A demonstrator vapes during a rally outside of the White House to protest the proposed vaping flavor ban in Washington DC on November 9, 2019. | Photo by JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP via Getty Images

Angry vapers and vaping companies convinced the president to kill his flavored vape ban.

Back in September, the White House organized a press conference in which President Donald Trump announced he was planning to swiftly pull flavored e-cigarettes from the market — a reaction to both a youth vaping epidemic that had escalated, and an ongoing outbreak of severe vaping-related lung disease.

Now it appears the ban — which was was supposed to prohibit sales of flavored e-cigarettes, including products featuring bubble gum, creme brûlée, fruit, menthol, and mint — is dead.

On November 4, the night before a planned news conference, Trump refused to sign off on the ban — reportedly over fears that it could cause people to lose their jobs, and cost him votes among supporters who use e-cigarettes, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story.

Trump was also swayed by protests against the ban and a social media movement — #IVapeIVote — in which e-cigarette advocates argued the ban could boost smoking rates and harm businesses. Meanwhile, pressure from tobacco and vaping industry lobbyists didn’t help, including a poll commissioned by none other than the vaping industry showing repercussions at the polls for Trump in battleground states, the New York Times reported.

It’s possible the president could change his mind again, and proceed with the ban, or come back with a carve out that protects vape shops, excluding them from the flavor ban. He might even attempt other avenues of legislation to make it harder for young people to access e-cigarettes, like raising the minimum age for buying from from 18 to 21, the Post said.

Or the ban may be another instance of a Trumpian promise unkept, one where politics got in the way of an important policy debate, as the Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out on Twitter:

And some public health advocates expressed dismay over Trump’s reversal:

“Public health decisions should be made based on science and not polling data,” Michael Eriksen, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health, told Vox.

But it’s important to remember that the ban was always controversial — and not everyone in the public health community was convinced that it’d fix America’s tobacco problem.

Why the flavor ban was controversial

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death, killing nearly half a million people in the US every year, and vaping is the most common method of smoking cessation. Though the best evidence suggests vaping’s no panacea, it is helpful for some — though the role flavors play in helping people quit smoking that isn’t clear.

“When I talk to the smokers we treat here, I hear compelling testimonials from people who tried to quit smoking many times and nothing worked until they tried vaping,” Andrew Hyland, chair of the department of health behavior at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, told Vox in September. “Flavored e-cigarettes may help some cigarette smokers quit.”

An op-ed in the Atlantic cited the record low in smoking prevalence among adults, and survey evidence (albeit from a study funded by the vaping industry) showing adult vapers enjoy fruit and dessert flavors. “It is virtually inevitable that banning flavors to make e-cigarettes less appealing to teenagers will simultaneously jeopardize adults who vape in place of smoking,” the article’s author, Sally Satel, wrote.

“[It] may reduce rates of vaping among kids, and it may also have negative impact on those ex-smokers who quit smoking as they may relapse to smoking,” Maciej Goniewicz, a leading e-cigarette researcher, also based at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, summed up when news of the ban broke. “[The ban] looks like double-edge sword.”

As the White House figures out what to do with vaping flavors, public health experts have told Vox that it might also consider looking at flavored cigarettes and cigars.

Researchers have long known menthol cigarettes are more attractive to youth and harder to quit than regular cigarettes. They’ve also been heavily marketed at — and are especially popular among — black smokers.

As combustible products, they’re more dangerous than e-cigarettes. Yet menthol cigarettes, along with flavored cigars, have been allowed to remain on the market.

So instead of just banning flavors in e-cigarettes, the FDA could also prohibit menthol in regular cigarettes, or limit the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels, said Michael Eriksen, who is also the founding dean of the Georgia State University School of Public Health. “We need to move forward with a focus on smokers,” he added, “make combustible cigarettes less appealing and addictive, and properly regulate innovation and possibly less harmful technologies. This plan has been complicated by the teen vaping problem and the lung disease outbreak, but neither should distract from the original goal of helping smokers quit using combustible products.”

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Trump during an event at the White House on Friday. | Getty Images

The White House’s credibility crisis fueled speculation about Trump’s seemingly unplanned trip to the hospital.

President Donald Trump made a trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, as White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham put it, to “begin portions of his routine annual physical exam” on Saturday. But there are indications the trip wasn’t as routine as the White House would have the public believe.

To be clear, there’s no hard evidence that Trump’s trip to the hospital was anything more more than a 73-year-old man being proactive about his health. But the White House’s complete lack of credibility on issues from crowd size to foreign affairs makes it disconcertingly easy to disbelieve what officials say.

While there would likely be fewer questions surrounding Trump’s health if the White House hadn’t long established a reputation for lying about everything, there are a number of indicators that something out of the norm went down on Saturday afternoon.

For one, in a break from precedent, Trump’s trip to the hospital wasn’t acknowledged ahead of time on any White House schedule. Secondly and similarly unusual, CNN reported that medical staff at Walter Reed weren’t notified of Trump’s visit in advance. White House pool reporters said they were told Trump’s movements on Saturday “were strictly unreportable” until he arrived at the hospital at 2:47 pm.

It smells fishy, and an unnamed “source familiar with the situation” acknowledged to CNN that the situation was “unusual” and did not follow protocol. Adding to suspicions, on Sunday, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell posted a video of Trump being hustled into an SUV on his way to Walter Reed by a White House physician — a visual seemingly belying the notion that everything was fine and normal.

Nonetheless, the White House wants people to believe there’s nothing to see here. In a statement released shortly after Trump went to Walter Reed, Grisham claimed that Trump was merely “taking advantage of a free weekend here in Washington” to start his physical because he’s “anticipating a very busy 2020.”

But the notion that the famously doctor-adverse Trump — who in 2018 made headlines when it was revealed he personally dictated a glowing letter of health released by his personal physical during the presidential campaign — would use a sunny Saturday afternoon of the sort he’s often spent golfing to start his second physical in nine months seems unlikely.

For now, however, the public is left taking Grisham’s word for it — that the president is the picture of health. Upon Trump’s return to the White House on Saturday, she released another statement saying Trump “remains healthy and energetic without complaints, as demonstrated by his repeated vigorous rally performances in front of thousands of Americans several times a week.” But she provided no details about what tests Trump underwent at Walter Reed, other than to say they included “a quick exam and labs.”

Adding to the mystery, Trump has not been seen by a White House pool reporter since leaving the hospital, and he’s not expected to make an appearance in public on Monday either.

Trump, however, was very active on Twitter on Sunday, including a tweet in which he acknowledged his trip to Walter Reed, claiming “everything very good (great!),” and adding that his physical will be completed next year.

The White House has no credibility when it comes to Trump’s dealings with doctors

People would be more willing to take the White House’s story about Trump’s Walter Reed trip at face value if officials hadn’t burned their credibility by snowing the public about topics ranging from unsubstantiated allegations of large-scale voter fraud to the president’s Twitter typos. And the administration already has a well-documented history of pushing dubious-at-best claims about Trump’s dealings with doctors.

Perhaps most memorably, after Trump underwent his annual physical in early 2018, presidential physician Ronny Jackson held a press conference in which he brushed off questions about Trump’s unhealthy diet and lifestyle and deadpanned that “if he had a healthier diet over the last years he might live to be 200 years old … he has incredible genes.”

Trump nominated Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs four months later, but that crashed and burned when Jackson was hit with a string of allegations of “overprescribing pills, drinking on the job and creating a hostile work environment,” as Politico put it. Early this year, however, Trump appointed Jackson to be his chief medical adviser and assistant to the president.

The same sort of hyperbole employed by Jackson during his infamous news conference was on display Saturday night, when Grisham went on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show for an interview in which the president was alternately described as having “more energy than almost anybody else in the White House” and “almost superhuman.”

After his most recent physical in February, physician to the president Sean Conley announced that Trump is in “very good health overall,” despite having health issues including clinical obesity and high cholesterol. We have no good reason to believe things have changed in the nine months since. But the unusual circumstances surrounding Trump’s trip to Walter Reed, combined with the White House’s broader crisis of credibility, have left people wondering.

In yet another statement about Trump’s Walter Reed trip released on Sunday, Grisham seemed to tacitly acknowledge the White House’s credibility problem by pointing out that there are occasions in which she hasn’t lied — the implication being that this is one of them.

“I’ve given plenty of on the record statements that were truthful and accurate — actively trying to find and report conspiracy theories really needs to stop,” she said, according to CNN’s Jeremy Diamond.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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Dave Eggers attends the 2018 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards on September 20, 2018, in Louisville, Kentucky. | Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images

David Eggers and I discuss satire, the Trump presidency, and the importance of disconnecting on The Ezra Klein Show.

I’ve wanted to have Dave Eggers on the show for a while now. Eggers has not only written a vast range of books (a deeply ironic personal memoir, a heartwarming novel about a Sudanese refugee, a futuristic story about a tech dystopia), but he’s also founded the national tutoring nonprofit 826 Valencia, started the literary magazine McSweeney’s, co-authored the screenplay of Where the Wild Things Are, and much more. I’m fascinated by people who are able to do a variety of wildly different things, all successfully. Dave Eggers is one of those people.

So, we start this conversation by discussing Eggers’s life’s work, his recent book The Captain and the Glory, and Donald Trump. But then — somewhere around the halfway point — the conversation transforms into something I can only describe as, well, therapeutic. Eggers doesn’t own a smartphone or have wifi in his house, and hearing the way he talks about the internet, social media, and our relationship to them put me in a sort of quasi-meditation state that I can’t describe adequately with words.

This one is a little strange, but it may just make your day. It certainly made mine.

You can listen to this conversation — and others — by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.

Dave Eggers’s book recommendations:

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it

Cal Newport on doing Deep Work and escaping social media

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A physician’s assistant checks the heart rate of an immigrant farm worker from Mexico during mobile clinic visit to a farm on April 30, 2013, in Brighton, Colorado. | John Moore/Getty Images

It pushes back on the idea that health insurance is a “welfare magnet” for immigrants.

A new study finds that low-income, legal immigrants don’t tend to move to states that offer them health insurance, suggesting that expanding their access to medical care wouldn’t create a “welfare magnet” that could overwhelm public resources.

Using data from the American Community Survey capturing over 200,000 immigrants nationwide between 2000 and 2016, Stanford University’s Vasil Yasenov, Duncan Lawrence, Fernando Mendoza, and Jens Hainmueller found that expanding public insurance offerings in certain states didn’t have a discernible effect on immigrants who had already settled in the US choosing to relocate to those states.

The paper pushes back on President Donald Trump’s rhetoric suggesting that immigrants take advantage of public health insurance and drain the social safety net. Trump has pursued several policies impeding immigrants’ access to health care, though for now they have been blocked in federal court.

Trump recently tried to prevent immigrants who do not have health insurance and cannot afford to pay medical care costs from entering the country as a way to cut costs for American citizens. And his “public charge rule” was estimated to cause tens of thousands of immigrants on Medicaid to drop their benefits.

The study could also inform debates about whether states should open their health insurance programs to more immigrants. Six states and Washington, DC, use state funds to offer Medicaid to unauthorized immigrant children, and California recently extended coverage to unauthorized immigrant adults, as well.

Green card holders don’t move for health care benefits

The researchers focused on specific categories of immigrants — low-income pregnant women and children who had recently obtained lawful permanent residency and were below 200 percent of the poverty line — who became eligible for state-level public insurance programs following a series of federal reforms in 2002 and 2009. They had been previously barred from participating in those programs if they had held green cards for less than five years under Clinton-era welfare reforms passed in 1996.

The 2002 reforms allowed states to provide prenatal care to immigrant women under the Children’s Health Insurance Program; in 2009, the Child Health Insurance Reauthorization Act allowed states to cover both immigrant children and pregnant women regardless of how long they had held green cards. As a result, the number of states offering them health insurance nearly doubled from 2000 to 2016.

Researchers thought immigrant mothers and children would be the most likely groups to make interstate moves due to expanded health care coverage, Yasenov said in an interview. But they observed no significant effect on their interstate migration rates.

Those results were surprising in light of prior studies about immigrants’ mobility and health care coverage: Immigrants tend to move around within the US more than their US-born counterparts, immigrants may choose to settle in areas with better public benefits, and substantially fewer immigrants have health insurance compared to US citizens.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, noncitizens are “significantly more likely” to be uninsured than citizens: among those under age 65, 23 percent of immigrants with legal status and 45 percent of unauthorized immigrants are uninsured.

All of those factors would point to immigrants seeking out better health care benefits by relocating. But in reality, that’s not the case — and that could assuage policymakers’ concerns about expanding public health care programs to immigrants.

“Policymakers are often concerned with fiscal constraints when they extend public health care and other public benefits — the concern that people might be moving from another country, from another state, from another city would lead to spiraling costs,” Yasenov said. “We hope our results are informative to policymakers who are looking for evidence in the health care world, especially in the context of legal immigrants.”

There are some limitations to the paper: It doesn’t speak to the effect of public health care offerings on unauthorized immigrants, a point of friction in the 2020 presidential race.

Nearly all of the Democratic candidates have backed the idea of providing immigrants health care coverage regardless of immigration status. Every candidate raised their hands when asked if they supported it at a debate in June. But Trump is trying to use it against his Democratic rivals.

“As long as I’m president, no one will lay a hand on your Medicare benefits,” Trump told voters at a speech in Florida on Thursday. “I will never allow these politicians to steal your health care and give it away to illegal immigrants.”

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Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, and Sven in Frozen 2. | Walt Disney Animation Studios

How dresses of velvet and ice are animated. Plus, Anna gets a new hairstyle.

When Brittney Lee first signed on to do animated work for Disney’s Frozen more than six years ago, our Queen of Arendelle sported a very different look. “Elsa was blue and had black spiky short hair,” Lee says. The character went through many iterations before landing on her final beauty look of a thick white-blonde side braid, white skin, and an impressive purple smoky eye. Her wardrobe went through just as many changes. What started out as a coat made out of living weasels was eventually turned into a glistening gown that millions of little girls around the world would go on to wear.

Lee and her colleague Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay are part of the visual development team at Disney. This means they’re animated artists responsible for designing everything from the characters to the environment to the props. And, yes, the costumes. Both worked on designing the outfits for Anna and Elsa on Frozen 2, which Sastrawinata-Lemay notes might be the most intricate of any animated movie in history due to advancements in 3D and computer generated imagery technology. It’s an upgrade that’s made her and Lee’s jobs both more exciting — “because it helps to enhance the storytelling” — and more challenging, “because there are so many more details to consider.” For example, as Lee explains, many of the costumes in the first Frozen involved embroidery, but the technique wasn’t nearly as involved as it is now. “On this film, we could really be elaborate and add a lot of extra bead work or sequins that wouldn’t have been possible to do on the first film,” she explains. “We really tried to meet technologies’ needs in creating more art work and more design where appropriate.”

Then there comes enhancements to the fabric. Lee and her team use a C.G.I. tailoring program called Marvelous Designer that allows them to see how certain materials would drape on an animated character in the same way that it would drape on a person. “Something that is meant to be a velvet shouldn’t be moving as if it was tulle or if it was cotton,” Lee explains. “We run a whole bunch of tests until we can get it moving in a way that is believable and that is also hopefully true to the fabric that we’re trying to represent.”

Disney

The way a fabric behaves in motion is important in this particular film because both Elsa and Anna spend a big chunk of it on the move, traveling through forest and ocean. As Lee explains, the simulation team at Disney has a process of testing different settings on the digital fabric to predict how it will react to certain elements. For one scene that Elsa spends in the water, Lee says, “we could see the way her dress looked when she was walking in the water, we could see it soaking wet, and we could see it floating underwater before we ever signed off on the final approved design that she’s wearing.” Lee and her team also pulled a lot of underwater photography and videos for reference “so that [the animated dress] can be built and perform the way that everyone’s anticipating it to perform.” She continues: “We try to do as much leg work as we can in the design phase.”

When it comes to the costume design direction for Frozen 2, Sastrawinata-Lemay says they were told three things about the film beforehand: it takes place in the fall, Anna and Elsa will be three years older, and there’s going to be an epic journey. “Everything else is being worked out at the same time as we’re designing,” she says. Thankfully, since this is a sequel, they already had a good idea of who the sisters are style wise. “We didn’t have to ask the question of ‘oh, would she or would she not wear this,’” Lee says. “It was always more of ‘well, what’s right for this girl at this moment in time?’”

Anna’s style draws inspiration from traditional Norwegian folk wear known as the bunad, a dress typically made out of wool and adorned with embroidery, and silhouettes like the cinched waist and full, A-line skirt from Christian Dior’s “New Look.” Her looks tend to be grounded in the fabrics and materials of the place and time period (the 1840s-1850s, according to Lee), which means she wears heavier materials like wool and velvet and her color palette skews on the warmer side. The focus for this film centered around upgrading her wardrobe to something that felt more mature than the “bubbly younger effervescent sister,” Lee says. One instance is the shape line of Anna’s dress which, before, always included a rounded scalloped shape. “We really squared those shapes off, so she’s just a little bit more linear and a little less playful,” Lee says. After 122 iterations, the team ended up with a classic A-shape dress with a bell skirt and a deep purple travel cloak.

Disney

For Elsa, the focus wasn’t to make her seem older, since “she’s always been a little more stoic and reserved,” Lee says. “She’s the older sister and so we sort of played that into her from the beginning.” But rather the challenge lay in how to design a costume that was going to endure high amounts of action. Elsa’s outfits draw inspiration from designers like Alexander McQueen and Elie Saab “just in their mystic grand silhouettes and bold statements,” Lee says. And everything the team had created for her up until the second film included long trains and floor length hemlines which would prove cumbersome. So the question then became: “How do we cut her hemline so that it’s not floor length, but still makes her feel like Elsa?”

Lee and her team managed to do this by creating a tailored coat paired with a double paneled cape, which allowed Elsa to “retain that snow queen dress quality that she had in ‘Let It Go,’” Then, for strength, they added snowflake encrusted shoulders that are meant to look like militaristic epaulettes. “We wanted to make sure we were illustrating that she’s the Queen of Arendelle,” Lee says. “There should be some sort of authority in the costume that she’s wearing for the bulk of the film.” As far as fabric and color go, tulle and cool shades are reserved for our frosty protagonist, who is creating these materials herself out of ice.

To add even more practicality to both Anna and Elsa’s wardrobes, they wear pants underneath their dresses. “We didn’t want [the pants] to be the element that you’re looking at, but we wanted them to function and help them be able to move through everything that they needed to move through,” Lee says. Elsa’s outfit is topped off with a pair of snowflake-adorned ice boots.

Disney

Along with the costumes, Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay also received a directive to upgrade the sister’s hairstyles. “The big thing for Anna on the first film is that she really owned pigtail braids,” Lee says. “But anytime that we tried to put her in the pigtail braids for this film, particularly in her travel costume, she just felt too young. It felt like she was still a school girl.” With the suggestion from director Jennifer Lee, they ended up pulling half of her hair down and adding a crown braid that runs across the back of her head.

This is another case when the technological advancements proved to make things tricky. The program used for grooming was intended to build things like grass; meaning, the hair looked almost too much like hair. “At Disney, we like to stylize and we like to caricature things and make them feel very appealing and very approachable,” Lee says. “So we can’t necessarily go straight to completely realistic hair because then that fights with what our characters look like.” The team then had to find a balance of being somewhat realistic and somewhat caricature like. “That might mean that the hair follicles are a little bit larger than what they would be on a normal human or smaller and it might mean that there’s just more of this magic hair spray in Elsa’s hair,” Lee says. “There’s always things that we’ve gotta consider that are different than real life.”

Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay are designing for what would be best for the characters and for the film, but they eventually have to grapple with whether or not people will want to wear their designs in real life. (They will; Disney reported that more than three million Anna and Elsa dresses were sold in North America in 2014 alone.) The duo try not to think about that when they’re in the thick of working though. “At the time, it’s more like solving a puzzle piece than designing for a consumer product,” Sastrawinata-Lemay says. Eventually they have to pass off what they refer to as “call outs” to their design team so that they can manifest their creations into physical costumes.

Disney

The timeline of the process goes something like this: Once an outfit is approved and while Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay are finalizing how the garment is constructed, where the seams are, and what specific fabrics they’re going to use, they simultaneously put together a diagram made up of call outs for the team that’s designing the physical costumes. “It’s like a bible on how to make the dress,’ Sastrawinata-Lemay says. “It’s really detailed, down to what direction the embroidery thread would go and how big or how small it is.”

It takes many iterations to get right, a relative idea since very rarely is there a one-to-one translation from film costume to consumer product, especially when it comes to the fabrics. Sastrawinata-Lemay says that, if somebody were going to make an exact replica of their designs, down to the materials used, “it would definitely be more of an haute couture gown outfit that would cost so much money.” The pair doesn’t have control over what the alternative materials are, but they understand the need to use affordable fabrics for items being mass produced. “It is no more expensive for us to put a very luxurious velvet cape on Anna than it would be for a much cheaper material,” Lee says, noting that this isn’t the case for product designers.

For the past two years that they’ve worked on Anna and Elsa, the animators have been immersed in the Disney universe, where the real world rules and restrictions don’t apply. “You’re designing for a princess so we kind of go all out,” Sastrawinata-Lemay says. “Because, well, why not?”

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Police and fire department vehicles at the scene of a shooting in Fresno, California. | Larry Valenzuela/Fresno Bee/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

At least four people were killed, and at least six wounded, police said.

A shooting in Fresno, California, on Sunday night has left at least four people dead and six people wounded.

It occurred at a football watch party. The suspect has not been publicly identified and remains at large.

The shooting marks the third mass shooting to take place in California in the past week; the first was a shooting at a high school in Santa Clarita and the second, a family shooting in San Diego. It is the 370th mass shooting in the US in 2019.

This story is still developing; here is what we know — and what we don’t — so far:

What we know

• Just before 8 pm local time, an unknown gunman entered a football watch party through the backyard of a Fresno home. “Everyone was watching football this evening when unknown suspects approached the residence, snuck into the backyard and opened fire,” Lt. Bill Dooley, a spokesman for the Fresno Police Department said.
• Three men were shot and killed on the scene; one man succumbed to his injuries after being taken to the hospital. Police have described all four as Asian men between the ages of 25 and 35.
• 10 people were shot in total. Of the wounded, Dooley said, “Some are listed in critical condition; some are listed in critical but stable condition.”
• Police are investigating the shooting by canvassing the neighborhood and searching for security footage. They have not released a description of the shooter.

What we don’t know

• The identity of the shooter
• The identities of the victims
• The type of weapon used in the attack
• The shooter’s motive

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Chris Malbon for Vox

How a techno-capitalist philosophy morphed into a justification for murder.

Blaze Bernstein, age 19 at the time of his murder, loved to cook.

Before he traveled back to his home in California for the 2017-’18 winter break, the University of Pennsylvania sophomore had been elected managing editor of a campus cooking publication called Penn Appétit. It’s a position he ended up never filling.

On the morning of January 2, his parents noticed that he’d left their house in the Orange County community of Foothill Ranch and tried to contact him. When he didn’t respond, they checked his Snapchat account and found messages between their son and Sam Woodward, a former high school classmate. The two had planned to hang out at a local park.

Bernstein, who was gay and Jewish, texted friends that he and Woodward were meeting for a sexual encounter. Less than a week later, investigators discovered Bernstein’s body in the park, hidden by a tree branch and a mound of dirt. He had been stabbed 19 times in the neck.

Authorities quickly identified Woodward as a suspect and found Bernstein’s blood in his car and on a knife in his possession. They learned that Woodward was a member of Atomwaffen Division — one of the most extreme neo-Nazi groups in the country. He was arrested; he pleaded not guilty and is still awaiting trial.

The local Jewish community center celebrated Bernstein’s memory by naming its cooking school in his honor. Atomwaffen celebrated Woodward by making T-shirts emblazoned with his mugshot.

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Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued through this year.

The October 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history. The March 2019 Islamophobic attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. It was followed in April by another attack on an American synagogue (this time in Poway, California), and an August 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart that was one of the most brutal attacks targeting Hispanics in US history.

In late July, FBI Director Christopher Wray reported that the FBI had made as many domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 as it did in all of 2018 — and further, that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

These killings were often linked to the alt-right, described as an outgrowth of the movement’s rise in the Trump era. But many of these suspected killers, from Atomwaffen thugs to the New Zealand mosque shooter to the Poway synagogue attacker, are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology, one that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into their own hands.

It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms.

Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence — attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that.

Accelerationism has bizarre roots in academia. But as strange as the racist movement’s intellectual history may be, experts believe it has played a significant and under-appreciated role in the current wave of extremist violence.

“It’s not an ideology that exists in a theoretical sense,” says Joanna Mendelson, a senior investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s an ideology that has actually manifested in real-world violence.”

Bizarre origins

The earliest version of “accelerationism” was, ironically enough, in some ways a celebration of the status quo.

The mainstream ethos of the 1990s was thoroughly capitalist, the collapse of the Soviet Union creating a sense that the spread of the American economic and political model was inevitable and irresistible. This coincided with a technological revolution — the rise of widespread internet access and the birth of mass internet culture, a sense of a world defined by and connected through technology in previously incomprehensible ways.

At the University of Warwick, a relatively new but well-regarded English university, a young philosophy professor named Nick Land argued that the triumph of capitalism and the rise of technoculture were inextricably intertwined. Drawing on the work of famously dense continental theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Land argued that capitalist technological advancement was transforming not just our societies, but our very selves. The self, he believed, was being dissolved by the increasing speed and pace of modern life — the individual was becoming less important than the techno-capitalist system it found itself in.

“Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its motor,” Land wrote in an email to Vox, in characteristically cryptic style. “Our question was what ‘the process’ wants (i.e. spontaneously promotes) and what resistances it provokes.”

The “we” he’s referring to is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a group of Warwick faculty members and graduate students who worked with Land to examine the questions that would come to define this early accelerationism. The writing that came out of CCRU’s work has a hallucinatory, ethereal quality that makes it hard to figure out exactly what they’re trying to say (Land’s marquee book is titled Fanged Noumena). It also feels very of its time; CCRU members obsessed over electronica and used the word “cyber” a lot, all conveying a sense of a society rapidly accelerating toward an exciting future.

The CCRU was a fount of mad energy, obsessed with the pace of life under late capitalism; its members had utter disregard for traditional academic norms about scholarship and behavior. This could not last long. The CCRU split from Warwick in 1998, long after the university’s philosophy department had grown tired of its antics.

According to Andy Beckett, a journalist who chronicled the CCRU’s rise and fall in the Guardian, Land and his remaining followers moved into a home in Leamington formerly owned by prominent British satanist Aleister Crowley, part of an obsession with the occult that had flourished in the accelerationist ranks. Beckett describes a psychologically tortured group that would scribble strange diagrams on the walls of Crowley’s former home. In Fanged Noumena, Land describes his “tool of choice” during his darkest period as “the sacred substance amphetamine … after perhaps a year of fanatical abuse [I] was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.”

After the CCRU’s collapse, its members spread across British academia as well as fields ranging from journalism to music production. Its ideas rose to prominence again in the early 2010s, taking two separate, and opposed political turns.

One was left-wing and academic, a school of Marxist thought focusing on how technology can be conscripted toward building a post-capitalist future. The other was right-wing, and in major part a product of Land’s mind.

After his breakdown, Land moved to China and became enamored with its techno-authoritarian political system. He worked as a journalist, reporting uncritically and favorably on the Chinese regime’s accomplishments. When I asked him which politicians he admired, he said he’s “not huge on political figures” on the scene today. However, he added, “[Singaporean technocratic authoritarian] Lee Kuan Yew and [former Chinese leader] Deng Xiaoping were greats.”

Land turned this admiration for technocratic strongmen into an entire political ideology. Linking up online with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin — who writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug — he helped construct the doctrine of “neoreaction,” or NRx, essentially an argument that democracy had outlived its usefulness. In his 2013 series of essays on the topic, titled The Dark Enlightenment, Land argues that the ideal state is a capitalist monarchy described as “gov-corp,” the state-controlled by an authoritarian CEO organizing policy according to the dictates of “rational corporate governance.”

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It was essentially a hard-right spin on accelerationism. Neoreactionaries argue that egalitarian and democratic policies described as “progressive” by left-liberals are, in fact, a way of slowing down the only progress worth having — acceleration toward techno-capitalist singularity. Neoreaction is a version of accelerationism adapted to address this problem.

“Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire,” Land wrote in a 2013 blog post. “Beside the speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator … comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the Left.”

Though NRx has no mainstream proponents, it does have connections to prominent figures. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature, and Trump-backing venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s fund supported Moldbug’s tech startup Urbit. In emails to right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos obtained by Buzzfeed, Moldbug claimed to be “coaching Thiel,” telling Yiannopoulos that he “watched the [2016] election at [Thiel’s] house … He’s fully enlightened.”

Neo-Nazi accelerationism and the alt-right

The extreme right-wing internet is a small place. The rise of neoreaction inevitably led it to cross paths with another online fringe movement of the mid-2010s: the alt-right.

Members of the two movements didn’t agree on everything: While Land and Moldbug valorize capitalism and see democracy as the major barrier to a better future, alt-right ideologues like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor valorize whiteness and see Jews and non-whites as the problem. Nonetheless, the two shared core ideas, like an emphasis on the role of genetics in creating human hierarchies, that make them comfortable coexisting in the same online spaces. “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” as Moldbug once put it. (Land is somewhat more critical, writing in The Dark Enlightenment that “the opportunity for viable ethno-supremacist politics disappears into a logical abyss.”)

The result is considerable cross-pollination between neoreactionaries and the alt-right. Ideas and terminology crossed the different group lines; some fringe influencers, such as the YouTuber Colin “Millennial Woes” Robertson, have described themselves as being both neoreactionaries and members of the alt-right. A 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center investigation found that several posters on The Right Stuff , an alt-right website, were heavily influenced by neoreaction.

“Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one of the posters quoted in the study wrote.

This is the most likely means through which the racist movement became introduced to the term “accelerationism.” There’s no meaningful use of the term or attention paid to Land among American racists prior to the alt-right’s encounter with The Dark Enlightenment — and why would there have been? An abstruse techno-capitalist philosophy seems to have little in common with the herrenvolk hatred of the KKK. It wasn’t until the rise of neoreaction and the alt-right — two very online movements that shared members in common — that the encounter would have happened.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “accelerationism” has displaced the alt-right in the eyes of many internet racists.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

In popular usage, the “alt-right” is generally taken to refer to racists on the internet. That’s actually a bit imprecise: The alt-right is a specific subset of online racists, one that believes white nationalism can triumph by trolling journalists and staging real-life demonstrations like Charlottesville. The basic model is Hitler and the Nazi party: Win power through democratic elections, then enact your goals.

This has long been a controversial strategy in the neo-Nazi community. It had been tried before in the 1950s and 1960s by the American Nazi Party, whose charismatic leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, attempted to turn it into a legitimate force. Rockwell staged a rally on the National Mall, demonstrated against civil rights, and planned marches through Jewish neighborhoods on Jewish holidays. This amounted to very little politically and, in 1967, Rockwell was assassinated by a former member of his own party.

The alt-right’s leaders believed the time was right for another try, in large part thanks to Donald Trump and the internet.

Trump is seen by the alt-right not as a crypto-Nazi, but as an outsider sympathetic to white nationalist goals. He served as a figurehead, a rallying point that could help them convert larger numbers of Americans to their cause. The internet allowed them to try out their message with a mass audience: memes and trolling and message boards allowed them to bypass media gatekeepers and reach Trump fans who might be receptive to white nationalist ideas directly. Indeed, the combination of Trump’s rise and alt-right online activity did swell the movement’s ranks considerably.

The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was supposed to be proof of concept, a demonstration that the pro-Trump shitposters could be turned into a real-world political movement. What actually happened was a wave of national revulsion and backlash, particularly after the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer by a white nationalist. The alt-right lost access to social media platforms, was hounded out of public demonstrations by Antifa, and unequivocally denounced by virtually everyone in American politics (except Trump). The second Unite the Right rally, held in DC in 2018, was a pathetically low-turnout affair.

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The silver lining for the alt-right — the president’s “very fine people” comment — wasn’t enough to salvage things. Trump, despite all his vicious rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies, had failed to stop what white supremacists see as the existential threat to America: the country’s long-term movement toward becoming a majority-minority country. The alt-right’s theory of change through elections lost favor with others on the white supremacist fringe.

“From 2015, when Trump announced and attacked Mexicans that first day, through around Charlottesville, these people really thought they were going to be victorious in the electoral [process] and be able to take a peaceful route back to power,” says Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “That has been completely given up on.”

This was the moment that neo-Nazi accelerationism really began its rise to prominence — and promote its new and more violent theory of change to supplant the ideas of the “alt-cucks,” as accelerationists derisively termed their white nationalist opponents.

Like neoreaction, neo-Nazi accelerationism holds that the liberal-democratic order is a failure — that we should move beyond it toward a better future, and that the task of political action should be to accelerate the speed of that transformation. Only in their view, that “better future” is not capitalist authoritarianism, but the total collapse of a degenerate and corrupt Western society — and the rebirth, out of its ashes, of a new political order more hospitable to white domination.

Their main inspiration on how exactly to “accelerate” this process came from James Mason, a previously unheralded neo-Nazi writer who produced a newsletter called Siege in the 1980s. In Siege, Mason uses the collapse of George Lincoln Rockwell’s political strategy to claim that any attempt to work inside the parameters of normal politics was doomed to failure. A better approach, he argued, was pioneered by serial killer Charles Manson — a correspondent of Mason’s who deeply influenced the theories developed in Siege.

The murders committed by Manson and his disciples served, in his mind, as a model of decentralized violent action that would be hard for authorities to stop. If neo-Nazis emulated Manson on an individual level, killed and tortured select targets, eventually they could help spur a white uprising against the system — accelerate the pace of a societal collapse already made inevitable by Jewish and non-white corruption, and set the stage for its replacement by a Fourth Reich.

“If I were asked by anyone of my opinion on what to look for (or hope for) next I would tell them a wave of killings, or ‘assassinations’ of System bureaucrats by roving gun men who have their strategy well mapped-out in advance and well-nigh impossible to stop,” Mason writes in Siege. “His greatest concern must be to pick his target well so that his act may speak so clearly for itself that no member of White America can mistake its message.”

Mason is still alive today. He lives in Denver and looks like an unremarkable bearded white man — that is, when he isn’t wearing his vintage Nazi uniform and a swastika arm band. He languished in obscurity until 2017, when members of the militant neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen tracked him down. The group was founded in 2015 and had long admired him; many of its members were on Iron March, a neo-Nazi web forum that was an early promoter of violent accelerationism.

After linking up with Mason in real life, they received his blessing to continue aggressively promoting his ideas, to promote websites with names like Siege Culture aimed at updating Mason’s framework for modern times. The accelerationism they preached centered on heightening the contradictions, using violence both to target their enemies and force a harsh response from the political system — eventually, they hoped, demolishing the state apparatus that stands between us and a white-dominated future.

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2017 was a good time for such a doctrine to begin spreading: The alt-right was buckling under post-Charlottesville strains, drawing adherents from those extremists disenchanted with the alt-right’s comparatively cautious approach. They adopted the alt-right’s tactic of trolling and shitposting to popularize their more violent ideas; the phrase “Read Siege” became a meme they pushed on social media.

Atomwaffen organized itself into cells: Adherents would meet up at physical “hate camps,” practice with rifles, and plan their next move. Accelerationist ideas flourished separately on social media platforms and extremist web forums like 8chan and Fascist Forge, reaching neo-Nazi groups around the globe.

The dedication to violence in accelerationist spaces is scary. They openly fantasize about the need to kill Jews and non-whites and even celebrate ideologically opposed acts of violence — like Islamist terror attacks — as a blow against the system.

Though violence is celebrated as the preeminent tactic, they’re willing to endorse non-violent means as well. Accelerationists have proposed distributing flyers for racist rallies alongside ones for a counter-rally, to stoke social division and create conflict. They suggest you should always vote for the most radical candidate in any election, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, to undermine the system’s coherence. One poster I saw even heralded the rise of Bernie Sanders, a Jewish socialist, on the grounds that his proposed expansions of the welfare state would bankrupt the US government and thus undermine its grip on power.

In their view, any sort of increase in social tension is good as long as it accelerates us toward system collapse — and individuals have an obligation to do what they can to hasten us along this path. Even, or more precisely, especially committing murder.

“I would be willing,” as one Fascist Forge contributor put it, “to use all resources possible for accelerationism.”

How accelerationism spread terror

Starting in 2017, Atomwaffen members began practicing what they preached. From that year on, the group has been publicly linked to at least five killings, including Blaze Bernstein’s. In October 2019, police in Washington arrested Kaleb Cole, believed to be the leader of the state’s Atomwaffen division, and seized eight guns from his residence. They believed he was about to commit a mass shooting.

But the thing about accelerationism today is that it does not require any organized plot or group to lead to mass murder. Accelerationist justifications for violence have suffused online white nationalist spaces to the point where anyone can encounter it and draw their own murderous conclusions.

“There is an entire subculture of individuals who are promoting this concept, who advocate for sabotage and destruction against the system,” Mendelson, the Anti-Defamation League researcher, says. “It only takes that one individual who’s inspired by the rhetoric on that message board to act.”

The internet has allowed James Mason’s original vision, “lone wolf” violence, to become a reality, not just in the United States but globally: Accelerationism seems to have played a role in the March 2019 Christchurch shooter’s decision to gun down Muslims while they prayed.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s motivation was a mix of hate and fear: Like all contemporary white supremacists, he believed non-white population growth was an existential threat to his race. His manifesto is titled “The Great Replacement,” a term coined by a French writer but in context refers to the theory of “white genocide” by demography that goes back decades in the white supremacist movement. Tarrant’s plan for stopping white genocide drew liberally from accelerationist ideas; he literally titled a section of the manifesto “Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics for victory.”

“Why did you carry out the attack? … To add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society in order to eventually destroy the current nihilistic, hedonistic, individualistic insanity that has taken control of Western thought,” he writes. “The change we need to enact only arises in the great crucible of crisis.”

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of Tarrant’s attack and manifesto on the internet’s racist right. The Christchurch shooting claimed 51 lives, one of the deadliest white supremacist terror attacks in modern history. The sheer violence of the assault on New Zealand’s small Muslim community turned his manifesto into a must-read on the racist right — and made accelerationism into one of the dominant ideas on the fringe right today.

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Carl Court/Getty Images

“Atomwaffen was a relatively insular universe. When the Christchurch shooter starts describing this, it makes a big jump to the wider consciousness of the white supremacist movement,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Beirich says. “That clear statement of accelerationism in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto took this to another level. Now, pretty much everybody on the radical right has read this stuff, imbibed this stuff — and he put it into the public domain for white supremacists.”

In April, about a month after Christchurch, a man named John Earnest entered a synagogue in Poway, California, and began firing on worshippers. Earnest’s manifesto is a mix of old-school Christian anti-Semitism and internet-era hatred; the manifesto cites both Tarrant and 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers as inspiration, but seems particularly inspired by Tarrant’s writing (“Tarrant was a catalyst for me personally,” he writes).

At one point, Earnest explicitly borrows a clearly accelerationist idea from Tarrant’s manifesto: the idea that using a gun in an attack could hasten the state’s collapse by stoking conflict over gun control.

“I used a gun for the same reason that Brenton Tarrant used a gun,” he writes. “The goal is for the US government to start confiscating guns. People will defend their right to own a firearm — civil war has just started.”

Several months after Christchurch and Poway, a third white nationalist named Patrick Crusius shot up a Walmart in El Paso, specifically targeting Hispanic patrons. Like Tarrant, Crusius was obsessed with the idea of a demographic threat from non-white immigrants. He pledged his allegiance to the New Zealand killer’s way of thinking.

“I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” he wrote in a pre-attack screed. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”

Christina Animashaun/Vox: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

It’s tricky to say definitively that accelerationism “caused” Blaze Bernstein’s murder, other acts of Atomwaffen violence, or the three white supremacist mass shootings of 2019. There is almost always a complex web of personal reasons for why an individual chooses to kill; It’s possible they would have turned violent regardless of what ideas they were exposed to. The influence of accelerationism is clearer in some of the killers’ writings than in others (Crusius’s manifesto, in particular, doesn’t seem too indebted to the theory).

Accelerationism is a diffuse idea, and it’s best to think of its influence as such. Neo-Nazis didn’t need accelerationism to be violent, but rather the doctrine’s omnipresence in online far-right spaces makes it more likely that both groups and individuals are inspired to embrace terrorism as a tactic. The frequent expressions of support for violence increase the baseline risk that someone turns to it.

“As late as Dylann Roof [the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter], the reaction of white supremacists was kind of ambivalent,” says Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League. “Now … they want more people like that to emerge.”

It’s hard to even say how many spaces there are encouraging that process. Atomwaffen is not the only organized group promoting accelerationism; other groups whose ideas fit the doctrine are the Bowl Gang, a small group of online propagandists who lionize Roof; and The Base, a trans-Atlantic neo-Nazi umbrella group that explicitly aims to turn online chatter into real-world violence.

These groups have also largely moved beyond open web forums like Iron March, Fascist Forge, and the now-shuttered 8chan. You can find their content on major social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter, but most of it has to be masked or heavily censored in order to avoid bans. (One accelerationist video I watched on YouTube bleeped out the word “Nazi” in the narration in an effort to dodge the censors.)

The real hubs of accelerationist activity are secure messaging platforms like Telegram, apps that are harder for law enforcement to surveil and easier to keep free of outside influence. Journalists and professional hate-watchers have gotten access to their channels, but it’s impossible to know exactly how many are operating outside of anyone’s view. Barring federal regulations weakening the encryption protections for these platforms — a proposal that raises serious privacy and data security concerns — it may not be possible to effectively keep tabs on what accelerationists are saying to each other and what they’re planning.

White supremacist violence tends to come in waves, with high-profile killings typically inspiring copycats until the movement is exhausted. In that sense, the current wave of accelerationist-influenced violence is hardly unprecedented.

But this is the first such wave in the era of internet ubiquity and is largely made up of young, digital-native men. Accelerationists instinctively understand that their statements and actions can rapidly reach a planetary audience. They are exploiting the speed of life under late capitalism to spread hate to the masses, a dark parody of the techno-capitalist singularity posited by CCRU theorists in the early 1990s.

In our correspondence, Nick Land told me that “the assumption” behind accelerationism was that “the general direction of [techno-capitalist] self-escalating change was toward decentralization.” It seems that this was partly correct — but in a far more horrifying way than anyone at the time could have anticipated.

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Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers political ideology and global politics. He also hosts Worldly, Vox’s podcast on foreign policy and international relations.

Chris Malbon is an illustrator and designer based in Bristol, UK.

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Former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker departs following a closed-door deposition led by the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill on October 3, 2019. | Zach Gibson/Getty Images

Democrats are probing whether the former special envoy was directed by Trump to squash an investigation in Ukraine. Republicans have a plan to throw him under the bus.

House impeachment investigators are probing whether President Donald Trump, or anyone in his inner circle, directed the president’s former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, to press Ukrainian senior officials to shut down a criminal investigation of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, according to sources close to the impeachment inquiry and committee records.

If House investigators are able to uncover evidence that Trump — or anyone close to him — directed Volker to shut down the legitimate investigation of a former head of state as conducted by a sovereign foreign nation, that might constitute a new abuse of power to be included in the articles of impeachment that Democrats are looking to bring against Trump, said one of the sources.

Volker’s role is considered critical in President Trump’s effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to open a formal investigation into alleged corruption regarding a political rival and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections. Neither charge has been found to have merit. Volker was one of the so-called “three amigos” — along with Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — who had direct access to Trump and worked closely with the US president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, on the Ukraine pressure campaign.

At the core of the impeachment inquiry is a substantial body of evidence that President Trump, both personally and through subordinates, pushed Ukraine to investigate former Vice President’s Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his business dealings in Ukraine. This pressure campaign stood to materially benefit Trump’s 2020 presidential reelection effort by manufacturing dirt against a key rival. It is alleged that Trump withheld $390 million in congressionally-approved military assistance to Ukraine for months pending Zelensky’s public agreement to open an investigation.

Volker has said in closed-door testimony that he participated in efforts to push the Zelensky administration to investigate corruption, but that “he was not aware that Vice President Biden’s name was mentioned or a request was made to investigate him until the transcript of [the phone call between Trump and Zelensky] was released on September 25th, 2019.”

Volker is scheduled to publicly answer questions before House investigators on Tuesday, November 19.

Perhaps because the stakes are so high, the White House and congressional Republicans have devised an aggressive plan to discredit Volker if he were to more directly implicate the administration in this effort, according to two people with first-hand knowledge.

They plan to paint Volker as someone who was acting on his own, freelancing in his attempts to shut down the Poroshenko investigation — pointing out that Volker worked for a lobbying firm that only two years ago received a $600,000 contract to represent the Poroshenko regime in the United States, the sources said.

Poroshenko — a confectionary and media oligarch — served as president of Ukraine from 2014 until May 2019, when he lost a reelection bid to the reform-minded Volodymyr Zelensky. The new Zelensky administration subsequently opened a wide-ranging criminal investigation of Poroshenko for alleged corruption and abuse of his presidential office for personal financial gain. That investigation is ongoing.

At a September 14 dinner in Kyiv — accompanied by William Taylor, a career foreign service officer and the acting ambassador to Ukraine at the time — Volker asked two senior Ukrainian officials close to Zelensky not to investigate Poroshenko further or prosecute him. Taylor described this conversation in his executive session testimony to House impeachment investigators. George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, was not present at the dinner, but through conversations with others who did attend, confirmed his understanding of this conversation in his own private testimony to the impeachment investigators.

House investigators believe that Trump, or people around him, sought an end to the Poroshenko investigation in order to protect themselves from whatever the former president and several of his former top aides and political allies might disclose about White House efforts to have Ukraine investigate the Bidens and other political rivals. Giuliani had for months been courting these Ukrainian sources, according to the Washington Post, to obtain “information about Hunter Biden … and [alleged] collusion between Democrats and Ukraine in the 2016 election.” Two of Poroshenko’s former prosecutor generals, as well as several others formerly or currently aligned with him, have been found to have manufactured records and made false allegations (some of them since retracted) that were used as ammunition by the Trump administration to pressure Ukraine and remove the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, from her position.

Taylor and Kent both testified Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee as the first public witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, but committee members and counsel did not ask either man about the Poroshenko matter. Volker’s name was mentioned 41 times — and in multiple instances, Taylor, Kent, and Republicans on the committee attested to his integrity and loyalty.

Volker had problematic conflicts of interest with regard to Ukraine

But Volker may have had his own motivations to curtail an investigation by the new Zelensky government. Last Friday, the Kyiv Post published an investigative report alleging that the Poroshenko regime — through a nongovernmental organization associated with his administration — paid a DC-based lobbying firm, the BGR Group, more than $600,000 to lobby on behalf of Ukraine, including for allowing the sale of lethal military aid.

The lobbying firm’s website today identifies Volker as a senior international advisor to BGR; he previously served as BGR’s international managing partner from 2011 to 2012.

Jeffrey Birnbaum, the president of BGR Public Relations, one of three divisions of the larger BGR Group, confirmed in an interview that Volker simultaneously worked as a senior international advisor to BGR and as special envoy to Ukraine. But, he added: “Ambassador Volker recused himself from the government of Ukraine work when he was appointed special envoy.” Birnbaum declined to provide any further information about Volker’s work for BGR.

Volker’s dual roles have raised serious issues of conflict of interest. At BGR, Volker advocated a shift of US policy to send lethal weapons to Ukraine — including Javelin missiles, a portable anti-tank weapon manufactured by Raytheon, and a key deterrent to Russian ground forces. Raytheon, which manufactures the Javelin missile system, retained BGR during the very same period of time that the lobbying firm was also representing the government of Ukraine.

The impeachment inquiry is investigating whether President Trump withheld the US military aid package, which included tens of millions of dollars worth of Javelin missiles, in order to pressure the Zelensky regime to investigate the Bidens.

In early October, Volker resigned as the executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, at the request of Sen. John McCain’s widow, Cindy McCain. Aside from concerns about Volker’s role in President Trump’s shadow diplomacy with Ukraine were other disclosures that the Institute received funding from Raytheon while Volker headed the organization. BGR represented Raytheon and Ukraine during the same period of time, raising questions as to whether Volker was exploiting his work for the Institute for his lobbying clients.

Volker resigned as special envoy to Ukraine on September 27, hours after the House Intelligence Committee said that Volker would give a deposition to impeachment investigators.

A rogue operator or someone acting at the direction of the White House?

In testimony Volker gave to House impeachment investigators on October 3, he attempted to put some distance between himself and allegations against the president: “At no time was I aware of or took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden. Moreover, as I was aware of public accusations about the vice president, several times I cautioned the Ukrainians to distinguish between highlighting their own efforts to fight corruption domestically … [and] anything that could be seen as impacting U.S. elections.”

But Volker’s attorneys also gave impeachment investigators his text messages about his interactions with Giuliani, fellow US diplomats, and Ukrainian officials showing he was far more knowledgeable about the administration’s efforts to push the Zelensky government to investigate Biden, and that he at times facilitated Trump’s and Giuliani’s worst instincts by going along with their efforts to demand the Zelensky administration investigate the Bidens. Investigators believe that he might have more damaging information than he has so far revealed; sources say the White House considers him potentially a far more dangerous witness against the president than they had originally calculated.

Anticipating that Volker might directly implicate President Trump in the effort to have the investigation of Poroshenko shut down, White House officials and sympathetic Republicans staffers on the House Intelligence Committee have devised a plan to discredit and intimidate the former special envoy if he were to make such claims, according to a person asked to participate in the effort.

This person said they planned to paint Volker as having gone rogue, someone willing to use his position as an American diplomat to protect a foreign leader from criminal prosecution because Volker personally stood to gain.

But Volker’s friends and former colleagues say that it would be inconceivable that a diplomat as experienced as he would have asked a senior Ukrainian official to shut down an investigation of a former Ukrainian president — without being directed to do so by President Trump or someone close to his thinking. A former career foreign service officer for more than two decades, Volker served under five presidents, including stints as the US ambassador to NATO and as the primary deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs.

Daniel Fried is a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, who personally oversaw Volker’s work for six years at the State Department. Fried told me that he would find it unlikely that Volker would have raised the issue of curtailing the Poroshenko investigation on his own: “He would want to make sure what the policy is. Before he would make such a recommendation he would want to know that was the line generally. I don’t see him freelancing on something like that.”

A person close to Volker, but who did not want to be identified because of the ongoing impeachment hearings, said that Volker “coordinated closely with people on the ground … with the embassy in Kyiv” before suggesting that Ukraine might forego investigating Poroshenko.

This same person said that Volker told them that he did not “act at the direction or on the instruction” of anyone at the White House or higher-ups in the State Department in Washington — and that Volker did not recall specifically asking the Ukrainians not to prosecute Poroshenko. He rather pointed out, the person said, that “it might not be in Ukraine’s national interest” to do so because it would “be politically divisive” and undermine “national unity.”

An executive branch official told me that senior State Department officials only learned of Volker’s attempted intervention on behalf of Poroshenko after the fact, when alerted to it by a foreign service officer in the U.S. embassy in Kiev.

A controversial dinner in Kyiv

The issue of whether Zelensky’s government should investigate or prosecute Poroshenko arose during the September 14 dinner attended by Volker, Taylor, and two Ukrainian advisers to President Zelensky, Andriy Yermak, and Igor Novikov. Yermak is one of Poroshenko’s closest advisers and friends, and personally oversaw sensitive negotiations with Russia and the United States.

As Taylor recently recounted in his testimony for investigators: “Ambassador Volker suggested to Mr. Yermak and Mr. Novikov … that it would be a good idea not to investigate President Poroshenko, the previous President.” At another point during his questioning, Taylor also recounted: “Kurt said [to the Ukrainians], you know, you should move forward, don’t prosecute Poroshenko.”

In his own testimony to House impeachment investigators, Kent independently corroborated Taylor’s account.

According to Kent’s testimony, after Volker suggested to the Ukrainians that they not prosecute Poroshenko, Yermak answered him: “What, you mean the type of investigations you’re pushing for us to do on Biden and Clinton?”

“And at that point Kurt Volker did not respond,” Kent testified.

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Looking Glass in Watchmen | HBO

Watchmen’s fifth episode is about gods, monsters, and a psychic squid.

The fifth episode of Watchmen takes us back to the ’80s — the age of hairspray, leather jackets, Howard Jones’s hit “Things Can Only Get Better,” the Cold War, and, in this universe, a psychic squid attack.

The 1980s-era of the Watchmen world is seen through the eyes of Looking Glass, the stalwart police officer with a mirrorball face and the uncanny ability to tell when people are lying. We meet him as a teen trying to promote the good word of Doomsday, how the end is near, and how God has pandas in heaven. To Looking Glass’s chagrin, the apparent apocalypse comes sooner rather than later, and he plays witness to mass death, destruction, and disorder in the form of a genocidal squid storming his local fair.

Though the squid attack is indeed bizarre (director Zack Snyder nixed the cephalopod assault from his 2009 cinematic adaptation, for example), it’s part of the most important question in writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel: Who holds accountable the most powerful people, and what decisions will they make when they’re left unchecked?

Looking Glass finds out the answers to these questions first-hand. He watches a recording of the space-bound billionaire Adrian Veidt, a.k.a. Ozymandias, a.k.a. the villain of the Watchmen graphic novel, who explains that the squid was a fake attack for the better of the nation. Veidt claims responsibility for the scarring event, and Looking Glass learns that Americans are just statistics and disposable figures to the very powerful, including Veidt and the government. And through his revelation, the viewer learns that the ultra-violent squid attack in Watchmen, like everything in Watchmen, means so much more than what it originally seems.

The squid attack is about theology, morality, and choosing between one evil or another

The Watchmen graphic novel encompasses a variety of strange elements, ranging from an omnipotent blue man who prefers to be naked all the time to the power politics at play in the United States and Great Britain in the 1980s (which we’ve come to associate with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher). But the most challenging bit comes at the end of the novel, forcing us to examine our own ideas about morality and humanity — and that would be the squid attack.

Gibbons/DC

In the final chapter of the comic, Adrian Veidt, a.k.a. Ozymandias, unleashes a colossal alien squid upon New York City. He sees it as the only way to keep the world’s superpowers from killing each other in a nuclear war. Ozymandias’s plan wasn’t without its supporters, either. Moore writes the story in a way that gives Ozymandias intellectual authority, and as such, other heroes (like Doctor Manhattan) go along with him.

The squid, with a brain cloned from a human psychic, releases a shockwave that instantly kills millions. Those who survive the shockwave go mad and are driven to violence by the sensory overload. In the novel, World War III: Nuclear Party Time is inevitable, and Ozymandias’s plan works. Countries around the world, including Russia, see the terror in New York City and offer support to the United States, burying any simmering political hostilities until the horrors are stopped.

Gibbons/DC

With the plan and the people executed — and the story’s heroes unable to undo what Ozymandias has wrought — everyone who had learned about the plan beforehand is faced with a moral dilemma: Tell people about the mass murder Ozymandias committed and inevitably trigger nuclear war, or remain quiet about the fact that the genocide was man-made. Only Rorschach, the most obstinate of the heroes, doesn’t go along with the cover-up.

Though Rorschach sticking to his morals is noble — lying to people about millions of deaths is unconscionable — the situation is positioned in such a way that if he spills the truth, it will inevitably wreck the fragile peace Ozymandias achieved. In order to prevent that from happening, Doctor Manhattan obliterates Rorschach in the name of the greater good.

The result is two unappealing choices for who is right: the unapologetic, objectivist moralist who risks armageddon based on what he believes to be “good,” or the clinical amorality of a genius utilitarian who kills millions of people to achieve harmony. There’s no simple nor tidy answer, especially with the stakes heightened to the point where Rorschach’s noble deed seems detrimental and Ozymandias’s “saving” the world seems moot. And perhaps the greatest lesson here is not that these are the only two choices, but rather that people should be wary of relinquishing personal responsibility to those in power.

HBO’s Watchmen asks how the squid attack preserves the status quo of government power

At the end of the comic, world peace has been restored. But The New Frontiersman newspaper (which has been referenced in the HBO adaptation) obtains Rorschach’s journal, and it’s implied it will publish Rorschach’s thoughts and observations of his investigation into Ozymandias’s scheme. What we don’t see fleshed out in the original graphic novel is the aftermath of how the attack changes the lives of everyday people, the ones who aren’t privy to the knowledge that the attack perpetrated on them was a hoax.

HBO’s adaptation examines, through Looking Glass’s story, at least one perspective of that. Unlike the heroes in the graphic novel, Looking Glass witnesses the attack firsthand in Hoboken. It shakes him to his core, and today he lives with a type of PTSD and fears the potential for another attack, hence the emergency alarm system and drills in which he’s invested. For Looking Glass, each day is spent revisiting the attack and dreading that it may happen again — a stark allegory for Americans who still remember 9/11 and its immediate aftershocks.

But episode five is not the first to reveal the lingering effects of the giant squid attack.

In the first episode of the series, Angela’s son Topher’s classroom displays a poster touting squid anatomy alongside one depicting America’s presidents, indicating that squids are still very important in this world, and all across the country at that. In the same episode, Angela and Topher drive home from school and pull over when they hear an alarm. Out of nowhere, several dead squid suddenly fall from the sky — or possibly from another dimension. This appears to be another connection to the squid attack of 1985, perhaps a direct result of it.

Topher sees the “squid falls” as little more than a gross nuisance. We haven’t yet seen Looking Glass’s reaction to the event, but judging from how serious he is about the alarms and how worried he is about another attack, I doubt that he’s able to just brush those squids off.

Knowing the backstory of the fake squid attack changes the complexion of the squid falls. We know the squid assault was fake, so presumably the squid falls are fake, too. So what’s their purpose? Who’s orchestrating the squid falls? And what benefit is there to arranging said squid falls?

I’m guessing the squid falls are a government act, as it’s difficult to imagine someone being able to pull off that kind of scheme. I could also see it being Lady Trieu, since she has the resources and money to accomplish such a grand feat.

Regardless of who is orchestrating the squid falls, they manage to keep the ’80s squid attack on people’s minds. The squid falls send the message that there’s danger looming, that the government and military could be the only things standing between you and another attack — which is, essentially, Ozymandias’s end goal in the graphic novel.

And if the squid attacks are used to get people to trust authority figures in this world, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to believe that the people in Tulsa, Oklahoma, should be wary of any authority figure’s power.

What’s a little less clear is how Sen. Joe Keene factors into the big reveal, when Looking Glass learns the attack was a hoax courtesy of Ozymandias. Keene’s planning something, but at this point, his endgame is still a bunch of moving pieces — a teleportation device, Ozymandias’s recording, framing Angela.

What we do know is that this revelation destroys everything Looking Glass thought he knew about the attack that changed his entire life. Finding out it was a hoax, that his whole life has revolved around this fake attack, is shattering. Just like the end of the graphic novel, Looking Glass is now in Rorschach’s position of keeping a secret that could change the world for the worse. The question becomes what he will — or won’t — do with this knowledge.

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Looking Glass seems to have a very full life. | HBO

The show delves into Looking Glass’s past — and revisits one of the most memorable moments from the comic.

After playing footsie with the original Watchmen comic for four weeks, the new TV show’s fifth episode — “Little Fear of Lightning” — dumps us straight into one of the comic’s most famous moments: the “interdimensional” squid attack on New York that kills 3 million people and does grave psychic damage to even more.

The event, as those who’ve read the comic know, is a plot cooked up by Ozymandias to avoid nuclear war and maybe bring about world peace. Known to the public as an “attack” by beings from another dimension, it manages to bring the US and USSR closer together, leading to the version of America we see in the series, where the Robert Redford administration is nearing its 30-year anniversary but where the tensions of the Cold War no longer seem relevant to the world at large.

As we learn in “Little Fear of Lightning,” it’s a deep, dark secret, held closely by a very small few, that the squid didn’t come from another dimension but was instead manifested right here on Earth. And among the people who were affected by its arrival are Steven Spielberg (who made a very Schindler’s List-esque movie about the squid) and our own Looking Glass, who narrowly escaped death at the squid’s nasty tentacles as a teen, then saw his life scarred by having been so close to such a devastating occurrence.

Just like Watchmen’s third episode, “Little Fear of Lightning” is a character showcase, following Looking Glass for nearly its entire running time. (We check in on Adrian Veidt briefly, and he does seem to be in space, spelling out a message using all of the corpses he’s been generating. This show!) But “Lightning” tells a darker and sadder story about what it means to live in a world where you survived an experience that’s roughly as rare — and even more likely to kill you — as being struck by lightning. It’s about survivor’s guilt. But it’s also about realizing that the world is built atop a lie.

To dig further into that theme, I (Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff) am joined by Vox associate culture editor Allegra Frank and culture writer Constance Grady to break down “Little Fear of Lightning,” from the Seventh Kavalry to James Wolk’s inherent shiftiness to squids galore.

Times Square: Now with 100 percent more squid

HBO

Emily: In the build-up to director Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation of Watchmen for the big screen, all involved agreed to change the ending of the original comic. Despite a slavish faithfulness to the comic’s images (if not exactly its themes) in the rest of the film, it was thought that a giant squid landing in Times Square would be too much for people to process. Instead, the movie suggested that Doctor Manhattan had created some sort of energy pulse that leveled much of Manhattan, thus necessitating his move to Mars.

It honestly wasn’t a bad story shift — it gave Doctor Manhattan a more easily understandable motivation to bail on Earth, at least (if you, for some reason, believe a godlike blue man would have understandable motivations, which I might quibble with). But I’m so, so happy the squid (Squidley? Squidward? Squidbert?) exists in the world of HBO’s Watchmen to destroy this fictional version of New York. True to the spirit of this project, “Little Fear of Lightning” writers Damon Lindelof and Carly Wray (another The Leftovers alum) and director Steph Green pull out resonances with the 9/11 attacks but also the ways we use pop culture to process these sorts of horrors.

What’s most notable, however, is how the opening flashback makes viewers feel the sheer gutting horror of that moment and how it would have reverberated in the decades to come. Allegra: I don’t know how spoiled you are on the comic, but how did you feel about the squid? Was it a bridge too far for you, as the movie’s creative team feared it would be for their 2009 audience? Or are you going to share a recipe for delicious calamari with me, so excited are you by the prospects of a giant cephalopod?

Allegra: I’ve become increasingly “spoiled” on the original Watchmen comic in my weeks-long quest to grasp what’s happening on the TV show. So I was aware of the squid attack — but only in the abstract. This week’s episode visualized what I interpreted as a very bizarre method of mass destruction and proved how terrifying that kind of experience could be.

The cold open rendered a young Looking Glass the equivalent of that classic horror movie trope, the Final Girl: He’s a teenage boy thrust into a situation where he could possibly lose his virginity, but the moment never comes to bear. His sexual anxiety, and the virginal purity that, in horror movies at least, establishes him as a rare moralist, ends up saving his life in the end. Looking Glass finds himself alone after a devastating, sudden, inexplicable mass casualty.

This scene helped to ease me, the sensitive viewer, into the idea of the squid attack because we saw only the aftermath and not the act of the killing itself. It’s still a shocking moment and a horrifying image to see hundreds of dead bodies lying on the ground, but I don’t think the scene veered too far into the ostentatious, as HBO has made no effort to hide how disturbed the show’s version of 2019 Tulsa is.

And on a plausibility level, that all those deaths were the effect of a squid that apparently came from another dimension doesn’t quite phase me — five episodes in, a squid attack feels normal enough for Watchmen, despite its inherent absurdity. It’s the impact of the attack that is meaningful, sculpting Looking Glass into the lonely, sexually repressed man we’ve come to know in the episode’s contemporary storyline.

On the inherent shiftiness of James Wolk

HBO

Constance: I’m coming into this show pretty unspoiled. All of my knowledge of the comic comes from the time a friend who read it 10 years ago summarized it for me, and I came away with a vague understanding of something something giant squid, something something blue penis. But even with minimal knowledge of the comic, the squid attack still lands; it’s a moment of pure Lovecraftian horror, and I absolutely buy that it would traumatize Looking Glass forever. Which only makes it all the more heartbreaking when he realizes that this horrific event that has shaped his life forever was a lie.

The other big reveal this episode comes when we find out that James Wolk’s affable gentleman senator Joe Keane is the leader of the Seventh Kavalry, and that he apparently saw his leadership as half of a partnership with the now-dead Judd as the chief of the police. For me, that twist wasn’t exactly surprising, but it was immensely satisfying, because it’s such a good use of Wolk’s inherent shiftiness.

Maybe it’s because I’m most familiar with Wolk from his role as Mad Men’s Bob “NOT GREAT” Benson, but anytime I see him onscreen, I feel incapable of trusting him. (Well, I trust him to inspire some truly iconic gifs, but that’s it.) Or maybe it’s because he’s so handsome: it only stands to reason that anyone with a face that symmetrical has to be hiding something. (Incidentally, this is why I think Armie Hammer is going to be great as Maxim De Winter in the forthcoming Rebecca. Obviously he has something to hide, because why else would he be so tall?) Regardless, I’ve been slowly going insane watching him slither around the sidelines of every Watchmen scene with his good ol’ boy accent and his Kennedy-lite posture, so the reveal that he is the man behind the curtains of the Seventh Kavalry is fantastically gratifying.

But the reveal is also thematically compelling, because it gets at an idea that seems fundamental to the Watchmen universe: The state and the terrorists are in on everything together. They are run by the same self-interested billionaires who think of the rest of us as their pawns and turn us against each other for their own purposes. All of the systems are corrupt, and escaping them is nearly impossible. All we’re left with is individuals trying to do their best to survive in a broken world.

Allegra, how did the Seventh Kavalry reveal work for you? Do you think there’s any possibility for hope left in the Watchmen world?

Allegra: Before I answer your question, I have to say your read on James Wolk (and Armie Hammer!) has deeply wounded me. But maybe that’s because you’re right about him — I can’t help but trust a beautiful man like Wolk’s Senator Keene when he wants me to believe he’s on the side of justice. That smile! That perfectly combed hair! Those bright, twinkling eyes! I’m a superficial goon, is what I’m saying, easily manipulated by pretty boys.

As such, Keene’s connection to the Seventh Kavalry gutted me. I yelled at my screen as he and other men and women we’d thought were good guys pulled off their Rorschach masks. How is it that so many of the people we’ve gotten to know in Tulsa deceived Angela, Laurie, and Looking Glass so easily and so totally? Their involvement is evidence that Adrian Veidt’s giant squid attack was not an end-all, be-all, but instead the impetus for decades of selfish behavior on the part of uncaring rich men looking to gain control over an unsuspecting public with dwindling resources.

But I don’t think that necessarily dictates a hopeless situation going forward. For starters, tying the Seventh Kavalry reveal to Looking Glass’s storyline — he being a survivor of this sort of selfish behavior in the truest sense — offers the kind of motivation that should undoubtedly empower those who do remain on the side of good.

This mass destruction via cephalopod, whether or not it was justified in the service of preventing a nuclear war, has all kinds of ramifications — from Looking Glass walking out of that carnival hall of mirrors to find hundreds of dead bodies, to Angela learning that her closest friend and mentor was never supporting her cause in the first place. These are devastating truths, but they’re also ones that I very much expect to embolden our heroes in this otherwise nihilistic world.

What about you, Emily? Do you think Looking Glass will find he power within him to share Veidt’s secret about the squid attack with Angela and company?

Will Looking Glass even survive, tho?

HBO

Emily: Before this episode, I wasn’t sure if Looking Glass was one of my favorite characters because he was so inherently compelling, or because Tim Blake Nelson is such a terrific actor. After this episode, I feel comfortable saying: It’s both.

The shattered quality that young Looking Glass carries out of that hall of mirrors moves forward with him into the current Tulsa timeline, and it’s the same shattered quality that is a major part of why he betrays Angela at episode’s end. To be sure, the Seventh Kavalry has revealed to him that much of his life has been based on a lie. But instead of telling his friend about this lie, he betrays her.

Before this episode aired, one of our colleagues was talking about how they didn’t want to see Looking Glass revealed as a secret racist. But what “Little Fear of Lightning” does with the character is almost sadder. Looking Glass isn’t an overt racist. He knows enough to say “woke” things like “He was a white man in Oklahoma” when Angela finds that KKK hood in Judd’s closet. But he’s also bound to something terrible by dint of who he is. In the complicated logistics of Watchmen’s plot, that terrible something is a conspiracy to keep the wool pulled over the world’s eyes.

But on a metaphorical level, the story plays as a muted horror movie about trying to do the right thing and still being roped in with the worst kinds of people because of how structural power works. Which is to say: Watchmen remains a show about whiteness, and Looking Glass is perhaps the most potent example of how you can be a truly kind and compassionate human being and still have a lot to answer for, including stuff that you maybe weren’t even aware of.

That’s what’s so provocative about the Seventh Kavalry being rooted in a truth. One of the details of the original Watchmen that makes me so uncomfortable is that Rorschach — the violent sadist and borderline fascist — is ultimately right about a lot of what he’s saying. It’s just that his methods (secrecy and paranoia) distort the narrative so much that he ceases to be someone worth emulating. He even ceases to be a reliable narrator, despite the fact that he’s often telling the truth.

But this season has revolved around twin secrets buried and kept away from those who most need to know them. The Seventh Kavalry revelation has the most immediate bearing on the plot — in that yes, other characters should probably know who was responsible for that squid attack — but the Tulsa massacre has the most immediate bearing on us in the audience, where words like “massacre” have only recently been applied to what history has often dubbed as a “race riot.” Buried secrets fester and become infected. But we can’t help but bury secrets.

At any rate, maybe Looking Glass won’t have to worry about any of the above much longer. As “Little Fear of Lightning” ends, a whole host of Seventh Kavalry gunmen are entering his house, seemingly to kill him. I hope he makes it through. After all: He’s played by Tim Blake Nelson, and it’s a delight to see him on our screens every week.

Constance: Looking Glass really is a fantastic character because he’s such a good example of how you can be both complicit in oppressive systems, and also the pawn of people with a lot more power than you have.

Looking Glass is obviously being used, and he knows it. He’s been used his whole life, arguably first by the church that sent him out into the world as a teen missionary, then by Adrian Veidt and his squid, then by Judd and the Tulsa police force, and now by Keane and the Seventh Kavalry. He’s a man whose superpower is being able to tell when someone is lying to him, but he has still spent his life being lied to and manipulated by all the people and all the systems that he trusted in.

And by extension, so have most of the other people in the Watchmen universe, including Angela and Laurie. And by further extension, so have we. So the question then becomes: What do we do when we learn that we are being used?

Looking Glass responds by deciding to let Keane and the Seventh Kavalry use him. He doubles down on his complicity. What we have yet to see is how the rest of the characters in this world will react to the idea that the people they trust are using them as pawns — and whether this world allows for the possibility of breaking free of your complicity all together.

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