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      Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right

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      After clinching the title of top conservative podcast in America (and second overall news podcast, according to Apple’s ranking) in March, Charlie Kirk said: “We’re not just talking. We’re activating a revolution.”In the hours after his killing at age 31 on the first stop of a buzzy college campus tour, the rightwing activist’s words echoed through young conservative circles. Social media eulogies rolled in, with users reposting clips of Kirk with his wife and children. Parents of teens wrote on X of learning about Kirk’s death through their children. “My 17 year old is bumming. Told me he plays Charlie in the background on his computer when he’s on it,” the conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote on X. Another X user wrote about speaking to teens at a church youth group: “Everyone I talked to is so distraught and heartbroken at his passing.”A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Kirk’s ideology was caustic; he espoused openly homophobic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and Christian nationalist views while uplifting misinformation and conspiracy theories. He also campaigned on issues that mattered to young Americans, engaging directly with them – no matter how virulently – on hot-button topics such as abortion, transgender rights, race and Palestinian solidarity.View image in fullscreenAmy Binder, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who studies politics and education, describes Kirk’s values as “insurgency conservatism” that was “designed to get attention”.It worked: TikTok users under 30 who voted for Trump in 2024 said they trusted Kirk more than any other individual, according to a New York Times profile, despite the fact that he never held office or a role in the White House. That election saw male voters ages 18 to 29 swing hard to the right; Trump also made inroads with gen Z women. Earlier this year, Trump praised Kirk for “what he’s done with the young people”.As a millennial growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kirk was obsessed with Limbaugh and the Tea Party movement. His fans also felt like outsiders within the American political system.“After Trump was elected in 2016, I was really surprised to see just how many students who were conservative were no longer identifying with the Republican party or with college Republicans, and had instead pivoted over to being really intrigued with what Turning Point was doing on campus,” Binder said. “They were doing much more exciting programming. It was less electorally focused, less about campaigning, and more about having events that were really confrontational.”Kirk appeared equally at ease chumming it up with high-powered donors as he did debating 20-year-olds in sweatpants. Kirk sparred directly with young people through video templates such as “prove me wrong” (a one-on-one debate, where students could wait in line to ask him a question), and he was an early guest on the YouTube series Surrounded, where he sat in a room with 25 liberals and goaded them with statements such as “abortion is murder and should be illegal” and “trans women are not women.”Turning Point USA raked in funding – the New York Times estimated a $92.4m revenue in 2023 – while advancing campus culture wars. Kirk’s content brought classic and extreme rightwing ideals to young people’s media feeds; he looked like both an old-school, suited conservative in the style of a Fox News host, and a social media-savvy man of the times. His video titles usually bent toward hyperbole (“Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State,” was posted less than a week before the shooting). There were gonzo premises, such as when Kirk and the YouTube prank team Nelk Boys showed up at a Wisconsin frat party to get out the vote in 2024. His meme literacy showed when he handed out hats that read: “White Boy Summer”, a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” catchphrase.With his wife, Erika, owner of a faith-based fashion brand and a former Miss Arizona USA, Kirk softened his image, presenting himself as devoted husband, father and a bit of a lifestyle influencer. He talked to tweens in Maga hats about his preferred Starbucks order and promoted “cuteservatives” like Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster who branded her show on Maha culture as a rightwing Call Her Daddy. After Kirk’s death, Brett Cooper, a 23-year-old conservative influencer in the “womanosphere” with more than 1 million Instagram followers, reposted a video homage that depicted him as a champion for girls and young women. (Yet this was a man who compared abortion to the Holocaust and claimed that women over 30 “aren’t attractive in the dating pool”.)View image in fullscreenFor 10 years, Turning Point USA hosted a “women’s summit”, where Kirk and others like Clark and Cooper encouraged attenders to focus on finding husbands. Evie, the conservative women’s magazine, published an obituary that called Kirk a “loving father, patriot, and husband”.Even young people who were disgusted by Kirk’s rhetoric could not deny his impact. Hasan Piker, the hugely popular leftwing Twitch streamer whose ideology stands in direct contrast to Kirk, was scheduled to debate with Kirk at the end of September at Dartmouth University. Both Piker and the gun control activist David Hogg spoke against political violence in the wake of the shooting (as did many Democratic figures such as Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani). Piker told his followers not to make jokes about Kirk’s shooting. “This is a terrifying incident,” Piker said. Hogg called the news “horrifying” on X.“I think it’s undeniable to say that Kirk was one of the first and most prominent people to shape what it means to be young and on the right in the US,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of communications at American University who studies extremism.After Kirk’s death, Braddock said he had seen “individuals calling this an inflection point, or a turning point where the left can no longer be tolerated”. Rightwing pundits have been eager to blame the left for the shooting.Adam Pennings, 25, is the executive director of Run Gen Z, a non-profit that supports young Republican candidates. “He’s always just been such an important part” of the young conservative party, Pennings said of Kirk. “He was everywhere.”Pennings knew Kirk through his work, but the two were not close. Still, Pennings said, due to Kirk’s omnipresence: “I feel like I lost a friend.” More

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      As the Epstein case shows, Trump’s Maga faithful care about only one kind of sex-crime victim | Emma Brockes

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      On Monday, Donald Trump appeared in two, unrelated stories involving the sexual abuse of women. The first was a ruling by the US federal court of appeals, upholding an earlier judgment in which the president was found liable for $83.3m in damages for defaming the writer E Jean Carroll – a woman whom, it was ruled in civil court in 2023, had been sexually abused by Trump. On the same day, Trump’s alleged contribution to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s “birthday book” was shared by Democrats on social media in the form of a lewd drawing the president denied having made. The E Jean Carroll news caused no public inconvenience for Trump; the Epstein story went up like a mushroom cloud in what has become the most politically dangerous episode of his presidency.What, exactly, is the difference then between the sexual abuse of E Jean Carroll, for which Trump has been found liable in a civil court, and the trafficking and abuse of victims by Epstein, in which there is no direct evidence of Trump’s involvement? For that matter, why does Trump’s record of gross references to grabbing women “by the pussy” and calling them “fat” and “ugly” elicit barely a shrug from supporters, while his friendship with Epstein, a man referred to in the press, variously, as the “billionaire paedophile”, the “paeodophile financier”, and, surely coming down the pike at some point, the “hell-based paedophile money manager”, has triggered not only fury among the Maga faithful but accusations of a Trump cover-up?Trump people would argue it’s a question of degree: Epstein occupies the worst and most taboo category of sex offender – a child abuser, in which no grey area exists. This assumes the existence, within Maga circles, of a continuum ranging from paedophile sex trafficking (very bad), through other categories of sex offending (less bad but still quite bad), to “date rape” and the whole of #MeToo (lot of fuss about nothing). But this isn’t how Trump supporters have calibrated their outrage. Instead, what we have seen is mass, Maga hysteria over Epstein, in which even the likes of Tucker Carlson have made veiled accusations against Trump, and complete indifference to every other accusation made by women against the president.It is a feature of misogyny, of course, that the flipside of abusing women and curtailing their rights is selective sentimentalisation. Animating the Maga movement is the desire for a return to traditional gender roles and pronatalism, a force driven, one assumes, by a sense of frustrated male entitlement that has built up over decades of gains made by the women’s movement. A hatred of women as extreme as the one seen within the current Republican movement requires a moral counterweight. And what better source of moral clarity – what starker moral issue, one that brooks no dissent or equivocation from anyone on either side – than the defence of abused girls? In the rightwing media, the only stories relished as much as those about Epstein’s crimes, are ones about violent offences committed by immigrants.As a result, the use to which “child abuse” is put within the rightwing ecosystem is not only as a bat signal for conspiracy theories, designed to increase the reach of each story, but as a pretext for everyone in that world to feel, perhaps fleetingly, very good about themselves, moral crusaders in a horrible world. In the case of Epstein, there’s the bonus of liberal names being ensnared in the net. In Epstein’s “birthday book”, Bill Clinton appears to have left a whimsical message referring to Epstein’s “childlike curiosity”, and “drive to make a difference”. And Peter Mandelson appears in a bathrobe to address Epstein as “my best pal”. (Sidenote: there can be few situations in which being gay in public life is an advantage over being straight – but downplaying one’s involvement with Epstein is definitely one of them.)The curious thing about all this is that, per the biases that govern how victims of sexual abuse are perceived, E Jean Carroll is a pretty good victim: an older woman (she was 52 when Trump abused her in 1996), doing a mundane chore (shopping), in a public place (Bergdorf Goodman). And yet the judgment of the civil courts in her favour in 2023 elicited no sympathy among Trump supporters, in or outside Congress, and since then the president has suffered no apparent drop in political fortunes.But here’s the rub: Carroll is an adult woman, liberal, successful, stylish, and articulate – everything that threatens and triggers Trump’s base. The only female victim worth defending in Trumpland is the fallen girl, a figure straight out of a Victorian lithograph, and one who inspires such fervour, such delusions of nobility, that if it comes to a straight contest, she may win out over Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      Rinse and repeat: US vaccine hearing on unpublished study debates same myths

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      A congressional hearing on Tuesday titled “How the Corruption of Science Has Impacted Public Perception and Policies Regarding Vaccines” largely consisted of a debate over an unpublished study comparing chronic illnesses in children who received vaccines with those who didn’t.The study was lead-authored by Marcus Zervos of Henry Ford Health, completed in 2020, and never submitted for publication, according to testimony during the hearing. Senator Ron Johnson, the chair of the subcommittee for the hearing, and the witness Aaron Siri, a lawyer who has represented RFK Jr and the anti-vaccination non-profit Informed Consent Action Network, both claimed the study was not submitted because the authors would lose their jobs were it to be published.Zervos and the other authors of the study were not present at the hearing. The study, which has never been peer-reviewed, is not currently available to the public as a pre-print or in any other form.Henry Ford Health’s communication office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.The only information that is currently publicly available about the study comes from the hearing itself, including witness testimony and a brief trailer for a documentary from the Informed Consent Action Network. The trailer says the study found that “amongst the unvaccinated group, there was zero brain dysfunction, zero diabetes, zero behavioral problems, zero learning disabilities, zero intellectual disabilities, zero tics and zero other psychological disabilities”.The trailer also includes a clip of Donald Trump saying: “A few decades ago, one in 10,000 children had autism. Today, it’s one in 31.”Witnesses on both sides of the debate during the hearing agreed that the study in question found no link between vaccines and autism.Jake Scott, a clinical associate professor of infectious diseases at Stanford – and the only physician who served as a witness during the hearing – had a different explanation as to why the study was not published.In his testimony, Scott said that the study is “fundamentally flawed”, adding that its core problem was that “vaccinated children had twice the follow up time and substantially more healthcare visits than unvaccinated children”. More healthcare visits mean more opportunities to be diagnosed with conditions like ADHD.Scott went on to explain that “the study reports zero ADHD cases among 1,000s of unvaccinated children. How is that possible with a national prevalence at 11%? That’s highly unlikely, unless conditions went undiagnosed.” Scott noted that the study also claimed a six to eightfold increase in ear infections among vaccinated children, but there is no plausible scientific explanation as to why vaccines would increase ear infections.This finding is consistent with past research showing that parents who do not vaccinate their children are also less likely to have their children treated for health conditions in the medical system. Conditions that were not diagnosed or treated would not have shown up in the study, which relied on medical records, according to hearing testimony.Siri claimed the authors of the study ran sensitivity analyses to account for the differences in medical care. These are not available to the public.As a point of comparison, Scott referenced a Danish study published this July in Annals of Internal Medicine which investigated whether childhood vaccines were linked to 50 different conditions, including many of the same conditions from the unpublished study, like ADHD, autism, asthma, food allergies and eczema. The Danish study looked at outcomes in over a million vaccinated children and 15,000 unvaccinated children, while the unpublished study looked at 18,500 vaccinated children and 2,000 unvaccinated children, according to hearing testimony.The Danish study found no statistically significant increase in risk for any of the conditions investigated, and that vaccinated children experienced lower rates of certain conditions, like ulcerative colitis.Johnson and Siri expressed skepticism over the Danish study, noting that the authors have not released the de-identified raw data they used for their conclusions. No data is available about the unpublished study.Later in the hearing, the conversation turned towards skepticism about vaccines in general and the Covid-19 vaccine specifically.Some graphics that Johnson shared left out critical information. For example, a line chart he introduced accurately showed that measles death rates had already begun to decline significantly before vaccines were introduced in the 1960s, due to other factors like improved sanitation, healthcare access and nutrition, but the chart stops in 1960. After vaccines were introduced and widely adopted, both measles cases and death rates declined to nearly zero.Measles was effectively eliminated in the US in 2000, but cases reemerged when vaccine adoption decreased. There have been 35 measles outbreaks in 2025, according to the CDC. At least two US children and one adult have died of measles this year.Scott, the Stanford witness, had trouble answering some questions based on spurious facts. He was silent for a moment when Johnson asked him “Did you believe when Fauci told us that the [Covid] mRNA shot would stay in the arm?” There is no credible evidence that Fauci ever said this.Toby Rogers, a fellow at the Brownstone institute whose study linking vaccines and autism was retracted said: “I believe we are in the midst of one of the greatest crimes in human history,” referring to vaccines. In now-deleted tweets, Rogers has called for hearings similar to the Nuremberg trials for public health officials who promote vaccines.When Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the hearing subcommittee, asked if Rogers believes the Covid-19 vaccine is comparable to the Holocaust, several audience members applauded. More

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      Migrant and Seasonal Head Start is a ‘bridge’ for many US families. An order threatens its survival

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      It has been a challenging year for Head Start.The Trump administration first froze funding and cut staff, forcing many centers to close temporarily or permanently. It then asked Congress to eliminate the early childhood education program in a leaked budget proposal (the White House ultimately reversed course).Then, in July, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an executive order excluding some immigrants from accessing a range of federal programs, including Head Start. Its argument: Head Start is equivalent to public welfare, which unauthorized immigrants have not been able to access since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOR) of 1996. And Head Start advocates are waiting to learn whether enforcement will begin this week or sometime soon.The term “unauthorized” includes not only undocumented people but also those who entered the US legally but do not qualify for public benefits, such as asylum applicants; trafficking victims; and recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a program that protects people who came to the US as undocumented minors from deportation and allows them to work.Head Start centers have said they have no protocols for verifying eligibility. The program doesn’t, for example, gather information on citizenship status.Attorneys general from 20 states and a coalition of Head Start organizations filed separate suits in federal court, arguing that the order was unconstitutional. Following the lawsuits, the government backtracked, though only slightly: it delayed enforcement of the rule until 10 September, pending the result of the legal challenges.Experts say this executive order is a broader attempt to disenfranchise immigrants from accessing a wide range of public services. “On its face, this appears designed to ensure that virtually all public supports are unavailable to unauthorized persons,” said Mark Greenberg, who formerly worked as deputy general counsel in the Department of Health and Human Services and also served in its administration for children and families.He said that the government has “a very, very difficult case … The legal question for the courts at this point will be, ‘Is Head Start similar to welfare?’”View image in fullscreenHe believes that this argument will be very difficult to prove. First, welfare is almost always defined as cash assistance or its equivalents, welfare checks or electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, used for food stamps. Head Start programming is neither. In addition, PRWOR does not give federal agencies the power to define what counts as a public benefit. So the government has to argue that Congress always intended to define Head Start as welfare – something it has never done.Should the executive order stand, it’s hard to estimate the possible impact on Head Start. Estimates suggest that the vast majority of the nearly 755,000 children currently enrolled are US citizens. Only 1.5 million children under 18 living in the US in 2023 were unauthorized, the most recent year for which statistics are available.However, one particular part of Head Start is likely to feel the impact more deeply.Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) provides early childhood education and services to approximately 25,000 children whose families work in agricultural labor. These children range in age from infancy to five years old, and the program currently operates in 34 states.The term “migrant” as used in MSHS does not refer to citizenship status. “In our world, a migrant means a family that is moving within a certain distance from their home in pursuit of work,” said Cleo Rodriguez Jr, executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association (NMSHSA).Nevertheless, between 37-45% of all farm workers are unauthorized and the order “raises the concern of chilling effects that go far beyond the families [in Head Start]”, Greenberg said. Parents may choose not to enroll eligible children to protect unauthorized family or friends from discovery, denying them the opportunities for social mobility and education that Migrant and Seasonal Head Start provides. And enforcement would theoretically apply to all families seeking Head Start services.Soon after Head Start’s creation in 1965, program administrators realized that itinerant farm workers could not enroll their children in one location year-round. Migrant Head Start began in 1969 to support these families. Seasonal Head Start was added in 1999 as warmer weather due to climate change enabled more agricultural workers to work year-round in one location.View image in fullscreenMSHS works the same as the other Head Starts in a few ways. It also serves infants and children up to age five. All enrolled children receive health services such as developmental and vision screenings and nutritional support.And according to Rodriguez, some of the key features of Head Start’s larger programs began with standards set by Migrant and Seasonal Head Start. The program served children agedup to three years from the beginning, whereas Early Head Start only started in 1995. Similarly, it always offered extended hours so agricultural workers could spend as long in the field as necessary; conventional Head Start did not expand to full-day and year-round care until 1998.“The program that supports agriculture families is really the model for all of Head Start,” Rodriguez said. “We’ve always served the infants and toddlers. We’ve always done the extended hours. We’ve always been flexible.”Every program, by necessity, is different, dictated by the length and yield of each harvest season. “What works in Nebraska doesn’t necessarily work in central Florida, and what works in central Florida doesn’t necessarily work in central Michigan,” he said.Variation even occurs at the same center from year to year. It’s common, Rodriguez said, for growers to ask MSHS staff to extend the program on short notice if the weather suddenly becomes more favorable.MSHS can even be open six or seven days a week and for lengthy hours. “Programs can start deploying buses at 4.35 in the morning, and get the kids to school and put them back to bed,” Rodriguez said.The flexibility that makes MSHS so useful for growers and families also makes it challenging to study, according to early childhood researcher Michael Lopez, who helped design Head Start studies while employed by the administration for children and families from 1991 to 2005.“We would do an assessment at the beginning of the year, an assessment at the end of the year, and you look at progress over the year,” he explained. “A defined academic experience for an MSHS kid could be three months in this location, three months in that location,” he said. In addition, “a lot of these measures were developed for predominantly English-speaking classrooms”, not designed for students learning the language.Nevertheless, Lopez said existing research supports the value of early education on children’s health and development no matter the program. “There’s no question in my mind that it has positive effects,” he said.View image in fullscreenMultiple studies suggest that children of migrant farm workers have among the highest high-school dropout rates in the country, due to a combination of language barriers, frequent moves and even a need to work to support their families.So when Rodriguez kept encountering MSHS graduates who not only completed high school but also went to college, one of his first projects as NMSHSA executive director was to start a summer internship program in Washington DC. Since 2012, 49 interns have worked for organizations including United Farm Workers, UnidosUS and the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators.Maria Espinoza participated in the program in 2021 and worked in agricultural research and policy before starting law school at American University this year. The youngest of seven, she was born in South Carolina to migrant parents during the tobacco harvest. When the family settled in the agricultural community of Immokalee, Florida, they sent her to a center run by Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA).“It was one of the first organizations that we interacted with after we moved,” Espinoza said. She recalls walking to and from class with her parents, interacting with her teachers and her parents attending meetings after their long hours working in the fields.“They were kind of a vehicle for how we settled into our community and the US as a whole,” she said, describing RCMA staff and centers as “pillars of the community”.Two of her siblings found employment at RCMA, with Espinoza’s eldest sister eventually launching her own daycare business. Espinoza’s nieces and nephews now attend RCMA’s charter school.“[MSHS] does so much to fill all those gaps and make a bridge so that both the families and their children are able to succeed,” Espinoza said.Even if the executive order is struck down, families are already more hesitant to engage, according to Rodriguez. Some MSHS parents have already been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).“My parents were both migrant farm workers, and I also did work when I was a kid,” Rodriguez said. “So this is very personal to me.”However, he still has a deep belief not only in the benefits of MSHS but also in America as a whole.“We’re still the greatest country with the greatest opportunities,” he said. More

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      Latte-swilling ‘performative males’: why milky drinks are shorthand for liberal

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      Another week, another somewhat fictional online buzzword to parse. This time it is the “performative male”, basically the idea that posturing straight men only read books to get laid, outlined in recent trend pieces including the New York Times, Vox, Teen Vogue, Hypebeast, GQ and millions of TikToks.According to the Times, this man “curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likable to progressive women. He is, in short, the antithesis of the toxic man.” Apparently these heterosexual men who read Joan Didion, carry tote bags and listen to Clairo are not in fact human beings who enjoy things but performative jerk-offs who don’t really care about any of that girly stuff and are just trying to impress their feminine opposites. As Vox put it: “think Jacob Elordi when he was photographed with three different books on his person, or Paul Mescal publicly admiring Mitski”. Reading! Enjoying music by women! Perish the thought.Each piece differed slightly in what it defined as the key characteristics of the performative male, but they all shared one detail: he drinks matcha lattes.This was unsurprising. For three decades the latte has been the favored blog-whistle of the trend piece writer. It signals liberalism, femininity, gayness, pretension, gentrification – ideally all of the above – so reflexively that its origins as an insult are rarely revisited.It began in earnest in 1997, when journalist David Brooks writing in the Weekly Standard coined the term “latte liberal”. He was trying, disparagingly, to give name to the crunchy consumerist leftism of the time, in which organic vegetables and world music had become part of the social justice hamper: “You know you’re in a Latte Town when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name that must have the word ‘Grounds’ in it, before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop.”Brooks wanted to hint that leftism is a luxury only the bourgeois can afford – an idea encapsulated by the earlier formation of champagne socialist. But the latte proved a stickier, more evocative symbol, painting liberals as soft and effete.In 2004, lattes really entered politics, when a Republican Pac ran an ad accusing presidential candidate Howard Dean of being a “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show”.Lattes also became a byword for gentrification. In 2000, when the Brooklyn neighborhood Williamsburg was, the Times bemoaned at the time, reaching “the point of hipster saturation”, the final straw was “a local Italian specialty store and a working-class institution … advertising the arrival of the Chai latte”. In New York Magazine’s 2005 feature L-ification, the publication mapped out how gentrification was spreading further east into Brooklyn along the route of the L train with little latte icons, a milky glyph of whiteness by that point understood by everyone.Noticeably, the latte form remains permanent, even as the type of latte shifts. Newt Gingrich accused New York mayor Bill De Blasio of “small soy latte liberalism” in 2014 – emphasising that the only thing more girlish than drinking a big dairy milky coffee was drinking a small vegan milky coffee. On Drake’s 2010 song Thank Me Now, when he’s asking the woman he’s left behind if she still thinks of him, he croons: “But do I ever come up in discussion / Over double-pump lattes and low-fat muffins?”Now the performative male has once again given rise to the idea that there is something inherently disingenuous about a milky beverage. Interestingly as the latte has changed colour, from white to green, the stereotype has expanded beyond the white liberal: matcha hails a diverse new generation of milky boys.The idea of the performative male started out mostly as a joke on TikTok, where knowing posters would show a man reading at the gym, for example, and joke that he was pretending. Contests in which men meet in parks to compete to be the most performative have been funny, postmodern, heterosexual versions of drag.But with each passing write-up, the knowing humorous element has been rinsed away, until Vox earnestly announced in its piece that the “MeToo movement showed us that even supposed ‘nice guy’ could be capable of alleged manipulation and abuse – that in fact, they could use their enlightenment as a kind of shield”. If you see a man with a matcha latte, you need to run!None of the pieces particularly wanted to reckon with the fact that, as Judith Butler put it, “gender identity is a performative accomplishment” to begin with, or that Arthur Schopenhauer was complaining in the mid-19th century that a performative reader “usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents”. Do we read in order to get laid? Only since forever.View image in fullscreenIronically much of this ribbing comes from the same people who decry a crisis of masculinity, and worry for future generations of boys who feel like they lack purpose and companionship. Yet in the world of the performative male, even having female friends and drinking milky coffee is a divergence from true masculinity.Why is the latte such an enduring emblem for this distrust – a way to call men you do not like effeminate?Partly it is the allegory of milk, the pursed mouth of a graphic designer on a coffee cup as a surrogate for the Madonna del Latte, the thousands of medieval depictions of Jesus nursing at Mary’s breast. Grown men drinking milk has always been laden in symbolism, the blend of nurture and eroticism evocative of a sexual infantalization. It is why so many films from A Clockwork Orange to Babygirl centre milk as a poison beyond a place of regular intoxication. When Kelis sings that her milkshake brings her boys to the yard, the lyric is so heavy in implication that the exact innuendo she is reaching for is irrelevant.Even the ancient Greeks used to have their own version of the latte joke, belittling the Persians who drank milk: Aristotle said Empedocles described it as “whitish pus”.But the milk in the context of the latte also turns coffee, a drink which was sold as fuel, bitter black stuff for TV detectives and the working man, into a sweet little treat. A latte fundamentally dilutes the taste of coffee and so it is easy to present those who drink it as watering down their wine. Even though the iconography of the latte liberal is now so strong it has stretched to drinks that do not contain any coffee to begin with. According to the performative male trend pieces, drinking a matcha latte indicates to women that you are soft, feminist-leaning and worldly (after all, it’s from Japan).Even though the latte is supposed to be this bastion of girlishness, women are not exempt from being chastised for drinking them, although the latte trope for them is more often a reflection of being superficial than performatively feminine. The logic of this makes little sense: latte liberal men are supposedly too European to be masculine, yet iced latte girlies are gormless Americans sucking on the straw of consumerism. No matter, the two sit side by side, one clutching a hot cup of simp soup, the other a pumpkin-spiced lobotomy. They are a pair one can project all their prejudices towards, without having to interrogate any of it too much.The irony is that hipsters and gentrifiers in coastal towns are rarely drinking lattes these days. They are much more likely to be sipping on a single origin V60 that’s been carefully weighed out on a digital scale. Indeed the stereotype could easily be flipped around – that it’s red states where complicated online Starbucks orders and Stanley cups filled with 32oz of latte abound. In the best survey of the coffee Americans actually drink and how it aligns with their politics by Diana C Mutz and Jahnavi S Rao, the differences were negligible. Although it is true that liberals do prefer lattes over conservatives (16% v 9%), the same research found liberals also prefer the more masculine-coded espressos over conservatives by a much bigger margin, and the vast majority of Americans prefer brewed coffee.But the milky latte stereotype persists because it is creamy and white (or green) and vaguely Italian. When GQ is asking “Are Matcha Men the New Soy Boys” you have got to wonder if gendering beverages has become the most performative act of all. More

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      Why Trump’s undermining of US statistics is so dangerous | Daniel Malinsky

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      In 1937, Joseph Stalin commissioned a sweeping census of the Soviet Union. The data reflected some uncomfortable facts – in particular, the dampening of population growth in areas devastated by the 1933 famine – and so Stalin’s government suppressed the release of the survey results. Several high-level government statistical workers responsible for the census were subsequently imprisoned and apparently executed. Though the Soviet authorities would proudly trumpet national statistics that glorified the USSR’s achievements, any numbers that did not fit the preferred narrative were buried.A few weeks ago, following the release of “disappointing” jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Donald Trump fired the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr Erika McEntarfer, and claimed the numbers were “rigged”. He also announced his intention to commission an unprecedented off-schedule census of the US population (these happen every 10 years and the next one should be in 2030) with an emphasis that this census “will not count illegal immigrants”. The real goal is presumably to deliver a set of population estimates that could be used to reapportion congressional seats and districts ahead of the 2026 mid-term elections and ensure conditions favorable to Republican control of Congress – though it is not clear there is sufficient time or support from Congress to make this happen. The administration is also reportedly “updating” the National Climate Assessments and various important sources of data on topics related to climate and public health have disappeared. In addition to all this, Trump’s justice department launched an investigation into the crime statistics of the DC Metropolitan police, alleging that the widely reported decline in 2024 DC violent crime rates – the lowest total number of recorded violent crimes city-wide in 30 years – are a distortion, fueled by falsified or manipulated statistics. One might say that the charge of “fake data” is just a close cousin of the “fake news” and all of this is par for the course for an administration that insists an alternate reality is the truth. But this pattern may also beget a specifically troubling (and quintessentially Soviet) state of affairs: the public belief that all “political” data are fake, that one generally cannot trust statistics. We must resist this paradigm shift, because it mainly serves to entrench authoritarianism.It was eventually a common sentiment in the Soviet Union that one could never trust “the official numbers” because they were largely manipulated to serve political interests. (At least, this is the sentiment reported by my parents, who grew up in the Soviet Baltic states during the 1960s and 1970s – I was an infant when we left in the late 80s so I cannot report much first-hand.) One upshot of this kind of collective belief, if it were to take hold, is that it can make one’s informational world quite small: if you can only trust what you can verify directly, namely what you experience yourself or hear from trusted friends and family, it is difficult to broaden your view to include experiences of people in circumstances very different from yours. This kind of parochial world with few shared reference points is bad for democracy and building solidarity across groups. It also makes it easier for an oppressive state to plant false and divisive “facts” to serve its goals; we’ll have a fake crime wave here and a booming economy there, and though maybe most people disbelieve this they do not quite believe the opposite either. No one can credibly claim or contest any socially relevant trends because all numbers are fake, so the activities of claiming and contesting things become pointless – just do what you can get away with.A political culture with no trust in data or statistics is also one that will rely more heavily on opaque decisions made by elites behind closed doors. In his influential historical study of the rise of quantitative bureaucracy, the historian Thomas Porter points out that basing policy decisions on calculated numerical costs and benefits reduces the role of “local” discretion and can have a homogenizing effect, which can strengthen centralized state control. The flip side of this coin is that it also divests people in power from part of their authority by enabling a degree of public transparency and scrutability: if a huge government project must be justified by reference to some cost-benefit calculations, these calculations can be cross-checked and challenged by various parties. If a government agency requires documentation of progress on initiatives, proof that public funds are being spent appropriately, and evidence on who benefits and by how much, there is substantially less room for plain corruption and mismanagement provided that independent parties have access to the relevant information. Without credible data that reflects the facts on the ground, how can the public push back against an invented “crisis” narrative, concocted to justify the invocation of emergency powers?Anyone who spends any time working with data is acutely aware that there are lots of choices to be made in the collection or processing of data – there are numerous “decision points” about what to include, how to precisely define or measure things, and so on. Indeed, insofar as data is used to tell stories about complex things such as the state of the economy or the health of a population, different data collection or analysis choices can to some extent lend support to different narratives, including predetermined narratives if an unscrupulous analyst is set on it. But it does not follow from this that “anything goes” or that statistics are meaningless. There are better and worse ways to collect and analyze data, both reasonable and preposterous ways to answer empirical questions such as “are crime rates in DC going up or going down?” Most importantly, when government statistics are managed by qualified and non-partisan officials and the relevant numbers can be challenged, debated and contested, then we have a democratic basis for guiding our institutions to better policy decisions. Data of public importance must be publicly accessible, not hidden from view.Trump’s assault on the integrity of data is not the worst of his ongoing abuses – the public should be more immediately outraged by the masked agents disappearing people on the streets and the national guard occupying city centers – but this pattern of actions vis-a-vis official statistics should be extremely alarming. It is a slow boil: if we reach the point where nobody trusts numbers because it’s all “fake data”, it will be too late to resist and too difficult to undo the damage. The opposition must block appointments of unqualified and clearly biased nominees to lead the BLS and other agencies responsible for data stewardship. We must resist undue interference in data gathering, whether that is at the level of the US census or at the level of city government. On the contrary, we should be investing in initiatives that strengthen public trust in and understanding of the social, economic and environmental data that can be used to guide decisions that affect our communities’ wellbeing.

      Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University More

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      Former CDC official ‘only sees harm’ to public health under RFK Jr’s leadership

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      The former immunizations director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned of the future of American health under the leadership of Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.In an interview on Sunday with ABC, Demetre Daskalakis – who resigned this week in protest over the White House’s firing of CDC director Susan Monarez – said: “From my vantage point as a doctor who’s taken the Hippocratic Oath, I only see harm coming.”He went on to add: “I may be wrong, but based on what I’m seeing, based on what I’ve heard with the new members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, they’re really moving in an ideological direction where they want to see the undoing of vaccination.”Daskalakis’s interview comes amid growing chaos across US health agencies and rare bipartisan pushback towards the White House’s firing of Monarez, which came amid steep budget cuts to the CDC’s work as well as growing concerns of political interference.There have also been growing public calls for Kennedy to resign, particularly as he has continued to make questionable medical and health claims – and be lambasted in response by experts and lawmakers alike.Explaining his resignation, Daskalakis said: “I didn’t think that we were going to be able to present science in a way free of ideology, that the firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down. And not having a scientific leader at CDC meant that we wouldn’t be able to have the necessary diplomacy and connection with HHS to be able to really execute on good public health.”Daskalakis also criticized Kennedy’s recent changes to the childhood Covid-19 vaccine schedule, noting that the vaccine is currently approved only for people aged 65 and older, as well as for children and adults with underlying health conditions.“That’s not what the data shows. Six months old to two years old, their underlying condition is youth. 53% of those children hospitalized last season had no underlying conditions. The data say that in that age range, you should be vaccinating your child. I understand that not everybody does it, but they have limited access by narrowing that recommendation. Insurance may not cover it,” Daskalakis said.He also cast doubt on Jim O’Neill, the new CDC chief who was a top aide to Kennedy and has no training in medicine or infectious disease science.In response to whether or not he trusts O’Neill saying that he is in favor of vaccines, Daskalakis said: “Honestly, I really want to trust it … But based on the very first post that I’ve seen from him on X where he says that CDC scientists manipulated data to be able to follow an ideology or an agenda in the childhood schedule, makes me think that I know what leader he serves, and that leader is one that does not believe in vaccination.”In a Saturday op-ed for the New York Times, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders accused Kennedy of “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future”, adding: “He must resign.”Since he assumed leadership over the health department, Kennedy – a longtime anti-vaccine advocate – has fired health agency workers and entertained conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health”.The health agency workers went on to accuse the health secretary of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information”.The letter comes after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter had been struggling with mental health issues and was influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick, according to the gunman’s father. More

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      RFK Jr says he’ll ‘fix’ a vaccine program – by canceling compensation for people with vaccine injuries

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      While unrest and new vaccine restrictions have kept US health agencies in headlines, there’s one vaccine program in particular that Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently vowed to “fix”, which experts say could further upend the vaccine industry and prevent people experiencing rare side effects from vaccines from getting financial help.While some changes to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which compensates people who suffer very rare side effects from vaccination, must come from Congress, Kennedy could take several actions to reshape or affect the program’s operations.Kennedy “seems to be pursuing two opposite theories” on changing VICP, said Anna Kirkland, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of Vaccine Court.“Make it easier and compensate more, versus blow it all up. And then maybe there’s a third way of, foment skepticism, undercut recommendations,” she said.The moves represent the latest battle in “the war on vaccines that he’s been waging for decades”, Art Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine said. Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist for about two decades, has reported more than $2.4m in income for referring vaccine-related cases to a law firm, for instance.Making major changes to the program may open up vaccine makers to more litigation, making it difficult for them to keep existing vaccines on the market or to produce new ones.In 1980, there were 18 companies in the US producing vaccines; a decade later, there were four. Congress passed a law in 1986 leading to the establishment of the VICP to prevent further instability in the vaccine market.By making changes to the program, Kennedy “can scare the manufacturers”, and the market is “pretty fragile”, said Caplan.Dorit Reiss, professor of law at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that “VICP was adopted … because manufacturers were leaving the market over litigation” and that “this would mean manufacturers will pull out of the market and we’ll have less vaccine accessible”.There aren’t many vaccine makers left in the US. Most vaccines are not very lucrative – either for the manufacturers or the doctors who administer them. Most routine vaccines are covered under the VICP.Caplan said any vaccines could be vulnerable and these actions have major consequences for uptake even if vaccines remain on the market.“The biggest problem is still undermining trust in mainstream science,” Caplan said.Changing or even eliminating the program would also likely make it more difficult for patients to have their cases addressed. Yet a bill that would abolish the VICP entirely, introduced by the representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, is gaining traction in anti-vaccine circles.Reiss noted that “undoing VICP might mean there’s no vaccines available”.A website about Gosar’s bill features a quote from Kennedy: “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”HHS did not respond to the Guardian’s questions on whether Kennedy knows about this use of his quotation, or what his plan to “fix” the compensation program involves.There are several actions Kennedy can take to “make vaccine availability much more difficult”, Caplan said.Kennedy has mentioned two concrete plans: adding discovery to existing compensation claims, and removing the backlog of claims. The program rules already allow discovery at the discretion of the adjudicators, called special masters. Adding special masters could help speed up claim processing, but the number of special masters was set by Congress, not HHS.In addition, the special masters answer to the US Department of Justice (DoJ), not HHS – though they represent the secretary in claims.“The first thing [Kennedy] said he was doing was working with Pam Bondi at DoJ,” Kirkland said. “Bondi could certainly direct her own employees to stop contesting a lot of things, and just let as much as possible go through, because they represent the secretary against the petitioners. So they could certainly change the softer ways that they operate, try to be easier, try to be faster.”In that case, Kennedy could ask the special masters to concede – effectively approving automatically – any claims about, for instance, diagnoses of autism or allergies after vaccination, Reiss said.One way to argue that a vaccine caused severe side effects under VICP is to present in a causation hearing a preponderance of evidence demonstrating it’s more than 50% likely – a metric known as “50% and a feather” – that the vaccine is the cause of a side effect.But “there doesn’t have to be existing literature that shows this connection. If you have a credible expert with a convincing theory, that’s enough” under VICP, Reiss said.Reiss noted that the “program was intentionally and consciously designed to make it easy to compensate”.“It increases vaccine trust when we have a quick, generous compensation program – when we can tell people: ‘Look, if the worst happens, if you’re the one in the million where things actually go wrong, you can be quickly and generously compensated, whereas if you instead get a vaccine-preventable disease, you don’t have any compensation.’ I think that can help trust. It’s also the right thing to do,” she said.The other way to settle a claim is the table of injuries, which lists the vaccines included in ACIP [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices], potential injuries and time periods.“If the injury occurs within that time, then causation is presumed,” Reiss said.Kennedy could change the table, adding more or different side effects. This would require publishing public notice and accepting comments. If a new injury is added to the table, cases are allowed to be submitted for the past eight years, rather than the usual three years.The table is “the one that’s the most straightforwardly under his control”, Kirkland said. The last time a government agency tried to change the table, it failed. “That’s got to mean something,” she added.If the ACIP no longer recommends a routine vaccine, it may be removed from the table. Claims would then need to go through the regular court system.There is a higher bar in the regular courts, where claimants have to show fault, demonstrating a defective product or negligence, for instance. The rules of evidence are stricter. Claimants also have to hire a lawyer and pay the lawyer costs and the experts.With the private US healthcare market, “if you don’t win your case, you’re going to then get stuck with gigantic medical bills”, Caplan said.In a country like the US, where the burden is on the individual to pay their medical bills, VICP is a safety net for people having medical events after vaccination, he said.Many of the claims now handled under VICP are for relatively low amounts of money that law firms – especially the rare firms with the expertise to take on large pharmaceutical companies – might not find worthwhile in representing.There are aspects of VICP that need reform, Reiss said. The program needs more special masters, the caps on payments need to be updated from original levels set in the 1980s, and the statute of limitations should be expanded beyond three years – especially because it is difficult to diagnose side effects in young children in that amount of time, she said.“The statute of limitations, special masters and caps need to be changed, and there have been efforts to do that,” she said. “They just, I think, didn’t get enough attention, and that’s probably not what he’s focusing on.” More