The onscreen version of exorcists Ed and Lorraine Warren is a far cry from their real-life counterparts.
The reputation of cute cuddly exorcists Ed and Lorraine Warren has grown outsized in 21st-century pop culture. That’s mainly thanks to the juggernaut Conjuring franchise, loosely based on their lives, with Vera Farmiga playing Lorraine and Patrick Wilson playing Ed. Then there’s the equally popular franchise spinoff series Anabelle, based on the Warrens’ creepy doll, and The Nun, based on a fan-favorite demonic entity from the previous films. There’s also the 2009 hit horror flick A Haunting in Connecticut and a number of bestselling books that depict the Warrens as the first and often last line of defense against the supernatural.
Alas, none of that is real.
Not Ed and Lorraine! you might say. Not the sweet, demon-shooing soulmates who chased evil across the US throughout the ’70s and ’80s! They were pure hearts! They were in love! They cleansed the Amityville Horror!
Actually, they didn’t. Like many of the Warrens’ stories, reports of their involvement in the alleged Amityville hauntings were greatly exaggerated. In fact, while their skills at exorcism are debatable, their skill at self-promotion remains unmatched.
That leaves us with two very different portraits of the Warrens today. In one corner, you have the gentle, soulful story of the Warrens as popularized by the Conjuring cinematic universe. In popular culture, the Warrens are lovable, wise, and courageous, the type of happily married couple anyone would want to be friends with.
In the other corner, you have the portrait of the Warrens as championed by skeptics and other doubters: a pair of conniving, reality-distorting, shamelessly grandiose self-promoters and sham psychics running a long-term con job. The recently released Netflix documentary The Devil on Trial takes up this point of view. While the narrative remains fully credulous about all things demonic, the Warrens are ultimately depicted as swindlers who preyed on vulnerable families in order to sell their own story for fame and fortune.
Not only that, but even after his death in 2006, Ed Warren stands accused of grooming and entering into a sexual relationship with an underaged girl, allegedly with his wife’s full awareness and complicity.
So who were the Warrens and how did we come to know them so well and not at all?
The Warrens had a hand in some of the most famous alleged supernatural events of the 20th century (emphasis on “alleged”)
Ed and Lorraine Warren were both raised in the Catholic church in Bridgeport, Connecticut. By the time they met as teenagers in 1944, she had already fully embraced her identity as a purported psychic medium, and he had gained a deep interest in the paranormal after having grown up in a house he reportedly believed was haunted. After fighting in World War II, Ed studied art in college, but wound up using his talent to fuel his rapidly deepening paranormal interests instead. Together with Lorraine, he would show up at an allegedly haunted house, paint a picture of the house, and then gift the artwork to the homeowners as a pretext to negotiate his way inside. Once they’d been welcomed in, Lorraine would often commune with the spirits, and the couple’s reputations as demonologists and ghost hunters began to grow.
In 1952, the Warrens created the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR), which still exists today. (The New England Skeptical Society, formed in 1996, would become one of the Warrens’ staunchest critics.) The emphasis on research helped the Warrens gain credibility in an era when interest in all things occult was growing rapidly. As their son-in-law Tony Spera writes on his website, “If you had nobody that would listen or help, you turned to the Warrens.”
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Warner Bros.
Among the reported 10,000 alleged paranormal cases the Warrens investigated over their many decades of activity were a handful that made them famous — in no small part because they made sure to capitalize on their involvement afterward through book deals and publicity.
For instance, although the Warrens were among many paranormal enthusiasts who took part in investigating the Amityville incident, they were among the most celebrated, and their participation regularly features in the prevailing pop culture narrative around it. In case you need a refresher: In 1974, the famously creepy farmhouse in Amityville, Long Island, saw a brutal family annihilation when a young man living there, Ronnie DeFeo, murdered his parents and four siblings. Despite popular myth, DeFeo never claimed to be possessed though he did unsuccessfully plead insanity at his trial. Two years later, the Lutz family bought the (dramatically discounted) house, lived in it for a grand total of 28 days, and then abruptly left, claiming the place was the site of a malevolent haunting. One night during the frenzied aftermath of their exit, the Warrens visited the site and took a series of time-lapse photos of the scene, including one famous, very obviously fake photo of, supposedly, a ghost of one of the murdered DeFeo children. (The man seen in the photo is generally believed to be Paul Bartz, an assistant of the Warrens; for a thorough debunking, see this detailed YouTube video by a skeptic.)
The twist: The Lutzes made it all up to get rich. The alleged Amityville haunting has been repeatedly debunked and widely accepted as a hoax by just about everyone who attended the incident except the Lutzes and the Warrens, who insisted over the years that Amityville was the most haunted location they’d ever visited. They profited considerably from their devotion to the narrative; they served as story consultants on 1982’s The Amityville Horror 2 (a prequel about the DeFeo murders) and of course on The Conjuring 2, which references their Amityville exploration. Most significantly, the notoriety of Amityville helped boost their visibility and made them the go-to experts for all things paranormal.
Several other purported hauntings and exorcisms became indelibly associated with the Warrens. The 1991 made-for-TV film The Haunted, in which they feature as characters, adapts their version of the alleged paranormal case of the Smurl family. Their bestselling 1992 book In a Dark Place, co-written with author Ray Garton, describes their investigation into the alleged event that became the basis for the 2009 horror film The Haunting in Connecticut. In that incident, the focal family, the Snedekers, claimed to be seeing the ghosts of people whose bodies had formerly passed through their home, which had once been a mortuary. Eventually this evolved into demonic possession. However, according to a highly cynical interview Garton reportedly did with Horror Bound magazine, which was later republished on the Paranormal Studies & Inquiry Canada website, the Warrens not only knew the whole thing was likely a hoax, but told Garton to invent whatever details he liked to sell the story:
As I gathered all the necessary information for the book, I found that the accounts of the individual Snedekers didn’t quite mesh. They just couldn’t keep their stories straight.
I went to Ed with this problem. “Oh, they’re crazy,” he said. “Everybody who comes to us is crazy. Otherwise why would they come to us? You’ve got some of the story – just use what works and make the rest up. And make it scary. You write scary books, right? That’s why we hired you. So just make it up and make it scary.”
Garton further insinuates in that interview that the Warrens switched their specialty from ghosts to demons purely because of the popularity of The Exorcist:
Back when I was reading about the Warrens, they were ghost hunters. Every house they investigated had at least one ghost, and there was always a spooky story behind it. But after The Exorcist was so wildly popular, first as a novel and then as a movie, Ed and Lorraine stopped encountering ghosts and began to uncover demon infestations. And it seems that wherever they went, people were being sexually molested by demons. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Then there’s the infamous “devil made me do it” trial, the subject of the new Netflix documentary and the basis for the third Conjuring movie (actually titled: The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It), in which the Warrens participated in the alleged 1980 exorcism of a young boy named David Glatzel. During the event, which took place during the early years of Satanic Panic, a participant named Arne Johnson, the boyfriend of Glatzel’s older sister, challenged the demon to enter him — after which he allegedly became possessed and subsequently shot and killed his landlord, Alan Bono. In the following murder trial, the defense tried to claim demonic possession. The court refused to allow the defense, however, and Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter. The Warrens walked away from it all with another bestselling book: 1983’s The Devil in Connecticut.
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Netflix
This is all head-turning, to be sure, but the Glatzel family has subsequently been deeply divided over the events. David, who was 11 at the time, maintains that he was really possessed, and his older sister married Johnson and stayed with him until her death in 2021. Meanwhile, his older brother, Carl Glatzel, has consistently claimed over the years that the family faked and exaggerated incidents while the Warrens incited and encouraged them in pursuit of fame and wealth. In 2007, he sued the Warrens, claiming the book was made of “complete lies” and that the Warrens “concocted a phony story about demons in an attempt to get rich and famous at our expense.” The suit, which was ultimately dismissed, claimed that the Warrens depicted his real-life skepticism as antagonism brought on by Carl’s own demonic possession, a characterization that has followed him around ever since. In the new Netflix documentary, he blames them for tearing his family apart.
And on it goes. Every major incident the Warrens have been involved with over the years has ultimately been thoroughly debunked, assuming supporting evidence was ever provided to begin with. In several cases, the Warrens claimed to have video or photographic evidence that never materialized. In one 1990 incident, Ed Warren described “film I took” of a female spirit supposedly haunting a cemetery. The film was never made public, and the spirit allegedly turned out to be the work of a woman named Judith Penney, who was reportedly wearing a white bedsheet over her head.
Judith Penney’s alleged relationship with Ed Warren underscores that the troubling difference between reality and fantasy was the real inescapable horror all along
The counter-argument to all of this essentially goes like this: The Warrens did profit from books and public appearances, yes, but they never charged for investigating cases, they gave some of the profits of their books to the families impacted by the cases, and they didn’t make that much money. They seemed to believe in what they were doing, even if they exaggerated a little. Plus, even the skeptics who investigated them commented on how nice they both were. Surely such nice people can’t be scammers, right?
Yet underlying all of this debate, and undermining all of the Warrens’ supporters, is a much darker cynicism surrounding who the Warrens were — particularly the difference between their public and private faces.
Judith Penney, who is sometimes described as Ed’s “assistant” or his “liaison,” has alleged that beginning in the early ’60s, Ed Warren, then in his 30s, began grooming her. In 1963, when she was 15, Penney claimed Warren moved her into the Warrens’ house in Bridgeport and commenced a full-blown sexual affair, with Lorraine’s full consent, that lasted until just a few years before Ed’s death in 2006.
Penney’s alleged relationship with Warren came to light in 2017 via the Hollywood Reporter, which was critical of both the Warrens and the Conjuring franchise for continuing to valorize the Warrens after the allegations of Ed Warren’s predatory behavior first came to light in 2014. Both Warner Bros. and the Warren family have painted Penney as a vulnerable elderly woman being manipulated by bad actors into fabricating claims as part of lawsuits filed by various greedy parties against the Conjuring franchise. (Lorraine never commented on the allegations and passed away in 2019.) However, there seems to be some proof: Penney was reportedly arrested for delinquency because she moved in with Warren (though it seems no investigation into Warren for sexual predation was initiated), and her presence in the house gets a nod in a 1980 book about the Warrens, The Demonologist.
The alleged grooming lies at the heart of the conflict between the Warrens on paper and the Warrens in pop culture: The billion-dollar Conjuring franchise relies on the public’s affection for the Warrens as characters, yet that affinity stems from a belief in their real-life purity and wholesome sincerity that gets harder to sustain as we learn more about them. For instance, Lorraine Warren’s presentation as a chaste, deeply devout Catholic often catalyzes the cinematic rousting of the demonic on screen; yet in reality, Penney alleged, Lorraine was not only fully complicit in Ed’s abuse of her, but coldly pressured her into getting an abortion. Further, Penney alleged, Ed was both physically and verbally abusive to Lorraine throughout the marriage. “If you know any part of the truth, portraying them as heroes is reprehensible,” wrote feminist author Jude Doyle in his succinct takedown of the pair in 2021.
In other words, the public’s love for the fictional Warrens fuels growing interest and awareness in the real Warrens — which then, ironically, makes interest and awareness in the fictional Warrens harder to sustain. Not that Warner Bros. isn’t trying. Though the Conjuring films have increasingly leaned away from relying too heavily on the Warrens as central figures — witness spinoffs from The Nun to Annabelle — they still typically rely on the Warrens as spiritual guideposts. As Bethy Squires recently wrote for Vulture, “All this weight on the suspension of disbelief makes The Conjuring–verse one of the most politically and metatextually rich franchises in film history. It has the vibe of religious propaganda but the craven commercialism of Warner Bros. Discovery. Absolutely fascinating.”
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Warner Bros.
The current Warren legacy, primarily carried forward by their son-in-law Spera, also goes a step beyond religiosity. On his website, in his summary of the Warrens’ appeal, he writes, “In a world that scoffs at ghosts and laughs at the unusual, the Warrens deliver a contrary message. That message is this: The fairy tale is true. The devil exists. God exists.”
The key phrase here isn’t about the devil or God, but rather the fairy tale. Even as Spera purports to usher fans into a world of supernatural terror, he knows that all of this is heightened, romanticized lore — not just folklore, but the story of the Warrens themselves as a couple of truth-seeking soulmates. The “fairy tale” here isn’t just that you can be purged of your mental illnesses with a mere sprinkling of holy water and some Latin, but that in a world full of doubters, you, too, might possibly find a higher calling and purpose alongside your spiritual other half.
This is all part of the lie the Warrens were so adept at selling. Whether you believe Penney’s version of the truth or not, and whether you believe in the Warrens’ sincerity or not, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the Warrens repeatedly fabricated claims of the paranormal where no evidence could ever be substantiated. (In case it needs stating, demons aren’t real.) Then they used those claims to gain fame and fortune.
And sure, perhaps they were doing it all as part of a glorified — and lucrative — religious fixation, spiritual roleplay with relatively harmless intentions. Yet as Judith Penney’s claims and the Devil on Trial documentary make clear, there are real people on the other side of those “harmless” intentions who are still troubled decades later by the chaos the Warrens fomented. Carl Glatzel, for instance, claims the Warrens made him the demon-possessed villain of their narrative of the Glatzel-Johnson incident simply because he tried to insist that the whole thing was a hoax — that is, “simply because I had a sane voice and knew the story was false since the beginning.”
Now, with pop culture happily passing along the myth of the Warrens, it gets harder and harder to speak the truth amid the lies.
Electric cars are crucial, but not enough to solve climate change. We can’t let them crowd out car-free transit options.
OSLO, Norway — With motor vehicles generating nearly a 10th of global CO2 emissions, governments and environmentalists around the world are scrambling to mitigate the damage. In wealthy countries, strategies often revolve around electrifying cars — and for good reason, many are looking to Norway for inspiration.
Over the last decade, Norway has emerged as the world’s undisputed leader in electric vehicle adoption. With generous government incentives available, 87 percent of the country’s new car sales are now fully electric, a share that dwarfs that of the European Union (13 percent) and the United States (7 percent). Norway’s muscular EV push has garnered headlines in outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian while drawing praise from the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Economic Forum, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “I’d like to thank the people of Norway again for their incredible support of electric vehicles,” he tweeted last December. “Norway rocks!!”
I’ve been writing about transportation for the better part of a decade, so all that fawning international attention piqued my curiosity. Does Norway offer a climate strategy that other countries could copy chapter and verse? Or has the hype outpaced the reality?
So I flew across the Atlantic to see what the fuss was about. I discovered a Norwegian EV bonanza that has indeed reduced emissions — but at the expense of compromising vital societal goals. Eye-popping EV subsidies have flowed largely to the affluent, contributing to the gap between rich and poor in a country proud of its egalitarian social policies.
Worse, the EV boom has hobbled Norwegian cities’ efforts to untether themselves from the automobile and enable residents to instead travel by transit or bicycle, decisions that do more to reduce emissions, enhance road safety, and enliven urban life than swapping a gas-powered car for an electric one.
Despite the hosannas from abroad, Norway’s government has begun to unwind some of its electrification subsidies in order to mitigate the downsides of no-holds-barred EV promotion.
“Countries should introduce EV subsidies in a way that doesn’t widen inequality or stimulate car use at the expense of other transport modes,” Bjørne Grimsrud, director of the transportation research center TØI, told me over coffee in Oslo. “But that’s what ended up happening here in Norway.”
And it could happen in other countries, too, including in the United States, where transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The federal government now offers tantalizing rebates to Americans in the market for an electric car, but nothing at all for more climate-friendly vehicles like e-bikes or golf carts (nor a financial lifeline for beleaguered public subway and bus systems).
Ending the sales of gas-powered cars, as Norway is close to doing, is an essential step toward addressing climate change. But a 2020 study found that even the most optimistic forecasts for global EV adoption would not prevent a potentially catastrophic 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Reducing driving — not just gas-powered driving — is crucial.
As the world’s EV trendsetter, Norway’s experience offers a bevy of lessons for other nations seeking to decarbonize transportation. But some of those lessons are cautionary.
How Norway fell in love with the electric car
At first glance, Norway’s EV embrace might seem odd. The country lacks a domestic auto industry and its dominant export is, of all things, fossil fuels. Nevertheless, Norway’s unique geography and identity helped put it at the vanguard of car electrification.
Historically, Norway has been mostly rural; as recently as 1960, half the nation’s population resided in the countryside. But as the postwar economy boomed, Norwegians migrated to cities, and especially to their fast-growing, sprawling suburbs (much as Americans did at the time). They also fell hard for the automobile.
“The car was this genius idea for Norwegians,” Ulrik Eriksen, author of the book A Country on Four Wheels, told me over dinner in Oslo, after stashing his cargo e-bike. “Because there is plenty of land, cars opened up urban space for people to live in, letting more of them get sizable single-family homes.”
Norway embarked on a road-building binge, constructing bridges over fjords and boring tunnels through mountains to connect downtowns with new neighborhoods on the urban fringe. As Norwegian cities expanded, public transit took a back seat. Bergen, for instance, shuttered its extensive tramway service in the 1960s, dumping some of the trams into the North Sea.
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Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Those decisions cast a long shadow: Norway still has one of Europe’s lowest rates of public transportation usage and a higher car ownership rate than Denmark and Sweden, its Scandinavian neighbors. “Most Norwegian cities now have more of a car-centric, American approach toward transportation than a multi-modal, European one,” Eriksen said.
Norway’s city residents often own an automobile even though they seldom use it, Oslo-based urban planner Anine Hartmann told me. “Norwegians identify as coming from the place where their parents or grandparents come from,” she said. “Many people have a car to return to that place or simply to visit a cabin in the country.”
By the 1990s, the automobile was Norway’s indispensable vehicle. It was then that Norwegian entrepreneurs launched two early electric car startups, Buddy and Think. Though their models were clunky and inefficient by today’s standards, the companies spurred excitement that Norway could become a global hub of EV production. Seeking to give the carmakers a tailwind, the Norwegian government exempted EVs from the country’s steep taxes on car purchases, which today add an average of $27,000 to each sale. Even better, EV owners — who at the time were few and far between — would not pay for tolls, parking, or ferries (over all those fjords) anywhere in the country.
Norway’s dreams of becoming a global hub of EV manufacturing quickly fizzled when the companies ran into financial problems. (This summer, I spotted a tiny, aged Buddy squeezed into an Oslo parking spot, dwarfed by SUVs on either side.) But the incentives remained on the books; since few people were buying EVs, their cost was negligible.
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David Zipper for Vox
That changed as the global EV market improved in the mid-2010s, with carmakers like Tesla offering stylish, high-performance models that attracted more buyers. Norway’s EV policies were now championed as a centerpiece of the national effort to slow climate change in an economy whose electricity is already clean, produced largely from hydropower. “We want people to buy electric cars,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in 2019. “It is the most important thing you can do personally and privately to help reduce climate emissions.”
As EV models improved, Norwegians began to realize how valuable the cost savings from government incentives could be, particularly for urban commuters. After an already discounted EV purchase, owners’ ongoing expenses were minimal because Norwegian electricity is inexpensive (due to abundant hydropower), and EVs were exempt from tolls, parking, and ferries. EV owners were even invited to drive in bus-only lanes.
Hundreds of thousands of Norwegians responded to the government’s invitation to buy an EV, seemingly saving money and the planet in one fell swoop. But not every EV purchase replaced a gas guzzler; Grimsrud noted that the Norwegians owned 10 percent more cars per capita at the end of the 2010s than they did at the decade’s outset, in large part due to the EV incentives. “The families who could afford a second or third car ran off to the shop and bought one,” he said.
Norway’s incentives have unquestionably reshaped the country’s car market and reduced carbon emissions. EVs’ share of new vehicle sales surged from 1 percent in 2014 to 83 percent today. Around one in four cars on Norwegian roads is now electric, and the country’s surface transportation emissions fell 8.3 percent between 2014 and 2023.
The national government seems ready to declare victory. “When it comes to electrical vehicles, I’m quite proud,” Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, Norway’s state secretary for transportation, told me at the Oslo headquarters of the Ministry of Transport. “My main lesson is that incentives work. We have succeeded at a large scale.”
But not everyone shares her enthusiasm. Although the EV rush has reduced tailpipe emissions, it has also entrenched car dependence, which inflicts other kinds of damage. “Climate change gave Norway an opportunity to change how we travel,” said Eriksen. “I worry we had this once-in-a-generation chance to fix our transportation network, and we blew it.”
EV subsidies fueled car sales, but Norway’s cities want fewer cars
As electric car sales picked up throughout the 2010s, Norway placed few constraints on its EV incentives. Wealthy Norwegians could buy as many high-end EVs as they liked, receiving a full package of subsidies on each one. Luxury carmakers like Porsche advertised Norway’s promotions in their marketing materials.
Although the EV policies were fueling a car-buying frenzy for affluent residents, they offered little to those of limited means. Many low-income Norwegians do not own a car: In Bergen, for instance, 67 percent of households in the lowest income quartile go without one. One recent study found the likelihood that a Norwegian household would purchase an EV rose 26 percent with each 100,000 Norwegian Krones (around $11,000) in annual income, suggesting that electrification subsidies — which ballooned to $4 billion in 2022, equivalent to 2 percent of the national budget — have redistributed resources toward the rich.
Meanwhile, EV incentives have undermined the shift away from automobiles that Norwegian city officials, like their counterparts throughout Europe, are increasingly encouraging. “Everyone agrees that 100 percent of cars should be electric. That’s not the question,” Tiina Ruohonen, a climate advisor to the mayor of Oslo, told me. “The real question is whether you really need to own a car in Oslo.”
Over the last decade, Oslo has joined Bergen, Trondheim, and Stavanger (Norway’s four largest cities) in committing to meet all future trip growth through transit, biking, and walking — not cars. Seeking to reduce driving, Oslo has removed over 4,000 parking spots since 2016 while also building bike lanes, widening sidewalks, and adjusting traffic patterns to reduce through traffic. Those efforts helped the city achieve a remarkable milestone in 2019: For a full year, not a single pedestrian or cyclist was killed in a crash.
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David Zipper for Vox
Walking and biking through Oslo helped me understand how it became so safe. The few motor vehicles I encountered within the city center moved carefully through streets thronged with pedestrians (some blocks are entirely car-free). Traffic typically moved at the speed of my e-bike; my one moment of anxiety came when a passing streetcar startled me as I gazed at Oslo’s picturesque harbor.
Many local leaders recognize that reducing car dependence will enhance urban life. “I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s former vice mayor of urban development, told Fast Company in 2019.
But there are inherent conflicts between cities’ efforts to limit driving and the Norwegian government’s promotion of EVs. Oslo’s elimination of street parking and creation of pedestrian-only streets, for instance, nudge Norwegians away from driving, but they also diminish EVs’ usefulness.
“The way to get people to buy EVs is to make them easy and cheap to use,” said Eriksen. “But cities don’t want driving cars to be easy and cheap.” A recent study of EV subsidies in Bergen underscores those tensions, finding that promoting EV adoption hampers cities’ ability to build dense neighborhoods that shorten trips and strengthen transit.
The effect of EV adoption on public transportation has been a particular concern for Norway’s cities because boosting transit ridership has been a linchpin of local mobility strategies. Bergen, for instance, opened its first light rail line in 2010, and Trondheim overhauled its bus fleet in 2019. But because generous EV incentives make driving cheaper, they make public transportation relatively less cost-competitive.
Worse, EV promotions have shrunk the funding available to invest in transit improvements because Norwegian public transportation budgets are partly funded through the road tolls that the national government exempted EV owners from paying. As more Norwegians purchased EVs, transit revenue fell, threatening major investments like a new metro line in Oslo. “One of my primary concerns is that because we are subsidizing EVs through the cheaper toll roads, we don’t have the money to pay for big transit infrastructure projects,” said Eivind Trædal, an Oslo city councilmember who until a few weeks ago led the city’s council’s environment and transportation committee.
National officials, for their part, have stuck to pro-EV messaging and refrained from discouraging driving. Despite its generous incentives for electric cars, the Norwegian government provides no discounts for those buying e-bikes or e-cargo bikes (Oslo and Bergen offer limited programs for residents). The country’s current 12-year National Transport Plan includes initiatives to catalyze the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles, but none to reduce car trips.
Trædal said that politics led the Norwegian government to downplay reducing transportation emissions through transit, biking, and walking — all of which produce significantly fewer emissions than driving an EV. “Nobody’s mad about getting a cheaper new car, right?” he shrugged. “It’s politically easier to just give them car subsidies.”
When I asked Kroglund, the country’s transportation state secretary, if Norway’s government seeks to reduce total kilometers driven, she said it does not. “We don’t have a specific goal [to reduce driving],” she told me. “Of course, we would like to get more people on public transportation and bikes. But that is more something that cities work on.”
But national policy decisions inevitably affect local transportation efforts — and sometimes undermine them. Last October, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration opened E39, a four-lane highway into Bergen that the city had opposed due to concerns that it would increase driving. Those fears proved justified. Lars Ove Kvalbein, a Bergen city adviser on sustainable mobility, told me that before E39 opened, 30 percent of those traveling into the city from the south had used a car, but after the highway opened that share jumped to 40 percent.
“E39 was part of a national plan that smashed all the positive local plans to pieces,” he said.
Other countries can avoid repeating Norway’s mistakes
In the last few years, Norway has begun to confront the tensions within its push for car electrification. In 2017, the country began requiring EV owners to pay for parking, road tolls, and ferries, although they still receive a discount. As of this past January, only the first $45,000 of a new EV’s purchase price is tax-free. Buyers of the largest (and often priciest) EVs must also pay an additional fee that scales with vehicle weight.
“The argument is to make the tax system more fair,” said transportation state secretary Kroglund, “and not give benefits for things that are unnecessary for the transition to EVs.” As a result of the new policies, Norwegian sales of some high-end EVs, like the enormous Chinese Hongqi SUV, have collapsed.
Looking to the future, TØI’s Grimsrud hopes that Norway’s next 12-year National Transport Plan beginning in 2025 will include a goal of limiting total driving, which could restrain highway expansion plans and direct more investment toward transit. “If you start with a national goal for reducing transportation emissions, it will force you to focus more on public transportation and less on road construction,” he said.
For other countries, a clear Norwegian lesson is that a focus on reducing transportation emissions through electric car adoption can worsen inequality. Capping the price of eligible vehicles and limiting the number of EVs that a household can purchase tax-free are intuitive moves that Norway took only belatedly.
At the same time, Norway offers a warning about the dangers of promoting EVs at the expense of modes that are more beneficial to the environment as well as urban life. The national government’s decision to subsidize electric cars but not e-bikes makes no sense from a climate perspective, although the United States Congress made the same mistake when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act last year. At a minimum, countries should ensure that EV adoption does not deplete resources needed for public transportation investments, as has happened in Norway and could occur in the US, since EVs reduce gasoline tax revenues, a portion of which funds American transit.
With frequent bus and rail service, walkable city centers, and expanding networks of bike lanes (including, in Bergen, the longest purpose-built bike tunnel in the world), Norwegian cities are far ahead of American peers in providing viable alternatives to driving. Nevertheless, over the last decade, US cities have taken significant steps forward: Bike share programs are now a fixture, and new bus rapid transit lines have emerged in places like Madison, Richmond, and Washington, DC. New York City and San Francisco have even experimented with making major thoroughfares car-free. But if local initiatives aren’t matched with supportive federal policies, Norway’s experience suggests that an influx of electric vehicles can hinder efforts to escape the automobile’s urban stranglehold.
“The mistake is to think that EVs solve all your problems when it comes to transport,” said Ruohonen, the Oslo mayoral adviser. “They don’t.”
The reporting of this story was supported by the Heinrich Boll Foundation through a Transatlantic Media Fellowship. Lucas Peilert provided research assistance.
There’s a surge in reports of assaults, vandalism, harassment, and intimidation.
Deadly violence in the Middle East is spurring attacks and heightening fear in Muslim, Jewish, and Arab (especially Palestinian) communities across the United States.
In Illinois, about a week after Hamas militants attacked Israel, a landlord stabbed his tenants, 6-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume and his mother Hanaan Shahin, more than two dozen times for being Muslim, according to the police. Only the mother survived and told a relative that the landlord yelled “you Muslims must die!” as he choked her.
Police opened a hate crime investigation this week after a man in Los Angeles was yelling “free Palestine,” “kill Jews,” “brown people matter,” and “Israel kill people,” and kicked in the back door of a Jewish family’s home and entered.
Israel’s airstrikes in the past three weeks have killed more than 8,000 Palestinians, most of them women and minors, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Hamas’s attack killed more than 1,400 Israelis, and the group is still holding about 200 people hostage, according to the Israeli government. As the war continues, law enforcement officials expect hate crimes reports to only increase: The FBI warned last week that “the volume and frequency of threats to Americans, especially those in the Jewish, Arab American, and Muslim communities in the United States, have increased, raising our concern that violent extremists and lone offenders motivated by or reacting to ongoing events could target these communities.”
At the Pennsylvania state Capitol, a man pulled up to a pro-Palestine protest, yelled out anti-Muslim and racist slurs, and pointed a gun at rallygoers from his car. In California, synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses have been vandalized since the start of the war. Flyers with anti-Jewish rhetoric — including “Jews wage war on American freedoms!” — were placed on vehicles across Orange County.
A man in Illinois was charged with a hate crime after threatening to shoot two Muslim men and yelling slurs at them. A Muslim all-girls school was on “soft-lockdown” after receiving a “threatening hate letter” that applauded the killing of al-Fayoume and included “racist, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim language, and discussed killing Muslims and Palestinians.”
Owners at a New York City Palestinian restaurant, who publicly called for an end to what they deemed Israel’s “apartheid,” disconnected the restaurant’s phone over threatening voicemails. The restaurant has received nonstop one-star reviews since the start of the conflict; a man entered the dining room in the past week, shouting “terrorist” at the workers. College campuses have become breeding grounds for a host of antisemitic and anti-Muslim acts, leaving students fearful that they are unprotected from intimidation and possible violence.
The FBI’s national hate crimes data is reported on a yearly basis, and the agency has not released specific numbers about the increases they’ve seen in threats and hate crimes against Palestinians, Jews, or Muslims have risen in the past few weeks. Even so, the FBI’s latest hate crimes report, released on October 16, showed that hate crimes were already on the rise in the past year.
Hate crimes increased by 7 percent in 2022 compared to 2021. Anti-Jewish attacks, the second highest hate crimes category after anti-Black, rose to 1,124 incidents. There were 158 reported anti-Muslim incidents and 92 reported anti-Arab incidents.
The numbers are an undercount. Many police departments opt out of submitting hate crime data to the FBI, and it remains difficult for officers to prove that a reported crime was motivated by bias. Fear and distrust of law enforcement among victims of certain populations, such as Muslim communities, leads to underreporting. Nevertheless, the number of incidents represents the highest number recorded since the FBI began collecting this information in 1991.
One expert told Vox that the current uptick in today’s anecdotal reports can be explained by “scapegoat theory,” the idea that certain marginalized groups should be blamed for various societal conditions or events.
“I won’t be surprised if there’s a spike in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents during this period,” said Frank S. Pezzella, an associate professor of criminal justice at John Jay College and author of the book Hate Crimes Statutes: A Public Policy and Law Enforcement Dilemma. “When these kinds of world events take place, whether here or abroad, people feel strongly about them. And when people have strong beliefs, they act out. They look at people in their neighborhoods and blame them for what is happening in the Middle East, or they blame all Asian people for what started in Wuhan, China.”
There might be an uptick in hate crimes right now, which one expert said could lead to a longer-running increase. “These kinds of spikes in hate crimes are unlike 20 years ago because they are elongating,” said Brian Levin, the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “We aren’t only seeing a higher number occur but that increase is resilient and plateaus for longer. Or, after a period when hate crimes have gone down, we sometimes see them reignite like a wildfire.”
Antisemitism was already on the rise
In a midtown Manhattan subway station after the onset of the war, a man punched a woman in the face and told her it was because “you are Jewish.” Several Jewish synagogues in Utah are “on high alert” after receiving threats in the past two weeks. A rabbi in Salt Lake City interrupted his synagogue’s service to evacuate the congregation after receiving a bomb threat by email. Swastikas and pentagrams have popped up at Jewish businesses and on public property, forcing some to remove their mezuzahs, a piece of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah that some Jewish people put on the doorframe of their homes. Jewish schools have increased security out of fear.
On October 24, the Anti-Defamation League, the main source for tracking antisemitic incidents (assault, vandalism, and harassment), released a statement that said there were 312 antisemitic incidents between October 7 and 23, 190 of which were directly linked to the war in Israel and Gaza. For comparison, the organization received reports of 64 incidents during the same period last year.
An ADL spokesperson told Vox that the count includes 49 incidents of vandalism, 10 instances of assault, and 253 incidents of harassment, which includes 108 anti-Israel rallies in which the organization found “explicit or strong support for Hamas and/or violence against Jews in Israel.”
Antisemitism was already on the rise before October 7. The FBI’s latest data confirmed the antisemitism trends that the ADL has recorded in recent years, Jonathan Greenblatt, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement.
By the ADL’s count, which includes criminal and noncriminal acts of violence against Jews, there were a total of 3,697 antisemitic incidents in 2022, the highest number recorded since the ADL’s data tracking began in 1979. Assaults, considered the most serious offenses, increased by 26 percent that year. While Jews make up just 2 percent of the US population, antisemitic hate crime incidents accounted for 9.6 percent of all hate crimes recorded by the FBI.
In the past few years, experts have disagreed about why hate crimes against Jews have surged, a debate that hinges in part on how such crimes are defined and categorized — in the past, the ADL has been criticized for characterizing some anti-Israel statements as antisemitic. The ADL’s data for 2022 found that antisemitic harassment made up the bulk of the reported incidents, with 2,298 incidents, followed by vandalism, with 1,288 incidents. Antisemitic assaults made up 111 of the reported hate crimes and 107 of them were perpetrated without the use of a deadly weapon. There was one fatality, according to the data.
Other acts that have drawn attention and controversy — notably people tearing down fliers of Israeli hostages — are not classified as hate crimes or antisemitic incidents by either the ADL or the FBI. An ADL spokesperson told Vox that the organization did not include the tearing down of Israeli hostage posters as acts of violence or antisemitism in its latest count since it is “still determining whether that meets our criteria.”
When asked whether the FBI was investigating the tearing down of posters as a hate crime the spokesperson told Vox, “Not all acts of hate are hate crimes. For us, there needs to be a threat of violence or violence associated with the act for it to reach the federal level.”
“Pulling down a flier, that’s just not a hate crime. But it is emotional. If I were leading a police department, I’d want to get people to not do that, because invariably, there will be fights that happen as a result,” Pezzella said. “If someone snatches a flier, and then someone hits them for doing so, [the altercation] borders on the line of bias motivation.”
There is some evidence that antisemitism increases with flare-ups in the Middle East, and that this has been the case for some time. “We have seen anti-Jewish hate crimes go up to decade and or multi-year highs fairly consistently when there’s violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians,” Levin said. Using FBI data, Levin found that in March 1994, there was a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes from 79 incidents to 147 a month after an American Israeli extremist opened fire on Palestinian Muslims praying in a mosque, killing 29 of them.
In October 2000, anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US increased from 81 to 204 after a series of mass protests by Palestinians in Israel. There were surges in antisemitic incidents in May 2021 in cities with large Jewish populations such as New York and Los Angeles after fighting broke out between Israel and Hamas over Israel’s threats to evict Palestinian families from East Jerusalem.
The FBI announced that “foreign adversaries” are trying to “take advantage of the conflict.” For example, on October 19, an ISIS media posting urged followers to “target the Jewish presence all over the world…especially Jewish neighborhoods in America and Europe,” and specifically encouraged attacks on Jewish temples, nightclubs, and economic interests and against “Jewish and Crusader” embassies, according to the FBI.
Anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism reports hark back to the post-9/11 period
The Boston police department has opened an investigation after someone reportedly sprayed the word “Nazis” on a sign for the Islamic Seminary of Boston and the Palestinian Cultural Center for Peace in Allston, Massachusetts.
The Cleveland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling for state and federal law enforcement to open a hate crimes investigation into an alleged vehicular assault on a Palestinian American man. According to the victim, the driver of the car yelled, “Kill all Palestinians” and “Long live Israel!” The car swerved at him and the driver shouted, “Die!” when he hit him and took off.
Dearborn, Michigan, one of the country’s largest Arab communities, has experienced several threats of violence. Police arrested a man in connection with a social media post in which he was seeking companions to “go to Dearborn & hunt Palestinians.”
The violence abroad has created violence and fear in the US for Palestinians and Muslims, and for Arabs in general, as well as people incorrectly perceived to be a member of those groups, including Sikhs. Sikh men, who grow long beards and wear turbans as part of their religion, Sikhism, sometimes get mistaken as Muslim and have faced anti-Muslim violence as a result.
Hate crimes against these communities remain underreported. The University of California Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, which tracks anti-Muslim discrimination worldwide, released a US study in 2021 that found that 55 percent of those who faced Islamophobia said they did not report it to authorities.
CAIR has said it has received 774 complaints and reported bias incidents against Muslims between October 7 and October 24. CAIR says the number is the highest recorded since 2015, when Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Abed Ayoub, the national executive director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), told the Associated Press that the organization has received more than 100 reports that include threats, verbal harassment, intimidation, and physical attacks since October 7. In one case the organization has highlighted, a Palestinian American family received death threats at their home and business, with callers stating “we’ll kill all you Palestinians” and “we’ll kill your family.” Following the threats, the family believes someone fired a bullet through their living room window.
“It’s very reminiscent of the early days of post-9/11, where people didn’t want to go outside, they didn’t want to send their kids to school,” Ayoub said. “They’re just worried about being in public and being approached.”
After the al-Qaeda terrorist organization attacked the Twin Towers and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Muslims and Arab Americans faced an unprecedented amount of hate and violence in the US. They received death threats and were harassed as mosques were burned down. Those perceived as Muslim were beaten and held at gunpoint. The number of assaults against Muslims rose significantly between 2015 and 2016, amid President Trump’s rise, and surpassed the 2001 peak. Anti-Muslim intimidation, or reasonable fear of bodily harm, made up the bulk of the incidents followed by assault, and then property damage and vandalism.
Post-9/11 surveillance has left Muslims distrustful and fearful of law enforcement and counterterrorism efforts that have targeted them. A few days after Hamas’s attack on Israel and as Israel began striking Gaza, the ADC said that it fielded reports that federal law enforcement had visited mosques and questioned and detained Palestinians in the US. In one report, the FBI allegedly visited a Texas mosque to ask about “troublemakers” in the community. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to the Intercept’s questions about the visits.
“We’re seeing a lot of Palestinian students threatened with violence and anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic messages,” said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, an organization that represents individuals who face consequences for speaking publicly about Palestinian rights. According to Sainath, the organization has received “a tsunami of requests for help.” They’ve received over 250, more than the number of requests they received in all of 2022.
Stereotypes seem to be fueling the incidents. “The stereotyping we are seeing right now are the classic anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab tropes,” Sainath said. “That Palestinians are all terrorists. That they want to kill babies and that they’re rapists. That they’re not people who have feelings and deserve empathy, human rights, and to live in equality. People are spreading the idea that [Arabs and Palestinians] are scary in some ways.”
Is it possible to break the cycle of hate?
In response to the reported increase in violence, the protests that have erupted nationwide, and heightened fear, the FBI and other law enforcement bodies have launched plans to increase surveillance across a variety of communities.
“In recent years, there have been several events and incidents in the United States that were purportedly motivated, at least in part, by the conflict between Israel and HAMAS. These have included the targeting of individuals, houses of worship, and institutions associated with the Jewish and Muslim faiths with acts of physical assault, vandalism, or harassment,” the FBI said in a statement. The FBI did not release numbers about the threats, but said many were made online and that many turned out not to be credible.
President Joe Biden acknowledged the concerns on X, formerly known as Twitter. “VP and I spoke with our national security teams to discuss ongoing steps to protect the homeland, including Jewish, Arab, and Muslim communities, following the attacks in Israel,” he wrote. In a recent Oval Office address, he stated that Americans could “not stand by and stand silent” in the face of such hate. Biden met with Muslim American leaders about how to combat anti-Muslim sentiment at the White House on Thursday in a meeting that was not on his public calendar. Muslim and Arab American leaders have criticized the president, saying that he seems indifferent to Palestinian civilians, as he pledges support for Israel. Biden spoke to Jewish leaders about antisemitism on October 11.
The rhetoric of the US leadership can have a major impact, according to Levin. “Civics matters now. When [President] Bush spoke about tolerance for Muslims six days after 9/11, we saw that hate crimes dropped precipitously the next day,” he said.
National and local organizations are calling for greater governmental and community support, as the upcoming 2024 presidential election is expected to keep surges in hate crimes elevated.
“With antisemitic incidents up across the board in nearly every category we track, a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach is needed to address these disturbing trends,” said Greenblatt. In May, Biden launched the country’s first national strategy to combat the rise in antisemitism. In September, the administration announced that it would use the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit antisemitism and Islamophobia in federally funded programs and activities.
“What we have to do now is make sure that structures for coordination within faith communities are maintained,” Levin said. People must also be aware of where to report hate crimes, Levin said, citing that some states, including California (833-8-NO-HATE) and New York (1-888-392-3644 or text “HATE” to 81336), have hate crimes hotlines. “Police departments all across the country must make sure they have plans for houses of worship, community centers, and protests.”