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when the subject of "why do people believe things that are seriously wrong and harmful" comes up it feels like you kinda hear one of two perspectives:
"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"
or
"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"
and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)
they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)
they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)
they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)
they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)
they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)
they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)
they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)
the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)
you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:
natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)
being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)
random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)
you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up
and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.
i know you're doing your best. we're all doing our best.
It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel in Oct 7, 2023, that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state.
Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following the Oct 7 massacre,“I was scrolling through social media, and I only saw support for Palestine,” she recalls. “People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.”
Then aged 19 and studying biomedical science at the elite Stanford University in northern California, Thomas, an African American, was first introduced to the anti-Israel movement at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where Palestinian flags were flown by some activists. “I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free,” she says.
She subsequently helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of Oct 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians. “I really loved it because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose,” she says of the encampment. “It was like an instant community.”
Besides fellow students, Thomas was encouraged by “faculty members like history professors” who “validated the movement”. “It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide,” says Thomas, who is now 21. “The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.”
‘I was confused by what our mission was’
Thomas grew up in Riverside County, one of the few Republican counties in the otherwise “very liberal California”. That, together with racist abuse at school, influenced her political outlook. “I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right,” she says.
Huge demonstrations took place at universities across the US in the months that followed Oct 7, with protesters confronting the educational institutions with their demands – including to divest from Israel and cut ties with counterpart Israeli institutions.
While the movement was largely peaceful, some demonstrations turned violent and led to clashes with police. “One of our protests got out of hand, and that kind of made me take a step back,” says Thomas.
This was in June 2024, when several militant students broke into the office of Stanford’s president, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. “They spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘Pigs taste best when dead’, ‘Death to America’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Kill cops’,” Thomas recalls.
“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.”
Yet those behind the vandalism “doubled down”, she says, and justified their actions, “even though Jewish students said they felt unsafe”. She explains: “They felt like they couldn’t go to their classes, they were getting harassed and doxxed [having personal information published online] and things like that. Essentially, we completely lost our minds.”
A drastic change of heart
Then, in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. Recently opened in London, the exhibition aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.
Nova exhibition
“Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Something piqued her interest, however, so she decided to go. “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’
“I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.” Three hours later, Thomas emerged feeling “so lost”.
“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people.”
Seeing pictures and footage of the young festival-goers hit home for Thomas. “They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”
One element in particular changed everything – an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to let him know he’d killed 10 Jews. “My heart sank because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”
Months later, Thomas was invited on a trip to Israel organised by a group combatting anti-Semitism on campus. “I knew if I was going to continue to speak on this, I needed to see it for myself,” she says.
During the 10-day trip last March, she met with Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin. “I was shocked at how much diversity I saw – I didn’t even know Israel had black people,” she said.
On the fourth day, the group had to take cover during a missile attack. “Our guide told us to get on the ground, and I put my hands over my neck and prayed. “I thought about the irony of how I’d called for the divestment of the very system I was praying for,” she says. “It [the missile] didn’t care about my politics or what I posted or any of that. I was a target, a body on the ground, and I felt utterly useless.”
Fortunately the missile was intercepted and the trip continued, but the experience left Thomas shaken. She says it made her realise “how cushy and comfortable a life” she had in America, and that she’d not realised the “real consequences” of what she’d been calling for.
‘It felt like being stoned publicly’
Back home, she posted a picture of her trip online – a decision that cost her dearly. “My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.”
Her post opened the floodgates. “I lost every single friend”, while her classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she was doxxed, and received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”
She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”
She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.
The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period is the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.
“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learned from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”
‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’
Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”
But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”
As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.
“I’m not Jewish. I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel,” she says. “We’re seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Having experienced a lot of it in my 20s, I think some of the worst, pettiest, most straight up this-is-just-bullying-you're-passing-off-as-praxis incidences of Queer Infighting endemic to young people can be best understood as attempts to exercise power by people with very little power.
Like you're 22, you're queer, you've just become a Marxist, the scope of World Suck is overwhelming and you have $30 in your bank account. What can you do to feel like you have any power? Well, you can try to get your frenemy cancelled for cosplaying a character from a problematic show. You can write a public callout post over someone's obviously friendly use of a slur you don't think they technically have the right to reclaim. Doing this stuff can make you feel like you have power and your actions have an impact. Unfortunately the impact in question is a negative impact on other marginalized people. But that often takes some maturity and self-reflection to notice.
I'm reminded of this post from 2017. To paraphrase, OP took part in community service via their university and part of that was cleaning the bathrooms at the local homeless community centre, which would frequently get trashed, not because the homeless people using them disrespected the work of the people cleaning them but because they had so little control over other things that happened in their lives, and the bathroom was something they could affect.
This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.
It's not worth it. Don't trash your community bathrooms.
Person who has read a book and maybe taken a college course or listened to a podcast episode: oh yeah I’m a real History buff I know everything about this field
Person who focused on it in undergrad: yea I’m a bit of an expert on that field; it was my major
Person who has done at least some graduate level work on the topic: yeah I specialize in [subsubfield]
Person with over a decade of focused study on the topic, at least partially in an academic setting: here is an in-depth powerpoint highlighting everything I don’t know about my field with footnotes and a bibliographic essay
So I’m going to push back on that. Having ancestors and relatives who lived through those times doesn’t make you an expert on those times; it makes you a recipient of memory from within your in-group.
I am a Holocaust historian, I am Jewish, and I’m part of the 3G survivor community. Judaism is fascinating in terms of memory construction, because our history is deeply intertwined with our liturgy and observance. This leads to many Jewish individuals considering themselves experts on Jewish history, when actually they’re conversant in a very specific, highly curated version of Jewish memory.
As a Holocaust historian, this becomes more acute because people with survivor grandparents assume that having those bonds and receiving their relations’ memories makes them well-versed in those histories. No, it makes them well versed in receiving their grandparent’s memories.
And that’s fine. That’s important. But memories aren’t the same as history. And when we receive our descendants’ personal histories, we are receiving their MEMORIES, shaped inevitably by lack of context, time, and trauma. Or to put it differently, we are receiving their primary source documents.
And that’s important. We need primary sources; without primary sources we would be literally unable to practice history. BUT, the practice of history requires that we interrogate primary sources within all aspects of their context, not accept them at face value.
This can became really messy when you study the history of your own minority identity group. In those circumstances, the experiences of y/our ancestors become a mythology that a large portion of y/our group accepts as fact. But then, when put under the scrutiny of critical historical interrogation, a lot of those agreed upon truths can be exposed as myth, and not fact. And that’s when y/our identity group turns on you.
As a Jew who studies Modern Jewish and Holocaust history, and a 3G Jew who received her grandmother’s memories of growing up in interwar Poland and fleeing from said state in 1939, I have experienced all aspects of this, and it’s weird and frustrating and fascinating. I recommend Zakhor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi for a deep dive on this.
A scathing report released on the Fourth of July says the National Museum of American History downplays the role of the founders while empha
In a broadside posted to its website just as fireworks celebrating America’s 250th birthday were lighting up skies on Saturday, the White House condemned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing it had become a political tool intent on denigrating the American story.
The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.
While the report concludes that the broader Smithsonian Institution — which oversees 21 museums and the National Zoo — “has not met its obligations to the American people,” it places particular blame on the National Museum of American History.
Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report accuses the museum of anti-white bias and of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have shifted the museum’s mission “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
The museum, it says, “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”
The report takes issue with specific exhibits, such as an 1840 statue of George Washington that includes a depiction of Hercules. The work’s accompanying text describes “the perceived courage of the American people.” That language, the report says, “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people.”
But the report’s “main concerns” involve what is not there.
Visitors today, it says, “will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other founding fathers, the Continental Congress, the pilgrims, the Puritans or major moments of the American Revolution.” Instead, it claims, many founders are presented chiefly in terms of their connection to slavery.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Smithsonian, Julissa Marenco, said, “For more than 180 years, the Smithsonian has served the American public with nonpartisan and independent scholarship, and we remain committed to doing so.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The Domestic Policy Council, which wrote the report, is a White House group tasked with developing the president’s domestic agenda and advising him on issues like education and health care. Its leader, Vince Haley, has spearheaded the administration’s commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, including Mr. Trump’s plan to build a 250-foot arch in Washington. Mr. Haley has also been credited with the idea for a patriotic sculpture garden known as the National Garden of American Heroes.
The Smithsonian has long been regarded as independent of the executive branch. But in an effort to have much greater influence on cultural matters in Washington, Mr. Trump has focused on the Smithsonian since March 2025, when he issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
In that order, which calls on Vice President JD Vance to overhaul the Smithsonian with the help of Congress, the president described a “revisionist movement” across the country that “seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
Mr. Trump has since announced that he was dismissing the director of the institution’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” (The Smithsonian did not follow through — publicly insisting it controlled personnel matters — but Ms. Sajet resigned, saying in a statement that her decision served the institution’s best interests.)
The White House also issued an ultimatum to turn over Smithsonian records or face potential budget cuts. In response, the Smithsonian’s secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, reasserted the institution’s independence but said materials had been submitted in an effort to be “transparent and open.”
Some 62 percent of the Smithsonian’s annual $1 billion budget is derived from federal sources, including funds directly appropriated by Congress. The Trump administration proposed cutting the Smithsonian’s budget by about 12 percent in the 2026 fiscal year, but Congress has maintained the institution’s federal funding.
Saturday’s report summons the specter of a funding withdrawal, citing how the president’s executive order directed Mr. Vance to work with the Office of Management and Budget to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”
Without specifying the exact remedy, the report says that “the president has a duty and obligation to seek reforms of the Smithsonian.”
The report criticizes the museum for viewing “traditional patriotic narratives” with suspicion or contempt. It says the museum endorses illegal immigration and advocates transgender issues, while it focuses on Christianity as “an instrument of conquest, exclusion or cultural erasure,” rather than its “constructive role” in “shaping the nation and its freedoms.”
It takes particular aim at the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, saying she has advanced “an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”
The story the museum tells, the report says, “is not one of ‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy and shame.”
Ms. Hartig did not respond to a request for comment.
The report immediately drew pushback from some in the historical profession, which has sharply criticized Mr. Trump’s efforts to enforce his view of history.
Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association, the country’s largest group of history scholars, questioned the report’s claims that the museum neglects the nation’s founding and its founders.
“The museum has extraordinary objects that tell the history of the Revolution, including the newly restored Gunboat Philadelphia,” she said, referring to a Revolutionary-era warship. “Visitors also encounter George Washington, his leadership prowess and the American Revolution in ‘The Price of Freedom,’” another exhibition.
But some conservatives commended the report.
“The National Museum of American History is the tip of the iceberg,” said Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has called for Mr. Bunch’s dismissal. “It’s not the only museum that erases our history and our heritage — all the other museums do. We have to go back to celebrating our country and its great achievements.”
The report, which contains more than 30 pages of footnotes, also criticizes an exhibition called “Many Voices, One Nation” that it claims tries “to convince visitors that illegal aliens are entitled to citizenship, voting rights and ‘belonging’ in America.”
And it criticizes an exhibition that closed in November 2025, “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” for what it says was too heavy of an emphasis on Benjamin Franklin’s connection to slavery, including his ownership of slaves, and not enough on his work as an abolitionist.
The report comes as the Smithsonian faces potentially significant turnover in its governing Board of Regents, a 17-member panel that includes Democratic and Republican elected officials as well as nine citizens.
Mr. Bunch has led the Smithsonian since 2019, and his relationship with the White House is, at best, strained. He has enjoyed the support of the board in asserting that the Smithsonian is independent.
But the museum is working with a diminished board since the terms of two Smithsonian trustees ended in March. Their replacements have yet to be named as Mr. Trump’s efforts to gain control of the institution have slowed that process.
Over the past few months, the Smithsonian managed to avoid further confrontations with Trump officials, perhaps because it made tweaks like altering some wall text and because the president was focused on matters like the war in Iran.
But the new report makes clear that the White House is fed up with the Smithsonian.
“The serious concerns raised in this report are not about a few exhibits or a few controversial labels,” the report says. “As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’”
Hot take, but even if you ARE punching up (instead of punching sideways at a group that is in the same boat as you), there's a limit to what you can say without sounding like a violent facist but woke this time.
Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.
When the only thing stopping you from completely dehumanising someone is your own judgement regarding their privilege level relative to yours, you are not a safe person to be around.
"convince your followers that their Oppressor Class (whether real or imagined) is less deserving of human rights" is the oldest and most reliable trick in the book to incite mass violence, and you're not immune to it because you're a Good Person with Correct Opinions. you will continue to be a potential breeding ground for fascist thought until you stop dehumanizing people in any context, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, or how serious you are. there can be no acceptable targets.
In the spring of 1994, the small African nation of Rwanda was engulfed in a maelstrom of violence that saw at least 800,000 Tutsi and modera
I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.
In particular, from that second link:
As we have already seen in this series of articles, Rwanda’s ethnic division between Hutu (around 85 %) and Tutsi (around 14 %) had deep roots in colonial rule. Under Belgian administration, identity cards fixed ethnicity as a rigid category, and the Tutsi minority was favoured for education and government work. After independence in 1962, this hierarchy inverted, and Hutu elites consolidated control. [...]
When RTLM launched in July 1993, it combined pop-culture style with extremist ideology. This hybrid made hatred sound normal, even entertaining. Music, jokes, gossip, and death threats co-existed in the same broadcast. [...]
RTLM’s language fused entertainment with ideology. It mocked Tutsis as arrogant “cockroaches” (inyenzi), accused them of conspiring to enslave Hutus, and encouraged listeners to “work” to eliminate them—a euphemism for killing. Humour, music, and familiarity disguised the lethal message.
actually I think you should be normal about ordinary citizens of authoritarian countries and yes that applies even to that country you're thinking of right now
"but they support [dictator] and [violent action]!" okay is it possible that a combination of propaganda, election rigging, and authoritarian crackdowns on dissent could lead a population to look like it supports something most people would find distasteful under more reasonable circumstances
Recreation.gov was supposed to make access to public lands more equitable and streamlined. Instead, it’s rife with bots and inequality, whil
It’s a few minutes before 8 am Mountain Time on March 16, the day that river permit cancellations are released on Recreation.gov, the federal website for public land reservations.
Rec.gov, as it’s commonly called, administers everything from river permits and timed entrance fees at the most popular national parks to campground reservations on remote sites belonging to the Bureau of Land Management, and a lot of people are recreating on public land these days. There were 11 million reservations on the site in 2024, up significantly from 3.5 million reservations reported in 2019. At the center of it all is an unlikely player in the outdoor recreation space: The site is operated by the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a corporation known more for cybersecurity than rafting trips.
Early each year, outdoor enthusiasts gear up for Recreation.gov’s annual lotteries for some of the most iconic experiences in the country: a river trip down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, which flows through the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Backcountry permits to hike into the Wave, an otherworldly rock formation in Arizona’s Paria Canyon–Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness. Overnight stays in the rugged, lake-studded Enchantments, in Washington’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.
Odds of getting a desirable Middle Fork permit are around 2 percent. Each year, around 200,000 people apply in advance for 48 daily lottery spots to hike into the Wave. Rec.gov itself reports that a campground with 57 campsites can see 19,000 users trying to reserve them. That’s a .3 percent success rate.
For the majority who don’t draw a permit, there’s one final hope: the release date for cancellations, where your chances of getting a spot are often based on how fast you can click, and whether you can be online right when canceled permits are released.
That’s where a river runner I’ll call Jack was last March 16. A web-developer friend of a friend who is frustrated by the way permits seem to be snapped up faster than humans can possibly click, Jack decided to do some experimenting to see if the speculation that bots are grabbing all the permits seems true.
That speculation is based in reality. There’s a user on the outdoor forum Mountain Buzz who offers up a free scraperbot to anyone who wants to use it, and developers have shared their code. Last year Sam Carter, the host of the River Radius podcast, did an episode where he built a bot to show that gaming the Recreation.gov system was possible. He was shocked at the response. “So many people say they’re using bots, people are bragging about it,” he told me. He heard from people who’d built their own, groups who have their own server dedicated to getting permits, and people who paid thousands of dollars to have someone build one for them. It’s happening. The question is how pervasive it is, and how easy it might be for anyone to hack Rec.gov.
Jack wants to prove that the system isn’t working, so he’s built a series of bots to try to outsmart the other bots. He has multiple accounts and bots that can do everything from alerting him to permit availability to keeping permits in his cart for hours at a time. “I’m trying to simulate what I think other people are doing,” he says.
The night before the river cancellations he’s interested in are released, Jack opens the Inspect Element browser tool on Rec.gov and scrolls through the data to find what dates are going to become available. “If you were a web developer of any kind,” he says, “you would be able to find it.”
He has programmed several bots, attached to burner accounts with obviously fake names, to try to grab the dates he knows will come up when permits are released at the tick of 8 am. As a control, he also has a friend on a laptop nearby who will be attempting to grab a permit the old-fashioned way, by clicking through the site herself.
When the clock turns over, everything happens fast. The scripts start running, flashing between five different screens, running through the calendars on Rec.gov pages. Then, within a few seconds, the action stops. Jack goes to the accounts to see if his experiment worked. In the first cart, the bot has secured permits for the Main Salmon, the San Juan River, and the Middle Fork of the Salmon. It’s impossible to overstate what a big deal it is to score these three prime trips in a year, much less in a single morning. In the second cart, another unicorn: a second Middle Fork permit.
By the time Jack looks at the carts, all the other cancellation dates have disappeared from the screen. As for his friend? She was skunked, even though she knew where to look—insight the public shouldn’t have.
“I don’t know what to say except it’s terrifying that that just worked.” Jack said, shaking his head. “I think it’s evidence that more people are doing that. No way there’s enough people out there trying to continually refresh their page, scattergun-click the first thing they see, then click Book Now. There’s no way a human could do that.”
As a human myself, I have been frustrated by my inability to win permits or to lock down good campsites. It came to a head for me last summer, when I was planning a trip down the Colorado River through Ruby Horsethief Canyon, in the deserty corner between Colorado and Utah. My husband’s college friends were coming out with their kids, who had never seen red rocks. We figured it would be easy to get campsites in early August, when the canyon is hot and the water is low. The rolling reservation window opens two months before each date, and on July 7, my husband logged into Rec.gov right at 8 am with a plan for sites to grab. I immediately heard swearing from the other room. “What the F, they’re all gone,” he yelled, smashing keys. Dates disappeared off the calendar. The campsites we wanted were gone, and so were most of the other ones. He refreshed the page; more dates disappeared. More yelling about ruined vacations. Eventually he was able to reserve a couple of less desirable sites, but we were flummoxed by how fast the options had disappeared.
Two months later, when we launched on our trip, we floated past empty campsite after empty campsite, including the ones we’d tried to get. For all the digital frenzy, the land was empty. A ranger passed us on a raft and said he’d seen it a lot that season—he didn’t know what they could do about it.
Earlier that summer, a group of friends had a similar experience on another highly sought-after permitted river section, the Gates of Lodore, a remote stretch of the Green River that flows through Dinosaur National Monument. They too found the boat ramp empty. Three private groups are allowed to launch each day, and according to an analysis of the 2022 numbers by The Colorado Sun, the odds of getting a permit are around 2 percent. But they were the only ones there. The permits were not being used.
That gap is showing up on other public lands. Maybe you’ve driven into a campground to find reserved signs on all the posts, but then watched the sites sit empty. I know I have. The Recreation.gov system was supposed to make it easier to access public lands, and to alleviate administrative work from federal land managers, who already have enough on their plates. Instead, it feels like a breaking point between the digital and physical worlds.
Even beyond bot usage, academics have shown that digital access through Rec.gov is inequitable, and that demand for camping and other public land access is outpacing technology and policy. Rangers can’t do anything about those empty campsites, which they want to see used. People like me are pissed they can’t get outside when they want.
And they’re also pissed that the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is profiting off of every single Recreation.gov transaction, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
As we work though our frustration about access, it’s worth considering why a consulting company Bloomberg once called “the world’s most profitable spy organization”—one that you might remember as Edward Snowden’s employer when he leaked global surveillance documents, and which recently lost 31 Department of Treasury contracts because a former employee leaked Trump’s tax documents—is holding the keys to our public lands.
When Sheri Hughes started working on the Middle Fork in 1980, she was 19 and didn’t know anything about river running. She just wanted a summer job near her hometown of Challis, Idaho. But she quickly fell in love with life on the river, and after her first rafting season, she got a job in the Middle Fork Ranger District of the Salmon-Challis National Forest, helping run the permit lottery. “People sent in a postcard with their three choices for what they wanted,” Hughes says, “and we literally pulled them out of a garbage bag.”
Back then, maybe 700 people would apply for 340 permit slots. But as the ’80s went on and the river got busier, the Middle Fork’s postcard program became untenable. They started experimenting with different systems, like a call-in system that crashed the phone system in Challis the day it opened, because the permits were so popular.
By the early ’90s, it was clear that they were going to have to transition to a digital lottery. At first, users had to print applications and mail them to the office, where the staff would input forms and try to manage the lottery equitably. “We worked really hard to make it fair. I’m a flaming Libra,” Hughes says.
Other public land managers were building their own digital reservation systems, which by 1999 were largely consolidated onto one website, ReserveUSA.com. In 2002 the George W. Bush administration created the Recreation One Stop program to unite those reservations. One major arm was Recreation.gov, which was administered by the Forest Service, even though it includes reservations for 14 federal agencies.
As Hughes’ team had found, the agencies tasked with land management didn’t have the tech skills or computing power to build an agile website for millions of users. It made sense to contract it out. In 2006, the contract was awarded through a bidding process to ReserveAmerica, a software development company now known as Aspira that had previously handled National Park Service reservations.
Two years prior, Congress passed the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, which authorized agencies to charge recreation fees for public lands. Fees for using federal land have existed since 1908, when rangers started charging for access to the road in Mt. Rainier National Park. FLREA codified what they could charge for and how it should be spent. It specified that at least 80 percent of fees must be kept and “used at the site where it was generated.”
Hughes took a job with the burgeoning Rec.gov team, and in 2009, the Middle Fork became the first lottery permit system to operate through the site. She says building it was a headache because the software had to be secure enough to manage money and personal information, but flexible enough to book reservations and lotteries and tickets across a range of geographies and time frames. “The programmers said, ‘We’ve done defense contracts that were way easier than this,’” she says.
When the contract was up again, Booz Allen Hamilton entered the bidding process. They proposed a new model. Instead of getting paid for the hourly work, as in most contracts, they would build the website for free and get paid via a surcharge on every transaction. That made it attractive to the government, which didn’t have to lay out any money. Booz Allen Hamilton had to rebuild the entire site—while the data belongs to the government, the software does not. Its initial five-year contract can be extended until 2028, and so far it has been.
BAH, which was founded in 1914, has worked on government contracts since 1940, when it was brought in to help with the Navy’s telecom and intelligence systems. In 2024, it was the 11th-biggest government contractor, billing the United States for more than $8.5 billion. Rec.gov was its first contract having to deal with public lands. Hughes says that while the BAH contractors often didn’t have experience with recreation and land use, they seemed excited about the work. It was a way for them to diversify what they were doing.
The new site was initially better, she says. BAH incorporated new functions that made the system smoother. But over time, as more programs moved to the platform, and as the federal workforce was reduced, it got worse. Moving to an online interface and cutting staff on the ground meant that there were fewer people checking and enforcing rules.
By the time Hughes retired in 2021, cracks were starting to show. They’ve only widened. Now, in part because of DOGE-induced staff cuts, there are fewer rangers on the ground and in leadership. On the government side, the Recreation.gov program doesn’t currently have a manager, and many other leadership jobs are vacant. The Forest Service press office declined to answer questions about current staffing and digital interference. When I tried to get through to the Rec.gov call center—which BAH is contractually obligated to manage—the wait time was 95 minutes. Hughes says it’s a challenge to keep the system running well, and that impacts the natural resources they’re trying to manage.
“I handed them a perfectly running system,” Hughes says. “And it’s just a shit show now.”
One of the biggest questions about the whole Recreation.gov juggernaut is just how much money Booz Allen Hamilton receives off each transaction. The contract is publicly available, but the way money flows through the system is a black box. Despite multiple requests, the Forest Service wouldn’t give me more than a rote email that regurgitated the answers given on the site’s FAQ page.
Booz Allen Hamilton arranged an interview for me with Will Healy, the senior vice president who runs the Recreation.gov program and has been involved in it since the beginning. “It’s actually a really clear line,” Healy says. “We do all the tech. We have built the system, we manage the hosting, we do the security,” he says.
But BAH also benefits from every transaction on the site. Healy says that arrangement was part of their business model in initially building the site for free. “It’s the nature of the contract,” he says. “We invested, we used our own money.”
That means that when you book a reservation—say, to camp in Channel Islands National Park or drive Acadia’s Cadillac Summit Road—a portion of that money goes to BAH. It is not clear exactly how much. Healy wouldn’t tell me the breakdown, or comment on the company’s contract. The Forest Service says it’s a trade secret, and the financial records we requested from the Forest Service through the Freedom of Information Act had the exact amounts redacted. But there are some hints as to how much money is changing hands. With the $2 timed-entry tickets, for example, the contract states: “The Government anticipates continuing to pass 100% of the convenience/processing fee directly to the R1S Support Services contract service provider.”
We do know that Booz Allen Hamilton is making much more money than it originally projected. In the contract, the company estimated that it would make $87 million in the first five years, and a total of about $182 million over 10 years if the contract was extended, which it has been.
According to their invoices, Booz Allen Hamilton billed for more than $140 million in the first four years of the contract. The Forest Service didn’t return our FOIA request for more recent numbers, but one analyst, Canadian sales strategist Blair Enns, projected that they could make $620 million by the time their contract expires in September 2028.
The uptick in traffic is one reason for that. But the model has also changed since 2016. That year there were less than 3 million reservations through the site; in 2023 there were roughly 9 million. BAH says there are now 5,800 facilities and more than 128,000 sites and activities to reserve. More facilities have shifted to using Rec.gov’s system, and things that were free, or didn’t exist, are now run through Rec.gov, where they come with a charge. That includes things like free Christmas tree–cutting permits for fourth graders (now with a $2.50 fee!) and timed entry tickets to national parks, introduced in 2021, which are nominally free but have a $2 processing fee. Booz Allen Hamilton gets a percentage of every permit application fee, even if you don’t win a permit.
That might be news to you, because it’s not clearly delineated on the site. As one former ranger, Betsy Walsh, told me, she often talked to people who were surprised. “People want to support the parks, so they’re fine with fees,” says Walsh, who worked at several parks before being let go from her job at Thomas Edison National Historical Park during the 2025 DOGE layoffs. “But you’re not supporting the parks. You’re supporting a private company.”
It’s not transparent. And in the past few years, several groups have gone to court alleging that it’s not legal, either.
In 2022, a Nevada hiker named Thomas Kotab sued the Bureau of Land Management, arguing in his complaint that the $2 fee for visiting Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area violated FLREA, which says public participation is required for setting fees and that it needs to be clear how much money stays on the landscape. The BLM moved to dismiss the case, but the district court ruled in Kotab’s favor on the public-participation aspect of his claim. The fees, however, were never changed.
The next year, seven plaintiffs filed a class-action suit, Robyn Wilson et al. v. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that the company was “forcing American consumers to pay Ticketmaster-style Junk Fees to access National Parks and other federal recreational lands.” BAH filed a motion to dismiss, alleging the plaintiffs didn't understand the contract. “To be sure,” its memorandum asserted, “certain federal agencies charge reservation fees to the users to help cover the government’s costs of operating Recreation.gov, including the USDA’s payments to Booz Allen. But those fees are charged by the agencies in their ‘sole discretion.’” More than six months after filing their lawsuit, the plaintiffs filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss their case. Their lawyers did not reply to requests for comment.
These cases underscore the core complaints about Rec.gov. “The frustrations are threefold: Use has grown, agencies are hobbled and could do more, and then the third piece is Rec.gov,” says Kevin Colburn, the national stewardship director for the advocacy group American Whitewater. “Why are we paying more and getting less? It’s the story of America right now.”
Throughout the system, rangers are bearing the brunt of people’s dissatisfaction. “People booked tickets through Rec.gov or with us in the visitor center, and the systems didn’t talk to each other,” says Walsh. “People would show up and claim they had tickets but couldn’t verify them. That led to stress and visitor conflict, and this was a park that didn’t have security or law enforcement.”
Rangers don’t have a lot of power to correct bad behavior. They can’t open unused campsites until after people don’t show up for their reservation, so the first night of a no-show can’t be used by anyone else. They can’t do anything about unused sites besides marking the user down in notes that are shared internally. One ranger told me he didn’t know if it made any difference—“We’re basically just blocking an email address,” he said. Some rangers told me they see the same group of people show up every year, while other people wait decades for a spot.
When BAH won the contract for Rec.gov, it was required to “provide a means to identify and suppress suspicious transactions including but not limited to web robot activity” and “recognize and prevent potentially duplicate profiles and provide a means to remove duplicate information.”
Both the company and the government acknowledge that there are issues on those fronts. “The site does experience attempted bot activity,” the Forest Service press office replied to me, “but multiple defenses are in place to detect and block large-scale attacks or efforts to capture multiple reservations.”
Healy says BAH has acknowledged the problems with bots enough that it has built availability alerts, which let users know when spots open up, to try to stay ahead of bots, and ahead of new businesses like Campnab or Outdoor Status, where you can set alerts for popular campsites or ticketed activities. In a statement, he emailed: “Booz Allen has implemented multiple defenses to detect, prevent, and mitigate bots that attempt to take advantage of the system; is constantly monitoring potential bot activity on the site; and is partnering with industry-leading vendors to leverage advanced solutions for identifying and mitigating that activity.”
But, he says, it’s tricky to create the right amount of friction to stop bad actors while still making the site accessible. “Believe me when I say the people involved want it to be fair,” he says.
These problems aren’t unique to public land, of course. They plague booking sites from Ticketmaster on down. It’s widespread enough that in 2016, Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS) to try to outlaw bots that scoop up tickets, but the law only addresses events with over 200 people. It doesn’t apply to things like campground reservations or hiking permits, where bots are scraping for a single opening at a time. On the bright side, there doesn’t yet appear to be much of a secondary market for scalped reservations.
There’s a difference, of course, between tickets to a Taylor Swift concert and time on public land. But if getting a good campsite becomes a race for who has the most computing power, then can we really say public land is for everyone?
To answer that question, we have to address the equity issues inherent in the Rec.gov system. That’s what academics who study the future of outdoor recreation told me. “In some ways the online reservation systems are democratizing,” says University of Colorado Boulder economics professor Jonathan Hughes, who studies public resource allocation. “But the sense I have is that certain folks might have better resources for managing that online system.” (Like Jack, Hughes made his own bot to see if it would work—it did.) Looking strictly at economics, Hughes has found that the current system benefits higher-income users and makes it hard for rangers to combat no-shows.
In 2022, a professor at the University of Montana named Will Rice, who runs the school’s Wildland and Recreation Management Research Laboratory, published a paper analyzing campsite reservations booked in advance through Rec.gov. He found that those who got reservations came from higher-income zip codes than those who got walk-in campsites. He says there are several reasons for that: access to high-speed internet, knowledge of how the system works, and logistics. Sites open months in advance, and reservations can get snapped up within seconds. For instance, if you do shift work, you might not know your schedule that far out or be able to be online at 8 am when the booking windows open.
A $20 campsite reservation means different things to different people. For some, it’s a lot; for some it’s nothing. What Rice and other researchers have also found is that savvy high-dollar users will book more days than they need, to ensure their spots even if they don’t use them. As Rice notes in a Forest Service management guidebook he cowrote in 2024, Allocating Recreation With Fairness at the Forefront, there are no real incentives for people to cancel reservations they’re not using, aside from getting a few bucks back.
Those worries have bubbled up to Congress. In 2023, Republican senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and John Barrasso (Wyoming) repeatedly asked the Department of Agriculture for details about how money for the contract was allocated and how much BAH was making. “The American people have a right to know the answer to each question we asked because the answers involve their parks and their money,” they wrote.
In 2024, Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, introduced the Review and Evaluation of Strategies for Equitable Reservations for Visitor Experiences Federal Land (RESERVE) Act, which would task the National Academy of Sciences with studying the fee structure, transparency, reservation system design, user demographics, and data accessibility of the current Rec.gov system to come up with ways to make it more equitable.
The bill passed the Senate in December 2024 but failed in the House during the last Congress. Padilla reintroduced it in May 2025.
Will Rice says there are many ways to make the system more equitable. Montana’s hunting lottery, for example, gives people their odds of winning and makes it clear where the money goes. (“With microeconomics,” he says, “we make better decisions.”) Since 2006, the Grand Canyon, arguably the most desirable river permit in the country, has been running its own weighted lottery, separate from Rec.gov, where your chances of winning improve over time, and where you can’t bot the system and go year after year.
In addition to those systemic changes, our friend Jack sees an array of potential technical fixes: auditing users who send thousands of requests a second, filtering for suspicious users, and closing off the data that let him see permit release dates. “That would slow me down, and I think that would go a long way to having people feel like there’s something changing,” he says.
Jack, who has given back every permit he got with a bot, says that he’s reported the issues he’s found to BAH and the Forest Service without any response. He says that they’re not even doing basic things to protect information. “There’s a part of me that wants to get caught,” he says. “It would refresh my faith in the system. My real phone number is attached to the bot accounts—it would be so easy.”
This spring, as boaters and campers and hikers log into Recreation.gov for another try at a permit, Jack has been back in front of his computer again, trying to see if the bots can still get permits, trying to see if the organizations we let steward our public lands—through covenant or through contract—have changed anything to make access more equitable. He’s worried they haven’t, and that permits will still go to the fastest bot. “It feels like an abdication of the idea of stewardship,” Jack says.
i wish people would stop bitching at mindy kaling over using GLP-1s to lose weight bc listen i followed her on social media back when you had to text twitter using SMS to post on mobile and she has been talking about dieting and working out and losing weight since like 2007-2008. if you were a things i bought that i love reader you know that she has been on the yo-yo dieting cycle for as long as she's been in the public eye and honestly long before that. she is literally the ideal use case for weight loss medication bc clearly she is in the class of people who never set out to be a Body Positive Icon but just made her peace with how she looked bc it was the hand she was metabolically/hormonally dealt, and pretty much proof positive that if Sheer Will Power and just having a private chef and trainer could give you a thin body, it would!! it's not her fault that people projected a certain image and politics on her that she never actually set out intending to embody! it is fine for people to change their bodies and they are not personally betraying you by doing so!!! oh my god we've lost the plot so hard. leave mindy alone.
and overall i'm just really tired of the line that "body positivity was all a lie" bc people who used to be bigger are now smaller. listen. there are people who took fat liberation incredibly seriously and had/have no intention of undertaking intentional weight loss as a goal, and good for them, but there are also a LOT of people who found body-positive messaging reassuring because it was just the best thing we had at the time. there are a lot of folks to whom the message "your body is not wrong, your body can be apolitical and not have morality ascribed to it because of its size" really resonated bc dieting and traditional weight loss methods had failed, and it helped with the crushing feeling of having a body that you wanted to change but struggled to do so, and being told from all corners that not being able to drop weight effortlessly made you a worse person. it wasn't a lie, it was just that we as feminists who don't believe in moralizing the body were doing the best we could with the resources we had at the time. and now there are new resources and some of those same people are realizing that there was nothing "wrong" with them on any level other than something that could be corrected with simple medication, and they're choosing to do so. i truly don't feel that that makes one duplicitous or a traitor to a movement that offered reassurance that you weren't "bad" for being fat, nor do i see how shaming and moralizing over intentional weight loss and telling those people they're bad NOW is at all helpful. (i also have a lot of opinions as to where that desire to shame and moralize comes from but i'm not in the mood to expand on them right now bc i don't feel like listening to the hollering of a lot of hit dogs in my mentions today. but i'd be shocked if i were wrong, is all.)
“marriage is a legal document that protects you, you’ve gotta decouple it in your brain from romance and amatonormativity” the fact that marriage is a legal document that protects and privileges you (that, might I add, generally isn’t valid without romance+sex) is LITERALLY amatonormativity. A legal status that privileges people in monogamous long-term romantic-sexual relationships IS AMATONORMATIVITY. That is *what it was coined to talk about.*
who gets to see you in the hospital- what about my best friend of twelve years? We’re not married and we never will be, so she doesn’t legally count as my family. I have known her since we were six years old and if something happened to me I would want her to know and be able to be there and if something happened to her I would want to know and be able to be there, but we’re not married and never will be.
YES, marriage is a legal document that protects you- now think about where that leaves those of us with no partner, with multiple partners, with important relationships that aren’t and never will be marriage, with partners we can’t marry- what about us? THAT IS AMATONORMATIVITY.
I see so many arguments over what is and isn't "good queer representation" that really just boil down to "y'all are actually arguing over matters of taste and genre preference, which is incredibly subjective and personal."
Worldbuilding where being queer is normalized and queerphobia has no impact on the plot? THAT'S FINE. Worldbuilding that includes queerphobia and tackles the effects of it as part of the story? THAT'S ALSO FINE.
Low-stakes queer romcom where the characters are fluffy and cute? THAT'S COOL. Messy queer drama with toxic people who fuck each other over and clash repeatedly? THAT'S ALSO COOL.
Stories that center the characters' queerness, show a trans character's transition, and are about the queerness as much as the rest of the plot? AWESOME. Stories where the characters' queerness isn't treated as a big deal, and have trans characters whose transition happened before the story entirely? ALSO AWESOME.
You may PREFER one thing or another, but it is actually good to have all these things. It's about variety. It's about queer characters being allowed to exist without censorship. It's about queer artists getting to make things without being told we're a "niche issue" or "adult content." It's about having as many goddamn cakes as the bakery can produce.
At the end of the day, I'd prefer a media landscape with fifty pieces of problematic queer representation over a media landscape with one single piece of queer representation that's trying (and usually failing) to be 100% perfect for everything and everyone.
my petty gripe about anachronism in historical/fantasy/spec-fic worlds is attraction language.
We’ve all heard the “should you use modern queer labels or not” argument but honestly even when people go “true, they wouldn’t use the labels ‘aromantic’ or ‘asexual,’” so often the characters describe their experiences as “I never felt romantic attraction” or “I don’t feel attracted to anyone” in ways that makes me go. You are stilllllll thinking about this in an extraordinarily modern online way. That 19th century steampunk detective man will NOT be angsting about having never felt romantic attraction, he would be angsting about being unable to feel moved by the beauty or charm of a woman, or something. And I do think that “attractiveness” language is different from the identity-level idea of experiencing attraction—Sherlock Holmes does not talk about not experiencing attraction, but when Watson says “What a very attractive woman!” Holmes responds “Is she? I did not observe.” (And then Watson calls him an inhuman automaton and calculating-machine and Holmes calls Watson’s judgement biased). Never swayed by the attractiveness of a man or woman, never desirous of marriage, never charmed by the delights of love, all of these feel like some of the variety of ways that someone in this milieu might describe an ace- or aro-spectrum identity more than “never felt attraction” does. Mostly because, like the terms for aromantic and asexual themselves, nailing down an exclusively attraction-based definition of a-spec identities is a relatively new and extremely post-AVEN thing. And yet in fiction everybody knows to articulate their experience as feeling sexual/romantic attraction. And I always want to go nooo how would THIS character think about it?? Not how you think this character SHOULD think about it, how would THIS person in THIS context articulate their feelings?
This is exactly the double-bind when it comes to writing aspec characters in particular (though I imagine other situations as well). If you do not explicitly state on page that the character is aromantic and/or asexual, it doesn't "count" as "canon" or as representation, and can be wilfully ignored by the reader, argued about online, and the "ambiguity" will be otherwise taken advantage of (and no, an author confirming aspec identity after the fact doesn't "count" either, according to these people). And yet, if you do explicitly identify the character as aspec, it's tacky, or out of character, or violating worldbuilding principles, or taking the reader out of the story.
A character can say "I do not desire a relationship. I've never had a crush. I don't want to have sex. Your assumptions about me make me uncomfortable." and the fandom will just go "lol but what if they did though. no one tell me that's aphobic, that's not real anyway, and also we're just Having Fun don't Yuck My Yum!"
There is no win state; I have no solution. It's just frustrating all-around.
