Battles of the Right 

How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing MediaSince the candidate clinched the nomination, the green room has become a chilly place.

By ROBERT DRAPER NY TIMES MAGAZINE

In recent years, one of the most important events on a prospective Republican presidential candidate’s calendar was the RedState Gathering, a summer convention for conservative activists from across the nation. Its host was Erick Erickson, a round-faced, redheaded former election lawyer and city councilman in Macon, Ga., who began blogging in 2004 on a site called RedState.com.

Erickson, who is now 41, is a conservative absolutist who made his name in the mid-2000s by “blowing up” — in the Twitter parlance he jovially employs — Republican leaders he viewed as insufficiently principled. In 2005, he played a role in torpedoing the Supreme Court nomination of the White House counsel Harriet Miers, publishing damaging admissions from White House sources that Miers had not been properly vetted. Five years later, he chided the National Rifle Association for being too willing to compromise, labeling it “a weak little girl of an organization.” He was a sharp-tongued critic of John McCain and Mitt Romney during their presidential runs, characterizing the former as “an angry old jackass” and the latter as “the Harriet Miers of 2012.”

Along the way, Erickson became one of the new kingmakers of the Tea Party-era G.O.P. A little-known Florida legislator and Senate hopeful named Marco Rubio reached out to him in 2009 when he was at 3 percent in the polls. A former Texas solicitor general, Ted Cruz, did the same in 2011. Rick Perry announced his 2012 presidential candidacy at Erickson’s gathering. By 2015, a number of the coming cycle’s aspirants — Rubio, Cruz, Perry and Bobby Jindal — had given him their personal cellphone numbers, and he had traded emails with Jeb Bush. And two months before that August’s convention in Atlanta, a New York-based Republican consultant named Sam Nunberg reached out to Erickson to ask if he could accommodate one more speaker: Donald Trump.

Erickson watched coverage of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness announcement at Trump Tower on June 16 and was not particularly impressed. On the syndicated radio show he broadcasts from Atlanta, he offered his assessment with a dismissive chuckle: “I guess he’s ready to be spoiler, not president.” He had met Trump once before, in July 2011, when he visited the 26th floor of Trump Tower to interview the businessman and reality-TV-show star. Trump had spent the past few months flirting with a presidential run only to decide, as he told Erickson that day, “I have a great show that’s a big success, and it’s hard to say, ‘I’m gonna leave two hours of prime-time television in order to get beat up by people that don’t know what they’re doing.’ ”

The hourlong conversation struck Erickson as pleasant but unmemorable. What did stick with him was their exchange as he was leaving Trump Tower. “Trump asked me if I played golf,” Erickson told me recently. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m terrible.’ ” Then, he said, Trump asked if he would be interested in coming to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate-turned-golf-club in West Palm Beach, Fla., to play. “I’m very flattered — I’ve never been to West Palm Beach before,” Erickson recalled. “Several times, his office reached out. So finally I asked my wife, ‘What do you think this is about?’ She said, ‘He wants to own your soul.’ So I never went.”

Erickson did not see much of a political future for Trump, but he imagined that he might be good for ticket sales, if nothing else, at the RedState Gathering. He informed Nunberg that Trump could have a slot on the convention’s second day.

The evening before he was to speak in Atlanta, Trump went on CNN and denounced the Fox News host Megyn Kelly for her sharp questioning of him during a recent debate, speculating that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever.” When Erickson saw the footage that evening, he called Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and rescinded Trump’s invitation on the grounds that he would be too much of a distraction. “And that was that,” Erickson would later recall with a sheepish grin. “Until the next day, when he’s blowing me up.”

On Twitter, Trump called Erickson “a major sleaze and buffoon” and said that the “small crowds” at the gathering were due to his absence. Trump’s supporters soon piled on. This was to be expected, but what surprised Erickson were the attacks from people he regarded as his fellow bomb-throwers in the conservative revolution. On Twitter, the talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham mocked “JebState.” The author and right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter brought up some of Erickson’s own crass utterances, like his characterization of the former Supreme Court justice David Souter in 2009 as a “goat-[expletive] child molester.” The next week, 30,000 readers of Erickson’s email newsletter canceled their subscriptions.

Erickson dug in, writing that Trump was “out of his depth” and lacking in “common decency.” But he was drowned out by Trump sympathizers with even bigger audiences than his own, like The Drudge Report and the online outlet Breitbart. It was one of the first salvos in what would open up in the year that followed into a civil war within the conservative media, dividing some of the loudest voices on the right. Days earlier, Erickson had unimpeachable credentials in the conservative movement. But by crossing Trump, he was now, in the eyes of his former allies, “a tool of the establishment.”

The conservative media has always been a playground for outsize personalities with even more outsize political ambitions. The National Review founder William F. Buckley fashioned much of the intellectual genetic code of the Reagan Revolution, while also writing fringe groups like the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement and, for good measure, running for mayor of New York against the liberal Republican John Lindsay. In 1996, the former Nixon media consultant Roger Ailes brought his attack-dog ethos to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel and built the network into a transformational power in Republican politics before his fall this year amid accusations of sexual harassment.

But alongside the institution-builders like Buckley and Ailes, the conservative-media landscape has also produced a class of rowdy entrepreneurs who wield their influence in more personal, protean ways. The godfathers mostly came to power in the 1990s: Clinton-administration antagonists like Rush Limbaugh, who began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and became talk radio’s hegemonic power in the Clinton years, and Matt Drudge, who started his pioneering Drudge Report online in 1996.

If these figures defied the stuffy ceremony of the East Coast think tanks, opinion journals and bow-tied columnists who traditionally defined the conservative intelligentsia, they rarely challenged the ideological principles of conservatism as they had existed since the Reagan era: small government, low taxes, hawkish foreign policy and traditional social values. What they mostly did was provide the Republican Party with a set of exceptionally loud megaphones, which liberals have often envied and tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Conservative talk radio and Fox News now collectively reach an audience of as many as 50 million — most of them elderly white Republicans with a high likelihood of turning out in election years. And this isn’t even counting the like-minded online outlets that have flourished during the Obama years, thanks to a growing internet-media economy and a presidency, particularly in the case of the Affordable Care Act, that gave conservatives common cause.

Then came Trump. In a sense, the divide that he has opened up among conservative media figures is simply a function of the heartburn his ascent has caused among Republicans more generally, pitting voter against voter, congressman against congressman, Bob Dole against the Bushes. Some conservative media outlets threw themselves behind Trump from the beginning, explaining away his more radioactive statements and his uneven-at-best record as a conservative. Breitbart, whose former chairman, Steve Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist, was an ardent early supporter, breathlessly covering Trump’s ascent in the polls and his smackdowns of “low energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio. But as Trump expanded into more sacrosanct targets — Fox News’s Kelly, George W. Bush’s performance in the war on terror and Cruz — the dissenting chorus among conservatism’s dons grew louder. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer warned in December that Trump “has managed to steer the entire G.O.P. campaign into absurdities.” His Post colleague George Will predicted that a Trump nomination would mean the loss of conservatism “as a constant presence in U.S. politics.” The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol floated the idea of a new “non-Trump non-Clinton party.” And on the eve of the Iowa caucus, National Review devoted an entire issue to a single topic: “Against Trump.”

Since Trump clinched the nomination, the dividing lines have become starker, the individual dilemmas more agonizing. Mark Levin, an influential talk-radio host, complains that among conservative commentators, Trump’s message is endlessly repeated by what he derisively refers to as “the Rockettes.” But Levin, too, recently announced to his listeners that he intends to vote for Trump, if only to prevent another Clinton presidency. As he put it to me, “I’m not going to be throwing confetti in the air if Trump wins,” adding that he viewed the candidate as “a liberal with some conservative viewpoints that he’s not terribly reliable at sticking to.”

Others — Sean Hannity, Ingraham, the former Reagan official and “The Book of Virtues” author William Bennett — have thrown in for Trump with a brio that strikes some in the business as unseemly. “Look, we’re in the opinion business, but there’s a distinction between that and being a Sean Hannity fanboy,” the Milwaukee-based talk-radio host Charlie Sykes told me. “It’s been genuinely stunning to watch how they’ve become tools of his campaign and rationalizing everything he’s done.”

“For 20 years I’ve been saying how it’s not true that talk radio is all about ratings and we don’t believe what we say,” he went on. “Then you watch how the media types rolled over for him. Obviously Donald Trump is very good for ratings, and at some point it’s hard not to conclude they decided the Trump train was the gravy train. I’ve been thoroughly disillusioned, and I’m not alone in that. It’s like watching ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’: Oh, my God, they got another one!”

When Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, the part of his announcement speech that most clearly foreshadowed the campaign to come had to do with immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it. A month before, he had run a segment with Ann Coulter, who had just published her 10th book, an anti-immigration screed titled “¡Adios, America!” Sykes was well aware of Coulter’s views, but he was taken aback when she began a riff on Mexican rapists surging into the United States (a subject that takes up an entire chapter of “¡Adios, America!”). “I remember looking at my producer and going, ‘Wow, this is rather extraordinary,’ ” he told me. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s.”

In fact, Corey Lewandowski had reached out to Coulter for advice in the run-up to Trump’s announcement speech. The address Trump delivered on June 16 bore no resemblance to his prepared text, which contained a mere two sentences about immigration. Instead, he ad-libbed what Coulter today calls “the Mexican rapist speech that won my heart.” When Trump’s remarks provoked fury, Lewandowski called Coulter for backup. Three days later, she went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and, amid shrieks of laughter from the audience, predicted that Trump was the Republican candidate most likely to win the presidency.

One evening this past March, Trump received Coulter at Mar-a-Lago. Though in recent years the two had developed a rapport on Twitter, she had met him face to face only once before he declared his candidacy, a lunch date at Trump Tower in 2011. Over lunch, Trump gave Coulter the impression that he had read her books. He also gave her a few items from his wife’s line of costume jewelry and told Coulter, who keeps a house in Palm Beach, that she was welcome to use the pool at Mar-a-Lago anytime.

The golf resort was the chief staging ground for Trump’s charm offensives against the conservative media. Many of its members have visited at Trump’s invitation in recent years, joining the resident Gatsby for steak and lobster on the patio, where Trump squints and appears to listen intently while his guests dispense political wisdom — though it is never clear whether he is actually interested in it, simply flattering his guests or sizing them up. When I dined with him on the patio this spring, Trump asked me eagerly about how I liked his odds in the election. Later, on the campaign trail, I watched him solicit the same counsel from random stragglers on the rope line.

Coulter, at any rate, appeared immune to the whole routine. A week earlier, Trump bragged during a Republican presidential debate in Detroit that “there’s no problem” with the size of his penis. On the patio, Coulter told the candidate that no one wanted to hear about his endowment. She told Lewandowski that he should buy a dozen teleprompters and put them in every room of Trump’s house until he learned how to use them. Reminding Trump that she had been his earliest and most dedicated advocate, she told him: “I’m the only one losing money trying to put you in the White House. You’re going to listen to me.”

This appeal to the bottom line seemed to tweak Trump’s conscience. He gave Coulter an open invitation to Mar-a-Lago, waiving the $100,000 membership fee. The following evening at the next Republican debate, he exhibited considerably more restraint, for which Coulter, with characteristic modesty, claims credit. “Coulter delivers!” she told me.

Some of Trump’s supporters within the conservative media are attracted to his actual positions on issues. One is his trade policy, on which many media personalities on the right are considerably more populist and protectionist than Republican Party leaders and Chamber of Commerce boosters. Throughout Obama’s presidency, Laura Ingraham has warned of China’s predations: “The trade war is on, and we’re losing it,” she has often said. For others, Trump’s assurance that he will appoint Antonin Scalia-like conservatives to the Supreme Court is reason enough for their support.

But Trump also simply fulfills the ineffable urge many have to, as Michael Needham, the chief executive of the conservative policy group Heritage Action for America, puts it, “punch Washington in the face.” This is true for Coulter, who, in her newly published paean to the candidate, “In Trump We Trust,” writes that Trump is fit for the presidency not in spite of his crudeness but because of it: “Only someone who brags about his airline’s seatbelt buckles being made of solid gold would have the balls to do what Trump is doing.”

But what really sold Coulter on Trump, she told me, was his hard line on immigration. Coulter told me that she had never given the issue much thought during her childhood in New Canaan, Conn., and her student days at Cornell. Then in 1992, the British-American journalist Peter Brimelow wrote a 14,000-word essay for National Review titled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” which would later become a sort of ur-text for today’s alt-right, the ascendant white-nationalist movement that has found its champion in Trump. Brimelow cast the current wave of American immigrants in dismal terms: less skilled, less European, less assimilated, less law-abiding and less Republican than the previous newcomers. Coulter, who was 31 and a law clerk at the time, remembers reading it and thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been completely lied to!”

Twenty-four years later, Coulter helped formulate Trump’s immigration-policy position, which she hailed on Twitter as “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” (Her additional tweet on the subject — “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper” — prompted Mark Levin to tweet back, “These have to be among the most pathetic comments of anyone in a long time.”)

Coulter has not always gotten her way with the candidate. At Mar-a-Lago that evening in March, she lobbied unsuccessfully for him to pick as his running mate Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, who is credited with selling Mitt Romney on “self-deportation.” And her book tour for “In Trump We Trust” hit a momentary snag when Trump told Sean Hannity that he would be open to “softening” his immigration stance, though Coulter chose to believe that, as she told me, “it was Hannity badgering him.”

Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler. When Khzir Khan, the Pakistani-American father of a U.S. Army captain who was killed in combat in Iraq, spoke critically of Trump at the Democratic National Convention, Coulter wrote on Twitter: “You know what this convention really needed: An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria[sic].”

That tweet provoked disgust from fellow conservatives, among them Erick Erickson, who tweeted: “What a terrible thing to say about a man whose son died for this country.” When I reminded Coulter of Erickson’s scolding, she let out a hearty laugh. “I always hated him,” she said. “This is one of the fantastic things. In any political movement, there are many people you think are losers and dorks, but your friends talk you into liking them, because they’re on our side. Now all of those people are out.”

Sighing, she said, “Trump has made my life better in so many ways.”

You will not find copies of “¡Adios, America!” or “In Trump We Trust” on any of the many bookshelves in the home of the Washington Post columnist George Will. A week after Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race in early May, Will and his wife, Mari, a Republican political consultant, gave a catered dinner party for Cruz and his wife, Heidi. The other guests were conservative donors, activists and journalists, along with their spouses. The Wills have been hosting these off-the-record encounters with political celebrities at their Maryland home for decades. In early 2009, Will’s fellow conservative columnists gathered there to meet Obama a week before his inauguration.

Among the guests that evening in May was Laura Ingraham. Ingraham is of proudly working-class heritage — her mother was a waitress for almost 30 years and her father owned and operated a Coin-a-Matic carwash — and does not share Will’s reverence for decorum. She was an early defender of Trump’s willingness to say things “no one else is saying.” While interviewing Cruz on her radio show six weeks before the Wills’ party, she interrupted him to mock his Harvard Law degree. Still, Cruz knew that his political future relied on conservative opinion-makers like Ingraham, and it was at his request that the Wills included her in the party.

Over cocktails, the Cruzes spoke fondly of their experiences on the campaign trail, and the other guests listened politely, mindful of Cruz’s recent humiliating defeat. Then midway through dinner, at a table set with glasses once used by Abraham Lincoln, Ingraham insisted that Cruz needed to throw his weight behind the man who had branded him “Lyin’ Ted.” “If you don’t endorse him, where does that leave you?” she said. “You don’t have the public and you don’t have the establishment. How can you be a leader of the conservative movement?”

Cruz amiably replied that such a decision did not have to be made right away. Others at the table joined in to defend him, but Ingraham would hear nothing of it. “You can’t want Hillary Clinton elected,” she goaded him.

Will sat fuming silently. “She was quite animated,” he would later recall. Cruz refused to offer his support to Trump that night or in the weeks to follow. Speaking at the Republican convention on July 20 moments before Cruz was to do the same, Ingraham taunted him: “We should all, even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos — and we love you, we love you — but you must honor the pledge to support Donald Trump now, tonight!” The following morning on her radio show, Ingraham declared that Cruz’s refusal to endorse had “effectively ended his political career.”

Will was no more persuaded by Ingraham than Cruz was. The first and only time Will met Trump was in March 1995, when, at Trump’s invitation, he gave a speech at Mar-a-Lago. Years later on Twitter, Trump would ascribe Will’s harsh view of him to Will’s having “totally bombed” with his performance that night. Will told me: “He started telling this story: ‘The reason Will doesn’t like me is I invited him to give a speech at Mar-a-Lago, and I knew it was going to be boring, so I waited out on the patio.’ Which raises two questions. First, if he knew it was going to be that boring, why did he invite me? And second, who would be the guy with the orange hair sitting in the front row?”

Will said on ABC’s “This Week” in 2012 that Trump was “a bloviating ignoramus” and he has spent much of the past year predicting the candidate’s imminent political demise. “I thought even an entertaining bore could be a bore after a while,” he told me. By late December of last year, however, his contempt had given way to alarm. “Conservatives’ highest priority,” he wrote in a Post column, “must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination” — even if it meant Hillary Clinton’s election.

Then on June 2, three weeks after his dinner party for Cruz, Will learned that his friend and fellow Republican Paul Ryan, the House speaker, had endorsed the nominee. Will considered the matter over martinis at home that evening. The next morning, he walked into his office and told his assistant: “Go change my registration. This is not my party anymore.”

Recently I visited Will at his office, a three-story Georgetown brick rowhouse erected in 1811. Its walls are covered with framed photographs, several of them depicting the writer in his youth alongside Reagan and other titans of his former party. The dean of conservative pundits, now 75, wore a crisp pinstripe shirt and gray slacks, his customary owlish Mona Lisa expression a bit tighter than usual, owing to the subject matter. Will told me that he cast his first vote in 1964, for Barry Goldwater. He voted for the Republican candidate in every succeeding presidential election, until now.

“I don’t use the word ‘frightening’ often,” he told me. “But it’s frightening to know this person” — Trump — “would have the nuclear-launch codes. The world is getting really dangerous. His friend Mr. Putin is dismantling a nation in the center of Europe. Some trigger-happy captain of a Chinese boat with ship-to-ship missiles might make a mistake in the next three years near the Spratly Islands. All kinds of things can go wrong. And the idea that this guy will be asked to respond in a sober, firm way? My goodness.”

He seemed genuinely despondent. “Given that, could you see yourself urging your readers to vote for Hillary Clinton?” I asked.

Will’s lips pursed slightly. “Well,” he said, “it’s clear from everything I’ve written that I think she’d be a better president. That said, I’m not going to vote for her. First of all, I’m a Maryland voter. She couldn’t lose Maryland if she tried.”

“Then. ...”

“I haven’t decided,” he said. “You can imagine — I get tons of emails: ‘I, too, have left the Republican Party. What should I do?’ Well, there are a number of legitimate options. Not voting is a legitimate expression of opinion.”

Ingraham and other conservative media personalities hailed Trump for having “tapped into” a shared and seething disquiet among predominantly white, non-college-educated voters. “What I don’t understand on the part of those being tapped into,” Will told me, “is: What exactly do they want? I can think of nothing the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly that they didn’t get. Took a while, but they got it.”

With a resigned half-smirk, he looked at the ground and intoned, in the manner of a hostage-video monologue: “It’s gonna be yuge. And it’s all gonna get fixed. And we’re all gonna be winners.”

“If he doesn’t build that wall, I’m pissed,” Sean Hannity told me, reflecting on the prospects of a Trump presidency in the office of his radio show in Midtown Manhattan. “If he doesn’t repeal Obamacare, I’m gonna be pissed. If he appoints a liberal jurist to the Supreme Court, I’m gonna lose my mind. And by the way: I’ll be screaming. Not talking — screaming about it. But in fairness, if Trump doesn’t keep his promises, you can also blame me, because I believed him.”

Although Coulter was Trump’s earliest cheerleader among prominent conservative-media personalities, Hannity’s stake in the election perhaps runs deepest of all, if only because of the size of his audience. He hosts the second-highest-rated show (after Limbaugh) on talk radio and the second-highest-rated program (after Bill O’Reilly) on cable news. More than 2.4 million weekly viewers and 13 million listeners have witnessed Hannity sticking his neck out on behalf of a first-time politician and sometime Republican who has voiced support for Planned Parenthood while vowing to limit America’s military footprint and shred trade deals that the G.O.P. has backed for decades.

Hannity’s critics on the right have accused him of essentially running hourlong daily Trump infomercials. When I asked him about this, Hannity responded with a well-rehearsed litany of sins perpetrated by the Republican establishment in concert with Obama: perilously low labor participation and homeownership rates, soaring national debt, Obamacare and so on. A Clinton presidency, he warned, would be “Obama on steroids.” These were his motivations. “My conscience is clear. And I feel like Donald Trump would be a great president.”

Hannity told me that he had in fact never stayed at a Trump hotel property, played on a Trump golf course or visited Mar-a-Lago. “I have my own place — on the other Florida coast, in Naples,” he said. “I don’t need his place. I always got the sense people were asking him for something. I don’t believe in asking for free stuff.”

Nonetheless, the two men have a mutual affinity that has spanned at least two decades. The MSNBC “Morning Joe” host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough theorized to me that their relationship has a psychological underpinning: “Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly all share the same resentment that they will never be accepted into Manhattan’s polite society no matter what they do.” (Trump is from Queens; Hannity and O’Reilly are from Long Island.) Trump, in a recent phone conversation, offered me a somewhat simpler explanation: “Sean likes having me on his show, and that has to do with ratings more than anything else.”

No presidential candidate in history, Hannity told me, understands television better than Trump — “not even close.” On this score, I couldn’t disagree. One evening this past spring, on his plane after a campaign event in Buffalo, Trump told me that at rallies, he always made a point of finding the TV cameras at the back of the media pen and noticing whether a red light was flickering. “That means they’re airing it live,” he explained. “So I make sure to say something new” — by which he meant newsworthy, the better to own the next news cycle.

Trump was a TV star for more than a decade before he became a politician; he watches TV news incessantly and understands the medium intimately. He knows the optimal time slots on the morning shows. He stage-manages the on-set lighting. He is not only on speaking terms with every network chief executive but also knows their booking agents. He monitors the opinions of hosts and regular guests more avidly than most media critics do and works them obsessively, often directly.

Scarborough told me that Trump’s family — particularly Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner — sometimes asked him for advice, and more than once “called me and asked me to get him off the ledge. I’ve said, ‘I can do that, but six hours later he’s going to revert to form.’ I told Jared at one point: ‘Jared, your father-in-law listens to me more when I’m attacking him on television than when I’m trying to convince him to be rational for the sake of the party.’ I think he’s a creature of TV.”

TV networks, in the mainstream as well as conservative media, have profited handsomely from Trump’s election-season theatrics, but some of their on-air personalities like Hannity are drawn to him for reasons apart from ratings. The prospect of getting in on the ground floor of a Trump administration that is short on policy ideas and disdainful of old Washington hands amounts to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. By employing the Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon, and by including both Ingraham and Roger Ailes in his debate preparations, Trump has implicitly encouraged the conservative media to consider itself part of the campaign team.

I asked Hannity if it was true that, as a Trump confidant had told me, he wished to be considered as a potential Trump White House chief of staff. “That’s news to me,” he insisted, adding a politician’s practiced nondenial denial: “I have radio and TV contracts that I will honor through December 2020.” Nonetheless, Hannity’s service to the Trump campaign well exceeds that of ritually bashing Clinton and giving Trump free airtime. He has offered private strategic advice to the campaign. The same Trump confidant told me of at least one instance in which Hannity drafted an unsolicited memo outlining the message Trump should offer after the Orlando nightclub shooting in June. In public, Hannity has made it his mission to warn fellow conservatives — naming names, like the columnist Jonah Goldberg and the National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry — that if they do not soon climb aboard the Trump train they will, as the hashtag threatens, #OwnIt: Clinton’s picks for the Supreme Court, her response to the Islamic State, her trade deals, all of it.

Hannity maintains that his scolding of Trump’s conservative dissenters derives from his fear of a Clinton presidency. “It’d be pretty much over,” he said. Taken alone, George Will or even National Review might have little impact on Trump’s standing in the race, Hannity argued, but “cumulatively they do. I can look at the poll numbers. If you go back to a month ago, he was garnering 73 percent of the Republican vote. The most recent, I think he had 88 percent. He needs to get to 93.” And the key to the last 5 percent might very well lie with the noisy holdouts, like Erick Erickson.

On Sept. 16, Erickson showed up at the National Press Club in Washington to participate in a debate sponsored by the National Religious Broadcasters. Erickson left RedState at the end of last year to concentrate on his radio show and his online opinion journal, The Resurgent, but he has remained influential among conservatives who do not support Trump. In July, when he learned that Ted Cruz was about to have a private meeting with the nominee on the eve of the convention, Erickson texted the senator: “Don’t endorse! Don’t endorse!” Later that evening, Erickson says, Cruz texted back: “Didn’t endorse! Didn’t endorse!” (Cruz finally announced that he would vote for Trump on Sept. 23.)

The subject of the debate, inevitably, was Trump: specifically, whether evangelical Christians should support him. Being a lifelong evangelical himself, Erickson had some thoughts on the matter. Over the years, he had been condemned for his own offensive words, like the time he called the Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis “Abortion Barbie.” But he had recently apologized for many (though not all) of these statements and had called upon Trump to affect a similar posture of Christian humility. “1 Corinthians is very explicit,” he told me. “If someone holds one’s self out to be a Christian and doesn’t behave that way, Christians are supposed to judge him. This is a guy who’s bragged about his affairs.”

This was Erickson’s principal argument during the debate. Trump was not merely a sinner, he said, but a gleefully unrepentant one. Erickson’s debate opponent, the Christian talk-show host and fervent Trump supporter Janet Parshall, responded by reciting a litany of sinners in chief — from Thomas Jefferson with the out-of-wedlock child he fathered with a slave, to Warren G. Harding with his multiple liaisons, to Richard Nixon with his foul language memorialized on the White House tapes. “We are not electing a messiah,” Parshall said. “Last time I checked, he was appointed to office and he is not term-limited.”

Erickson’s debating partner, the conservative activist Bill Wichterman, argued that Trump appealed to the worst in America: His bullying, his lying and his bigotry were “corrosive to our national character.” Erickson could testify to this. At one point, he was receiving as many as 300 emails a day from Trump supporters. Some of them referred to him as a “cuck” or “cuck-servative.” The word — a masculinity-insulting derivative of “cuckold” — was new to Erickson, as were its originators in the white-nationalist alt-right.

More than one of the emails predicted that Erickson would be shot to death. At the local grocery store, a man walked up to Erickson’s two young children “and told them they needed to know their father was destroying this country by supporting Hillary Clinton,” Erickson told me. And one evening, two people showed up on the Ericksons’ doorstep to deliver a threat — Erickson would not tell me what it was — explicit enough that he later hired security guards. “I’ve never had Obama or Romney or McCain or Clinton supporters come to my home or send me nasty letters,” he said.

Did Trump beget all of this? If so, what begot Trump? Erickson argued that the fault lay with Beltway Republicans. “They’ve broken so many promises,” he said. “They promised to defund the president’s immigration plan. They promised to defund Obamacare. They promised to fight the president on raising the debt limit. At some point, the base of the party just wants to burn the house down and start over.”

But even Erickson did not seem convinced that this alone explained what he saw as a nihilistic turn among Republican voters. “I do think there are a lot of people that have just concluded that this is it — that if we don’t get the election right, the country’s over,” he said. As to where they might have gotten that idea, Erickson knew the answer. It was the apocalyptic hymn sung by talk-radio hosts like his friend and mentor Rush Limbaugh, whose show Erickson once guest-hosted, though in the time of Trump, it seemed unlikely he would receive another invitation.

This February, Limbaugh, who has applauded Trump without endorsing him outright, posed to Erickson the question of whether a commentator should try to act as “the guardian of what it means to be a conservative.” In effect, the legend of talk radio was laying down an unwritten commandment of the trade, which applies as well to cable TV: Do not attempt to lead your following.

This was simple enough for an avowed Trump supporter like Ingraham. “Laura’s never missed an opportunity to build her career on the backs of others,” Erickson told me. He counted Hannity as another mentor and admired his entrepreneurial cunning, saying: “Sean reflects his audience. He’s not going to leave his audience.” On his own radio show, Erickson found that the more he denounced Trump, the more female listeners he picked up. But most of the 300,0000 people who tuned in weekly during rush hour were men. While Erickson refused to abandon his principles, he did not wish to go broke, either.

On Sept. 20, Erickson wrote a long post for The Resurgent titled “Reconsidering My Opposition to Donald Trump.” He made no effort to disguise his moroseness. “I see the election of Hillary Clinton as the antithesis of all my values and ideas on what fosters sound civil society in this country,” he wrote, and described his manifold objections to her at great length. But, he went on, “I have to admit that while I may view Hillary Clinton’s campaign as anti-American, I view Donald Trump’s campaign as un-American. ... While I see Clinton as having no virtue, I see Donald Trump corrupting the virtuous and fostering hatred, racism and dangerous strains of nationalism.” The election left him adrift. “I am without a candidate. I just cannot vote for either one.”

And so Erickson’s conscience led him back to where he was 13 months ago. Nowadays, he told me, he was doing all he could to avoid discussing Trump and the election altogether — a tall order for a talk-radio host. Responding to my look of bewilderment, he said, “Why dwell on the train wreck?”

Erickson believed he was not alone. “People know where we’re headed, don’t like where we’re headed and would rather talk about something else,” he said. Erickson had won many fights. This one was the biggest yet, and he had lost. There was nothing left to do but step back from his megaphone, dwell on happier matters and wait for the next righteous cause.

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In the 1980's the Reagan Administration de-regulated radio and now we are paying the price. Democracy is never safe in the face of hard left or hard right politics. The United States is at the end of a political era created after WW2 and has yet to define US 2.0 which will be radically different. Donald Trump glimmers a national mood but is incredibly clumsy and poisoned by his own excesses. It is a sad fact that we need Hillary Clinton to save the republic until a better revolutionary comes along. A Trump presidency would be a disaster.

David A Fairbanks

Reno, Nevada

HE HAD HIS REASONS

Colin Barrett  From GRANTA magazine

On Sunday evening, 28 August 2016, in their home near the small rural town of Ballyjamesduff in County Cavan, Alan Hawe put a knife through the throat of his wife Clodagh before going upstairs to strangle and stab to death his three sons, Liam, Niall and Ryan. The three boys’ beds were distributed between two upstairs rooms, which means two of the boys were sharing: the children were discovered in their bedclothes and early reports, more in hope than with any kind of verifiable accuracy, insisted they would have been sleeping when the attacks took place. The implication, in an attempt to soothe our gut-level instincts otherwise, is that the boys did not suffer, or did not suffer much, or extensively. Certainly Clodagh did – she tried to fight him off – but Hawe was armed and intent. ‘Alan was meticulous in everything he did,’ says an unnamed neighbour interviewed in the Daily Mirror the following Wednesday, ‘what he started, he finished.’ And it must indeed take a gruelling physical and mental conviction, a blazing adherence to your own ferocity, to overpower and kill four human beings – even if they were only a woman, even if they were only children – in such quick and unceasing succession. Hawe then went back downstairs and, permitting himself the one relatively lenient fate amid this paroxysm of physical atrocity, put a rope around his neck and let gravity do the rest.

The first newspaper reports referred to the event as a ‘family tragedy’, a euphemism that concealed as much as it revealed, and one that prefigured the national media’s subsequent selectivity when it came to what aspects of the story it would deem fit to speculate upon and what perspectives it would pass over in silence. To the authorities it was immediately obvious what had happened. No other suspects were or would be sought. Very quickly, the compound term ‘murder-suicide’ began to be invoked by the media. While ‘murder-suicide’ is a technically accurate term, there is something unsettling, something subliminally repugnant, about the way each noun is given equivalent weight by the connecting hyphen. Language, in its quest to be accurate and as concise as possible, can be callous, and the hyphen in the term ‘murder-suicide’ is a violent coupling, a forcing together into a state of symbiotic equivalence two things that are not, of course, symbiotic or equivalent at all. The hyphen welding ‘murder’ to ‘suicide’ implies that each state is as bad, or as tragic, as the other. That the murderer who then commits suicide is, on some level, as much a victim as those he murdered, is paying a commensurate price within a larger, indivisible spectrum of suffering signified by that conjoining hyphen. But what happened to the Hawe family was not only a ‘murder-suicide’. It was, first and foremost, a multiple murder committed by a man who then committed suicide.

As various unnamed friends of the murderer, newspaper columnists, even members of the clergy have been quick to assure us, we cannot possibly know what was going through Hawe’s mind when he committed these killings. We can infer that he showed some degree of premeditation (the prepared weapons of knife and hatchet, the rope for himself, waiting until the boys were in bed – his victims segregated – before beginning), a sustained commitment to his actions once he began upon them, and an awareness that there would then be consequences to these actions. We know this because he took steps to mitigate how those actions would be subsequently perceived. He wrote two notes. One was merely functional, an instruction pinned to the front door that whoever found it should not come inside, but alert the Gardai. The second piece of correspondence, a more ‘detailed note’, was addressed to his family. What explanatory or self-justifying details that note might contain are as yet unknown, but at the least, the existences of the first, but especially the second note, attest to sufficient cognizance on the part of Hawe that some kind of explanation would be required.

The Irish press, in their earliest reports, have emphasized how respected a member of the community Alan Hawe was. He was the head of a church-going family, was the well-liked and dedicated vice principal of a local national school, a GAA enthusiast and former teenage handball champion. He was ‘the most normal man you could meet’, ‘a brilliant dad’ and a ‘kind and decent person with an overriding need to look after those around him.’ The quotes go on and on, a lavishly detailed assemblage of testimonials to the rectitude of Alan Hawe’s character. The horrifying incongruity between this benevolent image of a caring, ostensibly well-oriented family man and the man guilty of such murderous brutality has naturally led to much speculation about his mental state.

Investigating Gardai quickly determined that Hawe had no clinical history of mental issues, had never been referred to, or sought of his own volition, access to mental health services. In the days leading up to the murders, locals, too, saw no clue indicating any alteration or degradation in Hawe’s mental state, mood or behaviour. Of course this lack of corroborating evidence doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the grip of a very real psychological anguish: many people with mental illnesses suffer, sometimes for a long time, in silence, and much of the immediate discussion of the case in Ireland has concerned how we as a society deal with, and talk about, mental health issues, male mental health issues in particular.

An opinion piece in the Irish Mirror, entitled ‘Will Cavan Tragedy Finally Break the Stigma Around Mental Health?’ was one of a slew of speculative articles written out of the premise that Hawe was mentally unwell and that this led him to do what he did. That he had no prior history of mental illness, no record of underlying psychological issues, only confirms that Hawe was stoically suffering in a silence that eventually became unendurable: as the Mirror commentator puts it, ‘we can safely assume . . . some deep emotional torment was at the heart of this case.’ Again, quoting an unnamed neighbour: ‘I feel so bad for Clodagh and the boys, but for Alan too. What was he going through?’ What emotional torments may have been visited upon his wife and children before he slaughtered them – what they were going through? – has yet to be deemed a question worth asking. The narrative has remained firmly focused upon Alan Hawe and his putatively imperilled mental state.

However sympathetic such a stance is intended to be, and no matter how couched it comes in compassionate qualifiers such as ‘what happened was an enigma’ and ‘we may never truly understand what drove him to this’, the premature ascription of Hawe’s crimes to an unarticulated mental illness rests upon another ugly, Victorianly anachronistic prejudice, which is that it is only the ‘mentally ill’ that are truly capable of such violence. This, despite the plethora of studies that show people who suffer from mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence rather than its perpetrators. Disguised as compassionate advocacy, articles such as these actually serve to reinforce the very stigmas they claim to want to ‘break’ when they unsubstantiatedly tie mental illness into a multiple murder.

The salient thing here is the media’s focus on propounding the theory that Hawe was mentally unwell, the victim of a ‘deep emotional torment’. The discourse thus generated – a discourse concerning mental unwellness and urgent public enjoinments for men and fathers to reach out and talk to someone about their secret suffering – may be sincere, but it is also, if only inadvertently, a strategy of rhetorical foreclosing that prevents another, urgently important discussion that needs to happen, and this concerns domestic abuse.

‘Prior Domestic Abuse is by far the number-one risk factor in these cases,’ writes Dr Jacquelyn Campbell of John Hopkins University, a national leader in the field of domestic violence and IPV (intimate partner violence) in the States. In a twelve city study of 408 domestic familial murder-suicides in the US, 91% were committed by men, and ‘intimate partner violence’ had occurred in 70% of them – though only one in four of these abusers had an arrest record for abuse at the time of the murder-suicide. Most of the time, when a man commits familial ‘murder-suicide’, it is the terminal act in a pre-existing pattern of domestic abuse.

One of the most pernicious aspects of domestic abuse, of course, is its insidiousness. It is a notoriously hidden crime: though research by Women’s Aid in Ireland shows that one in five women here will suffer domestic abuse at some time in their lives, Safe Ireland’s Domestic Violence Statistics Report of 2014 estimates that only 8-12% of women suffering domestic abuse attempt to access a domestic violence service, an underreporting trend reflected worldwide. While the Hawe case, in terms of the sheer savagery and scope of the killings, is shockingly exceptional and relatively rare, one component of it is depressingly mundane: in Ireland, more than one in two women who are murdered die by the hand of their current or ex-partner.

In Ireland, it is a great social sin to speak ill of the dead. In Ireland, you can impugn a dead man’s reputation – even a dead man who premeditatedly murdered his wife and children still has a reputation to impugn. The mainstream media, while content to hypothesize about the mental state of that man, are much more reticent (as far as I can see, completely silent) about the issue of domestic abuse.

The coverage of the Hawe incident, which focuses on him and marginalizes his victims, perpetuates two prejudices. The first is about mental illness: as I mentioned above, even though we understand that mental illness is not the sufferer’s ‘fault’, that it is not due to some frangibility of character but chemical imbalances that are sometimes exacerbated by environmental stressors and sometimes completely arbitrary, we are still susceptible to the idea that you have to be mentally ill to carry out atrocities. This prejudice, like all prejudices, is tautologous: only someone who is mentally disturbed could unmotivatedly murder their wife and children, because, well, you would have to be mentally disturbed in order to unmotivatedly murder your wife and children.

The other prejudice has to do with class and gender: Alan Hawe was a respectable middle class bastion of his community – a model patriarch in a patriarchal society – and we are predisposed to believe that a man like this could not possibly have been an abuser. Remarkably enough, the fact that this man premeditatedly murdered his wife and children does not, in itself, seem grounds enough for his position in society to be publicly challenged in the mainstream media.

The recurring cognitive dissonance in the reporting of the murders thus far is the way in which the media simultaneously acknowledges the visceral particulars, yet also promote an unblemished portrait of Hawe as a family man and venerated community fixture. But there is no contradiction: as long as you take as a given that Alan Hawe was himself the victim of a hidden mental illness, then the sanctity of the image of the patriarch can remain untainted, can actually be celebrated, even as the abhorrent details of the crime itself are repeated ad nauseam.

Another manifestation of these prejudices is the systemic marginalization of Clodagh Hawe within the narrative. By the Wednesday evening following the killings, the hashtag #HerNameWasClodagh was trending on Irish twitter. Contributors to the thread collated all the headlines in which Clodagh was either not mentioned or referred to only as the ‘wife’ of Alan Hawe, and the accompanying pictures of the ‘tragic family’ – the smiling father and his boys – in which Clodagh was not included. In order to evade the question of domestic abuse, the perspective of the woman and her children cannot be explicitly countenanced, and so the story of the multiple murder of a woman and her children is subsumed within the story of one man’s putative mental illness and suicide. The actual physical suffering of Clodagh Hawe and her sons Liam, Niall and Ryan, is subordinated to the hypothetical mental suffering of Alan Hawe, their brutal demises repurposed as tragic collateral in the master narrative of Hawe’s interior dissolution.

This narrative is invidious not just because of the selective hypocrisies around what it deems worthy of public interest (mental issues) and what it ignores (domestic abuse), but because of the message the focus on Hawe sends out to other men contemplating a similar terrible course of action. To them it says: we will remember the good things you did, we will acknowledge that you, too, were a victim, we will assume that you were in a terrible state of mind and that your suffering mattered, that even though we may never understand them, you surely had your reasons. To the thousands of women and children of Ireland living under the invisible tyranny of domestic abuse, who fear that the man they are living with might one day be capable of such an action, the mainstream Irish media offers nothing. It will not even consider their perspective: as the Irish writer Sally Rooney noted on Twitter, every article about the Cavan murders in the Irish Independent was followed by the number for the Samaritans – the suicide helpline – for those ‘affected’ by the article: ‘as if suicide is the only “affecting” aspect of the crimes. they don’t provide any contact numbers for domestic abuse services.’ As Rooney concludes, ‘the assumed point of the view of the reader is to identify with the story’s protagonist, i.e. the murderer, and not his victims’.

Since 2004, there have been at least twenty-four similar cases of familial murder-suicide in Ireland. All but one were carried out by the father/partner of the family unit. In the week following the murders, Professor Ella Arensman, Director of Research at the National Suicide Research Foundation, has appealed to the State stakeholders – the HSE and Garda among them – to set up an independent research body to review these cases. No such apparatus currently exists. To the women and children who will sooner or later die by the hand of their partner and father, the message from the State, as from the media, is the same: suffer in silence.

I USED TO BE A HUMAN BEING

Andrew Sullivan

New York Magazine

I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly surrendered my little device, only to feel a sudden pang of panic on my way back to my seat. If it hadn’t been for everyone staring at me, I might have turned around immediately and asked for it back. But I didn’t. I knew why I’d come here.

A year before, like many addicts, I had sensed a personal crash coming. For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

I was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.

If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”

But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it. I got a steady workout routine, and it gave me the only relief I could measure for an hour or so a day. But over time in this pervasive virtual world, the online clamor grew louder and louder. Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades — a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise. So much of it was irresistible, as I fully understood. So much of the technology was irreversible, as I also knew. But I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.

By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.

And so I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.

Since the invention of the printing press, every new revolution in information technology has prompted apocalyptic fears. From the panic that easy access to the vernacular English Bible would destroy Christian orthodoxy all the way to the revulsion, in the 1950s, at the barbaric young medium of television, cultural critics have moaned and wailed at every turn. Each shift represented a further fracturing of attention — continuing up to the previously unimaginable kaleidoscope of cable TV in the late-20th century and the now infinite, infinitely multiplying spaces of the web. And yet society has always managed to adapt and adjust, without obvious damage, and with some more-than-obvious progress. So it’s perhaps too easy to view this new era of mass distraction as something newly dystopian.

But it sure does represent a huge leap from even the very recent past. The data bewilder. Every single minute on the planet, YouTube users upload 400 hours of video and Tinder users swipe profiles over a million times. Each day, there are literally billions of Facebook “likes.” Online outlets now publish exponentially more material than they once did, churning out articles at a rapid-fire pace, adding new details to the news every few minutes. Blogs, Facebook feeds, Tumblr accounts, tweets, and propaganda outlets repurpose, borrow, and add topspin to the same output.

We absorb this “content” (as writing or video or photography is now called) no longer primarily by buying a magazine or paper, by bookmarking our favorite website, or by actively choosing to read or watch. We are instead guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy. Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.

And the engagement never ends. Not long ago, surfing the web, however addictive, was a stationary activity. At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing. Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives.

And it did so with staggering swiftness. We almost forget that ten years ago, there were no smartphones, and as recently as 2011, only a third of Americans owned one. Now nearly two-thirds do. That figure reaches 85 percent when you’re only counting young adults. And 46 percent of Americans told Pew surveyors last year a simple but remarkable thing: They could not live without one. The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade. The handful of spaces where it was once impossible to be connected — the airplane, the subway, the wilderness — are dwindling fast. Even hiker backpacks now come fitted with battery power for smartphones. Perhaps the only “safe space” that still exists is the shower.

Am I exaggerating? A small but detailed 2015 study of young adults found that participants were using their phones five hours a day, at 85 separate times. Most of these interactions were for less than 30 seconds, but they add up. Just as revealing: The users weren’t fully aware of how addicted they were. They thought they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did. But whether they were aware of it or not, a new technology had seized control of around one-third of these young adults’ waking hours.

The interruptions often feel pleasant, of course, because they are usually the work of your friends. Distractions arrive in your brain connected to people you know (or think you know), which is the genius of social, peer-to-peer media. Since our earliest evolution, humans have been unusually passionate about gossip, which some attribute to the need to stay abreast of news among friends and family as our social networks expanded. We were hooked on information as eagerly as sugar. And give us access to gossip the way modernity has given us access to sugar and we have an uncontrollable impulse to binge. A regular teen Snapchat user, as the Atlantic recently noted, can have exchanged anywhere between 10,000 and even as many as 400,000 snaps with friends. As the snaps accumulate, they generate publicly displayed scores that bestow the allure of popularity and social status. This, evolutionary psychologists will attest, is fatal. When provided a constant source of information and news and gossip about each other — routed through our social networks — we are close to helpless.

Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

If an alien had visited America just five years ago, then returned today, wouldn’t this be its immediate observation? That this species has developed an extraordinary new habit — and, everywhere you look, lives constantly in its thrall?

I arrived at the meditation retreat center a few months after I’d quit the web, throwing my life and career up in the air. I figured it would be the ultimate detox. And I wasn’t wrong. After a few hours of silence, you tend to expect some kind of disturbance, some flurry to catch your interest. And then it never comes. The quiet deepens into an enveloping default. No one spoke; no one even looked another person in the eye — what some Buddhists call “noble silence.” The day was scheduled down to the minute, so that almost all our time was spent in silent meditation with our eyes closed, or in slow-walking meditation on the marked trails of the forest, or in communal, unspeaking meals. The only words I heard or read for ten days were in three counseling sessions, two guided meditations, and nightly talks on mindfulness.

I’d spent the previous nine months honing my meditation practice, but, in this crowd, I was a novice and a tourist. (Everyone around me was attending six-week or three-month sessions.) The silence, it became apparent, was an integral part of these people’s lives — and their simple manner of movement, the way they glided rather than walked, the open expressions on their faces, all fascinated me. What were they experiencing, if not insane levels of boredom?

And how did their calm somehow magnify itself when I was surrounded by them every day? Usually, when you add people to a room, the noise grows; here, it was the silence that seemed to compound itself. Attached to my phone, I had been accompanied for so long by verbal and visual noise, by an endless bombardment of words and images, and yet I felt curiously isolated. Among these meditators, I was alone in silence and darkness, yet I felt almost at one with them. My breathing slowed. My brain settled. My body became much more available to me. I could feel it digesting and sniffing, itching and pulsating. It was if my brain were moving away from the abstract and the distant toward the tangible and the near.

Things that usually escaped me began to intrigue me. On a meditative walk through the forest on my second day, I began to notice not just the quality of the autumnal light through the leaves but the splotchy multicolors of the newly fallen, the texture of the lichen on the bark, the way in which tree roots had come to entangle and overcome old stone walls. The immediate impulse — to grab my phone and photograph it — was foiled by an empty pocket. So I simply looked. At one point, I got lost and had to rely on my sense of direction to find my way back. I heard birdsong for the first time in years. Well, of course, I had always heard it, but it had been so long since I listened.

My goal was to keep thought in its place. “Remember,” my friend Sam Harris, an atheist meditator, had told me before I left, “if you’re suffering, you’re thinking.” The task was not to silence everything within my addled brain, but to introduce it to quiet, to perspective, to the fallow spaces I had once known where the mind and soul replenish.

Soon enough, the world of “the news,” and the raging primary campaign, disappeared from my consciousness. My mind drifted to a trancelike documentary I had watched years before, Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence, on an ancient Carthusian monastery and silent monastic order in the Alps. In one scene, a novice monk is tending his plot of garden. As he moves deliberately from one task to the next, he seems almost in another dimension. He is walking from one trench to another, but never appears focused on actually getting anywhere. He seems to float, or mindfully glide, from one place to the next.

He had escaped, it seemed to me, what we moderns understand by time. There was no race against it; no fear of wasting it; no avoidance of the tedium that most of us would recoil from. And as I watched my fellow meditators walk around, eyes open yet unavailable to me, I felt the slowing of the ticking clock, the unwinding of the pace that has all of us in modernity on a treadmill till death. I felt a trace of a freedom all humans used to know and that our culture seems intent, pell-mell, on forgetting.

We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs. For the subtle snare of this new technology is that it lulls us into the belief that there are no downsides. It’s all just more of everything. Online life is simply layered on top of offline life. We can meet in person and text beforehand. We can eat together while checking our feeds. We can transform life into what the writer Sherry Turkle refers to as “life-mix.”

But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.

By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.

Think of how rarely you now use the phone to speak to someone. A text is far easier, quicker, less burdensome. A phone call could take longer; it could force you to encounter that person’s idiosyncrasies or digressions or unexpected emotional needs. Remember when you left voice-mail messages — or actually listened to one? Emojis now suffice. Or take the difference between trying to seduce someone at a bar and flipping through Tinder profiles to find a better match. One is deeply inefficient and requires spending (possibly wasting) considerable time; the other turns dozens and dozens of humans into clothes on an endlessly extending rack.

No wonder we prefer the apps. An entire universe of intimate responses is flattened to a single, distant swipe. We hide our vulnerabilities, airbrushing our flaws and quirks; we project our fantasies onto the images before us. Rejection still stings — but less when a new virtual match beckons on the horizon. We have made sex even safer yet, having sapped it of serendipity and risk and often of physical beings altogether. The amount of time we spend cruising vastly outweighs the time we may ever get to spend with the objects of our desire.

Our oldest human skills atrophy. GPS, for example, is a godsend for finding our way around places we don’t know. But, as Nicholas Carr has noted, it has led to our not even seeing, let alone remembering, the details of our environment, to our not developing the accumulated memories that give us a sense of place and control over what we once called ordinary life. The writer Matthew Crawford has examined how automation and online living have sharply eroded the number of people physically making things, using their own hands and eyes and bodies to craft, say, a wooden chair or a piece of clothing or, in one of Crawford’s more engrossing case studies, a pipe organ. We became who we are as a species by mastering tools, making them a living, evolving extension of our whole bodies and minds. What first seems tedious and repetitive develops into a skill — and a skill is what gives us humans self-esteem and mutual respect.

Yes, online and automated life is more efficient, it makes more economic sense, it ends monotony and “wasted” time in the achievement of practical goals. But it denies us the deep satisfaction and pride of workmanship that comes with accomplishing daily tasks well, a denial perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom such tasks are also a livelihood — and an identity.

Indeed, the modest mastery of our practical lives is what fulfilled us for tens of thousands of years — until technology and capitalism decided it was entirely dispensable. If we are to figure out why despair has spread so rapidly in so many left-behind communities, the atrophying of the practical vocations of the past — and the meaning they gave to people’s lives — seems as useful a place to explore as economic indices.

So are the bonds we used to form in our everyday interactions — the nods and pleasantries of neighbors, the daily facial recognition in the mall or the street. Here too the allure of virtual interaction has helped decimate the space for actual community. When we enter a coffee shop in which everyone is engrossed in their private online worlds, we respond by creating one of our own. When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates. Turkle describes one of the many small consequences in an American city: “Kara, in her 50s, feels that life in her hometown of Portland, Maine, has emptied out: ‘Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in … No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them.’ ”

Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”

He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”

The early days of the retreat passed by, the novelty slowly ceding to a reckoning that my meditation skills were now being tested more aggressively. Thoughts began to bubble up; memories clouded the present; the silent sessions began to be edged by a little anxiety.

And then, unexpectedly, on the third day, as I was walking through the forest, I became overwhelmed. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but my best guess is that the shady, quiet woodlands, with brooks trickling their way down hillsides and birds flitting through the moist air, summoned memories of my childhood. I was a lonely boy who spent many hours outside in the copses and woodlands of my native Sussex, in England. I had explored this landscape with friends, but also alone — playing imaginary scenarios in my head, creating little nooks where I could hang and sometimes read, learning every little pathway through the woods and marking each flower or weed or fungus that I stumbled on. But I was also escaping a home where my mother had collapsed with bipolar disorder after the birth of my younger brother and had never really recovered. She was in and out of hospitals for much of my youth and adolescence, and her condition made it hard for her to hide her pain and suffering from her sensitive oldest son.

I absorbed a lot of her agony, I came to realize later, hearing her screams of frustration and misery in constant, terrifying fights with my father, and never knowing how to stop it or to help. I remember watching her dissolve in tears in the car picking me up from elementary school at the thought of returning to a home she clearly dreaded, or holding her as she poured her heart out to me, through sobs and whispers, about her dead-end life in a small town where she was utterly dependent on a spouse. She was taken away from me several times in my childhood, starting when I was 4, and even now I can recall the corridors and rooms of the institutions she was treated in when we went to visit.

I knew the scar tissue from this formative trauma was still in my soul. I had spent two decades in therapy, untangling and exploring it, learning how it had made intimacy with others so frightening, how it had made my own spasms of adolescent depression even more acute, how living with that kind of pain from the most powerful source of love in my life had made me the profoundly broken vessel I am. But I had never felt it so vividly since the very years it had first engulfed and defined me. It was as if, having slowly and progressively removed every distraction from my life, I was suddenly faced with what I had been distracting myself from. Resting for a moment against the trunk of a tree, I stopped, and suddenly found myself bent over, convulsed with the newly present pain, sobbing.

And this time, even as I eventually made it back to the meditation hall, there was no relief. I couldn’t call my husband or a friend and talk it over. I couldn’t check my email or refresh my Instagram or text someone who might share the pain. I couldn’t ask one of my fellows if they had experienced something similar. I waited for the mood to lift, but it deepened. Hours went by in silence as my heart beat anxiously and my mind reeled.

I decided I would get some distance by trying to describe what I was feeling. The two words “extreme suffering” won the naming contest in my head. And when I had my 15-minute counseling session with my assigned counselor a day later, the words just kept tumbling out. After my panicked, anguished confession, he looked at me, one eyebrow raised, with a beatific half-smile. “Oh, that’s perfectly normal,” he deadpanned warmly. “Don’t worry. Be patient. It will resolve itself.” And in time, it did. Over the next day, the feelings began to ebb, my meditation improved, the sadness shifted into a kind of calm and rest. I felt other things from my childhood — the beauty of the forests, the joy of friends, the support of my sister, the love of my maternal grandmother. Yes, I prayed, and prayed for relief. But this lifting did not feel like divine intervention, let alone a result of effort, but more like a natural process of revisiting and healing and recovering. It felt like an ancient, long-buried gift.

In his survey of how the modern West lost widespread religious practice, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary” — a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief. We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues. Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.

The English Reformation began, one recalls, with an assault on the monasteries, and what silence the Protestants didn’t banish the philosophers of the Enlightenment mocked. Gibbon and Voltaire defined the Enlightenment’s posture toward the monkish: from condescension to outright contempt. The roar and disruption of the Industrial Revolution violated what quiet still remained until modern capitalism made business central to our culture and the ever-more efficient meeting of needs and wants our primary collective goal. We became a civilization of getting things done — with the development of America, in some ways, as its crowning achievement. Silence in modernity became, over the centuries, an anachronism, even a symbol of the useless superstitions we had left behind. The smartphone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist of this ratchet, in which those few remaining redoubts of quiet — the tiny cracks of inactivity in our lives — are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise.

And yet our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. They are always giving way to new wants and needs, always requiring updating or repairing, always falling short. The mania of our online lives reveals this: We keep swiping and swiping because we are never fully satisfied. The late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott starkly called this truth “the deadliness of doing.” There seems no end to this paradox of practical life, and no way out, just an infinite succession of efforts, all doomed ultimately to fail.

Except, of course, there is the option of a spiritual reconciliation to this futility, an attempt to transcend the unending cycle of impermanent human achievement. There is a recognition that beyond mere doing, there is also being; that at the end of life, there is also the great silence of death with which we must eventually make our peace. From the moment I entered a church in my childhood, I understood that this place was different becauseit was so quiet. The Mass itself was full of silences — those liturgical pauses that would never do in a theater, those minutes of quiet after communion when we were encouraged to get lost in prayer, those liturgical spaces that seemed to insist that we are in no hurry here. And this silence demarcated what we once understood as the sacred, marking a space beyond the 

secular world of noise and business and shopping.

The only place like it was the library, and the silence there also pointed to something beyond it — to the learning that required time and patience, to the pursuit of truth that left practical life behind. Like the moment of silence we sometimes honor in the wake of a tragedy, the act of not speaking signals that we are responding to something deeper than the quotidian, something more profound than words can fully express. I vividly recall when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was first laid out on the Mall in Washington in 1987. A huge crowd had gathered, drifts of hundreds of chattering, animated people walking in waves onto the scene. But the closer they got, and the more they absorbed the landscape of unimaginably raw grief, their voices petered out, and a great emptiness filled the air. This is different, the silence seemed to say. This is not our ordinary life.

Most civilizations, including our own, have understood this in the past. Millennia ago, as the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued, the unnameable, often inscrutably silent God of the Jewish Scriptures intersected with Plato’s concept of a divinity so beyond human understanding and imperfection that no words could accurately describe it. The hidden God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures spoke often by not speaking. And Jesus, like the Buddha, revealed as much by his silences as by his words. He was a preacher who yet wandered for 40 days in the desert; a prisoner who refused to defend himself at his trial. At the converted novitiate at the retreat, they had left two stained-glass windows depicting Jesus. In one, he is in the Garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood in terror, alone before his execution. In the other, he is seated at the Last Supper, with the disciple John the Beloved resting his head on Jesus’s chest. He is speaking in neither.

That Judeo-Christian tradition recognized a critical distinction — and tension — between noise and silence, between getting through the day and getting a grip on one’s whole life. The Sabbath — the Jewish institution co-opted by Christianity — was a collective imposition of relative silence, a moment of calm to reflect on our lives under the light of eternity. It helped define much of Western public life once a week for centuries — only to dissipate, with scarcely a passing regret, into the commercial cacophony of the past couple of decades. It reflected a now-battered belief that a sustained spiritual life is simply unfeasible for most mortals without these refuges from noise and work to buffer us and remind us who we really are. But just as modern street lighting has slowly blotted the stars from the visible skies, so too have cars and planes and factories and flickering digital screens combined to rob us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.

This changes us. It slowly removes — without our even noticing it — the very spaces where we can gain a footing in our minds and souls that is not captive to constant pressures or desires or duties. And the smartphone has all but banished them. Thoreau issued his jeremiad against those pressures more than a century ago: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.”

When you enter the temporary Temple at Burning Man, the annual Labor Day retreat for the tech elite in the Nevada desert, there is hardly any speaking. Some hover at the edges; others hold hands and weep; a few pin notes to a wall of remembrances; the rest are kneeling or meditating or simply sitting. The usually ornate and vast wooden structure is rivaled only by the massive tower of a man that will be burned, like the Temple itself, as the festival reaches its climax, and tens of thousands of people watch an inferno.

They come here, these architects of our internet world, to escape the thing they unleashed on the rest of us. They come to a wilderness where no cellular signals penetrate. You leave your phone in your tent, deemed useless for a few, ecstatically authentic days. There is a spirit of radical self-reliance (you survive for seven days or so only on what you can bring into the vast temporary city) and an ethic of social equality. You are forced to interact only as a physical human being with other physical human beings — without hierarchy. You dance, and you experiment; you build community in various camps. And for many, this is the high point of their year — a separate world for fantasy and friendship, enhanced by drugs that elevate your sense of compassion or wonder or awe.

Like a medieval carnival, this new form of religion upends the conventions that otherwise rule our lives. Like a safety valve, it releases the pent-up pressures of our wired cacophony. Though easily mockable, it is trying to achieve what our culture once routinely provided, and it reveals, perhaps, that we are not completely helpless in this newly distracted era. We can, one senses, begin to balance it out, to relearn what we have so witlessly discarded, to manage our neuroses so they do not completely overwhelm us.

There are burgeoning signs of this more human correction. In 2012, there were, for example, around 20 million yoga practitioners in the U.S., according to a survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs. By 2016, the number had almost doubled. Mindfulness, at the same time, has become a corporate catchword for many and a new form of sanity for others. It’s also hard to explain, it seems to me, the sudden explosion of interest in and tolerance of cannabis in the past 15 years without factoring in the intensifying digital climate. Weed is a form of self-medication for an era of mass distraction, providing a quick and easy path to mellowed contemplation in a world where the ample space and time necessary for it are under siege.

If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary. But the mysticism of Catholic meditation — of the Rosary, of Benediction, or simple contemplative prayer — is a tradition in search of rediscovery. The monasteries — opened up to more lay visitors — could try to answer to the same needs that the booming yoga movement has increasingly met.

And imagine if more secular places responded in kind: restaurants where smartphones must be surrendered upon entering, or coffee shops that marketed their non-Wi-Fi safe space? Or, more practical: more meals where we agree to put our gadgets in a box while we talk to one another? Or lunch where the first person to use their phone pays the whole bill? We can, if we want, re-create a digital Sabbath each week — just one day in which we live for 24 hours without checking our phones. Or we can simply turn off our notifications. Humans are self-preserving in the long run. For every innovation there is a reaction, and even the starkest of analysts of our new culture, like Sherry Turkle, sees a potential for eventually rebalancing our lives.

And yet I wonder. The ubiquitous temptations of virtual living create a mental climate that is still maddeningly hard to manage. In the days, then weeks, then months after my retreat, my daily meditation sessions began to falter a little. There was an election campaign of such brooding menace it demanded attention, headlined by a walking human Snapchat app of incoherence. For a while, I had limited my news exposure to the New YorkTimes’ daily briefings; then, slowly, I found myself scanning the click-bait headlines from countless sources that crowded the screen; after a while, I was back in my old rut, absorbing every nugget of campaign news, even as I understood each to be as ephemeral as the last, and even though I no longer needed to absorb them all for work.

Then there were the other snares: the allure of online porn, now blasting through the defenses of every teenager; the ease of replacing every conversation with a texting stream; the escape of living for a while in an online game where all the hazards of real human interaction are banished; the new video features on Instagram, and new friends to follow. It all slowly chipped away at my meditative composure. I cut my daily silences from one hour to 25 minutes; and then, almost a year later, to every other day. I knew this was fatal — that the key to gaining sustainable composure from meditation was rigorous discipline and practice, every day, whether you felt like it or not, whether it felt as if it were working or not. Like weekly Mass, it is the routine that gradually creates a space that lets your life breathe. But the world I rejoined seemed to conspire to take that space away from me. “I do what I hate,” as the oldest son says in Terrence Malick’s haunting Tree of Life.

I haven’t given up, even as, each day, at various moments, I find myself giving in. There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

*This article appears in the September 19, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.