By Clare Malone

Copyright newyorker

From Hillary Clinton voter to mommy blogger to COVID-vaccine skeptic to MAHA influencer—how Jessica Reed Kraus became an R.F.K., Jr., tag-along and a face of the new right-wing media. Plus:

The chess grand master who grew up in a cult
Could Trump end the Federal Reserve’s independence?
Where political violence comes from

Clare Malone
A staff writer covering the media business, journalism, and politics.
Jessica Reed Kraus likes to talk about the power of gossip and “quality conspiracy.” The Substack and Instagram star, who writes under the handle “House Inhabit,” became an unlikely powerhouse within the world of conservative media by providing her readers—many of them women—with just that.
Although Kraus isn’t a household name, she’s famous to a slice of Americans; she told me that her Instagram stories can get more than a hundred million monthly views. It’s easy to understand why; Kraus is an engaging writer with an obsessive bent and a stylish flair for the dramatic. Often, she will do deep dives into persons of note and events—she’s an Epstein-world fanatic, and recently got interested in Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos who is now incarcerated for fraud—that she believes have been written off in mainstream discourse. As more people have lost trust in long-established news sources, independent figures such as Kraus have emerged as alternatives, offering audiences not expertise, per se, but a distinctive point of view.
Kraus started her career in the mostly apolitical world of motherhood-focussed life-style blogging, back in the early twenty-tens. Her aesthetic was aspirational, clean-lined, California beach-living, and she featured her four sons and husband prominently. Brands like Samsung and the clothing retailer Dôen wanted to partner with her. But during the pandemic, her vaguely liberal world view began to shift. COVID lockdowns didn’t make sense to Kraus, and she felt that the media had a tendency to “censor” doctors with alternative views. Before she publicly embraced her anti-vax, anti-lockdown beliefs, though, she became a contrarian voice in pop culture, providing sympathetic coverage of the trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Johnny Depp, who had been dealt with far more critically by the mainstream press.
When the 2024 election cycle began, Kraus quickly decided that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whom she mostly knew as “the guy that my friends all liked during COVID,” would be a fascinating character to write about. He was just the sort of figure she was drawn to—a person with a complicated personal history who had fallen from the establishment’s good graces. The Kennedy campaign took note of her positive coverage. They invited her along on trips and to stay in his family home—giving her access to his private world in a way mainstream journalists could only dream of. Soon, seemingly eager to win over Kraus’s audience of mostly women, Trump’s team also started paying attention, and she began attending parties at Mar-a-Lago. Her posts around this time were more often portraits of the outsized characters that dominate conservative politics than about actual policy. In one photo-heavy scene report, she recounts the time Donald Trump, Jr. (whom she described as having “the swagger of a recently graduated football star”), his daughter, his girlfriend, and his ex-wife showed up to a “House Inhabit” reader meetup just weeks before the 2024 election. Her audience was rapt.
“I don’t have a political audience, I’m not writing for Washington, D.C.,” Kraus told me. Her readers seem to have grown tired of the old ways of keeping track of the news. Through Kraus, they can live vicariously, rubbing shoulders with the new MAGA élites.

Before becoming a star of Chess.com, the grand master was just a kid living in Arizona, being encouraged to play by the leader of a cult called the Church of Immortal Consciousness, also known as the Collective. “Cults work,” Rensch writes in his new memoir, “until they don’t.” Read Louisa Thomas on how Rensch grew up and helped to change the game »

How Far Could Donald Trump’s Assault on the Federal Reserve Go?
Where political violence comes from
The U.S. Government’s Extraordinary Pursuit of Kilmar Ábrego García
Where the Waters Once Flowed

Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Instruction to one getting a back tattoo, say—eight letters.
Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.
Name Drop: Guess the identity of a notable person in six clues.

P.S. Chants of “Stephen” erupted in the moments after Stephen Colbert and his team at “The Late Show” won the Emmy for Outstanding Talk Series last night. The award comes just months after CBS announced the cancellation of the series, citing financial reasons. What will TV be without “The Late Show”? 📺
Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.