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      in Elections

      J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?

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      Why the newly released documents won’t put out the fire.On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, “It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.”The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy’s in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself.Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the “twilight struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air.Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win

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      Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”Since his inauguration, Trump has ended policies giving LGBTQ+ Americans protection from discrimination. He has also restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare, said the US would only recognise two sexes, and barred transgender people from enlisting in the military.Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”When he wrote the TV series Queer As Folk in the late 1990s, he said, it was part of a movement, with writers “fomenting ideas” and putting gay and lesbian characters on screen.Had he been asked to imagine then what life for LGBTQ+ people would be like in 2025, “I want to say it’s going to be all rainbows,” he said, “skipping down the street hand-in-hand, equality, equality, equality.”But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.” More

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      in US Politics

      The ‘Iron Mountain’ hoax: how anti-Vietnam war satire sparked today’s conspiracy theories

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      We live in a ­blizzard of fake news, ­disinformation and ­conspiracy theories. It’s tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed ­exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it’s about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange ­document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret “­special study group” recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America’s economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson.View image in fullscreenIn reality, as the White House eventually realised, Report from Iron Mountain was a hoax. It was the brainchild of leftwing satirists: Victor Navasky, editor of a magazine called Monocle, his colleagues, and a fellow satirist, Leonard Lewin, who wrote it with the help of luminaries like the famous economist and former US ambassador to India, JK Galbraith. Their goal was to expose what they saw as the insanity driving the intervention in Vietnam, and the whole of the cold war. By presenting their fake report as a real leak, they aimed to make people ask if this insane document might be real – and what that said about the people running the US government.And it worked. To young Americans living under the shadow of conscription, Report seemed all too plausible. Officials whispered to journalists that some of their ­colleagues really did think like this. Once the hoax had its satirical impact, Lewin came clean. But his work was so convincing it began to take on a life of its own.In the late 1980s, Report from Iron Mountain was discovered by the extreme right, which was convinced it was real. It was republished by a company called the Noontide Press, part of a network of fringe organisations that were among America’s primary promoters of Holocaust denial. These ­people were convinced they had found the smoking gun, confirming their darkest suspicions about the government’s secret plots to start wars and control the ­public. A ­horrified Lewin embarked on a long legal battle to take back control of his work and its true, meaning.But meanwhile, the militia movement spreading across the US seized on Report from Iron Mountain, as fuel for its paranoid visions of imminent oppression at the hands of the ­one-world government and its black helicopters. And Lewin’s creation found its way to Hollywood. In JFK, Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie about the Kennedy assassination, the great revelation about why the president was assassinated hinges on a character repeating the hoax’s claims in the belief that they were disturbing truths.View image in fullscreenReport even spawned a secondary hoax: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This ­purported to be the operations ­manual that helped the elite control its ­sheeple-civilians. This strange text was first popularised by the pioneering conspiracist Milton William Cooper, who ­published it in Behold a Pale Horse, his influential compendium of ­conspiracy theories. Cooper also included extracts from Report from Iron Mountain itself (and, horrifyingly, another hoax: that notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Silent Weapons has often been cited by arch ­conspiracist Alex Jones and has been invoked by “Q”, the ostensible government insider revered by the QAnon movement.Lewin and his colleagues had contrived their hoax so expertly that they inadvertently created “evidence” for a host of conspiracy theories. It could be used to explain everything from why wars end to the real reasons behind lockdown, from environmental regulations and terrorist attacks to the fiery end of a cult in Waco, Texas.The reasoning at work here is revealing. If something in Report chimes with what is really happening in the world, the conspiracist’s logic runs, that cannot be a coincidence. Rather, it exposes the secret motives that caused that reality. The ­principle here – a ­consistent fallacy of ­conspiracy theory – is that “nothing is accidental”. One online ­analysis of Report from Iron Mountain in 2014 even decided the fact Lewin later wrote a novel was an attempt to ­retrospectively create a cover ­identity so he could pretend Report was fiction too.And yet the fate of this all-too-successful hoax also suggests what we might need to do to ­counter this kind of thinking. In a political ­climate roiled by conspiracy ­theories and disinformation, the tale of Report from Iron Mountain is a warning about the ­consequences of taking your eye off the line between compelling stories and what we know to be true.Phil Tinline is the author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy, which will be published by Head of Zeus on 27 March. More

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      in Elections

      Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir

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      An arbitrator has prevented the employee from promoting her book and disparaging the company until private arbitration concludes.Meta won a legal victory on Wednesday against a former employee who published an explosive, tell-all memoir, as an arbitrator temporarily prohibited the author from promoting or further distributing copies.Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.During an emergency hearing on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, found that Meta had provided enough grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had potentially violated her contract, according to a legal filing posted by Meta. The two parties will now begin private arbitration.In addition to halting book promotions and sales, Ms. Wynn-Williams must refrain from engaging in or “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments,” according to the filing. She also must retract all previous disparaging comments “to the extent within her control.”The filing did not appear to limit the publisher, Flatiron Books, or its parent company, Macmillan, from continuing publication of the memoir.“Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism” was released last week.Flatiron, via Associated PressMeta has vehemently denied the allegations in the book.The book is a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives,” a Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a statement. Ms. Wynn-Williams was fired for cause, he added, and an investigation at the time determined that “she made misleading and unfounded allegations of harassment.”A spokeswoman for Flatiron Books did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Ms. Wynn-Williams, who worked at what was then called Facebook from 2011 to 2018, did not comment.The move to publish the arbitration filing is one of Meta’s most forceful public repudiations of a former employee’s tell-all memoir, several of which have been published over the past two decades.Meta executives have also responded online to Ms. Wynn-Williams’s claims, calling most of them wildly exaggerated or flat-out false.It is unclear whether Meta’s attempts to claw back Ms. Wynn-Williams’s book will ultimately be successful. In 2023, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that prohibit workers from making potentially disparaging statements about former employers, including discussing sexual harassment or sexual assault accusations.In a Meta shareholder report in 2022, the company’s board of directors said that it did not require employees “to remain silent about harassment or discrimination,” and that the company “strictly prohibits retaliation against any personnel” for speaking up on these issues.And in 2018, Meta said it would no longer force employees to settle sexual harassment claims in private arbitration, following a similar stance taken by Google at the time.Sheera Frenkel More

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      in US Politics

      Trump official defending Doge filmed fashion influencer videos from office

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      The chief spokesperson for the agency overseeing mass firings as Donald Trump and Elon Musk slash the federal workforce used her office to record fashion influencer videos even as thousands of workers were losing their jobs.McLaurine Pinover, communications director at the US office of personnel management (OPM), posted several Instagram videos during business hours in which she posed in different outfits, CNN reported.One video was posted on 13 February, the day OPM reportedly directed several agencies to lay off thousands of employees with probationary status, including about 20 people on Pinover’s own team.Pinover has issued numerous statements backing moves to fire federal workers, including describing a controversial directive for all workers to list five things they achieve each week as “a commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce”.CNN said Pinover did not respond to questions but said she deleted her Instagram account minutes after being approached for comment. Pinover’s LinkedIn page appeared to have been taken down, too.Videos published by CNN showed Pinover in her office, showing herself wearing various clothing outfits with hashtags including “#dcstyle” and “#dcinfluencer” and the song Busy Woman by Sabrina Carpenter.One post was made on Tuesday, the day the Department of Education announced it was cutting half its workforce, CNN said.Pinover may have benefited from affiliate links to buy clothes in her videos, CNN said, though it noted that she only had approximately 800 followers to her account.Former OPM staffers told CNN the videos were filmed in the office of the communications director, across the hall from an annex used by workers for the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk’s vehicle for imposing cuts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne unnamed former staffer said: “I saw it, and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, that’s my office.’ She’s the spokesperson for the agency that is advocating for the firing based on performance and efficiency of the rest of the government workforce, and she’s using government property as a backdrop for her videos.”Jack Miller, Pinover’s predecessor as OPM communications director under Joe Biden, said: “Your number one job as a leader is to protect and support your people. So instead of fighting tooth and nail to keep your team, we’re posting fashion videos. It’s absurd.”Donald K Sherman, chief counsel for the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNN: “It is highly problematic that while dedicated civil servants who want to work for the government are being fired for all manner of dubious reasons, or are being forced out by this administration, that someone at the agency leading that attack on the civil service is using their government job for private gain.” More

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      in Elections

      Some Vegans Were Harmed in the Watching of This Movie

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      A film critic who provides “vegan alerts” for animal cruelty goes beyond onscreen violence. Milk and eggs are problematic, too.Inside a dark theater in Midtown Manhattan, Allison McCulloch watched “Kraven the Hunter,” an origin story for the obscure Spider-Man villain, while jotting notes on a white piece of paper smaller than a Post-it.Fur clothing.Taxidermied animals.Characters eating steak.McCulloch is the Roger Ebert of vegans, a dedicated cinephile who cares as much as anyone about acting and cinematography — and more than almost anyone about onscreen portrayals of dairy, poultry and beef.In the short reviews she writes for the app Letterboxd, she includes her overall critique as well as “vegan alerts,” flagging signs of animal products in a one-woman quest to highlight animal welfare onscreen, even in details most viewers would overlook.“People might think a glass of milk is innocuous,” she said. “It’s not. It’s full of violence.”Some of McCulloch’s vegan alerts for “Kraven the Hunter,” with Aaron Taylor-Johnson: “Sergei catches and eats raw fish” and “tiger rug.”Columbia Pictures/Marvel, via Sony PicturesMcCulloch has documented her opinion on 24,082 movies on her Letterboxd account, putting her in the top 100 out of the app’s more than 18 million members. Movies starring animals are almost a lock for vegan-friendly ratings, with films like “Flow” and “Kung Fu Panda 4” getting four stars.“Kraven the Hunter,” about a criminal-tracking vigilante played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, flopped by traditional measures (“incomprehensible plotting and dodgy one-liners,” Robert Daniels wrote in The New York Times). But it worked on some level for McCulloch, who was surprised by how it framed Kraven as a kind of conservationist who shares a supernatural connection with the creatures he encounters, and hunts criminals instead. She even gave the movie one “vegan point” for Kraven’s decision to not shoot a lion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Musk’s Tweet-Fueled Bubble May Be About to Burst

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      Elon Musk’s business empire may be starting to wobble.Over the past six weeks, the value of Tesla’s shares has plunged about 40 percent, wiping out virtually all they had gained after the 2024 election. This reversal reveals Mr. Musk’s soft underbelly: His fortune depends heavily on the inflated expectations of his rabid following. As those expectations deflate so will his power, demonstrating that financial markets are an underappreciated guardrail against both Mr. Musk’s and President Trump’s agendas.It is tempting to compare Mr. Musk to the true business titans of the past quarter century such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But those individuals created genuinely huge businesses that eclipse anything Mr. Musk has built by any possible metric. While Mr. Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to launch an ever-growing list of disparate initiatives and provided immunity from critics who question his operational decision-making, his corporate governance, his obscene pay packages, and now his migration into the political sphere.The high-wire act goes something like this: Dream up a business so ambitious that any setback is trivial and every accomplishment heroic. Identify yourself as the manic genius behind this ambitious business in order to personally capitalize on outsize returns from excited investors. Enlist social media to cement your iconic status, keeping your believers so enthusiastic that their fervor beats back any skeptics who dare to bet against your ventures, even as you pitch more and more fantastical ideas. At this point you hit the flywheel: Other investors, searching for outsize returns, flock to the shares of your other companies, pushing their valuations ever higher, thus fortifying your wealth and burnishing your reputation as a business mastermind.If you’re lucky, this happens when investors are dreaming of alternatives to the poor returns available when interest rates are ridiculously low; magical thinking about the power of technology suppresses any worry about the risks of problems down the line; and retail markets are turning stock trading into something more akin to online gambling.Understanding this cult requires one to rethink what one knows about finance. Financial purists like to think of financial markets as neutral arbiters that merely record the value-creating activities of entrepreneurs. Financial pragmatists understand that prices need not always reflect value, as behavioral finance has demonstrated. But what if entrepreneurs can capitalize on these dynamics to manufacture fortunes and political power?This trick is precisely what Mr. Musk has mastered. His messianic status, which was birthed in the explosion of social media, created a powerful cycle of outsize returns on ventures that lead to investors providing him with more and cheaper capital to diversify his empire that, in turn, attracts yet more investors fearful of missing out. Skyrocketing Tesla shares have made fans and investors so devoted that all he has to do is mention a new ambition to goad them into buying even more. And the larger the stated ambition, the more wealth and power they hand him. So why not try for Mars? The final step in this process is to consolidate power in the political sphere to ensure that the outsize ambitions can be nourished forever. If Mr. Musk had played it well, his empire may have been impregnable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Rage Against Elon Musk Turns Tesla Into a Target

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      Tesla charging stations were set ablaze near Boston on Monday. Shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon after midnight on Thursday. Arrests were made at a nonviolent protest at a Tesla dealership in Lower Manhattan on Saturday.The electric car company Tesla increasingly found itself in police blotters across the country this week, more than seven weeks after President Trump’s second inauguration swept Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, into the administration as a senior adviser to the president.Mr. Musk, 53, is drawing increasing backlash for his sweeping cuts to federal agencies, a result of the newly formed cost-cutting initiative Mr. Musk has labeled the Department of Government Efficiency.During a demonstration on Saturday at a gleaming Tesla showroom in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan, protesters joined in chants of “Nobody voted for Elon Musk” and “Oligarchs out, democracy in.” One held a sign saying, “Send Musk to Mars Now!!” (Mr. Musk also owns SpaceX.)Shots were fired at the Tesla dealership in Tigard, Ore., this week.Tigard Police DepartmentSeveral hundred protesters remained there for two hours, organizers said, blocking entrances and shutting down the dealership.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More