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# How OwamniBecame the Best New Restaurant in the United States
In the summer of 2021, Sean Sherman, a forty-eight-year-old Oglala Lakota chef, opened a restaurant called Owamni, in Minneapolis. Nearly overnight, it became the most prominent example of Indigenous American cuisine in the United States. Every dish is made without wheat flour, dairy, cane sugar, black pepper, or any other ingredient introduced to this continent after Europeans arrived. Sherman describes the food as “decolonized”; his business partner and Owamni’s co-owner, Dana Thompson, calls it “ironically foreign.” In June, the James Beard Foundation named Owamni the best new restaurant in the United States.
One evening in May, I met Sherman outside Owamni, which is situated in a park on the Mississippi River. Across the street, water plummeted fifty feet down St. Anthony Falls. The area was once the site of a Dakota village known as Owamniyomni—the place of falling, swirling water. Sherman pulled out his phone and showed me an eighteenth-century drawing depicting tepees on the shore of the falls. “There was clearly a village here. People everywhere,” he said. “But the Europeans were, like, ‘You are now called St. Anthony!’ ”
Inside, the dining room was flooded with light from a wall of windows. A bartender named Thor Bearstail delivered glasses of red wine. (Owamni breaks its decolonized rule with beverages, serving coffee, beer, and wine.) Bearstail, like the rest of the staff, wore a black T-shirt that read “#86colonialism” on the back. Eighty-six, in kitchen slang, indicates that a dish is sold out. A month earlier, Bearstail, who is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, in North Dakota, had moved from Fargo to Minneapolis to work at Owamni. His previous job was at a Red Lobster. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself,” he said.
American carnivores tend to think in terms of beef, pork, and chicken. Owamni reminds them that picture-book farm animals are not native to this continent. My first plate was raw deer, or “game tartare,” listed under a menu section titled “Wamakhaskan,” the Dakota word for animal. The dish was a study in circles: the meat pressed flat and dotted with pickled carrots, moons of sumac-dusted duck-egg aioli, microgreens, and blueberries. A blue-corn tostada served as a utensil. One bite was a disco ball in the forest.
Other wamakhaskan dishes were served: a puck of duck sausage, with watercress purée and roasted turnips; ground elk, served on a pillowy corn arepa; and a maple-chili cricket-and-seed mix. “We go through fifteen pounds of crickets a week,” Sherman said. He is solidly built, with big, dark eyes, and he wore a black chef’s jacket, an Apple watch, and a bear-tooth necklace; his hair hung in a braid to his waist. “It’s a lot,” he said. “Crickets don’t weigh that much.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26906)
“I’m going to go do some laundry, exercise, and shower.”
Cartoon by Jared Nangle
The gastronomy touted by auteur chefs during the past two decades is, Sherman often says, how Indigenous people ate for millennia. Ingredients are local, seasonal, organic. The traditional preservation methods that Owamni features—smoking, fermenting, drying—are au courant. But the restaurant does not provide a museum meal; the food is simultaneously pre-Colonial and modern. There are maple-baked beans, and cedar-braised bison with maple vinegar. Wojape, a Lakota berry sauce, is served with a tepary-bean spread and smoked Lake Superior trout. A bowl of char-striped sweet potatoes, doused in chili oil, is Sherman’s favorite dish. “It’s so homey,” he said. “I was eating mostly plant-based last year, so that was my go-to.”
I ordered a bowl of manoomin, a hand-harvested wild rice. The only place in the world where manoomin grows is around the Great Lakes. It forms part of the origin story of the Ojibwe people, who migrated inland from the East Coast centuries ago, following a prophecy to travel west until they found “the food that grows on the water.” Manoomin is harvested from a canoe, its grains knocked from the heads of rice stalks that grow in shallow waters. Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe activist, wrote that manoomin is the “first food for a child when they can eat solid; the last food eaten before you pass into the spirit world.”
At Owamni, it was fluffy and a tad chewy, with a sweet, earthy aroma. I could almost smell the lake. Sherman sources as much of Owamni’s food as he can from Indigenous producers. The rice comes from a young Ojibwe couple who own a small farm in northern Minnesota. “I had them drop off seven hundred pounds of rice the other day,” he said. “Just stuffed in their car.”
Around 7 *p.m.*, two men and a woman, all with little wires behind their ears, filed across the dining room. Behind them was a familiar face: Deb Haaland, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, and the first Native American Cabinet member in U.S. history. She was dining with Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth band of Ojibwe and an Owamni regular. (“I want to think it’s like my Cheers,” Flanagan told me.) Sherman said hello to the Secretary, then stopped back by my table. “It’s wild,” he said. “She’s eighth in line for the Presidency.”
Some two-thirds of Owamni’s staff identifies as Native, as do many of its guests. The novelist Louise Erdrich, who owns a bookstore in Minneapolis, is a repeat visitor. Several cast members from the FX series “Reservation Dogs” ate at Owamni this past summer, including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, the show’s star, who was accompanied by the model Quannah Chasinghorse. Leaving, I passed colorful bouquets of wildflowers placed on the long bar facing the open kitchen. A neon sign at the entrance reads “You Are on Native Land.” Outside, Sherman demonstrated a set of switch-on fire pits and noted that the surrounding park harvested rainwater. Next door, the ruins of the Columbia flour mill were lit in amber light. When I remarked on it all, Sherman shrugged, and said, “Different than the church basement, right?”
I first met Sherman on a freezing night in 2017, when he and Thompson hosted a dinner at the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis. Back then, they were business partners and romantic partners. They ran the Sioux Chef, a food truck and catering operation, which now owns Owamni. When I arrived, Thompson, a tall, animated woman, greeted me with cedar-maple tea. “It’s full of flavonoids!” she said.
The purpose of the dinner—a five-course meal prepared by M.Karlos Baca, an Indigenous food activist from the Southern Ute Nation—was to announce the launch of a nonprofit called *NATIFS*, or North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, which promotes culinary solutions to economic and health crises. Roughly a hundred people sat at folding tables. Between courses, Sherman delivered a slide presentation. “Food is a language,” he said. “To understand Indigenous food today, you need to know how we got here.”
For millennia, Indigenous people across what became North America cultivated high-yield, climate-specific varieties of plants, including sunchokes, lamb’s-quarter, gourds, knotweed, and goosefoot. By the thirteenth century, domesticated maize and sunflowers had spread in a green-and-yellow blaze from Mexico to Maine. “We still have Hidatsa shield beans and Arikara yellow beans,” Sherman told the diners. “There’s a Lakota squash—the awesome one with the orange flame—and gete okosomin,” a squash that looks like a lifeguard buoy, which Baca used for the soup course.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26486)
“After these rapids comes the really hard part—a bunch of guys we don’t know talking about crypto at the same time.”
Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
Native Americans hunted game like bison, which roamed as far east as Buffalo, New York. They harvested fish and shellfish. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere employed controlled burns, creating meadows among redwood groves where desirable plants would thrive and animals would graze. Everywhere, the people told stories and sang songs about their food; in many Indigenous languages, plants and animals are referred to as persons. “The diet of our ancestors, it was almost a perfect diet,” Sherman went on. “It’s what the paleo diet wants to be: gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free.”
Raiding Europeans were in awe of the abundance. In 1687, after the Marquis de Denonville, the governor of New France, attacked Seneca villages, he wrote that his army “destroyed a vast quantity of fine large corn, beans, and other vegetables.” In 1779, George Washington ordered an offensive against the Iroquois Confederacy, writing, “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Afterward, one officer wrote of beans, cucumbers, watermelons, and pumpkins “in such quantities” that “would be almost incredible to a civilized people.”
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson forced more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people—from the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations—to walk to present-day Oklahoma, along the Trail of Tears. Thousands died of starvation. Not long afterward, when the U.S. failed to beat back the Great Sioux Nation, it tried a different tactic: a government-funded campaign to kill buffalo herds. Before 1800, more than sixty million buffalo roamed the country; by 1900, only a few hundred were left. As the White Mountain Apache chef Nephi Craig has said, “You want to attack a people and wipe them out? Attack their food.”
In 1883, the U.S. Department of the Interior established the Code of Indian Offenses, banning all Native traditions. Cooking a ceremonial feast could land you in prison. Four years later, the government passed the General Allotment Act, which forced private ownership on tribal land, allowing white settlers to steal vast acreage. Tribes, now sequestered on reservations, relied on treaty-provisioned rations, then on government-issued commodities: bags of flour, powdered milk and eggs, blocks of lard and orange American cheese, and, as Sherman recalled from his childhood, cans of beef and salmon “with juices.” “This was not a nutritional program—this was a farm-supplement program,” he told the attendees. “This food was never, ever designed to be healthy. It’s high in fat, in sodium, in sugars—just over-processed food made by the lowest bidder for the government to hand out en masse.”
Sherman clicked to a slide depicting fry bread, also known as Indian tacos, which is like unsweetened funnel cake, served with toppings such as cheese and ground beef. Fry bread, a powwow staple, may be the best-known Native American food today. It was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, when the U.S. military forced the Navajo from Arizona to arid, infertile land in New Mexico. To prevent starvation, the military supplied people with sugar, salt, lard, and sacks of white flour—the makings of fry bread. Today, the food is a symbol of resilience and Native pride. In “Reservation Dogs,” one character pays homage to it with a music video titled “Greasy Fry Bread.”
Native Americans have now lacked access to their ancestral foods for many generations, leading, in part, to what Elizabeth Hoover, an environmental-studies professor at U.C. Berkeley, calls the “grim statistics.” Native Americans have the highest rate of diabetes in this country. Compared with white adults, they are sixty per cent more likely to be obese; compared with all other ethnic groups, they die much earlier from heart disease.
But, among the country’s five hundred and seventy-four federally recognized tribes, knowledge has survived. Women sewed seeds into the hems of their skirts before being forced to walk hundreds of miles from their homes. Recipes were scattered across reservations, then tucked away in grandparents’ kitchens. They contained methods for brewing sofke, making pemmican, and nixtamalizing corn—an ancient cooking technique in which the grain is simmered in an alkaline solution, making it, among other things, rich in protein. “There wasn’t even tooth decay back then,” Sherman said to the church audience as we spooned up poached quail eggs, preserved cholla buds, and huitlacoche—a funky corn fungus.
Before the penultimate course was served, Baca told the crowd about its ingredients, which included blue corn and grits made from bear root, the first thing his grandfather taught him how to forage. Hunting parties used to travel with sun-dried cakes made from blue-corn mush and from bear root, which was valued for its antimicrobial properties. “But people don’t eat these things anymore,” Baca said. He later told me, “With traditional dishes, people don’t always like it—it’s not what they grew up with. They grew up eating shit like every American. And the Colonial mind frame has captured their taste buds.”
Sean Sherman, a co-owner of Owamni. “The diet of our ancestors, it was almost a perfect diet,” he says.
The plate of grits, with smoked trout, smoked ramps, and pine-needle syrup, was dainty and delicious. Seated across from me was a man named Daniel Cornelius, a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Cornelius worked for the Intertribal Agriculture Council, which promotes Native farming. He expressed admiration for Sherman and Baca, and for their effort to reclaim Native cuisine: “The culinary approach has such a role to play, to get people excited about these foods, to show they can taste good.” Still, he said, “there’s this idea, like, ‘Oh, people have healthier food and a bunch of vegetables, they’re gonna be healthier and really happy,’ but that’s bullshit. The issues go a lot deeper. There’s a lot of intergenerational trauma.”
Sherman lives a few miles from Owamni, in a modest, pale-yellow Colonial, with a fire pit in the back yard and a black Ford F150 in the driveway. When I visited in the spring, the kitchen table was covered in seedlings, and the dining-room table was covered in vinyl LPs—mainly jazz, blues, and rock and roll—which he was in the process of sorting. Sherman told me that, when he was a kid, growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, “TV wasn’t really a thing. So my mom would just put on a record and I’d lie on the floor listening.”
The Pine Ridge Reservation, where forty-three per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, is a small fraction of the land that once belonged to the Great Sioux Nation, an alliance of seven tribes from across the Upper Midwest and the Plains who spoke Siouan-language dialects—specifically, Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota. Sherman has deep roots in the area. His great-great-great grandparents helped raise Crazy Horse, who was an Oglala Lakota warrior. His mother and father were born on Pine Ridge, and Sherman spent his childhood on his grandparents’ cattle ranch, surrounded by sandhills and prairies. Although there was just one grocery store on the reservation, and government commodities were the family’s main source of food staples, they had fresh garden vegetables and their own beef. They hunted pheasants, antelope, and deer. Sherman’s grandfather showed him how to dig for timpsila, or wild turnip; his grandmother gathered chokecherries to make wojape. By the age of seven, Sherman had his own .410-gauge shotgun, and he spent his days roaming the hills with his cousins. The dog was their nanny, Sherman’s mother, Joan Conroy, told me. “If they ventured too far, the dog would come home to let me know.”
Sherman’s father, Gerald, was barely around. He had been a U.S. Army gunner in Vietnam. “It’s amazing he survived,” Sherman told me. Back in the States, he’d reënlisted, gone *AWOL,* and eventually turned himself in. He did time in the Presidio stockade, in San Francisco, and returned to Pine Ridge with a drinking problem. “So then my mom was, like, ‘Well, here’s a good catch,’ ” Sherman said. (Gerald told me, “I was a mess back then.”)
We were seated in Sherman’s living room. He had taught himself to paint in oils during lockdown, and three of his canvasses—evocative Western landscapes—hung on the wall; along the bottom edge of one, depicting a ceremonial dancer, he had written, “Be the answer to your ancestors’ prayers.” Sherman picked up a Rubik’s Cube and started turning the squares. He told me that his parents divorced when he was twelve, and his mom took him and his younger sister to Spearfish, South Dakota. They lived in a trailer park. Sherman was a minority for the first time in his life, in a white, conservative, “Bible-thumping” town, he said. “I still had a fairly thick rez accent.”
After school, he would spend hours in a library at Black Hills State University—where his mom was taking classes—reading history, sci-fi, and fantasy. “Lord of the Rings” was a favorite. “I didn’t have any girlfriends, because I was shy,” he said. He listened obsessively to rock and punk—the Smiths, Dead Kennedys, the Replacements—and skied and drank in the hills above the nearby city of Deadwood. He did well academically, accruing all the required high-school credits by the end of his junior year. Conroy modelled a good work ethic. In three years, she got a college degree in political science while working multiple jobs—a cashier in a Deadwood casino, the proprietor of an art-framing shop. She even ran for a county seat. Off and on, she worked as a staffer for Tom Daschle, the South Dakota senator. When Sherman was eighteen, on a trip to Rapid City, he met Bill Clinton.
Sherman’s cooking career started because of his mom’s hectic schedule. “We were obviously super latchkey,” he said. As the older sibling, he was responsible for putting meals on the table. “I was playing with flavor, but we didn’t have any spices, so I was learning how to make, like, sloppy joes with just ketchup and mustard.” He got his first restaurant job when he was thirteen, prepping salads at a tourist spot called the Sluice. The next summer, he worked at a resort, where he was promoted to the grill. The cooking staff lived in a dorm in Custer State Park and experimented with recipes for rattlesnake and beaver, which Sherman found thrilling. “I also remember becoming more aware of racist things,” he said. Ku Klux Klan propaganda was displayed in a Spearfish gas station.
Cedar, squash, and beets at *NATIFS*’ Indigenous Food Lab.
Throughout high school, he continued working in restaurants—Burger King, Pizza Hut, a golf club—but it wasn’t until his senior year that he found something he loved. For a school project, he interviewed a member of the town’s volunteer fire department, who also worked for the U.S. Forest Service. She invited him to apply to be a field surveyor. “It was a dream job,” Sherman said. He learned to identify plants in the Black Hills, then document their size and location. He kept a journal, in which he drew the plants he saw. He started making block prints, too, and decided that he wanted to attend art school. He moved to Minneapolis, and got a job at the California Café, in the Mall of America. “I was thrown on sauté,” he said. “It was in public, in front of everybody. I learned really fast.”
In 2000, he took time off to travel around Europe, eating and drinking his way through England, France, and Italy. He dressed in black, wore small, rectangular sunglasses, and smoked cigarettes. (It was around this time that he made “Sioux chef” his AOL e-mail address.) He had decided to shelve art school; instead, he procured a copy of the Culinary Institute of America’s “The Professional Chef.” “I still did some art here and there,” he said. “But then I found art through food.”
He admired the Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan for her devotion to simplicity, precision, and balance. He read about Ferran Adría, the Spanish chef who is considered the godfather of molecular gastronomy. “And, obviously, everybody then was super into ‘Kitchen Confidential,’ ” Sherman said. “All the line cooks suddenly wanted to be drunken pirates.”
In his living room, Sherman, lounging comfortably on a beige sofa, leaned forward and set down the Rubik’s Cube on the coffee table, solved.
One day, in December, 2017, Sherman told me that, the night before, he’d dreamed that he was on a pirate ship. “We’re out at sea, with a troupe of circus performers aboard,” he recalled. “We’re all Native.”
We were at a beach bar in San Pancho, a small town in Mexico. Sherman was barefoot, seated facing the Pacific Ocean. The following night, he would be co-hosting a dinner at Cielo Rojo, a local boutique hotel, where he had worked a decade earlier. The event was a fund-raiser to help the Huichol—the people indigenous to the region—stop the development of a resort, Punta Paraíso, on the beach’s turtle-nesting ground. Sherman ate a spoonful of ceviche and finished describing the dream: “We’re on a voyage. We didn’t know where, but we were going to take back what was ours.”
By then, Sherman’s career had taken a number of unexpected turns. He landed his first head-chef job, in 2001, at a Spanish-Italian restaurant called La Bodega. The following year, he had a son, Phoenix, and soon married the child’s mother, a lead server he’d once worked with, named Melissa. To devote more time to his family, he sought a job with better hours. Nothing stuck. He managed a gelato shop. He tried to open an Irish café, inspired by Darina Allen and her Ballymaloe Cookery School, but the deal fell through. His marriage started to falter, and he took a summer gig at a resort in Ely, near the Canadian border, leaving his wife and young son behind. “As soon as I left, I started finding out about infidelities that kind of broke me emotionally,” he said.
He returned to Minneapolis and, in the interest of good benefits, took a job at a nutrition-and-wellness corporation called Life Time Fitness. At one point, Sherman was writing recipes for dozens of the company’s cafés across the country and helping run three restaurants, including a sushi spot called Martini Blu. “That’s when I hit the burnout,” he said.
In 2007, Sherman quit and headed south, to San Pancho. Melissa and Phoenix soon joined him. Although Sherman doesn’t like to swim, he spent a lot of time on the beach, contemplating the ocean. He befriended some fishermen, and started “hustling sushi” for tourists, turning one fresh, twelve-dollar mahi-mahi into five hundred dollars’ worth of sashimi. San Pancho is a hippie town, with tourists searching for authentic experiences. Sherman relished the local Huichol food: the nixtamalized-blue-corn masa and handmade tortillas, the salsas and seasonings—chilis, hoja santa, achiote—and the fresh produce. “I had this bolt, an epiphany,” he told me. Why wasn’t there any Indigenous food up north? “In Minneapolis, I could find food from all over the world,” he went on. “But nothing that represented the food or the people that were there before, which is completely insane.”
Owamni’s maple-chili cricket-and-seed mix. “We go through fifteen pounds of crickets a week,” Sherman said.
After lunch in San Pancho, we went to a gallery featuring Huichol art. “This could be Lakota,” Sherman said, pointing at beadwork depicting peyote flowers and an eagle. “I felt so comfortable among the Huichol. There are so many commonalities between tribes. They use sweat lodges, they have corn culture.” We stopped in a wine-and-spirits shop; Sherman loves mezcal. On a case was a sticker that read “I Stand with Standing Rock.” Sherman told me, “I thought I could focus on Indigenous peoples across North America, look at the whole big picture. I saw the whole path.”
In 2008, Sherman moved his family to Red Lodge, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone National Park, where his father’s wife, Jael, owned a dude ranch. Sherman cooked meals for guests, experimenting with local plants and game. Jael’s aunt, who happened to be named Julia Childs, took Sherman foraging and asked for his help with her big garden. Sherman reconnected with his father, Gerald, who had got sober, gone to business school, and started the Lakota Fund, one of the country’s first micro-loan initiatives. “It was good inspiration,” Sherman said. “Despite a rough start, he switched gears and did something that affects other people on a large scale.”
Two years later, Sherman and his wife separated, and mutually agreed that Sherman would raise Phoenix in Minneapolis. He began working at Common Roots, a farm-to-table restaurant, and hosting pop-up dinners that featured Indigenous cuisine. Around this time, he attended a gathering in Arizona of the Native American Culinary Association, founded by the chef Nephi Craig, who gave a presentation about ancestral foods. “That really helped solidify what I was doing,” Sherman told me. “That it’s not just about the cooking.” He was thirty-nine and raising a son as a single parent on less than fifty-five thousand dollars a year. But he was intent on launching something of his own. “I was just trying to figure out how and when,” he said. “I was really feeling a need to do this work. It was starting to consume me.”
In Minneapolis one evening, I went for a drink with Dana Thompson at Spoon and Stable, a French-inflected restaurant with a mostly white, male kitchen. Thompson, whose grandfather was part Dakota, is an effusive conversationalist. Her focus at both the Sioux Chef and *NATIFS*, the nonprofit, she said, apart from “just running the thing,” is mental health: “My true heart is in how these food systems are actually a healing mechanism for ancestral trauma.” Last year, she contracted a psychologist, who is available one day a week to the staff at *NATIFS*. “Suicidality, chemical dependency, dysfunctional conflict—it’s how this stuff manifests,” she said. “We’re not going to succeed if we don’t acknowledge what’s right there in your face.”
Thompson uses herself as an example. “I had a terrible childhood,” she told me. Her father, a police officer in a small Minnesota town, was suspected of having an inappropriate relationship with the family’s babysitter, a fifteen-year-old girl. The girl ran away from home and was killed attempting to jump onto a train. Thompson’s father was later arrested on felony-theft charges—their garage was filled with stolen electronics. The family relocated to Hibbing. Thompson moved out at the age of fifteen, eventually making her way to Minneapolis, where she pursued a career as a folk musician. She had a daughter at twenty-seven and continued playing in a band throughout her thirties, while working in music management and consumer-goods marketing.
In October, 2014, she attended an event called Dinner on the Farm, where Sherman prepared the meal and spoke to the guests. “It was like I’d been struck by lightning,” Thompson recalled. Sherman had created the Sioux Chef the previous April, and had been catering his own Indigenous dinners. A week later, Thompson met him for coffee, and offered to be his manager. “I didn’t have the funds,” Sherman said. “But I hired her.” Soon, they were inseparable.
With Thompson’s help, Sherman quickly gained wider recognition. In addition to hosting dinners on reservations, he spoke at the Culinary Institute of America, the United Nations, and Oxford University. In 2017, he published “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” which won a James Beard award for best American cookbook. That same year, he was invited to participate in the Catastrophic Meal, in Denmark, an event where ten chefs presented either utopian or dystopian dishes. Sherman, who was assigned utopian, used some nixtamalized corn he had brought, and foraged the rest of his ingredients: rose hips, wild greens, and blue crabs. “It was just being aware of where we are, the seasons, using extreme local foods,” he said. “And making people feel good. That was my statement of the future.” Not long afterward, he was cast in a Hyundai commercial.
Meanwhile, Sherman and Thompson had entered into a partnership with the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board to open a restaurant in a new riverfront park. Initially, it was conceived of as a small café with grab-and-go items, but, as construction proceeded, the concept began to shift to something grander. At the time, there were almost no Native American restaurants in the country, apart from Tocabe, a beloved fry-bread joint in Denver, and the Mitsitam Native Foods Café, in Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2016, Francis Ford Coppola had opened a Native-themed restaurant in Sonoma called Werowocomoco, which was widely accused of cultural appropriation and closed a year later. Loretta Barrett Oden, a Potawatomi chef who ran a pioneering Native American restaurant, in Santa Fe, in the nineties, had been brought on as a consultant. “I caught a lot of flack from Indian Country for it,” she said.
Duck sausage with watercress purée and roasted turnips.
Construction on Owamni was completed in July of 2021. The restaurant is situated on the second floor of a park pavilion built from tan bricks, white pine, reclaimed wood beams, and old stone walls—remnants of the area’s abandoned mills. A large terrace outside the entrance, which doubles Owamni’s size in warmer months, has a lawn of thick grass. “When we were first starting, the park’s developers were calling it the Columbia terrace,” Sherman said. “And we were, like, ‘We are not going to name our terrace after Columbus.’ ”
Thompson worked with an interior designer, ordered equipment and furniture, and arranged press coverage while simultaneously leading *NATIFS*. Sherman hadn’t planned on being Owamni’s executive chef, but once the restaurant opened he was in the kitchen eighty hours a week. “Dana is the glue,” Dawn Drouillard, the nonprofit’s culinary director, told me. “Sean is the face of the organization, but Dana plays a crucial role in everything we do.”
Their romantic relationship ended soon after Owamni opened. “The breakup didn’t happen in the right way,” Thompson said. “It was really cruel.” Within weeks, Sherman was dating Mecca Bos, a local chef and food writer. The day I met with Thompson, Sherman had posted on Facebook a series of romantic photos with Bos, writing, “This has been such an amazing and whirlwind past few months finding and being with the best adventure/cooking/romantic partner ever.” Still, Thompson told me that the split had been necessary: “We had this kinetic, incredible, rare energy together. It was like a rocket ship taking off—then we ran out of fuel.”
Despite the breakup, neither Thompson nor Sherman has any intention of leaving behind what they have built. Thompson, who owns forty per cent of the Sioux Chef, shares equal governance over the company with Sherman—a fact that Sherman didn’t quite register when they signed their partnership agreement, in 2015. “That basically locked me from making any decision without Dana’s blessing,” he said. “I had no idea that that was such a serious piece.” Sherman now hopes to put Owamni under the control of *NATIFS*, to use the restaurant’s success to fuel the mission of the nonprofit. “That’s always been my vision,” he said. But Thompson sees no reason to combine the Sioux Chef, a for-profit company, with *NATIFS*. “I’m not going to change it,” she said. “So there’s no way it’s going to happen.”
Sherman told me that Thompson needs the money from the Sioux Chef to augment her livelihood. “She believes the Sioux Chef still has a lot of potential, and of course it does,” he said. “She wants to get rich.” When I relayed this to Thompson, she laughed. “I just want to make back our loan payments,” she said. “I just want to be out of debt.” She added, “I think that time is going to calm Sean down.”
Despite their querulousness, Sherman and Thompson both acknowledge that they would not have reached this point if not for their relationship. “She made it so I didn’t have to negotiate for myself,” Sherman said. “She helped me grow.” Thompson told me, “I mean, he’s the visionary. He’s the rock star.”
The day after my drink with Dana, I met Sherman at *NATIFS*’ Indigenous Food Lab, the organization’s culinary-training center, in the Midtown Global Market. *NATIFS* moved into the space in January, 2020; that May, eight blocks away, a police officer murdered George Floyd. (Thompson, Sherman, and members of their staff participated in the protests.) During the pandemic, the kitchen was used to prepare ten thousand meals a week for nine of the state’s eleven reservations, which were devastated by *COVID*\-19.
Sherman ducked under a construction curtain. On the other side was a half-built gleaming stainless-steel kitchen. “This is gonna be a community classroom,” he said. “We’re investing in all this camera equipment, so down the road we can do V.R. classes.” The kitchen pantry was full of items like Labrador tea, strawberry popcorn, wild mint, juniper, and homegrown tobacco. Off to the side, there was a pink-and-yellow vintage pinball machine called Totem, depicting a mashup of various tribes’ heritage: tiki totems, Iroquois-style clubs, art work from the Plains. “It’s so wrong,” Sherman said. “I had to get it.”
Manoomin, a wild rice found around the Great Lakes, is hand-harvested from a canoe.
Sherman went downstairs to a freezer and returned pushing a cart filled with frozen rabbits. He is no longer Owamni’s head chef, but he still oversees the kitchen’s operations, planning menus and sourcing ingredients. “My role is just called ‘vision’ now,” he said. “I like to move fast and say yes to lots of things.” Thompson told me, “We’re being careful about where we spend our resources, and saying no a lot. But Sean is a people pleaser, so then I have to go back and be the bad guy.”
On my last afternoon in Minneapolis, I sat at Owamni’s bar with Sherman and ordered lunch. Sherman wasn’t eating; he was planning to smoke meat at home later. He still loves to cook, but he has no intention of returning to Owamni’s kitchen. “It’s not the best use of my time to be chopping carrots and telling teen-agers what to do,” he said. After Owamni opened, Sherman hired a chef de cuisine: “He was not Native, and he was clashing with some of the staff, and one night it hit a stress point. He said out loud, ‘There’s just too many chiefs in the kitchen.’ Everyone’s jaw dropped.”
The chef wasn’t Sherman and Thompson’s only controversial employee. In July, the operations director for *NATIFS*, Shane Thin Elk, resigned, after his ex-wife posted on Facebook tribal court documents detailing incidents of domestic abuse. Thin Elk, a recovering alcoholic,maintains his innocence. But the episode caused a scandal among some members of the staff. “It is part of our culture, shared by the *NaTIFS* workplace and our Indigenous community, to hold on to a restorative spirit, a belief that any of us—no matter how lost we are—can find our way back,” Sherman wrote in an online statement. “Just as strongly, it is a part of our culture that violence is never acceptable.”
Staff turmoil and turnover have been constant issues at Owamni. Two general managers have left. Earlier this year, Sherman had promoted Joatta Siebert, a twenty-nine-year-old from North Dakota who had done an internship at Noma, in Copenhagen, to chef de cuisine. “She’s a really hard worker,” Sherman told me, in May. “She’s got creativity down. Now she’s learning how to deal with people.”
In August, Siebert left Owamni. Some employees felt that she hadn’t been the right fit—that she pushed specials featuring colonized takes on Indigenous ingredients. “I do have a European background in cooking, but so does Sean,” Siebert said. “He taught himself how to decolonize his own food, and I was still in the process of that.” Soon afterward, a bartender was fired, in part for drinking on the clock. One employee said that, though the dismissal might have made sense at another restaurant, Owamni was supposed to be different: “What are we here for if we’re not helping this person?”
None of these issues was apparent in the dining room. More often, complaints were about patrons. Servers have heard “funny things” from diners, Sherman told me. He called over a hostess named Malia Erickson, who recounted that a woman had asked her if she was Native, then if she was Sioux; Erickson had nodded and tried to finish explaining the menu. “Then she takes out her phone and asks me to pull down my mask so she can take a picture of me,” Erickson said. “I told her, ‘Not today. No, that’s not O.K.’ ”
A man from New Jersey, then a woman wearing a sparkly elephant pin approached Sherman to offer praise. Sherman is now co-writing a cookbook, which will showcase Indigenous cuisine from the Arctic to Belize. He is talking to television producers about a spinoff—an Indigenous-foods roadshow. His vision on the beach in Mexico had become a persona, in the form of the Sioux Chef.
The attention is not always easy to navigate. Baca, who prepared the meal in the church basement, has been critical of the ways in which Sherman appeals to the mainstream public. At a food-sovereignty summit in Madison, Wisconsin, he said, “A reporter asked me, ‘Will there ever be an Indigenous Thomas Keller?’ But that’s not how we work. It’s all about community. When you focus on one person, you already got it wrong.” Nephi Craig, who now runs Café Gozhóó, on the White Mountain Apache reservation, in Arizona, said, “The standards of the Michelin star are not the standards in traditional Native communities. It’s not our goal to get attention.”
Sherman told me he’s not concerned with whether he gets any attention. “But I get the attention, so it’s easy for me to say,” he added. He’s also quick to help other Indigenous chefs. Crystal Wahpepah, a member of the Oklahoma Kickapoo tribe, met Sherman at a cooking workshop in 2015, and appeared as a contestant on the Food Network reality show “Chopped” the following year. When her catering business dried up during the pandemic, she began to think about opening her own restaurant. Sherman flew Wahpepah and her team to Minneapolis to spend a few days at Owamni; in November, she opened Wahpepah’s Kitchen, in Oakland. “Sean is my mentor,” she said. “He’s opened many doors.”
Elena Terry, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation who founded the nonprofit catering company Wild Bearies, and is a good friend of Sherman’s, told me that she values his role in the wider food-sovereignty movement. “I think that a lot of people appreciate the face that Sean puts out front,” she said. “He’s the epitome, right? Long braids, a powerful man who represents decolonization.”
At Owamni that afternoon, the staff was preparing for dinner. A manager named Teddy gathered everyone for a meeting. He reviewed some timing kinks from the previous night while a server lit a bundle of sage in a big clamshell. The staff smudges before every shift. Someone struggled to unstick a meat grinder. A waitress waved the sage over her face and passed the shell to a young cook. “The patio is gonna be bumping tonight,” Teddy said. “I appreciate you all. Let’s crush this.”
Sherman left, and walked up the hill to his truck. He is setting up Indigenous Food Labs in Anchorage and in Bozeman. This month, he’s at an Arctic-foods summit, in Norway, then at Terra Madre, a gathering of the Slow Food community, in Italy. Between events, he wants to visit the archives at the Vatican. “They stole everything,” he said. “They have to be sitting on a huge wealth of Indigenous stuff. I want to see what they have.” He could feel his attention moving away from the restaurant: “I don’t like being trapped in a box.” His eyes darted to the waterfall. “It’s hard for me to sometimes stop and be in the moment,” he said. “I feel like I’m just starting.” ♦
New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
Credit...
[Eliza Shapiro](https://www.nytimes.com/by/eliza-shapiro) and [Brian M. Rosenthal](https://www.nytimes.com/by/brian-m-rosenthal)
Photographs by Jonah Markowitz
Over more than a year, the reporters interviewed more than 275 people, translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents and analyzed millions of rows of data on failing private schools in the Hasidic Jewish community.
- Published Sept. 11, 2022Updated Sept. 12, 2022
### Listen to This Article
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The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.
But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.
Every one of them failed.
Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.
The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.
Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Image
Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
Warned about the problems over the years, city and state officials have avoided taking action, bowing to the influence of Hasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc and have made safeguarding the schools their top political priority.
“I don’t know how to put into words how frustrating it is,” said Moishy Klein, who recently left the community after realizing it had not taught him basic grammar, let alone the skills needed to find a decent job. “I thought, ‘It’s crazy that I’m literally not learning anything. It’s crazy that I’m 20 years old, I don’t know any higher order math, never learned any science.’”
To examine the Hasidic schools, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of public records, translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents and interviewed more than 275 people, including current and former students, teachers, administrators and regulators.
The review provided a rare look inside a group of schools that is keeping some 50,000 boys from learning a broad array of secular subjects.
The students in the boys' schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
Girls receive more secular education because they study fewer religious texts. But they, too, are struggling: About 80 percent of the girls who took standardized tests last year failed.
The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.
Often, English teachers cannot speak the language fluently themselves. Many earn as little as $15 an hour. Some have been hired off Craigslist or ads on lamp posts.
During religious study, teachers in many of the boys’ schools have regularly smacked, slapped and kicked their students, records and interviews show, creating an environment of fear that makes learning difficult. At some schools, boys have called 911 to report being beaten.
Still, Hasidic leaders have opened more than 50 new boys’ schools in the past decade, and they have received increasing amounts of government money, records show. One city child care program for low-income families sent nearly a third of its total funding to Hasidic neighborhoods last year.
Hasidic boys’ schools are not a monolith. Their attitudes toward nonreligious education can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. A few schools in Brooklyn’s Borough Park have held science and social studies fairs. One has an annual spelling bee. But those schools are the exception, The Times found.
For many, the consequences of attending Hasidic schools can ripple across time. Students grow up and can barely support their own families. Some leave the community and end up addicted to drugs or alcohol. Others remain and feel they have little choice but to send their children to the schools.
“My biggest fear is that my sons are going to get engaged, get married, start having kids,” said Shlomo Noskow, 42, whose children remained in Hasidic schools after he got divorced, left the community and struggled to earn a medical degree. “And the cycle just repeats itself.”
There are about 200,000 Hasidic Jews in New York, making up roughly 10 percent of the state’s Jewish population. They are distinct from modern Orthodox Jews and others who strictly follow religious law but also integrate their lives with contemporary society. Hasidim wear the same modest dress as their ancestors did, and most live in largely insular enclaves devoted to preserving centuries-old traditions.
For many Hasidic people, their schools are succeeding — just not according to the standards set by the outside world. In a community that places religion at the center of daily life, secular education is often viewed as unnecessary, or even distracting.
Some parents told The Times they know the limits of the schools, but they enroll their children nonetheless because they believe the educational system instills the values of their community.
Approached by The Times on dozens of occasions over the past year, by telephone, email and in person, the leaders of the largest Hasidic boys’ schools have declined to answer questions.
But over the last week, after The Times sent the schools a summary of its reporting, several Hasidic groups have publicly defended the way they educate children, writing opinion articles and issuing statements.
The groups all emphatically said Hasidic schools operate independently of each other, not as a network. They denied some of The Times’s findings, including that the schools do not provide an adequate education and that teachers regularly use corporal punishment. They also noted that the schools receive far less taxpayer money per pupil than public schools do, and they said Hasidic neighborhoods were not as impoverished as government data might suggest.
“The Hasidic community is proud of the education that it provides to its students — all of whom attend at their parents’ choice for a religious education — and has many, many accomplished and successful graduates,” wrote J. Erik Connolly, a Chicago lawyer representing the Tzedek Association, a group that works with Hasidic schools, in a letter to The Times.
Another spokesman for Hasidic schools, Richard Bamberger, denied that graduates of the schools were unable to speak or write in English and said the schools are safe and “have zero-tolerance policies against any violence.”
Mr. Bamberger and Mr. Connolly also said that Jewish schools, known as yeshivas, in general perform well on standardized tests for high school students, a point that Hasidic leaders have often argued. In fact, very few Hasidic students take those tests, and the results almost entirely reflect the performance of students at the yeshivas that provide robust secular education, including modern Orthodox schools.
In other parts of the world with large Hasidic populations, including in [Britain](https://www.yahoo.com/now/proposed-change-law-takes-aim-135706454.html), [Australia](https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-714925) and [Israel](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liberman-no-reason-to-fund-haredi-institutions-that-teach-idleness/), officials have moved to crack down on the lack of secular education in Hasidic schools. But that has not happened in New York, despite a state law requiring private schools to offer an education comparable to the one provided in public schools.
Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York City, began an investigation into the schools after receiving complaints in 2015, but his administration put it on hold when the pandemic hit. Mayor Eric Adams has not intervened in the schools — and has touted close ties to Hasidic leaders. In Albany, Gov. Kathy Hochul has taken a similarly hands-off approach, as did her predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo.
Image
Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times
State education officials have spent years drafting new regulations for enforcing the law but have watered them down amid opposition from the Hasidic community. A state education board is scheduled to vote on the new set of rules this week.
In statements, New York elected officials deflected blame. Representatives for Ms. Hochul and Mr. Cuomo each said it was the state education department’s responsibility to oversee the schools and noted that the agency does not report to the governor. A spokeswoman for the department said every student “is entitled to an education that allows them to fulfill their potential” but did not comment specifically about the Hasidic schools.
Through a spokesman, Maxwell Young, Mr. Adams said for the first time that his administration would complete his predecessor’s investigation. He added that he believed schools should be culturally sensitive and meet high standards.
Mr. de Blasio said in an interview that he had taken complaints about the Hasidic schools seriously.
“Had it not been for the demands of Covid, we would have finished the investigation, put the willing schools on a corrective action plan and urged the state to sanction the unresponsive schools,” Mr. de Blasio said, referring to a few yeshivas that did not allow city inspectors into the buildings. “And that’s what needs to happen now.”
## A guard against assimilation
Almost all of New York’s Hasidic Jews live in a few Brooklyn neighborhoods and a handful of towns in Rockland and Orange Counties. In those areas, storefronts are emblazoned with Yiddish, roads are packed with yellow school buses and sidewalks bustle with families. People distinguish themselves through volunteering, and the community looks out for its own, sharing meals to ensure no one goes hungry.
Hasidic people follow strict rules aimed at recreating a way of life that was nearly wiped out in the Holocaust.
Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.
Since arriving in Brooklyn in the 1940s, Hasidic rabbis have relied on religious schools to propel the community’s growth and maintain its continuity. Amid [growing antisemitic violence](https://nynj.adl.org/news/2021-audit-ny/), the Hasidim have been particularly vulnerable to attacks and harassment.
Image
Credit...Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
Image
Credit...Irving I. Herzberg, via Brooklyn Public Library — Center for Brooklyn History
Image
Credit...Irving I. Herzberg, via Brooklyn Public Library — Center for Brooklyn History
There is no unified Hasidic school system. More than a dozen Hasidic groups each run their own schools. Just one, the Lubavitch movement, encourages followers to speak English, so they can proselytize.
The largest group, the Satmars, is made up of two competing factions led by the grand rabbis Aaron and Zalman Teitelbaum. They each run branches of the United Talmudical Academy, a network of dozens of schools that also owns a large real estate portfolio. Last year, audit records show, they controlled more than $500 million in assets.
The U.T.A. helps set the tone for other schools in the community, including those run by the Bobov, Skver and Viznitz groups.
As the internet has become more widely available, many schools have grown more restrictive, even barring students whose parents are caught with smartphones. At least one U.T.A. campus has established a “committee of responsible parents” to enforce rules; some other schools now prohibit students from speaking English at home.
In some respects, the U.T.A. and others have rigorous curriculums, teaching students to parse complicated texts and legal principles in Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic. Some community members said that religious lessons can incorporate elements of math, history and other subjects.
But even some who are committed to the community said they wished Hasidic schools taught more secular subjects.
“They could have education and still have the religion. But they don’t, and the people are suffering so much,” said Hilly Rubin, 28, who attended a Hasidic yeshiva in Borough Park. Mr. Rubin said he left and tried to go to community college but could not keep up. He is now in debt and trying to stay afloat, he said. “It’s really inhumane.”
## ‘They knew nothing’
Hasidic yeshivas, like all private schools in New York, are not required to administer state standardized tests in reading and math, and most do not.
But some Hasidic schools give the exams as a condition of receiving public funding. In 2019, when nearly [half of all New York students passed the tests](http://www.nysed.gov/news/2019/state-education-department-releases-spring-2019-grades-3-8-ela-math-assessment-results), 99 percent of the thousands of Hasidic boys who took the exams failed, a Times analysis found.
The poor performance could not be easily explained by the community’s poverty or language barriers.
Statewide, the public schools that served only low-income students all scored exponentially higher than the boys’ yeshivas did, the analysis found. The same was true for schools that overwhelmingly enrolled nonnative English speakers.
In the schools that do not administer tests, it has been difficult to measure how much the students are learning. But hundreds of interviews and a review of student work show that those students are struggling, too.
Nearly three dozen current and former teachers across the state’s Hasidic yeshivas said most of the thousands of boys who passed through their classrooms over the years left school without learning to speak English fluently, let alone read or write at grade level.
Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.” One boy, in response to a prompt about what he liked, wrote: “To cee wen somone pente.”
Boys perform slightly better in math. Most can add and subtract, and some can multiply and divide, but few can do much more, teachers said.
Yaakov Bressler, who taught reading and math at a U.T.A. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from 2016 to 2019, said the parents cared about secular education, but their sons were hopelessly behind. Many did not know their ABC’s.
“Even in the older grades, I had to assume they knew nothing,” he said, “because they did.”
In a letter to The Times, the school said, “U.T.A. Williamsburg is dedicated to passing on the traditions and beliefs of the Satmar Orthodox Jewish Community, consistent with the desires of the Satmar parents who choose it for that purpose.”
Some teachers at Hasidic schools said they had become convinced that their yeshivas discouraged learning English because it was seen as a dangerous bridge to the outside world.
Teachers said they have encountered obstacles for many years.
Greig Roselli was a graduate student in philosophy with no experience teaching young children when a U.T.A. in Williamsburg hired him off Craigslist in 2010. On his first day, he had planned to test his students’ skill levels. But when he arrived at the yeshiva, in a large Gothic-style former public school building, all his students were hiding in a closet.
Herding the boys to their seats, he said, he started reading from his lesson plan, but the students interrupted him, giggling and shrieking. One scowled and said: “Go home, teacher.”
Soon, Mr. Roselli, who knew no Yiddish, realized he had signed up for an impossible task: teaching rambunctious 11- and 12-year-olds who barely spoke his language and were not eager to learn it. He quit after a year.
More than a decade later, the secular education in many Hasidic schools has grown worse, according to dozens of recent students, parents and teachers.
Some Hasidic boys’ yeshivas do not offer any nonreligious classes at all. Others make attending the classes optional. Yeshivas that provide secular education now mostly hire only Hasidic men as teachers, regardless of whether they know English.
One former student said he once had a secular teacher who doubled as the school cook. Another said one of his instructors repeatedly wrote the word “math” on the blackboard as “mathe.” Many young men said their English teachers spoke to them only in Yiddish.
Secular textbooks are either censored with black marker to blot out images of girls and pigs and words like “library” and “college,” or specially printed to omit such content altogether.
Pages from a censored textbook used in a Hasidic yeshiva in Brooklyn show that boys cannot see images of girls or read the names of many non-Jewish holidays.
Chaim Fishman, 24, who attended Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov in Williamsburg, said that when he asked English teachers the meaning of words, they often said they did not know them. The school did not respond to a request for comment.
Like others in the community, Mr. Fishman tried to learn English on his own, in part by secretly listening to the radio. After managing to leave his yeshiva, he enrolled in public school and was embarrassed at how little he knew.
“I’m the third generation born and raised in New York City,” he said, “and, still, when I was 15, I could barely speak English.”
## Private schools, public money
Despite the failings of Hasidic boys’ schools, the government has continued sending them a steady stream of funding.
Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum.
Officials have sent money to Hasidic schools for decades but have never provided a full public accounting. To create one, The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic.
The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period.
Hasidic boys’ yeshivas receive far less per pupil than public schools, and they charge tuition. But they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. And the money is flowing as New York City [is cutting public school budgets](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/nyregion/school-budget-cuts-new-york-city-appeal.html).
Some government programs provide a disproportionate amount of aid to Hasidic schools, The Times found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods, [even while tens of thousands of people have languished on waiting lists](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/nyregion/child-care-vouchers.html). The program provides more than $50 million a year to Hasidic boys’ schools that claim the end of their regular school day as child care, records show.
Yeshiva Imrei Chaim Viznitz in Borough Park had 735 boys enrolled in 2019, state records show, and collected funding from 650 vouchers that year, city records show. Parents there said administrators coached them on applying for vouchers and other programs.
Mr. Connolly, the lawyer who represents some of the Hasidic schools, disputed the accuracy of the city data.
Hasidic boys’ schools also received about $30 million from government financial aid programs, which they access by counting their older students as pursuing higher education degrees in religious studies.
The schools got roughly $100 million through antipoverty programs to provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks every school day to virtually all Hasidic boys, including during the summer. At least one school network, the U.T.A., uses the money to buy food from retailers it owns, using the profit to support its budget, interviews and records show.
The Times review also found that Hasidic boys’ schools benefit from about $100 million annually from federal Title 1 programs and other sources of funding for secular education. The money pays yeshivas to administer tests, check attendance, report enrollment data and buy instructional materials.
Hasidic boys’ schools received roughly $30 million in the last year before the pandemic to transport students, through a program [created exclusively for yeshivas](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/simcha-felder/140-yeshivas-attend-felder%E2%80%99s-transportation-workshop) by state lawmakers in 2013.
And they collected about $200,000 in federal money for internet-related services, even though they forbid students from going online.
## Hard lessons
The money is subsidizing instruction that has regularly involved corporal punishment.
One recent graduate, Chaim Wigder, said he remembered the first time his religion teacher at U.T.A. of Borough Park decided he had stepped out of line. Angry that Mr. Wigder, then 7, appeared not to be following along with a Torah reading, the teacher ordered him to the front of the classroom and smacked his hand, hard, with a ruler wrapped in electrical tape. “Do you think that’s enough punishment?” he asked in Yiddish, and then struck the boy even harder. More than a decade later, Mr. Wigder still remembers crying out in pain.
The school did not respond to a request for comment.
More than 35 men who either attended or worked at a Hasidic school in the past decade told The Times they saw teachers hit students with rulers, belts and sticks.
State law allows for corporal punishment in private schools, but there are no clear rules regarding its use. Hasidic yeshivas have integrated it into rigid religious instruction.
Six days a week, often before the sun rises, boys file into classrooms and spend up to eight hours a day studying the Talmud and other ancient texts.
Beyond memorizing religious passages, graduates said they learned logic, critical thinking and how to stay focused. Many said they strained to pay attention, afraid of being beaten if they did not.
At Avir Yakov Elementary, in New Square, north of New York City, one man recalled being kicked by a rabbi so hard that he flew under a table. He was 4 at the time. The school did not respond to requests for comment.
A recent graduate of Yeshiva Beth Hillel of Williamsburg said he once saw a teacher knock a classmate to the ground and stomp him repeatedly.
And at Bobover Yeshiva Bnei Zion in Borough Park, a young man said when he was 11, a teacher dragged him across the room, and his head banged on a locker and started to bleed.
Mr. Connolly, the lawyer for some Hasidic schools, said neither school had any record of incidents the men described.
“The attitude was constantly that you could get hit,” said Ari Hershkowitz, who went to U.T.A. in Williamsburg. “We were constantly under threat of that.”
Mr. Hershkowitz said he left the community and turned to drugs, eventually overdosing on cocaine. Now, at 25, he is rebuilding his life.
In the past few years, some Hasidic schools have asked teachers to be less violent in disciplining students.
Still, virtually all of the dozens of parents of current students interviewed by The Times said their sons had been hit at least once. Several said they had sought to protect their children by “tipping” their teachers, usually about $100 a year.
Over the past five years, the New York City Police Department has investigated more than a dozen claims of child abuse at the schools, records show. It is not clear whether anyone was charged in the incidents.
In April 2019, a 10-year-old at Yeshiva Chsan Sofer, in Borough Park, called 911 and said a rabbi had jumped on him and beaten him, according to a police record obtained by The Times. Within moments, the report said, a principal got on the phone and said the boy had not been beaten. The authorities responded anyway, and the boy left school in an ambulance. A lawyer for the school, Y. David Scharf, said the school cooperated in the resulting investigation, and the allegation was unfounded.
Mr. Bamberger, the yeshiva coalition spokesman, said even one violent incident was too many. “But a dozen alleged incidents across hundreds of yeshivas over a five-year period is comparably a far better safety record than most schools,” he said.
## ‘No point of advantage’
After attending Hasidic schools, men are often not equipped to live outside the community.
Joseph Kraus learned that firsthand.
Soon after turning 17 in Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, Mr. Kraus decided to run away — from his overbearing teachers, his parents and five siblings and the cramped cul-de-sac on which he had grown up, tending tomato and cucumber plants to stave off boredom.
He took a taxi to a local mall, where he bought jeans and T-shirts, and then to a youth shelter. On his first weekend there, in the fall of 2020, he felt astonished when he realized he had not marked the Sabbath for the first time in his life.
Over the next 18 months, he enrolled in remote public school classes but was barely able to use a computer or understand his teachers. He drifted from a shelter in Florida to a foster home in Texas to a job training program back in New York.
For much of this year, he shared a subsidized room with another homeless man in a Knights Inn on the edge of Liberty, a Catskills town dotted with boarded-up storefronts just an hour from his childhood home.
He spent his days walking the 30 minutes to and from the local library, where he searched for jobs without much success. He said he was recently fired from a diner because he could not write down orders. He lives off food stamps but skips many meals.
“I feel like I have no point of advantage,” said Mr. Kraus, now 19. “I have big hopes to be really successful. I feel like at this point it’s really stupid to talk about.”
Community leaders said that cases like Mr. Kraus’s are the exception.
“Perhaps The Times should tell the stories of some of the many Hasidic school graduates who are highly successful entrepreneurs, businessmen and professionals — and who attribute their success to a rigorous yeshiva education that trained their minds to think,” said David Zwiebel of Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group that advocates for Hasidic schools.
But in interviews, dozens of men described profound struggles. Some said they remained in the community, awash in debt and supporting their families with government welfare. Several said the only job they could find was at the yeshiva they attended. Others spoke while unloading trucks or stocking shelves and choked back tears as they described what their lives had become.
Mendy Pape said he left a Hasidic neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for Montreal in 2010. He got a job at a bagel factory, but, unable to afford an apartment, he slept on park benches. Despairing, he tried to take his own life.
After six months in a psychiatric hospital, Mr. Pape said he recovered enough to find work and an apartment. A neighbor started to teach him English in her spare time, he said, and gave him his first secular book: “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss. He was 28.
Now a nursing school graduate, Mr. Pape said he believes his Hasidic education was designed to keep him from leaving the community.
“I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a bank account, I didn’t have references. I didn’t have any of that because I didn’t even know what any of that was,” he said. “I had no knowledge really of how to speak to people. I thought I was all on my own. That’s the idea I was given in school.”
## ‘We will not comply’
Warnings about the Hasidic yeshivas have circulated for years, aired at news conferences, litigated in court and outlined in a formal complaint. One yeshiva graduate, Naftuli Moster, even formed an advocacy group in 2012 to press the issue.
At the state education department, three employees have raised red flags, The Times found. One former official, who worked on private school licensing, visited some Hasidic yeshivas and was unsettled to see that many seemed to operate entirely in Yiddish. Another, who processed funding requests, learned that some yeshivas offered only an hour of secular studies a day. That person started making notes in the margins of requests, questioning the wisdom of sending money. The employees said they were ignored by their superiors.
A spokeswoman for the department did not respond to a request for comment about the employees’ concerns.
Politicians who might have taken action have instead accommodated a Hasidic voting bloc that can sway local races.
“There’s a significant population that you ignore at your peril,” said Evan Stavisky, a veteran political consultant. “They are part of the fabric of New York politics.”
Yeshivas play a central role in getting out the vote. Before elections, teachers often give students sample ballots with names of the grand rabbis’ chosen candidates filled in, parents and former students said.
At some yeshivas, students who bring in their parents’ “I Voted” stickers win rewards. The Central United Talmudical Academy recently took children with stickers on a trip to Coney Island, two parents said. The other children had to stay behind. Mr. Connolly, the lawyer for some Hasidic schools, disputed the parents’ account.
Mr. Bamberger, the yeshiva coalition spokesman, said the Hasidic community’s large turnout should be applauded.
Over the past few years, rabbis have made keeping government out of the schools their central political priority.
“The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all,” Satmar Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum told followers in Yiddish in 2018, adding: “We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.”
Shortly before winning an endorsement from one faction of the Satmar group, Mr. Adams released a video showing him [scooting down a slide](https://twitter.com/ericadamsfornyc/status/1369393649080008704) at a Hasidic yeshiva. After that hourlong visit, he [said](https://forward.com/fast-forward/465460/after-visiting-yeshiva-eric-adams-impressed-by-secular-education/) he was “really impressed” by what he saw. Speaking for Mr. Adams last week, Mr. Young said the mayor’s decisions are not influenced by political support.
Mr. Cuomo rarely shied from using his bully pulpit during nearly three terms as governor. But when it came to yeshivas, he told Satmar Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum in 2018 that he would not crack down, according to [the Hasidic press](https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/general/1585335/photos-gov-cuomo-visits-satmar-rebbe-of-williamsburg-promises-not-to-interfere-with-yeshiva-education.html). He won the group’s endorsement shortly thereafter and [did not deny](https://nypost.com/2018/09/04/cuomo-dodges-questions-about-endorsement-deal-with-rabbi/) the report.
Hasidic leaders said the current governor, Ms. Hochul, made a similar pledge. While campaigning this year, she met with Hasidic leaders in Williamsburg. It was not clear what they discussed, but afterward an official Satmar Twitter account posted photos with a caption that read: “The Governor promised that she will fight any changes to the Yeshiva’s curriculum.”
The tweet was deleted soon after.
## A plea for help
Perhaps no situation captured the government’s inaction more clearly than the de Blasio administration’s response to a complaint it received in 2015.
That year, a group of former yeshiva students — who did not want their children to get the same deficient education they believed they had received — asked City Hall for help.
Top city officials debated how to proceed with an investigation. Mr. de Blasio and others argued the inquiry could backfire if it was too aggressive. That concern touched off a series of compromises that led to the city’s showing extraordinary deference to a lawyer representing the yeshivas, according to 10 former officials.
The lawyer, Avi Schick, was a former deputy state attorney general who had gained a reputation as a formidable litigator.
Mr. Schick insisted on being present for the inspections, which were scheduled in advance, some of the former officials said. He steered the city toward the better yeshivas named in the complaint, and he delayed visits to some of the most troubled schools.
Still, the inspectors observed scenes that concerned them. At one yeshiva, the children had their English books open to different pages and were not following along as a teacher read aloud. At another, a teacher did not appear to know his students’ names.
Image
Credit...Richard Drew/Associated Press
City officials, who had not been trained to conduct private school inspections, said they received little help from the state. Once, as the city was preparing to send a letter requesting guidance, top state education officials asked them not to, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Frustrated, a senior city education official in 2018 proposed creating a team to tackle problems in private schools, the official said. The plan went nowhere.
Ultimately, the city Department of Investigation [found](https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2019/dec/DOISCIJointStatementRelease12_18_19.pdf) that the mayor engaged in “political horse-trading” by delaying publication of an interim report on the schools, and The New York Post [obtained emails](https://nypost.com/2020/05/09/internal-emails-reveal-mayor-bill-de-blasio-helped-stall-yeshiva-probe/) showing that a top administration official promised yeshiva leaders the findings would be “gentle.”
Even so, the report said that only two of 28 yeshivas were offering an adequate education. But ahead of its release, just before Christmas 2019, Mr. Schick and others made sure the report did not specify by name which schools were deficient, three former officials said. Through a spokesman, Mr. Schick denied that account.
For their part, state officials have tried to enact rules that would have held yeshivas accountable by requiring a minimum amount of secular education. But a judge tossed out the rules over a procedural issue in 2019, and, in 2020, the state withdrew another plan after an outcry from Hasidic leaders. In March, they released another proposal with fewer requirements and muddier consequences for flouting the law.
Once again, Hasidic leaders have mobilized to block it.
“Now is our opportunity and sacred duty to try to stop the guidelines before they go into effect,” they wrote this spring, in a Yiddish-language flier urging a flood of letters to oppose the plan. “The future of your generations rests in your own hands.”
To guarantee their followers would answer the call, the leaders turned to a reliable tactic.
They sent it home through the schools.
Reporting was contributed by Alex Lemonides, Marcela Rodrigues-Sherley, Alyssa Lukpat and Bianca Pallaro. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Alexander Sarovic was in touch with Ukrainian special forces for months. The DER SPIEGEL reporter wanted to know if it would be possible to accompany the troops to the front. At the beginning of the week, Sarovic was finally able to meet up with the unit in southern Ukraine, together with photographer Maxim Dondyuk. They slept on cots in a farmer's home with an outhouse that had been repurposed as a base of operations. When Russian Su-25 fighter-bombers flew sorties nearby, the reporters weren't the only ones to grow nervous – the soldiers did too.
The sappers at the village entrance, their search devices in hand, warn the visitors: Stay out of the fields. The booby traps that the Russians may have hidden in them are difficult to see, they say.
Military vehicles are rushing past, leaving the sign marking the city limits of Balakliya behind, a small town in northeastern Ukraine that was once home to 27,000 residents. A dark-haired Ukrainian soldier who goes by the nom de guerre "Mechanic" is standing on the first parcel of land at the edge of town. He looks exhausted. The Russians, he says, maintained a military base here, pointing at the remains of a small house with olive-green crates stacked up in front of it. They're full of Russian munitions.
Someone has sprayed a "Z" in dark-colored paint on the wall, the symbol of the Russian war of aggression. Right next to it is a bit of graffiti that can best be translated as: "Hunter of Ukrainian soldiers." Balakliya, which lies on the Siverskyi Donets river, spent six months under Russian occupation. A few days ago, though, Ukrainian troops were able to liberate the town, one of many in the Kharkiv region from which Russian soldiers have fled. Ultimately, it was the Ukrainian troops who did the hunting.
Mechanic, who belongs to the 25th Brigade, arrived in Balakliya on Sept. 6 to secure the town. He pulls out his mobile phone and shows a photo of two dead Russian soldiers. They tried to escape, he says, but didn't make it. Others, though, did manage to get out in time, but "they left all kinds of equipment behind," including a brand-new Typhoon, a Russian armored personnel carrier.
### An Unbelievable Surprise Attack
The adjacent plot of land provides an impression of what the Ukrainians found during their Kharkiv offensive: In the ruins of an ammunition dump, there are several Russian Grad rockets lying about. Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers are driving past on the streets of Balakliya in Russian army trucks. Most of the weapons left behind by the occupiers, though, have long since been deployed elsewhere on the front lines, says an army medic from the 71st Brigade who goes by the name "Vira." The haul includes battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, Grad launchers and other armored vehicles, all of which the Ukrainians are now using.
As lightning fast as the advance of the Ukrainians in Balakliya and elsewhere was, they didn't get away without casualties of their own. Not far from a bridge lies a destroyed military vehicle belonging to the Ukrainian special forces, charred and almost grotesquely twisted. Vira says that their own ranks suffered several casualties and quite a few wounded. "But what do you expect? It’s war." He says he saw far more dead Russians.
A destroyed Russian military base in Balakliya: "They left all kinds of equipment behind."
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
The town of Balakliya was liberated by Ukraine's astonishing counteroffensive.
Foto:
Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
Such is the situation in Balakliya and much of the Kharkiv region: In the last two weeks, Ukrainian units have managed to push up to 70 kilometers into Russian-occupied territory. According to the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in the U.S., they managed to retake 9,000 square kilometers of land within just a few days. Kyiv has officially claimed that 4,000 square kilometers of that are under complete control. It seems almost unbelievable, but it looks as though Ukraine’s surprise attack has managed to throw out the allegedly second-strongest military in the world from the northeast of the country, sending Russian soldiers into a hasty and chaotic retreat.
### A Strategic Masterstroke
Nine-thousand square kilometers is an area ten times larger than the city of Berlin. Not even the Ukrainian leadership under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy likely thought their military, in the attack launched on Sept. 6, would be able to advance so quickly in the northeastern part of the country. Phillips O'Brien, a military expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, [described it](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/ukraine-russia-putin-kharkiv-kupyansk/671407/) in the *Atlantic* as a "strategic masterstroke that military scholars will study for decades to come."
The Russian military, widely considered before the invasion to be vastly superior, has now, at the hand of the Ukrainians, suffered one of the most painful defeats it has experienced in decades. Ed Arnold, a military expert with the British think tank Rusi, calls it "one of the greatest counteroffensives since the Second World War." And the victory in the northeast could ultimately accelerate the Ukrainian offensive in the south as well. In Moscow, the atmosphere has changed significantly, becoming more toxic. More and more hardliners are demanding that the Kremlin begin calling the "special military operation" a war and begin recruiting fresh soldiers.
Ukrainian special forces fire mortar shells at Russian positions near Kherson.
Foto:
Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
The battlefields of the Kharkiv region have also made it clear in recent days just how significant the effect of Western support has been. The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers from the U.S. have been devastating, and the German self-propelled howitzers and Gepard anti-aircraft tanks have also proved extremely helpful during the advance. Furthermore, it has become clear just how important U.S. intelligence was for the offensive. Washington, though, has graciously said that the battlefield successes have been due entirely to the Ukrainian leadership, which led its comparatively small force to a grand victory in Kharkiv.
### Extensive Planning
But what came as a surprise to many observers, and apparently to the Russians as well, was actually the result of meticulous planning, as reported by the *New York Times*. The strategy behind the offensive that has thus far been so successful was developed over a period of several months by Ukrainian and American military planners – and culminated in a strategic bluff.
A burned-out Russian armored vehicle in the Kharkiv region
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
When summer arrived, pressure began to grow rapidly on Zelenskyy. He was demanding more and more Western military help, but had yet to demonstrate to his backers in Europe and America, or to his own people, that the Ukrainian military could do more than just stand up to the enemy invaders, it could also push them back. Zelenskyy told his generals that he wanted to show in dramatic fashion that Ukraine could oust the Russians. Kyiv, after all, had also become concerned that Western support could begin to erode if the Ukrainian army didn't soon grab back large swaths of land.
In response, Ukrainian generals developed a plan for an ambitious attack in the south. The goal: recapturing the city of Kherson and severing Russian supply lines from Mariupol, the Russian-occupied port city on the Sea of Azov. Skepticism was extremely high from the very beginning, with both Ukrainian generals and their American partners doubting that rapid advances could be made in the south, and they feared that what gains were achieved would come at a cost of significant casualties. They were concerned about yet another war of attrition, and simulations reinforced their fears that an offensive in the south would fail.
### Close Cooperation
The U.S. military provided their Ukrainian allies with detailed information about where the Russian troops were stationed. They agreed that if any counteroffensive was going to be successful, it would have to start before the first snowfall, by the end of October at the latest. Anything after that would risk getting bogged down in the mud.
Throughout August, the U.S. provided Ukraine with ever increasing amounts of information about Russian positions, highlighting weaknesses and gaps in the Russian lines. The planners realized that Russia's lines in the northeast were extremely thin, a function of the fact that Kyiv had publicly announced its plan to attack in the south. President Zelenskyy and his advisers spent months talking about their intention to liberate the politically and strategically important city of Kherson and the rest of the Russian-occupied territory west of the Dnieper River.
Moscow, of course, was listening, and Russian generals began concentrating their troops in the south. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, came to realize that it would be difficult for Moscow to react to an attack and quickly move sufficient troops and materiel back to Kharkiv in the northeast.
### Dual Attack
As a result, instead of a broad offensive, the Ukrainian military ultimately proposed an asymmetric dual strike: The one in the south in the surroundings of Kherson would make slow progress due to the number of Russian troops stationed in the area. But the second prong was planned for the area around Kharkiv. British, American and Ukrainian strategists grew increasingly certain that the plan might just work. Even if Russian Telegram groups had been full of warnings for more than a month of Ukrainian troops gathering in the Kharkiv region, they apparently didn't see the broad offensive coming.
Shells belonging to Ukrainian special forces are prepared for combat.
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
A Ukrainian commander heads to the front lines in Kherson.
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
The Ukrainians deployed their most effective weapons to destroy bridges, ammunition depots and command posts along the Russian lines in the south near Kherson. For Putin's generals, the fall of Kherson would be disastrous, and they did precisely what the Ukrainians had hoped they would: They sent their best troops to Kherson.
Even weeks before starting their offensive, the Ukrainians began launching preparatory strikes on both fronts. Salvos of missiles from HIMARS multiple rocket launchers repeatedly struck munitions depots and command posts far behind enemy lines in both the south and the north. In addition, the U.S. provided Ukraine – secretly at first – with AGM-88 HARM missiles, which engineers were able to mount on Ukraine's Soviet-era MiG fighters despite their incompatibility.
The missiles home in on radar signals, such as those coming from air defense systems or other radar facilities, and quickly destroy them. The Ukrainians were thus able to weaken Russian defenses, with Putin's troops operating essentially blind in some areas without radar and unable to adequately defend against Ukrainian air strikes. Furthermore, Russia – already suffering from chronically poor logistics – was hardly able to keep up supplies of ammunition to numerous positions.
### The Offensive
Then, on Sept. 6, a Tuesday, the Ukrainians in the northeast set their offensive forces in motion.
Highly mobile units pushed forward to Balakliya, protected by the 14th and 92nd Mechanized Brigades, the 3rd and 4th Tank Brigades, the 25th Airborne Brigade and the 80th Air Assault Brigade, supported by special units and the Territorial Defense Forces. "The Ukrainians … seem to have built up a substantial, fast-moving strike force," wrote O'Brien, the military expert, including combat brigades equipped with lighter and faster wheeled vehicles. "This has allowed them a crucial mobility advantage over their enemy."
A Russian rocket that was left behind as the occupiers fled
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
Just one day later, the Ukrainians had already pushed 20 kilometers into occupied territory. And the Russians were literally running from the advancing units, which were poised to close a pincer between the border in the north and the city of Izyum to the south. The Russians repeatedly failed to mobilize air support or reinforcements, primarily because they were directly targeted by Ukrainian rockets and artillery.
It quickly became clear that the Russian command and control structures were either incredibly inefficient or didn't work at all. They were fighting with disparate units that were entirely isolated from each other, and many of them began to disintegrate. Balakliya fell to the Ukrainians on Sept. 8. And the Ukrainian plan was slowly becoming clearer: They intended to march on Kupiansk in the east along the Oskil River in an effort to cut off the strategically important city of Izyum from Russian supply lines. At the same time, similar to their tactic in Kherson, they were pushing the Russians back against the river and thus cutting off their escape routes.
"Ukraine has managed to build up a significant mobile reserve force in the north," says Justin Bronk of the London-based think tank Rusi. Ukrainian commanders, he says, were able to immediately send reinforcements as soon as Russian defensive lines were breached. "When its frontline forces managed to make a gap through the Russian front line, Ukrainian commanders were able to rapidly push reinforcements into that gap," Bronk says. And when Russian reserve units did show up, such as in Shevchenkove, enough Ukrainian troops were already there to surround the Russians, he adds.
### The Collapse
The result of the offensive was the complete collapse of Russian units in the Kharkiv region. On Sept. 9, the Ukrainians reached Kupiansk, and the strategically important Iyzum fell two days later. The retreat of Russian forces, it quickly became apparent, had been extremely chaotic, with large numbers of intact Russian tanks and other equipment lining the Ukrainians' path.
Indeed, the list of lost or destroyed materiel kept by the Oryx Blog reads like a document of complete failure: Fully 121 Russian tanks, 127 infantry fighting vehicles, 103 troop carriers, 74 artillery pieces, 26 armored recovery vehicles, 11 air defense systems, 99 trucks and five airplanes fell into Ukrainian hands. British intelligence believes that Russian losses were so significant that the country's defensive abilities will be affected for years to come.
Putin's plan of taking the entirety of the Donbas now appears to have become impossible through the loss of transportation routes and defensive positions. Instead, the Ukrainians are now advancing on the cities of Lysychansk and Lyman, both of which they were forced to abandon several months ago.
### Plummeting Combat Effectiveness
The collapse of the Russian front in Kharkiv "reflects the structural problems with manpower and low morale in an overstretched Russian military," Michael Kofman, research program director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a research institute belonging to the U.S. Navy, told the *Washington Post* recently. "The Russian military’s approach is fundamentally unsustainable." The Russian army, he continues, is exhausted, its combat effectiveness is plunging, and soldiers are terminating their service as soon as they can.
Is Putin in the process of losing a war to a much smaller and weaker country? Or can Russian troops regain the upper hand? Kofman says that a partial mobilization in Russia and the recruitment of fresh troops with an eye toward next year could improve Russia's fortunes. The war, he warns, is far from over. In the short term, though, Kofman says, Russia lacks the strength to defend occupied territory in southern Ukraine from counteroffensives while concurrently making progress in the Donbas.
Ben Hodges, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe, also spoke to the *Washington Post*, saying that the Russian military had reached what military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called the "culminating point," the moment when an attacking force can no longer carry on.
For Ukraine, this collapse is almost more important politically than it is militarily. Zelenskyy, after all, doesn't just have to keep up the morale in his own ranks, he also has to continually prove to Western detractors that victory is possible and that it is worth it to continue supporting Ukraine. Pressure is now growing on allied countries to quickly send more equipment that can be deployed this year and not next, says Ed Arnold, the British think tank analyst.
### The Second Front
And more support remains a necessity. Some of Russia's best troops are still fighting in the south where Ukraine's second counteroffensive is underway. The offensive has always been more than just a pure feint, says Arnold. The analyst believes that the Ukrainians will now find success here as well. "Ultimately, there will be no more Russian troops west of the Dnieper anywhere in Ukraine," he says. And it is possible that the Kherson offensive could herald the launch next year of an operation to reclaim the Crimea.
Ukrainian special forces in the Kherson region
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
A Ukrainian drone pilot
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
But even as the Russian lines collapsed in the northeast, the Ukrainian army has had a far tougher time of it in the south. In the border area between the regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv, the Ukrainians have only made extremely slow progress in recent weeks. They have only managed to retake a handful of villages and other settlements.
This Tuesday, along the narrow yet militarily important Inhulets River, it could be observed just how bitter the fighting has become. Members of a Ukrainian special forces unit have established their position in a broad valley full of pastureland.
Their grenade launcher has been assembled, dug in and camouflaged with branches. They have also excavated trenches nearby. From a rise, where only a sparse line of trees stands between them and the cameras of Russian drones, they look out across the endless fields. Members of the unit have asked not to be identified by name.
One of the soldiers, who goes by the nom de guerre "Kays," flies his drone out over the settlements. After several attempts, he is able to identify suspicious movements: On the screen of his mobile phone, a handful of enemy fighters scamper across the street of a nearby village. He calls over two comrades to confirm what he saw while three others prepare the mortar shells – 120 millimeter projectiles, produced in the Czech Republic, the size of small bottles of cooking gas.
The hamlets and settlements in the area are deserted, with almost all of the region's population having long since fled. Overnight, the Ukrainian army managed to retake another village within site of the special forces unit. The Russians, though, have begun to respond, with their artillery taking aim at the advancing Ukrainians and Su-25 fighters flying sorties overhead. The roar of the planes can be heard several times on this day, with thick, dark gray clouds of smoke rising from where their bombs fall to earth.
### Tough Fighting
The commander of a drone unit that is also in action on the southern front estimates that there are around 24,000 Russian soldiers west of the Dnieper. Among them, he says, are numerous paratroopers, who are considered to be among the best that Russia has to offer. Their positions, the Ukrainians say, are extremely well fortified, some of them with concrete. But experts believe that these units are not at full strength and are short of both equipment and reserves.
Ukrainian officers and soldiers told DER SPIEGEL that the fighting in the region has been extremely tough. And yet morale remains high, because the soldiers are aware that the Russian troops on the western side of the Dnieper are in a precarious position. The bridges over the river can no longer be used for heavy equipment following weeks of being fired on, and the Ukrainians are quick to destroy pontoon bridges.
The Ukrainians "are forcing them to fight in a position that is militarily pretty indefensible," says Justin Bronk, the think tank analyst. The attempt to hang on to Kherson, he continues, is a politically motivated decision made by the regime in Moscow. Kherson, the capital of the eponymously named region, was the only large city that the Russians were able to quickly conquer with no serious trouble – and it is the bridgehead to the port city of Odessa, which has thus far resisted the Russian invasion.
### No Panic Yet
Kays and his comrades have managed to locate a fixed point around which the Russian troops appear to be orbiting. It seems to be a field kitchen in a village around five kilometers away. The Ukrainian soldiers send up a second drone to confirm the sighting and to ensure that there are no civilians in the area.
Mortar shells made in the Czech Republic
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
Special forces drive to the front on a combat mission.
Foto: Maxim Dondyuk/ DER SPIEGEL
Three-quarters of an hour later, the second drone pilot reports back. He confirms that it is, indeed, a field kitchen. And there's more: The Russians appear to have established a command post in a two-story building near the kitchen. The mortar team fires an initial shell. There is a boom and a bright tongue of flame shoots out of the cannon, the shock wave extending for 10 meters. Then a second round is fired, and a third – a total of 19 shells. The others can monitor the strikes by drone, and they report four hits.
The special forces are packing up the mortar and the drones when one of them yells, "airplane!" This time, the roar is dangerously close and they sprint to the trenches they have dug. Then a column of smoke rises from the horizon. The Russian jet has luckily dropped its load quite some distance away.
### A Collapse of Morale
Panic hasn't yet broken out among the Russian forces in the south, says the deputy commander of the special forces unit operating along the Inhulets River. But it is only a matter of time before the defeat in the northeast will have an effect on Russian morale here in the south, he believes. He thinks that many Russian soldiers haven't abandoned their posts only for fear of the punishment that might be awaiting them if they do. But as soon as entire units begin retreating, the situation will change. "They can't punish entire battalions."
In contrast to the northeast, the Ukrainians aren't likely to attempt a rapid thrust here in the south. Such a move would likely produce a huge number of casualties, primarily because of the open landscape and the rainfall that is likely to set in soon.
There are military experts, though, who still believe that Ukraine has the momentum. "Russian morale has been on a steady decline," says Ed Arnold from Rusi. Indeed, he thinks it can't get much worse than it is now. If the Ukrainians are able to retake Kherson, says Justin Bronk, the Russian's chances for victory are extremely low. "If you could cause a second collapse in Kherson, that would be strategically devastating for the Russians," he says.
### Russian Uneasiness
The developments in Ukraine have also had a significant effect back in Russia. Ever since the troops have run into difficulties and an increasing number of soldiers have been returning in coffins, calls in Moscow for an escalation have grown louder. And uneasiness is rising in Russian towns near the Ukrainian border.
The governor of the Russian region of Belgorod has begun reporting almost daily strikes on villages on the Russian side of the border. Officials have evacuated a number of towns, with residents being sheltered in the regional capital city Belgorod, while schools have been transferred further away from the border. On top of that are the almost 13,000 people who fled to Russia from the Kharkiv area, with many having received a Russian passport.
The atmosphere in the border regions in Russia is rather strange at the moment. In speaking to residents of Belgorod, it sounds a lot like many have grown used to the war raging outside their front doors. But some, after seven months of war, are beginning to sound worried.
### Putin Remains Silent
Yevgeny Sokolov, a lawyer and human rights activist in Belgorod, says that many people are afraid and prefer to remain silent. "From the very beginning, it was clear that the military operation would be long and bloody," says Sokolov, a former soldier who served in Afghanistan as a paratrooper. He describes having seen flashes of light in the sky above the center of the city one night in early July. Russian anti-aircraft defenses had apparently intercepted incoming missiles, with one of them being diverted into a residential area, he says. Five people were killed. Nevertheless, he continues, very few of the city's residents know where to go for shelter. "What foolishness in such a situation," he says. "As you can see, everything is going according to plan," he adds in a deeply sarcastic tone.
Yevgeny Sokolov: "From the very beginning, it was clear that the military operation would be long and bloody."
Foto: Yevgeny Kondakov/ DER SPIEGEL
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has been silent for days, as though everything in Ukraine was, in fact, proceeding according to plan. Last Saturday, he inaugurated a giant Ferris wheel in Moscow, honored medical workers for their service in battling the coronavirus and then traveled to Uzbekistan for a meeting with Chinese head of state Xi Jinping. He is eager to demonstrate that he still has friends in this world. But despite his efforts at normality, he won't likely be able to conceal the fact that the situation in Russia is shifting.
### General Mobilization
The military defeat in Kharkiv came as an extreme disappointment to ultranationalists, hardliners and regime propagandists, in part because Ukraine is so much smaller than Russia and doesn't possess any nuclear weapons. In response, Kremlin propagandists have once again started to insist that Russia isn't fighting against Ukraine, but against Europe, the U.S. and NATO.
The first high-ranking politicians in Russia have begun using the word "war" to describe the conflict in Ukraine, even though it must still officially be referred to as a "special military operation." And an increasing number of hardliners, like Gennady Sukhanov, the head of the Communist Party, have begun demanding that Russia call a general mobilization to allow for the recruitment of a huge number of fresh troops. Sukhanov has only recently joined those who have been calling for such a move for several months. Even state-run broadcasters have begun discussing "heavy losses" on live television.
Sergey Mironov, head of the party A Just Russia, said before parliament: "The time for general mobilization has come." Not, though, he continued, for a military mobilization, but a mobilization in the minds of Russians, saying it is time to stop lying to the people. "Enough is enough! Only the truth and an honest evaluation of events will help us to victory."
But Putin still wants to avoid a general mobilization, because doing so could upset a significant number of Russians. The Russian president has consistently sought to convey the feeling that the war has little to do with the population at large.
### Freedom
Whereas the Kremlin finds itself in the position of having to digest a military disaster, many people in northeastern Ukraine are celebrating the return of their old freedoms. They embrace Ukrainian soldiers, wave blue-and-yellow flags and cheer as Ukrainian military helicopters fly overhead. Or, like the retiree Liubov Piskun, they provide food to the fighters. She and her neighbors recently gathered together lard, potatoes, tomatoes, honey, butter and whatever else they could find and brought it to the soldiers who were standing outside.
Piskun is 74 years old and lives in Kupiansk, a town in the Kharkiv region. She warily opened her door on Sept. 10. Her city had been occupied by the Russians since the early days of the war, spreading fear and suffering among the population. But the soldiers she now found standing in front of her door were different. "Good morning," they said in Ukrainian. "It was the happiest moment of my life," says Piskun, who related the incident over the phone.
She says she hadn't slept for almost six months. "I would sleep during the day for maybe two hours, but pretty much not at all at night." She says she would listen to the rockets and the thundering of artillery, as helicopters would fly low over the city. Russian flags were flying everywhere in the city. The only Ukrainian flag was high up under the roof of the medical university, so high that the Russians couldn't immediately get to it. "That Ukrainian flag gave us courage," she says, sobbing.
A lot of people in the region accepted the Russian passports that the occupiers were handing out, she says. "The line at the disbursement center was long." But she insists that she always knew "that our troops would come back to us." And this week, Liubov Piskun was finally liberated.
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**Imagine the entirety of your digital existence** plotted out before you: your accounts and passwords; your avatars; your contacts; every exchange of written dialogue; the full history of your logged interests, banal and forgettable and closely held; the note where you scrawled once-urgent word fragments that now make zero sense to you; the rabbit holes you fell down or the minor obsession or the thing that connected to the thing that led you to decide to do another thing that became a part of a part of a part of who you are, or a part of who you are to some people, or a part of who you are only to yourself, barely recognizable in the light of day. Your selfies. Your sexts. Your emails. Your calendar. Your to-do list. Your playlists. Your tabs.
Now imagine that you are both the son of a man running for president and a lawyer and lobbyist accustomed to mixing with powerful people and doing business overseas premised on your proximity to those powerful people, and that you are in the throes of a divorce and a midlife catastrophe brought on by the early death of your older brother and that, in your distortion field of grief, on a hell-bent drug-and-alcohol binge, you have been making even more horrible choices, taking up with your brother’s widow and, while in considerable financial debt, hiring prostitutes and zoning out with camgirls and staying awake for days at a time on crack cocaine and generally hurting everyone in your life who is trying to help you with your cruel and idiotic behavior.
And imagine that, in the middle of all of this, you lose control of 217 gigabytes of your personal data: videos in which you have sex; videos in which you smoke crack; bleary-eyed selfies; selfies that document your in-progress dental work; your bank statements; your Venmo transactions; your business emails; your toxic rants at family members; analysis from your psychiatrist; your porn searches; your Social Security number; explicit photos of the many women passing through your bedrooms, photos of your kids, of your father, of life and death, despair and boredom.
Imagine revealing this kaleidoscopic archive of all your different selves to anyone else. Now imagine it’s not just anyone but the same political opposition that has already sought to destroy your father’s candidacy by improperly pressuring a foreign leader to offer up dirt about your (sketchy, for sure) business dealings. Imagine, in a country with toxic and broken politics, how explosive this collection of data might appear to your enemies in the days leading up to a presidential election, and how valuable it might become after their defeat, as they seek to overturn and then undermine the results. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this nebulous cloud of data a “laptop.”
## On the Cover
### —
A picture of Hunter Biden’s home-folder icon. Photo: Marcus McDonald for New York Magazine
The first thing you need to understand about the [Hunter Biden laptop](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/hunter-biden-memoir-beautiful-things.html), though, is that it’s not a laptop. The FBI reportedly took possession of the original — at least if you accept the version of events promoted by those who have distributed the data, which Hunter Biden and his lawyers don’t — and all we have now are copies of copies. When it first publicly surfaced, 20 days before the 2020 election, the authenticity of the material was doubted to the degree that [Twitter and Facebook effectively banned the story](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/twitter-facebook-block-ny-post-hunter-biden-article.html) from legitimate political discourse. Since then, mainstream news organizations, including the New York [*Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-bill-investigation.html) and the Washington [*Post*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/)*,* have come to verify that at least some of the information contained in the cache is authentic.
It is hard to think of a single living individual who has experienced as total an annihilation of digital privacy since our devices became extensions of our consciousness. A suite of executives and thousands of employees were victimized by the [Sony hack](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/12/sonys-very-very-expensive-hack.html). In the iCloud hack known as “[the Fappening](https://nymag.com/tags/the-fappening/),” nude photos of dozens of celebrities ended up on Reddit and 4chan. The [2016 hack](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/10/hack-shows-clinton-aides-email-concerns-no-smoking-gun.html) of DNC servers and John Podesta’s Gmail exposed the private communications of a major political party. But in terms of the vastness of the data breach, the narrowness of its target, and its capacity to be deployed as a political weapon, none of those compare to the exposure of Hunter Biden’s entire virtual life.
Hidden inside the laptop, according to those (almost exclusively on the right) who have reviewed the data or who trust the word of those who claim they have, is a corruption scandal that implicates not just Hunter but other members of the Biden family, including the president. The laptop details Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian natural-gas producer that paid him millions of dollars to serve on its board — the relationship at the center of [Donald Trump’s first impeachment](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/president-trump-impeachment.html). It shows how a Chinese energy company directed millions of dollars in consulting fees to Hunter and his uncle. It reveals White House meetings and slush-fund dinners and wheeling and dealing, from Romania to Monte Carlo to Cafe Milano. Most important, these people claim the laptop contains proof that, despite his denials, Joe Biden — allegedly referred to in emails as “the big guy” — was fully aware of, and looking to profit from, his son’s business activities.
The most serious allegations remain unproved. The White House has whistled past the issue, with ritual “no comments” on the occasions it is questioned about matters related to the laptop. (In response to a request from *New York*, a White House spokesperson said, “You can say the White House declined to comment for the story.”) Without a counterargument from the White House or the Biden family, and with mainstream political reporters only now trying to catch up to the tabloid coverage and the ideologically motivated actors who have been advancing the story, Democrats in Washington simply don’t know what to say. There has been no penalty for silence while they’ve been in power, just the vague assumption that it does seem like there’s something to the story, if only anyone credible would bother to check it out.
But the present stalemate, in which one side treats the subject with polite indifference while the other side foments and fundraises off it, is unsustainable. Maybe it will be broken by the Justice Department, which is reported to be conducting a wide-ranging criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, examining whether he violated various tax, money-laundering, and lobbying-disclosure laws. In July, [CNN reported](https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/20/politics/hunter-biden-investigation-critical-juncture/index.html) that the Justice Department had “debated the strength of the case for months,” as it faced an unofficial September deadline to file charges ahead of the midterm election. Biden paid off a large tax liability with the help of a loan from an entertainment attorney (one of at least three lawyers on his team) in an apparent attempt to head off a potential indictment.
Even if the DOJ doesn’t bring charges against Hunter, Republicans may gain control of at least one chamber of Congress — and, with it, subpoena power — in November. If they do, they have vowed to start their own investigations, which would lead to months or years of manufactured drama. (The laptop has already been entered into the *Congressional Record* on a motion by Florida Republican [Matt Gaetz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_zwaifGuc).)
When you look at it as merely a political object, the laptop may not seem all that remarkable. But the implications of what happened to Hunter Biden go far beyond politics. Whether or not he turns out to be the perpetrator of a crime, he is certainly the victim of a violation — an invasion of privacy that is staggering in its totality. Even the people who are responsible for disseminating the laptop admit that, on a human level, what happened to Hunter is horrifying. “A lot of stuff I do, I don’t feel great about,” says one of them, Steve Bannon. “But we’re in a war.”
The act of investigation, once the discrete province of professionals, has been crowdsourced. And if you believe the story told by some famously unreliable narrators, it all begins with the eyewitness account of a computer repairman. Who is legally blind.
Trump supporter on October 20, 2020. The image of Hunter Biden’s face came from an image found in the data. Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
**The way** John Paul Mac Isaac tells the story, it was right before closing time on a Friday evening in 2019 when a stranger walked in, brushing past the vintage Apple PC mounted by the door of his computer-repair business in a strip mall in Wilmington, Delaware. Mac Isaac was used to encountering devices — and their owners — in extreme distress. “By the time they make it to me,” he says, “it’s pretty dire.” This customer had three broken laptops. Mac Isaac asked for a name to put on a repair order.
“Hunter,” the customer replied.
Last name?
“Ah, Biden.”
According to an image of the repair order, which was signed by someone whose signature looks a lot like Hunter Biden’s, the date was April 12, 2019. Biden has said he spent much of that winter and spring living an itinerant existence, in motels and Airbnbs up and down the East Coast, on a furtive journey of self-destruction. He has never offered an alternative explanation of his whereabouts that day, so it’s safe to assume he was in Delaware. He doesn’t think he was out running errands, a friend says, but he can’t say for sure, given his mental state at the time. The whole Biden family was trying to pull itself into shape to run against Trump.
“If you don’t run I’ll never have a chance at redemption,” Hunter had recently texted his father.
“I’ll run but I need you,” Joe Biden texted back. “Only focus is recovery.”
During this period, Hunter’s days revolved around scoring and smoking crack. He had been in and out of treatment, but he couldn’t stay clean. Like every addict, Biden had a litany of reasons for using. In his case, every politically attuned American already knows the tragic history: the car accident that killed his mother and sister when he was 2 and left him badly injured; the lifetime of comparisons to his more perfect brother, Beau; then [Beau’s death](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/05/beau-biden-dies-at-46.html) in 2015 and his grieving father’s decision [not to run for president](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/10/joe-biden-is-not-running-for-president.html) the next year, when many Democrats are convinced, at least in retrospect, that he would have beaten Donald Trump. Now, four years later, Hunter was fighting with his ex-wife over their ruined finances and with [Beau’s widow, Hallie](https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/beau-bidens-widow-hallie-dating-his-brother-hunter.html), over the fallout from the doomed affair they began after his brother’s death. It was during this period that Jill Biden summoned Hunter to the family home in Wilmington, where he found his family waiting for him along with two drug counselors. Hunter split.
The man behind the counter at the Mac Shop didn’t know about any of this personal turmoil. Like all his customers, this one was just a blur to Mac Isaac. He says he was first drawn to computers as an artistic kid with a medical condition, albinism, that impaired his eyesight — 20/400, he says — and kept him from driving but did not prevent him from seeing magnified images on a screen. He says that what he recalls of the man who brought in the laptops is a smudge of blue and gray clothing, a strong whiff of alcohol, and an air of entitlement.
Mac Isaac was a Mac guy in every sense. He had a tattoo of Apple’s smiley-face Finder icon on his bicep and a triangular FireWire icon on the back of his neck. In an unlucky twist for Biden, he was also a Trump supporter, and like everyone in Delaware, he knew the name of Joe Biden’s younger son.
The three laptops, Mac Isaac recalls, were all liquid damaged. One was dead. One was easily revived. The third, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, had a sticky, ruined keyboard. But Mac Isaac thought he could still salvage its data. The job would cost $85 and take a few days.
After the customer left the store, Mac Isaac says he closed up shop, popped open an Amstel Light, and started to work on the recovery. He dragged and dropped folders from the broken laptop onto an external drive. Almost immediately, Mac Isaac claims, he saw that the computer contained a large quantity of homemade pornography sitting right on the desktop. “It’s not like I hadn’t seen anything like that before,” he says. “It was probably the most I’ve ever seen in one place.”
A few days later, the blurry customer returned, this time to drop off a portable hard drive to hold the contents of his laptop. “When you see a grown man in a rainbow boa and a jock strap,” Mac Isaac says, “it’s hard not to have that image in your mind when he’s staring you in the face.” (It was pink, in truth, and it was an average scarf.) But he finished the job, made the backup, and called the cell-phone number the customer had given him to say he was done. The customer didn’t come back and never paid the $85. Mac Isaac says he put the broken laptop and the portable drive in a locked closet. Two weeks after the customer’s visit, on April 25, Joe Biden officially launched his presidential campaign.
**The fine print** of the original signed repair order says that equipment left in the shop longer than 90 days becomes its property. In interviews, several experts on Delaware law agreed that the document would make the laptop legally Mac Isaac’s after that time, and once he took possession of the computer, nothing would legally prevent Mac Isaac from sharing its contents with the world. Even so, by his own account, Mac Isaac started to poke around before 90 days had elapsed. The very first time he looked at the desktop, he says, he noticed an intriguing file: “Income.pdf.” “That kind of stood out,” Mac Isaac says. “So I clicked.”
If you want to make an argument to justify what happened next, the “Income” file is where it all starts. *The Laptop From Hell,* a 224-page book based on raw material from the data dump by New York *Post* columnist Miranda Devine, quotes from material found on the laptop to make the case that Hunter felt like his “family’s cash cow,” the son assigned the role of rainmaker while his father and older brother devoted themselves to public service. “Beau didn’t take on these fucking responsibilities,” Hunter reportedly ranted in a 2018 voice memo. “He didn’t do any of this shit.” In a text to his daughter Naomi, who was 25 at the time, Hunter complained that he had to “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years,” assuring her that unlike “Pop” — the family’s name for Joe — he wouldn’t take “half your salary.” In right-wing circles, these texts have been construed to suggest there was a formal revenue-sharing agreement between Joe and Hunter, though looked at in a more forgiving light, they can be read as hyperbolic bitching.
In a memoir chronicling the dissolution of her marriage, *If We Break,* Hunter’s ex-wife, Kathleen, describes him as an archetypal get-rich-quick guy. “From early in our marriage,” she writes, “the ‘big breaks’ were always just on the horizon, and every new partnership held enormous opportunity.” In 2008, around the same time Barack Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate, Hunter formed a consulting firm called Seneca Global Advisors and got involved in a business venture with John Kerry’s stepson and a man named [Devon Archer](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/hunter-bidens-tax-affairs-are-under-federal-investigation.html), who would later be convicted in a $60 million scheme to defraud a Native American tribe. (Hunter was not implicated.) During the Obama years, Hunter embarked on a series of overseas ventures, the most significant of which, in the end, involved a company called Burisma.
Burisma, in case you’ve forgotten the arcana of the first Trump impeachment, is a Ukrainian natural-gas producer run by Mykola Zlochevsky, an oligarch and former government minister of Ukraine who came under investigation for allegedly using his Cabinet post for the benefit of his company. Despite appearances, Hunter Biden contends that Zlochevsky was a western-minded innovator who wanted expert legal guidance in reforming his country’s energy sector. In 2014, Biden joined the company as a board member, a role that reportedly paid $1 million for the first year. Biden claims that the arrangement offered him the financial freedom to tend to his family as his brother was dying. U.S. State Department officials were concerned enough about the appearance of impropriety that they raised the matter with the vice-president, who told his son, Hunter later said, “I hope you know what you are doing.”
By July 2019, news organizations, most notably the New York [*Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html)*,* had published investigations of [Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/joe-biden-ukraine-controversy.html). Conservative outlets were trying to elevate the story into a major scandal. Rudy Giuliani and the investigative journalist John Solomon, among others, were holding regular meetings in an effort to advance the narrative. Mac Isaac was reading Solomon’s articles and watching Fox News. Every time he heard a new name, he would search for mentions of it on the hard drive. One particularly intriguing email Mac Isaac discovered suggested that an adviser to Burisma’s board named Vadym Pozharskyi had secured an audience with Joe Biden when he was overseeing diplomatic relations with Ukraine as VP. (“Dear Hunter,” read the alleged smoking-gun email from April 2015. “Thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together …”) Mac Isaac claims that he ignored the laptop’s porn and concentrated on turning up evidence of what looked, at least to him, like political corruption. “I kept my blinders on,” Mac Isaac says. “All I cared about was Burisma.”
Then, in September 2019, word leaked of a CIA whistleblower’s complaint about the [White House call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/read-the-transcript-of-trumps-call-with-ukraines-president.html) on which President Trump pressured the newly elected Ukrainian leader to investigate the Bidens and Burisma. A counter-scandal erupted, and the Democrats convened impeachment hearings. Mac Isaac thought the laptop might aid Trump’s defense.
Mac Isaac claims he was also fearful. He was deeply versed in conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and the murderous political elites. “I’m a guy at the back side of an ’80s strip mall,” he says. “How hard would it be for me to disappear?” Mac Isaac reached out to his father, Steve, a retired Air Force colonel. In October 2019, Colonel Mac Isaac visited an FBI branch office near his home in Albuquerque. An agent brushed him off, advising him that he ought to consult a lawyer about the legality of examining the laptop. A few weeks later, though, an agent based in Delaware followed up with the colonel, who referred him to his son, telling him to use a special code word they had set up to thwart would-be assassins.
Two FBI agents visited Mac Isaac’s home. He says they seemed primarily concerned with figuring out if the computer contained child pornography. Mac Isaac said he had not seen any. On December 9, 2019, according to the date on a copy of the grand-jury subpoena, the agents came to Mac Isaac’s shop and took away a MacBook, serial number FVFXC2MMHV29, along with the external drive provided for the data recovery. That same day, the House Judiciary Committee was preparing to debate two impeachment articles. Mac Isaac was thrilled — finally, Attorney General Bill Barr and the Justice Department were going to see what he had discovered.
Mac Isaac had made a copy of the laptop’s hard drive for himself as insurance. He had also set up a kind of dead man’s switch, making another copy of the drive to give to someone he trusted, with instructions to pass it along in the event of his death to President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Within a few days, he started to feel uneasy about the FBI. The agents called him up asking for assistance in getting access to the drive. *Didn’t the FBI have its own tech support?* He thought back to his conversation with the agents, especially a comment he recalled their making about his safety concerns, something to the effect of “Nothing happens to people who don’t talk about these things.” *Was that a threat?* He got back in touch with his father, and they called up an uncle, another former Air Force colonel who served on the board of a conservative nonprofit.
The Mac Isaacs decided to alert Congress to the existence of the laptop. They reached out to the offices of Representative Jim Jordan and Senator Lindsey Graham but heard nothing back. They tried to get in touch with the president through the contact page on the White House website. While the process dragged on, [Trump was acquitted by the Senate](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/senate-acquits-trump-52-48-with-only-romney-breaking-ranks.html), Joe Biden clinched the nomination, and the pandemic shut down the world. Mac Isaac started to wonder, *What if Biden was elected?* Nine months after the FBI’s visit, he decided to pursue his fail-safe option.
**The next link** in the chain of custody was Robert Costello, the lawyer for the president’s lawyer. Costello was representing Giuliani in an FBI investigation into his own Ukrainian activities, and as such, he had asked the former mayor’s staff to be alert for new information coming in over the transom. On August 27, 2020, according to the text of an email Costello shared, one of Giuliani’s assistants forwarded a strange tip that had come in through the contact portal on the Giuliani Partners website:
> *From: John Paul Mac Isaac*
>
> *Subject: Why is it so difficult to be a whistle blower when you are on the right?*
>
> *For almost a year, I have been trying to get the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop to the proper authorities. I first reached out to the FBI and they came and collected it but I have reason to believe they have destroyed it or buried it in a filing cabinet … Luckily for my protection I made several copies and I have been trying quietly to bring it to people’s attention.*
The tipster went on to claim to have “email proof” that Hunter and a business partner had been paid more than a million dollars in fees by Burisma and that they had used “their influence at the White House to pressure the Ukraine government to stop investigating” the company. “I feel the closer we get to the election,” Mac Isaac wrote, “the more this will be ignored.”
Costello wrote right back, telling Mac Isaac that he and Giuliani were “in position to get the information to the right places, provided the information is accurate and was obtained lawfully.” The timing was auspicious. A Republican-controlled Senate committee was working on an investigation of Hunter Biden, and Democrats were attacking the probe as a partisan smear job. The following month, the committee’s report would cite bank records to conclude that Biden and his business associates had received at least $4 million in fees from Burisma as well as millions more from other “foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.” Trump was seeking to capitalize on the issue. His campaign soon started selling T-shirts that asked WHERE’S HUNTER?
Mac Isaac replied to Costello by sending him an image of the signed repair order and the subpoena, which seemed to indicate that the laptop was relevant to a criminal investigation. Mac Isaac sent a copy of the laptop’s contents to Costello’s home, where he booted up the drive with the assistance of his son, who was handier than his dad was with computers.\*
Everything fit on an external drive, a black box about the size of a pack of cigarettes. “It’s not big,” Costello said one morning in June this year, as he showed the drive to a reporter. “But it’s powerful.” Sitting at a desk in the living room of his home in Manhasset, the white-haired attorney, who was dressed for golf, booted up his computer. “How do I do this again?” he asked himself, as a login window popped up with a username: “Robert Hunter.” (Hunter Biden’s given first name is Robert.)
Like many Gen-Xers, Hunter Biden was apparently unwilling to entrust his data solely to the cloud. He used desktop applications and backed things up to a device, which was his undoing. Costello first scrolled through the laptop’s email inbox, which contained tens of thousands of messages, fragments of everyday existence: a Politico newsletter dated January 31, 2019; Wells Fargo statements; a Google alert for the name “Biden”; a youth-soccer-game reminder. “Going through it,” Costello said, “you become familiar with someone.” He opened an email from Venmo, a receipt for a $2,400 “art consultation” with a woman with a Russian-looking name.
Costello proceeded to the laptop’s photo roll, which was populated by images from Biden’s devices as well as those of other family members, including his brother Beau’s children. Viewed sequentially, they appeared to tell a story. There was a photo of Beau’s gravestone in 2015; there was a photo of Hunter and Joe Biden on a military cargo plane toward the end of Obama’s second term; there, on November 9, 2016, was a photo of a television screen and the gloating face of President-elect Donald Trump; there was a screenshot of an angry text, apparently sent by his half-sister, Ashley Biden, to a group chat including Hallie Biden, confronting Hallie about her affair with Hunter (“this isn’t love, this is my brother high”); and there was another shot of a television, this time displaying a chyron reporting that he and Hallie had gone public with their relationship.
After that came the crack-up. “You’re fascinated by the fact that he’s so debauched,” Costello said, speaking for himself, as he hovered over images of glass pipes, hotel sheets, body parts.
“That’s Hunter,” he said, pointing to a disembodied penis.
But it wasn’t just Biden’s sex life that was on the hard drive. It was his whole life. Costello scrolled back up, rewinding time to May 27, 2015. The image was of Beau Biden three days before his death. He was in a hospital bed, his mouth agape, his eyes glazed and terrified.
Costello admitted that picture was hard to look at. “You feel like a voyeur,” he said. It was a feeling Costello could live with. He saw the laptop’s potential power as a political weapon, and he took the logical next step. “I called Giuliani,” he recollected. “I said, ‘You’re not going to believe what I have.’ ”
*Clockwise from top left:* Steve Bannon on Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia, October 18, 2020. Rudy Giuliani on Greg Kelly’s show on Newsmax, October 20, 2020. John Paul Mac Isaac on *Hannity*, January 22, 2021. Vish Burra on Representative Matt Gaetz’s podcast, November 11, 2021. Jack Maxey on Newsmax, April 7, 2022. Donald Trump Jr. on Eric Bolling’s show on Newsmax, June 16, 2022. Emma-Jo Morris on Nigel Farage’s show on GBN, May 4, 2022. Miranda Devine on *Tucker Carlson*, March 18, 2022. John Solomon on Sean Spicer’s show on Newsmax, July 16, 2021. Tony Bobulinski at a press conference carried on *LiveNOW* from Fox, October 22, 2020. Photo: Sky News Australia; Newsmax TV; Fox Live Now; Fox News; Firebrand Podcast; GBNews
**Emma-Jo Morris** was at her apartment in New York with her artist girlfriend and their new puppy when she heard from Vish Burra. It was Yom Kippur, “a very, very auspicious day. A heavy day energetically and spiritually,” she said, “and I’m fasting at home when I get this text from Vish saying, ‘Steve Bannon is going to call you.’ ”
Morris and Burra had met during the 2016 presidential election, when she was a producer for *Hannity* and he was a business analyst at a software company who posted political memes as a hobby. She was from Quebec, the daughter of a real-estate developer and a salesman who had worked his way to the middle class from a warehouse job. He grew up on Staten Island and sold weed to get by. They vibed immediately. Long before she came to America, Morris felt that the world revolved around what happened here. She adjusted her interests accordingly. “We had to pirate Fox News on an American cable box that took something like a SIM card that was registered to a U.S. address, which we got from the natives,” she said. At Concordia University in Montreal, she focused her studies on American politics and western political theory. “America coughs and the world catches a cold, right?” she said. Weeks after graduation, she went through the cable box and emerged inside News Corp.
The limitations of the medium soon became apparent. Morris did not fit the profile of the average Fox News viewer, and though she had a sense of humor about the ways in which her taste was often in conflict with her ideals, she had to admit that cable was not for her. It was boring, and it was dying. It all felt formulaic and stilted. What she wanted, she said, was something more “hard-core.” Her relationship with Burra reflected this desire. “We used to go for brunch and chill, chain-smoke cigarettes, and just chat. I had a Silk Road of my brand in Canada being imported to me on a constant basis. Belmonts,” Morris said. “Vish grew up in a very working-class neighborhood. He’s a child of immigrants. He had a rough time. And, I don’t know, I just liked it. I liked his vibe. I liked his edge.”
By September 2020, Morris, then 27, was the deputy political editor of the New York *Post.* “My guiding principle was representing people like my dad. I felt like I knew my reader that way,” she said. “I am a nationalist, populist conservative.” Meanwhile, Burra had joined Bannon’s entourage. Since being fired by Trump in 2017, the former chief White House strategist had focused his attention on promoting right-wing populism and hosting *War Room,* for which Burra was a producer. Minutes after Morris read the text from Burra, her phone rang.
“Hi, it’s Steve Bannon,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I’m calling because I have a story that’s going to change your life.’ ”
“What?” Morris said with a laugh.
“I have Hunter Biden’s computer.”
Bannon had learned about the laptop from Giuliani, who had gotten his copy from Costello. After quickly satisfying himself that the information was real, Giuliani had started to think about ways to disseminate it to the voting public. He had no confidence in the mainstream media. “They’re going to kill it before it’s born,” Giuliani said, recalling his thought process. So he brought in Bannon, who knew how to get the attention of reporters. Drama was both his custom and his strategy.
When Giuliani first called, Bannon figured he was just peddling bullshit. By now, Giuliani’s obsession with Hunter Biden and Burisma had already led to one impeachment. “You gotta remember, I love Rudy,” Bannon said, “However — and maybe history will prove differently — the whole Ukrainian thing, he starts talking about it, and I go, ‘Rudy, Rudy, Rudy! It’s a sideshow!’ Rudy gets so crazy on the Ukrainian stuff.”
Something Giuliani said, though, snapped Bannon to attention. “He said this was all about China, not just Ukraine. China.” Fighting the supposed peril of Red Chinese influence was Bannon’s personal hobbyhorse. He came up to New York and, at Giuliani’s apartment on the Upper East Side, took a look at what was inside the laptop. “It actually stunned me,” he says.
In December 2013, not long before Hunter got involved with Burisma, he accompanied his father on a visit to Beijing aboard Air Force Two and met with a Chinese businessman who was interested in investing capital outside the country. Later on — only after his father left office, Hunter has stressed — Hunter took a 10 percent equity stake in a venture with the businessman. Toward the end of the Obama administration, Hunter began a separate set of talks with Ye Jianming, a Chinese energy magnate who, like many businessmen of his stature, had ties to the nation’s Communist Party. In 2017, Hunter and his partners formed a corporate entity to pursue business ventures with Ye’s company, including a later-scuttled $40 million investment in a natural-gas project on Monkey Island in Louisiana. A 2017 email from a representative for one of the partners (subject line: “Expectations”) was allegedly found on the laptop. It proposed a corporate structure in which Hunter would own 20 percent of the company, with another 10 percent “held by H for the big guy.” The big guy, many on the right believe, was Joe Biden.
There is little else on the laptop to suggest that Joe Biden profited from, or was even fully aware of, his son’s business activities. In 2017, the former vice-president was a private citizen, so partaking in the deal wouldn’t have been illegal, but he hadn’t foreclosed the possibility of a future presidential run, and going into business with Chinese investors connected to the Communist Party would certainly have been a political and ethical nightmare for him. That said, the “Expectations” email was not written by Hunter Biden, and that deal ended up falling apart. But the Chinese relationship still proved fruitful for the Biden family. According to a subsequent [Washington *Post* investigation](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-china-laptop/), Ye later struck an agreement that paid nearly $5 million in legal and consulting fees to entities controlled by Hunter and his uncle James Biden. At the time, Hunter was acting as an attorney for an associate of an executive at the company, who ended up being arrested at JFK airport and charged with bribing government officials in Chad and Uganda. The next year, Ye was detained by Chinese authorities, and the payments eventually stopped.
**Bannon, a gifted aphorist,** likes to say that with the laptop, “you come for the pornography, but you stay for the compromise.” When he booted it up, he claims, it pried open a window that revealed the corrupt bargains at the heart of America’s relationship with China. “And Rudy had no idea what he had,” Bannon said. “I told Rudy, ‘This is incredible. This is the heart of the elite capture through the money-laundering and influence-peddling operations of the Chinese Communist Party.’ ” The China angle also happened to align with his financial interests. He had spent much of that summer living on a yacht owned by an exiled Chinese billionaire named [Guo Wengui](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/who-chinese-mogul-who-owns-boat-steve-bannon-was-busted-n1237511), a prominent critic of the ruling party and the latest in a long line of wealthy patrons. A few weeks before Giuliani’s call, Bannon had been arrested on the yacht and charged for his role in an alleged financial fraud related to fundraising for a private effort to build a wall on the Mexican border. (He was later sprung from the federal case by a [Trump pardon](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/trumps-final-pardon-list-everyone-we-know-so-far.html), then, on September 8, turned himself in after being indicted by a grand jury in New York on state charges. [He has pleaded not guilty](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/09/steve-bannon-could-be-in-big-trouble-in-new-york.html).)
Bannon tried to gin up interest within sympathetic media outlets. When he reached Morris, on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, she was not in the mood to process what he was pitching. The following day, they spoke again. “He said, ‘We just have his computer.’ He was kind of vague. I remember him being kind of cagey about it. He told me that Hunter Biden was on crack and left it somewhere and they got it.”
Bannon baited Morris with glimpses of the materials he said he could provide. At the time, he and a team from *War Room* were working out of a luxury hotel near St. Patrick’s Cathedral, scouring the drive for damaging material. Burra dubbed the effort “the Manhattan Project.” They expected that when the story detonated, it might swing the election to Trump. Finally, Bannon convinced Morris to meet with Costello. With the blessing of News Corp. attorneys, she headed out to Long Island. Costello gave her his show.
“It all felt much more legit after I saw it,” Morris said. “Like, *Okay, they have a hard drive.*” She copied some of the files onto a thumb drive and took an Uber back to the city. She called her boss with an update. “I was like, ‘I think this is something. I took some stuff to show you. It really looks like it’s Hunter’s.’ She said, ‘Bring it to me and we’ll take it to legal and figure out next steps.’” Then she called Burra. “I said, ‘I think this is legit,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s gonna be cool. Maybe you’ll be able to write a book by the end.’” She smiled at the memory. “You couldn’t have known what this was going to be,” she said. “I hadn’t seen ‘10 percent for the big guy.’ I hadn’t seen anything. I just thought I had something cool, you know what I mean? That was kind of the energy.” She had never had such a big story, never overseen such a big investigation, and while she was anxious about how to get it right, she was not conflicted about whether it was right to try to get it at all. In her opinion, the news value was obvious. “I was thinking if someone came to me and just said, ‘Hunter Biden was on crack,’ which we know he does, ‘and left his laptop somewhere, and forfeited ownership’ — that’s a great story,” she said. “Like, *What a degenerate!* I figured that alone could be just a tabloid story.”
She came to believe the contents of the laptop exposed a corruption that went far beyond partisan interest. “If this was all Don Jr., I would have gone harder, because it would be a story about how this person says that they’re a populist while they’re in bed with the CCP, right?” she said. “I just find it repulsive to capitalize off of your political power, especially in a foreign country. How dare you?”
For several days, as News Corp. reviewed the information, anxiety hummed around Morris. “Bannon and Rudy are starting to get crazy on me,” she said. “Calling me, asking, ‘Are you going? Are you going?’ ” Morris began to worry, too. If forces within the company hierarchy wanted to overrule her judgment for reasons political or prosaic, they surely could. To most outsiders, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid may have looked like a conservative rag, but to Morris, News Corp. was still a coastal media bureaucracy. “I was like, ‘Are we going or not? Just tell me, because I want to get these guys off my ass,’” she said. The range of options for a good employee doing her best to respect the formal processes of her workplace was limited. To do what she wanted, Morris would have to get creative. “I couldn’t undermine my boss. I couldn’t apply pressure myself. But I could involve a big gun at the organization.” Once Miranda Devine,a columnist from Murdoch’s native Australia, was alerted to the story,everythingbegan to move. By the end of the week, the *Post* had decided to proceed — *if* she could get a copy of the drive from Giuliani.
That Sunday, Morris and her girlfriend took their puppy to run some errands. As they roamed through the Container Store, Morris negotiated with Giuliani by phone. “I said, ‘Okay, we’re serious. I need the computer or the hard drive.’ ” He said no. “We were going back and forth. He said, ‘You need to promise me five covers of the New York *Post.*’ I said, ‘Rudy, you can have 20 covers of the New York *Post* if you give me this and it’s everything that we think it is.’ He was like, ‘Fine. Fine.’ ” Before he could change his mind, Morris and her partner went straight to Giuliani’s apartment. They convened in the study with Costello. “Our concern was her not peeing,” she said of the puppy.
“Welcome to the seventh circle of hell,” Bannon said when he walked in. From then on, Morris said, the hard drive was known as the “Laptop From Hell.” (The formulation “from hell” is credited to the comedian Richard Lewis, who made a joke about a “date from hell.” Reached for comment, Lewis said, “There’s a jail from hell waiting for people who steal my material.”) Bannon and Giuliani handed over an external hard drive.
On Wednesday, October 14, 2020, just 20 days before the election, [BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS](https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/) appeared on the front page of the *Post.* The paper described what it said was evidence that Joe Biden knew more than he had admitted about his son’s Ukrainian business, breezing through the convoluted tale of the “massive trove of data uncovered from a laptop computer.” The Biden campaign had not responded to a request for comment, according to the publication, but Hunter’s lawyer George Mesires offered a statement — about Giuliani. “He has been pushing widely discredited conspiracy theories about the Biden family, openly relying on actors tied to Russian intelligence,” he said. It was not a denial.
Outside the right-wing media, the reaction to the story was something like anxious paralysis. Social-media giants and news outlets had absorbed much of the blame for the results of the 2016 election, and they approached the 2020 election with caution, especially with respect to material that might be peddled by hostile foreign governments to affect voting. “The FBI came to us,” Mark Zuckerberg would later tell Joe Rogan, “and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that.’ ” On September 24, less than a month before the *Post* story, the head of security policy for Facebook had told the press to be careful since “threat actors,” including foreign adversaries, would try anything to “trick journalists into doing their amplification for them.”
Zuckerberg told Rogan he could not recall whether the FBI specifically mentioned Hunter Biden or his personal data in the warning issued to Facebook, but the *Post* story “fit the pattern” of what they had described. Facebook tweaked its algorithm to suppress its circulation. Twitter froze the accounts of users who shared news about the laptop, including the *Post*’s official account.
Members of the press who attempted to independently verify the report, meanwhile, were told by Giuliani that he would not hand over the hard drive and by the Biden campaign that accounts of a meeting between the vice-president and a Burisma adviser were refuted by his official schedule. A Biden spokesman said he had engaged in “no wrongdoing.”
By Monday, October 19, the narrative of a potential Russian hack had calcified. In an open letter published by [Politico](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276), dozens of high-ranking veterans of the intelligence community claimed the data cited by the *Post* “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The letter was signed by the likes of James Clapper and Michael Hayden. Clapper was not pleased to be asked about the letter two years after its release. “What are you trying to get me to say, that I screwed up and I shouldn’t have signed the letter? I’m not going to say that,” he said. “Did you read paragraph five of the letter? As far as I was concerned, we were waving the yellow flag. At the time, it was fishy to me. It had the characteristics of a Russian disinformation campaign.” Hayden said he had not maintained much interest in the story. “I’m not following it,” he said, but he stood by the decision to sign and release a statement about a theory for which there was only circumstantial evidence. “I was perfectly fine with that,” he said. “It looked like disinformation … It would be nice if we didn’t have to do anything or say anything, but the Russians were doing so much.”
The most immediate victim of the *Post*’s initial stories, besides Hunter Biden, turned out to be the Trump campaign. At the same time as Giuliani and Bannon were working to inject the story into the public discourse, a rival camp of Trump operatives led by Arthur Schwartz, an associate of Donald Trump Jr.’s, had been trying to get [*The Wall Street Journal*](https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-bidens-family-name-aided-deals-with-foreign-tycoons-11608682462) to publish a story about Hunter’s overseas business dealings, based on interviews with a former business partner named Tony Bobulinski. Amid the uproar over the laptop, the *Journal* rushed out a shorter than expected version of the investigation and basically dropped the matter. Bobulinski appeared at a disorganized press conference before a presidential debate in Nashville. That night, Trump brought up the “Laptop From Hell” and offered an incoherent defense when Biden called it a “Russian plan” to influence the election. (“Is this where you’re going? … The laptop is Russia, Russia, Russia?”)
The nation’s most influential media institutions approached the sordid matter with grave skepticism. In a note to the Washington bureau the day the *Post* story ran, *Times* editor Elisabeth Bumiller wrote: “Hey all, let’s please refrain from tweeting about the story while we’re reporting it out. Thanks very much.”
“It was as though because the *Times* had not reported it, it did not exist,” says a former *Times* staffer. “There’s a whole category of story where conservative media covers it — sometimes sloppily — and then mainstream media institutions treat the whole area as radioactive and just won’t cover it, just surrender the subject matter entirely.”
A reporter for a major television network defended the impulse. “If you were a New York *Times* reporter, let’s say, or a CNN reporter, and you’re looking at it, there are a million red flags. It was a thorny story to report out,” this person said. The *Times* had been pilloried for its intensive reporting on Clinton’s emails as the 2016 election approached, and BuzzFeed ended up mired in litigation after it published the now-discredited [Steele dossier](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/igor-danchenko-and-the-crippling-blow-for-the-steele-dossier.html) the following year. “Every news organization had their credibility on the line,” said the television reporter. To the extent the mainstream and liberal media (if you accept that they are different) discussed the laptop much at all, it was laughed off as another strange Trumpworld adventure in disinformation and incompetence.
Donald Trump himself wouldn’t stop talking about the laptop. Shortly before the election, he brought it up with Barr, the attorney general. “You know, if that was one of my kids — ” Trump said, before Barr cut him off, according to an anecdote Barr recounts in his [memoir](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/beware-bill-barr.html). Two years later, Trump would still be raving about what he calls a double standard in coverage of his opponent’s family. “If somebody from the Republican Party or the Trump family did that, I think they’d call for the death penalty,” Trump says.
What Barr didn’t tell Trump in October 2020, he claims, was that even before the laptop went public, a federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden was underway.
**The laptop story did** **not** have the intended effect on the election. On November 7, 2020, hours after Rudy Giuliani stood in the parking lot of [Four Seasons Total Landscaping](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/four-seasons-total-landscaping-the-full-est-possible-story.html) and said the election had been stolen, Joe Biden stood grinning on a stage in front of a big honking crowd of parked cars at his socially distanced victory rally in Wilmington. He was now president-elect. “Let this grim era of demonization in America,” he said, “begin to end here and now.” The rest of the family joined him and Jill onstage. Hunter was first to embrace him, while cradling his 7-month-old son, Beau.
Watching the Bidens celebrate, Jack Maxey thought to himself: *They got protected.* Maxey, a *War Room* co-host, had helped to dumpster-dive through the laptop before the election. But their effort had been for nothing, and now they were disappointed and deplatformed. Two days before Biden declared victory, Twitter had suspended the *War Room* account for posting a video in which Bannon and Maxey mused about whether Trump should behead Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray.
Trump’s defeat caused a schism. Burra and Maxey wanted to continue to mine the laptop. But Bannon was shifting to a postelection phase — contesting the count — and for that, the laptop was of no further use. Maxey claims Bannon threatened to fire him if he kept mentioning Hunter and the FBI on the air. Maxey says he quit instead. “For a guy who’s full of bluster,” he says of Bannon, “he’s kind of afraid of his own shadow.” Shortly after the inauguration, Maxey drove back to South Florida, taking a copy of the hard drive.
Maxey was a Palm Beach society guy. He came from Main Line money and had been an investment banker. Prior to joining *War Room,* his closest brush with political fame had come in 2018, when his Yale classmate [Brett Kavanaugh](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/kavanaughs-confirmation-all-the-unanswered-questions.html) was up for confirmation to the Supreme Court and a raunchy yearbook photo of their old fraternity appeared on the Huffington Post. “My little Irish cock was peeking out from the tails of my Brooks Brothers shirt,” Maxey recalls. He says he was the show’s de facto expert on the Biden family. “I knew a lot of the old-school people in Delaware,” Maxey says, claiming that he had run into Beau Biden a few times. Maxey never encountered Hunter, but he felt like the hard drive had given him insight into his psyche. “There’s been times when you’re looking at this laptop where you just feel like you’re surrounded by darkness,” he says. “You cannot even imagine the depth of the corruption.”
Hunter Biden might reply here, if he were interested in offering a comment for the record, that it’s pretty rich for the people who are sifting through his text messages with his family and prying into his most private moments, down to the dying breaths of his beloved brother, to suggest that he is the one who is dark and amoral. (Biden and his legal team declined to comment for this article.) He freely admits that he was an addict and that he did many terrible things to himself and his family during a two- or four- or five-year period — he’s vague about the time parameters — that followed Beau’s cancer diagnosis and death. He started the confessional process in a [2019 *New Yorker* profile](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign), giving a series of raw personal interviews to reporter Adam Entous. He didn’t inform his father’s campaign organization that he was participating in the story, and it turned out he withheld some important details from *The New Yorker,* too. When he wasn’t on the phone with the reporter, declaring himself a new man, he was in his hotel room in West Hollywood, playing host to a sleepless procession of dealers and shady characters.
Hunter revealed that detail in his recovery memoir, [*Beautiful Things*](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/hunter-biden-memoir-beautiful-things.html)*,* which was published soon after his father’s inauguration. This time, the author promised, he was speaking with total openness and honesty about his infidelity and addiction. Through his personal turmoil, though, he has consistently denied any financial impropriety. And for all the time they have spent scrutinizing his emails and his dick pics, Maxey and others have yet to find any incontrovertible evidence of criminality.
Hunter had presumed that once the election was finished, he would be able to go back to his life in California with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, a South African activist he met and married in the space of six days in 2019, and their son, Beau, now 2. Instead, he ended up in “a sort of exile,” a friend says, waiting for the Justice Department to decide whether to charge him and trying to ignore the tabloids and the political stuntmen. Last year, after the *Daily Mail* revealed the location of his then-residence, a rental home on a canal in Venice, California, right-wing film producers paddled by on a kayak to heckle him through a bullhorn. Someone parked a truck across the street with a billboard on it so that when he looked outside, he would be greeted by giant images of the haunted selfies from the laptop documenting his life at rock bottom. That was still less disturbing than the time, at his previous house in the Hollywood Hills, a group of people in MAGA hats banged at his front gate and shouted Hunter’s name while Melissa, then pregnant, cowered inside.
To Hunter’s pursuers, including Maxey, big tech’s decision to label the laptop as disinformation was just more evidence of what a serious threat it posed to the Bidens and the deep state. They were determined to prove that Hunter was even more depraved than he admitted. On Fox News, [Tucker Carlson](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/why-did-tucker-carlson-send-a-flash-drive-through-the-mail.html), who used to be friendly with Hunter, started to deliver conspiratorial stem-winders, suggesting his former dinner companion was involved in all kinds of unspeakable activities. Maxey became a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the hard drive, sending copies to Republicans in Congress and an investigative team at the Washington *Post.* The *Daily Mail* flew Maxey out to Los Angeles to meet with a reporter and hired a former FBI computer-forensics expert to authenticate the drive.
That April, two days after *Beautiful Things* went on sale, the [*Daily Mail*](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9445105/What-Hunter-Biden-left-tell-memoir-revealed.html) published a story headlined exclusive: WHAT *WASN’T* IN HUNTER BIDEN’S BOOK. The article, culled from “103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, more than 2,000 photos and dozens of videos,” would be the first of many. It was illustrated with a photo of Hunter straddled by a pair of women, reported he was “obsessed with making porn films with prostitutes,” and reprinted messages between him and his father. “Be careful what you text,” Joe Biden cautioned in one exchange. “Likely I’m being hacked.”
Still, the story barely made a blip outside the conservative-media bubble. Maxey tried to turn up the volume, describing in a public speech an allegedly indecent photo of a teenage girl that he had seen on the computer. At the time the original laptop stories were published, Giuliani had advanced a similar claim, driving down to Delaware to urge the local police to investigate whether one of the photos on the laptop amounted to child pornography. The Delaware authorities showed no interest, and others who examined the laptop suggested a more innocent explanation: The photo belonged to a teenage Biden family member whose photo roll had been backed up on the laptop. Still, the insinuation, which resonated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, seeped into the cultural groundwater.
After several months of talking about the laptop, Maxey said he began to worry. “I was getting welfare calls from all my military and intel friends saying, like, ‘Just checking to see if you’re still alive,’ ” he said. “I had an Escalade parked out in front of my house — weird shit.” Maxey decided Palm Beach was too hot. Earlier this year, he flew to Zurich. Outside the U.S., he told the press, he could take the search deeper.
**Steve Bannon said** that people who possess the laptop tend to read their own obsessions into it. The multifaceted nature of such a large collection of data meant that its meaning was elastic. “It’s got talismanic powers,” Bannon says. “If you really understand what you’ve got, the talisman, you understand that it unlocks everything that you ever wanted. It’s got the answers.” But he said the magical object could also be deranging to those who held it too closely. As an example, Bannon mentioned Maxey, who describes himself as “Hunter’s laptop king.”
From Switzerland, in April, Maxey gave an interview to the *Daily Mail* in which he claimed he and a German computer expert had recovered an additional 450 gigabytes of “deleted material” from the hard drive, including another 80,000 previously unseen images. This second trove, Maxey implied, was even more disturbing than the original. Maxey’s claims compelled Tucker Carlson to fly to Zurich with a crew from Fox to review the purported laptop material. (A portion of their interview later aired on Tucker’s show.) Maxey claims that a delegation from WikiLeaks showed up at the same time, hoping to post the data on the internet. But Maxey’s Swiss exile ended badly. “My tech guy is a good guy, but he’s almost like Rain Man,” Maxey says. He said the German had grown so paranoid about the potential reach of the Bidens and U.S. intelligence services that he nearly turned the laptop over to the Russian Embassy. Maxey said he intercepted him on a train to Bern.
By the summer, Maxey had returned to the U.S. “It’s really amazing to me how many people refuse to touch this,” he said when reached by phone. He immediately offered to pass along a copy of the laptop. The next morning, he hopped on a train up to New York.
We met at a hotel in Soho. “Chasing rabbit holes has been my life,” Maxey said. He had a mop of blond hair, unruly in the style of [Boris Johnson](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/goodbye-boris-johnson.html). “Here is the disc,” he said, pushing a small black hard drive across the table: the laptop. He held up another drive, the one with the new, more hellish stuff. He was keeping that to himself.
Back at the office, following Maxey’s instructions, we booted up the external drive. At Apple’s familiar opening window, beneath the “Robert Hunter” golf-ball login icon, we entered the password Maxey supplied, which was “password.” The desktop no longer resembled the jumbled, porny mess that Mac Isaac says he first encountered. Costello said it had been cleaned up by the time it got to his house. (“I got a wife around here,” he explained.) There were also a number of new folders, with titles like “Salacious Pics” and “The Big Guy.” (“I made those folders,” Vish Burra said. “I put them all in a folder when I found them because I couldn’t email them to myself because there was no internet.”) The many alterations made the laptop all but impossible to trust. “The forensic quality of this thing is garbage,” says Johns Hopkins computer-science professor Matthew Green, a cryptography expert who examined the drive for the Washington [*Post*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/)*.* He told the paper that it was like a crime scene that previous detectives had left strewn with burger wrappers. Even so, there was no mistaking the identity of the body.
The laptop’s devotees have lately been thrilled by the fact that major news outlets have finally come to the conclusion that it was not a piece of Russian disinformation. In March, in the 24th paragraph of a story about the federal grand-jury probe of Hunter Biden, the *Times* reported that emails from “the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” Later that month, the Washington *Post* began to publish a series of stories on Hunter’s finances, focusing on his China deals, citing a copy of the drive provided by Maxey. It also described how some emails in the drive were authenticated by Green and a second expert.
“When you consider all the shit I’ve said in the last year,” Maxey said, “no one’s sued me for defamation.” He took that as a form of vindication. (Among other things, Maxey has claimed the laptop revealed Hunter’s role in maybe possibly starting the pandemic through his involvement in an investment firm that had an interest in a biotech start-up that reportedly collaborated in bat research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.)
At the hotel, though, the laptop king was worried that he was losing control of his domain. Maxey had been publicly feuding with Garrett Ziegler, a 26-year-old former Trump White House aide who started a website that hosts a searchable database of Biden’s emails. Maxey was similarly infuriated with Kim Dotcom, a well-known hacktivist and intellectual-property pirate who Maxey says had lured away his former German collaborator. In April, Dotcom tweeted that the laptop data, including “all previously deleted and recovered files,” was now in the hands of WikiLeaks. “All of a sudden it’s like I get betrayed by my tech guy and Kim Dotcom,” Maxey groused. “And I’m like left out in the cold.”
What was on the second hard drive? Maxey offered only hints. But a few weeks later, an anonymous 4chan user announced they had obtained iPhone and iPad backups belonging to Hunter Biden, which they reportedly claimed to have recovered by using a tool called iPhone Backup Extractor. Maxey blasted out a text message, claiming that his “tech guy had a nervous breakdown or basically a psychotic episode and went rogue and published this stuff.” He later explained that the backups made up a portion of the material recovered in Zurich, which he said his former collaborator, whom he now identified as one Vincent Kaufman, had unlocked by using passwords stored in the iCloud keychain on the laptop. “He committed theft,” Maxey said. He added that the data was “100 percent real’’ and that if *New York* wanted the entire trove, he was willing to sell it.
When reached for comment, Kim Dotcom called Maxey a “lunatic,” and rebutted Maxey’s claim that he had offered to pay for any laptop data. “I arranged a meeting between Jack and Wikileaks in Switzerland,” he wrote in an email. “Subsequently I have been told that Maxey lied about the claim that he found 450gb of deleted files in the data. There were no such files.”
“Jack is a grifter,” Vincent Kaufman said, adding that he was done talking about the laptop. “This whole thing has given me only stress and grief … and I don’t want to have anything to do with that stupid hard drive and every garbage person associated with it.”
For a few days, the Hunter Biden iPhone leak burned up the right-wing regions of the internet. Then it emerged that the device had actually belonged to a different Hunter Biden — Beau Biden’s 16-year-old son.
**I have no regrets,”** said John Paul Mac Isaac. “Unless something horrible happens, and then I’m in prison.”
On a morning in June, Mac Isaac was sitting in a booth at Angelo’s Luncheonette in Wilmington, just a few blocks from the former location of his now-closed repair shop. His whole life had changed since the day in October 2020, when he says “five reporters bum-rushed me” and he learned that the press had discovered his role in turning up the laptop. Afterward, he says, vandals defaced the store and he was barraged with negative reviews and hateful emails. As a result, he had become a Trumpy folk hero, appearing on podcasts and at campaign rallies, often wearing a kilt and a Scottish Balmoral hat.
On this morning, Mac Isaac was dressed in a plaid button-up and a flat cap. He was starting to promote a forthcoming book, *American Injustice: My Battle to Expose the Truth,* which will be published in November by an imprint of Simon & Schuster. He said he was also planning to file a defamation lawsuit against CNN and others who had cast doubt on the provenance of the laptop. “Who decided to label me a stooge of Putin?” Mac Isaac asked. “Maybe people will get punished for saying horrible things and lies.” He said that a foundation affiliated with General Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne had promised to finance the suit.
At the same time, Mac Isaac said he was frustrated that so many parties, known and unknown, had ended up with copies of the hard drive, which he said had been modified considerably. “I can’t imagine how many hands and fingers have touched that drive,” Mac Isaac said. As much as he disapproved of Hunter, he added, his sense of honor compelled him to say that the child-porn rumors were untrue and that some widely circulated images attributed to the laptop were phony: “The Lady Gaga foot-massage thing? That’s fake.”
Mac Isaac is not the only party interested in the ways in which the contents of the hard drive might have been corrupted over time. Hunter’s legal team has assembled a group of researchers to forensically examine the data and determine — for reasons legal, reputational, and psychological — where the data came from. (Their efforts are being followed by a documentary film crew.) The researchers are not yet prepared to concede that Hunter ever visited the Mac Shop. Earlier this year, they began to reexamine a laptop returned to them by the government from another source, and that device has formed the basis of an alternative theory of the data’s provenance — one that began a few weeks before the repairman would have encountered the entitled man with the broken devices, in a guest cottage at the med spa and psychiatric clinic where Biden received ketamine infusions from Keith Ablow, a celebrity therapist and conservative TV personality, in the winter of 2019.
How and why Hunter Biden came to receive treatment from a protégé of Roger Ailes who appeared on Fox News to suggest his father might have dementia, only he can explain. But his time in the clinic is documented in the data, in photos in which he uses drugs while cast in the green glow of a sensory-deprivation tank. When he departed the clinic for the motels along I-95 en route to Delaware, he left behind personal artifacts: shirts, blazers, and a MacBook. The device remained at the property for a calendar year, until Ablow was raided by the DEA in February 2020. (No charges have ever been brought in connection with the raid, although Ablow has had his medical license suspended.) The agents seized the device and, once informed that it did not belong to Ablow, provided it to Ablow’s attorneys, who then contacted Biden’s attorneys to return it.
The research team believes it is possible that Ablow copied the data. In this version of events, the story of Mac Isaac is just a cover for a more obvious violation of the law, one in which Hunter is a more obvious victim and the cast of characters is more obviously villainous: a turncoat therapist and the political operative who is proud to be called the godfather of ratfucking. “Roger Stone looks to be in the middle of it, and it’s Roger Stone,” a source familiar with the research team’s work said. Ablow and Stone were connected when Ablow was considering a Senate campaign, and, almost a decade later, he penned the foreword for a book Ablow co-authored with Christian Josi. Its title was *Trump Your Life.* Ablow, who is now a life coach, denied the allegations. “On the record, spoken as someone who practiced psychiatry for 30 years, the theory that I conspired to distribute Hunter Biden’s laptop to anyone is insane,” Ablow said. Stone denied it too. He called the theory “deeply mentally ill” and the work of “your classic nutcase.”
As for Hunter, the oldest living child of the president now resides in Malibu, at the top of a hill, in a place of sublime beauty. He lives in a sunlit home of modest size and modern style. The Secret Service, ever hovering, has a house next door. He tries to dodge the paparazzi, not always successfully. He looks different today, at 52, than the man on the laptop. His face is fuller. His teeth, once rotting and crooked, have been restored to gleaming condition by a Manhattan cosmetic dentist (at a cost of $69,977, according to records cited in *Laptop From Hell*).
He has given up practicing law as he awaits a long-delayed decision from the U.S. Attorney in Delaware, who has continued the probe of his finances. He spends his days making art in his garage. Last year, he had shows in New York and Los Angeles. (Several pieces sold at a reported price of $75,000 each to undisclosed buyers.) He follows the work of the researchers closely. At first he thought Trump’s defeat might provide a definite end point to his troubles, that his father’s adversaries might move on to other obsessions. Like so many Americans, he has since learned his hopes were misguided.
He deals with his violation in his own way. He paints still lifes of flowers; portraits of Catholic martyrs; paintings of birds done in alcohol ink, which creates a ghostly effect. In one series, according to someone who has seen them, Biden has made a number of self-portraits, based on the photos in the tabloids, the ones that show him in the depths of his despair. The paintings are abstract, made up of colorful pixels, but you can still see the artist in there. He is planning to turn one image — a selfie that he took with a cigarette dangling from his mouth during a trip to Las Vegas, which now appears on the cover of *Laptop From Hell* — into a work in stained glass.
Hunter’s pursuers say he has only himself to blame for his loss of privacy — that it was the same carelessness and disregard for the rules of conduct that regular people follow that caused him to lose control of his digital life. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe he was addicted to danger itself, forever in an autoerotic dance with disaster. So many of the people who have peered into the laptop seem to think that it allows them to know Hunter Biden’s mind and motivations. But maybe that level of understanding is not possible, even for the man himself. He has been doing the same thing, looking at that face in the photographs, trying to turn it into art. He still doesn’t know where that Hunter was. Like the rest of the world, he has all the data, but there are so many holes in his memory.
*Additional reporting by James D. Walsh.*
\*Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that John Paul Mac Isaac sent a copy of the laptop’s contents to the home of Robert Costello’s son.
# The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?
Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.
A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.
The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.
A shelter under construction at the Rising S Company in Murchison, Texas. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this *was* a talk about the future of technology.
Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk [colonising Mars](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war), [Palantir’s Peter Thiel](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/02/seeing-stones-pandemic-reveals-palantirs-troubling-reach-in-europe) reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and [Ray Kurzweil](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kurzweil-terminator-singularity-artificial-intelligence) uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive *winners* of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
A proposal for a Mars colony by Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX. Photograph: SpaceX
What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.
Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.
Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset *requires* an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.
---
By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.
Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management”.
But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “It’s quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to ‘treat those people really well, right now’, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.”
He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has been among the tech barons leading the privatised race into space. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters
Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.
JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the *Twilight Zone* episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”
JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”
---
The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.
On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”
That’s why JC’s real passion wasn’t just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”
JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in [American Heritage Farms](https://www.ahfarms.org/). That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
Vivos hopes to fit its bunkers with features such as swimming pools and gyms. Photograph: Terravivos
Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.
There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called [Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/17/real-estate-for-the-apocalypse-my-journey-into-a-survival-bunker) in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the [Oppidum in the Czech Republic](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/29/bunker-sales-soar-anxiety-over-russia-rises-ukraine) claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.
On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.
Just the *known* unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The *New York Times* reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.
Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?
But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.
That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?
Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.
- This is an edited extract from *Survival of the Richest* by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). To support the *Guardian* and *Observer* order your copy at [guardianbookshop.com](https://guardianbookshop.com/survival-of-the-richest-9781914484704). Delivery charges may apply
On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted.
Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, [brain fog](https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e056366.abstract) “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. But [20](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34973396/) to [30 percent](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35121209/) of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do [65](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8667685/) [to](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35607826/) [85 percent](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00299-6/fulltext) of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict people who were never [ill enough](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5) [to need a ventilator—or any hospital care](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537021003242). And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.
Long-haulers with brain fog say that it’s like none of the things that people—including many medical professionals—jeeringly compare it to. It is more profound than the clouded thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue. For Davis, it has been distinct from and worse than her experience with ADHD. It is not psychosomatic, and involves real changes to the [structure](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5) and [chemistry](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867422007139) of the brain. It is [not a mood disorder](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(22)00260-7/fulltext): “If anyone is saying that this is due to depression and anxiety, they have no basis for that, and data suggest it might be the other direction,” Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at UC San Francisco, told me.
And despite its nebulous name, *brain fog* is not an umbrella term for every possible mental problem. At its core, Hellmuth said, it is almost always a disorder of “executive function”—the set of mental abilities that includes focusing attention, holding information in mind, and blocking out distractions. These skills are so foundational that when they crumble, much of a person’s cognitive edifice collapses. Anything involving concentration, multitasking, and planning—that is, almost everything important—becomes absurdly arduous. “It raises what are unconscious processes for healthy people to the level of conscious decision making,” Fiona Robertson, a writer based in Aberdeen, Scotland, told me.
For example, Robertson’s brain often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”: “I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Brain fog stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en route. For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.
Memory suffers, too, but in a different way from degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s. The memories are there, but with executive function malfunctioning, the brain neither chooses the important things to store nor retrieves that information efficiently. Davis, who is part of the [Patient-Led Research Collaborative](https://patientresearchcovid19.com/), can remember facts from scientific papers, but not events. When she thinks of her loved ones, or her old life, they feel distant. “Moments that affected me don’t feel like they’re part of me anymore,” she said. “It feels like I am a void and I’m living in a void.”
Most people with brain fog are not so severely affected, and gradually improve with time. But even when people recover enough to work, they can struggle with minds that are less nimble than before. “We’re used to driving a sports car, and now we are left with a jalopy,” Vázquez said. In some professions, a jalopy won’t cut it. “I’ve had surgeons who can’t go back to surgery, because they need their executive function,” Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, a rehabilitation specialist at UT Health San Antonio, told me.
Robertson, meanwhile, was studying theoretical physics in college when she first got sick, and her fog occluded a career path that was once brightly lit. “I used to sparkle, like I could pull these things together and start to see how the universe works,” she told me. “I’ve never been able to access that sensation again, and I miss it, every day, like an ache.” That loss of identity was as disruptive as the physical aspects of the disease, which “I always thought I could deal with … if I could just think properly,” Robertson said. “This is the thing that’s destabilized me most.”
---
Robertson [predicted that the pandemic](https://graniteandsunlight.wordpress.com/2020/03/20/covid19-and-post-viral-disability/) would trigger a wave of cognitive impairment in March 2020. Her brain fog began two decades earlier, likely with a different viral illness, but she developed the same executive-function impairments that long-haulers experience, which then worsened when she got COVID last year. That specific constellation of problems also befalls many [people living with HIV](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4108270/), epileptics after seizures, cancer patients experiencing so-called chemo brain, and people with several complex chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia. It’s part of [the diagnostic criteria for myalgic encephalomyelitis](https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/healthcare-providers/diagnosis/iom-2015-diagnostic-criteria.html), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS—a condition that Davis and many other long-haulers now have. Brain fog existed well before COVID, affecting many people whose conditions were stigmatized, dismissed, or neglected. “For all of those years, people just treated it like it’s not worth researching,” Robertson told me. “So many of us were told, *Oh, it’s just a bit of a depression.*”
Several clinicians I spoke with argued that the term *brain fog* makes the condition sound like a temporary inconvenience and deprives patients of the legitimacy that more medicalized language like *cognitive impairment* would bestow. But Aparna Nair, a historian of disability at the University of Oklahoma, noted that disability communities have used the term for decades, and there are many other reasons behind brain fog’s dismissal beyond terminology. (A surfeit of syllables didn’t stop fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis from being trivialized.)
For example, Hellmuth noted that in her field of cognitive neurology, “virtually all the infrastructure and teaching” centers on degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, in which rogue proteins afflict elderly brains. Few researchers know that viruses can cause cognitive disorders in younger people, so few study their effects. “As a result, no one learns about it in medical school,” Hellmuth said. And because “there’s not a lot of humility in medicine, people end up blaming patients instead of looking for answers,” she said.
People with brain fog also excel at hiding it: None of the long-haulers I’ve interviewed sounded cognitively impaired. But at times when her speech is obviously sluggish, “nobody except my husband and mother see me,” Robertson said. The stigma that long-haulers experience also motivates them to present as normal in social situations or doctor appointments, which compounds the mistaken sense that they’re less impaired than they claim—and can be debilitatingly draining. “They’ll do what is asked of them when you’re testing them, and your results will say they were normal,” David Putrino, who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai, told me. “It’s only if you check in on them two days later that you’ll see you’ve wrecked them for a week.”
“We also don’t have the right tools for measuring brain fog,” Putrino said. Doctors often use the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which was designed to uncover extreme mental problems in elderly people with dementia, and “isn’t validated for anyone under age 55,” Hellmuth told me. Even a person with severe brain fog [can ace it](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35930974/). More sophisticated tests exist, but they still compare people with the population average rather than their previous baseline. “A high-functioning person with a decline in their abilities who falls within the normal range is told they don’t have a problem,” Hellmuth said.
This pattern exists for many long-COVID symptoms: Doctors order inappropriate or overly simplistic tests, whose negative results are used to discredit patients’ genuine symptoms. It doesn’t help that brain fog (and long COVID more generally) disproportionately affects women, who have a long history of [being labeled as emotional or hysterical by the medical establishment](https://www.mayadusenbery.com/book). But every patient with brain fog “tells me the exact same story of executive-function symptoms,” Hellmuth said. “If people were making this up, the clinical narrative wouldn’t be the same.”
---
Earlier this year, a team of British researchers rendered the invisible nature of brain fog in the stark black-and-white imagery of MRI scans. Gwenaëlle Douaud at the University of Oxford and her colleagues [analyzed data from the UK Biobank study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5#Tab5), which had regularly scanned the brains of hundreds of volunteers for years prior to the pandemic. When some of those volunteers caught COVID, the team could compare their after scans to the before ones. They found that even mild infections can slightly shrink the brain and reduce the thickness of its neuron-rich gray matter. At their worst, these changes were comparable to a decade of aging. They were especially pronounced in areas such as the parahippocampal gyrus, which is important for encoding and retrieving memories, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is important for executive function. They were still apparent in people who hadn’t been hospitalized. And they were accompanied by cognitive problems.
Although SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID, [can enter and infect the central nervous system](https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/fulltext/S0166-2236(22)00050-9#gs0005), it doesn’t do so efficiently, persistently, or frequently, Michelle Monje, a neuro-oncologist at Stanford, told me. Instead, she thinks that in most cases the virus harms the brain without directly infecting it. [She and her colleagues recently showed](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9189143/) that when mice experience mild bouts of COVID, inflammatory chemicals can travel from the lungs to the brain, where they disrupt cells called microglia. Normally, microglia act as groundskeepers, supporting neurons by pruning unnecessary connections and cleaning unwanted debris. When inflamed, their efforts become overenthusiastic and destructive. In their presence, the hippocampus—a region crucial for memory—produces fewer fresh neurons, while many existing neurons lose their insulating coats, so electric signals now course along these cells more slowly. These are the same changes that Monje sees in cancer patients with “chemo fog.” And although she and her team did their COVID experiments in mice, they found high levels of the same inflammatory chemicals in long-haulers with brain fog.
Monje suspects that neuro-inflammation is “probably the most common way” that COVID results in brain fog, but that there are likely many such routes. COVID could possibly trigger autoimmune problems in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the nervous system, or reactivate dormant viruses such as [Epstein-Barr virus](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/03/epstein-barr-virus-mono-cancer-research/623881/), which has been linked to conditions including ME/CFS and multiple sclerosis. By [damaging blood vessels](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2033369) and filling them [with small clots](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02286-7), COVID also throttles [the brain’s blood supply](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33677642/), depriving this most energetically demanding of organs of oxygen and fuel. This oxygen shortfall isn’t stark enough to kill neurons or send people to an ICU, but “the brain isn’t getting what it needs to fire on all cylinders,” Putrino told me. (The severe oxygen deprivation that forces some people with COVID into critical care causes different cognitive problems than what most long-haulers experience.)
None of these explanations is set in stone, but they can collectively make sense of brain fog’s features. A lack of oxygen would affect sophisticated and energy-dependent cognitive tasks first, which explains why executive function and language “are the first ones to go,” Putrino said. Without insulating coats, neurons work more slowly, which explains why many long-haulers feel that their processing speed is shot: “You’re losing the thing that facilitates fast neural connection between brain regions,” Monje said. These problems can be exacerbated or mitigated by factors such as sleep and rest, which explains why many people with brain fog have good days and bad days. And although other respiratory viruses can wreak inflammatory havoc on the brain, SARS-CoV-2 does so [more potently](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5) [than, say, influenza](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(22)00260-7/fulltext), which explains both why people such as Robertson developed brain fog long before the current pandemic and why the symptom is especially prominent among COVID long-haulers.
Perhaps the most important implication of this emerging science is that brain fog is “potentially reversible,” Monje said. If the symptom was the work of a persistent brain infection, or the mass death of neurons following severe oxygen starvation, it would be hard to undo. But neuroinflammation isn’t destiny. Cancer researchers, for example, have developed drugs that can calm berserk microglia in mice and restore their cognitive abilities; some are being tested in [early clinical trials](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1014-1). “I’m hopeful that we’ll find the same to be true in COVID,” she said.
---
Biomedical advances might take years to arrive, but long-haulers need help with brain fog *now*. Absent cures, most approaches to treatment are about helping people manage their symptoms. Sounder sleep, healthy eating, and other generic lifestyle changes can make the condition more tolerable. Breathing and relaxation techniques can help people through bad flare-ups; speech therapy can help those with problems finding words. Some over-the-counter medications such as antihistamines can ease inflammatory symptoms, while stimulants can boost lagging concentration.
“Some people spontaneously recover back to baseline,” Hellmuth told me, “but two and a half years on, a lot of patients I see are no better.” And between these extremes lies perhaps [the largest group of long-haulers](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35607826/)—those whose brain fog has improved but not vanished, and who can “maintain a relatively normal life, but only after making serious accommodations,” Putrino said. Long recovery periods and a slew of lifehacks make regular living possible, but more slowly and at higher cost.
Kristen Tjaden can read again, albeit for short bursts followed by long rests, but hasn’t returned to work. Angela Meriquez Vázquez can work but can’t multitask or process meetings in real time. Julia Moore Vogel, who helps lead a large biomedical research program, can muster enough executive function for her job, but “almost everything else in my life I’ve cut out to make room for that,” she told me. “I only leave the house or socialize once a week.” And she rarely talks about these problems openly because “in my field, your brain is your currency,” she said. “I know my value in many people’s eyes will be diminished by knowing that I have these cognitive challenges.”
Patients struggle to make peace with how much they’ve changed and the stigma associated with it, regardless of where they end up. Their desperation to return to normal can be dangerous, especially when combined with cultural norms around pressing on through challenges and [post-exertional malaise](https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Post-exertional_malaise)—severe crashes in which all symptoms worsen after [even minor physical *or mental* exertion](https://longcovid.physio/post-exertional-malaise). Many long-haulers try to push themselves back to work and instead “push themselves into a crash,” Robertson told me. When she tried to force her way to normalcy, she became mostly housebound for a year, needing full-time care. Even now, if she tries to concentrate in the middle of a bad day, “I end up with a physical reaction of exhaustion and pain, like I’ve run a marathon,” she said.
Post-exertional malaise is so common among long-haulers that “exercise as a treatment is inappropriate for people with long COVID,” Putrino said. Even brain-training games—which [have questionable value](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/the-weak-evidence-behind-brain-training-games/502559/) but are often mentioned as potential treatments for brain fog—must be very carefully rationed because mental exertion *is* physical exertion. People with ME/CFS learned this lesson the hard way, and [fought hard](https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/21/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-pace-trial/) to get exercise therapy, once commonly prescribed for the condition, to be removed from official guidance in the U.S. and U.K. They’ve also learned the value of [pacing](https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Pacing#The_principles_of_pacing)—carefully sensing and managing their energy levels to avoid crashes.
Vogel does this with a wearable that tracks her heart rate, sleep, activity, and stress as a proxy for her energy levels; if they feel low, she forces herself to rest—*cognitively* as well as physically. Checking social media or responding to emails do not count. In those moments, “you have to accept that you have this medical crisis and the best thing you can do is literally nothing,” she said. When stuck in a fog, sometimes the only option is to stand still.
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iOS
2 years ago