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Self in Society Roundup 74
Immigration watch, education updates, Odysseus, Rush, Jon Ronson on the culture wars, and more.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2026
Immigration Watch
Abusing Children: Many people within the borders of the United States already live in a dystopian nightmare. Autumn Billings: "Trump Administration Plans New Facility To House 3,000 Migrant Kids. Many of Them Lack Legal Representation." Reprehensible. Future generations will curse us for allowing this to happen.
Abusing Adults: AP: "More than 2,300 Mexicans sent to Guatemala and Honduras as Trump ramps up third-country deportations."
Abusing Whistleblowers: NPR: "The grievance system in immigration detention is designed to offer a safe channel to report violations of detention standards and seek redress, without fear of retaliation. . . . The system—which in the best of times was a complex patchwork—barely operates and even at times backfires for those using it."
Abusing Military Personnel: NBC: "She enlisted because the Army said it could protect her parents. Then her father was deported on July 4."
Appeasing Tyrants: Matthew Petti: "ICE Handed Over Specific Iranians at the Islamic Republic's Request."
Caging Humans: NPR reviews the case of Homero Calderón, a professional soccer player and "father of two U.S. citizens" with open immigration cases, imprisoned in a concentration camp for no good reason for months. Shameful. Lindsey Toomer: "Health of Colorado priest in ICE custody deteriorating after almost a year in detention." C. J. Ciaramella: "This ICE Office Detains People for Days in Overcrowded Holding Cells."
Betraying Allies: NPR: "They fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now they worry about losing their green cards."
Undermining Our Own Economy: Billy Binion: "Ohio's Republican Governor Says Haitians 'Played a Major Role' in Springfield's 'Economic Comeback.'" Yet the Trump administration is warring against even legal immigration.
Destroying Lives: New Yorker: "More than a million immigrants are seeing protections that granted them safe lives in the U.S. suddenly swept away."
Education Updates
Dystopia Now: AP: "Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district."
School Choice as Speech Suit: J. D. Tuccille describes a novel approach to school choice by the New Civil Liberties Alliance. The organization argues that education inherently involves speech, so government requiring parents to subject their children to certain types of speech, in the context of compulsory attendance laws, violates the parents' speech rights. I think there can be a weaker and stronger version of the argument. The weaker version would say that governments must let parents opt-out of the official curriculum. The stronger version would say that governments may not compel people to support educational speech of which they disapprove.
Daycare: Some say it's very bad, others say it's very good. Phoebe Arslanagić-Little and Ellen Pasternack say, "It appears that whether a child attends daycare usually makes little difference to their outcomes."
Federal Daycare Waitlist: NPR: "More than 400,000 kids are on waitlists for federal childcare assistance." I continue to think that government would be better (or less-bad) simply to direct all such funds to direct subsidies to poor people with children.
Art Updates
Dolly Parton: RIP. America at its best.
Odyssey: I finally saw Odyssey, and in 70mm Imax. I recommend the film and specifically in that format if you can swing it. Pretty much all the things I've heard as complaints about the film—casting, underplayed gods, modern moral sensibility—are things I liked about it.
Rush: See the Rolling Stone interview and read the related article. A fun detail: In 2022 at a tribute concert for Taylor Hawkins, where Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson played, Paul McCartney urged the two to get back on the road. After Lifeson publicly worried about being the world's best Rush tribute band, Lee recalls, he said, "'They're your songs, motherfucker!' It's not a tribute band! We own those songs as much as we did with Neil. And they're part of us. They're part of your soul. They're part of your heart. And when we started playing them together again, that kind of woke up in him." See also the interview with Radio Futuro in Chile, where the duo talk about their appreciation for the quirky new Canadian band Angine de Poitrine.
Angine de Poitrine: Speaking of, the Guardian has a long article with interviews.
Mr Nobody Against Putin: This documentary, for which the filmmaker was forced to flee Russia, shows the propagandization and militarization of schools under the Putin War Machine. Here's video of the film winning the Oscar.
The Road Warrior: The second Mad Max film is quite good. It's sort of like a Western "reluctant sheriff comes to town to fight the baddies" story, only with fire, tricked out cars, death-defying stunts, and weird dudes in masks and leather. Mel Gibson of course is great; also outstanding are Bruce Spence as the flying sidekick and Emil Minty as the surprisingly expressive "ferrel kid."
Is God Is: This film is about domestic violence and the excesses of revenge. It's very artfully done, and the performances are interesting. It's dark, though, with a touch of grace in the end.
Animal Farm: It is after all a pro-socialist novel, argues Sam Weaver.
Quick Takes
Somin on Israel: Ilya Somin: "Over the last few years, Israeli settlers on the West Bank have repeatedly attacked Palestinians living there, seeking to force them off their land. These actions are deeply unjust, amounting to ethnic cleansing and gross violations of private property rights."
Trump Targets Canada: Ilya Somin: "Trump Imposes Harmful and Illegal Section 338 Tariffs Against Many Canadian Imports."
Minimum Wage: David Neumark and Emma Wohl via Cowen: "Adverse effects for poor and low-income low-wage workers help explain why minimum wages do not reduce poverty."
USS Lincoln: NPR: "Families of USS Lincoln crew say Trump should be 'ashamed' of conditions on board."
Bureaucratic Horseshoe: Austin Kocher offers a good example of someone coming at things from the left reaching libertariani-ish conclusions: "Bureaucratic violence is harm administered without overt force, through decision-making, paperwork, inaction, and exclusion. It reads as separate stories because responsibility is distributed in ways that avoid accountability."
mRNA Breakthrough: Ronald Bailey: "Breakthrough Personalized mRNA Vaccines Are Highly Effective Against Melanoma Skin Cancers."
North Korean Operatives: WSJ: "North Korea has built a secret workforce inside American companies. Using stolen identities, AI tools and U.S. accomplices, its operatives have cheated their way into remote jobs in an effort to earn money for Kim Jong Un’s regime."
$40 Trillion in Debt: Remember when Republicans used to care about this?
Sentience and Welfare: A paper claims, "The aggregate sentience losses of animals in the past half century outstrip the sentience gains to humans from population growth by at least 10,000-fold." Cowen sensibly replies that such "welfare" comparisons are mostly baseless and that "we are not obliged, as welfarists, to commit collective suicide to replenish the biodiversity of the earth." Obviously the paper is making a lot of questionable assumptions. I do think that "we" could develop and increase human populations in ways that optimized natural flourishing. One interesting note: If you want lots of sentient animals, it's possible that promoting space-faring human civilizations ultimately could radically expand the total number of animals. But I continue to think that utilitarianism as a metaethical theory is basically bullshit.
Things Fell Apart Episode List
BBC's Things Fell Apart podcast series by Jon Ronson about the culture wars is one of the best series I've heard (I'm still making my way through). I would say the episodes are crucial for understanding modern America. I asked ChatGPT to list and summarize the episodes; the results are below, with my light edits. For some episodes I insert my own comments, with paragraphs marked with my name.
[ChatGPT:] I checked the current feed, and there are two released seasons, with eight numbered episodes apiece. The feed contains 22 items because it also includes trailers and bonus conversations. One update you probably did not know: Jon Ronson said in July 2026 that he is finishing Season 3 and that it will be out in January.
I'm using the intended episode order rather than the somewhat confusing upload dates.
Season 1 — the origins of the culture wars
1. "1000 Dolls" — abortion and the evangelical right.
Ronson starts with Frank Schaeffer, son of the influential evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer. Young Frank wants to be a filmmaker; that ambition eventually produces a graphic anti-abortion film series featuring his father and surgeon C. Everett Koop. Those films help transform abortion from an issue many evangelicals regarded with relative indifference into a defining cause of the Christian right. Ronson follows the ripples all the way to the 1998 murder of abortion doctor Barnett Slepian.
Note: This may be the purest example of the show's governing idea: some weird, contingent little event that nobody recognizes as historically important turns out to have enormous consequences. The additional twist is that Frank Schaeffer himself has become deeply hostile to the political movement he helped create.
2. "Dirty Books" — the first modern school-curriculum war.
In 1974, Alice Moore, a fundamentalist minister's wife and school-board member in Kanawha County, West Virginia, reads all 325 books in a proposed language-arts curriculum and concludes that they contain obscenity, anti-Christian ideas, radical politics and objectionable treatments of race. Opposition snowballs into a countywide school boycott, strikes, violence and even bombings. Ronson also shows that some of Moore's most incendiary objections rested on misunderstandings or tendentious readings of the texts.
Note: The remarkable thing is how little has changed. Substitute "DEI/CRT" or today's fights over school-library books for some of the 1974 vocabulary, and the political dynamics are immediately recognizable.
Ari: One of the most interesting things about this episode is its discussion of how both Moore and modern leftists opposed Dick Gregory's autobiography, N-word (not spelled out here). Ronson interviews Gregory's son about this irony. See also Dick Gregory's essay about the 2016-era controversy. He defends a dean pushed out of a college for offering a copy of the book to a student: "I am pleased that she has the foresight to want to give these young men and women the knowledge, insight and experience of a civil rights activist that might just help them understand life a little better. I am disappointed that they seemed to have stopped at the title instead of opening the book and reading its contents."
3. "A Miracle" — Tammy Faye Bakker and AIDS.
During the AIDS crisis, televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the hostility of her evangelical milieu toward gay people. In 1985 she interviews Steve Pieters, an openly gay Christian minister suffering from AIDS, and treats him with extraordinary warmth and sympathy before a huge evangelical television audience. Ronson interviews Pieters decades later and traces the surprisingly beneficial repercussions of that one encounter.
Note: This is the lovely anomaly in Things Fell Apart: a pebble goes into the pond and the ripples actually make the world better. Ronson later called Pieters one of the most extraordinary people he had interviewed in his career. Pieters died in July 2023, after the episode appeared, at age 70.
Ari: This episode caused me to see Tammy Faye Bakker (Messner) in an entirely new light.
4. "Believe the Children" — the Satanic Panic.
The focus is Margaret Kelly Michaels, a young worker at New Jersey's Wee Care nursery school who becomes engulfed in the 1980s belief that Satanists are secretly subjecting children to bizarre ritual abuse. Suggestive and coercive questioning of very young children produces increasingly fantastical allegations; Michaels is eventually convicted on 115 counts and sentenced to 47 years. The case becomes an extraordinary example of how authorities, therapists, parents and children can mutually reinforce a false narrative.
Note: Michaels spent five years imprisoned before her conviction was overturned; prosecutors finally dropped all charges in 1994. This episode is especially useful background for understanding later child-trafficking panics, Pizzagate and QAnon—not because the movements are identical, but because the social psychology is so eerily familiar.
Ari: This episode also is an important warning about how the criminal justice system can fail catastrophically.
5. "A Scottish Jewish Joke" — the birth of online moderation and online shaming.
In 1988, software developer Brad Templeton posts an offensive Jewish joke to a primitive Internet discussion system. People object; administrators debate whether it should be removed; computer-science pioneer John McCarthy mounts a free-speech counterattack. Ronson presents it as perhaps the first recognizable case of somebody being publicly shamed for something posted online—and, more importantly, an early argument over whether online communities should police speech at all.
Note: I think this is one of the intellectually richest episodes. You can watch the basic dispute underlying thirty years of Internet governance being worked out while the Internet is still small enough that practically everybody involved can talk to everybody else.
6. "Many Different Lives" — feminism, identity and the origins of the trans-rights schism.
The episode begins with a girl growing up between unusual racial, cultural and family worlds and follows her influence on the emergence of 1990s third-wave feminism. Ronson then tracks divisions within feminism over whether trans women belong within women's movements and spaces, eventually arriving at the contemporary British fight over trans rights and the terminology surrounding it.
Note: This is probably the most compressed episode in the whole series. Ronson is trying to get from 1970s identity politics through third-wave feminism to one of today's nastiest disputes in 35 minutes. I regard it more as an illuminating genealogy than as anything approaching a complete history.
7. "A Secret Room Behind a Fake Wall" — Pizzagate to QAnon to Stop the Steal.
A bizarre 2017 Hollywood prank convinces actor Isaac Kappy that he has stumbled onto evidence of a secret pedophile world. Kappy begins making wild accusations about Hollywood figures and becomes absorbed into the Pizzagate/conspiracy ecosystem. Ronson follows the flow of claims outward through online conspiracy networks and eventually into Trump-world, election-fraud lawyer Lin Wood and the milieu surrounding January 6.
Note: This is the natural sequel to "Believe the Children." The Satanic Panic required therapists, churches, police and television to propagate a fantasy; by 2017, the Internet lets essentially the same sort of self-reinforcing narrative manufacture itself.
8. "A Mock Slave Auction" — everything converges at a school board.
In mostly white Traverse City, Michigan, teenagers create a private Snapchat group in which Black classmates are mock-auctioned, accompanied by racist jokes and slurs. The district's response prompts demands for anti-racism measures; those in turn provoke opposition framed around CRT, indoctrination and parental control. Ronson deliberately makes this the finale because nearly everything from the previous seven episodes—race, schools, moral panics, shaming, social media and political polarization—turns up in miniature.
Note: Season 1 mostly looks backward for origin stories. This episode abruptly says, in effect, "And here is what all those accumulated historical currents look like right now." It works unusually well as a finale.
Season 2 — the great lockdown acceleration
Season 2 has a stronger single thesis. Ronson noticed that an astonishing number of today's culture-war explosions clustered around May 2020, several weeks into COVID lockdowns. Isolation, fear, government restrictions, enormous amounts of time online, George Floyd's killing and the protests that followed created an extraordinary accelerant. All eight stories eventually lead back to that period.
1. "The Most Mysterious Deaths" — 'excited delirium' and George Floyd.
Ronson begins with the unexplained deaths of 32 Black women, many of them sex workers, in 1980s Miami. Out of that investigation grows the proposed syndrome "excited delirium," which later becomes embedded in policing and discussions of deaths involving restraint and Tasers. He then takes the listener, without initially announcing the destination, to the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020.
Note: Subsequent events actually strengthen the episode. In 2023 the American College of Emergency Physicians formally withdrew its old endorsement of "excited delirium," called its 2009 paper outdated, and said the term should no longer be used; the AMA likewise says the evidence does not support it as a medical diagnosis.
Ari: This also has direct relevance to the police-involved killing of Elijah McClain in Colorado.
2. "We're Coming After You, Honey" — Judy Mikovits and Plandemic.
A chance relationship between scientist Judy Mikovits and a wealthy family seeking answers for a daughter's chronic illness leads eventually to the Whittemore Peterson Institute and Mikovits's sensational claim linking the retrovirus XMRV to chronic fatigue syndrome. The scientific finding collapses, the paper is retracted, and Mikovits comes to believe she has been persecuted by the medical establishment. Years later that personal story becomes the emotional backbone of the viral 2020 conspiracy film Plandemic.
Note: One of the series' best episodes on how conspiracy theories acquire sincere
protagonists. Mikovits doesn't suddenly decide in 2020 to invent a conspiracy; Ronson shows a decade-long accumulation of grievance, humiliation and suspicion that makes the conspiracy story psychologically compelling to her.
3. "Tonight's the Night, Comrades" — the imaginary Antifa invasion.
During the unrest following George Floyd's death, American media and social media are awash in warnings that Antifa militants are about to descend on small towns. A family driving a bus on a Twilight-inspired camping trip through Forks, Washington, is mistaken for the invading Antifa force. Armed locals follow them into the woods; someone cuts trees across the road, effectively barricading the terrified family inside.
Note: The episode title itself comes from a supposedly Antifa tweet that helped inflame the panic. The account was actually controlled by the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa. It is an almost laboratory-perfect example of imaginary violence generating real threatening behavior.
Ari: Shockingly, no one involved in the extreme harassment of the family faced criminal prosecution. Terrifying events. This is a great example of "social contagion" at is most dangerous. The locals involved literally became the sort of domestic terrorizers they imagined themselves to be fighting.
4. "Spicy Brando" — the Whitmer kidnapping plot and the FBI.
Brandon Caserta is a drifting, antigovernment young Michigan man who becomes enraged by COVID restrictions and begins training with militia types. He is swept up in the federal case alleging a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Ronson digs into the enormous role of informants and undercover FBI operatives, the media's portrayal of the men as white-supremacist terrorists, and the uncomfortable question of where investigation ends and encouragement begins.
Note: Caserta was acquitted in 2022, as was Daniel Harris; other participants pleaded guilty or were convicted. That's precisely why this episode is good: "there really was a criminal kidnapping conspiracy" and "the government's tactics and characterization of particular defendants deserve scrutiny" are not mutually exclusive propositions.
5. "Things Weren't Going Back to Normal" — gender identity, parents and Florida politics.
During lockdown, January Littlejohn's 13-year-old child begins questioning gender identity. Littlejohn becomes furious after discovering that the child's Florida middle school had developed a gender-support plan without what she regarded as meaningful parental knowledge or consent. The private family rupture becomes a public cause, then feeds into the much larger political campaign over schools, parental rights and gender that culminates in legislation championed by Ron DeSantis.
Note: This is one of the episodes where Ronson's method matters most: he refuses to turn either the distressed teenager or the distressed parent into the villain the opposing culture-war camp wants. It has also been one of the more contested episodes—critics on the left subsequently argued that Ronson was too credulous toward Littlejohn's account.
Ari: I, on the other hand, tend to take Littlejohn's basic account (if not all the surrounding details) at face value. Her story is remarkably similar to that of Erin Lee of Colorado. And the hysterical claims about "furries" largely defined the last campaign for governor on the Republican side. However, Heidi Ganahl, despite her obsession with furries, did not claim that schools offered litter boxes to students, something others claimed.
6. "A Hierarchy of Trauma" — when clinical language escapes the clinic.
Ronson uses Bessel van der Kolk's enormously successful The Body Keeps the Score—a lockdown bestseller—to examine the expansion of "trauma" language. Ideas developed to understand severe psychological injury spread into campus disputes over offensive speech, triggering material and emotional safety, and then outward into workplaces during the racial and political upheavals of 2020.
Note: I particularly like this one because Ronson avoids the crude choice between "trauma is real" and "people are oversensitive." His actual subject is concept creep: a useful idea can become less useful when its definition expands to encompass qualitatively different experiences.
7. "You'll Own Nothing and You'll Be Happy" — how separate facts become one conspiracy.
Ronson starts with three essentially unrelated things: an attempt to solve affordable housing problems, an Oxford traffic-management scheme, and Danish politician Ida Auken's speculative 2016 World Economic Forum essay imagining a sharing-economy future. Online, they gradually fuse with the WEF's "Great Reset" into a single theory that elites intend to abolish private property and use "15-minute cities" to imprison people in their neighborhoods.
Note: This may be the show's best demonstration of what I'd call conspiracy collage. Most of the constituent facts are real—the WEF really did publish the piece, Oxford really did propose traffic filters—but the causal glue joining them into one master plan is imaginary. Auken herself explicitly said her scenario was not her proposed utopia.
8. "Mikki's Hero's Journey" — the man behind Plandemic, and the payoff.
The finale profiles filmmaker Mikki Willis. His brother's death from AIDS helps produce a lasting suspicion of the medical establishment; Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" gives him a way of interpreting his own life as a struggle in which a hero receives a call, confronts evil and slays a dragon. Eventually Willis makes Plandemic, with Judy Mikovits as its star, becomes an important COVID-conspiracy propagator, and appears around January 6. Ronson then reveals how Willis intersects, directly or ideologically, with story after story from the season.
Note: Definitely listen to this after the other seven even if revisiting episodes selectively. It's not merely another profile; it's the structural conclusion of Season 2. And I think Ronson's most interesting insight is that conspiracism is partly a storytelling problem: if you insist on seeing your life as a hero's journey, complicated people start turning into heroes and dragons. That is exactly the habit Ronson himself tries very hard to resist.
A couple of bonus items worth knowing about
The feed also contains a Louis Theroux conversation after Season 1, in which Theroux questions Ronson about his reporting and interview methods, and an analogous Adam Buxton conversation after Season 2. Those are worth listening to if what you especially like is how Ronson does this: approaching people he thinks are badly mistaken without humiliating them, while still trying to establish what actually happened. There's also a Hay Festival conversation and a later audience Q&A.
And having gone through the whole set again, I think your enthusiasm is justified. What distinguishes Things Fell Apart from most "culture war" material is that Ronson is much more interested in causal history than adjudicating which tribe is good. Again and again the important discovery is that today's grand ideological battle arose from a ridiculous accident, a personal grievance, a misunderstood text, a bad scientific paper, or some person nobody had ever heard of. That's very close to the Randi virtue you liked in the other project: curiosity about how people came to believe the thing, rather than merely announcing that the belief is wrong.