I spent thirty-eight minutes last week debunking September 11 conspiracy theories one by one with Shabbos Kestenbaum on PragerU’s The Brief. Many of you are familiar with the most popular ones: Jet fuel cannot melt steel; WTC 7 was brought down by explosive charges; a missile struck the Pentagon; dancing Israelis are evidence the Mossad was behind the terror attack.

I have had some variation of that conversation since 2003, when McGraw-Hill published my New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept. That book raised serious and some still unanswered critical questions about whether some senior Saudi royals and Pakistan’s air force chief might have had foreknowledge about the attack. At the same time, I made it clear that nineteen Islamist terrorists were solely responsible for carrying out the attack that day. The documentary evidence is overwhelming. All the hijackers had passports, visa applications, immigration records, flight school enrollments, rental car agreements, motel receipts, bank accounts, and ATM and credit card records establishing their movements across the United States for more than a year. There is airport surveillance footage, including Dulles CCTV of the Flight 77 hijackers passing through security and footage of Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari at the Portland, Maine airport on the morning of September 11. Real-time chilling phone calls from crew and passengers describe the hijackings in progress. Two flight attendants on AA11 reported during the hijacking the seat numbers for the hijackers that matched the actual seat assignments of the men on the manifest. There are recovered flight recorders, including the cockpit voice recorder from Flight 93 with Arabic audible in the cockpit. The martyrdom videos of the hijackers, recorded before the attack, were released over subsequent years by al-Qaeda’s own media arm, al-Sahab. Two of the plot’s real masterminds, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, gave a 2002 interview to Al Jazeera and boasted about the attack, as did Osama bin Laden in a videotape released October 29, 2004. Finally, there was forensic identification of hijacker remains at the Pentagon and at Shanksville.

Any inside-job theory must account for all of it and must explain what happened to the 246 passengers and crew aboard the four aircraft, all of whom had families, and most of whom were forensically identified.

What struck me in my conversation on The Brief is how little the truther theories have evolved over the years. They persist blithely in the face of overwhelming evidence. Truthers routinely refer to “the official story” as though it were a single document. It is not. It is a set of separately produced, methodologically distinct investigations, several of which contradict each other on points of detail — which is itself an argument against coordination. Still, an anniversary has a way of resurrecting their conspiracy theories, and on this 25^th year commemoration I see too many online.

So here is the short pocket guide I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. It would have saved me a lot of time. It is not a comprehensive long-form refutation of each theory and nuance raised in the past quarter century but is instead a primer that will hopefully serve as a starting point for rational debate about what happened on 9/11. Also, it is not a defense of the government’s account. I have spent a career criticizing that, and I’ll get to where it fails later. First, however, I want to provide a method for sorting the claims.

There are three categories, and almost all the confusion comes from failing to keep them separate.

One: Physically false claims

Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams so the fires could not have brought down the towers

The premise is true and irrelevant since no investigation has ever claimed the steel melted.

Structural steel melts at roughly 2,750°F (about 1,510°C). Jet fuel, essentially kerosene, burns in open air at about 800°F to 1,500°F. What is key to understand is that steel does not need to melt to fail. It needs only to lose strength, and it does that at temperatures the fires easily reached. Steel starts losing its strength around 750°F, has lost about half its strength near 1,100°F, and retains less than ten percent near 1,800°F.

The jet fuel ignited the fire. Investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology determined what happened by extensive subsequent testing in which they fired projectiles at fireproofed steel assemblies to model the debris field inside the towers. The conclusion? The jet fuel burned off within minutes of impact. The aircraft impact severed and damaged the perimeter and core columns and stripped the steel columns’ fireproofing. Unprotected steel in a large fire heats far faster than the code-rated assumptions. Structural steel also expands when heated, and expansion alone can destroy connections without any loss of strength. The raging fires were sustained by the office contents — paper, carpet, furniture, partitions, computers — across multiple floors.

The fires weakened the floor trusses. As they sagged, they pulled inward on the exterior columns. The visible inward bowing of the perimeter walls is documented photographically in the minutes before each collapse. When enough of the perimeter columns had bowed and buckled, the load redistributed to columns that could not carry it, and the section above began to shift. From that point the collapse was gravity-driven.

The hole at the Pentagon is too small so it must have been struck by a missile

Mete Sozen, the Purdue University structural engineering professor who modeled the impact, put it plainly: a crashing jet does not punch a cartoon outline of itself into reinforced concrete. What is left of the disintegrating plane flows in closer to a liquid than a solid. One wing hit the ground; the other tore away. The section of the Pentagon that was hit—Wedge One—had just been renovated with blast-resistant windows and steel reinforcement and Kevlar. It happened to be, by coincidence, the hardest part of the building that morning. The thin aluminum fuselage of the aircraft was no match for it.

But the engineering alone is not what ends this argument. Sixty-four people were aboard Flight 77, five of them the hijackers, and 125 more died inside the building. Scientific and forensic testing accounted for all 184 victims, though the explosion and fire left no identifiable or matching remains for five of them. For the “no-plane” theory to work, someone had to obtain those remains, transport them, plant them in a burning federal building, and run them through a military forensics laboratory. All but five of those families received a confirmed identification and buried someone.

At some point a theory becomes untenable simply for its size and complexity.

Two: True facts, false inference

This is where the real persuasive energy lives. It requires a careful examination of the evidence to determine what it means and how it fits into what happened that day.

Silverstein said “pull it” on WTC 7

Larry Silverstein was the New York real estate developer who had held the ground lease on World Trade Center 7 since the 1980s. Silverstein recounted in a 2002 PBS documentary a conversation with the fire department about Building 7 in which he said the fire department had made the decision to bring the building down. Truthers cite Silverstein as “proof” that WTC 7 was demolished.

“Pull” is real demolition vocabulary. It refers to bringing down a structure by attaching cables to it and hauling with heavy equipment, a technique used on small wood-frame and masonry buildings, never on a 47-story steel high-rise. Nobody “pulls” a skyscraper. Those who think that Silverstein was confessing on camera to a deliberate plan to demolish Building 7 ignore that it would be a confession to a method that does not exist at that scale.

Silverstein’s spokesman later said that by “pull it,” he meant withdrawing the firefighters. That is supported by the FDNY’s own contemporaneous accounts. Firefighter Richard Banaciski described being pulled back because everyone expected 7 to come down. There is one loose end worth conceding: Chief Daniel Nigro, in an offhand recollection given a year later, didn’t recall speaking to Silverstein that day. That happens with eyewitness testimony and recollections. The Fire Chief never had a more stressful day in his career than 9/11. It is not surprising that on a day the department lost 343 of its own, the brief conversation with a property developer was not at the top of what mattered that day.

Someone with advance knowledge profited by trading airline options just before the attack

Volume in United’s parent company spiked September 6, and American’s did so on September 10. Someone did profit. Here’s what nobody mentions. It’s not a mystery, not someone with advance knowledge cashing in with option puts and calls before the attack. The SEC opened its review on September 12 and meticulously traced and documented all the trades. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable tie to al-Qaeda or Islamic terrorists bought roughly ninety-five percent of the United puts. It was one leg of a strategy that also involved buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. That’s a hedge, not a bet on terrorism. Much of the rest of the volume on the American options was traced to traders acting on a recommendation in a subscription-only options newsletter faxed out on September 9. It recommended exactly that trade because of what it deemed financial headwinds facing the industry.

The BBC announced Building 7’s collapse before it happened, evidence of a scripted plot

That footage is real. Correspondent Jane Standley reported the collapse before it occurred; the building is visible over her shoulder. The BBC’s head of news, Richard Porter, addressed this publicly in 2007 and said it no longer had the tapes from that period. That predictably fed the theory although tape was destroyed or reused regularly in 2001-era broadcast operations. What really happened is banal. The FDNY had established a collapse zone hours earlier and was telling anyone who asked that the building was going to come down. That expectation moved through the press pool, onto the wires, and into a live newsroom operating with no verification loop on a day when reporters had already been told, correctly, that two 110-story towers had fallen.

Think about what the conspiracy version requires. An operation sophisticated enough to demolish three towers, fool every structural engineer on earth, and pass the whole thing off as a terror attack had somehow allowed a reporter to announce a collapse while the building was still standing behind her.

This incident is instead very good evidence of the chaos that day, a snapshot of what a newsroom looks like at four in the afternoon on September 11th.

The dancing Israelis

This one deserves the most care, because it has the widest global reach of any theory in a resurgence of post-October 7 mania that Israel is somehow behind every cataclysmic event in modern history, from the JFK assassination to 9/11.

It is true that five Israeli nationals were detained in New Jersey on the afternoon of September 11 after a witness reported men photographing the attacks and not appearing as shocked and dismayed as the witness expected. They worked for Urban Moving Systems, whose Israeli owner left the country after an FBI interview. FBI records released under FOIA included information that databases listed some of the men as having connections to Israeli security services. Although records systems of that kind aggregate raw and unevaluated reporting that is not verified, that got repeated a thousand times as a fact. The five Israelis were held about seventy-one days and deported on immigration violations.

Some context on the detention. Those five men were among roughly 762 people swept up on immigration charges in the immediate post-attack dragnet. The DOJ Inspector General’s April 2003 report on the September 11 detainees documents a policy of using every available statute to hold anyone of interest for as long as possible. Prolonged detention followed by deportation without charges was the norm for that population, not an anomaly requiring explanation.

The FBI investigated the five Israelis for any possible link to the attacks and found none. The Bureau’s investigation was not perfunctory. Its file on the five Israelis runs to hundreds of pages and includes searches, polygraphs, and database checks.

Now ask what a deep state intelligence operation to pull off 9/11 and make it look like an Islamist plot would really look like.

Operatives with foreknowledge of a mass-casualty attack do not park a van with their employer’s name painted on the side in a public parking lot, climb on the roof in view of an apartment complex, carry on where the neighbors can see them, and get stopped at a roadblock six hours later. Whatever those five men were doing, if they were Mossad they were the worst-run, most embarrassing operation in the agency’s history.

Some of the five gave interviews when they got home. Coming from a country where terrorism was a constant, even they were transfixed that morning on the scale of what was unfolding in front of them. They said they did not yet know there was an al Qaeda connection, but they knew that someone had put America under attack.

There is a companion claim, that 4,000 Jews were warned to stay home on 9/11. That is settled by arithmetic. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of the World Trade Center dead were Jewish — a Jewish Week analysis put the figure at 400 or more. That tracks the Jewish share of the New York area population almost exactly. If thousands had been warned off, the number would have been negligible. Where did the rumor start? The Jerusalem Post reported the day after the attack that Israel’s Foreign Ministry had received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the vicinity of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That was a routine consular accounting exercise. Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s satellite station, took that figure and concocted the story that 4,000 Jews had been given secret advance warning to stay away that day. It was then picked up by the Egyptian press before becoming front page news across the Arab media world.

Those who contend that Jews had advance knowledge also omit that five Israelis died in the 9/11 attacks. Three were in the North Tower, one aboard United 175 and one on American 11. The Israeli on AA11, Daniel Lewin, was an American-Israeli co-founder of Akamai, a former captain in Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s top tier special forces. He was seated in business class near the hijackers and is believed to have been killed trying to stop the hijacking. He was stabbed by Satam al-Suqami, which makes him almost certainly the first person murdered on September 11. An Israeli commando died fighting the plot in its opening minutes, not working as a conspirator to bring down the towers. The conspiracy theory is not just simply false, it is a grotesque inversion of what happened.

Those who see some Jewish plot behind 9/11 point often to Larry Silverstein, the real estate developer who was the leaseholder on WTC 7. They contend he only took the lease months before and skipped his usual breakfast at the Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106^th and 107^th floors of the North Tower, that morning.

The identical fact pattern involving a non-Jewish leaseholder would not have generated this theory. Silverstein did sign a 99-year lease in July 2001 but it was for the Twin Towers complex, WTC 1, 2, 4 and 5. Silverstein Properties had developed 7 World Trade Center in the 1980s and held it under a separate, much older ground lease. And he was contractually obligated to keep paying ground rent to the Port Authority and to rebuild. The insurance recovery funded a reconstruction obligation; it was not a windfall that he could pocket. And as for not showing up for his regular breakfast that morning, it turned out he had a medical appointment that had been planned for more than a month. Thousands of people who normally would have been in the complex were not there on September 11 for ordinary reasons — late trains, sick children, vacations, meetings elsewhere. I knew some of them who did not get there that day, and others who ended up in the Towers but survived. Survivorship generates coincidence at scale.

These accusations aren’t inferences drawn from September 11. They are a template — secret foreknowledge, the property owner who profits by fire, control of the press — applied to an event, the way it has been applied to every catastrophe for centuries.

Three: The questions that are open

There is a real, documented, evidentiary case about foreign government involvement in 9/11. It is not on YouTube. It is in a federal courthouse in Manhattan.

Two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, landed in Los Angeles in January 2000 speaking almost no English and were promptly helped to settle in San Diego by Omar al-Bayoumi. He assisted them with their apartment lease, bank accounts, the works. Bayoumi called it chance. He was ostensibly a student, living on a stipend from a Saudi aviation contractor while attending neither classes nor work. The FBI originally accepted the unwitting-bystander account. In documents declassified after 2021, the Bureau reversed itself and stated Bayoumi was an agent of Saudi intelligence.

Evidence the plaintiffs in the 9/11 litigation against Saudi Arabia obtained from Britain’s Metropolitan Police, which had seized Bayoumi’s belongings in Birmingham within two weeks of the attacks, included a 1999 video of him having himself filmed at the U.S. Capitol, recording entrances, exits and security posts. It was alongside a sketch of an aircraft and calculations an aviation expert identified as line-of-sight-to-horizon math.

In August 2025, Judge George Daniels found the evidence credible enough to deny Saudi Arabia’s motion to dismiss and send the case toward trial.

And then there is the failure nobody had to conspire to produce. The CIA knew in January 2000 that Mihdhar held a U.S. visa and that Hazmi had flown to Los Angeles. Neither was watchlisted until August 23, 2001. The FBI was not told until only weeks before the attacks, by which time it was too late to find the two, even though they were hiding in plain sight in San Diego. For roughly twenty months two known al-Qaeda operatives lived openly in this country under their own names — driver’s licenses, flight schools, a telephone listing, one of them briefly rooming in the home of an FBI informant.

George Tenet’s own phrase for that summer was that the system was blinking red.

Finally, I have my own stake in this. In Why America Slept, the final chapter is about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be one of al-Qaeda’s most senior figures. He was captured wounded in Faisalabad in March 2002, and I broke the story in my book about his questioning under a false-flag operation in which American personnel posed as Saudi security officers. Instead of being afraid of being in “Saudi” custody, he was relieved and asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. He gave them a private home number and a cell number from memory. That was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, King Fahd’s nephew and the head of the Kingdom’s largest media company. The telephone numbers were real. Pressed further, Zubaydah named two more Saudi princes and the chief of Pakistan’s air force as his high-level contacts. He again gave their telephone numbers from memory and said that two of the men had known that a major operation was coming against America. One investigator told me that Zubaydah’s monologue was the Rosetta Stone of 9/11.

Within roughly a year all four were dead. Prince Ahmed, 43, of a heart attack or a blood clot depending on the account, following surgery in Riyadh. Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, the next day in a single-car crash on the way to Ahmed’s funeral. Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, 25, a week after that — the Saudi Royal Court said he died “of thirst.” Pakistan’s Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir went down with his wife and much of his senior staff in February 2003, in an aircraft crash Pakistan has never publicly explained.

I am aware of the irony. I wrote an appendix in Case Closed dismantling the JFK “mysterious deaths” genre, and here I am in 9/11 with a cluster of my own. I don’t claim it proves anything. I know only that in twenty-three years no one in the United States government has been willing to explain it.

When I broke that story in Why America Slept—a book that got to #2 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list—the CIA began dismissing the account privately “on background only” to reporters. The line was that I had gotten it wrong.

My answer then to reporters who asked was that the government should release the interrogation tapes or transcripts of Zubaydah’s early days in captivity. What did the government do about my requests? In November 2005 the CIA secretly destroyed videotapes of detainee interrogations. CIA Director General Michael Hayden finally disclosed this publicly in December 2007, describing two tapes as the ones destroyed. He said the purpose was to protect the identities of undercover officers. The number of tapes destroyed turned out to be 92, disclosed in litigation in 2009. Most of them involved Abu Zubaydah. They were never provided to the 9/11 Commission, and they were never provided to the federal court hearing the Moussaoui case, the prosecution of the so-called twentieth hijacker, which had specifically asked whether such recordings existed.

Whatever Zubaydah said and however he was made to say it, the primary evidence no longer exists. He is one of a handful of detainees held at Guantánamo as what critics call a “forever prisoner” — never charged, never tried, never cleared for release.

Here is what I told Kestenbaum, and what I’d say to anyone who writes me this week.

The truther movement has been the best friend the genuinely culpable ever had. If you wanted to bury a serious question about Saudi officials, the most efficient thing you could possibly do is ensure that anyone raising a question about September 11 gets filed next to holograms and thermite.

Ask the next person who corners you at a dinner party for their positive account. Not what’s wrong with the official story but what happened, hour by hour, who did it, and what evidence would change their mind. Twenty-five years in, there still isn’t one. There is a list of anomalies. A list of anomalies is not a credible theory.

Nineteen al-Qaeda operatives, directed from Afghanistan and Pakistan, planned and executed those attacks. I have never seen a serious reason to doubt it. What remains in doubt — what has been in doubt since I wrote the book in 2003 — is whether they had help from people inside governments that were supposed to be our allies, and whether our own government has been straight with us about what it knew.

Those are different questions. The second one is still open.

——————————
Readers asked for more detail on a few points I left out to keep the primer manageable. Brief answers below, added since publication

Wasn’t World Trade Center 7 brought down by explosive demolition?
The building was unusual before anything happened to it. It was built over a Con Ed substation, which forced the designers to carry the upper structure on transfer trusses and use unusually long floor spans on the east side. Less redundancy than a conventional frame.

The North Tower’s collapse tore a roughly ten-story gash in its south face and started fires.

The water mains were broken. Nobody fought that fire. It burned for seven hours while the FDNY set a collapse zone and told anyone who asked that the building was coming down.

And the mechanism wasn’t the steel getting weak — it was the steel getting longer. Heated beams expand. On Floor 13 an expanding beam pushed a girder off its seat at Column 79, floors cascaded down to Floor 5, and that left a critical column unsupported over nine stories. It buckled. The interior failed before anything moved on the outside, which is why the facade came down looking uniform.

NIST said plainly it was the first known case of fire alone bringing down a tall building. Unprecedented is the finding, not a hole in it.

No demolition contractor, no explosives supplier, and no worker has come forward in twenty-five years. And finally, the insurers — who were on the hook for billions, who employ the best forensic engineers alive, and who litigated these losses for years — never once alleged demolition.

Why is there no clear video of the plane hitting the Pentagon?
The tapes exist, and most have been released — the Pentagon’s own gate cameras through FOIA litigation in 2006, then the Citgo station and Doubletree hotel recordings. What people mean is that none of them are any good.

Those were fixed cameras in 2001, recording at roughly one frame per second. A gas station camera watches the pumps. A hotel camera watches the entrance. The Pentagon’s two were parking gate barriers pointed at cars. None were aimed at the sky. Flight 77 was doing about 530 miles an hour — roughly 780 feet per second — and crossed any camera’s field of view in a fraction of a second. At one frame per second, the shutter almost certainly lands on empty sky.

We all carry 4K cameras now and assume 2001 worked the same way. It didn’t. And run the theory backwards: if someone could stage an airliner strike on the Pentagon, producing convincing video would be the easy part, and the most useful thing they could possibly have. The one thing a plot would want most is the thing that doesn’t exist.

Many of you who read Just the Facts know my 2003 book, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. It reached #2 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list that fall. Its final chapter, “The Interrogation,” broke the story of what Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah told CIA interrogators shortly after his capture. There’s front-page news today that brought me back to it —and what the coverage is missing.

A military judge, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, has set a June 5, 2028 trial date for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three of his Guantánamo Bay co-defendants, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Schrama rejected prosecutors’ request to begin in January 2027, ruling that it left too little time to resolve the pending motions to suppress evidence derived from CIA interrogations. A trial date was set once before, for January 2021. It came and went. A fifth original co-defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was severed from the case in 2023 after a military medical panel found that his treatment in CIA custody had left him psychotic and unfit to stand trial.

Look at who isn’t on this list.

Abu Zubaydah.

Zubaydah was shot, wounded, and captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, and then transferred among CIA black sites for more than four years before being sent to Guantánamo in September 2006.

In 2003, I broke major news from some of the earliest secret interrogations after his capture. The CIA, I reported, had run a false-flag operation on him. He was flown to a facility in Afghanistan dressed up to look like a Saudi detention site. Two Arab-American Special Forces personnel posed as Saudi interrogators. The idea was that he’d be terrified of what the Saudis might do to him. Instead — according to the intelligence sources who described the session to me — he seemed relieved. He named three Saudi princes and the chief of Pakistan’s air force, and recited their private cell phone numbers from memory. The numbers checked out.

Zubaydah said two of the four had known in advance that al-Qaeda was going to strike America — not the specific targets, just that something was coming.

When he later learned his interrogators were Americans, not Saudis, he recanted everything, insisting he had invented it all.

Washington passed what he’d said to Riyadh and Islamabad anyway. Both governments came back within days and said his charges were false.

Then this happened:

July 22, 2002 — Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, 43, a nephew of King Fahd and the owner of War Emblem, which had won the Kentucky Derby three months earlier, dies in a Riyadh hospital, of a cause variously reported as a heart attack or a blood clot.

July 23, 2002 — Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, dies in a one-car crash, on his way to Ahmed’s funeral.

Days later — Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, 25, dies on a 55-mile drive east of Riyadh. The Royal Court’s official cause of death: “thirst.”

February 20, 2003 — Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir dies when his recently inspected aircraft came apart in clear weather over Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, killing his wife and most of his senior staff. Sabotage was suspected. No one has ever been arrested.

I’ve spent a career dismantling mystery-death lists. In Case Closed, my book on the JFK assassination, I wrote a separate appendix debunking the claim that 103 people connected to the case had died under suspicious circumstances. I know exactly how that genre works. Still, I have never been comfortable with the four deaths that overlap with Zubaydah’s interrogation disclosures.

After Why America Slept was published, the CIA told some reporters on background that my account was wrong. I insisted the CIA should release Zubaydah’s interrogation tapes.

In November 2005, the CIA secretly destroyed 92 videotapes of Zubaydah’s interrogations. That only became public in late 2007. It took until April 2010, when internal CIA emails were released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, to learn that the destruction order came from Jose Rodriguez, then the head of the agency’s clandestine service, and that then-CIA Director Porter Goss agreed with the decision — though he wasn’t told in advance, and White House Counsel Harriet Miers was reportedly livid when she learned of it two days later. No one was ever prosecuted.

None of this gets litigated in 2028. Zubaydah has no trial date because Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime. The government’s term for him is a forever prisoner. The reason may be plainer than anyone wants to say: charge him, and in a courtroom he might be confronted with what he said in a fake “Saudi” jail cell in 2002.

It is only a couple of weeks until the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, and the full truth about what senior Saudis or Pakistanis may have known in advance is still elusive.

Someone I’ve known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. I like him and run into him regularly in the neighborhood. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything. The other day, he told me he respected my article in The Free Press, in which I said I’d leave my longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster, if it stood behind a virulently antisemitic Palestinian novelist. Then, out of the blue, he asked me a question in the tone people use when they already assume the answer.

“Do you think there’s a genocide in Gaza?”

No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not.

He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Then he explained why I was wrong. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people. Everybody knows that.

That was the whole of it. Not a study, not a court ruling, not a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows. I have sp…

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Every few years, the private record of a powerful government official suddenly becomes public. Not because the official chose to publish it or because a memoir was due. The notes surface because they were preserved by a system the writer did not fully control — and because someone armed with a subpoena or a Freedom of Information Act request finally went looking.

The public then reads words never intended for the public.

The latest example is Anthony Fauci.

Most of you have read about the 1,100 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era entries, covering December 2019 through the end of 2022. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told FOX News that the files were found on scattered government servers. It took eight months, he said, to find all of it.

Diary is the wrong word for what has emerged.

A diary suggests a journal kept in a bedside drawer — something its author alone creates and possesses. Fauci’s record is different. He wrote candidly, sometimes daily, using government infrastructure. The su…

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Somewhere in Germany this morning, someone typed a family name into a search box and learned, in about the time it takes to read this sentence, that a grandfather or a great-uncle had once carried a Nazi Party membership card. It is happening millions of times over. For eighty years the plain fact of who actually joined Hitler’s party lived in millions of paper cards that almost no one could reach. This year, at last, it became searchable online — and almost immediately a fight broke out over who is allowed to use it.

I have a particular reason to write about this now. In 1994 and I spent time inside the Berlin Document Center vault where those cards were kept, and I reported on them for The New Yorker. I argued that a record this important should be open to everyone. It has taken thirty-two years for that to come close to happening — and in the end it took a German newspaper and artificial intelligence, not any government, to do it.

The piece I published then, “Secrets of the Files,” …

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Note: as I finish this piece Wednesday night, Graham Platner has just dropped his Maine Senate bid amid a sexual assault allegation. That's a real story, but it's a different one from the story below. Platner was never a DSA candidate, and he isn't leaving the race because Democratic voters rejected him — he's leaving because his endorsers fled overnight, not because of an ideological reckoning. What follows is about something else: a disciplined, organized movement that is winning clean primary votes against sitting incumbents, and doing it again and again.

In the spring of 2010, as Tea Party insurgents began knocking off Republican incumbents in primaries, the party establishment reached for a familiar reassurance. GOP leaders repeated the idea that the Republican party was a big tent, welcoming the movement as an infusion of energy that could be absorbed, and managed. Ohio Congressman John Boehner said “there really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the…

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There is a viral video making its way across social media this week that every Democrat who cares about the future of the party should be required to watch. It runs about three minutes. It is not comfortable viewing.

In it, Scott Wiener — California state senator, frontrunner for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat, gay Jewish progressive with one of the most consequential LGBTQ legislative records in American history — sits with his back against a wall at an Irish sports bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, watching a World Cup match. An activist named Jesus Coba has cornered him. For three minutes, Coba screams, demands, and harangues. He repeatedly calls Wiener a Zionist. He tells him to get out of his neighborhood. He demands, again and again, that Wiener look into the camera and say “Free Palestine.”

Wiener mostly says nothing. His face is the face of a man who has just understood something he didn’t fully understand before. The ultra-progressive movement he helped build has come for him.

Three days later, Wiener showed up at San Francisco’s Trans March — an event he had attended for 22 consecutive years, an event that exists in part because of laws he wrote. A crowd confronted him, shouted obscenities, and made it, in his own words, “impossible for me to safely remain in the park.” He left. A video of the expulsion racked up roughly six million views by the following afternoon.

The activist who filmed it captured the moment’s terrible irony in a single sentence, shouted at Wiener’s back as he retreated through Dolores Park: “It sucks because you’ve been wonderful… for trans people, and you’ve been terrible… on Gaza.”

There it is. That sentence is not just about Scott Wiener. It is the clearest possible statement of what has happened to a significant faction of the American left.

The Most Progressive Jew in California

To understand why these two videos are so remarkable, you need to understand who Scott Wiener actually is.

He is not a centrist Democrat who got tagged with a progressive label. He is the real thing — a Harvard-educated attorney and 55-year-old gay man who has spent a decade in the California State Senate methodically dismantling the legal architecture around LGBTQ rights, one bill at a time.

Start with SB 107, his 2022 law that made California the first state in the nation to establish itself as a formal refuge for transgender youth and their families. When Texas, Alabama, and Idaho began criminalizing “gender-affirming care” for minors, Wiener’s law made California a legal sanctuary for those families fleeing extradition orders, subpoenas, and custody battles. Last year he strengthened it further with SB 497, which added warrant requirements for healthcare data and expanded shield protections for trans patients, their families, and their doctors.

Before that there was SB 239, which removed California’s HIV-specific felony statute. Before that, it was a felony to intentionally expose someone to HIV infection. Wiener’s bill reduced those offenses to misdemeanors and allowed prior convictions to be vacated.

SB 145 ended mandatory registration as a sex offender for cases of same sex “consensual” sex in which the victim was between 14-and 17 years of age and the adult was no more than 10 years the minor’s age.

Wiener also wrote the nation’s first LGBTQ Seniors Bill of Rights, protecting residents of long-term care facilities from discrimination based on sexual orientation or HIV status. He made PrEP available from a pharmacist without a prescription — also a first in the nation. He secured $15 million in state funds to cover gender-affirming healthcare that the Trump administration was cutting from Medicaid.

This is not simply a legislative record but rather an ultra-progressive architecture. No California politician has built more of the legal infrastructure protecting trans people.

He is also running for Congress in a heavily watched race — the frontrunner, having taken roughly 42 percent of the primary vote for the seat Nancy Pelosi held for nearly four decades. His November general election opponent is SF Supervisor Connie Chan, backed by Pelosi herself.

And in the last week, he has been cornered in a bar and expelled from a parade he helped make possible.

The Capitulation That Was Never Enough

What makes the Wiener story a genuine morality tale — and not just a local San Francisco drama — is the sequence of what he gave up before any of this happened.

At a candidate forum on January 7, Wiener sat alongside two progressive opponents — Supervisor Connie Chan and former congressional staffer Saikat Chakrabarti — and was asked to hold up a sign: Does Israel commit genocide in Gaza? Chan held up “yes.” Chakrabarti held up “yes.” Wiener declined to answer. It was a moment of genuine moral seriousness: a Jewish politician who knew what the word genocide meant to his community, refusing to deploy it as a campaign prop.

The backlash from the activist left was swift and furious.

Four days later, Wiener released a 90-second video and reversed himself. “I’ve stopped short of calling it genocide,” he said, “but I can’t anymore. To me the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out. And that qualifies as genocide.” He had read the polls and felt the pressure.

Two weeks after that, he resigned as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus — a position he had held since 2023. Wiener never took AIPAC money. He has called for a halt to U.S. arms sales to Israel. He now calls out Israel’s military response to the October 7 terror attack as “indefensible.” That was still not enough to satisfy the Gaza wing of the party.

The man who confronted Wiener at the Napper Tandy bar on June 24 was not some random stranger. Jesus Coba had targeted Wiener before — in 2024, he filmed himself confronting the senator on a flight from San Francisco to Phoenix, posting an image with a Hamas targeting symbol superimposed over Wiener’s head, then following him through the airport calling him a “weak-ass Zionist” and telling him his “whole bloodline’s cowards.” This is a man who makes a practice of hunting elected officials. And Wiener — who had already publicly declared Israel guilty of genocide and resigned his Jewish institutional leadership as a consequence — was still his target.

That is not a policy dispute. It has become a loyalty ritual.

Gaza Has Replaced Everything

Let me be direct about what these two incidents, taken together, reveal.

There is a faction of the Democratic Party — centered in the DSA, energized by the anti-Zionist left, and now demonstrably capable of winning elections, as the recent New York City primaries showed — for which Gaza has become the single organizing principle of political identity. Not climate. Not abortion rights. Not trans rights. Not Black Lives Matter. Not economic inequality. Gaza. Specifically: Gaza framed exclusively as genocide, with no acknowledgment of October 7, no acknowledgment of Hamas, no complexity, no history.

These activists have erected genocide as a non-negotiable litmus test — a single phrase that every Democrat must publicly affirm or be treated as an enemy. And critically: even affirmation doesn’t buy you immunity, as Wiener discovered. What they want is not agreement. What they want is the ongoing spectacle of submission.

The message of the Trans March video — “you’ve been wonderful for trans people, and terrible on Gaza” — could not be more explicit. A decade of legislative work protecting trans lives counts for nothing. The only currency is Gaza. Trans people, one presumes, should be grateful for whatever they’ve received, but that gratitude does not entitle their champion to attend their march.

The Infection in the Party

The Scott Wiener story is a flashing yellow warning light, and Democratic Party leaders who ignore it do so at their peril.

The DSA-aligned left is not a fringe curiosity. It is winning elections — in New York, in progressive enclaves across the country — and it is doing so by organizing around a cause that has, by design, no resolution. A demand for a ceasefire can be satisfied. A demand that every Democratic politician publicly endorse a genocide finding, on pain of expulsion from progressive spaces, is not a policy position — it is an ideological filter that will keep running forever, eliminating candidate after candidate who won’t pass it.

What that means in practice is the systematic destruction of the Democratic coalition’s most reliable progressive actors. Scott Wiener didn’t wander in from the center. But he is being expelled now from the movements he helped build and empower. The movement he helped arm with moral certainty had turned that certainty on him.

If the Democratic Party cannot protect politicians like Scott Wiener from this kind of targeted harassment — if it cannot articulate clearly that chasing a man out of a bar and a trans march because he won’t say the right words on Gaza is not progressive politics but its opposite — then it is surrendering its coalition to a litmus test that will drive a wrecking ball through the Democratic coalition.

Scott Wiener’s face in that bar video — blank, still, as though he is trapped and does not know what to do — is the face of a man who realizes he has been caught in a contagion sweeping the party’s far left.

It is not ultimately a story about Scott Wiener. It is a story about where a piece of the Democratic Party is going — and how it threatens to take down the party along the way.

I don’t often use this newsletter to recommend interviews I’ve done, but this one felt different.

If you’ve ever been curious about how I actually do the work—how stories begin, how sources are cultivated, how archives yield secrets, and how books come together—this is one of the deepest conversations I’ve had about it.

Earlier this week I joined Jack Carr on his podcast, Danger Close: The Fourth Option, for what turned into one of the longest and most in-depth interviews I’ve done in years—nearly one hour and forty minutes.

I’ve done hundreds of interviews over the past four decades, including conversations with some legendary interviewers. Yet I have to admit I was especially excited when Jack invited me onto his new podcast.

If you don’t know Jack, he’s a former Navy SEAL, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and the creator of The Terminal List, the thriller series that became the hit Amazon Prime show starring Chris Pratt. His podcast brings together authors, journalis…

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I registered as a Democrat the week I turned eighteen. My first presidential vote, cast in San Francisco in 1972, went to George McGovern. I didn’t think much of it at the time — in the San Francisco I grew up in, there wasn’t really a Republican Party to speak of, so being a Democrat wasn’t a choice so much as the only option on the table. McGovern’s 49-state loss to Nixon was the first time I understood how badly out of step my hometown was with the rest of America.

I stayed a registered Democrat for nearly thirty more years, until shortly after September 11, when I became an independent. I’ve been there since, watching for whatever remains of the vanishing middle in either party.

I haven’t had to watch very hard on the Republican side. What began as the Tea Party insurgency in the early 2010s became, under Donald Trump, a hostile takeover of the party I grew up around. The Bushes were pushed out. Mit…

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The summary isn’t wrong. It’s just not where the story is.

Read closely, three provisions don’t do what the celebratory coverage assumes — and each one matters more than the headline number attached to it. A nuclear fix that’s designed to be undone. A blockade whose removal may be permanent in a way the text obscures. And a war declared over by two of the three sides actually fighting it.

What’s concrete. The blockade language is specific and front-loaded: removal begins immediately, full termination within 30 days, naval traffic restored in proportion to pre-war volumes. Strait of Hormuz passage for commercial vessels is similarly immediate, though Iran’s …

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This is another in my occasional series on the pediatric trans industry.

Imagine a 14-year-old walks into a therapist’s office and announces she has bipolar disorder. She read about it online, she says. The symptoms match. She wants an antipsychotic prescription medication.

No competent therapist anywhere would write the prescription. The therapist would do what therapists are trained to do, explore family history, the circle of friends, the social media diet, the possibility that what the 14-year-old has concluded is bipolar disorder might be anxiety, depression, trauma, or simply the ordinary adolescent turbulence. That careful, skeptical, exploratory process is not an obstacle to good care. It is the care.

Now imagine the same 14-year-old announces instead that she is a boy.

In that case — and only in that case — the rules of therapy are inverted in the United States. The patient’s self-diagnosis is the diagnosis. The therapist’s job is to affirm it. And if a bill now moving through the California legislature becomes law, a therapist who asks too many questions could be sued for it — and minors can file claims until they turn 40.

Senate Bill 934: Litigation as Ideology Enforcement

This week, Senate Bill 934 cleared the California Assembly Judiciary Committee on a 7–3 party-line vote. The bill is authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat now running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. The ultra-progressive lawmaker is responsible for several controversial bills, including measures restricting parental involvement in their children’s ‘gender affirming care’ and a separate effort to narrow sex-offender registration requirements.

Wiener’s latest bill allows former patients to bring malpractice suits against licensed therapists for so-called “conversion therapy.” It has a statute of limitations unlike almost anything else in civil law. Patients who were minors at the time of treatment can sue until they turn 40. Adults get 10 years from their last session, or five years from “discovering harm.” In other words, the moment they decide the therapy harmed them.

Plaintiffs can seek damages for medical expenses, mental health treatment, lost wages, pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life. And, of course, attorney’s fees and, in cases of alleged fraud, punitive damages.

Wiener has been candid about why he authored the bill. In April, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Chiles v. Salazar that state bans on talk therapy touching sexual orientation and gender identity must survive strict scrutiny. That is the Constitution’s most demanding test. Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, and the case was remanded to lower courts.

Chiles v. Salazar put California’s own 2012 ban, the nation’s first, on shaky legal ground. Wiener acknowledged as much to California Senate committee: there have “already been rumblings” of a legal challenge to the California law, “so here we are.”

What to do if the courts will not allow the state to ban a category of speech between therapists and patients? Wiener noted publicly that Gorsuch’s opinion did not cover malpractice suits and therefore he designed a statute-by-litigation workaround by which the state will make practicing standard talk therapy when it comes to gender, financially ruinous. What the First Amendment forbids by statute, SB 934 accomplishes by litigation exposure.

The Definitional Sleight of Hand

The bill’s defenders and sponsors include prominent LGBT advocacy groups, Equality California, Lambda Legal, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, and the Trevor Project. They invoke the genuinely discredited practices that the phrase “conversion therapy” conjures: the aversion treatments, the oppressive religious boot camps, the electroshock horrors of decades past. Wiener slams it all as “psychological torture.”

Historically, that discredited legacy was abusive and is rightly condemned.

If SB 934 targeted only that, it would be unremarkable. Those practices are denounced by every major medical association, already banned for minors in California, and already grounds for professional discipline. Wiener has used that concept as a cudgel, saying the bill gives victims “the right to hold charlatans accountable for this debunked torture.”

But that is not how the bill is written. Its definition of prohibited “change efforts” sweeps in any attempt by a licensed mental health provider to direct a patient toward “a particular sexual orientation or a particular gender identity.”

That language is the critical hinge of the bill. The chilling effect isn’t a side effect but rather its mechanism. A therapist who spends six months helping a gender-distressed 13-year-old examine whether her confusion might be rooted in autism, internalized homophobia, or social contagion — and who watches that distress resolve without a single medical intervention — has, in the eyes of a plaintiff’s lawyer, “directed” the patient “toward” her birth-sex identity. That is not conversion therapy.

That is therapy. For every other condition in the diagnostic manual, it is called the standard of care.

The Chilling Effect Is the Point

Clinical psychologist Joseph Burgo said it plainly at last Tuesday’s committee hearing: “In supervising therapists today, I constantly hear their anxiety over their legal exposures or risks to their license if they do just that — practice traditional exploratory psychotherapy. These are not conversion therapists. These are honest clinicians who want to practice traditional psychotherapy with gender-distressed young people, but they’re afraid to do so.”

SB 934 bakes that fear into statute. Few therapists in private practice can absorb the cost of defending a malpractice suit, even a winning defense — and no malpractice insurer will look kindly on a clinician whose patient population carries a two-decade liability tail. The rational response for a therapist is to choose not to explore or question, not to have “watchful waiting,” what used to be considered the gold standard for treating minors with questions about their gender.

The safest path will be to affirm the child’s self-diagnosis, write a referral letter, and move the child along to the endocrinologist. The medical pipeline of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery becomes not just the path of least resistance, but the path of least litigation.

Among those who testified against the bill was Jonni Skinner, a 23-year-old detransitioner. Skinner grew up in a devoutly religious family in small-town Michigan. He described being a feminine boy who constantly was bullied and later diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Skinner told lawmakers he encountered trans influencers online as a teen: “They said, ‘Change your body and your life gets better. Don’t, and it gets worse.’”

Skinner told the committee that doctors told his mother that he would kill himself if he was not allowed to transition. The therapy he needed, the kind that might have asked and challenged whether an autistic, gender-nonconforming, bullied kid was actually a girl, is precisely the therapy SB 934 makes legally radioactive.

A child like Skinner has no comparable remedy. The bill creates a 22-year window to sue any therapist who counsels caution. Meanwhile, it is not intended to create an equivalent window to sue the clinic that prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or irreversible surgical interventions to a confused minor. Under SB 934, it is caution that carries potential liability. The scalpel may not.

How We Got Here

None of this happened overnight. Two years ago, I traced the history in “Who Put the Kids in Charge?” — how gender dysphoria entered the diagnostic manual only in 2013, the first time the disorder was applied to minors; how a Dutch protocol built on a handful of patients, and underwritten in part by a pharmaceutical company holding a puberty-blocker patent, became the global template; and how American gender clinics adopted the most permissive interpretation of it, multiplying from a single Boston clinic to dozens of dedicated pediatric gender centers over a decade.

The therapist’s predicament was then compounded by the profession’s own gatekeepers. In 2024, the American Psychiatric Association published Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, the first textbook of its kind — and, as I wrote in the New York Post, it is less a clinical reference than a handbook for affirmation-only practice. Its 26 chapters, each featuring at least one author who identifies as transgender, non-binary, or “gender-expansive,” instruct the next generation of psychiatrists that their role is to affirm, facilitate, and refer — not to explore. A young clinician trained on that textbook, practicing under SB 934, will not need to worry about the law’s liability because that clinician will only wave patients as fast as possible from the therapy couch into the pediatric gender pipeline.

The Rest of the World Is Walking This Back

What makes California’s timing so remarkable is that it comes as the countries that pioneered pediatric gender medicine are retreating from it. England’s National Health Service, following the landmark Cass Review’s conclusion that the evidence base for youth gender medicine is “remarkably weak,” ended the routine prescription of puberty blockers for minors and closed its Tavistock clinic for pediatric patients. Sweden and Finland — early adopters of the Dutch protocol — have restricted hormonal interventions for adolescents and restored psychotherapy as the first-line response to gender distress.

In other words, the careful, exploratory approach that SB 934 would expose to two decades of litigation risk is the approach now recommended by the health authorities of the very nations that invented this field. California is not protecting children from a discredited fringe practice. It is threatening therapists for practicing what is becoming, everywhere but here, the international clinical consensus.

What Is Next

I have no quarrel with protecting genuine victims. Anyone subjected to the coercive, shame-based practices that deserve the name conversion therapy should have their day in court, and the bill’s authors could have written a statute narrowly targeting exactly that. They chose not to. The breadth of the definition is not sloppy drafting; it is the mechanism by design.

A legislature that wanted to protect gender-distressed children would want more therapy for them, not less — more time, more questions, more of the in-depth analysis and skepticism that we demand from clinicians treating every other condition a child might claim to have. SB 934 delivers the opposite: a legal regime in which the only safe thing a California therapist can say to a confused 13-year-old is yes.

The bill now moves toward a floor vote in a legislature where its passage is assured and a governor’s signature is likely. What Sen. Wiener may not expect is a future wave of lawsuits from a constituency he seems not to be watching: detransitioners now reaching adulthood. Under the bill’s own language, after all, a clinic that fast-tracked a child toward a particular “gender identity” — complete with new pronouns, blockers, and a medical roadmap — has arguably committed the very offense the statute creates.

I expect some creative plaintiffs’ lawyers to notice. And they might use the statute to seek damages from the clinicians and institutions that moved children at warp speed into a medical system that left them with lifelong consequences.

California will then discover it has built a weapon that points both ways.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood at the White House podium this past Thursday and held up a mock design: a $250 bill bearing Donald Trump’s portrait. “I don’t think there’s anything untoward about it,” he said. The bill, he added, would honor the president serving during America’s 250th anniversary. Congress just needs to pass the legislation, and Treasury will print it.

Before going any further, let me be direct about something: this argument is not about Donald Trump. Supporters who admire him may find it entirely fitting that the president in office during America's 250th anniversary should appear on a new bill. Critics who oppose him may find the idea an affront. Both reactions are beside the point. My objection would be identical if the president were Biden, Obama, or any future Democrat or Republican. The problem is not whose face is on the bill. The problem is opening the door at all — because once it is open, every future pres…

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The two teenagers who opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego mosque left a 75-page manifesto that is the clearest and most chilling portrait yet of what online radicalization is doing to kids.

Eighteen-year-old Caleb Liam Vazquez of Chula Vista and 17-year-old Cain Lee Clark of San Diego livestreamed the attack to Discord. Their 75-page document contained both of their separate manifestos, with a title built like a flag: The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant — a tribute to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who slaughtered 51 Muslims in two New Zealand mosques in 2019.

These two boys did not invent a worldview. They inherited one — assembled, piece by piece, from the open sewer of the modern internet.

That is the part of this story that should keep parents awake. The *Sons of Tarrant* manifesto is not the work of a single ideology with a single grievance. It is, in every meaningful sense, the kitchen sink — every poisonous current of the last f…

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There is a word for what is happening in Miami Beach right now. It is not “civil rights litigation.” It is not “accountability.” It is not even, in any meaningful sense, “free speech advocacy.”

The word is lawfare.

And if you believe in open political debate — regardless of where you stand on Israel, Gaza, or anything else — what is unfolding in South Florida should alarm you deeply.

Let’s Start With What Actually Happened

Last September, Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Miami Beach, Mayor Steven Meiner, and Commissioner David Suarez, alleging that the city’s anti-protest ordinance was unconstitutionally designed to suppress pro-Palestinian …

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and I have published a new essay in Skeptic examining what has changed about antisemitism since October 7.

It has not simply increased in volume—it has shed its inhibitions. The stigma has collapsed.

We write:

“Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence.”

The normalization has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels.

On the left: Israel is framed as inherently illegitimate — hostility becomes an ethical obligation. The line between Jews and Israelis keeps disappearing.

On the right: Jews reemerge as omnipotent puppet masters — orchest…

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There are moments in a long-running public scandal when history seems to write the coda itself.

Last week, while much of the national press barely noticed, Joss Sackler, wife of former Purdue Pharma board member David Sackler, appeared in federal court in Miami and pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation. She admitted deleting WhatsApp messages that would have shown she was the intended recipient of prescription painkillers seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Miami International Airport in June 2024. Sackler was addicted at the time to the opioids that had helped ignite the deadliest prescription drug crisis in American history while simultaneously creating a multi-billion-dollar empire for the family into which she had married. She is scheduled for sentencing in July and faces a statutory maximum of 20 years, though the guidelines are expected to call for a far lighter sentence.

That would be a sad story in almost any family.

In this family, it is something more.

Her husband, David Sackler, is the son of Richard Sackler, the former Purdue president and chief executive, and he served on Purdue’s board before the company entered bankruptcy.

I have written extensively about the Sacklers, Purdue, and OxyContin, including in my book Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, and in follow-up reporting and commentary in the New York Times and here on Just the Facts. I argued then, and I believe now, that the people who directed Purdue deserved at the very least a criminal investigation commensurate with the scale of the lethal catastrophe they had sparked.

Instead, Purdue Pharma, the corporate entity, pleaded guilty in 2020 to federal conspiracy and fraud charges related to its business practices. It had pled guilty in 2007 to a felony charge of misbranding OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead. But no member of the Sackler family has ever been criminally charged for Purdue’s conduct.

That remains one of the great failures of accountability in modern American public health.

The opioid epidemic has killed on a scale that is often forgotten. The Associated Press, using federal data, reported that more than 900,000 deaths in the United States have been connected to opioid overdose since 1999. The early wave was driven by prescription opioids, led by OxyContin, and followed by heroin and then fentanyl.

Those numbers are not abstractions. They are parents who never came home. Children found dead in bedrooms. Veterans. Nurses. Construction workers. Teenagers. Grandmothers. People who were prescribed pills after surgery. People who were told their pain could be safely controlled. Patients who trusted doctors, who believed drug labels, who had faith in a system that had already been compromised. I have met and talked to many of the families of the victims. For every person who died from an opioid overdose, there are relatives and friends whose lives have forever been changed.

For years, many of those families fought the Sacklers in court, in bankruptcy proceedings, in the press, and in public memory. They demanded something more than money. They wanted admissions and accountability. Many wanted the Sackler name to stop floating above the wreckage, insulated by trusts, lawyers, philanthropy, and the antiseptic language of civil settlements.

Instead, what they finally received was a flawed multibillion-dollar bankruptcy deal. On May 1, 2026, a $7.4 billion national Purdue and Sackler settlement became legally effective. It is the messy and unsatisfying conclusion to a decade of litigation over Purdue’s and the Sacklers’ role in fueling the opioid crisis. The Sackler family owners are required to contribute at least $6.5 billion, Purdue is being replaced by Knoa Pharma, the Sacklers are barred from selling opioids in the United States, and more than 30 million documents related to Purdue’s opioid business are to be made public.

That is a tiny measure of accountability. But it is not the accountability for which the families fought.

It does not bring back the dead nor restore hollowed-out communities. It does not erase the years Purdue spent turning pain into profit. It does not answer the question that has haunted this story from the beginning: how can a company plead guilty to crimes of such consequence while the people who controlled and profited from it avoid criminal charges?

That is what makes the Joss Sackler case so grimly arresting.

It is not justice in any legal sense for the victims of OxyContin nor a substitute for the prosecutions that never came. It is not a reason to mock a person who says she suffered from addiction. Addiction is not a punchline or a moral failure.

But the symbolism is inescapable.

The epidemic that Purdue helped unleash did not stop at the gates of privilege. It did not care about the security guards, the private schools, the family offices, the wealth managers, the art collections, the high-end philanthropy, or the careful legal architecture built to preserve Sackler family fortunes. It did not care whether someone was sleeping under a highway overpass or living inside one of America’s most notorious fortunes.

It is a vivid reminder that addiction spares no one.

One of the reasons the Sacklers became a symbol of the opioid crisis was because they insisted, for so long, that the harms of OxyContin were someone else’s problem. Bad doctors. Needy patients. Criminal diversion. Personal weakness. Misuse and abuse. Anything but the predictable outcome of a business model that pushed a powerful opioid with catastrophic consequences.

Now, in a bitter historical turn, the opioid crisis has reached inside the family perimeter.

That does not make Joss Sackler responsible for Purdue’s decisions. Her lawyer is right that her case is legally separate from Purdue Pharma and other members of the Sackler family. That distinction matters. She pleaded guilty to her own conduct, not to Purdue’s.

But journalism is not only about legal distinctions. It is also about meaning. And the meaning here is unavoidable.

The family whose fortune was inseparable from OxyContin now has a member of its inner circle standing in federal court, acknowledging conduct tied to her own opioid addiction. That fact landed with force among the online communities of relatives and friends who lost loved ones to OxyContin and spent years demanding justice. For them, while it was not the justice they had sought, it seemed a kind of karmic reckoning.

I understand why.

For decades, America treated addiction as something that happened to other people. Purdue initially concentrated much of it Oxycontin marketing in the rural and blue-collar towns through Appalachia. Those were people who could be dismissed from a distance. And Purdue advanced the assumption that respectable medical treatment could not possibly create the kind of addiction associated with street drugs. That a pill prescribed by a doctor, promoted by a major pharmaceutical company, and wrapped in the language of pain relief must be safe enough.

That lie helped build a fortune and the wreckage is still with us.

The people who wanted criminal accountability for Purdue’s leaders did not get it. But the criminal justice system has now reached a woman who married into that same family, and it is a lesson that the forces unleashed by the family greed did not remain neatly contained. It exposes the fiction that wealth can build a wall high enough to keep consequence out.

I hope Joss Sackler has recovered. I mean that sincerely. Addiction is a disease, and recovery should be available to everyone, whether they live in a mansion or a shelter. But I also hope this story is not allowed to disappear as a strange footnote. It belongs in the larger record of the Sackler and Purdue saga because it reveals something essential about addiction and power. The opioid crisis was never only about drugs. It was about who gets believed. Millions of ordinary Americans learned that lesson the hardest way possible.

Now, in the family that set the fire, the story has come home.

I’m working now on several longer-form pieces, and those will arrive here as usual.

But I also wanted to flag something for readers who mostly see my work only when it lands in their inbox: I’ve been writing quite a bit on Substack Notes. These are often quicker, more immediate observations on a wide range of subjects — pieces that may not become full columns but are still part of the conversation I’m having with readers.

I realize many of you mainly follow my reporting when a longer piece arrives by email. So this is simply a reminder that a lot of my day-to-day writing is happening on Notes.

You can find my recent Notes here: https://substack.com/@posner/notes

No need to do anything differently if you prefer the longer essays in your inbox. But if you want to see the shorter, more immediate posts as well, Notes is the place to check.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Gerald

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The near-miss at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner put a spotlight on a flaw in American government that has been hiding in plain sight. Seven of the top eight senior officials in the presidential line of succession attended that dinner. Had catastrophe struck the president, vice president and House speaker, the next man in line was 92-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, at home in Iowa.

This is a constitutional roulette wheel, not a sensible continuity plan.

The current line of succession comes from the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. After Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman became president, Truman urged Congress to revise the old succession statute. His argument was simple: If both the president and vice president were gone, the next successor should be an elected official rather than a Cabinet officer chosen by the president. Congress agreed, placing the speaker of the House after the vice president, then the Senate president pro te…

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Not merely present. Not quietly publishing on the margins. Thriving.

As of April 2026, Tate’s month-old Substack profile shows more than 1.1 million subscribers and a top spot on the platform’s new-bestseller rankings. In other words, this is not a case of Substack reluctantly tolerating a controversial user in some forgotten corner of the internet. This is a case of Substack visibly rewarding him with prominence.

That matters.

Because Andrew Tate is not controversial in the ordinary sense of the word. He is not simply a dissident thinker, an inconvenient columnist, or a writer with unfashionable politics. He is a man whose “red-pill” ideology is built on misogyny, domination, humiliation, and the monetization of resentment toward women. He has been accused for years of helping normalize a poisonous culture online, especially for young men and boys. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram have …

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Today, as the Trump administration makes a historic move by reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, I wanted to resend this piece. Whatever your view of today’s change, it is impossible to understand the current debate without knowing how marijuana ended up in Schedule I in the first place. That history is far less familiar than it should be.

Cannabis is not killing 100,000 American annually, the number of opioid overdose and poisoning victims. So why does the federal government list it along with heroin, LSD and ecstasy, as a Schedule I narcotic, the most dangerous category of the Controlled Substance Act? It ranks ahead of lethal Schedule II drugs such as fentanyl and OxyContin.

Marijuana’s inclusion on Schedule I was not the result of medical studies or clinical testing. It was instead political payback from Richard Nixon, who was miffed that a commission he had appointed to study marijuana, returned with a recommendation to decriminalize the drug. In Pharma, I tell the story of how that happened from an insider’s perspective, the view of Michael Sonnenreich, then a young Department of Justice attorney. In 1969 Sonnenreich had singlehandedly rewritten the federal guidebook to the nation’s drug laws (Handbook of Federal Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Laws).

John Dean, later of Watergate notoriety, was then an associate deputy serving under John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general. Dean had been an associate staff director to LBJ’s National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws. After Sonnenreich had rewritten the drug law handbook, Dean asked him to meet with the attorney general.

What follows is an excerpt from Pharma about how marijuana ended up on the strictest drug schedule in America. An added bonus that it also includes the lobbying efforts of Arthur Sackler (yes, the same Sackler family as OxyContin infamy) for his client, Hoffman La Roche. Sackler wanted to keep Roche’s blockbuster benzos, Valium and Librium, off any of the Controlled Substance Act’s schedules.

Today’s move to Schedule III doesn’t erase the political origins of prohibition, but it does adjust a half-century-old policy rooted more in resentment than evidence.

When Sonnenreich and Mitchell met, he told the attorney general that the “drug laws are archaic” and the enforcement and regulatory framework was a confusing and sometimes contradictory hodgepodge of laws and amendments that had been cobbled together over the decades. In 1951 Congress instituted the first mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions and barred probation for first offenses. Five years later a different Congress increased the minimum jail terms. In 1965, faced with a wave of unknown psychedelic drugs, it criminalized manufacturing or possessing those hallucinogens and gave HEW enforcement responsibility.

None of the laws addressed treatment, Sonnenreich told Mitchell. He believed it was not enough for reforms to curb supply. They should also cut the demand for drugs. Mitchell asked Sonnenreich if he would meet with Nixon.

“Of course, I’d be willing to talk to the president.”

A few days later in the Oval Office, Sonnenreich told Nixon about his idea for a commission to examine existing laws before making any final recommendations. Nixon liked that. Sonnenreich was transferred to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. There, as deputy chief counsel, he began drafting what would become the heart of the Controlled Substances Act. He established “schedules” by which drugs were listed, balancing their medical usefulness, if any, against their potential for abuse.

Sonnenreich was thirty-one years old and liked his work. He expected to spend his career in government service. “My wife and I were happy; we had no problem in wanting more. We did everything we wanted to do.… One day this guy comes in with some Roche people and he says to me that ‘If you schedule Librium or Valium, we’re gonna challenge this, we’re gonna challenge that.’”

It was Arthur Sackler. Sonnenreich had never heard of him.

“I welcome your challenge, it makes my day,” Sonnenreich replied.

Sackler again warned that Roche would battle any effort to restrict the sale of its drugs.

“I’m going to do something better,” said Sonnenreich. “I’m going to file an administrative action to put your drugs under control and put them on the three times prescription rule [a controlled substance limited to a maximum of three refills].”

When Sonnenreich later held that administrative hearing to determine whether Roche’s benzodiazepines should be covered in one of the Controlled Substances Act schedules, he recalls “they had all the big law firms there, the biggest D.C. powerhouses. They were wrong if they thought that might scare me. They didn’t understand I was having a good time. They had just irritated me so much. I was still getting paid the same $7,900 a year, it didn’t make any difference to me.” Sonnenreich and the Justice Department won the administrative action. “Arthur was obviously very, very upset,” he recalls.

Sonnenreich’s draft of the Controlled Substances Act was at the heart of sweeping reorganization legislation—the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act—that the Nixon administration submitted to Congress in early 1970.

In creating four schedules of “controlled substances,” Sonnenreich had in part relied on extensive research and guidelines set out earlier that year by the World Health Organization. The public initially misinterpreted those schedules to think the drugs were listed in order of danger. Sonnenreich had instead balanced the potential for abuse with whether a drug had “any currently accepted medical use.” Although Cicely Saunders was then praising heroin as an effective pain reliever at her London hospice, it was judged to have no medical benefit. There was grim evidence of its abuse between hospital admissions and deaths from overdoses. It, along with LSD and ecstasy, were on Schedule I. So was marijuana, although that was a political compromise. The assistant secretary of health had suggested it be placed there temporarily until Nixon appointed a commission to recommend a final status.

Cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and fentanyl at least had demonstrated medical uses—cocaine in dental surgery as a topical anesthetic—and were listed on Schedule II, although they had a risk of “severe psychological or physical dependence.” Drugs on Schedule III were those with recognized therapeutic benefits but with a moderate risk of “physical or high psychological dependence.” That is where Miltown, along with amphetamines and barbiturates, was put. Schedule IV was designed to include combination drugs that had a “low potential for abuse.”

What was notably missing from the statute sent to Congress was any mention of Librium and Valium. Sonnenreich had expected they would later be added to the same category as Miltown, the industry’s original mild tranquilizer. Roche, however, argued that could not happen while its judicial appeal of the FDA’s effort to regulate more strictly the benzos was still pending. A new round of administrative hearings attempted to settle the matter once and for all. Neil Chayet, the founder of the Law-Medicine Institute at Boston University and a member of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Narcotic Addiction and Drug Abuse Committee, appeared in hearings as “an expert in legal medicine.” He set forth Roche’s position: Valium and Librium were not “drugs of abuse in the usual sense.” Roche even presented eleven letters from police departments that stated that none had seen criminal problems associated with either Valium or Librium.

Roche’s lobbying worked. When Congress passed the law in the fall of 1970 it had a fifth grouping, what some called “the Roche schedule.” It covered drugs with the lowest potential for abuse, and it included Valium, Librium, and a few codeine-cased cough syrups that contained codeine.

As Congress debated the bill, Neil Chayet called Sonnenreich. The two had been Harvard law school classmates. Chayet said he did legal work for Arthur Sackler and suggested the next time Sonnenreich was in New York, Sackler would like to meet him “to discuss Roche’s drugs and federal oversight.”

“Why should I meet with that idiot?” Sonnenreich replied. (“Those are the types of things you say when you’re very young,” Sonnenreich told the author).

Shortly after that conversation, Sonnenreich visited New York. Chayet arranged a dinner at Sackler’s sprawling apartment at United Nations Plaza. The twin thirty-eight-story towers had opened only a couple of years earlier and had been designed by the same architects who did the United Nations. Sonnenreich knew it was home to some of New York’s most prominent families.

“We had dinner,” recalls Sonnenreich, “and during the discussion Arthur got frustrated and started yelling at me. Well, I don’t respond well to being yelled at and I yelled back. Marietta was there and she got up from the table and left the room. Neil sat there quietly. And Arthur and I went on arguing for several hours. I had all the confidence and cockiness of a young guy and I kept telling him he was an ‘old dog who didn’t know the new things that had to be done.’ He was trying hard to persuade me that I was wrong on the regulations. Neither of us convinced the other.”

The next day, when Sonnenreich was back at the Department of Justice, Sackler’s secretary called.

“I got on the phone.”

“You know I like you,” Sackler started. “I would like you one day, if you leave the government, to do some work for me. Think about it.”

“I am going to stay in the government,” Sonnenreich told him. “This is what I’m happy doing, this is where I’m staying.”

Sonnenreich’s career was moving fast. Nixon had embraced Sonnenreich’s idea of a national commission to study and recommend how the government should address marijuana. Going into private practice did not entice him.

The president appointed nine of the thirteen members on the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. They included doctors, academics, psychiatrists, and attorneys. The congressional leadership appointed two U.S. senators, and two congressmen. Former Republican governor of Pennsylvania Raymond Shafer was its chairman (it was mostly referred to later as the Shafer Commission). Nixon tapped Sonnenreich to become the executive director, in charge of a staff of seventy-six.

Nixon expected that the conservative Republican majority with which he had stacked the Shafer Commission would return with an uncompromising finding about the dangers of marijuana. Instead, after eighteen months of testimony from dozens of experts, Sonnenreich and Shafer knew they had reached a conclusion that Nixon was not likely to embrace: they had not found evidence that marijuana was physically addictive, nor was it a gateway drug.

“When I told them at the White House what we were planning to say,” Sonnenreich told the author, “they thought I was crazy. They could not understand that we were going to recommend decriminalization.”

“You need to take marijuana out of the criminal justice system,” Sonnenreich argued in vain. “These young people are not criminals. You are degrading the criminal system. It can’t handle all of them.”

Sonnenreich was not a proponent of the drug but thought criminalizing it was the wrong solution. He pointed out when Nixon had come into office, the government “spent a total of $66.4 million for the entire federal effort in the drug abuse area.” That ballooned to $796.3 million by 1972, and for the next budget it would exceed $1 billion.

The administration hard-liners were furious with the interim report. They feared the public would interpret decriminalization as an endorsement for using marijuana. “From that moment on,” Sonnenreich told the author, “I was cut off from the White House.”

The Shafer Commission did not finish its final report, with 3,700 pages of appendices, until 1973. Nixon ignored its recommendations.1

Excerpt from PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, by Gerald Posner (pp. 254-259). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.