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In June, as the sun set on Dublin, Ohio, a well-to-do suburb of Columbus, several dozen people dressed in golf shirts and floral shifts filed into a small auditorium to listen to a talk by a new neighbor. Vivek Ramaswamy, a thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur, had settled in the area with his wife and toddler son after making a large fortune as the founder of a biotech company. Now, thanks to dozens of appearances on Fox News to criticize “cultural totalitarianism” enforced by liberal élites, he was closing in on fame as a conservative pundit. In the past year, he had cast aspersions on Black Lives Matter and “the death of merit”; mask mandates and U.S.-border protection; public-school curricula and the actor Jussie Smollett. All the flame-throwing had established him, in the words of one anchor, as the network’s “woke and cancel-culture guru.”

Ramaswamy has perfect-looking teeth, a high forehead, and a thick shock of hair that rises into a swirl at his crown. Out on the sidewalk, he’d hastily replaced his flip-flops with sneakers, in a nod to formality. At the front of the auditorium, perched on a stool, he spoke into his microphone with a showman’s brio, as if addressing a far larger crowd. He enjoyed forums like this, “where there’s no agenda, there’s no objective, other than to create spaces for open conversation, for people to be free to say, and feel free to say, the kinds of things that they might have wanted to say behind closed doors,” he said, smiling brightly. The true test of the strength of a democracy was not, he argued, how many people voted. It was “the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think, in public.”

One of the opinions he wished to air to those assembled was that “woke-ism”—a belief system that Ramaswamy sees as an insidious secular creed—has overtaken religious faith, patriotism, and the work ethic as a key American value. Corporate virtue-signalling and hypocrisy are everywhere, he told the audience. “Let’s muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change as you fly on a private jet to Davos,” he said, to laughter from the nearly all-white crowd. C.E.O.s were recruiting “token” people of color for their boards in the name of diversity while refusing to seek out diverse points of view. The Walt Disney Company was self-righteously protesting Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law after cutting deals with the repressive Chinese government to film footage for “Mulan” in Xinjiang.

To Ramaswamy, such corporate do-gooderism—and especially environmental, social, and governance investing, known as E.S.G.—is a smoke screen designed to distract from the less virtuous things that companies do to make money. Amazon donates to organizations that aid Black communities while firing workers trying to unionize. Nike produces advertisements with the civil-rights activist and former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick while exploiting workers in Asia. Many such companies, he intimated to the audience, were building tacit alliances with the Democratic élite.

That corporations are given to hypocrisy is hardly a novel observation. But Ramaswamy’s twist on the familiar critique, which he laid out last year in a book entitled “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” is to place E.S.G. investing at asset-management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street at the center of what ails American life. He calls this kind of socially conscious investing—not political corruption or dark money, not election denialism, not disinformation—the gravest danger that American democracy faces today. E.S.G., he told his audience, lets the private sector “do through the back door what our government couldn’t directly get done through the front door.”

The three top asset-management firms collectively hold more than twenty trillion dollars in retirement funds and other capital, about the same as the national gross domestic product. And the stocks that the firms control give them extraordinary influence over almost every public company in the world. “It’s not a right-leaning issue, it’s not a left-leaning issue,” he said. Private-sector attempts to address climate change are not only laughably insincere, he argued; they’re encroaching on work that should be done by the government—and only if the citizens agree.

Ramaswamy’s crusade against E.S.G. is based on a pair of seemingly contradictory ideas: that attempts by companies to address societal problems are cynical and ineffective, and that those attempts also pose an existential threat to the democratic process. But such inconsistencies are often obscured by Ramaswamy’s frictionless oratorical style—a brisk patter, peppered with references to Hobbes and Hayek, that wends toward well-modulated moments of outrage. In Dublin, his words had gray and blond heads bobbing in agreement.

Ramaswamy’s mother worked as a geriatric psychiatrist; his father was an engineer and a patent lawyer at General Electric. They came to the U.S. from South India before Vivek was born, in 1985. Growing up in the Cincinnati area, Vivek established himself as an overachiever: an accomplished pianist, a nationally ranked tennis player, and the valedictorian of his Jesuit high school. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, worked at a hedge fund, then started a pharmaceutical company, Roivant Sciences, where he made hundreds of millions of dollars. That a chunk of this wealth derived from a failed effort to bring an Alzheimer’s drug to market is something he doesn’t dwell on in speeches.

After Ramaswamy emerged from that failure, his cutting one-liners, which he deployed in “Woke, Inc.” and on Twitter, attracted notice at Fox News, and last year he left his pharmaceutical venture behind. His mother, Geetha, had never heard of Tucker Carlson or watched Fox News before her son started showing up on the network. “I wish he could be on other channels as well,” she told me. But, to her chagrin (and to his, though he’s slower to admit it), other networks weren’t biting.

In recent years, Ramaswamy has contemplated a move into politics—something he discussed with a friend from law school, J. D. Vance, a venture capitalist who was just elected to the U.S. Senate in Ohio. But if the event in Dublin, organized by a marketing executive, felt vaguely like a campaign stop, Ramaswamy was there to promote more than policy ideas. Although he’d begun his talk by saying “there’s no agenda,” it eventually turned into a sales pitch for an investment company he’d just started. The company, Strive Asset Management, had the financial backing of the billionaire Peter Thiel, Vance’s V.C. firm, and other investors, and intended to compete with BlackRock and its peers. Although Ramaswamy was still hiring and searching for office space, he told the audience that Strive would soon offer investment funds, at fees competitive with BlackRock’s, that wouldn’t ask the companies it invested in to “push political agendas.” It would ask them only to deliver quality products and services and to make money for shareholders.

As the talk concluded, anti-woke investing didn’t appear to be foremost on attendees’ minds. Two women descended on Ramaswamy with smiles as broad as his own. They’d founded their own K-12 school after criticizing what was being taught at their children’s private school. They planned to center virtue and patriotism in their new curriculum. Would Ramaswamy like to meet with them to discuss it further? (He would.) Two more women approached: would he attend their “Freedom Rally”? (He was supportive but noncommittal.) A man with a thick and bristly mustache pulled in close, stared him in the eyes, and asked, “When’s the last time you read ‘The Art of War’?” (“Uh, high school?”) Ramaswamy turned away to relieve his wife, Apoorva, a doctor who was eight and a half months pregnant, of their restless two-year-old son. By the time he turned back, a woman in a bright-red top was confiding that she, too, was concerned about the local schools. As Ramaswamy’s son dipped his hand in a cup of water and appeared ready to burst into tears, the woman said, “We’ve worked so hard to get rid of the gender-identity stuff. Now we want to . . .”

A shadow flickered across Ramaswamy’s face. “Don’t talk about that so much,” he told her while also signalling to his wife and a body man who was travelling with him that it was time to move on. “Talk about what you want to replace it with instead—civic education, American history, patriotism.”

The term “woke,” which dates back nearly a century, was initially used in Black communities to describe a raising of consciousness and has since become a catchall denoting awareness of a range of social-justice issues. In recent years, “wokeness” has also become, in conservative circles, a subject of suspicion and ridicule: shorthand for performative righteousness, like “political correctness” before it. Opposition to woke principles has become a business opportunity, too. A former Green Beret has found success with a “patriotic” coffee brand, Black Rifle, based in Salt Lake City. The conservative commentator Sara Gonzales founded American Beauty, a cosmetics company “for women who love America.” (Lipstick shades include Freedom Fighter and Triggered.) Vanessa Santos, who runs a right-leaning public-relations firm called Red Renegade PR, told me that the market for anti-woke goods is niche but ardent. “People want to buy something that’s patriotic,” Santos told me, and “they want to know the kind of person who’s behind the product.”

Ramaswamy’s Strive isn’t even the only “anti-woke” asset-management firm to launch in the past few years. In 2020, the money managers William Flaig and Tom Carter started the American Conservative Values E.T.F., a fund that boycotts companies deemed to be supporting a liberal agenda. 2ndVote Funds, which offers two products and emphasizes conservative and faith-based values, appeared the same year. Last month, Strive surpassed both outfits in size, announcing that it had more than five hundred million dollars in investment assets after its first three months.

What Strive sells are E.T.F.s—exchange-traded funds, which consist of a basket of stocks or bonds, similar to a mutual fund. The first E.T.F. that the firm introduced invests in energy companies. It was soon followed by an E.T.F. that focusses on the semiconductor industry. Strive also began a publicity campaign targeting seven companies—Amazon, Apple, Chevron, Citigroup, Disney, ExxonMobil, and Home Depot—that Ramaswamy claims would be more profitable if they abandoned their E.S.G. goals.

The creation of firms like Ramaswamy’s represents a countermovement to a phenomenon that itself was a countermovement. E.S.G. investing arose in part as a response to the concept of shareholder primacy, which Milton Friedman famously articulated in a 1970 essay in the Times. Corporations should not be concerned with the public interest, such as reducing discrimination and pollution, he argued. Managers’ only duty was to maximize the profits of shareholders, the company’s true owners—an idea that, for obvious reasons, was instantly appealing to many investors.

The opposing argument, which came to be known as stakeholder capitalism, contended that when companies made decisions they had a responsibility—financial as well as ethical—to everyone affected by their dealings. As such, they might weigh factors other than profit, such as environmental impacts and the well-being of workers and communities. The term “E.S.G.” was first formally proposed in a 2004 U. N. Global Compact report. Specific ways of measuring a company’s E.S.G. performance have since been refined into a scoring system. Pension-fund managers, for example, might use the scores to evaluate long-term risks such as climate change and demographic shifts, to avoid squandering the money of workers who would depend on their retirement funds in the future. Some companies game their E.S.G. scores and exaggerate their “responsible” choices as a cynical marketing strategy. But even companies that take the goals seriously aren’t motivated primarily by virtue. Rebecca Henderson, a Harvard Business School professor who consults with companies on sustainability, said, “I promise you, these companies want to make money.” But, she added, executives are also eager to stay viable in a future in which carbon might be taxed and more employees and consumers will avoid companies that pollute heedlessly or mistreat their workers.

Larry Fink, BlackRock’s C.E.O. and a proponent of E.S.G. investing, is a favorite target of Ramaswamy. As a shepherd of around eight trillion dollars in investor money, Fink has urged companies to adopt plans to become carbon neutral and ultimately transition to a post-carbon economy. Ramaswamy contends, without citing specific evidence, that Fink is collaborating with political élites on such matters: promoting environmental policies that they have failed to push through Congress. He has attacked Fink’s supposed liberal agenda so assiduously that a newcomer to U.S. politics might, after imbibing conservative media, mistake the BlackRock C.E.O.—one of the most powerful men on Wall Street—for a darling of the American left.

BlackRock’s business is more complicated than Ramaswamy suggests. For instance, not all of its funds are E.S.G.-based. (A company spokesperson notes that less than six per cent of its assets under management are in “dedicated sustainable investing strategies.”) Last year, BlackRock announced that it would allow investors in some of its funds to participate in company shareholder votes on matters such as executive compensation and climate policies, rather than BlackRock voting on their behalf.

Some skeptics of Ramaswamy speculate that, for all his insinuations about Fink’s alliances, he’s part of a well-established campaign that is guided by right-wing mega-donors and is intent on sabotaging climate-change measures. Ramaswamy dismisses such notions; he’s down, he says, with the “grassroots” people—conservative patriots who are fuelling anti-E.S.G. backlash that has reached Republican-controlled legislatures from Texas to West Virginia. In October, Louisiana announced that it would withdraw nearly eight hundred million dollars from BlackRock. Similarly, Florida later declared that it would divest two billion dollars from the company.

Bill Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital, a fifteen-billion-dollar hedge fund, was, behind Thiel and his affiliates, the second-biggest seed investor in Strive. Still, he told me, he disagrees with much of what Ramaswamy says: “My experience, at least with the companies we know, is that being thoughtful with everything from packaging to environmental considerations is generally something that’s good for business. If Exxon were smarter, they probably should have made some earlier-stage investments. They should have put up capital in the first round of Tesla.” Nonetheless, Ackman appreciates Ramaswamy’s emphasis on what he thinks is an unhealthy concentration of capital in the asset-management industry. “A world in which three fund managers are controlling corporate America is not a world that’s good for America,” Ackman said. Because BlackRock and its competitors make most of their money through fees, he said, and don’t own the stock they control on behalf of their investors, they have little at stake in the outcome of policies that they’re promoting.

Tariq Fancy, who until 2019 worked as BlackRock’s global chief investment officer for sustainable investing, has doubts about both Ramaswamy and E.S.G. He has concluded that sustainable investing, at least as BlackRock was practicing it, is counterproductive. E.S.G. creates an illusion of progress that allows people to avoid harder, more meaningful ways of addressing climate change and other problems. He said that most E.S.G. investing (which he differentiated from corporations trying to make themselves “greener”) takes the form of divestment—choosing not to put money in, say, fossil-fuel companies. Such discrete redirections of resources, he suggests, are unlikely to build into movements powerful enough to provoke broad policy change. “Look at the Middle East,” Fancy said. “They’d talk about not having investments in alcohol, but they never thought that it would stop people in France from drinking wine.” He also noted that Ramaswamy and other conservatives say that the government, not people like Larry Fink, should address climate change, but fail to acknowledge that the political and regulatory process has been distorted by corporate interests. “If they were serious, they would follow the argument to its natural conclusion,” he said. “You would want to get money out of politics. ” The more likely reality, Fancy believes, is that the Ramaswamys and Thiels of the world would prefer to see little to no government action on climate change, labor practices, diversity in boardrooms, or other issues.

When I asked Ramaswamy why he ignores how money in politics compromises the regulatory and legislative process, the issue seemed to bore him. People had been fretting about getting money out of politics for years, he said. His Larry-Fink-as-left-wing-bogeyman theory, by contrast, felt fresh.

But didn’t the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few pose a serious threat to democracy? Not necessarily, he replied. “You can buy your yachts, you can buy your houses, you can buy your nice cars, but you shouldn’t be able to buy a greater share of voice as a citizen,” he said. The ultra-wealthy did buy more of a voice, I pointed out, by influencing the political process at every level, from choosing the President and hiring lobbyists who write legislation to pouring money into school-board elections. He picked up his phone, as if to seek out a more interesting conversation. “I just don’t think that’s the biggest problem.”

Shortly after Ramaswamy was born, his family commissioned his horoscope, which predicted that he was destined for greatness. He would later say that his family bestowed on him, their firstborn, a sense of “deep-seated superiority” and an expectation that he would outperform the “average mediocre Joes” with whom he went to school. Geetha told me that she and her husband, known as V. G., believed that Vivek and his younger brother, Shankar, as children of immigrants, would have to work harder to succeed than the children of American-born parents. “There are a lot of things we didn’t know, being from India,” she said.

In eighth grade, at a large and economically diverse public school, Vivek was “roughed up” and pushed down the stairs by a Black student. An injured hip required surgery, and his parents decided to enroll him in a private preparatory school. When I first asked Ramaswamy if that incident influenced his views on race, he seemed not to have thought much about it. But some days afterward he wondered aloud if the experience had precipitated his doubt that members of one underrepresented group had a unique claim on being discriminated against: “All human beings can be on both the giving and receiving end of that.”

A strain of animus toward Black Americans runs through much of Ramaswamy’s public commentary. After a foundation that has been linked to Black Lives Matter was discovered to have spent donations on high-end real estate, he started to quip that B.L.M. should stand for “Big Lavish Mansions.” In our conversations, he could be similarly antagonistic, as when he discussed how today’s civil-rights activists—a group he defined as comprising Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Ibram X. Kendi—had “sold out” to corporate America. He couldn’t say exactly how Kendi had sold out, but he believed that Jackson, the Baptist minister and former Presidential candidate, who is now in his eighties, had profiteered on his standing as a civil-rights leader. Ramaswamy likened this to extortion, but later clarified that the extortion attempts he meant to criticize were racial-equity audits conducted by the former Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch and their law firms. Corporations such as Starbucks and Verizon, he said, felt that to avoid accusations of racism they had to hire the firms, often at great expense, to assess their diversity policies.

“I definitely find the idea of systemic racism revolting,” Ramaswamy told me. He allowed that it had existed in the U.S. at moments in the past, offering the era of slavery as one example. But racism was atrophying, he said, so societal goods should not be unevenly distributed on racial grounds. He mentioned a white, heavyset conservative male classmate at Harvard who was considered uncool, and argued that the social pecking order was stacked against him “more than some athletic Black kid who came and got a place on the basketball team.” Ramaswamy blamed affirmative action and similar policies for forcing élite institutions to lower their standards, and said that the current narrative of systemic racism creates more racism than would otherwise exist. “Affirmative action is the single biggest form of institutionalized racism in America today,” he concluded.

Ramaswamy’s political awakening began not at home but in the company of a conservative-Christian piano teacher with whom he took private lessons from elementary through high school. As he worked his way from the easy Bach preludes to Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca,” the teacher, who became something of a godmother, railed against Hillary Clinton and extolled the virtues of free speech, patriotism, and Ronald Reagan.

A conservatism that puts its faith in unfettered markets would come to inform even Ramaswamy’s understanding of caste relations in the Indian state of Kerala, where he spent summers with his family. Ramaswamy’s family is Brahmin, the highest caste in the Hindu hierarchy. In “Woke, Inc.,” he maintains that “American-style capitalism” is repairing the damage of that pernicious system, writing approvingly that a “lower-caste guy” in India can now deliver Domino’s pizza and “my family tips him to show their appreciation.”

At Harvard, where he majored in biology, Ramaswamy joined the South Asian Association but was more interested in American politics. Identifying as a libertarian, he became president of the Harvard Political Union. He also performed Eminem covers and original free-market-themed rap songs as a kind of alter ego called Da Vek. Paul Davis, who lived in a dorm with Ramaswamy and later worked with him at his pharmaceutical company, said, “He knows his views and style rubbed some people the wrong way, but he didn’t care.”

At the time, Ramaswamy was irritated by what he saw as groupthink all around him. One of his classmates’ campaigns, a push to raise wages for janitors on campus, prompted him to lash out in the Harvard Crimson. The article was an early demonstration of his glee at puncturing what he sees as liberal pieties. Those supporting a wage increase, he wrote, had inadvertently linked the “fundamental human worth” of the workers they were championing to the paychecks they received. True, a bigger paycheck might give the janitors more financial stability. But the higher pay—more than “the laws of supply and demand would require,” he claimed—would signify that Harvard students felt sorry for the janitors. This would harm the janitors in other ways, as “a condescending strain of sympathy subtly yet naturally replaces the mutual human respect that otherwise would have existed.”

The summer after Ramaswamy’s sophomore year, he took an internship at a nine-billion-dollar hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors. He thought that working in the firm’s biotech division, where a team of doctors and scientists evaluated stocks for the firm to invest in, might be more exciting than working in a lab. “Woke, Inc.” records his disillusionment with the experience. He recalls Amaranth’s founder, Nicholas Maounis, explaining to the summer interns that the purpose of a hedge fund was “to turn a pile of money into an even bigger pile of money.” Ramaswamy joined a company-sponsored cruise, where he says he came to the attention of the firm’s big traders by winning a poker tournament. After that, they began taking him to extravagant restaurants and clubs with bottle service—indulgences subsidized by investor fees. “Even at the age of nineteen, it struck me as, like, this is not the way a company should be,” he said. The next year, after one of the firm’s traders reportedly lost several billion dollars in a week betting on natural-gas futures, Amaranth collapsed. (Maounis, through legal counsel at his new firm, Verition Fund Management, said that he recollected neither Ramaswamy nor the events he related.)

Ramaswamy’s next summer internship, another disappointment, was at Goldman Sachs. He describes the inner workings of the firm as a charade, with jaded bankers in hand-tailored dress shirts doing little while making a show of how busy they were. He was especially struck by what was often called Service Day, when employees engaged in volunteer projects around the city. One day, he recalled, he and some co-workers gathered at a park in Harlem for a tree-planting session. A Goldman boss showed up in Gucci boots, told the employees to take photographs to document their presence, and then split. The group reconvened shortly afterward at a bar. (A former Goldman executive who participated in the volunteer program for nearly two decades told me that, although the flavor of the episode seemed credible, it was hard to imagine an entire group abandoning a project before starting.)

When Ramaswamy remarked to a colleague that it should be called Social Day, not Service Day, the colleague asked him if he’d ever heard of the Golden Rule. To treat others as one wished to be treated, Ramaswamy offered. “No,” the colleague told him. “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

After graduating from Harvard, Ramaswamy took a job as a biotech-stock analyst at QVT, a hedge fund in New York City led by physicists he considered brilliant. He learned about financial engineering and how to evaluate investment opportunities, but after a couple of years he got restless. In 2010, he spent a day auditing classes at Yale Law School, where he’d previously deferred enrollment. Sitting in on a criminal-law course taught by Jed Rubenfeld, Ramaswamy was mesmerized.

“I am inherently interested in questions of justice,” he told me. “It was a disciplined way to explore and figure out what I believed about things. I thought, I have to do this.” While continuing to work at QVT, he enrolled at the law school. In the years he was there, he said, he made around ten million dollars. At Yale, he established important connections: with Vance, a fellow Cincinnati Bengals fan; Thiel, who hosted an intimate lunch seminar for select students, and who later staked him on a venture helping senior citizens access Medicare; and his future wife, Apoorva, who lived across the way from him while attending medical school.

Ramaswamy stayed at the hedge-fund job after getting his law degree, and also took a standup-comedy class. The course was “traumatizing,” he said—he wasn’t any good. But he did learn a trick that stuck: carrying around a notebook to capture passing thoughts or jokes as soon as they arose. While researching biotech companies for QVT, he began filling the notebook with ideas and with impressions of executives he met. In 2014, these scribblings became the basis for Roivant, his pharmaceutical venture. It was a fine time to start a company. Venture-capital investors were flush with cash and searching for ambitious young men with startups that they could invest in.

The pharmaceutical-development process, which involves moving drugs through rounds of testing and approvals, is slow, and drugs are often abandoned along the way. Sometimes a drug doesn’t work. Other times, the decision to drop a product is economic: executives determine that the drug, no matter how effective, won’t be profitable, or won’t align with their business strategy. Ramaswamy’s idea was that Roivant could license drugs that had been left languishing, take them through the rest of the development process, and share the proceeds with the original manufacturer.

Ramaswamy had no experience running a company. Nonetheless, he’d soon declare that Roivant would be the “Berkshire Hathaway of drug development.” He raised approximately ninety-three million dollars from investors, among them QVT. Roivant had around ten employees at the start, including Ramaswamy’s mother and brother, and was organized in the spirit of a hedge fund, with subsidiaries that each specialized in a single medical issue, such as women’s health or urology. Scientists and pharmaceutical experts hired for a subsidiary were offered equity in the company as an incentive to leave jobs at more established drugmakers. Ramaswamy’s advisory board included several well-known Democrats, including Tom Daschle, the former Senate Majority Leader; Kathleen Sebelius, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama; and Donald Berwick, the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Berwick was attracted to Roivant, he told me, because of its commitment to improving access to critical medicines. “I thought he had latched on to an important problem in that there are important drugs that don’t get developed because they don’t fit in the business model of the company, so these assets stay on the shelf,” Berwick said. “His idea was to get them off the shelf by making them attractive. ” In discussions with Ramaswamy, “politics never came up,” Berwick said. What the founder did talk about was pricing drugs reasonably so that they’d be accessible to patients who needed them.

At the end of 2014, Roivant acquired one of its first drugs, an experimental Alzheimer’s medication, from GlaxoSmithKline, for five million dollars up front. There is no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s, and drug companies have spent billions of dollars trying to develop one. Geetha Ramaswamy had worked for pharmaceutical companies that were developing treatments for Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders, and had clinical expertise that would be valuable to her son’s company. The drug that Roivant bought, known as SB-742457, had been shelved even though in early trial phases it had shown signs of reversing mental decline when paired with an older drug called Aricept. Ramaswamy’s company would owe G.S.K. a 12.5-per-cent royalty on net sales and other possible payments should it manage to bring SB-742457 to market.

In 2015, the biotech industry was in the midst of a boom—or, some might say, a bubble. Stock prices had been skyrocketing in an environment full of hype. Ramaswamy took advantage of the moment. He created a subsidiary in Bermuda to own the drug, and prepared to sell shares to the public before the medication, in combination with Aricept, began the pivotal Phase III clinical trial.

That June, the subsidiary, Axovant, raised more than three hundred million dollars through an initial public offering—a remarkable amount given that the subsidiary’s value was based solely on the potential of one untested drug. As the drug, since renamed intepirdine, proceeded through the clinical trial, with around thirteen hundred patients, Forbes put Ramaswamy on its cover and called him “The 30-Year-Old CEO Conjuring Drug Companies from Thin Air.” In the accompanying article, Ramaswamy declared, “This will be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry.” The following year, Forbes named him one of the richest entrepreneurs in America under the age of forty. But in September, 2017, with Axovant reportedly valued at around $2.6 billion, Ramaswamy received an unpleasant phone call. Intepirdine was a bust. It had failed to meaningfully improve the health or cognition of the patients in the clinical trial.

“It felt humiliating,” Ramaswamy told me. Roivant had acquired another promising drug, to treat prostate cancer, that, when used in combination with a second drug, seemed to ease symptoms of uterine fibroids and endometriosis. But the prostate medication was years away from coming to market. “I’d let people down. I took it hard,” he said. Even now, he says, the wounds from the fiasco aren’t fully healed. However, he’s come up with a positive spin on it: “My latitude for being willing to fail big is a lot higher than it was then.”

In the summer of 2019, the Business Roundtable, an association of more than two hundred C.E.O.s of the largest companies in the country, issued a new statement of corporate responsibility, saying that businesses should aim to operate ethically in addition to delivering profits to their shareholders. The statement was not binding for members, but it reflected anxieties about wealth inequality and about the declining financial security of the middle class. Around that time, individual companies, from Airbnb to Citigroup, issued their own statements on moral obligations. In January, 2020, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, David Solomon, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, announced that the firm, in its U.S. and Western European markets, would no longer underwrite initial public offerings for companies whose boards lacked at least one “diverse” member. (That number is now two.)

Ramaswamy’s notebook began filling up again. “Everyone was saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, and it got under my skin,” he said. He submitted an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal in which he denounced “stakeholder capitalism” for advising powerful companies “to implement the social goals that their CEOs want to push.” These were issues that should be decided by the citizenry, he wrote, through voting and policymaking. After the article ran, Ramaswamy relished the impact that he seemed to be having. “It wasn’t like being at a dinner party, where I’m just sharing my opinions,” he told me. “If I wasn’t the one making that argument, I wasn’t sure if anyone else would be taking that on. That was enjoyable, but it also came with some sense of responsibility. ”

A book seemed like a natural next step. Seeking advice, he turned to Rubenfeld and his wife, Amy Chua, who is also a professor at Yale Law School and whose book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” about spurring her two daughters to become overachievers, had been a best-seller. (Chua had also mentored Vance at Yale and advised him on the writing of his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”) Around the time they met, Rubenfeld was under investigation by Yale for sexual harassment—a charge that he denies and which led to a two-year suspension from the faculty. He heard out Ramaswamy’s somewhat scattered ideas and suggested a tauter study of capitalism, democracy, and the changing culture of the American workplace. Rubenfeld said of Ramaswamy, “He is one of the most skilled people I know in terms of listening to criticism and learning from it.” Ramaswamy accepted the advice, began writing trenchantly about his experiences in the Ivy League and the corporate world, and eventually took his proposal to a publisher of conservative authors, Center Street.

In May, 2020, as he was working on the manuscript, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, and cities across the country erupted with protests. Corporate executives began issuing statements expressing sympathy and support for racial justice. (A photo circulated of Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, kneeling in apparent solidarity.) Ramaswamy, unsurprisingly, was annoyed. “The murder of George Floyd was tragic,” he wrote in “Woke, Inc.,” “but it was also tragic that thousands of people of all races died of diseases every day that could be better treated by a broken health-care system.” Employees at Roivant, too, wanted Ramaswamy to issue a statement of support for Black Lives Matter. Instead, he sent a company-wide e-mail that acknowledged the “painful” week and the protests, and advised his staff to “stay safe.” This did not go over well. A colleague accused him of being “tone-deaf,” and many of the young people Roivant had recruited demanded to know how the company was addressing systemic racism in its subsidiaries. He later wrote, “There was something curious to me about corporate America’s fixation on the BLM movement, even as other obvious injustices continued to abound. I was personally appalled by China’s persecution of its Uighur population.” But, he went on, “none of my employees or directors expressed concern to me about these human rights violations.”

In the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, Ramaswamy co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed with Rubenfeld. They called the assault on the Capitol “disgraceful,” but sounded more exercised that Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies had suspended Trump’s accounts on the ground that he had incited violence. The op-ed contended that the tech companies’ decisions about whom to ban were politically motivated.

Members of Roivant’s advisory board were following Ramaswamy’s new career as a cultural critic, and some were distressed. In Berwick’s view, Tucker Carlson and Fox News were toying with American democracy. Moreover, Berwick thought, Ramaswamy’s regular public statements about how corporations did not exist to deliver social benefits ran counter to Roivant’s original mission—to bring reasonably priced medicines to people who needed them.

The day after the Journal piece appeared online, Berwick resigned from Roivant’s advisory board. Daschle and Sebelius quit, too. Ramaswamy was startled by the departures, particularly Berwick’s, but he was unrepentant. A week and a half later, he went on Carlson’s show to call on President Joe Biden to pressure Twitter to reinstate Trump.

“To me, he’s assuming a status quo that does not exist,” Berwick said. “Democracy is so under the gun right now. And the very forces that he’s talking about, these moneyed forces, are part of the reason. His view is they should get out of the political scene entirely, and my view is they’re in it—the money’s there.”

Just a few weeks after January 6th, Ramaswamy announced that he would step down from the business he’d founded to focus full time on his writing and political interests. Roivant had recovered from its Alzheimer’s-drug failure, and he told me he realized that he “couldn’t be a free-speaking citizen without hurting the company.” He was also mulling a run for the Senate seat in Ohio held by Rob Portman, who said that he would not seek reëlection, in large part because of the polarization in Washington.

The Republican Party was perennially in need of candidates of color to diversify its ranks—especially those with stage presence and a good origin story. Ramaswamy was invited to a dinner attended by Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, and took the opportunity to raise the subject of his political future. He recalls McCarthy saying that he could do more good as a thought leader for the Party than as a junior member of Congress. Others he consulted suggested that a life in politics would be a source of misery and frustration.

Ramaswamy was also casting about for another business to start—maybe an anti-woke shoe company to compete with Nike, or an anti-woke beverage company to take on Coca-Cola. But conditions seemed more propitious for an “anti-BlackRock”—something much bigger than the anti-E.S.G. companies that had already formed.

At the time, a wave of anti-E.S.G sentiment was taking hold at the local level. States including Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Texas passed bills that allowed their officials to restrict the activities of financial institutions if they were determined to be limiting their dealings with the fossil-fuel or firearm industries. The lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, which has received funding from the billionaire Koch brothers and other allies of the fossil-fuel industry, is an enthusiastic supporter of such anti-E.S.G. endeavors. (Ramaswamy has appeared frequently at Heritage functions.) Heritage also has ties to the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group that includes conservative state treasurers and has promoted anti-E.S.G. efforts. Ramaswamy spoke to a gathering of the group this past February. A few months later, he was collaborating with one of its rising stars, Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer, on a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The piece criticized the disproportionate power of the “big three” asset managers over public companies.

Moore told me that, after he took office in January, 2021, he heard that coal, gas, and oil companies with operations in his state were struggling because some banks had made it more difficult for them to borrow money. (He declined to name any of the companies.) “I immediately started to dig in and wonder about how we could push back,” Moore said. West Virginia was one of the country’s largest energy producers, with some seventy-two thousand workers in the sector, and the industry generated millions of dollars in revenue for the state. Moore wrote to Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and U.S. Bank, warning that they might lose state contracts should they be found to be boycotting fossil fuels.

“Everybody talks about climate change, and I get what they’re saying—maybe the climate is changing,” Moore said. “But it misses what’s measurably changing drastically in this country, and that is the question of human flourishing. We see people’s life expectancy dropping, drug addiction, people generationally doing worse than their grandparents or parents were doing. That is a huge problem, one that has to be addressed more immediately than the question of the climate changing. Here in West Virginia, that is a rich man’s problem.”

Moore added that today some West Virginia coal miners make ninety thousand dollars a year. Meanwhile, small towns and local businesses have been “gutted” by Walmart. “If they take our coal-mining jobs away in certain parts of this state, the only jobs we have left are in Walmarts,” he said. “And that’s not living.”

Some states that pass anti-E.S.G. legislation could face a new set of economic difficulties, according to a recent study by Daniel Garrett, an assistant professor of finance at Wharton, and Ivan Ivanov, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. They found that in Texas five banks paused or halted their underwriting of municipal bonds after anti-E.S.G. laws were adopted in September, 2021. The experts’ estimate suggests that a loss of competition in the market cost Texas municipalities an additional three to five hundred million dollars in interest on bonds in the first eight months.

Earlier this month, the anti-E.S.G. movement gained ground in unexpected territory. Vanguard withdrew from a large climate-finance alliance, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, which aims to encourage fund companies to reach net-zero carbon targets by 2050. The company, which had been under pressure from Republican politicians, stated that it would track its own climate progress instead. Critics immediately accused the company of giving in to the anti-woke movement. Ramaswamy filed the news away as another victory.

He was also gratified, this fall, by the response to a public letter he’d sent the C.E.O. of Chevron, urging him to reject calls by BlackRock and other institutional shareholders to reduce carbon emissions and to increase investments in renewable energy. When I met Ramaswamy for dinner one night in Manhattan at his favorite Mexican restaurant, he told me he’d be meeting later that evening with Chevron’s C.F.O. Ramaswamy seemed exhilarated by the thought that he, like Larry Fink, could start telling business leaders what to do.

He’d been on a round of speaking engagements and was in the city with his body man to promote, among other things, a new book with a self-explanatory title: “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.” As he tore into a plate of quesadillas with huitlacoche, I asked Ramaswamy if his burgeoning reputation as a conservative firebrand had taken a personal toll. He chose his words carefully. A family member no longer spoke to him, and he’d been ghosted by a close friend. Although he’d forged new relationships with conservatives, none of the connections had turned into friendships. “I feel like the public advocacy, or whatever you call what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, has eroded more friendships than new friendships made up for it,” he said.

Although Ramaswamy delights in the visibility that his Fox News appearances bring, he wonders about the opportunities foreclosed. “I feel like I recoil when I see someone describe me as a conservative,” Ramaswamy said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a conservative. It’s just not how I would describe myself.”

Fear of the label did not stop Ramaswamy from travelling to Washington, D.C., a few weeks later to receive the Gentleman of Distinction Award at the annual gala of a right-leaning organization called the Independent Women’s Forum. The unofficial theme of the event, which took place in the great hall of a museum, seemed to be outrage about transgender athletes in women’s sports. Still, the mood in the room was exuberant. The midterms were imminent, and Republicans were anticipating big gains.

Ramaswamy had flown in from an investment conference in Las Vegas, where he had been interviewed alongside Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, at an event entitled “ESG for Thee, China for Me.” Somewhere along the way, he had upgraded his footwear to black brogues, and when he took the stage he delivered a speech less folksy than the one he’d tried out months earlier, in Dublin. He shared his child-of-immigrants story; quoted Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.; slammed E.S.G. and tech censorship; and then got to the self-mythologizing portion of the narrative—that he had stepped down from his company, where he’d been working to develop a cancer drug, to fight a new kind of cancer afflicting our culture.

“That is this new secular religion in America that says that your identity is based on your race, your gender, and your sexual orientation, full stop,” he said. “That America is a systemically racist nation. That if you’re Black you’re inherently disadvantaged. That if you’re white you’re inherently privileged.”

The following month, the Republicans’ disappointing performance in the midterms led to furious intraparty debate over whether to remain loyal to Trump or to move on. But a point of consensus seemed to be that the quality of the Party’s candidates mattered. After people started suggesting that Ramaswamy run for President, he found it hard to shake off the idea. Maybe he was the right person to unify the country around shared values—values that, at the D.C. gala, he underlined in a pounding conclusion.

“The idea that no matter who you are, or where you came from, or what your skin color is, that you can achieve anything you ever want in this country, with your own hard work, your own commitment, and your own dedication—that,” he said, his voice soaring, “is the American Dream.”

Moments later, he was engulfed by admirers. Frank Coleman, of the Cigar Association of America, who claimed that the F.D.A. was “trying to kill the industry” by threatening to ban flavored cigars, had never heard of Ramaswamy before, but said, “It was a tremendous speech.” Tulsi Gabbard, the former congresswoman and 2020 Presidential candidate who’d recently announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party, called Ramaswamy courageous. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, used the same word. An hour later, Ramaswamy was still fielding well-wishers when he realized that he needed to get to the airport. It was wheels-up soon, and he had places to go. ♦

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grits-galraisedinthesouth · 1 year

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Follow-up with writer Vanessa Grigoriadis who investigated Meghan Markle and her family in 2018 and published: Meghan Markle’s Family Breakdown: The Untold Story

It's 2023 and Vanessa is revisiting those twenty (20) conversations she had with individuals and groups from Meghan's past. Although she could not have predicted the current events, she says that she knew "this is going to go someplace real strange.” Vanessa believes the 5 (five) Friends People Magazine Article was a public rebuttal to her Vanity Fair Article. "Meghan obviously authorized her friends to speak on her behalf."

Criticism for her Article: Several media outlets refused to print Vanessa's story, but she said "you just wait and see." Vanessa knew that Meghan Markle was a "grasping, striving woman" who had connected herself to a group of people in Toronto who had everything but (still) wanted everything.

There was no outpouring of vitriol from the media towards Meghan Markle, but there was a genuine curiosity. The media was curious about her as an unknown actress involved with Soho House and an actress who might eventually become Harry's wife. She should have been content that people liked her but it wasn't enough. Her singular vision is to be "sainted." She wants the world to see her as an "oprah."

What we now know about her: She has a strange relationship to objective reality. She has a warped reality and she marshals evidence underneath it to support (lies) a thesis that may not be the case. She very much thinks that everyone is too dumb to figure out what she's doing. She tells a lie, then uses image management "PR crisis calm" in an attempt to dupe the public.

From the Suits Cast: MM did not relate well with them. "She's just not somebody you can be friends with...she'll be very nice but you never actually get to know this person. You can't touch her. Someone you can hike with but you can’t get through her glass wall. A large number of people on the set did not jive with MM."

From an anonymous writer (my guess is the CUT) who spent a full day interviewing Meghan Markle in California: MM is a person who does not know how to relate to human beings. She’s not on the level. She is not real.

The Wedding and Family Drama: She could have just invited her own family to be wedding guests but instead she chose to create her own CAST to show that she had people there for her. MM didn’t invite her family bc she couldn’t control what might come out of their mouths. If only she had invited both parents to the UK to meet the royals while she was dating Harry. Unfortunately, a female journalist moved to Mexico and intentionally befriended Thomas Markle. She took advantage of him.

Meghan wanted the world to see her as an "independent woman" but that was not true. There is something a little off with the entire family. Her family is a typical Hollywood weirdo family. She had an imperfect childhood where her dad did what he could but he had to work, and a mom who was chill but not around. Her parents were actually content with their "class," but MM was the strident one. From a young age, her ambition was to be in a higher class.

Middle class but Meghan grew up wanting to be in a different class. (like Jussie Smollett)You wish people could see but there is more evidence against what you think you see

Like Smollett---who was looking to be a national symbol. Moral authority True victims just want justice Jussie wanted to be a martyrThe poster boy for activism, hero for gay people, hero for black people---jussie smollett

Meghan and Harry pretend to hate the press but they are hypocrites who desire to promote their warped vision of reality free from criticism. She sends Harry to the EVIL media to push their victimhood by repeatedly mentioning Diana to make them “untouchable and unmentionable.” All their manipulation is justified because they are the victims fighting the monster. An imaginary monster for MM but in Harry’s mind it is real. It is clearly a lie for MM because she did everything possible to get attention from the press including drinks with Piers Morgan. She was desperate for the press to be interested in her.

The Future: She's playing at membership in the circle of the rich and famous (oprah, bezos) for whom reality doesn't matter and no one would ever say anything negative towards you. Her entire life is a scene where no one is telling you the truth.

Justine Harman (a magazine editor) met Meghan at a women's magazine meet and greet (for b level actresses). During their chat, Justine mentioned to Meghan that she was planning her wedding and Meghan offered to address the wedding invitations. The next time she saw Meghan the first thing she asked was "why didn't you call me to do the calligraphy for your wedding?"

She is a love bomber and likes to give extravagant gifts, but unlike Kim Kardashian, no one would refer to Meghan Markle as an authentic, kind person. Meghan is lovely to meet in-person but she's not authentic. She's extremely canny. "In her heart of hearts, does she know exactly what she’s doing?" She is robotic and does a lot of pop psychology. On a podcast people want to hear from a human being and not an android. She sounds like a robot. There is a gratitude gene missing from her.

Meghan Markle’s Family Breakdown: The Untold Story | Vanity Fair

NO ROSE WITHOUT A THORN-Inside the Markle Family Breakdown

Meghan Markle, a.k.a. the Duchess of Sussex, has become the darling of the British press and a royal Cinderella story. But her American family presents a more complicated story. Vanessa Grigoriadis digs deep to uncover the untold truths that turned one of the year’s biggest stories into a fractured, Kardashianified royal fairy tale.

BY VANESSA GRIGORIADIS DECEMBER 19, 2018

Meghan Markle will never, in all likelihood, be Queen. But among the many benefits of marrying Prince Harry and becoming Duchess of Sussex is that she and Harry will have their own domain, a special relationship with the 53 Commonwealth countries, in many of which Meghan’s mixed-race American background will be an asset. On her intricately planned 16-day tour of a few of these formerly colonized territories in the South Pacific, her first trip as an H.R.H., she ruled with her characteristic, almost magical mix of micro-management and moments of authenticity, exhibiting the type of spontaneous human interaction with which the royals have long struggled. In Sydney, she fell to her knees to greet a wheelchair-bound 98-year-old war widow, and in New Zealand, she directed underlings to distribute petits fours to a passel of children in a town square. In Dubbo, New South Wales, she labored over a baked banana bread, then presented it to a family of fifth-generation farmers. “She said if you go to someone’s house, you always bring something, so she did,” said the farmer’s daughter, overwhelmed by the honor of eating princess bread. “She said she was worried about the bananas, that she’d put too many bananas in it,” except “the Duke said there’s never too many bananas.”

But when Meghan arrived at the University of the South Pacific, in Suva, Fiji, this perfection was pierced. She was on hand to deliver a speech about the importance of funding girls’ education, her clavicle swathed in a ceremonial necklace resembling a dozen calves’ feet sprouting orange and pink peonies, and she proceeded with humanizing detail and flawless diction: “As a university graduate, I know the personal feeling of pride and excitement that comes with attending university,” she explained, her raven tresses gently pulled back from her face. “It was through scholarships, financial-aid programs, and work-study where my earnings from a job on campus went directly towards my tuition that I was able to attend university,” she continued. “And, without question, it was worth every effort.”

Within a day, a dissenting voice piped up from a world away, part of what has become Meghan’s own personal chorus: her American family. Her half-sister, Samantha Markle, a 53-year-old blonde with M.S. who is confined to a wheelchair, began tapping out tweets, soon to be converted into headlines. Insisting “Dad paid for her college education,” Samantha added, “I love my sister but this is ridiculous.” She also called Meghan “delusionally absurd.”

And this week, the most important voice in the chorus, Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, went on Piers Morgan’s British morning TV show to complain about his daughter’s “ghosting” of him, and to ask the queen herself to intervene in the family squabble.

Even if she’s not the monarchy’s most important princess—this honor goes to the assiduously pleasant Kate Middleton, one day to be queen consort—Meghan is the princess of the moment, as transformational in her way as Princess Di. She is the only female self-made millionaire in the royal family, her fortune coming from her work on Suits and on film; one of the oldest pregnant royals in a century (she’s 37); and the first bi-racial person in a family of people who used to powder their faces to make themselves whiter. As a royal, she’s not allowed to make political statements, but she’s an acknowledged feminist who advocates for gay rights, and for her first charitable endeavor, she collaborated with the mostly Muslim survivors of the Grenfell fire.

This soon-to-be mom to the first (known) bi-racial baby in the history of the monarchy represents the new and modern, all that America has given and will, if our politicians let us, continue to give to the world. She’s like the one percent Gal Gadot. Even her gaffes are merely evidence that she’s shaking up the royal family, which is dedicated to conservatism and self-perpetuation. When she refuses to wear nude-colored stockings to official events, as royals tend to, and goes bare-legged in the summer humidity, we cheer. When she closes her own car door, instead of waiting for a valet, it’s fraught with down-to-earth, woman-of-the-people symbolism. Her public performance has been near-flawless. She came from nowhere, and re-invented the way the British royal family could behave.

But of course Meghan didn’t come from nowhere, exactly. She came from the American hinterland, from an aspirational, peripatetic, and, yes, dysfunctional family, with whom she shares many traits, even if she sometimes seems to want to deny them. Where the British have generations of Plantagenets and Tudors, Americans have Jay Gatsby, a man who loved clothes as much as any princess (“I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before”) and a past he liked to keep hidden. Meghan isn’t Gatsby, exactly—she hasn’t expunged her background. But there’s something of Fitzgerald’s antihero in Meghan’s preternatural American re-invention. She comes from a family of acolytes of motivational speakers and reality shows (Tony Robbins and the Kardashians are touchstones), people who believe that the future doesn’t at all have to be governed by the past. According to a Hollywood source, when her star was rising she threw herself a party at her home unofficially billed as a “Sayonara Zara” party and gave away the lower- priced clothes in her closet to her guests.

The blowup between Meghan and some of her biological family has been a rare fiasco for the Duchess, aided and abetted by elements that include the British tabloids’ dexterity at fomenting race- and class-based discord, the royal family’s usual resistance to change, and the unbridled loopiness and more than occasional meanness of some Markles (her half-sister has called Meghan “the Duchess of Nonsense”). It has also pointed up an essential difference between our two countries: Brits often can’t escape their families, or even their class, whereas our myth is based on striking out on one’s own.

Beneath the performance, Meghan, reporting indicates, is a solitary, emotionally guarded perfectionist likely carrying scar tissue from her tumultuous background. The story of her biological family is a sprawling American epic, both up-by-the-bootstraps and shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves, generations’ worth of new beginnings, of which Meghan’s is the most spectacular. There are appearances by slaves and slave owners, cross-country journeys in pursuit of the American Dream, and the eventual attainment of a middle-class Angeleno life that played out for most of her family like a stoner shaggy-dog tale.

Royal historians have dug deeply through the ancestry of Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, as with anyone newly incorporated into royal lineage, and located her first known ancestor: a slave born in 1830 in Jonesboro, Georgia, the setting for Gone with the Wind, named Richard Ragland (the surname most likely came from the man who enslaved him). A generation later, during Reconstruction, many Raglands lit out for Southern California; in the 1950s, Doria’s parents moved from Ohio to Los Angeles, too. Her father ran an antique store, ‘Twas New.

Doria, gentle and loving, met Meghan’s father, Tom, in L.A., though he had been raised on the East Coast. He was the youngest of three sons in a creative family in the small town of Newport, Pennsylvania. One of his older brothers joined the air force and became an international diplomat. The other is the bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America, which is a church that I, as a practicing member of the Eastern Orthodox religion, was surprised never to have heard of before. At one point the church had a few hundred parishioners, though the Association of Religion Data Archives’ listing for the number of today’s flock is blank.

Tom, taciturn but lighthearted, enjoyed making practical jokes and putting on plays. After high school, he moved to the Poconos to work in theater, then to Chicago, eventually becoming a lighting designer. He married for the first time at 19, having two kids—Samantha and her brother, Thomas junior—before divorcing in the early 1970s and setting out for the West Coast, sans famille, to try his luck in Hollywood’s big leagues. When he met Doria, he was working as the lighting director of ABC’s long-running daytime soap General Hospital, on which nurses and doctors have lusty affairs while also performing heroic heart transplants. Doria, 12 years his junior, was a trainee makeup artist for the soap. The groovy couple was married at Sunset Boulevard’s Self-Realization Fellowship, shrine of the Hindu guru Yogananda, located down the street from the compound of the Church of Scientology.

Doria and Tom moved in together a couple of years before Meghan was born, along with Samantha and Thomas junior, who had relocated to L.A. after living with their mom. The teenage siblings were unruly. Samantha was auditioning for film and TV parts, or working the Lancôme counter at the Beverly Center and as an extra on A Different World, Lisa Bonet’s spin-off of The Cosby Show. According to a biography by Andrew Morton, Meghan: A Hollywood Princess, Thomas junior spent time smoking weed with his friends at the family home in Woodland Hills, a burb in the Valley. Ragland, who eventually opened a small boutique selling sundresses in a Topanga mall, wasn’t averse to joints, either, according to Samantha. They were a family of the type of low-level creatives who abound in Hollywood, enjoying an offbeat life in the sunshine. When Meghan would pitch a tantrum in her high chair, scattering peas on the floor, her dad would encourage her and even get in on the action himself, throwing more peas. Once, when Thomas junior and his friends were smoking weed in the living room while she cried in her room, Tom senior left to tend to her, then reappeared with a full diaper. He pulled out a spoon and began eating the contents, later revealing that he’d filled the diaper with chocolate pudding.

The startling and sensational descended in Meghan’s life with some regularity, though even as a little girl she was centered and ambitious. Tom and Doria divorced when Meghan was two. (Samantha and Thomas junior were on their way out of the house.) Meghan lived with one parent, then the other, until her adolescence, when she lived with Tom full-time. In what must have been a dissonant experience for Meghan, after her day at an all-girls Catholic school, he would pick her up and bring her along to work with him on the set of Married . . . with Children. Meghan loved girlie things, and had well-honed methods of dealing with the chaos and uncertainty of her dysfunctional family. She kept her closet neat, and even as an adolescent stored her Betsey Johnson shoes in their original boxes, wrapped in tissue paper, until she was ready to wear them next. “I remember busying myself and being the president of every club,” she has said of her schooling. “Not because I actually wanted to, but because I didn’t want to eat alone at lunchtime. This overachiever mask I wore was really just the way I battled feeling displaced.”

It was far from a perfect childhood, but magic always hovered nearby. In Los Angeles, the American Dream isn’t only made by grit, but rather by moments of luck. If there is an altar to which Hollywood bows, it’s the one of serendipity. And in 1990, Tom, who already made a TV salary, reportedly bought a winning lottery ticket, a stroke of luck not dissimilar to the one required to transform a California girl into a British princess. Meghan attended private school and Northwestern, majoring in international affairs and theater. She was the first person in her family to go to college.

It’s certainly a partial explanation for the current conflict that, while Meghan’s good fortunes only multiplied from her father’s doting, poor investments and family feuds led to a diminishment of Tom’s bank accounts. Samantha maintains that Tom paid Meghan’s tab when she enrolled at Northwestern and that if Meghan worked at all, as Samantha has tweeted, “it was only for extra shoe money and party money.” In 2016, Tom filed for bankruptcy. And Meghan did omit mention in Fiji of Tom’s contribution to her college education—she attended college supported by her parents and also financial aid. Though hardly “delusionally absurd” not to mention them in her Fiji speech, she could have made the choice to include them.

Meghan followed her father back to Hollywood after a short stint working at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires (her diplomat uncle has claimed he set her up), making her way from roles as suitcase girl on Deal or No Deal to guest spots on CSI to a female lead in Suits. Her starter marriage to a fast-talking movie producer broke up soon after it began, partially because the two had to spend months apart when Suits began filming in Toronto. Meghan dated a popular Canadian chef and started the Tig, her lifestyle blog; it was one part Goop and another Martha Stewart, with a consistently eloquent tone and a dollop of social justice before the topic became trendy. The image Meghan created for herself was free-spirited and earthy—but not entirely consistent with who she really was, according to those who know her. “Meghan’s goal was always becoming a household name,” says an acquaintance in the television world. “She’s insanely smart and poised, but very, very guarded. She’s not a person you can actually be friends with. She’s the type of person who is best friends with her stylist.”

In Toronto, Meghan became a regular at Soho House, an exclusive club drawing the city’s film, social, and banking set. She began hanging out with an international crowd, including a power stylist—Jessica Mulroney, best known for styling Justin Trudeau’s fabulous wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau—and Bahrain-born Misha Nonoo, at that time married to Alexander Gilkes, the British founder of online auction house Paddle8 and a close friend of Harry’s. “Meghan was socializing with foreign heiresses—upper-crust, smart, ambitious,” says a friend of Nonoo’s. “They have everything and they want everything.” Meghan also alighted on her fairy godmother: Violet von Westenholz, a British Ralph Lauren public-relations director whose father, an Olympic skier, is besties with Prince Charles. Von Westenholz knew Harry was looking to become serious with the right woman, and passed him Meghan’s contact information.

The trajectory of her family was moving in other directions. They stopped having holidays together and some eventually stopped speaking to each other. Money problems were a near-constant. Samantha filed for bankruptcy in 2003, joined by Thomas junior in 2012. He claimed at the time that he had $10 in cash and $88,000 in debts. After running into problems with a boutique she’d opened in Los Angeles, Doria also filed for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, the royal family’s personal wealth, which encompasses castles and endless swaths of British countryside and crown jewels, including a 530-carat cut diamond, the world’s largest, to squabble over, has been estimated at $85 billion. So it’s no surprise that, to some of her family, Meghan’s ascension was viewed as an opportunity to play the Kardashian game while acquiring their own measure of royal wealth and fame.

“The Kardashians and Anthony Robbins do this sort of thing—why can’t my dad?” says Samantha.

This fall, I sent Samantha a number of messages on Facebook, but she was slow to respond. Reading the tabloids, I realized that she was in Britain doling out interviews to TV talk shows. Her boyfriend—they live together in Bellevue, Florida—also accompanied her to Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where she delivered a handwritten letter for her sister to a bobby in his flat cap. The guard did not open the palace gates. The next set of paparazzi photos depicted Samantha proceeding in her motorized wheelchair to a nearby store, where she checked out a life-size paper mask of Harry’s face with the eyes cut out, stocked as a souvenir. Samantha put the mask to her face and smiled for the camera.

Royalty, to Samantha, may merely be another type of lottery—a hereditary one. It doesn’t seem that she thinks royalty is worthy of a great deal of respect, and certainly doesn’t receive its right to rule from God. Most Brits don’t believe in divine right anymore, either, but many agree that the royals provide a useful societal function. One I spoke with discussed the royals’ dependability in attracting tourists, and quoted the great 19th-century British political writer Walter Bagehot, who defended the monarchy on non-religious grounds. “A royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events,” he explained. “It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government, but they are facts which speak to ‘men’s bosoms’ and employ their thoughts.” Bagehot further believed that to cement the success of the nation the royals had to remain high status. “Our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it,” he wrote. “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”

It’s part of Meghan’s patent gift for her current role that she appears to let in daylight—hugging babies and grannies, baking a banana bread for a family of farmers—making it part of her magic, while maintaining her royal reserve. But her family, not so respectfully, calls bullshit.

If the royal family is merely a group of well-dressed celebrities, then Samantha not only doesn’t need to take them seriously, but she has as much right to be a celebrity as they do. Perhaps this point of view, combined with the fact that Samantha’s daughter has claimed Meghan put Samantha in paroxysms of jealousy for many years prior to her engagement to Harry, meant that she didn’t shy away from tabloids’ phone calls when they began to poke around Meghan’s family history. Talking to the British tabloid The Sun, she cast Meghan as a social climber: she said Meghan was shallow and superficial, had always wanted to become a princess, and had “a soft spot for gingers.”

When I got in touch with her, Samantha insisted that she was misquoted, and that the first comment she made about her sister was, “She’s got the eloquence of Condoleezza Rice and the grace of Princess Diana,” but this time line does not hold up. Samantha has also announced that she is writing a book entitled The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister, a strange choice of nomenclature given that “Princess Pushy” is the nickname for Princess Michael of Kent, who, at the luncheon at which Meghan was formally introduced to the royal family, appeared wearing a blackamoor brooch (a type of 17th- and 18th-century jewelry depicting black people wearing turbans or in subservient poses). Samantha later said she was misquoted on her title, and in any case the book’s real title was the still somewhat inappropriate In the Shadows of the Duchess.

Samantha struck me as less a wicked stepsister than a special kind of trickster, a proficient storyteller with deep emotional intelligence who was adept at reading my cues. “This story is about a very normal family thrust into the spotlight,” she said to me a couple of times, seeking to portray herself as a misunderstood mom of three who was provoked by her sister. She spoke delightfully about the moment Meg was born: “She was beautiful and pink, with little teeny fingers that would wrap around my finger,” she said. “For us, it was very humbling because we were teenagers freaking out learning how to be young adults in the world, and adults were doing their career thing outward, but when a baby comes, there’s an inward focus and fascination. I think it really did pull us all together.”

If the sisters lost touch down the line, couldn’t that happen in any family? Samantha says that she planned to support Meghan (“Is London wheelchair friendly? excited!” she tweeted before the wedding), but became angry not only when Meghan didn’t invite her to the wedding, but also because Prince Harry commented to the press that Meghan was enjoying spending time with the royal family because the royal family was “the family she never had.” Says Samantha, “Consistently, my family was being isolated and ignored, like we’re nonexistent.” She adds, “Like the uncle who got her the internship in Buenos Aires. He’s not trailer trash. It got back to me that Meg had said about her uncle, ‘I don’t know him,’ and I’m like, ‘What is this, Joan Crawford speaking?’ ”

The more Samantha talked, the louder the cheering from tabloid reporters on both sides of the pond. The British reporters were excited for Samantha to play the role of the uncivilized, low-class American who was not at all P.L.U., people like us; the American reporters knew their readership would appreciate her most if she was simply wackadoodle, another outrageous semi-celebrity for our outraged era. Samantha learned that a story could be worth $1,500, perhaps $3,000, or even more. Reporters began lobbing devilish questions her way, such as “Do you feel your sister is a humanitarian?” and “How does Meghan compare to Diana?” Invoking the name that Harry and the royals least wanted to come out of her mouth, Samantha answered, “Diana would not isolate family.”

Though Samantha and Tom have what one member of their family calls an enabling and dysfunctional relationship, Tom and Thomas junior, a choleric professional glazer, were estranged. But now Thomas junior wanted in on the celebrity action. Arrested in 2017 for allegedly holding a gun to his fiancée’s head before being released without charge, he began telling increasingly bizarre stories to the tabloids and even agreed to submit to a lie-detector test to prove the truth of a story he told about Tom using the services of a prostitute when Thomas was young. (Tom strongly denied these claims.) He also reportedly gave the paparazzi Tom’s address in Rosarito Beach, a tourist town 15 miles from Tijuana where Tom had retired a few years past. A handful of British paps descended on Tom’s neighborhood, taking up residence in Airbnbs along the road to his modest home and capturing him as he visited a convenience store for cigarettes and a four-pack of Heineken.

Thomas junior’s estranged son also began speaking out, seeming like the rational one in the bunch. Tyler Dooley, a strapping 26-year-old who lives in Grants Pass, Oregon, said that he doesn’t even go by the name “Markle” anymore “for obvious reasons.” His childhood in Los Angeles “wasn’t a fantasy or fairy tale by any means,” he tells me. “Drinking has led to so many problems in my family members’ lives.” He talks about leaving home as a teenager, being broke, not having any water or power in his house, and making his own way in the world. One day in the mid-2000s, he saw a friend of his with a sports car and asked how he got it. “Servicing federal debt” was the answer, and Tyler did that for a couple of years, studying the teachings of Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy to learn how to target customers’ hot points. Having a duchess in the family had commercial virtue, and Tyler never thought that becoming famous himself and hurting Meghan were the same thing: he hasn’t spoken poorly about her in the media, and tells me that the truth is he has few anecdotes to tell about her—he doesn’t remember their relationship much, except she was very nice to him when he was younger, lost, and ready to join the army.

In the past few years, Dooley had a marijuana business in Oregon with his mother, Tracy. He named it Royally Grown and marketed a strain of weed named Markle Sparkle (“sweet, silky, with a hint of blueberry”). Tracy once told a newspaper, “We plan to build a global empire like the Kardashians.” Today, Tyler tells me it’s important to note that he’s moving on to CBD. The weed market is flooded, and it’s no longer a growth crop.

Things didn’t exactly go well for the last American duchess. Wallis Simpson, whose husband, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne when the family shunned her, once said of her royal in-laws, “You are either with them or dead.”

Meghan is adept at walking fine lines, but handling her biological family and her new one—the royals—was an extraordinary balancing job. She considered Samantha and Thomas junior part of her ancient past—she claimed to have seen neither in years, and thought of herself in some ways as an only child—but she does not seem to have wanted to dis her father, whom she wrote about in loving terms on the Tig in 2014. In a post for Father’s Day, she wrote about “our club sandwich and fruit smoothie tradition post my tap & ballet class—classes, which by the way, he religiously took me to on Saturday mornings after working 75+ hours a week as a lighting director.” He put “gas in my car when I went from audition to audition trying to make it as an actress,” she wrote, and “believed in this grand dream of mine well before I could even see it as a possibility.” She lauded “the blood, sweat and tears this man (who came from so little in a small town in Pennsylvania, where Christmas stockings were filled with oranges, and dinners were potatoes and Spam) invested in my future so that I could grow up and have so much.” Tom would later describe her in similarly admiring terms, saying “my daughter has been a princess since the day she was born.”

In the run-up to May’s big royal wedding, though, the relationship hit a major snag. Knowing that a story about vulgar Americans sells papers, the British tabloids built a case by capturing Tom’s quotidian American-retiree life in Rosarito Beach. One day, they photographed him buying a toilet, potatoes, and paper plates at Home Depot and Walmart. Though Tom had been silent on the topic of his daughter for months, Samantha, perhaps feeling her oats as a media mastermind, thought she could change her father’s profile. Working with a paparazzo, Samantha crafted a plan for a pap to capture Tom visiting a tailor to be fitted for a suit, and then casually relaxing reading a book about British landmarks. “The Kardashians and Anthony Robbins do this sort of thing—why can’t my dad?” is the way she sums up her thinking to me. Needless to say, this harebrained scheme backfired when the pictures appeared in The Sun and a pap working for the Daily Mail—who was also following Tom—realized that the outings were a setup.

Tom reportedly received a call from Meghan and Harry explaining that they were confused as to why he had taken such bizarre action, and asking him please not to speak to reporters or participate in any more photographs. Of all the royals, Harry is known to absolutely revile the press for both its role in his mother’s death and the continuing breaches of his privacy when he traipsed the globe in his 20s drinking much too heavily, in part to deal with his unresolved trauma. Tom claims he offered to make an apology, but the couple said an apology would only fuel the story, which was running on a 24/7 loop on British TV. (Sources have raised questions about this account.) Instead, the couple, concerned for Tom’s welfare, directed a press regulator to issue a privacy warning to the papers to back off. Embarrassed, Tom stayed in Mexico and pondered his mistake. Then, four days later, the international news began broadcasting headlines that he’d had a heart attack.

“Throughout the heart attack, I feel my dad was ignored,” says Samantha. “Meg and Harry should have been on a plane, and been there at the hospital, minimum. They should have taken him back on a plane to Kensington, and had him meet Charles, and included him in the big picture.” But that didn’t happen. “I think they might have believed it was a fake heart attack,” says Samantha.

In England, the 92-year-old Queen, whose primary purpose in life has been promoting the longevity of the monarchy, was watching. She had lived through unpopularity, particularly during the saga of Princess Diana and Charles (loneliness, bulimia, Camillagate, Squidgygate, divorce, death by paparazzi). Much magic was lost. But in recent years, via the classic P.R. maneuver of replacing negative stories with new stories—the romance of William and Kate, plus Pippa’s bottom, the addition of Prince George and two spare heirs, and now Meghan and Harry—people fell in love again. Even in America, where today’s rich are decidedly “out”—they reek too much of MAGA—the royals, who embody a faraway fantasy of being rich, are hugely popular. And these days the royal family allows their every step to be photographed and calculated, like the world’s richest reality-show stars. The episodes run until the end of their lives.

The Queen knew that Harry worshipped Meghan, and also that the House of Windsor didn’t need another busted-up fairy tale. “She was very concerned that it [the Markle situation] was spiraling out of control, which it was,” says one observer. “Buckingham Palace wanted to be able to do something and be proactive and make the situation go away. It was a direction from the Queen, so her courtiers were under strict instructions to sort it out. But Kensington Palace was not singing from the same hymn sheet, and that was because the message was coming from Meghan. She didn’t want to engage and thought that she could handle it on her own.” Both palaces’ aides whispered and planned, to no avail. “There was a lot of tension between courtiers within the two royal households, and I think it just got to a point where it was stalemate and, you know, neither could move.”

For years, Meghan has publicly declared that she does not read her press, a usual tactic of Hollywood stars to seem above the messiness of image-making. It’s a contention that sophisticated communications folks find laughable. She may not be a press addict, as Diana was—Diana read every page that mentioned her in the tabloids, and exulted or worried over them—but Meghan herself was handling this fracas, or not handling it. “This is her family, and no one at the palace would make a move without her,” explains Patrick Jephson, Princess Diana’s former private secretary and author of The Meghan Factor, a book weighing Meghan’s impact on the monarchy. He pauses, then adds, “In talking about Meghan, I wouldn’t say that her advisers are doing a good job or a bad job. It is one of the perks of royalty never to be held responsible for their actions.” Regardless, the observer says, “Meghan and Harry made efforts to make sure Tom was properly kitted out for the day, so that level of care was there, but it wasn’t enough care. He needed an equerry to go out there and take him back to England, put him in Sandringham or Balmoral in a small cottage where no one knew where he was, and where he would have been very happy. That’s what should have happened.”

Meghan did what she could. By refusing to speak publicly about the fracas, or have someone speak on her behalf, Meghan was trying to maintain her famous elegance; her silence meant she was above the fray, plus she was more than a bit busy planning a wedding to be watched by billions. For Harry, and Meghan, the situation was deeply concerning as a security matter. Harry felt that the paparazzi had placed Thomas under extraordinary pressure—and they could destroy another parental relationship.

But at this point Tom seems to have been hurt and frustrated. His sense of himself as a loving and generous patriarch was unpleasantly rattled. He responded by talking to reporters at TMZ and later granting a nine-hour interview to a British tabloid. He called the royals a “cult,” compared them to Scientologists and the Stepford Wives family, and added, “They’re just like a Monty Python sketch. Say a few critical words about the royal family and they put their fingers in their ears, cover their eyes, and pull the blinds down. They don’t want to know about it.” He was annoyed by the way he’d been treated and said a courtier told him to make an apology. “Suddenly I’m being told that I needed help apologizing, as if there’s a special way to apologize to the royal family,” he explained. “Perhaps you do it with gravy and flowers on the side? I was taken aback to be asked if I needed help apologizing, like I was a child.” He also swung from despair —“If Meghan never speaks to me again,” he said, “I don’t know how I can go on without my heart breaking”—to anger, saying, “I’ve about had it with Meghan and the royal family.” He added, “I feel for Meghan, because she does have a difficult family. But it’s still her family.”

This sad and embarrassing incident culminated in Tom missing his daughter’s wedding, which he watched from an Airbnb in Rosarito Beach to escape the paparazzi staking out his home. In his stead, Prince Charles walked the new princess down the aisle, her silk tulle train (in a powerful symbol, she had the official flowers of the 53 Commonwealth nations embroidered on its edges). Doria, now a social worker, was the only family member in attendance, and Meghan paid deep respect to her African-American roots. Before the ceremony, according to the observer, thinking of her father’s absence, she broke down in tears.

At the end of the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” the original rags-to-royals story, Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters accompany her to her wedding, but in revenge, pigeons peck out their eyes. This is not quite what has happened to Samantha, who talked to me about wanting to use her platform to educate people about M.S., but in the past few months, she has disappeared into a netherworld of Twitter wars. There, she does battle with a clan of pro-Meg forces calling themselves Megulators (Samantha’s supporters call themselves “Megexit”). They resent Meghan on the grounds that she “thinks that now since she has a title and a ring on her finger, she can do whatever she wants,” which is “nothing but an insult to all normal people,” if you can follow the logic. After the Megulators harassed Samantha on Twitter in November, she called the F.B.I. and asked agents to investigate death threats, but to me she plays this off like no big deal. “It’s just a small group of people who just want to rattle the cage,” she declares.

For a while, Tom realized that talking to the press was a losing game, one in which he could possibly lose his daughter forever. For now, the observer says that the two aren’t speaking, but Meghan is interested in a probationary period during which he wouldn’t speak publicly, and then perhaps the two would be able to mend their relationship. The real drama is this: Will Meghan insist that Tom cut ties with one daughter, Samantha—who’s been, by far, the most hostile of the Markles, to clear the way to rebuild the relationship with Meghan? Tom is caught between two daughters.

The papers in London are full of new stories about Meghan, not all of them positive. Some are outlandish: Meghan wanted a certain emerald tiara for her wedding and the Queen made her wear Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau, and Meghan asked for air freshener to be sprayed in St. George’s Chapel before her wedding because she thought it smelled musty. Understanding what’s going on behind castle walls is always a game of reading tea leaves, but the posh Brits I spoke with said they’d heard that some stories were correct: Meghan’s staff is annoyed by her waking up at a Californian five A.M. and texting about various initiatives she wants them to pursue, and Meghan is callous toward staff in general. One thought it was “peculiar” that her mother was the only family member at her wedding; another even said she’d heard Meghan was dubbed “Monster Markle” at Kensington Palace. I can’t vouch for any of that, but when papers began reporting that Kate and Meghan had feuded before the wedding, and then Kensington Palace issued a statement denying a feud, I thought about Tina Brown’s comment in The Diana Chronicles, her outstanding biography of the princess: “The palace only bothers to deny something that’s true.”

Still, in fairy tales, magic always hovers in the distance. Far from being snobbish about Meghan’s family and excoriating Harry about the perils of marrying a commoner, Prince Charles, perhaps the most important arbiter of Meghan’s stature in the royal family, is taking her side in the scandal. Of course, Charles gains a benefit from the new spotlight on a younger generation of royals, or the “Fab Four,” as the British have dubbed Meghan-Harry-William-Kate. Their reflected glory makes Charles seem like a man of substance, a patriarch, which is good, because polls show that only a quarter of Britons want him to succeed the Queen, who, at 92, could expire rather soon. But to the less jaundiced observer, there’s another reason he would back Meghan, and that’s because his own upbringing wasn’t exactly the stuff of Hallmark Cards. When his mother, before she was crowned Queen, returned from her own tour of the Commonwealth—similar in shape to the one taken by Meghan and Harry—cameras captured her solemnly patting three-year-old Charles on the shoulder. He knows from difficult families.

“Let her go conquer the world,” says Meghan’s entrepeneurial nephew, Tyler Dooley, when we talked about his feelings toward her. “There’s big stuff in store. I know she can make the world a better place.” Including for Dooley. Today, in addition to getting into CBD, Dooley has taken a role on MTV’s The Royal World, a new spin on the Real Worldformula: one castle and 10 genuine royals, including a baroness, a count, and a royal Instagram influencer nicknamed Zsa Zsa. To those who might think he’s cashing in on his aunt’s name, he said, he sometimes makes as much in a day as MTV paid him for the whole shebang, plus “everybody in the house I lived in, the whole cast, is there because of a family or a connection of some sort.” He added, “At the end of the day, everyone dies. They might die with their titles, but they don’t even get to keep that. You die with no money, no friends, nothing. People are just people in the end.”

Toward the holidays, the chatter among royal correspondents was about Meghan’s mother, Doria, who might be the first non-royal member of the extended royal family invited to Christmas at Sandringham in the history of the monarchy. “Kate did not go to Sandringham before she married William in 2011, and the Middletons are still not invited,” declares etiquette expert William Hanson. “To have a partner’s mother come is a huge seismic shift.” During Christmas, the royals will play charades, particularly those that involve impersonations of world leaders, but the Queen likes to win, so everyone will need to make sure their impersonations aren’t very good. They may play soccer against their maids and butlers. They will eat dinner in black-tie, and they will not go to bed before the Queen decides to go to bed. They are possibly weighed before and after the meal, a royal tradition that was once meant to demonstrate how well they’d been fed, though Meghan, who is fond of light cooking and organic food and also pregnant, probably would rather she didn’t have to do that. The rest of the Markles won’t be there, which is sort of a shame—and makes perfect sense.

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#megxit #spare us #like a spare #brf #waaagh #revenge #2018 #BY VANESSA GRIGORIADIS DECEMBER 19 #vanity fair

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