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When an armed man stormed a Texas synagogue on Saturday, taking a rabbi and three worshippers hostage, it seemed fairly obvious that the victims identity had something to do with the attack. But in a press conference after all four hostages escaped Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, FBI special agent Matthew DeSarno seemed to deny that, telling reporters the attacks motive was not specifically related to the Jewish community.

DeSarno was attempting to communicate that the hostage takers core demand the release of imprisoned jihadist Aafia Siddiqui wasnt about Jews. But interviews with the hostages themselves revealed a clear connection: Their captor believed that a Jewish conspiracy ruled America and that, if he took Jews hostage, he could compel the US to release Siddiqui.

He terrorized us because he believed these anti-Semitic tropes that the Jews control everything, and if I go to the Jews, they can pull the strings, hostage Jeffrey Cohen told CNN. He even said at one point that Im coming to you because I know President Biden will do things for the Jews.

Perhaps DeSarno wasnt aware of this when he made his comments, which the FBI has since walked back. But major media outlets ran with his line, blaring headlines that downplayed the anti-Semitism at the core of the attack. It was as though the attacker had chosen Beth Israel at random, rather than targeted a Jewish community near where Siddiqui was imprisoned.

The coverage only underscored a creeping sentiment that spread among us last weekend. Many Jews, myself included, already felt like few were paying attention to the crisis in Colleyville as it unfolded over the weekend; that we Jews were rocked by a collective trauma while most Americans watched the NFL playoffs.

This is not a new feeling.

In the past several years, American Jews have been subject to a wave of violence nearly unprecedented in post-Holocaust America. If these anti-Semitic incidents garner significant mainstream attention a big if attention to them seems to fade rapidly, erased by a fast-moving news cycle. The root causes of rising anti-Semitism are often ignored, especially when politically inconvenient to one side or the other.

There are always exceptions: In the wake of the Colleyville attack, for example, many Muslims have been particularly vocal allies. But for the most part, the world has moved on. American Jews, on the other hand, cannot for good reason.

Lets recount what the past few years have been like for American Jews.

In August 2017, the torch-carrying marchers at Charlottesville chanted, Jews will not replace us, as they rallied to protect Confederate iconography. Armed individuals dressed in fatigues menaced a local synagogue also named Beth Israel while neo-Nazis yelled, Sieg heil! as they passed by.

In October 2018, we saw the deadliest mass killing of Jews in American history: the assault on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which claimed 11 Jewish lives. The far-right shooter believed that Jews were responsible for mass nonwhite immigration and wanted to kill as many as he could find in retaliation.

In April 2019, another far-right shooter preoccupied by fears of a Jewish-perpetrated white genocide attacked the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, killing one and injuring three.

In December 2019, New York and New Jersey the epicenter of American Jewry were swept by a wave of anti-Semitic violence.

Two extremist members of the Black Hebrew Israelite church, a fringe religion that believes they are the true Jews and we are impostors, killed a police officer and three shoppers at a kosher market in Jersey City. A man wielding a machete attacked a Hanukkah party at a rabbis home in Monsey, New York, killing one and injuring four. Orthodox Jews in New York were subject to a wave of street assaults and beatings.

In May 2021, the conflict between Israel and Hamas led to yet another spike in anti-Semitic violence, including high-profile attacks perpetrated by individuals who blamed American Jews for Israels actions. In Los Angeles, for example, a group of men drove to a heavily Jewish neighborhood and assaulted diners at a sushi restaurant. The attackers were waving Palestinian flags and chanting, Free Palestine!

This sort of violence is certainly not the norm. In absolute terms, most American Jews are still quite unlikely to be targeted by anti-Semitic attacks. But both quantitative and anecdotal data suggest that there has been a sustained rise in anti-Semitic activity.

The following chart shows data on anti-Semitic incidents of all kinds, ranging from murders to harassment, from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish anti-hate watchdog. The ADL data, while not perfect, is one of the better sources of information on the topic and it shows a spike in the past several years.

The explanation among scholars and experts for this rise tends to focus on Donald Trumps presidential candidacy and the concomitant rise of the alt-right.

In this telling, Trumps ascendance shifted the Overton window for the far right, leading to a rise in anti-Semitic harassment and violence. (Trump himself repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments despite having Jewish family.) Recent academic research finds that, in the United States, anti-Semitic beliefs are more prevalent on the right.

The attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway suggest this diagnosis is in large part correct. But the past few years of anti-Semitic violence demonstrate clearly that its not the full story.

The Colleyville siege seems to have been perpetrated by a British Islamist. The 2021 attacks seem to have emerged out of anti-Israel sentiment, a cause more associated with the left. The 2019 violence in New York and New Jersey doesnt really connect to politics as we typically understand it, emerging in part out of a radical subsection of the already-small Black Hebrew Israelite group and local tensions between Black and Jewish residents in Brooklyn.

What this illustrates, more than anything else, is the protean and primordial nature of anti-Semitism a prejudice and belief structure so baked into Western society that it has a remarkable capacity to infuse newer ideas and reassert itself in different forms.

Today, we are seeing the rise not of one form of anti-Semitism but of multiple anti-Semitisms each popular with different segments of the population for different reasons, but also capable of reinforcing each other by normalizing anti-Semitic expression.

There is no mistaking the consequences for Jews.

In a 2021 survey from the American Jewish Committee, a leading Jewish communal group, 24 percent of American Jews reported that an institution they were affiliated with had been targeted by anti-Semitism in the past five years. Ninety percent said anti-Semitism was a problem in America today, and 82 percent agreed that anti-Semitism had increased in the past five years.

Synagogues have had to increase security spending, straining often tight budgets that could be spent on programming for their congregants. Measures include hiring more armed guards to patrol services, setting up security camera systems, and providing active shooter training for rabbis and Hebrew school teachers.

Some of this is familiar; there have been armed guards at my synagogue as long as I can remember. But much of the urgency is new. For a community that has long seen America as our haven, a place different in kind from the Europe so many Jews were driven out of, its a profoundly unsettling feeling.

Dara Horn, a novelist and scholar of Yiddish literature, spent 20 years avoiding the topic of anti-Semitism. She wanted to write about Jewish life rather than Jewish death.

But the past few years changed things. In 2021, Horn published a book titled People Love Dead Jews, an examination of the role that Jewish suffering plays in the public imagination. Her analysis is not flattering.

People tell stories about dead Jews so they can feel better about themselves, Horn tells me. Those stories often require the erasure of actual Jews, because actual Jews would ruin the story.

One of the more provocative examples she mentioned is the oft-repeated poem, attributed to German pastor Martin Niemller, citing attacks on Jews as one of several canaries in the coal mine for political catastrophe. Youve probably heard this version of it, or at least seen it on a Facebook post:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for meand there was no one left to speak for me

In theory, the message is one of solidarity: What happens to Jews should be of concern to all of us. But Horn argues that theres a worrying implication to this message, one that instrumentalizes Jews rather than centering us.

What youre basically saying is that we should all care when Jews are murdered and attacked because it might be an ominous sign that real people might be attacked later, Horn tells me. I get that thats not what its trying to say, but it plays into this idea that Jews are just this symbol that you can use for whatever purpose you need.

In American political discourse, anti-Semitism often gets treated in exactly the way Horn fears: as a tool to be wielded, rather than a problem for living, breathing Jewish people.

Among conservatives, support for Israel becomes equated with support for Jews to the point where actual anti-Semitism emanating from pro-Israel politicians, from Donald Trump to Marjorie Taylor Greene, is treated as unimportant or excusable. The Jewish experience becomes flattened into a narrative of Judeo-Christian culture under shared threat from Islamist terrorism, eliding the ways in which Americas mostly liberal Jewish population feels threatened by the influence of political Christianity on the right.

Colleyville is already being deployed in this fashion. In a public letter, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) turned an attack on Jews into an attack on admitting Afghan refugees.

I write with alarm over reports that the Islamic terrorist who took hostages at a Jewish synagogue in Texas this past weekend was granted a travel visa, Hawley claims. This failure comes in the wake of the Biden Administrations botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and failure to vet the tens of thousands who were evacuated to our country.

Never mind that the attacker came from Britain, not Afghanistan. Never mind that he was not a refugee. Never mind that Jews are some of the staunchest supporters of refugee admittance in the country, owing to our own experiences as refugees after the Holocaust.

There are also problems like this on the left, albeit less common among mainstream political figures.

Incidents of anti-Semitic violence are mourned and then swiftly deployed in partisan politics, turned into a brief against MAGA America, rather than serving as an opportunity to confront the way many progressives fail to take anti-Semitism seriously as a form of structural oppression. Similarly, Jewish concerns about anti-Israel rhetoric crossing the line into anti-Semitism are ignored or even dismissed as smear jobs. I have had brutal, sometimes even angry conversations with progressive friends and acquaintances on this very topic.

The throughline here is that Jews dont own their stories; that anti-Semitism means what others want it to mean. And thats when people pay attention to anti-Semitism at all, which they often do not except for the few days after incidents like Colleyville.

A common refrain from Jews I know during and after the Colleyville standoff was a sense of total alienation, that they were glued to their phones and TVs while most others had no idea that American Jews were in crisis. It wasnt that we had been made into object lessons for others, at least not yet; it was that our suffering was barely worth noticing.

What American Jews need from mainstream American society right now is to be listened to, for our fears about rising anti-Semitism to be heard and, once heard, taken seriously on their own terms.

This does not require the false assumption of a monolithic Jewish community, where all of us agree on how to tackle anti-Semitism. What it does require is a mental reorientation among Americas non-Jews: a willingness to reckon with the fact that anti-Semitism remains a meaningful force in American society, one that requires a response both unfamiliar and politically uncomfortable.

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The world has moved on from Colleyville. American Jews cant. - Vox.com

Mike Cuffe blends in. Sitting in a chair that almost matches the color of his suit, which almost matches the gray Montana sky outside, the state senator looked a lot like the other legislators in a state administration committee meeting last February. He calmly grasped a stack of papers and leaned back to listen to Cindi Hamilton, a member of the public, who, with her yellow hair, leather jacket and cherry red tartan blouse, very much did not blend in.

After witnessing the national election a couple of months ago, some of us feel that it was the most corrupt, third-world, banana republic election we could even imagine, Hamilton said.

Hamilton was speaking in favor of a Montana bill that Cuffe sponsored, part of a suite of six election integrity bills passed and signed into law last spring. Senate Bill 169, the one Hamilton went to the committee hearing to support, requires photo ID to register and vote, with some exceptions. Other laws limited ballot harvesting, ended same-day voter registration and mandated yearly voter roll purges, instead of every other year. Cuffe voted yes on all of them.

Its clear Hamilton had been influenced by the Big Lie the inaccurate claim circulated by former President Donald Trump and his allies that the 2020 presidential election was rife with voter fraud. Cuffe said he doesnt believe there was something fishy about the 2020 election, but he acknowledged the bills he helped pass into law were influenced by voters like Hamilton.

MPAN / Thom Bridge / Independent Record via AP

There were concerns from a lot of folks, a lot of my constituents, about voting issues, Cuffe said. People went to sleep on election night believing that one candidate was well ahead and was pretty much assured a victory, and then when they woke up the next morning, his opponent had won. And some people still believe there was something funny there. I dont. I didnt then and I dont. But I felt we could do some things to help reduce potential issues and/or beliefs.

Cuffe has a warm timbre to his voice and asked me to let him know if he started to ramble too much. Hes a conservative, pro-life Republican and a Second Amendment advocate. Hes not the kind of local politician who garners national attention for fringe views or frothing fealty to Trump. But as a result of the legislation he helped pass last year, Cuffe has become one node in a broader network of Republicans reshaping democracy.

Since the 2020 election, hundreds of new voter restriction bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country, and dozens were enacted into law. In many cases, these bills were a response to the Big Lie. Those incessant claims of fraud created an appetite among Republican voters for answers, solutions and, most importantly, justice. In response, a vast network of right-wing influencers bothemergent and established began feeding that appetite by investigating dubious claims and concocting new election laws.

State legislators have heeded the call. FiveThirtyEight created a database cataloging these acts at the state level, including every voter restriction bill introduced and every third-party partisan audit conducted. (We have fun around here you can join in by seeing the full data set on our Github.) Whats revealed is an anti-democratic shift among the GOP, catalyzed by the Big Lie and ushered in by a network of right-wing power brokers.

When I spoke to more than a half-dozen individuals who are inspiring and enacting these legislative changes, there was a prevailing refrain: Theyre just trying to respond to an eroding trust in elections. Some believe that trust has legitimately eroded because of widespread fraud, while others believe it has been eroded by messaging about widespread fraud. None of them feel they are responsible for that erosion, only for its cure.

The suite of bills Cuffe helped pass in Montana, by definition, makes it more difficult to vote. Theyve even attracted lawsuits from voting rights groups that claim the laws make it prohibitively hard to vote, particularly for students, rural voters and Native Americans. Cuffe doesnt mind criticism hes been working in politics a long time but rejects the notion that the intent behind the bills was to disenfranchise voters. He said they only wanted to make a good system better in order to build back trust among voters who were now questioning the election system.

Were painted with a big, black brush that says were trying to curtail somebodys right to vote. Thats not at all the situation. It never was, Cuffe said. We had good things at heart.

Regardless of the intentions of those involved, the problem is only getting worse. Over the last year, Republican voters have become even less trustful of our elections, questionable amateur research is driving actual policy decisions, and many states have introduced or passed what experts call frighteningly anti-democratic legislation. The Big Lie has created an environment in which Republicans feel obligated to respond to fears of election fraud. But their responses both legislative and rhetorical are eroding democracy, not bolstering it.

The evolution of the Big Lie was the product of a vast catalog of politicians, pundits, true believers and benefactors financing and promoting claims of voter fraud and efforts to overturn the election. This includes lawyers like Lin Wood and Sidney Powell who filed pro-Trump lawsuits, Republican politicians who actively embraced the Big Lie like Georgia Rep. Jody Hice (whom Trump has endorsed in the race for Georgia secretary of state) and others who, while not embracing the Big Lie, refused to condemn it. It included political action committees and conservative groups that financed these efforts. And it included alt-right personalities like Steve Bannon and Mike Lindell, who have amassed huge audiences as they continue to promote the Big Lie.

The players in this network include a wide range of personalities. Theres a world of difference between Lindell, with his conspiracy theory-fuelled, feverish pleading for those in power to take his claims seriously, and Cuffes avuncular small-town sincerity. Yet each has represented a node in the network of the Big Lie, and its effect on our democracy.

Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Image

Among this group, there are a handful of people who you may not have heard of, but who are veritable celebrities among those who believe the Big Lie. They have amplified the Big Lie, inflaming voter fears and inspiring legislative action.

Matt Braynard is one of these people. Braynard worked on Trumps 2016 campaign but rose to prominence after he began a grassroots, crowdfunded investigation in 2020 that looked for evidence of illegal ballots cast in several swing states. It started with a tweet two days after the election (and before the presidential election had been called), explaining how he wanted to compare voter registration data to the Social Security Death Index and the National Change of Address database to look for evidence of fraud. All he needed was funding to cover the cost of the data. He went on to crowdfund nearly $700,000 to conduct the investigation. The results were compiled into a series of reports published online that claimed to have uncovered tens of thousands of illegally cast ballots from voters who had, for example, moved out of the state or registered at a non-residential address like a post office box or business. It secured him a position among those pushing hardest against the 2020 election results: His analyses and testimony were used in challenges to election results in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he presented his findings to state legislators in Georgia.

ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP via Getty Images

But upon closer inspection, the analysis didnt hold up. The methods Braynard and his team used have been criticized by experts, including in a review by the conservative Hoover Institution. Simply identifying two voters who share the same name and birth date doesnt necessarily indicate that they are the same person. And while Braynards political group, Look Ahead America, did attempt to verify those identities, they used iffy methods that, when demonstrated to me, appeared to be little more than creative Googling. They also only reviewed a sample of suspected ballots, and then projected what they believed the total number of illegal ballots to be based on that sample. This has led to several errors in the reported findings being uncovered by journalists and lawmakers.

Braynard vehemently defends his findings and is particularly frustrated that they were never tested in a court of law. (Braynards findings were filed as part of some Trump lawsuits, but the lawsuits were thrown out for other reasons.) Ian Camacho, the director of research for Look Ahead America, spent over an hour walking me through examples he selected to demonstrate their method for verifying that a suspected illegal ballot was in fact illegally cast. While I have not personally reviewed every instance, the examples and methods demonstrated to me were sloppy and inconclusive. For instance, he showed an example of what he claimed was a voter using their business as a residential address, but it was unclear if the voters name was the man Camacho identified, or his son, who shared his name and helped run the business. He also could not definitely prove that the business address was not also residential. Put it this way: If I used their methods to try to make a claim in a story for FiveThirtyEight regarding a specific instance of an illegal ballot being cast, it would not meet our standards for publication.

Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Talking to Braynard, he seems convinced he has genuinely uncovered a problem that renders 2020 election results in dispute. Braynard said he knows for a fact that his work has inspired some of the bills introduced in state legislatures. He pointed to a bill introduced in New Jersey that would mandate the use of ballot-counting machines with open-source software one of Look Ahead Americas policy suggestions which he said was introduced following a meeting between the state senator who sponsored the bill and one of his organizations volunteers. (State senator Joe Pennacchio, who introduced the bill, confirmed to FiveThirtyEight that he had met with a volunteer who helped point him to useful material when writing the bill.) Braynard said while Look Ahead America isnt lobbying for specific laws, they have a network of more than 3,000 volunteers that have been meeting with state legislators to educate them on the groups findings and policy suggestions. He said he did not believe his work has contributed to eroding confidence in elections.

I think that a lot of other peoples work has, but the bottom line is this: What we have identified as problems with the election are indisputable and theyre also the kind of things that can be easily remedied, Braynard said. We just want to restore confidence in elections.

Another popular figure in the Big Lie circuit is a former army captain named Seth Keshel, who drew the attention of figures like Bannon and even Trump after releasing a report that he said showed evidence of voter fraud. The report compared actual voter turnout to Keshels own prediction of voter turnout, which he made using his own model that included voter registration, population growth and other data. He claims that major deviations from his predictions indicated likely voter fraud. (Keshel also says this same model enabled him to accurately predict the outcome of all 50 states in the 2016 election, but did not provide evidence to support this claim.)

Since then, Keshel has been on a speaking tour including stops at campaign events for congressional candidates and meets regularly with state legislators to share his analysis and views, including at a meeting emceed by Montana Republican state Sen. Theresa Manzella. Keshel told me he doesnt believe his work is contributing to public distrust in elections, either, and that he was also motivated by a desire to restore that trust.

You have at least half the country that believes our election was decided by fraud. That is a crisis in and of itself, Keshel said.

But when the root of that crisis is a lie, any attempt to respond to it is just as baseless. And the cure can end up worse than the disease.

The more brightly people like Keshel and Braynard lit up their nodes on the network, the more seriously legislators like Cuffe felt they had to respond. They did so in droves, introducing hundreds of pieces of legislation and a wide range of tactics deployed for improving election integrity. Of the 579 pieces of voter restriction legislation FiveThirtyEight tracked, 50 have been signed into law, which we further categorized into seven types (many bills fell into more than one category). The majority of these bills, 330 in total, limited voting options in some way, whether that was eliminating ballot harvesting or placing more restrictions on absentee voting. The next largest category, with 128 bills, expanded voter ID laws. The smallest category was the most concerning: 14 bills made election roles more partisan, and some of these were enacted into law, such as Arizonas law to strip its secretary of state (currently a Democrat) from the authority to defend state election laws in court, and instead hands that power over to the state attorney general (currently a Republican). Some state legislators, in places like Montana, introduced only a handful of bills. Others, like in Georgia and Arizona, brought forth dozens. Texas legislators introduced over 100.

And the bills accentuate other measures that capture an anti-democratic shift among the GOP. States where voter restriction bills are being introduced and passed are often home to Republican members of Congress who voted not to certify some of the 2020 election results, and who have a below average pro-democracy voting record.

This is probably the most widespread and sustained wave of voter restriction legislation since the Voting Rights Act, said Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard University. But Im not sure that quantifying the number of pieces of legislation is the best measure.

According to Keyssar, voter access laws have ebbed and flowed throughout history, and a certain amount of clawing back of voter access was expected after the widespread expansion that took place during the pandemic. But whats troubling to Keyssar is not the number of bills, but the type of legislation being proposed and passed. In particular, he is concerned about bills that strip authority from election officials and grant it to partisan legislative bodies.

This is something different, he said. If your completely partisan state legislature is going to end up counting the votes, thats a lot more efficient than voter suppression.

Nic Antaya / Getty Images

The possibility of election subversion where one party overrules the results of an election through these newly created legal levers is of particular concern to several experts. Last September, Richard Hasen, a law and political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote a paper outlining the risk of election subversion. In it, Hasen makes the case that the Big Lie itself is a powerful enough force to open the door for election subversion, even without new laws in place.

It has already led to the harassment of election officials, who are quitting their positions around the country. In their place, Big Lie-believing Trump loyalists are running for their jobs, and some have already won. It opened the door for multiple partisan audits, which stoke the fires of distrust while putting election infrastructure at risk. It creates an appetite and acceptance among the public and politicians to use existing means to overturn election results, just as Trump attempted to do following the 2020 election. When combined with the new laws passed to give greater partisan influence over election administration, Hasen says it creates a dangerous environment. (Hasen also outlined what he believes to be guardrails against this kind of subversion, including the universal use of paper ballots and federal rules limiting the over-politicization of election administration.)

I never thought Id be writing a paper like this about the United States, Hasen told me. Im very worried. Its like being an epidemiologist right as a pandemic is starting to emerge.

Other experts emphasized that laws making it more difficult to vote should not be brushed aside as harmless, especially at the scale seen over the last year. Jake Grumbach, a political science professor at the University of Washington who studies the democratic performance of states, said that any law that increases voting barriers or removes voting options but is not in response to a clear and direct threat to election security is, by definition, voter suppression.

Those involved in pushing these bills through, like Cuffe, argue they strike a balance between preventing future potential security risks and not making it significantly more difficult to vote. But critics question the need for the legislative response in the first place.

What they said in Georgia and in many states is that we need to enact these election laws to reassure our citizens that the elections are safe, said Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University. But, of course, the citizens only believe the elections are unsafe because of lies that Donald Trump and other politicians have said. So they caused the anxiety and then theyre justifying their actions by saying they need to reassure voters.

Courtney Pedroza / Getty Images

And it doesnt even seem to be working. Polling from Monmouth University before and after Arizonas partisan election inquisition found that the so-called audit did more to reinforce concerns around election fraud than to alleviate them. And as laws have been passed under the banner of improving voter trust, Republican voter trust in elections remains low. Just 35 percent of Republicans said they had at least some trust in the U.S. electoral system in a poll conducted by Morning Consult on Dec. 30, 2021. Thats down from 43 percent in January of last year, and 69 percent prior to election day 2020, according to prior polling from Morning Consult.

Trust remains low even when asked about future elections. Thirty-four percent of Republicans said they have a great or a good deal of trust that elections are fair in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted Oct. 18-22, 2021. In that same survey, 60 percent of Republicans did say they were confident or very confident that their state or local government will conduct a fair and accurate election in 2022, but 36 percent also said that they would not trust the results if their preferred candidate doesnt win in 2022. And 59 percent of Republicans said they would not trust the outcome of the 2024 election if their preferred candidate lost. (By contrast, for the 2024 question, only 13 percent of Democrats said they would not trust results if their candidate lost.) Like Trump, many Republicans views on election fraud are directly tied to whether or not they like the result.

This is not what at least some of those involved in this network had hoped for. In my nearly two-hour conversation with Cuffe, the state senator from Montana spoke persuasively about his desire to do the right thing. He was, in his view, trying to avoid laws that would make it unnecessarily difficult to vote. And its true that the laws passed in Montana did not approach the most grievous examples collected in our catalog.

Even still, Cuffe demonstrates just how effective and far-reaching the Big Lies web has become, and how insidious it is not only Trump loyalist firebrands pushing bills in response to it, but your friendly neighborhood state senator. The laws Cuffe championed do make it harder to vote. Registering on the same day you cast your ballot is easier than having to register in advance. Voting without a photo ID is easier than voting with one, if you dont have a photo ID. Multiple voting rights groups including the League of Women Voters and the Native American Rights Fund opposed some of the laws, such as Cuffes voter ID law, and other groups have filed lawsuits challenging four of the new laws. Cuffe believes the laws will prevail because of how much effort went into ensuring they would not disenfranchise voters. He said he cares deeply about the right to vote, but that he felt voters fears around election fraud had to be addressed in some way and that election infrastructure needed to be protected against future issues that could arise.

That dynamic is what makes the Big Lie and its network of promoters so effective: People from many walks of life from conspiracy theorists to national legislators to local administrators and state senators are recruited to weaken democracy, all while believing theyre strengthening it.

I asked Cuffe if the laws he helped pass legitimized fears around election fraud rather than soothed them. He paused. He told me he cant say whats going through everyones mind, but that legitimizing the claims was never his goal.

The whole purpose was to make a good thing better, Cuffe said. Im not on the way to the graveyard or anything, but theres a lot more sand in the bottom of my hourglass than there is on the top. And it reaches a point where you realize the stuff youre doing is not for yourself, its for the time going forward.

Additional reporting by Nathaniel Rakich and Mackenzie Wilkes. Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Maya Sweedler and Curtis Yee. Story editing by Chadwick Matlin.

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The Big Lies Long Shadow - FiveThirtyEight

In his own words

Were going to be back here, and were going to humiliate all of these people who opposed us. Well be back here 1,000 times if necessary. I always win. Because I have the will to win, I keep going until I win. Interview with DailyMail.com, several days after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Islam at its full flourishing isnt some peaceful denomination like Methodism or religion like Buddhism; Islam is a black flag. It is an expansive, domineering ideology, and one that is directed against Europe. In this way, Islam give [sic] non-Europeans a fighting spirit and integrates them into something much greater than themselves. Interview with Europa Maxima, February 2017.

A race is genetically coherent, a race is something you can study, a race is about genes and DNA, but its not just about genes and DNA. The most important thing about it is the people and the spirit. Thats what a race is about. Speech at Texas A&M, December 2016.

Martin Luther King Jr., a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization. We must overcome!National Policy Institute column, January 2014

Immigration is a kind a proxy warand maybe a last standfor White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.National Policy Institute column, February 2014

Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence. VICE, October 2013.

When we hear any professional Latino support this or that social program, we sense in our guts that her policy proscriptions are rationalizations for nationalism. She mightsaymore immigration is good; shemeansThe Anglos are finished! Speech at the 2013 American Renaissance conference

What blocks our progress is thememethat has been carefully implanted in White peoples minds over the course of decades of programming, fromMississippi BurningtoLee Daniel's The Butlerthat any kind of positive racial feeling among Whites is inherently evil and stupid and derives solely from bigotry and resentment. And that the political and social advancement of non-Whites is inherently moral and wonderful. National Policy Institute column, September 2013

Richard Spencers clean-cut appearance conceals a radical white separatist whose goal is the establishment of a white ethno-state in North America. His writings and speeches portray this as a reasonable defense of Caucasians and Eurocentric culture. In Spencers myopic worldview, white people have been dispossessed by a combination of rising minority birth rates, immigration and government policies he abhors.

Fighting that alleged dispossession is the focus of the, until recently, tax-exempt organization he heads, the National Policy Institute (NPI). According to NPIs mission statement, it aims to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute ... will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity. NPI lost its tax-deductible status with the IRS for failing to file tax returns after 2012.

Spencer became president of NPI in 2011, following the death of its chairman, longtime white nationalist Louis R. Andrews. Concurrently, he also oversaw NPIs publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers, home of such scientifically bogus works as a 2015 reissue of Richard LynnsRace Differences in Intelligenceand screeds by other white nationalists, includingJared Taylor, editorof the racistAmerican Renaissancejournal, andSam Francis, the late editor of the white supremacistCouncil of Conservative Citizens newsletter. In 2012, Spencer launched an offshoot of Washington Summit Publishers that he calledRadix Journal, a website and biannual publication whose contributors include notorious antisemite Kevin MacDonald, a retired professor at California State University, Long Beach.

Spencer abdicated his position as editor ofRadix Journalin January 2017 to serve as the American editor of his new site AltRight.com. Launched on January 16, 2017, AltRight.com brings together several well-known white nationalist personalities including Henrik Palmgren of Red Ice, Brad Griffin of Occidental Dissent, andWilliam H. Regnery II, a reclusive member of the Regnery right-wing publishing dynasty that founded both NPI and the Charles Martel Society. Other leadership on the site includes Daniel Friberg, European editor, Jason Jorjani, Culture editor, and Tor Westman, technical director.

Described as a leading academic racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Spencer takes a quasi-intellectual approach to white separatism. In an online NPI recruiting video, he employs the tone of a sociologist discussing demographics:

As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession.

Spencer acquired that academic tone while obtaining a bachelors degree from the University of Virginia and a masters degree in humanities from the University of Chicago. That tone is part of an image-conscious strategy meant to appeal to educated, middle-class whites. He dresses neatly, eschews violence and works to sound rational.

We have to look good, he told Salon.com writer Lauren Fox, because no one is going to want to join a movement that is crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid.

In 2007, after he dropped out of a Duke University Ph.D. program in modern European intellectual history, Spencer took a job as assistant editor atAmerican Conservativemagazine, where he was later fired for his radical views, according to former colleague J. Arthur Bloom. Following that, Spencer became executive editor of the paleoconservative website Takis Magazine. In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight, a supremacy-themed webzine aimed at the intellectual right wing, where he remained until joining NPI.

One of Spencers first acts after taking over NPI was to move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Whitefish, Montana, where his family has a vacation home. But if Spencer is eyeing Whitefish as a locale for his Aryan homeland, he faces significant opposition. In December 2014, the Whitefish City Council debated an anti-hate ordinance barring groups such as NPI from assembling in the community. After concerns were raised about free speech, the council ultimately settled on a resolution supporting diversity and tolerance.

Spencer spoke at that council meeting, saying the anti-hate ordinance would have granted the right to police our minds but claiming that he supported the diversity and tolerance resolution. But real diversity includes thinking differently, theFlathead Beaconquoted him as saying. Real diversity is not people of all different shapes and colors acting the same way. That is the diversity of a Coke commercial.

Real diversity and tolerance apparently go only so far, however. In an address at white supremacist Jared Taylors 2013American Renaissanceconference, Spencer called for peaceful ethnic cleansing. As an example of how this could be accomplished, he cited the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where new national boundaries were formed at the end of World War I. Today, in the public imagination, ethnic cleansing has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so), Spencer said. But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.

Spencer also has termed his mission a sort of white Zionism that would inspire whites with the dream of such a homeland just as Zionism helped spur the establishment of Israel. A white ethno-state would be anAltneuland an old, new country he said, attributing the term to Theodor Herzl, a founding father of Zionism.

Such historical comparisons show how desperate Spencer is to legitimize his agenda. After all, if white people are dispossessed, why shouldnt they get a homeland, too? The problem, of course, is that white Americans have not been dispossessed, no matter how often that claim is made by ideologues of the racist right.

But Spencer is doing his best to make it seem that they are. When the 2011 census revealed that for the first time the majority of children born in the United States are non-white, Spencer concluded that efforts to restrict immigration were meaningless going forward. Even if all immigration, legal and illegal, were miraculously halted tomorrow morning, our countrys demographic destiny would merely be delayed by a decade or two, he told theAmerican Renaissanceaudience. Put another way, we could win the immigration battle and nevertheless lose the country, and lose it completely.

Although Spencer has repeatedly denied that he is a racist, his protests amount to a semantic debate over what racist means. Racist isnt a descriptive word. Its a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, I dont like you. Racist is just a slur word, he told theFlathead Beacon. I think race is real, and I think race is important. And those two principles do not mean I want to harm someone or hate someone. But the notion that these people can be equal is not a scientific way of looking at it.

Elsewhere, he has decried what he terms an overly expansive definition of racism by Cultural Marxists. In a 2013 NPI column, he wrote:

But for most academics and policy-makers who could be referred to as Cultural Marxiststhe definition of racism is much,muchmore expansive; it encompasses culture, privilege, societal assumptions and values, and all sorts of things they deem to be expressions of power. The hetero-normative marriage, Christmas, nationalist soccer fandom can each be considered racist, in that each is an avatar of European civilization and consciousnessand thus an obstacle for multicultural globalism.

Spencer has said he would gladly accept Germans, Latins and Slavic immigrants in his proposed ethno-state ironically, groups that faced severe discrimination in late 19th-century America. These foreigners and their customs, including Catholicism, spurred the creation of Know-Nothing societies, which eventually became known as the American Party. Pseudo-scientific studies were released, such as Carl Brighams A Study of Human Intelligence (1923), that claimed that Slavs and Italians, among others, were of inferior intelligence.

But today, kielbasa is considered as American as apple pie, and these non-Anglo Saxons are embraced by Spencer because of their white skins. They have assimilated.

To Spencer, however, assimilation is a deceptive term. In his foreword to a new edition of racist eugenicist Madison Grants 1933Conquest of a Continent, Spencer wrote:

Hispanic immigrants have been assimilating downwardacross generations towards the culture and behavior of African-Americans. Indeed, one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogenous and assimilated, nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.

This applies to the European motherland as well. In a promo for NPIs 2013 Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., Spencer opined that both Europe and America are experiencing economic, moral and cultural bankruptcy under the pressure of mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the natural expression of religious and ethnic identities by non-Europeans.

Spencers efforts to reach out to European nationalists have not gone well. In October 2014, his attempt to hold an NPI conference in Budapest, Hungary, resulted in his arrest and expulsion. Dubbed the 2014 European Congress, the conference featured an array of white nationalists from both Europe and America. Among the scheduled speakers were Jared Taylor ofAmerican Renaissance, Philippe Vardon from the far-right French Bloc Identitaire movement, Russian ultranationalist Alexander Dugin and right-wing Hungarian extremist MP Mrton Gyngysi.

Before the conference even started, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade released a statement condemning all xenophobic and exclusionary organizations that discriminate based on religion or ethnicity. Planned reservations at the Larus Center venue were canceled. On Oct. 3, Spencer was arrested while meeting informally with other participants at a cafe that was to have been an alternate venue. He was jailed for three days, deported and banned for three years from entering all 26European countries that have abolished passport and other controls at their common borders.

Back in America, stronger free speech protections enable Spencer to hold such conferences. But even though he idealizes an American society founded by European whites, he rejects the principles of egalitarianism enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Spencer takes issue with conservatives who advocate returning America to its founding principles. Even if that did happen, the outcome would be the same, according to Spencer: One should not rewind a movie, play it again, and then be surprised when it reaches the same unhappy ending.

Should we, for instance, really be fighting for limited government or the Constitution, so that the Afro-Mestizo-Caribbean Melting Pot can enjoy the blessing of liberty and a sound currency? he asked theAmerican Renaissancegathering.

In Spencers ethno-state there would be no such problems. In aJuly 3, 2014, column in NPIsRadix Journal, he lauded Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens greatest address, in which Stephens said that Thomas Jefferson was wrong about all men being created equal.

Spencer endorsed that sentiment, saying, Ours, too, should be a declaration of difference and distance We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created unequal. In the wake of the old world, this will be our proposition.

At every NPI event there is a book fair, and NPIs publishing division, Washington Summit Publishers, also offers its white nationalist titles on its own website and through sites such as Amazon.com.

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Spencer was a vocal advocate for Donald Trump due to his signature proposal to build a wall along the United States border with Mexico and his racist statements referring to Mexicans as criminals and rapists. Following a high-profile press conference on the racist alt-right movement a term that Spencer popularized Spencer organized a press conference with Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and Peter Brimelow of VDARE, two longtime leaders in the white nationalist movement, to codify the tenets of the alt-right. Race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity, Spencer told attendees. You cant understand who you are without race.

Only days after Trumps surprising victory over Hillary Clinton, the NPI held its fall conference on November 19, 2016, in Washington, D.C. In what he later described as a moment of exuberance, Spencer, flush with victory, offered the toast, Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory! to the nearly 200 attendees. He was met with a handful of stiff-armed salutes from the crowd. The gesture electrified the more radical sectors of the white supremacy movement while generating stern disappointment from some of its elder statesmen, including Jared Taylor. When asked about the incident, Taylor told Kristoffer Ronneberg: I was as shocked as anyone by all of that. The alt-right is a very broad movement. I have always known that there were at least anonymous Twitter accounts that are openly Nazi and anti-Semitic, but I did not think that Richard Spencer was that sort of person. I was shocked by these images that weve seen. The restaurant hosting the event later apologized and donated the proceeds to the Anti-Defamation League.

Following what Spencer and the alt-right came to refer to as hailgate, the media cycle fixated on trolling attacks against Tanya Gersh, a Jewish realtor living in Whitefish, Montana, who had been asked by Spencers mother to help her sell a piece of property.

The driving impetus behind the fracas appears to have been the possibility that some in the community might protest Sherry Spencers building to demonstrate their rejection of her sons ideology.

Spencer, who had recently joined into what was referred to as The First Triumvirate with Andrew Anglin ofthe Daily Stormer website and Mike Enoch ofthe Daily Shoah podcast (titles intended to evoke Nazism and the Holocaust), insisted that his mother was the subject of an extortion scheme, which Spencer categorized as a nasty shakedown of an innocent woman.

The shakedown allegation originated in a web posting purportedly authored by Sherry Spencer, Richards mother. The very next day, Anglin parroted the allegation in an article he wrote for the Daily Stormer. Over the next several months, Anglin posted a total of 30 articles urging his hundreds of thousands of readers to unleash a torrent of abusive phone calls, voicemails, emails, text messages, social media messages even Christmas cards on the Jewish realtor, her family and their associates. (In April 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against Anglin in the U.S. District Court of Montana in Missoula.)

But when Anglin threatened to bus in skinheads from the Bay Area for an armed protest against the towns small Jewish population, to be held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Spencer was forced to backpedal.

Spencer tried to play the march off as a joke and maintained that he had no control over Anglin, whom he referred to as totally wild thats not my kind of thing, though maintaining that Anglin was a rational person who wouldnt engage in physical violence.

On December 6, 2016, at the invitation of a neo-Nazi and former Texas A&M student Preston Wiginton, Spencer spoke to a ballroom of nearly 400 individuals. America, at the end of the day, Spencer told his audience, belongs to white men. Our bones are in the ground. We own it. At the end of the day America cant exist without us. We defined it. This country does belong to White people, culturally, politically, socially, everything. Following the controversy and attention generated by his appearance at Texas A&M, Spencer announced that he would be embarking on a college tour in 2017.

Read more:
Richard Bertrand Spencer | Southern Poverty Law Center

A Sky News investigation has found antisemitic, racist and white supremacist material in podcasts on one of the most popular streaming services, Spotify.

The company said it does not allow hate content on its platform.

But we found podcasts totalling several days' worth of listening promoting extreme views such as scientific racism, Holocaust denial and far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories.

And while some of the most shocking material was buried inside hours-long episodes, in some cases, explicit slurs could be found in episode titles and descriptions while album artwork displayed imagery adopted by white supremacists.

Spotify removed the content after we reported it to the streaming giant.

But many of these podcasts remain online elsewhere, including in largely unmoderated directories like Google Podcasts.

Google did not respond to our request for comment.

And experts are concerned that the "readily accessible" nature of this material could lure people towards extremism.

Content warning: this article includes references to racist, antisemitic and white supremacist language and ideas

One of the first results returned on Spotify when searching for the phrase "Kalergi Plan" directed us to a series which, at the time, had 76 episodes listed on the platform.

The so-called "Kalergi Plan" is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which alleges that Jewish elites are behind a deliberate plan to erase the white European race by promoting mass immigration.

We have chosen not to name any of the podcast series mentioned in this article to avoid publicising their content.

In one episode, the speaker explicitly promotes the Kalergi Plan.

He claims that the European elite has been "replaced" by a "new urban nobility" made up of Jewish elites.

The nine-minute monologue ends with an explicit call to violence against Jewish people.

Another episode by the same creator advances the racist and unfounded idea that white people are biologically superior to people of colour.

"There is something about [white men] that makes us privileged, its in our blood," he says.

He promotes this view, unchallenged, for 13 minutes. The monologue is littered with dehumanising language and makes comparisons that are too offensive to be included in this article.

The album artwork for the series depicts the raven flag - a symbol originally found in Norse mythology, but one that has been appropriated by some white supremacists in recent years.

We showed our findings to Maurice Mcleod of Race on the Agenda, a social research charity focusing on issues impacting ethnic minorities in the UK.

"This is incredibly dangerous," he told Sky News.

"Early this May we had the highest [monthly] number of reported incidents of antisemitism and, in the year to March, we had 115,000 reported incidents of hate crime. Now that's just what's reported, which is always only the tip of the iceberg."

"It feels like it's normalising this sort of thing if you can go on Spotify and listen to Adele, and then you can listen to this stuff right next to it." he said.

The Kalergi Plan is a variation of the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

Jacob Davey, head of research and policy of far right and hate movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said it was a belief that had been steadily increasing in popularity over the past decade.

"It's gone from what really was quite a fringe talking point among a few European extremists to the bread and butter discussion of extremists globally," he told Sky News.

But these ideas do not exist in an online vacuum, he said.

"In 2019, when an individual committed a really horrific terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, he was directly doing that in response to this theory," said Mr Davey

"And after that attack, there were a number of others throughout 2019. The spread of these ideas can really have a noticeable impact in compelling people to go on and commit atrocious violence."

This is just one of the series we came across.

Another one, hosted by US-based alt-right creators, uses racist slurs and white supremacist symbols in the episode titles and descriptions.

The hosts casually and openly promote a range of antisemitic and racist beliefs and theories, including Holocaust denial and scientific racism.

A third series from a different creator included episodes discussing what they refer to as the "beauty" of white supremacy, as well as readings of essays and books by prominent figures of the Nazi Party, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

The creator often used the episode description box on Spotify to advertise videos shared on other platforms. One link directs users to a video of a reading of what it calls "Dylann Roofs insightful manifesto".

Other episode descriptions link to a Telegram channel that has a swastika as its icon.

These three series amount to almost 150 hours of content.

In response to our findings, a Spotify spokesperson said: "Spotify prohibits content on our platform which expressly and principally advocates or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability.

"The content in question has been removed for violating our Hate Content policy."

The platform does allow users to report material that violates their content guidelines. The company also said it is developing new monitoring technology to identify material that has been flagged as hate content on some international registers.

But what is currently being done to moderate its podcasting platform beyond responding to user reports is not public knowledge.

The sheer volume of content online means that technology companies require algorithms as well as people to moderate their platforms.

And while technology capable of detecting hate speech in audio is being developed, it's not yet being widely deployed.

"One of the problems is that it takes a lot more memory to store long audio files. The other problem is that it's messy - you can have multiple speakers and fast-paced dialogue," said Hannah Kirk, AI researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and The Alan Turing Institute.

"There's also tonnes of extra linguistic cues in audio: the tone, the pitch of voice, even awkward silences or laughter. And that's a problem because we don't yet have the technology to accurately encode those kinds of extra linguistic signals," she told Sky News.

Ms Kirk said it is possible that companies like Spotify are hitting resource or technology constraints that mean they are not able to moderate their audio content at scale.

But, she said, the option is available for companies to transcribe audio content and run it through text processing models trained to detect hate, which are far more advanced.

We also found some of the same series on Google Podcasts.

Google's podcasting arm operates as a directory rather than a platform, meaning that it does not host content on its own server and instead collates podcast feeds that it automatically scrapes from the internet.

The company has received criticism before for allowing users to access extreme and misleading content on its interface. It's one of the few remaining places users can still find infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones's podcast.

We reported our findings to Google, but it did not respond. The series we flagged remains on its platform.

A spokesperson for the company previously told the New York Times that it "does not want to limit what people can find" and that it only removes content in rare circumstances.

But experts are concerned that the accessibility of extreme material on these popular platforms could lead people into becoming radicalised.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Why data journalism matters to Sky News

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Antisemitism, racism and white supremacist material in podcasts on Spotify, investigation finds - Sky News

Just three galaxy brains. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Tim Heidecker/YouTube

While half-checking your phone on Thanksgiving, you may have noticed that Tim Heideckers podcast Office Hours Live was on the air, but this was not an ordinary week for the talk show. In the special episode, Heidecker moderates a meandering marathon interview with comedians Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh. Wearing a ball cap with the logo for Elon Musks SpaceX, Heidecker serves up stoner-friendly questions like, How much can the brain absorb when it comes to new information?, and Levick replies simply by listing different parts of the brain in pulse-slowing monotone. Elsewhere, Suresh describes an Unsolved Mysterieslevel news story about the discovery of one of the devils horns, a topic that all three agree the New York Times would be too scared to pursue (Follow the money, Levick murmurs knowingly). Heidecker reads ad copy for Quad Core, a pyramid-scheme-seeming lifestyle health system that you can sign up for with the discount code Fuddruckers, which may draw your eye to a neon sign for the burger chain green-screened behind him.

If this reminds you of another podcast hosted by a certain UFC commentator and former Fear Factor host, youre right. Though hes booked interviewees as relatively innocuous as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Jay Leno, Joe Rogans hands-off style draws in guests who like that he wont push back on their rsums and responses, whether alt-right figureheads like Alex Jones or conspiracy-prone tech magnates like Musk, whose 2018 weed-toking appearance is invoked by Heideckers hat. But this hangout vibe also means that many Joe Rogan Experience episodes clock in at three hours or more, which is a long time to listen to anyone shoot the shit. This dull endlessness is the starting point for the Office Hours version: Heidecker, Levick, and Sureshs stream lasted for nearly 12 hours, an amazing stunt to witness in real time. While digesting turkey or a meat alternative, you could drop into the eighth hour of the show and hear Suresh explaining that humans can be considered animals on a cellular level.

In reality, the special loops an hour-long base video, but this feeling that they could go on forever makes the episode such a compelling (and funny) satire of Rogan. As the three comedians nail the lethargic tone of the Experience, everything that they actually discuss is patently ridiculous, spun from smart-sounding but meaningless buzzwords Levick says to Heidecker at one point, Im glad you said countercurrent, because its a sea change (whatever it is). Even if everything resembles the real JRE, each flimsy metaphor makes it harder to ignore the void at the conversations center. Theres a scene from Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buuels The Phantom of Liberty with a similar atmosphere: Characters attend a dinner party where toilets surround the table instead of chairs, but no one in the film views this as unusual. Instead of a visual gag, Office Hours punch line is conceptual; the joke might be on you if youre willing to listen to three weirdos talk for 12 hours about The Rock ruling the U.S. as a benevolent monarch.

That kind of obsession with formal detail, but with one major screw loose, is Levick and Sureshs trademark as a comedy duo. Theyre best known for their 2020 viral-video spoof conservative lecturer DESTROYS sjw college student: Levick plays a writer who pedantically eviscerates an audience question from Suresh about the moral compass of his book called Mr. Mouse Goes on a Fun Little Adventure to Happy Town (Define special mouse, Levick snaps repeatedly). Levicks pompous character was inspired by reactionaries like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, but instead of mimicking anything heinous that these people might say, the video lowers the stakes to the ground. Whats left is the underlying aggression that these particular exchanges share, now hilariously displaced into a heated argument over a cartoon mouse or, in a parody of an anti-masker bystander video, the message of When Harry Met Sally. Newly-minted SNL cast member James Austin Johnson does something comparable in his Donald Trump impression videos, in which he embarks on all sorts of free-associative tangents, like how Weird Al was mean to Coolio. Since he so closely replicates the real mans bizarre speech patterns, Johnsons videos feel like staring into Trumps erratic id, which gets at something less obvious than Alec Baldwins topical caricature. These comedians are more interested in unleashing toxic energy with pitch-perfect accuracy, a better fit for an absurd political reality that cant be rationally described.

Heidecker is the perfect partner in crime for this super-dry, committed brand of satire. Across all of his series with Eric Wareheim, hes made laser-precise parodies of infomercials, sitcoms, and, for the 2013 pilot of their horror anthology Bedtime Stories (20132017), a useless aftershow in the style of Talking Bad. The closest of his projects to the Rogan takeoff might be his epically scaled The Trial of Tim Heidecker from 2017, in which his character from On Cinema at the Cinema is on trial for murder. Directed by Eric Notarnicola, The Trial is nearly five hours long and stylized exactly like a live feed of court TV, but that aesthetic only makes its core psychodrama more perverse. At its heart, On Cinema is a soap opera about the power struggles of two incompetent film critics (Heidecker and Gregg Turkington), and in The Trial, their feuds look especially pathetic when they collide with the real world. The judge, lawyers, and jury have no frame of reference for a petty argument over which Star Trek movie was set in San Francisco, but they also seem powerless to stop this bizarre lore from swallowing up the legal process. As much as Heidecker has absorbed Trumps and Alex Joness mannerisms into his QAnon-prone, alternative-medicine-hocking On Cinema character, The Trial is more focused on the total inability of conventional systems to deal with his character and, in the end, he gets away with negligent homicide for selling faulty vape pens at a terrible EDM festival.

When Office Hours drains the center of The Joe Rogan Experience, whats left behind is a soup of directionless anecdotes and lamentations about cancel culture. Suresh worries that his stand-up jokes about Einstein in antifa might attract controversy, but Levick reassures him that this hour is valid and fucking funny. This also seems to be the premise of Rogans podcast: the possibility that each guests perspective could have a kernel of validity, and listeners are free to come to their own conclusions. By following Rogans format, Heidecker, Levick, and Suresh highlight something related: JRE episodes are mainly about unchecked rambling. Topics on deck could be as banal as Rogan and Musk vaguely spitballing about the future of AI, or as potentially harmful as misinformation about ivermectin and COVID vaccines. Whatever it is, its all delivered in the same casual, conversational tone. So when Heidecker talks about the therapeutic power of crab salts crystallized DNA from decomposed crabs which, if taken in capsule form, could provide complete immunity from disease and irreparably disrupt the pharmaceutical industry its important that this idea can jump out of the shows ASMR rhythm enough to make you laugh, jolting you awake from a multi-hour galaxy-brain session. If a perfect imitation of JRE can tap into its essence, Office Hours finds three men desperate to talk, but with nothing of value to say. And if that seems laughable, then its hard to see what might make it valid.

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The Tim, Jeremy, and Rajat Experience - Vulture