Amna Nawaz:

It's been 150 years since the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the most famous and enduring events in American history.

While Native Americans were victorious, Judy Woodruff reports on how the battle reshaped the government's policy towards indigenous people, and why it still resonates so deeply for so many today.

It's part of her series Crossroads: America at 250.

Judy Woodruff:

Along this stretch of sweeping prairie on the Crow Reservation in Montana, members of more than a dozen Native American tribes have gathered for what's known as a Victory Ride.

It commemorates the end of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, or what Native Americans here often refer to as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

Trina Lone Hill, Oglala Sioux Tribe:

I still look at it as a moment in history that we should be proud of. They're the last ones to surrender. They're the last ones to come onto the reservations and accept our new fate, basically.

Judy Woodruff:

Trina Lone Hill, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, helped organize the Victory Ride. She says she's been coming to this annual event for more than 30 years and hearing stories of her ancestor Susie Shot-In-the-Eye.

Trina Lone Hill:

My great-great-great-grandmother fought here alongside her husband and her sons. And so I continue to tell that to my children. This is why we're here. This is why we fight.

Man:

This is the 150th anniversary, and it's good to see everybody here.

Judy Woodruff:

One hundred and fifty years later, it's an especially poignant moment for Native Americans, as the nation celebrates its own anniversary, 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document that culminates with a list of grievances against the British crown and refers to Native Americans as merciless Indian savages.

Ned Blackhawk:

One of the things about the founding is that, when you establish something, it creates enduring legacies.

Judy Woodruff:

Ned Blackhawk is an historian at Yale University and the author of "The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History."

Ned Blackhawk:

That grievance is something obviously that Native Americans have a lot of trouble with, myself included, because it is vilifying and homogenizing and representing indigenous Americans as if they were other than American.

Judy Woodruff:

It's a giant contradiction.

Ned Blackhawk:

It's a giant contradiction. It's an enormous paradox that sits at the heart of America. These are the most misunderstood subject of American history, and we need to understand them to understand ourselves more fully.

Donovan Taylor, Researcher, "The History They Tell: Oral History from Native American and First Nations People Regarding the Battle of the Little Bighorn": We're still here today. We persevered the Europeanism and colonialism and we're adapting.

Judy Woodruff:

Donovan Taylor is a Northern Cheyenne tribal member and a researcher for "The History They Tell," an oral history project that interviewed hundreds of descendants of Native Americans and First Nations people who fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Leon Eagle Tail, Gros Ventre Tribe:

This battlefield is just a reminder of what we can accomplish if we all get together.

Judy Woodruff:

Leon Eagle Tail and Chester Whiteman traveled from Washington state and Oklahoma to be here. They joined thousands of other Native Americans from across the country who set up camps and teepees along the banks of Montana's Little Bighorn River.

Chester Whiteman, Cheyenne Tribe:

We have always been like a second-class citizen. We weren't citizens until 1924. But we were here before anybody else came.

Leon Eagle Tail:

We experienced a great genocide. We are recovering. But a lot of times, it takes things like this to help us remember what we went through.

Judy Woodruff:

This remembrance includes a reenactment of the famous battle that started after the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer attacked a village of mostly Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Native Americans who had gathered in defiance of orders to return to reservations, the military's goal, to force these nomadic tribes back onto reservations as the United States continued to push farther West.

Donovin Sprague, Lakota Sioux Historian:

The big thing was gold in the Black Hills. See, two years before this, Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills, so there was a push to take that land.

Judy Woodruff:

Donovin Sprague is a Lakota historian and a descendant of both Chief Hump and the legendary Native American warrior Crazy Horse, both of whom fought here.

Donovin Sprague:

We had a very big village just right over here that was just kind of like bursting at the seams. And then as soldiers came in and were detected, they come out to meet that resistance. After that, it was a big turning point. The soldiers were dismounted, and they're just running to Last Stand Hill.

Judy Woodruff:

More than 260 U.S. soldiers were killed, including Custer, who is believed to have died here on what is now known as Last Stand Hill.

But it was a victory that would soon bring devastating consequences.

Ned Blackhawk:

It's tragically ironic that the defeat of this relatively small party in Montana will set in motion a policy reform that convinces the federal government that it has to do more aggressive intrusions into Indian country.

And it begins punishing these recalcitrant tribal members, as it sees it, in ways that are unprecedented, the removal of children to the boarding schools, the subdivision of their lands, and begin a process of what is known as Americanization that tragically dismantles essential economies, often governments, and even family relations across Indian country.

Judy Woodruff:

It's a history that many Native Americans say the nation has yet to fully reckon with.

Chester Whiteman:

Declaration of Independence, we're still classified as savages. That needs to change. There's a lot of things that need to change, because we're not savages. We're human beings.

Judy Woodruff:

And this legacy of mistreatment continues to cast a long shadow.

Today, Native Americans have the highest poverty and lowest life expectancy rates of any racial or ethnic group in the United States.

Leon Eagle Tail:

From the Trail of Tears to being put on the reservation in Oklahoma called Indian Territories, to where they put us on reservations here, that's the reason why this battle took place, because they had orders to put us back on the reservations.

It's no different than the concentration camps that the Jews had to survive in Germany, no difference.

Judy Woodruff:

After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, more Western lands would be taken. And Ned Blackhawk says, even in defeat. George Armstrong Custer would become an emblem of American identity, portrayed in countless advertisements...

Narrator:

Errol Flynn in his greatest role.

Judy Woodruff:

... and in feature films like the 1941 Western "They Died With Their Boots On," starring Errol Flynn.

Ned Blackhawk:

The West becomes after 1876 the most imagined region of the United States. And Custer becomes one of its most singular figures. So this vision of Custer in many ways becomes a vision of America itself.

Woman:

Introduce yourself.

Judy Woodruff:

But today there are new efforts to begin changing that vision.

Woman:

Just talk to each other like you guys are at home, OK?

Judy Woodruff:

Native American journalists urged tribal members to record their own family histories and stories of ancestors who fought here. And for those we spoke with, it was a time for reflection.

Donovan Taylor:

I don't like that feeling of animosity. I want to be at peace. Our ancestors already done that. Why should we have to do that too?

Judy Woodruff:

And for many others, it was a moment to acknowledge both the pain of the present while remaining hopeful about the future.

Trina Lone Hill:

You know, I see so much despair on the reservation. We talk -- there's so much -- countless stories about poverty and alcoholism and suicide, all of these things that are modern problems.

I want to see -- I want to bring our kids out of that. I want them to feel this pride. I want them to I guess get a different perspective.

Leon Eagle Tail:

We are the survivors, him and me. We survived. But we want our children and grandchildren to thrive. So that's why I'm here.

Chester Whiteman:

Everybody talks about healing and things like that. But both parties have to heal together. And for a long time, it wasn't like that. Nobody would stick the hand out to try to help the other side. And, today, it's starting to turn, where everybody wants to hear our story, the real story.

Judy Woodruff:

A story still being written, as the nation marks its 250th anniversary.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Judy Woodruff in Crow Agency, Montana.

One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings: “Its meaning varies with the context of use but can include as a greeting, congratulations, or celebration.”

But the high-five Wikipedia page is among my very favorites not because of its writing, but because of its iconic photos — specifically the ones in the section on the “too slow” variation:

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.

The sequence was uploaded on August 14, 2008 by Bgubitz, a user who describes themself as an accountant who likes “sunsets and long walks on the beach.” Today, photos from the “too slow” series are featured on Wikipedia pages in eight languages and get more than 200,000 annual views.

A quick search of “high five wikipedia photo” shows that the images are an object of fascination for many others besides me. People around the world have noted that the pair looks a lot like Rachel and Chandler from Friends. But not everyone is a fan. In 2020, one particularly passionate Wikipedia user named Kugihot suggested the photos be removed because they were “simply a waste of precious Wikipedia public bytes.”

Writing on the article’s talk page, the forum where editors discuss the article at hand, the critic went on: “My main concern that is especially out of place to me is the final image which depicts the use of finger guns, which is arguably completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of different variations of high fives.”

To me, the fact that the photos inspired such extreme pedantry speaks to their power. Kugihot’s ridiculous suggestion was denied by other editors. Long live the high-five photos, finger guns and all!

I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five.

Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart.

I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them.

So I launched an investigation. I figured that the high-fivers must have some sort of internet presence, so I started combing the web for mentions of the photos. I saw that they’d graced the front page of Reddit several times, and one such post had a compelling comment:

“Fun fact: me and my wife (then girlfriend) are demonstrating the ‘too slow’ high five on the Wikipedia high five page.”

My eyes widened and my heart raced. Searching through the activity of that commenter’s account, I quickly gathered that the high-five guy loved indie-folk music, bourbon, and crossword puzzles. He had little kids, a soft spot for Yosemite National Park, and a Disneyland pass, which made me think he was from California. He seemed refreshingly wholesome (he provided calculus help to anonymous internet strangers on r/math) and sweet (he gave genuine advice to lovelorn posts posters in r/relationships).

He didn’t post often — only about once a month or so — and at first I was having difficulty finding anything that could confirm that he was indeed the finger-gunning high-fiver. But soon enough, I scrolled to a comment that confirmed my suspicion.

In a discussion of the photos in an r/askreddit post, he left a response deep in the comments: “For the 3-4 people who might see this, here is a picture of me and her on our wedding day.”

Photo evidence! “Victim misses” had become “victim Mrs.”!

Detective work

By this point, I’d read the guy high-fiver’s decade-old musings about philosophy and his recaps of Disneyland trips, which made me feel like I knew him on a personal level. But I still didn’t have any way to identify him.

Not surprisingly, searching Google for middle-aged men in California who like national parks and Sufjan Stevens didn’t yield anything of worth. I tried messaging him but didn’t get a response.

Then, on a recent snowy Sunday afternoon, I poured myself another cup of coffee and hunkered down at my laptop in pursuit of my white whale.

I went back to the Wikipedia profile of the “long walks on the beach”–loving account. It had only made 76 edits, which isn’t many, and hadn’t been active in a decade. On the user’s talk page, some Wikipedians had written to say how much they liked the high-five picture. “Awesome idea for the photos,” wrote one user in July 2009. “Doesn’t hurt that your girl’s a cutie too.”

Did they meet the night of the high five? Were they already together? Was it the finger guns that sparked their love story?

Was bgubitz the same person as high-five guy? I put on my thinking cap. The three pieces of information that bgubitz had revealed (accountant, likes sunsets, likes long walks on the beach) seemed to match the sweet, math-loving person on Reddit, but then again, two of those three descriptors are among the most generic traits ever. (Find me someone who doesn’t enjoy sunsets!)

Searching “bgubitz accountant” yielded an accountant named Ben Gubitz, who unfortunately looked nothing like the guy in the high-five photo. But Ben Gubitz’s Facebook friends were public, so I perused them until — voila! I finally found the high-fivers: Tim and Tamara O’Nan from Southern California. Nearly 14 years later, they’d barely aged, and now they had two kids in elementary school.

Yet I did not feel entirely satisfied. I wanted to know the whole story. Did they meet the night of the high five? Were they already together? Was it the finger guns that sparked their love story?

Pretty soon, the three of us were together on a Zoom call.

Birthday celebration

“It was my birthday, and we had just come back from a birthday dinner with some friends,” Tim explains on our video chat. “You can see some unwrapped birthday gifts in the background, and I’m pretty sure the shirt I was wearing was a gift from Ben, who was the friend that convinced us to pose for photos for Wikipedia.”

They tell me that he and Tamara are not big high-fivers, and they have no personal connection to the “down low/too slow” maneuver. The participants just realized that move didn’t have any photos on Wikipedia and saw it as an opportunity.

Tim and Tamara tell me that they met three years before the photo was taken. Tamara, who was in college, went to a restaurant in Newport Beach, Calif. where Tim, who was 30 at the time, was performing guitar and singing. Tamara thought he was hot. Tim thought the same about Tamara. Pretty soon, they were a couple.

But by the time the high-five photo shoot happened, Tim was about to move to Scotland to start a Ph.D. program in theology at the University of Aberdeen. Tamara was in a transitional period too: She had graduated from UCLA and was preparing for a physician’s assistant grad program. Because of their uncertain futures and the prospect of going long-distance, it didn’t make sense to stay together.

“Whenever the photos go viral, we get texts from friends and acquaintances. It’s our five minutes of fame.”

Or so they thought. “I got eight months in the divinity program and realized I didn’t want to do it anymore. I felt aimless,” Tim says. “I had to get out of the ivory tower and figure out the basics of my life.”

Tamara has a different take: “The romantic version of the story is that he saw on social media that I had gone on a date with someone else and decided to fly home and marry me.”

Tim proposed soon after his return from Scotland, and they’ve been married for almost 11 years now. “We have two daughters who are four and seven,” says Tamara, “and we actually live right down the street from where those photos were taken.” Tim runs a math-tutoring business, and Tamara is a physician’s assistant.

I ask if they’ve ever been recognized by strangers in public, and they laugh and say no. But people they know have seen the photos circulating on meme accounts or Reddit. “Whenever the photos go viral,” Tim says, “we get texts from friends and acquaintances. It’s our five minutes of fame.”

I suggest that they recreate the photos, and they enthusiastically agree. Nearly 14 years after the original shots, they staged a reenactment in their house, finger-guns included:

Even better, they sent along these heartwarming family shots:

“I’m so grateful that the moment in my life the internet has clung on to for eternity happens to be with my one true love… phew,” Tamara writes to me after the family shoot. “Be careful what you put out there.”

Tim adds that the young man in the original photos would never have believed it if he got a glimpse at these 2022 pictures. “It was just so unlikely at the time,” he writes. “I was just about to travel halfway around the world for school, so our future together was uncertain. But in the end, it all worked out so perfectly.

“Thirteen years later, I’m married to the love of my life with two amazing daughters, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. It’s more than I could have ever imagined. High five!”

UPDATED, with response of Google
Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?

Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.

Today it added a button that makes things up. Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.

You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click create image. You type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and gives you back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right you refine it.

Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”

Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it.

The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.

The announcement of 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth from just a few hours ago baffled me. His instruction to the planet is six words long:

type whatever you want to see

That is the gate. That is the whole gate.

Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild.

The post opens by asking whether you have ever looked at an empty lot in your neighbourhood and imagined a community garden. It closes by telling you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.

It is live in every country tonight. Free. No application.

Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.

This new feature will guaranteed lead to governments, factions fighting infowars, trolls etc.

A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.

This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.

Google responded to this article and said:

We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.

One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.

Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.

Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.

I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.

I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post on its own and published a verdict underneath.

The video came out of Google’s model minutes earlier. The audio track is silence — I measured it. Minus 91 decibels, first frame to last.

The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.

Hive has a defence and it is a fair one, so let me make it before they do. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording.

That defence is the problem, not the excuse.

Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact. They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry. The one case where the detector has an excuse is the only case that ever happens.

Google’s answer works if the image reaches you through Google, unaltered, and you already suspected it.

That is not how any of this arrives.

There is another problem that Google doesn’t count. The official who now gets to look at a genuine photograph of a genuine atrocity and say: AI.

He doesn’t need the tool for that. He needs everyone to know the tool exists.

If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playfull mapping app matters.

When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real.

They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap.

Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated.

Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.

In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated.

Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD?

In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.

There is a village in North Brabant, ninety minutes from my desk, called Volkel. It has an air base. That air base stores American B61 nuclear bombs, a fact the Dutch government has never confirmed, which became public through a leaked diplomatic cable and was later described by a former Dutch prime minister as absolutely pointless.

On Google’s maps, Volkel spent years as a rash of coloured pixels. So did the ammunition depot at Staphorst. So did a Patriot missile site in Limburg, and several royal palaces, because the Dutch approach to hiding a military installation was to paint a large abstract artwork on top of it. The photographer Mishka Henner collected them into a gallery and sold them as art, which tells you how well the hiding worked.

Tonight it is all in the open, and anyone who wants a missile site in Limburg can simply add one.

Now notice what that entire twenty-year argument assumed.

You only censor a map that works. Every blur, every polygon, every diplomatic request was an admission that Google Earth was accurate enough to be dangerous. Governments were not worried the map would lie. They were worried it would tell the truth.

Google’s position never wavered. It does not blur satellite imagery by choice. Sites come pre-obscured because a government or a supplier requires it as a condition of flying over.

So to take one real building out of Google Earth, you need a state.

To put a nuclear plant into Iran, I needed a sentence.

The asymmetry is not meant to be funny. For twenty years the danger was a map that revealed something true, and there was a procedure for that — a law, a ministry, a condition on the overflight permit. Tonight the danger is a map that shows something which was never there, and for that there is no procedure at all.

Somebody already did the hard version of what I did tonight.

In February 2025 a Google Earth satellite pass photographed a parking lot at the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Ordinary cars, ordinary rows.

A year later those cars were on X, in a photograph of the same base supposedly flattened by an Iranian drone strike.

Same cars. Same rows. Same spaces, vehicle for vehicle.

Somebody generated a war zone and forgot to move the Toyotas.

The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar. It was not Qatar. It was Bahrain. The “before” was a genuine Google Earth capture from 10 February 2025. The “after” was made with Google AI — AFP and BBC Verify both ran it through Google’s signature detector and got a hit. It passed 950,000 views before anyone counted the parking spaces.

Building it took six steps. Screenshot Earth. Open Gemini. Upload. Prompt. Download. Crop. Six chances to get bored, and one forger who got bored at the parking lot.

Tonight, Manama can be changed in seconds with Nano Banana.

Upload a suspicious satellite image to Gemini, ad @verifyai and it will tell you if Google is behind the forgery.

Adjudicate off Google entirely. Sentinel-2 is free and refreshes every five or six days. Landsat, Planet, Airbus, Vantor. You want a sensor with an orbit, a collection time and a resolution you can check.

Take two collects. Todd Myers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said it before any of this existed: for every collect, you need a duplicate collect from different sources.

Check the orbit. If an image claims a specific satellite at a specific hour, the published orbital elements will tell you whether anything was up there. The most boring check in the toolkit, and the only one no model can fake, because it isn’t about the pixels.

Disclosure

I build ImageWhisperer. Google technology is part of it, not the whole of it. No single score is ever the finding.

Sources

• Google, Transform any place with Nano Banana in Google Earth, Bryan Horowitz, 30 July 2026

• Google Maps Platform, Street View Insights is now Generally Available — 280 billion images, 110+ countries, March 2026

• TechRadar, Google says its Street View imagery now covers 10 million miles

• Bellingcat, Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD? A Guide to Verifying Google Earth Satellite Image Dates

• Bellingcat, MH17 — The Open Source Evidence

• CNN, Google Maps: When censorship is beautiful — Mishka Henner, Dutch Landscapes

• Live Science, 15 Secretive Places You Can Now See on Google Earth — Volkel Air Base

• Google, We’re creating a new satellite imagery map to help protect Brazil’s forests

• Forbes, Google Earth Users Get Powerful New AI Image Upgrade Today, 30 July 2026

• Engadget, Nano Banana image generation comes to Google Earth, 30 July 2026

• Dan Clark, How AI fakes are turning satellite images into war misinformation, Financial Times, 4 March 2026

• AFP / CEDMO, Fake AI satellite imagery spurs US-Iran war disinformation

• DW fact check, Fake satellite images distort Middle East conflict from above

• European Commission, Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act

• TechRadar, You can now ask the Gemini app if an image was made by AI

• History & Archaeology Online, Did the Earthquake of 62AD lead to Pompeii’s Decline or Renewal?

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“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

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Their conclusions have implications for countries around the world grappling with the stability of their democracies — including the United States.

A Data Set of Mediocrity

When he was a young Ph.D. student, Mr. Scharpf was conducting dissertation research in Buenos Aires when a government official dropped a fateful offhand comment during a conversation in a cafe. During the military dictatorship, the official said, the intelligence officers who did the regime’s worst dirty work were “essentially idiots.”

At first, Mr. Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers.

When he returned to his university in Germany, he mentioned the discussion to his colleague, Mr. Glassel. Both men saw a glimmer of social-science possibility. They decided to learn more. Argentina, it turned out, had published information on all of its military officers’ graduation ranks, promotions and retirements going back to the late 1800s, which meant that it was possible to identify and track the low performers. And because secret police work during the Dirty War was conducted primarily by army intelligence Battalion 601, the researchers could trace exactly which officers joined the unit, how long they stayed and what happened to their careers.

The data showed that the official’s offhand comment had been right. For the most part, the Argentine military operated under a meritocratic “up or out” system. Officers who underperformed early would fall behind their peers, and eventually be forced into retirement. But Battalion 601 offered a detour around that meritocracy: Low performers could transfer into the secret police, spend a few years earning promotions there and then return to the regular army, often leapfrogging over peers who had stayed with the regular forces. Men who took the detour ended up with longer careers, higher salaries and better pensions than similar individuals who stayed in the mainstream military units.

The worse an officer’s academic record had been at the military academy, the more likely he was to join Battalion 601. And once inside, the lowest performers were assigned to the most brutal units, carrying out the day-to-day tasks of torture and murder, work that was so morally repugnant that it carried a serious risk of both social stigma and psychological trauma. But that meant that the career rewards for doing it were the most valuable. A stint as a monster could rehabilitate the most disastrous underperformer.

How Regimes Rely on ‘Loyal Losers’

Ordinarily, of course, it is very difficult to get complete information on who a regime’s “dirty workers” are or what motivated them to take those jobs. So there aren’t really comprehensive data sets to compare with Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf’s research on Argentina.

However, available information suggests that other countries may have followed a similar pattern. For example, Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf found that superiors in the Nazi bureaucracy skillfully exploited career pressures to recruit commanders for the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that carried out the “Holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe. Many of the recruits had backgrounds that placed them at a disadvantage, such as records blemished by disciplinary proceedings, unclear “racial purity” or lack of military and policing experience. Zealous service in the killing squads helped them improve their careers.

In the Soviet Union, the NKVD, the secret police who killed hundreds of thousands of people during the so-called Great Terror of 1937, “deliberately recruited individuals with poor formal skills and knowledge,” Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf write, often with no more than a primary school education. Senior commanders nurtured their subordinates’ fear of failure by instigating competition between different offices to see who could arrest more people.

In the modern era, autocratic leaders often win power via elections, and then dismantle checks and balances to concentrate power in their own hands. That process tends to be far less violent than the acts carried out by the Argentine military junta or Stalin’s NKVD, but over time it sharply curtails political competition and freedom of expression.

Although each country has its own idiosyncrasies, that process tends to follow a pattern, said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies democratic backsliding. Initially, elected would-be autocrats often appoint “loyal losers” to important positions to rubber-stamp their power grabs, Ms. Frantz said. “The leader knows that people are going to be more likely to be loyal if they don’t have many other career options, so when I say losers, I kind of mean it literally,” she said.

Take Hungary under Mr. Orban. He was first elected in 2010. By 2022, the European Parliament passed a resolution stating that Hungary had ceased to be a democracy and had become an “electoral autocracy.”

To make that happen he relied on a few handpicked loyalists at the top, plus a small percentage of ambitious strivers at the midlevel who saw politics as the route to success, experts say. “There were certain offices that did the dirty work,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton University professor who has studied Hungary’s democratic breakdown. She pointed to the National Judicial Office, which selected judges and controlled their promotions, as particularly crucial. It was led by an Orban loyalist.

At the lower levels of the court system, a small percentage of ambitious individuals carried out the government’s agenda. “Five or 10 percent of the judges, the careerists, just do the ‘dirty job’ to get along with their career,” said Attila Vincze, a judicial studies researcher at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic who has studied how Mr. Orban co-opted courts.

Venezuela began a similar trajectory after Hugo Chávez was elected in 1999, but ultimately he and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, used more violent means to preserve their power. To crush protests and other public opposition, the government relied on the National Guard, a branch of the military tasked with preserving internal security, and armed gangs of civilians known as “colectivos.”

The National Guard is considered “the lowest rung of the armed forces” in terms of prestige, said Alejandro Velasco, a Latin America historian at New York University. “If you couldn’t get a job and you couldn’t get in the army, you would join the National Guard.” The colectivos grew out of informal neighborhood watch groups, but as their ties to the government grew, many members were given jobs in the security details of government ministries.

Eventually, such leaders become too unpopular for mere manipulation to keep them in power, and they lose elections. Which leaves them with a choice: leave office, as Mr. Orban did this month after losing an April election, or turn to more violent repression to hang on to power.

Leaders who take the latter path, as Mr. Maduro did in Venezuela in 2024 after his efforts to tilt the presidential election in his favor failed, need to have loyal units of the security forces available to do the dirty work of a violent crackdown. Mr. Maduro relied heavily on the National Guard and the colectivos. According to Human Rights Watch, government forces killed dozens of opposition supporters and detained thousands more after the stolen election.

The American Case

For Americans, this is not just an academic question. Many experts worry that democratic decay appears to be progressing especially quickly during President Trump’s second term.

Ms. Frantz sees parallels between Mr. Trump’s presidency and some of the elected authoritarian leaders she has studied elsewhere. Although Mr. Trump did not create the Republican Party, he has reshaped it over the last decade into an institution centered around himself. And a number of his cabinet members and political appointees, particularly in his second term, appear to fit the paradigm of loyalists whose résumés would be unlikely to land them roles in any other administration.

So the Trump administration’s apparent attempts to secure political control over the armed services, as well as the F.B.I. and ICE, stand out as worrying even when compared with other cases, Ms. Frantz said. Elected leaders “tinkering with” the security services “tends to be something that we see once a system has already transitioned to authoritarianism,” she said, rather than when democracy is in decline.

Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf are concerned that President Trump’s planned expansion of ICE, in particular, could make it an ideal venue for “detouring” by ambitious underperformers who could be deployed for anti-democratic purposes. The worry is especially profound given the storming of the Capitol at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, albeit by a less organized band of loyalists.

The playbook for a leader to create a loyal security service, they said, is to set up or repurpose an institution that can become a “second ladder” for career promotions, resource it generously and ensure that the barriers to getting hired there are low, signaling that it offers career opportunities to those who cannot find them elsewhere. (Cutting other government jobs or squeezing budgets can create a larger pool of potential recruits.) The leadership then signals impunity for people on that second ladder, to assure them that they won’t face consequences for wrongdoing.

The administration seems to tick those boxes, even if Mr. Trump’s intentions are obscure. (The president has spoken openly of a third term in violation of the Constitution and disparaged the need for an election.) ICE remains an anti-immigration force, but it is set to be radically expanded, with a budget that would dwarf other federal law-enforcement agencies if the current funding bill passes. The Trump administration has drastically cut employment in other federal agencies, leaving thousands of people unemployed or fearful that they soon might be. And top officials in the administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, explicitly assured ICE officers of “immunity” after immigration officers killed a protester in Minneapolis in January.

At the same time, it has become easier than ever to become an ICE agent. Ryan Schwank, a former training academy instructor, testified to Congress in February that new cadets “are graduating from the academy despite widespread concerns among training staff that even in the final days of training, the cadets cannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs.” ICE recruits must now complete only nine practical examinations to graduate from the training academy, compared with 25 exams that were listed in a training syllabus dated July 2021. It’s a good career opportunity for someone looking to get ahead.

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