Oct. 21, 2024: Sinwar Is Dead; White House Hunts for ‘Iranian Spy’

Burgerism; Sinwar found with UNRWA passport; Hezbollah targets Bibi

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The Big Story

You’ve probably heard the news by now, but if you haven’t, we’re happy to be the ones to break it to you: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks, is dead. (For a consideration of his legacy, we’d recommend this obit by Tablet’s Armin Rosen in UnHerd.)

Sinwar was killed Wednesday after an encounter with an IDF patrol in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood; the IDF discovered his body Thursday and released photo and video confirmation of his death shortly thereafter. According to an account in The New York Times sourced to Israeli and U.S. officials, the Israelis had been “scouring” the neighborhood for weeks on the suspicion that Sinwar and other top Hamas commanders were hiding there, but the patrol ran into him by chance after observing three men moving house to house. A firefight ensued in which one Israeli was wounded, and the Palestinian group split up. After that, per the Times:

The troops killed the first two militants and turned their attention to the man in the other building, deploying a drone to examine the building’s interior. The drone, entering a ruined house from the upper floor, captured footage of a wounded man sitting in a chair, his face swaddled in a kaffiyeh to hide his identity.

The man hurled a stick at the drone, according to the footage. Israeli officials said a sniper then shot the man in the head, and a tank fired at the building.

The Israelis, who were unaware they had just killed Sinwar, left and came back the following morning to discover that the body was still there. No doubt Sinwar, who was known to communicate only via handwritten messages as a security precaution, had kept his location a closely guarded secret. But Hamas’ inability to retrieve the body of its slain commander tells you something about the organization’s current capabilities in Gaza. 

Rafah, where Sinwar was found and killed, was of course the city that the Biden administration spent months attempting to protect. Indeed, many of the policy instruments that the administration now uses as sticks against the Israelis—the sanctions machine against “settlers” and other supposed extremists; the Kabuki investigations into Israeli misuse of U.S.-supplied weapons—were initially rolled out in February and March of this year to discourage Israel from crossing Biden’s “red line” by entering Rafah. I was around the same time that Biden officials were reported to be asking their Israeli counterparts for advice on the “mechanics” of how to “force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse” (New York), and summoned then war cabinet member and leading Bibi rival Benny Gantz to Washington (only to berate him about Rafah, much to Gantz’s surprise). Even Kamala Harris got in on the game, proclaiming that, having “studied the maps,” she had come to the conclusion that “it would be a mistake to move into Rafah with any military operation.” 

We’ve seen some chatter on social media suggesting that the White House should be “embarrassed” for being so “wrong” about the Rafah operation, as if the administration was laboring under the delusion that its words are supposed to be related to reality. As we reported at the time, Rafah was never about Rafah—it was an Obama-Biden “values feint” meant to twist the Israelis’ arm into a cease-fire deal that would put Iran’s prized asset in Gaza under an American protective umbrella. Preserving Hamas was not an unintended consequence but the entire point of the exercise. Unfortunately for the White House, Sinwar was not as stupid as American reporters and recognized that the U.S. pressure on Israel meant that Hamas could hold out for better terms. In March, “​​Sinwar messaged Hamas officials, urging them to refuse a hostage deal,” The Wall Street Journal reported today. “Hamas had the upper hand in negotiations, Sinwar said, citing internal political divisions within Israel, cracks in Netanyahu’s wartime coalition and mounting U.S. pressure to alleviate the suffering in Gaza” (emphasis ours). Where Sinwar appears to have miscalculated was in assuming that the Israelis would listen to Biden—something that nobody in the world does, least of all Americans.

So, with that background, the second bit of news in today’s Big Story should not come as a surprise to Scroll readers. Over the weekend, a Telegram channel aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published leaked, classified U.S. intelligence documents, including a “Visual Intelligence report by the Department of Defense National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency” (per Axios), about Israel’s plans to attack Iran. The channel claimed it obtained these documents from a “source in the U.S. intelligence community.” 

White House officials, reportedly shocked and appalled by the breach, have launched an “investigation” into the leaks. They are looking at a target-rich environment: Some on social media have pointed the finger at Pentagon official Ariane Tabatabai, the Iranian asset hired by Robert Malley into the State Department, while others have noted that the man who would normally coordinate a whole-of-government counterintelligence investigation is none other than Maher Bitar, who formerly led the Georgetown chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and then interned for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. Adam Kredo of The Washington Free Beacon reports, moreover, that “thousands upon thousands” of U.S. government employees have access to the classified system, no doubt including some of those who’ve signed the various anonymous letters and dissent cables expressing their opposition to the “genocide” in Palestine. 

But there’s also the possibility that the “leak” wasn’t a leak at all. Israel’s i24 News reported Sunday, citing an account of U.S.-Iranian talks in the Kuwaiti press, that Washington was directly briefing Iran on potential Israeli targets. According to the report:

In its communication, the U.S. also suggested that Iran consider evacuating certain military and security installations belonging to the Revolutionary Guards and Basij forces. This step is seen as a means to minimize Israeli attacks on those sites, thereby potentially resolving the current hostilities.

So, somebody explain to us—why exactly would somebody risk jail time by “leaking” to the Iranians what their bosses were telling the Iranians explicitly?

Now, on the one hand, the “leak” story has a funny side. It’s darkly amusing, for instance, to read about the hunt for the top-secret Iranian mole only a few weeks after U.S. officials were loudly complaining to Axios that the Israelis were refusing to share their plans for attacking Iran—complaints that followed those same officials leaking Israeli invasion plans in Lebanon to The Washington Post. Surely, this is a counterintelligence mystery worthy of James Jesus Angleton. On the other hand, there’s a serious point here, which is that leaking to Iran about Israel is official administration policy—just as it was under Obama, whose administration leaked Israeli plans for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities.

In other words,  the Iranians haven’t “infiltrated” the U.S. government, and the Biden administration is not being outwitted by wily Persian spies. The White House is committed to protecting Iran and its assets in the region—that’s the explicit policy, not a mistake or a misunderstanding. Whether Iran has a “mole” in the U.S. government—or whether some underling gets scapegoated in a limited hangout—is entirely beside the point. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: David Mikics reviews a new collection of writings on America by Norman Mailer, the wild-eyed “left conservative” the country sorely needs today

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The Rest

→Sinwar, whose personal wealth has been estimated at more than $1 billion, was found with a wad of cash, a roll of Mentos, and a false passport. The kicker? The passport belonged to Hani Zaroub, a teacher at UNRWA—the former employer of the aforementioned Maher Bitar, who now serves on the U.S. National Security Council as the deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for intelligence and defense policy. 

→Special Report: Burgerism

A play on birtherism, burgerism is The New York Times’ new coinage to describe the supposed “conspiracy theory” that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s as a young woman. Here are the first three grafs of the Times’ Sunday story, “Kamala Harris and McDonald’s: A College Job, and a Trump Attack”:

Vice President Kamala Harris has recalled her stint at a Bay Area McDonald’s 41 years ago in introducing herself to voters—a biographical detail relatable to millions of Americans who have toiled in fast-food restaurants.

But former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly accused her of inventing it. Lacking a shred of proof, he has charged that she never actually worked under the golden arches—recalling his earlier false claim that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. 

While this story may seem frivolous, let’s dive in, because it’s a telling example of how outlets like the Times operate. 

First, Kamala did not merely “recall” her stint at a “Bay Area McDonald’s”—she and her campaign initially claimed she paid her way through college by working at McDonald’s. But after reporters from The Washington Free Beacon reached out to the campaign asking for details about the job, the campaign changed its story via a friendly leak to Politico, claiming that Harris had in fact worked at the Golden Arches as a “summer job” to earn “spending money.” 

Second, the Times paints burgerism as a wacky Trump conspiracy theory without a “shred of proof,” but in fact the “theory” originates with the aforementioned reporters from The Washington Free Beacon. In August, they published a story noting that … 

• Harris had never once mentioned the McDonald’s job until running for president in 2019, including in her two memoirs;

• Neither of the two third-party biographies of Harris mention her working at McDonald’s, and the author of one of those biographies told the Beacon that he was “not aware” of her working there;

• Harris failed to mention the McDonald’s job in a 1987 job application (i.e., one year out of college) in which she was asked to list her entire work history for the previous 10 years;

• Harris refused (prior to the Beacon’s story) to provide any details about which McDonald’s she worked at, or when;

• McDonald’s has no records of her employment.

Since the Beacon story came out, Harris has stopped mentioning McDonald’s on the campaign trail. 

Third, the Times claims to have debunked the burgerism conspiracy theory. How? Well, although the paper admits that Harris’ Bay Area McDonald’s job was apparently so secret that many of her “friends and close aides” had no idea she worked there, a “high-school friend,” Wanda Kagan, “confirmed” the story to the paper. But how did Kagan know? Kagan knew Harris from Montreal, where Harris lived before moving to the Bay Area, which is where Harris allegedly worked at McDonald’s. By Kagan’s own admission, she never heard the story from Harris herself. Indeed, Kagan wrote in a Thursday article for Oprah Daily that she “lost Kamala’s contact information” after Harris moved to the United States for college. But in 2005, after seeing Harris on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Kagan reached out to Harris’ mother, Shyamala, and the two reconnected. At some point between then and Shyamala’s death in 2009, according to the Times, Shyamala told Kagan about Harris’ McDonald’s summer job. 

And that’s how Wanda Kagan became the only person on planet Earth who could confirm Kamala worked at McDonald’s—at least according to The New York Times, which required reporting from six people to reach a conclusion based solely on double hearsay and the word of the campaign:

 →Image of the Day: 

That’s Donald Trump “working at McDonald’s” at a scheduled campaign event on Sunday at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. So the entire point of the New York Times Rube Goldberg machine described above was, of course, to gift the Harris campaign with a talking point to counter the McDonald’s event. We hope that the campaign at least left the Times writers a tip on the dresser. 

→A suicide drone launched by Hezbollah struck the private home of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Caesarea on Saturday. No one was injured in the attack, but Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials have vowed to retaliate directly against Tehran for the actions of its proxy. We think that’s a good idea, but we’d caution the Israelis not to share any plans to Washington. 

→On the subject of Lebanon, Axios reports that Israel has submitted a proposal to the White House for a diplomatic solution to end the war in Lebanon. From the report, it appears that the Israelis have two main demands:

1. That the IDF be permitted to engage in “active enforcement” in southern Lebanon to keep Hezbollah forces away from the Israeli border

2. That the Israeli Air Force be permitted freedom of operation in Lebanon’s airspace

A U.S. official told Axios that it “is highly unlikely Lebanon and the international community would agree to these conditions, which would dramatically undermine Lebanon’s sovereignty.” We attempted to reach our colleague Tony Badran for comment, but he was only able to send us a clown emoji and several expletives before collapsing into a fit of laughter. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A Year of Reading Torah, by The Editors

Thousands of people signed up for our Simchat Torah Challenge, embarking on a yearlong journey of studying the parsha—the weekly Torah portion. Here’s why some of them are taking part, and what they hope to find.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Norman Mailer vs. the Big Empty

Thirty-five years after the Cold War fizzled, America’s most entertaining and iconoclastic writer about culture and politics remains too hot to handle

By David Mikics

In 1962, Norman Mailer sat down to debate his friend William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was America’s most influential conservative, and Mailer was a homegrown radical. Mailer boldly proposed, “End the Cold War. Pull back our boundaries ... Let the Communists flounder in the countries they acquire. The more countries they hold, the less supportable will become the contradictions of their ideology. [...] Let it be their waste, not ours.”

Mailer’s plan to finish off the Cold War by letting the Soviets conquer more countries and overextend themselves was an absurdity that no nation in history would have entertained. He knew his rope-a-dope approach to the communist threat could appeal to no one in a position of power, let alone the general public—yet he had a sufficiently unorthodox imagination to remain a party of one, all the while aspiring to a prophet’s role.

Flamboyant and at times risible, Mailer still had the wisdom to build a bridge to Buckley, with whom he disagreed almost completely. He feared an America divided into irreconcilable parties, and so was pledged to combat polarization.

Mailer, like Buckley, recognized the evils of the Soviet Union. In his debate with Buckley, he praised conservatives for being onto something. But some of them, for all their trumpeting of freedom, wanted to impose a collectivism of their own, a conformity of mind allied to the military-industrial complex. Sen. Goldwater would gladly lead the nation into a heightened struggle with Russia, Mailer pointed out, but the senator refused to admit that “greater economic liberty is not possible so long as one is building a greater war machine.” The Cold War had already “given this country over to the power of every huge corporation and organization in America.”

In an open letter to Fidel Castro, whose military prowess he had admired, Mailer reproached the Cuban leader for turning toward communism. But he added that America had its own evil—existence within the aura of the corporation, which shackled the country’s psyche. Mailer would spend the rest of his life looking for an alternative to the stagnant, corporate-controlled aspect of American life, what he called “the big empty.”

Nearly two decades after Mailer’s death, the thought control exerted by government through the media’s “anti-disinformation” project has proved his point. Mailer would have been appalled by the state of our news media, now willingly reduced to Washington’s lapdog. The phalanx that stretches between government and big corporations is stronger than ever.

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A Mysterious Country, a collection of Mailer’s writings about American democracy spanning the decades from the early 1960s to the 2000s, came out last year from Skyhorse Press, the refuge of the canceled. The volume, edited by Mailer’s biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and his youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, was turned down by Random House, Mailer’s usual publisher. Having made millions off the Mailer corpus, the woke corporate publisher par excellence apparently feels no continuing responsibility to the author’s retrograde posterity. Mailer, born a hundred years earlier, was now too hot for a major press to handle in an age of cookie-cutter progressive bias.

A Mysterious Country is well worth perusing, since it makes clear that Mailer was a true original in his politics. Though he didn’t often have plausible answers to our political dilemmas, he was daring in his search for true questions. We could use his wild intellectual courage today, perhaps more than ever.

Mailer’s leftism had the tang of existential risk. He wanted to free America from the stolid security-minded obsessions of the ’50s, and make the nation brave and interesting. But as the ’60s hurtled forward, Mailer realized he couldn’t follow the leftist rebels of the day, even the most magnetic among them, the yippies. He needed to turn himself into something new, a left conservative who would be loyal to traditional American values while at the same time breaking free of tradition when it proved false and constricting.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer’s brilliant book on the ’68 conventions, contains a pivotal passage on why the yippies ended up futile, their antic zeal a spent force. “They had seen some incontestable vision of the good,” Mailer wrote. “The universe was not absurd to them; like pilgrims they looked at society with the eyes of children: society was absurd.” In the yippie utopia, “modern mass man would have all opportunities before him at once and could create and despoil with equal conscience,” and this was “equal to straight madness for the average Good American, since his liberated expression might not be an outpouring of love, but the burning of his neighbor’s barn.”

By expunging from themselves all conservative instincts the yippies had become unmoored. They aimed at “the destruction of every saving hypocrisy,” and with it the collapse of civilized life. They knew nothing of Burke, or of Hobbes, Mailer implied. The yippies fantasized about everyone doing their own thing and leaving others in peace, but they “were yet to learn,” he concluded, “that society is built on many people hurting many people, it is just who does the hurting which is forever in dispute.”

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Mailer’s self-appointed task of inspiring the country made him tune into the disparate sides of the American character and recognize his own right-wing leanings, even while professing a wild-eyed leftism. In The Armies of the Night, his report on the 1967 March on the Pentagon, he demands from his daughter, an 18-year-old freshman at Barnard, “that she not take marijuana, and never LSD, until she had completed her education, a mean promise to extract in these apocalyptic times.” He interspersed his report on the 1964 Republican convention, “In the Red Light,” with salutary quotations from Burke, suggesting that the Republicans were not the true conservatives they ought to be.

In The Armies of the Night Mailer styled himself a “left conservative.” Many years later, in 1996, he showed how serious he was about the term by sitting down with Pat Buchanan, the hard-right isolationist and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. Buchanan was running for president in the Republican primaries, and Mailer was excited by his populist attacks on corporate power. Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary, Mailer thought, because he “had spoken not as a conservative but as a left conservative.” Though Mailer had always thought “that he was the only left conservative in the land, he now had the curious pleasure of discovering that he was half of a two-man band.” Buchanan was for the working class and against the big corporations. “We’ve got to start the income of working men and women rising again, especially those who work with their hands, tools, and machines, many of whom are black and Hispanic and rural white,” he told Mailer. But Mailer’s dream of a “left-right coalition” foundered during his long interview with Buchanan when he tried to get him to consider Jesse Jackson as a running mate. If only Buchanan would come over to the Democrats, Mailer urged. But Buchanan refused to budge.

Mailer said to Buchanan that he feared “we could break down into race riots and ghettos with barbed wire around them.” In a commentary he appended to the Buchanan interview, Mailer wrote, “If white neighborhoods were invaded by the rioters, there would be martial law to ring every ghetto. [...] It would be totalitarianism without a name, and corporate capitalism would live happily ...”

Here, Mailer was spectacularly wrong. When the George Floyd riots occurred, instead of exercising martial law, the police abandoned Black neighborhoods, whose citizens were left to fend for themselves against criminals. The corporation triumphed not via fascist repression but something more insidious—the abandonment of its basic responsibility to protect innocent people, in particular the innocent poor, followed by a DEI advertising campaign constructed to assuage the white conscience.

Mailer was prescient in his suspicion of the corporation and yet utterly off the mark in his prophecies of race war because, one suspects, he was secretly looking forward to that war as an antidote to the quiescence that he hated. Like all apocalyptic thinkers, he had a yen to bring hidden clashes to the surface. He underestimated the power of the corporation, which, commandeering Democrats as well as Republicans, had no need to spark violence.

Mailer always harked back to his experience in the Army, when he rubbed shoulders with country boys from Arkansas and Texas, some of whom became characters in The Naked and the Dead. The ’60s equivalent to the white Negro hipster of Mailer’s 1957 essay would be the middle-class leftist Jewish youth who transformed himself by living off the rough magic of the all-American white working class. In The Armies of the Night Mailer described the face-off between the shaggy anti-war demonstrators at the Pentagon and the implacable line of crew-cut soldiers assigned to hold them back. The soldiers came from the working class. But the protesters were urban middle class, and so were:

forever alienated in childhood from all the good simple funky nitty-gritty American joys of the working class like winning a truly dangerous fist fight at the age of of eight or getting sex before fourteen, dead drunk by sixteen, whipped half to death by your father [...] there is a God-given cynical indifference to school, morality, and job. The working class is loyal to friends, not ideas. No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit.

Mailer’s rhapsody contains a nut of wisdom. The soldiers guarding the Pentagon were kids, not fanatics. To them the military was just a job, not to be taken seriously when compared with the pleasures and hard knocks of working-class life. Mailer then delivers a telling fantasy of how the demonstrators purloined the soldiers’ vigor. When the protest kids confronted soldiers now, and were able to stare them in the eye, they were, in effect, saying silently, “I will steal your élan, and your brawn, and the very animal of your charm because I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit, I am stealing your balls.”

Mailer admits that the protesters were not merely silent, as he imagines them in this passage. For 32 hours they taunted the troops, often mercilessly, and the soldiers were under orders not to reply.

Stealing someone’s balls across the class divide, if that is indeed what happened at the Pentagon, is not a plausible way to make a left-right coalition. Instead, it is an exercise in humiliation.

Mailer had a fine eye for the deadness, but also the mystery, to be glimpsed just below the surface of many a politician. About Nelson Rockefeller at the 1964 Republican convention he wrote,

Rockefeller was not a man who would normally inspire warmth. He had a strong decent face and something tough as the rubber in a handball to his makeup, but his eyes had been punched out a long time ago—they had the distant lunar glow of the small sad eyes you see in a caged chimpanzee or gorilla. Even when hearty he gave an impression the private man was remote as an astronaut on a lost orbit.

Though the components of Mailer’s portrait appear satirical, his sense of Rockefeller is both curious and sympathetic. The seeming lostness of the man led Mailer to search for the key to his personality—and he found it. Mailer discerned Rockefeller’s core trait, his rage at being bullied, when he defied an unfriendly crowd at the convention. Seven years later, his bloody response to the Attica riots was, tragically, a similar act of defiance.

Politics, Mailer knew, could never be as wholehearted as the life of a nation demanded—there was always something dead, managerial, and rote at the core of political dealmaking. Even JFK had a blank and evasive aspect to him, though Mailer had championed Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign. He fulfilled the nation’s desire for a leading man rather than a fatherly authority figure, and like every actor he was “an empty vessel, a man of many natures,” spurred to remake himself for a high political role. “The only way he could re-create the impoverished circuits that lay between himself and the depth of his emotions was to become President,” Mailer pronounced while JFK was in office.

In his political reporting, Mailer by and large escaped the sinkhole of mere adulation. The closest he came was in his encomium of Bobby Kennedy, whom he regarded as a savior because he was a hero for working class New Yorkers, who waited upward of four hours to file past his closed coffin at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. RFK represented Mailer’s last best hope for the republic. He was moved by Bobby’s metamorphosis from Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man to (in Mailer’s view) a compassionate prophet-prince. You must change or else pay the price for remaining the same, Mailer liked to tell his children, and he saw proof of the adage in Bobby Kennedy.

Mailer wrote just three weeks before RFK’s assassination that the candidate “has grown more in the last ten years than any man in America’s political life. As a consequence, I think America might grow more with him than any other candidate, and American life might thereby become more adventurous and more responsible.”

Adventure and responsibility, wedded together, was Mailer’s dream. He wanted America to look like him, a solid bourgeois father in spite of all his philandering, with a colorful streak of rebellion. The disaster that forever marked him guilty, his stabbing of his wife, Adele Morales, in 1960, the year he first planned to run for mayor, perhaps served to remind Mailer that rebellion was not to be confused with the mind-destroying rage that overtook him that night. Five years before the stabbing, Mailer wrote eerily about psychosis in his Lipton’s Journal (recently published by Skyhorse; “Lipton’s” was “tea,” i.e., marijuana, under whose influence he wrote the journal). He knew and feared his affinity with the violent psychotic, a kinship that would lead to what might be the two deepest meditations on evil in American literature, his late-in-life masterpieces The Executioner’s Song and Oswald’s Tale.

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Putting down A Mysterious Country, the reporter mused on how much he shared with Mailer’s left-conservative vision. Mailer surely would have butted heads with current progressivism, which wanted to divide all humanity into two static categories, victim and oppressor. He knew that we are all both victims and oppressors, of ourselves and others. The helpless innocence purported to come with victim status was poisonous, he would have said, above all for the people who imagined themselves victims.

The reporter had been voting for presidents for 45 years, but he decided he would sit this one out. Now, for the first time, he would refuse to cast a vote in the presidential election. He would go to the ballot box to vote yes on Proposition 4 in his new home state of Florida, a reasonable pro-choice measure. But even with the best will in the world he could not force himself to vote for either Trump or Harris. Trump was a distressing amalgam of huckster, carnival barker, rude truth-teller, shameless hawker of lies, and troller of enemies real and imagined, a petty addle-witted razor-shrewd glob of self-satisfaction, far less able to cut a figure than the robber barons of old, for he was too distracted to be stylish. Kamala Harris incarnated like no one else in public life what Mailer called “the cold majesty of the corporation,” boasting endorsements from Goldman Sachs, Dick Cheney, Taylor Swift, and Oprah. (Most of the institutional powers hated Trump’s guts.) She seemed incapable of speaking a convincing sentence—one had the unmistakable sense that she herself didn’t believe what she was saying. There was a fine edge of desperation about Harris’ every word and gesture, and everyone knew why. If she lost this election she would be instantly reviled by the entire Democratic Party, her many flaws once again paraded through the press. If the Democrats won this election, the reporter brooded, what was left of the First Amendment would be gutted, and the deadening of the 1950s would afflict America again, this time in a progressive guise.

Mailer, the reporter remembered, wrote in the early ’60s that “today we are alienated from our acts”—far truer now, when algorithms had pushed aside human decision-making. And the more alienated we get, the more we cling to ersatz certainty (“the science”). Mailer wrote, "The mass of men begins to have respect not for those simple ideas which are mysteries, but on the contrary for those simple ideas which are certitudes."