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@ -94,7 +94,7 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
- [x] 11:34 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring Fail2ban|Fail2ban]], [[Configuring UFW|UFW]]: voir si la liste d'IP peut etre partagee avec [crowdsec](https://crowdsec.net) 📅 2022-04-30 ✅ 2022-04-16
^button-Make the Most of Your Salads With Balsamic Honey Salad DressingNSave
 
# Make the Most of Your Salads With Balsamic Honey Salad Dressing
| Nutrition Facts (per serving) | |
| --- | --- |
| 96 | Calories |
| 9g | Fat |
| 4g | Carbs |
| 0g | Protein |
Show Full Nutrition Label Hide Full Nutrition Label
×
| Nutrition Facts | |
| --- | --- |
| Servings: 6 | |
| Amount per serving | |
| Calories | 96 |
| % Daily Value\* | |
| Total Fat 9g | 12% |
| Saturated Fat 1g | 6% |
| Cholesterol 0mg | 0% |
| Sodium 113mg | 5% |
| Total Carbohydrate 4g | 1% |
| Dietary Fiber 1g | 2% |
| Total Sugars 2g | |
| Protein 0g |
| Vitamin C 1mg | 6% |
| Calcium 7mg | 1% |
| Iron 0mg | 1% |
| Potassium 54mg | 1% |
| *\*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.* | |
(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)
Balsamic vinegar and honey (along with a bit of mustard) pack a lot of flavor in this sweet-yet-tangy salad dressing. If you've never made [homemade dressing](https://www.thespruceeats.com/lemon-garlic-salad-dressing-2217089) before, you will be delighted with how easy it is. You may find you like being able to control exactly what and how much goes into your salad.
Feel free to adjust all the seasonings to your taste and use this recipe as more of a guideline toward deliciousness than a strict recipe, per se.
This dressing complements fresh green salads with nuts and fruits, such as an [apple and walnut salad](https://www.thespruceeats.com/apple-and-walnut-salad-recipe-5084986), or a [fall fruit salad with walnuts and blue cheese](https://www.thespruceeats.com/apple-salad-with-pecans-and-raisins-3062165).
- 1/4 cup [extra-virgin olive oil](https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-olive-oil-4690453)
- 1/2 to 1 teaspoon [Dijon-style mustard](https://www.thespruceeats.com/homemade-dijon-style-mustard-recipe-1806782)
- 1/2 to 1 teaspoon honey
- 1 medium [shallot](https://www.thespruceeats.com/all-about-shallots-2215641)
- 1 clove garlic, optional
- 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1. Gather the ingredients.
2. In a small bowl or measuring cup, whisk together the oil, vinegar, mustard, and honey. If you're using the dressing right away, make the dressing in the bottom of the large salad bowl.
3. Peel and mince the shallot. Add it to the dressing. If you want to add the additional kick of garlic, peel that, mince it, and add it as well. Whisk them into the dressing. Add the salt and pepper and whisk those in, too. Let the dressing sit 5 to 10 minutes for the flavors to blend a bit.
4. Taste the dressing—the best way to do this is to dip a lettuce leaf into the dressing so you taste how the dressing will work on the salad.
### Recipe Variations
- Taste the dressing, and add more salt and/or pepper if you think it needs it.
- You can adjust the amount of [honey](https://www.thespruceeats.com/honey-history-1807611) and mustard to make it sweeter or more pungent, respectively.
- Too strong? Consider whisking in an additional tablespoon of oil, or just add a tablespoon of warm water to dilute the flavor a bit.
- If you don't have a shallot, you can use a small amount of [red onion](https://www.thespruceeats.com/uses-for-different-onion-types-4008831), about a tablespoon, minced.
### How to Store
- If there is any leftover dressing, store it in an airtight container and place in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.
### How should balsamic vinegar be stored after opening?
- Store your opened bottle of balsamic vinegar in the pantry along with other kinds of vinegar you may have. Vinegar has a long shelf life, but just keep track of the expiration date.
Rate This Recipe
I don't like this at all. It's not the worst. Sure, this will do. I'm a fan—would recommend. Amazing! I love it! Thanks for your rating!
Now, the question for J.E.B. was, what had become of that promising but complicated boy in the years since?
The answer, he hoped, was on the other side of the door at Florence Park, and on the fifth try, someone did finally answer: “the wife of the subject.” And soon he was in the presence of Boy #402 himself. Now 31 years old and an Army veteran, he had grown to 5 feet, 11 inches and filled out. His hair had deepened into a shoe-polish brown, his complexion was tanned from outdoor work. Stationed in Germany, he’d met and married his wife, Irmgard, and the couple had two children.
Albert DeSalvo with his wife, Irmgard, and son Michael at a Greater Boston beach. The faces of the wife and son were shielded to protect the anonymity that Irmgard sought in Germany. This photo was presented in Middlesex Superior Court during DeSalvo’s Boston Strangler trial. The Boston Globe then published the photo on Jan. 15, 1967.
The man appeared in that moment to be in good health, and the picture of ordinary. But appearances and reality would prove savagely misaligned. For Boy #402 was Albert DeSalvo, soon to be known to all the world as the Boston Strangler, one of the city’s few, truly notorious criminals who would claim credit for 11 killings — including five women already slain by the time J.E.B. knocked on the door in Florence Park that late summer afternoon.
---
No one knew any of that then. And none might know it still, had I not asked in 2011 to examine the 62 boxes of records of the landmark study of 1,000 boys and the roots of criminality — an effort led by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a renowned husband and wife Harvard professor team. I’d read about the couple’s Crime Causation Study and thought it might help with a book I was researching on James J. “Whitey” Bulger, another of Boston’s notorious crime figures. The study is kept at the Henry A. Murray Research Archive, on loan from Harvard Law School, and I learned that the raw files on each boy had gathered dust for decades. I submitted the application required by a 1986 contract governing access, and in time won permission to work my way through stacks of boxes — provided I sign a confidentiality provision that I not share what I discovered.
Commissioner of Youth Services Ralph W. Whelan (left) and doctors Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck of Harvard University Law School at a press conference in New York on Jan. 21, 1960. Gartis
There was, as it happened, nothing on Whitey in the files; he had not been part of the study as he was never sent to a reform school. But what I did find in Box 41 was jaw-dropping: Albert DeSalvo, Boy #402, was one of the Gluecks’ original 500 delinquent subjects. Here was all manner of information about the future serial rapist and self-proclaimed strangler, organized in color-coded folders filled with scoring charts for testing he underwent (his reported IQ was 93, the low end of average intelligence) and researchers’ notes typed, single-spaced, on onionskin.
Entry by entry, DeSalvo is revealed as a boy slowly making his way in a world of wrong, from petty thefts and mayhem to offenses of increasing sordidness — and sexual edge. The new details foreshadow the possibility of what DeSalvo would become, even if they do not form a clear criminal prehistory, at least not that of a psychopath. But what does come through loud and clear is that this was a young man entirely unashamed of the shape his life was taking. Criminal activity seemed to be his preferred form of entertainment.
“
‘Several times he (Al) tried to lie about the seriousness of his ‘troubles’ but when caught he cheerfully admitted his deception.’
J.E.B., researcher
“Al related his delinquencies with a grin and great deal of pleasure,” was one of myriad observations made by the social worker J.E.B. during an interview-cum-confession with the 12-year-old on June 3, 1944. J.E.B. continued: “Several times he (Al) tried to lie about the seriousness of his ‘troubles’ but when caught he cheerfully admitted his deception.”
And as for motivation, DeSalvo’s explanations were uncomplicated: “I wanted the things,’’ the boy matter-of-factly told J.E.B. in 1944. “Or I wanted the money to spend.”
The records are a biographer’s dream, revealing a much broader pattern of early troublemaking for which the boy was never caught. To be sure, much of his story is well known, having been deeply dissected by journalists, authors, and filmmakers, particularly the presence in his life of a monstrous father, an alcoholic who beat his wife, brought home prostitutes for sex, and raped one of his daughters. Best-selling books, documentaries, and podcasts have been produced, many of which continue to litigate whether DeSalvo, called America’s Jack the Ripper, really did strangle some or all of the 11 women killed in 1962 and 1963. Recently, filming began around Boston on a new strangler movie, featuring Keira Knightley as the late Loretta McLaughlin, a former editorial page editor at the Globe who covered the killings as a young reporter at another Boston paper. But previously published accounts of DeSalvo’s early transgressions mainly cited just two arrests based on police records. Turns out, the records available only scratched the surface. The thick files about Boy #402 narrow that gap.
Study by the Harvard team of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck: Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency Havard University Press
I requested a waiver to the confidentiality provision required by the 1986 contract so that I’d be able to write about DeSalvo being part of the Gluecks’ study. I thought I had a good case; after all, DeSalvo had been dead for 40 years and the files were of significant historical value, given his notoriety. The bid was rejected, however, and the prospect of unlocking the material seemed finished. Except for one thing. The contract contained an end date for restrictions: June 1, 2020. Last year I renewed my request, citing the expiration date in Harvard’s own ground rules. Several months passed without word. Then in July the e-mail arrived from archival officials: “Your application has been approved.”
---
For young DeSalvo, as with every boy at Lyman who joined the study, the start of his involvement in 1944 was intense, involving multiple interviews, tests, and psychological assessments made over the course of several months. Albert took the Stanford Achievement Test in both reading and arithmetic; the actual tests are still part of the file, featuring his answers written in pencil. In one math question, for example, he incorrectly wrote “23″ as the answer to the question, “Jim caught 9 fish, Ray caught 8 fish and Joe caught 7 fish. How many fish did they catch together?” Albert had repeated second grade at the Williams School in Chelsea, and he was in fifth grade, assigned to a “special class,’’ when he’d been sent off to the boys reformatory.
Researchers also filled numerous questionnaires created for the Gluecks’ study with answers Albert provided on all aspects of his life. They wrote that Albert’s “play places” were “street corners, railroad yards and the waterfront,” that his companions were “gangs, delinquents, boys,” and that his ambitions were “vague.” In a section called “Misbehavior Manifestations,” where a boy was asked to come clean about his wrongdoing, Albert admitted to 11 of 18 behaviors on the list, including “smoking, running away from home, gambling, late hours, stealing rides, hopping trucks, sneaking admissions, begging, destructive mischief, impulsive stealing and planful stealing.”
The social workers typed up the results of more open-ended conversations with their subject. Albert insisted he’d gotten along with most of his schoolteachers, except in fifth grade. He hated the teacher, Miss Hill, who used a “the rat-tan,” or cane, to keep him in line. When he refused to submit, she’d call in the school master to administer the blows.
“
‘He sees his father as a pretty worthless sort of fellow who has threatened his mother a great deal.’
Researcher, on Albert DeSalvo
The boy also had plenty to say about his father Frank. “He sees his father as a pretty worthless sort of fellow who has threatened his mother a great deal,” one social worker wrote. The boy “can remember throwing things at his father when the father was abusive toward his mother.” Albert told J.E.B. during their interviews that his parents argued violently, and when he and his brother tried to intervene, he was “hit by flying dishes.” To escape his father, Albert said he started “bunking out,’’ staying overnight in a shanty he and friends had discovered under the bridge connecting East Boston and Chelsea. Albert described the shanty as “fun,’’ as he and his pals enjoyed avoiding being spotted by the Coast Guard patrolling the waters.
J.E.B. summarized Albert’s inaugural “delinquency” in a section titled “First Wrong Doing.” Albert admitted he was 7 years old when he accompanied a pal on a housebreak, found a fur coat in a closet, and stole it. In Albert’s own account, however, it seems his 10th year marked the full reveal of a young and prolific malefactor. He told J.E.B. that was the year he began “to clip” from various 5&10 stores in the Chelsea area, “when the salesgirls were not looking, he’d grab candy, funny books, knives and flashlights.” He began smoking — “about a half-pack a day” — and, having soured on school began “to hook school” (truancy). He also “fished cars” parked near Chelsea Creek, stealing pocketbooks and whatever he saw in reach. Turning 11, he and his friends began hopping onto the backs of trucks driving down Broadway in Chelsea to steal candy or fruit. Or they’d ride the trucks into Boston and sneak into such movie houses as the Trans-Lux, the Normandie, or Stuart to catch a matinee. Most recently, at age 12, he confessed to J.E.B. that he and his pals had “browbeat” newsboys and stolen their money, or, as Albert described it, “socking newspaper boys and taking their dough.” They’d beaten up eight or nine boys and had gotten caught only once.
Chelsea, it seemed, was his oyster. Albert and his friends, wrote J.E.B., “delighted in going into nearby bakery shops and throwing a squash pie in the face of the clerk when she became angry that the boys did not have money to pay for the pastry they ordered.” For fun, he and his friends set fire to “a whole lot of freight trains in Chelsea” but never got caught, even as “thousands of dollars of burlap bags and feed for horses” burned. Without a second thought, he took advantage of the owner of a beauty shop on Everett Avenue who was paying him to run errands. “The woman used to hide the day’s receipts in a tin box in the store,” wrote J.E.B., and one day Albert seized the “opportunity to appropriate some of it,” stealing $35.
Despite the many misdeeds he’d only been arrested once — the Nov. 6, 1943, beating and robbery of $2.85 from a paperboy, for which he received probation. He’d been able to avoid any real consequences, his obliging manner and quick smile apparently helping to conceal his long run of mostly small-bore crimes. Luck ran out late the next month, though, when he and a friend were arrested for a housebreak — creating the official record later cited in the many accounts of DeSalvo’s life. But the DeSalvo files contain new details fleshing out the caper, with Albert explaining to J.E.B. the break-in was all about payback. He and his partner had had a falling out with a third friend, or as J.E.B. reported it, “They had an argument with him and wanted to get even.” The estranged friend, said Albert, “had tempted them with his stories of jewelry just hanging around” his mother’s house. Vengeance then coalesced around a jewelry heist, and late on the afternoon of Dec. 28 the two boys climbed through an unlocked window of the house on 87 Fifth St. in Chelsea and made off with $27 worth of rings and bracelets. Unfortunately, Albert said, the ex-friend later “ratted them out,” and so he ended up not only committed to the Lyman School, where he would live, in two stints, for about 16 months. Because of the Glueck study’s association with the Lyman, Albert also found himself in the hands of the researchers.
Students studied in groups at tables at the Wauchusett Cottage Reading Room at the Lyman School for Boys in Westborough. Albert DeSalvo stayed at Wauchusett briefly when he was first sent to Lyman in December 1943. The Westborough Digital Repository
In the files, each event is termed a “crisis,” with researchers numbering them chronologically, filling in such details as the time, place, and manner, whether Albert was alone or with others, and whether the crime was planned or not. In most instances, Albert’s wrongdoing was deemed “committed on impulse of the moment.” J.E.B. asked Albert why — what was the motivation for all his thievery? One reason, as J.E.B. wrote, “was for the pleasurable returns and the hope that he would always get away with it.” The other reason? “The fact that everyone in his neighborhood stole, except the sissies.” Overall, J.E.B. reported that while Albert showed “some respect for good authority” he did not think Albert would be able to check his urges. “This boy is the type who would show some caution about things but has too much energy to let his conscience keep him completely out of trouble.”
The final element in Albert’s in-take as a study subject included a Rorschach inkblot test administered on May 11, 1944. In his findings, a psychoanalyst named Dr. Ernest G. Schachtel, concluded from Albert’s response that the boy felt “not wanted or loved”; “not taken seriously or not counting”; and “resentment.” Testing for personality traits, the analyst concluded DeSalvo showed no signs of “kindliness or trust,” but did register “hostility” and “suspicion.” In his summary, the analyst wrote that Albert was a boy who felt “basically not wanted and rather insecure. He is half-afraid, half-aggressive.” The diagnosis: Albert was mildly neurotic. The prognosis: “Claims that his mother is going to move out to the country with his grandmother. In this case the prognosis would be not too bad. Distinctly would be bad in his own environment.”
The move to the country never happened.
---
Bit by bit, the image of a man was taking shape in the study records, but what sort of man? Hard to know. Robert Sampson, a Harvard professor and criminologist who has incorporated the Gluecks’ data into his own research, said of the study’s exhaustive information about young Albert DeSalvo, “Predicting future criminality in individual cases among delinquents is really hard to do. But clearly there was something lurking there.”
A remarkable feature of the Gluecks’ work was its longitudinal ambition, where researchers circled back over the years to visit with subjects. The next substantial interaction with the DeSalvos came three years later, on March 14, 1947 — a home visit to the apartment the family had moved to near Chelsea Square. The social worker found both the new address, a neatly kept second-floor unit at 82 Fifth St., and also a major family re-alignment. Frank DeSalvo was out of the picture, and Albert’s mother, Charlotte, had re-married. Charlotte and Albert’s older sister, married herself now and visiting that day, hosted their visitor, and the interview was conducted in the kitchen. Charlotte served cake and coffee, the social worker commenting later that the two women were friendly and cooperative.
The session largely produced a chronicle of horrific abuse that Charlotte and her offspring had suffered at the hands of her former husband. The social worker also heard about positive change — Charlotte’s marriage to a man with “good habits,” a truck driver of Armenian descent who’d never married before, whom Charlotte described as a steady provider who did not drink.
As it turned out, Albert even made a cameo appearance; he was newly released from the reformatory following a second commitment that had signaled a turn for the worse. Initially his attitude had been excellent after his first parole in late 1944. But as J.E.B. learned during follow-up field work, once two of Albert’s past partners in juvenile crimes were paroled from Lyman during the summer of 1946, Albert’s conduct “deteriorated rapidly.” Observed J.E.B.: “He was staying out late nights, going to Revere, smoking, masturbating, occasionally skipping Sunday school.” The boy’s attitude soon became “wholly negative” and a conviction for joyriding brazenly through Chelsea in a stolen car late that summer landed him back in Lyman for a second stint.
Paroled again, Albert seemed to now want to put the best face on things for the visiting J.E.B. “Shortly before the investigator left the home,” the social worker later wrote, “Albert went into the living room and returned with a picture of his mother and stepfather and showed it to the investigator with considerable pride.”
---
Eight years would pass before J.E.B. headed back to 82 Fifth St. in Chelsea to further update the DeSalvo file. In the interim the Glueck staff continued to track DeSalvo, as it did with as many of the original subjects as could be found. J.E.B. consulted with probation, school, welfare, and other officials, and he learned they were generally “pleased with his progress.” He seemed to quiet down for good after his second stint at Lyman. He worked after school in the spring of 1947 for a fruit peddler at $2 a day, then at Tommie’s Shoe Shine Parlor in Bellingham Square in Chelsea. He spent the summer of 1948 on Cape Cod employed by Ruthi’s Sandwich Shop in South Harwich, where he waited on tables and was “a general handy man.” He returned to Chelsea to work at a local laundry. Then, at summer’s end, he went away; he had enlisted in the US Army on Sept. 29, 1948, two weeks after his 17th birthday, and was headed overseas.
J.E.B. had no reason not to expect continued cooperation during the March 3, 1956, home visit, but when Albert’s mother, Charlotte, answered the door around 3 p.m. she was hardly welcoming. “Very irate,” J.E.B. wrote. Charlotte wanted no part of the social worker; she refused him entry and delivered a rant. She said Albert’s youthful lawbreaking “has long been forgotten,” that her son had learned his lesson, overcome a bad start in life and “paid for the damage which he did to society and has more than made amends for it by his long and distinguished service in the U.S. Army.” Not letting up, she told J.E.B. that the Glueck study “had no business whatsoever in looking up” her son since his discharge from Lyman.
J.E.B. made his case for the importance of the study, and managed to hang in long enough to allow Charlotte “to blow off steam.” Despite her refusal to give specifics, the social worker “gradually elicited information” about the subject — that Albert had married while stationed in Germany, and the couple had a newborn. J.E.B. also learned Albert was back in the states. “Mother denied all delinquency of any kind by the subject either in the Army or out of it.” But once Charlotte realized she’d revealed the fact of her son’s marriage to the researcher, she blew up. J.E.B. captured her outrage by typing this part entirely in capital letters: “THE MOTHER MADE CLEAR THAT THE WIFE OF THE SUBJECT KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT HIS JUVENILE RECORD OR COMMITMENT AND THAT BOTH HE AND SHE — THE MOTHER — WANT THE WIFE TO REMAIN IN IGNORANCE ABOUT THIS POINT.”
Concluding his report, J.E.B. wrote, “Needless to say, this interview was hardly a pleasant one.” Even so, the update on Albert had been generally favorable — he’d served in the army for nearly eight years, had married, and had a daughter. Stability was the new watchword. In the Glueck study, Albert’s designation was adjusted, classified now as “non-delinquent.”
---
His mother’s wishful thinking notwithstanding, the worst of Albert DeSalvo was yet to come. On Sept. 15, 1962, shortly after Albert turned 31, J.E.B. went to see him for what would prove to be the last official interview as part of the Glueck study. And he knew as he did so, that DeSalvo had resumed his “bad habits.” It was impossible not to know; the press had covered a series of arrests. The first was in Dorchester, where DeSalvo was caught trying to break into a local market on Jan. 9, 1958; another occurred on the night of Oct. 26, 1959, when he “was caught with several tools (screwdriver, hammer, chisel), trying to pry open the rear window of the Submarine Sandwich Shop” in East Boston. For these and two other daytime burglaries, DeSalvo never served a day in jail; he received suspended sentences. Then, on March 17, 1961, he was apprehended trying to break into a house on Broadway Street in Cambridge, and it was while he was in custody that he confessed to being the culprit police had dubbed the “Measuring Man.” For months he’d been posing as a talent scout to con his way into women’s apartments. He’d flatter them about their potential for professional modeling and then fondle those who allowed him to take their measurements. Following a trial in May, DeSalvo was found guilty of assault and battery and breaking and entering, and he was sent to the Billerica House of Correction.
The arrests have been documented in broad strokes in prior accounts, but the DeSalvo files contain new details. J.E.B., for example, conferred with probation officers about their dealings with DeSalvo. One in Boston told J.E.B. that DeSalvo was a puzzle; he and his wife both had good jobs, and so the officer “was at a loss to explain why the man tried to break into the store in view of his good financial condition and assumed it might be due to some psychiatric compulsion.” To other probation officers, DeSalvo seemed “affable’' and “a family-man type, courteous, and obviously devoted to the interests of his home.” But following his 1961 arrest in Cambridge, a probation officer there concluded that DeSalvo had not only conned women into allowing him to abuse them, he’d conned the probation department. The officer said Albert was actually “only a surface cooperative probationer, and that all during this period that he was not as law abiding as he pretended to be.”
Boston Police detectives worked through the night trying to solve the case after 67-year-old Jane Sullivan was discovered throttled to death in her apartment on on Aug. 30, 1962. She was believed to the the sixth victim of the Boston Strangler. Sullivan had worked as a night-shift nurse at Longwood Hospital.Edward Jenner, Boston Globe staf
What now makes the final interview with DeSalvo seem like a scene out of a mystery thriller is its timing. If his later confession as the Boston Strangler is to be believed, he’d already killed a first wave of five victims when J.E.B. located the DeSalvo home in Malden on Sept. 15, 1962, and was invited inside. While some remain unconvinced he was a murderer, DeSalvo was already by then a serial rapist, his victims scattered across four New England states. Later called the “Green Man” by police, DeSalvo dressed in green work clothes when he entered homes and sexually assaulted his female victims.
DeSalvo had been out of jail for five months when he let brought J.E.B. into his home on Florence Street Park that Saturday. (Today both the house and street are gone, leveled in the 1970s as part of a downtown renewal project.) J.E.B. took notes that filled four, single-spaced typewritten pages and an eight-page form questionnaire. “The interview was an exceptionally long one,” he wrote, staying until nearly 7 p.m. J.E.B. described the homestead as a “2-story affair, at least 75 years old,” a house that needed upkeep, “both inside and out.” DeSalvo showed off a new bathroom he said cost $800 to renovate, along with a new stove in the kitchen and described plans for more improvements. Once J.E.B. was seated, Irmgard announced she was going out to do some “Saturday shopping,” and Albert “was designated by her to do some ‘baby-sitting.’” The couple now had a second child, a newborn son, and as J.E.B. and the man of the house were talking in the living room the social worker couldn’t help but notice Albert’s “careless supervision of his two children.” At one point Albert directed his “little son to make a mess.” And he grinned as he egged the toddler on. “Mommy can clean it up,” he said.
When she returned, Irmgard joined the conversation, giving J.E.B. a thumbnail sketch of her life story: She was 29, born in Wiesbaden, Germany; finished ninth grade and then went to work as a waitress in one of the local cafes. She met Albert while he was stationed nearby, adding that at first her mother “violently objected” to him, but “gradually relented.” J.E.B. was impressed, writing, “Mrs. DeSalvo struck the investigator as a very practical woman; certainly, she is more intelligent than the subject.” She was “the driver” and “the saver” in the marriage; “it was her money which enabled them to make the down payment on this Malden home.”
Albert was Irmgard’s cheerleader, praising “her good common sense.” He bragged, “It was the best thing I ever did when I married a German girl.” Still, J.E.B. detected an uneasiness in Albert’s worshipful manner. “Investigator suspects that the wife of the subject is quite materialistic and makes many demands on him, which he feels unable to meet.”
“
‘I had bills; my wife was unable to work because the baby was too small. I tried to get money the easy way, and now I know how foolish I was.’
Albert DeSalvo
Indeed, the trickiest part of the interview involved mining details about Albert’s recent run of criminality. Here the couple seemed to choose their words carefully, and in ways that suggested they didn’t want J.E.B. to know what they were saying. “She would speak to the subject in German; he would answer in the same language.” Explaining the break-ins, Albert sanitized his actions and avoided altogether his sexual deviancy. He was under a ton of pressure, he told J.E.B. “I wasn’t working,” he said. “I had bills; my wife was unable to work because the baby was too small. I tried to get money the easy way, and now I know how foolish I was.”
Presenting a united front with his wife, Albert insisted he was loving, loyal, and law-abiding. He’d recently begun work as a carpenter’s apprentice and nodded in agreement when Irmgard indicated she’d read him the riot act and that, as J.E.B. wrote, “if he got into any further trouble, she — the wife — would take the two children and return to Wiesbaden, Germany.” Irmgard added that she now drove Albert to and from work and did not let him out of her sight so that “he won’t get any ideas.”
It mostly sounded good, but J.E.B. clearly didn’t buy it. “Subject appeared quick to alibi his own shortcomings.” Nothing that the couple said changed J.E.B.’s view of DeSalvo as an “unstable and irresponsible individual.” And his forecast was hardly hopeful. “Al is full of good resolutions and a desire to ‘make good,” J.E.B. observed, but “it is doubtful if he will persist in such good resolutions.” In the arc of DeSalvo’s participation in the Glueck study, which began in 1944 when the boy was a delinquent at the Lyman School and then included a 1956 reclassification to “non-delinquent,” J.E.B. completed the 1962 paperwork with another revision in his standing: “serious delinquent.”
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Albert DeSalvo entered East Cambridge Court in 1967.Boston Globe
Delinquent for sure, but was he the Strangler? His penchant for falsehoods and braggadocio make it hard to be conclusive. One of DeSalvo’s many lawyers, the late Boston trial attorney Thomas C. Troy, certainly thought Albert was all bull, telling a documentarian: “He looked into the mirror every morning and said who can I lie to today.” By 1967, or five years after the final Glueck study interview, DeSalvo claimed he was the Boston Strangler, and he was imprisoned for life, found guilty of a handful of the rapes he’d committed as the “Green Man” — all of which is well documented in prior accounts. In 1973 DeSalvo was found stabbed to death in his cell.
The last words in the DeSalvo files also came in 1967 — a flurry of notes that today read like friendly exchanges between members of an exclusive men’s club. Sheldon Glueck on April 14 wrote a “Dear Erwin” missive to the renowned Harvard Law School dean, Erwin N. Griswold, to say he’d received “a telephone call some weeks ago from a detective on the staff of Attorney General Elliot Richardson.” Richardson’s office was investigating the Strangler case. Glueck was looking for the dean to intervene; the detective wanted to look at the files on DeSalvo, who “was among our 500 delinquents in Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency.” Glueck noted the confidential promises made to the study subjects and asked the dean to go over the detective’s head: “If you will write the Attorney General accordingly.”
Dean Griswold did just that, with Richardson’s short reply of April 26 included in the file. “Dear Erwin,” Richardson began, “I’ve run the matter down and gather that the inquiry was part of the routine investigatory process in connection with the strangler case.” He assured the law school dean, “It is not essential from our point of view to press the matter” and promised “the inquiry to Professor Glueck should be dropped.”
“With warm regards, as ever, Elliot.”
And with that, the files remained off limits. Until now.
Eight of the women strangled in the Boston area in the 1960s that police believed may have been killed by the same man, the infamous Boston Strangler. Albert De Salvo confessed to being the killer. The women are (top left to lower right): Rachel Lazarus, Helen E. Blake, Ida Irga, Mrs. J. Delaney, Patricia Bissette, Daniela M. Saunders, Mary A. Sullivan, and Mrs. Israel Goldberg.Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
*Dick Lehr, a former Globe staffer and member of the Spotlight Team, is a professor of journalism at Boston University and the author of nine books, including “Black Mass” and “Whitey,” both about Whitey Bulger, written with the late Gerard O’Neill.*
# A Search for Family, a Love for Horses and How It All Led to Kentucky Derby Glory
Herbie Reed has been fishing, and the catch was plentiful. The 75-year-old pulled in about 30 crappie from a nearby honey hole, a continuation of his family’s recent run of good fortune. It is late afternoon, and he has poured himself a Woodford Reserve on the rocks and sits down at his dining room table with his shirt unbuttoned to his belly, ready to explain how he arrived at this impossibly blissful moment in time.
“I came up by myself,” he starts.
Unwanted and uneducated, Herbert Ray Reed says he walked out of an Appalachian hollow as a child in the 1950s and never went back. His mother had died when he was 5 years old, and the family structure unraveled after that. Hitching a predawn ride on a cattle truck at 9 years old led him away from dark times in Pecks Creek Hollow in rural Powell County to this town of Versailles, where he showed up unannounced at his aunt’s house. “My God, honey,” he recalls her saying to him. “How did you get here?”
She was one of about a dozen people who took him in at varying points in a chaotic childhood. After settling in this bluegrass region of Kentucky, Herbie lied about his age to get a job riding racehorses. He was 14. He wasn’t a feral child, but in many ways Reed was raised by horses. They gave him an occupation, an outlet, an opportunity to be somebody. Horses became a generational family business—a source of revenue and pride and profound heartache, as well.
Eleven days ago, one horse raised the Reed name to the highest level of the equine game. Rich Strike, trained by Herbie’s son, Eric, [won the Kentucky Derby in breathtaking fashion](https://www.si.com/horse-racing/2022/05/08/in-result-no-one-saw-coming-rich-strikes-kentucky-derby-win-helps-redeem-racing)—with a spectacular late charge down the stretch to collar favored Epicenter before the wire at outrageous odds of 80–1. It was the second-biggest upset in the 148-year history of America’s oldest continuous sporting event.
Eric had Herbie join him at the post-race press conference, even though he had no direct involvement in training Rich Strike. Along with owner Rick Dawson and jockey Sonny Leon, they were such big-race novices that they had to be told to sit down for the interview. Then, Herbie and Eric informed the world about their bond, until there were tears shed in the room and from the podium.
“He’s been going to the track with me since he was 6 years old, and that’s no bull,” Herbie said that evening at Churchill Downs. “He would go every day, and when he was 8, he could put a spider bandage on a horse, and most people don’t even know what it is anymore.
“He said, ‘I know what I want to do. I’m not going to college; I’m going to train horses.’ And if you find something you love to do, you never work. He found something he loved to do, and he’s good at it, and I’m as proud as I can be of him.”
Why did young Eric Reed tag along with Herbie to the barns in the morning?
“It wasn’t so much the horses early on,” Eric says. “I idolized my dad. That’s why I did it.”
Less than 72 hours after that life-altering two minutes in Louisville, Rich Strike is in repose in his stall at Eric Reed’s Mercury Equine Center outside Lexington. The shedrow is quiet, and there is nothing to mark the presence of nascent racing royalty. When Reed approaches, “Ritchie” comes to the stall gate and cranes his neck out, softly trying to playfully bite his hand. The trainer laughs and dodges, patting the chestnut colt’s nose.
This is Reed’s 15 minutes of fame, but he happily steers a reporter toward his dad’s life story—“It could be a Hollywood movie,” he says. Right then and there, standing in the barn where Rich Strike resides, Eric answers a request to interview Herbie by suggesting an immediate road trip. He abruptly jumps in his Chevy Tahoe—with the rusted sideboard and three fishing rods in the back—and heads toward the exit of the farm. He apologetically brushes off a TV reporter waiting for him at the front gate and drives 40 minutes west to meet with Herbie.
*Rich Strike will skip the Preakness, but he could still race in the Belmont Stakes on June 11.*
Evers/Eclipse Sportswire/CSM/AP
Father and son share a large parcel of land off a narrow strip of blacktop outside Versailles, their houses just a few yards apart. One is something of a luxury log cabin. The other is more modern and serves as a part-time bed and breakfast (“Rabbit Creek”). The two men frequently fish and talk horses together, just as they have for decades.
“Everybody loved him,” Eric says of Herbie’s training days. “He was happy, and people would come to him all the time with questions: *Herbie, help me, I can’t figure this horse out.* It was like he was a guru or something. I remember all the admiration for him. I kept thinking, ‘Man, that’s what I want. I want people to think of me that way.’”
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## SI Recommends
The horse racing world is split on how to think of Eric Reed today. Some are disappointed—even angry—that he made the rare and controversial decision [not to race the Kentucky Derby winner this Saturday in the Preakness](https://www.si.com/horse-racing/2022/05/12/kentucky-derby-winner-rich-strike-skips-preakness-no-triple-crown), the second leg of the Triple Crown. Others are lauding his resistance to public pressure, instead choosing what’s best for Rich Strike and what adheres to his own training philosophy.
Rich Strike isn’t at Pimlico Race Course but still looms as the dominant story line in Baltimore this week. He is the horse who shocked the world twice, first in victory and now in absentia. As such, it’s worth remembering where the Reeds came from—specifically, a place where the Triple Crown isn’t even a daydream, much less a consideration. A place where the gift of a big-time horse is to be protected like a Ming vase.
“You know, if you run the Preakness you’ve blown the Belmont,” Herbie says. “That looks like where \[Rich Strike\] wants to go; a mile and a half \[the Belmont distance\] is right up his alley. You hate to \[skip the Preakness\], but like Eric said, ‘I ain’t got but one good horse; I gotta take care of it.’ He’s got to do what’s best for the horse.”
That horseman mantra was handed down from father to son, and it’s why sharing that inconceivable Derby moment with Herbie was the true reward for Eric Reed. He made a lot of money and gained a lot of fame on the first Saturday in May, and felt some validation after working on the margins of the sport for so many years. But mostly Reed is leveraging this pinch-me moment to honor his father, a survivor who started a lineage of perseverance.
“You have to get lucky in life, and I’ve been lucky,” Herbie says, for the moment ignoring the unlucky episodes he’s also endured. “I stop and think sometimes, ‘What the hell made me do all this?’ I don’t know, but I had no fear in me.”
No fear led him to hitchhike around parts of Kentucky in search of something other than a home life he won’t discuss in detail. “I lived in some bad-ass places,” he says.
“At that time, I hated everybody. I’ll take some things to my grave, I guess, because there were people involved who aren’t here to defend themselves. But some bad things happened.”
No fear led to running away from whoever was caring for him multiple times, to skipping school, to giving up on education at an early age, to tattooing his initials into his forearm with a cluster of pins dipped in ink at age 12. “I’d give anything in the world if I hadn’t,” he says. “I hate ’em. It looks terrible.”
Herbie Reed (left) and son Eric (center) celebrate their shocking Kentucky Derby win with jockey Sonny Leon.
And no fear led him to thoroughbred racing, having seen a friend make up to $16 a day galloping horses. Fourteen-year-old Herbie Reed didn’t just lie about his age when he went to the barn of prominent Kentucky trainer Doug Davis. He lied to one of Davis’s assistants about his experience on horseback in asking for a job breaking yearlings. The fib became obvious to the assistant when Herbie got on the wrong side to mount the first horse they tried to put him on.
“He threw that saddle up and I’m standing on the wrong side,” Herbie recalls. “He said, ‘What are you doing? Boy, look, I know you’re having a hard time, but quit that damn lying. You ain’t 16 and you ain’t never been on no damn horse.’”
Still, they gave him a chance. Herbie climbed aboard four yearlings that day and showed an immediate instinct for the job. That led to becoming an exercise rider for Davis at Keeneland Race Course and subsequent riding jobs for other trainers and breeders. During that time, Davis and other horsemen would eat lunch at a diner in Versailles after the morning work was done. One day, a friend pointed out a pretty waitress who was sweeping around their table so often that “there’s going to be a hole in the damn floor.”
That’s how Herbie met Glenna, his wife since 1964. About nine months after they met, the couple decided to elope. Davis, the trainer, had been saving Herbie’s money for him to make sure he didn’t blow it. He delivered the boy $900 and a warning when he asked for it to get married. “I think you’re making a bad mistake,” Davis told him. Herbie bought a pink ’53 Ford for $50, and he and Glenda ran off to Tennessee to get hitched. He was 16, but once again fudged his age to get a marriage license. They came home and hid the news from Glenda’s family for a while.
Scott Miller, a local horseman who would become mayor of Versailles and gave Herbie a job at a young age, convinced him he had to tell Glenna’s father the truth. “Go out there and be honest with this man,” recalls Stiles Miller, Scott’s son. “Tell him what you did.”
Herbie did. After some immediate blowback, Glenna’s father eventually became a father figure to Herbie.
“Her daddy didn’t want nothing to do with me,” Herbie says. “He knew how I came up. I’ve got to thank her father for everything. I had that monkey on my back. When you come up like that, you just don’t know how to control yourself. Her dad would take me in and we’d talk. I’d get so mad I wanted to kill him. He used to tell me, ‘When you get so mad you want to hurt somebody, start counting backwards from 100 back. By the time you get to 50, you won’t want to do it no more.’”
Wiser but not richer, Herbie doubled down on his efforts to make money. He was galloping horses at Keeneland Race Course in the morning, then working nights at a Texaco near the couple’s apartment six days a week. He was getting by on five hours of sleep a night.
“When Glenda and I started out, we didn’t have a pot to pee in or one to pour it out of,” he says. “Me and her, we didn’t have s---.”
Baby Eric arrived soon thereafter. Meanwhile, Herbie’s horse savvy earned him moves up the ladder from exercise rider to assistant trainer for some prominent Kentucky conditioners before he eventually went out on his own. [Equibase statistics show](https://www.equibase.com/profiles/allStartsPeople.cfm?eID=24614&typeSource=TE&rbt=TB&year=1977) Herbie won 73 out of 707 races from 1976 to 2011, earning total purses of $670,328. Those are modest numbers. Herbie had some success at races on the Kentucky circuit, but resisted overtures from at least one well-heeled owner to take a string of horses to race in Florida for the winter. After the upbringing he had endured, the usual nomadic trainer life held no appeal.
“I didn’t know what a family was,” Herbie says. “When I got married, I couldn’t ever remember anybody putting an arm around me and saying, ‘I love you’ or encouraging me to do better. It just never happened. You know, you don’t miss what you never had. But once I got a family and saw how important it was, you realize.”
Soon enough, young Eric Reed was joining his father at the track. He would never leave it.
Since the Derby win, Rich Strike has spent most of his time at Mercury Equine Center outside Lexington.
Pat McDonogh/Courier Journal/USA TODAY Network
Nearing the end of his time at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Eric told Herbie that his career plans were set. They didn’t include college. Herbie didn’t like what he was hearing.
“I didn’t want him to do it,” Herbie says. “He was smart. He never did homework, made straight A’s, and I thought, ‘Why waste that? Go to college.’ The one thing I regret is that I don’t have an education. I made it to the ninth grade. I don’t care what anybody says, when you’re around educated people and you don’t have one, you feel inferior. Because you can’t talk on their level. One thing about college, it opens doors you can’t open any other way.
“But he told everybody, ‘I’m way ahead of anybody going to college because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to train horses my whole life.’”
Eric began by assisting his dad, who offered no shortcuts or favors. One frigid winter night at Latonia Race Course in Northern Kentucky (now called Turfway Park), Herbie dispatched Eric to sit outside a horse’s stall for hours leading up to a race, offering him a blanket and nothing else.
Eventually, Eric started out on his own, navigating the same low-stakes claiming circuit his dad had worked. When he called home once from Ellis Park in Henderson, Ky., to ask his dad for advice, this was the response: “Look, brother, I can’t tell you nothing. You’re training those horses now.”
After plugging along at a modest clip for more than 15 years, Reed started to see an uptick in results in the early 2000s. More wins, more horses claimed, more purse money. The financial backing of a thoroughbred owner for whom he trained allowed him to take a big swing—buying a 60-acre property that would become Mercury Equine Center in 1985. The place had been part of fabled nearby Spendthrift Farm at one point, but had fallen into some disrepair. Reed and his wife, Kay, went to work refurbishing it.
With a ⅝-mile oval for training,160 stalls and plenty of paddock land, they built their dream farm. Within a few years, Reed was winning more races and purse money in a year than his father did in 35 years. He was a tier below the top trainers in the sport, but making a good living and enjoying his life.
Until the phone rang late one night in December 2016.
A thunderstorm had rolled through on an unseasonably warm winter night, and a lightning strike is believed to have ignited one of three horse barns on the property. What ensued was a nightmare. Jumping in the car and rushing from Versailles to the farm, Eric says he could see the glow of the fire painted against the dark sky from more than a mile away.
“It was raining sideways, pouring rain,” Reed recalls. “I told my wife, ‘We’ve lost everything.’”
It turned out not to be the case—by chance of fate, the wind from the storm was blowing the opposite direction from the way it usually blows on the farm, away from the other two barns and the house on the property. But the losses [were still horrific](https://paulickreport.com/news/the-biz/deadly-fire-hits-lexingtons-mercury-equine-center/): 23 horses died, 13 escaped.
The memories are stark and searing: one of his workers, “absolutely naked, no shoes, no underwear, running in and out and pulling horses out”; some horses exiting the barn with their ears or manes on fire; workers having to hold back Kay to keep her from running into the blaze. The fire was put out a couple of hours later and the temperature plunged in the aftermath of the storm. Reed told his staff to go home and return at first light to survey the damage and retrieve the horses that had been let loose.
“We got back here at about 7,” Reed says. “I thought the night was horrible, but then you see the bodies. … I’m telling you, man, nobody deserves to see that. That’s when the worst of it hit me.”
Gutted, Reed and his attorney began the process of calling the horses’ owners to tell them which animals had survived and which had perished. He thought strongly about quitting the business. The voice he needed to hear most was his father’s.
[](https://www.si.com/tag/daily-cover)
“About three days into it, my dad calls me,” Eric recalls. *Hey boy, you still on your feet? You got to get back to training them horses, Eric. People are paying you, and those horses need to get out of the barn. Can’t nobody tell you what to do, but I am going to throw one thing at you: If you quit, them horses died for nothing.*
Gradually, Reed pulled himself and his operation back together. He dabbled in a [YouTube hunting and fishing show](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUfVYCtfx61WIy9-ZBW9_HQ) with a couple of friends, *The Bluegrass Boys Outdoor Show*. But his heart was in training horses, and with the help of friends and family he persevered.
One thing Reed did upon rebuilding the burned-down barn: He left a clearing, surrounded by white split-rail fencing, where part of the carnage had occurred. No one sets foot in there, other than to mow the grass. “This is hallowed ground,” he says. “This ground, we know what happened here and it’s not going to be forgotten.”
Reed was also not forgotten by his clients and others in the industry. In a business where relationships often fracture and owner second-guessing is rampant, Reed maintained good rapport with those who pay the bills. That includes St. Louis businessman Mike Schlobohm, who sent Reed the filly Resurrection Road in 2018 largely because his training fees were affordable for an entry-level owner. Five years later, Resurrection Road has [won five of 21 starts](https://www.equibase.com/profiles/Results.cfm?type=Horse&refno=10126715®istry=T&rbt=TB) and earned nearly $125,000 in purse money for a satisfied owner.
“He just always has been super good to us,” Schlobohm says. “He always wants to do what’s right for the horse. He treats every horse individually, he finds the right spots for them to race, and his horsemanship eliminates a lot of vet bills.”
(Knowing what he did about how Reed operates, Schlobohm said last week, “I guarantee he does not want to run that horse in the Preakness.” The next day, Rich Strike was scratched from the race.)
Reed’s business continued chugging along at a steady but unspectacular pace when he hooked up with Dawson in 2021. An oil and gas guy from Edmond, Okla., Dawson was reentering horse racing after some unspecified bad experiences that Dawson elected not to discuss. Dawson is a small player, having sent three horses to Reed before the two claimed Rich Strike for the paltry sum of $30,000 as a 2-year-old last September. The pair won a five-way “shake” for Rich Strike after he won his second career race by 17 lengths at Churchill Downs. Exciting as that was, it’s hardly a gateway to the Kentucky Derby.
Reed took Rich Strike back to Mercury Equine Center and began prepping him for a race at Keeneland three weeks later. Reed watches his horses’ morning gallops from what is essentially a combination clocker’s stand and office on the turn of his home training oval, a place where he keeps cans of Raid handy to fend off the omnipresent wasps. “With this, I’m Clint Eastwood,” he said, holding a can of the pesticide. “Without it, I’m scared of ’em.”
Coming off that big maiden score at Churchill, Rich Strike was sent off at 4–1 in the race at Keeneland on Oct. 9, but finished a dull third in an $80,000 race. It dampened some of the excitement in the group, but it did not change Reed’s plan.
“I don’t know another trainer in the world that would have run that horse back at a stake after that race at Keeneland,” Herbert says. “I wouldn’t have seen that kind of talent in that horse. He knew he had something. After Keeneland he said, ‘I’m going to tell you, he’s the best horse I’ve ever trained.’”
Eric knew Rich Strike had a troubled trip at Keeneland and figured a little more racing luck would reveal the colt’s talent. But the day after Christmas, he finished fifth at 46–1 odds in a stakes race at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans—14 ½ lengths behind Epicenter. “That would have been the end for me,” Herbie says. “I would have run him for $50,000.”
Still undeterred, Eric pointed Rich Strike toward Kentucky Derby prep races in 2022 at Turfway Park, more familiar territory for Reed and Leon. The horse performed better there, finishing third twice and fourth once in stakes company, earning enough Derby qualifying points to reach the fringe of making the race. Winning was another matter entirely. Since that maiden victory in September, Rich Strike had never led another race.
Owner Rick Dawson (right of trophy) joined forces with Eric Reed (left) in 2021.
Pat McDonogh/Courier Journal/USA TODAY Network
Rich Strike came to Churchill Downs in late April as a complete afterthought. He had one timed workout at the track, on April 27, and no one cared. It seemed unlikely he would get in the race. He was “in it for the saddle cloth,” as the saying goes, referring to the yellow fabric memento Derby horses wear with their name on it beneath their saddles when they go to the track to train in the morning.
What happened the day before the Derby became part of the instant Rich Strike lore. Seemingly shut out of the 20-horse field, a last-minute scratch cleared the way for him to enter. While the horse’s connections were ecstatic, the outside world yawned. No one gave the horse a chance, and he was sent off at the longest odds in the field.
Eric and Herbert Reed watched the race on the big screen in the Churchill paddock. Taking note of the race leaders blazing through the first quarter mile—the fastest in Derby history at 21.78 seconds—Herbert said to his son, “We might not win it, but I know they won’t.” The half-mile split was less than 46 seconds, still a withering pace that set up the race for a dead closer—Rich Strike’s wheelhouse.
When Derby rookie jockey Leon—himself as big a long shot as the rest of the crew—made a series of bold moves and smart decisions, he put Rich Strike in position for a dash to the finish. When he caught Epicenter and Zandon in the final sixteenth of a mile, almost no one in the crowd of 147,000 knew the horse suddenly stealing the Kentucky Derby on the rail. But the boys watching in the paddock knew, disbelief and euphoria commingling. When Rich Strike crossed under the wire first, Eric Reed collapsed to the ground—a bad back, a rush of emotion, overwhelming shock, whatever the reason. Herbert feared his son was having a heart attack.
“Scared the hell out of me,” Herbert says. “Then he got up from there and I started laughing at him.”
As the ecstatically unruly group howled and hugged and staggered its way toward the Kentucky Derby winner’s circle, Eric Reed’s first thought was who he wanted next to him for this walk of a lifetime. [He called out, “Where’s my dad?”](https://www.courier-journal.com/videos/news/2022/05/08/strike-rich-horse-owner-dawson-kentucky-derby-churchill-downs-winner-reaction/9693184002/)
Herbert Reed was right there behind his son. As he has been across every step of an incredible familial journey.
**[Read more of SI’s Daily Cover stories:](https://www.si.com/tag/daily-cover)**
**• [The Return and Rebirth of the WNBA’s AD](https://www.si.com/wnba/2022/05/05/ad-long-covid-identity-new-york-liberty-daily-cover)
****• [Does the NBA Have a $@&!\*% Problem?](https://www.si.com/nba/2022/05/11/nba-profanity-problem-daily-cover)
****• [Sicilian Scrum: One Italian Rugby Club is Standing Up to the Mafia](https://www.si.com/sports-illustrated/2022/05/10/briganti-rugby-sicily-mafia-daily-cover)**
# A new generation of white supremacist killer - Los Angeles Times
ATLANTA—
Bored during the early days of the pandemic, Payton Gendron logged on to the 4chan message board website to browse ironic memes and infographics that spread the idea that the white race is going extinct.
He was soon lurking on the web’s even more sinister fringes, scrolling through extremist and neo-Nazi sites that peddled conspiracy theories and anti-Black racism. It wasn’t until he spotted a GIF of a man shooting a shotgun through a dark hallway, and then tracked down a livestream of the [2019 killing of 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand](https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-new-zealand-mosque-terrorist-attack-20190315-story.html), that Gendron appeared to have found his calling: as a virulently racist, copycat mass shooter with a craving for notoriety.
The white 18-year-old from Conklin, N.Y., suspected of [killing 10 people Saturday in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarke](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-05-15/buffalo-shooting-that-killed-10-investigated-as-racially-motivated-violent-extremism)t, appears to represent a new generation of white supremacists. They are isolated and online, radicalized on internet memes and misinformation, apparently inspired by livestreams to find fame through bloodshed, much of it propelled by convoluted ideas that the white race is under threat from everything from interracial marriage to immigration.
Jeanne LeGall, of Buffalo, N.Y., readjusts a couple stuffed animals at a makeshift memorial near the Tops Friendly Markets at Jefferson Avenue and Riley Street on Sunday in Buffalo.
(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
“Now you have this new ironic world of killers,” said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism. “It’s a different world — just a constant flow of bad statistics, bad memes, bad lies about the people they want to hate.… That’s the 4chan way: You say things that are outrageous that you don’t necessarily believe — and over time you come to believe.”
Unlike the white supremacists of old — from the Ku Klux Klan to newer neo-Nazi terror groups such as the Base or the Atomwaffen Division — the new recruits to racist 4chan and 8chan forums are often teenage boys in high school, MacNab said. They act out their rage at a time of dimming economic opportunity for some young people and the changing demographics of a country they have been told no longer has a place for them.
“They piggyback on each other’s crimes and, as each one became more famous, then just absolutely made it more desirable for them to copy,” MacNab said. “The joke is always: Who can beat the kill number? ... To them, it’s like a video game. How do you score better than the last one?”
Armed with a high-powered rifle scrawled with a racial epithet, the suspect broadcast his killing spree live on Twitch, a platform popular among young gamers, and published a 180-page manifesto that espoused the racist “replacement theory,” the idea that white Americans are at risk of being replaced by Jews and people of color.
Identifying as a white supremacist fascist with neo-Nazi beliefs, Gendron wrote that low white birth rates around the world represent a “crisis” and “assault” that “will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”
Experts say replacement theory — whose label was first coined in France by the white nationalist writer Renaud Camus in his 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement” — has inspired a steady stream of violent racist gunmen in the United States in recent years, from the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 to the killing of one congregant and injury of three others at a synagogue in Poway, Calif.
An armed police officer closes a gate to Al Noor Mosque after it was officially reopened following the previous week’s mass shooting on March 23, 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
(Carl Court / Getty Images)
While Gendron ultimately was motivated by a mass killing outside the U.S. — Brenton Tarrant’s 2019 massacre of worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand — he lauded in his manifesto the perpetrators of racially motivated massacres in the U.S. These included Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., and Patrick Crusius, who targeted Latinos and immigrants at a Walmart in El Paso. That shooting, which killed 23 people, has been described as the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history.
White supremacist and far-right killers have dominated the extremist homicide totals since 2018, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. Over the last two years, there was a historic upward shift overall in the frequency of anti-Black hate crime across the U.S., Levin said.
“We saw a concerning historic inflectional spike in anti-Black hate crime and online invective in 2020 and 2021 with increased violence, but without the kind of multi-fatality attacks that previously accompanied such spikes, until now,” Levin said. “This shooting is an extension and return to mass acts of violence.”
The lull in hate-driven mass shootings was partly because the pandemic shut down schools, malls and places where crowds of people congregated, Levin said. But also because federal law enforcement paid closer attention to extremists on online apps such as Telegram after the El Paso shooting in 2019, said Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
Although such attacks appear to target specific communities, they are actually driven by a set of larger white power ideologies, said Kathleen Belew, assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago who studies extremism.
Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” said racist radicalization was not a Southern or regional problem. The Buffalo attack was clearly related to racially motivated attacks in the U.S. in recent years, from the Pittsburgh synagogue to the El Paso Walmart.
“Radicalization is happening all the time around our country,” she said.
Running Gendron’s manifesto through plagiarism software, Belew found that significant chunks were lifted from the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter. But Gendron also appeared to have written portions himself, including his support for replacement theory.
“Immigrants are one threat, the presence of African Americans is another one, and Jews who are allegedly controlling these plots to eradicate the white race,” Belew said. “There’s a hyperfixation on the white birth rate and on white women having white children and the violent defense of that system.”
Although white supremacists such as Gendron may become radicalized online, they were also incited by the spectacle of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection: “The Capitol attack was a radicalization action that dramatically increased online activity in spaces like those the Buffalo shooter is believed to have frequented,” Belew said.
Blending the ideology of “great replacement” with ironic symbols and internet in-jokes is a key feature of a new breed of white supremacist mass shooters, Hayden said.
“Dialoguing with people, mass murder as performance is a particular phenomenon of the post-Trump era,” he said. “The manifesto is part of a performance, a physical representation, the bloodshed is taking the memes into real life.”
“These killers don’t have any perception of people being people.” Hayden said. “These are murders presented almost like video games, and they’re actually, for that reason, very, very, very scary.... That mimetic aspect of it — the internet winking and things like that — feels even a step more dehumanized and horrible.”
About 60% of the extremist killings in the U.S. between 2009 and 2019 were committed by people espousing white supremacist ideologies such as replacement theory, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“White supremacy is the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat in the United States,” according to Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism based in Montgomery, Ala.
Federal law enforcement assessments and studies by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, Beirich said, show far-right plots and attacks have been “exponentially growing” in recent years. In the Western world, she said, the threat of extremism has shifted from Islamic extremists to “ideologically motivated racial extremists.”
But she cautioned: “Within the white supremacy world, there’s a lot of different motives.”
“It’s like he’s fused Dylann Roof’s racism into the great replacement,” Beirich said of Gendron, noting his manifesto links to race science studies and to prominent American white supremacists like [Jared Taylor](https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jared-taylor). “You realize this guy has immersed himself in this hodgepodge of white supremacist websites.”
Converging online, isolated young men had fewer outlets than their forebears who tend to gather in local groups and meet others in their community.
“When you have groups of people that meet regularly, you kind of have an outlet,” she said. “I think not meeting makes them more dangerous.”
While most of the killers are young males, not all of the new generation of white supremacists or extreme racists are white.
“You can have people of all different colors participate in the white supremacy rally,” MacNab said, noting that Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys far-right extremist group, is half Cuban, half Black and some of the Oathkeepers who showed up at the Capitol in Washington were not white.
“It’s just a weird world we live in these days,” MacNab said. “A lot of that’s back to the irony. If you’re doing what you’re doing, because you want to make liberals cry, then you’re saying things you don’t necessarily believe. And I think a lot of conservative people of color kind of got caught up in that.”
In his manifesto, Gendron presents himself as a young left-winger who evolved into a fascist, eco-fascist, populist and accelerationist bent on speeding up the collapse of established government, said Alexander Reid Ross, an adjunct professor at Portland State University and a senior fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right who read the manifesto.
“He kind of provides some reasoning for that toward the end: The left wing has admirable goals, but for that reason it will always set back progress because for him, nonwhite people, except for Asians, are intrinsically inferior, so if you try to help them, you’re impeding the success of white people,” Reid Ross said of the manifesto.
Reid Ross noticed that Gendron highlights his German and Italian roots in the manifesto, yet still believes in the “great replacement.”
“We all tend to think of great replacement as anti-immigrant,” Reid Ross said. “What this killing shows us is it’s more than that: It is targeting anybody who isn’t white. He calls them ‘replacers’ and they have to be slaughtered, expelled or killed.”
Experts who study extremism have made an effort to not circulate Gendron’s manifesto.
“Each manifesto seems to lead to another attack and another manifesto and is a radicalizing force,” Beirich said. “So it’s very important that neither the video — which presents the attack like it’s a first-person shooter game — or the manifesto be circulated because it will inspire further attacks.”
Because Gendron’s manifesto includes detailed tactical advice and instructions, she said, “it’s a plan ... actually even more dangerous than an ideological statement.”
After the Christchurch shooting in 2019, Beirich and other experts formed an advisory panel that worked with a tech company group, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, to more quickly remove content such as attacker manifestos and videos to avoid inspiring further attacks and retraumatizing victims.
Some online critics said those groups didn’t act fast enough to prevent Gendron’s video from being cross-posted on Facebook and other sites, where it lingered for hours. But Beirich insisted that authorities acted more swiftly. And while screenshots of portions of the manifesto are circulating online, Beirich said, all 180 pages are not widely available and “it’s not going viral within minutes” like it did with Christchurch.
While Gendron came from the nation’s extreme fringes, a significant proportion of Americans share some of his ideas. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans agree with at least two key tenets of replacement theory, according to a new [poll](https://apnorc.org/projects/immigration-attitudes-and-conspiratorial-thinkers/) released last week by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
Experts caution, however, that belief in those tenets does not necessarily make a person a full-blown believer in the theory, let alone be willing to act violently.
The poll, which surveyed 4,173 American adults, asked about two statements that capture key parts of replacement theory — that there’s an effort to deliberately replace native-born Americans with immigrants for political reasons and that native-born Americans are losing economic and political clout in the U.S.
The survey found that about 1 in 3 Americans agreed that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” About 1 in 7 Americans said they “strongly” agree with that.
Late Saturday, Gendron stood in a Buffalo city courtroom, wearing a white paper gown with his hands shackled, as he was charged with one count of first-degree murder.
His court-appointed lawyer pleaded not guilty.
While Gendron probably wanted the public to focus on white genocide after the shooting, Hayden of the SPLC said they should instead focus on the rich donors who sought to profit from radicalizing Gendron and other young men.
“There are very wealthy people in this country who are seeking to keep this radicalization material humming because it benefits them,” Hayden said. “The more chaotic the country is, the more the rich can work for themselves.”
*Jarvie reported from Atlanta and Hennessy-Fiske from Houston. Times staff writer Richard Winton in Los Angeles and senior editor David Lauter in Washington contributed to this report.*
Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) and Chantal Delsol (b. 1947) are both prominent French philosophers who are very public about their Roman Catholicism. This alone would put them, in the minds of many of their fellow citizens, into “conservative” political and cultural camps, though the truth is considerably more complicated. This past year saw the appearance in English translation of Marion’s 2017 book, [*A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo48117802.html), and the publication of Delsol’s *La Fin de la Chrétienté*. Both of these short works grapple with the role of the Church in a dechristianized culture; both show the complex negotiations required to steer between what Marion calls the “twin and rival disasters” of integralism, which seeks to establish a Christian social order, and progressivism, which risks letting any distinctively Christian identity evaporate.
Religion has, of course, played a very different role in modern, highly secular France than it has in the United States (which Delsol calls a *pays biblico-revolutionnaire*—a biblical-revolutionary land), but the differences may not be as great as is sometimes claimed. As shown by the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec in the 1960s, and by more recent cultural changes in Ireland, the secularization of seemingly robust religious cultures can happen very quickly, and there is reason to think that our own country is undergoing just such a shift. So Marion and Delsol’s books can help us contemplate our own likely more secular future.
Jean-Luc Marion first came to the attention of English-speaking readers three decades ago with the publication in translation of *God Without Being*. This work of philosophical theology embraced the postmodern critique of “onto-theology” while drawing some surprising conclusions from that critique, including a robust defense of that seemingly most ontological of theological doctrines: transubstantiation. Because of its sometimes counterintuitive intellectual moves and its postmodern Heideggerian idiolect, this book helped secure Marion’s reputation as a challenging and highly speculative thinker. But Marion is also a practicing Catholic who cares passionately about the place of the Church in the postmodern world. In *A Brief Apology* he offers what he characterizes as an exercise in practical reasoning in an interrogative mode, pursuing the question of the role Catholics can and should play in French society. (Like Delsol, he makes only passing reference to non-Catholic Christians.)
Marion argues that the situation in France, and the West in general, is so dire that in order to avoid complete societal dissolution, “we must make an appeal to all the resources and all the strengths. Even the Catholic ones.” He chooses to characterize this situation as “decadence,” rather than “crisis.” This decadence is in fact “a crisis of crisis,” by which he means something like what Nietzsche meant by modern nihilism in his *Twilight of the Idols*: “‘I do not know where I am or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,’—sighs the modern man.” This also echoes the critique of modernity made over half a century ago by Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of Marion’s intellectual mentors, in *The Moment of Christian Witness*. It is precisely by the infinite deferral of the moment of crisis that the modern world defeats the Gospel, since the Gospel is a call to crisis that demands a decision. The modern allergy to crisis undermines not only Catholicism but also Western society itself. “We are not falling into the abyss, we are suffering from a stagnant decadence.”
Marion employs Augustine’s critique of Rome as a republic that failed to embody true justice, which requires worship of the true God. Marion argues that because divine grace gives Christians access to justice, “they alone can uphold, always only partially, but always effectively, earthly cities to which they fundamentally do not belong.” It is precisely the “outsider” status of Christians in society that allows them to press beyond narrow national interests to true justice and communion. The French Republic’s motto—*liberté, égalité, fraternité*—is realizable only if there is a universal paternity that unites all people: “The only Father conceivable who can ensure just and actual brotherhood, because it ensures union in communion, is found in heaven; only from there can it come to earth.” Marion quickly notes that the Republic, being a secular state, obviously cannot incorporate this into its motto, much less into its constitution, yet “Catholics can witness to this paternity in a society of orphans.”
**Given the strong connection he draws** between Christianity and true justice, Marion’s embrace of the secularity (*laïcité*) of the French Republic might seem surprising. This embrace distances him from integralism and its arguments in favor of a Christian political order, which he dismisses as “an illusion.” But he does it also for positive theological reasons, invoking thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Charles Taylor to argue that first Judaism and then Christianity “desacralize” the world, and worldly politics along with it. His exposition and defense of *laïcité* depend upon a dual use of this term: on the one hand, it can be a neutral word for the secular sphere’s renunciation of competence in religious matters; on the other, it can mean an aggressively secular anti-religion. The more neutral sense of the term simply identifies a realm distinct from the sacred, part of the structure of difference that is integral to the providential order of the world. *Laïcité* in the negative sense is precisely the violation of this structure of difference, an overstepping of the profane into the realm of the sacred, the former banishing and replacing the latter. Marion writes that this sort of *laïcité* could become “a fourth monotheism, like the first monotheism without God, the most abstract and therefore the most dangerous.”
In defending a positive notion of *läicité*, Marion appeals to Pascal’s distinction between the orders of bodies, minds, and charity to argue for the incommensurability of these three orders and for the primacy of the order of charity. This distinction “allows us to identify the neutrality of the state with the first order”—i.e. the state’s proper sphere of concern is the bodily acts of its citizens—“and to validate its *positive* powerlessness to see (and, what is more, to judge) the order of mind (freedom of thought, research, etc.) and above all the order of charity (freedom of conscience, of belief and unbelief, or ‘religion’ and of change of religion).” True *laïcité* requires that the state embrace its blindness and incompetence with regard to religious belief. Marion draws from Pascal here, but an American might be forgiven for hearing echoes of John Courtney Murray.
When Marion turns to the positive contribution the Church can make to society, he points again to the “outsider” or “otherworldly” status of Christians: “They make the world less unlivable, because their aim is not to set themselves up in it in perpetuity, but to begin to live in the world according to another logic, and in fact they already belong to another world.” The Christian orientation toward another logic, another world, and ultimately to a transcendent Other, lies at the heart of Marion’s account of what Christianity offers to the postmodern West. He sees the triumph of the market in the West as a form of practical nihilism that obliterates difference by reducing everything to its economic value: “The economy rests on a possibility of abstraction, which reduces each and every thing to money, and thus establishes equivalence between things that in reality have nothing in common; whence the possibility of universal exchange.” Our mania to put a price tag on everything obliterates difference, reducing it to a monetary sameness in which things are distinguished not qualitatively but quantitatively. Such a reduction destroys our capacity to apprehend a good that is qualitatively other.
This is the societal manifestation of Nietzsche’s will-to-power, the will that wills no good except its own increase. Such a will, Marion writes, makes a person “a slave of the worst of masters, himself,” and to be liberated from this bondage involves “attaining and setting up a thing for a good, a thing in itself, which is a thing outside of me.” This is precisely what Christianity offers: “He alone tears himself from nihilism who, in imitating Christ, succeeds in not willing his own will (to will), in order to will *elsewhere* and *from elsewhere.*” Such a good can become the common good of a society because, while irreducibly other in its transcendence over the world, it is not abstract in the way monetary value is; rather, it is concretely “accomplished in the Trinity and manifested in a trinitarian manner by Christ.” This offers “a political model that is at base non-political…a community that aims at communion, because in fact it comes from communion.”
The appeal to the life of the Trinity and the life of God incarnate provides an opening for Marion to conclude his *Brief**Apology* with a discussion of the phenomenon of the gift, a theme he has explored in other works. Rejecting the model of “gift-exchange,” which links giving and getting, Marion sees gift as following “the logic of erotic phenomena”: “It creates the eventual conditions of a gift in return, but does not depend on the reality of the return on investment, or expect it.” This erotic logic helps address the issue of the exercise of power by Christians. Because the gift is given without expectation of return, the Catholic citizen can, like Christ himself, offer to the political community his or her gift of witness to true communion without demanding political power either as a precondition or an expected award.
**Unlike Marion, Chantal Delsol is a thinker already known for her political philosophy** and *[La Fin de la Chrétienté](https://www.editionsducerf.fr/librairie/livre/19337/la-fin-de-la-chretiente)* (“The End of Christendom”) continues an already well-developed line of inquiry. Her approach, influenced by her teacher Julien Freund and his appropriation of the thought of Max Weber, is marked by a philosophical anthropology that acknowledges the social and historical construction of human identity without totally abandoning the idea of human nature. In this sense, her project is not unlike that of Alasdair MacIntyre. It leads her to pay close attention to the play of historical contingencies in such notions as human dignity. Rather than a static identity, human nature is a dynamic, evolving reality—indeed, if anything is “essential” to our nature it is our ceaseless desire to exceed that nature. As she writes memorably of the human person in her book, *Qu’est-ce que l’homme?* (“What Is a Human Being?”): “Rooted, he wants to be emancipated from his roots. Put another way, he seeks an inaccessible dwelling place through a succession of temporary way stations.” The result is an Augustinian anthropology of the “restless heart” inflected by postmodern historical consciousness. All of this informs her account of the fate of Christianity in the contemporary West.
English speakers might be misled by the title of *La Fin de la Chrétienté*. The term *Chréienté* refers not to what we would call “Christianity,” understood as a community of belief and practice (what the French call *christienisme*), but rather to the socio-political formation that we refer to as “Christendom.” Delsol describes this as “the civilization inspired, ordered, guided by the Church,” which endured for sixteen centuries, beginning with Theodosius’s victory in the Battle of the Frigid River in 394 AD, but which is now in its death throes. Delsol’s book might be thought of as a preemptive autopsy, comparing a dying Christendom with the death of pagan civilization in the late ancient world—a death brought about by Christendom itself.
Delsol begins by examining how a Church that so resolutely resisted modernity for two centuries in the name of Christian civilization has since the 1960s come to embrace such modern values as religious freedom—values utterly at odds with Christendom. She offers an analysis of early twentieth-century fascism and corporatism as integralist attempts to save Christendom that “proved to be worse than the disease.” Animated by a utopian nostalgia that proved to be merely the mirror image of modernity’s utopian futurism, these sorts of movements fell prey to those, such as Charles Maurras, who wanted Christendom but couldn’t care less about Christianity itself. In the end, Delsol argues, such movements proved to be nothing but “the convulsions of a dying Christendom.”
While both Marion and Delsol see integralism as a doomed effort to resuscitate Christendom, Delsol is less confident than Marion that Christendom can be replaced by a benign form of *laïcité*, in part because she is generally skeptical that any society can in fact be secular. Secularity is a fantasy indulged in by intellectuals, but for ordinary people, “for whom common sense whispers that there are mysteries behind the door,” religion of some sort is unavoidable. Our present moment, she argues, is not one of secularization but of revolution “in the strict sense of a cyclical return.” Ancient paganism is reborn, albeit in new forms marked by the sixteen intervening centuries of Christendom. This revolution involves a kind of Nietzschean transvaluation both in morals (what she calls “the normative inversion”) and in worldview (“the ontological inversion”). Delsol tries to retain a certain analytic detachment in describing these inversions of prior moral norms, casting herself as an observer of this moment of historical transition rather than as a partisan. Still, she insists on the significance of this inversion. She believes that the mores of a society form the basic architecture of its existence, a structure more stable than codified laws, shaping not only the actions of those who belong to it but also their feelings and habits. As any parent will recognize (Delsol is the mother of six), “children are always educated by their times more than by their parents.”
**To shed light on our own times**, Delsol looks back to the birth of Christendom, the last great inversion of norms in the West. She insists on two claims that might seem contradictory at first: the advent of Christendom was a radical break with the pagan past, and it was also unthinkable without that past as the basis on which it built. Christians constructed their civilization using elements of pagan culture, in particular Stoic morality, though now “democratized” and reframed within a new system of beliefs that transformed what was appropriated. Like Marion, Delsol sees “otherness” as a key to the innovation of Christianity. In contrast to the profoundly unified religious world of the Romans, in which the gods and humanity were fellow citizens of the cosmos, Christianity “introduced a dualism between the temporal and the spiritual, the here-and-now and the beyond, human beings and God.” The advent of Christendom brought a sharp reversal of societal attitudes regarding divorce, abortion, infanticide, suicide, and homosexuality. Delsol evinces a keen sympathy for those pagan Romans, conservators of traditional values, who felt that with the advent of Christendom they had entered “an intellectual and spiritual world torn apart,” and she shows genuine admiration for those who continued to battle in the face of what was clearly inevitable defeat.
So too in our own day the partisans of Christendom fight in service of what is manifestly a lost cause. Delsol points to shifts in both laws and popular attitudes toward divorce, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Though there are pockets of resistance to these developments (particularly, she notes, in the United States), the path of this arc is clear: “Humanitarianism, the morality of today, is a morality entirely oriented toward the well-being of the individual, without any vision of the human person \[*vision anthropologique*\].” What we see is an “inversion of the inversion,” an undoing of the revolution of the fourth century that turned the ideals of Christianity into socially enforced norms. Some would say that this is the result of our progressive realization of the inviolability of individual conscience with regard to ultimate questions, but Delsol resists narratives of progress: “In each era, ‘progress’ consists simply in reconciling realities (laws, customs, mores) with diffuse and sometimes as yet unexpressed beliefs that evolve in silence.”
This suggests that human beings are not simply behavers, but also believers. The moral norms of the ancient world changed because the beliefs of Christianity supplanted those of paganism, making long-accepted pagan practices suddenly appear odious. Delsol quotes Tacitus: “\[Christians\] hold profane all that we hold as sacred and, on the other hand, permit all that we hold to be abominable.” Like Marion, Delsol ascribes to Judaism and Christianity a key role in de-sacralizing the world. The dualism of Christianity, with its transcendent God standing over and against the world He created, replaced the “cosmotheism” of antiquity, which saw the cosmos itself as saturated with divinity. Or, more precisely, monotheism was layered on top of cosmotheism, a “secondary religion” covering over (but just barely) the “primary religion” of humanity, which “arises, so to speak, on its own, proliferates without fertilizer, and instantly occupies and reoccupies a place as soon as it is free.” This reoccupation of the space vacated by Christendom is what we face today. Christianity has been replaced not by atheism and secularity, as the Enlightenment *philosophes* foretold, but by a religion “more primitive and more rustic.”
Today this primitive and rustic cosmotheism takes various forms, perhaps most powerfully in the emergence of environmentalism as a kind of popular religion. Nietzsche was right in pointing to the “otherworldliness” of Christianity as a repudiation of the ancient world, and the contemporary repudiation of Christendom is fueled by a desire to focus again on this world as our true home. “For the monotheist, this world is only a temporary lodging. For the cosmotheist it is a dwelling. The postmodern spirit is tired of living in a lodging…. It wants to be reintegrated into the world as a full citizen, and not as a ‘resident alien.’”
Delsol notes the numerous writers who have described modernity as parasitic on Christianity, but she prefers to speak of modernity as a “palimpsest” written over the Christian text, just as Christianity was written over the text of antiquity. This is always the way that human societies work: “Using all the possible materials” from the past “but depriving them of their meaning in order to reinvent them for the benefit of a new epoch.” Just as Christendom replaced paganism, a religion founded on mythos, with one that claimed to be founded on truth—and persecuted those who denied that truth—so now, in our postmodern moment, “truth” has once again been eclipsed by mythos. Yet this new mythos is ineradicably marked by the Christian appeal to “truth,” for it does not breed tolerance, as the myths of antiquity did, but retains the universalism of the Christendom that it has overwritten. For Delsol, the “woke” have “taken over the concept of dogmatic truth, and excluded their adversaries from public life, just as the Church had excommunicated in times past.” The fate of the West is neither nihilism nor ancient pagan religion, but humanitarianism, “the evangelical virtues…recycled to become a kind of common morality.” But, Delsol asks, “what will become of principles that can no longer permanently replenish themselves, their source having been banished?” We are left with what Delsol calls, invoking Flannery O’Connor’s *Wise Blood*, “the Church without Christ,” and one suspects that Delsol would agree with O’Connor in *A Memoir of Mary Ann* that, in the absence of faith, “we govern by…a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”
Blame for this outcome can be laid at the feet of Christendom itself: “In its pretention to establish itself as a civilization, Christianity ended up producing a monstrous avatar that is at the same time its alter-ego and its mortal enemy.” But, Delsol reminds us, Christendom is not Christianity, and the demise of the former is not the demise of the latter. She is inclined to cast a jaundiced eye at excessive Christian breast-beating over the past, “which can resemble masochism.” We rightly judge aspects of Christendom to have been distortions of the Gospel, but Delsol, the good historicist, sees little point in condemning those in the past who did not have the benefit of our hindsight. Delsol comes neither to praise nor to condemn Christendom, but to bury it.
She is concerned, however, that in their reasonable fear of repeating the errors of Christendom, Christians will end up muting their distinctive voice. Late in the book, she shifts from the descriptive to the prescriptive: “To dialogue is not to dissolve oneself in the theses of the adversary, and one does not need to cease to exist in order to be tolerant—in fact, the opposite is the case.” This is not the integralist call for a return to Christendom. It is, as Delsol puts it, a call to “a spiritual revolution,” which by worldly standards might look like defeat. Christians must form their children “to carry themselves like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: resigned, but also able to walk toward the infinite.” For Delsol, as for Marion, the category of “witness” is key. Christians without Christendom must take up the role of witnesses rather than rulers, and learn the virtues characteristic of a minority: “Equanimity, patience, and perseverance.” Christians must take as their model not Sepúlveda, who justified the conversion by conquest of the Americas, but the martyred Trappist monks of Tibhirine, who died because they would not abandon their Muslim neighbors.
**There are clear points of convergence between Marion and Delsol.** They both reject integralism and seek a practical *modus vivendi* within the current socio-political order. Neither thinks that the Kingship of Christ requires Christians to have their hands on the levers of temporal power. And neither wishes to embrace a progressivism that would dilute Christian witness into a vague spirituality. Marion in particular is resolutely Christo-centric in his approach: “In order to understand Catholics, it is first necessary to figure out what makes them tick: Christ.” This is especially the case when it comes to determining the success or failure of the Church: “\[Christ\] never guaranteed it would become a majority, or dominant in the world: he only asked it to pass through the same experience of the cross by which he gained the Resurrection.” It is through witness, not through coercion, that the Church engages the world and seeks to change it. Marion and Delsol are “conservative” primarily in the sense that they seek to conserve the centrality of Christ in the Church’s witness, and to do this in continuity with the saints of the past.
But there are also important differences between the two. Delsol’s tone is more combative than Marion’s. This is partly a difference of intellectual style—between a philosopher-theologian who typically operates in a speculative and abstract mode and a philosopher-sociologist who mucks around in the messiness of history. But there is also a substantive difference. Marion still operates within Jacques Maritain’s “New Christendom” model, in which the Church’s public role is to provide the state with the values it needs to sustain what Maritain called “the democratic secular faith.” That faith was, if not Christian, at least “Christianly inspired,” and it formed a people that “at least recognized the value and sensibleness of the Christian conception of freedom, social progress, and the political establishment.” Marion seems confident that “Christians furnish society with its best citizens from the point of view even of the interests of the city of men, because their disinterestedness toward earthly power makes them honest workers who are efficient and reliable in community life.”
Delsol explicitly rejects Maritain’s New Christendom model, calling it one of “the last illusions” of the postwar era. This is in keeping with her rejection of the idea that modernity is secular, even in Marion’s benign sense of *laïcité*. Maritain and Marion’s vision of the Church supplying the modern nation with something it lacks is at odds with Delsol’s claim that contemporary society in fact possesses its own moral norms and belief system: neo-pagan cosmotheism. If she is right, then there are no gaps for Christian beliefs and values to fill; the space they would occupy is already filled with alternative beliefs and values. Marion’s *A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment* echoes the title of Richard John Neuhaus’s 1987 book *The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World*. Both of these books see the Church as serving a vital social role within a religiously neutral state. In light of this agreement, it is tempting to cast Delsol in the role of Neuhaus’s friend Stanley Hauerwas, the contrarian insisting on the ineradicable conflict between Church and world, and suggesting that “Catholic moments” may simply be nostalgia for the halls of power. In fact, immediately after her criticism of Maritain, Delsol invokes Hauerwas’s student, William Cavanaugh, as offering an alternative approach, one that focuses on the Church as what Pope Francis has called “a field hospital,” present not to provide values to a secular world, but to bind up its wounds.
Finally, we might note how Marion and Delsol address the topic that has been haunting the Church for the past two decades: the sex-abuse crisis. One would expect the counter-witness of this scandal to be of particular concern to thinkers who give primacy to “witness” as the Church’s mode of engagement with the world. But Marion mentions pedophilia only in a brief footnote largely dedicated to pointing out the presence of pedophiles in other communities and organizations. To be fair, his book came out in France several years before the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church issued its scathing report on sexual abuse in the French Church. But something Marion *does* say makes one wonder if his silence on this issue is entirely accidental. At the outset of the book he notes, “Only the saints speak properly of God and are qualified to critique the Church and Catholics.” He then goes on to write a few pages later that “the believer who is serious and practicing the faith *forgets* to occupy himself with the reform of ecclesiastical institutions.” Marion is undoubtedly correct to warn Catholics away from an obsession with ecclesiastic politics and toward focusing on the heart of the Gospel. But this still leaves the question of how reform is possible in a Church with few saints and a hierarchy with a poor track record of policing itself. Over the past few decades, ordinary, non-saintly Catholics—and often, alas, ex-Catholics—played a key role in holding the Church accountable. An idealized ecclesiology that seems to ignore this fact is hardly adequate to our moment.
Delsol, unsurprisingly, has little tendency to idealize the Church. Though the Independent Commission’s report had not yet been issued when she wrote her book, it was clearly on the horizon, and she does address the scandal in a few passages. She notes that pedophilia, now criminalized, had once been considered by the Church and society at large “a lesser evil that one bore in order to safeguard families and institutions.” She repeats this point later, noting that what was seen as a relatively minor misstep at one point in time—“collateral damage”—became, at a later point in time, a crime against humanity. All of this fits with her historicist account of moral norms and her tendency, when writing in her analytic mode, of eschewing moral judgements on the past, which had its own very different norms.
But Delsol is also able to step out of that analytic mode and speak more normatively as a member of the Catholic faithful, and here her judgments are sharper. She sees the sex-abuse catastrophe as evidence of the distorting effects Christendom had on Christian faith. “The Church behaves like a governing and dominating institution, believing that everything that is forbidden to others is permitted for it.” Powerful cultural institutions often convince themselves that, in light of their important societal role, they cannot afford the luxury of truth-telling. By the grace of providence and the vicissitudes of history, the Church, freed from Christendom, is now in a better position to witness to the truth, even if it is the truth of her own failures.
Both of these brief books are rich in resources for reflection. As the Church in the United States confronts the reality of accelerating disaffiliation among young people, the experience of the Church in France, which has long grappled with dechristianization, acquires greater relevance. Marion and Delsol help us see how Catholics in an increasingly post-Christian society might bear witness to their faith without bitterness or nostalgia—and perhaps even with joy.
On Saturday, in the parking lot of a neighborhood grocery store, an eighteen-year-old armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, the N-word emblazoned on its front sight, began shooting. Shots cracked in the air, piercing through an unusually warm eighty-degree spring afternoon in Buffalo, New York. The teen-ager, who was later identified by the police, donned military-esque camouflage, was draped in body armor, and wore a camera to capture his bloody rampage. When the shooting stopped, thirteen people had been hit, ten of them killed. Eleven of those shot were Black. The gunman was captured by the police when he left the grocery store, and, by late Saturday night, he was arraigned on charges of first-degree murder.
The shooter is alleged to have posted a hundred-and-eighty-page “manifesto” avowing white-supremacist beliefs. In the hate-filled text, he denounced immigrants and Black people as “replacers” of white people. [The notion that white people are being replaced](https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/making-sense-of-the-racist-mass-shooting-in-buffalo) has recently moved from the fringe of far-right politics to mainstream Republican Party politics. The Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has helped to popularize the ideology, and it has dovetailed seamlessly with the rhetoric of the Republican Party, which has insisted on describing the arrival of migrants at the southern border—seeking entry into the U.S. as asylum seekers—as an “invasion.”
The shooter rationalized his vicious attack by trying to fit it into this grand, esoteric conspiracy of white replacement through immigration. His manifesto, by contrast, is filled with crudely racist memes about Black Americans. In fact, for all his denunciation of “replacers” in the manifesto, an archive of his posts on the messaging platform Discord, from the past six months, barely mentions immigrants. Instead, he writes prolifically and disparagingly about Black people, whom he incessantly describes with racial slurs. In a search of archived posts beginning in 2021, the word “immigrant” appears twelve times, “replacement” eighteen times, “replacer” twenty-two times, but “blacks” and the N-word each appear a hundred times.
The manifesto seems intended to confer a sense of intellectual sophistication on his savage act. But the shooter’s Discord posts are full of sophomoric, even banal stereotypes about Black people—as genetically inferior, as predisposed to crime. The shooter claims inspiration from the white supremacist who murdered fifty-one worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. The Christchurch shooter also recorded his massacre and left a manifesto. But, for all of the Buffalo shooter’s professed inspiration from [the Christchurch massacre](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-new-zealand-shooting-and-the-great-man-theory-of-misery), his actions seem to flow primarily from homegrown resentments. He searched by Zip Code for the largest Black population close to where he lived, in order to “kill as many blacks as possible.” His research led him to a grocery store, on the city’s East Side, along the Jefferson Avenue commercial corridor, running through the heart of Black Buffalo.
Once startling and noteworthy, mass shootings have melded into the background of life in the U.S. Since January, there have been almost two hundred shootings involving at least four victims shot or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. A recent report published by the C.D.C. showed that, from [2019 to 2020](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7119e1.htm?s_cid=mm7119e1_w), the over-all homicide rate involving a firearm rose by nearly thirty-five per cent. The Buffalo massacre stands out not only because of the number of people killed but because of the political nature of the assault. This must be viewed within the context of the growing normalization of racism and political violence in the U.S. If [Dylann Roof](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/06/inside-the-trial-of-dylann-roof), the white racist who killed nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015, helped to inaugurate the racial grievance at the core of [the Trump Presidency](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-bitter-fruits-of-trumps-white-power-presidency), then the Buffalo shooter’s killing spree may be emblematic of its still rippling effects. Roof, whom the Buffalo shooter acknowledges in his manifesto as a “freedom fighter,” also penned a manifesto full of deranged ideas, linking Black crime with the decline of white life in the U.S.
In his manifesto, the Buffalo shooter writes, “Blacks are the most privileged race in the US and many western countries. But yet they say they are the most oppressed. What other race is given trillions of dollars of White taxpayer money to succeed, but yet fails and asks for more? What other race actively destroys their communities like they do?” The comments do not sound very different from those [made by former President Trump](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trump-elijah-cummings-and-the-definition-of-a-rodent), who tweeted in the summer of 2019, of the late African American congressman Elijah Cummings’s majority-Black Baltimore district, “Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen?” and “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
Trump coddled avowed white supremacists during his Presidency, and his open stoking of racial animus unshackled the Republican Party from norms long held in mainstream politics. One day prior to Roof’s mass murder, Trump announced his candidacy for President in New York City and called Mexican immigrants “rapists.” When white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017, screaming “Jews will not replace us,” [Trump claimed](https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson-sorkin/donald-trump-from-his-tower-rages-at-the-other-side-in-charlottesville) that some of the demagogues were “very fine people.” Before the Christchurch shooter carried out his massacre, in 2019, he hailed Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” The President called the attack “horrible” but downplayed the threat of white nationalism in the same breath. Throughout 2020, as historic protests against racism unfolded, and an election loomed, the Republican Party continued to court its right-wing fringe. Seventeen-year-old [Kyle Rittenhouse](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante) menaced a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin; armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, killed two unarmed men; and overnight became a celebrity within the Republican Party. Trump defended Rittenhouse; Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, also refused to condemn him. Rittenhouse was eventually acquitted of first-degree-homicide charges, last November, and remains a hero on the right. During [the assault on the Capitol](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/among-the-insurrectionists), on January 6, 2021, extremists and the mainstream Republican Party came together in an act of violence intended to overturn the results of the election. This marked a dangerous turning point in U.S. politics, when it became clear that, for the right, anything was on the table when it came to preserving political power.
As the protests of 2020 receded into the background, Republicans went on the offensive. One of Trump’s last initiatives in office was the formation of the 1776 Commission, undertaken as a rebuke to the New York *Times’* 1619 Project. “The crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country,” he said. This has since evolved into a generalized strategy, intended to shift the conversation away from systemic racism, voting rights, and police reform, and toward a fight over critical race theory. As the culture warrior Christopher Rufo, of the Manhattan Institute, [put it](https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory):
> We’ve needed new language for these issues.... “Political correctness” is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore.... It’s much more invasive than mere “correctness,” which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: “cancel culture” is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; “woke” is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. “Critical race theory” is the perfect villain.
When Stephen Findeisen was in college, at Texas A.&M., a friend pitched him a business opportunity. He was vague about the specifics but clear about the potential upside. “It was, like, ‘Don’t you want to be financially free, living on a beach somewhere?’ ” Findeisen, who is twenty-eight, recalled recently. After attending a weekend presentation, Findeisen realized that he was being recruited to join a multilevel-marketing company. “I was, like, What are you talking about? You’re not financially free! You’re here on a Sunday!” He declined the offer, but a couple of his roommates signed up. They also got a subscription to a magazine about personal and professional development. One day, Findeisen came home to find copies of the latest issue on the coffee table. “I remember clearly thinking, We have four copies of *Success* magazine and no one is successful. Something is wrong here.”
Findeisen has been leery of scammers since high school, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. “She was sold a bunch of snake oil, and I think she believed all of it,” he said. She recovered, but Findeisen was left with a distaste for people who market false hope. After graduating with a degree in chemical engineering, he sold houses for a local builder. In his spare time, he started uploading to his YouTube channels, where he put his debunking instincts to work in short videos such as “Corporate Jargon—Lying by Obscurity” and “Is Exercising Worth Your Time?” Initially, subjects included time-management tips and pop-science tropes, but his content really took off when he began critiquing sleazy finance gurus. These days, his channel Coffeezilla has more than a million subscribers, and YouTube is his full-time job.
We live, as many people have noted, in a golden age of con artistry. Much of the attention has focussed on schemes that target women, from [romance scammers](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-worst-boyfriend-on-the-upper-east-side) to multilevel-marketing companies that deploy the language of sisterhood and empowerment to recruit people to sell leggings and [essential oils](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-essential-oils-became-the-cure-for-our-age-of-anxiety). But Findeisen was interested in the self-proclaimed finance gurus who target people like him and his friends from college—young men adrift in the post-financial-crisis world, distrustful of the traditional financial system but hungry for some kind of edge. In their proprietary courses, the gurus promise, they teach the secret habits of rich people, or the pathway to passive income, or the millionaire mind-set. Watch one YouTube video like this and your sidebar will fill up with suggestions for more: “How I WENT from BROKE to MILLIONAIRE in 90 days!”; “How To MAKE MILLIONS In The Upcoming MARKET CRASH”; “How To Make 6 Figures In Your Twenties.”
Coffeezilla became one of the most prominent dissenting voices. Findeisen’s videos featured fast edits, a digitally rendered Lamborghini, and the lingo of hustle culture, albeit deployed with a raised eyebrow. As Coffeezilla—Findeisen kept his real name under wraps for years, he said, after he was subject to harassment campaigns—he dissected the gurus’ tricks: the countdown timers they used to create an illusion of scarcity, their incessant upsells. In one of his most popular videos, he spends an hour interviewing Garrett, a twentysomething man who quit his teaching job to take self-marketing courses from a flashy Canadian named Dan Lok. As he draws out the story of Garrett’s increasingly expensive immersion in this world, Findeisen’s expression shifts from mirth to bafflement to genuine anger.
“When I interviewed Garrett, I thought this was an absolute travesty,” Findeisen told me. “And then, when I discovered crypto for the first time, it was, like, ‘Oh, that guy lost, like, five hundred thousand on Tuesday,’ ” he said. “Crypto scams are like discovering fentanyl when you’ve been used to Oxy. It’s a hundred times more powerful, and way worse. And there were just not that many people talking about it.” Findeisen is an inveterate skeptic. “I always want to go where people aren’t going,” he said. “I think, if I was seeing only negative crypto stuff, I’d start a pro-crypto channel. But I’m seeing the opposite.” (Dan Lok’s team said that he “refutes all claims and allegations made against him by ‘Garrett’ on Coffeezilla.”)
Last summer, as bitcoin’s valuation approached all-time highs and the world was going crazy for [non-fungible tokens](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-beeple-crashed-the-art-world), Findeisen spent months unspooling the story of Save the Kids, a [cryptocurrency](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/cryptocurrency) project promoted by a handful of high-profile influencers, some of whom were affiliated with FaZe Clan, the wildly popular e-sports collective. Findeisen’s investigation zeroed in on one of the influencers, Frazier Kay, who promoted the Save the Kids crypto token to his followers, touting it as an investment with a vaguely defined charitable component that would “help children across the world.” Soon after the project launched, the token’s value plummeted. Findeisen heard that a crucial piece of code, meant to protect the project against pump-and-dump schemes, had been changed before the launch. (It is unclear who ordered that change.)
In a series of videos, Findeisen pieced together clues, including D.M.s, interviews with whistle-blowers, leaked recordings, and photographs sent by an anonymous source. He tracked funds as they moved in and out of various digital wallets. Wearing suspenders and a crisp white shirt, Findeisen sat in front of what he calls his conspiracy board—a digital rendering of a bulletin board displaying the key players connected by a maze of threads—and made the case that Kay had a pattern of involvement in questionable crypto deals. The Save the Kids series marked Findeisen’s transition from a snarky YouTube critic to something more akin to an investigative journalist. After an internal investigation, FaZe Clan terminated Kay. The collective released a statement saying that it “had absolutely no involvement with our members’ activity in the cryptocurrency space, and we strongly condemn their recent behaviour.” In [a tweet](https://twitter.com/FrazierKay/status/1409221680178909184) posted after Findeisen’s initial investigation, Kay wrote, “I want you all to know that I had no ill intent promoting any crypto alt coins. I honestly & naively thought we all had a chance to win which just isn’t the case. I didn’t vet any of this with my team at FaZe and I now know I should have.” Kay didn’t respond to a request for comment from *The New Yorker*, but, in a message to Coffeezilla, he said that he didn’t profit from the Save the Kids crypto token and explained that the “purpose of the project is charitable giving. It’s in that spirit and with that intent that I was involved and put capital into it.” In a subsequent video, Kay said that he was “tricked” into participating in the scheme.
When I visited Findeisen this spring, at the tidy, spare town house that he shares with his wife and two dogs, Barney and Nala, he was preoccupied with another big story. (He asked me to not mention the city he lives in, because he’s been doxed before.) This one concerned SafeMoon, a cryptocurrency token purporting to be a “safe” investment vehicle that would nonetheless go “to the moon,” crypto parlance for a dramatic rise in valuation. After its launch, last spring, SafeMoon was briefly everywhere—on a billboard in Times Square, and tweeted about by celebrities including Diplo and Jake Paul. (Diplo’s team said that the tweet “was a joke.” Jake Paul’s team didn’t respond to a request for comment.) “You have to understand how big it was,” Findeisen told me. “It had a four-billion-dollar market cap within a few months of launching.” Months later, though, SafeMoon had lost a significant percentage of its value. Findeisen made it his mission to understand how that happened, whether it involved anything illegal, and who profited along the way.
The day that I visited, Findeisen was releasing a video about Ben Phillips, a former member of SafeMoon’s marketing team. Phillips is a YouTuber whose videos—primarily of pranks he pulls on his half brother (“VIBRATING pants on my bro in PUBLIC \*\*PRANK!\*\*”; “I superglued beer goggles to my bro! PRANK!”)—have more than a billion views. In April, 2021, in [a now deleted tweet](https://web.archive.org/web/20210412092418/https://twitter.com/BenPhillipsUK/status/1381538558226337793), Phillips encouraged his followers to buy him something from Starbucks, linking to what he said was his crypto wallet. Findeisen tracked various wallets’ transactions in the subsequent eight months, and found that, although in public Phillips promoted SafeMoon, in private he appeared to be selling it. (Phillips didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.) Findeisen told me that people think their crypto-wallet transactions are anonymous, but that this is not the case. If you can figure out whom a wallet belongs to, the transactions are easy enough to trace. “You don’t need a subpoena—you can just be some random guy in Texas figuring it out,” he said.
Findeisen works in front of a green screen, at a desk crowded with two monitors, a microphone, and a sound mixer. A whiteboard propped against the wall was full of scrawled affirmations: “story is king”; “trust the process.” The shady behavior that Findeisen features on his channel is often abstruse to the point of near-unintelligibility; to make it visually engaging, he works with a graphic designer who creates animations that illustrate funds flowing between different wallets, or money being siphoned out of a liquidity pool. The designer lives in [Ukraine](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/ukraine). When Findeisen was on a call with him recently, they were interrupted by air-raid sirens.
“This video has taken longer than I expected,” he said. “I don’t like to upload too late in the afternoon—this is kind of pushing it. But I’ve been putting off this video way too long.” He typed and erased several potential titles. “‘I caught this YouTuber pumping and dumping’—do people understand what that means?” he asked. He worried that “pumping and dumping” wasn’t pithy enough to capture a YouTube audience. “‘Pump and dumping’—does that work?” he said. “And do you include the amount?” (He ended up going with “I Caught This Youtuber Scamming for $12,000,000.”)
As he tweeted a thread promoting the video, Findeisen explained that he has taken to reaching out to the subjects of his videos for comment. Most often they decline to comment; sometimes they deny his accusations; more commonly they make excuses. “They all see themselves as, like, the fifth-worst guy,” he said.
I recognized in Findeisen the antsy feeling of sitting in your chair after having posted something big, waiting impatiently for the world to change. He scrolled quickly through the message requests in his Twitter in-box. One was from someone purporting to have information about an employee at a popular cryptocurrency exchange who was allegedly running a pump-and-dump scheme. Findeisen asked for more information. He clicked back to YouTube; his new video already had nearly two thousand views. In the next two weeks, Findeisen released several more videos unspooling the SafeMoon saga. Combined, they have more than two and a half million views.
Some of Findeisen’s viewers are dismayed to learn that he actually owns some bitcoin. “I try not to be too negative about crypto,” he told me. “I think about how we can shape it into something better—more like the future that the people making it *say* they want. In that way, we’re on the same side.”
So far, there have been relatively few prosecutions in the world of crypto. “The lesson, if you’re a cynical person, is to commit fraud on the blockchain,” Findeisen told me. I asked him whether he considered his videos to be in the genre of white-collar true crime. “I guess I always think of true crime as: the guy gets locked up at the end,” he said. “And a lot of my stories feel incomplete. Because the reporting happens, right? And then they just continue doing what they do.”
To keep from being overtaken by cynicism, Findeisen has been allowing himself a bit more creative leeway in his videos. He and his designer have built a number of digital sets that they use as backdrops, or for interstitial scenes: a detective’s office; an Old West-style bar with a robot bartender; a dystopian, near-future cityscape. “The Coffeezilla Cinematic Universe,” Findeisen jokingly called it. The C.C.U. is a world in which the hyper-financialized logic of the cryptosphere has overtaken reality. The video about Ben Phillips ends with Coffeezilla and the robot bartender on a rooftop. They gaze out at a city of great wealth and great poverty, lit up by neon signs: “Timmy Needs Chemo”; “Get Rich Now, Loser!” When I watched the video later, on YouTube, it was interrupted by an ad, for a company urging me to invest in crypto. “Fly me to the moon,” a singer crooned, as a square-jawed man lifted off the ground and floated upward, borne aloft by the magic of it all.
# How Hollywood’s Blockbuster Golden Boys Went Weird
Hollywood has developed a leading man problem. And not just because the archetype—at least that singular, dashing, charismatic man we came to know on the silver screen—seems to have all but disappeared. The Chrises (Hemsworth, Pratt, Pine, Evans) of the world are just fine, but they work more as plug-and-play movie stars. As audiences have shifted mostly from multiplexes to streaming, today’s male leads are no longer larger than life, and they just don’t hold the same sway over the movie industry and wider culture that big-time blockbuster heroes did as recently as 10 years ago.
And it was the final generation of these Hollywood leading men, whose career peaks came at the turn of the millennium, that truly defined that type. Their outsized power and influence seemed to make them untouchable, especially to the Gen-Xers and older millennials who filled movie theaters back when these stars’ careers felt unstoppable. Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., and Johnny Depp—all in their 50s or early 60s today—consistently put butts in seats while starring in unique and (mostly) non-comic-book-based intellectual properties. Smith’s charm, from his start as a goofy-cool rapper and on a hit sitcom to an action star is undeniable; Cruise was magnetic, the model of both white American handsomeness and competence; Murphy’s teeth-baring standup translated perfectly into credible action-comedy roles; Downey, a truly talented young thespian, combined humor and pathos—often in the same scene; Depp’s beauty and cool belied darkly chameleonic energy that ushered some twisted and brilliant material to the mainstream.
Yes, these actors are still Hollywood giants, and all five are still banking checks from the various franchises that cemented their careers: Smith in *Bad Boys 4* (though that production is on [pause](https://view.email.hollywoodreporter.com/?qs=717632777c77b6910bbefcd7ced908efc3e38000f8bdc4a818e52086e286b00c43d7008aedbca6b14d9329cb7d8169b53761a9144797e246bad84156a09ca6207563dcf9f3eaee11) after The Slap); Cruise as the star and producer of the perpetually relevant *Mission: Impossible* franchise (the seventh film is set for release next year); Murphy returning as Axel Foley in *Beverly Hills Cop 4*; Downey rounding out his *Sherlock Holmes* trilogy; and Depp… well, actually, he’s been largely excommunicated by Hollywood—but more on that later.
These actors’ imperial phases are decidedly behind them—with the exception of Cruise, who may pull off a magic trick in reviving his Navy aviator for *Top Gun: Maverick* on May 27—and their projects just don’t afford them the outsized status that they once did. Meanwhile, reality has caught up with these men and exposed their not-so-nice sides. Bluntly, years and decades at the top may have led them to go a little bit cuckoo. Here’s a look back at how these five Hollywood golden boys became the eccentric men we know today.
**Highlight:** Parlaying his boundless lovability on *The**Fresh Prince of Bel-Air* into a reign as the movie star to beat after 1996’s smash hit *Independence Day* brought in $817 million at the box office.
**Lowlight:** It has to be slapping Chris Rock on stage earlier this year at the Oscars over his dud of a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s bald head resembling Demi Moore’s in *G.I. Jane,* then yelling, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth”—twice—on live TV. That [video of him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8FtuVN48z4) dancing to his own 1997 hit “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” at an Oscars afterparty wasn’t great, either.
**Statement of Defiance:** Still [not apologizing](https://pagesix.com/2022/04/25/will-smith-still-hasnt-apologized-to-chris-rock-for-oscars-slap/) to Rock man-to-man—even as he travels to India for a “spiritual journey” amid the controversy.
Tom Cruise attends as Paramount Pictures presents the Los Angeles Premiere of "Star Trek Into Darkness" at The Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 (Alex J. Berliner/ABImages)
**Highlight:** Starring in the *Mission: Impossible* films while also producing installments of the hit franchise—his dedication behind the camera here goes largely underappreciated. *M:I* has become one of Hollywood’s all-time reliable crowd-pleasers, thanks in no small part to the incredible stunts Cruise performs himself (like literally [hanging from a plane, mid-air](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afS5ks54tms)). Today, the franchise remains as strong as its star’s rippling physique.
**Lowlight:** His notorious 2005 Oprah appearance made that moment of [manic](https://www.today.com/video/10-years-ago-tom-cruise-jumps-oprahs-couch-449205827898) couch-jumping an uncomfortable meme that became one of [YouTube’s first viral hits](https://www.wired.com/story/tom-cruise-viral-video-fallout/). And then [there’s](https://www.businessinsider.com/tom-cruise-dancing-scientology-retreat-video-2011-12) that other [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgMrrf5QzQ) of Cruise thrashing to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” as he and his fellow Scientologists celebrate his birthday aboard a boat, as was seen in HBO’s exposé documentary *Going Clear*.
**Statement of Defiance:** As Covid-19 was killing thousands and putting the country in lockdown**,** [Cruise was berating](https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/tom-cruise-covid-19-rant-1104720/) the production crew of the latest *Mission: Impossible* installment for breaking protocols. “We are not shutting this fucking movie down. Is it understood?,” Cruise was heard [barking at them](https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/tom-cruise-covid-19-rant-1104720/)**.**
Eddie Murphy performs at Madison Square Garden in 1987. (Getty Images)
Getty Images
**Highlight:** An 80s hot streak like no other: *48 Hrs. (*his [stunning feature debut](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3s13jbmrn0))*, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop* (as well as the hit sequel)*,* and *Coming to America*. Murphy basically owned the decade.
**Lowlight:** [Getting caught](https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/9716859/eddie-murphy-comeback-prostitute-fortune/) with a transgender sex worker in 1997 while married to model Nicole Mitchell is just one moment in a string of failed relationships (Murphy has [10 kids by five women](https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/2443917/eddie-murphy-wives-girlfriends-ten-children/), including Spice Girl [Mel B](https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/inside-mel-b-eddie-murphys-22960499)).
**Statement of Defiance:** “Faggots were mad,” he unapologetically said of his homophobic jokes in his 1987 standup film, [*Raw*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQBLzotAn3M). He would later apologize in a 2019 [*New York Times* interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/movies/eddie-murphy.html), conceding that he was “kind of an asshole” during this period.
**Highlight:** After an enviable early career that catapulted him to the A-list by his mid-20s, Downey fell hard, weathering a deeply troubled [period](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/us/robert-downey-jr-is-pardoned-by-california-gov-jerry-brown-for-1996-conviction.html) of drug use that led to him losing his reputation in Hollywood. Then in 2008, a cleaned-up Downey helped launch the biggest franchise of all time, portraying Tony Stark in *Iron Man.* A total of nine Marvel movies now grace his resume and he held the title of Hollywood’s [highest-paid actor](https://variety.com/2015/film/news/robert-downey-jr-highest-paid-actor-world-1201557060/) in 2013, 2014, and 2015—reportedly banking [$75 million](https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/robert-downey-jr-avengers-endgame-salary-1202156978/) for *Avengers: Endgame* alone.
**Lowlight:** Spending [1996](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/us/robert-downey-jr-is-pardoned-by-california-gov-jerry-brown-for-1996-conviction.html) to [2001](https://edition.cnn.com/2001/LAW/07/16/downey.drug.charges/index.html?related) in jail, prison, treatment, and on probation because of his continued heroin and cocaine addiction, which made Downey uninsurable as an actor. “It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth, my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of gunmetal,” he [told](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-06-me-63303-story.html) one judge of his addiction.
Bonus low: Following up his run as Tony Stark/Iron Man with the forgettable big-budget [flop](https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2020/08/15/box-office-robert-downey-jr-dolittle-is-both-one-of-this-years-biggest-bombs-and-biggest-hits/?sh=6291d19f689e), 2020’s *Dolittle,* wasn’t so hot for his career, either.
**Statement of Defiance:** Swiping at Marvel when in 2019 [he told](https://people.com/movies/robert-downey-jr-not-defined-by-what-i-did-with-marvel-iron-man/) *Off Camera*’s Sam Jones of [moving past Iron Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4FQI2BI3hw&t=138s), “I’m not what I did with that studio.”
**Highlight:** Nabbing his first [Oscar nomination](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000136/awards) in 2004 for his unforgettable Keith Richards-as-vaguely-queer-freebooter performance as Jack Sparrow in *Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl* (but really, all the *Pirates* movies in which he appeared are career highlights for Depp).
**Lowlight:** A messy ongoing legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard, who has accused him of sexual assault. Depp is now [suing](https://www.thedailybeast.com/johnny-depp-takes-the-stand-in-dollar50-million-defamation-civil-case-against-amber-heard) her for [$50 million](https://deadline.com/2022/04/johnny-depp-trial-starts-amber-heard-defamation-countersuit-domestic-abuse-1234999738/) in a nasty defamation [trial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWvBDYcWaug) [that’s being](https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/live-updates-johnny-depp-amber-heard-defamation-trial/) viewed live [around the world](https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/johnny-depp-amber-heard-trial-live-updates-and-coverage/). Depp is also [suing](https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/johnny-depp-spent-3m-blast-hunter-s-thompsons-ashes-out-n715231) his former business managers for allegedly mishandling his funds; this has brought a countersuit in which the managers have said he blew his fortune on unnecessary purchases—including $3 million to blast the ashes of his late pal Hunter S. Thompson out of a cannon.
**Statement of Defiance:** “It’s insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine because it was far more,” [Depp told](https://people.com/movies/johnny-depp-managers-claim-spent-30k-wine-insulting-far-more/) [*Rolling Stone*](https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-trouble-with-johnny-depp-666010/) in a 2018 trainwreck of a profile.
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iOS
3 years ago