Members of the Proud Boys, a far-right nationalist group, confront a crowd at the second Million MAGA March in Washington, DC, in December 2020. The Proud Boys participated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol building during the January 6 insurrection, which was motivated by conspiracy theories about the stealing of the 2020 presidential election. Geoff Livingston, via Flickr
Blog

Why Conspiracy Theories Captivate


The 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred when I was nine years old. In the days afterward, I remember obsessively reading everything I could about the attacks in my dad’s ​Newsweek ​magazines. A few years later, I stumbled upon the film ​Loose Change​, which purported to uncover the truth behind 9/11. At first, I was skeptical. Of course, Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks—that’s what I’d read in ​Newsweek.​ But as I kept watching the film, I felt a growing sense of doubt. By the time the credits rolled, I was sure that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated to create a pretext for a war in Iraq and subsequent war profiteering. 

As I grew up and gained more in the way of critical-thinking skills,​ I eventually came to recognize that the theories being pushed by 9/11 skeptics were delusional. That earlier flirtation with conspiracy theories in my adolescence has made particularly sensitive to the rash of similar falsehoods that are being widely peddled today—most notably, the pervasive belief that the 2020​ election​ was stolen, which led directly to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. What motivates people to believe in these blatantly bogus conspiracy theories?

Continue reading Why Conspiracy Theories Captivate →

Lynn Barlow is a writer based in Asheville, North Carolina. When she’s not writing, she can be found skiing, whitewater kayaking, or playing fetch with her dog Urza. Instagram: @biggitygnar

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"Drugs," by WithoutFins, via Flickr
Ocoee, Tennessee
Commentary

Gateway Drug

When the pandemic hit, I started working at a head shop—and started getting into the heads of my customers.


Last March, I was working in Montana as a ski instructor at the Big Sky Resort. When the pandemic reached the United States and stores started shutting down, I remember meeting up with friends for a potluck dinner. We drank Coronas and joked about the toilet paper shortage.

Three days later, the resort closed—an unprecedented six weeks early—and we were all out of jobs. My friends and I threw an impromptu end-of-season party at the local dive bar. There was an edge to that evening, though. It seemed that no one could sit still or hold a calm conversation.

A week after the resort closed, my boyfriend, who lived in Tennessee, called. There were rumors that states were going to shut their borders to keep the virus from spreading. “I don’t want you to be stuck in Montana away from me,” he said.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked.

“I want to come get you and move you back to Tennessee with me.”

I had intended to move in with my boyfriend after the ski season ended, but this would be two months earlier than planned. With some hesitation, I agreed. I didn’t want to leave my friends in Montana, but I didn’t want to have to deal with a pandemic on my own, either.

Once we got back to Tennessee, though, our plans began to unravel. That summer I was supposed to return to my seasonal job as a whitewater kayak instructor on the Ocoee River, but the state lockdown shut down that possibility. Instead, I sat by myself on the couch, day-drinking and watching Netflix. My boyfriend worked alone from morning till dark on various projects around his unfinished house.

At a certain point, I found myself surrounded by beer cans, watching American Hoggers, and realizing that I needed to get off the couch and out of my boyfriend’s house. When a friend called and said their mom needed help at the family store, I jumped at the opportunity—not thinking much about the fact that the “family store” was a head shop, a place that sells paraphernalia for using drugs. I’d worked as a line cook in plenty of restaurants and as a guide at rafting companies, I told myself. What could be so different about working at a head shop?

Continue reading Gateway Drug →

Lynn Barlow is a writer based in Asheville, North Carolina. When she’s not writing, she can be found skiing, whitewater kayaking, or playing fetch with her dog Urza. Instagram: @biggitygnar

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U.S. President Donald Trump at a February rally at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. Gage Skidmore, via Flickr
Blog / Political Prose

Comparing Biden and Trump on Economic Inequality


The economic impact of market restrictions prompted by the pandemic—not to mention the coronavirus’s broader toll of more than 200,000 Americans deaths and other losses from ruined health and well-being—will likely linger well into the next president’s term. In the meantime, the pandemic appears to be accelerating trends toward greater income and wealth inequality within the country. U.S. billionaires have fared spectacularly well under the lockdown, having increased their wealth by $931 billion since March, according to data from Forbes analyzed by Chuck Collins and his collaborators. A report by the anti-poverty group Oxfam estimates that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos now has so much money that he could pay each of his employees a six-figure bonus and still have more wealth than he had in March. Meanwhile, less advantaged Americans have been hit hard by the lingering downturn. Although stimulus checks and temporary expansions of unemployment benefits for a time worked well to mitigate the damage, poverty rates have recently spiked. Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities are disproportionately high among people of color. And while high-wage earners have recouped almost all their job losses, employment among low-wage earners remains almost a fifth lower than it was at the start of the pandemic, according to an analysis by Raj Chetty and other researchers.

Amid this upheaval, the next president will make policy decisions with major implications for whether the gap between the rich and poor in this country grows or narrows. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have put forward two starkly different visions for the country’s economy—particularly in regards to tax policy, which will dramatically shape income and wealth inequality over the next decade. In general, Trump argues that the tax cuts on high earners that his administration pushed through in 2017 should be extended, which he believes will lead to greater economic growth. Biden supports rolling back tax cuts for those who earn more than $400,000, saying on the campaign trail that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share.” The continued impact of the coronavirus on the economy will complicate these policy decisions moving forward, but we can sketch out the sort of agenda each candidate will likely push forward once in office—based on their stated proposals as well as their track record while in office—and the possible impact of a Biden or Trump presidency on economic inequality.

Continue reading Comparing Biden and Trump on Economic Inequality →

Timothy Beryl Bland, PhD, is a writer based in Richmond. For his doctorate in public policy and administration from Virginia Commonwealth University, he researched the influence of think tanks.

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Hans Lange and Kate Rosenberg outside New York City Hall on their wedding day, August 30, 1941.
New York
Commentary

Distance from Home

Before the pandemic, the distances separating me from my cross-continental family seemed so small. But this freedom was never a birthright, as previous generations of my family knew all too well.


On November 15, 2012, I woke up to discover that my partner had died while we slept. He was forty. I was thirty-seven. Our kids were three and six. The cause would later be identified as an undiagnosed heart condition, but in the hours right after his death, I had no idea what had happened. I remember the seemingly endless procession of strangers who crowded into our small Brooklyn apartment that day. EMTs. Two incredibly young cops. A pair of detectives. The city’s medical examiner. All asked the same things. Later I realized that most of their queries were designed to clear me of any wrongdoing before they allowed me and my children to leave the apartment and decamp to my aunt and uncle’s home in the suburbs. But at the time I just couldn’t figure out why I had to keep repeating myself, and why—when I had called 911 at 7 a.m.—my children and I were required to remain in the apartment with my partner’s lifeless body still on our couch late into the afternoon.

Within thirty-six hours, my parents and my two brothers arrived from my hometown, Vancouver. Over the next few days, other family and friends showed up as well. I was shocked by the number of people who flew in from out of town for the funeral. “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far,” I kept saying.

A year and a half later, I was the one making a rushed trip across the continent. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer eight years earlier. After a period of remission, the cancer had returned, and my mother was dying. I booked a flight to see her one last time. Days later my father called to tell me her condition was deteriorating faster than expected, and I hurriedly bumped up the arrival date, changing my ticket to the next day. When my plane landed, I saw my father standing outside baggage claim, and I knew I was too late. At her funeral, I found myself uttering a familiar refrain to others who had traveled: “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far.”

That mobility—that ability to come from so far—was something I took for granted before the global pandemic closed borders and sheltered us in place. Continue reading Distance from Home →

Ellen Friedrichs is a health educator and the author of Good Sexual Citizenship. Twitter | Instagram

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Blog / Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Resilience


In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | September 2020: Resilience

The pandemic has forced everyone to reconsider how to live, survive, and cope during a time of loss, economic upheaval, and social unrest. For some, the period has also been marked by discovery, resilience, and perseverance. How does one navigate when things are out of control, when civil discourse is anything but, and when six feet is today’s social norm?

In The Fray magazine is looking for essays, reportage, and photo essays that examine how people have responded and what has lifted them up during this time of uncertainty. Please review our submissions guidelines at inthefray.org/submit and send a one-paragraph pitch NO LATER THAN SEPTEMBER 30. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please distribute this call widely across your social networks, or let us know how we can spread the word.

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Young men wearing face masks in Ho Chi Minh City, four days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Blog

The Evacuation of Saigon, 2020


It’s not 1975, and we aren’t Americans and South Vietnamese fleeing the advancing Viet Minh forces. It’s forty-five years later, in the middle of March, and we are mostly Australians (along with some New Zealanders) fleeing the contagion of the novel coronavirus.

Amid rumors that the country will soon halt international flights, I board Vietnamese Airlines Flight VN773 out of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. Bound for Sydney, the plane is scheduled to take off on this balmy Sunday night with a full load of passengers. When I flew in just one week before, my plane had been almost a third-empty. Only the cabin crew wore masks. Back then, the number of reported cases worldwide was under 100,000, with most of the infected in China and only a few dozen in Vietnam. But on tonight’s flight, the faces of all the passengers are half-hidden in paper filter masks. Cases in China and elsewhere have surged, and the World Health Organization, which announced just days earlier that the COVID-19 outbreak was a pandemic, is urging governments around the world to mobilize to stop its spread.

Continue reading The Evacuation of Saigon, 2020 →

Igor Spajic is the author of books on low-cost car restoration and vintage science fiction and a longtime contributor to Restored Cars Australia.

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The view of Cerro Rico from the city of Potosí in May. fabian.kron, via Flickr
Potosí, Bolivia
News

Touring Bolivia’s Cerro Rico, the Mountain that Eats Men

The silver that made Potosí fabulously wealthy is now all but gone, but miners still toil in the Bolivian city’s nearby mines in search of minerals vital to global supply chains. In recent years, locals have promoted a kind of “danger tourism”—guided tours of the sprawling and still lethal Cerro Rico complex—as another employment option in a region with very few, but critics say it draws too many voyeurs and thrill-seekers.


It’s one of the most grueling, dangerous jobs on Earth. Workers at the Cerro Rico mines near Potosí, Bolivia, toil from dawn till dusk in constricted, dust-filled passages, knowing they might die at any moment and likely will never reach middle age. Now, Cerro Rico has become a leading tourist attraction—despite the risks, the plight of the miners, and the downward spiral of a community that has fallen far from past wealth and glory.

“It’s like going to the zoo, looking at animals,” said Julio Morales, an ex-miner turned mining tour operator turned activist, who believes the visits are getting out of hand. “The mines are not a game.”

Continue reading Touring Bolivia’s Cerro Rico, the Mountain that Eats Men →

Mark Dickinson has taught on three continents and traveled to more than seventy countries. Before beginning his career in the classroom eighteen years ago, he worked for almost a decade as both a television and newspaper reporter.

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Stanford University is one of eight schools where wealthy parents fraudulently secured spots for their children as part of a nationwide college admissions bribery scheme. HarshLight, via Flickr
Commentary

Meritocracy’s Casualties

The individualist credo is exacerbating already steep inequality and driving elites to protect their privilege by any means—even criminal ones.


The college admissions scandal that implicated Hollywood stars and other wealthy parents produced its first convictions in September, with actor Felicity Huffman among the growing list of those sentenced to prison time for engaging in bribery and fraud to get their children into a selective college (though in Huffman’s case for a short term of fourteen days). The nature of this scandal—which involved FBI wiretaps, paid-off SAT proctors, and even doctored photos of students playing sports—turned an intense media spotlight on the spectacularly unethical behavior of certain well-off families. But the scandal is a symptom of a much deeper problem in modern American life: widening income inequality and the destructive competition it engenders across the class divide.

When income inequality rises, the stakes of the economic game rise. Where children end up along a steep gradient of academic achievement matters all the more for their chances later in life. For example, in 2018, edging your way into the top 5 percent of earners would have made your household $119,000 richer than one that had just made it into the top 20 percent; back in 1978, that difference was just $56,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. Because every step up the ladder pays off more, parents feel greater pressure to do all they can to improve their kids’ prospects. The payoff for cheating grows, too—even elaborate frauds of the sort that William Rick Singer and his team allegedly perpetrated to get his high-profile clients’ kids into Stanford, Yale, the University of Southern California, and other schools. (Singer, who pleaded guilty to fraud and a host of other criminal charges in March, admitted to bribing university administrators and colluding with wealthy parents to secure admission for their children.)

Beyond the ranks of celebrities and the elite, economic anxieties abound. It has become commonplace to observe that children from middle-class families are less likely to achieve a better standard of living than their parents. And as those chances dwindle, a greater burden falls on children and their parents to ensure their future success.

Continue reading Meritocracy’s Casualties →

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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Danish Rajab, a former salesman in his early twenties, was shot by a pellet gun during anti-India protests near his home in Srinagar in 2016. He lost his job after his injuries made it impossible to work. After three surgeries, he can still only see blurry images from his left eye. Photo by Sharafat Ali
Srinagar
News

Dead Eyes

The dispute over Kashmir has raged for seven decades and ignited three wars. Now the conflict has entered a new phase: violent street protests in India-controlled Kashmir, followed by brutal crackdowns by Indian security forces that have maimed a new generation of militants, protesters, and bystanders.

Umer Beigh

Hiba Nisar was eighteen months old when she became the youngest casualty of the latest phase in the deadly, decades-long conflict in Kashmir. Last November, protesters clashed with Indian security forces outside her home in Kapran, a village in the south of the Muslim-majority state controlled by India but also claimed by Pakistan. As protesters pelted them with stones, Indian police fired tear gas, which began to seep into Hiba’s home. Hiba started to choke.

Her mother, Marsala Jan, grabbed her and opened the door, intent on getting her out of the smoke. “As I sneaked out, I heard a loud bang,” Jan recalls—the security forces had fired their shotguns. A spray of lead pellets ripped through the doorway. Jan had covered her daughter’s face with her hand, but a pellet went through her hand, she says, and into Hiba’s left eye.

Hiba was partially blinded. “Fate struck a terrible blow,” Jan says. “I held my child tight, but … I failed to protect her eye.”

Since 2010, Indian security forces have used pellet guns to deal with widespread protests in Kashmir, leading to the blinding, maiming, or killing of hundreds of people, according to human rights advocates and local medical personnel. While the term “pellet gun” brings to mind a children’s toy, the pellets—also known as birdshot—are metal and spray over a wide area. Most countries do not use them for crowd-control purposes because they cannot be aimed and thus cause indiscriminate injury.

Continue reading Dead Eyes →

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A portrait of Kamal, a refugee from Darfur. Painting by Linnéa Spransy
New Haven, Connecticut
Commentary

I’ll Jump When I See Them

The travel bans have been in the headlines, but less reported are the other moves that the Trump administration has made to keep refugees out of the US. For families fleeing war in Sudan and other conflict zones, these policies have taken a toll.


Imagine a Goodwill tucked inside an elementary school, with the energy of a Cairo airport gate. That’s the scene, on busy days, at IRIS, the refugee resettlement agency where I work in New Haven. The downstairs donation space overflows with coats; lamps stand over stacks of pots, pans, and bassinets. Upstairs, refugees from the Middle East and Africa bustle about the hallway with cups of tea and paperwork. Along the walls are world maps and local bus routes, kids’ drawings of airplanes and stars, flashcards for the US citizenship exam.

Working with refugees is unsettling sometimes. Knowing who survived genocide only to get hit by a car, who has trouble eating when he thinks about his mom not having food back home, whose sister tried to get to Europe on a raft—it undoes you sometimes.

Over the last two years, refugee resettlement work has gotten tougher. In 2017, President Trump’s “travel ban” blocked visitors and migrants from a number of Muslim-majority countries and temporarily halted the admission of refugees altogether. The US refugee resettlement program is now operating again, but the Trump administration has taken other, less publicized steps to undermine it—most recently, setting a record-low cap on admissions of just 30,000 refugees for 2019, less than a third of the annual average since 1980.

Continue reading I’ll Jump When I See Them →

Ashley Makar is the community liaison at Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS). Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, and Killing the Buddha.

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Prague
Commentary

Remembrance of Things Past

Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, publicly forgave one of her former captors before he died last year—at the end, a convicted war criminal. On the seventy-fourth anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the long journey to bring one of its SS officers to justice raises questions about the power of forgiveness and the importance of historical memory.


Look at this picture: she is Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, extending her hand to Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer in the camp. The setting: a district court in Lüneburg, Germany, where Gröning was accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. Date: April 2015.

The picture is a conundrum: why would an Auschwitz survivor extend forgiveness to her former captor? Kor’s parents and two of her siblings had perished there. She and her twin sister Miriam had endured the deadly human experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.”

During his trial, Gröning accepted “responsibility in front of God” for what he did at Auschwitz, but he rejected any criminal responsibility. Perhaps so as not to implicate himself further, he refused to show remorse or apologize.

For this and other reasons, none of Kor’s fifty-two co-plaintiffs in the case against the former SS officer followed her lead in publicly forgiving him. Many condemned her for the act.

When I chanced upon the photograph, though, I knew right away why Kor had forgiven Gröning. For I had heard her explain, years earlier, why.

Continue reading Remembrance of Things Past →

Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

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Not all millennials are this damn good-looking—and not all of them are struggling in the ways that working-class millennials generally are. Photo via Flickr.
News

Adulting While Poor

Not all millennials are struggling to reach the traditional milestones of adulthood, but some are—and America’s growing inequality is the reason.


Why can’t millennials afford their own homes? Reading much of the popular press, one is led to believe it’s their unrealistic expectations, indulgent spending, and general allergy to adulthood that have trapped them in a renter’s purgatory. Nebraska senator Ben Sasse wrote a whole book, The Vanishing American Adult, in which he argued that young people today are stuck in a Peter Pan–like state of carefree childhood, spending their time playing video games, buying stuff, and snapping selfies—even posting ironic memes about “adulting”—rather than seeking meaning in career, family, and a stable home.

It is true that millennials have been slower to reach various milestones on the way to an all-American adulthood—including buying a home—than prior generations at the same point in their lives. For example, Americans ages eighteen to thirty-four are now more likely to be living with their parents than in any other housing arrangement, according to 2014 data from the Pew Research Center (which defines millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996). That has never been the case before, according to census data going back to 1880.

A more rigorous explanation for their failure to launch is that the Great Recession stunted millennials’ economic lives at a critical age. As a result, they’re still struggling to obtain gainful employment in a more demanding labor market, or find affordable housing in a contracted mortgage market. In other words, it’s not their lousy values—it’s their lousy economic prospects.

But this line of argument, too, misses something crucial. Its focus on middle-class, if downwardly mobile, millennials obscures just how diverse a generation millennials are. Not all of them are into Snapchat and kombucha juice, that’s for sure, but what’s less appreciated is that not even a majority of them are college-educated. Barely four out of ten Americans between ages twenty-five and thirty-four—members of what will be the most academically credentialed generation ever—have a bachelor’s degree. Thanks in part to the country’s widening income gap, the picture of “how millennials are doing” is dramatically different depending on which segment of the population you happen to be looking at. And to an overlooked degree, what determines whether, when, and how members of this generation attain the traditional markers of adulthood—a house and career, marriage and kids—is one factor: class.

Continue reading Adulting While Poor →

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:

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