God and Caesar

“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." An appropriate Gospel to hear, just weeks before a national election! A sobering Gospel, given religion’s increasing subordination to politics in American society! A confusing Gospel, given that it leaves unspecified exactly what belongs to God and what to Caesar!

 

As another election approaches, we are all aware of the many challenging and difficult issues facing our country, along with the contentious and acrimonious arguments that increasingly characterize campaigns and dominate national news. Disagreement and debate are natural and appropriate in a free society. That is how we choose among competing candidates and their policies and so provide for the peaceful transfer of political power to those we designate to govern our country according to the political, cultural, and moral values which we express in our votes.

 

As committed Catholic Christians, we also share with our fellow citizens in the benefits and the responsibilities of citizenship in 21st-century American society. So, what resources does our faith offer us to participate in civic life? What lessons from centuries of Catholic tradition and the experience of Catholic history in the United States can we share with our fellow citizens? What can we do together to promote the common good and care for our common home?

 

From the beginning Christians have been conscious of being both in the world while not of it. [John 17:15-16]. Jesus, as we just heard, cleverly commanded his questioners to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s [Matthew 22:20]. Saint Paul said that our citizenship is in heaven, but he also instructed Christians to obey lawful governments and to pay their taxes [Philippians 3:20; Romans 13:1-7].  In the 3rd century, despite Roman persecution, the early Christians prayed, “for Emperors, their ministers, for the condition of the world, for peace everywhere, and for the delaying of the end” [Apologetics, 39].

 

The New Testament emphasized that our religious obligations to God, while always absolute in themselves, do not cancel out our membership in civil society and our resulting obligations to the political community in which we all share. Whether as public officials or as ordinary citizens, we want the peace, security, and justice that civil society makes possible. And we have corresponding obligations. Thus, the Second Vatican Council called upon all citizens to “be mindful of the right and also the duty to use their free vote to further the common good” [Gaudium et Spes, 75].

 

Civilization doesn’t come free. Nor does our faith allow us any excuse to act as if it did. Thus, the Second Vatican Council warned: “They are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come, think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities. … This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age” [Gaudium et Spes, 43; Cf. Hebrews 13:14; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Ephesians 4:28].

 

The same Council taught that, while the Church as such has received from Christ “no proper mission in the political, economic or social order,” even so from its explicitly religious mission comes “a light and an energy which can serve to structure and consolidate the human community according to the divine law” [Gaudium et Spes, 42].

 

Over time, the Church has adopted - and adapted to ever changing political and social situations - the ancient understanding that human beings are social and political by nature [Cf. Aristotle, Politics I, 2], that human beings are naturally intended to live and thrive in close cooperation with others, and that the most developed and fulfilling form of that is our political association as fellow citizens. This political association as citizens with one another provides us with many benefits, which we would not otherwise enjoy. At the same time, it also challenges us with serious responsibilities and obligations to one another and to the wider community.

In this traditional understanding, political choices are ultimately moral choices that express what we value. Such choices identify whom we care about enough to include (or not) and highlight what kind of nation (and world) we want to be. 

 

As Catholics and citizens, we need to be particularly attentive to this dimension of political decision-making, to the moral complexities of power, of pursuing power, of exercising power. As I said at the outset, Jesus did not conveniently clarify what precisely belongs to God and what to Caesar. He recognized both duties. Then as now, he challenged the Pharisees - and he challenges us – to give God his due while caring for the world.

As Catholics and citizens, we need to respond to the challenges of voting and other political choices in a morally serious way that transcends simplistic sloganeering and emotional appeals to narrowly defined secular identities and group interests. As our own American bishops reminded us over a decade ago: “Catholics may choose different ways to respond to compelling social problems, but we cannot differ on our moral obligation to help build a more just and peaceful world through morally acceptable means, so that the weak and vulnerable are protected and human rights and dignity are defended” [USCCB, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (2015), 20]. 

Homily for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, October 18, 2026.

 

"Don't Let the Lie Pass"

 

"Don't let the lie pass." So said Simon Seebag Montefiore on a recent podcast discussion, about his new book The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East (NY: Knopf, 2026). The "lie" to which he referred was the increasingly prominent anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish line promoted and perpetuated by pro-Palestinian, leftist elites, especially now and especially here in the great Western imperial and colonial powers. Setting straight the historical record about the founding and the subsequent survival of Israel is one, but only one, aspect of The Cauldron, which is in fact an incredibly detailed history of the wider Middle East (19 countries in all) from 1900 until now.

A bestselling author of Catherine the Great & Potemkin, Stalin, Young Stalin, The Romanovs, and Jerusalem, Montefiore is a British-born descendent of the prominent Sephardic Sebag-Montefiore Jewish family. Here he guides the reader through the multiple twists and turns of one of the world's most complicated regions. While we in the West may be primarily preoccupied with Israel, because of a shared religious history, Montefiore convinces the reader that one must understand the wider story of the entire region from Iran to Morocco, from the Ottoman sultanate to today's multiplicity of (largely artificial) nation states. Hence, his account begins, not in Jerusalem or Constantinople or in one of the Western capitals destined soon to redraw the region's borders, but in Arabia where in 1902 the future Ibn Saud conquered Ryadh and began what we now know as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Prior to the transformations forced upon them by the 20th century, most people lived under empires of some sort or other. In what we call the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century, that was the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered Constantinople and ended the Christian Byzantine Roman Empire five centuries earlier. To the West was Europe with its mix of empires and nation states. To the east was the ancient nation of Iran, the modern continuation of the ancient Persian Empire. Besides Iran, the only other authentic ancient national state in the region was Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire but in practice a British protectorate. 

Montefiore recounts in intensive detail the military and political processes by which this sprawling area, populated by a multiplicity of ancient peoples, coexisting as neighbors often peacefully, but sometimes not, was divided into a set of new national states, most of which had never existed before in any form, however ancient the names they adopted (e.g., Lebanon, Syria). One of those new states (although by no means the newest), Israel, represented an ancient people recently restored to their ancient land and restoring its ancient name.

"One of the depressing threads is the grinding reduction of this gleaming mosaic to a bleaker binary of nationalisms." This is a prolonged account of how the Middle East today has become "less and less diverse and tolerant." Nasser expelled Egypt's Jews, Westerners, Turco-Circassians, Greeks, and Armenians, and in the process "impoverished Egypt and ended two millennia of cosmopolitanism." In the one undoubted genuine genocide to take place in the region during this period, the Ottomans "erased" the Armenians. To create modern Turkey, "hundreds of thousands of Greeks" were expelled from lands where Greeks had lived almost since the Trojan War. "But one of the greatest tragedies has been the decades-long purge of Christians: thanks to Arab nationalism and islamist terror, Middle Eastern Christians have declined from 20 percent in 1900 to 4 per cent today. In 1900, Christinas were 14 per cent of Iraq's population; now they are 0.4 percent; in 1990 a million Christians, today 150,000."

The author also considers "the messy interventions of outsiders." The first part of the book examines "the end of the Ottoman Empire and the thirty-year rule by French, British, Italians, and briefly Greeks, which was followed by the U.S. and Soviet interventions of the Cold War." The rest chronicles the multiplicity of new states and their eighty or so years of independence with internal and mutual conflicts.

The entire account is somewhat daunting. The transformation (mostly for the worse) of ancient societies like Egypt and Iran is described in detail. Likewise described are the self-creation of Saudi Arabia and the artificial creations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan by France and Britain. And, of corse, the complicated story of Israel's founding and the many missed opportunities for the creation of an Arab Palestinian state alongside it. The familiar adage about how the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity is abundantly confirmed.

The account also includes often overlooked areas and contemporary conflicts in the region - for example, the Third Sudanese Civil War, which "is by far the greatest civilian massacre in the Middle East in modern times." In that league, of course, is Iran, which massacred its civilian population in two infamous days in January of this year, "an event so colossal that it may be the largest single event massacre in the entire Middle East since 1900."

Concluding with the recent conflict in and with Iran is not accidental. Montefiore considers the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran "a world-changing epochal moment as significant as 1789 and 1917." He suggests "it was not so much Islam that was radicalized after 1979, but revolutionism that was Islamised." Meanwhile, some "Arab monarchies have become citadels of the open version of Islam. But this is a recent, fragile achievement, dependent on particularly inspired leaders in the Kingdom and Emirates - and a period of safety under American protection between 1991 and 2026 that could already be over."

Israel, meanwhile, he believes, has become "both swaggering and insecure, over-reaching and under-prepared, secular liberal and militaristic messianic, spectacular in tactics, impoverished in strategy." To thrive, he believes "it needs to convert military success into creative coexistence and regional alliance."

The Cauldron contains more historical information than many readers may be looking for and more than most may be prepared to assimilate. Beneath all the details, however, is a coherent analysis of one of the world's most consistently contentious regions, which may be indispensable for understanding whatever ways forward may yet be findable.

What If the Polls Are Right?

Once upon a time, I used to valorize the public act of of voting, everyone voting together on the same day, which at some level I still see as a democratic participatory ideal. But then I switched to Early Voting - easier to do, especially when I lived in Tennessee where one could vote anywhere and I drove to the polling place of my choice. Here in New York, where I would have to walk to my assigned polling place, I have become a confirmed mail-in voter. Accordingly, my midterm ballot is already in the mail. Whatever happens between now and Election Day my vote has been cast. Not that it matters very much in New York City, where the party primary is much more important than the general election.

Outside New York City, however, this seems to be shaping up to be an amazingly important and interesting midterm election, with control of both houses of Congress conceivably in play. If the polls are to be believed, this promises to be a very good election for Democrats. Why and how has this happened, and what might that mean for our future? So in the spirit of election season I am temporarily putting on my former political scientist's hat and playacting as political pundit for the day!

"If the polls are to be believed" is, of course, quite a caveat. Polling is a notoriously imperfect science. At its best, polling is not a prediction of the future but a picture of the present. For all sorts of reasons, even as a picture of the present, a poll's accuracy can be problematic, and polling has perhaps become even more difficult. Because polling can easily tend to overrepresent those who are easier to reach and more willing to participate, many polls may tend to skew Democratic. (In all three of his presidential races, for example, Donald Trump over-performed his pre-election poll numbers.) That said, history and environment both seem to confirm the direction in which the polls are trending.

Historically, the opposition party (the party that lost the presidential election two years previously) tends to gain seats in Congress in the midterms, with only the rarest of exceptions in the modern period. This is, if anything, especially likely when the president is a "lame-duck," even when the president is still personally popular (e.g., Eisenhower in 1958). What political scientists call the "thermostatic theory" of elections proposes that voters act like a household thermostat, shifting their support back and forth and thus normally rewarding the out-party in midterm elections. This is actually quite problematic for democratic governance, since (especially in this contemporary era of political polarization and small congressional majorities) it easily tends to cause gridlock, inhibiting the the effectiveness of the legislative process and further increasing voter disillusionment and cynicism. On the other hand, it can also provide an important check on executive power, something obviously very much needed for democratic governance, particularly at present.

Even more than history, it is the current ambient environment that seems to confirm the overall direction in which the polls are pointing. President Trump has become at present a particularly unpopular "lame-duck." So a serious swing in the Democrats' direction is to be expected. The Republican House majority is so small that even a modest swing in the Democrats' direction would presumably give them the majority. In the not too distant past, midterms saw significant gains in the number of seats held by the opposition party. The radically reduced number of actually competitive seats, thanks to political polarization in the electorate and increasingly effective partisan gerrymandering, make such significant shifts less likely. But in a "wave" year, we may yet expect some surprises.

The Senate may well serve up such a surprise, which would be a most momentous gain for the Democrats. A year ago, hardly anyone would have predicted that the Democrats might also capture control of the Senate. At present, Republicans hold a 53–47 majority in the Senate (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats). A net gain of four seats would be required to bring Democrats to 51 seats, securing a governing majority. (A net gain of five seats would be even safer, given the unpredictability of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.) Given the predominance of states that voted for Trump in 2024 and that have Republican senators in this year's electoral map, winning control of the Senate would presumptively seem to be quite a steep climb for the Democrats. (In the states that went for Trump all three times, Democrats currently have no Senate seats. In the states that Trump lost all three times, Republicans have only one Senate seat, Maine.)

Since then, however, the map of competitive Senate seats has dramatically expanded, presumably as part of a general reaction against President Trump's policies - particularly his tariffs and the Iran War, both of which have contributed to serious inflation, most dramatically higher gas and diesel prices. President Trump won in 2024 in large part because of voters' anger about high prices and Trump's promise to reduce the cost of living. He also promised to end "forever wars." High prices and the war with Iran are dramatic policy failures which cannot be "spun" away or successfully distracted from with increasingly irrelevant "culture war" polemics.

Maine may prove to be an exception - if indeed Susan Collins can successfully localize the election in her favor. More generally, however, politics has largely become nationalized, and local issues may matter less in elections, especially federal elections where control of Congress (and hence a possible check on an increasingly unpopular President) are at issue. "Candidate quality" can still matter, however. Thus, if even long-shot Texas goes Democratic, credit must go obviously to the wider "wave" but also to the evident deficiencies of the Republican Senate candidate and the surprising strengths of the Democratic candidate. Perhaps neither factor would be sufficient without the other, but together the anti-Trump environment and concerns about "candidate quality" may combine to accomplish unexpected results. 

Parenthetically, the Democratic candidate in Texas is a Presbyterian seminarian. The Democratic senatorial candidate in Kansas is a Methodist pastor (pastor of the largest church in the state). This may be a good year for Democratic pastors and seminarians! For too long, the Democrats have been portrayed as the non-religious or irreligious or even anti-religious party. If the Democrats can reclaim some of the religious vote, that would be both good for them and good for the country.

More broadly, another unexpected "candidate quality" problem posed for Republicans by the suddenly expanding map is that candidates who are used to winning in ordinarily "safe" districts may sometimes prove surprisingly ineffective as candidates when faced for the first time with an actually competitive election.

And then there is the "enthusiasm gap." There is evidence that Democrats are much more enthusiastic about voting this year - as measured not just by polls but by turnout in party primaries and special elections. In close races, which most contested races increasingly are, turnout matters, which makes it the most significant remaining imponderable. 

The one area where Republicans do appear to have a definite advantage is money. All things considered, one would always rather have more money than less. However, given the level of political polarization, political advertising probably does not change many minds, although it may help boost base voter turnout. In 2024, Trump won in part because of his success in turning out "low propensity" voters who don't follow politics closely and seldom or never vote, especially in midterms. If last-minute advertising somehow motivates unenthusiastic Republicans and low-propensity voters to show up and vote, that could make a real difference and counteract any predicted Democratic wave.

Money matters also in that how money is spent and where money is spent are indications of how candidates and parties perceive the political environment. The fact that the Republicans are spending serious money in places which in an ordinary year could be counted on as relatively safe suggests significant internal concern on the party's part.

Obviously, all predictions could still prove wrong. Democrats' confidence may prove to be overconfidence. The Republicans might well have a better than expected outcome and over-perform the polls - as did the Democrats in the 2022 midterm. (In that case, even if the Democrats do well, it could be portrayed as a loss.) Whatever happens, we will know soon enough. 

So, supposing the Democrats do win control of the House and probably even the Senate, what then?

I see two looming dangers for the Democrats if the midterms go as well as anticipated. The first, more obvious danger is that they may misinterpret a successful electoral outcome too favorably. That is what President Biden and Democrats allegedly did in 2022. That year the Republicans regained congressional control as expected but demonstrably underperformed. The predicted "red wave" was instead an underwhelming trickle. The Democrats over-performed - perhaps, some argue, in reaction to the Dobbs decision. Whatever the explanation, the vote was almost certainly not an obvious endorsement of the Biden Administration, but that was how Biden and the Democrats apparently interpreted it. That misinterpretation may have contributed to his ill-fated decision to run again. (My guess is that he might have tried to run again anyway, because that is what presidents do. The Democrats' 2022 midterm over-performance may, however, have further muffled voices within the party that might have tried to alter that course.)

Be that as it may, the obvious danger is that the Democrats may interpret a 2026 midterm success too positively, as an endorsement of them, rather than, as it probably should be interpreted, as a protest vote against Trump and, by extension, the Republicans. in other words, a "wave," if there is one, will likely be not so much a "blue" wave as an anti-"red" wave! The Democratic party's "brand" still remains very problematic among many voters. (Hence the phenomenon in a few places of Democrats not even fielding a candidate and instead leaving the opposition role to an "Independent.") The supposed toxicity of the Democratic "brand" in some states remains a reality to be confronted down the road. Meanwhile, the accordingly ambivalent nature of the election's result may remain an abiding challenge for the Democrats, especially if they regain congressional control. Most likely the two years between the midterm and the next presidential election will see lots of Democratic party infighting between its competing factions contending over the fundamental ideological orientation of the party. That may be inevitable, and it may even help to clarify the party's "brand" going forward, but is it likely to improve the party's standing among the voters?

All of which leads to my second concern. If the Democrats do as well as the polls predict, it will presumably be because voters have rejected the status quo and have handed Congress over to the opposition wanting them to do better. But can they? Do they have a coherent enough policy agenda to address voters' real concerns, and can that policy agenda actually be implemented? Will they even try, or will they fritter away their control of congress in intra-party squabbles and endless publicity stunt investigations or (even worse) impeachments? “Don’t be impeaching anybody,” Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois has said. “Let’s just get back to work.” That sounds like good political advice.

Columbus Day

In my City College of NY senior year undergraduate course on American Political Thought, taught by the admirable Professor George McKenna, our final assignment was to write a utopian version of America as it "could and should be." My academic effort leaned more towards the "should" than the "could." None of what I imagined has come to pass, and 54 years later even I would want to retract many of my utopian proposals in light of subsequent American experience and more mature reflection. That said, one of the relatively minor features of my 1972 utopia was America's national holiday Continental Day, October 12.

In the real world, then and now, that is the federal and state holiday Columbus Day. The choice of that day was, of course, a nod to my Italian-American heritage, of which I was particularly conscious at that particular time when "unmeltable ethnics"* were being celebrated. It also represented - as the celebration of Columbus Day itself has historically represented - an alternative to the country's otherwise predominantly Protestant founding story, a wholesome reminder that groups other than English Protestants were also involved in exploring, settling, and immigrating to this continent, and accordingly have as clear a claim as they to be here.

Of course, since then, there has been increasing recognition that Columbus' encounter with the "New World" - while an event of monumental world-historical significance with an array of complex consequences for the rest of the world, which would obviously not otherwise exist in its present form - admittedly also entailed catastrophic consequences for many of the original populations of the Americas. There are, therefore, multiple significations to Columbus Day, all of which deserve to be studied, discussed, and debated. Among them, however, also remains its abiding significance as a constitutive building block of an alternative to the prevalent WASP-centric account of the American founding, and its special significance for the celebration of Italian-American identity. 

In 1901, the infamous Edward Alsworth Ross, future President of the American Sociological Association, popularized the white-supremacist term "race suicide" (an obvious forerunner of contemporary right-wing worries about a "Great Replacement"). Ross warned "That the Mediterranean people are morally below the races of Northern Europe is as certain as any historical fact." Likewise, after the notorious lynching of 11 Sicilians by a New Orleans mob, The New York Times wrote about "sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." Such elite bigotry eventually led to the 1924 law which severely restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe. If only, such horrible history were all just ancient history, rather than a perennial problem embedded deeply within our society's story even now!

The celebration of Christopher Columbus' foundational role in American history - an Italian Catholic in the service of Spain's Catholic monarchs - has always served as a counterweight to our country's cultish veneration of its English Protestant "Founding Fathers" and a resounding rebuttal to nativist anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and particularly anti-Italian prejudice. The fact that some contemporary elite voices may now feel free to diminish Columbus Day is an obvious testimony to the decline of Italian-Americans' political influence and the perceived irrelevance of their immigrant struggles in the new narratives employed by contemporary cultural elites.

Of course, the claim that Columbus "discovered" America was always appropriately disputed by others who highlighted the activities of earlier explorers - e.g. Leif Erikson - not to mention that the continent was already populated prior to Columbus' arrival. The historical significance of Columbus lies not so much in his being the "first" European to land here, which he manifestly was not, but that his voyages made a difference in ways that those of previous explorers had not, and that his arrival began the period of sustained European colonization of this continent - the encuentro between the "Old" and the "New" worlds. Religiously, it also marked the beginning of a sustained effort by Christian Europeans to evangelize the indigenous peoples of this continent. That this continent is now what it is, a mixture of people from all parts of the world, a reality celebrated by some, while lamented by others who have a narrower notion of America, is the long-term legacy of what began on this day in 1492.

How all this happened - how the encuentro between peoples was also a collision with frightful consequences for many, a cause of great suffering among the indigenous peoples, and the occasion of many injustices perpetrated against them - all this has likewise long been recognized. Indeed Columbus himself was faulted for some of his own behavior even in his own lifetime. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) was famously a passionate defender of the indigenous peoples, whose sufferings at the hands of Spanish conquistadores he documented as he traveled back and forth between America and the Spanish Court exposing and condemning the crimes he had witnessed against the native peoples. It is a regrettably modern moral conceit to think that only our contemporaries can recognize the moral failings and sins which we as a society have benefited from.

Acknowledging that the colonization of this continent and the evangelization of its inhabitants were carried out by sinners does not negate the historical significance of the encounter between the "Old" and "New" worlds, which made possible the one world which we now inhabit. There is no "right side of history." There is only history, with its inevitable mix of good and bad. Whether our ancestors came 500 years ago or are recent immigrants, their immigration and therefore our very existence as their descendants are all consequences of the actions and accomplishments of those Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English explorers, settlers, and missionaries who followed the path opened up for them by Columbus.  It atones for no ancient evil and does no present-day service to pretend otherwise.

The challenge of the present is rather to really be the “one out of many” community we have historically professed to be – for all of us, for everyone, however long he or she has been here.

(Photo: The Statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle, New York City)

* Cf. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972).

The Social Reckoning

 

According to Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed it, The Social Reckoning is not, as such, a sequel to his 2010 The Social Network, which chronicled the problematic birth of Facebook. Strictly speaking, perhaps, it is not.  Yet Sorkin also has said it “never occurred” to him that Jesse Eisenberg wouldn’t want to reprise the role of Mark Zuckerberg, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination in 2010. For his part, Eisenberg apparently no longer wants “to be associated with that character.” Instead, the billionaire founder and CEO of Facebook is played by Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy in HBO's Succession and Roy Cohn in the 2024 film The Apprentice. So we are already used to Strong playing unlikable, unsympathetic people very well, something he does again here in this movie. He is not, however, the main figure in the film.

The Social Network focused on the founding of Facebook and on the damage done to Zuckerberg personally and to his friendship with Eduardo Saverin. Sequel or not, The Social Reckoning, released this week, focuses more broadly on the damage done to our wider world by social media, damage to us as individuals and to American society more broadly. The Social Reckoning dramatizes the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook data scientist, who leaked photos of the company's internal documents to Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a political reporter newly covering the intersection of politics with technology for The Wall Street Journal, who used the inside information to write "the Facebook Files." The leak suggested that Facebook knew its platforms spread misinformation, encourage radicalization, and possibly harm teens' mental health, but did little to fix it, thus exposing the megacompany's allegedly willful damage to society.

Horwitz is portrayed, almost comically, as technologically ignorant, even about how to use GPS. Haugen has to explain everything to him. She starts out as a true believer in Facebook's "mission," but is disillusioned by some of her actual experiences at the company and, above all, by the radicalization of a former friend. The extremely effective scenes of interactions between Horwitz and Haugen are very human and provide some relief from the film's super serious and somewhat depressing theme. The film jumps around chronologically. There is the Horwiz and Haugen story, but also a Zuckerberg story (which includes images of January 6), and both take place at different times. But the fashionable technique of going back and forth in time is made less challenging and difficult for the viewer by a timeline which conveniently appears on the screen at various points, thus clarifying what is happening and when.

The Social Reckoning ends on a seemingly happy personal note for Horwitz and Haugen, as she celebrates her happiness in living her testimony to Congress. But, of course, in the real world, what, if anything, has changed for the better? The film highlights the perennial problem of how hard it can be to do anything constructive about extreme concentrations of economic, technological, cultural, and political power in unaccountable corporations and unaccountable individuals - especially in a country increasingly oligarchical and post-political.

Apart from sharing these postings, at this point I use Facebook primarily to wish friends a Happy Birthday. It frightens me to learn that some 43% of the American public relies on Facebook to get their news!