My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) gives Mearsheimer an even sharper test case than Reagan, because she said the anti-Mearsheimer thesis out loud. “There is no such thing as society,” she told Woman’s Own in 1987. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” That is liberal atomism stated as flatly as anyone has ever stated it. If Mearsheimer is right, her own career should refute her sentence. It does.
Begin with what made her. The grocer’s shop in Grantham, the Methodist discipline of her father Alfred Roberts (1892-1970), the thrift, the sermons, the civic duty of a provincial alderman’s home. Thatcher did not reason her way to her convictions any more than Reagan did. She received a value infusion in childhood and spent fifty years applying it. The woman who preached that individuals make themselves was herself the most thoroughly socialized politician of her generation, a walking product of one shop on one street in one Lincolnshire town.
Then look at what won her elections. Free-market doctrine never had mass appeal in Britain. The Falklands did. In April 1982 her government was the most unpopular on record, and the war transformed her into the embodiment of the nation. Crowds did not cheer monetarism. They cheered Britain humiliating an enemy and recovering its standing after Suez and the IMF crisis of 1976. Her project sold itself as national restoration: putting the Great back in Great Britain. The individualist economics rode on tribal feeling, which is Mearsheimer’s ranking of nationalism over liberalism in one package.
Her foreign policy splits the same way Reagan’s does. The rhetoric was liberal and Atlanticist, freedom against communism. The practice was balance-of-power realism. She spotted Gorbachev before Washington did and announced in December 1984 that she could do business with him. She opposed German reunification in 1989 and 1990 on naked power grounds, fearing a state that might dominate the continent, and she said so to anyone who listened. No liberal principle supports blocking forty million Germans from self-determination. Realism does.
Europe is the cleanest evidence. The European project is liberalism applied to nations: pool sovereignty, dissolve borders, let rules and markets replace tribal loyalties. Thatcher signed the Single European Act in 1986 for market reasons, then recoiled when she saw where the logic went. The Bruges speech of September 20, 1988 drew the line at the nation-state. When her liberalism and her nationalism collided, nationalism won, exactly as Mearsheimer predicts it must.
The domestic record carries a darker Mearsheimerian lesson. Her economics treated people as the atomistic actors of liberal theory, and where the theory met dense social groups it broke them. The miners’ strike of 1984-85 destroyed not just an industry but the villages built around it, and Mearsheimer’s frame predicts what followed: people stripped of one group attachment seek another. Scotland, hit by deindustrialization and then the poll tax, transferred its loyalty from Britain to Scottish nationalism, and the Tories were nearly extinct there within a decade. The long fuse of resentment her project lit in the deindustrialized north helped detonate Brexit, itself a tribal revolt against liberal integration. Her individualism produced nationalist reactions on every side, because the social nature she denied kept reasserting against her.
Her end completes the argument. The electorate never removed Thatcher. Her tribe did. In November 1990 the Conservative Party, the most ruthless group organism in British politics, judged her a liability over Europe and the poll tax and cut her down through its own internal rituals. The woman who said there were only individuals and families was destroyed by a collective she could not command, and she spent her remaining years wounded by exile from it. She needed the group more than the group needed her.
So Mearsheimer’s frame reads Thatcher as a nationalist who mistook herself for an individualist. The mistake cost her little while the two ran together, in the Falklands and the Cold War. It cost her everything when they diverged, over Europe and within her party. And it cost Britain a measure of social cohesion that her theory said did not exist and her policies proved did.
Thatcher is the buffered self elected to office. Taylor traces the buffered self to the Reformation’s long discipline: the war on magic and sacrament, the relocation of meaning from the world into the conscience, the sealed individual answerable to God and his own will. Methodism carried that discipline into the English provinces, and the grocer’s house in Grantham ran on it. Conscience, thrift, work, self-command, no mystery and no excuse. Thatcher did not merely hold the buffered anthropology. She was its finished product, three centuries of Reform compressed into one woman above a corner shop.
Her creed projected that self onto the whole country. There is no such thing as society means: there are no porous selves. There are sealed units of will and responsibility, each generating its own purposes from within, connected by contract and family and nothing else. Her economics assumed that man. Strip away subsidy and shelter, and the buffered individual stands forth, chooses, strives, and prospers. The Sermon on the Mound in May 1988 gave the theology version: salvation is individual choice, the Good Samaritan needed money before he could do good. The Church of England answered with Faith in the City, a porous Christianity of communities and bonds, and she regarded the bishops as fools. The two anthropologies could not hear each other.
In person she seemed sealed to a degree that astonished people. No doubt, no need for approval, four hours of sleep, no visible malaise. The lady’s not for turning is the buffered self’s motto: my meanings are inside, generated from within, and the weather of other minds does not cross my boundary. Ministers came to her with the mood of the party, the mood of the country, and the mood did not enter. She lacked the porous receptors. She could not feel a room, and toward the end she could not feel the nation turning on the poll tax, because feeling a nation requires a permeability she had trained out of herself or never had.
Yet her power over others was porous power. Cabinet ministers, grown men who had governed empires of paper, described being in her presence in the language of possession and fear. The handbagging, the blue gaze, François Mitterrand’s (1916-1996) line about the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe. Charisma is a presence crossing into other selves and acting there, an enchanted phenomenon with no place in her own theory of persons. She wielded on others a force she did not believe existed.
And her politics, when it mattered most, re-enchanted the world. The Falklands turned the nation back into a charged and sacred thing, a presence that claimed lives and demanded rejoicing, and the country answered as porous selves answer a summons. Her rhetoric peopled the cosmos with agents of menace: the enemy within, the Argentine junta, Brussels reimposing the frontiers of the state. Enemy within is demonology, the old enchanted grammar of possession and threat. She preached a disenchanted economy and ran an enchanted politics, and the second carried the first to three election victories.
The deepest collision came in the coalfields. Her theory saw inefficient industries staffed by individuals who could retrain and move, because buffered selves can move; their meanings travel with them, inside. The villages she broke were the last enchanted communities in industrial Britain: the pit, the chapel, the band, the gala, the union banner carried like a relic. The men were porous to those things. The pit was not their employer. It was in them, constitutive, the way the parish was in a medieval villager. When the pits closed, men grieved as for deaths, and then died early themselves in numbers, and her anthropology had no category for the wound. You cannot register the destruction of meanings you believe do not exist outside the head. Arthur Scargill (b. 1938) led an enchanted tribe against a woman who could not see one.
Her end ran the lesson in reverse, twice. First, the fall: the party’s mood gathered for months, porous men like Geoffrey Howe (1926-2015) absorbing the danger and signaling it, and she, sealed, perceived nothing until the votes were counted. The buffered self’s invulnerability had become deafness. Second, the aftermath: the woman whose theory said the self is complete in itself was hollowed out by exile from power, wandering, by every account, in grief for a presence that had left her. Denis, the red boxes, the purpose, the force that had filled her, gone. She turned out to be porous after all, open to one great power her whole life, and when it withdrew it took most of her with it.
So Taylor’s frame reads Thatcher as a woman who governed porous people with a buffered creed, broke their enchanted worlds in the name of a self they did not have, and was broken in turn by forces her philosophy could not admit through the boundary. The creed was wrong about Britain. Its last refutation was her.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s frame turns Reagan inside out. Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) talked like the purest liberal individualist in American politics, and on Mearsheimer’s account that talk was the surface of something else: nationalism wearing liberal clothes.
Start with the rhetoric. The city on a hill, the evil empire, the Westminster speech of June 8, 1982 consigning Marxism-Leninism to the ash heap of history. That language is universalist. Rights belong to everyone, freedom is the natural condition of man, and the Soviet system offends against human nature. Pure political liberalism by Mearsheimer’s definition.
Now look at the practice. Reagan governed in a bipolar world, and Mearsheimer argues that bipolarity disciplines states into realism whether they like it or not. Liberal hegemony only became possible after 1989, when the United States faced no peer. Reagan never had that luxury. So his foreign policy looks like containment with a megaphone. He armed proxies in Afghanistan and Nicaragua rather than sending armies to build democracies. He embraced Jeane Kirkpatrick’s (1926-2006) distinction between authoritarian friends and totalitarian enemies, which is realist alliance logic dressed as moral philosophy. He pulled out of Lebanon in 1984 after the barracks bombing rather than escalate for credibility’s sake. He negotiated with Gorbachev (1931-2022) the moment the balance of power made negotiation profitable. A liberal crusader does not sign the INF Treaty with the head of the evil empire. A realist does.
Reagan preached individualism, but nobody experienced Reaganism as atomism. People experienced it as belonging. Morning in America, the flag, the restored pride after Vietnam and the Carter years. Reagan offered Americans membership in a group with a story, and that is why they loved him. The cowboy individualist is an American tribal myth, a marker of group identity. When Reagan celebrated the lone entrepreneur, his audience heard a hymn to us, the Americans, against them. His individualism functioned as a shibboleth of the tribe.
Reagan’s own biography illustrates Mearsheimer’s claim about socialization beating reason. He did not reason his way to his creed. He absorbed it: the Disciples of Christ piety of his mother in Dixon, Illinois, the small-town Midwest of the 1920s, the Hollywood anticommunism of the Screen Actors Guild fights, the General Electric years touring plants and giving the same speech hundreds of times. By the time Reagan held power his values were decades-old infusions, and he held them with the fixity of a man who never doubted what his group taught him. Reason came later, as decoration.
Reagan succeeded because he fused the two ideologies in the order Mearsheimer says they must be ranked. Nationalism first, liberalism second, with liberalism serving as the vocabulary of the nation rather than a program for the planet. The universalist talk gave Americans a flattering self-image. The realist practice kept the costs down. His successors inverted the order after the Cold War, took the universalist talk as a literal program, and produced the failures Mearsheimer’s book catalogs.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
The Democratic Party comes off worse, because it is the institutional home of the creed Mearsheimer calls a delusion. The GOP contains a faction his theory vindicates. The Democrats are built on the thing he says is false.
Start with the core. Rights universalism is the party’s official religion. Every human being everywhere holds the same inalienable rights, and politics exists to vindicate them. This is the language of the party’s lawyers, its NGOs, its foundations, its foreign policy hands, and its activist base. If Mearsheimer is right, this creed misdescribes the species. People do not experience themselves as bearers of universal rights. They experience themselves as members of particular groups, and the largest group that commands real sacrifice is the nation. A party whose moral vocabulary runs past the nation to humanity asks voters for an allegiance almost no one feels. “Citizen of the world” is, on his premises, a phrase that describes nobody.
Here is the paradox, though. The Democrats preach universalism and practice tribalism. The party’s electoral machine is a coalition of identity groups, each organized around the group attachments Mearsheimer says drive human beings. So the party half-confirms his theory in its daily operations while denying it in its philosophy. The trouble is the level at which the tribalism operates. The Democratic coalition mobilizes tribes below the nation: racial groups, gender categories, sexual identities. The Republican coalition increasingly mobilizes the nation as the tribe. If Mearsheimer is right that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, the party that organizes sub-national tribes against a party that claims the national tribe has chosen the weaker position. Ceding the flag is ceding the strongest force in politics.
The coalition structure produces its own pathologies under his premises. A party of many tribes without a tribe above them must pay each member group constantly, in policy, in language, in vetoes over the platform. Each group polices its boundary, because that is what tribes do. Hence the purity spirals, the acronym politics, the inability to tell any constituent group no. A single-tribe party disciplines itself around the leader. A many-tribe party negotiates itself into paralysis.
The professional-class wing fares no better. The educated stratum that now dominates the party believes in reason as the route to political truth: explain the policy, check the facts, correct the misinformation, and voters will update. This is the anthropology Mearsheimer ranks last. If socialization and innate sentiment beat reason as sources of belief, then explainer journalism, fact-checking operations, and the whole technocratic style convert almost no one. The misinformation framing rests on the assumption that wrong beliefs come from bad information, when on his account they come from group attachment, and no correction touches them. Thomas Frank (b. 1965) asked what was the matter with Kansas, why voters there ignored their material interests. Mearsheimer’s answer is that nothing was the matter. Voters vote their tribe. The Democrats keep offering material benefits to working-class voters, the rational-actor appeal, and keep watching those voters, White and increasingly Hispanic and Black, drift toward the party that offers belonging instead. Benefits do not buy loyalty. Membership does.
Immigration is where the creed costs most. The universalist logic runs straight to the activist positions: no human is illegal, asylum is a human right, enforcement is violence. The national tribe’s boundary instinct runs the other way, and on Mearsheimer’s account that instinct sits deeper than any argument. The party’s immigration politics since 2013 reads as a long experiment in testing his theory, with the results he predicts.
Foreign policy implicates the Democrats as much as the neocons. Liberal hegemony was a bipartisan project, and its Democratic version, humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, the rules-based international order, flows from the same universalism. Libya was a Democratic war. If Mearsheimer is right, the Clinton-Obama-Biden tradition of foreign policy fails for the same reason the Bush tradition failed: you cannot install a creed in a society whose members were socialized into something else. The antiwar left, long the party’s embarrassing uncle, holds the position his theory endorses, which mirrors the GOP’s situation, where the restrainers were the embarrassing uncles until recently.
Now the other side of the ledger, because his premises also reveal the Democrats’ great hidden asset. If socialization beats reason, the side that controls the institutions of childhood and young adulthood wins the long game regardless of elections. Progressives hold the schools, the universities, the entertainment industry, the HR departments. They perform the value infusion on each cohort before its critical faculties mature. Young Americans lean left not because the arguments persuaded them but because the institutions formed them, which is exactly how Mearsheimer says moral codes get made. On his premises this is worth more than any presidency. It also explains why the Republican assault on those institutions, school choice, homeschooling, the university funding fights, is rational rather than paranoid. Both sides now act as if Mearsheimer is right about where beliefs come from.
One more implication, about religion. The Democrats became the secular party as their constituencies stopped going to church, and on Mearsheimer’s account that removed a deep source of solidarity and moral formation. What filled the space looks like a substitute creed: sacred values, blasphemy norms, conversion narratives, excommunications. This confirms his anthropology, humans will have a tribe and a sacred order whether or not they call it religion. But the substitute is the creed of a class, formed in universities and fluent only there. It cannot scale to a nation, and it alienates the voters whose formation happened elsewhere.
The path his theory suggests is the one the party keeps finding and losing. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) fused liberal policy to national solidarity and won five consecutive presidential cycles for his party. Barack Obama (b. 1961) ran in 2008 on one America, no red states and blue states, the national tribe, and won bigger than any Democrat since. The party wins when it claims the nation and loses when it speaks past it, upward to humanity or downward to the demographic coalition. If Mearsheimer is right, the Democrats’ problem is not their policies, which often poll well. It is that they built a church on the doctrine that congregations do not exist. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws the line in A Secular Age between two ways of having a self. The porous self of the enchanted world stands open to forces outside it. Spirits, curses, blessings, relics, and words can get in and do things to you. Meaning lives in the world, not just in minds. The buffered self of modernity closes that boundary. Meaning retreats inside the head, the world becomes a neutral system of objects, and the self gains invulnerability at the price of what Taylor calls the malaise of immanence, the flatness of a disenchanted world. Run the Democratic Party through this distinction and the party splits open along a line nobody in it can name.
The party’s commanding heights belong to the most buffered population ever assembled. The professional class that staffs the campaigns, the foundations, the agencies, and the newsrooms lives the buffered life in full: secular, credentialed, therapeutic, managerial. Its political style follows from its self-structure. Policy is social engineering. Problems are technical. The world is a system to administer, and the administrator stands outside what he administers, disengaged, running the numbers. Trust the science. Read the explainer. The wonk is the buffered self doing politics, and the party’s chronic production of candidates who read as managers rather than leaders comes from a class that trained itself out of the registers in which leadership is felt rather than evaluated.
But the party’s base was never buffered. The Black church is a porous institution. Grace moves through bodies there, the Spirit descends, the dead are present, and a sermon is an event in the world rather than a transfer of information. Hispanic Catholicism keeps its saints, its candles, its processions. Immigrant communities carry enchanted worlds with them. For most of the twentieth century the Democratic coalition ran on this porousness. The civil rights movement was a porous event. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) spoke of souls, redemption, and the beloved community, and the language did work because his hearers had selves that language of that kind could enter. The party’s moral music came from its porous wing. As the leadership class secularized, the party kept the songbook and lost the voice. Obama could still cross the line, singing Amazing Grace in Charleston, preaching eulogy as a participant rather than an observer. Hillary Clinton (b. 1947) could not, and the difference between those two politicians is in large part the difference between a man who could enter the porous register and a woman locked in the buffered one.
Now the strange part. Taylor predicts the buffered self will not rest easy. The closed boundary produces flatness, and the flatness produces a hunger for re-enchantment. Look at the party’s activist wing through this lens and you find the porous self reborn inside the secular world. Words wound there. A slur is not information about the speaker but a force that enters and damages the hearer, which is porous anthropology to the letter, meaning located in the word as a power rather than in the mind as an interpretation. Safe spaces are anti-contagion architecture. Trauma discourse describes a self that external events colonize and inhabit. Whiteness functions as a possessing force that operates through people without their intent, and implicit bias names a spirit you carry unknowing, while “doing the work” is the exorcism. Systemic racism, in its strongest formulations, has the structure of an enchanted force: invisible, omnipresent, acting at a distance, working through hosts. None of this is meant as mockery. It confirms Taylor. Strip a population of God, saints, and sacraments, and the porous structure does not vanish. It returns wearing secular clothes, with sacred victims in place of saints, privilege confessions in place of the confessional, and cancellation in place of excommunication.
So the party holds a contradiction it cannot see. Its official epistemology is buffered: facts, data, expertise, the disenchanted universe of the explainer. Its activist practice is porous: contamination, purity, possession, words as forces. The same young staffer who mocks religious voters for believing words can be blasphemous will file an HR complaint describing speech as violence, and no one in the building notices the two anthropologies at war in one person. Taylor calls this cross-pressure, the buffered self haunted by what it buffered out, and the Democratic Party may be the most cross-pressured institution in American life.
The electoral costs run in two directions. Toward the religious, the buffered leadership cannot hear porous claims as anything but irrational preference. A religious-liberty claim sounds like a policy demand rather than what it is, a report from people for whom the sacred is real and violable. The party’s tone-deafness toward the devout, including the devout inside its own coalition, is a translation failure between self-structures. Toward the unchurched young, the party becomes the accidental supplier of enchantment. Politics turns into the only available source of the sacred, which produces activists who need politics to deliver meaning, belonging, and salvation, loads on the system it was never built to carry. A buffered politics of administration cannot feed them, so they radicalize toward the porous politics of purity and contamination, and the party’s internal wars follow.
Mass politics itself is a porous experience. The rally, the flag, the martyr, the anthem, solidarity felt in a crowd, these work on selves to the degree the boundary opens. A party run by buffered selves distrusts all of it as manipulation, kitsch, or danger, and so it cedes the enchanted register of national life to its opponents while wondering why its superior policy papers do not move anyone. The Democrats’ nostalgia for the civil rights era is nostalgia for the last moment the party spoke as a porous institution and the country felt it. The songbook is still on the shelf. The question Taylor leaves is whether a leadership class formed by disenchantment can ever sing from it again, or whether it can only cite it.
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My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right about human nature, the Republican Party’s internal fights stop looking like arguments over policy and start looking like a contest between a faction built on a false anthropology and a faction built on a true one.
Start with fusionism. The Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, traditional values, and anticommunism rested on the individualist picture Mearsheimer rejects. Its economic wing treated the voter as a rational actor who responds to incentives, calculates his tax burden, and wants government out of the way so he can flourish alone. Paul Ryan (b. 1970) was the purest expression of this. He offered entitlement reform, dynamic scoring, and opportunity-society rhetoric to an electorate that, on Mearsheimer’s account, never wanted any of it, because people do not experience themselves as atomistic actors maximizing utility. They experience themselves as members of groups under threat or in decline. The base’s indifference to the donor-class agenda, visible since at least 2012 and undeniable after 2016, follows from his premises. Libertarianism within the GOP becomes a doctrine for the small minority of men whose temperament lets them feel like lone wolves, funded by a donor class whose interests it serves, and structurally incapable of winning mass loyalty.
The faction Mearsheimer’s anthropology vindicates is national conservatism. Donald Trump (b. 1946) grasped by instinct what Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), and JD Vance (b. 1984) argue in books: the nation is the largest tribe that works. Mearsheimer says in The Great Delusion that when nationalism and liberalism collide, nationalism almost always wins. If so, the populist turn is a correction toward reality, and the party’s older establishment was the delusion. Immigration becomes the central issue under this reading because it concerns the boundary of the group, and boundary questions arouse the deepest sentiments humans have. The establishment treated immigration as an economic question with a clear answer. The base treated it as a question about who we are. Mearsheimer’s premises say the base had the better grasp of what politics is.
His argument cuts hardest on foreign policy, which is the book’s subject. If rights universalism is a philosophical error, then the democracy-promotion wing, the Bush-Cheney-Bolton lineage, was committed to a project that might never have worked: remaking tribal societies in the image of a creed their members never internalized. Afghanistan and Iraq become predictable failures rather than execution problems. The restraint wing of the party, which barely existed in 2003 and now contests for dominance, holds the position his theory endorses. Sovereignty replaces human rights as the organizing vocabulary. The fight between Vance and the remaining Reaganite internationalists over Ukraine is, on these premises, a fight the restrainers should win and probably will.
The religious right gets an unexpected vindication too, though on secular grounds. If socialization beats reason as the source of moral preferences, then whoever controls the institutions of childhood controls the moral future. The school-board fights, the curriculum wars, the battles over what a seven-year-old hears about sex and country and God stop looking like culture-war theater and start looking like the most consequential politics there is. Mearsheimer’s account implies that conservatives who spent decades fighting over marginal tax rates while progressives captured education made a catastrophic allocation of effort. The value infusion happens before the reasoning faculties mature. The side that performs the infusion wins, a generation later, regardless of who wins the arguments.
For practices, the implications are uncomfortable for anyone who likes deliberative politics. If reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, persuasion through argument converts almost no one. Mobilization beats persuasion. Loyalty signals beat white papers. The rally, the flag, the enemy, the grievance, these work because they engage the tribal endowment. Trump’s style is, on this reading, a more accurate political technology than the think-tank style it displaced. The party’s drift toward loyalty tests and primary purges follows the same logic: tribes police defection because defection threatens survival, and a party that behaves like a tribe will punish heretics more harshly than incompetents.
Governance is where it gets dangerous, and where Mearsheimer himself might caution the GOP against over-reading him. He is no postliberal at home. His argument for liberalism is that people will never agree on first principles, that such disagreements turn lethal, and that liberal tolerance is a survival arrangement, a modus vivendi rather than a truth. A Republican Party that takes his anthropology as license for full tribal rule misreads him. The same premises that explain why nationalism beats liberalism abroad explain why a continental, multiethnic nation needs liberal institutions at home to keep its internal tribes from each other’s throats. The constructive project his theory implies is a thick civic nationalism: build a shared American identity strong enough to function as the tribe, so the smaller tribes within it do not tear the place apart. The destructive temptation his theory also explains is majority-group identity politics, which treats one tribe within the nation as the nation. The first might hold a diverse country together. The second guarantees the conflict it claims to prevent.
So the picture: the donor wing holds the money and a refuted anthropology. The populist wing holds the voters and the correct one, but flirts with conclusions Mearsheimer rejects. The party’s unresolved condition, populists winning the symbolic fights while donors win the legislative ones, persists because the coalition contains both the truth about human nature and the interests that profit from denying it. If Mearsheimer is right, that arrangement is unstable, and the populists hold the high ground, because they are working with the grain of the species.
The Democrats are a buffered leadership sitting on a porous base it can no longer hear. The Republicans are a porous base that captured the party and drove the buffered leadership out.
Start with where the enchanted world survived in America. It survived on the right. Evangelical and charismatic Christianity never accepted the buffer. In the Pentecostal and charismatic churches that supply the party’s most committed voters, demons are real and active, prayer changes outcomes, prophecy continues, healing flows through hands, and spiritual warfare is a daily fact. The devil is an agent with plans. This is the porous self in full, not a remnant of it, and it constitutes the largest enchanted population in the developed world. The Republican coalition is built on top of it.
For decades the party paired this porous base with a buffered command structure. Fusionism, seen through Taylor, was an alliance of self-structures as much as ideologies: buffered money and porous believers. The Chamber of Commerce wing, the libertarian economists, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney (b. 1947) and the Ryan budget wonks, these were buffered men running a disenchanted politics of incentives and growth charts, while the enchanted base supplied votes and moral energy. The arrangement held as long as the buffered wing delivered respect along with judicial appointments. It stopped holding when the base noticed the respect was absent. What followed was the porous capture of the party.
Trump is the porous phenomenon par excellence, and Taylor explains him better than most political science does. Begin with his formation. His family church was Norman Vincent Peale’s (1898-1993), and positive thinking is a porous doctrine: words are forces that shape reality, speech acts on the world rather than describing it. Trump talks the way a man talks when he believes saying it makes it so. The fact-checkers spent a decade treating his statements as failed propositions, buffered selves grading an enchanted speaker, and they never touched him because his audience does not receive his words as propositions either. They receive them as acts, blessings and curses, loyalty and war. The rallies are enchanted events, closer to revival than to speech, where presence does the work and the crowd comes to feel a force rather than evaluate an argument. The MAGA hat functions as a talisman. The prophecy movement declared him a Cyrus, an anointed pagan instrument of God, and Paula White (b. 1966) stood in the White House calling on angels from Africa and South America. None of this embarrasses the base, because none of it is foreign to the porous self.
Conspiracy belongs in the same analysis. QAnon is a porous cosmology: hidden powers behind appearances, a cosmic war of good and evil, coming judgment, secret knowledge for the initiated. The Deep State is demonology for the administrative age. Where the buffered self sees institutions, procedures, and incompetence, the porous self sees powers and principalities, and the porous reading generates loyalty and martyrdom in a way no institutional analysis can. The COVID wars ran along the same line. To the buffered self, the vaccine is a technical object entering a body that is a system. To the porous self, the needle is the state crossing the boundary into the flesh, contamination by an alien power, and the resistance was felt at the level of self-structure before any argument arrived.
The buffered conservatives know they lost. George Will (b. 1941), the disenchanted Tory atheist, left the party. The Burke-and-Buckley style, argument, citation, the well-made essay, gave way to prophecy and rally. The remaining buffered men in the coalition, the tax-cut donors and the Federalist Society lawyers, now operate the way the Democratic porous wing operates in its party, as a tolerated minority that supplies something the dominant self-structure needs, in this case money and judicial craft, while the energy comes from elsewhere.
Taylor’s malaise of immanence shows up on the right in its own form, and here the party has an advantage it barely understands. The young men adrift in the disenchanted world, the audience that found Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) and kept going, hunger for exactly what the buffered order cannot supply: weight, meaning, a cosmos with stakes. The right offers re-enchantment without apology. Trad Catholicism, Orthodox conversion, the online vitalists and neo-pagans, the gym-and-God circuit, all of it sells thickness of being to selves starving on immanence. The left supplies re-enchantment too, but disguised, embarrassed, smuggled in as politics. The right sells it under its own name, and in a market of starving selves the open seller wins.
Now the costs, which are severe. Governance is buffered work. Regulations get drafted, budgets scored, agencies run, by disengaged reason operating on systems. A party whose energy is porous and whose governing requires buffered skills produces what we have watched it produce: administrations at war with their own technical staff, prophecy where planning should be, loyalty tests applied to jobs that need competence. The porous self also makes a magnificent market for grifters. An audience that receives words as forces and leaders as anointed will buy the supplements, the gold coins, the miracle cures, and the legal defense funds, and the right’s media economy has become in part a machine for harvesting enchanted trust. And porous politics has no internal brake. The buffered self can be argued out of a position. The possessed cannot, and a party that runs on enchantment cannot easily call its own demons off.
Step back and the two parties form a single picture. The selves are sorting. The buffered are consolidating in one party, the porous in the other, and each party keeps a shrinking minority of the opposite type, Black churchgoers among the Democrats, country-club rationalists among the Republicans. American polarization, read through Taylor, is not two ideologies fighting over policy. It is two self-structures that no longer share a world, one living among objects and the other among powers, each finding the other not wrong but unintelligible. The Republicans hold the deeper reservoir of what mass politics runs on. The Democrats hold the machinery of the disenchanted state. Neither can do what the other does, and the country requires both.
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Michelle Goldberg (b. 1975) is an American journalist, author, and political commentator whose work examines the intersection of religion, sex, ideology, and political power. Since 2017 she has written an opinion column for The New York Times, where she is a favorite of the left and ignored by the right. Across a career spanning magazines, newspapers, books, podcasts, and television, Goldberg has chronicled the rise of Christian nationalism, the conflicts over reproductive rights, the evolution of contemporary feminism, and the ideological struggles reshaping both the American right and the American left.
Goldberg was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a Jewish family steeped in journalism. Her father, Gerald Goldberg, served as managing editor of The Buffalo News. Her mother taught mathematics at a community college. She resisted following her father into the trade at first, but journalism surrounded her from childhood, and the resistance did not hold. Her political consciousness formed early. At thirteen she accompanied a pregnant thirteen-year-old friend to an abortion clinic, an experience she later described as formative. In high school she defended abortion clinics during a period of intense anti-abortion protest. These experiences fixed a lifelong concern with reproductive rights and women’s autonomy at the center of her work.
A precocious student, Goldberg attended SUNY Purchase at sixteen before transferring to the University at Buffalo. She earned a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she developed the reporting habits that defined her later career.
She entered journalism during the early years of digital media. After working for alternative newspapers in California, she joined Salon in 2002. There she reported on the growing political influence of conservative Christianity, the religious right, and the battles over reproductive freedom. She combined traditional reporting with cultural and political analysis, and she developed a style that sought to explain how ideas become movements and how movements reshape institutions.
Her breakthrough came with Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006). Built on extensive reporting among evangelical activists, pastors, political organizers, and conservative intellectuals, the book argued that Christian nationalism had become a major force in American politics. It appeared years before the movement entered mainstream political discourse, and it established Goldberg as an early and influential chronicler of the phenomenon. The book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2007 and remains a foundational journalistic account of the modern religious right.
Goldberg followed with The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (2009), a global investigation of reproductive rights and women’s status. The book rested on reporting trips to India, Egypt, Kenya, and Nicaragua. Goldberg examined how policies such as the American global gag rule affected clinics and women’s health services abroad, and how struggles over contraception and abortion reflected larger battles over political authority. In Nicaragua she documented the consequences of a total abortion ban and the efforts of feminist activists to challenge the alliance between political leaders and religious institutions. The book widened her focus from American politics to international questions of gender, religion, and development. Its argument: control over reproduction remains a central instrument through which societies exercise power.
During the following decade Goldberg became a leading progressive magazine writer. She served as a senior contributing writer for The Nation and wrote for Slate, The Daily Beast, and The American Prospect. Her reporting and commentary turned with growing frequency to populism, nationalism, feminism, immigration, and the changing character of liberal democracy.
In 2015 she published The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, a biography of Indra Devi (1899-2002). The book traced how yoga moved from India into mainstream Western culture and explored larger questions about spirituality, globalization, and the culture of self-improvement. It departed from her political books in subject, yet it extended her abiding interest in how belief systems migrate across societies and change over time.
Themes from The Goddess Pose resurfaced in her journalism years later. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldberg became a notable commentator on the relationship between wellness culture, alternative spirituality, anti-vaccine activism, and right-wing conspiracy movements. She argued that communities organized around health, self-discovery, and personal empowerment had become vulnerable to misinformation and political radicalization, a phenomenon often called “conspirituality.”
Goldberg joined the Times opinion section in 2017. Her first column, “Tyranny of the Minority,” appeared on September 25 of that year. The move marked a transition from the world of progressive magazines to the most influential newspaper opinion platform in the United States. From 2018 through 2021 she co-hosted the Times podcast The Argument, where she debated colleagues from across the ideological spectrum, including frequent exchanges with fellow columnist Ross Douthat (b. 1979). The podcast became an important forum for argument about American politics, culture, and public policy during the Trump years.
Her tenure at the Times has coincided with an era of political turbulence. She has written at length about the presidency of Donald Trump (b. 1946), democratic backsliding, abortion rights, immigration, political violence, free speech controversies, and the internal conflicts of liberalism. Her columns return again and again to how ideological movements create identities and loyalties that outrun conventional policy debate.
A major theme of her later work traces the evolution of Christian nationalism after Kingdom Coming. During the Trump era she argued that much of the religious right had entered a transactional alliance with Trump, trading traditional moral standards for judicial appointments and political influence. As the decade progressed she examined the fusion of Christian nationalism with populist grievance politics, conspiracy theories, and online movements such as QAnon. Her reporting documented the transformation of a movement once centered on churches and religious organizations into something decentralized and networked through digital channels.
Although firmly identified with progressive politics, Goldberg has criticized the left. During the #MeToo era she raised concerns about the erosion of due process in some high-profile cases and warned against collapsing the distinctions between different kinds of misconduct. She has written against call-out culture, ideological conformity, and the internal policing of progressive institutions. Excessive purity tests, she has argued, weaken political organizations and distract them from larger strategic goals. This willingness to challenge factions within her own coalition makes her a more complicated figure than admirers or critics sometimes allow.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) returned Goldberg to the issue that first drew her into political life. Her post-Dobbs columns documented the practical consequences of abortion bans: legal confusion, medical uncertainty, and widening disparities between states. She framed the decision as more than a legal victory for conservatives. In her account it transformed the status of women as citizens and as patients.
Goldberg has received professional honors throughout her career. She belonged to the Times opinion operation during the period when the newspaper received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on sexual harassment and abuse. She received the Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis in 2020, recognition of her commentary during a period of intense political conflict.
Her influence extends past print. She appears often on cable news, mostly on networks and programs aligned with liberal audiences, and she participates in public debates about politics, religion, feminism, and democracy. The combination of reporting, historical perspective, and ideological analysis has made her among the most recognizable opinion journalists of her generation.
Goldberg lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Matthew Ipcar, and their two children. Her career mirrors the transformation of American journalism over the past quarter century. She emerged from the insurgent world of early online magazines, built her reputation through long-form reporting and books, and arrived at the institutional center of American media at The New York Times.
Whether the subject is Christian nationalism, reproductive rights, yoga culture, populist politics, feminism, wellness movements, or the future of liberal democracy, Goldberg’s central concern remains how belief systems organize human behavior. Her reporting seeks to explain how beliefs become social movements, political coalitions, and durable institutions with the capacity to reshape public life.
I was interviewed by Goldberg in 1999 and 2000 for two articles. She was charm personified. She was magnetic. She was empathic. She was feminine. She was disarming. She sounded like the sexiest woman alive. She made me want to be my best self. She had this quality that made me want to open up. I wanted to talk to her for hours. So did all of my friends (in the Los Angeles sense) who spoke to her. Joan Didion (1934-2021) wrote that her smallness and inarticulateness led people to forget her presence and say things against their own interest. Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) built The Journalist and the Murderer on the claim that every reporter plays a confidence game, presenting as sympathetic, harmless, on your side, until the piece runs. A young woman who giggles and plays harmless while interviewing men holds a strong hand at that game. The subject relaxes, performs, condescends, and talks. The reporter who later writes that the religious right threatens the foundations of the Republic did not sound like that on the phone, though she was honest that her politics were left, but she did it in a way that felt non-threatening. I spoke to her as if she was my best friend in the world. There was nothing underhanded or unethical in her method. I knew she followed good journalistic protocol. She just had a way that relaxed all of us who spoke to her. When Goldberg called, we had all day for her because we enjoyed talking to her. And when we read our quotes in her pieces, we recognized that they were accurate and fair and we enjoyed her lively writing. We had no complaints about our Michelle Goldberg experience.
When she became famous a few years later, it was for polemics, and it was hard to recognize the woman I knew.
Of course, I never “knew” Goldberg. I only encountered her in one role. Upon reflection, some parts of what I heard decades ago translated into her later success — intelligence, empathy, courage, honesty, spontaneity, education, and commitment to her craft.
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, the implications run through every layer of Goldberg’s career, and most of them cut against her.
Start with her subject. Kingdom Coming treats Christian nationalism as an aberration, a fevered radicalism threatening the secular Republic. On Mearsheimer’s account, the Christian nationalists behave as humans behave. They form intense group attachments, derive their moral code from socialization and innate sentiment, sacrifice for fellow members, and seek to order political life around their tribe’s sacred commitments. The dominionist is the default human. The anomaly requiring explanation is the secular liberal universalist who believes a Nicaraguan peasant, a Cairo housewife, and a Brooklyn columnist share an identical set of inherent rights that trump every local solidarity. Goldberg spent twenty years explaining the wrong puzzle. The megachurch needs no explanation. The Times opinion section does.
Second, her own formation. Mearsheimer’s passage on socialization describes Goldberg’s trajectory. She absorbed her moral code in a secular Jewish home where the father edited the local paper. She defended abortion clinics in high school, before her critical faculties matured, exactly the sequence Mearsheimer describes: value infusion first, reasoning second. Berkeley journalism school, the progressive magazines, Cobble Hill. By her own account the clinic visit at thirteen was formative. Mearsheimer might say it was constitutive. The career that followed reads less like a reasoner examining belief and more like a tribe member elaborating the commitments her group installed before she could examine anything. Her conviction that she chose her positions through reason while her subjects inherited theirs through church and family becomes the central unexamined assumption of the work.
Third, The Means of Reproduction. This is the book Mearsheimer’s argument hits hardest, because it is liberal universalism in its purest form: the claim that reproductive rights belong to every woman on the planet, and that American policy, NGO money, and feminist organizing should secure them in India, Egypt, Kenya, and Nicaragua. Mearsheimer’s whole point about ambitious liberal foreign policy applies. The rights crusade runs into nationalism and local religion and loses, because group attachment beats abstract rights nearly every time the two collide. Goldberg’s own reporting documents the resistance, the alliances between political leaders and clergy, the failure of universalist pressure to dislodge local arrangements. She reports the evidence for Mearsheimer’s thesis and draws the opposite conclusion. Where she sees a struggle still to be won, he sees a structural limit.
Fourth, her one great insight survives and turns on her. Goldberg’s career-long theme, that belief systems organize human behavior and become coalitions and institutions, is Mearsheimer’s anthropology applied to other people. She grasps the social nature of man whenever she looks right. The asymmetry is the tell. The evangelicals have a tribe; she has positions. They are socialized; she reasons. Mearsheimer flattens the distinction. Both run on the same fuel.
Fifth, her heterodoxy fits the theory better than her universalism does. When she warns the left against purity tests because they weaken political organizations and distract from strategic goals, she argues as a coalition member concerned with group survival, which is what Mearsheimer expects of a profoundly social being. Her #MeToo cautions, her impatience with call-out culture, these are tribal maintenance, and there is no shame in that on his account. The shame, if any, lies in describing the work as independent reason.
Last, the Dobbs writing. She frames abortion as the status of women as citizens and patients, a rights question with a correct answer. Mearsheimer’s frame recasts it as two moral communities with incommensurable codes, each installed by socialization and sentiment, fighting over whose code the state enforces. Rights talk then becomes one tribe’s idiom rather than a neutral standard, and the post-Dobbs map of America, state by state, community by community, looks less like backsliding from a universal norm and more like the social nature of man reasserting itself against a fifty-year legal abstraction.
Gemini says:
Intellectuals on the left would find much to agree with in John Mearsheimer’s description of human nature, but they would reject his conclusion that this social reality invalidates the universal project of human rights. Many left-wing theorists, particularly communitarians and critical theorists, already critique the pure atomistic individualism of classical liberalism.
The smartest response from the left would address his points by reframing the relationship between socialization, reason, and rights.
1. Rights as Protection Against the Group, Not a Denial of It
The left does not need to believe that humans are naturally atomistic lone wolves to believe in individual rights. Thinkers like Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947) argue that precisely because humans are profoundly social and embedded in groups, the individual needs robust legal rights to protect him from the tyranny of the collective.
Groups, tribes, and nations routinely enforce conformity, suppress dissent, and marginalize minorities. Left-wing anthropology views universal human rights not as a description of how humans naturally live, but as a protective shield. The fact that a person is born into a group that shapes his identity does not give that group the right to crush his autonomy, control his body, or silence his speech when he reaches adulthood.
2. Socialization is Not an Absolute Prison
Mearsheimer argues that because socialization happens during a long childhood, individuals have limited choice in formulating a moral code. A left-wing response, drawing from Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), would counter that while socialization forms the initial identity, the development of reason allows for communicative rationality—the ability to look critically at one’s own inherited values and debate them.
History is filled with individuals and movements that rejected the intense socialization of their birth groups. The left points to the abolition of slavery, the rise of the feminist movement, and the fight for gay rights as evidence that humans can use critical faculties to override inherited cultural programming. Socialization is the starting point, but reason is the lever used to reform it.
3. Universalism as the Evolution of Socialization
Mearsheimer views tribalism and group attachment as fixed biological and social limits. Left-wing cosmopolitans argue that the definition of the group can expand.
Political philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (b. 1954) suggests that education, global communication, and shared institutions can foster a sense of global citizenship. In this view, universal human rights are not an attempt to turn people into atomistic actors; they are an attempt to expand the boundaries of the social group to include all of humanity. The goal is to make the global community the ultimate group strategy, minimizing the destructive Us-versus-Them tribal conflicts that Mearsheimer views as inevitable.
4. Human Rights as an Earned Social Technology
Finally, the left would argue that Mearsheimer confuses a philosophical justification with a practical tool. Samuel Moyn (b. 1962), whom Mearsheimer quotes, has written extensively that human rights are a relatively recent historical phenomenon, emerging in the mid-20th century as a response to the horrors of state-sponsored tribalism and total war.
The left views human rights not as an innate biological truth discovered by lone wolves, but as a hard-won social technology. It is a set of rules that complex, deeply social societies invented to manage conflict, preserve peace, and ensure that the collective does not destroy the individual.
Applied to Goldberg, Alliance Theory does something more aggressive than Mearsheimer did. Mearsheimer relocated her inside a tribe. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton redescribe her job.
Start with her organizing premise. Across every book and column, Goldberg’s stated project is understanding how beliefs become movements, coalitions, and institutions. Alliance Theory reverses the arrow. Coalitions come first. Beliefs are downstream artifacts, patchwork narratives generated to mobilize support for allies already chosen. On this account Goldberg has spent twenty-five years studying the exhaust and calling it the engine. The megachurch crowds she watched in Ohio in 2004 did not assemble because of a theology of marriage; the theology of marriage got foregrounded because the alliance needed mobilizing, and gay marriage mobilized. Kingdom Coming sits at the center of this. The book treats Christian nationalism as a belief system with a vision of reality, and treats the believers’ subsequent conduct as a falling away from it. The paper handles her exact material in passing: the combination of libertarianism with Christian fundamentalism never emerged from philosophical analysis, and the only reason those philosophies travel together in America is the strategic alliance between pro-life evangelicals and wealthy Republicans struck in the 1970s. Goldberg reported the incoherence of that fusion as a paradox needing explanation. Alliance Theory says there was never anything to explain. The beliefs are not a worldview with internal tensions; they are a coalition’s collected talking points, and coalitions owe no one consistency.
Her Trump-era finding follows the same pattern. She wrote that the religious right entered a transactional alliance with Trump, trading moral standards for judicial appointments, and she framed this as a scandal and a corruption. Alliance Theory predicts it as the baseline. Loyal partisans flout their apparent moral principles when it serves their allies; the most morally vocal are often the least morally constrained, because the moral vocabulary was always a mobilizing tactic rather than a constraint. Evangelical support for a thrice-married casino owner is not the fall of a belief system. It is evidence about what the belief system was for. Goldberg got the reporting right and the genre wrong: she wrote a tragedy where the theory says she witnessed normal operations.
Then the theory turns on her own production. A Times opinion columnist is, in Pinsof’s non-pejorative technical sense, a professional generator of alliance propaganda: narratives that establish the in-coalition as moral and the rival coalition as menacing, that recruit third parties, that embolden allies. Her prize citations say this without embarrassment. The Hillman Foundation praised her as a voice for people who wake up unable to believe what is happening, whose columns make readers feel they are not alone in their horror. That is mobilization, named as such by the people paying tribute to it. The language of Kingdom Coming, the fevered radicalism and bellicose fundamentalism, performs the perpetrator framing the paper catalogs: the rival coalition as aggressor, one’s own as the threatened party. Her post-Dobbs columns perform the victim framing: documenting the suffering of the coalition’s members to mobilize sympathy and recruit the undecided. None of this requires insincerity. The theory’s whole point is that the propagandist believes the propaganda; that is what makes it work.
Her heterodoxy, which I called complexity in the bio, gets reread too. Notice the form her criticisms of the left take. Purity tests weaken political organizations and distract from strategic goals. That is not a moral argument against her coalition; it is tactical advice to it. She objects to call-out culture the way a staff officer objects to a doomed offensive. Alliance Theory predicts this kind of internal criticism from a high-value coalition member: it polices tactics, never allegiance, and it doubles as a credibility display that makes her advocacy more persuasive to third parties. The columnist who sometimes scolds her own side is a better recruiter than the one who never does.
The theory also supplies a test you could run on her archive. Pinsof says double standards are discovered by taking a moral principle deployed for one group and applying it to the rival group. Goldberg invoked due process during #MeToo when certain cases troubled her. The test: chart her due-process concern against the coalition membership of the accused, across Franken, Kavanaugh, Cuomo, and the rest. If the concern tracks allegiance rather than evidence, Alliance Theory scores. I have not run that chart and will not assert its result. But the theory tells you where to dig, and her twenty years of columns are a large dataset.
The conspirituality work fits last. She described wellness communities sliding toward QAnon as belief migration, ideas infecting new hosts. Alliance Theory describes it as re-sorting: groups switching sides in a consolidating two-super-alliance structure, with the beliefs arriving after the switch to justify it. The yoga teacher did not read herself into the rival coalition. She changed sides, then acquired the narratives, which is the order the theory expects and the opposite of the order Goldberg’s frame assumes.
The summary implication is harsher than Mearsheimer’s. Under Mearsheimer she was a tribe member who mistook herself for a reasoner. Under Alliance Theory she is a skilled coalition propagandist whose deepest professional belief, that belief drives politics, is itself a piece of coalition equipment: it lets her describe her own side as people with convictions and the other side as people with a dangerous ideology, when the theory says both sides are alliances all the way down, and the conviction talk is how alliances fight.
The Voice
Goldberg writes a reporter’s column. The unit of her prose is the evidentiary paragraph: a scene, a statistic, a quotation from a scholar, then the turn. She opens on a news peg or a person, often someone she interviewed, and closes with the thesis sharpened to a sentence. The syntax is plain and declarative, medium-length sentences, low ornament. She is not an aphorist like Bret Stephens (b. 1973), not a stylist of wordplay like Maureen Dowd (b. 1952). Among Times columnists her prose is the least decorated and the most reported. She still gets on planes; the post-Dobbs columns came from clinics and courtrooms, and the texture of her writing depends on that.
Her diction runs middlebrow-academic. She leans on books. A typical Goldberg column hangs on one monograph or one historian, quoted and credited, and this borrowing of scholarly authority is a signature: it performs diligence and positions her as a reader who synthesizes rather than a pundit who emotes. The vocabulary stays accessible, with occasional profanity in looser venues and a dark, deadpan humor that undercuts the apocalyptic register she otherwise works in. She writes “democratic emergency” sincerely, then mocks her own doomscrolling, and the alternation keeps the catastrophism from going stale.
Her most distinctive rhetorical move is staged ambivalence. The first person in a Goldberg column is a site of conflict: I wanted to believe this, I struggled with this, part of me thinks the critics have a point. She gives opposing arguments their strong version before answering them, and many columns are built as a wrestle she narrates and then wins. The move does double work. It flatters the reader as someone capable of complexity, and it makes the conclusion feel earned rather than issued. Whether the wrestle is real or choreographed varies by column, but as craft it is her best trick, and it is why her concessions to the other side circulate more than her attacks.
The spoken voice is another instrument. On tape, on The Argument, on MSNBC, at the Munk hall, she talks fast, stacks clauses, interrupts herself, and hedges constantly: sort of, kind of, I mean, right? The pitch is high, the delivery has the run-on quality of a writer thinking in drafts aloud rather than a broadcaster delivering lines. Under pressure she laughs, a quick nervous laugh that reads as either charm or weakness depending on the room. She sounds like print media, and next to trained broadcast voices that is audible.
The Munk debate in May 2018 is the best documented stress test of her speaking manner, because she left friendly territory. Arguing for the resolution with Michael Eric Dyson (b. 1958) against Stephen Fry (b. 1957) and Jordan Peterson (b. 1962), before three thousand people in Toronto, her side lost, with the audience swinging six points against the resolution over the course of the night. One reviewer’s observation gets at her method: she spent much of her time citing Peterson quotes she presented as appalling, trying to shock the audience. That is prosecutorial quotation, the opposition’s own words entered as exhibits. It is how she argues in print, where it works, because the reader of a Times column shares the premise that the quotes are damning. Live, before a hall that did not share the premise, the exhibits drew boos instead of gasps, and she had little else to pivot to. Her debate style is inductive, built from cases, examples, and reported detail, and when the audience refuses the moral frame, the cases stop adding up to anything. The same reviewer’s contrast holds: she and Dyson played within the bounds of their own group’s expectations, while Fry took the room with self-deprecation, a register she rarely uses on a stage.
On The Argument from 2018 to 2021 you hear her in a format built for her. Against Douthat, who constructs syllogisms aloud, she counters with reporting, history, and incredulity, and the hedging that sounds weak on a debate stage sounds like honesty in a conversation. MSNBC shows the third mode: friendly territory, where she is fluent and mordant and supplies the moral summary the segment was built to reach.
The pattern across all of it: her power is on the page, where she controls pacing, stages her ambivalence, and deploys quotation before readers who accept her premises. Each step away from the page, podcast, cable, stage, strips out a layer of that control, and the Munk debate, the farthest step, is where the style failed in public and measurably.
The Set
Start with the geography: brownstone Brooklyn, Park Slope to Fort Greene, with a Manhattan annex at the Times building and satellite postings in Washington. The household pattern repeats. Two professionals, one or both in media or politics-adjacent design and consulting, as with her husband Matthew Ipcar, who came out of Democratic digital work. Children in public school or in private school with guilt. Secular homes with ethnic texture, Jewish or lapsed Catholic, where religion survives as holidays, irony, and subject matter.
The second ring is the world she came up through and never left. The Nation under Katrina vanden Heuvel (b. 1959), where Katha Pollitt (b. 1949) holds the chair of feminist elder. Salon under Joan Walsh (b. 1958), her old editor, now at The Nation and CNN. Chris Hayes (b. 1979) ran the parallel route from The Nation to MSNBC and anchors the cable wing of the set, alongside Rachel Maddow (b. 1973) and Joy Reid (b. 1968), whose green rooms function as the set’s clubhouse. The feminist writers form a guild within the guild: Rebecca Traister (b. 1975), her nearest analogue, at New York magazine; Irin Carmon (b. 1983); Jessica Valenti (b. 1978); Jill Filipovic (b. 1983); Moira Donegan (b. 1990) of The Guardian. The third ring supplies the footnotes: the Christian-nationalism scholars and reporters Goldberg cites and blurbs and shares panels with, Sarah Posner, Katherine Stewart, Jeff Sharlet (b. 1972), Kristin Kobes Du Mez (b. 1975), Robert P. Jones, Andrew Whitehead, and Samuel Perry. They give her columns their academic ballast; she gives their books their largest audience. The trade runs smoothly because everyone profits.
What they value comes through in what they envy. They envy the prescient. The set’s highest compliment is that someone saw it coming, and Goldberg holds a strong hand here, since Kingdom Coming predates the field. Claims of early warning function as currency: who called Trump first, who took Christian nationalism seriously before 2016, who flagged the Dobbs endgame while liberals still trusted the Court. They envy the read. Circulation among the right people beats raw traffic; a column that three senators, two showrunners, and the seminar tables of five universities discuss outranks one that merely goes viral. They envy the book. The column is the salary; the book is the soul. A serious book every few years separates the writer from the pundit, and the set polices that line hard, because the pundit is what each of them fears becoming.
The hero system is a secular salvation story with journalism in the priesthood. The transcendent value is democracy, spoken of the way believers speak of the faith, as a fragile inheritance under siege. Service to it confers a kind of immortality: the set’s eschatology is the future historian, and its members write for the archive, for the tribunal of how-this-will-look. Hence the resonant phrases, the right side of history, history is watching, what did you do during the emergency. The saints are recent and real. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) and John Lewis (1940-2020) hold the top tier. The martyrs include George Tiller (1932-2009), the murdered abortion provider, whose name appears in the set’s writing the way the names of martyrs appear anywhere. The heroes are testifiers and exposers: Christine Blasey Ford (b. 1966), who spoke at cost; Jodi Kantor (b. 1975), Megan Twohey (b. 1976), and Ronan Farrow (b. 1987), whose Weinstein reporting gave the set its proudest institutional moment and Goldberg’s newsroom a Pulitzer-adjacent glow; the election workers and state officials who held in 2020; and, in the complicated wing, Liz Cheney (b. 1966), a convert heroine whose welcome shows that the system can absorb a conservative who pays the entry fee of total rupture with her side. Al Franken (b. 1951) occupies a stranger niche, the sacrifice. Goldberg wrote the column urging him out and later confessed her doubts, and the set still argues the case, because it tests whether the system’s purity demands serve or eat its political goals.
The status games run on calibration. The first game is heterodoxy within limits. Criticizing your own side earns courage credit, and Goldberg plays this game as well as anyone alive: the column against purity tests, the doubts about #MeToo overreach, the worry that the left talks itself out of majorities. But the credit accrues only when the criticism stays tactical, framed as concern for the coalition’s effectiveness. Cross from tactics into defection and the set does not argue with you; it stops inviting you. Bari Weiss (b. 1984) is the proof case, with Glenn Greenwald (b. 1967), Matt Taibbi (b. 1970), and Andrew Sullivan (b. 1963) as the longer roll of the expelled. Their exits raised the value of the safe internal critic, since the set needs to show it tolerates dissent, and Goldberg’s brand of dissent is the kind it can afford. The second game is the Substack question. The exiles cashed out for subscription money and independence; staying at the Times became, after their departures, a legible act of loyalty and a bet that institutional prestige outlasts newsletter income. The third game is the citation economy. Quoting Du Mez or Perry in a column confers seriousness on the columnist and reach on the scholar, and rank within the set partly consists of who gets cited, blurbed, and invited by whom.
The normative claims sit close to the surface. Democracy outranks every competing value, and threats to it license departures from old norms of balance, which the set renamed: objectivity became both-sidesism, a sin, and moral clarity became the virtue that replaced it. Speech carries weight; words do harm; platforming is itself a moral act, which is why who appears beside whom on a stage or a masthead generates the set’s fiercest internal fights, the James Bennet (b. 1966) defenestration over the Tom Cotton op-ed in June 2020 being the constitutional crisis the set still relitigates. Bodily autonomy ranks just below democracy, with abortion rights as the test no member fails. Expertise deserves deference; the marginalized deserve amplification; and the direction of speech matters, since punching down condemns and punching up excuses.
The essentialist claims are the set’s least examined possession, because the official doctrine is anti-essentialist. Gender is a construct; race is a construct; categories are made, contingent, revisable. Yet a working essentialism operates one ring out. The right has a nature in this talk: an authoritarian personality, a rage that is who they are. The phrase *this is who they are* does the essentializing for opponents, while *this is not who we are* does the de-essentializing for America. Identity categories, officially constructed, confer real epistemic authority in practice; the standpoint of the marginal speaker counts as a credential, and lived experience functions as evidence that outranks survey data in a dispute. History gets the deepest essence of all: it has a direction, sides, and a verdict pending, and the set knows which side it sits on. So the grammar runs: constructionist about ourselves, essentialist about our enemies, teleological about time.
The moral grammar shows in the verdict words, and the set’s prose can be parsed by them. Dangerous, chilling, troubling, normalize, complicit, gaslight, dog whistle, erasure, harm, reckoning, do the work. The grammar has rules of person and direction: who may say what about whom, with license scaling to standpoint; impact outranking intent; silence counting as a position. It has rituals, the throat-clearing acknowledgment of one’s own privilege before a risky claim, and the apology, a fixed form with required elements, whose botched performance ends careers faster than the original offense. And it has a register problem the best members feel: too much moralizing reads as humorless, too much cleverness reads as unserious, and status flows to those, Goldberg among them, who can hold the dark joke and the alarm in the same column.
The set’s deepest shared trait may be the one it discusses least. Nearly all of them came up insurgent, in webzines, alt-weeklies, and little magazines, attacking the institutional center, and nearly all of them now are the institutional center, with its salaries, prizes, and security. The self-image lagged the position by about fifteen years. Much of the set’s anxiety, its purity disputes, its expulsions, its need for emergencies, makes sense as the behavior of insurgents who won and cannot say so.
Goldberg starts writing for Salon in 1999, when Salon is a webzine fighting for survival and the enemy is the mainstream press: the credulous Washington corps, Judith Miller’s (b. 1948) weapons reporting, the Sunday shows, the whole apparatus the bloggers called the MSM with a sneer built into the acronym. Ezra Klein starts as a college blogger, moves through The American Prospect, and builds Wonkblog inside The Washington Post before founding Vox in 2014 to disrupt the very form of the newspaper. Chris Hayes starts at *In These Times* in Chicago, a socialist magazine with a five-figure circulation, then The Nation. Jamelle Bouie comes up through the Prospect and Slate. Rebecca Traister comes out of Salon. Joan Walsh edits Salon through its insurgent decade. Glenn Greenwald begins as a solo blogger so far outside the citadel that he publishes his first media criticism on Blogspot. Matt Yglesias blogs from his dorm room. The shared founding experience of this cohort, roughly 2002 to 2008, is the siege of legacy media from below: the institutions had failed on Iraq, failed on Bush, failed on the financial crisis, and the webzine writers said so daily, for little money, with the joy of people throwing rocks at a building they could not enter.
Then the building hired them. The absorption runs roughly 2011 to 2017. Hayes gets an MSNBC show in 2011. Klein gets venture funding and then, after the digital-media model collapses, returns to the Times in 2021. Bouie joins The New York Times in 2019. Traister lands at New York magazine. Goldberg’s own absorption completes the pattern: Salon to The Nation to the Times in 2017, the year the Trump subscription surge made the paper rich enough to collect the whole generation. The Times did not merely survive the insurgency. It ate it. It hired the bloggers, bought Wirecutter and The Athletic and Wordle, took the podcast form the insurgents pioneered and built The Daily, the largest news podcast on earth. By 2020 the people who spent their twenties attacking the institutional center of American journalism were the institutional center of American journalism, with the salaries, the prizes, the book deals, and the security details that the position carries.
The self-image did not update. That is the lag, and you can date it. The insurgent identity formed around 2005, at the peak of the blogs-against-MSM war. The positions changed by 2017 at the latest. Yet the rhetoric of 2005 persists into the 2020s: speaking truth to power, from the most powerful opinion platform in the language. Afflicting the comfortable, on a columnist’s salary with a brownstone. Punching up, from the top floor. Fifteen years, give or take, between the fact of victory and the failure to acknowledge it.
Now the explanatory work. Why can they not say they won? Four reasons, each sufficient, jointly overwhelming.
The first is the license. The set’s moral grammar permits aggression only upward. Punching up is courage; punching down is cruelty. The grammar therefore makes position-denial mandatory: the moment you admit you are the center, every attack you launch reclassifies as punching down, and your entire critical practice loses its license. A columnist at the Times mocking a Substack crank, a podcaster in a basement, a pastor in Alabama, is the strong attacking the weak unless the columnist maintains, against the evidence of her own W-2, that she remains the embattled party. The underdog claim is load-bearing. Remove it and the practice collapses.
The second is the authority economy. In this set, marginality confers credibility. The outsider sees what insiders cannot; the marginal voice carries epistemic privilege; lived experience of exclusion functions as a credential. A group that runs on that currency cannot admit to having become insiders without devaluing its own holdings. Victory is forfeiture. So the set performs marginality from the center, and the performances grow more elaborate as the gap widens.
The third is the business model, and this one is institutional rather than psychological. The Times added millions of subscribers after 2016 on the explicit promise of emergency: democracy dies in darkness was the competitor’s slogan, but the whole sector ran on the sentiment. Goldberg’s Hillman Prize citation praised her for making horrified readers feel less alone, which is a subscription pitch restated as an honor. The emergency is the product. An institution whose revenue depends on siege cannot let its writers announce that the siege lifted and the defenders hold the citadel, and the writers, no fools, do not need the memo. Note the relief, faint but detectable across the set’s output, whenever the emergency rearms: the Dobbs decision, the second Trump term. Each restoration of real external threat resolves, for a while, the dissonance of being powerful people whose identity requires powerlessness.
The fourth is responsibility. Insurgency outsources outcomes. If the institutions belong to someone else, their failures belong to someone else. Admitting that your cohort has run elite journalism, publishing, the foundations, and the awards circuit since roughly the mid-2010s means owning what that culture produced on your watch: the credibility collapse, the trust numbers, the half of the country that stopped listening. The insurgent self-image is, among its other uses, a liability shield.
Now the behaviors the thesis explains, with cases.
The purity disputes first. June 2020, the Tom Cotton op-ed. By the standards of an institution, the Times running a sitting senator’s argument for troop deployment is ordinary practice; the institutional response is rebuttal. The staff instead rose as a movement, declaring in a coordinated formula that running the piece endangered them, and the editor, James Bennet, lost his job. Read as institutional behavior the episode is baffling: a newspaper purging an editor for publishing a newsworthy opinion. Read as insurgent behavior inside a captured fortress it makes sense. People formed by movement politics, finding themselves inside the institution with no external wall left to storm, storm inward. The staff revolt is the only insurgency available to insurgents who own the building. The same logic covers the Donald McNeil Jr. (b. 1954) expulsion in 2021 and the serial Slack uprisings of those years across the sector. A movement needs enemies; an institution needs standards; when the two conflict, the set keeps choosing enemies, and that choice is the clearest behavioral evidence that the self-image still runs on movement time.
The expulsions second. Bari Weiss in 2020, Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine the same summer, Greenwald from The Intercept he founded, that October. Each expulsion performs the same double function. It enforces the boundary, and it proves, to the expellers, that they still constitute a movement with a boundary to enforce. Institutions tolerate internal dissent because their identity rests on procedure; movements cannot, because their identity rests on alignment. Every purge is a demonstration that we are still the scrappy us, even though the purge is conducted from the commanding heights with severance paperwork. And the expulsions produced the great irony of the cycle: the exiles built the next insurgency. Weiss’s The Free Press, Greenwald and Matt Taibbi on Substack, Sullivan’s newsletter, together reconstructed the 2005 position, outsiders throwing rocks at a failed legacy center, except now the failed legacy center is Goldberg’s cohort. The Free Press sold to a legacy broadcaster in 2025 for a nine-figure sum, which suggests the next absorption is already underway and the cycle has a period of about twenty years.
Third, the need for emergencies. The set’s anxiety has a misattributed object. The stated object is fascism, theocracy, the end of the Republic. The unstated object is the dissolution of identity that victory entails. If the emergency ever fully resolved, the members of the set would stand revealed as what they materially are: prosperous senior employees of a profitable media corporation, with mortgages, equity, and access, indistinguishable in social position from the establishment journalists they came up despising. The emergency defers that revelation indefinitely. This is why the set’s threat assessments ratchet but never resolve, why each election is the last election, why the rhetoric cannot de-escalate even when de-escalation might serve the stated political goals. The threat inflation that critics read as cynicism reads better as self-preservation, of a self.
Last, the Goldberg-specific turn, because she is the thesis in miniature. Her first book describes a movement, Christian nationalism, whose project she defines as the patient capture of institutions: school boards, courts, agencies, the long march of the faithful through the structures of a society they felt excluded from. She wrote it as a warning. But as a description of method it applies, clause for clause, to her own cohort’s two decades in media, publishing, and the prize circuit, a movement of the excluded marching through institutions and then, having captured them, continuing to speak in the idiom of exclusion. She had the pattern right. She found it in the only place her position allowed her to look.
Kahn is running the counter-reformation, and he is well cast for it, because he was never an insurgent. Joseph Kahn (b. 1964) is institutional to the bone: son of Leo Kahn (1916-2011), the Purity Supreme and Staples co-founder, Harvard twice over, Dallas Morning News, Wall Street Journal China correspondent, two Pulitzers, then the long climb up the Times masthead to the top job in June 2022. The webzine generation stormed the citadel; Kahn was born in it, left to win his spurs abroad, and came home to run it. That biography shapes the strategy.
His navigation has four parts.
The first is doctrine. From the start he named maintaining editorial independence in an age of polarization as his priority, and he has repeated it in every venue since, including his Princeton appearance this April, where the talk centered on the Times as an independent entity under pressure. The crucial statement came in his May 2024 interview with Ben Smith (b. 1976) at Semafor, where he refused, on the record, the demand that the Times become an instrument of the anti-Trump resistance, arguing that a newspaper that campaigns is a newspaper that forfeits its claim on the persuadable. The left raged; he did not retract. In the terms of the essay, Kahn chose standards over enemies and said so aloud, which is the one thing the insurgent cohort cannot do. He is the institution announcing that it knows it is the institution.
The second is discipline. When contributors and staff organized the open letter against the paper’s trans coverage in February 2023, coordinated with an activist organization, Kahn and Kathleen Kingsbury answered with a memo that rebuked the signatories, defended the reporters by name, and declared that participation in campaigns against colleagues breached policy. Nobody was thrown to the crowd. The coverage continued. That single episode marked the regime change: in 2020 the staff revolt cost an editor his job; in 2023 it cost the revolters a scolding. He has since tightened social media guidelines, pruned the Slack culture, and made plain that the newsroom is not a movement space. The insurgency inside the building met, for the first time, management that declined to negotiate with it.
The third is leverage he did not create but uses. The staff revolts of 2020 ran on a seller’s market; a Times journalist could threaten to walk because BuzzFeed News, Vice, and the venture-funded digital sector were hiring. That sector is dead. The Times stands nearly alone as a place that pays journalists well and securely, which transfers power from staff to masthead with every passing layoff elsewhere. Kahn’s discipline works partly because exit options collapsed. The movement lost its strike fund.
The fourth is the redirected emergency. Kahn faces a real external threat, a second Trump administration that subpoenas, sues, and restricts access, and he uses it shrewdly. Fighting subpoenas and refusing Pentagon credential conditions lets him unify the newsroom against an outside foe, satisfying the staff’s hunger for combat, while framing the fight as press freedom rather than partisan resistance. He gets the cohesion of the siege without conceding the resistance identity. The both-sides attacks help him too; he cites criticism from both the left and the right, including from inside his own newsroom, as evidence the paper sits where it should.
Beneath all of it lies a structural change that makes the doctrine affordable. The Goldberg-era business model monetized horror; the Kahn-era model monetizes the bundle. Games, Cooking, The Athletic, Wirecutter now drive subscription growth, which means the company no longer needs the emergency the way it did in 2017. Wordle subsidizes independence. Kahn can afford to disappoint the resistance reader because the resistance reader is no longer the marginal subscriber.
Two caveats. Kahn’s writ runs over the newsroom, not Opinion; Goldberg answers to Kingsbury and Sulzberger, so the columnist corps lives outside his reformation, and the paper speaks in two registers as a result. And Kahn is not a pure restorationist: as managing editor from 2016 he co-led the diversity plan and presided over the culture he now disciplines. Whether that sequence reflects conversion, or a careful man waiting for the publisher and the labor market to make discipline possible, his record does not say. The outcome is the same either way. The insurgents who won and could not say so now work for a man whose entire public posture consists of saying it for them.
David Zahniser (b. 1965) is an American journalist whose career has centered on the government of Los Angeles. As a City Hall correspondent for the Los Angeles Times since 2007, he has become an authority on municipal power in Southern California: campaign finance, ethics enforcement, land use, lobbying, labor influence, housing policy, and public corruption. While most political reporters of his generation moved toward national subjects, Zahniser built his career on mastery of a single institution. His reporting has shaped public understanding of how Los Angeles governs itself and how pvarious interests work to bend that process.
Zahniser graduated from Pomona College in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in history. Before journalism, he worked as a staff writer for a labor union. The job gave him an early education in organized labor, a force that remains central to Los Angeles politics. His later reporting shows a rare familiarity with the relationships among unions, elected officials, developers, business groups, and community activists that drive local policymaking.
He came up through the local newspaper world of Southern California, a training ground that exposed him to the practical workings of government at street level. His stops included the Claremont Courier, the Pasadena Star-News, the Daily Breeze, the Santa Monica Daily Press, L.A. Weekly, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Covering city councils, redevelopment agencies, planning commissions, neighborhood disputes, and local elections gave him a granular understanding of the institutions that became his life’s subject.
His years at L.A. Weekly shaped his investigative method. The alternative weekly still ranked among the city’s influential journalistic institutions, and Zahniser produced reported examinations of redevelopment projects, city politics, and the administration of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (b. 1953). The work deepened his interest in the intersection of government power, economic development, and political influence.
In 2007, Zahniser joined the Los Angeles Times and became a principal City Hall correspondent. His beat extends past electoral politics. He works through the technical material of municipal governance: environmental impact reports, ethics filings, campaign finance disclosures, planning documents, court records, grand jury indictments, and public records requests. His stories tend to examine the systems through which power operates rather than the personalities who hold office for a term or two.
Where many political journalists trade on insider access, Zahniser practices a document-driven method. His stories grow out of long analysis of public records, financial disclosures, and bureaucratic paperwork. Colleagues describe his ability to find significant patterns inside dense technical documents. The method suits land-use fights, development battles, ethics controversies, and corruption investigations, where the paper trail tells the story that sources will not.
A defining achievement came with the Times investigation “Big Money, Unlikely Donors.” Working with Emily Alpert Reyes, Joe Fox, and Len De Groot, Zahniser helped uncover suspicious campaign contributions tied to major development projects. The investigation showed how political money moved through networks of donors whose financial participation made little sense given their economic circumstances. The project exposed weaknesses in campaign finance oversight and showed how far developers and political operatives could reach into local government. In 2017, the team won the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting, a major honor in business and investigative journalism.
Through the late 2010s and early 2020s, Zahniser led coverage of the federal corruption investigations that engulfed City Hall. His reporting documented allegations against developers, lobbyists, elected officials, and city staff, and explained how land-use approvals became vehicles for bribery and influence-peddling. The investigations produced criminal prosecutions and convictions, reshaped public perception of City Hall, and fed calls for structural reform.
Another major chapter opened in 2022 with the release of secret recordings of conversations among senior Los Angeles political figures. Public attention fixed on the racist remarks captured on tape. Zahniser’s reporting pressed on the larger significance of the conversation. He explained the technical process of City Council redistricting and showed how elected officials shape district boundaries to preserve power, secure economic assets, and apportion representation among communities. The scandal produced a political crisis with few modern parallels in the city. The fallout brought the resignation of Council President Nury Martinez (b. 1973) and pressure on council members Kevin de León (b. 1966) and Gil Cedillo (b. 1954). Zahniser belonged to the Times team, with Dakota Smith, Julia Wick, Benjamin Oreskes, and others, whose coverage won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.
Development and urban growth sit at the center of his work. Los Angeles is a city where zoning decisions, transit projects, housing proposals, and redevelopment plans carry enormous economic consequences. Zahniser has shown again and again how an obscure planning decision can reshape a neighborhood, redraw political alliances, and generate large private fortunes. His reporting connects technical planning procedure to the broader questions of affordability, inequality, homelessness, and growth that define the city’s politics.
His institutional memory distinguishes his journalism. His stories place current controversies in historical context, tracing present disputes to decisions made years or decades earlier. By connecting today’s conflicts to earlier policies and arrangements, he helps readers see that the city’s recurring problems grow from long-term structural choices rather than isolated events.
Beyond reporting, Zahniser served as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists during his time at the Times, supporting local journalism and professional standards.
He continues to cover City Hall as of 2026, a year of consequence for his beat. His recent reporting has examined Mayor Karen Bass (b. 1953) and her reelection campaign, her budget proposals, the performance of her signature homelessness program, and the challenge mounted against her by Councilmember Nithya Raman (b. 1981), a contest with the June 2, 2026 primary at its center. The work shows the same pattern as the rest of his career: sustained attention to one institution, grounded in documents, with the money and the land at the center of the story.
Zahniser belongs to a shrinking tradition of metropolitan beat reporters who spend decades on a single institution. While colleagues moved between beats or sought national prominence, he stayed with Los Angeles City Hall and accumulated procedural and historical expertise that few reporters can match. His career demonstrates the continuing value of local accountability journalism and of sustained attention to the hidden workings of government. Through investigations into campaign finance, corruption, ethics enforcement, and development politics, he stands as a major chronicler of political power in modern Los Angeles.
The Back Region: David Zahniser Through Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) divided social life into regions. The front region is where the performance happens, where a team of performers sustains a definition of the situation before an audience. The back region is where the team retires, drops the performance, rehearses the next one, and says what it thinks. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman argued that neither region holds the true self. Both are staged. The backstage has its own conventions, its own etiquette, its own required behavior. Chief among those conventions is what he called the treatment of the absent: performers backstage mock the audience they flatter out front. The waiter ridicules the diners in the kitchen. The doctor jokes about the patient in the corridor. The derogation is not a slip. It is how teams bind themselves.
Los Angeles City Hall runs on this division. The council meeting is the front region. The public comment period, the ceremonial presentations, the unanimous votes, the language of community and equity, all of it sustains a performance of open deliberation. The audience is asked to believe that decisions happen in the chamber. They do not. They happen in the back region, in offices and restaurants and union halls, among performers who trust one another to keep the regions sealed. The vote on the floor ratifies a settlement reached out of sight. Everyone inside the building knows this. The performance requires that the audience not see it demonstrated.
In October 2022, the regions collapsed. A recording surfaced of a 2021 conversation among Council President Nury Martinez, council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and labor leader Ron Herrera, taped in the offices of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The four were a team in Goffman’s strict sense: performers cooperating to stage a single routine, in this case the routine of redistricting as a neutral, community-minded process. On the tape they talk the way teams talk backstage. They are crude about colleagues. They are racist about a colleague’s child, about Oaxacans, about Blacks and renters and anyone outside the coalition. And they are technical. They sort the city’s assets, the airport, USC, the Expo line, the shopping districts, and discuss which member’s district should hold them and which members can be weakened by losing them.
The public reaction treated the tape as an unmasking. The real Martinez had been exposed; the front-stage Martinez had been a fraud. Goffman would resist that reading. The backstage talk was not more real than the floor speeches. It was a different performance for a different audience, the audience of the team. The contempt on the tape follows the script Goffman wrote in 1956: teams consolidate themselves by degrading the absent audience, and the uglier the degradation, the tighter the bond it builds. What the tape revealed was not the secret character of four individuals. It revealed that the staging of Los Angeles government requires a back region, and it showed what the work done there sounds like.
This is where David Zahniser earned his Pulitzer. Most coverage stayed with the slurs, which is to say it stayed with the unmasking story, the front-stage scandal of bad people caught. Zahniser did something else. He explained what the four were doing. His reporting walked readers through redistricting, the once-a-decade redrawing of council boundaries, and showed why the conversation happened at all: district lines decide which member controls which economic assets, which donor bases, which voting blocs. He translated the backstage talk. The slurs were the team’s bonding ritual. The asset map was the team’s business. Zahniser’s coverage kept the business in view when the city wanted to talk only about the ritual.
He could do this because his entire method is a back-region operation. Consider what a document is, in Goffman’s terms. An environmental impact report, an ethics filing, a campaign finance disclosure, a grand jury indictment: these are texts an institution produces for a restricted audience, regulators, courts, its own files. They are written with a different audience consciousness than the press release. They sit closer to the back region than anything an official will say into a microphone. The institution speaking to itself, or to a bureaucratic audience it considers captive, lets things show that the front-stage performance conceals. Zahniser’s career is built on reading at that seam. The “Big Money, Unlikely Donors” investigation found, in disclosure filings, donors whose contributions made no sense given their incomes. The front-stage story said citizens supporting candidates. The filings, read closely, showed a back-region arrangement: money routed through names. The documents did not mean to confess. Documents never do. But they are produced with the audience’s gaze pointed elsewhere, and that lowers the staging discipline.
Goffman catalogued the discrepant roles, the people who move between regions without belonging to the team. The spotter checks up on performers from inside the audience. The shopper enters the establishment as a customer and reports to a rival. The beat reporter is a discrepant role Goffman did not name but would recognize. After thirty years in one building, Zahniser holds backstage knowledge without team membership. He knows the rehearsals, the props, the staging history. He sits in the chamber as what Goffman called a non-person, present and discounted, like the waiter at the dinner party, until the moment his story runs and the discounting ends. The team cannot expel him and cannot recruit him. The access journalist resolves this tension by joining the team in practice, trading staging secrets for backstage invitations, and his reporting becomes part of the performance. Zahniser refused the trade. The documents made the refusal affordable. A reporter who can read the filings does not need the invitation.
His institutional memory works the same seam. Goffman noted that a performance is vulnerable to anyone who saw the earlier shows, because the team revises its routine and counts on the audience forgetting. The council member who champions a project in 2026 voted to kill its predecessor in 2014, and the front-stage performance depends on no one recalling the older staging. Zahniser recalls it. Three decades of watching one theater turns every new performance into a text read against its drafts.
The tape changed the theater. After 2022, every performer in City Hall assumes the back region is wired. Goffman wrote that teams require a place where the performance can drop; staging is exhausting, and the backstage is where performers recover and prepare. Strip that away and the performer adopts front-stage discipline everywhere, which does not end backstage dealing. It pushes the dealing into thinner channels, the walk without phones, the conversation that leaves no record. The paradox for journalism is sharp. The leak that produced the city’s greatest backstage exposure has made the next one harder. What remains, when the talk goes dark, is paper. Institutions cannot run on unrecorded conversation. The approvals must be filed, the money must be disclosed, the maps must be published. The back region leaves residue, and the residue is the public record.
That is the wager of Zahniser’s career, made decades before the tape vindicated it. The tape was a windfall, one night of the back region broadcast whole. The documents are the daily discipline, the back region recovered in fragments, filing by filing. Goffman taught that the front-stage performance is not a lie laid over a truth; it is one staging among others, and the work of understanding an institution is the work of moving between its regions. Zahniser does that work for one building in one city. The council votes in public. He reads what it wrote when it thought no one was watching.
What Dies With Him: David Zahniser Through Stephen P. Turner on Tacit Knowledge
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career dismantling a comfortable idea: that tacit knowledge is a shared substance, a collective possession that groups hold and pass down. In The Social Theory of Practices and Understanding the Tacit, he argued that nothing of the kind exists. There is no group mind, no practice-stuff transmitted from one generation to the next. Tacit knowledge is individual. Each person builds his own through his own history of exposure, trial, error, and feedback. Two craftsmen in the same shop hold similar skills because similar conditions trained them, the way two trees on the same hillside lean the same way. Nothing passed between them. When we say a skill was handed down, Turner says, we describe an arrangement of conditions under which a learner built the skill again, for himself, from scratch. And when the conditions disappear, the skill stops getting rebuilt. It dies with the last man who holds it.
David Zahniser holds a skill of this kind. Call it the ability to read Los Angeles City Hall. He can look at a campaign finance disclosure and see that something is wrong with it before he can say what. He knows which ethics filing is anomalous, which environmental impact report buries its finding, which donor name does not belong on the list. The “Big Money, Unlikely Donors” investigation began in that kind of recognition: contributions from people whose circumstances made the giving implausible. A janitor does not give the maximum to a council race. A retiree on a fixed income does not fund a land-use fight. The filings were public. Anyone could read them. Almost no one could see them.
Turner explains why. The recognition is not a method that could be written down and handed to a younger reporter. It is the residue of a particular path: a job writing for a labor union in the late 1980s, then the Claremont Courier, the Pasadena Star-News, the Daily Breeze, the Santa Monica Daily Press, the L.A. Weekly, the San Diego Union-Tribune, then nineteen years at the Times reading thousands of filings against the stories they did or did not yield. Every story that panned out tuned the recognition. Every tip that collapsed tuned it too. The training set was decades of paper checked against decades of outcomes. A manual could list red flags, and the list would be nearly useless, because the flags are not the knowledge. The knowledge is the weighting, the feel for which flag counts in which context, and the weighting lives below articulation. Zahniser could not fully explain his own judgment if he tried. On Turner’s account, no expert can.
This is the standard story of craft expertise, and if the frame stopped there it would yield a tribute. It cuts deeper, because the corruption Zahniser covers runs on the same kind of knowledge.
Consider what a fixer in Los Angeles development knows. He knows which council office is open for business and which is not. He knows how an ask gets phrased so that it is understood and deniable at once. He knows what a contribution means, what a fundraiser hosted at the right moment means, what a consultant’s retainer buys, what the exchange rate is between a PLA commitment and a zoning variance. None of this is written anywhere. It cannot be written anywhere, because in this craft articulation is evidence. The federal prosecutions that swept City Hall in the late 2010s show the structure of the problem. Prosecutors could not build cases from documents alone, because the documents record everything except the understanding. They needed wiretaps, cooperators, men describing in their own words what the money meant. The quid pro quo lives in tacit understanding between parties who have learned, through their own histories of deals offered and honored, what signals what. The fixer’s knowledge was built the way Zahniser’s was built: years inside one system, with feedback.
So the document reporter and the corrupt fixer are rivals in the same craft. Both are experts in the unwritten layer of City Hall. Both know that the official record is a surface and that the action sits beneath it. The fixer’s work is to keep the action below the paper line. Zahniser’s work is to find the places where it broke the surface, the donor who should not be on the list, the approval that moved too fast, the variance that contradicts the file. Each man’s skill defines the other’s problem. The fixer who understands what a reporter can see learns to leave less. The reporter who understands what a fixer must do learns where the residue collects. Neither can fully explain his own craft, and each spends his working life modeling the other’s.
Turner’s frame also explains what Zahniser’s stories can and cannot give the reader. A story articulates a finding: this donor is connected to this developer, this approval followed this money. What it cannot transfer is the judgment that produced the finding. The reader receives outputs of a pattern recognition he cannot audit. He cannot rerun Zahniser’s thirty years and check the weighting. He can only watch the findings hold up over time, story after story, and extend trust on the record. Turner argued that this is the general condition of expertise in public life: the expert cannot show his work in any complete sense, because the work is partly sub-articulate, and so the public’s relation to expertise is always a relation of trust built on track record rather than inspection. Zahniser’s track record is long enough that the trust functions. A new reporter’s would not, even with identical talent, because the talent is not the knowledge.
Now the succession question. On Turner’s account, tacit knowledge survives only where the conditions for rebuilding it survive. The conditions in this case are plain: a stable beat, held for decades, at an institution willing to pay a senior salary for one building, with enough publication and feedback density that a learner’s recognition gets tuned. Those conditions existed at the metropolitan papers of the late twentieth century. They produced Zahniser. They no longer exist. The Times has shrunk through round after round of cuts. Young reporters cycle through beats in two or three years, which is enough time to learn the org chart and not enough to learn the building. No one now entering journalism will read filings against outcomes for thirty years, because no employer will fund the apprenticeship. The conditions are gone, so the skill will not be rebuilt. When Zahniser retires, the knowledge does not transfer to a successor or to an archive. It stops.
The other side of the rivalry faces no such problem. The fixer’s apprenticeship is funded by the development economy, which is not shrinking. Lobbying firms are stable institutions with senior partners and junior associates and decades of client continuity. The conditions for rebuilding that craft persist in every cycle, because the money that pays for it persists. So the two rival bodies of tacit knowledge, the reading of City Hall and the working of City Hall, are on different reproduction schedules. One side’s apprenticeship system collapsed with the newspaper business. The other side’s never depended on it.
Turner offers no comfort here. His whole argument is that knowledge of this kind cannot be preserved by writing it down, digitizing it, or storing it in an institution. The Times can keep Zahniser’s archive forever. The archive holds his findings. It does not hold him. A future reader of the archive will know what Zahniser saw and will not acquire the seeing. The city will still produce filings, and the filings will still carry their anomalies, and for a while there was a man who could look at the page and feel which number was wrong. The page will outlast the feeling.
The Voice
Zahniser writes flat on purpose. Subject, verb, object, attribution. The metro style of the late twentieth century, kept alive past its era. He puts numbers high because numbers carry his stories: “Under L.A. mayor’s $300-million homeless program, 40% have returned to the street”. The dollar figure and the percentage do all the work. No adjective in that headline could add anything, and he knows it, so there is no adjective.
His signature device is deadpan juxtaposition. He sets two facts side by side and lets the collision happen in the reader’s head: “Bass helped Raman win reelection. Now Raman wants to unseat her.” Or “In L.A. mayor’s race, everyone is campaigning on change — even the incumbent.” The irony lives in the arrangement. He never points at it. This is the rhetoric of a man who has decided that commentary is a tax on credibility and that sequencing is free. A columnist would write “the hypocrisy is striking.” Zahniser writes the two sentences and walks away.
He uses the human anchor sparingly and as evidence rather than decoration. The Inside Safe story opens: “It was a risky move and Jonathan Torres knew it, but he did it anyway. He let an out-of-town guest stay with him in his room.” One man, one rule, one consequence, then the lens widens to the $300 million program. The scene exists to prove the policy finding, then gets out of the way. Wikipedia
His third tool is procedural translation. Redistricting, CEQA, ethics rules, the city’s contracting maze: he renders them in plain words with short defining clauses, assuming no knowledge and condescending to no one. This was the heart of his tapes coverage. While others wrote about slurs, he explained what an asset map is and why a council member wants the airport in his district. The explainer instinct is constant. He dates everything, “the third such case in a decade,” because his institutional memory is itself a rhetorical instrument: it tells the reader this event has a lineage, and the official calling it unprecedented is wrong.
Quotes do his characterization. He picks the quote where the official reveals himself and prints it without comment. The restraint reads as fairness and functions as a blade.
The wit he keeps out of news copy leaks into his Twitter presence, where his bio reads “Ex-L.A. Weekly, Ex-Daily Breeze, ex cetera”, a pun he has kept for years. During the tapes chaos he posted footage captioned “Inside the council chamber”, three words over pandemonium, maximal understatement. His “Inbox:” tweets present an artifact, a union statement, a city memo, with no framing at all. The deadpan is the same on every platform; only the dose changes.
He turns up on KCRW, on the Times podcast, on local radio panels, and the pattern in those appearances matches the prose: even pace, low affect, no performance. He answers in the order he writes, fact first, then attribution, then context. He hedges with care, “what we know” and “what we don’t know yet” as distinct categories. He supplies the procedural tutorial unprompted because he knows the host will not ask for it. When pushed to predict or to assign motive, he declines and redirects to the record. The dry humor surfaces a little more in audio than in print, but it stays under the line. He has none of the broadcast reporter’s punch or the pundit’s certainty. He sounds like a man reading from notes he trusts.
The whole package is a rhetoric of withheld judgment. The flatness is not an absence of style. It is the style, and it makes a claim: the documents speak, I arrange them, you conclude. Thirty years of arrangement, and the conclusions have a way of arriving where he put them.
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James O’Keefe (b. 1984) is an American undercover investigator, media entrepreneur, author, and political activist who turned hidden-camera operations into a durable institution of conservative media. Over two decades he built, lost, and rebuilt organizations devoted to a single proposition: that institutions say one thing in public and another in private, and that the gap between the two constitutes news. Admirers place him in the muckraking tradition of Nellie Bly (1864-1922) and Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Critics describe him as a partisan operative whose deceptions and editing choices corrupt the record he claims to expose.
O’Keefe was born on June 28, 1984, in Bergen County, New Jersey, and raised in a Catholic home in suburban Westwood. His father worked in construction; his mother practiced physical therapy. He attended Rutgers University, where he studied philosophy and edited a conservative student publication. His instinct for political theater showed early. As an undergraduate he campaigned to remove Lucky Charms cereal from Rutgers dining halls on the grounds that the leprechaun mascot demeaned Irish Americans. The stunt parodied campus identity politics rather than advancing a grievance, and it previewed the method that defined his career: occupy the language of an institution, push it to absurdity, and record what happens.
Two relationships shaped his formation. The first ran through the Leadership Institute, the conservative training organization founded by Morton Blackwell (b. 1939), which schooled young activists in the mechanics of messaging, organization, and confrontation. O’Keefe worked there after college and absorbed its emphasis on practical technique over theory. The second relationship was with Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012), the conservative media entrepreneur who saw in O’Keefe a weapon against the legacy press. Breitbart supplied the distribution platform that turned O’Keefe’s early operations into national events.
His apprenticeship in undercover work came through the anti-abortion movement. In 2008 he collaborated with activist Lila Rose (b. 1988) on recordings of Planned Parenthood employees made while the pair posed as people seeking help for a pregnant minor. The operation circulated widely in conservative media and established the template he would repeat for the next two decades: a false identity, a hidden camera, a private conversation, and a public release timed for maximum effect.
The ACORN investigation of 2009 made him famous. Working with Hannah Giles, O’Keefe recorded employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now appearing to offer tax, housing, and legal advice to visitors presenting themselves as a prostitute and her companion. Breitbart’s site BigGovernment.com published the videos in sequence, and the rollout overwhelmed ACORN’s capacity to respond. Congress voted to cut the organization’s federal funding. Donors fled, affiliates collapsed, and ACORN dissolved within a year. The episode demonstrated that a twenty-five-year-old with a camera and a distribution partner could destroy a national organization that had operated for four decades.
ACORN also fixed the pattern of dispute that followed every subsequent operation. Supporters argued the videos showed real misconduct that established media had no interest in finding. Critics argued the footage was edited to mislead, and several official reviews, including one by the California Attorney General, found that the published videos omitted context and that no criminal conduct by ACORN employees was established, even as some reviews faulted individual employees’ judgment. The argument over ACORN never resolved. It became the standing argument over O’Keefe himself.
He founded Project Veritas in 2010 to institutionalize the method. The organization fused functions that conventional journalism keeps separate: investigation, advocacy, fundraising, and viral distribution operated as a single system. The nonprofit form gave it donor money and tax advantages; the activist culture gave it speed and aggression that no newsroom could match.
The same year brought the episode that most damaged his standing with journalists. O’Keefe and three associates entered the New Orleans federal building housing the office of Senator Mary Landrieu (b. 1955) while posing as telephone repairmen. Prosecutors initially weighed felony charges; O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of entering federal property under false pretenses and received probation. Mainstream outlets treated the conviction as disqualifying. His supporters treated it as proof the government feared him. Both readings hardened.
Project Veritas proved ACORN was no fluke. In 2011 its operatives, posing as representatives of a Muslim organization, recorded NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller disparaging the Tea Party movement. The release triggered a crisis at NPR that contributed to the resignation of its chief executive, Vivian Schiller (b. 1961), no relation to Ron. The operation showed that the method scaled upward: a prestige institution proved as vulnerable as a community-organizing group.
Through the 2010s the organization ran operations against labor unions, technology companies, television networks, government agencies, political campaigns, and schools. Its findings circulated through conservative television and radio, and Republican lawmakers cited them in hearings. Fact-checkers and press critics answered each release with challenges to its editing and framing. The cycle became ritual: release, amplification, rebuttal, fundraising appeal.
Not every operation worked. In 2017 a Project Veritas operative approached The Washington Post claiming that Senate candidate Roy Moore (b. 1947) had impregnated her as a teenager. The Post investigated the accuser instead of publishing the accusation, traced her to Project Veritas, and published a reconstruction of the attempted sting. The episode reversed the usual roles. A target had caught the hunter, and it did so by practicing the verification O’Keefe’s critics accused him of skipping.
Legal trouble recurred. In 2013 O’Keefe paid $100,000 to settle a suit by Juan Carlos Vera, a former ACORN employee who argued the recordings violated California law. In 2022 a federal jury ordered Project Veritas to pay about $1.2 million to Democracy Partners, a Democratic consulting firm an operative had infiltrated under a false identity. The verdicts established financial costs for the method without deterring its use.
O’Keefe wrote three books across this period: Breakthrough (2013), American Pravda (2018), and >American Muckraker (2022). The books mix memoir, manifesto, and self-defense. Their consistent claim places hidden-camera work in the lineage of American undercover reporting, from Bly’s asylum exposé forward, and argues that the press abandoned the tradition out of class loyalty to the institutions it covers.
The most consequential episode of his later Project Veritas years concerned the diary of Ashley Biden (b. 1981), daughter of Joe Biden (b. 1942). Project Veritas acquired the diary in 2020 after its theft from a Florida residence and chose against publishing it, citing authentication and privacy concerns. Federal prosecutors investigated the interstate transport of stolen property, and in November 2021 agents executed search warrants on homes of O’Keefe and his colleagues. The raids ignited a debate over press freedom that crossed ideological lines; even outlets hostile to O’Keefe questioned whether the government could treat a self-described news organization’s editorial materials as ordinary evidence. Courts appointed a special master to screen the seized devices. Two individuals who sold the diary pleaded guilty; neither O’Keefe nor Project Veritas was charged.
By the early 2020s the organization he founded had grown into a multimillion-dollar institution with a board, a large staff, and donors who expected governance. In February 2023 the board removed him. A staff memo accused him of abusive management, micromanagement, and spending irregularities, including the use of organizational funds for personal expenses. O’Keefe denied the charges and argued that the board acted under pressure from interests his investigations threatened, pointing to the timing after a release targeting Pfizer. Project Veritas later sued him, alleging he prepared a competing venture on its time and resources. The organization declined after his departure, suspending operations and shedding staff, which strengthened the argument that it had never been anything other than its founder.
Within weeks of his removal he launched O’Keefe Media Group, known as OMG. The new organization abandoned the nonprofit form for a subscription and direct-support model and built its strategy on decentralization. Where Project Veritas concentrated investigative capacity in a staff, OMG sought to distribute it across a network of citizen journalists equipped with cameras and training. The O’Keefe Academy formalized the instruction. The vision treated investigative journalism as a practice to be multiplied rather than an institution to be staffed.
OMG resumed the familiar operations. Targets included technology employees, federal officials, and corporate executives, with several stings built on dating-app encounters that yielded candid talk from government staffers, a series promoted under the name “Dating the Deep State.” A 2024 recording of a Washington Commanders executive disparaging the team’s owners, players, and fans drew national coverage and cost the executive his job. The same year O’Keefe released Line in the Sand, a documentary on the United States-Mexico border distributed through the platform of Tucker Carlson (b. 1969). OMG also recruited poll watchers and election observers, extending his long interest in election procedures into field organization.
The pattern has continued into the mid-2020s. A 2025 hidden-camera recording of a Fox Weather executive boasting of misusing company funds led to his firing. In early 2026 OMG ran an undercover series in Los Angeles documenting petition circulators paying homeless people on Skid Row for ballot-petition signatures and voter registrations, including footage of payments and of circulators directing signers to use the names of registered voters. O’Keefe and his crew reported being assaulted while confronting the circulators on camera. The series brought police attention and renewed argument over whether his releases produce prosecutions or only spectacle. In the same period he fought a personal legal dispute with a former associate that briefly cost him his firearms under a restraining order a judge later lifted, and in May 2026 OMG won a federal court ruling it characterized as a significant victory. He also launched an interview program, “My Price Is My Life,” featuring dissidents and controversial figures, a format that moves him toward conventional media work even as the undercover operations continue.
O’Keefe’s significance lies in the model. He emerged as trust in established institutions collapsed and demonstrated that a small team with cameras, a donor list, and social-media distribution could set the national agenda without access, credentials, or institutional permission. His methods descend from the undercover reporting of the Progressive Era; his distribution strategy descends from Breitbart’s digital populism. The fusion of the two, funded by the audience, was his invention, and activists across the political spectrum have copied it.
The argument over his legacy reduces to a dispute about deception. O’Keefe holds that lying to institutions reveals truth about them, that the candid private statement outranks the official public one, and that a journalism establishment that once celebrated Bly’s feigned madness forfeits standing to condemn his feigned identities. His critics hold that his deceptions extend past the targets to the audience, through editing that arranges authentic footage into inauthentic stories, and that his measure of success is political damage rather than accuracy. Two decades of operations have given both sides their evidence. Careers have ended, organizations have dissolved, juries have awarded damages, prosecutors have investigated, and the cameras keep rolling. Whatever the verdict, the boundary between reporting and political combat sits where it does in American media partly because James O’Keefe spent twenty years moving it.
Alliance Theory holds that political belief systems have no moral thread running through them. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton argue that beliefs derive from alliance structures, that moral principles serve the strategic function of mobilizing support for allies and opposition to rivals, and that the inconsistencies in every political camp follow from the heterogeneity of its coalition rather than from hypocrisy in any personal sense. Moral principles are not so principled. Core values are not so core. Apply this to James O’Keefe and something strange happens. The theory explains his career, his target list, his audience, his firing, and his durability. It also reveals him as a practitioner of the theory, applied with a one-sided discipline the theory predicts.
Start with the product. O’Keefe sells documented hypocrisy. Every operation follows the same arc: an institution states its principles in public, an employee flouts them in private, the camera catches the gap. The ACORN videos showed a community organization appearing to assist a criminal enterprise. The NPR sting showed a fundraiser for a neutrality-professing network disparaging the Tea Party. The Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson recordings showed health officials talking about their products in ways their press offices never permit. Alliance Theory says this gap exists everywhere and must exist everywhere, because belief systems are patchwork narratives stitched together to serve coalitions, and no one can perform the patchwork without seams. O’Keefe mines a renewable resource. He will never run out of material because the supply of inconsistency is structural. The theory explains why two decades of stings keep producing footage: institutions generate the gap between stated principle and alliance function as a byproduct of normal operation, the way engines generate heat.
But the theory cuts against his interpretation of the footage. O’Keefe holds that the private statement reveals the institution’s true character and the public statement conceals it. Alliance Theory denies that any true character sits beneath the inconsistency. There are only alliances, and statements tuned to audiences. Consider what a sting does in Pinsof’s terms. The operative fakes the cues of alliance membership: similarity tags, shared rivals, the markers that trigger alliance detection. The fake Muslim donor group presented NPR’s fundraiser with what looked like a wealthy ally who despised the Tea Party. Ron Schiller then did what alliance psychology directs a man to do in the presence of a perceived ally: he signaled loyalty by derogating the shared rival. The dating-app operations run the same play in miniature. A government employee believes he sits across from a sympathetic woman and produces the candor that performs trustworthiness in courtship. The hidden camera records alliance signaling calibrated to the wrong audience. O’Keefe then releases the footage to the public, where the same words function as betrayal. His method does not strip propaganda away to expose truth. It captures one propagandistic register and broadcasts it to an audience for whom a different register was prepared. The private statement is no less strategic than the public one. It is strategy aimed at a smaller room.
This reading does not acquit his targets. It says the confession O’Keefe claims to extract is a performance, and the institution’s public statement is also a performance, and the question of which one is “true” dissolves. What remains is the alliance structure, visible in both registers.
The target list confirms the frame. Pinsof’s figure of the American alliance structure places journalists, scientists, universities, Google, Hollywood, and federal agencies on the liberal side of the super-alliance divide. O’Keefe’s career reads as a tour of that column: ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NPR, CNN, The Washington Post, teachers’ unions, Big Tech, the FBI, Pfizer, the Department of the Army’s bureaucrats, Los Angeles housing officials, California voter-registration NGOs. A theory of journalism cannot predict this list. A map of coalitions predicts it. His stated principle, that powerful institutions deserve undercover scrutiny, would, if applied transitively, produce stings on megachurches, gun manufacturers, oil companies, and conservative media empires. It does not. The principle is the moral package. The alliance is the function. The exceptions prove the structure rather than the principle: when OMG recorded a Trump domestic-policy aide in 2026, the operation served the populist core against the administrative class, the same rival his audience has always held, now staffed by nominal co-partisans. The alliance line runs around the MAGA coalition, and “the Deep State” names whatever sits outside it, whichever party signs its paychecks.
The propagandistic biases sort the combatants on both sides. His audience applies victim biases to O’Keefe. The Landrieu conviction becomes political persecution. The FBI raids over the Ashley Biden diary become proof the regime fears him. The 2023 board coup becomes a deep-state decapitation. The restraining order and the firearms seizure in 2026 become harassment. Each setback gets recoded as grievance, the perpetrator’s responsibility maximized, the mitigating circumstances denied, the harm embellished, exactly the bias package Pinsof describes for allies under attack. The same audience applies perpetrator biases to his conduct: the false identities become tradecraft, the misleading edits become editing, the federal misdemeanor becomes a technicality. None of this requires bad faith. Motivated reasoning, in the paper’s sharpest line, operates as an honest signal of loyalty. A subscriber who accepted a fact-check from The Washington Post would be defecting, and his fellow partisans would read the defection correctly.
The symmetry holds on the other side. The journalism establishment condemns O’Keefe’s deceptions as disqualifying while celebrating the lineage of Nellie Bly, the Mirage Tavern, and the Mother Jones private-prison infiltration. Undercover deception by coalition members serves truth; undercover deception by a rival serves propaganda. When the Post unmasked the Roy Moore operative in 2017, the press treated the episode as verification triumphant, and it was, but the same institutions extend no equivalent credit when O’Keefe’s footage proves accurate and an executive resigns. Fact-checkers police his edits with a rigor they do not apply to sympathetic documentary makers. The guild’s claim that he is not a journalist functions as boundary enforcement by a coalition defending its credential, and Pinsof would note that the boundary moved when the FBI raided him: portions of the press defended his materials against seizure, because the category “journalist” shelters their own coalition’s privileges, and a precedent against him endangered allies. They defended the category, not the man.
Interdependence explains the business model. Project Veritas ran on donors; OMG runs on subscribers. Both arrangements bind O’Keefe to his coalition through reliable mutual benefit: he supplies ammunition against shared rivals, they supply income and acclaim. The model contains a discipline no editor could impose. A sting against a conservative institution would rupture interdependence, confuse the similarity tags, and read as betrayal under the transitivity rule, since attacking his audience’s allies makes him the ally of their enemies. The target list is not a choice he revisits operation by operation. The coalition structure chose it for him, and his revenue enforces it.
The board coup of February 2023 plays as an alliance rupture with competitive victimhood on both sides. The staff memo claimed abuse, cruelty, and misappropriation: victim claims designed to mobilize the board and donors. O’Keefe answered with his own victim narrative, timed to the Pfizer release, claiming powerful interests had captured his creation. Both sides bid for the loyalty of the same third parties, the donors, in the pattern Pinsof describes for groups striving to establish that their side suffered the greater injustice. The donors split, the organization collapsed without its founder, and O’Keefe rebuilt his coalition under a new name within weeks. The speed of the rebuild measures how little of his support ever attached to the institution. The alliance was always with him.
O’Keefe’s operating premise and Alliance Theory’s thesis are the same claim. He has spent twenty years arguing that stated values are propaganda, that institutions profess principles to serve interests, that the moral package conceals the coalition function. American Pravda is folk Pinsof. The man built a career, two organizations, and an academy on the insight that moral principles are not so principled. The difference between O’Keefe and the theorists is scope. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton apply the insight symmetrically, to liberals and conservatives, masses and elites, and predict that all humans run the same alliance psychology because it ships with the species. O’Keefe applies it to rivals only. His camera finds the gap between principle and practice in NPR and never in his donor base, in the FBI and never in his own editing suite. An asymmetric application of a symmetric theory is the signature the theory predicts: he uses the insight propagandistically, as a weapon for his allies, which is what the insight says people do with insights. The exposer of alliance behavior turns out to be its most disciplined practitioner, and Alliance Theory, unlike his critics, does not even count this against him. It counts it as human.
A limit. Alliance Theory has nothing to say about whether any given O’Keefe video is accurate, whether his edits deceive, or whether ACORN deserved its death. Those are evidentiary questions the theory leaves to others. What it explains is why the answers never settle anything: because the verdict each viewer renders was determined by the alliance map before the footage played, and the footage, whatever it shows, gets metabolized as ammunition by one coalition and as libel by the other. O’Keefe understood that before the academics formalized it. He bet his career on it, and the bet keeps paying.
The Group Mind on Hidden Camera: James O’Keefe Through Stephen P. Turner
James O’Keefe runs his enterprise on a theory of knowledge he has never had to defend. The theory goes like this. Organizations contain a hidden layer of belief that everyone inside knows and no one says. Official statements conceal this layer. Candid private talk samples it. A hidden camera, pointed at one unguarded employee, therefore extracts the institution’s true character and forces the tacit into the explicit, where the public can finally see it. Every sting from ACORN to the dating-app operations depends on this chain of inference. The footage is the evidence; the theory is what makes the footage mean anything.
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) has spent four decades dismantling exactly this kind of theory. In The Social Theory of Practices, Brains/Practices/Relativism, and Understanding the Tacit, Turner attacks the idea that groups possess shared hidden objects: collective practices, common presuppositions, a stock of tacit knowledge held jointly by members. His argument turns on transmission. A hidden mental content cannot be copied from one mind to another, because what passes between people is only public performance: words, gestures, examples, corrections. Each learner watches the performances and constructs his own internal analogue through his own history of trial, feedback, and habituation. The analogues resemble one another enough to coordinate conduct, and the resemblance creates the illusion of a shared object behind them. But the object is a fiction. There is no group mind, no collective unconscious, no institutional soul. There are only individuals, each carrying tacit knowledge of his own manufacture, produced by his own path through the world.
Run O’Keefe’s method through this argument and the central inference of the sting collapses. Consider the operation that made the genre respectable to its audience: Ron Schiller at lunch, disparaging the Tea Party to men he believed represented a Muslim charity. O’Keefe’s framing held that the camera had caught NPR saying what NPR believed. Turner’s question is simple. What entity, exactly, did the believing? Schiller’s talk that day was the output of one man’s habituation: his years of donor lunches, his trained feel for what wealthy prospects want to hear, his individual read of that table on that afternoon. The performance reveals a great deal about Schiller, his formation, and the skills his job selected for. It reveals nothing about a shared hidden belief at NPR, because on Turner’s account no such object exists to be revealed. The inference from one tongue to the institution’s soul requires a folk Durkheimianism, the organization as a person with private convictions any member can confess. Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) at least argued for his collective consciousness. O’Keefe assumes his and points a camera at it.
The same goes for the phrase that carries the whole enterprise: what everyone inside knows and no one says. Turner treats “what everyone knows” as a manner of speaking that dissolves under pressure. Each insider knows his own version, built from his own exposures, and the versions converge only in their outward performances. The convergence has a real cause, and here the frame starts to give something back to O’Keefe rather than only taking away. Institutions hire particular kinds of people, train them through particular feedback, reward particular performances. These causal processes produce similar individual habits across a workforce, similar in the way that graduates of one drill sergeant march alike. So a sting can constitute evidence of something institutional, but the something is a pattern of convergent individual formation rather than a shared secret. The implication is methodological. One executive on camera is a sample of one habituation. Twenty-eight separate instances of cash changing hands for ballot signatures on Skid Row, recorded across multiple circulators, approaches evidence of a convergent practice, the kind of repetition from which an institutional pattern can be inferred without any appeal to a group mind. Turner’s frame does not condemn the hidden camera. It sets the sample size at which the camera’s findings begin to mean what O’Keefe says they mean, and most of his famous operations fall below it.
There is a second, stranger problem. O’Keefe claims to make the tacit explicit, and Turner’s account says this is the one thing a camera cannot do. Tacit knowledge, on Turner’s reading of the tradition that runs through Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), is what never makes it into words: the feel, the trained judgment, the embodied skill that lets a man perform without consulting rules. When Schiller speaks candidly, he does not read out hidden content. He produces more words, another explicit performance, this one tuned to a small room instead of a press release. The gap O’Keefe’s cameras document is a gap between two explicit registers, frontstage talk and backstage talk, and both registers ride on tacit skill that stays off camera: the fundraiser’s feel for flattery, the bureaucrat’s feel for what a date wants to hear, the petition circulator’s feel for which homeless man will sign. The sting captures the products of tacit knowledge and never the knowledge. The institution’s true operating layer, the trained judgment in ten thousand individual heads, remains exactly as inaccessible after the video drops as before. O’Keefe sells extraction of the tacit. What he delivers is a second transcript.
The journalism guild’s standing answer to O’Keefe is a normative claim: he is not a real journalist. In Explaining the Normative, Turner asks what such claims amount to, and his answer is corrosive. Normative assertions invoke a special realm of correctness, validity, and constitutive rules that supposedly stands apart from ordinary causal fact. Turner argues the realm is empty. When we explain why a performance counts as real journalism, everything we can point to is causal and local: who was trained in which newsroom, who answers to which editors, what habits of checking got drilled into whom, what sanctions follow which lapses. The “norms of journalism” add nothing to this inventory. They are a folk theory, what Turner calls a good Bad Theory, an idiom that feels explanatory while referring to nothing, sustained because it does rhetorical work its users could not do by stating the causal facts plainly.
This is why the credentialing fight against O’Keefe never lands a clean blow. The guild cannot state the rule that excludes him, because there is no rule. Its members acquired their sense of what real journalism is the way everyone acquires tacit competence, through individual apprenticeship, correction, and habituation, and a habituation can be possessed without being articulable. Asked to articulate it, they produce post hoc rationalizations that O’Keefe defeats one by one. Deception disqualifies him? Then it disqualifies Nellie Bly’s feigned madness and the Mirage Tavern. Editing for effect disqualifies him? Every documentary edits for effect. Political motive disqualifies him? The advocacy press keeps its credentials. Each stated criterion either excludes honored ancestors or admits him, and the guild retreats to the unstated remainder, which is where its real knowledge lives and where, by its nature, it cannot be exhibited. O’Keefe has built a career in this gap between what the profession knows tacitly and what it can say. He claims the muckraker lineage and dares the guild to produce the membership condition. Twenty years on, it has not, because on Turner’s account it cannot.
Turner offers the guild a way out that it will not take. Drop the normative idiom and describe the difference causally. The Washington Post’s unmasking of the Roy Moore operative in 2017 displayed what newsroom formation produces: reporters whose trained suspicion fired at a story that wanted too much to be believed, who checked the accuser before the accusation, whose habits of verification had been built through years of supervised failure. O’Keefe’s operatives lack that formation, and against it the Moore sting died. Stated this way, the contrast needs no constitutive norms. Different training histories produce different capacities; one capacity caught the other. This is a stronger indictment than “not a real journalist,” because it can be demonstrated rather than asserted. The guild prefers the normative version anyway, which is the persistence of a good Bad Theory in the wild: the moralized idiom feels weightier than the causal facts, even though the causal facts are all there is.
O’Keefe believes his method can be codified and scaled, a doctrine teachable to thousands of citizen journalists. Turner’s transmission problem says otherwise. What made O’Keefe effective was never the protocol; it was his individual tacit endowment, the nerve, the timing, the feel for a mark, grown through two decades of practice that began with a leprechaun at Rutgers. The Academy can transmit the explicit shell: equipment lists, legal guidance, scenario templates. Each student must then grow his own tacit analogue through his own failures, and most will not, because the formation took the founder twenty years and a temperament. The prediction is a citizen-journalist corps whose output varies wildly around a low mean, with occasional hits from the few students who put in the habituation, a prediction the early OMG record already tracks. Decentralized journalism inherits the same constraint as every apprenticeship: the master can show, but he cannot transmit, and showing only starts the student’s own slow construction.
O’Keefe needs a collective object Turner denies: the group mind whose confession one camera can capture, since without it a sting is a sample of one habituation and the genre loses its inferential force. The guild needs a normative object Turner denies: the constitutive rule of real journalism, since without it the boundary fight reduces to a comparison of training regimes that O’Keefe might survive. Each side wages the war with a fiction, and the fictions are load-bearing. Strip them away, as Turner would, and what remains is a set of plain causal questions. What formations produce what habits of talk. What sample of recorded performances licenses what inference about an institution. What training builds verification and what training builds nerve. Neither combatant wants the war on those terms, because the fictions fight better than the facts. That preference, for idioms that feel explanatory over descriptions that are, may be the most institutional thing the hidden cameras have ever caught.
The Emotional Energy Machine: James O’Keefe Through Randall Collins
Randall Collins (b. 1941) built his sociology on a small unit: the situation. In Interaction Ritual Chains, every successful encounter requires the same ingredients. Bodies assembled, a barrier against outsiders, a mutual focus of attention, a shared mood. When the ingredients combine, the participants entrain on one another, rhythm answering rhythm, and the encounter pays out its products: solidarity, symbols charged with group membership, standards of right conduct, and the master commodity Collins calls emotional energy, the confidence and enthusiasm that individuals carry away and spend in their next encounter. People chain these situations together across a lifetime, seeking the encounters that pump energy and avoiding the ones that drain it. Beliefs, loyalties, and moralities ride along on the chain. The theory has an unsettling implication: people do not assemble because they believe; they believe because they assemble.
Run James O’Keefe through this apparatus and his entire operation resolves into ritual engineering, link by link.
Start with the sting, which Collins exposes as a manufactured interaction ritual with one counterfeit participant. The operative supplies every ingredient. Co-presence: a lunch table, a bar, a date. The barrier: privacy, intimacy, the closed door that tells the target outsiders cannot hear. The mutual focus and shared mood: the fake donor’s flattering attention, the dating profile’s manufactured chemistry, the false membership symbols that gain entry, a Muslim charity’s letterhead, a repairman’s uniform, a young woman’s interest. The target’s alliance detectors read a solidarity encounter in progress and his body cooperates, entraining on the operative’s rhythms, warming as the ritual builds. And then he produces candor, which on Collins’s account is the natural output of a successful ritual rather than a leak or a slip. Solidarity talk is what charged encounters generate. The unguarded disparagement of shared enemies, the boasting, the confession, these are membership offerings, the verbal sacraments of a bond the target believes is forming. Ron Schiller at lunch was not failing to maintain his guard. He was succeeding at a ritual. The sting harvests the success.
The cruelty of the device, and its theatrical power, lies in the asymmetry. For the target the ritual succeeds in the room and fails retroactively, weeks later, on the internet. The solidarity he invested in turns out to have had one participant. Collins says failed rituals drain emotional energy, and the sting engineers the most catastrophic failure available: a ritual revealed as counterfeit before the largest possible audience. The published video lets viewers watch a man’s emotional energy collapse in public, the deflation, the shame, the resignation that follows within days. That spectacle is part of the product. The genre does not merely transmit information about a target. It exhibits his ritual destruction.
The release is the second ritual, and here the chain proper begins. A video drop assembles O’Keefe’s audience around a mutual focus, the footage, with a shared mood of righteous anger and predatory glee, behind a barrier that subscription and insider knowledge supply. The encounter is mediated rather than bodily, a weakness Collins acknowledges in dispersed audiences, and O’Keefe compensates with the strongest substitutes available: countdown promotion, synchronized timing, the comment swarm that lets each member see the others reacting in real time. OMG releases on a schedule, new videos every Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern. Collins would recognize the liturgical calendar at once. Symbols decay without recharging; solidarity fades in days; a congregation must reassemble at fixed intervals or dissolve. The Tuesday drop is a service, and the brand, the raised-eyebrow founder, the phrase citizen journalist, the hashtags, are the charged symbols the service renews each week.
From there the links multiply. The confrontation ambush, where O’Keefe appears with camera and crew to face a target, is a staged conflict ritual designed so the tension breaks his way. In Violence, Collins argues that face-to-face conflict is governed by confrontational tension and fear, and that the party who controls the attention space wins the encounter long before any blow lands. The ambush gives O’Keefe every attentional advantage: foreknowledge, a team, a script, a camera the target must suddenly perform for. The target stumbles, flees, or stonewalls, and the footage records emotional energy transferring from him to O’Keefe in real time. When the tension breaks the wrong way, as on Skid Row in March 2026 when petition circulators assaulted his crew, the loss converts instantly into a different ritual ingredient: the wound becomes a martyr symbol, the attack footage becomes the next mutual focus, and the audience reassembles in outrage. Collins’s conflict sociology runs back through Georg Simmel (1858-1918): an external enemy is the cheapest solidarity machine ever devised. The persecution episodes, the FBI raids, the police at the West Palm Beach office, the restraining order and the seized firearms, each one supplies an enemy in motion and a fresh occasion for the congregation to feel itself a congregation.
Why is the model self-funding, and why does it never need to win an argument?
Self-funding, because what the subscriber buys is ritual membership rather than information. Information is a poor commodity; it leaks, and anyone can free-ride on a news report. Participation cannot be free-ridden. The monthly payment purchases a place inside the barrier: early access, insider briefings, the standing of a member rather than a spectator, a personal stake in each Tuesday’s solidarity. Collins describes a market for ritual participation where people allocate their resources toward the encounters that pay the highest emotional energy. O’Keefe’s pivot from the nonprofit donor model to direct subscription was a move toward the pure form of this market. Project Veritas sold donors the satisfaction of funding a weapon. OMG sells members the weekly experience of firing it. The Academy extends the market one step further by selling ritual production, training consumers to become operatives, each graduate a new node intended to generate chains of his own. Whether the graduates succeed matters less to the model than that the training is a high-intensity ritual, the workshop, the mission, the initiation.
And the model never needs to win an argument because arguments and rituals run on different currencies. An argument trades in validity; a ritual trades in emotional energy; and Collins holds that beliefs follow the energy. A fact-check arrives from outside the barrier, authored by members of a rival congregation, carrying no charge for O’Keefe’s audience except the charge of profanation. Collins is precise about what happens when outsiders attack a group’s sacred symbols: the group experiences righteous anger, the strongest of the ritual emotions, and the symbol comes out of the encounter recharged. Every debunking therefore functions as a donation. The editing controversies, the Columbia Journalism Review autopsies, the deplatformings, each one supplies the Tuesday service with its reading. A criticism that might devastate O’Keefe in the currency of validity arrives in his economy already converted into fuel. This is why two decades of refutation have left the operation undented. His critics keep trying to win an exchange of arguments with a man who is conducting an exchange of rituals, and only one of these games is being scored.
The frame also explains the event his enemies misread as the end, the February 2023 firing. Project Veritas kept the building, the staff, the donor list, the legal team, and the brand, and collapsed within months. Collins predicts exactly this. Emotional energy attaches to persons, not institutions. O’Keefe was the organization’s energy star, the figure who dominated every attention space, whose confidence was the display that drew the chain forward, and the rituals ran through him: his reveals, his ambushes, his persecution. Remove the star and the services go dark; the symbols, uncharged, fade; the congregation drifts to wherever the energy went. It went to a new name within weeks, and the donors followed, because the chain had never lived in the nonprofit. It lived in the man and the audience, and that pair rebuilt the apparatus at the speed of an email list.
One last turn. The press has always been a ritual chain too. The newsroom ran on co-presence and deadline entrainment; the front page was a daily mutual focus for a city; the byline, the prize, the masthead were charged membership symbols; and the profession’s morality, objectivity and verification, was the ritual standard the chain sustained. That chain has been weakening for thirty years as its assemblies dispersed, its symbols lost charge, and its congregations stopped showing up. O’Keefe’s innovation was to see, earlier than the institutions he attacks, that the ritual function and the information function of journalism could be separated, and that the ritual function was the one the audience paid for. He kept the forms, the exposé, the hidden camera, the muckraker lineage, and rebuilt them as pure energy machinery for the platform age: scheduled drops, member barriers, conflict liturgy, a persecution calendar. His targets keep asking whether what he does is journalism. Collins suggests the harder question runs the other way. What he does is what journalism was always partly doing, with the other part removed, and the removal is why it runs so hot.
Here are 10 things news organizations and journalists should watch for to avoid landing a starring role in one of these videos:
The driving premise of those engaging in undercover-video stings borrows from a Saul Alinsky rule: Humiliating an individual is a powerful pathway to disrupting an institution. These operatives aim to find individuals, however loosely connected to an organization or movement, who will make a comment or take an action that challenges the way an institution presents itself to the public. While this may not often prove actual fraud in action, it aims to sow doubt. This can be any employee, vendor, freelancer, PR rep, donor, interviewee, or even a customer. The very definition of infiltration in this universe is so broad that video provocateurs are sure to declare victory even if they gain access to the receptionist desk rather than the inner workings of a corporation. From the perspective of the sting orchestrator, their work aims to reveal some fundamental, inconvenient truth (in this case, fraud in a federal program that subsidizes mobile phones for low-income people).
Infiltrators know that using the endorsements of trusted people and companies can help open doors with insiders, particularly via social media platforms such as LinkedIn. They are also expert at using old-fashioned networking to gain access to private conversations. Recently, an operative in an O’Keefe sting asked his target to help him get his niece a job, thus planting an additional operative.
Operatives almost always use fake identification or claim fake identities. Expect these infiltrators to create fake companies, make real donations while posing as fake donors, host fake websites, and use fake identification. Operatives keep these assets alive for years at a time. In one instance, anti-abortion activist David Daleiden is alleged to have created a fake company and used fake government ID to gain access to medical professionals. In another, O’Keefe concocted a fake company (including a basic website) in an attempt to lure filmmakers into accepting money from a dubious source.
Undercover operatives play on empathy to encourage rule bending or some level of deceit. Plenty has been written about how ethical people decide to break the rules. In general, if you find yourself talking to someone you’ve recently met (who appeals to your expertise or sense of self-importance) and you find yourself saying something like, “I’m going to share this but it didn’t come from me…,” you have made yourself vulnerable to operatives. (That case involved bid rigging for a school-district contract.)
Operatives use gossip or social event chit-chat to generate criticism about the boss or workplace decisions, and get subjects to concur or divulge secrets about the inner workings of an operation. In one sting a deputy attorney general in Maryland admits to an operative (as he flirts with her) that he is “winging it” in his job and that his boss does not want to run for governor.
Ego and alcohol add up to regretful comments. Fundraisers, public events, and conferences are golden opportunities for undercover operatives. A key strategy is to attend the cocktail hour, or hang out in the bar of hotels where conference attendees are staying, hoping that the combination of alcohol, flirtatiousness, and ego-boosting comments will open the tap of exaggeration or private storytelling. After New York Elections Commissioner Alan Schulkin was featured criticizing Democrats in what he thought was a private conversation at a Christmas party, he explained that he was trying to “placate” a woman who was a “nuisance.”
Even when someone has the appearance of legitimacy, it’s important to verify their identity. Undercover operatives have posed as a telephone repair operator, a flower delivery person, a physician, a public works employee, and more.
Operatives subvert organizational rules and culture to their advantage. For example, O’Keefe operatives visited a labor union with a culture that eschews demeaning any types of work, presented members with a nonsensical work proposal, and subsequently deceptively edited the video footage when the union representatives tried to steer the operatives toward more productive work instead of treating the operatives more harshly.
Operatives look for situations where people are already emotional about something they care deeply about, and then do something provocative. For example, they pretended to be Hillary Clinton supporters and wandered through a crowd of Bernie Sanders supporters protesting outside of the Democratic National Convention, generating footage of activists appearing angry and combative.
Like many journalists, operatives use old-fashioned ambush techniques to get interviews or comments. But often they take it a step farther with more aggressive techniques that would not be endorsed in most newsrooms. In one case a journalist was ambushed at his home by a man who appears to be O’Keefe pretending to be a Verizon employee conducting a satisfaction survey. O’Keefe recently published video of a counter-sting where one of his operatives was ambushed by the people she was trying to catch on video, where she is heard being badgered with aggressive and sexual taunts and being followed even into her cab. A more common undercover operative strategy is to confront someone that’s been secretly recorded for comment about the recording. The minute you find out you are on an O’Keefe video, get ready for an ambush.
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McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s main attraction, had the support of the prominent sports physician Neal ElAttrache when he decided to use performance-enhancing drugs.
The doctor, Neal ElAttrache, oversaw the surgery to repair McGregor’s leg. He is a widely celebrated figure and has treated a litany of Hollywood actors and baseball and football stars. He is also the head physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Rams.
In response to questions from The Times, ElAttrache said by text that after he had repaired McGregor’s broken leg he sent him to specialists in bone healing and “explained that I don’t prescribe hormone or steroid treatment.” He was referring to drugs banned by nearly all major sports because they help athletes build muscle far faster than the human body can by itself.
ElAttrache said that after McGregor saw a specialist, he wrote a letter supporting McGregor’s application for a special exemption that would have allowed him to use performance-enhancing drugs without facing a penalty.
Officials overseeing the U.F.C.’s drug testing program believed that in seeking the exemption, McGregor — with the imprimatur of ElAttrache — was trying to exploit a loophole to use banned drugs, the two people said. It was the beginning of a split between the U.F.C. and the United States Anti-Doping Agency, known as USADA, the entity that was overseeing the U.F.C.’s drug testing program.
Across more than three decades of practice in Los Angeles, Neal Sami ElAttrache (b. 1960) has occupied the point where elite athletics, surgical innovation, celebrity culture, and the commerce of professional sports converge. The teams that won championships, the athletes who signed record contracts, and the performers whose bodies constitute their livelihoods came to him when those bodies failed. His career tracks the transformation of sports medicine from a specialized branch of orthopedics into a central institution of professional sport, and his biography offers a study in how a medical tradition passes from founders to heirs.
ElAttrache grew up in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, in a home where medicine and family life shared the same rooms. His father, Selim ElAttrache, a Syrian Druze immigrant, practiced orthopedic surgery and treated patients whether or not they could pay, at times accepting goods and services in place of money. His mother, Vera, worked as a nurse. Patients came through the family home, and the son absorbed early the personal character of the bond between physician and patient. He later described this as the foundation of his own practice: medicine rests on trust before it rests on technique.
He attended the University of Notre Dame, where he won the light-heavyweight boxing championship as a freshman. The victory revealed a competitive temperament and a physical confidence that later eased his rapport with professional athletes, men who size up everyone around them by how they carry themselves. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1981 and took his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1985. A general surgery internship and an orthopedic residency in Pittsburgh followed. Then came the move that defined his career. He went west for a sports medicine fellowship at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Los Angeles.
The fellowship placed him under Robert Kerlan (1922-1996) and Frank Jobe (1925-2014), the two men who built modern sports medicine in America. Kerlan had pioneered the role of the team physician for professional franchises. Jobe had revolutionized the field in 1974 when he reconstructed the ulnar collateral ligament of pitcher Tommy John (b. 1943), an operation that now carries the patient’s name and that rescued thousands of throwing careers. ElAttrache became more than a trainee under these men. He became the institutional heir to their tradition. From Jobe he inherited a conception of sports medicine as the restoration of elite human performance rather than mere orthopedic repair. The distinction shaped everything he did afterward. A surgeon who repairs a shoulder returns a man to daily life. A surgeon who restores performance returns a pitcher to a hundred-mile-per-hour fastball, and the second task demands a different relationship to anatomy, rehabilitation, and risk.
ElAttrache joined Kerlan-Jobe upon completing his fellowship and rose alongside the commercialization of professional sports. He became head team physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Rams and served as orthopedic consultant to the Los Angeles Lakers, the Los Angeles Kings, and the Anaheim Ducks. In 2008 he served as senior orthopedic surgeon for the United States Olympic team at the Beijing Games. As franchises grew into billion-dollar enterprises and player contracts climbed into the hundreds of millions, the physician who determined when an athlete could return to competition acquired a new kind of authority. ElAttrache exercised that authority more often, and at higher stakes, than perhaps any surgeon of his generation.
A succession of landmark cases marks his surgical career, each carrying consequences for entire organizations rather than single careers. In 2008 he reconstructed the anterior cruciate ligament of Tom Brady (b. 1977) after an injury that threatened the New England Patriots dynasty. In 2013 he repaired the ruptured Achilles tendon of Kobe Bryant (1978-2020), an injury that ranks among the most consequential in modern basketball. In 2023 he performed a modified elbow procedure on Shohei Ohtani (b. 1994) as Ohtani prepared to sign the largest contract in the history of professional sports. He treated Aaron Rodgers (b. 1983) after Rodgers ruptured his Achilles tendon, and the rehabilitation protocols developed for that recovery compressed timelines that the profession had long considered fixed. Each case tested the same question: how far can surgical technique and rehabilitation science push the boundary between injury and career resumption?
ElAttrache matched his clinical work with invention. In 1999 he developed a socket-and-screw fixation system for attaching tendons and ligaments to bone. Licensed through Arthrex, the device spread throughout orthopedic surgery and generated substantial royalties. He called it orthopedic duct tape, a joke that revealed his preference for practical answers to complex surgical problems. He refined the docking technique in Tommy John surgery, reducing bone trauma and improving graft fixation. His contributions to rotator cuff repair, Achilles reconstruction, and rehabilitation protocol became standards across the specialty.
His academic record gave the clinical reputation an institutional foundation. He authored roughly one hundred peer-reviewed articles, forty textbook chapters, and ten instructional videos, and he delivered more than three hundred lectures in the United States and abroad. His publications on shoulder surgery, elbow reconstruction, and knee ligament repair circulate widely in the field. Through this body of work he linked the laboratory, the operating room, and the training facility, three worlds that the founders of his specialty had first joined and that he kept joined.
Leadership followed scholarship. He served as president of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine from 2018 to 2019 and as president of the Herodicus Society from 2016 to 2017. He chaired the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Foundation, co-chaired medical affairs for the Kerlan-Jobe Institute, and sat on the clinic’s board. When Kerlan-Jobe partnered with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2014 to form the Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute, ElAttrache guided the transition. The merger expressed a broader pattern in American medicine, the absorption of physician-owned practices into large health systems, and it posed the question of whether a clinic built on the personal authority of founding surgeons might survive inside a corporate structure. Under ElAttrache’s stewardship, the institution kept its reputation for elite athletic care while gaining the resources of a major medical center.
Recognition accumulated. Medical publications and surveys named him among Southern California’s top physicians year after year. Observers of Los Angeles sports counted him among the most powerful figures in that world, a striking judgment about a man who never owned a team, coached a game, or signed a player. His patient roster grew beyond athletics to include actors, musicians, and public figures, anyone whose livelihood depends on a body that performs. In Los Angeles, a city organized around performance, the surgeon who restores performance occupies a singular position.
The personal dimension of his practice distinguishes him as much as the technical. He married Tricia Flavin, an operating room nurse he met during his early years at Kerlan-Jobe, and together they raised three daughters. Athletes who came to him as patients stayed as friends. They sought his counsel on matters far from surgery and remained in contact years into retirement. For ElAttrache, the physician-patient bond constitutes an enduring human connection built on loyalty and confidence rather than a professional transaction. The philosophy descends in a straight line from the house in Mount Pleasant where patients walked through the family door.
That same philosophy drew him into controversy. After mixed martial artist Conor McGregor (b. 1988) suffered a catastrophic leg fracture in a 2021 UFC bout, ElAttrache participated in the surgical repair and later supported McGregor’s application for a therapeutic use exemption that might have permitted substances prohibited under anti-doping rules during recovery. The exemption was denied. A 2026 investigation by The New York Times reported that anti-doping officials viewed the request with skepticism and that experts could not recall a comparable exemption sought for treatment of a broken bone. ElAttrache defended the exemption process as a legitimate channel for medical care and argued that athletes should not lose access to appropriate treatment because a substance appears on a prohibited list. The episode exposed the unstable boundary between healing and enhancement, between athlete welfare and competitive fairness, a boundary that the physician devoted to his patient and the regulator devoted to the sport draw in different places. The same loyalty that made athletes trust him made regulators wary.
By the mid-2020s, ElAttrache had become more than a surgeon. He was an inventor, a researcher, an institutional leader, a mentor to a generation of fellows, and the custodian of a tradition that runs back through Jobe and Kerlan to the founding of his specialty. His influence travels through the athletes he treated, the surgeons he trained, the techniques he devised, and the institutions he built and preserved. His career embodies the maturation of sports medicine from a niche discipline into a visible and consequential branch of modern medicine, and it raises the questions that attend any field where healing, money, fame, and competition meet. Few physicians have shaped the careers of elite performers to a comparable degree. Fewer still have defined a specialty while practicing it.
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Dan Senor (b. 1971) worked as a Senate aide, a war-zone spokesman, a presidential campaign adviser, a hedge fund executive, a bestselling author, and a podcast host. He’s built a career built on translation: between Israel and America, between government and markets, between the foreign policy establishment and the listening public. Since October 7, 2023, his podcast Call Me Back has made him an influential English-language interpreter of Israeli politics and society, perhaps the most listened-to of his kind, a status that rests on three decades of accumulated access, credibility, and institutional knowledge.
Daniel Samuel Senor was born on November 6, 1971, in Utica, New York, the youngest of four children in a Jewish family bound to Israel by work and history. His father worked for Israel Bonds, the organization that channels diaspora capital into the Israeli state. Members of his mother’s family survived the Holocaust in Slovakia before emigrating to North America. The family moved to Toronto, where Senor grew up and attended Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. The household combined Zionist commitment with the immigrant memory of catastrophe, a pairing that shaped his lifelong preoccupation with how societies endure crisis. His sister, Wendy Senor Singer, later directed AIPAC’s Jerusalem office for many years, a fact that shows how far the family’s professional and communal lives intertwined with the American-Israeli relationship.
Senor studied history at the University of Western Ontario and spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Jerusalem year gave him direct exposure to Israeli political culture during a period of ferment, and it converted an inherited attachment into a firsthand one. He later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. The sequence matters. Senor built a foundation in history and foreign affairs before adding the credential that opened finance to him, and his subsequent career alternated between the two tracks rather than abandoning either.
His political career began in Washington in the 1990s on the staff of Senator Spencer Abraham (b. 1952), a Michigan Republican. Senor served as a foreign policy adviser and then as communications director, a combination that trained him in both substance and presentation. When Abraham became Secretary of Energy under President George W. Bush (b. 1946), Senor continued to work with him. These years placed Senor inside the Republican foreign policy network at the moment that network prepared to govern. He also worked in investment banking at The Carlyle Group, the private equity firm whose partner ranks included former officials from several administrations. Carlyle gave him an education in global capital and a model for how government experience converts into financial position.
The Iraq War made him a public figure. After the 2003 invasion, Senor advised U.S. Central Command and joined the reconstruction effort, then became chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority under Ambassador L. Paul Bremer (b. 1941). From Baghdad he conducted daily briefings that made him one of the most visible civilian faces of the American occupation. He served longer in Iraq than almost any other American civilian of that period, and he watched the occupation’s failures accumulate from inside: the disbanded army, the insurgency, the gap between Washington’s assumptions and Iraqi realities. The Pentagon awarded him the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, its highest civilian honor. The Iraq years gave Senor something his later critics never dislodged: he had stood at the podium for a war that went wrong, and he carried both the experience and the association for the rest of his career.
The years after Baghdad show a man building parallel structures. In 2009 he co-founded the Foreign Policy Initiative with William Kristol (b. 1952) and Robert Kagan (b. 1958). The think tank worked to preserve the interventionist, internationalist strand of Republican foreign policy at the moment that strand began losing the party’s base. The Iraq War had discredited the project the founders still believed in, and the organization fought a rearguard action that the rise of Donald Trump (b. 1946) would later overwhelm. Senor’s association with Kristol and Kagan placed him in the neoconservative lineage, though his own work moved toward Israel and away from the broader democratization agenda.
In 2010 he joined Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by Paul Singer (b. 1944), and rose to partner and member of the firm’s management committee. As Chief Public Affairs Officer he oversees communications, public policy, and geopolitical risk analysis. The position suits him. Elliott practices an aggressive form of activist investing that depends on political and legal intelligence as much as financial analysis, and Senor’s government experience translates into commercial value there. The Elliott salary also underwrites his public work. He does not depend on media income, book advances, or think tank funding, which frees him from the economic pressures that constrain most commentators.
He remained active in Republican politics through the Romney era. He served as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney (b. 1947) in the 2012 presidential campaign and worked with Paul Ryan (b. 1970), the vice presidential nominee who became House Speaker. Senor belonged to the wing of the party that lost. The Romney-Ryan Republicanism of free trade, alliance maintenance, and entitlement reform gave way to a party hostile to most of what Senor’s circle championed. He responded by stepping back from partisan combat rather than converting. His later public identity centers on Israel and Jewish life, subjects on which the Republican coalition’s internal wars touch him less.
His most durable intellectual contribution came through collaboration with his brother-in-law, the journalist Saul Singer (b. 1961), a former editorial page editor of The Jerusalem Post who married Wendy Senor. Their book Start-Up Nation (2009) asked why Israel, a small country under permanent threat, produces more technology startups per capita than any nation on earth and listed more companies on NASDAQ than any foreign country except one. Their answer drew on military service, immigration, flattened hierarchy, informality, and a culture that tolerates failure and rewards improvisation. The book became an international bestseller, appeared in dozens of translations, and gave Israel a brand. Governments and business schools adopted its framing. Israeli officials used the phrase as shorthand for the country’s economic identity. Few books by political operatives achieve that kind of penetration, and the success rested on timing as much as argument: the book arrived as the global economy turned toward technology and as Israel’s diplomatic position made an economic success story useful.
Senor and Singer returned in 2023 with The Genius of Israel, published weeks after the October 7 attacks. The book shifted from innovation to resilience. It asked why a society fractured by religious, ethnic, and political division recovers from crisis faster than wealthier and more stable countries, and it pointed to thick communal bonds, national service, strong families, and a shared sense of purpose that survives political combat. The timing made the book read as either prophetic or premature, depending on the reader. The attacks tested its thesis in real time, and Senor spent the following years arguing that Israeli society passed the test even as its government failed.
Call Me Back launched in May 2020 through what became Ark Media. Senor conceived it during the pandemic as a conversation series, and for three years it built a respectable audience among listeners interested in Israel, geopolitics, and Jewish affairs. October 7 transformed it. English-speaking audiences, many of them American Jews shaken by the attacks and the campus reaction that followed, needed a guide to Israeli politics and military strategy, and Senor’s program supplied one. The podcast has produced more than five hundred episodes and now anchors a media company. Ark Media runs a daily news product, a members-only subscription feed, additional programs, and newsletters from the Israeli journalists Amit Segal and Nadav Eyal, who appear as regular contributors. Senor built, in effect, a small media institution around access to the Israeli political and security elite.
The format explains part of the influence. Call Me Back runs long, favors historical context over breaking news, and treats its guests as sources of expertise rather than targets. Senor interviews Israeli journalists, generals, intelligence veterans, diplomats, and politicians, and he asks questions designed to extract explanation rather than confrontation. He functions as a translator. He renders Israeli coalition politics, security doctrine, and social tension legible to audiences that lack the background to follow Hebrew media. The approach has costs. Critics note that the guest list tilts toward the Israeli establishment and the American pro-Israel center-right, that hard questions about Gaza arrive softened, and that the program’s analytical frame rarely escapes the assumptions of its host. Supporters answer that no other English-language program delivers comparable access and depth, and that Senor’s restraint as an interviewer produces more information than adversarial alternatives.
Senor is not a journalist by training or temperament. He spent his career as an advocate: for a senator, for an occupation, for a candidate, for a fund, for a country. The podcast extends the advocacy into a new medium, but it does so through curation and emphasis rather than argument. Senor rarely lectures. He selects guests, frames questions, and lets the answers carry the load. The method gives the program credibility that direct advocacy would forfeit, and it makes the editorial choices harder to see.
His personal life mirrors the professional intersections. In 2006 he married Campbell Brown (b. 1968), then an NBC anchor who later worked at CNN and became a senior executive at Meta overseeing news partnerships. They have two sons and live in New York City. The marriage joins Republican foreign policy circles to mainstream media and then to the technology platforms that reshaped both, a combination that few households contain.
Critics place Senor within the pro-Israel center-right and the post-Cold War foreign policy establishment. His worldview formed in the 1990s and hardened in Baghdad: American power underwrites global order, Israel anchors the American position in the Middle East, and societies survive through cohesion, institutions, and will. The Iraq War damaged the establishment that taught him these views, and the Trump era scattered it, but Senor adapted where many of his contemporaries did not. He narrowed his public focus to the subject he knows best and built an audience that the establishment’s collapse could not take from him. Supporters call him the clearest English-language communicator on Israel.
Senor holds no academic post, no press credential, no government office. His authority rests on access, experience, and the trust of an audience, resources he accumulated across thirty years in rooms where decisions got made. The career suggests that the old categories of journalist, official, and analyst have lost their boundaries, and that the figures who now explain the world to the public often come from advocacy rather than observation. Senor never hid which side he stands on. The audience that made Call Me Back a phenomenon did not want neutrality. It wanted someone who knew the terrain and shared the stakes, and Senor spent his whole life becoming that man.
David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton argue in “Strange Bedfellows” that political belief systems do not descend from values. They rise from alliance structures. People choose allies on similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, then deploy propagandistic biases to support those allies in conflict: perpetrator biases that excuse an ally’s harms, victim biases that magnify an ally’s grievances, attributional biases that credit an ally’s successes to character and blame his failures on circumstance. The resulting belief systems read as patchwork, full of contradictions that no philosophy could generate but any coalition map could predict. Dan Senor’s career tests the theory well because he has spent thirty years doing in public what Pinsof says everyone does in private: choosing allies, managing transitivity, and producing the narratives that hold a coalition together.
Start with how he chose. Pinsof’s three criteria run through Senor’s biography like load paths through a building. Similarity came first. He was born into the pro-Israel alliance, the son of an Israel Bonds man, raised among people whose markers of identity announced their coalition membership. The year at Hebrew University, the AIPAC sister, the brother-in-law at The Jerusalem Post: these are not credentials. They are alliance signals, the tags Pinsof describes that let likeminded people find each other and coordinate. Interdependence followed. The Abraham office gave him political capital, Carlyle gave him financial ties to the Republican establishment, Elliott pays him a fortune to convert government experience into market intelligence. At every step, Senor bound himself to people who could provide benefits and to whom he could provide benefits in return. The result, by midlife, was a man embedded in three overlapping alliances at once: the Republican foreign policy network, the pro-Israel coalition, and the finance world that funds both.
Pinsof predicts that membership in heterogeneous alliances produces heterogeneous beliefs, and Senor’s record confirms it. He championed free markets while celebrating Israeli state industrial policy, the government venture programs and military technology transfers that built the startup sector. He sold democratization in Iraq while his coalition courted Gulf autocracies, and he later treated the Abraham Accords, an alliance of Israel with absolute monarchies, as a diplomatic triumph. He warned against nationalism as the pathology that wrecked the Middle East, then co-wrote a book arguing that Israeli national cohesion, service, flags, and shared purpose explain the country’s strength. No value system reconciles these positions. An alliance map reconciles them instantly. Each belief mobilizes support for an ally or opposition to a rival, and the apparent contradictions mark the seams where different allies’ interests meet. Pinsof would say Senor is not a hypocrite. He is a normal political animal with a complicated portfolio of allies.
Start-Up Nation looks different through this frame. Read as scholarship, it is a breezy book with a selection problem. Read as alliance work, it is a masterpiece. By 2009 the pro-Israel coalition faced a recruitment problem. Its existing pillars, evangelical Christians and committed Jews, were aging or contested, and the country’s brand abroad ran through occupation and war. Senor and Saul Singer rebuilt the brand in the idiom of a new constituency. They translated Israel into the language of venture capital, entrepreneurship, and business school case studies, and they recruited investors, founders, and MBA students into a coalition those people had no prior reason to join. Pinsof calls this a bridging alliance, the kind that links groups with no natural similarity by manufacturing interdependence. The book gave secular global capitalists a stake in Israel’s success and a vocabulary for defending it. That is why governments handed it out and why Israeli diplomats quoted it. It expanded the alliance structure, which is the highest service a partisan can perform.
The book also runs on what Pinsof calls attributional bias. Israel’s advantages flow, in its telling, from internal dispositions: chutzpah, improvisation, flattened hierarchy, the crucible of military service. External causes get less ink: American aid and security guarantees, German reparations, the arrival of a million trained Soviet engineers, the diaspora capital his own father spent a career raising. The pattern matches the bias exactly. Allies’ successes come from character. The same bias structures The Genius of Israel, where resilience flows from the society’s inner qualities rather than from circumstance.
When alliance structures shift, beliefs and loyalties shift with them, and that individuals caught between fracturing allies face the two risks transitivity exists to prevent: infighting and betrayal. After 2016 Senor’s network shattered along exactly those lines. William Kristol chose open war with the new Republican coalition and lost his magazine. Robert Kagan migrated toward the Democrats. Mitt Romney became a pariah inside the party he had led. Senor did something else. He went quiet on Trump and loud on Israel. The move reads, in Pinsof’s terms, as transitivity management of a high order. His Israel coalition now contained both Never Trump donors and Trump-administration architects of the Abraham Accords, both liberal Jewish listeners and evangelical Republicans. Any strong statement about Trump would set his allies against each other or force him to side with some rivals against some friends. So he relocated his public identity to the one alliance that spanned the rupture. The narrowing that looks like intellectual focus, the turn from Republican politics to Jewish peoplehood, is what alliance preservation looks like from the inside.
Call Me Back then becomes legible as coalition infrastructure. Consider the guest list. Israeli journalists, generals, intelligence veterans, diplomats: men and women drawn from the security establishment of an allied state, interviewed by a man who never pretends to neutrality. The program’s critics complain that hard questions arrive softened, and Pinsof explains why softening is the product, not a defect. The podcast performs the perpetrator biases on Israel’s behalf: context for harms, emphasis on intentions, attention to the mitigating circumstances of urban war. It performs the victim biases too, keeping October 7 present, documenting the hostages, cataloging the world’s indifference. Pinsof notes that victim biases make no sense as self-image maintenance, since they advertise weakness, but make perfect sense as mobilization, since they recruit third parties to an ally’s side. That is the program’s function in wartime. It mobilizes English-speaking third parties for Israel, week after week, through the testimony of credible insiders. The competitive victimhood the theory predicts, each side striving to establish the greater injustice, structures the entire post-October 7 information war, and Senor commands one of its most effective platforms.
The audience completes the picture. The listeners who made Call Me Back a phenomenon after October 7 were disproportionately American Jews undergoing what Pinsof’s framework would describe as alliance shock. Many had spent decades inside a progressive coalition, and the campus and activist reaction to the attacks read to them as betrayal, the precise risk that transitivity calculations exist to detect. A rival of my ally has become the friend of my friends: the structure had stopped making sense, and people in that condition need help renegotiating their alliances. Senor supplied it. He offered a narrative in which the old coalition had defected first, in which Jewish security required new friends and a colder eye toward old ones. Liberal Jews listening devotedly to a Romney adviser and Elliott Management partner are strange bedfellows by any ideological measure. By Pinsof’s measure they are the predictable output of a reshuffled alliance structure, since beliefs follow alliances and alliances follow threat. The podcast does not merely describe the realignment of American Jewish politics. It conducts it.
Even the family pattern fits. Pinsof grounds alliance psychology in evolved machinery, and kinship remains the oldest alliance technology humans possess. Senor’s coalition runs through blood and marriage: the sister who directed AIPAC’s Jerusalem office, the brother-in-law who co-wrote both books, the wife whose career linked the network to NBC, CNN, and then Meta. The Senor-Singer family operates as a node in the pro-Israel alliance structure, with interdependence so thick that the usual line between personal and political loyalty disappears.
The Voice
Senor speaks like a man who learned his trade at a podium and refined it at a microphone. The Baghdad briefings trained him in message discipline, and the discipline never left. He almost never speculates beyond his ground, he bridges away from danger with phrases like “what’s important here is” and “I want to step back for a second,” and he keeps a small set of safe formulations he returns to under pressure. The training shows most on television, where he compresses into talking points, speaks fast, and concedes nothing. The podcast relaxed him. On Call Me Back he sounds like a different man: warmer, slower, host-generous, a salesman at ease in his own store.
The accent is broadcast-neutral North American with a faint Canadian flatness he never mentions. The pace runs fast. He stacks short clauses with “and,” builds momentum rather than ornament, and rarely pauses or fills. The fluency itself is the credential. He sounds like a man who has answered this question a thousand times, because he has.
His signature device is the wind-up question. He spends a minute or more building context for his guest, naming dates, defining terms, sketching the institutional background, and then lands on a modest ask: “Am I getting that right?” or “What am I missing?” The construction does three jobs at once. It educates the audience, it flatters the guest, and it lets Senor deliver his own analysis while appearing only to ask. The humility is a vehicle. He gets to make the argument and the guest gets to confirm it. “What am I missing” may be the heaviest phrase in his repertoire, because it converts assertion into inquiry.
He defers to guests as a matter of method. He introduces them with extended praise, credits their books, tells the audience why this person knows more than anyone. The deference buys him something: a guest who feels honored talks longer and discloses more. He also ventriloquizes disagreement rather than owning it. Hard questions arrive attributed to others: “The critique you’ll hear is,” “People will say,” “Our listeners have been asking.” He almost never says “I disagree.” The third-party frame lets him press without rupturing the relationship, which suits a man whose product is access.
He summarizes constantly. “So what I hear you saying is” precedes a restatement cleaner and more quotable than what the guest said. The habit reflects his translator function. He takes Israeli political shorthand, military jargon, and Hebrew terms and renders them for an American ear, defining as he goes: the Kirya, a hesder yeshiva, what a coalition of sixty-one means. He treats no knowledge as assumed, which keeps the program open to newcomers and keeps him in the teacher’s chair.
His diction is plain, concrete, and business-inflected. He reaches for “extraordinary,” “remarkable,” and “stunning” as his intensifiers of choice, and he softens with “sort of” and “kind of” far more than his polish would predict. He numbers his points in briefing style: “Three things. One.” He tells time in specifics, dates, names, locations, a habit from both journalism-adjacent work and the spokesman years, when a wrong detail meant a news cycle.
Emotion stays controlled. After October 7 the program carried real grief, and Senor signaled it through pace rather than volume. He slows down, drops register, lets silence sit a beat longer than usual. The restraint reads as gravity and probably is, but it also serves the brand: he positions the show as the calm room in a hysterical media environment, and a host who breaks composure forfeits that.
The overall register is optimistic. He sells. Even in the worst weeks of the war he frames toward resilience, capability, and the long view, and he ends episodes pointing forward. The relentless constructiveness is the rhetorical spine of everything he does, the books included. Where a journalist’s instinct runs toward what is broken, Senor’s runs toward what holds. You can hear the Israel Bonds inheritance in it: the son still makes the case, the pitch refined across forty years, delivered now to the largest room his father could have imagined.
What they value first is competence under pressure. The set’s formative experiences are the deal, the campaign, the war room, and the crisis call, and its members judge each other by performance in rooms where stakes run high and time runs short. They prize fluency, the capacity to summarize a complicated situation in three points without notes. They prize discretion: the unforgivable sins are leaking, grandstanding, and freelancing. They value access and treat it as both currency and proof of seriousness, since a man whom generals and ministers will call back has been vetted by the only process the set trusts. They value philanthropy as obligation rather than option. A successful man who does not give, sit on boards, and show up has failed a test everyone can see. They value family thickly and conventionally: marriages endure in public, children attend day schools or at least Hebrew school plus summer programs in Israel, and the bar mitzvah functions as a dynastic event. And since October 7 they value resilience above everything, in themselves, in Israel, and in institutions, having organized their entire account of the war around the claim that the society holds.
The hero system runs from victim to builder to defender, and the arc structures everything. At its foundation lie the sacred dead: the six million, the fallen of Israel’s wars, and now the murdered of October 7, whose photographs and names the set keeps in circulation with liturgical care. Above the dead stand the founders, the generation that built a state from ash, and the set treats founding as the highest human activity: founding states, companies, schools, funds, magazines. The living heroes follow the pattern. The reservist who flew back from New York on October 8 outranks everyone. The hostage families who turned grief into advocacy hold a sanctity no one challenges. The entrepreneur who builds in Tel Aviv under rocket fire, the donor who funds a wing or a fellowship or an iron dome of lawyers for campus Jews, the communicator who walks into a hostile studio and holds the line: each enacts the same story, the Jew who refuses the victim’s role while honoring the victims. The supreme status move available to an American family in this world is a son or daughter who makes aliyah to serve in the IDF, because it converts the set’s rhetoric into blood commitment. Gentiles can enter the hero system as righteous outsiders, and the set canonized Douglas Murray (b. 1979) in this role after October 7, the eloquent stranger who showed up when allies fled. Immortality in this world means a named institution, an endowed chair, a building in Jerusalem, a fund that outlives you. Singer pursues it through a philanthropic empire; Hertog pursued it through Tikvah; Rowan pursued it through the war for the University of Pennsylvania.
The status games sort into four currencies that only partly convert. The first is money, table stakes in the finance wing, where status runs by fund performance, by the scale and intelligence of giving, and by who can summon whom. The second is access, the currency Senor trades in: who heard from Dermer first, who got the general the week of the strike, whose WhatsApp groups carry real information, who has sat with the prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) functions in these games as a complicated prize, a man much of the set distrusts but no one can afford to be cut off from. The third currency is voice. The set once outsourced its public argument to professionals; since October 7 it rewards members who fight in public, and a hierarchy of platforms emerged almost overnight, with a successful podcast or newsletter outranking an op-ed, an op-ed outranking a panel, and a viral congressional hearing moment outranking everything. Ackman plays the voice game loudly and divides the set in doing so, because the older norm prized restraint, the Singer model of power that never tweets, and the set still half-believes that a man who posts his anger has lost a form of control that matters. Senor’s standing rests on resolving this tension: maximal voice, zero apparent anger. The fourth currency is sacrifice, the hardest to fake, measured in children in uniform, trips to Israel during the war rather than after it, and presence at funerals and shivas. Attendance is the set’s deepest status practice. Showing up, at the rally, the hospital, the hostage family’s hotel, generates a credit that money cannot buy, and absence gets noticed and remembered.
The normative claims start with self-defense as the master norm. Jews must hold power and must use it, because the alternative was tried and produced Auschwitz; weakness invites aggression and strength brings peace, in the Middle East and everywhere. From this follow the operational norms: the American alliance is sacred and must be tended by every generation; military service in Israel and communal service in America are duties, not choices; success obligates giving; one defends Israel in public and criticizes in private, and the man who takes internal disputes to the Times has defected. Antisemitism must be fought everywhere but the set now ranks its threats, holding that the campus and progressive variant is the rising danger and the right-wing variant, though lethal, lacks institutional power, a ranking that conveniently tracks the set’s coalition needs and that its Hartman-flank members contest. The universities betrayed their trust and must be disciplined through the only lever donors hold. Moral clarity outranks moral complexity, a norm the set states in exactly those words; nuance has its place, but a man who reaches for complexity in the first week after a massacre reveals where he stands. Civility remains mandatory within the set, suits and courtesy and no profanity, which makes its wars cold rather than hot: the punishment is the dropped board seat, the unreturned call, the name quietly removed from the invitation list.
The essentialist claims begin with peoplehood. The Jewish people exists as a real, continuous, trans-historical entity, not a construction or a faith community but a family with a story, and every member of the set can perform the story on demand, from Abraham through expulsion through Zionism to the present war. Antisemitism is likewise an essence, the oldest hatred, a virus that mutates across centuries while remaining itself, which means each new outbreak confirms an eternal pattern rather than requiring local explanation. Israelis possess a national character: improvisational, blunt, resilient, allergic to hierarchy, the chutzpah essence that Senor’s first book sold to the world. The Iranian regime is fanatic in its essence and cannot be appeased, only deterred or defeated. The Arab world divides into essential pragmatists, the Gulf modernizers of the Abraham Accords, and essential rejectionists. America is good in its essence, a covenantal nation whose elites have temporarily lost the thread, and the West stands as a civilizational category with Israel at its frontier, holding the line for everyone else, against barbarism that is also treated as a kind of essence. The set rarely notices that its essentialism cuts both ways, that a world of eternal hatreds and fixed national characters leaves little room for the diplomacy and transformation its pragmatist wing pursues.
The moral grammar gives all of this its daily language. The set speaks in clarity words: moral clarity, existential, unambiguous, evil, and the post-October 7 coinages, never again is now, bring them home, we will dance again. It speaks in presence words: standing with, showing up, shoulder to shoulder. It speaks in family words about the entire people, our boys, our hostages, am echad, one people with one heart. Sin, in this grammar, is silence: the colleague who said nothing, the institution that issued the mealy statement, the celebrity who posted about every cause except this one. Betrayal is its aggravated form, reserved for the progressive allies who failed the test, and the set processes betrayal through lists, mental and sometimes literal, of who called and who did not in the week after the massacre. The heretic has a face: the anti-Zionist Jew, with Peter Beinart (b. 1971) as the archetype, the insider who took his inheritance and turned it against the family, and the set’s rage at him exceeds anything it directs at gentile critics, because the grammar treats him as a defector rather than an opponent. Redemption exists too, for the lapsed Jew whom October 7 brought home, and the set tells these return stories constantly, the assimilated financier who found his way to shul, because they confirm that the essence holds, that the people endures, that under pressure the family reassembles. Senor’s podcast speaks this grammar fluently while sanding off its rougher edges, which is much of why the set treats him as its voice: he says what the room believes in a register the room can forward to anyone.
The set has fractures the grammar papers over. The Trump question divides it on a line that runs through dinner parties: the policy wing largely despises him, the donor wing largely funds him, and the norm of cold civility keeps the dispute managed rather than resolved. The judicial overhaul of 2023 split it again, with the Hartman flank and many of the journalists in open opposition to the Israeli government while defending Israel abroad, a two-front posture the set found exhausting and never fully reconciled. Religion grades it from secular philanthropists through Conservative synagogue stalwarts to the Modern Orthodox, with mutual condescension running quietly in both directions. And beneath everything sits the unspoken hierarchy between money and intellect, the donors who fund the writers and the writers who privately believe they outrank the donors, an old arrangement, older than this set, that holds because both sides need the other and the war reminded everyone why.
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer is right, Dan Senor splits into two men, and only one of them survives.
The first Senor served as chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from 2003 to 2004. That job rested on the premise Mearsheimer attacks: that people are rights-bearing individuals first and tribesmen second, so a dictatorship could be removed, institutions installed, and Iraqis might reorganize themselves around liberal citizenship. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts what happened instead. Strip away the state and people do not revert to atomistic individuals waiting for a constitution. They revert to family, sect, and tribe, the groups that shaped them before they could reason. Sunni, Shia, and Kurd behaved as profoundly social beings, and the CPA podium from which Senor spoke became a monument to the great delusion. If Mearsheimer is right, the formative project of Senor’s public life failed for reasons knowable in advance.
The second Senor wrote Start-Up Nation (2009) with Saul Singer (b. 1961) and The Genius of Israel (2023). Read those books against The Great Delusion and something strange appears: the later Senor is a Mearsheimerian. The Genius of Israel argues that Israelis flourish because they are embedded. Mandatory army service, tight communities, Shabbat dinners, national ritual, a shared story that begins before any individual is born and continues after he dies. The book attributes Israeli happiness and resilience to thick social bonds and treats American loneliness, the fruit of liberal individualism, as the disease. That is Mearsheimer’s value infusion, his long childhood of socialization, his claim that group attachment runs deeper than reason, repackaged as an airport bestseller. Senor lived the refutation of liberal universalism in Baghdad and then wrote the case for particularist nationalism in Tel Aviv, apparently without naming the reversal.
So Mearsheimer vindicates Senor’s sociology. The trouble starts with Senor’s politics, because the same anthropology cuts in directions Senor cannot welcome.
Take the alliance. Senor’s public case for Israel leans on shared values: two democracies, two open societies, natural partners. Mearsheimer’s framework dissolves that ground. If nationalism is the strongest political force on earth and liberal values do not bind states, then the US-Israel relationship must justify itself on interest, and Mearsheimer spent a famous book with Stephen Walt (b. 1955) arguing it does not. The man whose picture of human nature explains why Israeli society works is the same man who argues American support for Israel runs against American interests and persists through domestic lobbying rather than strategic logic. Senor can take Mearsheimer’s anthropology or fight Mearsheimer’s foreign policy, but the two come from one set of premises, and Senor’s career requires him to hold the first while rejecting the second.
Take the Palestinians. If humans are tribal at the core, if group attachment precedes and outranks reason, then Palestinian nationalism is as durable as Jewish nationalism, made of the same material. The Genius of Israel celebrates what happens when a people gets sovereignty, an army, and a story. Mearsheimer’s logic says the people on the other side of the wall want those same goods for those same reasons and will not stop wanting them. Economic peace, the Abraham Accords model of trading prosperity for national claims, assumes men will accept individual goods in place of group recognition. That assumption is liberal individualism in regional dress, and Senor’s own book about Israeli cohesion supplies the argument against it.
Take the diaspora, which may be where the frame bites Senor hardest. The Genius of Israel carries an implicit verdict on American Jewish life: thin, lonely, assimilating, sustained by choice rather than obligation. Mearsheimer explains why. America socializes its children into individualism, so American Judaism becomes one option among many, and options get declined. Israel socializes its children into peoplehood, so Jewish identity arrives before reason and stays. If Mearsheimer is right, Senor’s two homelands run on incompatible operating systems, and the one Senor lives in, raises money in, and broadcasts from is the one his own analysis marks for decline. He commutes between a society organized around the truth about human nature and a society organized around the delusion, and he makes his living interpreting the first to the second.
What then for Dan Senor? He becomes a man whose books are right and whose career premise is exposed. The podcast host who defends the alliance on values must shift to defending it on interest, harder ground, contested ground, Mearsheimer’s home field. The author who proved community beats individualism must explain why that law applies in Hebrew but not Arabic. And the Bush-era spokesman must concede that the realists he spent 2003 dismissing understood Iraq, and human beings, better than his principals did. Mearsheimer being right does not destroy Senor. It promotes his sociology and demotes his politics, and it leaves him holding a winning argument that belongs to his opponent.
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Rebecca Ellis is an American investigative journalist whose career traces a path through public media into metropolitan accountability reporting. She covers Los Angeles County government for the Los Angeles Times, where her work on child welfare, juvenile justice, and the county’s sexual abuse litigation has made her a central chronicler of institutional failure in the nation’s largest county. Her career illustrates a shift in American journalism away from political personality coverage and toward the study of how government agencies function in practice, who depends on them, and what happens when they break down.
Ellis grew up in New York City and graduated from Brown University in 2018. She entered the profession through public media rather than through the campaign trail or the political desk. She served as a Kroc Fellow at NPR in Washington, a competitive entry-level program that rotates young journalists through the network’s reporting and production operations. She then worked general assignment and breaking news on the metro desk of the Miami Herald before joining Oregon Public Broadcasting, where she covered city politics, housing, homelessness, and policing in Portland. The sequence gave her grounding in local government across three regions and two mediums, radio and print, before she turned thirty.
Portland made her reputation. In the years after the 2020 protests, the city became a national proxy for arguments over policing and public order, and private security firms filled gaps that the shrinking police bureau left behind. Ellis investigated that industry in a three–partseries that documented weak state oversight, questionable hiring, and misconduct among contractors operating with quasi-police authority and little of the accountability that attaches to sworn officers. The series made her a Livingston Award finalist in 2022, an honor reserved for journalists under thirty-five, and signaled the method that would define her later work: pick the institution no one watches, learn its regulatory architecture, and document the gap between its legal obligations and its conduct.
The Los Angeles Times hired her in 2023 to cover Los Angeles County government. The assignment placed her inside one of the largest local governments in the United States, a bureaucracy that runs public hospitals, probation facilities, the foster care system, and social services for ten million people on a budget larger than that of many states. Most reporters assigned to such a beat gravitate toward the Board of Supervisors, where the political theater happens. Ellis gravitated toward the departments, where the consequences happen.
Her early county reporting uncovered failures in child welfare and juvenile justice. With colleagues, she documented the county’s practice of housing abused and neglected children in hotels because the foster care system lacked placements and treatment beds. The practice cost taxpayers millions while leaving children in unstable rooms with thin supervision. The stories pulled a hidden crisis into public view and forced officials to account for decades of underinvestment in foster infrastructure. At the same time she investigated the county’s juvenile halls, where chronic staffing shortages, safety breakdowns, and administrative dysfunction had drawn the attention of courts, state regulators, and community advocates. Her probation department coverage portrayed an agency unable to meet its legal obligations even as oversight bodies circled.
What followed marks the most distinctive phase of her career. Ellis did not treat the settlement as the end of the story. She treated the settlement as a new institution requiring the same scrutiny she had applied to the probation department. Her reporting examined the claims process: questions about claim verification, allegations of fraud within parts of the intake pipeline, attorney solicitation practices, and the investor financing that stands to profit from mass tort payouts. Her recent work includes coverage of the State Bar investigating a Los Angeles law firm connected to the $4 billion sex abuse case, the county pausing some payouts amid settlement investigations, and reporting on how investors stand to profit from the county’s sex abuse settlements. The move required her to anger a new set of powerful actors, the plaintiffs’ bar and litigation finance industry, after years of angering county officials. Few local reporters scrutinize both the institution accused of abuse and the legal machinery built to remedy it. Ellis does both, and the symmetry defines her approach.
The work has earned professional recognition beyond the Livingston selection. She was part of the Los Angeles Times team that received a National Headliner Award for coverage of the county’s sexual abuse settlement crisis. The honors reflect impact as much as craft. Her reporting prompted investigations by county officials, legal regulators, and prosecutors, and shaped public debate over how the county should fund and verify the largest sex abuse settlement in American history.
Her method combines traditional investigative technique with command of legal and bureaucratic systems. She works from court records, settlement filings, public records requests, and internal government documents, and she pairs the paper trail with interviews with the people the systems fail: foster children housed in hotels, detainees in collapsing juvenile halls, abuse claimants navigating the settlement pipeline. The pairing lets readers grasp both the institutional architecture and the human cost. Her prose stays plain and her stories stay specific. She names the facility, the dollar figure, the official who signed the memo.
Ellis belongs to a generation of journalists formed by public media and local accountability work rather than by political journalism. The career path matters. Reporters who come up through NPR fellowships and regional public broadcasting learn beats built around systems, housing, courts, social services, rather than around campaigns. As local government disputes migrate from legislative chambers into lawsuits, consent decrees, and court supervision, reporters fluent in administration and litigation have become the profession’s growth stock. Ellis arrived at the Los Angeles Times with exactly that fluency at exactly the moment the county’s failures turned into the largest municipal liability story in the country.
Her body of work makes a larger argument about where accountability now lives in American local government. The Board of Supervisors did not reform the probation department; federal and state oversight, litigation, and sustained reporting forced the question. The foster care crisis did not surface through legislative hearings; it surfaced through hotel invoices and reporters who read them. The abuse settlement did not stay clean because officials designed it well; it came under scrutiny because a reporter kept reading the filings after the press conference ended. Ellis works the line where bureaucracy, law, and public money meet.
L.A. County D.A. claims four in five cases in $4-billion sex abuse payout may be fraudulent
Los Angeles County’s district attorney says he believes four in five claims in the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history may be fake — a claim that dwarfs previous assumptions over the scale of fraud within the $4-billion payout.
Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman has asked the judge overseeing the bulk of the sex abuse cases to pause payments for six months while he continues his sprawling criminal investigation into the plaintiffs, lawyers, and therapists behind the claims.
Distributing the money now, he argues, will hamper his investigation “by complicating witness cooperation [and] obscuring financial trails.”
The county agreed in April 2025 to pay $4 billion to settle more than 11,000 claims of sexual abuse arising from county-run juvenile halls, foster homes and a notorious children’s shelter. The claims, many of which dated back decades, came after California changed the statute of limitations to give victims who were sexually abused as children a new window to sue.
Seven months after the payout was announced, the D.A.’s office opened a probe, spurred by claims that some plaintiffs made up stories of abuse and were never in county custody. Times investigations found nine people who said they were paid small amounts of cash by recruiters to sue the county for sex abuse in juvenile halls. Four of them said they fabricated the claims.
The Voice
Her speech runs casual where her prose runs formal. She’s reporter who talks like a graduate student explaining her dissertation at a bar: “kind of,” “sort of,” “basically,” “roughly,” “quite frankly” recur as verbal padding. She says “kind of” as a hedge before almost any characterization: “it kind of triggered this domino effect,” “the lines get a little blurred there,” “sort of cleaned up.” The hedging is constant and it does work. It marks the line between what her data shows and what she infers, which for a reporter on a live legal and political story is self-protection and accuracy at once.
Her diction stays plain. She says “screw-up” twice, once about the county and once, with the softener “if you will,” about the evacuation order failure. She says “the county seems to have done a really good job that morning” before pivoting to the question that guts the praise: so where were all those firefighters that night? That move, concede then pivot, structures much of her answers. She grants the strongest version of the official defense, unprecedented conditions, three fires, mutual aid into the Palisades, and then sets the fact that survives the defense: 60 engines east of Lake Avenue, one truck west, eighteen dead on the west side.
Numbers anchor her rhetoric. She repeats “60 versus one” and flags it: “that’s why I wanted to highlight that number.” She builds credibility through method talk rather than through adjectives. She narrates the public records request, the 55,000-page PDF of latitude and longitude pings, the data colleague who made it legible, the minute-by-minute mapping. The method narration does double duty. It shows her work and it implies that anyone disputing her conclusions must dispute the coordinates.
She volunteers her caveats before the host can raise them. The mutual aid gap, the missing AVL data from other agencies, comes from her own mouth, twice, unprompted the second time: “again, there’s this caveat.” She refuses conclusions the data cannot carry. Asked whether deployment failed, she answers “I wouldn’t say the deployment” and reroutes to the narrower claim the records support: a possible repositioning failure, a “moth to a fire” pattern, a phrase she attributes to two former incident commanders rather than claiming as her own. She borrows vivid language instead of generating it, which keeps her testimony dry and her sources colorful.
She also pushes back on officials in real time, but with a tonal courtesy that disarms. When the host relays Supervisor Horvath’s suggestion that evacuation procedure failures trace to federal regulation, Ellis says “I will say, for this issue, I don’t think it’s a federal issue” and names the local failure: one side of town warned hours after the other. The disagreement comes wrapped in “I will say” and “if you will,” the verbal equivalent of a paralegal correcting a partner without raising her voice.
Emotion enters through other people. Her own register stays flat until she relays the residents: “the level of rage a lot of residents feel toward the fire department, who they quite frankly feel abandoned them, is pretty intense.” The strongest material she delivers is the story of Sophia, the woman who stayed for her tortoise, fought fires from her roof with no siren in earshot, fled near dawn, and lost the animal anyway. Ellis tells it with no adjectival inflation beyond “extremely broken,” and she lets the detail, the son finding the tortoise dead in front of the house, do the work. When the host supplies the emotional conclusion, “I can imagine she feels betrayed,” Ellis answers “Yeah, I think that’s fair to say,” declining even there to editorialize past what her source told her.
Her syntax in speech rambles where her print prose marches. Sentences restart, qualifiers stack, “um” and “you know” thread through. None of it reads as nervousness. It reads as a speaker composing in real time and refusing to outrun her evidence, which makes the few flat declaratives land harder. “Residents are really, really angry.” “No, definitely not,” when asked whether residents feel they have answers, followed by the quiet judgment she rarely permits herself: “I think in large part that’s pretty fair.” That last line is her style in miniature. The verdict arrives in eight plain words, hedged twice, after thirty minutes of coordinates.
The Set
Rebecca Ellis moves through a social world with three overlapping rings. The inner ring is the Los Angeles Times newsroom, in particular its metro and investigative desks. The middle ring is the accountability ecosystem of Los Angeles County: the oversight officials, plaintiffs’ attorneys, advocates, and data keepers who feed and consume her reporting. The outer ring is the national guild of young accountability reporters who came up through public media and now staff the investigative teams of major metros. Each ring has its own values, its own version of the hero, its own status ladder, and its own moral grammar, and Ellis holds standing in all three.
Begin with the newsroom. The Times metro operation that Ellis joined in 2023 carries the institutional memory of the paper’s accountability tradition: Paul Pringle’s USC investigations, Harriet Ryan and Matt Hamilton’s work on Bell and on USC, James Queally on courts and policing, Connor Sheets on sheriff’s gangs and county institutions, Julia Wick, Dakota Smith, and David Zahniser on City Hall, and the data desk where Sean Greene turned Ellis’s 55,000-page PDF of fire truck coordinates into a map. Above them sits executive editor Terry Tang, who took the job after Kevin Merida (b. 1957) resigned in 2024, and above her the ownership of Patrick Soon-Shiong (b. 1952), whose interventions in the opinion pages have made the newsroom anxious about its independence. The anxiety shapes the floor. Metro reporters at the Times now hold a value that older newsrooms took for granted and theirs cannot: the wall between reporting and ownership. They prize work so documented that no owner, no subject, and no lawyer can dislodge it.
What this world values, beneath the craft talk, is verification as a way of life. The supreme good is the document: the internal memo, the AVL ping, the settlement filing, the invoice for a foster child’s hotel room. Testimony ranks below paper. Emotion is admitted only when sourced to someone else; the reporter who cries on the page loses standing, while the reporter who makes a reader cry with a dead tortoise and a flat declarative gains it. They value stamina, the willingness to read the 55,000th page. They value beat fluency, knowing the county code well enough to catch the violation an official does not mention. And they value impact, defined with some circularity as the response of the institutions they cover: the paused payouts, the launched investigation, the resignation.
The hero system follows from the values. The hero of this world is the reporter who forces a powerful institution to admit what it concealed, at personal cost, without error. The martyrology features reporters who endured legal threats, source freezes, and institutional pressure and published anyway. Pringle holds hero status for pushing the USC stories against, by his own account, his own editors. The young reporters’ version adds a wrinkle: the hero now also masters data. The romance of the shoe leather reporter has merged with the romance of the records request, and Ellis’s fire truck investigation, built on coordinates rather than confessions, is the new model. Immortality in this world is the clip file and the prize citation, the knowledge that a law changed or a settlement paused because of something you published. The fallen hero is the fabricator, and one rung above him, the reporter who became a player, who traded coverage for access or carried water for a faction.
The status games run on several boards at once. Inside the newsroom, status accrues to front-page placement, to investigations that take months and survive legal review, and to being the byline the editors send when the county melts down. Across newsrooms, the game is prizes. The Pulitzer sits at the top, and below it a lattice every player can read: the Livingston Awards for reporters under thirty-five, where Lynette Clemetson’s Wallace House operation at Michigan anoints the generation’s stars and where Ellis has been a finalist more than once; the National Headliner Awards, which honored the Times settlement coverage; the Polk, the IRE awards, the Loeb. A second board is the talent market. The Times, The Washington Post, ProPublica, and The New York Times poach from one another, and a reporter’s market value tracks her last investigation. A third board is subtler: standing with sources. The reporter known to protect sources, to quote with context, and to resist spin holds capital that never appears on a resume but determines what she can break. Ellis plays a fourth game few colleagues attempt: she accumulates standing with adversarial parties on both sides of the same litigation, county counsel and plaintiffs’ firms, each of which believes she might expose the other.
The middle ring, the county accountability ecosystem, has its own roster. The Board of Supervisors: Hilda Solis (b. 1957), Holly Mitchell (b. 1964), Lindsey Horvath (b. 1982), Janice Hahn (b. 1952), and Kathryn Barger (b. 1960), whose district burned in the Eaton fire. The oversight layer: the county’s Office of Inspector General under Max Huntsman, the Probation Oversight Commission, the court monitors, the state attorney general’s office, and the state regulators who declared the juvenile halls unsuitable. The litigation layer: the plaintiffs’ firms handling thousands of abuse claims under California’s lookback law, among them Slater Slater Schulman, the New York firm that amassed the largest share of county claims, along with the established local trial bar; opposite them, county counsel and outside defense firms. The advocacy layer: foster care reformers, juvenile justice organizations, the Berkeley-based investigative reporters like Garrett Therolf who have tracked the Department of Children and Family Services for years. The values here diverge by faction, but the ecosystem shares one currency: credibility with the record. Every player, supervisor, monitor, trial lawyer, advocate, needs journalists to certify its version of events, and Ellis is among the certifiers whose stamp carries weight.
The normative claims. The public has a right to know how its institutions treat the powerless. Power conceals by default, so concealment requires no proof of malice to deserve exposure. The reporter must follow the evidence even when it harms allies, and a story that flatters your sources demands more skepticism, not less. Fairness means the subject gets to respond before publication, not that the truth gets split down the middle. Victims deserve compensation, and the process that compensates them deserves audit, and these two claims do not cancel. Anger at injustice is fuel, never a method. And the work must be its own justification: the reporter who asks what coverage will do to her access, her party, or her friendships has begun to corrupt.
The essentialist claims. This world believes some people are reporters by nature: born skeptics, congenital readers of fine print, people constitutionally unable to let a discrepancy rest. It believes institutions have natures too. Bureaucracies essentially protect themselves; given a choice between transparency and self-protection, the agency will choose self-protection every time, and the reporter who expects otherwise is a naif. Politicians essentially perform; their statements are positioning until documented otherwise. Trial lawyers essentially follow fees, whatever justice they also deliver. And the public is essentially distracted, which is why the hero system rewards the reporter who makes it look. The world holds a final essentialist belief about itself: that journalism is a calling rather than a job, that the people who do it well could earn more elsewhere and stay because the work expresses what they are.
The moral grammar assigns praise and blame in a distinct pattern. The gravest sin is fabrication, followed by plagiarism, followed by burning a source. Below those felonies sit the misdemeanors: the unforced error that hands the subject a correction, the overwritten lede, the credulous quote. Blame attaches to outcomes less than to process; a reporter who follows the method and gets a fact wrong receives correction and sympathy, while a reporter who cuts corners and happens to be right receives quiet contempt. Praise flows to restraint. Saying less than your evidence might support is virtue; the hedge is honorable; “I wouldn’t say the deployment” wins more respect inside the guild than a thundering accusation. The grammar also contains a tension the players feel but rarely name. The world honors the reporter who angers anyone, yet it draws its emotional energy from a rooting interest in the powerless, and when the powerless or their champions become the story, as the plaintiffs’ bar did in the county settlement, the grammar strains. Some members resolve the strain by softening coverage of allies. The world reserves its highest private honor for those who do not, which is the honor Ellis is currently earning, story by story, in a town where both the abusers’ employer and the victims’ lawyers now answer her calls with care.
Manufactured Natures: Stephen Turner on the Essentialist Claims of the Rebecca Ellis Set
Stephen Turner (b. 1951) has spent a career dissolving the collective objects that social groups believe in. In The Social Theory of Practices and the essays that followed, he argues that when a group attributes a shared essence to itself or to others, a common spirit, a nature, a hidden thing that members possess and outsiders lack, the attribution cannot survive the question of transmission. No essence passes from one head to another. Each member acquires her own habits through her own history of imitation, correction, and feedback, and the rough uniformity that results gets misread, after the fact, as evidence of a shared object that was there all along. Essence talk, for Turner, is a folk theory. It does real work in the group’s life, but the work is social rather than descriptive: it legitimates authority, polices boundaries, and converts contingent training into destiny. Run the accountability journalism world around Rebecca Ellis through this analysis and its essentialist claims come apart in instructive ways.
Start with the claim the guild makes about itself: that some people are reporters by nature, born skeptics, congenital readers of fine print, constitutionally unable to let a discrepancy rest. Turner’s first move is to ask how such a nature could be acquired or detected. The guild’s answer is that it cannot be taught, only discovered, which is what makes it an essence. The biographical record answers differently. Ellis’s skepticism has a visible manufacturing history: Brown, then the Kroc Fellowship at NPR, an institution that exists to install the dispositions of public radio journalism in twenty-two-year-olds through rotation and supervision; then the Miami Herald metro desk, where breaking news drills the habit of verification under deadline; then Oregon Public Broadcasting, where a beat structure teaches a reporter to read regulatory filings because the beat produces nothing else. Each stage is a feedback loop. Editors strike the unsupported sentence, praise the documented one, and the young reporter’s habits converge on the guild standard. Nothing transmits except corrections. The “born reporter” emerges at the end of the pipeline and the pipeline is then deleted from the story. The essence narrative does work the training narrative cannot: it makes the hierarchy feel natural. If reporting talent is an essence, then the prize committees that certify it, the Livingston judges, the Headliner panels, are detecting something real rather than consecrating one training lineage over others, and the certified can carry their authority as discovery rather than as appointment.
Take next the essences the guild attributes to the institutions it covers. Bureaucracies protect themselves by nature. Politicians perform by nature. Trial lawyers follow fees by nature. Turner treats such claims as folk causal theories that substitute a nature for an explanation. Their virtue is economy: a reporter who believes the probation department will conceal by default needs no case-by-case analysis before filing the records request, and the heuristic pays its way often enough to survive. Their vice is unfalsifiability. When the county cooperates, the cooperation gets explained inside the essence: they only released it because they knew we had it, the candor is itself a tactic. No behavior can count against a nature, which is the mark of an attribution doing social work rather than empirical work. The social work here is jurisdictional. The claim that institutions essentially conceal is also the claim that the public needs a class of professional revealers, and so the essence attributed to the bureaucracy underwrites the existence of the guild. The reporter’s authority and the agency’s nature are two sides of one coin, minted together.
Ellis’s own practice shows less essentialism than her world’s talk. Her fire investigation did not assume the county fire department’s nature and write toward it. She requested the vehicle locator pings, mapped them, and reported a pattern, sixty engines east of Lake Avenue, one truck west, while volunteering the caveat that other agencies’ data was missing. Asked on the Rebuilding L.A. podcast whether the deployment failed, she said “I wouldn’t say the deployment” and confined herself to a narrower repositioning question her coordinates could carry. Turner’s framework illuminates the difference. The guild’s essence talk is a shared vocabulary, but the working reporter’s skill is a set of individually acquired habits that often outrun the vocabulary. Ellis talks the guild’s folk theory in green rooms and practices something more granular at the keyboard. The gap between what the group says it knows and what its members each do is exactly where Turner says to look.
The settlement phase of her career stresses the guild’s essentialism. The folk theory sorts the county litigation cleanly: the bureaucracy conceals by nature, the survivors suffer by circumstance, the lawyers fight by calling. Her phase two reporting scrambled the sort. The lawyers’ fee-following nature, a background assumption when they sued the county, became foreground when she examined solicitation practices and the State Bar opened an investigation. The claims process, built as the remedy, displayed the self-protective behavior the theory reserves for the wrongdoer. Members of the guild who held the essences experienced her reporting as betrayal, an attack on the victims’ side, because in an essentialist scheme scrutiny tracks natures: you investigate the kind of actor that conceals. Ellis behaved as though no actor has a kind, only a position and a paper trail. Turner gives the vocabulary for what she did: she treated the essences as defeasible folk summaries rather than as knowledge, and the portion of her world that confused the summary for the thing could not follow her.
Journalism, members say, is what they are; they could earn more elsewhere and stay because the work expresses their nature. Turner reads vocation talk as the conversion of an acquired disposition into a discovered self, and the conversion has a clear function in a collapsing industry. A guild that cannot pay market wages must pay in identity. The essence of the journalist, incorruptible, called, born for it, is the compensation package. It also disciplines: the reporter who leaves for public relations has not changed jobs but betrayed a nature, and the threat of that judgment holds the labor force in place at the price the industry can afford. The calling narrative even structures the heroes. Paul Pringle’s canonization rests on the story that he could not have done otherwise, that pushing the USC stories against his own editors expressed what he was. Turner would note that the canon is assembled backward: the guild selects the careers that ended in vindication, narrates them as essence unfolding, and quietly drops the equally driven reporters whose certainty ended in error. The essence is a retrospective award.
The Ellis set behaves alike because its members passed through similar pipelines, answered to similar editors, chased similar prizes, and corrected toward similar standards, each one separately. There is no shared object, no essence of the reporter, no nature of the bureaucracy, only convergent habituation and the folk theory that decorates it. The decoration pays the underpaid in identity, naturalizes the prize hierarchy, justifies the guild’s jurisdiction, and sorts the world into actors who deserve scrutiny by kind. Ellis’s distinction, on this reading, is that she wears the decoration lightly. Her habits, acquired ping by ping and correction by correction, let her investigate her own side’s saints, because habits, unlike essences, do not know whose side anyone is on.
In Explaining the Normative, Stephen Turner attacks the idea that beneath social life sits a layer of obligation, oughts that bind independent of anyone’s say-so, validity that transcends what people happen to enforce. He calls the idea normativism, and his charge is that it explains nothing while smuggling in a tribunal that does not exist. What presents itself as the binding force of a norm, Turner argues, decomposes without remainder into ordinary causal material: habits installed through training, expectations about what others will do, anticipated sanctions, and a folk vocabulary of duty that members learn along with everything else. The feeling of obligation is real. The objective obligation behind the feeling is the fiction. Communities then use the fiction in predictable ways: to settle disputes by appeal to a higher authority that is, in fact, only themselves, and to license a priesthood that claims special access to what the norms really require. The accountability journalism world around Rebecca Ellis runs on normative claims, and Turner’s analysis bites on every one of them.
Take the foundational claim: the public has a right to know how its institutions behave. The sentence presents a normative fact, a right, sitting somewhere prior to any law or practice, which the reporter merely serves. Turner asks where such a fact could live. Not in law; the First Amendment restrains government and grants the public no claim on the county’s hotel invoices, which is why Ellis needs the California Public Records Act, a statute, revisable, fought over, and full of exemptions. Not in the public, which never convened to issue the right and mostly does not read the stories that vindicate it. The right to know is the guild’s charter myth, and its function is jurisdictional. It converts what reporters do, extract information that institutions prefer to hold, into what someone is owed, and a job into a fiduciary duty. The conversion pays. A trade that serves a pre-existing right can claim protections, access, and deference that a mere business could not. Turner’s point is the claim works without being true. The records statutes, the press passes, and the deference exist because enough people act as if the right exists, and the acting, not the right, carries all the causal weight.
Or take the norm Ellis’s career now tests: follow the evidence even when it harms allies. Inside the guild this is spoken as a duty with objective force, the thing a real reporter must do. Turner’s dissolution starts with the observation that the duty becomes visible only through enforcement, and the enforcement is the community’s behavior, nothing above it. When Ellis turned from exposing the county to auditing the settlement, the claims verification questions, the solicitation practices, the litigation financiers, her world split. One faction read her as violating a norm: protect survivors, do not arm the county against its victims. Another read her as fulfilling a norm: the evidence led to the plaintiffs’ pipeline, so the duty ran there. Normativism says one faction was right, that a fact about journalistic obligation existed and adjudicated the dispute. Turner says look for the tribunal and you find only the factions. What settled the question was causal, the State Bar opened its investigation, the county paused payouts, her reporting held up, and the guild then rewrote the norm retrospectively as having always commanded the audit. Had her stories collapsed, the same community would now cite the same vocabulary to condemn her. The norm did not guide the outcome. The outcome fixed what the norm is said to have been.
The procedural norms decompose even faster. Fairness means the subject gets to respond before publication: spoken as ethics, structured as liability management. The pre-publication call documents the absence of malice and shrinks the libel exposure, and the Times legal review, the no-surprises rule, the carefully logged requests for comment exist because lawyers and insurers shaped them. The reporter experiences the procedure as duty because she acquired it as habit, under editors who enforced it, in a newsroom whose general counsel appears in the credits of its own podcast. Turner does not say the ethical gloss is cynical. He says the gloss is causally idle. Remove the felt obligation and leave the libel regime, and the calls still get made. Remove the libel regime and leave the felt obligation, and the practice erodes within a generation, as it has in jurisdictions and formats where the sanctions disappeared.
The same analysis reaches the claim that anger is fuel, never a method. Ellis performs this norm visibly: residents rage, the tortoise dies, and her own register stays flat, “I think that’s fair to say.” The guild narrates the flatness as an epistemic duty, emotion corrupts inference. Turner would trace the installation. The flat register survives editing; the angry draft does not. The flat quote survives the defense lawyer’s deposition; the editorializing reporter becomes the story. Wire service convention, broadcast regulation, the libel bar, and prize-committee taste built the affect rules, and each reporter acquires them as corrections long before she can state them as principles. The principle is the residue of the corrections, stated as if it had been their source.
Turner reserves particular attention for the priesthood that every normativist community generates, the specialists who claim the norms have content beyond what the community enforces. Journalism has built this apparatus in full: the Society of Professional Journalists code, the ethics columnists, the ombudsmen and public editors, the Poynter seminars, the journalism school ethics requirement. On Turner’s reading these institutions do not discover the profession’s obligations; they manage the vocabulary in which the profession’s conflicts get fought. Their pronouncements matter exactly as far as newsrooms sanction in accordance with them, which is why the codes trail practice by years and why their gravest pronouncements, on aggregation, on social media, on artificial intelligence, read as attempts to catch a moving train. The Ellis settlement coverage will eventually appear in this literature as a case study, and the case study will present as discovered principle what was, in the event, a reporter’s habits colliding with her coalition’s expectations and winning.
Two of the set’s normative claims deserve a closer look because they carry the economics of the trade. The work must be its own justification: the reporter who weighs what a story costs her access or her friendships has begun to corrupt. And victims deserve compensation while the process deserves audit, two duties asserted as non-canceling. The first norm performs the same conversion Turner finds everywhere, turning a market condition into a duty. An industry that cannot pay for loyalty must moralize it; the prohibition on weighing personal cost keeps reporters producing adversarial work at salaries that do not price the adversity. The second norm is more interesting because the set asserts the two duties do not conflict while its behavior shows they do. The faction that froze Ellis out experienced the conflict; the vocabulary denies it. Normativism requires the denial, because admitting that duties collide without a fact to resolve the collision concedes Turner’s whole case: that what gets called the resolution is just the community’s sanctioning behavior settling into a new pattern.
What remains of the Ellis set’s ethics after Turner is everything that was doing the work all along. The training pipelines that install the habits. The libel regime, the records statutes, the prize committees, the editors, the peer contempt and peer honor that sanction deviation and conformity. The folk vocabulary of rights and duties in which the sanctions get narrated. Turner’s dissolution does not predict the ethics will fail; the causal substrate is sturdy and self-reinforcing. It predicts only that when the substrate shifts, when ownership changes, when the libel calculus moves, when the prize economy rewards different work, the norms will follow, and the community will discover that its eternal obligations have quietly acquired new content. Ellis, on this reading, is not obeying a higher tribunal her colleagues betrayed. She is what her corrections made her, running in an environment that, for now, still pays out for the habit of reading one more filing. The guild calls that integrity, and Turner would not object to the word. He would only note that the word names a disposition with a history, and the history, not the tribunal, explains every story she files.
Apply four questions to any public communicator and the shape of their situation emerges. What coalition do they depend on for status and income? Who do they risk angering if they speak plainly? Who benefits if their framing wins? What truths might cost them their position?
Most careers yield one stable set of answers. Rebecca Ellis yields two, because her career at the Los Angeles Times splits into two phases with different coalition structures, and the second phase required her to investigate the people the first phase made her allies. That flip is rare in local journalism.
Start with the first question in phase one. When Ellis joined the Times in 2023 to cover Los Angeles County government, her income came from the paper and her status came from a coalition that forms around any accountability reporter on a social services beat. The coalition included her editors, who needed the county beat to produce impact. It included the prize committees, the Livingston judges who had named her a finalist for her Oregon private security investigation in 2022 and the National Headliner judges who later honored the Times team for its settlement coverage. It included the oversight apparatus around county government: inspectors general, court monitors, state regulators, the attorneys who sue the county. And it included the advocates, the foster care reformers and juvenile justice activists who feed reporters tips, documents, and outraged quotes. When Ellis documented children sleeping in hotels because the county lacked foster placements, or staffing collapses inside the juvenile halls, every member of that coalition gained. Her stories armed the advocates, vindicated the monitors, strengthened the plaintiffs’ lawyers, and gave her editors the impact metrics that justify an investigative reporter’s salary.
The second question, in phase one, had a comfortable answer. Speaking plainly risked angering county officials: the Board of Supervisors, the probation department brass, the Department of Children and Family Services. These are people with limited power over a Times reporter. They cannot fire her. They can slow her records requests, freeze her out of background briefings, and complain to her editors, and that is roughly the extent of their arsenal. A reporter whose plain speech angers only the institution she covers occupies the safest position in journalism. The adversarial posture is the job description. Her paper, her prizes, and her sources all reward the anger she provokes. In phase one, the four questions reveal a reporter with aligned incentives: the people she might anger and the people she depended on sat on opposite sides of the table.
Then the table turned. The county’s failures moved into the courts. California’s lookback legislation opened the door to thousands of sexual abuse claims from former wards of county juvenile halls and foster placements, the county moved toward a settlement measured in billions, and Ellis followed the story into its second phase. Here the third question becomes the hinge. Who benefited when her phase one framing won? When the framing was county institutions abuse children and hide it, the beneficiaries included the claimants, the advocates, and above all the plaintiffs’ bar, whose contingency fees scale with the county’s liability. Every story Ellis wrote documenting abuse inside the halls raised the settlement value of the claims. She did not write the stories for that purpose. The stories were true. But truth has beneficiaries, and the lawyers were among them.
Phase two begins when Ellis turns the same scrutiny on the remedy. Her reporting examined claim verification, attorney solicitation practices, alleged fraud in parts of the intake pipeline, and the investors positioned to profit from mass tort payouts. By early 2026 she was reporting on a State Bar investigation of a law firm tied to the $4 billion case and on the county pausing payouts amid settlement investigations. Run the first question again and the coalition has reorganized. Her editors and the prize committees remain. But the sources who sustained phase one occupy a new position. The plaintiffs’ lawyers who once handed her filings now field her questions about their solicitation practices. The advocates who cheered her foster care exposes now watch her cast doubt on a claims process that compensates survivors. A reporter’s coalition includes her source network, and Ellis chose to convert a wing of her source network into subjects.
The second question now has a harder answer. In phase two, speaking plainly risks angering the plaintiffs’ bar, which differs from angering a county bureaucracy in kind. Trial lawyers sue people for a living. They command publicity machinery of their own, relationships with other reporters, and a moral shield the probation department never had: they represent abuse survivors. A story questioning claim verification can be reframed, within hours, as an attack on victims. Ellis also risks angering the survivors, or at least the organizations that speak for them, who hear scrutiny of the settlement as a threat to compensation. And she risks angering the part of her own professional culture that treats plaintiffs’ attorneys in abuse litigation as the good guys. The county, meanwhile, has become an awkward partial beneficiary of her work. When she reports fraud allegations in the claims pipeline, county officials seeking to limit payouts can wave her stories. The reporter who spent two years arming the county’s adversaries now produces copy the county can use. Nothing about her method changed. The field changed around her.
The third question, run on phase two, explains why the work remains honest rather than captured. If her new framing wins, the framing that the settlement apparatus deserves the same scrutiny as the abuse, the beneficiaries form a strange and unstable set: taxpayers, legitimate claimants whose payouts a fraud scandal might otherwise taint or delay, county budget officials, and the State Bar. No single member of that set can sustain her the way the accountability coalition sustained phase one. Taxpayers do not leak documents. Budget officials make poor heroes. The diffuseness of the beneficiaries is the strongest evidence that coalition service does not drive the reporting. A reporter optimizing for coalition position might have stayed in phase one forever. The abuse story could supply a career of sympathetic victims, villainous bureaucrats, and prize entries. Ellis traded that position for one where her natural allies are a bar association and a county counsel’s office.
The fourth question cuts deepest, and its answer differs by phase. In phase one, the truths that might have cost Ellis her position were truths unfavorable to her sources: evidence that an advocate exaggerated, that a claimed pattern of abuse rested on weak documentation, that the county’s failures were less damning than the litigation posture required. Most beat reporters never test whether they can publish such truths because the occasion never forces it. In phase two, Ellis forced the occasion on herself. The truths she now publishes, that some claims may be fraudulent, that solicitation practices in the case drew a State Bar investigation, that investors stand to profit from a fund built for abuse survivors, are the truths phase one made expensive. Each one strains the source relationships her beat depends on. The countervailing truths also exist and also carry cost: if she overweights the fraud allegations, she hands the county a pretext to slow compensation to people its facilities harmed as children, and her reporting becomes the county’s shield. She works a corridor with coalition penalties on both walls.
Her spoken manner, visible in her August 2025 podcast appearance on the Eaton fire investigation, shows how she manages the corridor. She concedes the strongest official defense before delivering the fact that survives it. She volunteers her caveats before the host can raise them. She attributes the vivid phrases to her sources and keeps her own language flat. She corrects a county supervisor’s federal deflection with “I don’t think it’s a federal issue” and softens the correction with “I will say.” The hedging reads as caution. The four questions suggest it reads better as coalition management: a speaker who knows that every plain sentence angers someone she may need, and who prices each sentence before saying it.
The questions also illuminate what Ellis’s two-phase career says about her employer. The Times pays for impact, and impact in phase two comes from a smaller, stranger audience than impact in phase one. Children in hotels is a story every reader understands. Litigation finance in a mass tort settlement is a story for the State Bar, the county counsel, and the courts. That the paper sustained the second phase suggests its incentive structure, prizes, subscriptions, institutional pride, can still reward reporting whose coalition payoff is thin. That is the condition that makes Ellis possible. Her four answers, in both phases, depend on a newsroom willing to absorb the anger her plain speech generates. The day that willingness fades, the fourth question gets a new answer, and the truths that cost a reporter her position will include the ones Ellis now publishes every month.
What the flip reveals, in the end, is the difference between a reporter whose adversarial posture is positional and one whose posture is methodological. Positional adversaries fight whoever their coalition opposes. Methodological adversaries audit whoever holds power in the story, and accept that the audit will eventually reach their friends. Ellis passed the test most accountability reporters never face, because she scheduled it herself. She read the filings after the press conference ended, and the filings led back through her own source list. She kept reading.
The Auditor’s Apprenticeship: Stephen Turner on Expertise and Tacit Knowledge in the Career of Rebecca Ellis
Stephen Turner’s work on expertise begins from a problem for democracy and a problem for philosophy, and the two problems meet in a reporter like Rebecca Ellis. The democratic problem, set out in Liberal Democracy 3.0 and the essay “What Is the Problem with Experts?”, is that liberal politics presumes discussion among rough equals, while modern government runs on knowledge that citizens cannot check. The public must take expert claims on trust, which makes the management of that trust, who certifies the experts, who audits them, who translates them, the real constitution of a modern polity. The philosophical problem, worked through in The Social Theory of Practices and Understanding the Tacit, is that the knowledge experts hold is mostly tacit, embodied in trained judgment rather than statable rules, and tacit knowledge cannot be transferred. It can only be re-created, learner by learner, through apprenticeship and feedback. Put the two together and you get Turner’s picture of the knowledge society: a lattice of trained judgments that no one can fully articulate, held together by certifications and trust relations that the official theory of democracy barely acknowledges. Ellis works a junction point in that lattice. Her job is to audit expert classes on behalf of a public that cannot, using an expertise of her own that the public cannot check either.
Her value to the Los Angeles Times rests on a command of bureaucratic and legal systems that her readers, and most of her colleagues, lack. She knows that county fire vehicles carry transmitters that ping their coordinates every minute, that the pings are a public record, and that a records request phrased the right way will shake them loose. She knows how to read a settlement filing for the clause that shifts risk, a probation staffing report for the number that contradicts the press release, a county budget for the fund where liability hides. Almost none of this is statable as rules. Ask her to write down how she reads a filing and she could produce tips, but the tips would not produce her judgment in a novice, any more than a written description of bicycle balance produces a rider. Turner’s account of the tacit explains why. The knowledge lives in habituated perception, in what leaps out of a page at her after years of pages, and what leaps out cannot be handed over. It can only be grown again in another person through the same kind of history.
Her career. The Kroc Fellowship at NPR is an apprenticeship institution in Turner’s exact sense: it does not transmit a body of doctrine, it arranges occasions for habituation. The fellow rotates through desks, files under supervision, gets corrected, and the corrections accumulate into dispositions. The Miami Herald metro desk added the deadline reflexes, verification under time pressure, the habit of calling before believing. Oregon Public Broadcasting added the beat layer, and the beat is the deepest apprenticeship journalism has. A beat reporter learns her agencies the way a clinician learns bodies, by long exposure to cases, until the abnormal announces itself. The Portland private security investigation marks the moment her trained perception outran the official record: she could see, in licensing files and hiring practices, a pattern the regulators who produced the files had not assembled. Turner’s anti-collectivist point belongs here. Nothing called “journalistic practice” entered Ellis at any stage. Each reporter who passes through Kroc or a metro desk builds her own approximation of the guild standard out of her own corrections, and the approximations converge because the feedback environments resemble each other. The convergence is real. The shared object is not.
Los Angeles County government is an expert formation almost perfectly sealed against citizen judgment. Its budget exceeds most states’. Its child welfare, probation, and public health systems run on professional knowledge, administrative records, and, increasingly, litigation: consent decrees, court monitors, settlement funds. A voter cannot check any of it. The supervisors cannot check most of it; they too take their departments’ claims on trust. The official democratic theory has no answer to this except elections, and elections cannot reach a claims-verification process or a fire department’s deployment logic. Turner argues that polities handle the problem, when they handle it at all, through intermediary institutions that audit and translate expert claims: commissions, inspectors, and the press. Ellis is that theory walking. When she mapped the vehicle locator data and put sixty engines east of Lake Avenue against one truck west, she performed an audit no resident of Altadena could perform, of an expert system, incident command, whose own self-account the public had no way to test. When she examined the abuse settlement’s intake pipeline, she audited a second expert class, the plaintiffs’ bar, whose claims about claim validity the survivors, the county, and the courts had all been taking substantially on trust.
The sequence of her career, read through Turner, is a sequence of audited expert classes. First the security regulators in Oregon. Then the county’s administrative experts: probation officials, child welfare managers, fire command. Then the legal experts: the mass tort firms, the claims processors, the litigation financiers. Each class holds knowledge the public cannot check, each produces a self-justifying paper record, and each met in Ellis an outsider who had grown enough insider perception to read the record against the self-justification. The fire chief could say unprecedented conditions; the pings said the trucks did not reposition. The firms could say every claim is vetted; the filings and the State Bar’s interest said the vetting deserved its own audit. Turner’s framework names what makes this possible and what makes it rare. Possible, because expertise is tacit and individual, an outsider can grow it; nothing confines the reading of settlement filings to lawyers. Rare, because growing it takes years of fed-back exposure that almost no institution outside a beat newsroom will subsidize.
The public that cannot check the county cannot check her either. Readers do not re-request the AVL data or re-map the pings. They take her audit on trust, which means the democratic problem has not been solved, only moved one step, to the question of who certifies the auditor. The answer is the apparatus visible all over her career: the masthead of the Times, the legal review that precedes publication, the prize lattice, Livingston, Headliner, that consecrates trained judgment the way boards certify physicians. Her habit of narrating method, the 55,000-page PDF, the data colleague, the minute-by-minute map, the volunteered caveats, functions as a trust performance. It shows work the reader still cannot replicate. The judgment calls that constitute the expertise, what counts as a caveat, which inference the coordinates will carry, why “I wouldn’t say the deployment” but yes to a repositioning question, remain tacit, and the reader trusts the flat tone and the institutional stamp. Turner would not call this a scandal. He would call it the normal structure of a knowledge society, and he would point out that journalism’s self-image, we make expertise transparent to the public, understates what the trade really is: a rival expert class whose product is audits, certified by its own guild institutions, trusted because the certifications have held up.
Tacit knowledge dies when the apprenticeship chain breaks; there is no manual to store it in. The expertise Ellis holds was grown by a fellowship, two metro desks, and a beat structure, every link of which sits inside an industry that has shed most of its capacity to grow the next Ellis. When a county of ten million has one reporter who can read its settlement architecture, the audit function of democracy hangs on a single trained perception and the willingness of one paper to keep paying for it. Turner’s expert classes go unchecked by default; checking them is the artifact, the thing that requires institutions. Her recent reporting on the claims process shows what the artifact buys. The audit of the remedy, the part of the story no faction wanted, the part only trained judgment could see in the filings, came from the one person positioned to perform it. The lattice held at that junction because she was standing there. The question her career poses, in Turner’s terms, is who is being habituated, right now, to stand there next.
Posted inAbuse, Los Angeles Times|Comments Off on The Settlement Is Also an Institution: Rebecca Ellis Covers Los Angeles County
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
