“Our nation was founded to perpetuate democratic principles. These principles are that each man is to be treated on his worth as a man without regard to the land from which his forefathers came and without regard to the creed which he professes. If the United States proves false to these principles of civil and religious liberty, it will have inflicted the greatest blow on the system of free popular government that has ever been inflicted. Here we have had a virgin continent on which to try the experiment of making out of divers race stocks a new nation[.]” — Teddy Roosevelt

The other day, Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute and right-wing pundit Jonathan Keeperman (also known as “Lomez”) aired an episode of their podcast entitled “The Indian Question”:

The title of the episode seems to be a reference to “the Jewish Question”, a term in 18th and 19th century Europe for the question of how Jews should be treated in European society. That term, of course, became notorious when it was associated with the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, which was billed as being a final solution to “the Jewish Question”. I assume that Rufo and Keeperman chose this rather incendiary title in order to grab attention. Well, they succeeded.

The episode was motivated by a debate that’s been raging across social media for weeks. It was kicked off by Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, who tweeted outrage at a group of Indian American kids attending a University of Texas football game. I already wrote about that controversy three weeks ago:

Jonathan Keeperman (“Lomez”) invited me on his podcast to share my views and debate him, so I did. Here’s the episode that resulted:

Rufo was busy, so it was just Keeperman and me.1

Anyway, before I talk about the substance, I thought I should say something about the side debate of whether a liberal like myself should even go on right-wing podcasts like “Rufo and Lomez”. Throughout most of the 2010s, there was a popular notion that society should basically ignore and shun people like that, and that if we all simply shunned them, and pressured our friends and colleagues to shun them, they and their views would vanish from American society — or at least remain marginalized.

That approach failed. Anti-immigrant ideas didn’t remain marginalized — in fact, they took over the country, despite their continued unpopularity among the general American public. Are Rufo and Lomez pushing xenophobic ideas? Yes, of course they are. I’m not going to sugarcoat that fact just to be polite. But simply shouting “Those guys are XENOPHOBES!!” and keeping those guys out of polite society would be doubling down on a foolish, self-defeating strategy. The alternative was always to confront those viewpoints directly and defeat them in the court of public opinion, so that’s what I set out to do.

OK, anyway, on to the substance of the debate.

Keeperman and I began the debate by finding common ground. We both basically subscribe to the principle of nationalism — we believe that nation-states are exclusive clubs that exist for the benefit of their members, and that this is a basically good way to organize human society. We both think the United States of America is basically good — or at least, has been basically good throughout most of its history.

I explained my belief that liberal nationalism is the best ideology available — maybe for other countries, but certainly for the United States. All of our greatest successes as a country — victories in wars, successful policy reforms, integration of past waves of immigrants — have come from our use of the nation-state as a tool to promote individual rights, dignity, and empowerment. I told Keeperman that the Abundance Agenda is, at least implicitly, an expression of liberal nationalism — the movement is about creating abundance for Americans specifically, with the implicit premise being that Americans deserve abundance.

Keeperman disagrees about the liberal part, of course, but he does feel that he has the best interests of the United States in mind. His worry is that immigration is stoking ethnic conflict in America, because recent immigrant groups — for example, Indians — are not assimilating into American society like previous groups did.

To me, assimilation has always been about measurable behavior. If the children and grandchildren of immigrants act culturally American — if they speak English, intermarry, give their kids typical American names, go to college football games, climb the income ladder, move out of enclaves, and so on — then they’re assimilated. By all of these standards, the recent waves of immigrants — Mexicans, Chinese people, Indians, and so on — are assimilating just as fast as or faster than the East and South European wave did a century ago, or than the Irish and the Germans did two centuries ago.

The aspect of assimilation that Keeperman worries about most is national identity — the degree to which the children and grandchildren of immigrants feel bound up in a shared community and a shared identity with countrymen of different backgrounds. I agree that this is extremely important; many of the benefits of the nation-state, like the ability to provide public goods and welfare states, come from this sort of shared identity. It also probably leads to greater toleration of minorities (including immigrants). All of those goals should be very important to liberal nationalists.

Lomez — who is not a liberal, but cares about national cohesion nonetheless — worries that identity assimilation is lacking in the modern day. He argues that today’s immigrants retain their old-world allegiances much more strongly than the immigrants of a century ago — that second-generation Indian Americans in Texas still think of themselves as Indians rather than as Americans, and so on.

We do have lots of surveys about this, in fact. There’s a clear pattern — immigrants tend to identify more as their ethnicity than as “American”, but later generations are more likely to identify as “American”. Here’s a survey showing that third-generation Asian Americans are a lot more likely to identify as just “American”:

We see the same pattern even more strongly among Hispanics:

Second and third generation immigrants are also a lot less likely to describe themselves as “global citizens”.

Now, these could be generational effects — people identifying more as “American” as their families stay in America for longer — or they could be cohort effects. It’s possible that due to identity politics, plummeting patriotism, or to the ability to connect with co-ethnics abroad on the internet, recent cohorts of immigrants are less likely to want to identify as “American”.

In fact, we have some evidence that this is happening for Indians, specifically. In 2020, the Indian American Attitudes Survey found that the second generation was a lot more likely than the first (i.e., immigrant) generation to identify as “more American than Indian”:

But by 2024, that pattern was somewhat weaker, with more U.S.-born Indian Americans identifying as “more Indian than American” and “equally Indian and American” than four years prior:

This is just two survey snapshots, a few years apart. It would be helpful if we had had good longitudinal surveys asking people about American identity versus ethnic identity for decades. But we don’t, so we’re left to worry and speculate.

Without longer-term data, my guess is that this identity shift — to the degree that it’s real and not just survey noise — is a short-term response to political conditions. Indian Americans had full access to the internet in 2020, and they were just as able to talk to ethnic Indians in India or Australia or Canada. Identity politics — including institutions such as ethnic clubs at universities — had been around for decades, and the sentiment behind it was probably at its height in 2020.

Instead, my bet is that we’re seeing a reaction to the rise of the MAGA Right itself. It was in 2024 — right before the second survey wave — that anti-Indian attitudes became extremely popular among the online Right. 2024 is also when it became clear that a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the nation. My guess is that stronger ethnic identification among Indian Americans was probably a reaction to the perception that a substantial part of America was attacking Indians.

Keeperman — like other rightists I’ve talked to — seems to think that immigrant groups assimilate only under aggressive pressure from the majority. The model I usually hear is that of German Americans in World War I, who were the subject of feverish forced-assimilation campaigns — pressured to change their names, stop speaking German, and profess allegiance to America. In his discussion with Rufo, Keeperman argued that vocal anti-Indian racism was part of a “hazing process”.

My argument is that this is exactly backwards. Ethnic identity is fundamentally defensive in nature. Identity groups are like gangs — if you no longer feel like a part of the big gang (the nation), you’re probably going to turn to a smaller gang (your ethnic group) for protection and support. For this reason, forced-assimilation campaigns can suppress visible expressions of ethnic difference, but they strengthen ethnic identity itself.

There’s plenty of evidence to support this. Although forced-assimilation campaigns in WWI made some Germans change their names, they caused Germans as a whole to intermarry less and to volunteer less in World War II. Anti-Hispanic rhetoric tends to increase Hispanic identification, and perceived discrimination makes Hispanics more likely to identify with their ethnicity.

This pattern is likely to play out again, with the new rightist fad for anti-Indian bigotry. Bo French’s tweet, and the outpouring of support it received from the grassroots Right, is going to make some Indian Americans question whether America really accepts them — and whether they might have to turn to other Indians for support rather than their countrymen of other races.

Rufo and Keeperman’s “Indian Question” podcast is, of course, only going to make things worse. When your race’s mere existence in America is being described as a “question” by a senior fellow in the Manhattan Institute, you naturally tend to get a bit apprehensive — and a bit defensive. In the last ten minutes of my debate with Keeperman, I got very vehement and animated about the counterproductive nature of the anti-Indian rhetoric.

Keeperman argued that assimilation only worked so well in the 19th and 20th centuries because of “ethnogenesis” — we took a bunch of disparate European groups and made them all “White”. But I don’t think this is quite right. Yes, assimilation succeeded because of ethnogenesis, and yes, “White” ethnicity became more salient. But the ethnicity we tried to create in the 20th century was actually something else. It was “American”.

Attempts to create an “American” ethnicity date at least back to Teddy Roosevelt.2 These intensified in the New Deal years, and during and after World War II. This effort partially failed. Black Americans never became part of the “American” ethnicity, for a variety of reasons — geographic and legal segregation, linguistic differences, pervasive anti-Black racism, the memory of slavery, the rise of Black Nationalism, and so on. But for other racial minorities — Asians, Hispanics, and Middle Easterners — it partially succeeded.

The idea that the efforts of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, and other liberal nationalists of the mid 20th century were all about creating White identity is a recent conceit; if you read anything from the time period, you realize that this wasn’t the goal, even if it was one of the lasting results. To understand the mood of the time, you should listen to the patriotic song “Ballad for Americans”, by Paul Robeson, which was sung at the 1940 Republican national convention.3 Here’s a key excerpt:

Now hold on here.
What are you trying to give us?
Are you an American?

Am I an American?
I’m just an….
Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian,
French and English, Spanish, Russian,
Chinese, Polish, Scot, Hungarian,
Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian,
Greek and Turk and Czech,
And double-check American!
And that ain’t all!
I was baptized Baptist, Methodist,
Congregationalist,
Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic,
Orthodox Jewish, Presbyterian,
Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Quaker,
Christian Scientist,
And lots more!

You sure are something!

Our country’s strong, our country’s young,
And her greatest songs are yet unsung,
From her plains and mountains,
We have sprung to keep the faith
With those who went before.
We nobodies who are anybodies believe it.
We anybodies who are everybodies have no doubts!

This mood is utterly absent from both the modern Right and the modern Left. On the Right, there is no attempt at ethnogenesis — only perpetual fragmentation, suspicion, and finger-pointing. Here is what I wrote in my post three weeks ago:

It’s this pathological inability to understand alliances and coalition-building that will ultimately doom the New Right. Like the far Left, this is a movement built to exclude and divide and splinter — both because of the querulous personalities of rightists themselves, and because of the intransigence of a racial ideology that abhors any impurity. If they ever managed to see off the Hispanics and the Asians, the rightists would start in on the Greeks and the Italians, and so on. There’s no victory in sight — only eternal conflict. These are not nation-builders; they are nation-dismantlers.

Meanwhile, the progressive movement has tried its hand at ethnogenesis — POC and BIPOC were both essentially attempts to create new racial categories defined in opposition to the White category. But these attempts fell apart. And there hasn’t been an attempt to create a broadly shared American ethnicity, because the modern progressive movement is also obsessed with purity, exclusion, and tent-shrinking.

But if we are going to flourish as a nation, the project of creating an American ethnicity is essential. The rightist approach — bullying nonwhite people until they meekly suppress any evidence of their backgrounds — will backfire spectacularly. In fact, it is already backfiring. Instead, the right approach is the liberal nationalist one — to allow or even encourage people to value their roots, while also emphasizing that they’re all one unified people now. When it comes to assimilation, a big tent beats a small one, and carrots work better than sticks.

That’s why there is no “Indian Question”. There is only the question of what sort of nation America is to be. We must pick up the discarded project of our 20th century forebears, and make it work completely this time.

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Andrew P. Napolitano, “The Prosecutor’s Dilemma” (October 8, 2026) (Washington Times version)

The Prosecutor’s Dilemma

By Andrew P. Napolitano
October 8, 2026

“That it is better 100 guilty persons should escape, than that one innocent person should suffer.” — Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

The hardest decision a government prosecutor may ever face is also one of the most important tests of the rule of law: What do you do when you believe a crime occurred, and you believe you know who committed it, but you do not believe you can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty?

The temptation is obvious. A prosecutor is a public official. The alleged victim wants justice. The public demands accountability. The alleged offenders appear unsympathetic. The known facts produce moral outrage. Yet none of those considerations changes the prosecutor’s constitutional obligation.

A criminal prosecution is not a referendum on whether something terrible probably happened. It is an attempt to prove, in a courtroom, that a particular defendant committed a particular crime beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.

The recently renewed investigation into an alleged sexual assault involving seven Cornell University fraternity members illustrates this dilemma. The woman has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by multiple men at a Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. The case initially was not prosecuted, but it has now been reopened and reassigned amid the emergence of additional information and intense public scrutiny.

Read more>>

How much money should any one person have?

When Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire, people got mad.

"He will own everything!" claims a popular YouTuber. "He will own your house…your country…your government."

Comedian Bill Maher, lately a voice of reason, asked, "Would it be crazy to have a law that said, 'You can't go above 1 percent of gross domestic product?!'"

Actually, yes. My new video explains why it would be crazy.

People who hate the very rich tend to assume that there's a finite amount of wealth. So if Musk has a trillion dollars, everyone else must have less.

"That's simply not true," explains business ethics professor Chris Freiman. In a free market, businesses create new wealth, because consumers give up dollars only "because they got stuff that they valued more in return."

Car buyers voluntarily give Musk money because he created a car they value more than other cars.

Likewise, "Steve Jobs became a billionaire, but the rest of the world got a billion iPhones," says Freiman. Since the exchange was voluntary, "that seems like something to celebrate, not resent."

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) understands that. Sort of.

Years ago, he said, "Nobody should earn more than one million dollars!"

But then he became a millionaire. Asked about that, he replied: "Write a bestselling book, you can be a millionaire, too!"

"If we had capped success in the past," notes Freiman, "We probably wouldn't have the iPhone, Netflix, DoorDash, Amazon, Spotify."

Or robot vacuums, air fryers, Uber, Waze, etc. We are all better off thanks to the ingenuity (and often greed) of millionaires and billionaires.

No one forces us to give them money. We give it to them because they created things that we value what more than the dollars we give up.

Yet when Musk became a trillionaire, a YouTube channel with more than 2 million subscribers proposed that America "tax every penny in net worth of somebody who has over $999 million."

That would deter people from becoming billionaires. But why is that good? Consumers are better off when Musk makes money.

No one is forced to buy his cars or satellite internet. We pay because his products are better than what we had before.

OK, it's true that sometimes we are forced to give Musk money. But that's because our government forces us to pay for NASA, and NASA discovered that Musk sends things into space much more efficiently than NASA ever could. Musk saves taxpayer money.

When government spends money, by contrast, I cringe.

Congress took billions of your dollars to build electric vehicle chargers. After more than three years, just 384 were open to the public.

In that same time period, Tesla built more than 35,000.

"Who is a better steward of resources?" asks Freiman. "Entrepreneurs or government officials?"

Entrepreneurs, without question, because they put their own money on the line. People spend their own money more carefully than governments spend other people's money.

Even the greediest business faces a test government doesn't: Consumers can say no.

I won't defend all billionaires.

Some get rich by cheating.

Bernie Madoff stole billions by lying to investors. Sam Bankman-Fried, running the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, defrauded customers and investors.

Others, like Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Cuban President Fidel Castro, get rich through political power. They force people to give them money.

"I will not defend Fidel Castro," says Freiman. When he died, his fortune was estimated at $900 million. "He got it through coercion. That's a problem. But if you make $900 million creating and providing goods and services to people at prices, then the sky's the limit."

Where there is honest capitalism—riches earned without government favors (crony capitalism)—everyone is better off.

That's the distinction critics of billionaires miss.

The important question isn't: How much money does someone have?

It's: How did they get it?

If they got rich through fraud, theft, coercion, or government favors, prosecute the fraud, and end the favors.

If they got rich because people voluntarily buy something they created, celebrate them. They makes us richer.

I hope America has more trillionaires.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post Why Trillionaires Will Be Good for America appeared first on Reason Magazine.

“Richard Dawkins has popularised the idea that most people have no trouble denying the existence of gods for which there is no evidence…. He urges them to go ‘just go one god further.’ This book directs a similar challenge to atheists to reject a final baseless posit of religion: the worship of self-sacrifice.

"It’s time for the secular world to fully grow up and break free from the bonds of religious morality. This is the only path to self-conscious, rational progress in the field of morality, and to the civilisational progress it will enable.”

~ Ben Bayer from the free-to-read Preface to his new book Breaking Free From Faith-Based Morality

The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. culminates Sorkin’s secular humanist artistic philosophy, which he’s showcased throughout his career, including the astute Steve Jobs, the melodramatic A Few Good Men and his involving NBC political manifesto The West Wing.

This new Sony Pictures movie is not a keen observation or insightful depiction of current events, let alone history. The sequel achieves a faintly yet strongly driven theme of self-made American individualism. Whatever falseness or truth of its claims, in shifting, layered perspectives arranged by a timeline within a few years before and after the cataclysmic and decimating lockdown during the 2019 pandemic, when life in America was severely prohibited and restricted by the government for two years, The Social Reckoning slowly delivers upon its title, which is excellent.

This film follows up a 16 year-old movie based on a book, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. At the time, the 2010 movie was overhyped, just as some were choosing up sides and beginning to doubt, malign, indulge, exploit and cash in on the phenomenon known as social media, led by Facebook, a website and app founded by an Ivy League-educated capitalist, geek/whiz kid/tech bro (choose your jargon). Terms shift, change and don’t matter. A capitalist is a capitalist and Mark Zuckerberg, portrayed in this picture by Jeremy Strong—in another outstanding performance by the actor who was the best thing about the rotten-themed camp classic Succession on HBO—is neither hero nor villain in Strong’s sterling performance.

Driven by Sorkin’s incisive screenplay, Strong’s portrayal of the industrial titan is not a mere character study. Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg gets less screen time than a different actor in the first movie did. This is a good thing. Because the lessons and, indeed, reckoning with Facebook and how it’s radically changed, improved and/or ruined lives across the globe derives from philosophy, not personality.

Strong, more deeply and insightfully than his predecessor, Jesse Eisenberg, captures the passion and contradictory premises underneath the blankness of today’s typically mixed American capitalist, personified here by Zuckerberg, who fundamentally embodies today’s blank American—particularly the college-bred American, most particularly the upper echelon college-bred American. The Social Reckoning belongs instead to the young American, who is hopeful, optimistic and idealistic. This reality-based character, Frances Haugen, portrayed by an actress named Mikey Madison, struggles to make sense of the world.

This means contending with her own depression, loneliness and despair amid the swirling madness of an industry fed by the best and worst of Americans mixed together resulting in a volatile blend which can both liberate and destroy lives. Besides capitalist Zuckerberg and technician Haugen, The Social Reckoning depicts the intellectual, Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) who writes for the Wall Street Journal, as the one who bridges the gap between the upper and lower level Facebook employees.

As two extremes on the scale of humanity, the journalist represents the middle of the road—he wins a Pulitzer Prize for his 17-part series about Facebook—and this, too, creates an interesting paradox. Purposely or not, Aaron Sorkin repudiates the false dichotomy between rich and poor, high income and low income, top executive and lower-level employee and other poisonous notions which power many of today’s ominously rising Communist, fascist and Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers.

Pivoting from the Haugen-Zuckerberg coupling, he re-directs focus to a Horwitz-Zuckerberg coupling—note how much the two men have in common as The Social Reckoning envelops the audience; how they’re moved by short gains, how they both emphasize, stress and act upon being at liberty to investigate, detect and gather information—and how they win. Zuckerberg powers the world’s most powerful website. Horwitz and his editors power one of the West’s most powerful media. Both men affect real change and billions and billions of dollars. Both radically change lives.

Yet it’s Haugen who’s posed to win the greatest prize and this is the point of The Social Reckoning. Watch the movie to find out what she gains, if anything, and whether she acts to re-gain and keep it.

Along the way, The Social Reckoning dramatizes this young technology worker’s challenge. Like Snowden, she begins by doubting the status quo. Like Snowden, she’s introverted. Like Snowden, she blows the whistle on what she learns but only after reasoning, judging and deciding to act upon her own independently reached conclusions based on knowledge of facts and evidence confirmed by her own experience and values. Emphatically and pointedly, Haugen’s not portrayed as feminist. Her activism comes only after a thorough introspection, because, like Snowden, she’s been hurt and damaged and handicapped—she’s withdrawn. Yet she’s curious. Hopeful, like Snowden, not anti-social. Haugen yearns to connect. The character Frances Haugen, as depicted here, seeks to know and understand.

“Be selfless,” instructs the employee guidebook for Facebook. Haugen discovers that she’ll need to go against this explicit advocacy of altruism as business policy (and altruism is why civilized countries, such as Australia, are right to prohibit social media for children, a judgment I’ve come to based on the writings of Cal Newport and evidence of social media’s industrial regression which ought to have been progression). The movie shows that, as predicated in altruism and programmed and engineered by blank, agnostic men of ability who refuse to judge and exercise rationality with clarity and consistency, social media atrophied, becoming a monstrosity that poisons the child and rots the soul. Altruism—through fostering chronic comparison to and living for the sake of others—is the cause.

Facebook, after Zuckerberg created it, became a behemoth with no purpose or point. It exists as a vacant vessel for numbers, statistics, metrics, algorithms and analytics, and The Social Reckoning dramatizes this, too, in number after number after number after number after number, relentlessly depicting living by numbers as death by showing the people driven solely by numbers. Note that the word is numbers, not profits—The Social Reckoning is not an anti-capitalist diatribe.

In fact, the journalist partly driven by his passion for truth mixes the same moral grayness as Zuckerberg, who is partly driven by his passion for connection. Both men lack any knowledge of how to achieve their goals to elucidate or connect. To their credit, they strive for it. Horwitz and Zuckerberg are both enterprising, curious and investigative. They both achieve success in their own fields. But it’s the egoist-individualist who self-enriches by valiantly, honorably pursuing her own happiness.

Aaron Sorkin’s thoughtful film contains great insight, whatever its flaws, including Alexandre Desplat’s overbearing musical score, which overwhelms the theater with overly percussive sound blaring when Jeremy Strong appears as Mark Zuckerberg and, again, during a montage depicting the 2021 riot on Capitol Hill, which Sorkin gets 100 percent wrong. The leftist screenwriter distorts the riot as he weaves fragments into the film to make his point.

“Get to the end,” someone says when the one who says it needs to stop and listen. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of this cutoff to thought and conversation—today’s punitive interruptions of people who express themselves with cliches such as “I got you,” “no worries” and “you’re good,” which are often shorthand for “stop talking and shut up”—can relate to the blather in The Social Reckoning.

Philosophical arguments arise, too. That social media companies are a referee in a game is properly, correctly and rightly destroyed, countered by Zuckerberg, who points out that Facebook is the town square, not a referee in a game, pointing out that free speech is 100 percent absolute. This capitalist ideal is one with which the Wall Street Journal reporter fundamentally agrees and accepts: “You have to earn it,” he tells Haugen, his anonymous source.

Also, the interplay between a technologically ignorant reporter and the educationally ignorant technologist intrigues. The contrast dramatizes that we are all Comprachicos, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, lost in a world of machines, tools and organs, whether newspapers, apps or likes, designed to instill conformity and developed beyond our capacity to properly use them, let alone understand their impact on our lives. The exchange over the sexist claim of “mansplaining” is one of many exchanges in The Social Reckoning that makes you think and gain amusement from today’s tit-for-tat false dichotomies—all of them, or many of them, rooted in irrationalism.

Such knowledgeable, brilliant minds—founders, reporters, technicians—are all wasted, groping and struggling to breathe, yearning to live and be free, longing to belong in the world. The movie’s climax of the riot on January 6th, 2021, which cartoonishly depicts and distorts the riot without regard for those who were killed, strikes a false note even as it shows, perhaps without the filmmaker’s intention, the core of Mark Zuckerberg’s downfall.

“Take it down,” goes the phrase, repeated over and over and over during Sorkin’s anti-Trump/U.S. Capitol riots climax, an action which contradicts the moral absolutism Zuckerberg’s held throughout his young, brilliant and accomplished life. Silencing the voice of an American president, who never ordered, let alone endorsed or called for, let alone incited, anything remotely resembling a riot, let alone an insurrection, was, in reality, the beginning of the end of Facebook.

Facebook’s distorted impact on Western civilization—and not for reasons Sorkin would have you think—culminated in the asinine view that the riot was a serious attempt to overthrow the government by an incumbent president, a view for which there’s no evidence. The riot sequence, as stupid as it is, allows Sorkin to depict that Zuckerberg’s billion-dollar empire is built on a house of cards—almost literally a castle in the clouds—and this is why The Social Reckoning is a true dramatization of what it means to love your own life, which begins with owning your life.

The Social Reckoning refers to an interior process and Madison, the actress perfectly dramatizing this American whistleblower, performs the character arc from anxious, ignorant, neurotic young woman, alarmed at the radicalization of someone she knows, to the relaxed, grounded, romantic, rational—and happier—person she chooses to become, richer than anyone else on screen.

I know firsthand that depicted Zuckerberg sycophants are everywhere in Silicon Valley and other tech bubbles, such as Seattle. It’s especially prevalent in Silicon Valley, though today’s sycophancy can be rampant near you, too, whether on a military base, a Starbucks or polling place, TSA lines or a fast pass airport line where people trade privacy for speedier access to government-approved permission to travel. What you gain and what you lose by trading who you are, what you think, what you value and what you like—it’s fully accounted for in The Social Reckoning. As a reckoning, it succeeds by focusing on a character who values herself and dares to be vulnerable and reach out to a stranger on the other side of a computer monitor.

In this sense, The Social Reckoning challenges the Facebook premise that one ought to strive to be selfless, as its guidebook instructs. Whatever the awards, whatever the numbers, whatever the billions of dollars, whatever the movie’s box office receipts, whatever the multi-trillion dollar debt of a nation—or a corporation or movie studio—or your own net worth, you, too, can be rich. You, too, can be wealthy. You, too, can be healthy and happy here on earth.

This is the ideal of being social: to be selfish and begin again by choosing to connect with another man or woman—someone to whom you may give the benefit of the doubt, someone who can hold your hand or give you a thumb drive, or hug you, close, for longer than 10 seconds, longer than it takes to click like or swipe left or select an emoticon. Treat yourself like you’re an adult, not an ignoramus or a moron, The Social Reckoning proposes. You are and can and ought to be glorious, radiant and happy. This is the meaning of this movie.

I don’t know Frances Haugen and I don’t know whether this story depicts what she did with fidelity to what is true. But, in this movie, Aaron Sorkin dramatizes the power of the individual to change the world by putting herself first and foremost, and why reconnecting with reality as it is gives the individual the power to penetrate the thick clouds of disgust around you, transcend to a higher state of being with joy and profit from knowing you’re in company with the best people living in harmony with integrity on earth. Sorkin, who created or co-created the fine 1995 movie The American President, 2015’s best movie Steve Jobs, The West Wing, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Social Network, continues to create thoughtful movies. For now, The Social Reckoning is his best.

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