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The most potent of the drugs currently approved for inducing weight loss has an even stronger effect when combined with another hormone-targeting treatment. The findings suggest that combining the two could lead to more potent weight-loss therapies, an approach that could become available for wider use in the next few years.

“It’s a pretty astonishing degree of weight loss,” says David Preiss at the University of Oxford, who wasn’t involved in the latest research.

Tirzepatide, sold under the brand names Mounjaro and Zepbound, is the most potent approved weight-loss drug. Throughout the world, it is used to treat adults who have type 2 diabetes or obesity, or who are overweight and have at least one weight-related condition, such as high blood pressure. The drug is administered through weekly injections and mimics two appetite-suppressing hormones: GLP-1 and GIP.

Searching for an even stronger alternative, Dan Skovronsky at Eli Lilly in Indiana and his colleagues recruited 367 people from the US and Argentina who were overweight or who had obesity, all of whom had type 2 diabetes.

They randomly split the participants into groups, then gave some a high, 15-milligram dose of tirzepatide each week. Other groups received varying doses of tirzepatide in combination with eloralintide, a drug that targets a different appetite-suppressing hormone, amylin, and was delivered via a second weekly injection. The team named this dual approach EloraTZP. The remaining participants received placebo injections.

Eleven months later, participants receiving only the 15-milligram tirzepatide dose had lost 15.6 kilograms, or about 14.8 per cent of their body weight, on average. In contrast, those who received the highest dose of eloralintide and the 15-milligram dose of tirzepatide lost about 24.5 kilograms on average, equivalent to 23.3 per cent of their body weight. The placebo group lost just 3 per cent of their body weight, on average.

The findings were presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Milan, Italy, on 30 September.

“Adding a drug acting like amylin [alongside tirzepatide] effectively brings a third appetite-regulating pathway into play, which may explain why the combination appears to deliver substantially greater weight loss,” says Lora Heisler at the University of Aberdeen, UK, who also wasn’t involved in the work.

The tirzepatide group also experienced a 2.4 per cent reduction, on average, in their blood sugar levels. The same figure was 2.9 per cent in the high-dose EloraTZP group and 0.3 per cent among those on the placebo. “These are massive reductions [with EloraTZP],” says Preiss. “You would imagine that this [and the weight loss] would reduce the risk of cardiovascular complications, high blood pressure,” he says, although further studies exploring this are needed.

However, mild to moderate side effects, such as diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting, were more common in the EloraTZP groups than those on tirzepatide alone or the placebo. This is probably why up to 27 per cent of those in the EloraTZP groups dropped out of the trial, whereas the dropout rate was just 3 per cent in the tirzepatide group and 17 per cent in the placebo group, says Preiss.

The increased risk of such side effects may put some people off the combined treatment approach, even if it carries the potential for greater weight loss, says Heisler. “They might find the combination more difficult to tolerate. If the patient’s already doing well on a drug like tirzepatide, then additional benefit may not outweigh the added treatment burden or side effects.”

What’s more, some people would only benefit from losing small or moderate amounts of body weight, and so EloraTZP may not be the right approach for them, says Preiss. Still, a larger trial of EloraTZP, delivered as a single weekly injection, is set to launch by the end of the year, the team wrote in a press release. If all goes smoothly, the US Food and Drug Administration could approve the approach for wider use in the next few years, says Heisler.

Although the latest trial was based on people with type 2 diabetes, weight-loss drugs consistently have larger effects in people who don’t have the condition, but have obesity or are overweight. It is unclear why this is the case, says Preiss, but it suggests the benefits of EloraTZP could be even greater for such people, although further trials are needed to verify this, he says.

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One summer morning, the Rev. Melissa Wagner stepped into the pulpit of her church and delivered a sermon that no pastor ever wants to give.

Wagner fought back tears as she spoke in her stately United Methodist church that had stood in Belding, Michigan, for 120 years. To celebrate their faith and prosperity, the town’s leaders had built a grand edifice with a soaring domed ceiling, massive stained-glass windows and an 8-foot painting of Jesus overlooking the altar.

But on that Sunday in 2024, Wagner spoke to a nearly empty church — about 12 elderly members, sitting far apart from one another in a sanctuary built for a thousand people. Wagner stood alone in the pulpit. There was no choir, no church organist, and no children or young families.

She was delivering a eulogy — not for a person, but for her congregation. She was announcing that their church would close because of dwindling membership.

“You are still the church,” Wagner said as one elderly woman dabbed her eyes with tissue. “And while where you worship will change, the one you worship does not.”

What Wagner experienced with her shrinking congregation is arguably the most urgent challenge facing churches across America. Experts project an estimated 100,000 churches in the US will close or be repurposed over the next decade. Many churches will be unable to escape this “tsunami” of closings — a grim trajectory one pastor described as, “Every year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter.”

This is the challenge that “Christianity at a Crossroads,” a new TV documentary series, examines. The comprehensive four-part series, which premieres Thursday on PBS stations, features heart-wrenching scenes like the last days of Belding United Methodist Church. It also shows how mass church closures will hurt communities across America — including people who don’t attend church or care nothing for organized religion.

The filmmakers talk to an astonishing range of churchgoers from leaders such as the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a vocal supporter of President Trump, to the Rev. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate candidate in Kansas, to people who attend a virtual reality church as avatars.

The shadow that hangs over the entire series, though, is the perilous future of the church. Christian leaders have been warning about the decline of American churches for decades. What’s new about the PBS series is that it presents portraits of the people and congregations behind this decline, along with specific numbers and a timeframe for the expected church closings.

At the same time, the series offers Christians glimmers of hope: stories of churches that are bucking the trend by adapting, embracing technology and growing their congregations.

Why church closings affect more than just churchgoers

Despite churches’ struggles, Christianity remains the dominant religion in America. It’s woven into the fabric of American history as well as the nation’s political and civic culture. About 62% of adults in the US identify as Christian, and the series says that an estimated 30% of Americans — about 100 million people — still attend church every week.

There are recent signs that the gradual decline in church attendance has leveled off. For the first time in 25 years, the number of people attending in-person worship in the US has increased, according to a new study from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Worshippers are showing up in greater numbers, giving more money to congregations and volunteering more, the study found.

But there will be no return to the glory days of the mid-20th century, when almost half of Americans routinely attended a church, synagogue or mosque, the same study concluded.

The filmmaker behind “Christianity at a Crossroads” agrees with that assessment.

“The tsunami is going to continue for a while, says Martin Doblmeier, the founder and president of Journey Films, a production company specializing in movies and TV series about faith.

The docuseries, though, also looks at churches that defy this trend. They include thriving immigrant churches like Korean Central Presbyterian Church in Northern Virginia. Others like Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, have about 10,000 members and expanded their congregation in recent years by making their church a more attractive destination for people outside their church walls.

“They still have a packed house but now also have about 15,000 people who view them online,” Doblmeier tells CNN. “It’s no longer an in-person church with an online option. It’s an online church with an in-person option. That’s quite intentional, and a sign of the future.”

Some churches have rightly been accused of being partisan, hypocritical and discriminatory toward women and minorities. But film argues that most American churches are “engines of social good.” At a time when the social safety net is fraying and affordability is a midterm-election mantra, churches are stepping into the void.

Various studies show that regular churchgoers donate more to charity, are more active in politics and more likely to join civic groups. Volunteerism has declined for years in America, but churchgoers step into the gap.

When pews go empty, those outside a church’s walls also suffer, the Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, an author, activist and senior pastor at Middle Church in New York City, says in the film.

“In so many neighborhoods, the church is the food pantry, the immigration station,” she says. “This is the place that is (there) for the outsider, the stranger.”

A Maryland church makes a tough decision

The film explores the reasons that church attendance began declining around the 1960s. Some are well-documented: declining trust in institutions, debates over homosexuality, clergy sex-abuse scandals and the rise of “nones,” those who describe their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular.”

A result of this trend is that thousands of churches across America are now like the United Methodist church in Belding, Michigan. Their peak days are in the rear-view mirror. They often face brutal choices: whether to close or limp along, living off endowments and the tenacity of a few dedicated worshippers.

This was the situation facing the Rev. Matt Braddock, senior pastor at Christ Congregational Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. Membership had dwindled below 100 people, while the sanctuary cost about $400,000 a year to insure and maintain. The pressure to keep the church open became so acute that Braddock developed a migraine headache that lasted for six months.

“Every year was so stressful because we were always cutting corners in every budget to pay for the building,” Braddock tells CNN.

His church, which is featured in the PBS series, made the difficult decision several years ago to close its building. But they continued to worship by moving into the basement of another church, where Braddock discovered some surprises. He found that he liked the intimacy of worship in small spaces. The church saved enough money to hire staff. Membership stabilized, and pledges are now strong, he says. His headache is now gone.

He says the experience has made him, and his congregation think anew about how the “church” should be defined.

“It was important for me to remind everyone that the church isn’t a building, and it never was,” Braddock says. “It’s the gathering of God’s people. Where we are gathering, God’s always with us, wherever that is. I understand the attachment to a building, but I question whether we should have been attached to the building in the first place.”

What unites churches that thrive

But many declining churches don’t adapt. Its leaders don’t demand change, and its members don’t pursue it until it’s too late. Doblmeier, an award-winning filmmaker who has been making documentaries about faith for decades, thinks he knows why.

The same reason many go to church is the same reason why many churches struggle to survive: the allure of the familiar.

“Church is the place you go to because you feel as though it’s not changing,” he says. “People look forward to the same rhythms, prayers and rituals that they’re so used to … This is the one place where they can have comfort and stability.”

The PBS series spotlights churches that have successfully defied the wave of closings. One example is the Church Project in Texas, a faith community that has returned to the practices of early Christianity by primarily meeting in small groups in members’ homes.

What unites churches that grow?

As the documentary series shows some shared traits — accessible parking, lively music, powerful preaching and efforts to shower visitors with hospitality — seem mundane. But they are non-negotiable elements for growth. The film also spotlights the Church of the Nativity in suburban Baltimore, Maryland, which has learned another key to expansion: make church fun for young people. It draws about 800 kids and youths for its Sunday services.

“They saw early on that if the children want to come, they will bring their parents,” Doblmeier says.

One of American church leaders’ biggest fears is that their country will become more like Western Europe — a “post-Christian” landscape filled with empty cathedrals and church buildings converted to condos.

Yet Braddock, the Maryland pastor, has faith. He says humans need community.

“People can get together for other reasons,” he says, “but there’s something important to people with similar spiritual questions and hungers getting together and finding meaning. That doesn’t go away. Having vitality doesn’t mean numerical growth. Churches can still be full of life without having to be megachurches.”

The first Christians worshipped primarily in each other’s homes. They didn’t define the church as a building — it was a “body of believers — it was wherever Christians gathered in Jesus’ name.”

That belief is part of why Christians’ faith lived on, despite persecutions and scandals through the centuries. This is the faith that Wagner, the pastor in Belding, alluded to when she looked out on her mostly empty church and told its remaining members, “the one you worship does not change.”

This is the faith that many churches in America hold onto today. And it also poses their biggest challenge.

How do you hold onto “God’s unchanging hand” but change just enough to keep filling the pews and collection plates?

In the years ahead, every church will have to answer that question.

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President Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.

The ads have run across cable and network television — on Fox News, CNN and MS Now, with football games on Fox and with national newscasts on CBS, ABC and NBC, including “Meet the Press,” which Mr. Trump is known to watch.

Mr. Trump was eager to see the laudatory ads on the air and told Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to come up with the money from within the government, the people said. Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s counsel, and Will Scharf, the White House counsel, both said it would be legal to use D.H.S. funds. The president and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, both spoke with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, about the ads.

On Sept. 20, U.S. Customs and Border Protection — which falls under D.H.S. — awarded the contract to LMD, a Maryland marketing firm, federal records show.

This article is based on interviews with 12 people familiar with the president’s interest in the ads and how they came to be. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the president’s demand.

The taxpayer-funded ads have been criticized by Democrats and even some Republicans as a possible violation of federal laws against using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” And they come as the president is also directing spending from his super PAC — MAGA Inc., which entered the fall with $400 million — for which he has been raising money since he won re-election in 2024.

It was not clear why taxpayer funds, and not money from the super PAC, were used for the spots.

The White House has called the ads public service announcements and said they are appropriate because there is no “call to action” to vote for any candidate. Some of his aides also noted that Mr. Trump is not running for office now, in an attempt to blunt criticism of the ads as violating federal laws about the use of public money.

When pressed by a reporter on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said: “If somebody said that that’s wrong, I’ll gladly pay the money.”

“But these are ads for the country,” he added. “You have to understand. I’m not promoting a candidate. I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.”

At least four spots have run so far, at a cost of about $5.5 million, and that is expected to grow, according to the media tracker AdImpact and people familiar with the spending. One played images of Mr. Trump to the song “Love Me” by Christian Berishaj, who performs as JMSN. (The artist has protested the use of his song.)

Another was identical to a Trump campaign video from 2024 that condemns “villains” whom the president perceives as enemies. The use of material originally made during Mr. Trump’s political campaign has given fuel to critics who reject the White House claim that the ads are simply public service announcements.

A third ad, about the Iran war, features remarks from both Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Such public service spots typically say which agency paid for them. In this case, all of the ads had an unusual tagline: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

‘Love Me’

On Aug. 7, Mr. Trump was in the Oval Office with a group of Republican strategists working with his team, along with James Blair, his top political adviser, and Ms. Wiles. Natalie Harp, his ever-present assistant and provider of positive news about himself, was there as well.

At the time, Mr. Trump’s advisers were waiting for him to sign off, finally, on spending from his super PAC for midterm candidates, after months of anxiety from Republican candidates about whether he would help them financially in tight races.

But during that meeting, the president was much more interested in looking at videos of himself.

He turned to Ms. Harp and asked her to show the group the type of imagery he favors.

Ms. Harp pulled up a series of videos made by the White House digital team on her tablet: Mr. Trump standing in front of vast crowds; Mr. Trump beside Marine One; Mr. Trump with fighter jets streaking overhead.

One video showed Dana White, the U.F.C. president, at the 2024 Republican convention, calling Mr. Trump “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” Mr. Trump has talked with delight about that quote repeatedly ever since.

Mr. Trump made clear he planned to travel to support candidates in the midterms, but also that his presidency needed to be promoted, front and center, in the commercials his advisers were making.

Later that month, The Atlantic reported that MAGA Inc. was planning a blitz of midterm ads, with Trump as the centerpiece.

Instead, a Trump-linked nonprofit called Securing American Greatness aired a spot featuring the Dana White quote, spending just under $60,000, according to AdImpact. The ad primarily aired over Sept. 2 and Sept. 3 around Washington, where Mr. Trump was sure to see them.

But then, weeks later, several ads glorifying Mr. Trump began appearing across the country — this time paid for by taxpayers, by way of Customs and Border Protection.

The ads included the “Love Me” spot, in which Mr. Trump says in a voice-over that “America will never be a communist country.”

As the taxpayer-funded spots began running, MAGA Inc. has spent directly to help out in one specific race, putting more than $20 million into the Texas Senate campaign. Two other new groups linked to MAGA Inc. — No Going Back PAC and Safety and Affordability PAC — were recently created and have spent and reserved more than $163 million on spots in races across the country.

But those ads feature Mr. Trump only sparingly.

Asked to comment for this story, the White House press office sent an unsigned statement saying, “These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders and abroad.”

The White House has said there is precedent for using taxpayer money for the ads. “Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted on X on Sept. 27.

His office sent out an email stating that “presidential public service announcements are nothing new,” comparing the spots to efforts to promote health care policy in past administrations, or President Woodrow Wilson’s World War I propaganda campaign.

The Government Accountability Office has found likely or confirmed violations of the anti-propaganda rule before, including during the tenures of both President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush. Those cases concerned publicity campaigns related to policies, not ads focused on the presidents themselves.

‘This Is My Money’

The money for the ads was freed up on Sept. 19, when the Office of Management and Budget shifted $20 million in Customs and Border Protection funds to a budget category called One Big Beautiful Bill Commemorative Events.

The next day, C.B.P. awarded a $20 million contract to LMD, a marketing firm based in Columbia, Md., that federal records show had past work as a government contractor. The actual purchase of the airtime was made by a second firm, LMO, according to a person familiar with the events, who wasn’t authorized to discuss them publicly.

A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget declined to comment on the reporting for this story. A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department would only say, “D.H.S. follows all applicable rules for contracting decisions and keeps all decision makers informed. All contracting decisions are made in accordance with applicable law.” Officials with LMD and LMO did not respond to requests for comment.

The spots started out airing narrowly but soon ran in heavy rotation not just on cable channels, but on broadcast networks as well. They ran heavily on the network morning programs like “Good Morning America” and “CBS Mornings,” according AdImpact, and appeared in entertainment shows including “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Amazing Race.” One aired repeatedly during weekend football broadcasts on the Fox network.

The ads are not the first costly television campaign under Mr. Trump, nor are they the first controversial ones. In 2025, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary at the time, appeared in a $200 million-plus government ad campaign. The ads, which showed Ms. Noem on a horse at Mount Rushmore, ultimately drew the president’s disapproval, and became the justification for replacing Ms. Noem.

The latest ads promoting Mr. Trump come as his standing with the public has dropped. His approval rating sits at around 37 percent, a number that has been low and steady for months, according to a polling tracker by The New York Times. Republicans are increasingly fearful of a Democratic sweep of both House and Senate, and losses in state legislatures.

Mr. Trump has remained a prodigious fund-raiser for his various construction projects around Washington and at the White House, as well as his future presidential library. Last month, he promised to spend “probably” $400 million to $500 million on midterm election races, but he made clear who holds the purse strings to his super PAC.

“This is my money that I control,” Mr. Trump said.

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An ad that was approved by President Trump and paid for by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Credit…via YouTube

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When Elon Musk took SpaceX public in June, a big part of its value proposition came from promises of data centers in space. Skeptics were quick to list all of the hurdles. This afternoon Google’s Project Suncatcher is scheduled to launch hardware in pursuit of the same idea: it will send artificial intelligence processors into orbit onboard—of all things—a SpaceX rocket.

That doesn’t mean Musk’s pitch will become reality anytime soon. If anything, the gulf between Suncatcher and a working data center in orbit suggests how far off that future still is. But as AI’s appetite for electricity tests the patience of communities being asked to feed it, some of the richest tech companies are racing to source their energy needs from space instead.

The test satellite will carry just four processors, which will be used to run Google’s Gemini AI models for 15 minutes at a stretch before they need to shut down and cool off. The ultimate goal is to establish a full-fledged orbital data center, built from constellations of thousands of satellites that will share the work of running AI models and beam their responses back to Earth.

The whole effort has less to do with what could be accomplished out in space than with what’s getting harder to achieve down here on Earth. Data centers are projected to use around 3 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030, roughly double their share today, according to an International Energy Agency report. In orbit, sunlight is abundant and free, and Google says a solar panel there generates up to eight times as much power as it would on the ground. “We have direct access to a wonderful renewable source of energy,” says Alexander Wyglinski, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

There’s a political incentive to look beyond U.S. soil, too. As the data-center buildout grows more divisive, blasting that infrastructure into space and away from people’s backyards holds obvious appeal.

But scale is the main question, Google readily admits. The biggest AI data centers that are being built now pack in hundreds of thousands of chips and draw up to a gigawatt of power, several thousand times the output of the International Space Station’s solar arrays. Even getting enough solar panels into orbit would be a massive undertaking at that scale. “It’s going from arrays that are several meters on a side to arrays that are a couple of kilometers on a side,” says Kerri Cahoy, a professor of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Launching enough mass to generate the power is huge.”

The problems don’t end once everything is up there, either. Though space is cold, its vacuum is a lousy place to dissipate heat, which is why Suncatcher’s chips must clock out to cool down and why the satellites require specialized radiators. The whole satellite network needs to be resilient to space debris. And the cosmic radiation that Earth’s atmosphere filters out can scramble calculations, forcing systems to catch and correct errors on the fly. “When we talk about satellite platforms, and you put a computer into them, you don’t put [in] a computer like the one you have on your desk,” Wyglinski says.

For months before today’s launch, Google has been anticipating those problems on Earth, shaking spacecraft to simulate the launch and bombarding its chips with proton beams to test their response to radiation. “It’s about seeing what works, identifying points of failure and applying those findings to future missions,” says Travis Beals, a senior director at Google, who leads Project Suncatcher.

Even so, scaling up could force Google and SpaceX to confront some stubborn physics. Every chip and solar panel has to be hauled into orbit, and every answer those chips produce has to come back down.

Satellites can transmit data to Earth, but doing so at scale is expensive and difficult. “We don’t have the convenient, easy way to get that data back to the ground,” says Alan George, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, who heads a National Science Foundation center focused on space computing. During the Cold War, the problem was bad enough that U.S. spy satellites parachuted exposed film back to Earth. 

Computers on Earth relay information easily, and lasers have made it possible to do the same between spacecraft. But getting information between Earth and space is another story entirely, so it is best to process some of the information gathered on satellites before it is sent down to Earth. “I like to tell my students the best data compression is answers,” George says. While that logic could apply to AI responses, too, his work putting computers in space tells him that the resource constraints make it hard to match what “you would put down the street in a building.”

Google’s engineers say they began from a similarly skeptical premise. “As a first step, we tried to find reasons that it was impossible,” Beals says, “but we gradually became convinced that it might actually work.” 

And then there’s the question that may ultimately decide the whole thing: How will the limited bandwidth and energy savings make up the maintenance costs? 

he cost of launching data center satellites and replacing them as they wear out, along with the bottleneck of getting data back down, may eat up whatever the free sunshine saves. The competitors in the first space race were nations jockeying for scientific dominance. Orbital data centers are mainly being pitched by corporations, which tend to prefer profitable ventures. So even if Project Suncatcher solves its technical challenges, those physical limitations could still kill the idea before Google gets anywhere close to a full-blown data center in space.

More often than not, space throws up more challenges than early movers expect. “It’s usually the late entrants who finally figured out how to do it effectively,” Cahoy says. SpaceX itself didn’t reach orbit until half a century after Sputnik.

If she’s right, the company that eventually gets data centers in space to scale may not even have booked its ride to orbit yet.

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The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has confirmed plans to cut 20% of generals and admirals and declared “no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps” would be tolerated inside the country’s military.

Delivering his latest extraordinary attack on diversity, and dismissing reports of low morale within the US armed forces as “false claims”, Hegseth also suggested they were retaining service personnel at “record” rates.

The defense secretary pointed to those onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, following concern over mental health and supply issues on the aircraft carrier, which was deployed for almost nine months. About “80% of the force” onboard was retained, he said.

Addressing lower-ranking troops at the Marine Corps Base on Wednesday, Hegseth boasted about the anti-diversity policies in the Pentagon pushed by Donald Trump’s administration.

“The only focus, as you know, in your formations should be training, readiness, accountability, discipline and lethality,” Hegseth said. “And when you pursue those things, you don’t have to walk on eggshells … the complainers, the ideologues and the poor performers are no longer in the driver’s seat.”

He added: “But it’s worth saying again, so the fake news understands it. We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

Generals “who clung to the woke department, or seemed to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion, well, they no longer work here”, Hegseth said.

Eight US navy personnel assigned to the Lincoln attempted suicide since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, it emerged last week.

Hegseth appeared to reference the carrier while attacking the media on Wednesday, insisting there are “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, patently false claims of low troop morale, or flat-out propaganda, as if it’s written by our adversaries”.

The crew of the Lincoln, which was at sea for 286 days, disembarked on 1 September in a Thai resort city. The crew had been scheduled to wrap their deployment in May, but it was extended amid Trump’s war on Iran.

During his speech in Quantico, Virginia, the defense secretary announced several new initiatives, including a a new Pentagon project which will see Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey – a top Trump donor and ally – and Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker, work with the department to study the “future of warfare”.

The Guardian previously reported on how Luckey’s company, Anduril Inudstries, a major defense technology company, has received billions in government contracts over the last year.

Hegseth also took aim at Ivy League universities and liberal arts colleges during his speech – which Trump has targeted routinely since he returned to office. The defense secretary branded the institutions as “DEI-worshipping woke factories”. Notably, Hegseth is a graduate of Harvard and Princeton Universities – both members of the Ivy League.

Hegseth said the Pentagon would now partner with other institutions as part of its educational pipeline. Some of these schools, such as Liberty University and Hillsdale College, are known for conservative values.

Others joining the partnership are Louisiana State University, Mississippi University and Tuskegee University.

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The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, gestures after giving a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia on Wednesday. Photograph: Alex Wong/Pool Getty Images North America/AP

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Rachel Dolezal never surprised me in the slightest. A white woman who masqueraded as Black while leading a N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State about 12 years ago, she was an almost inevitable sign of our times.

So Hannah Gann needn’t surprise us either. Gann is a 34-year-old public-school teacher and activist in Philadelphia who grew up white, Jewish and affluent but for years has falsely claimed to be of Black (Tunisian) and Palestinian descent. She was a prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause, so forceful as to have been accused of antisemitism. Fellow activists outed her last month and she has acknowledged lying.

Gann is an ideological descendant of Dolezal, who grew up white in Montana in the 1980s and ’90s and started “identifying” as Black some years after completing a master’s degree at Howard University, a historically Black school. Wearing her hair in Black American styles and sporting a spray tan or using bronzer — the one thing besides membership in Homo sapiens that she shares with Donald Trump — she claimed to have a Black father. Her parents outed her as white in 2015, but she dug in her heels. She now goes by the name Nkechi Diallo and has said that she is “not white” but “transracial.”

There have been other such cases between Dolezal’s outing and Gann’s. Remember Jessica Krug, the white woman from Kansas passing as a Blacktina from the Bronx? Krug taught history at George Washington University, studied Blackness and published a well-reviewed book. She called herself “Jess la Bombalera” on social media, affecting a New York Latino accent in posts defending her indigent Bronx “brothers and sisters.” She resigned from George Washington in 2020 after admitting her deception.

There was also Satchuel Paigelyn Cole, a white social justice activist who confessed in 2020 that she had posed as Black. And there was CV Vitolo-Haddad, a white grad student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who resigned from a teaching post in 2020 after admitting to have pretended to be a person of color.

These cases suggest a subtype of modern white identity. For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview. It is an extreme expression of the outlook that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called “Woke 1,” in which the world is always neatly divided into wicked white oppressors and virtuous nonwhite victims. For a white person with these beliefs, it is a short step to wanting not to be white, to escape the original sin of that privilege.

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!” The decision may be eccentric — skin darkening as part of your morning routine? — but it is hardly counterintuitive.

In the pre-woke days, I knew a couple of intermediate cases. These were white women who embraced Black culture, dated Black men exclusively, used “blaccents” spontaneously and deep down seemed to wish they were Black. (Why these cases seem to almost always involve women is an interesting question to which I don’t have an answer.) But these women held off from claiming to be Black — restrained by an awareness that they not only lacked the right ancestry but also hadn’t grown up with the social disadvantages that Blackness so often entails.

It is not surprising, then, that Dolezal, in taking the extra step, told many stories of suffering racist abuse. Even after being outed, she claimed that growing up, she and her siblings (some of whom were adopted and Black) were beaten by her white mother and stepfather, who, she said, “would punish us by skin complexion.” (This story — including the claim that she had a stepfather — has been denied by family members.)

Such stories would seem to be Dolezal’s way of appropriating oppression as a mark of Blackness — offering her a path to feeling justified in claiming Blackness that those women I knew in the pre-woke days would not have taken.

Every time one of these cases turns up, it reminds me, ironically, of how much racial progress we have made in America. There was no procession of Dolezals in, say, the 1950s. No matter how leftist your politics, you would never have chosen to live as a Black person. This underscores how very much easier being Black is today than it once was, regardless of the challenges that remain. I doubt any white person claiming Blackness in the old days would have lasted more than a month.

There were some interesting almost-exceptions. The white jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow called himself a “voluntary Negro” starting in the 1920s and married a Black woman, but he did not claim to actually be Black. And in the 1880s, the white geologist Clarence King married a former slave and told her he was Black, but he lived as white outside the household.

Modern cases like Gann’s are something else. And because the fetishizing of Blackness and the reviling of whiteness is a natural outgrowth of our progressive intelligentsia’s worldview, I see little that will stop them from appearing from time to time. While Krug disappeared from public life, Dolezal presses on in her simulation, and recently said she’d like to sit down for a meal with Gann. Perhaps Gann, too, will ultimately decide that her self-identification as Black and Palestinian is valid, regardless of biology and family history.

This sort of thing will remain rare but never go extinct — no more perplexing than the occasional four-leaf clover. Get ready for another case in a year or three.

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Ricardo Tomás

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