2025-09-17 11:31:17
I was about to write about the train murder in North Carolina, but the assassination of Charlie Kirk pushed it out of the news. For those who don’t know, here’s the story:
Gruesome video shows a man stabbing a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte light rail train…The unprovoked attack — which is being investigated by the FBI — happened shortly before 10 p.m. August 22…
The victim, Iryna Zarutska, fled Ukraine in 2022 with her mother, sister, and brother to escape the war with Russia…
The suspect, Decarlos Brown, 34, was…charged with first-degree murder. Homeless at the time of the stabbing…Brown has a lengthy criminal history, including convictions for armed robbery, felony larceny and breaking and entering. Family members told CNN he has a history of mental health struggles…He spent more than five years behind bars for robbery with a dangerous weapon, state records show. North Carolina state records list 14 cases for Brown, other than those related to the killing. They stem back to 2011 and include arrests for minor offenses like speeding and shoplifting. It is unclear how many of them were prosecuted[.]
A more detailed (and more gruesome) account can be found here.
About two weeks after the murder occurred, it exploded into the public consciousness. The FBI declared an investigation, and President Trump posted a montage of the victim on social media.
This being America in the 2020s, a lot of people insisted on viewing the case in racial terms. Right-wing accounts decried black crime rates, and Fox News showed statistics about interracial violence. This was unhelpful. Although the killing was probably a hate crime — the perpetrator repeatedly says “I got that white girl” in the video — it was also the act of a lone schizophrenic who claims that the victim was reading his mind. Blaming a whole racial group for the actions of a lone psycho killer makes no sense.1 As Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual write, this is really a story about how our broken justice system releases repeat offenders and criminally insane individuals back into society again and again, rather than a story about race relations.
On the flip side, some progressive commentators seemed more worried about racist reactions to the crime, or about the fate of the perpetrator, than about the gruesome murder itself. CNN’s Brian Stelter fretted about “pro-Trump activists” making political hay out of the murder, while Van Jones expressed sympathy for the killer, declaring that “The man who stabbed Iryna Zarutska was hurting…hurt people hurt people.” This was also unhelpful. Just as minority groups shouldn’t be blamed when someone from that group commits a crime, the perpetrators shouldn’t be given special protections or consideration because of their race.
Meanwhile, some cynical commentators (including myself) simply noted that it was nice to see MAGA types expressing sympathy for an immigrant refugee, and for a Ukrainian. It would be nice if they could extend the sympathy they felt for Iryna Zarutska to the many thousands of young Ukrainian women who are being raped and murdered by the invading Russian army.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say about the racial politics of this particular murder. But the urban politics are much more interesting. In the wake of the killing, a number of people argued that incidents like this are why America doesn’t have good public transit:
These people are overstating their case, but when you get right down to it, they do have a point. America’s chronically high levels of violence and public disorder are one reason — certainly not the only reason, but one reason — that it’s so politically difficult to build dense housing and transit in this country.
For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.
But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century.
A fair amount of research around the world shows that fear of violent crime keeps a lot of people from using public transit. Urbanists can shout all they like about how driving is far more dangerous than taking the train or bus, but telling people what not to be afraid of has a very poor track record as a method of persuasion. Air travel and terrorism are both examples where dangers that are out of people’s control are scarier than dangers people feel they can avoid, such as car accidents. We devote huge societal resources to minimizing the risks of plane crashes and terrorist attacks, and if we want more Americans to embrace life in dense cities, we’re going to have to do the same with the risk of crime on public transit.
The slaying of Iryna Zarutska was a sensational incident, but not an isolated one. Back in 2018, three people were stabbed to death on the Bay Area’s BART train within a span of five days. There was a mass shooting on an NYC train in 2022. That same year, an Asian woman was pushed onto the train tracks and killed at the Times Square station. In 2024 a sleeping woman on the NYC subway was lit on fire and burned to death.
Those are the most sensational incidents, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg; tons of crime on public transit goes unreported, even when it reaches epidemic proportions, such as during the anti-Asian hate crime wave in 2021.
Americans are simply not going to accept a transit-centric lifestyle unless and until the incidence of violence on trains and buses goes way down. I was about to write a whole post about this, but I realized I already wrote one, last year:
I could probably improve on it a little, but not much. So here’s that post, republished. Urbanists need to take this to heed.
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a huge fan of dense, walkable cities. Much of my enthusiasm comes from living in Japan for several years, and I’ve written a bunch of posts about why Japanese cities are so especially great. Here was the most relevant one for today’s post:
Back home in America, I’ve called for a bunch of changes to make our cities better places to live. Most importantly, we need more housing density and better transit. These are the two main goals of the YIMBY movement. I also want more commercial density — lots of shops in walkable downtown areas — which is something YIMBYs should focus on more than they do. I don’t think American cities are going to become like Tokyo — or Paris, or Singapore, etc. — anytime soon. But I think places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Miami, and Philadelphia can move enough in that direction to make a big difference in America’s quality of life, and probably in our economic productivity as well.
But we’ll need to change a lot about our society in order to get there. Usually, when I talk about urbanism, I talk about land use deregulation, increased transit funding, and transit cost reduction, so that we can build dense housing and transit cheaply and abundantly. And I think those policies are incredibly important. But when I suggest these policies to conservatives, or even just to politically neutral NIMBY types, the response I always get is that Japan and Europe can have nice cities because they have public order. They point out the vast disparities in violent crime between America and the rich nations of Eurasia:
With America’s high crime rates, they say, we could never have cities like that.
And I think the conservatives and NIMBYs are partially right. They’re partially wrong, in that you don’t have to have a city as safe as Tokyo in order to have lots of density and good transit. NYC has a homicide rate of about 4.6 per 100,000 as of 2023, which is about 10 times that of Tokyo and 4 times that of Paris, and yet it’s super dense and very walkable. But they’re partially right. One reason is that, just as they say, low levels of both violence and general public disorder probably make it a much more pleasant experience to walk around a downtown area. In my post about why Japanese cities are such nice places to live, I wrote:
Good public safety makes people feel safer leaving their homes — especially women, and especially at night. This makes neighborhoods more vibrant and increases the feeling of community. And when it’s safe to go outside, living in a small apartment doesn’t feel nearly as confining; no one feels like they have to hide inside their house from muggers, rapists, etc…In fact, there’s a virtuous cycle between public safety and dense walkability — the more people are out walking around, the more “eyes on the street” there are to deter crime, which in turn makes more people feel safe walking around.
In fact, there’s evidence that crime represents a sort of “congestion cost” that makes cities function less efficiently.
But there’s another effect here that’s political in nature. Both violence and general disorder probably discourage locals from supporting both housing density and public transit — in other words, they give rise to NIMBYism. Transit, especially if it’s made free or if fare-jumping is easy, allows both criminals and drugged-up disorderly types2 to reach otherwise peaceful neighborhoods. And since apartment complexes A) are cheaper to live in than single-family houses, and B) usually come with inclusionary zoning requirements that require any new complex to include some poor tenants, they also mean more poor people in the neighborhood. If a city has poor public safety and public order, this means increased danger — or at least increased anxiety — for existing residents.
This turns some people NIMBY out of concern for public safety. And NIMBYs themselves are the main obstacle to building denser cities in America. When NIMBYs tell you that America isn’t safe enough for density, they are describing their own motivations and concerns.
It’s important to note that it barely matters whether NIMBYs are right about the effect of apartment construction and transit on local crime. For example, while there are certainly a number of studies finding that adding transit increases crime near bus stops and train stations, the estimated effects are generally small, and a few studies find no effect.3 But the claim that trains bring crime to safe neighborhoods is incredibly common in American politics. Without a widespread perception of public safety and order, people will keep using NIMBY anti-development policies to try to keep anyone away from them who even might commit a crime or make a scene on the street.
We can try to simply yell at fearful NIMBYs to stop being a bunch of NIMBYs and call them racists and segregationists and petty landed gentry, but this approach historically has poor results. Instead, the country should address their concerns about violence and disorder, in order to build a constituency for urbanism in America. (And of course, needless to say, lowering crime and increasing public safety is good in and of itself.) Europe, Asia, and New York City have all largely figured out how to do this. We can learn from their successes.
Matt Yglesias had a good post back in 2023 about Europe’s approach to public safety and order:
One key is gun control, of course. But another very important policy is to have a lot of police officers. Matt writes:
France has, for example, about 150,000 members of the Police Nationale, plus another 100,000 members of the Gendarmerie. They are supplemented by a Police Municipale in the cities that’s about 20,000 strong, and there are apparently about 1,000 rural guards. That’s about four officers per thousand people, while the FBI says the United States has between 2.4 and 3.4 law enforcement personnel per person, depending on how you count.
In fact, although Europe has a reputation for being lenient in terms of policy toward crime, most European countries — and East Asian countries — have more police per capita than the United States does. Here’s a chart from Lewis and Usmani (2022) showing that while America has higher rates of incarceration, other rich countries tend to have more cops:
The guys with machine guns in the image at the top of this post are, if I’m not mistaken, part of the Gendermerie Nationale, France’s national police force. You see these guys standing all over Paris with big imposing guns. Somehow it detracts from neither the walkability nor the charm of this safe, low-crime European megacity. Yglesias notes that nationalized police forces are a feature of many European countries, which might or might not be a good lesson for America.
But the real point here is that as Lewis & Usmani argue, and as Alex Tabarrok has been arguing for years, the U.S. is probably under-policed. In fact, there’s a ton of evidence that simply hiring a lot more police officers reduces crime. German Lopez did a great review of the research literature in 2021, when “defund the police” was a hot-button issue, so I’ll quote from him:
There is solid evidence that more police officers and certain policing strategies reduce crime and violence. In a recent survey of criminal justice experts, a majority said increasing police budgets would improve public safety…A 2020 study…by [Chalfin et al. for] the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded, “Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides…
A 2005 study [by Klick and Tabarrok] in the Journal of Law and Economics took advantage of surges in policing driven by terror alerts, finding that high-alert periods, when more officers were deployed, led to significantly less crime.
And Chalfin and McCrary (2018) find that once they try to correct for certain errors in police data, the effect of policing on crime is even larger.
Increased numbers of police act through several channels, which can be difficult to disentangle with evidence. First, their presence on the street deters crime directly, because people don’t want to commit crimes in front of police. Lopez writes:
Hot spot policing…focuses on problem areas, even down to specific city blocks, with disproportionate levels of crime and violence. Police departments send officers to these places with a goal of deterring further disorder…A 2019 review in the Journal of Experimental Criminology looked at dozens of studies and found hot spot policing reduced crime without merely displacing it to other areas, and, in fact, there was evidence of “diffusion” in which crime-fighting benefits actually spread to surrounding areas. The review relied on several strong studies, including randomized controlled trials (generally the gold standard of research), suggesting that the findings were based on solid ground.
Second, the general presence of a bunch of cops in a city acts as a deterrent, because would-be criminals are afraid of being arrested and punished after the fact. There are some studies on “focused deterrence”, in which cops try to contact gangs and warn them not to commit violent crimes, and these generally find a positive effect. But there’s probably a more general deterrence effect that operates through word of mouth — when would-be criminals hear about people getting arrested, it makes them think that if they commit crimes, they too will get arrested.
The third way cops fight crime is via incarceration itself — they arrest criminals, who then get prosecuted and incarcerated, which removes repeat offenders from wider society. Scott Alexander has an excellent (and very long) review of the literature on incarceration and crime here:
The basic upshot is that removing criminals from society does prevent crime, although the financial cost of preventing crime this way — which involves supporting prisoners for many years of their lives — is very high. Hiring more police does reduce crime a lot, but the physical incapacitation piece of that is the most expensive piece. Ultimately he agrees with Tabarrok, and with Lewis & Usmani, that America is over-prisoned and under-policed.
In general, there’s an emerging consensus that the specter of long prison sentences doesn’t act as much of a deterrent to criminals, but that a high probability of being caught is a very effective deterrent. Jennifer Doleac, who studies the economics of crime, writes:
[M]ost people quickly age out of crime. There is lots of data documenting that the likelihood of committing crime increases until ages 18 to 20, then decreases. (Crime is largely a young person’s game.) That means we are incarcerating lots of people who are no longer an active threat. It’s a waste of money and does not make us safer.
Long sentences might be useful if they deterred crime — that is, if the threat of a harsh punishment provided a meaningful incentive to obey the law. But research consistently shows that increasing the probability of getting caught is far more effective. Most would-be offenders are probably not thinking very far ahead, which means the chance they’d be arrested weighs far more than the details of any future imprisonment.
(I highly recommend this long interview of Doleac by the excellent Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic, by the way.)
Alex Tabarrok agrees with Doleac’s prescriptions, harshly criticizing economists who assume that criminals are rational actors. He argues that a high probability of swift punishment for wrongdoing, with small punishments at first and long sentences only for a few incorrigible offenders, is the way to go.
A high probability of punishment comes from more policing. It increases the chance that a cop will be available — even nearby — to go catch a criminal. It increases the number of cops to follow up leads and investigate cases. And as Doleac writes, more cops allow for more frequent nonviolent positive interactions between the cops and the communities they police, which builds trust and improves both reporting of crimes and snitching. (Note: Congress is already working on a bill to provide more funding for detectives, to improve the abysmally low rate at which American police forces actually solve crimes.)
So anyway, this is the first big piece of what Europe and Asia do to reduce crime: Hire a lot of cops. This is also a big part of why NYC is one of America’s safest big cities. In terms of total police department employment per population, New York is second only to D.C.
Of course, gun control is also an important factor in why cities in other rich countries are safer. Some American cities have been able to enact stringent gun measures that, if enforced, would prevent most criminals from owning guns. But therein lies the rub, as they say — as Matt Yglesias has pointed out, gun control can only be enforced by a whole lot of policing.
Other rich countries are also noted for the professionalism of their police forces. America requires very little training for its officers, compared to its peer nations:
This isn’t because the U.S. is averse to long training requirements for its professions — an American cosmetologist has to train for 3000 hours to be certified, which is almost five times as much as a police officer. One might think that handling matters of life, death, and the law would take a little more professionalism than putting on makeup and cutting hair.
Another thing that Europe and Asia do — and which NYC does to some extent — is to have cops stand around on the street instead of driving around or waiting for calls in a station. I wrote about the effectiveness of police boxes and foot patrols back in 2020:
In America, the police mostly drive around, looking for people to pull over and waiting to respond to 911 calls. In Japan, however, lots of police walk around on the street, or stay in police boxes known as koban (交番). And this totally changes the dynamic of police-community interaction!! In Japan, you can (and people often do) ask cops for directions! You can stand around and chat with cops if you like! You can even ask cops for recommendations for local shops and restaurants. And the cops themselves have a totally different experience — instead of only interacting with civilians when something bad is going on, they see thousands upon thousands of people peaceably going about their business, and interact with many of these people…
In the U.S., a cop showing up means that a dangerous, potentially violent confrontation is imminent. In Japan, it’s no big deal — just a person in a uniform standing there, like a security guard in a store…
In addition to creating routine, positive police-community interactions, police can deter crime just by walking around. Experiments with police foot patrols have found that they reduce crime substantially.
There’s plenty more evidence that foot patrols are highly effective in reducing crime.
Note that there’s a strong synergy here between urban density — especially commercial density — and effective policing. If there are a few areas with a lot of foot traffic, it’s easier for cops to stand around and make sure those areas feel safe.
Leftists and many progressives, of course, doggedly oppose all these measures, labeling them “carceral urbanism”. But although I’ve jokingly embraced that label, the reality is that an urbanism that focuses on public safety isn’t really very carceral — it would shift America’s resources from punishing crime to preventing it from happening in the first place. Lewis & Usmani call this a “first world balance”, and it does seem to be what all the countries with nice cities are doing.
One thing more people are realizing in the wake of the pandemic is that urban disorder and urban violence are not quite the same thing. Disorder refers to things like public drug use, chaotic street behavior that poses a threat of potential violence, and ubiquitous property crime. No city typifies this distinction more than San Francisco, which has a low-ish murder rate for a U.S. city, but which is awash in visible drug use, petty crime, and scary mentally ill people on the street. Here’s what I wrote back in 2023:
SF has one of the highest property crime rates of any city in the nation. Car break-ins are ubiquitous, and seeing thieves stripping car engines on the street is commonplace. The city has suffered from the same wave of retail smash-and-grab thefts common throughout the Bay Area since 2020. There is a steady drumbeat of stories about thieves ransacking businesses, invading homes, and robbing patrons in cafes.
Now, having your car smashed or your store ransacked or your laptop stolen out of your hands usually doesn’t kill you. Only very rarely do you actually die from that. But it’s a constant reminder that you’re at the mercy of men who could do violence to you if they wanted. If you try to keep hold of your precious laptop, will the thief pull out a knife and slash your throat? If you accidentally catch someone smashing your car window, will they use the baseball bat on your head instead? If you try to protect the merchandise of the store that employs you — on which you depend for your very livelihood — will the thief pull out a gun or a knife? And so on. Property crime is scary because it carries with it the threat of violence.
The second reason is the presence of a lot of loud, aggressive, erratic people on the streets…San Francisco is awash in methamphetamine (which makes people violent and sometimes psychotic) and fentanyl (which is highly addictive, and may cause violence or psychosis upon withdrawal). Signs of these epidemics are everywhere; needles are everywhere on the streets, and drugs themselves are often discovered just sitting around. A number of downtown areas are basically open-air drug markets…
Streets filled with aggressive, screaming strangers and ubiquitous drug markets usually don’t kill you. But they make many people feel unsafe nonetheless. Could the guy who staggers by you bellowing racial slurs be about to beat you…or stab you… Who used the needles lying on the ground in the park where you take your children to play, and will the drugs they used caused them to turn violent? Etc.
San Francisco’s urban chaos is immediately visible to everyone who visits:
It’s true that these problems mostly afflict the downtown area and the Mission district; most of the rest is relatively orderly and nice. But the areas blighted by disorder are the exact same areas that have the greatest density and the most transit stops. This fact has not been lost on the residents of San Francisco’s nicer neighborhoods, who are some of the most NIMBY in the entire nation.
The disorder also afflicts public transit as well. San Francisco’s trains, especially the BART, are notoriously full of disreputable characters, making them a terrifying experience for women, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups. Here’s a pre-pandemic article from SFist that paints a pretty accurate picture:
BART has been lamenting a loss of around 10 million riders on weeknights and weekends over the last five years…[T]he insides of trains are filthy and gross, and people are worried about being robbed or accosted while they ride them…As for petty crime, that seems to be more prevalent during rush hours when thieves can snatch cellphones on crowded trains, dart out of doors and disappear onto crowded platforms. But news reports of violent crimes like one that happened Tuesday night when a man was the victim of an unprovoked attack with a chain, or the fatal stabbing that occurred in the middle of the day last November, are enough to scare anyone from wanting to be trapped on a nighttime or weekend train, especially in Transbay Tube, when someone is having a mental health crisis or is otherwise being threatening.
A pretty clear illustration of the danger of disorder on public transit comes from New York City this week, where a mentally unhinged person burned a sleeping woman to death on the subway. NYC is one of America’s safest big cities, and the murder rate is low. But you should be able to ride the train without being worried that a crazy person will burn you to death if you fall asleep.
There are a number of things American cities can do to curb this urban disorder, if they’re so inclined.
First, note that both Europe and Asia make it much easier to involuntarily commit people with psychiatric disorders to mental institutions. The U.S.’s de-institutionalization movement in the 1960s and 1970s went much further than similar movements in other countries, and the idea that involuntary commitment represents a form of totalitarian state oppression is still a pillar of progressive ideology to this day.
Of course, sometimes, the progressives were right — and still are. Involuntary commitment lends itself to abuses, since mentally ill people are easy to take advantage of. Mental hospitals require constant monitoring to prevent such abuses. But the alternative that America has embraced since the 70s is arguably even less humane — it has condemned many people with severe and dangerous mental illnesses to bounce back and forth between jail and the terrors of the streets.
Involuntary commitment, not conformist culture or racial homogeneity, is the why mentally ill people don’t scream at you on the streets of Tokyo. I have personally witnessed a dangerous mentally ill person being forcibly restrained and committed in Tokyo — it’s not pretty, and I hope there’s oversight to prevent that person from being abused, but it works.
Notably, New York City has tried to fight the post-pandemic wave of urban disorder by stepping up efforts to involuntarily commit people. San Francisco, though, has declined to follow suit. And most cities in America simply ignore the question, since they’re not walkable enough for mentally ill street people to matter much.
As for transit, a key method of keeping it orderly is to simply make people pay for it. Crazy people and petty criminals are often deterred by the small cost of a train or bus fare. Progressives, of course, always push for free public transit; when that doesn’t work, they fight against vigorous enforcement of fare jumping. But this usually spoils the commons that public transit represents — by letting a bunch of crazy people and petty criminals ride for free, it discourages the mass of normal folks who can choose to walk or bike or drive or take Uber. This results in public transit becoming a form of taxpayer-supported welfare instead of a service that most voters use — and this tends to make it vulnerable to budget cuts and disinvestment.
Lo and behold, when some BART stations in the Bay Area put in new ticket gates that are very hard to get past, and added more cops on trains, conditions on the train rapidly improved.
Beyond expanding involuntary commitment and enforcing transit fares, there are a bunch of small things American cities can do to curb disorder — arresting people for selling fentanyl on the street, investigating and imprisoning the smash-and-grab rings that terrorize urban retail outlets, and so on. San Francisco did many of these things in advance of Xi Jinping’s visit to the city for the APEC summit in 2023, and large parts of the downtown area have been noticeably nicer since then (“noticeably nicer” being a relative term, of course). If SF can clean up disorder for the dictator of China, why can’t it do it for its own regular law-abiding taxpaying citizens?
Matt Yglesias also points out that cities in Europe are much more tolerant of ubiquitous security cameras. Cameras are certainly one reason why crime in Japan is so low. In America, the progressives who tend to dominate big-city politics and culture have fought tooth and nail against expanded use of cameras, despite the fact that the chief beneficiaries of those cameras would be poor people of color.
In general, American cities — and to some degree, states — have tried to use anarchy as a form of welfare. By being permissive toward aggressive street behavior, drug use, fare jumping, and petty crime, they have tried to make life more tolerable for poor people. Except it’s primarily poor Americans whose lives are wrecked by the social ills that progressives refuse to crack down on; the middle class and the wealthy can retreat to their car-centric suburbs.
And so American cities are known throughout the world as shitholes, and their residents hide in their houses and drive their cars down highways to the mall instead of taking the train and walking through a nice downtown full of shops. Small-time fentanyl dealers, shoplifters, and unhinged street bullies have a slight measure of freedom, and the regular citizens of America go visit the metropolises of Asia and Europe and wonder what their own country is missing.
Update: Lehman and Mangual have some additional data about the lack of safety on American public transit, and some good ideas about what could be done to improve it:
Charlotte’s public-transit system has a reputation for danger. In recent polling, just 37 percent of residents of the surrounding Mecklenburg County described the system’s buses and trains as safe from crime, and just 29 percent called the stations safe. That’s consistent with research showing that extending the Blue Line caused an increase in crime in the immediate vicinity of new stations. But the problem isn’t just in Charlotte. Although major crimes are declining nationwide, crimes on transit remained elevated through the end of 2024, according to data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
How can Charlotte keep people such as Brown off the train? The answer goes back to his first offense of that evening—failure to pay his fare. People likely to commit major offenses underground also tend to commit minor offenses: fare evasion, riding bicycles or scooters in a station, or using drugs. In recent years, many jurisdictions have ratcheted back enforcement of these offenses on public transit. Charlotte is only now saying that it will add fare-inspection capacity, following years in which nobody checked tickets.
I strongly recommend the rest of the article as well.
And focusing only on white victims causes us to ignore other horrific cases, like the black San Francisco father who was attacked and stabbed to death by a Hispanic man while picking his son up from school the other day.
These people often get called “homeless”, but in my experience actual homeless people tend to be less disorderly and violent than drugged-up people who already have places to live.
The same seems to be true of housing construction. Some studies find that public housing, or subsidized “affordable” housing, is associated with a small increase in local crime, other studies find no effect. In general, the effect seems to depend a lot on the type of neighborhood where the housing is built, and on the characteristics of the housing itself. These studies are less cut-and-dry than the studies of bus stops and train stations, so I decided to put them in a footnote.
2025-09-15 17:07:26
The People’s Republic of China is still the world’s biggest single source of environmental harm. China overfishes the world’s oceans, blasts mercury and nitrous oxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere, and dumps plastic waste into the sea. It has made progress on many of these problems, but when you’re the biggest global manufacturer, it’s very hard not to also be the biggest global polluter.
China’s most devastating environmental impact has been its emissions of greenhouse gases. Thanks to its unprecedented use of coal, China releases more carbon every year than the United States and Europe combined:
And yes, this is true even after you account for offshoring of emissions. China is also the world’s leading emitter of other greenhouse gases — methane, nitrous oxide, F-gases, and so on. Historically, China has only accounted for 15% of total carbon emissions, but its share is rising quickly.
Unless China decarbonizes, there can be no victory over climate change, and the planet will roast. This is not a moral statement, but a simple fact.
There are two ways to decarbonize: 1) degrowth, and 2) green energy. None of the proponents of degrowth are asking China to stop growing its economy1, and it wouldn’t matter if they did; China has no intention of slowing its growth in order to save the rest of the planet from climate change.
In fact, the same is true of the developing world. India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America aren’t going to impoverish themselves in order to save the climate. The only way for these countries to grow their economies without roasting the planet is to replace coal and oil with solar and batteries — or to grow rich using solar and batteries in the first place, skipping the fossil fuel stage entirely.
The only way this is ever going to happen is if solar power and batteries (and other green technologies) are really, really cheap. China, India, and the rest will not adopt these technologies because Greta Thunberg tells them to. They will only switch to green energy if it’s cheaper to do so.
So if we want to save the world from climate change, the only really effective way to do this is to make green energy as cheap as possible.
How do we make green energy cheap? In the past, this meant doing a bunch of scientific research, in order to drive breakthroughs in our understanding of solar and batteries. But although that research continues, and is still important, there has been a major shift; now, cost decreases come mostly from scaling effects. This is from an MIT News report on a paper by Kavlak et al. in 2018:
The relative importance of the factors [driving down solar costs] has changed over time, the study shows. In earlier years, research and development was the dominant cost-reducing high-level mechanism, through improvements to the devices themselves and to manufacturing methods. For about the last decade, however, the largest single high-level factor in the continuing cost decline has been economies of scale, as solar-cell and module manufacturing plants have become ever larger.
You can visualize this cost decline with a scaling curve, which shows how costs go down as the volume produced goes up:
Similar curves exist for batteries. These are all specific instances of something called Wright’s Law, which says that the more you build of something, the cheaper it gets. Not every physical technology follows Wright’s Law, but solar, batteries, and many other green technologies do follow it.
This is why for many years, I wrote that the best way for the U.S. to defeat climate change was to scale up the production of solar power, batteries, and other green technologies. The Inflation Reduction Act, with its subsidies for green energy and electric vehicles, was a victory for my desired approach.
Except that victory was far too modest and short-lived. The IRA was good, but it wasn’t transformational on a global scale. And because the Republican Party has made opposition to green energy a pillar of their ideology, the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are now canceling and obstructing solar plants and battery factories, even though that will make energy more expensive for Americans.
America has abdicated the fight against climate change.
But that doesn’t mean the strategy I advocated for defeating climate change was a bad idea. In fact, it’s still going to work! It just won’t be America that executes that strategy. It will be China. In fact, it already is.
China has long subsidized the production of solar cells and wind turbines. In recent years it has also lavished enormous subsidies on the electric vehicle industry:
Xi Jinping has emphasized electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energy as the “new three” — the core of the “new productive forces” reshaping global technology and power. Whether or not he’s right about that (and I think he is), his focus on green technology suggests that although some subsidies have been pulled back, China will continue to focus on promoting these technologies.
In addition to these subsidies, China has applied its typical strengths — cheap bank loans, integrated supply chains, copious engineering talent, and wage suppression — to the scaling of green tech manufacturing. As a result, China now dominates global solar panel production:
And China now accounts for over 70% of all the electric car production on the planet, and production is still soaring:
China is achieving similar dominance in wind turbines, industrial electrification technology, heat pumps (to a lesser extent), and so on.
All of this green technology production is helping to finally curb China’s apocalyptically high emissions levels — just as advocates of green growth have always predicted it would. Green energy is starting to displace coal in China in both electricity production and industrial heating, leading to a plateau and even a small reduction in Chinese emissions over the last year or two:2
This trend needs to accelerate a lot, but China is still scaling up green technologies, so I’m pretty hopeful that it will. In the meantime, just making Chinese emissions plateau is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.
But in fact, China is doing a whole lot more than just curbing its own emissions — it’s helping the developing world to grow without ever emitting a lot of carbon in the first place. China is exporting huge amounts of green technology to developing countries:
Most of these panels are going to Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan:
China’s exports of EVs are also soaring:
An increasing number of these are going to developing countries as well, as the U.S. and EU erect trade barriers against Chinese EVs.
Again, it’s crucial to remember that developing countries are buying all this green tech not because of morality, or even because of self-preservation (since whether they decarbonize or not has very little effect on global emissions). They’re buying all this green tech because it’s cheaper than fossil fuel tech.
China is what made green energy cheap. Yes, part of this is subsidies. But a lot of it is just good old scaling laws — China produces in such vast quantities that costs keep getting driven down and down across the board. The scaling laws still work, and China is the undisputed master of physical scaling.
What this means is that China is executing the strategy I’ve long advocated for saving the world from climate change. While U.S. energy policy dithers and shoots itself in the foot over ridiculous culture wars, China’s dogged industrial policy and peerless manufacturing prowess has made green energy so cheap that simple economics are going to take over from here.
I’m generally known as a harsh critic of the Chinese government, and of Xi Jinping’s leadership in particular. But in this case, I think we have to give credit where credit is due. The United States — the country that defeated the Axis, fed the world with the Green Revolution, and did so much to promote global growth and technological progress over the last century — has utterly dropped the ball on the biggest environmental challenge of our age. Instead, the threat will be met and defeated by China, and — more than any other single individual — by Xi Jinping himself. That’s no small accomplishment.
China’s success in battling climate change should also provide various doomers and pessimists with a reason for hope. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of all the world’s problems as aspects of a single “polycrisis”. But the truth is that problems often don’t reinforce each other; sometimes, they cancel each other out. The Second China Shock — the wave of heavily subsidized manufactured exports that is now threatening to deindustrialize many countries around the world — is certainly a threat to many nations’ domestic industries. But at the same time, that wave of exports is doing a huge amount to help fight climate change.
Personally speaking, I wish America had been the country to save the world from climate change. I wish democracy had proven more effective than autocracy at meeting a global environmental threat. But at this point I’ll take what I can get.
Because degrowth is thinly veiled anti-Westernism.
Note that this reduction is not shown on the chart at the top of the post, which ends in 2023.
2025-09-13 18:15:33
I remember walking through a bookstore in college and seeing an issue of Foreign Affairs with the headline “The Palestinian H-bomb”. I was curious, so I picked it up off the rack and gave it a quick read. The article — written during the days of the Second Intifada — argued that there was no practical way to stop suicide bombers, so as long as the Palestinians were able to keep recruiting a steady stream of people willing to give up their lives to take out a few Israelis, there was really no way for Israel to stop them.
It sounded plausible, and I recall being pretty convinced of the thesis at the time. But it turned out to be wrong. Just a few years after that article was written, suicide terror in Israel subsided to a low level:
What happened? Palestinian recruitment for suicide terror might have flagged, but from what I’ve read, the main reason was that Israel built a big fence around the West Bank and implemented a bunch of other security measures that made it very difficult for suicide bombers to get through. What looked for a while like an invincible weapon turned out to just be another temporary advantage.
I think about this when I think about cancel culture.
Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:
Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant — she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.
That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger — a very standard liberal viewpoint.
Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.
The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.
Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.
Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)”, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.
But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets — Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers — is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack — like an NYT writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” — can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship.
Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals and tent-shrinking. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!
And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming — berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.
Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower — losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head — but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar.
Except that just like with “the Palestinian H-bomb,” the frightened public vastly overestimated the power of cancel culture. Bari Weiss went on to start The Free Press, a very successful Substack publication that often flouts the same progressive norms that forced Weiss out at the NYT. Now, CBS News is reportedly in talks to buy The Free Press and hire Weiss for a major editorial or executive role at the network.
Progressive cancel culture turned out not to be invincible after all — it was a temporary culture-war advantage that was driven by one group’s early adoption and intensive use of a new technology. The disruption to the lives of people who got canceled was usually (though not always) short-lived. Over time, companies learned that progressive anger was transient and distractable, and that boycotts weren’t going to materialize; after realizing this, they mostly stopped firing people who got dogpiled on Twitter.
Today, if you were to tweet what Weiss tweeted about Mirai Nagasu in 2018, you’d be more likely to get attacked by the anti-immigrant right than by the woke left. And corporate brands are far more likely to be boycotted by the organized right than by the distractable, diffuse left.
The threat of progressive cancel culture in America has been defused.
Part of that, of course, is because of a general conservative shift in American politics since 2021. And part of it is because Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, causing some progressives to abandon the platform. Many of those progressives went to a similar platform called Bluesky.
Like right-wing platforms such as Gab, Parler, and Truth Social, Bluesky’s reach is limited. Its usage rates remain far, far below those of X, and a bump of new users following Trump’s election is slowly fading:
Practically all the important progressives — academics, commentators, activists, politicians — are on Bluesky, talking to a much smaller audience than they used to have on Twitter. But what they say just doesn’t seem to matter at all. “They’re dragging your ass on Bluesky” is a statement that strikes fear into the heart of practically no one. A mob denouncing you as transphobic, racist, misogynist, etc. on Bluesky will have essentially no chance of negatively impacting your career.
And yet the progressives on Bluesky have retained all the habits of speech, thought, and behavior that characterized the high cancel-culture era of the late 2010s. For most of my life, liberals were known as the nice guys of American politics. But log on to Bluesky, and it’s all just stuff like this:
(This was a response by a journalist to a professor who shared a paper about AI.)
Nate Silver recently wrote a post about the prevalence of this attitude and style of communication on Bluesky:
Some excerpts:
A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News…
And sometimes, Blueskyists even make violent threats toward people who disagree with them. For instance, the journalist Billy Binion says he recently “logged onto Bluesky to find thousands of people screaming at me, many of whom were telling me to kill myself” after having posted that “billionaires should exist”.
Whenever I read a criticism of my writing on Bluesky, it seems to be insubstantial and denunciatory, like this casual insult from New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie:
This tweet may have gotten 4500 likes, but it poses no threat to my reputation or career — nor, I suspect, does Bouie think it does. Nasty, bitter talk like this is just a habit — a cultural holdover from the days when everyone was always in danger of getting canceled unless they could prove their bona fides by canceling the next guy.
But it’s a habit that has harmed America as a country.
Progressive culture’s substitution of nastiness for persuasion and argument has robbed America of the incisive commentary of which intelligent progressives would otherwise be capable. Progressives got addicted to the power of cancel culture — their seemingly invincible H-bomb — and when it stopped working they just didn’t know what else to do, because they had forgotten everything they used to do in the time before Twitter. Here’s what I wrote in a recent thread:
There was this big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small # of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values…But progressives got addicted to that seemingly infinite power. They forgot everything else. They forgot how to persuade. They forgot how to organize. They forgot how to compromise. They thought the only tool they would ever need again was heckling and shunning on social media.
Undoubtedly, the Bluesky progressives think that they’re just socially shunning people — exercising the age-old power of social ostracism to show the door to people whose opinions are beyond the pale of polite society. But the cultural spaces that progressives still dominate are shrinking; very few people are likely to think of Bluesky as anything resembling “polite society”. Instead of ostracizing the people they hate, Bluesky’s progressives are only isolating themselves.
Megan McArdle wrote that by secluding themselves within the Bluesky enclave, America’s progressives have made themselves less relevant:
[Bluesky’s nastiness] makes it hard for the platform to build a large enough userbase for the company to become financially self-sustaining, or for liberals to amass the influence they wielded on old Twitter. There, they accumulated power by shaping the contours of a conversation that included a lot of non-progressives. On Bluesky, they’re mostly talking among themselves.
Within this little hothouse world that American progressives have created for themselves, there’s not much to do except try to cancel each other. Meanwhile, the broader country is moving on without them, and not in a good direction. One of the reasons opposition to Donald Trump’s executive overreach and harmful policies has been weak in his second term in office is that progressive writers are hanging out on Bluesky trying (and failing) to cancel Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver.
Progressives need to snap out of it. They need to realize that the late 2010s were a very special time that will not be repeated again in our lifetime, and that they need to go back to the older tools of persuasion, compromise, organization, and effective governance, instead of sitting around saying nasty things about each other until the country collapses around our ears.
2025-09-11 17:04:39
Charlie Kirk, a conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, was brutally assassinated while participating in a live debate in Utah. As of this writing, the assassin has not been caught. FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted that the suspect had been apprehended, but a little while later tweeted that suspect had been released, and that the investigation was ongoing:
Because it’s not clear who shot Kirk, it’s not known what the motive was. It could be a confused, politically inscrutable lunatic, like the two assassins that took aim at Donald Trump last year. It could be someone on the political left, who hated Kirk’s conservative politics; there were certainly plenty of those. Or it could be someone on the political right, who thought Kirk wasn’t sufficiently rightist. For example, Kirk had received a lot of hate from the white supremacists known as “groypers”:
And Kirk certainly had rivals for influence within the MAGA movement, such as Laura Loomer.
So unless and until the killer is caught, we won’t have any idea about the motive behind Kirk’s murder. That fact should be obvious. And yet it’s not stopping many figures on the political right from assuming that the killer was a lefty, and calling for extreme measures in response:
This seems very foolish to me. First of all, it’s risky to jump to conclusions. If the killer is caught and turns out to have been a rightist, or a politically confused nutcase, what are all of these people screaming for war against “the left” going to say? “Ahh well, nevertheless”?
Second of all, hatred begets hatred, and violence begets violence. When people like Elon Musk and Matt Walsh blame their political enemies for something like this, it simply encourages rightists to go out and do more of the same. Maybe that makes sense if you think you’re in the middle of a civil war, and the way to fight that war is to sit safely behind your keyboard and make inflammatory remarks until someone somewhere with less to lose goes out and murders someone from the other team. But if you’re a sane, normal, reasonable person who wants to go to work and love their family and have a functional, stable country, then you shouldn’t go around screeching for civil war.
Even worse, some right-wing influencers are using Kirk’s assassination to call for the implementation of fascism and a violent purge of the Democratic Party:
Recall that the Reichstag fire was a leftist arson attack (or possibly a Nazi false flag attack) that Adolf Hitler used as a justification to implement full fascism in Germany.
This is obviously some insane and evil stuff. But at the same time, whether or not the killer himself turns out to have been a lefty or a righty, there’s a grain of truth to the accusations that the online left encourages violence. I thought Donald Trump was actually on pretty solid ground when he called out radical leftists for poisonous rhetoric:
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie [Kirk] to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.
Whether or not the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk was on the left, there were certainly plenty of anonymous leftists cheering his death:
And let’s not forget the outpouring of online leftist glee after Luigi Mangione murdered health insurance executive Brian Thompson.
The people writing things like this are not famous or powerful or individually significant in any way. But the incredible amount of engagement and approval that tweets like this receive shows that this kind of hateful, violent sentiment does exist, in nontrivial amounts.
In fact, I should note that I myself have been a target of extreme leftist rhetoric on a fairly regular basis. Here’s just one small example:
On anonymous platforms like X and Bluesky, the marginal cost of calling anyone and everyone a Nazi is zero, so everyone calls everyone a Nazi. And malignant trolls get attention and status by whipping up fear and extremism. Of course, rightists do this too. The result is a constant toxic mix of alarmism and extremism, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum.
Before social media, toxic sentiments like this certainly existed, but they rarely surfaced. Social media is simply unique in how extreme and divisive its content is:
The hard left viewpoints that Trump is decrying are creatures of social media. Of course, right-wing shouters like Musk, Matt Walsh, etc. just contribute to the problem by trying to stir up alarm and hatred at “the left”. But because social media has convinced many of its users that they’re in an existential civil war with an implacable vicious enemy, they think that toning down their rhetoric would equate to unilateral disarmament. So no one tones it down.
This is extremely frustrating, because away from the screeching online meme wars, elected politicians are generally very good about this stuff. Gavin Newsom, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Nancy Pelosi, Zohran Mamdani, Joe Biden, and every other important Democratic politician rushed to condemn Kirk’s killing. Even some major leftist influencers like Hasan Piker condemned it.
And yet people’s perception of what “the left” is about isn’t driven by elected Democrats, or even by influencers; it’s driven by the anonymous social media mob, the progressive shouters who are elevated by social media algorithms over and above more reasonable voices.
The same exact thing happens on the right. Almost no GOP politicians have expressed antisemitic or anti-Indian sentiment, and yet anti-Indian racism and antisemitism have become commonplace on X. Even right-wing influencers like Chris Rufo have denounced the “racialism, anti-Semitism, and conspiracism” they see bubbling up on the anonymous online right, but they’re powerless to stop it — or to stop it from defining “the right” in the eyes of many Americans.
Sometimes these anonymous hate mobs are just bored passers-by looking to blow off some steam, or malicious teenagers who don’t know better. Sometimes they’re American extremists who use armies of bots to amplify hateful sentiment. And in some cases, anonymous hate and extremism on English-language social media are amplified by the actions of foreigners seeking to divide and weaken the U.S.
A lot of the people you read on social media are simply fake. For example, the popular right-wing account “Wall Street Silver” (now called “Wall Street Mav”) is probably not an elderly man in the finance industry; he turned out to be the same person who manages another account called “Real Jessica”:
It’s technically possible that one of these identities is real, but I wouldn’t bet on it. These are deliberate fabrications by people who are more tech-savvy than the average American, whose purpose is fomenting civil conflict and internecine hatred in the United States. Here’s a good thread of what are probably bots spreading civil war rhetoric in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination.
Even when social media hate is not being farmed by bots, it’s still often being pushed by foreigners whose avocation is commenting on American politics from overseas. For example, here is a Frenchman encouraging Americans to see themselves as being locked in a civil war:
And here is a Malaysian man declaring that liberals have “hijacked the republican” despite never having actually lived in America:
Why should we Americans listen to Frenchmen and Malaysians who tell us to hate and fear our countrymen? Twenty years ago, we would never even hear from people like this; the people we talked to about these issues would have been almost entirely other Americans. Now, keyboard warriors who would never be in any danger of fighting in an American civil war feel free to urge us to slaughter each other, and social media pipes their vitriol directly to the screens in our pockets.
All of these effects — algorithmic elevation of divisive content, armies of bots and trolls, and intervention by foreigners — mean that social media is a uniquely polarizing force in our society. Nathan Witkin has a good post reviewing the evidence here, and rebutting those who have claimed that social media is politically benign:
In fact, I still think that American society in general is calming down from the unrest of the 2010s. The number of people being radicalized by platforms like X and Bluesky is actually fairly small. But they’re the people who are the most engaged in politics, and so they have an outsized importance on the direction of the nation. Even as most Americans tune out politics, the people who are actually running the show remain glued to an X feed that shows them weapons-grade hatred all day long. And unfortunately, the crazies who buy guns and shoot at the politically influential class are also mainlining that same social media hate.
As a result, although Americans are having fewer political arguments around the water cooler and at Thanksgiving dinner these days, the 2020s are also seeing an upsurge in prominent acts of sensational political violence:
I shouldn’t have to tell you how bad this is for our nation. A civil war is just about the most horrible thing that can happen to a country, both in social and economic terms. I still think the probability of an actual American civil war is relatively low, but if it does happen, it won’t be rifle battles in an empty field like last time — it’ll be more like the Spanish Civil War, with neighbors fighting neighbors, rampant atrocities on both sides, and the nation impoverished for many years.
Even assuming we manage to avoid that worst-case scenario, it’s possible that the U.S. will suffer a protracted period of elevated political violence, similar to the Years of Lead in Italy or the Troubles in Northern Ireland. With regular Americans too exhausted to take their country back, the political arena might be dominated for the next ten or twenty years by people who do nothing but mainline hate memes, egged on by America’s enemies and by the worst villains in our society.
Regular Americans need to fight back against the toxic idea that our neighbors are our enemies, or else that accusation will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2025-09-09 16:17:20
Advanced civilizations sometimes really do throw it all away. I recommend reading the book Lost Enlightenment, which is about how the golden age of Islamic science and scholarship and literature gave way to centuries of religious fundamentalism and backwardness. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, China turned its back on exploration, refused to import Western technologies, and generally de-emphasized science; centuries of economic stagnation and military weakness followed.
These are useful examples, but they’re all from the premodern period, where cutting-edge science and technology didn’t make a huge difference in people’s standard of living; most people were farmers living on the edge of subsistence. But around 200 years ago, technology really started to matter, and living standards began to skyrocket in a way they never had in history. Thanks to technology, humanity is now about 20 times richer on average than we were two centuries ago, and the number keeps going up:
For a civilization to turn its back on algebra in 1100 or on spring clocks in 1800 was certainly foolish. But for a civilization in 2025 to turn its back on the technologies that took our species from indigent peasants to modern standards of living would be just unfathomably insane.
And yet that is exactly what I now see Western civilization doing. In the U.S., the Anglosphere, and Europe, there are simultaneous backlashes against a number of key technologies that have either made the modern world what it is, or promise to make it even wealthier. These include:
vaccines
solar and wind power
batteries
AI
software platforms
anti-obesity drugs
lab-grown meat
self-driving cars
air conditioning
I’m a well-known techno-optimist. Here was a manifesto I wrote about why technology is (usually) a good thing:
And here’s an essay I wrote about why the creation of industrial modernity — which depends crucially on technology — is by far the most important accomplishment of humankind:
In past years, I would write a techno-optimist post at the start of the year, gushing about all the marvels that are coming our way — here are the ones for 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. But this year I didn’t write one, because it seemed like America was generally turning away from techno-optimism, toward a dark, reactionary Luddism. I can still write a list of inventions to get excited about, but I feel like I’ll be setting myself up for disappointment when the general reaction is fear, cynicism, and superstition.
So instead, here’s a post about how the West is turning its back on the light of technology — the very thing that made it great in the first place.
The thing that inspired this post — and the header image at the top — is the American right’s turn against vaccines, so let’s start with those.
The chief villain of this story, of course, is RFK Jr., who spent most of his political career as an antivax kook on the left, and was only embraced by Trump in a strategic alliance in 2024. Here’s a video from 2023 in which RFK told a podcast interviewer that the polio vaccine “killed many, many more people” than polio ever did.
That is, of course, complete nonsense. The polio vaccine is incredibly safe; the worst recorded incident of a defective vaccine, in the 1950s, killed a total of 10 people, and the total number of documented deaths ever resulting from the polio vaccine is no more than a couple dozen. In a typical year before the introduction of the vaccine, about 1,000 Americans died of polio every year:
The drop to zero, of course, coincides with the introduction of polio vaccines in 1955, which rapidly defeated the disease.
But this is very far from the kookiest anti-science thing that RFK Jr. has uttered. In his writings, he has expressed doubt about the germ theory of disease itself, and embraced a version of an ancient, discredited theory of disease called “miasma theory”. Ars Technica reports:
[RFK] wrote an entire section on [the germ theory of disease] in his 2021 book vilifying Fauci, titled The Real Anthony Fauci. The section is titled "Miasma vs. Germ Theory," in the chapter "The White Man's Burden."…He writes: "'Miasma theory' emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses."…
Kennedy contrasts his erroneous take on miasma theory with germ theory, which he derides as a tool of the pharmaceutical industry and pushy scientists to justify selling modern medicines. The abandonment of miasma theory, Kennedy bemoans, realigned health and medical institutions to "the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition."
According to Kennedy, germ theory gained popularity, not because of the undisputed evidence supporting it, but by "mimicking the traditional explanation for disease—demon possession—giving it a leg up over miasma."
Miasma theory? Seriously??? One X user referred to RFK’s ideas as “actual, honest-to-god medieval peasant beliefs”, and he isn’t wrong. The discovery that germs cause disease — and the subsequent development of vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation to combat germs — was one of the fundamental break points that lifted humanity out of medieval conditions. In 1900, around 0.8% of all Americans were killed every year by infectious disease; today, in a typical year, it’s about a hundred times lower than that:
RFK is already putting his medieval peasant theories into practice, canceling federal support for mRNA research that promises to turn cancer from a death sentence into a manageable condition:
To his credit, Donald Trump has broken with his HHS secretary on the vaccine issue:
"I think you have to be very careful when you say that some people don't have to be vaccinated," Trump said…"They're just, pure and simple — they work," he added. "They're not controversial at all. And I think those vaccines should be used."
But although Trump’s power over the GOP is great, it’s not infinite. Despite Trump promoting the Covid vaccines that his first administration pioneered, the American right was eventually dominated by the antivax movement, leading to a large number of unnecessary deaths among conservatives.
Now, the antivax turn in the GOP is far bigger than RFK. The state of Florida is ending all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren. This won’t only harm kids whose parents choose not to vaccinate them; it will also endanger kids whose parents do vaccinate them. This is because vaccines work via herd immunity; vaccines aren’t 100% effective, but if everyone or almost everyone gets vaccinated, transmission gets halted because vaccines are effective enough that viruses can’t keep spreading.
If just 7% of parents don’t vaccinate their kids for measles, herd immunity against measles will be impossible, and lots of vaccinated kids will get measles too.1 This is why we have vaccine mandates — by going unvaccinated, antivaxers aren’t just placing themselves and their own kids in danger, but everyone else around them as well.
Already, measles is starting to make a comeback in America, as a result of antivax superstition. There have been over 1400 cases this year so far — not a huge number yet, but growing alarmingly. If vaccine mandates are scrapped in red states, those numbers will continue to climb.
Slowly, the American right is turning into a movement against the germ theory of disease, and only bad can come of it.
2025-09-08 17:34:20
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” — Ronald Reagan
There’s a meme going around on right-wing social media, where right-wing influencers ask “What is an American?”. Some don’t give answers, and simply assume that people who read the question will start thinking along the lines they want:
Others merely prompt the reader with evocative images:
But some do give answers, and their answers give a glimpse into how the political right is thinking in America nowadays:
What’s interesting on this chart is that the author — who may or may not himself be American, but who is certainly doing a good job of riling Americans up on social media — doesn’t try to establish a hard and fast cutoff, but instead defines a system of grades, where the longer your ancestors were in the country, the more points you get.
This kind of thing is natural in a polyglot country of immigrants like America. In every country you’ll find some form of restrictive nationalism — the idea that no matter what the citizenship laws say, only certain groups of people are truly members of the nation. But in most countries, there’s some kind of hard cutoff you can use — usually, membership in a specific ethnic group or religion. But America is so diverse that any attempt to draw a hard, bright line around which groups are “real Americans” is probably going to fail, because the cutoff will be transparently arbitrary. And so our restrictive nationalists resort to drawing concentric circles, defining a whole spectrum of American-ness based on some combination of family history, race, ethnicity, and religion.
This idea seems to be gaining power on the right. Online, you hear the term “Heritage American” thrown around a lot. C. Jay Engel, who has done a lot to popularize the term, sees “Heritage Americans” as people who value both the racial composition and the racial hierarchy of the U.S. before World War 2:
When I say Heritage American, this is what I mean: those who are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II. This therefore includes the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation, even if that was a significant sociopolitical mistake. We are also the product of our mistakes as a nation.
It includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation.
It affirms however the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life. Heritage America is centered around the experiences and norms of Anglo-Protestants.
This is pretty vague — there’s no test you can really do to tell if someone is or isn’t a “Heritage American” under this definition. In fact, the right can’t agree at all who exactly qualifies. A blogger calling himself “Ragnar Lifthrasir” defines the idea purely in ethnic terms (though he allows for other ethnicities to attain “ally” status):
[U]nderstanding who Heritage Americans are has never been more urgent. These descendants of the Founding Americans—Protestant, English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans who built the nation from Jamestown through the 1870s—represent more than ancestry. They embody a distinct American ethnicity forged through centuries of frontier experience, constitutional development, and cultural synthesis…
[There are also] those who are not Heritage Americans but who unequivocally support Heritage America…I call these citizens, “Ally Americans”. They can be of any ethnicity or faith or immigration vintage. But they advocate for America remaining a predominantly White, Christian nation governed by the spirit and letter of America’s founding documents.
Ben Crenshaw, on the other hand, adds an ideological element to the definition (something that Engel explicitly rejected):
For most nations of the world, to be considered a true German or Italian or Chinese or South African you must be a blood descendent (and thus exhibit common genetic traits), you must live in a geographical location where those people have historically lived, and you must abide by certain customs and ways of life. While America is not a “propositional nation,” neither does she neatly align with how other peoples have historically associated. Heritage America is not reducible to “blood and soil” fearmongering, yet neither are family, kin, and the land unimportant in America’s identity.
What does it mean to be an American? Heritage America is best understood as involving seven inheritances: the English language, Christianity, self-government, Christian government, liberty, equality under the law, and relationship with the physical land.
All these people can agree that “Heritage Americans” are an important group, but none of them can agree on who exactly belongs in that group.
It’s important to recognize that all of these ideas are well outside of the mainstream. YouGov did a poll this summer asking Americans what makes someone an American. Most of the items at the top of the list were behaviors like obeying the law, voting, speaking English, and beliefs like supporting the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, not owing allegiance to other countries, and so on. Ethnicity, race, religion, and family history all scored at the bottom of the list:
YouGov also asked a bunch of head-to-head matchups about which of these traits was more important, and the results came out basically the same. Furthermore, the partisan breakdown didn’t show particularly stark differences between Republicans and Democrats on who belongs:
It’s important to note that this poll came out after Trump’s 2024 victory, after the eruption of popular anger over uncontrolled immigration, and well after the “vibe shift” that saw America take a more conservative turn. It closely matches the results of a similar poll in 2021 by Pew, another similar poll by the VOTER Survey in 2017, and others too. Americans consistently say that race and religion are far less important to them as markers of shared nationhood than belief in American ideals and behavior consistent with that belief.
So why should we care what some online weirdos think, if they’re so out of the mainstream? The answer is that in the age of social media, it’s not necessarily mass opinion that determines policy — at least, not in the short term. Regular Americans may be tuning the “Heritage American” stuff out, but young Republican staffers are absolutely marinating in this online stuff, and they’re the future of the party. As Politico reports, savvy politicians and social media managers courting the young right-wing base are already making reference to the “Heritage Americans” term:
While the specific worldview surrounding “heritage America” may have been incubated online, it is increasingly finding its way into the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration. In a speech at the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute in July, Vice President JD Vance urged conservatives to reject the view that America is founded exclusively on a common creed, reviving a theme from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last year. “America is not just an idea — we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life,” said Vance…If the subtext wasn’t clear enough, he added: “That is our heritage as Americans.”
The iconography of the heritage America movement has surfaced in the Trump administration’s messaging…In early July, the Department of Homeland Security’s official account on X posted a painting of a pioneer couple cradling a baby in the back of a covered wagon, under the caption: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.” Later the same month, DHS followed that post up with another one featuring John Gast’s painting American Progress, captioned “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
And Eric Schmitt, a senator from Missouri, gave a speech at the recent National Conservativsm convention called “What is an American?”, expressing similar sentiments to what you’d hear from online rightists:
At this point, it should be clear that the fact that something is sanctioned by our government does not mean it’s good for our country. That much is obvious with various forms of legal immigration today…
We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith…
My ancestors arrived there from Germany in the 1840s…The first settlers in my state were mostly Scots-Irish—a hard, proud, fiercely independent people, forged in the hills of Ulster and the backwoods of Appalachia, ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization. They were the ancestors—as it just so happens—of my friend and our vice president, JD Vance.
As the historian David McCullough writes, the Scots-Irish families that first settled Missouri “saw themselves as the true Americans”…For some time now, we’ve been taught to be ashamed of these things that defined us[.]
To these “national conservatives” who now control much of our government, the struggle to make Heritage Americans the country’s dominant group is paramount, taking precedence over economic concerns, and even over defense against foreign enemies. A new National Defense Strategy being considered by the Trump Administration would basically see American power withdraw from the entire world in order to focus on the struggle to deport immigrants from the U.S.:
Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize protecting the homeland and Western Hemisphere, a striking reversal from the military’s yearslong mandate to focus on the threat from China…A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow…[I]n many ways, the shift is already occurring. The Pentagon has activated thousands of National Guard troops to support law enforcement in Los Angeles and Washington[.]
To the “natcons”, the paramount threat to America is immigration, not any foreign adversary. JD Vance has already expressed that sentiment with regards to Europe, and there can be little doubt that he and his fellow-travelers — who at this point dominate the Trump administration, and thus the MAGA movement, the Republican Party, and thus the nation as a whole — feel the same about America.
Trump renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War, but it’s clear that the main “war” he thinks he’s fighting is against immigration:
But this idea of immigration as an invasion, and deportation as a war, isn’t shared by the majority of Americans. Gallup has begun to see a major backlash against Trump’s anti-immigrant jihad. The fraction of Americans who wanted to decrease the rate of immigration soared under Biden, but has now plummeted back to where it was in Trump’s first term:
Interestingly, the shift is even sharper among Republicans:
And the percentage of Americans who say immigration benefits the nation is surging:
Again, this shift is happening more among Republicans than among Democrats:
Republicans still generally approve of Trump’s immigration policy. But this shift suggests that many Republicans are satisfied with what Trump has done so far, and don’t want to see it go much farther. They probably do not want to see the nation redefine itself around the blood-and-soil concept of “Heritage Americans”, and reorient the mission of the U.S. Military around mass-expelling people who have less “heritage”.
In fact, I suspect that there’s a very deep and fundamental reason why most Americans — including most Republicans — reject the “Heritage American” concept. Yes, many think of America as a “propositional nation” — an idea defined by the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and so on. But I suspect that many also value American culture as a marker of shared nationhood.
When I was growing up in Texas, one of my best friends was born in Shanghai, and didn’t become a U.S. citizen until the age of 18. Culturally, he was a little different than me and the rest of my friends — his mom made dumplings instead of sandwiches, he taught me how to use chopsticks, he didn’t believe in God.
But in all the cultural ways that mattered to us, we were the same. We watched the same TV shows, played the same video games, and listened to the same music. We used the same slang, had the same attitudes toward school, and wanted pretty much the same things for our future. And yes, we believed in the Constitution, and American freedoms, and all of that stuff.
During the 2010s, during our nation’s great national collective freakout over race, I wrote to my friend and asked him if he had ever felt discrimination growing up, or if he had ever felt excluded from the majority. He responded that while once in a great while he faced a little racism from a few jerks, it didn’t dominate his experience. In terms of identity, he told me he just felt very American.
This kind of real, on-the-ground cultural affinity is something too nebulous for YouGov pollsters to ask about, and yet I suspect it’s deeper and more important than most of the more quantifiable markers of American-ness. America is a propositional nation to some extent, but we’re also a cultural nation, bound together by shared habits and attitudes and lifestyles and beliefs. What matters the most isn’t our family’s history in the country, but our own personal history. Shared life experience beats shared heritage in terms of building the bonds of nationhood.
I recently had an extensive online conversation with a dedicated natcon, and it was…weird. He told me that nonwhite Americans can never really be his countrymen. But he also talked a lot about Europe, and about his family’s history in the German Empire. It was clear his notion of “heritage” went way beyond America, and connected to deep ethnic and religious concepts that reach far beyond our nation’s borders.
It felt very foreign to me. When I compare that online guy with someone like my high school friend who was born in Shanghai, there’s no question which one feels more American. My friend can quote the Simpsons and Star Wars with me. We can go to a mall together with his kids, and see a movie and enjoy it together, with shared cultural context. We won’t obsess over his ancestors in China or my ancestors in Europe. What will matter most to us is our shared personal history in the United States of America.
The bond my friend and I share is rooted in the land, and in community. It is tied to the place we grew up — College Station, Texas, and the United States of America — that taught us to be who we are. In contrast, the bond that natcons feel with the German Empire, or with other natcons in Australia and the UK, or with the idea of heritage and whiteness and Christendom and so on, is what I call a vertical community. It’s a notional bond between a bunch of people who find each other online and decide that they have more in common with those distant people than with the people who live next door in physical space.
Vertical communities have always existed, but in the 20th century, place still dominated. Only with the coming of social media did vertical communities begin to make a serious challenge to traditional communities as the organizing social unit of humankind. But the bonds that those online communities create are thin; a human being cannot thrive forever on the sugar high of Twitter flame wars and Facebook likes. The physical world draws us inexorably back to the places we live, and the people who live around us.
Right now, the MAGA movement is in charge of America. It is fundamentally an online creature — a weak bond between a bunch of people whom social media has taught to have the same notional enemies. In our division and our complacency, the American majority, who does not live for online hate memes, has allowed ourselves to put people in power who would tear up our actual heritage in the service of those memes. But eventually, no nation ruled by the Extremely Online can thrive, and I think my countrymen are starting to realize that.
Update: Matt Yglesias has a good post about how National Conservatism is out of step with American history:
