.

As the train rolled into Lviv, volunteers ushered Elvira and her kids into a basement gym, served them hot soup and gave them a place to sleep. A few days later, the family was on the move again, this time on a bus headed north to Chervonohrad, a small mining city.

The checkpoints along the way were hastily thrown together with sandbags and tires.

The journey was taking its toll. Artem, the energetic five-year-old who clung to anything superhero related, was sick. The constant movement, loud noises, longing for his father, for home — all of it was taking its toll. He began suffering from what were likely panic attacks. By the time the bus reached Chervonohrad, he was vomiting constantly.

Elvira called an ambulance and spent the next several nights in the hospital with Artem, while Kira spent those first nights in Chervonohrad alone in a retrofitted kindergarten, sleeping on a child’s mattress next to a dozen other refugees.

The sprawling, three-story building with its brightly colored walls adorned with drawings of animals and furniture fit for kindergartners would become the family’s home for the next five months. Kira, Artem and Elvira set up in a room with nine beds that slept 14 people, from a newborn baby to several women in their 70s.

The toll of the war started to fade, though it would never leave. Slamming doors and passing firetrucks no longer made Kira and Artem jump.

But when she said “boom,” Artem still covered his ears and neck, and dropped to the floor.

The kids made friends in Chervonohrad, while Elvira busied herself sewing pillows and making jewelry for the other refugees in the shelter. She took MasterClass courses online, and spent her days making and selling intricate blankets, quilts, embroidered portraits, toys and dolls.

“It would help me get distracted,” she says.

“When you do something like this, you express yourself and you don’t bottle everything inside of you.” As the war progressed and the front lines shifted, many refugees at the shelter returned home, replaced by others from regions like Luhansk, Kherson and Severodonetsk.

But in Pavlohrad, the bombs kept falling, and Elvira and the children remained in limbo.

In the spring of 2022, Elvira enrolled Artem in kindergarten nearby, walking him to school every morning, while Kira resumed her online classes, hunched over a tablet in a chair

made for a five-year-old. The family arrived in Chervonohrad speaking only Russian, the dominant language in the country’s east, but now were learning to speak Ukrainian, out of practicality and pride.

Artem would play with the other children on the playground outside, running circles around the jungle gym with his trusty, red Batman hat, while Kira could be found strolling the sleepy, working-class village with newfound friends. Twice a day volunteers cooked the refugees a hot meal. On cold nights, all three of them would sleep in the same bed.

The months passed, the spring turning into the summer of 2022, and life became so routine it almost felt normal. Yet every night, as Elvira tucked Artem into bed and kissed Kira, she longed for the balance of her old life.

“I’m worried,” Elvira told me when we met of her husband and mother. “But I closed my heart. I’m hoping to isolate this from my emotions because if I continue to worry about them then I won’t be able to do anything. I still have children, and I need to take care of them.”

WHEN ELVIRA HAD LEFT PAVLOHRAD

roughly four months before, she had hoped to return home, to see her husband and mother.

She had never contemplated leaving Ukraine.

But then one day in early July, a man came to the kindergarten-turned-shelter. He was from a U.S.-based nonprofit called WelcomeNST, short for “neighborhood support team.” The man told Elvira about Uniting for Ukraine, a sponsor-based resettlement program that would eventually result in nearly 124,000 Ukrainians applying to move to the United States as of September 2022.

The pitch was tempting — neighborhoods in the U.S. had banded together to sponsor refugees from Ukraine, with one family finding a place to live, another securing transportation and others responsible for enrolling kids in school, buying food, shopping for clothes and paying for airfare. The man was here, tasked with finding eligible refugees and matching them with U.S. families.

Not everyone in Ukraine fit the criteria for WelcomeNST. To prevent a “brain drain” from the country, the organization sought the most vulnerable families, from towns occupied

by Russians or regions on the front line. Places like Pavlohrad. Anyone could receive humanitarian parole, a temporary U.S. visa. For Elvira, “temporary” was the selling point.

“It’s always best to live on your native land.

It’s better to be and feel at home. So the first JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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question I asked was, ‘Can we come back?’”

The answer was simple. Yes. So she applied.

YURII SLEPAK CLIMBS INTO THE VAN

and turns the key as the diesel engine hums alive. It’s September 2022, and we’re on the border between Poland and Ukraine. The stonefaced border guard watches us impassively as we cross. Slepak grins and catches my eye as he looks at me through the rearview mirror.

“Welcome to Ukraine!”

Slepak is a Kyiv native and country manager for WelcomeNST. This is his 30th time crossing into Ukraine from Poland since the war started. Then again, he says it could be 31 or 35. He’s starting to lose count.

On this trip he’s accompanied by Liz Davis-Edwards, the founder of WelcomeNST. I’m along for the ride with Deseret News photographer Kristin Murphy. In a few days, we’ll make the same drive back into Poland, but with three extra passengers — Elvira, Kira and Artem.

Since late July, Elvira has been in constant contact with Jason and Kristin Norby, who live in Lehi, Utah, with three of their four children. Jason served a mission with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ukraine. As the war intensified, and the White House unveiled Uniting for Ukraine, the Norbys recruited their neighborhood and filled out the application to sponsor a refugee family. Soon, they matched with Elvira.

By mid-September, their travel plans were approved by U.S. Customs and Immigration, and the family had three tickets to Salt Lake City.

As we cross into Ukraine, within seconds it’s apparent we’re in a war zone. A line of semitrucks driving in the other direction out of Ukraine spans more than 15 miles, a byproduct of all of Ukraine’s air and sea ports closing, forcing all trade to be done via the highways.

On the left, the van passes a line of cars backed up behind a military checkpoint as soldiers with bags under their eyes and AK-47s slung across their backs screen the westbound cars. On the right are bunkers of varying degrees, some an organized pile of sandbags, with turrets and hedgehogs, steel anti-tank road barriers, others no more than a stack of old tires and concrete blocks, a ripped tarp offering meager protection from the rain.

Soldiers huddle outside of a gas station passing around cigarettes, one cradling an evening cup of coffee. A few hundred yards down the highway stands a billboard that reads: “Defend independence, victory is near.” Beyond it lies a sprawling field of sunflowers, Ukraine’s national flower and a symbol of resistance, now 60

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brown and dying as the first fall temperatures creep into the evening.

Slepak steers the van into the shelter the following day, met by a barking German shepherd, children yelling, and a small group of women scrolling through their phones and smoking cigarettes. Standing at the end of the pavement, Elvira and Kira welcome them with a hug.

Artem is upstairs, busy fighting zombies on Minecraft.

Elvira would soon leave Ukraine for the first time, and everything she now does with her family seems to carry extra weight. She takes a final stroll through the city park; shares a final meal with her friends at the shelter; takes a final morning walk to Artem’s kindergarten.

Sandwiched between multistory, Soviet-era government housing, Artem’s kindergarten — dubbed “School No. 13” — has undergone a rapid transition since the war started.

At first glance, it mirrors a typical kindergarten found in any corner of the world. Kids walk in late, wiping sleep from their eyes; toys and games fill the cabinets on one wall, with brightly painted sunflowers decorating the ceiling. The class eats breakfast, then forms a circle to sing and play what appears to be some iteration of “duck, duck, goose.”

But little more than an hour into the school day, Oliyannya Mariyana, the school’s principal, walked into the classroom with a somber announcement.

“Today we pray for the brother of our dear teacher ... who was killed on the front line,” she announces to the class.

Mariyana and the teachers at School No. 13 didn’t explain the war to the kids when it first started, some of whom mistook explosions for thunder and air raid sirens for firetrucks. But as refugees streamed into Chervonohrad, enrolling their kids in the local schools, it became impossible to hide.

“They’re smart,” she said, “they catch on.

One kid will see the news, another kid has a dad on the front lines. Then they talk to their classmates.” And on that cold, rainy Monday marking Artem’s final day at school, the reality of war came crashing down on the kindergarten 700 miles from the front line.

At 9 a.m., the kids file out of the classroom, down a flight of stairs, gathering in a hallway, a mural of the Ukrainian flag behind them. A row of teachers stand with their backs to the wall, some with red, puffy eyes, while the kids laugh and tease each other, oblivious to the day’s news.

“Let’s pray for the dead,” one teacher announces, as the children press their hands together and recite a prayer in unison, followed

TOP : ART E M KARNAU K H , I N Y E L LOW, H OL DS H IS H AN DS IN P RAY E R B E F ORE AL L TH E ST U DE NTS P RAY TOGE T H E R ON H IS L AST DAY IN K IND E R GART E N F OR P E OP L E K IL LE D IN WAR AND T H E IR FAMI LI E S .

B OT TOM: L E SYA ANDRIIV N A , A C L ASS ROOM AIDE , H U G S ART E M GOODBY E ON H IS L AST DAY IN K INDE RGAR T E N B E F ORE MOV ING TO T H E U NIT E D STAT E S .

by the national anthem, then another prayer.

After about 15 minutes, they walk single-file out of the hallway and back to their classroom.

Artem carries on through the day with nervous apprehension, as if he knows something big is about to happen, but he doesn’t quite understand the gravity. By 2 p.m., the class forms a circle around him, singing and clapping, his teacher pausing every few seconds to bring him in for a hug.

“We are losing Artem today, but this is a gift for their family,” she tells the class.

A short walk away at the shelter, Kira wraps up her online class, once again sitting in a child’s chair, hunched over a smartphone, the volume turned down to avoid waking the sleeping newborn in the next room over.

She throws on a jacket, the weather now flirting with snow, and joins her mother for

one last walk through Chervonohrad to Artem’s school. There, Elvira makes the first of many tearful goodbyes.

“Thank you for everything,” Elvira says as she hugs Artem’s teacher.

THE NEXT MORNING A VAN PULLS UP

to the shelter.

With the family’s belongings consolidated into a roller suitcase and a plastic bag, Elvira and her children survey the room they have called home for the past seven months. Kira is in all black and Artem sports a fleece-lined jacket with Ukrainian blue and yellow around the pockets as the family steps outside into the rain.

Natalya Stefaniv, the kindergarten’s former principal who now works as the shelter’s

“I told him that we were going to be crying, but that he shouldn’t mind, because those are good tears.”

KI RA CRI ES ON HER MOTHER ’S S H OU L DE R AS T H E Y START T H E IR JOU RNE Y TO L E AV E U K RAINE .

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coordinator, walks Elvira out.

“We are going to travel through Chervonohrad on our way back,” Elvira tells her.

“Everyone should come back to Chervonohrad! You know our address, our phone number … we’ll keep in touch. We’ll find each other on Facebook,” Stefaniv responds.

“For sure.”

Artem looks up at his mom, a stuffed animal wrapped around his neck. He sees everyone crying, and follows suit.

“Artem, don’t cry!” Stefaniv says.

“I told him yesterday that we were going to be crying, but that he shouldn’t mind, because those are good tears,” Elvira tells her, laughing as her voice wavers.

“Well, this is it. I told you when you found out you were going to leave that it will be a very good day,” Stefaniv says, handing Elvira a painting of the Nativity of Mary. “She will help you to leave and come back safely.”

“Goodbye,” Elvira says in a hushed tone, going in for one more hug.

“If you left something behind, you can always come back,” the principal says, her voice muffled as she presses her head into Elvira’s shoulder.

“I left half of my heart behind,” Elvira says.

Elvira loads the suitcase into the van and the family piles into the middle seats. Slepak steers between potholes as the family takes one last look at the school.

This is the family’s first time leaving Ukraine. They nervously hand their passports to the border guard, behind him a sign bearing the Polish flag reading “Welcome to the European Union.”

They spend their first night in a hotel, pushing their way through the revolving door of a swanky Marriott in Warsaw, their room overlooking the historic city from the seventh floor.

At 4 a.m., they walk into an airport for the first time in their lives, standing in line among business people dressed in suits and vacationers wearing novelty T-shirts.

Elvira’s mind races. Was this a mistake?

Would something go wrong on the flight? Was she missing an important travel document?

Would her children be OK? What about her husband? Her mother? Kira fidgets with her phone and sends updates to her friends in Ukraine. And Artem is sick. Again.

Standing in the line waiting to get their boarding pass, the five-year-old looks around nervously, the blue stuffed animal still cinched

The stress of landing, herding Artem and Kira off the plane, and then trying to communicate to the paramedics for a moment overshadowed their new reality — they are in America.

L E FT: WE LCO M E N ST VOLUNTEERS CHEER AS THE KARN AU K H FAMILY ARRIV E S AT T H E SALT L AK E C IT Y INT E RNAT IONAL AIRP O R T. JAS O N N O R BY, R I G HT, A N D HIS WIF E , KRI STI N NORBY, SECOND FROM RI GH T, H OST E D T H E KARNAU K H S AT T H E IR H OME U NT IL T H E Y F OU ND T H E I R OW N A PA R TM E N T. R IGHT: ELVI RA, KI RA AND ARTEM REAC T TO P H OTOS OF U TAH ‘S NAT U RAL L ANDS C AP E U P ON T H E IR ARRIVA L.

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to his neck, before he doubles over and vomits on the floor.

His fever hovers around 102 as he squeezes Elvira’s hand and walks onto a KLM plane headed for Amsterdam. He sips water with a thousand-yard stare as Elivra and Kira intensely study the safety pamphlet as the plane takes off.

In Amsterdam, the young boy struggles while navigating the sprawling Schiphol airport, one of Europe’s largest, as the family hurries through customs and makes their connecting flight.

“Ukraine? It’s dangerous there,” the customs officer says as he hands back their passports.

Artem’s fever would not go down on the nine-hour flight from Amsterdam to Salt Lake City, and neither did Elvira’s anxiety. As the Airbus A330 barreled over Greenland, Artem’s heart rate spiked and his fever jumped above 100 degrees as he cradled the vomit bag.

“We’re looking for a passenger who speaks Ukrainian or Russian and can translate,” the flight attendant says over the loudspeaker, as Elvira tries to communicate with them using what little English she knows.

“Artem no good,” she says pointing to her forehead then putting her finger in the air, trying to tell them that his fever is rising.

The flight attendants give him Tylenol, juice, and fill plastic bags with ice to try and quell his fever. The language barrier makes it tough, but they know enough — her family is fleeing war. As they walk off the plane, one of the attendants smiles, pressing his thumbs and pointer fingers together to form a heart.

After days of travel across checkpoints and multiple time zones, the family steps off the plane and into a new beginning, met by an uncharacteristically hot September day with fall monsoons bringing little relief.

Members of the Salt Lake City Fire Department greet Elvira, the first Americans she would meet on U.S. soil. They are there at the end of the ramp to treat Artem. They take his vitals and sit the five-year-old down in a wheelchair.

“He’s going to be fine, but if he starts to feel worse on the drive home, you can call us at any time,” one of the paramedics says, as another drops down on a knee to play peekaboo. Pale and exhausted, Artem cracks a grin.

The stress of landing, herding Artem and Kira off the plane, and then trying to communicate to the paramedics for a moment overshadowed their new reality — they are in America.

“Super,” Elvira says with a smile. Super is one of the few English adjectives she knows.

ELV IRA, K IRA AND ART E M V IS IT AME RIC AN F ORK C ANYON S H ORT LY AF T E R A R R I V I N G I N U TA H .

Walking through the Salt Lake airport, Kira gapes at the massive panorama shot of Delicate Arch.

She nearly steers Artem’s wheelchair into the wall as they pass the picture of Mount Timpanogos during peak foliage. And Capitol Reef during sunset, or Mount Superior with a fresh blanket of snow.

It takes them about 30 minutes to clear customs. The entire neighborhood support team is waiting, erupting in a cheer when the family walks into the lobby.

“Welcome to Utah,” reads one sign in Russian, as roughly 20 people from Lehi clap, holding blue and yellow balloons, and waving Ukrainian flags. After months of texting and talking over Zoom, Jason and Kristin hug Elvira like longtime friends.

The welcome party continues in the quiet Lehi neighborhood that for the next several weeks would be home for Elvira and her family. Blue and yellow — the colors of Ukraine — are everywhere; ribbons hang from windows, signs are taped to the doors and balloons fly from mailboxes. Jason and Kristin’s door is even painted yellow, decorated with blue paper hearts in preparation for the family.

Tired and a little nervous, Elvira steps into the Norbys’ home for the first time as more neighbors walk over to meet them. Jason, speaking in broken Russian, walks them downstairs into the finished basement. Kira blushes as he points her toward her room, which for the first time in her life, she has all to herself.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Elvira says, before talking into the Google Translate app, then flashing her phone to Jason and

Kristen: “My heart goes out to all of you.”

Elvira surveys her new room, with a comfy queen-size bed and her own bathroom down the hall, and notices a familiar picture on her bedside table — Elvira; Oleksandr, her husband; Kira; and Artem are all smiling, their arms around each other.

“Super,” she says, fighting back tears. “Super.”

A week later, the family piles into Jason’s Toyota Sequoia and heads up American Fork Canyon. The steep canyon walls block out the late afternoon sun, casting a chilly shadow.

But they have firewood, and a few miles up the road they pull over, filing out of the SUV carrying bags of hot dogs and marshmallows.

Kira, with the Norby kids, climb the school bus-sized boulders, while Artem, wearing a yellow “Minions” shirt and red Batman bucket hat, remains intensely focused on collecting twigs.

“We need to pick up more sticks for the fire, it will help it be bigger,” he says, still speaking Ukrainian.

Soon, flames dance in the pit. They roast hot dogs — Kira remains unsure whether she prefers the ones from Ukraine, or the U.S. ones. Artem lets out a panicked laugh as his marshmallow catches fire and chars black.

The evening light fades, and Elvira cranes her neck to see the peaks of the central Wasatch.

A motorcycle roars past, echoing off the canyon walls. Artem covers his ears, like so many times before in Ukraine. But here he has nothing to fear.

Speaking into the Google Translate app on her phone, Elvira turns it toward Jason.

“To be up in the mountains like this, it’s beautiful.”

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T H E R E P U B L I C A N PA R T Y O F T H E E A R LY 2 1 S T C E N T U RY I S B A R E LY R E C O G N I Z A B L E . W H AT I S I TS F U T U R E ?

by Matthew Continetti

illustration by Lincoln Agnew JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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ON

july 6, 2003, three months into the second iraq war, i showed up at 1150 Seventeenth

Street NW in Washington, D.C. I had just turned 22. It was my first day as an editorial assistant at the Weekly Standard. At the time, 1150 Seventeenth Street was more than an office building.

It was an intellectual hub — the frontal cortex of the American right. The magazine where I was about to begin work was the most influential in the city. Copies of the Standard arrived at the White House each week. A photograph hanging on a wall in the magazine’s office showed President George W. Bush reading an issue.

The Standard’s editors appeared regularly on the most important source of information for Republicans and conservatives: Fox News Channel. But the Standard also had mainstream credibility. One of its senior editors, David Brooks, was a fixture on PBS and NPR. He was about to join The New York Times.

From 1150 Seventeenth Street emanated the ideas that shaped the Republican White House and Congress and then the world. On the same floor as the Standard was the Project for a New American Century. It was a small think tank co-founded by the magazine’s editor that since its inception in 1997 had advocated for a defense buildup, containment of China and regime change in Iraq. The top floors of the building housed the right’s premier think tank: the American Enterprise Institute. Taxes had been cut, welfare reformed, social programs redesigned and governments toppled because of the intellection that took place within the walls of 1150 Seventeenth Street.

That morning I was walking into not just a building but an intellectual and political movement. A few years earlier, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I had stumbled upon American conservatism and the theoretical works that undergird its thought. In the months before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I had read (and only somewhat understood) Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind,” Leo Strauss’ “Natural Right and History,” Richard Weaver’s “Ideas Have

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Consequences” and Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom.” I picked up copies of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, Seth Lipsky’s New York Sun, Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary and the Weekly Standard. In 2004, when John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote “The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America,” I felt a thrill of recognition when these two British editors of the Economist identified 1150 Seventeenth Street as the center of a rive droit, a “right bank,” a hub of conservative activity that included the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a small think tank next door; the offices of the Public Interest one block away; and the D.C. branch of the Hoover Institution and its publication, Policy Review, up Connecticut Avenue.

The rive droit is gone now. The building at 1150 Seventeenth Street was demolished in 2016. AEI moved to a renovated mansion near Dupont Circle. Neither PNAC nor the Standard exists any longer. The Bush administration is a distant memory. The twin projects of 1150 Seventeenth Street — the expansion of democracy abroad and a recommitment to traditional moral values at home — ran aground.

The intellectual community housed within 1150 Seventeenth Street dispersed. Many of the writers, wonks and scholars who worked there found themselves in a strained relationship with the American right. The center of

gravity of American conservatism drifted toward Capitol Hill, where the Heritage Foundation, the Kirby Center of Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life hosted scholars and speakers friendly to the administration of former President Donald Trump. The right became more populist than it was in 2003. To define oneself as a conservative in the 2020s was to reject the ideas and practices of the “establishment” that 1150 Seventeenth Street had come to represent.

I have spent the last decade thinking about this change. In April 2011, I went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to follow Trump as he visited the home of the first presidential primary. I watched as he spent a few hours in local diners. He extended the Trump brand, increased his leverage in salary negotiations with his employer, NBC, elevated himself as a celebrity opponent of President Barack Obama and became the unquestioned leader of the conspiratorial birther movement, which claimed falsely that Obama had not been born inside the United States. It was obvious that Trump was not playing for the validation of established media outlets. Even then, his audience comprised voters who had been forgotten or ignored or dismissed as nuts. Readers of the National Enquirer, his adviser Roger Stone once said, were “the Trump constituency.”

It was a constituency that 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney must have thought he needed to win. Shortly before that year’s Nevada GOP caucuses, Romney and his wife appeared in Las Vegas alongside Trump and accepted the billionaire’s endorsement. “He’s a warm, smart, tough cookie and that’s what this

country needs,” Trump told CNN at the time.

Romney won the caucuses but lost the general election. The right told itself that Romney had failed because he lacked the requisite populist sensibility, fighting spirit and antagonism toward the powers that be. He was more Fortune than National Enquirer The week before the 2012 election, I had appeared on a panel sponsored by the American University College Republicans. My co-panelist was Matthew Boyle of the national populist website Breitbart.com. I presented my case that the race was close but that independents could still carry Romney to the White House.

Boyle shook his head. Romney was a loser, he told the small audience. Romney was going down, and an anti-establishment figure such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would take over the GOP and win in 2016. I laughed Boyle off. I would not make the same mistake again.

As Obama began his second term, I began to research the history of the American right. How, I wondered, had the conservative movement failed to motivate the white voters without college degrees who had comprised Richard Nixon’s “silent majority,” the “Reagan Democrats” and the “Republican Revolution” of 1994? What explained the gulf between my colleagues in Washington, D.C., and conservatives beyond the Beltway? How had matters long thought settled — the importance of markets, the benefits of free trade, the blessings of immigration, the necessity of war — become so hotly contested?

The answers to such questions go far beyond the politics of Obama and Bush. But the Obama years are a good place to start to understand what the conservative movement once was, and what it has become.

to define oneself as a conservative in the 2020s is to reject the ideas and practices of the conservative elite “establishment.”

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one week before taking the oath of office, Obama visited the home of George Will, widely considered one of the most influential thinkers on the right. There, he had dinner with a group of conservative journalists, including Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. The talk radio right, then led by the late Rush Limbaugh, viewed the incoming president’s overtures to conservatives with suspicion. “This was inside-the-Beltway conservative pundits,” Limbaugh told his audience, “and it was obvious to me Obama’s objective here is to sway what I call establishment punditry.”

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R E P UB LIC A N NOMI NEE DONALD TRUMP GESTUR E S AS DE MOC RAT IC NOMINE E HILLA RY C L INTON LOOKS ON DURI NG THE FI NAL 2 01 6 P RE S IDE NT IAL DE B AT E .

The right told itself that Mitt Romney had failed because he lacked the requisite populist sensibility, fighting spirit and antagonism toward the powers that be. He was more Fortune than National Enquirer.

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“establishment punditry.” As the first Black president, who had been raised in Indonesia and Hawaii before attending Occidental College and Columbia University, Obama was the target of conspiracy theories and racism. All of the kooky things some inhabitants of the right had said about Bill Clinton would be said about Obama too, in email chain letters and elsewhere. But the fantasies about Obama also carried with them the fear of foreign invasion: The conspiracists said that he had been born in Kenya, that he was a Muslim and that he was a Communist.

In fact, Obama was nothing more than a conventional academic liberal. He hewed closely to the beliefs and tastes of upscale, metropolitan academics throughout the country. Like earlier Democratic presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Obama used the extreme right as a foil for himself and a cudgel against congressional Republicans. He told audiences that the Republican Party was in the grip of a “fever” of anti-elitism and anti-government sentiment and that the fever would break as he became more successful. But the “fever” did not break. It swelled.

During the Obama years, images of decline, irreparable transformations, unbridgeable divides and fascistic liberals filled the minds of conservatives. Every faction of the right treated the Obama presidency as an inflection point. America’s fate would be decided one way or the other. It was said that Obama’s victory presaged America’s slide into European social democracy and global irrelevance.

Obama’s stated desire to reverse the Reagan revolution flamed conservative fears. Krauthammer argued that Obama undermined the “moral foundation of American dominance.”

To “inside-the-Beltway” conservative analysts such as Krauthammer, Obama’s foreign and domestic policies worked synergistically to undermine America’s superpower status and bring an end to unipolarity. Obama’s expansion of the welfare state crowded out funds for national defense. Nor was the potential cost limited to the United States. Foreign policy thinker Robert Kagan warned Obama’s policies threatened the “liberal world order” that America had sustained since 1945.

But Obama’s biggest problems, at least in the beginning, came from within the United States: Less than a month after his inauguration, the grassroots rebels who had marched against Bush’s immigration proposals and lobbied GOP congressmen to oppose the bank bailout were fighting the new president’s tax, spending, environment and health care plans.

On February 19, 2009, the CNBC personality Rick Santelli delivered an on-air rant. His target was the expansion of the bailout and Obama’s $1 trillion economic stimulus package. Santelli called for concerned Americans to hold a “tea party” like the patriots of the American founding.

The tea party was noteworthy for its hostility to both the Democratic and the Republican parties. When it turned to electoral politics, the tea party backed anti-establishment candidates, with a mixed record in general elections.

That was because the tea party brought out both optimistic, forward-looking, mainstream supply-siders and pessimistic, anti-institutional, conspiracy-minded extremists. The “birther” demand to see Obama’s birth certificate attested to the prevalence of conspiracy theories in American life. The tea party’s media spokesman, Fox host Glenn Beck, had an apocalyptic worldview in which the fate of the republic was one bad election away. References to shadowy groups and global bankers filled his monologues. He scribbled on a chalkboard.

“Establishment” pundits tended to gloss over the more exaggerated aspects of the tea party. They focused instead on its potential to ground the populist right in the text and structure of the Constitution. Will, for example, called the tea party “the most welcome political development since the Barry Goldwater insurgency in 1964.” Krauthammer urged Republicans to adopt “a reformed, self-regulating conservatism that bases its call for minimalist

Social media undermined the authority of elites to rule from above in every country, in every industry, in every sphere of human activity.

government — for reining in the willfulness of presidents and legislatures — in the words and meaning of the Constitution.” Brooks wrote in The New York Times, “Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement,” but “I can certainly see its potential to shape the coming decade.”

There was more to the tea party than constitutionalism, however. It was a manifestation of America’s “folk libertarianism:” a widespread oppositional attitude toward authority of all stripes. It was also anti-illegal immigration.

Liberals mocked the apocryphal tea party protester who held a sign saying, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” They did not understand that the tea party had no problem with universal entitlements in principle. Rather, it opposed redistribution: shifting tax dollars from middle-class entitlements to the nonworking poor. In foreign policy, the tea party was noninterventionist and unilateralist. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was his father’s son in politics. Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz were suspicious of overseas entanglements.

The challenge for the GOP was finding a way to harness the populist energy of the tea party while integrating it into a party agenda that could appeal to the suburban voters who had fled Bush’s wars and burst housing bubble.

In 2010, in an anti-Obama wave election, Republicans won back the House of Representatives, and in command of detail, Paul Ryan became the Republican spokesman. When the Romney-Ryan ticket went down to defeat two years later, many Republican and conservative elites interpreted the loss as a reason to moderate the party. Immigration reform was a necessity. The GOP “autopsy” released in the spring of 2013 counseled Republicans to support the legalization of illegal immigrants and to move away from strong stances on abortion and same-sex marriage. “There’s no need for radical change,” wrote Krauthammer. “The other party thinks it owns the demographic future — counter that in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem.”

The conservative grassroots, talk radio and activist network argued that Romney had failed because he was a creature of the party establishment. After all, during his four years as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, he had been the architect of the law that became the model for Obamacare. In the final weeks of the 2012 election, moreover, Romney had failed to stand up to the bias of debate moderator Candy Crowley of CNN when she

erroneously and improperly took Obama’s side during an exchange over the president’s response to the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Romney hadn’t been combative enough. He had focused on the economy, which was sluggish but growing, to the exclusion of social issues. He represented the executive suite rather than the laborers without college degrees who swung elections.

Steve Sailer, a contributor to paleoconservative journals, put forward an alternative to the RNC autopsy strategy of outreach to minority groups and young people. Sailer called his approach “in-reach.” Because Republicans drew primarily from white voters, especially married white voters with families, Sailer reasoned that the party should seek to boost turnout among its core constituency rather than fritter away political capital on minority groups whose objections to the GOP were in all likelihood insurmountable.

The dueling autopsies — outreach versus in-reach — fueled the distrust and loathing between the conservative “establishment” and the talk radio right. The rise of social media during the first decades of the 21st century exacerbated this divide. Celebrities, provocateurs, presidential aspirants and established media personalities had the largest Facebook and Twitter accounts, but technology altered the forms of communication to such a degree that no one editor or journal had the ability to establish the definitive conservative position.

Social media tore down the walls that separated the credentialed from the fringe.

The very terms “credentialed” and “fringe” became fraught in a world where opinions were accessed directly and where there was no third-party validation. Social media undermined the authority of elites to rule from above in every country, in every industry, in every sphere of human activity. Conservative intellectual elites were not immune from this development. The boundaries of “permissible dissent” that Pat Buchanan had complained about were washed away in an unending digital flood.

The loudest anti-establishment voice was Breitbart.com. Its founder, Andrew Breitbart, had apprenticed under Matt Drudge. Breitbart believed politics was downstream from culture and that conservatives and liberals were in a political-cultural war. There could be only one victor. Breitbart pioneered the use of new media to advance conservative politics.

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collaborator Stephen K. Bannon. Bannon was a 59-year-old Navy veteran who had worked at Goldman Sachs before investing in Biosphere 2, an earth science research facility in the Arizona desert. He also produced conservative documentaries. Bannon believed that the United States was on the cusp of a revolution. He subscribed to a cyclical theory of history in which a cataclysm that begins with every third generation is resolved in a “fourth turning.” The global financial crisis, Bannon thought, was the nemesis of the third generation after World War II. Bannon believed that the elites who congregated each year in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the future of global capitalism and the “rules-based international order” were reenacting David Halberstam’s tale of Vietnam-era folly, “The Best and the Brightest” (1972). He was convinced that American businessmen and politicians turned a blind eye to the rising threat of China out of greed and willful ignorance. He reconfigured Breitbart into an anti-establishment assault vehicle. the title of his bestselling book, Charles Murray warned that America was “Coming Apart.” At the top of society, a self-perpetuating elite lived inside a bubble of affluent neighborhoods in postal codes Murray called “Super-ZIPs,” while mass suffering played out below. Most Americans, Murray pointed out, did not enjoy the benefits of intact families, vibrant communities and church membership. Be they known as James Burnham’s “managerial elite,” Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts” (from his 1991 book “Work of Nations”), the “cognitive elite” that Murray and Richard Herrnstein described in “The Bell Curve,” Christopher Lasch’s “elites” (“Revolt of the Elites,” 1996), David Brooks’s “Bobos” (“Bobos in Paradise,” 2000), or Richard Florida’s “creative class” (“The Rise of the Creative Class,” 2002), the Americans whose status was grounded in undergraduate and postgraduate educations and assortative mating were far removed from the rest of the country.

Murray was not an optimist. Only a religious revival, he wrote, similar to the growth of Methodism in Victorian England, could restore social capital and repair the social fabric. Murray’s colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, cataloged the decline of work among males in their prime years. These men were dropping out of the workforce and, to a great degree, society as well. The welfare I N 2 01 2, IN

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state sustained them. Through expanded Medicaid and disability programs, they came into contact with opiates. The addiction levels were staggering. Opioid and heroin abuse caused a spike in deaths, in some years killing as many Americans as had died in Vietnam.

In a paper released in December 2015, Anne Case and Angus Deaton revealed that death rates among non-Hispanic whites experienced a “marked increase” between 1999 and 2013.

All of this happened under the noses of most conservative and Republican elites. They lived in the wealthy Virginia and Maryland counties surrounding Washington, D.C. They enjoyed life in the Super-ZIPs. They were not only center-right individuals adrift in a sea of blue. They also were separated from growing numbers of their own political party by background, education, income and lifestyle.

In its attitudes and priorities, the white working class was closer to Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan than to Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. The issues that most deeply affected it — trade, illegal immigration and drug addiction — were not at the top of the conservative intellectuals’ to-do list. A major document of conservative reformers, the 2014 report Room to Grow, mentioned free trade twice, both times positively; it mentioned immigration and drug addiction not at all. The Weekly Standard did not reference the opioid addiction crisis until the late summer 2016. These omissions happened not because conservative intellectuals were negligent but because such issues did not penetrate the bubble until the 2016 presidential campaign began.

The “next-in-line” candidate that year was Jeb Bush. He announced his presidential campaign on June 15, 2015. The next day, Trump rode down the escalator of his eponymous Manhattan tower and declared himself a candidate as well. The dark horse had arrived, bragging about his wealth and television ratings, declaring the American dream dead, and promising to build a wall to keep out illegal immigrants and “Make America Great Again.”

The thrice-married Trump had changed his voter registration three times as well: from Republican to Reform Party, from Reform to Democrat, and, in 2009, from Democrat to Republican. He had no affiliation with the Republican Party establishment and no pull with conservative pundits. “It is simply childish to trust this contemptible parody of a father figure,” wrote Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. Will said that he deserved to lose

Trump despised the media with the same intensity as the conservative grassroots. He challenged the conventional wisdom of both party establishments.

50 states. Krauthammer called him a “rodeo clown.”

Limbaugh disagreed. The day Trump announced, he told his audience, “All of this, I’m telling you, is going to resonate with people.

And here’s something else to watch: The more the media hates this and makes fun of it and laughs, the more support Trump’s going to get.” And sure enough, within about a month, Trump had surpassed Bush in the national poll averages and become the front-runner.

He maintained that status throughout the primary — except for a few days in the beginning of November 2015 when another outsider, Dr. Ben Carson, briefly took the lead.

Trump was a showboat and celebrity, a self-promoter and controversialist. He was silly and mocking, a caricature of a caricature.

Anti-establishment conservatives found him refreshing. Not one iota of Trump was polit-

trump arrived at a time of dissociation — of unbundling, fracture, disaggregation and dispersal. the disconnectedness was not only social and cultural. it was also political. ically correct. He played by no rules of civility. He genuflected to no one. He despised the media with the same intensity as the conservative grassroots. He challenged the conventional wisdom of both party establishments.

He declared that illegal immigration and trade with China carried great costs. He directed his foreign policy not toward Eurasia so much as toward America’s southern border. He followed Buchanan in decrying outsourcing, foreign trade agreements, immigration and the Iraq War. That Trump chose illegal immigration as his main issue made him all the more polarizing, visceral, contentious and spiteful. Immigration restriction had replaced Social Security 72

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as the “third rail” of American politics. Trump decided not only to touch the third rail but to hug it. It made him electric. Republicans, Democrats, journalists, corporations, entertainment and sports figures, and even the pope felt it necessary to define themselves against him. Their flaunting of their moral superiority only made Trump more attractive to voters alienated from the political process.

After terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and San Bernardino, California, in the fall of 2015, Trump announced his support for a ban on Muslim entry into the United States. The speed with which prominent Republicans and conservatives condemned his proposal revealed that the future of the GOP depended on the identity of the party’s 2016 nominee.

Nominating Trump would alter the character of the GOP in a fundamental way: Just as Goldwater had given conservatives a foothold in the GOP after decades of exile, just as George McGovern’s nomination had caused liberal anti-Communist and Catholic working-class voters to leave the Democratic coalition, just as Ronald Reagan’s nomination had confirmed the GOP’s identity as a conservative, pro-life party, a Trump nomination would recalibrate American politics along the axis of national identity. Trump masterfully exploited these divisions within the conservative movement and the GOP as he accelerated the party’s move toward national populism. He drew huge crowds to his tentpole rallies. He set the agenda. He made all the headlines.

As Trump moved closer to the GOP presidential nomination, it became clear that large parts of the conservative movement had different institutional priorities than many Republican voters. The most striking example of this disintermediation between intellectuals and voters was the “Against Trump” issue that National Review published on the eve of the 2016 Iowa caucuses.

The magazine sought to consign the star of “Celebrity Apprentice” to the dustbin of conservative pretenders. They brought together some of the biggest names on the right.

“Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones,” said an unsigned editorial. “If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government,” wrote Beck. “I think this is a Republican campaign that would have appalled

Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan,” wrote the vice president of the Cato Institute. “A shootfrom-the-hip, belligerent showoff is the last thing we need or can afford,” wrote Thomas Sowell. Among the contributors who warned conservatives and Republicans about embracing Trump’s candidacy were the editors of First Things and National Affairs, Brent Bozell III, two former attorneys general, and the presidents of the Club for Growth and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. National Review editor Rich Lowry unveiled the symposium in an interview on Fox News Channel with anchor Megyn Kelly.

None of it mattered. Not only was this advice ultimately disregarded and Trump nominated and elected president, but the editors of National Review found themselves the subjects of vitriolic criticism, ad hominem insults and harassment on social media. They were flayed as the actual traitors to the right. Some donors to the magazine were furious. Readers canceled subscriptions. What might have been a laudable stand for principle inadvertently revealed both the ineffectuality of opinion journalism and the widening gulf between conservative intellectuals and the movement they sought to lead. Trump did not need National Review. He had Twitter. And talk radio. And, increasingly, the Fox News Channel itself.

Trump arrived at a time of dissociation — of unbundling, fracture, disaggregation and dispersal. The disconnectedness was not only social and cultural. It was also political — a separation of the citizenry from the government founded in their name. Trump was dismissed as “not a real conservative” because of his past positions on abortion and guns and because of his current positions on entitlements, trade and war. In truth he worked hard to forge alliances with key constituencies within the conservative movement and Republican coalition. Since 2011, he had been unabashedly pro-life. He was the NRA’s dream candidate.

He brought on supply-siders Lawrence Kudlow and Steve Moore. He stirred the crowd at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and castigated Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. After Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in early 2016, Trump worked with the Federalist Society to unveil a list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Trump’s strongest supporters within the conservative movement came from the network of institutions, spokesmen and causes that the new right established during the

1970s. Trump deployed new right symbols.

His antagonism toward the establishment was obvious. The single-issue groups for gun rights, for the right to life and for the right to work were all behind him. So was the American Conservative Union. Phyllis Schlafly was one of his most committed supporters before her death in 2016. Buchanan cheered him on.

Jerry Falwell Jr. endorsed him. Richard Viguerie said, “Donald Trump will be helping to advance the conservative movement.” John Wayne’s daughter endorsed Trump. Clint Eastwood expressed tepid support.

Trump did well where George Wallace had done well. He flourished in places with whites without college degrees, in the South, and in ethnic blue-collar enclaves such as Staten Island. In Orange County, California, Trump

the conservative movement, in its present disagreeable and hesitant condition, must forge a new consensus.

took 77 percent of the Republican primary vote. Just north of Orange County sit the Claremont Colleges, where Harry Jaffa taught until his death in 2015. At the pro-Trump Claremont Institute and in its publication, the Claremont Review of Books, a Manichean understanding of politics and an apocalyptic vision of the nation’s future took hold. For decades, the American right had defended the spirit of institutions such as the academy, the Congress, the presidency, the market, the church, and even the press from liberals and radicals. Now large sectors of the right were giving up on those institutions as hopelessly corrupt.

Now the dividing line was between those who thought that the result in 2016 would determine the nation’s continued existence and those who thought that it was just another election. “Those most likely to be receptive of Trump,” wrote Claremont Institute senior fellow John Marini, who had tutored Justice Clarence Thomas in political philosophy

years before, “are those who believe America is in the midst of a great crisis in terms of its economy, its chaotic civil society, its political corruption and the inability to defend any kind of tradition — or way of life derived from that tradition — because of the transformation of its culture by the intellectual elites.” For Claremont senior fellow Angelo Codevilla, the nation might continue under Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, but the republic itself had long since expired.

A third Claremont figure, former Bush official Michael Anton, wrote under a pseudonym that “2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway.”

Conservatism had failed to stop America’s descent, Anton wrote. Conservative intellectuals were more interested in preserving their status and wealth than in saving the nation. The republic was dying because of immigration.

“The election of 2016 is a test — in my view, the final test — of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation.” Limbaugh read the entire piece on the air.

Noticeably absent in all of these essays was empirical evidence. Notably absent in all of these essays was sympathy for contemporary America, and reasons it might be worth defending, and charity for “blue” America. Such qualifications did not count for much in a media environment shaped by Facebook, Twitter, talk radio and cable television. The large and diverse conservative movement simply could not handle the compound stresses of war, immigration and populism. The opinions of Trump the person became hard to disentangle from assessments of his program. Fights over his rhetoric, behavior and symbols, such as the border wall (decades after the fall of a different wall), morphed into struggles over his economic and foreign policies, then changed back again. It was easy to score points by associating one’s opponents with either Trump’s most radical supporters or his most vociferous detractors. Alt-right trolls, libertarians, Reformocons, “Never Trumpers,” Claremonsters, traditionalist Catholics, paleos, a few remaining neos and other varieties of conservatives competed for attention online.

Conspiracies flourished. Civil discourse became a relic. Reputations were bruised, jobs were lost, alliances sundered, friendships ended and conservatism ruptured. Kristol, for example, had endorsed David Horowitz’s collection of essays, “The Politics of Bad Faith” (1998), but when Kristol began lobbying JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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46 percent. And on January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States. asked an American in the late 1970s what problems the country faced, he or she would have mentioned inflation, crime and national dishonor. Conservatives were able to trace these challenges back to liberal economic, social and foreign policies, and they offered plausible ways of solving them. In some ways, the problems America faces today are also the result of too much liberalism — an outof-control egalitarianism, an unwillingness to maintain public order, a culture that silences politically incorrect views. The question — and it is an open question — is whether there is a viable conservatism to resist these trends.

The conservative movement, in its present disagreeable and hesitant condition, must forge a new consensus, based on the particularly American idea of individual liberty exercised within a constitutional order, that addresses the challenges of our time. Conservatives need to ask the following: How can we address the problems everybody sees, while trying to keep the concerns unique to us from overwhelming our society?

The likely answer probably will incorporate the modifications to conservative policy positions that Trump forced upon the movement — a belief in secure borders and national sovereignty, an emphasis on the condition of working people without college degrees, a tough stance toward China, and a reluctance toward humanitarian intervention abroad.

But a conservatism anchored to Trump the man will face insurmountable obstacles in attaining policy coherence, government competence and intellectual credibility.

Untangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Trump won’t be easy.

It will require Republican officials to follow the lead of conservative jurists who acknowledged the reality of Biden’s victory. It will require a delicate recalibration of the relationship between party elites and the grassroots populism that fuels the Trump phenomenon. It will require a depersonalization of the right, with leaders focusing less on individual candidates and more on the principles that have guided the movement for more than half a century: anti-statism, constitutionalism, patriotism and anti-socialism. It will require a willingness to look ahead to the next election rather than dwelling on 2020. And it will require leaders who can set the agenda, define the alternatives

KEVIN D IETSCH/GET T Y IM AGE S

IF YOU H AD

P R E SIDE N T DONALD TRUMP AND FI RST LADY ME L ANIA T RU MP DANC E AT THE I NAUGURAL FREEDOM BALL I N 2017 IN WAS H INGTON, D.C .

“those most likely to be receptive of trump are those who believe america is in the midst of a great crisis.”

—john marini

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individuals to launch an anti-Trump Republican or independent campaign, Horowitz attacked him on Breitbart as a “renegade Jew.” Kristol shrugged it off. “That’s something new,” he said. And it was new. The antisemitism directed at Trump critics such as Kristol and former Breitbart contributor Ben Shapiro had an intensity and force that was as novel as it was frightening.

Trump’s luck was incredible. First he defeated the Republican establishment in the primary. Then, in the general election, he faced Hillary Clinton, who was just as establishmentarian as Jeb Bush and even more polarizing and disliked. Trump was the most unpopular major party nominee in history, but Hillary Clinton was No. 2. She played into Trump’s hands, demeaning his supporters and catering to the wishes of her Democratic base rather than those of independent swing voters.

And she paid for it. By 2:30 a.m. on the morning after Election Day, the Republican nominee had won enough states to be declared the winner. The GOP ticket racked up 304 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 227, even as it lost the popular vote, 48 percent to

and model appropriate standards of behavior.

The alternative would be a national populist GOP dominated by a single man whom not only educated elites but also a majority of the American people view with contempt.

It is worth considering whether the elite-driven strategy that for decades provided structure and stability to the conservative movement is possible in the America of the 21st century. It may turn out to be the case, as political analyst Jonah Goldberg has suggested, that the intellectual conservatism of tomorrow will have the same attenuated relationship to politics as H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock’s conservatism had in their day. Or the future may look more like the present at the time of writing, as parents organize spontaneously at the grassroots level to reject (and in some cases ban) what they see as politically correct and anti-American school curricula. If social media platforms now serve as the public square, then the future may hold more contentious debates over vaccinations and over independent “audits” to find voter fraud where none exists.

So long as Democrats can point to Trump, independents and college-educated white voters will avoid association with the Republican Party and conservatism. At the same time, following the example of mayoral candidate Eric Adams in New York, Democrats may appropriate issues, such as law and order, once associated with Republicans. Indeed, the rise of liberal critics of “woke” racial-equity politics may portend a new center — potentially a new neoconservatism — based in the classical liberal principles of individual freedom, personal responsibility, equal opportunity, merit-based achievement and color blindness.

Still, the problem with predictions is that they tend to be wrong. However the future unfolds, conservatives must return to the wisdom of their best minds and advocates. “The proper question for conservatives: What do you seek to conserve?” Will wrote in “The Conservative Sensibility” (2019). “The proper answer is concise but deceptively simple: We seek to conserve the American Founding.” Or as Bill Buckley said in 1970, “I see it as the continuing challenge of National Review to argue the advantages to every one of the rediscovery of America, the amiability of its people, the flexibility of its institutions, of the great latitude that is still left to the individual, the delights of spontaneity, and, above all, the need for superordinating the private vision over the public vision.” Buckley’s challenge to National

Review is also the challenge to today’s conservatives and Republicans.

This “rediscovery of America” must center on America’s founding documents, for there would be no American conservatism without the American founding. The Constitution and its 27 amendments anchor conservatives eager to preserve and extend the blessings of liberty that are the birthright of every American. The Constitution grounds conservatives in a uniquely American tradition of political thought that balances individual rights and popular sovereignty through the separation of powers and federalism. The Constitution not only protects human freedom but also creates the space for the deeper satisfactions of family, religion, community and voluntary association. “A free society certainly needs permanent means of restricting the powers of government, no matter what the particular objective of the moment may be,” wrote Friedrich Hayek. “And the Constitution which the new American nation was to give itself was definitely meant not merely as a regulation of the derivation of power but as a constitution of liberty, a constitution that would protect the individual against all arbitrary coercion.

One cannot be an American patriot without reverence for the nation’s enabling documents. One cannot be an American conservative without regard for the American tradition of liberty those charters inaugurated. “Conservatives may of course draw from foreign sources — I yield to no one in the admiration due to Edmund Burke, a great friend of America — but they should be read with a view to possibilities in America,” Harvey Mansfield said. “America cannot abandon the great principles of liberalism, above all the principle of self-government and, with it, the constitutional means for achieving and preserving it.”

Nor can conservatives abandon America.

The preservation of the American idea of liberty and the familial, communal, religious and political institutions that incarnate and sustain it — that is what makes American conservatism distinctly American. The right betrays itself when it forgets this truth.

Why? Because the job of a conservative is to remember.

this “rediscovery of america” must center on america’s founding documents, for there would be no american conservatism without the american founding.

M AT T H E W C O N T I N E T T I I S A S E N I O R F E L L OW AT T H E A M E R I C A N E N T E R P R I S E I N S T I T U T E .

H I S E S S AY I S E XC E R P T E D F R O M H I S B O O K “ T H E R I G H T: T H E H U N D R E D Y E A R WA R F O R A M E R I C A N C O N S E RVAT I S M ,” P U B L I S H E D 2 0 2 2 BY B AS I C B O O KS, A N I M P R I N T O F P E R S E U S B O O KS, A H AC H E T T E B O O K G R O U P C O M PA N Y.

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THE NEW FIGHT AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY IS IT TIME TO CRACK DOWN?

BY E R I C S C H U L Z K E

T

his story begins with a warning.

It describes a court case involving stomach-churning details about what may be America’s darkest and most depraved industry.

The reader will encounter scripts of sexual behavior that millions of teens on smartphones now view as routine, but which many readers will find shocking and very unsettling. The reader who chooses to read on may well find that the benefits justify the costs. However ugly the wound, the best disinfectant in such a case is usually sunlight.

The story begins in 2014 when, at the age of 13, Serena Fleites’ life was nearly destroyed by explicit videos made at the urging of her then-boyfriend. The boy, just a year older, shared them with friends. Someone posted them to Pornhub, the world’s largest porn website.

But that incident won’t define Fleites. Instead, she may well become the plaintiff who took down Pornhub. Earlier this year a federal judge in California ruled that credit card company Visa cannot wriggle out of Fleites’ suit against Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek. Fleites’ attorneys argue that Visa knowingly helped MindGeek monetize child porn. MindGeek, a privately held Canadian company, is one of the largest pornography companies in the world, 76

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with annual revenues of $460 million. Its sites averaged about 4.5 billion visits a month in 2020 — roughly double the traffic Google and Facebook receive every month combined.

For the first time since the dawn of the internet, the porn industry is on defense. Last

THE NEW CRITICS OF PORN ARE FIERCE AND FOCUSED, CONTESTING NOT JUST IN LAW AND REGULATION, BUT ALSO THE REALM OF PUBLIC MORES.

year Germany imposed an age verification law, and this spring that nation shut down a major porn platform. After a false start, the United Kingdom is also poised to soon launch its own age verification law. Here, the U.S. lags. American kids need only click a box asserting that they are 18 to gain access to everything imaginable, and much that isn’t.

The new critics of porn are fierce and focused. They’re contesting not just in law and regulation, but also the realm of public mores.

This comes at a time of growing debate on the left about the dangers of porn, casual hook-up culture and ways in which feminism’s embrace of the sexual revolution has harmed women.

The porn critics’ most potent weapon may in the end prove to be the word “consent.”

Beginning in the 1950s and rising through the 1970s, the phrase “consenting adult” became central to public discourse. The entire sexual revolution hinges on it, especially support for today’s broad reach of pornography. But what if both halves of that phrase — “consent” and “adult” — begin to fracture? We may be about to find out.

F L E IT E S CONS E NT E D to nothing. As a minor,

barely a teen, she couldn’t. Yet when that video appeared in 2014, her life collapsed.

She had been an A student, journalist and anti-porn advocate Nicholas Kristof reported, but school became mortifying; she dropped out. She couldn’t tell her mom; she moved out. Someone gave her heroin; she got addicted. She tried pills and awoke in the hospital.

She tried to hang herself, but her sister found her in time. Addicted and desperate, she was

pressured into making more videos. These, too, went to Pornhub. The spiral continued.

Fleites’ counterpunch began in December 2020 when Kristof told her story in a scathing expose in The New York Times. Kristof wrote that Pornhub “monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for ‘girls under18’ (no space) or ‘14yo’ leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”

Fleites filed her lawsuit in the summer of 2021.

Alongside Fleites’ lawsuit, her attorneys have filed dozens of cases for other Pornhub victims. And after the Visa ruling, they hinted they may also soon target Mastercard and Discover. Meanwhile, Visa belatedly announced that it was finally suspending payments through MindGeek’s advertising arm.

“Visa knew that MindGeek’s websites were teeming with monetized child porn,” Judge Cormac Carney wrote in his decision, adding ILLU STR ATION BY BR I A N STAU FFE R

that Visa “is not alleged to have simply created an incentive to commit a crime, it is alleged to have knowingly provided the tool used to complete a crime.”

THERE WE RE OT H E R unpunished crimes in the

Fleites case. The boyfriend himself was also a victim. It is against federal law to knowingly share pornography with a minor younger than 16. But on the internet this is a legal fiction.

The only barrier between the young and the most extreme porn in the U.S. is the question, “Are you 18?”

No surprise then that schools are saturated with porn. In “American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers,” author Nancy Jo Sales interviewed over 200 girls between 13 and 19 years old. They describe porn as a constant, on the boys’ phones at all times and in all places — even in classrooms. “‘This girl Jennifer was giving a presentation and these guys put their phones like that’ — she held her phone up to show the screen.

‘They were like, Oh, Jennifer, I have a question, and they raised their phones and it was a

porn video. She couldn’t even concentrate.’”

Sales writes: “‘It’s just become so common,’ Billie groaned, referring to boys looking at porn in school. ‘And, like, what are you supposed to say? It’s bad enough when they compare us to porn stars and look at their pornstar accounts on Instagram at lunch. But when they’re, like, looking at a girl they know — that we may know — a girl our age’ — now she was referring to boys looking at nudes — ‘how can we, like, object? Either we’re slut-shaming or we’re jealous or a prude.’”

Sales’ interviews bring the Fleites tragedy into focus. The porn norms of Fleites’ young world — flaunted by boys and affirmed by adult silence — were clear. Who was Fleites to object? It was the air they all breathed.

Few kids involved would even know they were committing crimes for which a 16-year-old could be tried as an adult.

And yet, it’s not the libido of the boys but the silence from the adults that puzzles the critics. Does anyone really think that 14-yearolds are not routinely clicking the “I’m 18” box? (They are.) Or that hypervigilant and JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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preternaturally tech savvy parents are somehow protecting their children? (They aren’t.)

Some governments have had enough. Europeans are moving on age verification rules.

France’s recent effort got struck down by its courts, but it was tangled in broader speech regulation. Germany is struggling to implement its rules, but is taking it seriously. The U.K., as noted, is also poised to move soon, but is also wrapping it in broader online safety measures. Meanwhile, companies like Meta and Google are moving ahead with their own technologies for nonintrusive age verification to protect underage users.

Meanwhile the U.S. still dithers. The obvious explanation is that the First Amendment protects free speech with a very strong libertarian margin of error that is foreign to European values.

Congress has tried. In the 1990s, it passed age verification laws to rein in child porn exposure. But the courts demurred. The last such effort was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2009 as violating the First Amendment.

But the court did, notably, indicate that technology developments could shift the analysis, if the tools became less blunt with time.

And a decade on, the tech has improved. But more than anything the urgency has heightened. And so Europeans are wading into the waters of age verification.

G E R MA N Y HAS E N DO RSED biometric tools to

meet its new rules. In one approach, video of the consumer would be analyzed with AI, with 23 a target minimum age, a margin of error because even the sharpest technology cannot distinguish a near adult from a barely adult.

And neither can anyone else, really. As a country we can’t quite decide when adulthood begins. On voting, the shift from 21 to 18 in the United States grew out of the Vietnam War. Old enough to be drafted, old enough to vote.

Some states followed the vote with alcohol.

But it turned out that drunk 18-year-olds are a road menace. In 1984, the federal government required states to adopt 21 as the legal drinking age as a condition of federal highway funding. Tobacco doesn’t cause road fatalities, but it is highly addictive and deadly. In 2019, the federal minimum age to purchase tobacco products jumped to 21.

Some industries that deal with deadly

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younger drivers make an even harder bargain.

Want to rent or insure a car? If you are under 25, you’ll pay a steep premium. Statistically, you’re dangerous. It’s actuarial tables.

It’s also brain science. The prefrontal cortex matures at almost exactly 25. Here’s a typical analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University: “The frontal lobes, home to key components of the neural circuitry underlying ‘executive functions’ such as planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas of the brain to mature; they may not be fully developed until halfway through the third decade of life.”

Individuals vary, and women mature a bit

WHEN THESE VIDEOS GO OUT INTO THE WORLD YOU CAN’T GET THEM BACK. A TRULY ETHICAL PORN PRODUCT DOES NOT EXIST.

sooner than men. But no neuroscientist would argue that an 18-year-old has an adult brain.

So how does a girl who is barely 18 give adult consent for the permanent public display of her most intimate youthful mistakes?

THERE IS GE NE RAL agreement that some things

cannot be consented to. And yet porn scripts that evoke rape — the quintessential form of nonconsensual violence next to murder — are pervasive. These portrayals are often presented as play or “rough sex.” There are, to borrow a phrase, shades of gray in “faux” portrayals of sexual violence. But as the gradient becomes normalized, deeper shades come out of the alleys onto Main Street.

On its website, We Can’t Consent To This tells stories of victims, both survivors and those who did not survive. Here’s a typical story of a woman who escaped such a relationship: “Looking back he was clearly trying to ‘groom’ me into accepting it, using emotional blackmail, gaslighting, making me feel guilty. …

I did not want to face up to the fact that he had learned this in porn and then became dependent on it. …”

Normalizing such rape scripts under the guise of “rough sex” was bound to cause trouble. A 2019 Savanta ComRes poll found that 38 percent of U.K. women under the age of 40 had experienced unwanted strangulation or other sexual violence. The Centre for Women’s Justice told the BBC that there is “growing pressure on young women to consent to violent, dangerous and demeaning acts. This is likely to be due to the widespread availability, normalization and use of extreme pornography.”

Medical experts were horrified. “I am extremely concerned by the cultural normalization of strangulation,” British neuropsychologist Dr. Helen Bichard told The Guardian. That’s a sentence earlier generations of English speakers would never have expected to see in print outside the pages of a darkly prurient dystopian novel. “We all protested when George Floyd was killed by the same method of carotid restraint,” she said.

“Why are we passively allowing young women to risk his fate? The law must send a strong signal that this is simply unacceptable.”

We Can’t Consent To This set out to do just that, battling a disturbing trend in criminal trials. Women would be killed, and the killer would try to use “rough sex gone wrong” as a defense. The group’s website tells the stories of 60 women in the U.K. who were killed. The activists argue that crimes that in previous generations would be attributed to anger or alcohol were now often blamed on consensual sexual violence.

With the group driving public awareness, in 2021 the U.K. codified by statute earlier court decisions that “a person cannot consent to the infliction of serious harm or, by extension, to their own death, for the purposes of obtaining sexual gratification.”

Pornhub had made token efforts to moderate its content to exclude child porn and “true” violence. But Kristof reported that the moderation team was understaffed and perversely incentivized to approve content quickly and loosely.

Moreover, as one moderator told him, “The job in itself is soul-destroying.” Just as some things cannot be consented to, some are best

forgotten. Any reassurance the casual user draws from even the most exacting moderation would have to reckon with unwelcome memories imposed on those who are paid to flush out the abattoir.

2011 book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that forgetting is critical to social and individual mental health: “Our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” He points to divorce, bankruptcy and even expungement of criminal records as examples of formal forgettings.

Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, has been described as the godfather of the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten,” which in 2014 legally entrenched a rule that E.U. citizens can demand the erasure of personal data collected by tech companies.

The right to keep that data can be revoked at any time, Mayer-Schönberger said, even if a consent form was signed. But this does not apply to consent forms for copyright purposes.

Which means that subjects of porn films have no recourse if they later regret their choice.

Without a radical overhaul of U.S. law and culture, there will never be a “Right to be Forgotten” in the U.S. The iconic First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams makes that clear in his 2017 book, “The Soul of the First Amendment.”

Abrams outlines case after case in which true facts found in articles in Europe have been deemed irrelevant and the contents ordered stripped from Google: “It is not a small thing for a government, let alone a continent-wide governmental entity, to criminalize the dissemination of truthful information on the medium that most people turn to for just such information. But that is now the law in Europe.” It simply will not happen here, he says.

But even in the U.S. there are possible exceptions, and again they center on consent.

When we spoke, Mayer-Schönberger was surprised and intrigued to learn about a criminal case involving pornographers in San Diego who used deception rather than consent. The finding that consent had been compromised,

I N HIS LA N DMA R K

he said, “opens up a very interesting angle. It might allow more room to argue that consent was compromised by pressure, or even that a younger adult had not given true consent.”

Is it wrong to derive pleasure from a past event that may very likely now traumatize someone involved? Is consent a one off matter — or does true consent require an active present, not just a static past?

CRI T IQU E S AND DE F E NS E S of porn have long focused on the impact it may or may not have on the lives of those who use it. Is it addictive?

“EVERY SINGLE PERSON HAS ABSOLUTE AUTONOMY OVER WHETHER OR NOT THEY DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTE TO THIS INDUSTRY.”

Does it contribute to male impotence? Does it damage romantic relationships and families?

All valid lines of inquiry.

But porn’s new critics argue the deeper porn problem cannot be found in the lives of the end users. Sometimes, it’s not about you.

And sometimes it’s not about mere legality.

This past winter, a young British feminist took that argument to the floor of the Oxford Union, the legendary debating society.

Louise Perry is a British activist, author of “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.”

(Her book, a bestseller in the U.K., hit U.S. bookstores in August).

Oxford Union asks advocates to speak on either side of a question. The audience then determines the winner. At issue in February was whether to “welcome the new era of porn.” Perry argued that consent is a troubled concept: “As long as those women are old enough — just — and as long as they are moderately sane enough, and as long as they say yes at the crucial moments, then they reach the legal threshold for consent and the

industry can do with them what it likes.”

Perry concluded by moving beyond regulatory questions. Watching porn is a personal choice, she said: “Every single person has absolute autonomy over whether or not they directly contribute to this industry. It is so much easier to give up porn than it is to give up factory farm meat or clothes made with sweatshop labor because we all have to feed and clothe ourselves but not a single person in this room ever needs to watch porn ever again.”

Perry’s hunch was that — while there are certainly many Jeffrey Epsteins and Bill Cosbys, for whom compromised or withdrawn consent is irrelevant — there are also millions for whom the very thought of sex without consent would be repellant.

Perry reminded the audience that in 2001, Jenna Jameson, then known as the Queen of Porn, had argued on that same floor in defense of her then-profession. Jameson won that debate decisively in the audience vote.

But in the years that followed, Perry noted, Jameson became an outspoken critic of porn.

And 21 years later — a long time, but not long enough for a prefrontal cortex to mature — a new Oxford Union audience, persuaded by a dynamic young feminist, voted 171-139 to reject the motion that the “new era of porn should be welcomed.”

It’s been a big year for Perry. She became a first-time mother, launched her book in the U.K., and at the end of August began her U.S. book campaign. Gearing up for that, Perry went on Bari Weiss’ influential podcast, “Honestly.” There, she debated another writer, who defended porn as a mixed but positive good.

At one point, Weiss turned to Perry and asked if she forbid her husband from watching porn. “Of course,” Perry replied. “Long before we were married. It’s a fundamental values thing, right?”

She immediately pivoted back to consent, clearly at the forefront of her values: “You might think they consented at the time. You cannot know they are still consenting. The nature of these videos going out into the world is that you can’t get them back. … I do not think that a truly ethical porn product exists.”

E R I C S C H U L Z K E I S A S E N I O R P R O D U C E R AT BY U RA D I O A N D D I R E C T O R O F T H E A P O L L O 1 3 P R O J E C T, A P R O G RA M D E D I C AT E D T O P R I S O N E R R E E N T RY AWA R E N E S S.

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THE STARTING LINE OUR POLITICAL FRICTION BEGINS WITH OUR UNDERSTANDING OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT

BY G E N E V I E V E VA H L

I

n American football, like any sport, players walk onto the field with a common understanding of the goals and regulations of the game. Pass or run the ball 10 yards, you get a first down. You have to start a play within 40 seconds of when the previous play stopped to avoid a penalty. No grabbing your opponent’s face mask or you’ll get flagged. Most importantly, make it to the end zone and you’ll get six points — seven if your kicker makes the extra point. Win, lose or tie, everyone is competing to the best of their ability based on an agreed-upon set of rules.

“Think of civic engagement in the same way,” says John Jacobson, a veteran high school social studies teacher of 34 years at Shorewood High School in Shorewood, Wisconsin.

“We need to make sure that we are operating from a present, commonly understood array of rules and processes. That is the biggest thing civics education does for our society.”

Civics literacy allows for the understanding of what the rules are in American governments — defined by Mary E. Hylton, a professor of social work at Salisbury University in Maryland, as “Understanding the basic processes and functions of government encourages more involvement in democratic processes,” thus, civic engagement.

Yet without this civics literacy, we see falsities take root and actions made that could undermine one of the longest-standing constitutional democracies in the world, as seen when untrue claims of fraud in the 2020

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election resulted in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. To rekindle the levity of a sports metaphor, it’s as if two NFL teams showed up to the Super Bowl and were told that they had to play soccer. When we can’t agree on the role of government, democracy can’t happen. And if we don’t understand the role (and the rules) of the American government, then there are chances that we won’t agree on it.

ONLY 47 PERCENT OF ADULTS SURVEYED WERE ABLE TO NAME ALL THREE BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT, WHILE A QUARTER COULD NOT NAME ANY.

“Our whole entire democracy depends on (civics education), it’s a representative democracy,” says Mark Gage, the director of publishing and communications at the Center for Civic Education. “So it depends on the knowledge of the people and on their engagement. Without these two things, there is no democracy.”

Recent studies have shown our national civics literacy has waned to dangerously low levels. The latest Annenberg Civics Knowledge Survey, conducted in September, concludes that only 47 percent of adults surveyed were

able to name all three branches of government, while a quarter could not name any. This lack of civics literacy runs the generational gamut.

The Concord Law School at Purdue University reports that on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress civics test, only 24 percent of eighth graders demonstrated proficiency. The average scores of that test have remained essentially the same since 1998, earning the second-worst results of any school subject besides history.

It seems that the results are so dire because Americans not only discontinue their civics education after formal schooling, but also because Americans may not be learning civics in school at all. According to the Center for American Progress, one year of civics or government education is required in only nine states and the District of Columbia for high school students to graduate. Additionally, 31 states require only a semester, while 10 other states have no requirement at all.

Gage recognizes the priority shift in curriculums as a driving force of the crisis. “For years there’s been a focus on math and reading, English, language arts — which I think is a good thing. … But this has often been at the expense of civic education,” he says.

Jacobson attributes social media as a cause of disengagement. “I think it’s because so much of everyone’s time and attention is consumed in some way shape or form by social media.”

Algorithms keep people within a bubble, their bubble, in a cycle of confirmation biases.

“If I am looking at conservative content or liberal content and I’m engaging with it, it is programmed to keep refeeding me the same thing,” says Jeff Davis, program director of civic education at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. “So that government class in a public school setting may be one of the last chances to have a dialogue with those who think differently in a controlled and safe setting.”

The online civics education tool, iCivics, founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, utilizes games to look at various aspects of civic engagement to disseminate equitable, nonpartisan civic education in that safe setting. “We believe that difference and debate are the hallmarks of democracy, not bugs, not problems,” says Emma Humphries, the chief education officer at iCivics. “Folks who have a high-quality civic education are more likely to think it’s important to see their fellow Americans as just that, and they’re more likely to have the skills to engage with them.”

Yet, only 28 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools, according to a Gallup poll from July, which is the second lowest this figure has been since this question started being asked in 1973. Even though a PDK International survey found that 50 percent of all adults have confidence that teachers can effectively teach civics.

Tools like iCivics hope to not only improve the numbers on civics surveys, but also these.

One of the challenges comes with translating civics lessons into civic action. When the coach draws a play on the dry-erase board, it can seem abstract until bodies are on the field, actually executing the plays, seeing the holes to be run through toward the end zone.

Jacobson, too, finds that without manifesting the abstract concepts and complexities of the Constitution into a livable experience, it can be hard for people to fully grasp the nuance.

So he has several simulations he introduces over the course of a semester “geared toward giving students a better appreciation for … the sophistication of the way government works, the way law works, the way diplomacy works,” he says. “With all due respect to ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’ it’s a little more complicated than a three-minute cartoon.”

Like those in-class simulations, A Starting Point, a video-based civic engagement platform, looks to address the nuances of civics in everyday life. The platform covers myriad topics — like if the U.S. should raise the debt limit — through short videos featuring officials from both parties speaking on the topic in concise, digestible clips, animated facts and figures. Perspectives on both ends of the political spectrum ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE E LLI N G S O N

are given equal time, allowing viewers to hear not only the party they identify with, but those opposite of their beliefs as well.

Back on the football field, coaches can disagree with referees, asking for a review of the play in question. The referees, using the set of agreed-upon rules and regulations of the game, come to a final conclusion based on those undisputed, accepted notions that American football is based on. The decision is made, and the game keeps being what fans know and love it to be, whether their team wins or loses.

“We have to have a commonly held understanding of what we’re arguing,” Jacobson adds.

“And at least understanding the structure and the process of how our Constitution works would be a good start to working out all the differences that we are inevitably going to have and that we should celebrate.”

“THAT GOVERNMENT CLASS IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL SETTING MAY BE ONE OF THE LAST CHANCES TO HAVE A DIALOGUE WITH THOSE WHO THINK DIFFERENTLY.”

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ILLUST RAT IO N BY HAR RY CAMPBELL

POETRY

THE IDEA OF ANCESTRY AFTER ETHERIDGE KNIGHT

BY R IO CORTEZ

I am in a sweet place standing in Millcreek on a road in its canyon and this sweet place has also been the sweet place of my people I am staring into the water my grandmother fished with a rod and a line I am standing near the head of a timber trail felled by grandfather’s grandfather I am listening to the aspen its green coins singing in the wind and I know it sang just like this for them I am standing right at the center of its singing the same sound heard by black bears or the calf of a moose lying even sweeter in the yarrow showing we can be moonless and shining in wildflower

I know this timber was once a house my mother’s grandmother’s mother’s hammer in hand everything throttling backward toward me through time a timber roof that has kept the frost from coming in and stinging my babies we made that for ourselves I consider choosing there are times when it is a joy to remember I like to think about my people drinking fresh buttermilk from the chosen farms of their other people all of us gazing back at the house framed by our future knowing filling up on fresh tomatoes and after maybe lying like the silk calf in the deerwood and the aster and never-ending E XC E R P T E D F R O M “ G O L D E N A X” BY R I O C O RT E Z .

C O PY R I G H T 2 0 2 2 BY R I O C O RT E Z . P U B L I S H E D BY A R RA N G E M E N T W I T H P E N G U I N B O O KS, A D I V I S I O N O F P E N G U I N RA N D O M H O U S E L L C .

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THE LAST WORD

ON MY HONOR JACK MCCAIN ON DUTY, HELPING AFGHAN REFUGEES AND LIVING UP TO HIS FATHER’S LEGACY

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

A

t 36, Jack McCain has had an impressive military career. The fourth-generation naval officer’s journey has included five deployments in the Pacific, Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, as well as participating in search and rescue operations, including three that saved lives.

He taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he earned a degree in international relations before going on to a master’s degree in security studies from Georgetown University.

But nowhere has the naval aviator — he flies helicopters — forged stronger connections than in Afghanistan, where he’d volunteered for combat as a cultural liaison.

During a tough year of combat training, he also learned about Afghanistan history and politics, learning the Dari language before deploying to Kandahar Airfield as an air adviser, flying alongside, teaching, training with and relying on his Afghan counterparts as an “Afghan Hand.” That’s a link between the U.S. and Afghan militaries, advising on the culture, politics and military issues of the Middle Eastern country.

That birthed a passion — born of gratitude, respect and genuine affection — for helping resettle Afghan evacuees, who took great personal risk to help America’s military, into satisfying lives in the United States.

He still flies as a reserve naval aviator. But back home in Arizona, his day job now is director of state and local government affairs for American Airlines’ Phoenix hub. And President Joe Biden this year appointed McCain to the Board of Visitors for the U.S. Naval 84

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Academy to “inquire into the state of morale and discipline, the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic methods,” among other matters.

Despite his personal accomplishments, though, the question of lineage invariably peeps through. And Jack McCain has no intention of cruising on the fact that he’s the son of the late Sen. John S. McCain — is, in fact, John S. McCain IV. He’s also happy to “wiggle out of talking politics.”

He’s simply Jack, he says, though he’s proud to serve as a trustee of the McCain Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to advancing democracy and defending human rights.

He hopes his action speaks louder than his name. “In the military, it took time for people to figure out who I was related to,” says McCain. “I generally do everything I can to obscure that fact. … I never want to make that association explicit because to use that would be incorrect. It would be something that would drive the old man nuts if I were running around talking about who I was related to, provided I am trying to do good work and serve a cause that’s greater than my own self-interest.”

Deseret talked to McCain about helping Afghan refugees, civility and pursuing passion that serves a greater good.

YOUR RESUME IS RICH. HOW DO YOU INTRODUCE YOURSELF?

The thing I usually lead with, depending on context, is whoever I’m working for in

that moment, which at times is difficult to pin down, whether I’m working for American Airlines, or I’m working for the McCain Institute, or working for the Navy, or on behalf of the Afghan evacuees. The things that become permanent are I’m a veteran, a helicopter pilot — which I love, because it’s probably the most interesting thing about me — and I also am an Arizonan. The older you get, the more you realize how much where you’re from impacts who you become.

WHY IS WORKING WITH AFGHAN REFUGEES IMPORTANT TO YOU?

They protected me in a place where they didn’t have to. I spent a year of my life flying alongside Afghan pilots in Blackhawks in Kandahar and Helmand, which are notably rough neighborhoods. And when the collapse came, I wanted to do everything I could to help protect the people who protected me. It was a long and arduous process. And we didn’t get all of the people that deserved to be evacuated.

Now they’re here. In my specific case, the pilots I flew with and their families are in Arizona. Given that they were willing to bet their lives on the promises that America gave them, we owe them everything we can give now.

HOW MANY PILOTS AND HOW DID YOU HELP GET THEM HERE?

About 60 pilots, 250 Afghans in total, so pilots and family members. I was a very small part in a very large effort. I spoke the language and had the contacts on the ground. My job was to organize them, figure out where they

were and try to get them moved to positions that could help them get evacuated in different regions. I was a very small piece of a very big machine in August 2021.

ARE YOU IN TOUCH WITH SOME OF THEM?

I am in very close contact with almost all of them — efforts to try to help improve their situations, get the kids educated, get them integrated into society so that they can live safe, stable and sustainable lives.

WAS THE EVACUATION THROUGH AN ORGANIZATION?

Their actual evacuation was not. The effort was very, very haphazard. It was just everyone doing what they could. They received support from multiple organizations, one of them being the International Rescue Committee, to help resettle once they arrived in the U.S. It helped provide for some of their basic needs.

Because of the way the refugee system works in the U.S., it’s a very short amount of time that they’re taken care of.

These are all educated men and women who operated their craft at high levels in the Afghan military, so they’re not your standard evacuees. I’m trying to help them get what they deserve.

ARE PAYING DEBTS AND HONOR IMPORTANT TO YOU?

Honor is a very interesting concept of differing levels, from the personal level to national or even international. The concepts may be a little arcane, but they are important because they provide you with an ethos, with guidance into circumstances where there may not be a clear right thing to do — or circumstances in which it’s difficult to do the right thing.

There’s a very popular line: “Character is doing the right thing when no one’s looking.”

I’ve come to hate that line, because I believe it is most difficult sometimes to do the right thing when everyone is looking. You see that throughout history and throughout your personal life. The idea of honor and character is simply doing the right thing by virtue of the fact it’s the right thing to do.

I speak about civility more often. It seems to be a little more pertinent. Whether that’s perception or reality, I’m not sure. But civility, especially interpersonal and political civility, are vastly important not just for bringing the temperature of discourse down. Without civility, it becomes easy to fire back and forth as opposed to, in a political sense, legislating.

You have to cooperate to legislate. If you can’t respect the person across from you or you can’t speak to them, you certainly can’t cooperate. Then you don’t get anything done, which is why you see almost political paralysis across state, local and national governments.

Civility is very near and dear to me.

WHERE BESIDES POLITICS DO YOU SEE INCIVILITY?

I spend a significant amount of time on social media. I think that’s a place where civility would be very useful. It becomes easy to see the person sitting across from you or the person you’re interacting with as an avatar or a nameless, faceless being as opposed to a human being. It becomes easy to say things that we wouldn’t necessarily say if we were close to watch the consequences. I don’t have a pitch and I’m not selling anything. I just think that to reframe ourselves when it comes to civility in interpersonal discourse, social media, even news media and politics would be a useful exercise for all of us.

WHAT CHALLENGES DO YOU SEE PEOPLE FACE?

Everybody’s circumstances are a little bit different, but one of the broad-stroke things is uncertainty — whether it’s inflation or whatever talking point you want to use, which can become partisan quickly. But this idea of things not being certain or not feeling right becomes a problem.

I think it has myriad causes and influences.

At the end of it, lacking certainty is a difficult way to live and has a tendency to give you a bit of tunnel vision, to maybe not make decisions the same way you would if you were able to look further ahead.

I do see a lack of civility between individuals at all levels of government and personal media as a problem because people have stopped trusting the sources of information that they usually did and started finding alternatives.

Or maybe it’s not even a lack of trust, but the availability of different sources of information. The best way for ideas to be better is a free marketplace of ideas.

I’m not one to intimate that there should be some sort of censorship or anything like that.

But I do see a symptom in our inability to talk to one another.

WHAT ARE BRIGHT LIGHTS IN YOUR LIFE RIGHT NOW?

The brightest light — also the perfect duality, the brightest and darkest light that I have at

this moment — is the circumstances of the Afghan humanitarian parolees, because they are here and I’m incredibly happy about it. They’re no longer in danger. They have opportunity.

But integration into a society that’s alien to you is an almost impossible feat when you are not prepared for it — and nobody was — and when you are not given resources to thrive.

I was a cultural adviser in Afghanistan, so I am very aware of what it takes to integrate into another society. There are an incredible number of well-intentioned and willing people that have stepped up to help. But it takes a larger effort because 70,000 to 100,000 Afghans are now evacuating. It is an amazing fact that that effort happened. But it is also worrisome that we have not followed through.

I would also say I am happy to be gainfully employed, I’m happy living back in Arizona and still able to fly on weekends in the reserves.

Frankly, I enjoy that because it’s fun — and it’s difficult and dangerous and exciting. And still able to give back, even if it’s not full-time. It’s one weekend a month, two weeks a year. And sometimes that’s good enough.

CAN READERS MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO THOSE REFUGEES?

Absolutely. There’s a piece of legislation that has not passed. It has been worked on through blood, sweat and tears by a massive number of people, but it is stalled. It’s called the Afghan Adjustment Act. If any reader feels compelled or reads up on this issue and feels like they have a desire to call their congressmen, burn up the phone lines, send emails — just get the awareness that this needs to pass. The legislation fixes a lot of the problems that we’ve had since arrival. Plenty of people are worried about vetting and it fixes that problem. It provides them resources and codifies their legal status in the United States.

They have a degree of uncertainty that would be impossible to live under. They don’t know if in less than a year they’re going to get deported back to Afghanistan.

I would also say, if you run into or know of Afghan refugees in your community, do what you can to reach out, ask what they need or simply present a friendly face because they are in a place that is about as different from their home as anything could be.

ANY LAST WORD?

I would say that the guiding light that I was given by my old man was “Whatever you do, find and serve a cause greater than your own self-interest.”

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2023

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EVENTS

FINDING SOLUTIONS TO GUN VIOLENCE GOVERNMENT LEADERS AND EXPERTS GATHERED TO FIND AGREEMENT ON HOW TO ADDRESS ONGOING GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA.

E M I LY B E LL M CCO R M I C K , LE FT, PR E S I D E N T A N D FO U N D E R O F T H E PO LI CY PR OJ E C T, A U TA H N O N - PR O FI T, A N D R O B I N R I TC H , R I G H T, PR E S I D E N T A N D PU B LI S H E R O F T H E D E S E R E T N E WS .

In collaboration with the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, Deseret Magazine convened government leaders and experts from across the political spectrum to identify common ground and find solutions to gun violence. The October event at the university’s Thomas S. Monson Center in Salt Lake City was an extension of a Deseret Magazine symposium of articles that explored some of the common and polarizing elements of mass shootings. A diverse group of politicians, academics, public safety officials, community leaders and education experts, including a five-person panel of national experts on gun rights and gun violence, offered a range of solutions that highlighted the importance of setting aside political differences to address this nonpartisan issue plaguing the nation.

B E LOW: SA LT LA K E C I TY PO LI C E C H I E F M I K E B R OW N .

LEFT: DOU G WIL KS , EXECU T IV E E DITOR OF THE DE S E RE T NEWS, AND JAS ON PERRY, DIRE C TOR OF THE H INC K L E Y I NSTI T U T E OF POLI TIC S AT T H E UNI VE RS IT Y OF UTAH.

B E LOW: NATAL IE GOC H N O U R , D I R E C TO R O F T H E K E M C . GARDNE R P O LI CY I N ST I T U T E A N D K E N S QU IRE S , C H IE F SAFE TY O FFI C E R AT TH E U NIV E RS IT Y OF U TAH .

R I G HT: UTA H CO N GR E SSM A N B L AK E MO O R E S HA R E S L EG I SL ATIVE E F F OR TS TO C UR B G U N VIO LE N C E W H I LE PA N E L ISTS A B I G A IL VE GTE R O F B E R RY UN IVE R SITY, A R I DAVIS O F JO HN S HO P K IN S, A N D DAV I D YA M A N E O F WA K E F O R E ST LO O K O N .

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