On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.

For years, graying, khaki-clad evangelists have faithfully made the rounds at conservative events. However, as Wolfe, a 41-year-old former Princeton postdoc, writes in his book, these “men in wrinkled, short-sleeve golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats” are yesterday’s Christians. Among younger activists, they inspire the rolling of eyes—they are the embodiment of an ineffective boomer approach to taking over the United States for Jesus.

In their place, a group of young pastors hope to spearhead a Christian nationalist glow-up as they eagerly await a “Christian prince” to rule America. These often bearded thirty- and fortysomethings have suits that actually fit. They are extremely online, constantly posting on myriad platforms, broadcasting their YouTube shows from mancaves, and convening an endless stream of conferences for likeminded followers. Let’s call them, as one scholar I spoke with did, the TheoBros.

For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.

In American Reformer, their unofficial magazine, hagiographies of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco appear alongside full-throated defenses of countries that execute gay people. On podcasts, the TheoBros unpack “the perils of multiculturalism,” expose “Burning Man’s wicked agenda,” and peel back the nefarious feminist plot of Taylor Swift. In Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, one of their seminal texts, he writes that in an ideal Christian nation, heretics could be executed.

The rise of the TheoBros worries more mainstream religious conservatives. Janet Mefferd, a former Christian radio host and journalist who tracks their ascendancy, says her community is alarmed to see an extremist movement gaining traction. “I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism,” she says. “But a lot of us find that terrifying.”

“I’m not sure what the endgame is, other than they want to advance Christian nationalism—but a lot of us find that terrifying.”

The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power. Vance, a Catholic convert married to a Hindu, would seem an unlikely hero for a movement of devout Protestants who believe in a homogeneous America. But over the last few years, his political orbit has increasingly overlapped with that of the TheoBros—so much so that to careful observers, his public echoes of their ideas are beginning to sound less like coincidence and more like dog whistles.

And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birthrates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.

With no meetings, website, or an explicit statement of faith that unifies their beliefs, the TheoBros are not an official organization. They identify with 16th-century French theologian John Calvin, who spawned a rigid and deterministic form of Protestantism. Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida religion scholar, traces the current movement back to R.J. Rushdoony, an Armenian American philosopher who popularized the idea of Christian nationalism (and homeschooling) in the early 1970s.

Out of Rushdoony’s movement emerged two camps: the charismatic Christians, now known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and the reformed Protestants, which include the TheoBros. They share the goal of creating a Christian nation, says Ingersoll, but differ on a key point of theology: Adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation believe that God is still speaking directly to people through pastors who have declared themselves apostles and prophets. The TheoBros, meanwhile, believe that God said all he needed to say in the Bible.

Many TheoBros are also proponents of postmillennialism, the idea that believers can hasten Jesus’ return by fighting against the satanic forces of liberal excess. TheoBro Aaron Renn, an Accenture consultant turned Christian pundit, has described our current era as a “negative world,” where Christians are persecuted for their beliefs. Andrew Isker, another Bro, calls it “trashworld.”

Like all self-respecting millennials, the TheoBros have little tolerance for boomers, with the exception of their patriarch, Douglas Wilson, a 71-year-old pastor in Moscow, Idaho. When he was younger, Wilson imagined himself going into the family business—Christian bookstores—but after a stint in the military, he moved to Moscow in 1975 to study philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he became involved with the Jesus People, a kind of mashup of evangelical and hippie culture. He helped found Christ Church, the congregation over which he still presides and that regularly draws crowds of 1,300.

Wilson has since turned the college town into his own Christian kingdom. He helped found New Saint Andrews College, the Canon Press publishing house, and Logos School, one of the nation’s first classical Christian schools, where students exclusively study the Western canon. Wilson embraced Calvinism in 1988 and remade his church from the freewheeling Jesus People hub into something far more sober and buttoned-up, where women couldn’t be church leaders and the only music allowed was hymns and psalms. In the early 1990s, Wilson helped launch the Association of Classical Christian Schools, which had 502 member institutions across the United States as of March 2023.

“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

His influence over Moscow has not been without controversy. In a 2021 Vice exposé, former members of Christ Church alleged that ministers had encouraged them to stay in abusive relationships. That tracks with Wilson’s 1999 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, in which he wrote, “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” For that reason, Wilson wrote, the dynamic of a dominant man and a submissive woman is “an erotic necessity.” (Wilson called allegations of the church urging women to stay in abusive relationships “categorically false.”)

Wilson has also promoted another form of dominance. In the 1996 book Southern Slavery: As It Was, Wilson and his co-author argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” and “there has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world” as that of the antebellum South. (In a 2020 blog post, Wilson said he now allows that while “the benevolent master is not a myth, the idea of the horrific taskmaster is no abolitionist myth either.”) When I asked Wilson about his controversial statements, he likened himself to a chef who strategically deploys jalapeno peppers: “Then some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapenos and put them on one Ritz cracker.”

In July, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, Wilson shared the stage with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), as well as Vance, who auditioned his “America is a people” bit a week before his star turn at the GOP convention. Wilson agrees with Vance’s suggestion that children should be allotted votes, managed by their parents. “I would like to see elections where households vote,” he told me. Men, as the heads of households, would actually cast the votes. Though he believes that women’s suffrage was “a mistake,” he would allow a special exception for single mothers.

Wilson offered the crowd a few one-liners (“I’m a Presbyterian, not a Lesbyterian”), but mostly, he talked about the persecution of Christians. “It used to be that the sexually troubled had to keep their kinks hidden away in the closet,” he mused. “Now it is the conservative Christian who needs to keep his virtues hidden in the recesses of the closet.” After the National Conservatism Conference, Wilson appeared at the Believers’ Summit, which was headlined by Trump and hosted by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.

But it’s not just conferences and interviews with the likes of Tucker Carlson where Wilson promotes his ideas. He has a blog, a podcast, and a YouTube channel, thanks mostly to the urging of his children and younger colleagues. One example is that every year since 2018, Wilson has been celebrating what he calls No Quarter November: “The month where we say out loud what everyone is thinking.” In a 2023 video, which was the brainchild of one of his sons, Wilson sits at a sumptuously appointed Thanksgiving table, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, and addresses the camera. “If you think of my blog as a shotgun,” he says, “this is the month when I saw off all my typical, careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.” His wife, clad in an apron, brings out a turkey and places it in front of him, and then the tranquil scene is interrupted by a blaring alarm and a glowing red “perimeter breach” sign. Wilson excuses himself, heads to his garage, and straps on a flamethrower. After using it to light a cigar, he aims the fire at cardboard cutouts of Disney princesses Elsa and Ariel, and the logos of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Netflix.

Wilson’s willingness to make campy content sets him apart, says Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades. “Instead of a crotchety old guy talking about stoning people, he’s like, super cool,” she says. “He’s witty.”

In subsequent videos, Wilson tackled women’s culpability in rape, the dark side of empathy, and the virtues of “something called the patriarchy—that which, according to our soi-disant and lisping political theorists, must be smashed. Only they say something like ‘thmasth.’”

Wilson has used his platforms to anoint the next generation of ultraconservative reformed Christian pastors, all of whom happened to be men. Mefferd, the conservative Christian journalist, told me that Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism got traction in mainstream Christian circles in part “because Doug Wilson endorsed.” Another Wilson protégé is Joel Webbon, a 38-year-old pastor who hosts a podcast and YouTube show, which he films from a wingback leather chair in a book-lined room.

Webbon wasn’t always reformed—he is an alumnus of a Bible school run by a New Apostolic Reformation affiliated outfit, which he now considers “straight-up heretical.” In his 20s, he broke from the group, moved to Texas, and started his own church. In a video from a few years ago, Webbon credited Wilson with emboldening him to say whatever he wanted—like telling a guest that the Founding Fathers weren’t responsible for the slave trade because Africans had done the actual kidnapping and enslaving.

“Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

For Webbon, it was intensely liberating to watch Wilson speak in public without worrying about being canceled. “You stay in your little corner, you stay on your little leash, because you’re like, I don’t know what will happen,” Webbon said. “But when you see some other guy do it, and you’re like—that’s the worst thing that can happen? Vice writes an article about you? [Christianity Today editor-in-chief] Russell Moore won’t invite you to his birthday party anymore? Like, that’s it.” At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Webbon is so impressed by his own audacity that he maintains an online list of all the controversies in which he’s become embroiled. There, he explains why he called Christian men living in California “stupid” (they could just move to a red state); why he once ordered his wife to stop reading a book on theology (he didn’t want her exposed to beliefs that were different from his own); and why he believes in a patriarchal household structure (the Bible says so). Webbon, who is planning to host a conference in Texas next spring called “Christ Is King: How to Defeat Trashworld!” maintains that a “return to the Constitution is impossible” and that the only viable alternative is the Ten Commandments.

Some of Wilson’s other acolytes are attempting to create their own versions of Moscow, Idaho. Take Brian Sauvé, a 33-year-old Christian recording artist, podcaster, and pastor of Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Like Webbon, Sauvé wasn’t always reformed—Refuge began as a charismatic Christian church. After the lead pastor resigned in a scandal, the then-24-year-old Sauvé ascended to take his place, immersed himself in reformed theology, and moved the church in a new direction. Today, he presides over a Moscow-esque ecosystem: a publishing house called New Christendom Press, as well as St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy, modeled after those in Wilson’s network. “Can you feel it in the sails?” reads St. Brendan’s website. “The stiff breeze out of Moscow, Idaho? We can.”

On his three podcasts and to his more than 53,000 followers on X, Sauvé regularly states that women’s primary function is to bear children. In July, after Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable” began widely circulating, he posted: “It is desperately sad to think of all the intentionally barren women who will find themselves totally alone in their 50s, realizing their irreversible mistake. They will wish they could trade it all—money, vacations, independence, all of it—for children they can now never have.”

But unlike more mainstream conservatives, Sauvé does not even pretend to champion the idea of a Judeo-Christian nation. He posted in July, “[O]ur political system is heavily influenced by Jews who reject Christ and embrace all manner of evils.”

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is Josh Abbotoy, executive director of American Reformer and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called New Founding. A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a Project 2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session” hosted by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist Chris Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher. In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network? None other than JD Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement. Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate, Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director, Josh Clemans: a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers. The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the Society for American Civic Renewal, a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron Charles Haywood, who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “warlord.” According to founder Nate Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and that its members “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.” But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities. Promotional materials describe a community of “unmatched seclusion” where “simple country faith” protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime. Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay. “Who’s going to grab the land? Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring, something authentic to the region’s history, or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro Andrew Isker—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church, studied divinity at New Saint Andrews, and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform Gab. In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee. Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion, not to mention how hospitable the state has been to refugees. “Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer. The conference was hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros, Isker sees much to like in Vance. In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as “Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).” In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers, “You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse. Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them. She wants them destroyed. She wants you to never be able to have this. She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to. Enter William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it, the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States, has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism. Baptists are only the beginning. Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream, which he and other TheoBros refer to as “Big Eva.” In August, he posted on X, “Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

Wolfe served in the Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals. As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.” The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media, but in mainstream conservative outlets, it was Stephen Wolfe who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world. In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative, Wolfe paints America as a “gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders. (Sound familiar?) He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”

Wolfe grew up in Napa, California, and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to “do the Wendell Berry thing” in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe” and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.” The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online. He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure. Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited. Women would not be allowed to vote—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed. “I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper, suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.” The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty, so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé: “I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?” What role, I asked him, would Jews play? After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

“We need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity, or Judeo-Christian worldview, or Judeo-Christian whatever, and really eradicate that from our thinking. Because if we say that America is a Judeo-Christian country, then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech, and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about America as a people. The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.” America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness, but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.” Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all, but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him. “I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life, and to seek to restore that,” he said. “This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was.”

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,” Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot “an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.” WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted, and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate. As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.” Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

Correction, September 19: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Chris Buskirk’s role at American Reformer.

At least a few times a week, when no elections are underway, the Maricopa County recorder’s office hosts tours of the Tabulation and Election Center, or MCTEC, a gray, one-story concrete fortress on the edge of downtown Phoenix where as many as 2.4 million ballots will be sorted and counted this fall. Ever since the 2020 election, when President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the county helped Democrats flip the state, the site has been the subject of suspicion, threats, and conspiracies.

In response to the chaotic scenes of 2020, when Alex Jones showed up with a megaphone and declared that it was “1776,” the county installed a 10-foot-high security fence with an intercom system around the entrance. People in four states have been arrested for threatening the recorder, ­Stephen Richer, whose office is responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots. In March, the vice chair of the county GOP joked about lynching him; in July, she led the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention. Richer, a 39-year-old Republican lawyer with thinning red hair, has, in turn, tried to demystify his team’s processes with aggressive transparency.

On a 105-degree Tuesday in June, I joined a small group from a local chamber of commerce for a peek under the hood. Some participants had questions about their own experiences: Why had a relative’s ballot not been counted? What really happened when Sharpie ink bled through a ballot? As we wound through corridors, past rows of printers and stacks of empty USPS bins, Sarah Frechette, deputy registrar outreach coordinator in the recorder’s office, pointed out one safeguard after another. You need a key card to pass through any door, and each card only grants access to certain areas. No one from the recorder’s office can enter the tabulation room—a different agency counts the votes. Just three people have access to the server, which is encased in a small glass room within the tabulation room. No one can enter that room unless another person is present. If ballots are kept overnight, they are stored in secure rooms behind floor-to-ceiling chain-link cages. The only thing missing is a moat.

When we arrived at a beige room with rows of tables where trained workers attempt to verify signatures on mail-in ballots flagged for review, Frechette drew our attention to the ceiling. “Camera…camera…camera…camera,” she said, pointing up. They are everywhere, and they are always on. You can go online and watch the livestreams yourself.

MCTEC is a citadel of lawfulness, where Democrats and Republicans check each other’s work and protect the democratic process in America’s fourth-largest county. Richer refers to the tabulation room as “the holiest of holy rooms.” But outside the metal gates, it’s a different story.

To much of Richer’s party, MCTEC is a crime scene. Almost four years after Joe Biden’s victory, the myth of stolen elections shapes races up and down the ballot and across the state. It has consumed the energy of the legislature and thrown a wrench into the gears of governance through an endless parade of lawsuits and investigations. America’s most volatile swing state is trapped in a time loop: Arizona is where the 2018 election was suspect, the 2020 election never ended, and the 2022 election is literally still being contested.

This obsession with fraud and betrayal has cost Arizona Republicans dearly. What was once a locus of conservative power has shifted slowly but tangibly toward the Democratic column. Republicans have lost a succession of statewide races, alienated independents, and driven officials from their ranks—and sometimes their homes—with threats of violence and retribution. Those defeats have not muted the power of the stolen election narrative; they have reinforced it. In a paranoid party, the biggest winners are the losers. With every setback the Big Lie grows more righteous, more lucrative, and more vital.

The process has at times veered into the comic, but the results are deadly serious. Arizona shows what happens when a conspiracy takes over a party, and election denial becomes not just a tactic but its animating purpose. Processes, such as vote-by-mail, that have for decades made Arizona one of the easiest places in America to vote are now on the chopping block. Officials and low-level workers who have served the public for years are fighting for their jobs—or giving up on them. The very idea that voters should decide elections is viewed with suspicion in some corners of the legislature.

This fall, with Arizona once again poised to play a major role in the presidential election and the fight to control both houses of Congress, and the state legislature up for grabs, election deniers are everywhere. Republicans are no more prepared to accept a Democratic victory now than they were four years ago. And with President Donald Trump leading or within striking distance in most recent polls of the state, the figures who have spent the last four years undercutting the basic workings of democracy might finally reap their rewards.

To see what the recorder’s office is up against, I didn’t have to go far. That same morning, a few blocks north of MCTEC, a small crowd spilled out the doors of a cramped hearing room in the bowels of the Maricopa County Superior Court for the final three arraignments in State of Arizona v. Kelli Ward, et al. The case—in which 11 ­Arizona Republicans and seven other Trump allies were charged with conspiring to submit false Electoral College certificates in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election—is both a commentary and a meta-commentary on the whole state of affairs.

Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general who brought the case, won her election in 2022 by 280 votes; Abe Hamadeh, her Republican opponent, was still contesting the result. Hamadeh had recently filed a fourth appeal, arguing that Mayes should be removed from office and a do-over should be held. He’d been challenging the result for so long that he was now also running for Congress; Anthony Kern, an indicted fake elector since elected to the state Senate, was running against him.

The fake electors were symbols of the state party’s evolution. Prior to 2016, Arizona’s official Republican organizations seesawed between hardcore activists and more mainstream leaders. The Maricopa GOP censured the late Sen. John McCain, champion of the latter faction, three times for purported liberal heresies. In turn, McCain’s allies periodically purged the state and local party of gadflies to restore a veneer of normality. The Trump years, and McCain’s death, effectively settled the debate; even as the electorate in Maricopa County moved to the center, the Republican Party went full MAGA.

Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor who is stepping down at the end of his term after years of threats and abuse, told me that the first signs of an unraveling came in 2018, when Democrats narrowly won three statewide races, including a bid for US Senate. Gates, a 53-year-old lawyer with short graying-brown hair who had previously helmed the state party’s “election integrity” efforts, recalled how Republicans had expressed shock and suspicion at the results, which weren’t called until nearly a week after the election.

Conservatives focused their ire on Richer’s Democratic predecessor, Adrian Fontes, who at the time was responsible for both in-person and mail-in voting. Fontes had run for office on a promise to expand voting access, but presided over a chaotic primary and general election plagued by hourslong waits at some polling stations. The Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors then reached a deal with Fontes in which the board took back control of in-person voting.

“Some of the vitriol in 2019 when I was the chair and I was negotiating that new relationship, I saw it—it was palpable,” Gates said. “Did I see what ended up coming? No, but these pressures were here. They were under the surface and had broken through.”

Afterward, the state GOP enlisted Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer, to conduct an audit of the 2018 election. The 228-page report he produced is striking, both for what it does and doesn’t say. Richer concluded that it was “plausible” Fontes had acted with partisan interest by opening multiple “emergency voting” centers the weekend before Election Day and by continuing to attempt to “cure” mail-in ballots days after polls closed.

Richer’s report also contained traces of past and future conspiracies. His requests for correspondence between Fontes’ office and George Soros, he noted, went unfulfilled. But he also determined Fontes had done nothing illegal, and his report’s allegations of inappropriate behavior were fairly benign and, by Richer’s admission, unsubstantiated. This was a conventional political document, with a conventional political solution. A few months later, Richer declared his candidacy against Fontes. His slogan: “Make the Recorder’s Office Boring Again.”

Behind the scenes, though, the state party was in the midst of a transformation. In 2018, the millennial political activist Charlie Kirk relocated to Arizona from Illinois and began building out a power base around his nonprofit, Turning Point USA, and his PAC, Turning Point Action. Kirk’s Christian nationalist agenda is centered on the Dream City Church in Phoenix, which claimed during the pandemic to have developed a proprietary air-purification system that kills “99.9 percent of Covid within 10 minutes.” (It does not.) He hosts a “Freedom Night in ­America” rally there once a month; Trump has twice campaigned at Dream City.

These MAGA Republicans blamed their setbacks not on Trump, of course, but on electoral malfeasance and the fecklessness of the McCain wing of the party. At the state GOP’s annual meeting in 2019, a handful of Kirk allies, including Turning Point Action’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, and Turning Point USA’s former spokesperson, Jake Hoffman, helped elect Kelli Ward—a right-wing doctor who had once proposed holding a state Senate hearing on chemtrails and waged an ugly primary challenge against McCain—as party chair. (The Arizona Republic reported that Bowyer was working on his own time, not Turning Point’s.) In a harbinger of things to come, the Republic reported, delegates insisted on choosing their new leader via voice vote. They didn’t trust the machines.

“In a paranoid party, the biggest winners are the losers. With every setback the Big Lie grows more righteous, more lucrative, and more vital.”

Trump lost Arizona the next year, at a time when many Arizonans were primed to reject such a loss, and reacted accordingly. Although Richer defeated Fontes, his fellow Republicans almost immediately alleged that something sinister was going down at MCTEC—and soon Richer himself would become the subject of conspiracies. A lawsuit filed by Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Alex Kolodin, on behalf of Bowyer, Hoffman, Ward, and eight other Arizonans who would have served as electors had Trump won, included an affidavit alleging that former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had helped develop the technology used in Arizona voting machines; a claim that Biden’s lead could have been manufactured “with blank ballots filled out by election workers, Dominion or other third parties”; and a reference to a “former US Military Intelligence” expert who was identified only as “Spider.” Ward pressured the Board of Supervisors to stop the certification. When that failed, according to Mayes’ indictment, the 11 Republicans gathered around a conference table at state party headquarters on December 14 to sign their own set of papers declaring that they were Arizona’s rightful electors.

In their arraignment six months later, Trump lawyers Boris Epshteyn and Jenna Ellis, and fake elector Steve Lamon, pleaded not guilty. (Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Ellis, in exchange for her cooperation in the case.) But Trump diehards still view the underlying event with pride. A video of the signing that the state party posted on X is still up. So is a group photo Ward posted, with the message: “Oh yes we did!” This past spring, four days after the indictments dropped, Hoffman, now a state senator, was elected to the Republican National Committee.

The Arizona efforts to “stop the steal” were merely the prelude to an even stranger quest to expose how the election was supposedly stolen. It is hard to summarize what happened next without starting to feel a little insane yourself. In the months that followed, Republican legislators pursued theories that ballots were shredded, that they were imported from South Korea, that drop boxes were illegally stuffed with ballots, that the tabulators were hacked, and that evidence of voter fraud had been incinerated at a farm where 166,000 chickens died in a fire. (The chicken fire did happen, but no ballots were harmed.) The entire party had become Gene Hackman at the end of The Conversation—delirious, destroyed, surrounded by the shattered floorboards of its paranoia.

In Chandler, Arizona, a QAnon-­promoting realtor named Liz Harris tried proving the existence of massive fraud by linking mail-in ballots to vacant lots. But some of her claims could be debunked using Google Maps. Harris was elected to the Statehouse and subsequently expelled for inviting a witness to testify who accused various elected officials of committing crimes on behalf of the Mormon Church and the Sinaloa cartel. In April, she joined Hoffman on the RNC.

The search for clues culminated in 2021, in a monthslong “audit” commissioned by Republican members of the Arizona Senate, paid for by e-commerce kingpin Patrick Byrne, and carried out under the direction of an IT firm called the Cyber Ninjas at a former basketball arena in central Phoenix nicknamed the Madhouse. The Ninja volunteers, one of whom—fake elector Kern—had been on the US Capitol grounds on January 6, were inspired by an inventor named Jovan Pulitzer (not his given name), who claimed to have developed a proprietary system that could detect ballot tampering. They inspected the ballots for evidence of bamboo fibers (to prove they had actually come from China) and shined UV light under them to search for ­watermarks. (Some QAnon followers believed Trump had secretly marked legitimate ballots.) Pulitzer had previously led a search for the Ark of the Covenant. Evidence of fraud proved similarly elusive.

There was plenty of drama on Election Day, as might be expected in a county the size of Maricopa. Take the Sharpies. Voters who showed up at some polling locations were told to fill out their ballots with markers because the ink dries faster. In some cases, the markers bled through to the other side of the ballot, causing panic among voters. Sharpies formed the basis for one of Trump’s post-election lawsuits, but the case was thrown out because there was no evidence the issue prevented votes from being counted. When a voter brought up the subject on the MCTEC tour, a staffer explained why—the ballot’s offset design was crafted specifically to stop bleed-throughs from affecting the tabulation.

But the spectacle was partly the point. During the audit, the Cyber Ninjas’ CEO partnered with a documentary filmmaker (who’d previously argued that aliens had done 9/11) to produce The Deep Rig, a movie that purported to explain how the CIA influenced the 2020 results. The film premiered in 2021 at Dream City—where the state GOP voted to give Ward another term at its annual meeting that year. (The chair election, which this time used paper ballots, mirrored the party’s crackup; one losing candidate alleged that the election was rigged and demanded an audit, which Ward rejected on the grounds that “you certainly don’t allow a challenger who lost an election to demand something that they don’t have the right to.”) The Cyber Ninja audit was a joke, but a useful one. Politicians and activists learned that there were few consequences to indulging the lie. Quite the opposite—refusing to do so might cost you your job, while egging it on could get you a much better one.

No one understood this lesson better than Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor who resigned after questioning the decision to call Arizona for Biden. As the state party attempted to regroup from its recent setbacks, Lake kept election denial front and center during her run for governor in 2022. She won Trump’s endorsement after promising at a Turning Point event to revisit the stolen election as governor, then hosted a rodeo with MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Lake was the sort of candidate the Turning Point crowd had been waiting for: a proto-Trump for a shadow party. She spoke at Dream City, rallied with Kirk and Bowyer, and stumped with the organization’s enterprise director (also a state representative). Lake led a slate of like-minded conservatives who vowed to use their powers to take back what was stolen from them. She filed her first challenge to the vote process before ballots were even mailed out.

A few weeks after the 2022 election, Lake had a dream. As she later recounted in her memoir, Unafraid: Just Getting Started, she found herself drugged, blindfolded, and bound with duct tape in the back of a pickup truck being driven by two men. One, with “a batch of ginger stubble, a color match for his thinning hair,” was named Stephen. The other—“short, with greasy black hair, and a face that seemed incapable of bearing any expression other than smugness”—was called Bill. They had taken her to the desert to kill her but were too incompetent for the job. After Stephen fumbled with his Glock, Bill grabbed the weapon and fired wildly in her direction. When she awoke, Lake wrote, her phone was ringing. It was her attorney, bearing news about her lawsuit challenging the election results.

If the villains of 2020 were shadowy foreign powers, Republicans had clearer targets when Lake lost two years later. They blamed Richer and Gates, whose Board of Supervisors was responsible for Election Day administration and tabulation, as well as certifying the results. The losing US Senate candidate, Blake Masters, conceded while nonetheless demanding that Gates resign. But the rest of the slate began a series of long-shot legal challenges premised on the corruption and incompetence of MCTEC. Touring Arizona in the ensuing months, Lake beamed photos of Gates and Richer onto big screens and falsely accused them of “intentionally” causing delays at voting sites and of “pumping 300,000 invalid ballots” into the final tally.

Lake wasn’t merely complaining. She actively attempted to reverse the outcome via lawsuits that aimed to install her in her rightful place in the governor’s mansion. To represent her, she hired a self-described “adventure travel guide” and lawyer named Bryan Blehm, who had distinguished himself previously as counsel for the Cyber Ninjas audit. Blehm is often described as a “Scottsdale divorce attorney,” which is true but incomplete; he is also an expert on motorcycle law. He was not an experienced election lawyer, and by his own admission—in a letter defending himself against an investigation by the state bar—lacked the resources for the task.

Blehm’s case was not strong, in other words. A judge suspended his law license for two months for making a false statement in a state Supreme Court filing and ordered him to take continuing legal education. Lake’s attorneys in the voting-machines action were docked $122,000 for filing a case without merit. Alex Kolodin, the Arizona lawyer who worked with Sidney Powell on the election challenge that cited “Spider,” was ordered by a court to take five different remedial ethics classes. (The cases were a boon for Kolodin, who is now a state representative and a member of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee; he recently posted a photo of himself doing his coursework at a Dream City Trump rally.)

But Lake had strength in numbers. Mark Finchem, an Oath Keeper and former state representative who lost his 2022 race for secretary of state by 120,000 votes, filed his own lawsuit to contest the results and demand a new election. Hamadeh filed a series of similar challenges on his own behalf, which “the crazies love because they see me fighting,” he privately told a fellow Republican. Conceding a lost race went from the norm to the exception, and lawsuits were filed as a matter of course. The recorder’s office has been dragged to court 43 times since 2020. Eventually, citing psychological harm, physical threats, and damaged career prospects, Richer fought back with a defamation lawsuit against Lake.

Republican elected officials have tried to make it easier to flood the political and legal systems with baseless claims. Fake elector Kern introduced legislation that would protect attorneys who filed election challenges, however frivolous. Kolodin, the oft-sanctioned election lawyer, supported a bill that would strip the bar of the power to sanction lawyers altogether. In May, GOP members of the Arizona House called for impeachment of Mayes, the attorney general, in part because of her efforts to prosecute election-denying officials in rural Cochise County, which had failed to certify the 2022 election before the deadline.

Arizona’s elections themselves seem increasingly superfluous. One state representative backed a bill to give the legislature, not voters, power to award the state’s electoral votes. Another pushed a law that would preemptively award Arizona’s electoral votes to Trump in 2024. It was an effort, one of the bill’s supporters explained, to “ignore the results of another illegally run election.”

Lake, who continues fighting for a redo of the gubernatorial election even as she runs for US Senate, is stuck in the same predicament as much of her party. Election denial might have started as an applause line, but once you exposed the conspiracy it also meant you couldn’t stop—the only way out was to keep telling the lie until you finally won.

At his office across from the courthouse, I asked Gates, who has publicly detailed his struggles with PTSD, if he had seen any ­indications that the fever was breaking. He replied by pointing out a recent change the supervisors had made to the chamber where they hold public meetings. In February, a group of attendees upset about the recent elections had attempted to storm the dais. Now the room has a pony barrier.

“I could post on X that I just had a sandwich, you know, and there’d be several comments that I’m a traitor,” Gates said.

A few days after the MCTEC tour, I stopped by a Republican candidate forum at a rec center next to a pickleball court in Sun City West, a sprawling retirement village 45 minutes from downtown Phoenix. The community is red, white, and very old—at one point, the emcee interrupted proceedings to ask whether anyone was missing a pair of bifocals.

Fears of stolen elections came up in almost every race, even the ones you might not expect. A candidate for Maricopa County sheriff promised that, if elected, he would put deputies in charge of transporting ballots and confiscate suspicious voting equipment. A candidate for the legislature promised to get rid of early voting. A candidate for Maricopa County attorney blamed the Republican incumbent for pursuing sanctions against election deniers. Even one of the candidates for superintendent of schools managed to bring the conversation back to “election integrity.”

The Trump campaign’s local field director, on hand to promote a get-out-the-vote program, said that Hamadeh had “supposedly” lost his 2022 race, moments before Hamadeh himself took the stage to brag about his ongoing lawsuit. Kern, whose campaign sold T-shirts bearing his mugshot, described himself as a “proud member of the 2020 electors club” and announced to the crowd that it was “time for battle.” Multiple candidates used their time to demand Richer’s firing.

When Richer spoke, following a Lake-backed primary challenger who accused him of mailing out extra ballots, he talked up his law enforcement endorsements and efforts to keep voter rolls up to date. “I want to be a resource,” he told the room.

The crowd booed.

The moderator asked him a question that he said had been picked at random: Did Richer believe the 2020 election was stolen?

Richer enunciated his response as clearly as he could.

“I do not believe the 2020 election was stolen,” he said.

The boos started up again.

Republican voters weren’t persuaded by the recorder’s promises of transparency and good faith. In July, Richer lost his primary by a little less than nine points. For the third straight election, the most competitive county in America’s most competitive state will roll the dice with someone new.

For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

This election cycle, former President Donald Trump has made one campaign promise the most prominent: Mass deportation. It is a long-standing vow. In 2016, Trump said he would deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Once in the White House, he ordered sweeping worksite raids, enacted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, and deliberately separated migrant families, many of whom have yet to be reunited.

But thanks to outside resistance, internal opposition, sanctuary policies, legal guardrails, and sheer ineptitude, the Trump administration removed fewer than 1 million people from the country—far behind the number Barack Obama deported during his first four years in office.

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

The nation’s undocumented immigrants grow and harvest the food we eat, construct our homes, and care for our young and elderly. They pay billions in taxes, start businesses that employ Americans, and help rebuild in the wake of climate disasters.

Not only would Trump’s plan rip families and communities apart, but it also would have devastating effects for years to come, including on US citizens who perhaps have overlooked how integral undocumented immigrants are to their everyday life. Trump frames immigration as an existential threat to the United States. He has said immigrants are “taking our jobs,” are “not people,” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The reality is that if his plan were implemented, American life as we know it would be ruined—even for those cheering for mass deportation.

Here’s how this “mass deportation” agenda would fundamentally reshape the country:

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According to a 2016 report by the Center for American Progress, deporting 7 million workers would “reduce national employment by an amount similar to that experienced during the Great Recession.” GDP would immediately contract by 1.4 percent, and, eventually, by 2.6 percent. In 20 years, the US economy would shrink nearly 6 percent—or $1.6 trillion. Trump’s plan would lead to a dire shortage of low-wage workers, which would “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation,” predicts Robert J. Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration.

“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers,” Miller told the New York Times last November. Most economists disagree. “The only reason a politician would say such a thing is that they think that lots of people believe it,” says Michael Clemens, an economist at George Mason University. “It’s certainly not based on any research or empirical fact whatsoever.”

Instead of freeing up employment opportunities, findings from one study suggest that the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants could result in 968,000 fewer jobs available for US citizens, losses that would be compounded each year the policy remained in effect.

 

A recent study projected that if 7.5 million workers were deported, inflation would rise by 3 percent in two years.

The price of services would be almost 10 percent higher by 2029.

 

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Food

Half of all farmworkers in the United States are undocumented. A mass deportation program would lead to reduced domestic production and increased reliance on imports. Pierre Mérel, an agricultural and resource economics expert at the University of California, Davis, says labor-intensive fruit and vegetable harvesting would be most affected. Based on a 2022 study he co-authored, Mérel estimates that a 50 percent decrease in the farm labor supply could result in a 21 percent increase in the prices of hand-picked crops. “If [immigrant workers] just disappeared overnight,” says Andrew Mickelsen, whose family operates a potato farm in Idaho, “[the sector] would be devastated...I do not think that we in this country could grow enough food.”

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Care

Some 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, with more than two-thirds employed as providers or in supporting jobs. On top of that, more than 160,000 are employed as cleaners and housekeepers. “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms, and empty our bedpans,” says Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition. “When former President Donald Trump talks about mass deportations and enforcement, he’s talking about eradicating the type of quality of life that Americans enjoy right now.”

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Infrastructure

One in five undocumented workers—1.4 million people—are ­employed in construction. That’s more than 10 percent of the entire labor force, and 32 percent of roofers. With the industry already facing a shortage of about 500,000 workers, Trump’s deportation scheme would grind the construction of new housing to a halt, turbocharging the affordability crisis. Joshua Correa, a builder in Dallas, estimates a $300,000 house might cost anywhere from $40,000 to $45,000 more if just a fraction of the immigrant workforce is deported. “You can’t build things in the United States,” says Brian Turmail of the Associated General Contractors of America, “without people to build them.” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas put it more simply: “The economy would collapse.”

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In Arizona, there are roughly 100,000 undocumented homeowners.

If they were all deported—and their homes foreclosed on—it would result in a $44.2 billion hit to the state’s housing market.

 

Some immigration experts and former government officials have questioned the feasibility of Trump's radical plan, citing logistical and legal obstacles. But, even if he only attempts to unleash the full force of the federal government to uproot millions of noncitizens, there could be a lasting toll on immigrants and Americans. The effects of Trump's cruel practice of separating families at the border, known as "zero tolerance," are still felt today even though the policy was eventually reversed. Six years after its implementation, children and parents remain apart.

[Related: The Migrant Families Separated Under Trump Are Still in Legal Limbo]

Children would almost certainly be hurt again. More than 3.4 million unauthorized immigrants have a US-born minor child. Eighty percent of unauthorized immigrants entered the country before 2010, and almost 10 million citizens or lawful residents live in mixed-status homes. One study found a mass deportation program would slash the median income of mixed-status households by almost half, plunging millions of families into poverty.

Even if not fully realized, Trump's plot would crash the economy, leave food fallow in the fields, target vulnerable neighbors, and hurt the very population he claims to want to uplift—the American worker.

Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.

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This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.

For decades, McLean Bible Church has served as the place of worship for many of DC’s Republican elite. The sprawling evangelical megachurch in Vienna, Virginia, boasts a roster of former parishioners that includes everyone from Ken Starr to Mike Pence. It’s where Donald Trump once dropped in for a brief prayer after a round of golf.

McLean Bible is also where, in November 2017, a senior pastor named Dale Sutherland formed a nonprofit called Act2Impact. In those days, the organization was described in state records as an “auxiliary” of the church, with a mission to “preach the gospel” and “conduct evangelistic and humanitarian outreach.”

But that mission was short-lived.

Two years later, Sutherland—who had once been an undercover narcotics officer in DC—left McLean Bible and filed papers to rename Act2Impact. It became the Constitutional Defense Fund (CDF), which would “promote and secure” constitutional rights. “We aim to defend and strengthen those rights through methods that will include litigation and other means,” the filing stated. New directors joined, replacing church elders. One was Joseph Abdalla, a former cop who’d been Sutherland’s partner.

Around this time, Sutherland also leaned into a new persona, adopting the Undercover Pastor as his brand and moniker. “Buying cocaine and preaching Jesus. A weird combo,” notes his website, which touted a newsletter—“get biblical wisdom delivered to your inbox”—and YouTube channel. “I used to lock people up,” he likes to say, “now I’m trying to set people free.”

Sutherland is much less public about the CDF, which in the half-decade since its rechristening has evolved from spreading the good news to facilitating a far-reaching, multimillion-dollar legal campaign to dismantle America’s gun laws. From 2020 to 2022, the CDF collected $12 million in cash and funneled nearly $10 million to two connected gun rights groups and a DC law firm, Cooper & Kirk, which together have filed at least 21 lawsuits since 2020 that challenged gun restrictions. These lawsuits, aimed at getting an eventual Supreme Court hearing, concern bans on AR-15-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, as well as restrictions on young adults buying and carrying handguns. During its next term, which begins in October, the court will hear one of the suits, a challenge to the government’s ability to check the spread of home-produced, unserialized “ghost guns.”

The CDF paid Cooper & Kirk more than $8 million between 2020 and 2022. The fund also made payments to the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Foundation (an offshoot of the Firearms Policy Coalition), which are the plaintiffs, individually or together, in every one of the 21 lawsuits the operation is behind.

The CDF’s money came via Donors Trust, a pass-through fund founded in 1999 with the aim of “safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative” philanthropists who seek to channel their wealth into right-wing causes. The trust has more than $1 billion in assets and is not legally required to identify its donors.

In short: An anonymous funder or funders is bankrolling a legal attack aimed at providing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court an opportunity to wipe out America’s firearms laws. It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook but for guns.

It’s akin to the Christian right’s abortion playbook but for guns.

“It’s about as far from a bottom-up, grassroots operation as possible,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and vice president of Giffords Law Center, who has spent a decade tangling in court with gun rights interests. Skaggs said that in terms of its ambition and scale, the dark money operation is unlike any litigation funding arrangement he’s seen.

The motives of many of the players in this drama—gun rights advocates and the conservative lawyers who work for them—are obvious. But Sutherland is more of a mystery. People who have known him for years say they’ve never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or state a position on the gun debate.

Over the past two years, I have tried to piece together this network and chart its workings. It’s an effort that has involved reading many thousands of pages of financial filings, depositions, and court records. I’ve done dozens of interviews and knocked on the same doors again and again, trying to figure out how an undercover pastor became the unlikely middleman for a covertly funded operation to abolish gun laws. Here’s what I’ve learned.

The Firm

In August 2019, before he stepped on a podium in Colonial Williamsburg, Charles Cooper was introduced as a “legend” of the conservative legal world. He began by warming up the crowd at the Convention of States Project leadership summit, which brings together people who want to amend the Constitution to eliminate what they consider ambiguous language that has enabled liberal advances. “Are there any freedom-loving, anti-communist patriots in this room?” The audience clapped and cheered. “Do any of you cling to your Bibles and your guns?”

“Are there any freedom-loving, anti-communist patriots in this room? Do any of you cling to your Bibles and your guns?”

The day before, Cooper had lost his decades-long gig as the National Rifle Association’s outside counsel. As details of financial abuses became public many had rallied around then-CEO Wayne LaPierre. Cooper did not and was purged.

Before representing the NRA, Cooper led the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and executive agencies. Cooper’s Reagan-era DOJ opinions—for instance, one finding that employers could refuse to hire those with AIDS—burnished his reputation as a polished champion of a strident conservatism. Cooper tapped Samuel Alito to be his deputy and, two decades later, would guide him through the Supreme Court confirmation process. By then, Cooper had founded Cooper & Kirk, which became known as the conservative movement’s prestige advocate. It hired hard-right zealots from elite law schools, including Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Noel Francisco, who would become Trump’s solicitor general. Cooper defended Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, and represented fellow Alabaman Jeff Sessions when the then-attorney general was under scrutiny for his contacts with Russian officials in 2016.

Cooper’s Williamsburg speech was titled, “The Real Threat to the Second Amendment.” He described how his work had contributed to split circuit court rulings on whether people have a right to carry guns outside the home for self-defense. A case that would resolve that question, he noted, was before the Supreme Court.

Cooper was referring to New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which challenged a New York law that required applicants for concealed carry permits to demonstrate a heightened need for protection. At the time, Cooper & Kirk was representing the Bruen plaintiffs. Although the firm did not argue the case before the Supreme Court—that was handed off to star SCOTUS advocate Paul Clement—invoices show that in April 2021, the month the justices agreed to hear Bruen, Cooper & Kirk managing partner David H. Thompson conferred with lead attorneys on the case about an “amicus panel,” a body of subject experts that advises on litigation strategy.

CDF money went to attorneys and advocacy groups that filed friend of the court briefs backing the plaintiffs. Such filings, known as amicus briefs, are integral to legal strategy in appellate litigation and are often cited by higher courts in decisions. Thompson filed an amicus brief in Bruen on behalf of the Second Amendment Foundation. And another partner at the firm, John D. Ohlendorf, did so on behalf of J. Joel Alicea, himself a Cooper & Kirk attorney identified in the brief only as a professor at Catholic University. The CDF-funded Firearms Policy Foundation filed an amicus brief as well. So did the archconservative Claremont Institute, which got a $105,000 CDF grant in 2021 to support gun rights. John C. Eastman—the lawyer who helped rally Trump’s faithful before they stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and is now under indictment in Georgia and Arizona for attempting to subvert the 2020 election—wrote the Claremont brief. (Eastman’s law license has been temporarily suspended in California and DC.)

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Bruen was momentous. Conservative justices not only struck down New York’s law, but also established a new test for the constitutionality of all gun restrictions. No longer should courts weigh the government’s interest in reducing violence or promoting public safety against the right to bear arms, the majority said. Rather, the constitutionality of gun laws should depend on whether they’re similar enough to restrictions in place when the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, or when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, points at which the original meaning and public understanding of the Second Amendment are best discerned.

Lower courts have since seen a surge in challenges to firearms restrictions, ruling on an average of one a day in the year after the decision, according to an analysis by Jacob D. Charles, a scholar at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. Although courts have diverged when applying the standard, thanks to Bruen, gun laws are being struck down at an unprecedented clip. “We are more excited than ever about the future,” Brandon Combs, director of the Firearms Policy Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, declared after the Bruen ruling. “Indeed, FPC is already working with the exceptional litigators at Cooper & Kirk—truly the best in the space—on the largest Second Amendment litigation program in the country.”

The Plaintiff

Of course, before Cooper & Kirk can get involved, a plaintiff is needed. That’s where the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition come in. They not only act as plaintiffs, but they also recruit individual plaintiffs, someone who can claim standing—a direct injury from the law that’s being challenged.

The Second Amendment Foundation has always been involved in litigation, and in 2013, it helped create the Firearms Policy Coalition, which is similarly focused on challenging gun laws in court. Since Trump appointees have made the composition of the Supreme Court so favorable and the foundation began to receive CDF funds in 2020, the groups have become juggernauts. In the three years prior to 2020, a public database of federal lawsuits identifies them, alone or together, as plaintiffs in 28 actions; in the three subsequent years, that number jumps to 89. “We want to get a case before the Supreme Court,” Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb told journalist Stephen Gutowski last year. “And the quicker these cases move, the better for gun ownership and for gun rights.”

“We want to get a case before the Supreme Court. And the quicker these cases move, the better for gun ownership and for gun rights.”

Gottlieb created the Second Amendment Foundation and another group at the vanguard of conservative crusades, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, back in the early 1970s. He is known for direct-mail and marketing savvy, and for cashing in on right-wing causes through private companies that have business arrangements with his advocacy groups. In 1984, he pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud and was sentenced to a year in prison, which he served largely on work release. (More recently, the attorney general of Washington state investigated Gottlieb, who filed a lawsuit against the office alleging the inquiry into his activities was politically motivated.)

Gottlieb first gained public notice in the late 1980s as an architect of the Wise Use movement, which championed the exploitation of natural resources and an end to environmentalism. Backlash to federal control of land in Western states and encroachment of environmental regulation fueled a groundswell. “I’ve never seen anything pay out as quickly as this whole Wise Use thing has done,” Gottlieb said back then. “It touches the same kind of anger as the gun stuff, and not only generates a higher rate of return, but also a higher average dollar donation. My gun stuff runs about $18. The Wise Use stuff breaks $40.” When news stories linked Wise Use to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Gottlieb described them as “overplayed.” In 2023, he headlined the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an event hosted by the Rod of Iron Ministries, which is led by a son of Moon. The MAGA-allied church glorifies AR-15-style rifles—the type of gun used in the recent attempt to assassinate Trump—seeing in them the biblical “rod of iron,” Christ’s prophesied instrument of dominion at Armageddon.

In November 2022, two years after the CDF operation began, Gottlieb gave a deposition as part of a challenge to an Illinois law that prohibits young adults from carrying a gun in public. When I first read the deposition in early 2023, many questions I’d had were answered. In it, Gottlieb testified that an anonymous funder was supporting the case by paying his counsel, Cooper & Kirk. He said the firm had given him a statement outlining how much money the person had spent on what he estimated to be a dozen foundation lawsuits underway in 2021. (Court records confirm his assessment.)

When asked whether he knew who was paying Cooper & Kirk, Gottlieb testified, “I wish I did.”

That remark alarms some legal ethicists, who argue that rules of professional responsibility should be interpreted as requiring that a client know who is paying their counsel before consenting to representation. “He’s either just lying or the firm is delinquent in getting informed consent,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston who specializes in legal ethics and firearms regulation.

In response to written questions, Gottlieb said that his answers in the deposition were “accurate” and that “our attorneys did not fail to get our informed consent, it was given.” Outside funding arrangements can raise questions about whether the financial backer or plaintiff is really in charge, but Gottlieb said, “merely because a third-party may have paid for some services rendered, SAF retains control over all legal direction, strategy, and settlement authority, which is wholly ethical.”   

Gottlieb is not the operation’s only beneficiary who seems to be unaware of the source of the largesse. In 2021, the CDF paid Gary Kleck, a professor emeritus of criminology at Florida State University whose work has been touted by gun interests for decades, $6,900, according to an IRS filing. When I emailed him, Kleck said the money was a consulting fee from Cooper & Kirk for work he’d done on Bruen. “I have no idea what the Constitutional Defense Fund is,” he said, “and had never heard of it before you contacted me.”

The Professor

Even when they go before a court inclined to overturn gun laws, the lawyers and plaintiffs need research to bolster their case. Enter Georgetown assistant professor William English, who in 2021 received a $58,750 CDF grant and the same year filed a key brief supporting the Bruen plaintiffs.

Before arriving at Georgetown in 2016, English, a political economist, was research director at Harvard University’s Edward J. Safra Center for Ethics. (While at Harvard, he also founded the Abigail Adams Institute, whose mission is “reviving traditional humanities education”—i.e., the Western canon. In 2022, the CDF gave the institute a $23,000 grant for “constitutional research.”)

In June, the New York Times ran a profile of English in which the existence of a dark money drive to strike down gun laws being run through the CDF was first revealed. The Times detailed how English’s Bruen brief was filed jointly with the Center for Human Liberty—another part of Gottlieb’s operation that was incorporated in Nevada two months before English filed his brief. In it, English argued that, based on his own research that had not been peer-reviewed, there was no connection between right-to-carry laws, increased numbers of gun carry permits, and violent crime. The brief was prepared by a Manhattan attorney, Edward Paltzik, whose firm received $80,000 from the CDF in 2021.

English’s work suited the needs of the Bruen plaintiffs perfectly. Their counsel cited it during oral arguments, and Charles Cooper’s pal, Alito, did so in a concurring opinion. An update English later published concluded that AR-15-style rifles are in “common use,” a finding central to the gun movement’s legal advocacy post-Bruen. Since the ruling, gun interests have cited English’s work in dozens of motions and pleadings in cases nationwide.

Academics on both sides of the gun debate have found defects in English’s work. In a January 2023 deposition in an Oregon case, Kleck, the Florida State professor, said English’s survey can’t be relied on. “He’s vague about exactly how he developed his sample,” Kleck said. “And there is nothing in his report to contradict the assumption that what he had was a self-selected sample.”

I’d been trying to get English and Georgetown to respond to questions about his research since the Bruen ruling came down. In December 2022, I paid a visit to the gated community where Georgetown President John DeGioia lived. After that, the university’s communications office finally responded by email, stating: “Georgetown respects and supports academic freedom, including the right of its faculty members to conduct independent research. The University’s Institutional Review Board reviewed this study before the survey began, and the survey costs were supported by an external grant that did not flow through the University.”

The tax ID number that the CDF reported to the IRS in conjunction with English’s grant is Georgetown’s. Asked recently to clarify the meaning of “did not flow through the university” and whether it had a position on English’s failure to divulge who funded his work, a Georgetown spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the university is “unable to identify any record of Constitutional Defense Fund funds flowing through Georgetown and is uncertain why the University’s tax identification number appears in CDF’s records. Georgetown faculty members have academic freedom to conduct independent research projects. The views of faculty members are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Georgetown University.”

On June 26, English published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he defended his work, bashed the New York Times, and characterized attempts by me and other reporters to get answers from him as “harassment.” English wrote that the Times “and other outlets are signaling that they will cancel academics who state inconvenient facts…Those of us who want to foster an evidence-based public-policy discourse should reject these tactics, and courts should take note of them.”

The Middleman

Lawyers and academics all need to be paid, which brings us back to the Undercover Pastor.

Sutherland likes to tout his time with the DC police, but not all of his undercover work ended smoothly. In one early 1990s case, Sutherland and Abdalla—now on the board of the CDF—handled an informant named Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was shot 16 times and killed. When federal prosecutors tried members of the drug crew suspected in the killing, it emerged that Williams had been allowed to continue making street buys for Sutherland, who was posing as a Georgetown University construction worker seeking crack, despite the presence of the “white guy” causing dealers unease, according to court transcripts. At trial, evidence went missing, including a pager in Sutherland’s possession that defense attorneys argued could shed light on the killing and related crimes. “I am going to get the chief of police and the United States attorney in here and read them the riot act,” the judge said at one point. “To lose evidence of various kinds day after day is just not satisfactory.” Prosecutors dropped the murder charge but obtained drug conspiracy convictions against the defendants.

After Sutherland left the DC police force in 2013, his role at McLean Bible, where he’d long held staff positions, grew. In 2016, he began talks with the Southern Baptist Convention on a partnership to “plant” churches in the DC region. Sutherland founded an entity called New City Network, an arm of McLean Bible, to carry out the work. Concerned that the partnership violated McLean’s constitution, which requires the church to remain unaffiliated with denominations, a group of members filed suit against McLean in 2022.

The legal battle revealed a complex series of money transfers totaling more than $7 million between McLean, the convention, and New City Network. The plaintiffs felt that records and testimony produced in their suit demonstrated that the partnership had indeed violated McLean’s constitution and dropped their case last year. In a letter summarizing the litigation, however, their attorney made clear that questions remain: “Current and former church leaders deposed could not explain the reasons for this unorthodox payment structure, or state with confidence where the money went specifically.” A church webpage allows that “financial transactions for the church planting were sometimes confusing,” but says an independent audit accounted for the money spent. 

“Current and former church leaders deposed could not explain the reasons for this unorthodox payment structure, or state with confidence where the money went specifically.”

Sutherland was among those deposed. He said that he’d left McLean Bible and his role leading New City Network in May 2019. He was unable to name any churches the network had started, save for one in Falls Church, Virginia, where he and his son-in-law now preach. “For Heaven’s sake,” Sutherland said. “I can picture all the pastors in my head. I just can’t think of the names they gave their churches. Boy oh boy.”

One of the plaintiffs in that suit, Jeremiah Burke, said Sutherland’s limited recall was an act. “He repeatedly recounts, in his podcast and on his Instagram page, in vivid detail, events from 20 and 30 years ago with absolute precision, events in which he is the hero,” Burke said. “However, in his deposition, having sworn under oath to tell the truth, Dale somehow couldn’t call to mind details of significant events from the recent past.”

One name that Sutherland could not recall in his September 2023 deposition was Veritas Church in DC’s Georgetown neighborhood, which had gotten New City funds. Sutherland became interim pastor of Veritas in 2020 and renamed the church City Light, the same name used by the church in Virginia that he and his son-in-law lead. In 2020 and 2021, IRS disclosures for the CDF listed City Light’s Georgetown location as the CDF address. When I visited last year, I found a largely vacant office building, save for one floor occupied by the Embassy of the Republic of South Sudan, and no sign of a church or the CDF.

A former McLean Bible elder, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal church matters, described Sutherland as “kind-hearted” and a “warrior for the Lord,” but also “deceptive.” During the church planting drive, he said, Sutherland “did things the way he wanted to, he just kind of ran rogue.” The elder said Sutherland “is a pretty good talker, he can sell pretty well,” and would “cuddle up next to” the congregation’s big donors.

As Sutherland left McLean Bible and established the CDF, he began to collect more money from his array of nonprofits, including Code 3 Association, whose stated goal is better relations between police and the public. (Abdalla is a director there, too.) In 2020, these nonprofits—the CDF, Code 3, and Boost Others, Inc.—paid Sutherland and his private company, Code 3 Consulting, more than $200,000. Over the next two years, Sutherland collected more than $700,000 from his nonprofits. He also began flipping DC properties, which he sometimes bought from the estates of the recently deceased or those in bankruptcy. From 2020 through early 2023, records show, he bought at least a dozen properties valued at $7 million and sold them for more than $11 million.

In short, Sutherland has been awash in cash since he filed paperwork to create the CDF. In one sense, he’s an odd middleman. People who know him can’t recall Sutherland expressing support for scuttling gun laws. “I never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or gun rights,” said the former McLean elder. “I never did, nope, and I was with him a lot.”

“I never heard him talk about the Second Amendment or gun rights. I never did, nope, and I was with him a lot.”

But there are connections that lead back to McLean Bible. In a 2023 interview, Thompson, the Cooper & Kirk managing partner who has overseen much of the firm’s Second Amendment work, praised the church that was his spiritual home for two decades. “I grew up Episcopalian,” said Thompson, who did not respond to written questions for this story, “and about 20 years ago, I became a born-again Christian and went to McLean Bible Church.”

Twice in the last year, I knocked on the door of Sutherland’s home. I got no response and left a business card. Attempts to reach him by phone failed. Then, in mid-June, he answered. I asked him to explain how he’d come to be running money through the CDF to Cooper & Kirk. “Sir, I am in the car with my grandson,” Sutherland said, “and I am not talking.”

The Dark Money

In July 2016, a young man in Washington state, angry and jealous after a break-up, bought an AR-15-style rifle and a 30-round magazine. A week later, he bought another 30-round magazine, then shot and killed three people, including his ex-girlfriend, at a house party. He later blamed his actions in part on easy access to guns. The killings prompted the state legislature to enact a ban on high-capacity magazines and AR-15-style rifles. The Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, as co-plaintiffs, filed suits in 2022 and 2023 to strike down the bans. Cooper & Kirk is their counsel in the case targeting the magazine capacity ban. English’s survey findings were cited by the plaintiffs in both cases. (As the Times reported, however, the plaintiffs subsequently agreed not to rely on English’s work “in any respect” after the state sought to subpoena information from English in the AR-15 case regarding the development of his survey.) Both cases are pending in federal district court in Washington state.

Autumn Snider’s son, 19-year-old Jake Long, was the first to be shot and killed at the party. Snider said those with the means to fund litigation meant to impact public policy should be free to do so—as long as they do so openly. “You have the obligation to reveal who you are and should have the confidence to provide transparency to the public,” Snider said. “If you can’t be forthcoming with who you are, that is a red flag.”

Defenders of using dark money to support litigation liken the practice to anonymous political speech, which enjoys First Amendment protection. But such arguments have limits, said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA School of Law who has written a book on the gun debate. “First Amendment rights are mitigated by the need to ensure the integrity of the judicial system,” Winkler said. “We generally don’t allow parties in a case to be anonymous.”

Anonymous funding arrangements, which are not uncommon in the realm of impact litigation, effectively allow an “end run” around judicial ethics safeguards. “How do you know whether there is any impropriety, any influence peddling?” Winkler said. “It’s fundamentally problematic.”

Seth Endo, an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, said the debate over disclosing the identity of anonymous funders involves fundamental questions about the role of courts. If courts are neutral arbiters of the rights and responsibilities of disputing parties, as many who work in them like to contend, then it’s easy to argue that disclosure is irrelevant. However, if courts are not detached umpires but are themselves political agents that drive social change, then the public has a strong interest in knowing who’s enabling litigation, Endo said.

Given Cooper & Kirk’s ties to deep-pocketed conservatives who specialize in waging ideological battles through courts, there are any number of suspects who may be routing millions of dollars through Donors Trust to Sutherland’s CDF—and on to the advocacy groups and their lawyers.

Donors Trust is a pass-through that effectively conceals the identities of individuals and advocacy groups backing right-wing causes. (On the political left, organizations like the Tides Foundation do the same.) Those who give to Donors Trust can say how they’d like their money to be spent, but they don’t have the final word. In exchange for giving up that control, they get up-front tax benefits. Prominent funders and architects of the modern conservative movement, including the Kochs, the Bradley Foundation, and hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer, have all moved money through Donors Trust. 

In 2013 and 2014, Mercer’s foundation gave a total of $800,000 to Gottlieb’s Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which was at its zenith when Gottlieb was pushing his Wise Use agenda. Mercer is a gun lover and Trump devotee. From 2020 to 2022, Mercer’s foundation gave more than $56 million to Donors Trust. Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who has spearheaded her family’s philanthropic and political efforts, did not respond to emailed questions.

By the end of 2022, the last year for which IRS filings are public, Sutherland’s fund had $1.6 million on hand. The pastor has recently formed other nonprofits with similar names, including an outfit called the Constitutional Freedom Fund, incorporated in Virginia in 2022, and the Foundation for Constitutional Freedom, established in Utah in December 2023. Details on their activities have yet to be disclosed.

Recently, a French film director named David André unveiled a documentary series on Sutherland called Dale L’Infiltré, or Dale Undercover. A blurb on a promotional video reads, “Dale Sutherland, a young pastor-police officer, will become a master in the art of infiltration, filming criminals without their knowledge and using fictitious identities: Italian mafia boss, pimp, drug trafficker, rap producer.” Sutherland also recently started a new podcast: Cops, Criminals, and Christ.

In the fall, Cooper & Kirk is slated to represent the Firearms Policy Coalition, which is joined by the Second Amendment Foundation before the Supreme Court in the ghost gun case. Given the court’s current political lean, the gun rights advocates might well prevail. Other cases, which could result in AR-15-style rifle and high-capacity magazine bans being ruled unconstitutional, are wending their way through lower courts, though the funding source for this entire dark money operation remains shrouded from the public.

Update, July 30: This story has been updated to further detail Alan Gottlieb’s involvement with the criminal justice system.

On the first night of the Republican National Convention, I settled into a seat in the upper levels of Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum to watch the most incongruous political address of my life. The speaker was Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The subject was the betrayal of the American worker. The audience included many of the kinds of people he held responsible for that treachery.

O’Brien, whose union has not endorsed Donald Trump, started off nice but soon got angry. He slammed the “economic terrorism” of corporations firing employees who try to organize and attacked business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce. As he worked further into his list of grievances, the applause grew more and more tepid, until it finally just seemed to stop. Trump and his newly announced running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio—whom O’Brien singled out for praise for having recently walked a picket line—stood politely throughout. Occasionally, the former president turned to his would-be vice president, cracked a joke, and smiled.

If you suspended your skepticism for a moment, it looked like a glimpse of the anti-corporate, anti-elite Republican Party that Vance, a self-styled spokesman of “forgotten” people, has promised to usher in. Then I checked my notifications and found the Republican Party that Vance more concretely represents. Around the same time O’Brien took the stage, another figure who has historically shied away from events like the RNC was shaking up the race in his own unprecedented way: The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the world’s richest union-busters, Elon Musk, was planning to donate $45 million a month to a super-PAC supporting the Republican campaign. 

The Republican convention was defined by the basic tension between the image Trump sought to project and the purpose his candidacy ultimately serves. In many ways, some cosmetic and others not, it was a far different event than any Republican convention in memory. The gathering offered a glimpse of a potentially unbeatable electoral coalition this November—a unified MAGA movement that’s making inroads with Black men, Latino voters, Gen Z, and union members. Republicans were expanding the tent by granting admittance to anyone who shared their antipathy to migrants, pronouns, and $5 gas. Vance, a Never Trumper–turned–MAGA heir, was a symbol of that vibe shift, promising an ideological realignment built to last. But his star turn in Milwaukee suggested a different story, one that might sound less like O’Brien and more like Musk. It was not the rise of the workers. It was the restoration of the bosses.

I spent much of the day after O’Brien’s speech talking to Republicans about his remarks. Everyone was in favor of the union leader speaking (though Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, in an extremely Ron Johnson moment, told me that he hadn’t seen it). But it wasn’t so much due to the content of the speech. O’Brien’s appearance was an example, Trump supporters told me, of the sort of deal-making and coalition-building they believed only he could swing. It would “shred the Democrats,” as one Nebraska Republican put it.

Indeed, the whole convention sometimes seemed like a demonstration of Trump’s power of persuasion. From the model and rapper Amber Rose to Linda Fornos, a Nicaraguan immigrant who sells life insurance in Las Vegas, and San Francisco investor David Sacks, the refrain was the same: They never thought they’d find themselves agreeing with Trump—until Trump won them over. Come to think of it, that is also the story of Vance.

Some of the people I talked to were supportive of a more pro-labor GOP. Barbara Porcella, a Republican from Long Island in New York who comes from a family of union plumbers, told me O’Brien “nailed it, he absolutely nailed it.” Perhaps not coincidentally, New York is one of the states where Trump has made the biggest inroads in recent years. A Politico story on the state’s drift reported that union leaders were “alarmed” by Trump’s strength among their members.

“I don’t know why the unions vote Democrat,” Porcella said.

It’s Day Two of the RNC, and there’s a bizarre ripple racing through the delegate class: Are we unionists now? @garrison_hayes speaks with @timothypmurphy about the historic appearance of Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, at the… pic.twitter.com/2Pwe25oiOS

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 17, 2024

But the answers to that question were toting red lanyards just like hers. Every time I went to the convention floor from the media filing area later that night, I took an escalator past the Uline Lounge, a VIP area named for the Wisconsin-based packaging moguls who have poured vast amounts of money into combating union power. Sitting behind Trump in the presidential box one night was South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who in January, in the midst of a yearslong battle with the International Longshoremen’s Association, pledged to fight the union “all the way to the gates of hell.” Not far away, foot traffic came to a standstill as people lined up to take a photo or have a word with Markwayne Mullin, the senator from Oklahoma who nearly fought O’Brien at a hearing. Also in the building was Tate Reeves, the Mississippi governor who signed a joint statement with McMaster and four other governors in April declaring that the United Auto Workers’ organizing efforts in the South “threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” (Disclosure: I and most Mother Jones employees are members of the UAW.) 

One of the week’s memorable visuals was West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, the party’s nominee to replace Joe Manchin in the Senate, appearing on stage alongside his bulldog, Babydog, who sat on a little chair. Babydog was pretty cute. Justice’s record isn’t. Retired coal miners have sued the party-switching billionaire resort owner repeatedly to force his companies to pay the health benefits they promised. Everywhere you turned there was someone for whom unions were not a vital new constituency in a workers’ party, but a speed bump on the road to higher profits. 

“We’ve become the party of the working men and women in this country; Democrats are the party of wokeness,” Johnson told me, after saying he’d look up O’Brien’s speech on YouTube “if it’s a good one.” There was room, he added, to “talk to, particularly, private-sector unions.” 

But Johnson has never offered much support for private-sector unions, nor has he backed the sort of workers whom Vance would later, in his own speech, blame Democrats for selling out. Johnson was one of the party’s loudest proponents of offshoring American manufacturing jobs. He once told a group of Realtors: “Let the billions of people around the world…provide us these goods—high-quality, dirt-cheap.”

Outside the arena Tuesday, I found Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor whose 2011 law gutted the ability of public-sector unions to collectively bargain. (A recent state court ruling struck down much of that law.) Walker’s union-busting push defined a whole era of conservative governance. He was the fulfillment of a dream—a million white papers and donor retreats crawled so that one day he might walk.  

“[I’m] glad that he was there, glad that he seems to be supporting the president,” he said of O’Brien. “I don’t always have to agree with every speaker on everything, but I was happy he was there, just as I was happy to have union”—he paused to choose his words carefully—“private-sector union support when I was running for governor.” 

I asked the state’s most famous union-buster if Republicans should take the Teamster’s advice and become more pro-union. He offered a substitution.

“I think they’re pro-worker,” he said. “That’s the key.”

After O’Brien left town, with a good deal of his membership criticizing him for the stunt, the party’s public flirtation with organized labor seemed to fade away for a while. No one in this new workers’ party mentioned unions again Tuesday night or for most of the program Wednesday. The Teamsters were like any number of people and issues in Trump’s orbit: The value was in having his name attached to theirs; the rest was diminishing returns.

It fell to Vance, on Wednesday, to pick up the subject and mold it into something more palatable to the audience. “We need a leader who fights for the people who built this country,” he told the audience, and who “answers to the working man, union and non-union alike.” Vance spoke those words deliberately, as if there was something profound about his having said it out loud—the way a politician might have once declared their support for same-sex marriage.

Vance’s speech was, like O’Brien’s, the kind of thing you never would have heard at the Republican convention in years past. Weaving in stories from his bestselling memoir, he sketched a picture of Middletown, Ohio, as a place that Democrats and Republicans gutted with destructive trade deals and disastrous foreign policy. “Jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war,” he said. Vance was well-positioned to make that case. He is a famously good storyteller whose life story is so compelling that, as his wife, Usha, pointed out moments before, it has already been the subject of a Ron Howard film.

But Vance was chosen not just because of the people he once knew back home, but because of the people on his Venmo now. Take that big incoming donation from Musk. The Tesla founder had reportedly spent the last few weeks lobbying Trump to choose Vance as his running mate. So had billionaire Palantir founder Peter Thiel, with whom Musk and Vance had both worked. As my colleague Jacob Rosenberg wrote this week, Vance may have started as a rural-white whisperer for liberal elites, but he rose to power in the MAGA universe through his ability to explain Trumpism to conservative and libertarian Silicon Valley elites.

The burgeoning anti-monopolist wing of the GOP is a real thing. Some elected officials, including a few whom O’Brien had praised by name, have shown more of a willingness to publicly align themselves with certain unions. But the people who phoned Trump to lobby for Vance are not clamoring for passage of the PRO Act. They did not call in their chits to get Republican senators to vote to shore up Teamster pensions. They aren’t advocating for a living wage for restaurant workers. They are the people O’Brien was purportedly there to tear down. Thiel is a monopolist. Musk wants to make trucking autonomous. The Tesla boss, who is now one of the biggest political donors in history, has threatened to take away stock options from unionizing employees at Tesla and is currently suing to eliminate the National Labor Relations Board. For these people, the appeal of Vance is not any gesture to the UAW, but a kind of sweeping, techno-authoritarian transformation. They are not anti-elite. They are the elite.

You don’t have to speculate about how Trump would deal with unions as president, because he has been president before. During his first term, Trump’s NLRB appointees were notoriously anti-union, and corporate interests such as Musk are banking on his army of conservative appointees to the federal bench gutting labor protections even further. That’s in stark contrast to the man Trump is running against, whom the New Yorker called “the most pro-labor president since FDR,” largely thanks to the aggressive intervention of his NLRB.

On Wednesday, as Vance offered his toned-down style of class war, Trump offered more signs that a second term would continue to favor the c-suite in a lengthy interview with Bloomberg. He was proposing nearly $1 trillion in corporate tax cuts and floating JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon as his future Treasury secretary. Trump had already promised oil company executives that he would put the brakes on electric-vehicle incentives while asking for $1 billion in campaign cash.

Trump, in a rambling acceptance speech Thursday, reiterated that promise while rebranding it as a deal for workers. He would scrap the new electric-car incentives on day one, he said, and impose a massive tariff on Chinese vehicles made in Mexico. (Biden has already imposed one.) Then he singled out the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, who in the last year had secured a new contract with the Big Three after a historic strike and presided over the first successful union drive at a Southern automobile plant.

“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen,” Trump said of the Chinese vehicles, “and the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately, and every autoworker—union and non-union—should be voting for Donald Trump.”

It was a fitting end to the Republican rebrand that wasn’t—a billionaire boss, whose catchphrase is “You’re fired,” reaching out to the workers of the world by demanding their leader be laid off.

It wasn’t just the pro-worker facade. The convention was different in other ways, too. The assassination attempt added a shock of religious fervor to a cause that had never been lacking in it. Tucker Carlson called Trump’s survival “divine intervention.” On my first day in town, I met a woman who had been standing right behind Trump when the ex-president was shot, then drove more than 500 miles just to see him again. It was just a thing she had to do. A Florida woman who had stood behind Trump at a different rally just a few days before that told me that taking a bullet for the ex-president would have been the great honor of her life. 

“I’d be pleased. I’d be happy,” she said. “And my mom says the same thing.”

People stopped posing for photos with the Trumpian thumbs-up and started raising their fists instead. On my way to the security checkpoint, a guy dressed as Uncle Sam wheeled up to me on an electric scooter and turned to show me the white patch on his ear. You saw more and more of those little white squares over the course of the week. The whole thing was a sign from God, supporters said, and to be fair, spiritual awakenings have often stemmed from less. Musk himself had been caught up in the moment, confessing his loyalty to Trump on a dashed-off X post minutes after the shooting, as if he had suddenly gazed into the fiery furnace and seen the truth. 

The party had never seemed so unified, even if the reason for that unity was that everyone who might otherwise have spoken out had stayed home or been cast aside. Vance was there because some of the people in this same movement had wanted to hang former Vice President Mike Pence. (That Pence had survived was not generally considered an act of providence.) Sitting in Milwaukee, seeing a party that was so much more put together than it was when it last won in 2016, and so much more deliberate in its outreach, it was hard to shake the impression that this might all actually work. The Democrats were something more than a mess. The polls were all coming up Trump.

It is a powerful coalition, but it is not a particularly well-balanced one. Some people are going to cash in, and some people are going to get screwed. The bad news for O’Brien, and the good news for Musk, is that it’s usually the people who spend $200 million who leave the auction with what they paid for.

On the first night of the Republican National Convention, I settled into a seat in the upper levels of Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum to watch the most incongruous political address of my life. The speaker was Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The subject was the betrayal of the American worker. The audience included many of the kinds of people he held responsible for that treachery.

O’Brien, whose union has not endorsed Donald Trump, started off nice but soon got angry. He slammed the “economic terrorism” of corporations firing employees who try to organize and attacked business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce. As he worked further into his list of grievances, the applause grew more and more tepid, until it finally just seemed to stop. Trump and his newly announced running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio—whom O’Brien singled out for praise for having recently walked a picket line—stood politely throughout. Occasionally, the former president turned to his would-be vice president, cracked a joke, and smiled.

If you suspended your skepticism for a moment, it looked like a glimpse of the anti-corporate, anti-elite Republican Party that Vance, a self-styled spokesman of “forgotten” people, has promised to usher in. Then I checked my notifications and found the Republican Party that Vance more concretely represents. Around the same time O’Brien took the stage, another figure who has historically shied away from events like the RNC was shaking up the race in his own unprecedented way: The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the world’s richest union-busters, Elon Musk, was planning to donate $45 million a month to a super-PAC supporting the Republican campaign. 

The Republican convention was defined by the basic tension between the image Trump sought to project and the purpose his candidacy ultimately serves. In many ways, some cosmetic and others not, it was a far different event than any Republican convention in memory. The gathering offered a glimpse of a potentially unbeatable electoral coalition this November—a unified MAGA movement that’s making inroads with Black men, Latino voters, Gen Z, and union members. Republicans were expanding the tent by granting admittance to anyone who shared their antipathy to migrants, pronouns, and $5 gas. Vance, a Never Trumper–turned–MAGA heir, was a symbol of that vibe shift, promising an ideological realignment built to last. But his star turn in Milwaukee suggested a different story, one that might sound less like O’Brien and more like Musk. It was not the rise of the workers. It was the restoration of the bosses.

I spent much of the day after O’Brien’s speech talking to Republicans about his remarks. Everyone was in favor of the union leader speaking (though Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, in an extremely Ron Johnson moment, told me that he hadn’t seen it). But it wasn’t so much due to the content of the speech. O’Brien’s appearance was an example, Trump supporters told me, of the sort of deal-making and coalition-building they believed only he could swing. It would “shred the Democrats,” as one Nebraska Republican put it.

Indeed, the whole convention sometimes seemed like a demonstration of Trump’s power of persuasion. From the model and rapper Amber Rose to Linda Fornos, a Nicaraguan immigrant who sells life insurance in Las Vegas, and San Francisco investor David Sacks, the refrain was the same: They never thought they’d find themselves agreeing with Trump—until Trump won them over. Come to think of it, that is also the story of Vance.

Some of the people I talked to were supportive of a more pro-labor GOP. Barbara Porcella, a Republican from Long Island in New York who comes from a family of union plumbers, told me O’Brien “nailed it, he absolutely nailed it.” Perhaps not coincidentally, New York is one of the states where Trump has made the biggest inroads in recent years. A Politico story on the state’s drift reported that union leaders were “alarmed” by Trump’s strength among their members.

“I don’t know why the unions vote Democrat,” Porcella said.

It’s Day Two of the RNC, and there’s a bizarre ripple racing through the delegate class: Are we unionists now? @garrison_hayes speaks with @timothypmurphy about the historic appearance of Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, at the… pic.twitter.com/2Pwe25oiOS

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 17, 2024

But the answers to that question were toting red lanyards just like hers. Every time I went to the convention floor from the media filing area later that night, I took an escalator past the Uline Lounge, a VIP area named for the Wisconsin-based packaging moguls who have poured vast amounts of money into combating union power. Sitting behind Trump in the presidential box one night was South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who in January, in the midst of a yearslong battle with the International Longshoremen’s Association, pledged to fight the union “all the way to the gates of hell.” Not far away, foot traffic came to a standstill as people lined up to take a photo or have a word with Markwayne Mullin, the senator from Oklahoma who nearly fought O’Brien at a hearing. Also in the building was Tate Reeves, the Mississippi governor who signed a joint statement with McMaster and four other governors in April declaring that the United Auto Workers’ organizing efforts in the South “threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” (Disclosure: I and most Mother Jones employees are members of the UAW.) 

One of the week’s memorable visuals was West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, the party’s nominee to replace Joe Manchin in the Senate, appearing on stage alongside his bulldog, Babydog, who sat on a little chair. Babydog was pretty cute. Justice’s record isn’t. Retired coal miners have sued the party-switching billionaire resort owner repeatedly to force his companies to pay the health benefits they promised. Everywhere you turned there was someone for whom unions were not a vital new constituency in a workers’ party, but a speed bump on the road to higher profits. 

“We’ve become the party of the working men and women in this country; Democrats are the party of wokeness,” Johnson told me, after saying he’d look up O’Brien’s speech on YouTube “if it’s a good one.” There was room, he added, to “talk to, particularly, private-sector unions.” 

But Johnson has never offered much support for private-sector unions, nor has he backed the sort of workers whom Vance would later, in his own speech, blame Democrats for selling out. Johnson was one of the party’s loudest proponents of offshoring American manufacturing jobs. He once told a group of Realtors: “Let the billions of people around the world…provide us these goods—high-quality, dirt-cheap.”

Outside the arena Tuesday, I found Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor whose 2011 law gutted the ability of public-sector unions to collectively bargain. (A recent state court ruling struck down much of that law.) Walker’s union-busting push defined a whole era of conservative governance. He was the fulfillment of a dream—a million white papers and donor retreats crawled so that one day he might walk.  

“[I’m] glad that he was there, glad that he seems to be supporting the president,” he said of O’Brien. “I don’t always have to agree with every speaker on everything, but I was happy he was there, just as I was happy to have union”—he paused to choose his words carefully—“private-sector union support when I was running for governor.” 

I asked the state’s most famous union-buster if Republicans should take the Teamster’s advice and become more pro-union. He offered a substitution.

“I think they’re pro-worker,” he said. “That’s the key.”

After O’Brien left town, with a good deal of his membership criticizing him for the stunt, the party’s public flirtation with organized labor seemed to fade away for a while. No one in this new workers’ party mentioned unions again Tuesday night or for most of the program Wednesday. The Teamsters were like any number of people and issues in Trump’s orbit: The value was in having his name attached to theirs; the rest was diminishing returns.

It fell to Vance, on Wednesday, to pick up the subject and mold it into something more palatable to the audience. “We need a leader who fights for the people who built this country,” he told the audience, and who “answers to the working man, union and non-union alike.” Vance spoke those words deliberately, as if there was something profound about his having said it out loud—the way a politician might have once declared their support for same-sex marriage.

Vance’s speech was, like O’Brien’s, the kind of thing you never would have heard at the Republican convention in years past. Weaving in stories from his bestselling memoir, he sketched a picture of Middletown, Ohio, as a place that Democrats and Republicans gutted with destructive trade deals and disastrous foreign policy. “Jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war,” he said. Vance was well-positioned to make that case. He is a famously good storyteller whose life story is so compelling that, as his wife, Usha, pointed out moments before, it has already been the subject of a Ron Howard film.

But Vance was chosen not just because of the people he once knew back home, but because of the people on his Venmo now. Take that big incoming donation from Musk. The Tesla founder had reportedly spent the last few weeks lobbying Trump to choose Vance as his running mate. So had billionaire Palantir founder Peter Thiel, with whom Musk and Vance had both worked. As my colleague Jacob Rosenberg wrote this week, Vance may have started as a rural-white whisperer for liberal elites, but he rose to power in the MAGA universe through his ability to explain Trumpism to conservative and libertarian Silicon Valley elites.

The burgeoning anti-monopolist wing of the GOP is a real thing. Some elected officials, including a few whom O’Brien had praised by name, have shown more of a willingness to publicly align themselves with certain unions. But the people who phoned Trump to lobby for Vance are not clamoring for passage of the PRO Act. They did not call in their chits to get Republican senators to vote to shore up Teamster pensions. They aren’t advocating for a living wage for restaurant workers. They are the people O’Brien was purportedly there to tear down. Thiel is a monopolist. Musk wants to make trucking autonomous. The Tesla boss, who is now one of the biggest political donors in history, has threatened to take away stock options from unionizing employees at Tesla and is currently suing to eliminate the National Labor Relations Board. For these people, the appeal of Vance is not any gesture to the UAW, but a kind of sweeping, techno-authoritarian transformation. They are not anti-elite. They are the elite.

You don’t have to speculate about how Trump would deal with unions as president, because he has been president before. During his first term, Trump’s NLRB appointees were notoriously anti-union, and corporate interests such as Musk are banking on his army of conservative appointees to the federal bench gutting labor protections even further. That’s in stark contrast to the man Trump is running against, whom the New Yorker called “the most pro-labor president since FDR,” largely thanks to the aggressive intervention of his NLRB.

On Wednesday, as Vance offered his toned-down style of class war, Trump offered more signs that a second term would continue to favor the c-suite in a lengthy interview with Bloomberg. He was proposing nearly $1 trillion in corporate tax cuts and floating JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon as his future Treasury secretary. Trump had already promised oil company executives that he would put the brakes on electric-vehicle incentives while asking for $1 billion in campaign cash.

Trump, in a rambling acceptance speech Thursday, reiterated that promise while rebranding it as a deal for workers. He would scrap the new electric-car incentives on day one, he said, and impose a massive tariff on Chinese vehicles made in Mexico. (Biden has already imposed one.) Then he singled out the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, who in the last year had secured a new contract with the Big Three after a historic strike and presided over the first successful union drive at a Southern automobile plant.

“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen,” Trump said of the Chinese vehicles, “and the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately, and every autoworker—union and non-union—should be voting for Donald Trump.”

It was a fitting end to the Republican rebrand that wasn’t—a billionaire boss, whose catchphrase is “You’re fired,” reaching out to the workers of the world by demanding their leader be laid off.

It wasn’t just the pro-worker facade. The convention was different in other ways, too. The assassination attempt added a shock of religious fervor to a cause that had never been lacking in it. Tucker Carlson called Trump’s survival “divine intervention.” On my first day in town, I met a woman who had been standing right behind Trump when the ex-president was shot, then drove more than 500 miles just to see him again. It was just a thing she had to do. A Florida woman who had stood behind Trump at a different rally just a few days before that told me that taking a bullet for the ex-president would have been the great honor of her life. 

“I’d be pleased. I’d be happy,” she said. “And my mom says the same thing.”

People stopped posing for photos with the Trumpian thumbs-up and started raising their fists instead. On my way to the security checkpoint, a guy dressed as Uncle Sam wheeled up to me on an electric scooter and turned to show me the white patch on his ear. You saw more and more of those little white squares over the course of the week. The whole thing was a sign from God, supporters said, and to be fair, spiritual awakenings have often stemmed from less. Musk himself had been caught up in the moment, confessing his loyalty to Trump on a dashed-off X post minutes after the shooting, as if he had suddenly gazed into the fiery furnace and seen the truth. 

The party had never seemed so unified, even if the reason for that unity was that everyone who might otherwise have spoken out had stayed home or been cast aside. Vance was there because some of the people in this same movement had wanted to hang former Vice President Mike Pence. (That Pence had survived was not generally considered an act of providence.) Sitting in Milwaukee, seeing a party that was so much more put together than it was when it last won in 2016, and so much more deliberate in its outreach, it was hard to shake the impression that this might all actually work. The Democrats were something more than a mess. The polls were all coming up Trump.

It is a powerful coalition, but it is not a particularly well-balanced one. Some people are going to cash in, and some people are going to get screwed. The bad news for O’Brien, and the good news for Musk, is that it’s usually the people who spend $200 million who leave the auction with what they paid for.

In a Princeton University lecture hall one morning last December, Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living philosophers, offered his Philosophy 385 (“Practical Ethics”) students a brief overview of their upcoming final. The registrar, he noted, had scheduled the exam for the following Sunday evening. This, he proclaimed, “seems unethical.”

The line got a good laugh. A hint of winter chill hung in the air, the undergrads having just sloughed off their Canada Goose parkas and settled into the seats of Wood Auditorium in McCosh Hall, a Tudor Gothic behemoth that was once the largest building on campus. It was here, 102 years earlier, that Albert Einstein described his theory of relativity to a packed house.

The 200 students enrolled in Philosophy 385—about as many as in all other Princeton philosophy classes combined—were acutely aware, per the course syllabus, that they were his final crop:

This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. NOTE: This will be the last time I teach this course before my retirement from Princeton University.

In May, following a two-day farewell conference, the now-78-year-old Australian bade farewell to Princeton and, with a perceptible measure of good riddance, the United States, his second home for more than a quarter-century. For his final class, Singer had prepared a PowerPoint looking back on his years at Princeton—and America.

It’s striking to consider the extent to which the United States has been shaped by Singer’s version of utilitarianism—the belief that actions are ethical insomuch as they increase our collective pleasure and limit our collective suffering. His addition to this ancient idea is simple and profound: Singer believes that all pain experienced by sentient beings counts the same.

The logical extensions of his intellectual positions have on occasion caused great controversy, as when Singer’s belief that newborns lack sentience led him to assert that in extreme cases, parents should have the right to end the life of a severely disabled infant. In response, a disability rights organization dubbed him “the most dangerous man on earth.” Generally speaking, Singer sees few ideas as off-limits. He recently helped launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which last fall published an article on whether zoophilia is morally permissible.

Whatever one might think of Singer’s ideas, there’s no doubt they’ve had a great deal of impact. Interest-based utilitarianism is at the root of Singer’s path-breaking advocacy for animal rights and, somewhat controversially, of effective altruism, the charitable principle famously espoused by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud last year. Earlier this year, along with Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Singer launched a podcast exploring how to live an ethical, meaningful life.

Perhaps most profoundly, his philosophy flicks at the core of America’s democratic project. While the Founding Fathers were most influenced by John Locke, it was John Stuart Mill—a utilitarian—whose ideas shaped the evolution of constitutional liberalism in the second half of the 20th century. As we face one of the most fraught political periods in recent memory, it’s sobering to hear Singer’s take on America’s shortcomings—and his assessment of what’s to come.

Singer first arrived in the US in 1973, shortly after finishing his graduate work at Oxford University. He was accompanied by his wife, Renata, who’d recently given birth to their first child. The couple had planned to return to Australia to raise their daughter but wanted to spend some time in the States first. “Obviously, everything in America is a big presence growing up in Australia,” Singer told me during one of several interviews.

On the advice of philosopher Derek Parfit, another influential philosopher of Singer’s generation, Singer accepted a visiting professorship at New York University and settled into university housing on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

The NYU position came with the possibility of a two-year extension, but the college was then on the verge of bankruptcy. It ultimately sold off its uptown campus, and the administrators informed Singer that they wouldn’t renew his contract. “We were reasonably okay with that,” he recalls. “We didn’t want our children to grow up as Americans, really.” He quickly landed an appointment at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

“‘Animal Liberation’ lit the fire for me,” says the attorney and activist Cheryl Leahy. “You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

With time to kill between jobs, he spent the fall of 1974 teaching a continuing education course. In it, he presented a draft of a manuscript based on an essay he’d published the year before in the New York Review of Books. The piece was inspired in part by Singer’s decision, four years earlier on Earth Day, to stop eating meat. It was persuasive enough to convince the Review’s founder and editor, Robert Silvers, to become a vegetarian.

Published in 1975 with the same title, Animal Liberation is almost inarguably the most important book in the history of animal rights. It has remained in print for 50 years and been read by almost everyone in the field. Cheryl Leahy read it at age 13, after a classmate accused her in the lunchroom of eating the “decomposing flesh of a tortured animal.”

Today, Leahy is executive director of Animal Outlook, a nonprofit focused on animal protection, and has spent her 20-year career as an attorney advocating for the interests of nonhuman beings. “Animal Liberation lit the fire for me,” she told me. “It probably did for countless people. You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

Thanks in part to Singer, vegetarianism in the United States has increased over the years. In 1994, barely 1 percent of Americans self-identified as vegetarian or vegan. Recent surveys put the rate at 5 to 8 percent. Yet with population growth, the US public now consumes more meat than ever, and the vast majority of factory-farmed animals still live short, miserable lives. Even “cage-free” hens, Singer laments, are generally crowded into giant sheds with thousands of birds. “I’m disappointed [the animal welfare movement] hasn’t gone further,” he told the class I attended.

Some 25 years after the couple’s NYU adventure, Singer received an invitation to teach at Princeton. Their kids were grown, and he and Renata had been contemplating a move anyway. “In fact,” he says, “we’d been talking about going to a Third World country for something quite different.” But a friend, animal rights activist Henry Spira, argued that Singer had a greater obligation: “Henry said to me at some stage, ‘You ought to come over the United States because it’s a much bigger pond and you’ll have a much bigger impact. The United States needs your ideas just as much as Australia, but it’s 15 times bigger and you’ll have more of a world influence.’” The offer proved “just a bit too tempting to turn down.”

Back in the lecture hall, with Australian understatement, Singer informed his students that his 1999 hiring “caused something of a stir.” Indeed, the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that no academic appointment had caused such controversy since 1940, when City College had tried to hire atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Editorial writers, the story noted, “have compared Mr. Singer’s hiring to that of a Nazi.” Then-Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton alum and supporter, threatened to stop donating to the university if the appointment stood. Protesters blocked the entrance to Nassau Hall, the administration building, because of Singer’s support of euthanasia in extreme circumstances. But Princeton President Harold Shapiro stood behind Singer, and the hubbub subsided.

Given all of this year’s campus upheaval over Israel’s activities in Gaza, Singer’s hiring kerfuffle seems almost quaint today. I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no. During the lecture, when Singer spoke proudly of his role in launching the Journal of Controversial Ideas, no one seemed to bat an eye.

Near the end of his lecture, Singer addressed an elephant in the room—Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange founder who’d just been convicted of defrauding customers and investors out of at least $10 billion. Bankman-Fried also ranked among the most prominent champions of effective altruism (EA), a movement inspired in significant part by Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”   

EA proponents generally advocate for using data and reason to maximize the future benefits of any charitable action. In his paper, Singer argued that the failure of wealthy people to contribute to humanitarian causes was akin to failing to help a child drowning in a shallow pond. He was referring in this case to a famine afflicting Bangladeshi war refugees, but the argument applied generally.

In 2009, inspired by Singer’s work, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched an organization, Giving What We Can, framed around their pledge to donate at least a tenth of their income to effective charities. The next year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invited fellow billionaires to take the Giving Pledge, a vow to dedicate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. When a group of 17 billionaires signed the pledge in late 2010, the press release included a statement from Singer.

Singer explained to his students how Sam Bankman-Fried had claimed he’d never intended to commit fraud and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” He lowered his voice and added, “Well, be warned: Don’t let life creep up on you.”

Although their causes and motivations have been questioned, the notion that rich people ought to be more altruistic—the “A” in EA—is not a matter of serious dispute. It’s the “E” where things get complicated.

In 2013, Singer co-founded The Life You Can Save, an organization named after one of his books that attempts to quantify and maximize charitable impact, often in terms of quality-adjusted life years, a metric borrowed from the public health universe. In practical terms, this usually means steering money to causes that benefit developing nations as opposed to, say, your elementary school PTA.

At the heart of MacAskill’s own 2016 book, Doing Good Better, is the idea that a dollar spent by a citizen of a rich country could do 100 times more good if spent in an impoverished nation. This notion is not particularly controversial either, at least not among ethicists, who by and large would agree that giving to the opera is neither charitable nor effective by any meaningful definition of the words.

But then there’s “longtermism,” an EA offshoot that prioritizes the elimination of existential risks such as biological and nuclear weapons, climate change, and malicious AIs, which longtermers say could wreak havoc on future humans or other forms of life—which could include (non-malicious) sentient AIs. In a more recent book, What We Owe the Future, MacAskill casts protecting the denizens of the distant future as the moral imperative of our time—the ultimate cause.

This view is highly controversial. The New School for Social Research philosophy professor Alice Crary, a prominent critic, calls longtermism “toxic” because of the stark utilitarian tradeoff it embraces. The focus on “existential risk,” she writes, “marks a dramatic shift from the concern with present and near-term suffering that is the hallmark of their effective altruist progenitors.”

Effective altruism, which Singer’s work helped inspire, “makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” says philosopher Alice Crary. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

Singer distances himself from strong longtermism in part for this reason. He’s also skeptical of the longtermers’ more speculative projects, like aiming to protect the interests of sentient nonhumans. Utilitarians, Singer says, are split on whether hypothetical beings deserve the same consideration as actual humans. “That I still regard as one of the most difficult and baffling issues in ethical theory,” he says.

He’s also doubtful that we can meaningfully adjust our actions to do good in the distant future and is thus careful to distinguish between the dangers from asteroids and viruses—“where we can significantly reduce risks for modest amounts of money”—and more abstract projects. As for general artificial intelligence, AI that broadly matches or surpasses human capabilities, “we don’t know whether that will come, we don’t when it is coming, and we don’t really know what we could do now that would reduce that risk.”

But Singer is more tolerant of the notion of pursuing a high income with the intent to donate a sizable portion to charity. The EA community calls this “earning to give,” and it’s a significant part of the work of effective altruist Benjamin Todd’s organization 80,000 Hours (the average person’s work longevity); its disciples included Bankman-Fried, who claimed he aspired to accumulate near-infinite wealth so he could redistribute it.

For his students, Singer put up a slide reading, “Do Good But Don’t Be Sketchy!” explaining how Bankman-Fried had told journalist Kelsey Piper he’d never intended to commit fraud, and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” A father of three and grandfather of four, Singer then lowered his voice. “Well, be warned,” he said. “Don’t let life creep up on you.”

But Singer’s admonition begs the question of whether EA can be used to justify unethical behavior. It certainly seem to rationalize the existence and inform the ethos of elite colleges like Princeton, an institution that admits more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent, and where graduates’ most common career path is “business.”

EA arguably relieves such institutions of the pressure to embrace a more socioeconomically diverse group of students and encourage them toward public-interest careers. “EA makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” Crary says. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

“Australia does elections better than America. We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays…We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries.”

Singer might not go that far, but he was willing to sign on as an unpaid adviser (in name only) to Class Action, a nonprofit I co-founded that advocates against inequitable admissions policies at so-called elite colleges and the funneling of graduates into investment banking and management consulting careers.

To his students, Singer said: “You will get asked to donate to various charities after you graduate, and one of them might be to improve education here at Princeton. The question can be raised: Is this the most effective thing that you can do with your donations?”

He acknowledged that they might feel a debt to their alma mater: “But I think you should think of your charitable donations like that in a different pocket from donations where you want to really do the most good in the world.”

While Singer is best known for his influence on animal rights and effective altruism, his Oxford graduate thesis, later published as his first book, focused on the ethics of civil disobedience in democracies. In it, he argues that our voluntary participation in a democratic process obligates us to accept its outcome.

“After the election,” Singer wrote in 1973—amid the Watergate scandal that would lead to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation—“it is too late to say that one never accepted its validity.” It’s thus only natural that he has followed American politics closely, and critically, ever since the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush president in 2000, shortly after Singer arrived at Princeton. Now, like much of America, he’s anxious about November.

“One of the things that’s absurd about American politics is first-past-the-post voting,” Singer says, citing the practice of allowing voters to select only one candidate and awarding the seat to whomever has the most votes—as opposed to alternative voting systems that are used around the world and widely perceived as fairer. “The reason that Bush was president instead of [Al] Gore was Ralph Nader running for the Greens,” he says. “That was terrible of him, and I’ve never forgiven him, but it also shows how stupid this voting system is. [Donald] Trump never would have gotten the nomination in 2016 if they’d used ranked-choice voting.”

“Australia does elections better than America,” he adds, citing a litany of practices he views as beneficial. “We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays, not a weekday. We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries—we don’t have politicians do it. We don’t have primaries. We have parliamentary parties elect their leaders, which means they’ve been through the scrutiny of their colleagues, so it’s a much better proving ground for who’s going to be a good leader.”

He holds special enmity for the Electoral College. “Hillary [Clinton] got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, so she should have been president,” Singer says. “And the gerrymandered electorates are disgraceful as well.”

Singer points to the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire when she could: “Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean?”

Whatever his debt to the United States and its institutions, Singer’s national allegiance is clear. “I’ve never thought of myself as an American,” he says, as we talk about how difficult it is for his countrymen to accept the insanity of US politics. “They are astounded about the gun laws,” he says. “Australia has very tough gun laws, and they were brought in by a conservative prime minister, John Howard. It’s just incredible to me that America cannot see how obviously terrible it is to have guns available to everybody.”

The critiques continue. “America lacks universal health care coverage, which is something that we Australians all take for granted,” Singer says. “This is perhaps more controversial, but we generally don’t think that it’s a good idea to have a Supreme Court that decides issues like abortion.”

Australians, he adds, have difficulty grappling with the outsize sway of money over politics and policy here. “It’s not that money has no influence in Australia,” he explains, “but it doesn’t have the same kind of influence on individual elected representatives, because what matters is the political party—and individual candidates for Parliament don’t have to raise their own money.”

Prior to Trump’s recent criminal conviction, over a vegan lunch at a Princeton dining hall, I ask Singer what he sees in America’s future. “You think philosophers have crystal balls, do you?” he asks with a smile. I counter that I do not, but that readers would be keenly interested in an astute traveler’s observations of our embattled democratic order. “You’re Alexis de Tocqueville in this story,” I say.

“I hope I can live up to it.”

He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “Until recently, I thought that Trump was not going to be electable. I thought he had this 40 percent of hardcore supporters, but that wasn’t going to be enough. But obviously, the polls that have come out recently have been more scary than that. I wish there were a strong Democrat running for office who is not in his 80s, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.”

Trump’s behavior has polarized the nation and “encouraged this idea that we have our own set of facts,” he emphasizes. “Bush did some of that, too. I think Karl Rove said something like, ‘You’re living in the reality world.’ But Trump has made it so much worse, talking about the fake news stuff just to get people to believe that there were no facts you can agree on. I think that’s been very damaging to democracy.” (Rove has denied that he was the source of the quote in question, which the New York Times Magazine attributed to an anonymous “senior adviser to Bush.”)

Trump would not “do what needs to be done” on climate, and that problem “dwarfs the others,” Singer says. “Another four years, then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

Most utilitarians believe that engaging with ideas—even patently false ones—generally serves the greater good, but on the eve of the first presidential debate, which was disastrous for President Joe Biden, Singer said he thought Trump might be the rare exception. Debating Trump, he told me in an email, “would be unethical if this would-be despot, crazy person were not the overwhelmingly likely nominee of one of America’s two major political parties.”

Yet based purely on a political-utilitarian calculus, he figures Biden didn’t have much choice. “I think it would look weak to refuse to debate him,” Singer said. “Trump would make a lot of hay with that. He would say, ‘He’s old and senile and can’t do it.’”

After the debate, Singer wrote on X that “Biden should announce that at the Democratic Convention he will release his delegates to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump.” In a follow-up email, he cited the “terrible blot” of Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign on Nader’s own career as a consumer advocate and the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire from the Supreme Court while Democrats controlled the Senate, which resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade “and now is denying the EPA the power to issue essential environmental regulations.”

“Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean for the US and the world?” he said.

He fears what a second Trump term might portend. He’s particularly worried about Trump’s fossil-fuel cheerleading and hostility toward climate action. “He’s not going to do what needs to be done, and that’s a huge problem that dwarfs the others. Another four years,” Singer told me, “then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

The demise of the founders’ grand experiment isn’t far behind on his worry list: “Would it be the end of American democracy? Probably not is my guess, but there’s a much greater chance of it being the end of American democracy if Trump is elected than if he’s defeated. I wouldn’t like to take that risk. And the fact that he would not support Ukraine against his friend [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, whom he understands so well, is also a big worry. Because that’s not just about the plight of Ukraine, it’s about the rule of law in international affairs.”

His concern extends to the Gaza situation. “Trump is such a loose cannon” that he’s difficult to predict, Singer says. “But given the idea that he’s all about putting America’s interests first and he doesn’t seem to show that he cares much about other people, he may well believe that it’s in America’s interest for the Netanyahu government to do as it wishes. And that may be much worse for the Palestinian people than if Biden, who is at least trying to put some pressure on the Netanyahu government to have a ceasefire, remains in office.”

Back in McCosh Hall, the hour drew to a close—and with it Singer’s Princeton career.    

After nearly a quarter-century, there was a palpable sense he’d had enough. His farewell slide to his last-ever Practical Ethics class—which was followed by a rousing standing ovation from the students—had nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy or politics or even ethics.

It was a photo of Singer in a wetsuit, surfboard in hand, practicing a hobby he took up in his 50s. “Bye,” it said. “I’ve gone surfing.”

In a Princeton University lecture hall one morning last December, Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living philosophers, offered his Philosophy 385 (“Practical Ethics”) students a brief overview of their upcoming final. The registrar, he noted, had scheduled the exam for the following Sunday evening. This, he proclaimed, “seems unethical.”

The line got a good laugh. A hint of winter chill hung in the air, the undergrads having just sloughed off their Canada Goose parkas and settled into the seats of Wood Auditorium in McCosh Hall, a Tudor Gothic behemoth that was once the largest building on campus. It was here, 102 years earlier, that Albert Einstein described his theory of relativity to a packed house.

The 200 students enrolled in Philosophy 385—about as many as in all other Princeton philosophy classes combined—were acutely aware, per the course syllabus, that they were his final crop:

This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. NOTE: This will be the last time I teach this course before my retirement from Princeton University.

In May, following a two-day farewell conference, the now-78-year-old Australian bade farewell to Princeton and, with a perceptible measure of good riddance, the United States, his second home for more than a quarter-century. For his final class, Singer had prepared a PowerPoint looking back on his years at Princeton—and America.

It’s striking to consider the extent to which the United States has been shaped by Singer’s version of utilitarianism—the belief that actions are ethical insomuch as they increase our collective pleasure and limit our collective suffering. His addition to this ancient idea is simple and profound: Singer believes that all pain experienced by sentient beings counts the same.

The logical extensions of his intellectual positions have on occasion caused great controversy, as when Singer’s belief that newborns lack sentience led him to assert that in extreme cases, parents should have the right to end the life of a severely disabled infant. In response, a disability rights organization dubbed him “the most dangerous man on earth.” Generally speaking, Singer sees few ideas as off-limits. He recently helped launch the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which last fall published an article on whether zoophilia is morally permissible.

Whatever one might think of Singer’s ideas, there’s no doubt they’ve had a great deal of impact. Interest-based utilitarianism is at the root of Singer’s path-breaking advocacy for animal rights and, somewhat controversially, of effective altruism, the charitable principle famously espoused by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud last year. Earlier this year, along with Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Singer launched a podcast exploring how to live an ethical, meaningful life.

Perhaps most profoundly, his philosophy flicks at the core of America’s democratic project. While the Founding Fathers were most influenced by John Locke, it was John Stuart Mill—a utilitarian—whose ideas shaped the evolution of constitutional liberalism in the second half of the 20th century. As we face one of the most fraught political periods in recent memory, it’s sobering to hear Singer’s take on America’s shortcomings—and his assessment of what’s to come.

Singer first arrived in the US in 1973, shortly after finishing his graduate work at Oxford University. He was accompanied by his wife, Renata, who’d recently given birth to their first child. The couple had planned to return to Australia to raise their daughter but wanted to spend some time in the States first. “Obviously, everything in America is a big presence growing up in Australia,” Singer told me during one of several interviews.

On the advice of philosopher Derek Parfit, another influential philosopher of Singer’s generation, Singer accepted a visiting professorship at New York University and settled into university housing on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

The NYU position came with the possibility of a two-year extension, but the college was then on the verge of bankruptcy. It ultimately sold off its uptown campus, and the administrators informed Singer that they wouldn’t renew his contract. “We were reasonably okay with that,” he recalls. “We didn’t want our children to grow up as Americans, really.” He quickly landed an appointment at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

“‘Animal Liberation’ lit the fire for me,” says the attorney and activist Cheryl Leahy. “You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

With time to kill between jobs, he spent the fall of 1974 teaching a continuing education course. In it, he presented a draft of a manuscript based on an essay he’d published the year before in the New York Review of Books. The piece was inspired in part by Singer’s decision, four years earlier on Earth Day, to stop eating meat. It was persuasive enough to convince the Review’s founder and editor, Robert Silvers, to become a vegetarian.

Published in 1975 with the same title, Animal Liberation is almost inarguably the most important book in the history of animal rights. It has remained in print for 50 years and been read by almost everyone in the field. Cheryl Leahy read it at age 13, after a classmate accused her in the lunchroom of eating the “decomposing flesh of a tortured animal.”

Today, Leahy is executive director of Animal Outlook, a nonprofit focused on animal protection, and has spent her 20-year career as an attorney advocating for the interests of nonhuman beings. “Animal Liberation lit the fire for me,” she told me. “It probably did for countless people. You cannot overstate the importance of Singer’s work in influencing and launching this movement.”

Thanks in part to Singer, vegetarianism in the United States has increased over the years. In 1994, barely 1 percent of Americans self-identified as vegetarian or vegan. Recent surveys put the rate at 5 to 8 percent. Yet with population growth, the US public now consumes more meat than ever, and the vast majority of factory-farmed animals still live short, miserable lives. Even “cage-free” hens, Singer laments, are generally crowded into giant sheds with thousands of birds. “I’m disappointed [the animal welfare movement] hasn’t gone further,” he told the class I attended.

Some 25 years after the couple’s NYU adventure, Singer received an invitation to teach at Princeton. Their kids were grown, and he and Renata had been contemplating a move anyway. “In fact,” he says, “we’d been talking about going to a Third World country for something quite different.” But a friend, animal rights activist Henry Spira, argued that Singer had a greater obligation: “Henry said to me at some stage, ‘You ought to come over the United States because it’s a much bigger pond and you’ll have a much bigger impact. The United States needs your ideas just as much as Australia, but it’s 15 times bigger and you’ll have more of a world influence.’” The offer proved “just a bit too tempting to turn down.”

Back in the lecture hall, with Australian understatement, Singer informed his students that his 1999 hiring “caused something of a stir.” Indeed, the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that no academic appointment had caused such controversy since 1940, when City College had tried to hire atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Editorial writers, the story noted, “have compared Mr. Singer’s hiring to that of a Nazi.” Then-Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton alum and supporter, threatened to stop donating to the university if the appointment stood. Protesters blocked the entrance to Nassau Hall, the administration building, because of Singer’s support of euthanasia in extreme circumstances. But Princeton President Harold Shapiro stood behind Singer, and the hubbub subsided.

Given all of this year’s campus upheaval over Israel’s activities in Gaza, Singer’s hiring kerfuffle seems almost quaint today. I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no. During the lecture, when Singer spoke proudly of his role in launching the Journal of Controversial Ideas, no one seemed to bat an eye.

Near the end of his lecture, Singer addressed an elephant in the room—Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange founder who’d just been convicted of defrauding customers and investors out of at least $10 billion. Bankman-Fried also ranked among the most prominent champions of effective altruism (EA), a movement inspired in significant part by Singer’s 1971 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”   

EA proponents generally advocate for using data and reason to maximize the future benefits of any charitable action. In his paper, Singer argued that the failure of wealthy people to contribute to humanitarian causes was akin to failing to help a child drowning in a shallow pond. He was referring in this case to a famine afflicting Bangladeshi war refugees, but the argument applied generally.

In 2009, inspired by Singer’s work, Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and Will MacAskill launched an organization, Giving What We Can, framed around their pledge to donate at least a tenth of their income to effective charities. The next year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invited fellow billionaires to take the Giving Pledge, a vow to dedicate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. When a group of 17 billionaires signed the pledge in late 2010, the press release included a statement from Singer.

Singer explained to his students how Sam Bankman-Fried had claimed he’d never intended to commit fraud and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” He lowered his voice and added, “Well, be warned: Don’t let life creep up on you.”

Although their causes and motivations have been questioned, the notion that rich people ought to be more altruistic—the “A” in EA—is not a matter of serious dispute. It’s the “E” where things get complicated.

In 2013, Singer co-founded The Life You Can Save, an organization named after one of his books that attempts to quantify and maximize charitable impact, often in terms of quality-adjusted life years, a metric borrowed from the public health universe. In practical terms, this usually means steering money to causes that benefit developing nations as opposed to, say, your elementary school PTA.

At the heart of MacAskill’s own 2016 book, Doing Good Better, is the idea that a dollar spent by a citizen of a rich country could do 100 times more good if spent in an impoverished nation. This notion is not particularly controversial either, at least not among ethicists, who by and large would agree that giving to the opera is neither charitable nor effective by any meaningful definition of the words.

But then there’s “longtermism,” an EA offshoot that prioritizes the elimination of existential risks such as biological and nuclear weapons, climate change, and malicious AIs, which longtermers say could wreak havoc on future humans or other forms of life—which could include (non-malicious) sentient AIs. In a more recent book, What We Owe the Future, MacAskill casts protecting the denizens of the distant future as the moral imperative of our time—the ultimate cause.

This view is highly controversial. The New School for Social Research philosophy professor Alice Crary, a prominent critic, calls longtermism “toxic” because of the stark utilitarian tradeoff it embraces. The focus on “existential risk,” she writes, “marks a dramatic shift from the concern with present and near-term suffering that is the hallmark of their effective altruist progenitors.”

Effective altruism, which Singer’s work helped inspire, “makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” says philosopher Alice Crary. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

Singer distances himself from strong longtermism in part for this reason. He’s also skeptical of the longtermers’ more speculative projects, like aiming to protect the interests of sentient nonhumans. Utilitarians, Singer says, are split on whether hypothetical beings deserve the same consideration as actual humans. “That I still regard as one of the most difficult and baffling issues in ethical theory,” he says.

He’s also doubtful that we can meaningfully adjust our actions to do good in the distant future and is thus careful to distinguish between the dangers from asteroids and viruses—“where we can significantly reduce risks for modest amounts of money”—and more abstract projects. As for general artificial intelligence, AI that broadly matches or surpasses human capabilities, “we don’t know whether that will come, we don’t when it is coming, and we don’t really know what we could do now that would reduce that risk.”

But Singer is more tolerant of the notion of pursuing a high income with the intent to donate a sizable portion to charity. The EA community calls this “earning to give,” and it’s a significant part of the work of effective altruist Benjamin Todd’s organization 80,000 Hours (the average person’s work longevity); its disciples included Bankman-Fried, who claimed he aspired to accumulate near-infinite wealth so he could redistribute it.

For his students, Singer put up a slide reading, “Do Good But Don’t Be Sketchy!” explaining how Bankman-Fried had told journalist Kelsey Piper he’d never intended to commit fraud, and “sometimes life creeps up on you.” A father of three and grandfather of four, Singer then lowered his voice. “Well, be warned,” he said. “Don’t let life creep up on you.”

But Singer’s admonition begs the question of whether EA can be used to justify unethical behavior. It certainly seem to rationalize the existence and inform the ethos of elite colleges like Princeton, an institution that admits more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent, and where graduates’ most common career path is “business.”

EA arguably relieves such institutions of the pressure to embrace a more socioeconomically diverse group of students and encourage them toward public-interest careers. “EA makes students in places like Princeton feel like they’re the heroic rescuers of the world,” Crary says. “And these institutions have enriched themselves off of it.”

“Australia does elections better than America. We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays…We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries.”

Singer might not go that far, but he was willing to sign on as an unpaid adviser (in name only) to Class Action, a nonprofit I co-founded that advocates against inequitable admissions policies at so-called elite colleges and the funneling of graduates into investment banking and management consulting careers.

To his students, Singer said: “You will get asked to donate to various charities after you graduate, and one of them might be to improve education here at Princeton. The question can be raised: Is this the most effective thing that you can do with your donations?”

He acknowledged that they might feel a debt to their alma mater: “But I think you should think of your charitable donations like that in a different pocket from donations where you want to really do the most good in the world.”

While Singer is best known for his influence on animal rights and effective altruism, his Oxford graduate thesis, later published as his first book, focused on the ethics of civil disobedience in democracies. In it, he argues that our voluntary participation in a democratic process obligates us to accept its outcome.

“After the election,” Singer wrote in 1973—amid the Watergate scandal that would lead to then-President Richard Nixon’s resignation—“it is too late to say that one never accepted its validity.” It’s thus only natural that he has followed American politics closely, and critically, ever since the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush president in 2000, shortly after Singer arrived at Princeton. Now, like much of America, he’s anxious about November.

“One of the things that’s absurd about American politics is first-past-the-post voting,” Singer says, citing the practice of allowing voters to select only one candidate and awarding the seat to whomever has the most votes—as opposed to alternative voting systems that are used around the world and widely perceived as fairer. “The reason that Bush was president instead of [Al] Gore was Ralph Nader running for the Greens,” he says. “That was terrible of him, and I’ve never forgiven him, but it also shows how stupid this voting system is. [Donald] Trump never would have gotten the nomination in 2016 if they’d used ranked-choice voting.”

“Australia does elections better than America,” he adds, citing a litany of practices he views as beneficial. “We have ranked-choice voting and we have proportional representation for the Senate. We vote on Saturdays, not a weekday. We have an independent electoral commission, which draws up electoral boundaries—we don’t have politicians do it. We don’t have primaries. We have parliamentary parties elect their leaders, which means they’ve been through the scrutiny of their colleagues, so it’s a much better proving ground for who’s going to be a good leader.”

He holds special enmity for the Electoral College. “Hillary [Clinton] got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, so she should have been president,” Singer says. “And the gerrymandered electorates are disgraceful as well.”

Singer points to the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire when she could: “Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean?”

Whatever his debt to the United States and its institutions, Singer’s national allegiance is clear. “I’ve never thought of myself as an American,” he says, as we talk about how difficult it is for his countrymen to accept the insanity of US politics. “They are astounded about the gun laws,” he says. “Australia has very tough gun laws, and they were brought in by a conservative prime minister, John Howard. It’s just incredible to me that America cannot see how obviously terrible it is to have guns available to everybody.”

The critiques continue. “America lacks universal health care coverage, which is something that we Australians all take for granted,” Singer says. “This is perhaps more controversial, but we generally don’t think that it’s a good idea to have a Supreme Court that decides issues like abortion.”

Australians, he adds, have difficulty grappling with the outsize sway of money over politics and policy here. “It’s not that money has no influence in Australia,” he explains, “but it doesn’t have the same kind of influence on individual elected representatives, because what matters is the political party—and individual candidates for Parliament don’t have to raise their own money.”

Prior to Trump’s recent criminal conviction, over a vegan lunch at a Princeton dining hall, I ask Singer what he sees in America’s future. “You think philosophers have crystal balls, do you?” he asks with a smile. I counter that I do not, but that readers would be keenly interested in an astute traveler’s observations of our embattled democratic order. “You’re Alexis de Tocqueville in this story,” I say.

“I hope I can live up to it.”

He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “Until recently, I thought that Trump was not going to be electable. I thought he had this 40 percent of hardcore supporters, but that wasn’t going to be enough. But obviously, the polls that have come out recently have been more scary than that. I wish there were a strong Democrat running for office who is not in his 80s, but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.”

Trump’s behavior has polarized the nation and “encouraged this idea that we have our own set of facts,” he emphasizes. “Bush did some of that, too. I think Karl Rove said something like, ‘You’re living in the reality world.’ But Trump has made it so much worse, talking about the fake news stuff just to get people to believe that there were no facts you can agree on. I think that’s been very damaging to democracy.” (Rove has denied that he was the source of the quote in question, which the New York Times Magazine attributed to an anonymous “senior adviser to Bush.”)

Trump would not “do what needs to be done” on climate, and that problem “dwarfs the others,” Singer says. “Another four years, then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

Most utilitarians believe that engaging with ideas—even patently false ones—generally serves the greater good, but on the eve of the first presidential debate, which was disastrous for President Joe Biden, Singer said he thought Trump might be the rare exception. Debating Trump, he told me in an email, “would be unethical if this would-be despot, crazy person were not the overwhelmingly likely nominee of one of America’s two major political parties.”

Yet based purely on a political-utilitarian calculus, he figures Biden didn’t have much choice. “I think it would look weak to refuse to debate him,” Singer said. “Trump would make a lot of hay with that. He would say, ‘He’s old and senile and can’t do it.’”

After the debate, Singer wrote on X that “Biden should announce that at the Democratic Convention he will release his delegates to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump.” In a follow-up email, he cited the “terrible blot” of Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign on Nader’s own career as a consumer advocate and the “great pity” of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire from the Supreme Court while Democrats controlled the Senate, which resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade “and now is denying the EPA the power to issue essential environmental regulations.”

“Does Joe Biden really want his legacy to be the reelection of Donald Trump and everything that that will mean for the US and the world?” he said.

He fears what a second Trump term might portend. He’s particularly worried about Trump’s fossil-fuel cheerleading and hostility toward climate action. “He’s not going to do what needs to be done, and that’s a huge problem that dwarfs the others. Another four years,” Singer told me, “then it’s almost past the time where we can prevent catastrophic climate change.”

The demise of the founders’ grand experiment isn’t far behind on his worry list: “Would it be the end of American democracy? Probably not is my guess, but there’s a much greater chance of it being the end of American democracy if Trump is elected than if he’s defeated. I wouldn’t like to take that risk. And the fact that he would not support Ukraine against his friend [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, whom he understands so well, is also a big worry. Because that’s not just about the plight of Ukraine, it’s about the rule of law in international affairs.”

His concern extends to the Gaza situation. “Trump is such a loose cannon” that he’s difficult to predict, Singer says. “But given the idea that he’s all about putting America’s interests first and he doesn’t seem to show that he cares much about other people, he may well believe that it’s in America’s interest for the Netanyahu government to do as it wishes. And that may be much worse for the Palestinian people than if Biden, who is at least trying to put some pressure on the Netanyahu government to have a ceasefire, remains in office.”

Back in McCosh Hall, the hour drew to a close—and with it Singer’s Princeton career.    

After nearly a quarter-century, there was a palpable sense he’d had enough. His farewell slide to his last-ever Practical Ethics class—which was followed by a rousing standing ovation from the students—had nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy or politics or even ethics.

It was a photo of Singer in a wetsuit, surfboard in hand, practicing a hobby he took up in his 50s. “Bye,” it said. “I’ve gone surfing.”