Will It Be Different This Time?

Brian Stewart

It is starting to look like a question of when, not if, the Islamic Republic of Iran will fall.

Although the Islamic Republic of Iran has always brimmed with enmity for foreign foes, popular discontent at home has always posed the more obvious and lethal threat to its existence. By its very nature, theocratic rule tends to unsettle societies in ways that breed political opposition of great breadth and depth, and the clerical tyranny in Tehran is no exception. Since it seized power in 1979, and particularly since the disastrous 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war, the revolutionary theocracy has had to contend with tenacious opposition from below. At one time or another, a range of dissidents—from liberal student activists and ardent secularists to disgruntled mullahs and the bourgeoisie—have defected from a system that, in theory and in practice, has no respect for the concept of the citizen.

Barely four decades into its existence, the Islamic republic is confronted by another eruption of public rage, this time brought about by the nation’s women, that may yet end in revolutionary change. A majority of Iranians now groaning under this austere order have no recollection of the revolution that produced it, and reject its central justification—an Islamic concept known as velayat-e faqih, or “guardianship of the jurist.” Originally conceived as a license for the clergy to assume responsibility for orphans and the infirm, the late Ayatollah Khomeini amended it to encompass the whole of society. By these means were his unfortunate subjects relegated to the status of state property.

The current Supreme Leader, Seyed Ali Khamenei, and his regime have used capricious violence and cunning incentives to shore up their support base and thwart resilient opposition. Lavish instruments of repression and intimidation have imposed a high price on those Iranians brave enough to protest in public, and an elaborate welfare state and subsidy system have wedded the poor to the ruling establishment. For decades, this potent combination of sticks and carrots has ensured that the counter-revolutionary cause has always ended in bitter disappointment and defeat. This time, though, things may be different.

In recent years, the Iranian working class and urban poor have abandoned their quiescence and joined the ranks of disaffected educated professionals and protesters hailing from the middle class. This denotes a new level of resentment made more acute by a combination of economic mismanagement, the pandemic, and punishing sanctions. The inflation rate hovers around 50 percent and the value of the rial has been shredded. As a result, the regime’s traditional constituency has shrunk considerably. Iran’s authorities continue to employ brutality in an attempt to smother the burgeoning civil resistance, but the spell of fear in Iranian society has been broken.

This new dispensation is indicated by the schisms that have opened among the clergy, with even regime stalwarts venturing trenchant criticism of the government. The leadership of the fearsome Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps may be culled from the upper echelons of society, but the rank-and-file of the Guard Corps and the Basij are another matter. Drawn largely from the lower orders, the loyalty of these enforcers is no longer assured. The massive, lingering street demonstrations will not be easily swept away.

The proximate cause of Iran’s latest eruption of unrest was a grotesque crime. On September 16th, 2022, a 22-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died in custody, following her arrest by Ayatollah Khamenei’s “morality” police for wearing her hijab improperly. Amini’s murder at the hands of cold and arrogant officialdom caused Iranian women to pour into the streets. But that cruel instance of the routine subjugation of half the Iranian population has also galvanized a broad cross-section of Iranian society, including its diverse mosaic of ethnic groups. The courage of women removing or burning their headscarves in public—a breach of law punishable by whippings, if not detention and rape—has been augmented by demands for an ignominious end to the regime that equipped the clerics with such inordinate power in the first place.

Iranians have plainly tired of this regime, the baroque misogyny of which is a standing affront to their basic rights. To the embarrassment of regime apologists in the West (some of whom betray a surreptitious fancy for theocracy), the participants in this new liberation movement understand that the mullahs are incapable of prioritizing Iran’s national and economic interests over revolutionary ideology. Those who have long claimed the contrary in support of a policy of rapprochement have fallen silent of late. But it is vanishingly unlikely that they have learned from their mistake of siding with Iran’s rulers over its ruled—or worse, of imagining that the rulers are the legitimate tribunes of a people infuriated by US imperialism.

If the slogans “Mullahs Get Lost” and “We Don’t Want Your Islamic Republic” sound uncompromising, it is because the decaying one-party/one-god state has left Iranians with no alternative. Although the waste and futility of the Islamic revolution have exacted a terrible price on the country, even modest reform initiatives (from the presidential campaign of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 to the green revolution in 2009) have been stymied by a corrupt and imperious establishment. For the vast populace, convulsive street demonstrations have been the only possible means of redress.

Iranians today live without hope for the backward political order that has immiserated and imprisoned them since 1979. It’s no less apparent that they have lost their fear of it. Separately and together, these facts should make the masters of the Iranian regime nervous. If, as Benjamin Disraeli remarked, a weak government discloses itself by its eagerness to resort to strong measures, the Islamic republic will continue to reveal its vulnerability in the ruthless force with which it aims to quell dissent. But for a state that no longer commands the widespread loyalty of its people, such measures are fraught with risk.

This may explain its initial reluctance to unleash brutal suppression en masse. But there can be little doubt that a regime with no compunction about abusing and killing its own citizens will seek to stamp out this uprising with force. The most recent evidence of this impending savagery was a proposal by the rubber-stamp parliament, which voted overwhelmingly in favor of harsh measures, including capital punishment, for protesters. Although the judiciary is the only body vested with authority to determine punishment in these cases, raising the specter of the death penalty evokes a grisly precedent. On the heels of the revolution, this regime became infamous for raping its female political prisoners on the eve of their executions because killing a virgin is a sin in Islam.

Nonetheless, the spirit of revolt now on display has inflicted the kind of damage on the legitimacy of the state from which it cannot easily recover. This development is even more grave in its implications than it may at first appear. The end of the Islamic republic would be an unqualified boon for liberal civilization, shoring up the cause of freedom after more than a decade of autocratic gains in the international system. Since the US has a huge stake in thwarting both Iran’s atomic ambitions and its pursuit of regional hegemony, it’s naturally invested in any possible transformation, or at least reformation, of the Iranian regime. The principal blessings of regime collapse would be enjoyed in Iran itself, which could at last shutter its political dungeons (not least the monstrous Evin prison) and build an open society for all. But the wider world—beginning with the Middle East where the Islamist imperium has wrought so much destruction—would accrue huge benefits from a post-revolutionary Iran, too.

The inauguration of a new order in Tehran would surely be followed by the return of its copious oil supplies to the market, alleviating the crude shortage occasioned by Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian resistance would be strengthened, since Putin’s outmoded forces have been reinforced by an Iranian arsenal of missiles and kamikaze drones. The gruesome Assad dynasty in Syria would be dealt a severe blow by the removal of its primary patron and protector, as would the Houthi insurgency in Yemen. Hezbollah, Iran’s jihadist proxy, would also suffer grievously from the loss of its foreign paymaster. No longer hostage to the whim of the Party of God, Lebanon could reclaim its full sovereignty. Last but not least, without the looming specter of a predatory and potentially nuclear-armed Iran, both Israel and the Gulf states would enjoy an unprecedented security windfall.

In the meantime, hard facts must be faced. Henry Kissinger has long maintained that Iranian leaders must decide whether they want to be “a nation or a cause.” But Kissinger, like other foreign policy “realists,” insists that the character of foreign states is not a legitimate American concern, so his analysis fails to consider the nature of the regime seated in Tehran. The architects and heirs of the Islamic revolution have rejected the choice articulated by Kissinger and offered by the international system, seeking instead to burnish their prestige and power with an unsleeping quest for the bomb. The raison d’être of the Islamic republic remains what it has always been: to be an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism, and to conscript the Iranian nation into the service of that messianic cause. For such a regime, founded on the imposition of the veil and weaned on virulent antisemitism and anti-Americanism, it cannot possibly forego either mission without putting its entire order of power at risk.

The Islamic republic’s imperial ambitions have exacerbated its predicament at home. Its decades-long strategy of sponsoring and directing jihadist terror has long passed the point of diminishing returns, as the mounting costs of this sectarian imperium have discouraged the generosity of patronage networks. The once-popular view that any US military action against Iran would stoke the latent nationalism of its people and bind them to the ruling class has not been borne out. The targeted killing of General Soleimani in early 2020 was mourned by large crowds of Iranians. But since then, sizeable numbers have declared themselves to be contemptuous of the shadow commander. Across the Iranian hinterland, Soleimani’s omnipresent face is being burned in effigy.

When the Iranian people took to the streets in June 2009 to protest a fraudulent election, President Obama abstained in the clash between a cruel dictatorship and its long-suffering subjects. Anxious to protect his chances of signing an arms control agreement with the regime that would (purportedly) suspend its pursuit of a nuclear weapon, the ostensible leader of the free world paid his respects to the principle of “sovereignty” while musing about the past ills of US foreign policy. For a while, White House apologists implausibly insisted that the president’s neutral posture would help the demonstrators. American moral support for them would only play into the hands of their oppressors (or so the argument went), who customarily seek the pretext of a foreign plot to discredit popular discontent. This foolishness evaporated when Iranian demonstrators addressed their chants to Obama, demanding to know where his sympathies lay.

The lesson of this humiliating episode is that the United States should leave no doubt about where it stands in a struggle between tyranny and liberty. Obama himself has now admitted as much, conceding that it was a mistake not to have shown solidarity with Iran’s freedom movement. The Biden administration finds itself on the horns of that same dilemma—caught between its desire to resurrect the nuclear deal on one hand, and the depredations of the Islamic regime on the other. Present indications are that it is not in a hurry to repeat Obama’s mistake. “Don’t worry, we’re gonna free Iran,” Biden said during a recent campaign rally for Democratic Rep. Mike Levin. “They’re gonna free themselves pretty soon.”

These words were met with cautious approval from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies on November 7th:

The White House increasingly appears to recognize that Tehran lacks any interest in reaching a nuclear deal consistent with Western interests. U.S. envoy for Iran Robert Malley said on October 31 that the Biden administration would not “waste time” trying to resuscitate the JCPOA. However, it remains unclear whether the White House would advocate pursuing the deal if protests faded. To eliminate such ambiguity, President Biden should reject further talks and adopt a policy of maximum pressure on Iran.

In order to exploit the vulnerabilities of the Islamic republic and move human rights up the agenda, Washington must confront the left flank of the Democratic party that deems every US “intervention” a species of imperialism, as well as the cynical realists who recoil from any moral dimension to foreign policy whatsoever. In addition, it must not yield to those who feign support for Iranians even as they advise Western powers to remain neutral.

The strength and durability of the uprising in Persia suggests that the die may at last be cast against the Islamic republic. It no longer feels premature to venture that the days of this ghastly theocracy are numbered, even if the odds remain against a rapid overthrow. The revolutionary spirit of this regime looks depleted—not by the hostile actions of its foreign adversaries, but by its own kith and kin. In the midst of this latest season of protest, it is becoming evident that the Islamic republic has entered a patriarchal autumn and a hardened majority of Iranians are now determined to outlive it.

Iran and China Use Private Detectives to Spy on Dissidents in America

Iran and China Use Private Detectives to Spy on Dissidents in America

By Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum NY TIMES

The U.S. investigators are hired under false pretenses by authoritarian governments to do their “dirty work,” the F.B.I. says.

Michael McKeever, a private investigator, was unwittingly hired to watch an Iranian dissident. F.B.I. agents were watching, too. 

Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The job that came in through Michael McKeever’s website was unremarkable, the kind of request he often received in his decades working as a private investigator in New York.

An international client wanted his help tracking down a debtor who had fled from Dubai and was believed to be in Brooklyn. Mr. McKeever was to surveil a house and photograph the people coming and going. “Kindly be discreet as they are on the lookout,” he was told.

Mr. McKeever and an associate began taking turns conducting the surveillance, but they failed to notice another team watching the same address. They were F.B.I. agents, and one soon got in touch with a warning.

“Your client is not who you think they are,” the agent said, according to Mr. McKeever. “These are bad people, and they’re up to no good.”

Mr. McKeever, 71, would later learn that he had been used by Iranian intelligence agents in a suspected plot to kidnap Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian-American journalist who has been unsparing in her criticism of Iran’s human rights abuses, discrimination against women and imprisonment and torture of political opponents.

“We were afraid they were going to look to snatch and grab her, bring her home and probably kill her,” said James E. Dennehy, the former head of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence and cyber division in New York, who now runs the bureau’s Newark office.

Across America, investigators are increasingly being hired by a new kind of client — authoritarian governments like Iran and China attempting to surveil, harass, threaten and even repatriate dissidents living lawfully in the United States, law enforcement officials said.

Federal indictments and complaints in the past two years detail cases in which private investigators were drawn into such schemes in New York, California and Indiana, and F.B.I. officials say they believe others have been as well. Most appear to have been used unwittingly, and later cooperated with the authorities; a few, however, were charged.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, said a government can hire an investigator in a routine transaction to learn detailed information about a person’s residence, cellphones, Social Security number, work address — and feed that knowledge to a state security apparatus.

“It strikes me as low-cost, low-risk state-sponsored terrorism in the 21st century,” Mr. Hoffman said.

The tactic comes amid a broad wave of repression, officials said, which has included the poisonings of opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Britain and elsewhere; Saudi Arabia’s involvement in luring Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent critic, to its Istanbul consulate where he was brutally killed and dismembered in 2018; and Turkey’s pursuit of perceived enemies in at least 31 countries, according to a 2021 report by Freedom House, which promotes democracy globally.

In the case involving Ms. Alinejad, Manhattan federal prosecutors filed kidnapping conspiracy charges in July 2021 against an Iranian intelligence official and three associates, all in Iran. None are likely to be apprehended if they remain there, but officials said the goal, beyond protecting potential victims, was to expose and deter plots devised at the highest levels of a foreign government.

For most private eyes, daily work is far from the glamorized depictions in film and literature, with jobs originating with law firms, insurance companies and aggrieved spouses. Today, many assignments come via the internet, with no face-to-face contact.

“If you’ve got somebody on the other side — an intelligence professional who can lie and create smoke and mirrors — sometimes it’s hard to vet those clients correctly,” said Wes Bearden, a Dallas-based private investigator and an officer of the World Association of Detectives, which has about 1,000 members.

Many private investigators, some with backgrounds in law enforcement, are decidedly old school. Mr. McKeever’s website bears the motto “Delivering the truth … with honesty and proof,” and lists offerings like employment background checks and “Infidelity & Matrimonial Investigation.”

That sort of street-level legwork can also provide the basis of an intelligence operation, one that foreign governments can conduct cheaply at a safe remove.

“That’s their proxy that they use here on the ground in a very natural way to do a lot of their dirty work,” the F.B.I.’s Mr. Dennehy said.

In Ms. Alinejad’s case, he said, the Iranians wanted to know her emotions, her state of mind — even her body language. Was she frantically looking over her shoulder or did she seem carefree?

Mr. McKeever said that after being told of Iran’s role, he secretly cooperated with the bureau, providing access to his email account. F.B.I. officials confirmed his cooperation. Mr. McKeever has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and he continues to operate his firm.

As private investigators fall victim to the sorts of schemes they usually unearth, the F.B.I. says it has been contacting professional groups to warn them.

“The more we can draw attention to it, the more we hope private investigators and others will learn to spot these red flags,” said Roman Rozansky, an F.B.I. counterintelligence official in New York.

Not every private eye has avoided legal trouble. Michael McMahon, a 55-year-old retired New York Police Department sergeant who built a second career as a private investigator, was arrested in 2020. He faces charges of acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government, stalking and two conspiracy counts. Prosecutors say he was part of an effort to coerce a Chinese citizen living in New Jersey, identified only as John Doe-1, to return to that country.

Mr. McMahon said that he was stunned and that he had no knowledge he was working for China.

“When I read the complaint against me,” he said in an email, “I became sick to my stomach. As my background shows, I committed my life to upholding the law and never have — and never would — commit a crime.”

Michael McMahon, a private investigator accused of working for China, said he would never commit a crime and had no idea his employer was a hostile foreign government. Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mr. McMahon said in an interview that in 2016, he took a job from a woman who found him through his website. He said he was led to believe she was calling for a client from China who was seeking a person in New Jersey who had stolen money from a Chinese construction company.

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“We need to locate that person — is that something you do?” he recalled her asking.

“‘I said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I do.’”

Mr. McMahon said the woman claimed to own a translation company and paid him with a check in the firm’s name. He said he conducted surveillance on five occasions in New Jersey in 2016 and 2017, each time notifying local police departments that he was parked outside a residence. That, Mr. McMahon said, was evidence that he had nothing to hide. He said he hired two other investigators, both retired New York police detectives, to help.

Mr. McMahon said he was awakened early one morning in October 2020 by his dog barking and someone banging on the door of his Bergen County, N.J., house. About a dozen F.B.I. agents and police officers had come to arrest him.

Justice Department officials said Mr. McMahon and a group of other defendants, some in China, were part of an aggressive Chinese government campaign called Operation Fox Hunt. Brooklyn federal prosecutors have said Mr. McMahon was integral to the scheme.

“After multiple months of investigative work by the defendant Michael McMahon,” the indictment says, “the co-conspirators planned a specific rendition operation to stalk and repatriate John Doe-1 through psychological coercion.”

Prosecutors have said Mr. McMahon knew John Doe-1 was being sought by the Chinese government: While conducting surveillance, he emailed himself a link to an English-language Chinese newspaper page listing the man among 100 fugitives wanted in an anti-graft campaign.

They have also said that Mr. McMahon, in a conversation with a co-defendant, a Chinese citizen who had lived in Queens, proposed they harass John Doe-1 by parking outside his house to “let him know we are there.”

Mr. McMahon’s lawyer, Lawrence S. Lustberg, said that investigators are often hired by private firms to locate people who are simultaneously sought by the authorities, and that his client’s harassment comment was just a suggestion that they engage in more overt surveillance — which he said never occurred.

“I have not seen one piece of evidence — not one — that Mike had any idea that he was in any way working for the Chinese government,” Mr. Lustberg said.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn declined to comment.

Mr. Lustberg noted that his client also was not given an opportunity to cooperate with investigators.

“There never comes a time before his arrest,” Mr. Lustberg said, “where the federal government goes to him and says, ‘Hey, do you realize what’s going on here? You are being played by the Chinese government.’”

Iran, a theocracy facing a cresting wave of protest at home, has also been eyeing its critics abroad for years and has taken advantage of American detectives. In July 2020, Mr. McKeever received the email asking that he watch the Brooklyn home that turned out to be Ms. Alinejad’s residence.

“I am contacting you on behalf of a client looking [for] a missing person from Dubai, U.A.E., who has fled to avoid debt repayment,” wrote the sender, Kiya Sadeghi, according to the indictment.

Ms. Alinejad, as a journalist in Iran, had frequently exposed malfeasance and corruption, and was threatened with arrest or worse for writing articles critical of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Her press pass was revoked and she was forced to flee in 2009. From Brooklyn, she has remained a high-profile presence in the news media. In July, a man was arrested with a loaded AK-47-style assault rifle outside her home.

Mr. McKeever said he knew nothing about Ms. Alinejad. Mr. Sadeghi’s email said his services were needed for surveillance on a “potential address” for the missing person, according to the indictment.

“Will need high quality pictures/video of persons living in the address and cars they drive,” one email said. The client wanted “photos of faces and cars” and their license plate numbers and, “if possible picture of envelopes in mailbox,” Mr. Sadeghi wrote in another message.

To Mr. McKeever, the assignment seemed straightforward: “I thought it might be a one-day job.”

The indictment identifies Mr. Sadeghi as an Iranian intelligence agent who researched and hired investigators in the United States, Canada and Britain to procure surveillance services for Iranian intelligence, the indictment said.

On July 22, 2020, Mr. McKeever emailed Mr. Sadeghi to report that surveillance had begun, and attached a photograph of the home.

In August and September, he was asked for additional days of work, including pictures and video. The client also wanted “pictures of faces of everyone visiting the address, even if they are marketers and salespeople,” one email said.

“Pictures of everything and everyone,” Mr. Sadeghi wrote in another message. “Client wants lots of content even if you may think it is not of value.”

In October 2020, Mr. McKeever received the call from the F.B.I. He agreed to cooperate.

“I was like, hey, whatever you need, I’m good,” Mr. McKeever said.

Mr. McKeever said he continued to communicate with Mr. Sadeghi with full knowledge of the F.B.I., and conducted additional surveillance in early 2021. At one point, Mr. Sadeghi asked whether it was possible to park in front of the house in a car outfitted with a camera to provide a live video feed. In all, Mr. McKeever was paid just under $6,000 for his services, the indictment says.

Looking back, he does not believe he ignored obvious red flags in the repeated requests from Mr. Sadeghi. But he acknowledged that he missed clues that might have raised suspicions, like the questions he had posed to Mr. Sadeghi that never generated satisfactory answers.

For example, he said he asked for the name of the supposed debtor, so he could determine whether a person by that name lived at the Brooklyn address. He was never told. He now believes the Iranians were trying to thwart any checking he might have done on his own.

“One of the things I could have done is run a trace on that house and said, ‘Who lives here?’” Mr. McKeever recalled. “And I could have Googled that woman’s name.” If he had learned her name, he said, his reaction would have been, “‘Whoa, wait a second.’”

Ms. Alinejad, in an interview, said she was furious when she learned of the extent of the surveillance.

“Miles away from my homeland,” Ms. Alinejad said, “I’m being watched and monitored by someone who has been hired by the Iranian regime.”

According to the indictment, the plotters had researched routes from Ms. Alinejad’s home to the Brooklyn waterfront, and methods of taking her by boat to Venezuela and on to Iran.

“No question in my mind that they could have done it,” Mr. McKeever said, adding, “I’m glad that it didn’t work out.”

Over his many years as a private eye, Mr. McKeever said, he always tried to be vigilant in scrutinizing the jobs he took. He did not believe he was naïve, but he knew clients could lie. If there was a lesson for private investigators, he said, it was to be careful not to be used.

“I was used,” he said.

Benjamin Weiser is a reporter covering the Manhattan federal courts.

William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk,

The New Yorker Interview

Talking About Grief with Anderson Cooper

After my husband died this summer, I found comfort in Cooper’s podcast about death and loss, “All There Is.”

By Amanda Petrusich The New Yorker

“If you want to be the most human you can be, then this is part of that,” Cooper says, of grief. “Grief enables you to love more fully, to experience things more fully

When the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was ten, he lost his father, Wyatt, to heart disease; when he was twenty-one, his older brother Carter died by suicide. In 2019, his mother, the artist and clothing designer Gloria Vanderbilt, passed away at ninety-five of stomach cancer. (Vanderbilt had watched, desperate and helpless, as Carter leapt from the terrace of the family’s fourteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan.) For Cooper, who is now fifty-five, loss has become an unexpected beacon in his life—a way of constantly reaffirming his humanity. “My mom and I would talk about this a lot,” Cooper said recently. “No matter what you’re going through, there are millions of people who have gone through far worse. It helps me to know this is a road that has been well travelled.”

In September, Cooper started “All There Is,” a seven-episode podcast about his passage through grief. It is a tender and elegantly honest exploration of how death can crack open the lives of the people left behind. Full disclosure: I am also grieving. This past August, my husband of seventeen years passed away; we have a beautiful one-year-old daughter, Nico. So far, I have found the experience of grief bewildering. Sometimes I feel like a zombie that’s been stabbed in the heart with a sharp stick, but rather than collapsing, or dying, I just keep on lurching about, moaning haphazardly, stumbling toward the horizon. I found my way to Cooper’s podcast when I was feeling hungry for fellowship and support. It really helped.

On a recent weekday morning, I met with Cooper at his home, a restored 1906 firehouse in Greenwich Village, which he shares with his former partner and current co-parent, the night-club owner Benjamin Maisani. Their sons—Wyatt, two and a half, and Sebastian, eight months—were playing upstairs. Cooper showed me around the place, which was stylishly appointed with period-appropriate antiques and art work, including several paintings by his mother. He dug some lukewarm bottles of water out of a small refrigerator. “I wanted an ordinary kitchen, because I don’t care at all about food,” he joked. The basement contained dozens of boxes of papers and other ephemera excavated from his mother’s apartment and art studio. He has been reluctant to hand the project over to a professional archivist, in part because the work of sorting felt too idiosyncratic and too intimate. “My mom saved everything. These are letters that have significance,” he said, digging through an overstuffed cardboard box. “These are letters and doodles from Richard Avedon. This is Dominick Dunne’s Christmas card from the late sixties. These are Truman Capote letters. These are from Gordon Parks,” he said, holding up fistfuls of paper. “And then some of them are just purely love notes between my mom and Sidney Lumet. Or letters between my dad and my mom.” He sighed.

Cooper and I settled in his library to talk. I told him that in the immediate aftermath of my husband’s death, I felt repelled by the literature of grief, with its platitudes and gauzy reassurances. He nodded. “I, too, have avoided any sort of grief literature, which is probably more about my own limitations—I’m sure there are really brave people doing incredible things,” he said. “My thought going into this was not to become a part of that. I’m clearly not a professional in this realm; I didn’t really even plan on doing a podcast.” Instead, Cooper had been thinking about one of his favorite books, Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” from 1946, which describes Frankl’s gruesome imprisonment at Auschwitz and the techniques and philosophies that he honed to survive. “He would narrate what he was going through to himself while he was going through it, almost looking at it clinically, or from a slight distance. Not to compare my little feelings to his experience at Auschwitz, but as I started going through my mom’s stuff I found it overwhelming, and I started recording myself because I needed someone to talk to,” Cooper said. The process was immediately healing. “Then I thought, Oh, well, maybe I should share this.” Within two days of the show’s launch, it was No. 1 on Apple’s podcast chart in the United States. The final episode of the season will air on Wednesday. “I’ve been overwhelmed by the response,” Cooper said. “I didn’t know that anyone would listen, frankly.”

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

In the second episode of “All There Is,” Stephen Colbert introduces the idea of cultivating gratitude for loss. You’re skeptical of whether that is truly possible. But outside of gratitude, which I agree is a tall order, I’m curious if you found that grieving made you feel extra-human. Parenthood and grief—which I happened to experience in very quick succession—both opened something up in me. It reminded me of a line from Walt Whitman’s correspondence, taken from the ancient Greek play “Heauton Timorumenos,” or “The Self-Tormentor”: “I am human; I consider nothing human alien to me.” Has the experience of profound grief expanded your humanity in a way that you find useful?

Yes, totally. Yes. If you are open to that, grief has that potential. Stephen talked about wanting to be the most human you can be. If you want to be the most human you can be, then this is part of that. Grief enables you to love more fully, to experience things more fully.

Three years ago, Stephen and I did an interview on CNN, just a few weeks after my mom died. The ideas that he brought up to me then were truly stunning, and they remain stunning. One was a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien: “What punishments of God are not gifts?” The other was, “Learn to love the thing you most wish had never happened.” Those are such next-level ideas. Am I grateful for this? That’s a really hard thing to wrestle with. But it’s also an interesting frame to have on the shelf as a possibility one day. I’ve thought about those words endlessly over the last three years. He opened my mind. There’s this accumulated wisdom in people who have gone through this, and for there not to be a daily WhatsApp chat group where people are sharing the accumulated knowledge . . . just think about all the attention that’s paid to birth, and all the silence surrounding death.

I like that Whitman quote. One of the things I repeat to myself is, “This is what humans do. This is what happens to humans. This is what happens to humans; this is what humans do.” Part of it is, I’m sort of socially awkward, so I also have to tell myself, Oh, humans say good morning to each other. If you’re in the elevator, humans say hello.” But on a larger level this is simply what humans go through, and I am not the first human to go through this. My mom used to say to me, “Why not me? Why should I be exempt from this?”

There’s a strange power in grief, too. For a moment, I felt almost invincible.

Oh, totally.

For me, the feeling quickly faded. But during those first few days it was, You can’t hurt me; I’m too hurt already. I am the most hurt already.

I went to places where I would test my invincibility all the time. I tested it for years. I revelled in it. I don’t have that feeling anymore, but I had it for a long time. We all have this illusion of what death looks like—the world stops spinning, and people die in slow motion. Then you see the reality of it, and you see how easy it is to die. The more you see how easy it is to die, and what death actually looks like, the less invincible you start to feel. There’s always something else that can be taken from you.

Was there any part of you that thought, consciously or unconsciously, Perhaps if I expose myself to enough death and suffering, I will become numb to it?

No. Not at all. You can’t allow yourself to feel numb to what you’re seeing. You’d be doing a disservice to the people you are there to report on, because you cannot understand what they are going through if you’re comparing it with something else you’ve seen and placing it on a sliding scale of sorrow. I talked to B. J. Miller about this a little bit. [Miller, a palliative-care physician, was electrocuted as an undergraduate at Princeton, and is a triple amputee; he also lost his sister Lisa to suicide. He is the author of “A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death.”] After the experience B.J. had, he wanted to work in the area between life and death. For me, it wasn’t about wanting to become numb to it; part of it, I realize now, was wanting to get as close to death as possible. I talked with him about this scene in “Dances with Wolves”—this is so cheesy, but I keep bringing it up. Weirdly, he also had a memory of this exact scene, and of watching it with his sister. Kevin Costner rides in front of gunfire on a horse. It’s not an adrenaline rush; it’s more just leaving yourself open to whatever happens. That feeling is very powerful. I was in a shootout in downtown Johannesburg a month before the election of Nelson Mandela. Snipers in buildings, shooting into a crowd of Freedom Party supporters who were demonstrating. You couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from. It went on for at least half an hour. It was among the most extraordinary thirty minutes of my life. But that’s what I was searching for. It wasn’t to feel numb. It was to feel.

I recognized a reporter’s instinct, a reporter’s curiosity, in the format of the podcast—a kind of buried belief that if you just look at something from enough angles, if you talk to the right people, if you do the right research and ask the right questions, you can make sense of anything. I wonder to what extent your early experience of loss and grief has guided your career. For you, has it always been: Let me try to get to the bottom of this?

Totally. It’s everything. I started taking survival courses as a sixteen-year-old. First, a month-long course in the Wind River Range, in Wyoming, and then one in Mexico. I left high school early and rode in a truck across sub-Saharan Africa. I was trying to build up, in my mind, my ability to survive in the world, which seemed like a very scary place. I doubted my own ability to survive. So I set about a course of study—I thought, I need to learn.

Was it a relief to find yourself in places where death was so plainly present that it couldn’t be minimized or ignored?

I didn’t really think it out as, O.K., I want to go to places where the language of loss is spoken; I want to go to places where life and death is something that we can talk about, where it will be so overwhelming that I will be forced to feel things. I didn’t really see it like that. But it’s clearly what motivated me to start going to places that were precarious, very real, elemental—where life and death were something that people wrestled with and spoke about.

I don’t want to make it sound like I was going in with a magnifying glass to study people. But I did want to be around people I could relate to, who were in pain and who understood pain, and where I could talk about it in a way that I couldn’t here. It wasn’t enjoyable. I was often very depressed and sad, given what I was seeing, and the circumstances that I was living in, for months at a time, in Somalia or Sarajevo or Kenya. To understand, to be able to meet somebody else in pain, to learn and empathize, was an extraordinary thing. And yet I was also trying to understand: Why do things happen? I remember being in Rwanda during the genocide. I was there only very briefly. But I’d been to Rwanda a lot before the genocide. I was just asking people, “Why are you doing this? Why would your neighbor do this?” Trying to understand how people survive, how people make the choices they make.

One of the things that has surprised me about doing this podcast is: this is the first time I’ve felt the way I felt overseas in my day-to-day life. To be able to have these conversations with people, even to have this conversation, is extraordinary to me. I feel like this is the most meaningful conversation I could possibly be having, and everything else I’m gonna be dealing with today is not as significant or as important as this. Stephen Colbert once said something about how people never know if they can bring up what happened to his brothers and his father. His response was something to the effect of “I can’t believe people aren’t asking me about it every day.” That resonated with me. Having these conversations is difficult, but I feel very lucky.

Bearing witness is a profound act. I would imagine when you’re reporting from a war zone, or in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, there is an enormous hunger for that—people must approach you and say, “Come here. See this. Hold this grief with me.” Hosting this podcast, you must be experiencing a new version of that—becoming someone people can show their grief to.

Absolutely. That’s something I didn’t know at first. I remember going to Somalia in August, 1992, to a town called Baidoa. It was during the famine there. The U.S. had just started some relief flights, but it was before they sent in troops. I got there, I didn’t know anything, I didn’t know where to go, I’d never been to a place like this. Some kids, heavily armed, came up to me on the runway where I’d been dropped off by a relief flight. I ended up having to hire them, because you had to hire gunmen in Somalia at that time. They said, “Where do you want to go?” I was, like, “I guess the hospital?” They took me to the hospital, and they pointed me to the surgical room. I said, “I can’t go into the surgery room.” They said, “Of course you can. You’re American.” An interesting thing to say. I ended up going into the surgical theatre, and there were American medics in there. They wanted the story to be told. They were operating by lamplight. They were cutting off limbs. People want you to know who their child was. People want you to know what they’re going through. They don’t want to die in silence.

I’m amazed at how many people have reached out to me. I try to read every one of their messages, because I feel it’s the least I can do. I can’t respond to them all, but every chance I get, if I’m in a car going from one place to another, if I’m shooting something for “60 Minutes,” in between, I am reading people’s D.M.s. They are incredibly moving.

One of the things I found especially brave about the podcast is that it’s centered on the strange and difficult chore of cleaning out your mother’s apartment. A modern, enlightened person is supposed to know that stuff doesn’t matter—the more important thing is the invisible legacies people leave behind, who they loved, who they were, how they lived. But what if we’re too dismissive of the material legacy? There’s a moment on the show where you encounter a box of your father’s belts. Not an obviously sentimental or meaningful box of belts, but, still, I felt such relief just to hear you say, “I don’t know what to do with these belts.” Where are the belts?

The belts. I have not done anything with the belts. They are still in the same box. I moved everything either here, and stuffed it in the basement, or to my house in Connecticut. I’ve been going through it on weekends when my kids are napping. Some days I think, I can’t do this today. Other times it’s just putting stuff in smaller boxes and then collating and organizing. Someone sent me a picture yesterday of a thing that they did with belts. They framed them, essentially, sort of all on top of each other, and it looked quite nice. There’s a whole industry of people who will make quilts out of your loved one’s clothing, or they will help you repurpose stuff in other ways. The idea of making a quilt or something for my kids—that I kind of like. The belts, I’m not sure about. I looked at them again this past weekend. Some are these turquoise-and-silver, Native American or First Nations-style belts that were a thing in the late seventies. Throwing them out is not really an option, because I have so few actual physical objects that belonged to my dad. I don’t know what happened to most of the stuff. I recently opened up a drawer of my mom’s sweaters, to box them up, and found this pair of pajama bottoms, wrapped in white tissue paper, with a note from her saying, “Andy, these were your father’s pajamas.” I don’t know. The belts. I’m not sure what to do.

I also wanted to ask you about the title of the podcast. In the first episode, you tell the story of the name, which is taken from “Is That All There Is?,” a Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller song that was a hit for Peggy Lee, in 1969. Those words can feel expansive and optimistic, or utterly despairing, depending on how they’re said. Lee’s delivery is cheerful, but also incredulous: “Seriously? That’s it?” Yet I wonder if the experience of grief has ever made the universe feel bigger or more mysterious to you?

Most of my life, I’ve looked at it in the same way—through the eyes of a ten-year-old child. Doing this podcast has opened me up to other ways of looking at grief. I have learned from the people I’ve been talking to that there are other ways to look at it. I find that really helpful. Laurie Anderson said something to me at the end of our conversation, and I was so stunned by it that I just ended the interview. She pointed out that the little child I once was has died. That was a revelation to me. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. There is no one left who really knew that little child. It’s painful talking about it, but it’s also kind of amazing, that idea. I’m still trying to figure out what exactly it means. Certainly, a part of you dies when someone you love dies. But the idea, just the idea that the person you were dies . . . to suddenly realize that kid is dead—or, at least, he doesn’t exist in the memory of anybody else who is living? That was an amazing thought to me.

Grieving with small children is such a complicated practice. My first instinct was to protect my child from my grief, as though it were a toxin. But then I started to think it might be more damaging—or at least more confusing—to hide it from her.

For me, it was terrifying to suddenly have my dad out of the picture. My dad was such a present parent; my mom was always working. I didn’t really know her all that well. Now not only was my dad gone but life felt very unstable to me. So when my mom was also showing instability, or an inability to function . . . seeing her grieve made me feel even more unstable. Again, these are different circumstances, but I clung to my nanny, who I could talk to about my sadness. And yet she didn’t have power in the house, because her position was vulnerable. My mom didn’t like the fact that I had a close relationship with her, so we had to hide it. My mom just plunged back into work. She needed to work—for whatever people thought about how wealthy she was, she needed to work. My dad died at a time when the whole designer-jean thing was really taking off, and she had to promote that stuff, and travel around the country.

I remember her telling me that my father had died, and I remember some people were in the house who had come with her from the hospital: Al Hirschfeld, the cartoonist from The New Yorker; his wife, Dolly. I remember her being in bed a lot and crying. As a child, to see that was very upsetting. I shut down. It was very hard. Over the years, my mom would mention stories about my dad, and I just couldn’t acknowledge it. I’d listen, I’d hear it, and I would sort of play along. But I couldn’t . . . I’d retreated deep into myself.

Also in your conversation with Stephen Colbert, he talks about his life before and after his father’s and brothers’ deaths—the phrase he uses is “a break in the cable.” It is staggering how our brains seem to immediately reconfigure everything—our memories, our experiences—around this new fissure. There’s so much I already can’t remember.

Have you recorded yourself saying this to yourself?

I suppose I am right now, in a way.

Because you absolutely should. I can’t speak for you, but for me it’s not like six years later I suddenly remembered a whole lot more. What you remember now is maybe the most you are going to remember. I started writing about my brother in the days after he died, just little things, stories, because I don’t remember them anymore. I remember them only because I’ve read them. For me, they didn’t come back. I’m happy that I wrote about my nurse—my nanny, May, who I would call my nurse. Little Scottish sayings she had, her remembrances of me. I wish I had recorded her when she was still alive. If writing seems too onerous—you have a baby, so you have to find time to do it—just making a voice memo on your phone every now and then, wherever you are, just saying some random memory, I guarantee that in two years you won’t regret having those recordings to listen to. I’m not a professional. I don’t mean to be giving you advice. But for your daughter, for Nico, eighteen years from now when she is feeling this absence, to have recordings of you in this time, now, and to be able to hear your voice, at the age you are now, talking to future her . . . maybe the recordings are just you narrating these stories to her. Maybe that will help you to do it.

In one episode, you describe how the loss of your father, brother, and mother made you feel like “a lighthouse keeper on an empty island”—the last man standing, the lone steward of this particular story. Telling that story has been a kind of ongoing project for you. Besides the podcast, you’ve written a book about your family, you made a documentary film with your mother—

Yeah, I’m working on an Ice Capades thing. [Laughs.] I feel like I’m bordering on “O.K., enough.” My friend Andy Cohen was, like, “You’ve really plumbed this. . . .” What’s left other than “Gloria Vanderbilt . . . on Ice!”? [Laughs.] Part of me wrestles with the question of “Did I need to make this public?” But I wouldn’t have had these conversations with people if I hadn’t committed myself to doing this. One of the things I’m wrestling with now is how long do I do this for? Do I stop? Do I take a break, and then start up again?

One thing I’ve always appreciated about your work as a reporter is that you’re incredibly clear-eyed about the disconnect between a nice, smart idea and the lived reality of a situation. I think that was present in, say, your reporting on Hurricane Katrina, and it’s present here, too, when it comes to advice about metabolizing grief: it’s not quite suspicion, but it is a kind of pragmatic “O.K., but so what?”

Yeah, totally. If you become versed in the literature that’s out there, the self-help books, it’s very easy to have those slogans in your head. But actually being able to live them is a completely different thing. You can intellectually know, yes, I know I should embrace life. I’m totally on board with that. I don’t really know exactly how to go about it. Or maybe I just don’t know that I can do it. I’ve been very cautious in trying to figure out who to talk to for the podcast. Not that I have anything against people who have worked in helping other people for a long time. I just wanted these to be very genuine conversations.

One thing that hasn’t come up much in any of the episodes so far is this grand, existential question about what exactly happens after we die. Maybe that’s too theological, and therefore divisive. I’ve found myself fixating on it a bit.

Laurie Anderson talked about it a little. I love her. She said that she believes people turn into other things. “I didn’t know Vaclav Havel turned into an airport, but people do!” I loved that moment. “People do!” People turn into love. The idea that the love I felt for my nanny, that my nanny is love to me—that resonates with me. But I also think it can be off-putting. There are people who have very strong religious beliefs about what happens after death. What you say is interesting. For you, it matters. To me, that hasn’t been as present in my mind. Maybe because I’m just selfish and it’s all about me. Like, “Oh, they’re dead. They’re fine.” [Laughs.]

My daughter has a wonderful twenty-two-year-old nanny, and I found myself wandering into the room and saying to her, “Hey, girl. What do you think happens when we die?”

Twenty-two-year-olds love that question, I bet. [Laughs.]

The look of horror that came over her face! [Laughs.]

As a twenty-two-year-old, I was interested in that question, but I don’t recommend it for anybody.

Your brother died very suddenly, by suicide; your father also died relatively suddenly, during heart surgery. With your mother, you had time to say goodbye, to reckon with the transition. For you, how were these experiences of grief different?

I think they were very different. I think the opportunity to have conversations with somebody and the ability to prepare makes a huge difference. With my dad, there was a run-up to it, but I was unaware of the run-up. So, for me, it was a sudden shock in the middle of the night. And then obviously my brother’s death was also a huge shock. But with my mom and my nanny there was a long run-up to it. My mom found out she had cancer, and nine days later she was dead. But she’d started to decline. She’d fallen once. She’d had nurses for the last two years of her life. After my dad’s death, and after my brother’s death, I was prepared for the death of anybody. By that point, I assumed everybody would die. I knew everybody would die. Obviously, we all know intellectually that we’ll all die, but it’s a separate thing to actively think about and prepare yourself for everybody in your life being dead.

Here’s the thing—the first time I did the New Year’s Eve coverage, it was 2002, going into 2003. There was a lot of concern about security post-9/11. We were having a meeting at CNN with the team who was going to be doing the New Year’s Eve coverage, and I remember saying, in the team meeting, in complete seriousness—we were talking about contingency plans, if there’s a problem—I said, “Can you just give me the call-in number to the CNN desk in Atlanta? So that if there’s an attack, and we go down, and we’re not able to broadcast, and a lot of people are killed, I’ll be able to call into CNN and continue to broadcast?” And they looked at me, like, “How fucking egotistical are you that you assume everyone else around you will die, but somehow you’ll be the one who survives, and you’ll call in to continue to report?” [Laughs.] But ever since those early losses I have made those contingency plans in my head, constantly. Part of going to wars was to see what happens when a society collapses. Sarajevo was surrounded by Serbs, in the hills, who were lobbing mortars at the city, and so I know what it’s like to sleep in a skyscraper where the windows have been blown out, and the wind is ripping through the hallways. That prepared me. I haven’t been building a bunker with supplies in my basement, but I probably should.

I saw some booze down there.

That’s from one of Benjamin’s old bars. [Laughs.]

Does that feeling ever end? Are you ever prepared enough? In your career, at your age, have you reached a point where you think, O.K., I’ve seen a lot, I’ve experienced a lot—I’m ready now to be alive on Earth and not be scared?

I think about that idea a lot. I think, When is the time to actually start to enjoy everything? My brother wasn’t able to sleep at night as a little kid; he would go in to see my dad, and my dad would be working. My brother would curl up in his lap. One of the things my dad always said—my brother must have been eight or so at this time—he would say, “Carter, enjoy. Enjoy, enjoy.” I like that idea. I say that to myself, because I know that’s what my dad would say. I find that I’m able to do that in some ways more now than ever before. Having children has, for me, made a huge difference in my life. I have never enjoyed my days as much as I do now, just being with these little creatures. Work has been really important to me. For me, work was the thing that got me through just about everything. It was the constant in my life. It enabled me to plunge head first into the things that scare me most. ?

 

A brief history of Republican extremist rhetoric

A brief history of Republican extremist rhetoric

Lucian Truscott IV

There was a saying in Hollywood when I worked out there in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s: to make a motion picture, first you need the written word. It was true. None of the moving images you’ve seen in a movie theater on your television would have been possible unless some writer had sat down in a room, usually alone, and written the screenplay or teleplay that told the story and described the action that would eventually fill screens for you to marvel at.

I should confess my prejudice from the beginning: as a writer, I have always believed in the power of words to inform, to entertain, to inspire, to soothe, to amaze, to stun, to motivate, to carry you away to places you’ve never been and to experience feelings you’ve never felt. Without words, we would be lost. We would not be able to communicate with one another. We would be unable to engage in commerce, to give directions, to express our love for each other or for wonderful things, even to grieve and recover from grief. Words are one of the most important things that make us human. The animal world is without them, although some species such as whales and birds and canines like wolves can “talk” to each other by making sounds that are emitted from vocal cords not unlike our own.

The Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are currently 171,146 words in use in the English language, not to mention some 47,000 or so that were once used but have become obsolete. I don’t know the numbers for other languages, but with some 7,000-plus languages spoken around the world, there are probably two billion words in use by human beings on this planet.

Certain words are more powerful than others. The word “love” is one of them. It has been the subject of countless poems and books. It is a word found throughout the Bible and the sacred texts of other religions. The word “love” is as universal as the air we breathe. It expresses something seemingly all of us feel or are capable of feeling or want to feel.

But so is the word “hate” powerful. If words can bring us together, join us to one another individually or as a people, so can they drive us apart. Hate is one of those words. If you say you hate someone, you are expressing your apartness from that person. By hating a person or a place or an idea, you are marking it as wrong, as alien, as unlike yourself, as dangerous – a thing to be scorned, even to be destroyed.

And it is here that we enter the world of rhetoric, the art – if you will – of using words to serve the purpose of persuasion. You can persuade, or attempt to persuade, people for various reasons and in various ways. The academy, where rhetoric is studied, will tell you there are three ways to use rhetoric to appeal to an audience: As the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, observed, you can use “logos,” deploying reason. You can use “ethos,” counting on your own character and credibility to carry the day. And you can use “pathos,” appealing to the audience’s emotions and shared beliefs and values.

Political rhetoric, the use of words to persuade people, let us say, to be on your side rather than that of your opponent, can make use of all three corners of what they call the rhetorical triangle, involving reason, credibility (which we can read here as apparent truthfulness), and emotions. And that’s the way political rhetoric has gone practically since our country’s founding. Here are the reasons my program or policy is better than my opponent’s, and here are the reasons I’m more trustworthy than my opponent. For example, my opponent took campaign contributions from the “X” industry, so how can you trust that he will represent you and not the industry that gave the money? Here is a list of people with whom my opponent identifies, and these are the reasons his closeness to them is not in your interest. Vote for me! I will do the things I say I will do, unlike my opponent, who failed to keep his promises the last time you voted him into office.

Or politicians could decide to just sling mud and lies and hate.

There are plenty of examples of rhetoric visiting the gutter in American politics. In campaign ditties sung by troubadours – an early version of campaign advertising – John Adams accused Thomas Jefferson (accurately, as it turned out) of fathering children by a slave. Invective was slung about in campaign after campaign. Father Charles E. Coughlin, a famous “radio priest” from Detroit, at first supported President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. But when he turned against him, he hurled anti-Semitic attacks at Roosevelt, accusing him of being in league with “Jewish bankers” who controlled the world, and thus the American economy, to the detriment of ordinary citizens. In the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s, right-wing politicians accused their liberal opponents of being communists and socialists. The examples of racism being used in American politics is so long and disgusting it is sickening. In recent times, there was the so-called Willie Horton ad used against Michael Dukakis by George H.W. Bush. So does the infamous ad showing a pair of white hands crumbling up a job rejection letter with a black hand clearly shown on the letter and a voiceover explaining that he didn’t get the job because of racial quotas. Helms’ opponent in the Senate race in North Carolina was Harvey Gantt, who was Black.

I’m sure you can come up with examples of your own of what used to be called dirty politics through the years. But except for the vicious rhetoric which preceded the Civil War over slavery, when southern states under the banner of the Democratic Party banded together to attack northern politicians, Lincoln chief among them, most of the nasty rhetoric in American politics was more or less one-on-one, with individual candidates making nasty accusations against their opponents.

Until 1990, that is, when Newt Gingrich, using GOPAC, a Republican organization put together to help train and fund GOP candidates for office, began his campaign to elect Republicans to Congress who would one day elect him Speaker of the House. In service of that singular cause – Gingrich made it sound like it was about Republican ideas and programs, but it was really all about himself – he released a memo put together with the help of Republican pollster Frank Luntz. The title of the memo was “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” The memo was written because so many Republican candidates had told GOPAC organizers, “I want to speak like Newt,” who was then making fiery speeches on the House floor, usually to an audience that consisted of the House video cameras and zero members. The speeches made his reputation for using negative words and attack phrases meant to divide, diminish, distract and destroy political opponents, namely Democrats and the Democratic Party.

The Gingrich memo codified Republican negative attack politics and was notable for language that was at the time called vicious and nasty, not to mention negative and outrageous. From the perspective of the week that Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer by a right-wing extremist follower of Donald Trump who had posted long diatribes against Jews, the LGBTQ community, Blacks, and immigrants, the Gingrich memo seems to float into view on a pink cloud of lost innocence.

The memo has two lists of words Luntz had tested with focus groups to determine their political efficacy. The first was a list of “Optimistic Positive Governing Words,” meant to “help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!” It included words like building, caring, change, children, courage, crusade, commitment, family, fair, freedom, hard work, incentive, liberty, opportunity, peace, precious, preserve, principle, prosperity, protect, pride, reform, strength, tough, truth, we/us/our.

The second list, entitled, “Contrasting Words,” was meant to “define our opponents” and be applied to Democrats’ “record, proposals, and their party.” Here we go with the attack vocabulary according to Newt Gingrich: abuse of power; anti flag, family, child, jobs; bizarre; cheat; bosses; bureaucracy; corrupt; criminal rights; decay; destroy; destructive; disgrace; greed; failure; incompetent; intolerant; liberal; lie; pathetic; permissive; radical; selfish; self-serving; shallow; shame; sick; steal; taxes; they/them; traitors; unionize, waste; welfare.

The words themselves were not as remarkable as the fact that one of our two political parties made a decision at its highest levels to abandon persuasion in favor, essentially, of name-calling and attacking the other side not just as wrong on the issues, but as a group of “them” who were not as genuinely American as “us.” The fact that it was an organized effort to marshal a way of attacking the other side began to infect everything about the Republican Party. An activist by the name of Grover Norquist, who ran a Washington D.C. lobbying outfit with the innocuous name of Americans For Tax Reform, began holding Wednesday morning coffee klatches for Republican campaign advisers and staffers and legislative assistants on Capitol Hill, and he handed out what became known as “talking points” for the week to come. The Republican Party would speak with one voice for the next seven days about tax cuts or deregulation or what they termed “extreme” environmental policies, or whatever Norquist and other Republican organizers came up with. They would pepper their talking points with Gingrich’s attack words, and they would hammer their weekly message home with repetition ad nauseum. You would turn on a political program on television, and every Republican would be mouthing not just the party line in general, but a specific party line. And then next week, the talking points would change, and they would mouth a new one.

The words and the talking points worked. The Republicans took control of the House for the first time in decades and Gingrich was elected Speaker. Throughout the 1990’s and into the 2000’s, you could detect a difference in the way politics was practiced by Republicans as they deployed Gingrich’s attack words to demonize Democrats and label them as against everything “we” stood for. They were supposed to be used to contrast “good” Republicans from “bad” Democrats, and that is exactly what happened.

That is, until over time the Gingrich list wasn’t nasty enough. Democrats became the enemy, or in the words of Donald Trump, the “enemy of the people.” Democrats are now “evil” and “in league with the Devil,” and not just anti-flag and anti-family, but “anti-God.” Democrats are going to “take your guns,” when no such policy has ever been proposed by any Democrat running for any office. And naturally, Democrats and any person straying from the Trumpian truth and narrow are now labeled as pedophiles, including a fellow Republican, Arizona Speaker of the House Randy Bowers, who refused to go along with Trump’s charge that the election was stolen in his state. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, after she had been nominated to the Supreme Court, was smeared by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri as being sympathetic to pedophiles because several prison sentences she had given child abusers were deemed not long enough. A rumor that a Democratic Party pedophile ring was headquartered in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant spread so fast and so far that the inevitable happened: an armed man showed up one day and shot up the place looking for all the pedophiles.

An entire movement, if it can be called that, QAnon, sprang up around the idea that leaders in the Democratic Party are conspiring to kidnap children, abuse them, kill them, and then drink their blood because of its “anti-aging” qualities. This charge has been levied against Nancy Pelosi by Republican candidates for office. Other Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene have labeled Pelosi a “traitor” and called for the “death penalty” for her. One Republican congressman ran an online ad showing him shooting a gun at a firing range with a voiceover calling for “firing” Nancy Pelosi. He was asked in a television interview if it wasn’t true that he was encouraging people who perhaps were not completely in control of themselves to take their guns and actually “fire” them at Nancy Pelosi or other Democrats. It had become so commonplace for guns to be brandished in Republican campaign ads by now that he just shrugged.

And so, it has come to pass that this week we’ve got Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter and the world’s most wealthy man, as well as numerous Republican elected officials, gleefully spreading vicious lies that the attack on Paul Pelosi was somehow a gay tryst gone wrong. The garbage right-wing website they linked to just made stuff up. But Republicans linking to the site and Musk himself have become expert at using a kind of code to get across their hateful disinformation. It frequently takes the form of raising an apparently innocent question: I’m just asking, could this be true? Then they cite the lies they want to put across.

In his tweet about the attack on Paul Pelosi, Musk used another common way of spreading extremist lies: He didn’t come right out and endorse the story he linked to, but rather said “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” It’s the I’m just sayin’ scam writ large. The entire Republican Party has become adept at using the language Trump has employed when he wants to spread a story he knows to be untrue – people are saying, or I’ve heard from people who say. There are half a dozen wordings for the scam, but all serve the same purpose. Neither Trump nor any of the other Republicans who put across lies in this fashion have heard anything of the sort, but once they say it, everyone will hear it. That’s the point. A lie is no good unless it is spread widely, and they’re experts at moving lies around the information ecosystem.

I heard a Fox News host “just asking” why Paul Pelosi’s attacker had been jailed without bail when “lots of people hit other people with hammers,” and they don’t get arrested and held without bail, implying that because the attacker’s victim is the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he is being singled out by prosecutors and discriminated against. The Fox News talking-head didn’t have to tell his viewers what they had been trained to know already: It’s the libs going after a man just because he’s a conservative.

It has become a common refrain from Republicans and their followers on the far right: they call the Trump mob that assaulted the Capitol “patriots” and claim they are being treated more harshly than liberals or Antifa or Black Lives Matter protesters would be treated for committing the same offenses. It’s utter nonsense, of course, but Republicans regularly spew such a miasma of hate and nastiness that it has become normalized, just another day in American politics. Some of the hate and lies are right out there in antisemitic memes and racist tropes and violent imagery like shooting guns. Other Republican rhetoric is coded or put in the form of “innocent” questions, but all of it is toxic, and its growth and volume have turned politics in this country dangerous.

This is how far things have gone: There are armed men in camouflage outfits and bulletproof vests standing watch at ballot drop-off boxes in Arizona. A state court judge recently refused to ban this blatant form of voter intimidation and called it “free speech.”

My friend Charlie Pierce in his Esquire column yesterday referred to the entire phenomenon of the Republicans’ descent not just into violent rhetoric but violence itself as “the prion disease [that] has jumped from one subject population to the general public, and in too many ways, it is creating its own reality in the national mind.”

“We are all lost and mad,” Charlie lamented. I can understand why he feels that way. I could continue this brief history of the descent of Republican political rhetoric into a radical politics that embraces anti-democratic principles and movements and leaders like the ones in Hungary and Italy, but enough is enough. It makes me physically ill to go back through this stuff and write it down for this column.

I would part ways with Charlie Pierce in one way, however. The prion disease infecting the Republican Party is a metaphor derived from mad cow disease that can destroy whole herds if not caught and treated.

But mad cows catch the disease from infectious agents in the wild. Republicans have administered the disease to themselves beginning with Gingrich’s memo more than 30 years ago, and the virus has mutated and turned deadly. There was a purposeful takeover of the politics of a political party that used to be part of our democratic system but is no longer. It is now a fascist party that is actively spreading a political disease that can kill our democracy and has already killed some United States citizens. The political ravings of Vladimir Putin about Ukraine would be right at home in the Republican Party of today. In fact, they already are.

It has gone beyond rhetoric, folks. To the Republican Party and its leaders, Democrats are not fellow citizens to be persuaded but a people with whom they are at war who must be destroyed. There have been enough guns in enough Republican political ads recently that it’s not just a phenomenon, it’s a fact. Even with all their voter suppression and gerrymandering and threats at ballot drop boxes and lies about Democratic voter fraud, if Republicans can’t beat us at the ballot box, they’ll encourage their loon followers to “be wild” and “fire” us.

After years of hateful and violent rhetoric, they’ll know exactly what to do.