There is a subset of people on both Left and Right who are invested in thinking that the world is constantly getting worse. These are the same people who go after Steve Pinker, who has argued that things are getting better on average, even though he notes that there are blips and that he can’t predict whether there may be a hug “worsening” in the future—like a nuclear war or global warming that can’t be overcome. But I’m constantly surprised at how people, in the face of the data, still think the world is on a serious moral and material downslide. Would you rather live in 1880 than now? If so, you might already be dead from a tooth abscess.

In his latest column (click to read), Jesse Singal takes these people to task, especially our old friend Scientific American, which has apparently climbed on the “things are worse” bandwagon, which may now have become one aspect of the woke mindset.  Singal gives some data to counteract these claims, and you can see his article for free by clicking on the headline below (his link to the Sci. Am. article is one he found archived).

An excerpt and some corrections given by Singal:

The other day I came across a Scientific American article headlined “We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality.”

The article, by a pair of researchers at Stanford University and York University, attempts to argue that we are living in increasingly terrible, violent, chaotic times.

Is this true? It’s a widely held belief, particularly among academics and media, as well as an interesting horseshoe coalition of far-left (capitalism has destroyed everything) and far-right (multiculturalism and the collapse of traditional values have destroyed everything) thinkers and, perhaps more often, “thinkers.” Steven Pinker wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, published in 2011, in part to rebut this sort of thinking, which is endemic in his own circles.

So, the article: it’s bizarre. Let’s unpack it. The framing presents the thesis as an obvious, established fact, and immediately sets out to describe deniers as Part of the Problem and to explain their false beliefs. The subheadline: “We are living through a terrible time in humanity. Here’s why we tend to stick our heads in the sand and why we need to pull them out, fast.”

What is particularly terrible about these times? According to the authors:

If it seems like things are kind of off these days, you’re not alone. Recently, more than 100,000 people liked a post marking the start of the pandemic that said, “[Four] years ago, this week was the last normal week of our lives.”

Objectively speaking, we are living through a dumpster fire of a historical moment. Right now more than one million people are displaced and at risk of starvation in Gaza, as are millions more in Sudan. Wars are on the rise around the globe, and 2023 saw the most civilian casualties in almost 15 years.

These are all terrible events, and every one of the lives represented in these statistics is a real-life human person whose death or injury affected others. But at a zoomed-out level, none of this is remotely unusual in human history, and the authors don’t present any evidence — here or elsewhere in the piece — that things really are worse. “The most civilian casualties in almost 15 years” doesn’t mean much. It’s actually 13 years, according to the headline of the linked-to Guardian article. Let’s take a look at the top of that piece:

Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a monitoring group, said 33,846 non-combatants had been killed or wounded during 2023, an increase of 62% on last year, and the largest amount it had counted since it began its annual survey in 2010.

Again: Every one of those is a real-life human. But still, the question at hand isn’t “Is it bad when people are killed or maimed in war?,” but “Are we seeing some sort of scary historical rise in the number of people killed or maimed in war?”

No. Not even close.

There follows a lot of data about deaths in war that far exceeded 33,846, like massive killings in Cambodia, Germany, and Iraq (I’d add Syria). Then Singal says this:

That doesn’t mean that the plight of Ukrainian, Gazan, and Sudanese civilians isn’t horrific, or that the progress we’ve made is permanent. Maybe the 2024 figures will be worse. Maybe all-out war will break out between Israel and Lebanon, China will get more aggressive about Taiwan, NATO will get fully pulled into the Ukrainian-Russian war, and all sorts of other shit will hit the fan. It’s entirely possible! Humanity has never enjoyed permanent peace and it would be delusional and hubristic to think we can get there. But the point is, numerically, the only way you can claim that we’re in some particularly dark era, as this Scientific American article does, is by. . . well, not revealing the numbers.

The authors of the Scientific American op-ed, Marianne Cooper and Maxim Voronov, also claim that “the second biggest covid surge occurred this winter”. (The article was published on June 18) Singal gives graphs of both hospitalizations and death rate to show that this isn’t true.

Singal gives a theory, which he says is not his, that we’ve evolved to pay attention to bad news, and to be very anxious, because in our long 6-million-year history before civilization that mindset was adaptive. And that, he says, is why we get so much Chicken-Little-ism now, and why so much denial of a palpably improving world. I’m not sure about that theory as there’s no way to test it, but Pinker has noted that bad news always gets more airplay than good news, and I suppose Singal’s explanation of this is as good as any.

Singal’s peroration includes this:

But overall, it’s remarkable the progress our species has made, however you slice it, at least in terms of people’s ability to live longer lives, have the food they need to eat, and have shelter. We haven’t solved these problems, of course, and in many instances the political dysfunction frustrating our attempts to do so is agonizing, but perspective still matters a great deal. It’s hard to build a mostly stable, mostly prosperous civilization. It really is! That’s why we only just got around to it recently, and why the job is unfinished.

. . . . . Anyway, I wish Scientific American were a better magazine these days. This was an exceptionally weird article. But I’m not going to pretend it’s the end of the world or anything.

I’ve bashed Scientific American enough that I needn’t do it again here. Singal has done the work for me. It was once an excellent popular science magazine, with explanation of new scientific developments written by scientists themselves and no intrusion of ideology. I don’t know if it can ever return to the earlier format.

Just two days ago I wrote about a viral piece written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali for The Free Press, arguing that three forces—Chinese Communism, radical Islamists, and American Marxists, with Putin helping out from the sidelines—were aiming at destroying Western values in a sequential process. This sequence was first suggested by Russian spy and defector Yuri Bezmenov, and involved these four steps: demoralization of the West (several decades), destabilization of society (5 months to two years), crisis (short, time not specified), and “normalization,” in which a new authoritarian society gains hegemony.  According to Hirsi Ali, we appear to be at the end of the demoralization phase.

As I said, although Hirsi Ali’s article has its good points—notably that there are forces, like Islamists and their Western “progressive” running dogs, setting out to destroy Western values, though they purport to buttress them—I don’t see evidence that there’s any kind of concerted effort among the indicted groups to take over the West. Further, Hirsi Ali lumps together disparate phenomena as evidence for the demoralization (George Floyd riots, covid restrictions, pro-Palestinian protests, etc.), including some that don’t even seem to be real (she argues, for example, that pedophilia is becoming normalized, which I vigorously contest, and criticizes the spread of regulated assisted suicide, which I support).  In the end, Hirsi Ali simply forces all the stuff going on now into the Procrustean bed of Bezmenov’s scheme, and since everything can be fit into that scheme, her thesis can’t be disproven.

Yes, Hirsi Ali’s piece is valuable in underlining the attack on Western values, but this point has been made many times before; see for instance Douglas Murray’s 2002 book The War on the West.  As for fitting everything into Bezmenov’s scheme, Cathy Young, in a percipient analysis at The Bulwark Substack, says that this is simply a “conspiracy theory.”

Click below to read:

Hirsi Ali’s is indeed a conspiracy theory. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it is if the alleged conspirators are not conspiring. The long essay shows that they’re not: what looks like conspiracy is simply a concatenation of various social forces whose results are visible today. I’ll indent Young’s words below:

In fact, the essay is notable mainly for one thing: it represents a startling plunge, for Ali and evidently for the Free Press, into outright, unabashed conspiracy theory.

. . . Chinese propaganda, radical Islamism, and homegrown social justice radicalism absolutely deserve criticism and pushback (and they are already getting it: for instance, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements, which Ali asserts are “now a requirement at universities across America,” have already been jettisoned by some major institutions including Harvard and MIT). But the Grand Unified Theory of Subversion should be just as resolutely rejected. Like all conspiratorial explanations of complex phenomena, it inhibits rather than promotes understanding.

And, like me, but in a far more sophisticated analysis, Young concedes that Some forces Hirsi Ali names are indeed eroding Western values, but are doing so independently. There is no conspiracy, and if that’s not true, and Bezmenov’s theory is fuzzy and untestable, which it is. then Hirsi Ali’s essay loses much of its force.

WHAT MAKES ALI’S CONSPIRATORIAL TURN so unfortunate is that her critique of toxic cultural trends in America and the West is often on point. Yes, shunting fourth-graders into “racial affinity” groups and having them map their “oppressor” and “oppressed” identities is bad. Yes, focusing on Thomas Jefferson’s slave ownership while giving short shrift to the liberatory politics of the American Revolution that eventually paved the way for the abolition of slavery can invite what Ali calls “civilizational self-loathing”—the idea that America and the West are no better than authoritarian societies around the world, or even uniquely evil. Yes, the embrace of Hamas by many social justice activists in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel exposed the movement’s moral bankruptcy, and the emergence of groups like “Queers for Palestine” which try to blend a Hamas-friendly worldview with an LGBT-friendly one is a spectacular case of intersectionalist idiocy. Yes, the movement for transgender equality raises some difficult questions—about women’s sports, single-sex spaces, puberty blockers, etc.—that often get labeled “transphobic” instead of being given a nuanced look. Yes, the push to destigmatize nontraditional sexuality can lead to almost certainly unhealthy trends like the romanticization of polyamory. And so on.

. . .Ali concedes that Bezmenov’s formulation of “subversion” may not explain or address “all the West’s problems.” However, she writes, “once I immersed myself in his formulation, many of the topsy-turvy developments in our institutions fell into place.”

Of course they did. That’s how conspiracy theory works: Everything falls into place once you accept it. And it’s unfalsifiable.

Here’s part of Young’s critique that Hirsi Ali is mixing disparate phenomena (or even nonexistent phenomena) into the theory:

For instance, Ali writes that for many people, the alarm bell signaling something wrong was the 2020 “omni-breakdown . . . with the crises [of] the Covid-19 pandemic and the draconian controls that governments imposed, and the George Floyd riots.” In her view, this was “the revolution” reaching boiling point after years of subversion. Is she suggesting that the “draconian controls”—which differed greatly from country to country—were somehow part of the same agenda as the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd? You could certainly argue that social tensions in the summer of 2020 were exacerbated by stresses caused by the pandemic and by the mitigation strategies. But sometimes, a perfect storm of crises happens. It doesn’t mean that someone is pulling the strings and levers, or even that someone set the machinery in motion at some point in the past.

. . . Ali’s grab-bag of “demoralization” also includes the “defund the police” movement as one of the assaults on traditional institutions. But that movement turned out to be extremely short-lived; now, even progressive jurisdictions (San Francisco!) are boosting police funding.

Even more mystifying, Ali asks us to “consider, for example, our culture’s attitude toward pedophiles, now rebranded as ‘minor-attracted persons.’” But rebranded by whom? (Ali’s link on “minor-attracted persons,” which I removed, goes to an obscure advocacy site.) There have been fringe efforts to rebrand pedophilia for decades—dating back to NAMBLA in the 1970s—and they have all been met with public scorn and revulsion. That remains true today. While a few articles have appeared in progressive publications over the years advocating tolerance toward non-offending pedophiles, they have invariably caused a strong backlash. Salon, which ran a couple of such articles in 2015, eventually took them down. In 2021, Allyn Walker, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, published a book that attempted to reframe adult-child sexual attraction as a sexual orientation rather than a disorder and “minor-attracted people” as a part of the “genderqueer community.” The outcry that ensued was such that Walker was placed on an administrative leave and then agreed to step down from the faculty.

Here are some of Young’s disparate causes for phenomena, some of which aren’t even intended to subvert Western values:

THE REASONS FOR THOSE UPHEAVALS—some of which are cycles in long-term trends going back to the 1960s and 1970s, or even earlier—are varied and complex, especially since Ali is trying to pull together such disparate phenomena. Changes in family structure, for instance, are the result of women’s evolving roles, the advent of reliable contraception, and the rise of the affluent consumer society. The right-to-die movement, which is now widely viewed as having gone too far, is partly a response to medical advances that can keep people alive—and in pain or at least severe discomfort—for much longer than was possible in earlier generations. Finally, many of the trends Ali discusses are extensions of the principle of individual autonomy, a part of the set of post-Enlightenment Western values that she (rightly) credits with enabling unprecedented human flourishing. Can such principles as personal freedom and tolerance be taken too far? Can some important humanistic values clash with other equally important ones? Yes, of course. But free societies constantly negotiate such questions.

Likewise, the social justice movements that Ali regards as subversive—and which are, in fact, often toxic in their attacks on modern liberal democracies—are largely an extension, or distortion, of liberal principles that seek to extend the benefits of liberty and equality to traditionally excluded groups (women, racial minorities, gays, etc.). The 1619 Project, which Ali mentions in passing, arguably distorted American history. But the impetus for it came in large part from the failure to grapple with the tragedies of black history in America (not just slavery, but the betrayal of black Americans after the Reconstruction for the sake of national unity). The feminist movement was born from the contradictions between the Western, and especially American, ideal of the autonomous individual and social and cultural norms that circumscribed female autonomy. Sexual liberation movements applied the principles of liberty to sexual choices.

I didn’t mean to quote so much of Young, but there’s a lot that I didn’t quote, and all of it goes to show that Hirsi Ali’s piece is hyperbolic and doesn’t hang together well. But it was not useless, for these days there are some people and social pressures that, knowingly or not, will seriously undermine America, or the West as a whole. (The Encampers come to my mind immediately.)  Donald Trump, not mentioned in Hirsi Ali’s article at all, may be the greatest threat to Western values on the horizon.

One reason Hirsi Ali’s article, flawed as it is, got such purchase is simply because of her own fame and life history. Many of us, including me, see her as a hero who went up against her upbringing as a strict Muslim, shed religion entirely to become an atheist (and a member of the Dutch parliament), and then fled after she and Theo van Gogh made the feminist and anti-Islamic film “Submission“, (the short movie is here) for which van Gogh was subsequently murdered. (There was a note pinned to the knife in his chest warning that Hirsi Ali was next.) I’d urge you to watch the ten-minute movie, which to us seems both moral and reasonable, but for which van Gogh, deemed an infidel, gave his life.

Hirsi Ali is eloquent and persuasive, as you can see in her books with their one-word titles (Infidel, Prey, Nomad, and Heretic), though with the last book I began to be disillusioned. While it properly calls out Islam, its program to defang the religion (the subtitle is Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now) is simply impractical. And now Hirsi Ali has shed her atheism, touting Christianity as the one bulwark against the same forces she names above (see critiques here; the links are working though some look wonky). No, I don’t think the return to Christian values, the good ones which are simply humanistic values that don’t come from Christianity at all, is what we need right now.

I’m a bit concerned that the Free Press gave Hirsi Ali’s piece so much air time (with a big boost by Bari Weiss), but Young’s critique is a good palliative.

h/t: Steve

Many of us feel that the world is going mad.  What used to be called “political correctness” is sweeping the country from the Left, and authoritarianism sweeping in from the right. On one hand we have the encampments and Ilhan Omar, on the other, Donald Trump.  Names like Audubon, Fisher, and Jefferson are being policed, as I pointed out in the last post, people are self-silencing on and off campus, students are celebrating the Houthis and even Hamas, DEI initiatives are promoting racial divisiveness and the instillation of guilt, people are calling for the defunding and even the elimination of the police, young people are cheering for the intifada all over the world, and so on.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a theory (or rather, borrows a theory) to explain all this, one that she lays out in a provocative article in the Free Press. No, it doesn’t mention religion, though she has suggested that Christianity is a way to fight what she sees as the dissolution of the West. Rather, here he describes what is happening in the West, suggests that it’s part of a deliberate four-stage plan (we’re at the end of stage 1), what those stages involve, and how we can stop it.

The article is surely worth reading, as her “stages” do fit nearly into a plan suggested by the journalist Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993), who spied for Russia, defected to the West, and then described how the Soviet system took over Russia. It is the stages of that takeover (Bezmenov’s “Soviet subversion model”) into which Hirsi shoehorns the West’s own transformation.

You can read her take below, which is also archived archived here.  It sounds plausible enough, but I can’t quite buy it. Surely there are people who do seem to be calling for the dissolution of the West, but I can’t quite see the plotting she envisions, nor can I believe that the West is malleable enough to fall for it. Hirsi Ali seems to have been quite taken by Bezmenov and eager to apply his model to the West. You be the judge. Click to read

Hirsi Ali first limns the Western values that are endangered (quotes from hjer article are indented):

The West’s inheritance springs from a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles—radical ones—that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history.

Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism. Each of these ideas might have been extinguished in their infancy but for the grace of God and the force of their appeal.

. . . Right now, so many Western nations are under grave threat from the twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam familiar to me from my youth.

Of course Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, which became authoritarian and didn’t adhere to these values, so she’s particularly sensitive to their erosion.

Here are the four stages of Western dissolution as outlined by Bezmenov; indented quotes are from Hirsi Ali:

Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages, a diagram of which I have provided. These are, in order: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally, normalization.

Hirsi Ali provides a handy chart (made by Bezmenov) of what will be affected by this process, but to me it looks a little like a Unabomber letter, and I’ll reproduce it below. Here are the stages and their expected duration, as well as the signs of the first stage that we’re in now (and nearing its end).

Demoralization

Demoralization is the first stage and requires the subverters’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 to 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation.

The demoralization process targets three areas of society: its ideas, its structures, and its social institutions. The targeted institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm the old ways of thinking, the old heroes, are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.

Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.

. . .What else can explain the daily displays of moral panic attacks masquerading as righteous activism, from the destruction of artwork to self-immolation? As human life ceases to look inviolable, we might also expect measures like euthanasia to gain steam, not just to help end terminal anguish but to end all manner of non-debilitating hardship. It’s no surprise, then, that we are seeing movements speeding ahead for “assisted dying” in the U.S., UK, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Ireland, and the rest of the West.

Next, the fundamental structures of society—like the rule of law and social relations—are targeted. For example, demoralization in the rule of law would entail undermining our trust in legal institutions and eroding the basis for legal authority. This could be accomplished by presenting the justice system as corrupt or illegitimate and by sowing distrust in the mechanisms of law enforcement. Think of the movements to “defund the police” because of “systemic racism.” Or the conviction last week of the front-runner presidential candidate on 34 counts of obvious political charges.

This stage also includes, says Hirsi Ali, both euthanasia (assisted dying) the breakup of the traditional nuclear family, something she sees as a bulwark of Western values, and “the retrograde practice of polygamy” (now “polyamory”). DEI statements begin to curb academic freedom, and college students begin to feel that “resistance is justified”. This is usually couched as resistance to Israel, but Hirsi Ali says it’s also resistance to Western values. She’s not far wrong here, given that student protestors, in their authoritarian sureness, say that they’re out to “globalize the intifada”. This can be seen as the Islamist takeover of the West (“Turtle Island” as they call it.)

Destabilization

Destabilization is the next phase. This process is considerably shorter, taking anywhere between five months to two years. With demoralization now reaching its full maturity, society is increasingly paralyzed by harsh domestic turmoil across all sectors. Democratic politics take on the character of a vicious struggle for power. Factionalism takes hold. Economic relations degrade and collapse, obliterating the basis for bargaining. The social fabric frays, leading to mob rule. Society turns inward, leading to fear, isolationism, and the decline of the nation-state itself, leading to crisis.

It is important to understand that, at this stage, the process of subversion is largely self-propelled. What once required active involvement on the part of a subverter has now taken root and grows organically. Then, society ruptures all at once in a rolling series of crises as the full extent of the cancer manifests.

I’m not sure that we’re not at the beginning of this, but of course one could couch Trump’s campaign as part of the struggle for power. I’m not sure, however, if you can see this happening, or beginning to happen, in the rest of the West.

Finally, we have the two final stages:

Crisis and normalization

Bezemov says the “crisis” phase is supposed to last 2-6 months, and Hirsi Ali doesn’t mention it. That leads to “normalization”—presumably the Western acceptance of a new authoritarian set of values, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This stage is supposed to be indefinite:

Finally, says Bezmenov, a subverted society enters the normalization stage, which is when the subversive regime takes over, installing its ideology as the law of the land. By then, the enemy has totally conquered the target society—without ever firing a shot.

WHO IS DOING THIS?

Hirsi Ali says she can “discern at least three forces” producing this dissolution.

The first: American Marxists. This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West.

The thundering socialists of the past (think of poor Bernie) seemed to earnestly care about the working class. Perhaps they did so naively, but at least they loved the poor. Does AOC? Rashida Tlaib? My former countrywoman, Ilhan Omar?

So this is largely the extreme Western Left.  And they will be allied with members of the next group, as indeed they have, at least on campus:

The second force is the radical Islamists, who are riding the coattails of the communists to power. A good example is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles. Of these tentacles, some are openly religious, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, each with chapters in nearly every American university. Other organizations don a secular mask, like the so-called Students for Justice in Palestine. These groups have become increasingly confident over the past months. Anti-Israel Muslim candidates recently won elected seats in countries like England, where imams talk openly about reestablishing the caliphate in Europe.

The question at hand is whether Marxists and Islamists can produce some kind of coherent society, for Islamism aims to convert the entire West to tenets of Islam, tenets that are very different from those of Marxists. If both groups are trying to destroy the West, they may succeed, but ultimately they’re working at cross purposes.

 Things become even weirder when you add in the third “subversive” force:

The third force is the Chinese Communist Party. The most obvious avenues through which the CCP has spread subversion in America is through its numerous Confucius Institutes. These organizations have been vehicles for Chinese espionage within major American academic institutions. Then there is TikTok, an addictive social media app controlled by the CCP, which presents Chinese children wholesome, educational content while wreaking havoc on American kids—polarizing them and feeding them anti-American propaganda.

In the end, then, and not necessarily consciously, the phases are being propelled by a mixture of American Marxists/Socialists, radical Islamists, and Chinese Communists.  In Hirsi Ali’s view, this combination will destroy Western values, but what kind of society will it produce? Does each group envision the same kind of endpoint?  Maybe that doesn’t matter; perhaps the groups just hate Western values and will fight it out for power after they’re gone.  Here’s the chart Hirsi Ali produces to show the process. She doesn’t mention it, nor that it was created not by her but by “Tomas Schuman”, a pseudonym for Bezemov himself.

How do we stop this? First, says Hirsi Ali, we need to “recognize the good activism from the bad”, and she says that “there is no easy way” to do this ave “pay attention to your gut and avoid being recruited by people for subversive causes. Even if we’re undergoing this dissolution, that doesn’t seem as hard as Hirsi Ali makes out.  Don’t support Hamas, Rashida Tlaib or DEI, don’t become an encamper, and, I guess, avoid all the pejorative forms of wokeness. I would add that you should speak up if you see Western (or “liberal”) values attacked.

What is happening? Speaking for myself, it’s not absolutely clear what Hirsi Ali is saying. Is she just describing only how Russia became communistic, or describing what’s really going on in the West? Are we going through these four stages in order?  I’m not sure. Is there collusion among the groups to destroy Western values? No, surely not, even if they have the same aim, for the society that each group aims for is very different.

In the end, all I can say is that Hirsi Ali correctly points out that many groups and many protesters are, in the end, bent on the destruction of Western values. But this has been said by many others; to name two, Hirsi Ali herself in her earlier works and Douglas Murray. And you’ll have encountered this idea before. To me the serious point of the article is nothing new (though recognizing the aims is important), and the new point—that we may be going through a Soviet-style transition to dictatorship and authoritarianism—is not very convincing.  The more I think about her article (it’s also on audio, but I haven’t listened to it, and the audio may be a bit different from the Free Press article.