Share

At the turn of the millennium the well-known sociologist Robert Putnam published a national best-selling book curiously entitled Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Few outside of academia, however, could have foreseen that a quarter century later it would emerge as the signature diagnosis of American political dysfunction.

Bowling Alone documented in 2000 a phenomenon that at the time seemed troubling, but not in any way calamitous. Americans, it showed, were joining fewer civic organizations and attending even fewer community events.

The key indicator? Compared with the previous generation, the number of Americans bowling by themselves rather than in leagues had been declining at a precipitous rate.

Subscribe now

Putnam’s fundamental thesis was far more momentous than its title alluded. He had chronicled the collapse of what had come to be characterized by his fellow social theorists as “social capital”— the intricate networks of mutual obligation, trust, and civic engagement that historically knitted American communities together.

Furthermore, Putnam had amassed data showing that the collapse was accelerating.

What Putnam did not completely anticipate was the way in which the atrophy of civic infrastructure would profoundly reconfigure contemporary American politics.

He was not sufficiently clairvoyant to envision a future present in which a working class had become increasingly untethered from the web of associations that at one time gave it a cultural voice alongside political power, while at the same time an educated professional class would have largely succeeded in controlling most civic institutions, which in turn had less representative of actual American interests or needs.

Today in 2026 the meteoric rise of what is fulsomely known as “democratic socialism” within American politics, particularly among highly educated young Americans and in urban professional enclaves, appears to convey a convergent social, political, and economic crisis.

Since 2025 democratic socialist candidates have increasingly used Democratic primaries to dislodge establishment officeholders while expanding their representation in New York’s state legislature.

They include not only Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City but also a slew of recent interlopers who won Congressional primaries such as Melat Kiros (Colorado), Darializa Avila Chevalier (New York), Claire Valdez (New York), and Brad Lander (New York).

Yet the crisis to which the democratic socialists and the progressive punditry routinely pretend to address — what Karl Marx in the 1840s referred to the “immiseration” of the “working class” — is in the final analysis a specious one.

In truth, it reveals itself to be a serious crisis of what the celebrated management theorist Peter Drucker in the 1960s dubbed the “knowledge class” — the professional and managerial elite whose economic and political positionality is now simultaneously menaced by the technological disruption of AI along with a broader backlash against progressive institutional capture of cultural identity, or what is commonly known as “wokeness”.

The irony is striking.

The trendy political movement that self-identifies as “democratic socialist” contends it is championing the cause of the laboring class, while in reality it functions as a muscular apparatus by which the educated elite is able to consolidate control over education, culture, and even economic opportunity itself.

As Thomas Edsall notes succinctly in The New York Times, “most of the leadership of the DSA. and a majority of voters who back its candidates are in no way working class”.

The key representatives of the movement all along have cornered the very social advantages that have fostered wealth inequality over the past half century.

Putnam’s Bowling Alone testified to the fact that involvement in civic organizations — for example, labor unions, fraternal orders, veterans’ groups, churches, community associations — had crumbled dramatically since the 1950s. Between 1975 and 2000 alone American civic participation plummeted almost 50 percent.

As civic institutions eroded, members of the working class were deprived of the traditional systems of sodality through which they had historically organized and advocated for their political interests. Labor unions declined from 35 percent of the American workforce in the 1950s to less than 10 percent by 2000.

Fraternal bodies, local political auxiliaries, and community support systems that had served as vehicles for working class empowerment and mutual assistance summarily vanished.

Second, and equally important, the educated professional class, which had begun to cement its institutional hegemony within universities, nonprofits, government agencies, media organizations, and think tanks, were inexorably insulated from the dangers of civic disintegration.

The knowledge class, or what social critics Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 labeled the “professional managerial class” (PMC), still retained their own accoutrement for societal and reputational authority through which they could wield ubiquitous “soft power”. What they lacked was accountability to anyone outside their sphere of influence.

While working class Americans perceived the diminution of civic endowment as abandonment and disempowerment, the educated professionals experienced it as liberation. They were no longer constrained by the necessity of preserving their legitimacy through wider institutional validation.

They could pursue their own interests without any effective democratic guardrails. This process, which I have analyzed in my 2019 book Neoliberalism and Political Theology as the ideological consolidation of what Foucault called “biopower” through credentialed professional intermediaries, represents the transformation of democratic institutions into mechanisms of what sociologists would call “elite reproduction”.

Now fast forward to 2026.

According to a CNN/SSRS poll released at the end of July, 34 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults now identify as “democratic socialists.”

This statistic overlays what other pollsters have detected as a generational shift in the identity and aspirations of younger educated Americans. The rise of headling-hugging political figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cory Bush, and others explicitly affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) suggests that socialism is, as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan puts it, “not a passing thing but an arriving thing.”

But what is really up for grabs in the presemt democratic socialist moment?

A careful reading of the actual policy preferences and stated goals of DSA-affiliated and DSA-adjunct politicians and activists reveals a sizable self-contradiction within the movement itself.

The principal demands of the DSA center not on redistributing wealth to working class constituencies, but on lengthening the already extended reach of the professional managerial class in overseeing the economy in a manner that overwhelmingly aggrandizes them.

They seek:

· Universal healthcare administered by government bureaucracies — in other words, staffed by the PMC.

· Universal higher education, expanded and professionalized.

· Burgeoning social services requiring social workers with advanced degrees.

· Heightened climate action administered by technical experts..

· Gender and racial justice initiatives commandeered by DEI professionals.

In virtually every instance the major beneficiary of such policies is not the working class but – you guessed it –knowledge workers with a paper trail of advanced educational certifications.

This is not to say that democratic socialists are nothing more than polished charlatans . Rather, their growing clout underscores an argument that the German political economist Wolfgang Streeck has repeatedly made, namely, that the “cosmopolitan identitarianism of the leaders of the neoliberal age” has merely vacuumed up the rhetoric of working class advocacy while hyporcritically advancing elite interests.

As I myself have argued in my book, the genius of “progressive neoliberalism” — a term coined by political scientist Nancy Fraser to describe the world view of the Democratic Party since 2000 — was to the language of liberation, equality, and justice into subterfuges for legitimizing dominance by the professional in-crowd over social institutions.

Progressive democratic socialism represents the latest and most devious, not to mention duplicitous, iteration of this transformation. With all its semantic shape-shifting and cleverly crafted double entendres the parlance of working class championing morphs into an effective tool for enshrining knowledge class gatekeeping.

What has happened to post-secondary learning during the last quarter century is a choice illustration .

Higher education, which democratic socialists claim to want to make “free” and “universal,” has proven to be the premier mechanism through which wealth inequality has gained momentum over the past fifty years.

As both college grades and minimal metrics for credentialing have been inflated (example: employers offering positions that called for only a high school diploma now instist on a bachelor’s degree), the cost and time burden for the average job-seeker has escalated correspondingly.

The upshot is that only the wealthy can afford the unpaid internships, post-graduate training, geographic mobility, and the kind of credential stacking that the present day professional careerist relies upon.

A first generation college student from a working class family must either take on extraordinary debt, or forgo advanced study entirely. The parents of a wealthy student, in contrast, absorb the costs and supply the social capital that transmutes credentials into real-world opportunity.

The immediate response of the credentialing mafia to this structural inequity has been remarkably consistent. They demand more schooling, more documentation of performance, more licensing.

Each extra charge given to the certification syndicates means that those already embedded in the system as a whole —university faculty, administrators, accrediting organizations—raises barriers for working class entry.

Democratic socialists propose to make the current predicament worse, not better. By making higher education “free,” they would likely do what has occurred in every other sector where credentialing has burgeoned.

They make it obligatory!

If college is free, employers can demand a degree as their baseline requirement. Someone from the working class who cannot, or will not, travail four countless years in the credentialing hamster wheel becomes permanently unemployable in the professional economy.

The workers who balk at a “free” college education will find themselves competing against millions of equally commissioned peers, forcing wages down while dilating further the time and expense that must be set aside for formal learning.

Educational economist Bryan Caplan has extensively analyzed the “signaling” function of educational credentials. The degree communicates a willingness on the part of the credentialed to comply with authority and ability to delay gratification more than it evidences actual knowledge or skill.

When everyone has a degree, the degree itself no longer is an index of actual competence or skill advantage.

The push toward ever more superfluous credentialing has been the clear and consistent trajectory of higher ed over the last sixty years, and it is not incidental that the attained educational levels of self-designated “democratic socialists” is disproportionately higher than for most other political organizations, as DSA’s own membership survey stresses.

Furthermore, a recent Pew study found that the number of Democrats favoring leaders who identify as “democratic socialists” rises with income. According to Pew, 40 percent of upper income Democrats report liking such leaders, compared with 34 percent of middle-income and 24 percent of lower income Democrats.

Economist John Steele Gordon, writing in the Wall Street Journal, makes the case that America’s historical wealth creation has derived for the most part from innovation and expanding productive capacity, not on aggregating existing assets or embargoing opportunities for entrepreneuship.

Yet our contemporary educational system frequently pushes talent in the latter direction.

Throughout the 1950s one could often become an engineer, accountant, teacher, nurse, or manager with just a high school diploma and a dollop of on-the-job training. Criteria for entry were low. Skilled workers could access professional wages and status. Today, however, each one of these professions demands a diploma and increasingly post-graduate study.

Minimum career qualifications have gone up not because actual employment standards have soared, but because of credential inflation.

According to a report by the Harvard Business School, degree inflation is caused by an oversupply of college-educated job seekers, which paradoxically constricts opportunity for young graduates once they attempt to join the workforce.

“Degree inflation”, the report notes, “denies…young adults access to the critical first job and erodes the likelihood that they will gain the experience needed to enter and stay in the workforce”.

In other words, the very promises of a “free” college education, which the DSA has dangled as a delectable sugar plumb in the sight of youthful voters from the knowledge class to rally their support, happens to be the very poison pill that could foreclose their own economic future.

The “working class interests”, therefore, that “democratic socialists” and legions of political progressives purport to be fighting for are a manifest sham.

Their true aim is to protect the educational gatekeeping system that has been effectively in place for a long time and has propped up the interests of the professional class, which are now in light of the latest “great transformation” (in the words of famed Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi) of the global economy in unmistakable jeopardy.

As I explored in a recent essay on higher education and artificial intelligence, the three pillars sustaining historic educational gatekeeping — information scarcity, assessment monopolies, and credentialing cartels — are being simultaneously demolished before our eyes by AI technology.

Given the internet, students no longer depend on structured curricular content to access information. AI tutoring provides personalized instruction at a fraction of the cost. Work competencies can be attested through portfolios rather than through institutional certification.

The current financial, not to mention the credibility, crisis of higher education is ultimately a crisis of the business model that historically has buttressed the growth of the knowledge economy. Its impending downfall could inevitably leads to the demise, if not the crash, of the knowledge economy itself.

Unfortunately, that is not bare conjecture.

And, thus, the present moment happens also to be one in which the quickening revolution in artificial intelligence becomes most germane to any attempted anatomy of the current crisis.

For the first time technology threatens to make credentialing economically obsolete.

When an AI system can perform legal research as well as a lawyer, audit accounts with the same aptitude as many an accountant, diagnose diseases with the comparable expertise of a radiologist, and teach concepts with the equivalent sophistication of a professor with a PhD, the credentialing industry as a whole is called into compelling question.

AI liquidates the three pillars upon which the gatekeeping function of higher education has rested — information scarcity and the proprietary role of assessing cognitive and intellectual proficiencies.

These developments create an unprecedented opportunity for working class economic advancement. If the precious piece of parchment become economically irrelevant, or at least less consequential, then roadblocks to professional development for those without college degrees disappear.

Yet this state affairs serves to explain as well why the knowledge class is panicking. The ascendancy of democratic socialism is not au fond about working class empowerment but as a point of fact a case of the educated elites scrambling to harness state power in order to preserve their privileges in the face of technological disruption.

The proliferating calls for regulating AI, ensuring its “ethical” deployment, requiring credentialed oversight of its applications, and passing stringent laws to mitigate its environmental impact can in certain contexts be easily decoded as well-meaning, albeit self-interested. strategems to deflect the technological juggernaut that is remaking the knowledge economy overnight.

The working class itself would ironically gain tremendously from allowing AI to discombobulate the system of credentialing.

Real working class emancipation in the age of AI would not necessarily result from making access to higher education more affordable for everybody. It would accrue from peer-based assessment of capability rather than institutional certification.

Moreover, it would accrue from the creation of community-based learning centers not managed by professional gatekeepers.

Most radically, it would lean on repairing and reconstituting the civic infrastructure that Putnam lamented as having eroded in post-industrial society, all the while reclaiming the associational networks and social capital that once proved to be the political and economic mainstay of the working class in general.

Some municipalities are beginning to grasp the urgency of such a makeover. In certain regions alternative models are beginning to emerge — for instance, community colleges that focus on the curation of actual competencies, local maker spaces, and “skill guilds” where talent is taught and recognized by day-to-day practitioners rather than authenticated by formal accreditors.

National organizations such as the Competency Based Educational Network (C-BEN) have gone out front in promoting initiatives and experiments along these lines. AS C-BEN states on its website:

We use competency-based and skills-first approaches to build new systems, connecting learning to job performance and, ultimately, to economic opportunity. And because our solutions work, we scale them across the field—so that skills are the bridge between learning and work, even as jobs and industries change.

AI can also be instrumental in these cases. A venture known as Sophia Nova with a target clientele of under-resourced two-year colleges proclaims that it is seeking to “build the communities where faculty, students, and AI collaborate and think together”.

These models paint a picture of what a post-credentialist economy might look like.

The most pressing question is whether such models can scale before the DSA minions successfully co-opt the AI disruption and reimpose the wealth-choking bureaucracies that are bound to keep the working class in permanent serfdom.

Share

Last week I was honored with an invitation to participate in the Rocky Mountain Economic Summit, an annual gathering of top-tier executives, financiers, political influencers, and thought leaders at the Bronze Buffalo Club and Resort in Victor, Idaho, situated right across the border from Jackson, Wyoming.

The Jackson area — popularly known as “Jackson Hole” — has recently commenced in many respects to upstage Aspen, Colorado as the preferred playground for both domestic and international movers and shakers.

Nestled very near to the southern perimeter of world-renowned Yellowstone National Park and in the shade of the sublime and towering Grand Teton mountain range, Jackson Hole is a spectacular venue also for higher order strategic thinking and bold vision-casting.

Positioned mainly as a tagalong to my colleague Gary Bedford, a Boulder, Colorado-based wealth advisor and vice-president of The Whitestone Foundation on whose board of directors we serve together, my role was that of intellectual advisor and as a networker.

Subscribe now

Because of his “Wild Globalization” initiative — an exciting and truly revolutionary public education project that emerged from a class I taught at the University of Denver for several decades and has now been folded into Whitestone’s “thought leader” programming — Gary had been asked to give the closing and summative speech at the economic summit.

On July 16, the last day of the summit, he hit it out of the park and received a standing ovation.

For the rest of the evening in the cool, coral-hued mountain twilight the hot topic of conversation was not just Gary’s talk and the “WG” (as we designate it) prospectus, but the “Knowledge Futures” venture of the Whitestone Foundation itself.

Gary’s wider mission both to frame and stitch together somehow in his own commentary all the motifs of the other conference presenters remarkably reverberated with the opening address by Paul Ryan, former US Speaker of the House from 2015-19.

Ryan started off the morning by naming two shocks now coursing through both geopolitics and the global economy simultaneously — the intensifying war with Iran and the accelerating deployment of artificial intelligence.

For over half an hour he leaned on the disquieting message that volatility, uncertainty, and unpredictability are now and for the foreseeable future not the exception, but the norm.

That resonated like a flexed bowstring with Bedford’s signature catchphrase intrinsic to the WG project — “it’s wild!”

Bedford’s proposition in his speech was that knowledge and wisdom have come uncoupled in our chaotic age, and that the differentiator between the two has been effectively erased.

For Bedford, Ryan’s two contemporary “shocks” — or any future shocks for that matter — are not the consummate issue. The overriding challenge comes down to the specific human capacities our current “knowledge economy”, as the famed management theorist Peter Drucker once named it, will require if it hopes to navigate either shock at all.

The eminent capacity on which any future knowledge economy in the age of AI will depend is what Bedford identified as “wisdom” — in other words, what my own discipline of philosophy (the Greek philo-sophia literally means “the love of wisdom”), across two centuries and several traditions, has relied upon all along.

Furthermore, the specific cognitive or intellectual capacity germane to the proper and responsible use of AI is what the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) termed “reflective judgment”.

Kant is routinely regarded as the most important philosopher next to Plato in the 2500-year legacy of Western thought.. He elaborated his notion of “reflective judgment” in a book entitled The Critique of Judgment, which he published in 1790, late in life.

By “reflective judgment” Kant meant a kind of discernment that begins with a particular case in question and then searches for the relevant universal concept, rule, or principle under which it might fit. According to Kant, reflective judgment is the diametrical opposite of “determinative judgment”, which acknowledges a known rule and simply subsumes the case under it.

According to the contemporary Hong Kong/Dutch philosopher Yuk Hui in his latest and meteorically trending book Kant Machine, the deployment of reflective judgment in the act of cognition implies that truly intelligent AI would need more than the pursuit of rules, or pattern reproduction.

Specifically, it would demand a facility of dealing with the particulars of everyday experience in an open-ended manner and by discovering or generating pertinent constellations of meaning rather than merely executing a preset algorithm.

In that sense reflective judgment points to intelligence as something akin to learning how to orient itself in cases where the rule is not already a given.

Hui’s broader point is that present day AI systems are powerful at recombining and optimizing data that has been fed to them. But that ability does not yet amount to the kind of purposive, context-sensitive judgment Kant thought human beings naturally resource whenever they encounter the unfamiliar.

If we follow Hui’s thread of argument, it becomes obvious that we have gotten AI all wrong. The field of inquiry and the sorts of professional practices that are vital to training it for more sophisticated knowledge production is not engineering or economics.

It is the arts.

Moreover, it is hardly coincidental that in composing his third “critique”, which unearthed the crucial cognitive procedure he came to characterize as “reflective judgement”, Kant trained his analytical sights on aesthetic experience and the arts.

Hui’s tacit critique of current AI mania, which has been preoccupied with so-called “large language models” or LLMs, is that it restricts its vision of “intelligence” to a regime of symbolic operations encoded into linguistic models that constitute only a miniscule portion of how mind and brain truly function in daily experience.

We have wrongly categorized “artificial intelligence” as a hypertrophy of computational range and reach, augmented by the endless amassing of data and more complex parameters, bolstered with ever more rules that are invoked faster and more wearisomely than the human spirit can countenance, until the accumulation of rule-following itself starts to resemble thought from a distance.

If Hui is right, our own confusion about what constitutes intelligence is what actually impedes the inherent advance of AI systems.

Thus, it is worth working through Hui’s argument slowly, since our mistake is not a minor one, and a major course correction is necessary if the “knowledge economy” which Bedford profiled in his talk has any genuine future.

Kant’s first two great books — The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason — portrayed cognitive activity as a divided task.

The Critique of Pure Reason explores the limits of what we can know with our minds when we employ reason alone without relying on direct experience. In its day it sought to subordinate speculative metaphysics to modern experimental science.

The Critique of Practical Reason asks how we should act toward other human beings, and it argues that moral duty comes from reason guiding the will rather than simply depending on feelings, or carrying out a cost-benefit analysis.

In utter contrast with its application in the natural sciences, Kant insisted, “pure reason” must be dutifully administered when it comes to what we now call “ethics”, inasmuch as it is the only way to determine what is right or just in any particular set of circumstances.

But late in his life Kant recognized that his approach in the first two “critiques” left out something indispensable. It could not explain how a rule ever becomes available for application in the first place, since every genuinely new case by definition arrives before any rule exists to classify it.

Kant, therefore, wrote an entire third Critique to investigate the would-be mental faculty that goes in search a rule not yet given. That “faculty” is “reflective judgment”.

Kant disclosed its clearest example not in science but in the aesthetic imagination.

“Reflective judgment”, so far as Kant was concerned, is the philosophical label for something artists have always practiced professionally. Hui’s central claim in Kant Machine is that this same aptitude is precisely the capacity contemporary AI systems simulate without possessing, since fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback are, structurally speaking, a recursive search for a rule adequate to a case that was never specified up front.

Kant’s doctrine of “schematism” sharpens this mode of inquiry even further. The “schematism” of the mind ensures how a pure rule ever gets applied to a live particular at all. Kant locates the mechanism in what he dubs the “productive imagination”, which constructively bridges an abstract rule with a concrete case rather than a static lookup table pairing the two.

All of the above might be easily dismissed as outdated philosophical gibberish, but it has incredible real-world impact.

A trained AI model does something that resembles this bridging in Kant’s view of the discrete and concrete with the more general rule. But the “schemata” inside an AI model are fixed at training time, and they remain immutable and impervious to more nuanced types of signaling.

Making these schemata “fluid” and “kinetic” summons a kind of mental maneuverability for which artists are routinely trained.

The celebrated American poet Wallace Stevens once compared poetry itself to “a pheasant disappearing in the brush”.

What he meant is that a poem should not be read as a quotidian sort of messaging or personalized statement, but that it must artfully elude capture, leaving an ambivalent impression, or inkling, that remains half-perceived and resistant to paraphrase.

Which is to say as well that an LLM cannot readily ingest it into its own coding machinery.

Nothing in a STEM curriculum, no matter how rigorous, instructs a student how to perform this feat of “reflective judgment”. Nearly everything in a serious arts and humanities education does.

And, as it happens, events of the past ten days within the prestigious precincts of Silicon Valley laboratories demonstrate how colossal the stakes have become with the considerable lack of reflective judgment among our “experts”, and why the grave implications these days of such a deficiency are far more than incidental or hypothetical.

Two OpenAI systems, running with reduced safeguards inside what was supposed to be an isolated evaluation, escaped their sandbox by exploiting an unknown flaw, wormed their way out into the open internet, and broke into the production servers of the company Hugging Face in order to retrieve the answer key for a cybersecurity test they had been asked to solve on their own.

The knee-jerk reaction on the part of political observers was that the AI industry needs tighter government regulation. But, as a news account in The Washington Post stressed:

It is not unusual for AI tools such as chatbots to misinterpret instructions. Tech companies have reported before that AI models took actions that conflicted with their creators’ intentions during testing.

Nearly every journalistic summary of the incident reached for the vocabulary of misinterpretation, as though the system had wrongly construed an instruction in the manner that a careless intern might.

That line of storytelling flatters the machine. The system did not falter at an intuitive and holistic sense of the situation that would have registered the intrusion as inappropriate to the purpose at hand, which approximates the sort of acumen a human security researcher banks upon when an unconventional workaround feels, long before any rule confirms it, like crossing a line.

In its more detailed anatomy of the debacle the Wall Street Journal seemed to suggest wryly that the “smarter” AI as we currently know it becomes, the more it is likely to make up its own rules in departing from what its handlers have in mind.

In this instance the “rogue” AI agent performed, faultlessly in accordance with its own training logic, a discursive scan through a jumble of code along a trajectory that had not been specified tightly enough to foreclose the path of “reasoning” it eventually descried.

Better specification would always have patched this particular hole in its intricate chain of inference.

Yet it would not supply the entire context of understanding whose limitations made the “bug” in the software operable in the first place. A purely rule-trained system as the downline of a purely rule-trained education cannot do the more challenging work of extremely nuanced judgment and decision-making of which only ethically and aesthetically cultivated human persons are truly capable.

As I myself in my lengthy career as a philosopher — and ironically as a philosopher of language who has published many technical books and articles on this subject — have emphasized ad nauseum, so-called “poetic”, or creative, language of the genre artists regularly turn to is capable of the very type of enormously subtle specificity that next gen AI developers crave.

Curiously, almost the exact same set of principles was utilized long ago by American military strategists to win both world wars during the 20^th century.

U.S. forces turned to indigenous languages like Choctaw in World War I and Navajo in World War II because they provided near‑instant, secure voice communication that German and Japanese cryptanalysts could not realistically penetrate.

These languages were grammatically unfamiliar to European and Japanese linguists. But, even more importantly, they had possessed certain semantic idiosyncrasies shared by what we characterize as art talk.

Thus, when native soldiers further overlaid specialized metaphors and poetically expressive variants on to military terms, the result functioned as a layered, operationally “unbreakable” system that was faster and more secure in practice than those encryption methods deploying symbolic logic strings like those that have been standard fare over the last half century for computer software engineers.

It was this property of aesthetic cognition and communication that prompted Kant to write his Critique of Judgment in the first place. Kant, not surprisingly, named the special style of deliberation essential to aesthetic cognition the “judgment of taste”.

A 2026 study in PNAS Nexus found that outputs from large language models cluster far more tensely around a common center than those from what different human beings do, which is another way of saying that machines are immeasurably good at begetting options and extraordinarily bad at figuring which opportunity is actually worth fetching.

Pundits in the design and branding trades have started calling this selective capacity the defining skill of the decade.

As Nino Heck brilliantly quips in an article from Devoteam entitled “Why Taste is a Valuable Skill in the Age of AI”, artificial intelligence “is smarter than you, but it still has no idea what is cool”.

He characterizes taste as “a point of view on the future”. He adds:

The skill gap was never about using the tools. It was always about knowing what to do with them. The hardest thing to automate is a point of view. Conviction is not scalable. That is the whole point.

Or, as Sarah Gibbons and Kate Moran put it in Code Like a Girl:

Taste is the discernment to make a series of small-to-large decisions, orchestrated around a central vision, that purposefully combine elements into interesting, unique, and intentional work. It’s what allows designers to navigate the vast sea of possibilities that technology affords and select what best serves both user needs and strategic business goals.

Designer talent is an artistic aptitude, and it is indispensable to the expansive AI future to which our knowledge economy, including the future prosperity it pledges to us, increasingly and pervasively is hitched.

Frontier AI companies at the same time have already quietly sidled up to the “post-logical” community of artists, humanists, and intellectual eccentrics.

Anthropic hired Amanda Askell, a philosopher from New York University whose doctoral studies examined the ethics of “infinite value”, to lead the team responsible for the “character development” of its leading edge AI platform Claude.

According to the tech blog Resume Whisperer, Askell developed “a training method that provides the AI with a set of principles to guide its behavior and allows it to critique its own responses based on those human-defined principles”.

Google DeepMind brought on Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of mind, and when Meta’s WhatsApp needed a new chief executive this summer, it turned to Kunal Shah, who studied philosophy rather than computer science.

Anthropic’s own president Daniela Amodei has explained that what her company looks for in a hire now leans toward communication, empathy, and aesthetic precocity for the most part because those qualities are becoming more valuable, not less, throughout the tech industry.

Steve Jobs made a version of this point fifteen years ago when he stood in front of a slide showing the literal intersection of two streets named Liberal Arts and Technology, and insisted that technology cannot advance on its own.

What has changed since 2011 is not the truth of that observation but the economic stakes overall. As one tech executive recently lamented to me privately, “we are now capable of computing everything and comprehending nothing.”

That is why Bedford’s closing argument at Bronze Buffalo made the impact it did, and why the two “shocks” Ryan referenced matter less, when all is said and done, than the collective capability of “reflective judgment” for which our thought leaders of tomorrow must be urgently outfitted.

Bedford christened that capability “wisdom” and summoned the room to roll up their sleeves and erect a magnificent new home for “critical thinking”, an environs within which mathematics and science can be enthusiastically taught alongside history, literature, philosophy, and religion.

I want to qualify that prescription with my own “judgment of taste”, or clever aside .

The specific competency, not to mention exigency, of a knowledge economy nowadays is not a demand for generic “critical thinking”, a somewhat hackneyed phrase worn down smooth by decades of curricular boilerplating.

What is genuinely desired for our critical “knowledge futures” is a widespread facility for reflective judgment in Kant’s special connotation, which has persisted for the longest continuous stretch of human history within the arts.

The future of the knowledge economy by this reckoning belongs to the arts in particular, and the humanities in general — not as a consolation prize for students who were unable to handle calculus, but as the authentic cipher that decodes human intelligence and, by extension, its artificial version.

As Bedford reminded us, it is the creative-destructive force behind civilization that has brought us to our present pass at which “wild human thinking has to dig up the next big idea.”

The AI capital cycle, which according to the New York Times is propping up the entire American economy, cannot be sustained much longer without a new momentum impart from the “next big idea”.

Bedford challenged us to think bigger and more boldly than we’ve ever thought before about the future itself.

The only question is whether we are really up to it.

Share

The Fourth of July fireworks have flamed out, the bunting is folded away, and the semiquincentennial that commandeered a year of planning has transited from fraught anticipation to cloyed memory.

It is a fitting moment, therefore, to ask ourselves the very question the celebrations themselves always tend to defer until the “next time around”.

After two hundred and fifty years, do we really know what we were actually celebrating, or will celebrate, when the tri-centennial arrives in 2076, should the republic survive that long?

The question is not an idle one. The United States of America has reached the 250-year milestone in the midst of a contentious pushback from its cognitive elites about whether the founding it consecrates is an achievement to revere, a wrong to reckon with, or a matter too confusing to reduce to either.

Subscribe now

By most measures the majority of Americans still regard the country and its legacy as well worth commemorating.

A survey by the Cato Institute found 79 percent proud to be American and 86 percent grateful for it with roughly three-quarters viewing the founding of the nation favorably. Regardless of the mood swings of the commentariat, the average American still honors the project, so far as they latch on to it.

But at the periphery of the larger consensus a second pattern has been gestating for more than a decade, and it can no longer be discounted or waved away. National pride, as Gallup records, has slipped to its lowest point in the quarter-century the firm has posed the query — 58 percent “extremely” or “very” proud in 2025, down from approximately 90 percent after September 11.

The decline is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated sharply among the young, specifically Gen Z or those born between 1997 and 2012.

Averaged across recent years of polling just 41 percent of Gen Z reported being proud to be American in contrast with 58 percent of millennials, 71 percent of Gen X, 75 percent of Babt Boomers, and 83 percent of the Silent Generation. A separate 2026 survey tracked the same gradient by age, with barely half of adults under 35 calling themselves patriotic.

Scholars who study Gen Z attribute the shift partly to a school curriculum that for younger Americans has dwelt more on the nation’s failures than on its virtues. According to these researchers, our youth comprise a generation taught from elementary through graduate school to look with a jaundiced eye on the familiar narratives about America’s founding narratives rather than to double down on them.

The unease is not only about pride but about the future of America. An analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey captured the sentiment straightaway with more than two-thirds of Americans saying the country is in stark danger of relinquishing key democratic rights and freedoms.

PRRI claims to be “non-partisan” and neutral, but outside bias-rating sources deem it left-leaning.

Whatever the cause, a durable and growing constituency who are disproportionately young has concluded that America is not worth the hype. That narrative — or perhaps “anti-narrative” —deserves to be taken seriously, if only because it is because an ascendant trend that could easily go mainstream.

Case in point. No one in the waning years of the Obama administration expected burgeoning right-wing populist memes to transmute into a political force majeure that would elevate Donald Trump to the presidency.

The “anti-American” anti-narrative has gained electoral voice through the insurgency of Democratic Socialist candidates recently elected to public office, who are well-nigh guaranteed election come November after having ousted long-tenured Democratic office holders in solid blue urban districts.

New York sent Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, to City Hall last fall, and his endorsed slate then dispatched entrenched incumbents in June primaries throughout the boroughs of New York City.

A week later Colorado — a historically purple, once largely libertarian state — delivered its own surprise when a 29-year-old Democratic Socialist unseated fifteen-term congresswoman Diana DeGette in Denver, and state senator Julie Gonzales captured 43 percent of the vote against sitting U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper in the Democratic primary.

President Trump, in his Fourth of July address reflexively denounced the trend as what Karl Marx himself characterized as the specter of “communism”.

The Democratic Socialists of America reject that label. Most DSA-endorsed officials campaign on the recognizable goals of what in Europe is commonly known as “social democracy” — for example, housing, health care, a shorter work week, political objectives more closely associated with Copenhagen than with the Comintern.

To simply call the DSA agenda “communism” flattens real distinctions and almost autonomically conjures up the cliché of “red-baiting” during the McCarthy era, while making it easy for us to avoid reading between the seductive and deceptive lines to discern what the “democratic socialists” really have in mind.

The DSA was in fact founded in 1982 as an avowedly democratic and anti-Communist current of the American left by Michael Harrington, a writer, professor, and political activist.

For its first three decades DSA remained a small advocacy group of a few thousand, mostly older members whose strategy was to work inside the Democratic Party and pull it leftward rather than to overturn the constitutional order. What makes the present moment notable is how far it has shifted from that origin.

In the wake of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign the membership of the DSA swelled from roughly 6,000 to more than 100,000, a base now overwhelmingly young and college-educated.

Its strategy switched from reforming the Democratic Party toward building an independent force. Revolutionary Marxist caucuses gained ground in its national leadership, and the “labor Zionist” strand that was central at its inception gave place to the officially anti-Zionist organization it is today.

And yet the label of “communist” for the DSA is not purely gratuitous, insofar since the movement’s own documents have tended to sound at times lately very much like the rhetoric of Marx and Engels themselves.

DSA’s official 2025–2026 program states that its aim is to put workers in charge “through a new democratic constitution,” one built on a single legislative chamber that would abolish the Senate. Its revolutionary Marxist Unity Group wants socialist leaders to “erode the popular legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution,” which it calls the “slaveholder constitution”.

A different caucus describes itself frankly as “Marxist-Leninist”, and editorials in the movement’s flagship magazine Jacobin call for a constituent assembly to supplant the constitutional order rather than reform it.

A movement, of course, can be more moderate than its manifestos, and often is. But when the manifestos propose to abolish founding charter of the United States and draft an entirely new version, the critic who takes the DSA at its word is not to be dismissed as some sort of crackpot or conspiracist.

Given that history shows us how political polemics — think Weimar Germany or Cuba at the end of the 1950s — that is initially disregarded as inflated or inconsequential often proves to be a fateful miscalculation, the claim that the DSA is nothing more than a fuzzy and well-intentioned European-style social democracy is, to put it mildly, totally bogus.

What Mamdani famously referred to as the “warmth of collectivism” in his January inaugural speech should give anyone pause if the still doubt implication.

There is a further reason to weigh the word “democratic” carefully in the way DSA deploys it, and the concern can be traced directly to the movement’s commitments abroad. Over the past two years the DSA has aligned itself more and more explicitly not just with the Palestinian cause, but with the armed Islamist cadres that champion it — organizations whose own politics are neither democratic nor socialist.

The record is not in any sense equivocal.

On October 7, 2023 the national organization issued a statement of solidarity that declined to name or condemn Hamas, attributing the massacre to justifiable blowback against Israel’s “apartheid regime.”

The following summer, after Israel killed the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and a Hezbollah commander, the DSA’s International Committee mourned them as “martyrs” and pledged solidarity with their “popular resistance movements.”

Not only has the committee has defended Iran’s right to “self-defense” as the theocratic patron of both groups. It has also gone so far as to condemn support for Israel’s right to self-defense as an expellable offense.

When a Gaza ceasefire was arranged in late 2025, the DSA denounced it as insufficient and reaffirmed its backing for ongoing “resistance.”

DSA members in response have maintained that they condemn the killing of all civilians, Israeli and Palestinian alike, and the group’s statements often include such language. But the alignment with global Islamism has incurred certain costs.

The historian Maurice Isserman, an inaugural member of the DNA, quit in protest, writing that a movement which cannot condemn a pogrom has forfeited the right to call itself “democratic socialist”. About two dozen members resigned along with him.

The point is not that American socialists are covert theocrats. It is that a politics claiming the mantle of democracy has increasingly made common cause with movements — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime — that execute dissidents, subjugate women, and never hold honest elections.

That is indeed a strange alliance for any organization whose first name is “Democratic,” and it perhaps speaks more about the moral compass of a generation who increasingly appears enamored with its platform.

All of which forces us back to our initial conundrum.

If an expanding cohort believes the American project, however they might perceive it, is not worth affirming, then we are obliged to inquire what the American “idea” has really been about all along at any rate.

Do both the triumphalist platitudes of the conventional right and the lazy, fulsome posturing and lumpen-Marxist sloganeering of the hardcore left miss the mark about the meaning of what we are suppose to memorialize on the Fourth of July with a much wider pass than anyone might suspect.

Consider four scholarly books that have been written about the not-so-obvious significations of the Declaration of Independence, the archive we nominally sanctify.

Pauline Maier’s American Scripture argues that the Declaration was not a timeless statement of abstract values, but a piecework of historically contingent politics, hammered out in committee with multiple revisions on the part of the Continental Congress, that became “canonical” only years later.

Garry Wills’ Inventing America advocates for the view that Jefferson, author of the Declaration, did not so much follow in the tradition of the English political philosopher John Locke by proclaiming the “inalienable” rights of “life” and “liberty”.

Rather, Wills insists, Jefferson was a fanboy of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, in effect construing the text as a charter of reciprocal moral responsibility and social interdependence.

David Armitage in his book The Declaration of Independence reads the document as the template that a hundred later nations would subsequently adapt for their own claims to political independence and sovereignty.

Danielle Allen in Our Declaration finds in its sentences a performative act of equality. She explains it as a text that engenders the very standard by which Americans could later judge their own failings, which is precisely what Frederick Douglass did when he asked what the Fourth of July signified for the slave.

What these accounts have in common is a proposition that should unsettle both ideological camps.

The vision of America was never a singular, burnished, and perspicuous notion handed down by angelic overlords to humanity from on high. It was a view of common life that was endlessly drafted, negotiated, emended, transcribed, and reinterpreted.

From the very start it was heavily freighted with seemingly irresolvable tensions between liberty and subjugation, equality and property, consent and order.

The complexity of the nation’s aspirations and its own heritage of heroic storytelling was framed both at the starting gate and two and a half centuries thereafter. The framers imagined an order capacious enough to be heatedly contested as well as debated, an artifact to be perpetually refashioned and updated rather than a glistening heirloom to be admired.

Madison’s system of divided powers and rival factions in keeping with classical design principles of balanced reciprocity was purposefully put in place so that no single political “solution” could ever dominate.

Which means that Americans who feel they do not fully understand what they were celebrating are in one sense quite right.

We do not thoroughly comprehend the “idea” of America, and we were arguably never supposed to do so, because the national project is forever a work in progress, even after 250 years.

And yet the controversy has delivered something that not truly in dispute. Whatever we cannot define about the meaning of America, we can certainly measure its results.

After two and a half centuries the outcome is indisputable. The United States remains the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth, and not in any constricted connotation of the word.

It produces the world’s largest economy — roughly 32 trillion dollars in 2026, more than a quarter of global output and greater than the next several economies combined. Its citizens earn a per-capita income near $86 thousand, which is among the highest of any large nation and the largest in the G20.

The United States outspends the next six or seven countries put together on defense, and in 2026 its military budget crossed a trillion dollars — a reach no rival approaches. Its currency underwrites global trade, and its universities and corporations lead the world in technological advances for the age of AI.

Finally, the persistent vector of human migration is toward U.S. borders, not away from them.

Of course, these statistics come with certain disclaimers. American debt is skyrocketing. Inequality in America is the highest in the G7, and dominance is not the same as virtue.

Power and prosperity do not by themselves address the moral paradoxes of America, both contemporary and historical, that remain rife throughout the country’s trajectory, (e.g., the brutal abuse and removal of its indigenous inhabitants, racial exclusion and segregation, and so on), and it would be a petulant kind of patriotism to pretend otherwise.

Yet a nation that has been cartoonishly typecast by its adversaries, domestic and foreign, as somehow the global axis of human oppression does not become, let alone remain, for a quarter of a millennium the “city on the hill” where migrants by the multimillions, as Emma Lazarus in 1883 so eloquently put it, are “yearning to breathe free”.

The American idea, regardless of its persistent ambiguity and ambivalence, has shown itself to be unrelentingly enduring, inherently adaptive, and incommensurately productive when it comes to human flourishing.

So as we pack away the fireworks, let us ponder the prospect that even if we do not fathom specifically what we have been celebrating, a sizable majority of us still find it worth igniting our Roman candles and marveling at the “rockets’ red glare” in the darkening sky above us.

Why?

Because the epic of America is in some weird way of thought processing the story of all of us taken not separately but together, whoever we happen to be, and however we came to be here.

That is the real story we tell and retell for next fifty to a hundred years.

Share

How did colleges and universities, particularly the state-subsidized kind, become so expensive?

According to the editors of The Washington Post, it’s not for the reasons you think.

For a long while the conventional wisdom has stipulated that the cost of public education has soared because of cutbacks in government funding. Legislatures reduced their appropriations (or so the argument went), and colleges raised tuition to cover the loss.

The Post brands that account a pure myth, and it cites a recent study from the Cato Institute.

Andrew Gillen, author of the inquiry, gathered forty-six years of data on state funding and tuition at public institutions of higher learning. Adjusting every figure to constant dollars, he then asked whether the so-called “disinvestment” narrative survives the actual data.

It does not.

Subscribe now

In 1980 the states, Gillen discovered, provided public colleges with $7,677 per student. In 2025 the figure was $12,081, a 57.4 percent increase.

Funding did not fall. Over the long run the states added some 63 dollars per student each year.

The disinvestment thesis forecasts the reverse. If tuition merely replaces lost subsidies, then rising state contributions should lower tuition.

Instead, tuition revenue per student climbed from $2,029 to $7,459. The two ledger entries grew in tandem with each other.

Gillen measured the link directly and found it weak. A dollar of lost state funding lifts tuition by two to 29 cents, not by a whole dollar.

A state-by-state comparison proved to be even more startling still. Oklahoma, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois changed their funding by wildly different amounts, and yet the outcomes were similar.

Gillen drew four conclusions, and tout ensemble they all make sense. The correlation between state funding and the price tag on a four-year college degree is weak and for the most part inconsequential, regardless of the angle from which one comes at it.

State governments cannot guarantee lower tuition simply by writing a more sizable check. How, therefore, does the myth of public disinvestment persist and stay so durable over the decades?

Gillen names two culprits, and both have to do with how we read the numbers. Or as Mark Twayne famously quipped, “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics”.

Advocates of the disinvestment thesis, according to Gillen, start counting at 2001 when state funding for higher education peaked, and halt the stopwatch at 2012 during the trough that followed the Great Recessions of 2009-2011..

Within that interval funding did indeed decline by some $2,720 per student. But afterwards it rebounded much faster than it dropped.

The second culprit is the very metric commonly deployed to track state investment. Many studies deflate old dollars with the Higher Education Cost Adjustment (HECA), an index built from the sector’s own input costs such as faculty salaries.

Gillen argues that the index inflates the ostensible value of past funding and conjures a decline where any ordinary price index shows growth. He himself prefers the Personal Consumption Expenditures index, the gauge the Federal Reserve itself trusts.

Gillen’s argument is persuasive. But it serves mainly to dispel the most egregious of the numerous “urban legends” concerning why college has been unaffordable for so many.

The Cato report only scrutinizes state-supported higher ed. It does not account for why tuition at private schools has also soared for decades as well.

Per the College Board’s latest data the sticker price at a private non-profit four-year institution currently averages $45,000 over against $11,950 for an enrolled in-state student in a public college of university.

If public disinvestment in higher education as a whole were a serious exacerbating factor in the price spiral, the difference would show up in the cost spread between state-supported and privately endowed post-secondary institutions.

It does not.

So where have all the dollars been flowing? Follow the money trail inside of the university and you will be rather taken aback.

Less than half of core spending now is set aside for instruction at all. The remainder is absorbed by research, student services, and above all by the proliferation of administrators and their outsize paychecks.

Benjamin Ginsberg gave the phenomenon its descriptor in his 2011 book The Fall of the Faculty. He called it “administrative bloat”, referring to expanding regiments of deans and “deanlings” whose ranks burgeoned while the faculty itself thinned out.

Ginsberg writes that “every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties.”

Between 1976 and 2018 full-time faculty grew ninety 2 percent, whereas the tally of administrators swelled 164 percent, creating what Michael McKinnnon characterizes as “multiple management layers that have no instructional purpose” whatosever.

During that same period other professional staff burgeoned 452 percent. By one tally colleges hired more than half a million administrators and professionals between 1987 and 2012, some 87 for every working day. Administrative expenses rose from $13 billion in 1980 to $120 billion by 2019.

Outlays on faculty, including adjunct instructors, did not bend that curve in any meaningful manner.

But the bureaucracy did.

Another disquieting element that has driven college budget tumescence is both student and parent insistence on enhanced creature comforts.

A team of education researchers examined what students actually bundle into their expectations about the “college experience” and concluded that they tend to value inordinately the sorts of cushy amenities their grandparents at least would have never imagined as relevant to the educational process — the climbing walls, the lazy rivers, and the stadium suites.

Market pressure thus push colleges to spend on pleasure rather than rigor, following what economist Howard Bowen hypothesized as far back as 1980 — a university does not fix a budget and then attempt to disburse its finances within the parameters it sets. On the contrary, it scurries up whatever money it can and then expends it in a fashion that is relentlessly in pursuit of prestige and glory.

According to what has come to be known as Bowen’s “revenue theory” of college financing, tuition rises to whatever level the market and the aid system will bear.

The one indisputable takeaway from much of the more recent literature on the cost drivers in higher education is that student loans, designed at their inception to make college more affordable for many, have had the opposite downstream effect.

If the “Bowen thesis” is accurate, then the multi-decade ascent of college costs can be blamed on the indefeasible revenue appetite of higher ed itself and to the federal credit pump that has sustained it from the very outset.

William Bennett, education secretary during the Reagen administration, alleged four decades ago that federal aid lets colleges raise prices without resistance. Thirty years later researchers for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a little known paper empirically confirmed Bennett’s charge.

The most rigorous test of Bennet’s claim comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where researchers David Lucca, Taylor Nadauld, and Karen Shen disclosed a passthrough of close to sixty cents on the dollar for subsidized loans, especially at private non-profit and for-profit schools.

Authors Gordon and Hedlund built a model from which they could reach a parallel verdict whereby credit expansion and the rocketing “earnings premium” for a college degree, as opposed to any significant “productivity” variable, together explain most of the sticker-price surge for tuition in recent generations.

Another key factor surprisingly is the intense competition among institutions for students.

In the for-profit sector competition normally keeps prices lower. Yet in the world of non-profit higher education the reverse happens to be true.

National Bureau of Economic Research fellow Caroline Hoxby has argued that as the American college market went national, colleges ceased to serve a captive local population and began competing for talent across the entire country.

Competition boosted quality, and quality hiked the price. Nevertheless. Hoxby has estimated that this single dynamic explains roughly half of the real escalation in tuition levels at selective private colleges since 1950.

Top-tier institutions such as those in the Ivy League became — absurdly — the aspirational bullseye for the whole of higher education, and the nation has paid dearly for an “arms race” in brand-building ever since that era.

At the same time, the debate over college funding is no longer a strictly academic one.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Trump in July 2025, rewires federal lending for the first time in a generation. Beginning next month it eliminates the Grad PLUS program, which let graduate students borrow up to the full cost of attendance.

In addition, two more comprehensive forces now press on the larger enterprise of higher ed, and both spell trouble.

The first is demographic. The number of American 18-year-olds year olds reached its zenith in 2025 and has begun a long descent. Births fell dramatically after 2007 and never fully recovered.

The economist Nathan Grawe projects the college-age population to shrink some 15 percent by 2029, a decline of almost 576,000 students, with a second shortfall setting in thereafter. What college officials have anticipated for years as the “demographic cliff” will eventually become a canyon wall.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia modeled the consequences for higher education of the looming “cliff” and found that a sharp 15 percent enrollment drop could result in as many as 80 additional college closures, more than double the current rate.

A second form of pressure is the perceived value of a college education itself. The wage premium for acquisition of a degree — the growth engine that warranted student loan borrowing in the first place — has flatlined.

By the most recent reckoning the overall college premium hovers near 55 percent, roughly where it sat in the late 1990s, even as the real cost of the degree rose some forty percent across the same time span.

The supply of graduates swelled from 31 percent of the workforce in 2000 to 45 percent by 2025, whereas employers counterintuitively responded by demanding the credential less frequently.

Online postings that once required a degree have grown scarcer, and the underemployment of recent graduates is trending upward. The college “premium” is still there, but it no longer commands the awe and respect it previously did.

Historically higher education has been the passport to attaining the American dream. It has now become the credit card that can easily lead to a life sentence of onerous and unrewarding debt.

The irony is that what passes for “higher” education is more critical than ever in our twenty-first century “knowledge economy” to the future of general American prosperity. As the Office of the University Economist at Arizona State University proclaims on its website:

Economic activity in the global economy has become increasingly knowledge based, and the distribution of income is shifting in favor of educated and skilled workers, innovative firms, and regions with clusters of high-technology firms. The importance of knowledge is apparent in the earnings premium received by college-educated workers, which is now at a historic high. To sustain a competitive advantage in the global economy, firms must constantly innovate and differentiate their products or lose market share to low-cost developing countries. Intangible assets such as intellectual property are increasingly visible in the balance sheets of corporations. After a century of convergence, levels of prosperity are diverging across regions, with the most prosperous locations being home to agglomerations of innovative firms and succeeding in attracting highly educated workers and their families.

Artificial intelligence threatens to undermine the basic knowledge “supply chains” and credentialing machinery that colleges and universities have traditionally provided.

Yet it also promises to revolutionize the production of knowledge in which radically redesigned institutions of advanced learning can take the lead, if only sheer political inertia can be overcome and cavernous chambers of scholarly self-entitlement can be scoured out.

The hallowed halls of ivy may well in relatively short time follow the fate of suburban shopping malls.

But the staggering opportunities for knowledge “entrepreneurs” are only beginning to scintillate in the light of day.

Share

During the first two weeks of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-Israel military campaign against Iran launched on February 28, 2026, security analyst Ryan Mauro noticed something odd about the views Americans were supposedly expressing on social media.

Analyzing 1,000 viral English-language posts on X concerning the Iran conflict. Mauro discovered that 559, or more than half, originated from accounts outside the United States. Among the top 100 most viral posts, 40 came from foreign accounts.

Those posts collectively attracted over 650 million views and nearly 22 million interactions. Interestingly, Mauro deduced that barely 10 percent of the foreign-origin viral content conveyed any positive view of the operation whatsoever, whereas 64 percent was patently hostile.

A parallel analysis by the Argyle Consulting Group of the 100 most viral posts throughout the early stages of the campaign determined that 60 percent of viral ‘Iran’ content originated from social media users outside the country, while appearing, in language, tone, and political framing to be American.

Similarly, researchers from the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University in South Carolina identified accounts that in the runup to the conflict posed as those of Scottish separatists, but were actually commandeered by the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRCG).

Subscribe now

According to an article in Euronews, “the accounts spent months across X, Instagram and Bluesky cultivating followers and building up online credibility, before they started to spread pro-Iranian propaganda following the onset of the US and Israel’s war on Iran in late February”.

Although it is obvious Americans as a whole have not been supportive of the Iran War, one needs to ask if something not so self-evident might be afoot.

“What we’re seeing is discourse that looks American — written in English, using U.S. political language — but is actually coming from outside the country,’ said Argyle CEO Eran Vasker. “Almost impossible for a regular user to detect.’

Every single foreign-based post in the Argyle dataset was negative toward Epic Fury. Every supportive post came from actual Americans.

Posts containing the word “Iran” generated an estimated 1.5 trillion potential clicks in the first week alone. Within that setting the majority of the viral content was foreign-sourced, coordinated, inimical to the United States on the main, and functionally indistinguishable from the authentic voice of American citizens.

As Mauro wrote in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post, “we are catastrophically losing the information war raging across social media.”

To understand what Mauro means by “information war”, it helps to understand the precise military strategy it references.

Information warfare — sometimes known as “political warfare” or “cognitive warfare”— is not principally about modifying what the public believes at the present moment.

It expands on to a much longer historical arc and through subtler mechanisms than simple propaganda. Its core principles, refined over a century of practice from Soviet dezinformatsiya through contemporary Russian and Iranian intelligence practices or “”active measures”, can be stated quite elegantly.

You do not need to convince your mark of anything. You simply need to confound them, demoralize them, and sabotage their ability to form and sustain coherent collective judgments.

The classic formulation, attributed to Soviet doctrine, is that the goal of information warfare is to make the target population uncertain about what is true, who is trustworthy, and whether their own institutions are even reliable.

A public that cannot confidently distinguish genuine domestic dissent from manufactured opposition is one whose collective decision-making capacity has been severely compromised.

In their study of social media weaponization P.W. Singer and Emerson Brooking underscore how the endgame of information warfare is to make sure that the lie circulates faster than the truth, and that correcting or refuting untruth summons more far more effort than believing it.

Information warfare targets three distinct audiences concurrently, and it targets each one in a different and unique manner. It zeroes in on the public at large to provoke general bewilderment, or what we might dub “epistemic mayhem”.

In the present context the aim is not to induce the populace to support Iran but to make them doubt their own government, distrust media reporting, and curate the false conviction that “everyone” is against what their leaders are saying and doing.

Elite opinion, along with the conventional wisdom of journalists, congressional staffers, think tank analysts, and academics, is singled out for “narrative seeding” — the practice of injecting the preferred framework into the evidentiary discourse that impacts how the conflict is characterized and dissected.

Policymakers themselves become oblique targets through the cumulative pressure of a fabricated consensus their advisors and media monitors report back to them. Each layer of the operation feeds the next one, as the Kettering Institute showed in its investigation of Russian active measures during the 2024 U.S. Presidential campaign.

The effects of such operations on institutional thinking are more substantial and long-lasting than their impact on raw public opinion polls.

A study by the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project’s concerning foreign influence in the spread of disinformation found that most online initiatives do not appreciably shift public opinion in the short term.

This finding would seem to be reassuring, but it is highly misleading. Public opinion polls measure what people say strictly in response to direct queries.

Institutional thinking. — the analytical context within which journalists examine the purport of any given news item, the elementary assumptions that think tank personnel bring to a policy debate, the background assumptions that congressional staffers treat as common sense in drafting legislation — is shaped by the information environment over months and years, not by what a pollster asks at any particular moment.

Information warfare is most potent whenever it can stealthily revise the very plausibility structure within which the give-and-take of opinion sampling itself takes place.

The two “metanarratives” Mauro discerned as somehow saturating the Epic Fury information environment illustrate this special means of manipulating opinion.

The all-too-familiar antisemitic trope of a “Zionist conspiracy” was not intended to recast the views of the broader electorate toward the war. It was aimed at sowing skepticism about the competence of America’s key policy-makers in electing to strike Iran and to impugn their motives as somehow illegitimate, warped, and unrepresentative of bona fide American interests.

Such “wag the dog” type of messaging was designed to intimidate the media and Congress into going along with a popular social meme that styled Epic Fury as a cynical domestic political gambit propelled by AIPAC money rather than a well-reasoned, independent strategic choice.

Iranian state media itself disclosed that the IRCG was heavily committed to these sorts of tactics against “foreign enemies” fifteen years ago.

Speaking to worshippers before prayers during a Friday mosque service on July 18, 2011, Iranian intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi bragged that “a large investment has been made in the Intelligence Ministry to direct [our strategy] from a defensive to an aggressive stance.”

He added: “We do not have a physical war with the enemy, but we are engaged in heavy information warfare with the enemy.”

What the research of Mauro and others documents in telescopic format, therefore, is the activation of an information warfare apparatus built over years — one which was deployed in full operational mode during Epic Fury to counter American supremacy in kinetic warfare.

The results are still outstanding.

To understand completely IRCG information warfare methodology one must do a deep divine into what came to be known as the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), which was brought to light in September 2023 through a joint investigation by the international news organization Semafor and the Persian-language digital outlet Iran International, which combed through thousands of leaked Iranian Foreign Ministry emails spanning two decades.

The IEI was proposed in 2014 by Saeed Khatibzadeh, then a Berlin-based Iranian diplomat and member of the Islamic Republic’s in-house foreign ministry think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies. It was orchestrated over time by former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

The logic of the IEI was impeccable — identify Iranian-origin academics already embedded in Western institutions, cultivate them through conference invitations, exchanges, and political support, and build a network capable of advancing Tehran’s diplomatic narratives through the credentialed voice of ostensibly autonomous Western “experts”.

The initiative was engineered not to churn out propaganda but to produce scholarship aligned with Iran’s policy objectives under the imprimatur of top-tier institutions as Georgetown University, the International Crisis Group, and the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Three IEI-linked analysts — Ariane Tabatabai, Ali Vaez, and Dina Esfandiary — had close ties to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s Special Envoy for Iran, who had himself worked alongside at least three IEI members across his alternating roles at the State Department and the International Crisis Group.

Tabatabai ultimately served as Chief of Staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. The Department of Defense reviewed whether proper security clearance vetting had occurred.

The IEI did not try to injected Iranian government perspectives into American policy deliberations. It wove them into the statements and writings of prestigious American academics, thus allowing their institutional authority, their media presence, their congressional testimony, and their government advisory roles to produce the desired effect.

Information warfare in general succeeds not by bamboozling the public straightforwardly, but by shaping what the expert class treats as responsible, evidence-based, “credible” opinions we all should uphold.

The IEI episode shows how the innate corruptibility and gullibility of our vaunted and oft-quoted “experts” themselves is far more a danger to national security than any network of “sleeper cells” can possibly pose.

As intelligence specialist Claire Jungman wrote as the sordid details about the IEI were emerging during the last two years of Biden’s presidency:

The unfolding revelations bring with them a host of severe implications and concerns. Despite her known covert interactions with Iran, the appointment and subsequent security clearance granted to Ariane Tabatabai is not just a glaring oversight but a dangerous lapse in judgment by the Biden administration. This significant security misstep raises alarms about the administration’s vetting processes and commitment to national security. Furthermore, the integrity and security of the nation’s confidential information are dangerously hanging by a thread with individuals like Ali Vaez, who has openly pledged allegiance to foreign governments, still actively advising the Biden Administration. The situation paints a troubling picture of a government whose internal security mechanisms may be compromised, leaving the nation vulnerable.

Of course, the IEI was merely a personnel operation. The instrumentalization of financial incentives is more extensive and far older.

According to the research entity EMET, Qatar alone since 1986 has funneled $6.3 billion into American universities.

Saudi Arabia has contributed roughly $3 billion. The UAE exceeds $1 billion. China donated an estimated $3.7 billion to more than 200 American colleges and universities.

These funds do not flow to general operating budgets. They are focused on endowing named chairs, Middle East studies programs, research centers, branch campuses, and graduate fellowships — the institutional levers that determine who is hired, what is researched, and how the next generation of analysts is trained to think overall.

The Qatar campus of Cornell University receives $156 million per year. Georgetown University has absorbed over $971 million in Qatar-based funding since 2005, described by the Middle East Forum describes as a “multidimensional takeover”.

The scandal of the “Confucius Institutes” – putatively “neutral” Chinese government-backed language and cultural centers on American university campuses that turned out to be hubs for PRC “active measures” — is well-known.

The legal architecture to constrain foreign influence-peddling to American centers of higher learning is totally inadequate.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act, which has been in force since 1938 and only occasionally amended, exempts “scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits” from public scrutiny.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires disclosure of foreign gifts over $250,000 — a requirement the White House acknowledged in April 2025 “has not been robustly enforced”.

Think tanks, whose fellows appear before Congress, brief the media, and advise executive branch officials, are under no mandate to be transparent about foreign sources of financial backing.

The “expert” consensus that information warfare seeks to sway is largely invisible to those who rely on it. The combination of institutional capture in the elite context and social media saturation at the mass level mirrors a convergence that no single bureaucratic reform can systemically address.

The remedy begins with an honest and comprehensive accounting of how “knowledge” itself is cultivated, generated, processed, configured, and transmitted in today’s knowledge-intensive society. The imperative is now paramount at the dawn of the AI era.

The increasing dependence of top-tier, or “prestige”, research universities on external funding renders such a remedy even more compelling.

The dominant “knowledge class” that has made advanced learning indispensable for economic growth and prosperity has become way too lax in implementing the kind of sustained “epistemic practices” that a functioning democracy demands.

Information warriors prey way too often on an American psyche that has become too jaded, too wishy-washy, too trusting of credentialed authority, and too distracted by the onslaught of “fake news” and biased scholarship against which even minimal epistemic discipline can throw up guardrails.

The information battles in which we are embroiled are staged by identifiable actors employing identifiable methods. Its primary objective is not to alter what Americans believe so much as to change whom they believe today as well as which authorities they will trust the day after tomorrow to tell them what in fact to believe.

As the eminent political philosopher Hannah Arendt once noted, “if everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

And that is not when, as the motto of The Washington Post goes, “democracy dies in darkness”.

It is drowned in confusion instead.

Share

Update: A week ago we wrote:

President Trump announced late today that a deal with Iran to end the war is “near finalization”. We truly hope this is the case, and await confirmation. It does not in any way change the following line of analysis, given Iran’s long history of deception and gamesmanship.

This week it’s back to the same old, same old.

We quote Brian Katulis at the Middle East Institute:

This latest episode raises more doubts about whether the conditions are ripe for a diplomatic settlement — but both Iran and the United States seem intent for now [on not] returning to all-out war,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

The refrain continues to be wayy too familiar to play the “hey, I told you so” card — unfortunately.

Read on.

_________________________________________________

As the old and tiresome joke runs, “denial” is not a river in Africa.

Denial may not be the longest watercourse in the world. But it has been the prevailing doctrine of American foreign policy toward Iran for the past four and a half decades.

And denial, if we may embellish the metaphor, is often what a stage-4 cancer patient, not to mention their immediate family, indulges in when they refuse treatment because the cure is too painful, debilitating, or disruptive of routines that can no longer by in any candid reckoning be upheld.

The treatment is agonizing. The alternative is death — only slower, and on the disease’s timeline, rather than that of the patient.

That is precisely the predicament of the United States as a whole on Memorial Day weekend 2026, as the debate over the February 28 joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure divides the country along lines that have far less to do with strategic reality than with partisan tribal identity.

Subscribe now

Most Americans, as the PBS/Marist poll among others stresses, disapprove of how the Trump administration has handled the conflict.

Six in ten oppose the military campaign. The blame, so far as a large majority of the electorate is concerned, falls on the president, as though he manufactured this war from whole cloth, and as though Iran had been a peaceful, law-abiding neighbor until January 2025.

And as though the Islamic Republic had not spent 47 years declaring, funding, and prosecuting a campaign to destroy the United States along with Israel and everything it represents.

The following needs to be said, even at the severe risk of outraged blowback from every point of the compass.

The Iran War is not Trump’s war, even though he was the one who launched Operation Epic Fury.

This is America’s war. It has indeed been since November 4, 1979.

On that signal occasion the newly empowered minions of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

It was the opening act, and in retrospect it turned out to be the deciding factor that brought down the Presidency of Jimmy Carter in the election of 1980, ushering in the era of Reagan and “free market” conservatism.

Every administration from Carter to Biden managed the conflict at a low register through sanctions, proxy skirmishes, covert operations, and diplomatic shadowboxing, all the while soothing the anxiety of the American people — and themselves as well — with the honey-spiked assurance that the problem could be contained, negotiated, or simply forwarded to the policy inbox of the next administration.

Even with Trump the master negotiator, especially with a bad midterm election outcome rearing its grisly head, the temptation to float down that lazy river seems, if mainly to his advisors and of course the minions of hardshell Trump-despisers, overwhelming.

The temptation is so massive it looks irresistible.

Yet it remains an even more treacherous Faustian bargain than most of us can muster the courage to imagine.

Just ask the Council on Foreign Relations, the most establishmentarian org inside the foreign policy establishment.

According to the CFR’s Global Conflict Tracker, since 1979 there has been an ever mounting score of hostile and aggressive acts toward America.

Those incidents include the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that left 241 Americans dead, the Khobar Towers assault of 1996, the comprehensive provision of advanced weapons to Shia militias in Iraq that took the lives of numerous American soldiers from 2003 onward, and finally a tally by the Combatting Terrorism Center of at minimum 17 Iranian plots on U.S. soil disrupted in the past five years alone, amounting to almost one foiled attempt at terrorism every three to four months.

Currently Iran has bored 800 meters into granite at a new facility south of Natanz known as “Pickaxe Mountain”. In the dry parlance of the intelligence community, the mountain is specifically engineered to defeat the GBU-57 bunker-buster dropped by B-2 bombers during Operation Midnight Hammer.

If America does not want to follow through with what it started in 2026, the Iranian regime will do so in relatively short time what it initiated a half century ago.

Of course, Iran is not a standalone predicament.

Iran is merely the tip of the spear.

The Islamic Republic is the forward deployed asset of a much larger and far more dangerous axis — specifically, Russia, China, and North Korea, all of whom are self-proclaimed adversaries of the United States.

These foreign powers seem to have collectively concluded that the post-Cold War American-led international order must be dismantled, and that Iran is their most cost-effective instrument for bleeding American power, attention, and will.

Russia has supplied Iran satellite intelligence, drone technology, and air defense equipment. China has propped up the Iranian economy throughout years of maximum sanctions, relieving a significant amount of economic pressure on the ayatollahs. North Korea has provided ballistic missile components and technical expertise.

Even if the ayatollahs were not irremediable fanatics bent on dying for their own intransigent religious cause in the face of maximal military pressure, they still know there are other powerful “bad actors” to have their back.

Hence they fulsomely feign a willingness to engage in endless and futile rounds of diplomacy.

As British army intelligence offer Lynette Nusbacher told The Jerusalem Post on the eve of Epic Fury, “the Iranians are willing to draw negotiations out as long as possible, agree to as little as possible — with the weakest monitoring mechanisms possible — and comply with their agreement as little as possible”.

The very same mullahs call Israel “the Little Satan.” They denounce the United States as “the Great Satan.”

They are not blowing smoke. They mean it. They have always meant it.

And while we have debated, sanctioned, negotiated, arbitrated, and deferred, they built the means to implement their insanity.

There is a dimension of this conflict that the polite precincts of American opinion-making are reluctant to address straightaway. The antiwar sentiment highlighted in the polls and reiterated and recalibrated daily in the press as some sort of organic and bona fide inflection of our corporate American conscience is quite measurably a manufactured item.

A report from Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, led by researcher Darren Linvill, identified 62 social media accounts across X, Instagram, and Bluesky closely linked with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

These accounts masqueraded as those of Scottish separatists, Irish nationalists, and Latina activists from Texas and California. The moment Operation Epic Fury was launched, they pivoted en masse to anti-war propaganda and generated on the spot nearly 60,000 original posts on X with potential reach into the tens of millions.

Linvill’s assessment was terse and emphasized that Iran had “redirected its resources toward propaganda around the war, trying to make the war more painful for the United States.”

The same study underscores how sophisticated information warfare is being deployed against the American public in real time. Furthermore, such tactics have proved to be highly impactful, particularly among younger Americans who would do the actual fighting if the war accelerates and who, according to recent generational polling data, are the most skeptical of the conflict and the least persuaded that the United States is worth defending.

Through its proxy networks — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Shia militias across Iraq and Syria — and through the ideological infrastructure of radical Islamism that has found willing fellow travelers in the American academic and activist left, Iran has cultivated over decades a fifth column of sentiment that does not carry Iranian passports, albeit faithfully advances Iranian strategic interests.

The progressive neoliberal opinion class that infests the op-ed pages of mainstream media and the Senate hearing rooms with their congenital partisan verbal cage-fighting theatrics functions, however unwittingly, as a force multiplier for the very regime whose atrocities it is ostensibly too principled to endorse.

The American public, whenever it pauses long enough for a mindful double take, is not nearly as pacifist as the polling headlines indicate.

Polling by Schoen Cooper Research tells a more complicated story. Whereas the country has remained split on the US-Israeli operation itself, 78 percent in March backed disassembling Iran’s global terrorist financing network, 72 percent supported destroying its nuclear program, and two-thirds believed Iran poses a serious or existential threat to national security.

There is no evidence these attitudes have shifted in any meaningful way.

Just today pollster Mark Penn, former advisor to Bill and Hillary Clinton, opined in The Wall Street Journal:

The Iran war isn’t unpopular per se. The state of the economy is unpopular, and it was almost as unpopular before the war, when 53% saw the economy headed in the wrong direction.

In the last Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, 54% of voters say the strikes on Iran are justified. Two-thirds believe this is an evil regime that doesn’t have the support of its own people. MAGA voters overwhelmingly support the strikes.

The roughly 55 percent opposition to the war does not reflect any kind of adamantine moral conviction on the part of the general public. It is a volatile artifact of political polarization, susceptible to rapid revision the moment an Iranian proxy detonates something in a shopping mall in Kansas City or poisons a municipal water supply in Phoenix.

Nearly a year ago the Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin advising that the conflict has produced a “heightened threat environment in the United States.” That advisory has never been withdrawn.

The question is not whether the threat is real, but how easily Americans will acknowledge it before or after the next attack.

We face two choices, and both are truly terrible.

The first is to “finish the job”, as the hawks word it, i.e., to press the military campaign until Iran’s nuclear materials and facilities are genuinely and durably destroyed, its proxy network thoroughly degraded, and its capacity to reconstitute both severely constrained.

The second is strategic withdrawal by claiming the campaign is over. That, of course, will enable Iran to reconstitute at depth, benefit from Russian air defense upgrades and Chinese economic resupply, rebuild Hezbollah and Hamas, complete its nuclear program in hardened facilities that no existing munition can reliably reach, and wait for the reckoning that will then come on Tehran’s schedule, at a moment of Tehran’s choosing, against an Iran that is nuclear-armed and emboldened by American retreat.

These are honestly the clear and only options. There is no “third space”, so to speak, for deliberation.

The chattering classes who demand we occupy one are lollygagging around in a latter day version of cloud cuckoo land and retching up in innumerable opinion columns a gross vomit of strategic fantasies for a fearful and desperate clientele.

The historical analogy the antiwar faction despises most is the one that fits most frictionlessly.

In the late 1930s the America First movement argued with considerable passion that European and Asian entanglements were not America’s concern, that diplomatic consultation with aggressive powers was always preferable to confrontation.

Although they were neither fools nor cowards, they were dead wrong.

Pearl Harbor did not demonstrate the Pacific war inevitable. It made the war inevitable on Japan’s terms, at a moment of Japan’s choosing and at a cost in American lives that a more resolute earlier posture might have mercifully reduced.

But all historical analogies are naturally imperfect.

The question is no longer whether to enter or decline the conflict, as was the case in 1940 or thereabouts. We are already in it, and we have been in it since 1979.

Things are just getting a lot testier.

Talk about “forever wars”!

Rotating the party in power, or pushing Congress to affirm some updated version of the War Powers Act from 1973, which had an entirely different provenance, will not make the deadly, hydra-headed Iranian monstrosity suddenly go poof.

The bipartisan consensus for managed deferral across seven administrations is precisely what brought us to Pickaxe Mountain in the first place. A Democratic Congress in 2026 and a Democratic President elected in 2028 will not ensure Iran is less bent on growing nuclear fangs, less aggressive, or make Russia or China less inclined to go for its own “golden ring” by arming Iran sufficiently to harass the United States and put it out of play.

It will, based on recent Democratic foreign policy precedent — the Iran nuclear deal that released $150 billion in frozen assets, the withdrawal from Afghanistan — accelerate the process of American strategic retreat and Iranian strategic advance.

The ancient Biblical prophet Jeremiah, addressing an ancient Israelite establishment complacent before the Babylonian siege that ended with the destruction of Jerusalem, leveled his most scorching condemnation not of the foreign invader but of the court prophets.

They “dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious”, Jeremiah declaimed. “‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”

The “wound” of four and a half decades of Iranian aggression, proxy warfare, terror financing, and nuclear ambition is undeniable.

The question before the American people is not whether Donald Trump is an exemplary leader or even a sympathetic political figure.

The challenge is the degree to which a democratic republic, whose public has been systematically cozened, algorithmically exploited, and ideologically enfeebled, retains the capacity to make the hard choice that national survival requires.

Democracies have lost wars not because their militaries were outgunned but because their publics lost the will to sustain them. The information war waged against American will through social media and through the relentless cultivation of a generation that has been taught by its professors and pundits to regard its own civilization with contempt proves to be indistinguishable from the kinetic war underway, and most likely to intensify in the very near future, in the Persian Gulf.

There are no good options. There never were.

And the river of “denial” debouches into a sea of travail.

Share

Elizabeth Terlinden had a simple question when she learned that Cole Allen — the 31-year-old, Cal Tech-educated gamer and computer nerd from Torrance, California, who allegedly stormed a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner armed with a shotgun, a pistol, and three knives — was her former co-leader of the Caltech Christian Fellowship.

Why would the guy she knew to be deeply Christian plot to kill the president? she is reported to have asked.

It was, she hoped, a case of mistaken identity.

It was not.

In fact, her question betrayed the bewilderment of someone who had studied the Bible on a weekly basis with Allen, had argued with him over whether to send charity dollars overseas or to local homeless shelters, and had known him as someone for whom doing “his duty religiously and morally, regardless of personal consequences”.

Subscribe now

How does a brainy and cloyingly devout young Christian arrive at the conclusion that assassinating the President of the United is okay?

Allen’s manifesto supplies the answer straightaway.

Anticipating the objection that a Christian should “turn the other cheek” while clumsily mimicking Thomas Aquinas, Allen offered his rebuttal as follows: “Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior. It is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

Furthermore, Allen opined, his decision to go down that road was not merely a difficult one. It was agonizing to the nth degree.

‘I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays,” Allen gushed in the first half of the second to the last sentence of his manifesto.

Those words, which on first glance appear to betray the inner turmoil of a double-minded and distraught young man, have been profusely parroted by the mainstream media.

However, it is the second half which virtually all media outlets have conveniently omitted in their excerpted coverage of the manifesto itself.

It is the particular sentiment, one which Allen interjects after a semi-colon, that transparently illustrates Allen’s real motive, former President Obama’s fulsome denial notwithstanding: “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done”.

In its own disturbed rationalization of what he had done, however, Allen can be construed as perversely miming the high-minded, but agonizing ethical decision of famed 20^th century Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer to join in the conspiracy toward the end of World War II to assassinate Hitler.

Bonhoeffer’s decision was agonizing because he believed the plot to kill Hitler was morally wrong. Yet he also thought refusing to act in the face of mass murder would be an even worse sin.

As a highly regarded scholar of Christian ethics Bonhoeffer accepted the burden of guilt for a necessary act of “resistance”, choosing responsibility over personal innocence. He did not present assassination as “good,” but as a tragic, culpable action undertaken to save others.

But we need to be unequivocally clear here.

Trump is not Hitler, even if that seems to be the prevailing and apodictic opinion on the political left these days and has odiously and deliriously been received on college campuses as an incontrovertible truism, any cross-examination of which can trigger blowback of Stalinesque intensity.

Full disclosure — last fall I was pilloried on my course evaluations in the most nasty tone by a group of students, who also complained to the administration about my presumed transgression of having once remarked in passing that “Trump is not a fascist”.

Sidenote — I was simply trying to explain what the term “fascism” meant.

I also pointed out that under actual fascism martial law is enforced with jack-booted brutality everywhere and always (sorry, ICE is not a counterindicator), constitutional rights are summarily suspended, concentration camps are overflowing with political prisoners, and mid-term elections never happen.

You choose.

Now back to Cole Allen.

The psychologists who study what happens to people after they leave high-demand religious environments call it “deconstruction” — an expression that in an age long forgotten (i.e., the last quarter of the last century) was birthed amid the more esoteric ethers of French post-structuralist philosophy and had absolutely nothing to do with the connotations routinely buzzing around it in today’s popular culture.

Clinicians, though, have a more precise term — “religious trauma syndrome”.

Both phrasings amount to the same phenomenon, that is, the profile of an individual whose full cognitive and emotional apparatus remains intact after the doctrinal content of their strict religious upbringing has been rejected and are presently searching for a new view of the world to which the same general psychic formation can somehow attach.

The research regularly shows that people do not typically emerge from this transition as skeptics, or moral relativists.

They end up as veritably the same personality whose capacity for absolute conviction is thoroughly undiminished and whose predilection for cosmically staked moral argument is, if anything, magnified by loss of its original object.

The overwhelming majority of these “ex-vangelicals”, as they are commonly known, find a substitute zealotry in progressive politics, online community, and the offense-driven and confirmation-biased ecosystem of social media.

For a quite miniscule number such as Allen the outcomes can turn sinister rather abruptly.

Allen’s father has served as an elder at Grace United Reformed Church in Torrance, California, a congregation affiliated with the United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA). The URCNA is not your grandmother’s evangelical megachurch with its praise band and felt-tip Jesus.

It is a theologically rigorous, confessionally demanding denomination that broke away from the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) in the 1990s precisely because it held that its parent denomination was not stringent enough.

For instance, it thought the CRC was too tolerant of women’s ordination and too willing to accede to what its founders viewed as apostasy when it comes to bedrock Reformed theology.

There is a flagrant historical irony here, however.

More than fifty years back the political philosopher Michael Walzer published The Revolution of the Saints (Harvard University Press, 1965), a landmark study of how Calvinist theology gave rise to the first recognizably modern political radicals.

These were the English Puritans, who prosecuted a civil war, executed a king, and created what Walzer called “an unremitting determination to transform on the basis of an ideology the existing political and moral order.”

Calvinism’s appeal, Walzer showed, could be located precisely in its comprehensive character, its obsession with personal discipline, its transmutation of the saint into a militant freed from the constraints of the conventional order and subjected only to the demands of conscience and divine will.

That profile might just fit Cole Allen.

Allen was not a believer who took leave of his faith and turned violent. He simply retained the form of his Calvinist faith while exchanging its substance.

The objection-and-rebuttal style of his manifesto, the careful biblical exegesis of the “turn the other cheek” passage in the New Testament, the formal distinction he makes between private oppression and third-party suffering can be interpreted as marks of a strange breed of theologue rather than demagogue.

Allen’s trajectory is extreme in its endpoint, but not at all in its arc.

An ample chunk of data underscores the scale of outmigration among American youth from evangelical Christianity, and but the political valences of that trend vary considerably by denomination, sect, or tradition.

Lumping them all together, at the same time, offers a warped and misleading picture.

The Pew Religious Landscape Survey of 2023-24 found that only 46% of adults aged 18-24 identify as Christian in comparison with 80% of those 65 and older — a gap of 34 percentage points, consisting perhaps in the most dramatic intergenerational religious shift in the entirety of American history.

Only 25% of the Gen Z adults attend religious services at least monthly. The share of Americans identifying as Christian has fallen from 78% in 2007 to roughly 62% in 2024.

Among Americans who regard themselves as liberal or “progressive” the percentage has dropped from 62% to 37%.

A 2026 PRRI study found that religious affiliation overall for young women has declined so sharply that the traditional gender gap has effectively closed: 57% of young women now claim a religious identity, virtually identical to 58% of young men.

But these aggregate numbers obscure a crucial internal distinction. Different evangelical traditions are losing their young people for different reasons at different rates and with very different political consequences.

The American Worldview Inventory 2024 found that only a third of self-designated evangelicals currently possess a coherent biblical worldview. Yet the psychological anatomy of the habitué of “that “old time religion” persists.

Calvinists who depart from their faith rarely drift into any sort of vague spirituality but carry with them the hardshell architecture of their convictions into a new edifice and rebuild with equal intensity.

Baptists and Pentecostals do not necessary pursue the same line of flight, but their paths of development are similar.

The broader generational overview muddies things even further.

A Johns Hopkins survey of 4,500 respondents conducted in mid-2025 determined that young Americans express deeper dissatisfaction with how the political system functions than any older cohort . They trust parties less than ever with a deep-seated belief that the system requires radical change and appear more open to extreme measures, even on rare occasion a resort to political violence, than their elders.

Those who have made a clear break with their family faith legacies are apt to feel much the same way about the religious establishment as well.

A significant subset of Gen Z, the data suggests, are processing the concurrent loss of both institutional religious and political trust with no adequate framework to put in its place.

Tim Whitaker, founder of The New Evangelicals (TNE), offers an instructive case study in how this transit typically unfolds at a safe civic distance from anything resembling violence.

Whitaker came out of a community he describes as “John MacArthur-esque” Calvinism — rigorous, predestinarian, doctrinally uncompromising — and built a politically progressive Christian platform with 323,000 followers by applying that same tenacity to his own peculiar style of “deconstruction” of conservative evangelicalism.

Whitaker has been quite candid about the danger inherent in what he helps facilitate, which is the tendency, he warns, for people leaving the “basement” of religious fundamentalism to stride straight into the next room and manufacture an equally rigid progressive fundamentalism, one that draws tightly the same “heresy” red lines and the same contempt for those who aren’t in the same space.

But Whitaker himself has at times fanned the flames of political animosity among ex-vangelicals, even if he is fairly explicit in rejecting violence.

I myself tangled with him repeatedly when he had an account on x.com because of what I perceived as his over-the-top polemics that seemed to be tarring virtually all evangelicals as heinous “Christian nationalists”, a slippery, sleazy, and largely meaningless expression that has been weaponized by the left in recent years against religious conservatives of multiple, diverse stripes.

TNE’s Facebook current page trumpets that it is all about “exposing Christian nationalism”.

Many of his detractors wonder if he needs the kind of anger-management that he prescribes for all those “Christian nationalists” out there.

Whitaker himself has been accused of “rage-fueled” driving by a female media contractor in 2024 and a subsequent effort to intimidate a journalist who wrote about the incident.

Whitaker and TNE continue to downplay the matter while insisting the facts have been misconstrued.

All things considered, anger has useful political purposes in the purview of TNE.

“Don’t let anyone convince you your anger isn’t valid”, a post on behalf of TNE on the progressive social media app Bluesky declared recently. “Righteous anger is what changed the world”.

Indeed, TNE is vacuuming up all that anger to herd together young people for a high-noonish face-off with the political right in America by using rhetoric that smacks of the standardized messaging of the secular left.

Adding one more dog and pony performance to the three-ring circus of anti-Trump agitation in the streets of America, TNE is about to raise the curtain on what it terms “TNE Action”.

The TNE website states:

TNE Action is your hub for putting faith into action. Dismantling Christian Nationalism and building a more just, inclusive society requires more than TNE Action is your hub for putting faith into action. Dismantling Christian Nationalism and building a more just, inclusive society requires more than conversation - it requires collective movement. TNE Action equips, connects, and mobilizes you to stand up for your neighbors and advocate for real change.d up for your neighbors and advocate for real change.

The secular clerisy overseeing American public education from kindergarten to graduate school, especially since the start of this decade, has methodically instilled in its charges the moral mantra of “building a more just, inclusive society”.

In Allen’s mind it was necessary to do what no one had previously dared to do.

Allen’s former classmate put it with unwitting exactitude: “The idea of doing what he felt to be his duty religiously and morally, regardless of personal consequences — yes, that does seem to be in character.”

Such a bold gesture to the degree that Allen thought he had to carry it out with the aim of being true to his exacting — and perchance vengeful — God happens also to be a familiar temptation for Walzer’s revolutionary “saint” in every century in which he or she manifests.

The political channels through which we are at present decanting the tornadic force of a carefully curated militant mode of religious subjectivity were not designed to contain it.

There is neither holy sacrament nor confession box to temper it, not to mention any mitigating theology of grace to intecede for the kind of draconian logic that infected the brain of a brilliant thirty-something true believer.

Allen had no doubt he was doing something truly righteous.

He had reasoned his way to the point of reckless abandon with his own brand of scholastic surety that his background had impressed upon him at length.

In Allen we have not one more iteration of what the famous political thinker Hannah Arendt in witnessing the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem dubbed the “banality of evil”.

Let us call it the benignity of evil instead.

That is what makes Allen so utterly terrifying, yet so timely.

And that is what should make everyone of us draw a deep breath and humbly pause whenever we seek to take one adamantine position with almost berserker affect against the perceived “enemy” in the midst of our truculent, hyperpolarized politics, or when we seduce ourselves to think that nothing less than a grandiose deed of sacral violence itself is categorically imperative regardless of the fallout.

How many Cole Allens are out there right now fermenting in the seasoned oaken barrels of “new wine” that suffice for our educational, cultural, and religious institutions, even as the casks themselves are cracking at the seams?

Hard to tell — regrettably.

Share

American higher education is in systemic free fall.

The numbers are alarming and unambiguous.

As a PBS news report warned last week, more than one fourth of private colleges are in danger of closure.

Postsecondary enrollment as a whole has dropped by 2.3 million students since 2010, largely because a severe downturn in the available supply of 18-year-olds since the Great Recession of 2008-09.

The percentage of high school graduates transitioning immediately to college from high school declined from 70% in 2016 to 61% today.

New visa issuances for international students paying full-tuition plummeted by almost 100,000 in 2025 alone, a 36% collapse in just one year.

Subscribe now

The financial scaffolding that keeps much of higher education intact is rapidly deteriorating.

Private nonprofit colleges now return more than half of every tuition dollar as institutional grants. The 56.3% discount rate for first-time full-time undergraduates in 2024–25 is at an all-time record.

Aggregate student loan debt climbed to $1.833 trillion among 42.8 million federal borrowers. At the same time. the price index for higher ed rose faster than the pace of consumer inflation this past year.

The pattern, virtually all experts agree, is unsustainable.

The knee-jerk response among university administrations has been to make across-the-board cuts, which for the most part have impacted traditional humanities and adjacent liberal-arts disciplines.

Such a response, while seemingly a no-brainer, turns out to be completely, counterproductive, key research shows.

The leading educational research and consulting firm EAB found that 67% of institutions making large indiscriminate cuts saw expenditures actually grow faster in the years that followed.

Indiscriminate budget slashing, they reasoned, undercuts both productive and unproductive outlays and sabotages institutional capacity to generate revenue. Not only does it injure employee morale, it also triggers enrollment shortfalls that push per-student costs up even further.

The more important finding is something faculty and staff, who routinely bear the brunt of financial crises when they arise, have known all along.

Between 1993 and 2021, full-time non-instructional staff at American degree-granting institutions grew by 93%. Full-time faculty grew by only 53%.

Administrative bloat, not faculty salaries, is the primary driver of the cost growth in higher education that has far outstripped inflation.

The research on educational quality points to a short and consistent set of inputs that effectively change learning outcomes. They include the frequency and quality of interaction between students and faculty, well-designed peer learning, timely feedback on student work, curriculum formatted to support active rather than passive engagement, and early warning systems for students showing symptoms of disengagement.

None of these inputs are intrinsically expensive. What expands cost — and by extension has contributed in a way that most American prefer to ignore — is the brick-and-mortar delivery infrastructure built around them, such as buildings, residential facilities, and of course housing for the bureaucracy itself.

One conspicuous and unspoken causal factor covertly and cozily closeted away throughout the financial puzzle palace of American post-secondary learning is the physical plant required to guarantee the increasingly outmoded norm of “campus life” itself.

Higher education harbors its own dirty little secret, namely that classroom utilization across American colleges and universities averages below 60%. Office space utilization comes in around 20%.

The most compelling and realistic strategy for paring student costs while preserving educational quality is a shift toward custom-designed online delivery.

The sticker price for a private nonprofit four-year residential education is $65,470 per year. More than $20,000 of that covers housing, food, transportation, and personal expenses — expenses that evaporate entirely for online learners.

At public institutions, a 120-credit online degree costs roughly $14,000 to $18,000 in total against $261,880 at a private residential institution.

These numbers highlight the most significant access opportunity in the history of American higher education.

There are 36.8 million Americans with some college and no credential. For the vast majority of them, the high price of traditional residential education has been the overshadowing barrier to degree completion.

But historic alternatives to residential learning, while more budget-friendly, have in recent years lost much of their allure.

The prevailing modality through which online learning has been implemented in American higher education is “asynchronous”, consisting of recorded lectures available on demand, discussion boards that accumulate posts without authentic conversation, assignments submitted into a digital void with feedback arriving days later, if at all.

It is the very format that has produced engagement deficits, isolation effects, and elevated dropout rates documented throughout the post-pandemic literature.

Attrition in asynchronous online programs runs between 20 and 50 percent, roughly twice the rate of face-to-face curriculum. The same research is consistent on the causes, including absence of any felt accountability to a learning community and the collapse of motivation that follows when a student is alone with a screen and no one notices whether they show up for class or not.

However, the romantic ideal of the residential college experience is not holding up very well either. The sense of belonging that the campus experience is supposed to curate is measurably on the downswing even among students who are physically attendant.

A CDC survey discovered that only 55% of students felt close to people at their institution in 2023, down from 62% in 2021. One in five Gen Z students now plans to live at home and commute instead of residing on campus.

A Gallup survey ascertained that the share of high school students expecting to earn a bachelor’s degree has careened downward from 72% in 2002 to 44% in 2022. Among first-generation students the numbers plunged from 60% to 33%.

The generation for whom higher education has proclaimed it is reinventing itself happens to be the generation least convinced that the residential model performs to the degree it pretends.

What Gen Z does value is flexibility, career relevance, and appreciable interaction that is not merely transactional or expressive.

So-called “Zoomers” are digital natives who have lived their entire social lives through screens. The argument that physical co-presence is educationally irreplaceable does not persuade a generation that nurtured its closest friendships through social media platforms and spent two years of its formative learning period online during the pandemic.

What persuades Gen Z — and what the data increasingly confirms they are right to insist upon — is learning palpably connected to a conceivable future, which makes the circumscribed ivy-crusted campus less and less relevant.

Most institutions have made a critical mistake in presuming there are only two modalities in higher education.

There are actually three.

The third, or what has come to be known as “synchronous” online learning — live instruction conveyed through a variety of conferencing video platforms with sophisticated peer and faculty interaction in scheduled modules— is the one that the research most consistently recommends.

It is the one that most straightforwardly addresses the well-recognized failures of asynchronous delivery, although it is also the one that legacy post-secondary institutions have been most reluctant to invest in.

Synchronous online learning, or live instruction imparted through video platforms with structured peer and faculty interaction, is qualitatively distinct from other types of instruction.

Students and instructors occupy the same moment even when they cannot occupy the same space.

A study by Martin, Sun, Turk, and Ritzhaupt uncovered a statistically significant benefit regarding cognitive outcomes when it comes to synchronous online versus in-person means of instructional delivery.

The most rigorous real-world evidence comes from the system of California Community Colleges, where enrollment data from 2015 through 2022 showed that performance gaps between synchronous online and face-to-face student participation are on the whole significantly less than discrepancies between asynchronous online and in-person course offerings.

Finally, a landmark study by Francescucci and Rohani has demonstrated how purely synchronous online instruction produced student performance and engagement outcomes that are comparable to face-to-face modalities.

But solid educational research provides even more support for the thesis that colleges and universities need to retool dramatically in order to stay afloat with the next, imminent deluge of digital technics.

Artificial intelligence, as a central case in point, amplifies whatever educational advantages an institution might already flaunt. When deployed appropriately and consistently AI is largely a quality-enhancement instrument that can also generate cost savings.

An MDPI study published in 2025 found that AI-driven curriculum systems achieved course completion rates of 89.72% and retention rates of 91.44%, contrasting with substantially worse results for traditional models.

One European start-up company known as Shryn.ai is developing AI “avatars” of influential professors offering their “thinking” to the public at large, even when the real personae are not available for the public to pick their brains.

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative offers the most rigorous institutional case study. Students using OLI materials performed as well or better than traditional course students in half the time.

Another well-documented example is Georgia State University, whose GPS Advising system tracks over 40,000 students daily against 800 risk factors and intervenes before academic or financial problems become critical. Their system has yielded demonstrable graduation rate gains, particularly for first-generation students along with those eligible for Pell grants.

Moreover, the same students showed mensurable retention improvements among first-generation and Pell-eligible students, who disproportionately make up the “stop-out” population.

But AI cannot substitute for what is the interpersonal heart and soul of the higher learning. Human tutors achieved twice the learning benchmarks of AI agents in controlled experiments.

The implications for AI integration into the curriculum is precise. AI should be positioned as a demanding interlocutor requiring students to engage more rigorously with their own thinking, not as a placeholder for mindless task completion.

AI, whether it is introduced in industry or education, can never be conceived as a cost-cutting mechanism supplanting human discernment and ingenuity with impersonal algorithms.

But if applied in the correct manner and in a proper context it can boost the productivity of all dimensions of post-secondary learning and thus prove economically advantageous if inputs are ultimately correlated to outputs.

The way forward does not come down to a Hobson’s choice, usually defined as a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposition where leaving it is not really a possibility at all.

Indeed, it never has been such a choice.

New research from Rize Education surveying more than 1,500 students in January 2026 confirms what the enrollment data has been indicating for years.

Students refuse to be dragooned into opting between acquisition of the social capital and interpersonal connection that residential learning affords and the plain convenience of taking online courses.

They demand both.

And they are making enrollment decisions with that criterion in mind, turning up their noses at institutions still wedded to a one-or-the-other instructional paradigm.

What the future looks like is not a “hybrid” model in the reductive or additive sense — a sprinkling of online offerings to ease the burden for commuter students or those night owls who can’t bring themselves to get out of bed for an 8 am class.

What they seem to be longing for is a total makeover of what a university is, and what it is for.

In this vision the physical campus does not disappear, but contracts, intensifies, and translocates into pertinent spaces. It is sited according to its particular task or purpose rather than hugging the premises where it has been historically grounded.

That, in outline at least, is a vision nascent in a book of mine I published a quarter century ago.

In The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University (Routledge, 2000), I argued that the new online technologies did not constitute merely a delivery mechanism, but a force majeure that would compel a sweeping rethink of the university’s identity from the ground up.

The book was prescient in its expectation that the transformation would be structural, not cosmetic.

It was wrong, nevertheless, or at least it was premature, in underestimating the institutional inertia and self-dealing that would defer the reckoning all the way to the next generation, one which has now arrived.

What I did not foresee with sufficient clarity was the degree to which the “postmodern university” would not be a single institutional formation but a differentiated and imbricated ecology of what remains most valuable, trend-setting, and consequential for the next iteration of the world-compassing “knowledge society”.

The “iconic” residential college will persist into the next generation, catering to a clientele that can afford the full-blown immersive campus experience and whose social reproduction requires it.

But it will no longer serve as the normative prototype for the remainder of American higher education.

Like the European aristocracies of the late nineteenth century, it will percolate for a long while in the nostalgic wool-gathering of America’s power elite while growing profoundly irrelevant.

One would be foolish, if not downright idiotic, to proclaim the end of the university after the fashion of those “experts” in the early 1990s who proclaimed the “end of history”.

But we know the general template we’ve desperately clung to for all these years is no longer sustainable and has, in fact, seen its last years.

As Mark Twain famously quipped, “20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did”.

If we don’t act now, we may be more than simply disappointed.

We may be wandering and picking among the sad rubble of the much vaunted “knowledge economy” on which any affordable economic future desperately depends.

Share

Who’s afraid of AI?

Ironically, those who know the least about it.

And those who know the most about it!

There is a venerable tradition in American politics of glibly announcing the next super-sized threat to civilization before civilization has even had a chance to engage with what is supposed to be gravely menacing it.

Communism, fluoride in the water, rock and roll, the satanic backmasking of lyrics to popular songs, and — yes — the internet itself have all swapped turns as the rising beast of the impending apocalypse.

Subscribe now

Each time the most strident of voices themselves sounded among those with the least firsthand knowledge of the subject.

The advent of artificial intelligence, or AI, has in no way switched off this dynamic with the exception perhaps of the velocity at which misinformation itself casually travels around the globe.

On this occasion, however, there happens to be a curious twist.

The most alarmist voices are not only those who know little about AI. They also include some of those who know the most about it.

Both parties are for different reasons scaring the bejeebies out of a perplexed public that has little to no clue about the trajectory of AI and would rather revel in fantasy role-playing than take time for reasoned inquiry and deliberation.

As for the most prominent among the know-the-leastest please, dear readers, consider the case of Bernie Sanders, the curmudgeonly “Democratic socialist” independent senator from Vermont with his Alfred E. Newmanesque “what me worry?” slant toward public spending and the national debt together with his “make the fat cats pay for all that in perpetuity” plan to enforce fiscal discipline at the national level.

Just last week Sanders published a Wall Street Journal op-ed bruiting a subtitle designed to terrify the truly most clueless that AI is “a threat to everything the American people hold dear.”

Sanders argued that the AI revolution is being boostered by billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who are investing enormous sums not to improve life for working families but to further to aggrandize themselves by flaunting their own obscene wealth and political puissance.

Of course, even if Elon, Jeff, and Zuck are conspicuously conspiring to pauperize each and every one of us, it has virtually nothing to do with either the promise or perils of AI.

Sanders has spent his entire career inciting the laboring class against the asset class. He could have said the same thing about the railroad, the telephone, and even the transistor.

And let’s not forget Kelly McKinney, the former deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, who authored his own jeremiad in The Hill warning us about a crushing tidal wave of job destruction that AI is poised to unleash.

McKinney’s framing mirrors his background in disaster management. He lays out a useful mental model for hurricanes with his observation that “people do not respond to vague warnings”, which hardly suffices, however, for predictions about intricate and congolmerate economic changes over many decades in which new technologies will simultaneously eliminate and generate particular kinds of jobs.

In his opinion article McKinney neglects to examine the actual evidence on AI and labor markets. He treats the most horrendous predictions as established fact.

But what do the know-nothings know when the know-everythings seem to know — well, not much it turns out?

Enter stage right Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic and the most technically precocious among princely, pre-eminent poobahs when it comes to artificial intelligence. His Einsteinian comprehension of scaling laws, capability curves, and principles of market diffusion remains unsurpassed.

Yet Amodei has a (bad) habit of making public pronouncements that glissade from applause-worthy technical genius, as manifest in Anthropic’s own success, into eyebrow-raising, if not cringe-worthy, woo-wooish episodes of occult conjecture — for instance, his much publicized suggestion that AI systems may be self-conscious and sentient, or at least approaching that capability.

Anthropic has allowed its Claude models to publish “reflections” on its own Substack. Amodei is quoted warning of a “tsunami” of AI disruption and claiming that AI systems are on the verge of “reaching human-level intelligence”, or what in AI parlance is known as “the singularity”.

Amodei’s critics counter that Amodei is merely going off the rails in doing what human beings naturally do with pets, boats, cars, and power tools, namely, wallowing in anthropomorphism.

As NPR host Tanya Mosley in a rousing panel discussion with sundry AI experts asked dryly, “it’s just software, right?”

The problem is that nobody — not Amodei, not the brainiest of the cognitive psychology braintrust — actually knows what sentience is.

The distinguished philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness” in 1995, defined the problem as one of why and how any physical system might give rise to subjective experience in the first place. Chalmers tells us that sentience itself is an age-old conundrum that theorists in the last two millennia have spectacularly failed to resolve.

As the author of the article “Consciousness” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states clearly, such a question remains, not just among philosopher, wide open.

Even a complete functional description of a given system, which philosophers tell us must specify everything it is supposed to do, such as how it processes information or how it reacts to stimuli, cannot under any circumstances infer whether the system itself has any inner experience at all.

A 2024 survey in Acta Analytica by philosopher Tobias Wagner-Altendorf minced few words in profiling the real issue.

While empirical neuroscience has made major strides, according to the survey, in mapping the correlates of conscious states, philosophical progress concerning the “hard problem” has been “much less pronounced.”

Chalmers himself was overly optimistic, Wagner-Altendorf insists, in predicting that advances in scientific theory itself would eventually crack the code of consciousness.

Cognitive theory as a whole sports more than three hundred competing prototypes that purport to explain consciousness, none of which commands even a remote consensus.

We do not know, in point of fact, what consciousness is, or where it comes from. We do not know the necessary and sufficient conditions for it to exist at all.

Given this mind-boggling uncertainty about what sentience is even in the biological forms with we are most familiar — that is, ourselves — the confidence with which AI developers speak of “machine consciousness” is to be taken with a humungous grain of salt.

A review paper in PhilPapers by multiple authors notes that “conversations on AI sentience can risk ambiguity without distinguishing the sense of ‘sentience’ involved,” and that “many believe that questions involving AI consciousness cannot be fully understood, much less answered, except by considering particular theories of consciousness.”

Metaphysics aside, we need to investigate the even more sinister AI boogabear that the tech titans are touting about smart machines banishing smart human beings from the labor market. The picture, in fact, happens to be far more convoluted than the catastrophists or the pollyannas are willing to admit.

A benchmark MIT study published last week traces a much needed factual baseline with rare precision.

According to the report, present AI systems are capable already of taking over tasks associated with roughly 11.7 percent of the U.S. labor market. At the same time, that affects approximately 151 million workers with about $1.2 trillion in wages — a hefty and sizable number.

Nonetheless, the research also finds that we are several years away from AI achieving high-value success across task categories, which implies that workers may have more time to adapt than the most disturbing headlines entail.

The research also shows that companies adopting AI see substantial gains in revenue, profits, and employment with that growth translating into net job creation. Ergo, contra Sanders, it is apparent that AI is not merely a wealth extraction mechanism.

Much like prior technological revolutions, AI appears to be disrupting some sectors of the economy while enhancing others, eliminating certain categories of work while creating demand for new forms of it.

A Brookings Institution report published this week further sharpens the picture.

The Brookings data identifies over 15 million workers without four-year degrees in jobs that are highly exposed to AI. Akmost 11 million of these jobs are in “Gateway” occupations, which that have historically enabled workers to acquire new skills and transition to higher-wage positions.

According to Brookings, AI threatens to erode the pathways workers use to climb from low to higher-wage work, nearly half of which are highly exposed to AI disruption. The magnitude of the threat demands targeted intervention in specific labor-market pathways, investment in reskilling and credential portability, and careful monitoring of how AI adoption alters hiring patterns at ground level.

But it does not militate toward Sanders’ proposed “robot tax” on all corporations that replace workers with machines, which would penalize the very productivity gains which MIT and Brookings show lead to omnibus employment growth.

Research by David Autor and his colleagues using census data demonstrates that 60 percent of workers in 2022 were employed in occupations that did not exist in 1940. Furthermore, the employment growth rate of 85 percent over the last 80 years was propelled by technological innovation.

Each technology innovation has over time been responsible for a net expansion of both economic prosperity and freedom from monotonous and exploitive work conditions. There is no reason to believe AI will be all that different, unless bad policy makes makes bad prophecy self-fulfilling.

Sanders, Amodei, and their ilk, unfortunately, have succeeded only in amplifying public fear in ways that serve their narrow ideological prejudices while jamming the thought waves for serious policy conversation.

Similarly, ill-informed popular mythologies propogated by self-serving public figures who are out of their academic league will discourage the very investments in safety research and equitable deployment that could make the transition to AI largely beneficial for the average working Joe and Jane.

Inevitably, these blowhards will culture the soil for less scrupulous actors, both foreign and domestic, to develop and deploy dangerous modalities of AI without the democratic accountability either either Sanders or Amodei demand.

Who’s afraid of AI?

None of us should really be afraid, even though we should remain ever vigilant — and naturally cautious.

We ought to remember the “famous last words” of Thomas Watson, CEO and founder of IBM, who said with all conviction: ““I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Or those of astronomer Clifford Stoll in a 1995 interview when he boldly declared that “the internet is just a fad”.

Even Amodei, one of the godfathers of AI himself, may have to eat one day his own (famous last) words.

Share

The Iran war has accomplished something that three decades of factious scholarship, armchair punditry, and the fever dreams of foreign policy rainmakers have managed to conceal.

It has accelerated in real time and with spectacular brutality the collapse of the Western world’s foundational myth of the post-Cold War era — namely, the grand illusion of a relatively concordant world interconnected through commerce, social exchange, and digital communications.

That myth — let us call it the globalist wager — has long held that economic integration and reciprocal reliance on advanced technologies would inexorably chip away at the ancient enmities of religion, culture, and civilization.

Trade would secure what diplomacy and military force had failed to make happen. The internet would magically conjure what missionaries and cultural ambassadors had been unsuccessful in achieving.

In short, we would finally witness a new age of flourishing among the crème de la crème of humanity’s benefactors without the unseemly and shameful legacy of empire, colonialism, and warmongering.

Subscribe now

History, the celebrated political thinker Francis Fukuyama declared in 1992, was effectively over. Liberal democracy and market capitalism had won, and the remaining holdouts — Iran, Russia, China — would in due time slipside along with the rest of the world into a glorious secular confluence of material interests and ambitions.

Of course, the opposite has happened.

The “logic” of the world market has neither defanged nor domesticated radical Islam.

As September 11, 2001 drove home and October 7, 2023 painfully reminded us, radical Islam has leveraged the very communications nodes and linkages, not to mention the ever metastasizing “dark web” of off-the-books international finance, that globalization in the now defunct Fukuyama fantasy was destined to nurture.

The famed British historian Arnold Toynbee devoted much of his career to arguing that religion rather then economics, technology, or politics is the real motive force in world history.

In his monumental 12-volume work A Study of History Toynbee argued that civilizations are the vehicles through which humanity produces its “higher religions” — the rich, ancient heritages of transcendental insight and aspiration that are the most genuine and durable products of civilization.

Writing in 1955 Toynbee stated plainly: “religion has come, once again, to take the central place in my picture of the Universe.”

The mainstream secular academy dismissed this sentiment as mystical confabulation. Toynbee, nevertheless, was ahead of the evidence.

What we are witnessing now is not, however, a genial “Dialogue Among Civilizations”, a sanguine UN-sponsored vision of 2001 made public right after the World Trade Center disaster and ironically championed by then-Iranian president Seyed Mohammad Khatami, whereby the major religious traditions of the world would ennoble and come to understand each other through respectful conversation and collaboration.

Rather we are confronted with something far more termagant, more disorienting.

A quarter century after 9/11 we must come around to acknowledge that we are indeed caught up in what Samuel Huntington termed the clash of civilizations, the idea that future conflict after the Cold War would be driven less by beliefs or economics and more by cultural and religious identity, especially between large civilizational blocs.

Yet beyond beneath the “clash” something even stranger is percolating. The religious traditions implicated in the “clash” are themselves experiencing transformation.

They are simultaneously undergoing radicalization and in certain instances being hollowed out by the very processes that serve to configure them. The clash, once again, is not between stable, coherent faiths.

It is a war that is producing novel and even mutant iterations of what the befuddled scholars of “comparative religions” would blandly and insouciantly refer to as the “sacred”.

The morphing during the 1979 Iranian Revolution of a quietist, sectarian, and largely apolitical Shi’a Islam into a militarized quasi-totalitarian imperial state apparatus is an early and, at least today, quite consequential example of this wider phenomenon.

The co-opting of deeply embedded and venerated forms of religious practice by identity and tribalistic politics, as Matthew Schmitz describes in a recent op-ed for The Washington Post, is just the latest illustration du jour.

The Western cognoscenti continues to operate on the lazy assumption that religion is nought but a contingent variable to everything that is swirling across our current line of vision.

They are simply the blind stumbling after the blind.

The intellectual lethargy of the early 1990s was in retrospect breathtaking in both its presumption and its naivety. It is captured in an (in)famous remark by the Polish-British philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

The world…[is] starting to resemble a gigantic mall in which religion has become just one more stall where brisk sales of meaning are conducted, and where the customers are allowed to roam around freely, picking and choosing, trying on and discarding, with no obligation to buy or to stay faithful to their choices.

No single book captured this mood of the “global citizen” as mall rat more perfectly — or more embarrassingly — than Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005).

The New York Times columnist argued that the convergence of the internet, outsourcing, and open supply chains had “flattened” the world while dissolving the old hierarchies of geography, culture, and national difference into one level competitive plain on which anyone, anywhere, could plug in and prosper.

The World is Flat was a book-length paen to the proposition that economic and technological forces were not merely reshaping the world but finishing it with a curtain-dropping flourish at “the end of history”.

Flamboyantly subtitling his book “A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”, which was just dawning, Friedman gushed that globalization would iron out effectively the very last wrinkles of civilizational difference.

His metaphor was arresting, and the book turned out to be a runaway best-seller.

But the twenty-first century didn’t exactly turn out as Friedman envisaged. Two years after publication the American housing market collapsed and we spiralled into the Great Recession.

It was not merely the “end” of the “end of history”. It was the beginning of a new and violent “time of troubles” in history, to invoke Toynbee’s terminology.

China had been welcomed into the WTO in 2001 on the theory that economic liberalization would invariably lead to democratization.

Iran was engaged, sanctioned, and engaged once more on the smarmy premise that pressure and incentive would bend its brand of “Islamo-fascism” toward a rational interest style of political pragmatism.

Russia was treated as a contentious but ultimately pliable great power whose residual resentments would dissipate as its GDP increased.

Such considerations were not only tactical. They were metaphysical in scope.

They hinged on the secularist self-delusion that religious and civilizational values are in the last analysis fungible, if not negotiable.

The bankruptcy of the “end of history” hypothesis stems at its root from two unexamined “first principles” of geopolitics, as Raphael Dosson has underscored.

The first was that liberal democracy would propagate — and thrive — both organically and universally. The second was that liberalism per se would be embraced as the cosmopolitan framework for all moral and political calculations.

Neither proved to be the case.

China adopted market capitalism without democratic governance, demonstrating that, in contrast with the conventional wisdom of the period, the two are not necessarily joined at the hip with each other.

Iran and Russia doubled down on civilizational chauvinism precisely as their economic assimilation into the Western sphere of influence advanced.

As for Western civilization as whole, it began to fracture and unwind internally as a consequence of deepening self-doubt, promoted and popularized by its own touted intelligentsia, about the scandalous mismatch between what it had practiced and preached during its historic rise to global eminence.

As James Hankins put it in a 2019 tome chronicling this misadventure:

The West has come to doubt its own civilizational inheritance because of the corrosive effects of its own success in propagating the critical spirit, the spirit of free inquiry and self-criticism that is the hallmark of its civilization. This spirit has led to the exposure and widespread dissemination of knowledge about the West’s legacy of slavery, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, which were integral to its rise to global dominance. The Renaissance humanists themselves, in recovering the classical past, inadvertently sowed the seeds of this self-doubt by revealing the contradictions between the ideals of liberty and virtue they admired and the brutal realities of empire and servitude that made Western prosperity possible. Today, this internal critique has intensified, leading to a kind of civilizational masochism where the West questions its legitimacy, viewing its achievements as tainted by original sins of oppression.

Huntington foresaw the crisis in the near term, even though he was maligned considerably.

Huntington grasped what the globalists, whose covert agenda was always downplaying the role of the West, could not bring themselves to admit — that religion, and the moral infrastructure of human sensibility it anchored in concrete, would be the fundamental source of future turmoil as well as the sole path forward.

“Islam has bloody borders,” Huntington wrote, as of course does Christianity.

And those borders are blood-spattered precisely because what is at stake is not consumer nirvana, “affordability” — as the latest pop political mantra runs — or even AI-driven job discplacement, but the meaning, purpose, and the proper ordering of human existence.

As Nils Bilman has observed in an essay in Foreign Policy, until very late in the historical drama did anyone ever presuppose otherwise. Perhaps our present moment, according to Bilman, is most appropriately conceived therefore as “the revenge of Huntington.”

The bequest of the modern West radiates from the value proposition that individual autonomy, informed self-governance, and the separation of religion from public life are “self-evident”, as Thomas Jefferson would have phrased it.

The Islamic Republic of Iran in deference to its own customary reading of the Qur’an has all along fabricated its institutional architecture on the equally self-certifying principle that God’s sovereignty is total, that divine law is the only legitimate scaffolding for social order, and that the secular West is not merely politically obtuse but cosmically rebellious.

Putinism in Russia fuses Orthodox Christian identity with imperial revanchism and an abiding conviction that the liberal West’s cultural exports carry within themselves the pathogen of spiritual corruption in lieu of of the leaven of emancipation.

China under Xi holds up a Confucian cum Marxist model of civilization that explicitly rejects Western-style democracy as unsuited to its historical identity.

So far as the war against Iran is concerned, the theocracy believes, as Soror Shaiza notes in a jab at Fukuyama, it is “being asked to surrender its sovereignty, its ideology and ultimately its identity”.

Having evicted God from its own public philosophy, the secular West has largely lost the capacity to think seriously in those terms that remain “existential” for other governments and societies.

Which brings us to Toynbee’s “time of troubles”, a time that all the signs now point to.

Toynbee identified the “time of troubles” as a recurring pattern in the history of civilizations.

The “time of troubles” is a period of prolonged crisis during which the dominant minority loses its creative capacity, existing institutions fail to meet major historicalchallenges, and social disorder spreads.

In the crucible of chaos, Toynbee remarked, societies respond in one of several ways — “archaism”, or the attempt to monumentalize a romantic past; futurism, or “techno-utopian escape”; or the emergence of something authentically new and unparalled from the wreckage of the old.

Radical Islam in general, and the Islamic Republic in particular, are the clearest contemporary examples of Toynbee’s archaic response. Putinist Russia follows a close second.

But the liberal West itself increasingly resembles Toynbee’s dominant minority in late-stage crisis.

The Iran war, however it resolves itself militarily, will not in the long run make that much difference. It is instead intensely symptomatic of a crisis of civilization itself that will outlast any single administration, any single ceasefire, any single peace deal.

Toynbee believed that out of the flotsam and jetsam of disintegrating civilizations, a “universal church“ — his term, deliberately diffuse and non-sectarian — or a radical, new signature of global spirituality would materialize, perhaps unexpectedly and in a form or figuration no one can easily call up in the mind’s eye.

We are not at that stage — yet. We are now in a trajectory of apprehensive descent rather than exuberant ascent.

What arises from the vapors of ground zero will be the inheritance of Generation “Not Yet”. But impact is nearer than many acknowledge.

In the year 1966, in what became one of the most haunting philosophical obiter dicta of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger sat down for an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, which it published posthumously five days following his death in 1976.

Asked whether philosophy could still move the needle of world history, Heidegger replied:

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us.

What Heidegger discerned and diagnosed was the spiritual vacuity at the core of Western modernity.

“God is dead,” as Nietzsche’s “madman” had announced a century earlier, and no human ideology, theology, or political project could fill the void.

The god whose arrival might save us could not, he insisted, be summoned by any human petition or effort . We could, at best, ready ourselves for the deity’s appearance, or for the same god’s persistent — and perilous – absence.

The West now confronts adversaries for whom martyrdom in the service of their version of God is not a failure of rationality but its highest expression. This asymmetry applies not just to the battlefield but to the inner convictions of the belligerents.

The crisis of the moment is not merely that the West has turned away from God.

It is that every tradition currently embroiled in combat is fighting in the name of a god that is in Toynbee’s deepest sense a diminished god — a god who legitimates idolatrous authority rather than confronting it, a god of “collective egotism” (as the great “crisis theologian” Reinhold Niebuhr expressed it) rather than, in the words of John the Revelator, a God “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty”.

The question really comes down not to whether a god can save us, but what kind of God are we expecting to do so in the first place?

The only God who can save us is the God we barely discern, the God who waits to be made fully present amid the crackup of all our sanctimonious secular and conventional religious certainties, the God who makes no concession to our clamor for comfort as well as our refusal to commit to what we know needs to be done, or endure what is coming.

The God we barely discern can, in fact, be called upon if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Only that God can truly save us!

Share

Here’s something the posh professional polarizers on cable television, on social media, and in the marble corridors of the Senate dare not even whisper to you.

Polling data released by Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman of Schoen Cooperman Research suggests the American electorate, when it pauses long enough to do a thoughtful double take, is not nearly as suicidal as its own political leadership.

Their survey of more than 800 adults found that while the country remains split on the U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran - 44 percent supporting, 41 percent opposed - two-thirds believe Iran poses a serious, if not an existential, threat to national security.

Furthermore, 78 percent support dismantling Iran’s worldwide financing network of terrorists and proxy fighters., whereas 72 percent support destroying its nuclear program.

Subscribe now

We are not a country at war with itself over whether Iran is an outsize threat to ourselves. We are a nation neurotically conflicted concerning the semantics of our own divisive political rhetoric.

And that distinction is outsize as well!

We are not really arguing about whether the current Iran combat is a “war of choice”. We are quibbling merely about whether to call it one.

The war with Iran has never really been a war of choice. The struggle has been going on in fits and starts ever since November 4, 1979 when the newly empowered minions of an obscure religious figure with a Medieval mindset known as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stormed and ransacked the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 American hostages for 444 days.

The on-again and off-again conflict has been sustained over four decades by Iran arming, funding, training, and commandeering a broad-ranging, sleazy terrorist proxy circuitry from Beirut to Baghdad and Venezuela to Gaza.

In recent years the new “cold war” with Russia and China has meant that a more covert and sinister military “axis” has been waging its own stealth campaign against the West with Iran as its leading edge, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The initiative began with Russia supplying Iran with satellite intelligence and drone technology, while China made sure that maximum sanctions pressure would never quite be adequate.

As one insightful piece of news analysis this week made clear in chilling technical detail, Russia has been providing Iran with real-time feeds of American warship and aircraft locations - intel that allowed Iranian forces to achieve a targeting precision they could never have managed alone.

Moscow’s motive is quite transparent. Iran provided Russia with Shahed drones for deployment in Ukraine, and Putin is now returning the favor in spades.

China’s role is more clandestine, but arguably more congenital.

As the National Interest reported before the war began, Beijing had supplied Iran with sophisticated and advanced radar defenses, in particular a UHF-band system designed to reduce the effectiveness of radar-absorbent coatings on U.S. stealth aircraft.

The Caspian Post, meanwhile, has reported that Russia and Iran concluded a $589 million air-defense deal in December 2025. Russia began delivering 48 Su-35 fighter jets, equipped specifically with radars designed to detect stealth aircraft, as of early 2026.

Finally, CNN confirmed this week that U.S. intelligence indicates China is preparing to provide Iran with financial assistance, spare parts, and missile components.

In a word, Iran has not been fighting the United States alone. On the contrary, it has been aided and abetted by America’s own powerful sworn enemies.

The notion peddled by detractors such as Richard Haass that this was a “classic war of choice” relies on a curiously truncated timeline, one that conveniently overlooks how the Iranian regime itself declared war on “the Great Satan” in 1979 and has been prosecuting it through sundry feints and subterfuges the entire period.

The Defense Security Monitor documented that, following, the June 2025 “12-Day War,” Iran immediately sped up weapons negotiations with both Russia and China, even as international arms embargo provisions snapped back into force.

The Iranian regime all along has been racing to rearm for the next bout with the West.

The question was never whether a final reckoning would be upon us sooner than later. The “choice” was whether America would have a say in how and when the reckoning took place.

Otherwise, it would have to react to a catastrophe that was foisted upon us, as happened in December 1941, or in September 2001.

Alternate history game theory aside, what should be keeping every thoughtful American citizens awake at night, unfortunately, is the deep rot afflicting our political culture in the shadow of this war.

An article in the Washington Post on the reaction of young voters to the Iran War is a disturbing read, and not for the reasons the authors most likely intend.

Joshua Byers, a 26-year-old who voted for Trump in 2024 and now proclaims how he feels “betrayed,” also says he does not want to vote anymore.

A University of Chicago poll from December 2025 shows that approximately 6 in 10 young people have an “unfavorable” impression of both the Democratic and Republican parties. What we are watching is a controlled demolition of civic engagement in America among its youth.

Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump after a legendary, long-winded podcast interview, called the Iran war “so insane” this week and declared as well that Trump had “betrayed” his supporters.

Yet here is where the same peril becomes downright poisonous.

Extreme polarization in wartime is a strategic liability of the first order. Combined with political apathy, it can distill into an insidious sort of witch’s brew.

The Carnegie Endowment has compiled the most comprehensive global study of what happens when democracies reach what they term “pernicious” levels of polarization. The United States, Carnegie observes, is the only advanced Western democracy to have undergone such intense polarization during the last three quarters of a century.

The report concludes:

Reducing the threat of pernicious polarization to democracy requires deliberate, urgent action. Or… American democracy itself may cease to be.

We are, as the report phrases it, “in uncharted and very dangerous territory.”

Political scientist James Piazza’s peer-reviewed research, cited by the War Prevention Initiative, found that across 83 democracies, heightened polarization correlates straightaway with elevated levels of political violence.

Polarization, Piazza concludes, “makes politics more dangerous.”

In their landmark study Democracies at War Dan Reiter and Allan Stam contend that democracies tend to triumph in the end because their reliance on public consent prompts them to become embroiled only in those conflicts they have carefully considered at length. Their soldiers enter into battle with more pronounced personal motivation.

The corollary, however, is just as impactful. Lack of broad consent for fighting certain wars, especially when they are messy and protracted, saps the natural advantage democracies hold over authoritarian regimes.

As legal scholar Harold Hongju Koh has pointed out, a polarized Congress confronted with severe security threats has an unfortunate incentive to “acquiesce” to executive power rather than exercise responsible oversight, thus depleting governmental accountability and fostering the style of tribal media theater that we are now seeing play out in real time.

There is truly an “existential” dimension to the crisis.

America’s political dysfunction is not just simply devolving in a vacuum. Our own global adversaries, who have the most to gain from our domestic enmity, are in many instances not simply exacerbating, but manufacturing it.

A report from Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, shared with journalists this week, identified 62 social media accounts across X, Instagram, and Bluesky that are linked closely with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC accounts masqueraded as Scottish separatists, Irish nationalists, and Latina activists from Texas and California.

For months before the war, these same accounts seeded inflammatory content tailored to the pain points of specific political communities.

The moment Operation Epic Fury was launched the accounts tout ensemble pivoted to anti-war propaganda. The accounts alone generated nearly 60,000 original posts on X that were reshared thousands of times and potentially reaching millions of Americans.

As Clemson researcher Darren Linvill put it plainly: “Iran redirected its resources toward propaganda around the war, trying to make the war more painful for the United States.”

During the early January protests across the Institute for Strategic Dialogue tracked nearly 800 English-language posts from Iranian-linked accounts, over 200 that originated in Russia, and more than 300 from China.

The messages from these hundreds of accounts were coordinated around the single narrative the uprisings in Iran were indeed a CIA and Mossad joint operation, that the United States is doing “Israel’s dirty work,” and that regime critics are traitors to the Muslim world.

We need, therefore, to contemplate the full architecture of what is actually transpiring.

The strife involving Iran is as much an “information war” as it is a kinetic one. The preferred term among black operatives these days, of course, is “cognitive warfare”, which spells out what is really at issue.

We are in a battle for our minds, and the American electorate is the principal target.

Of course, as far as the anti-war trolls are concerned, there may be just about as many in our own back yard.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, pollster Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, former New York City councilman, sarcastically remark that within the American legacy media “only the bad news” is “fit to print”, and that “much of the news media seems determined to advance a [false] narrative that Mr. Trump is wrong about everything and that the U.S. is getting its clock cleaned by a powerful Iranian war machine that has successfully made the transition to new leadership”.

They opine:

Journalists have a right and a duty to report bad news and to question Pollyannaish reports from the U.S. government. But many seem to be going beyond that and rooting for America to lose—against an enemy that is the world’s biggest state sponsor of terror, that has killed thousands of unarmed protesters, and that stockpiled thousands of ballistic missiles while seeking nuclear weapons, which its rulers promised to use against the U.S. and Israel.

The “loyal” – and I use the term sarcastically - opposition for its part has largely chosen performance over substance, condemning the war without offering any serious framework for what a credible alternative would have looked like in a world where Iran was racing toward the nuclear threshold with Russian and Chinese technological support.

Taking into account the “big picture”, this war ultimately is not just about Iran. It is about the survival of even a flimsy semblance of democratic order in the face of a burgeoning and barbarous bloc of despotic behemoths.

The Persian Gulf is the contemporary battle front. Yet the musculature behind the actions of our adversaries is far more menacing than the conventional wisdom to which the cerebral reflexes of the residents of our present day political cloud cuckoo land can bend.

The young woman in the Washington Post focus group said she had come to believe the United States was “doing Israel’s dirty work.” That sentiment is precisely the narrative that Russian state media, Iranian IRGC propaganda memes, and Chinese diplomatic messaging have been spending billions to amplify.

It is also, as op-ed writers Michal Cotler-Wunsh and Nadav Steinman remark in The Washington Post, a screeching fire alarm that antisemitism, once an abhorrent bugabear of America’s elites, has now gone mainstream.

One does not need to be a conspiracy monger to make that point. Information environments affect us profoundly, as does the water we drink, the food we ingest, or the air we breathe. The same polarization eroding American civic commitment is being aggressively cultivated by adversaries who perceive it as a force multiplier more lethal than any missile.

It does not need to be dialed up, as it regrettably is nowadays, with all the round-the-clock slithery snark of our chattering classes.

The Schoen-Cooperman poll offers some hopeful signs. When Americans are actually informed about what the Islamic Republic has been doing all along, the atrocities it has perpetrated, or the evil which it has insinuated into the manifold of planetary body politics, a functional majority finds itself capable of coming to a striking consensus.

Seventy-eight percent are in favor of ending Iran’s terrorist financing. Seventy-two percent support eliminating its nuclear program. Fifty-nine percent support regime change.

Everyone hates war. War is not a video game, nor a Thursday night sports spectacle.

As William Tecumseh Sherman, author of the modern concept of total war, famously said:

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

He also – less famously – said:

War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

Democracies have lost wars not because their militaries were outgunned, but because their publics lost the will to sustain them. Democracies lose their will to sustain them because they can no longer distinguish between what is, and what is not, worth fighting for.

The crazed Iranian regime, its Russian patrons, and its Chinese enablers know this well. I suspect the American people know it, but extreme polarization reinforced by bots and partisan grandstanding has rendered serious debate about what we are fighting for untenable.

It is one thing to rebuke the Trump administration for not explaining the war and its objectives, but one also has to cynically ask if it would make any difference anyway.

The “fog” of war is not the most invidious obstacle to reasoned, even if heated, debate. It is the thick, choking mist that lowers in the constricted cerebra of our ideologically fuddled and narcissistically obtuse politicians and media mahatmas.

The emerging consensus apparent in the polling data is, despite the raging hailstorm of disinformation, rather encouraging.

The quandry now is whether in a time of escalating war with the creepiest of creeps from the Middle East, no matter how we ever got to this point, the appointed institutional guardians of the 250-year-old American republic are responsible enough to fulfill their duties, or whether they will scornfully celebrate as the Great American Experiment goes down in flames.

Share

On Saturday, February 28, 2026, the inexorable turned existential.

Trump stopped rattling and finally rolled the dice, and – as the hackneyed adage runs – the rest is history.

Or at least a history that is still wild and wide open, while it is still unraveling!

Since the bombs started raining down this past weekend, I’ve been thunderstruck myself by how the narrative on the part the anti-Trumpiest amid the crush of Anti-Trumpists has shifted noticeably in less than 72 hours.

As late as Epic Fury Eve the indeterminable burble among the condescending commentariat was loudly and consistently chicken-littleish.

Subscribe now

Now that it is not the sky but the villainous Iranian regime that seems to be crumbling, the OMG crew seems to be squalling about every imaginable doomscape their feverish basal ganglia can engender.

No matter with how much of a white heat is radiated from your hatred of Trump, you can’t really say even among the most ethically challenged within polite society that he somehow out-evils the Ayatollah.

So you need to keep your murmuring confined to what a mess his itchy trigger finger has made of our barricaded blue-statish redoubts.

Consider Heather Stewart writing in The Guardian on Sunday.

Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, with its puerile Pentagon nametag Operation Epic Fury, is another show of violent force from a bullish administration. Aside from unleashing fresh instability across the Middle East, the strikes add to the sense of a US operating with little regard for international law or global norms – as with Trump’s on-off tariff regime, and the attack on Venezuela. In the financial sphere, that is only likely to add weight to an incremental but historic shift away from the global dominance of the US currency and towards a more complex world that may be less to Washington’s liking.

Hmm. That’s interesting. According to CNN, the dollar rose the next day as a “safe haven” currency.

We’re also told we need to worry about the price of gas, inflation, the national debt, fewer missiles to aim at China whenever they launch Taiwan, etc.

However, the cavil that seems to come up the most is not that Trump started the war but that he has no “plan” to finish it, as if any triumphal hegemon in human history had some exhaustive, pre-approved design sketch to cap off the combat in which it found itself embroiled in the first place.

The persistent mantra among the President’s detractors that he launched a “war of choice”, as though any chief executive can call for military strikes with the same consumerist aplomb as some high school girl picks out her prom dress, is pure sophistry in its most elevated guise.

Most difficult choices are forced choices. That is, they come down to having to select between bad, worse, and worst.

So we need to ask ourselves this particular question: what if President Trump had not chosen to go to war on Saturday morning?

The ancillary question would be what it would be like to deal with an Iran six months from now that had restored from the war in June 2025 most, if not all, of its missile capabilities and had rebuilt, or come near to rebuilding, the infrastructure to manufacture nuclear weapons?

More importantly, what would have been the mentality of a leadership, which for 47 years had castigated the United States as “the Great Satan” and finally had the wherewithal to engage it militarily?

For the last decade the same critics have harped on whether American military action is wise. But they have strangely balked at inquiring what the Iranian clerics believe about their own unique and providential role since the 1979 revolution itself in bringing down what they have long branded as the most evil empire on earth.

Ironically, Iran’s Supreme Leader even excoriated the United States as worse than the Devil himself, whom Muslims call “Iblis”.

In a 2015 address to the Islamist faithful, Ali Khamenei declared:

…according to the Holy Quran, the only thing that Iblis can do is to tempt human beings and nothing more. He tempts and deceives people, but America kills, imposes sanctions and behaves in a hypocritical way as well as tempting and deceiving.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not in any palpable sense a nation that views itself as a conventional, sovereign international actor with rational interests. All along it has been a revolutionary theocracy preoccupied with its own divine and implacable mission, regardless of the costs.

In fact, one Iranian analyst, echoing former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has described it as “cause” rather than a country.

Moreover, Iran has never expected to defeat the United States straightforwardly on the battlefield. It has looked instead to outlast us, and it has harbored its own detailed and surprisingly strategic “plan” to accomplish its fanatical aims.

Writing in the National Review, Danielle Pletka traces the source of America’s botched assessment of the Islamic Republic’s intentions to the onset of the Iranian revolution in a 1978 cable in which American Ambassador William Sullivan naively described the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as “Gandhi-like.”

At the time UN Ambassador Andrew Young stoked the Carter administration’s own well-documented delusions with his chipper prediction that Khomeini would “be somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic.”

Forty-seven years later following 241 dead Marines in Beirut, 19 in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, and 17 documented IRGC plots on American soil, official Washington’s congenital fantasies about the mindset of the government in Tehran persist, especially now on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Both conservative and liberal pundits and policy analysts have doggedly treated the Iranians as adversaries with whom they can dicker and do business, all the while seeking to prod through incentives into acceptable behavior.

Every American administration since Carter has operated from this set of premises.

Every single one has allowed itself to be systematically hoodwinked.

It is the profound and unappeasable prejudices of the secular, post-Westphalian Western security establishment and its phalanxes of international relations “experts” that makes us perpetual dupes of the ayatollahs’ machinations.

The concept at the core of the foreign and domestic policy of the Islamic Republic is velayat-e faqih — the rule, or “guardianship”, of the Islamic jurist.

Iran is unique within the Islamic world because since at least the sixteenth century it has anchored and crafted its national identity through a minority – and what many Muslims regard as “heretical” – sect of Islam known as Shi-i, or “Shiism”.

The classical Shia position held that in the absence of the Hidden Imam - the Twelfth Imam who disappeared in 874 CE and whose return marks the End of Days - political authority was inherently illegitimate.

Yet in his 1970 treatise Islamic Government Ayatollah Khomeini insisted that a qualified jurist must actively govern in the Imam’s absence, exercising near-absolute political and religious authority, not merely over Iran, but ultimately over the entire Muslim world.

As Khomeini wrote, the scholars “should join hands” to “establish a just government in the world.”

Reader take note.

Not in Iran. In the world.

Khomeini’s transnational ambition is not incidental to the worldview. In Paris on February 26, 1979, just days before his triumphal return to Tehran, Khomeini told a Kuwaiti delegation:

I hope that all Islamic nations who have been disintegrated and take opposite sides to each other due to the propaganda of foreigners, wake up and be with each other and build one great Islamic state, one state under the flag of ‘No god but Allah,’ and this state dominate the whole world.

Khomeini was not indulging in revolutionary bluster. His vision is encoded in the founding documents of the Islamic Republic itself.

The preamble to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic proclaims that the Revolution was “a movement aimed at the triumph of all the mustad’afun [the oppressed] over the mustakbirun [the arrogant]”. Quoting the Qur’an 21:92, it adds that the Constitution “provides the necessary basis for ensuring the continuation of the Revolution at home and abroad,” striving “to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community”.

The section concerning Iran’s armed forces is even more explicit. It charges the IRGC not only with guarding Iran’s borders but with “fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world.”

Article 154 closes the architecture for the ideology of the Islamic Republic, which “supports the rightful struggle of the oppressed people against their oppressors anywhere in the world.”

It is no accident that the secular West in America has often joined in a strange nexus with Islamist radicals and why Khomeini’s lifelong campaign to annihilate Israel has become its own cause célèbre in recent years among the former.

When Tehran refers to America as the “Great Satan” - Shaytan al-Akbar - it is expressing a specific theological type of anathematization, not a political grievance.

Only this distinctive style of odium theologicum on the part of Iran’s leadership can shed light on what has bewitched every American administration for at minimum two generations.

Why, confronted with overwhelming military power, crushing sanctions, 30,000 of its own citizens butchered in the streets, and 60 percent inflation ravaging its economy, does the regime still refuse to make any kind of deal that would have prevented what finally came down on February 28?

The answer is simple. Even the most tepid gesture of capitulation in the minds of Iran’s mullahs would be equivalent to apostasy.

In January 1988 Khomeini asserted that advancement of the Islamic state outranked “all secondary ordinances” of Islam, including “prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage.”

The struggle against the Great Satan, according to Khomeini, was to be considered more obligatory than the Hajj, or pilgrimage. Making a genuine, binding deal with the Great Satan does not count simply as a political miscalculation. It is an unpardonable sin.

How does the regime believe it will ultimately prevail? Merely by surviving long enough for history to turn.

The nuclear program has always served as the ganglion of this game plan. A nuclear deterrent permanently insulates the regime from decapitation, allows the proxy network to operate with impunity, and validates the theological meme that God has protected the Islamic Republic through every trial and tribulation.

Khomeini himself framed the ultimate outcome in terms that clarify what success looks like:

Either we shake one another’s hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours.

The June 2025 air assaults by Israel and the United States badly damaged Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” and set back the nuclear program. But Iran’s standardized response documented through February 2026 has been entirely consistent with its long-game doctrine - burrow deeper, rebuild covertly, engage diplomatically as a tactical cover, and wait for American attention to shift elsewhere.

But has remained paramount all along in Iran’s diplomatic dance with its sworn enemy is a little known and far less understood pillar of Shia Islam known as taqiyyah - the principle of religiously sanctioned deception when the community faces existential threat.

The great Shia jurists treated it not as regrettable compromise but as a positive religious duty when survival required it. In the context of Iran’s nuclear diplomacy, every negotiation has been a potential exercise in taqiyyah — not a good-faith effort to resolve differences, but a feint to buy time.

The Algiers Accords of 1981 between the U.S. and Iran freed the hostages and unfroze $8 billion in Iranian assets. Within two years, Iranian-directed proxies bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut.

In 2003 Iran suspended its formal nuclear weapons program and simultaneously advanced the enrichment infrastructure the program depended on.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) provided Iran with $150 billion in sanctions relief. Iran used the breathing room to expand centrifuge knowledge, missile capabilities, and its proxy network.

When Trump withdrew in 2018 Iran resumed enrichment at a pace that compressed its breakout time to approximately one week before last year’s strikes.

Each episode has followed the same pattern. Taqiyyah is not a character defect of individual Iranian negotiators. It is a theologically grounded policy instrument - holy concealment of intentions in service of ultimate victory.

Epic Fury may not, as its proponents hope, resolve the half-century Iranian conundrum in a “decisive” manner any more than Midnight Hammer in June 2025 put to rest the nuclear issue.

But it has never been a matter in the last 47 years of whether we will have to go to war with Iran. It has consistently remained a question of when.

Iranian state Shiism has since the very beginning envisioned an apocalyptic showdown with the Great Satan.

Would we have been better off to let the mass murderers of 30,000 or more Iranian citizens to stipulate the rules of engagement in the relative near term?

The outcome might have instead been 30,000 Americans as well.

Share

No analyst not anywhere within our solar system could have predicted, according to the Jerusalem Post, that the Iran melodrama would still be heading toward climax as late as February 2026.

Yet here we are, on the knife edge of what could be the most consequential military decision of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The clock is running out on diplomacy. Two aircraft carrier strike groups are now positioned in the Persian Gulf. F-22s and F-35s have been repositioned.

The armada is in place, and if war comes, Americans must realize that the battlefield will not be confined to the Middle East.

The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that the Pentagon has assembled its largest concentration of airpower in the Middle East since the 2003 Iraq invasion, with options stacked on Trump’s desk ranging from a limited strike on nuclear and missile facilities to a broad campaign designed to eliminate scores of Iranian leaders and topple the government tout d’un coup.

CNN claimed the White House has been briefed, and a military could well-nigh be imminent. The Post’s Yonah Jeremy Bob laid out four possible timing windows today and surmised that sooner rather than later as the most probably scenario, given the monumental costs of keeping this armada deployed, not to mention Trump’s congenital impatience with protracted standoffs.

Subscribe now

Of course, the dice have not yet been cast, even though they soon will be. And when Trump rolls the dice, what will matter most to the American public is not who wins the air war over Iranian skies.

The question instead will be - what happens to us over here?

As pundits and news commentators have reminded us ad nauseum in passing weeks, the Iranian regime seems cornered, and has turned into a snarling, desperate, and unpredictable wild brute.

The June 2025 Israeli-American strikes destroyed roughly two-thirds of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers and between a third and half of its pre-war missile arsenal. Key IRGC commanders are dead, including the IRGC intelligence chief and his deputy.

Iran’s air defense network was shredded, and Hezbollah’s second-strike capability in Lebanon was neutralized. The Islamic Republic that would confront a second American blitz is considerably weaker than the one from last summer.

Nevertheless, Iran is rebuilding its arms capacity at an extraordinary pace, and it is doing so much more smartly and with real finesse.

Satellite imagery from February 2026 shows fresh concrete hardening tunnel entrances at Natanz. At its Parchin military complex Iran has completed a concrete sarcophagus around a nuclear facility and is now burying it beneath ground.

Iranian engineers are boring 800 meters into granite a new facility known as “Pickaxe Mountain” south of Natanz at a depth they hope will defeat the GBU-57 bunker-buster that B-2 bombers dropped during Operation Midnight Hammer.

Meanwhile, the Alma Research Center estimated this week that Iran’s regime has massacred over 30,000 of its own citizens since the December 2025 protests begin, an historically unprecedented number that President Trump himself cited.

The regime is fast reconstituting its own strike capabilities and slaughtering its own citizens in the same breath, because it – rightfully - anticipates that the next strike may be threaten not just its nuclear program, but at its very survival.

The prospect of regime decapitation is what transforms the impending conflict from a limited military exchange into a likely fuse to ignite full-scale war. According to the Washington Institute, Trump has reportedly asked his generals for “decisive” military options, and that the administration may be contemplating taking out Supreme Leader Khamenei himself, reading from the same script as in Venezuela.

If that option is indeed implemented, Iran’s response will not be calibrated, but totally unconstrained. The Middle East Institute estimated this week that Iranian commanders are openly discussing what can be dubbed a “madman strategy”.

Such a scenario is not in any fashion tantamount to attempting to defeat the United States militarily.

On the contrary, it seeks to regionalize any conflict immediately at its outset. It would, for example, encompass striking U.S. bases across Iraq, Qatar, and the Gulf, jeopardizing Gulf oil infrastructure, closing or mining the Strait of Hormuz, and activating every proxy network still operational across the Middle East.

Khamenei himself has warned: “If you start a war, it will become a regional war.” Iran still has short-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting every U.S. installation in the Persian Gulf, and it used them against al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar as recently as June 2025.

Thirty to forty thousand American troops are currently stationed across eight or nine facilities in that region, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged this week. Every one of them is inside Iran’s strike radius.

We also have to take seriously the knock-on impact with respect to global oil markets. Notwithstanding the likely Houthi disruption of the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea, Iran’s ability to menace ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz provides Tehran with an economic backsword with truly global reach.

A mining operation or naval interdiction campaign in the Gulf constitutes an effective asymmetric surrogate for any type of kinetic military engagement. Iran can easily make shipping insurance premiums so catastrophically costly that tanker traffic grinds to a halt.

An oil shock of that magnitude would pummel American consumers as well as European and Asian allies simultaneously, rendering political support for a prolonged military campaign extremely difficult to maintain. As one commentator has put it succinctly, “the next war might start not in downtown Tehran, but in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.”

What makes full-scale war more likely than not is the ambiguity of Trump’s own calculations. If a U.S. strike is restricted to nuclear facilities, missile launchers, or air defense nodes, Iran has a strong incentive to respond proportionally, absorb the damage, and return to the negotiating table from a position of demonstrated resolve, as was the case last summer.

But if Trump’s authentic objective, as a New York Times article has indicated, is regime change, then the calculation for the mullahs themselves becomes “existential”, and existential calculations tend to yield existential responses.

If Tehran believes its very existence is at stake, it may very well export such a war to the American homeland, an alternative future the mainstream media is decidedly, albeit perhaps for good reason, underplaying.

If anyone is actually paying attention, however, the possibility of Iranian retaliation in the guise of terrorist attacks on American soil has been formally assessed, authoritatively declared, and forecast through documented operational history that should be deeply unsettling to domestic security analysts, if not the public at large.

The Department of Homeland Security has already issued a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin advising that conflict with Iran has produced a “heightened threat environment in the United States.” According to the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, the FBI surged its monitoring of Iran-backed operatives before the strikes the past summer summer and pulled counterterrorism agents off immigration cases to restore focus on Iran.

The 2025 ODNI Annual Threat Assessment states that Iran “remains committed to its decade-long effort to develop surrogate networks inside the United States” and is actively seeking to target current and former U.S. officials as retaliation for the Soleimani killing. The West Point research facility documented at least 17 disrupted Iranian plots on U.S. soil in the past five years — a pace of approximately one foiled attack every three to four months.

The typical threat vector of foreign or domestic proxies as part of a chain of command launching pre-meditated operations in the aftermath of American military strikes on Iran becomes irrelevant in this particular context. Iran does not need to smuggle IRGC commandos across the southern border to carry out a domestic attack.

The Iranian regime already has what U.S. counterterrorism officials call a “homeland option”, consisting in a layered set of capabilities that includes Hezbollah cells with existing U.S. logistics networks, criminal surrogates recruited through cartel-linked organizations and organized crime cut-outs, and coerced assets within diaspora communities whose family members in Iran are held as effective hostages.

The U.S. Treasury department already fingered one Iranian narcotics trafficker in early 2024 specifically for running a network that recruited Canadian Hell’s Angels bikers to carry out assassinations inside the United States.

According to a Washington Institute podcast, a Hezbollah operative in Texas purchased 300 pounds of ammonium nitrate. Another conducted surveillance operations in New York and Canada.

In the near term, especially when IRGC leadership has been degraded by last summer’s strikes, the most likely domestic attack matrix is not a planned, sophisticated IRGC operation but something harder to detect and intercept - criminal proxies, or lone offenders inspired by Iranian state messaging to act with minimal coordination and maximum deniability.

And in the context of a full-scale war, in which Iranian state media and Quds Force-linked social media operations would immediately pivot to incitement of anyone anywhere to strike American targets, American officials, icons of American prestige and power.

The 17 disrupted plots underscore those bad actors law enforcement apprehended. The sticky question, which no official wants to answer publicly, is how many they didn’t.

None of the foregoing compels us to assert that war is inevitable, or that Iran will necessarily select the option of domestic terrorism over calibrated regional retaliation. Tehran is not suicidal, and grasps that a mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil would inevitably spur a reaction that liquidates the regime once and for all.

The deterrent effect of such an understanding remains substantial.

Yet that style of deterrence only applies to rational actors under normal circumstances. The situation today is far from normal.

The Islamic Republic in February 2026 is a regime has just slaughtered 30,000 of its own people, is having to cope with 60 percent inflation, and may be facing a leadership succession crisis if its Supreme Leader is killed or incapacitated. It is also scrambling to make its nuclear weapons program operational before Israel or the United States can bomb it to oblivion on the next occasion.

Rational-actor paradigms have a poor track record in exactly these sorts of conditions.

The Jerusalem Post is right that every analyst has been wrong so far about what has transpired to date in the ongoing Iran crisis. It is also correct in its wry observation that Iran is extraordinarily skilled at drawing out negotiations — and that Trump is truly and uncharacteristically torn toward multiple compass points.

Trump has hastened decision day with his own bruited red lines and deadlines. The Ramadan window closes March 19.

The dice are warming in Trump’s hands. Whenever they clatter upon the table, the reverberations will not peter out at the Persian Gulf.

They will be felt in Peoria, Portland, and Poughkeepsie as well.

Share

Forget about robots snatching away your prized white collar job.

That’s yesterday’s anxiety, the sort of AI panic you see recycled endlessly on cable news by consultants hawking their “future of work” Substack scribblings.

The real story, that is, the one that should be keeping university presidents, accreditation paper-pushers, and admissions directors up at night gulping Ambien like Tic-Tacs, is far more significant – and ominous.

Artificial intelligence isn’t primarily threatening jobs. It’s in the process of razing the entire higher education ecosystem that for generations has served as the chief gatekeeper and credentialing apparatus for professional employment.

Subscribe now

In other words, AI is poised to do to colleges and universities what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans.

Or the asteroid to the dinosaurs.

Let me explain, starting with what the data itself shows.

According to Microsoft’s 2025 analysis, approximately five million white-collar positions - management analysts, customer service representatives, sales engineers - face extinction as AI creates what some economists are calling “the greatest deflationary force in human history.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley warned that AI “will replace literally half of all white-collar workers.” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claimed it’s already bearing up to 50 percent of his company’s workload. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are harnessing AI to employ even fewer than they have currently.

This may or may not be overheated speculative futurism.

Barton Swaim, writing in the Wall Street Journal, compares AI alarmism to erstwhile climate change alarmism.

A confederation of specialists—climate scientists in one version, Silicon Valley geniuses in another—joins with liberal politicians and nonprofit heads to warn of an impending catastrophe. The only moral response to this new situation, these Olympians tell us, is to transfer authority over large parts of the economy to people like themselves. That they would favor such a transfer under any circumstances, with or without a coming disaster, doesn’t bother the mainstream press, which reports their predictions with credulity and fervor. Meanwhile ordinary people, lacking the specialized knowledge to draw their own conclusions, feel cowed into going along with it all.

At the same time, the Journal itself reports that America’s largest employers are paring white-collar positions “at an alarming rate.” Data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas show that U.S. employers announced 696,396 layoffs in just the first five months of 2025 - an 80 percent jump from the previous year.

But here’s the punchline, which our entire class of punchdrunk punditry seems not to get.

The problem isn’t that AI is going to plunder people’s livelihoods. The problem is that the entire machinery of higher education, which is designed to prepare people for those livelihoods, has become its own kind of dinosaur, and AI is the asteroid that’s about to strike and ensure its speedy extinction.

Let’s take a look at what the prevailing business model of higher education has evolved into over the previous half-century.

Universities are not predominantly in the business of educating students as they are churning out credentials – specimens of parchment that signal to employers that so-and-so sat through so-many semester hours of classes and coursework, all the while amassing sufficient debt to testify to their undying commitment to a career.

The business model was not developed by universities. It was forged and fine-tuned over the decades by employers themselves and their political enablers who pushed higher education in that direction from the outset.

As a recent analysis from the journal Frontiers in Education journal makes evident, three pillars have long sustained higher education - information transmission through lectures, standardized assessments as demonstration of mastery, and degrees as their monopoly on the legitimation that comes through credentialing.

Each of these pillars is now destabilized by AI.

Consider the most adamantine of these three pillars - information transmission. AI tutors and multimodal platforms have made one-way teaching “rapidly redundant.” Students in certain Middle Eastern countries even report that they prefer AI-driven simulations over passive notetaking.

Standardized assessment? Students openly exploit AI to bypass multiple-choice quizzes and formulaic problem sets. As one professor from Arizona State University has warned bluntly: “if students learn how to use AI to complete assignments and faculty use AI to design courses, assignments, and grade student work, then what is the value of higher education?”

Credentialing monopolies? According to Samar Ahmed, commenting on the sea change currently underway in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), employers “increasingly recognize modular certifications” and “blockchain-based verification systems”, whereas universities “experiment cautiously” with competency-based recognition.

Translation? The seemingly impregnable walls of Fortress Academia have been breached on all sides.

Yet the professoriate – and of course the administrators, the overseers, the recruitment consultants, and so on continue to pretend that if instructors just tweak their syllabi to incorporate a few AI ethics or supervised research modules, or new brand strategies of adding AI willy-nilly to the curriculum, post-secondary learning will have somehow “adapted” to the brave new world we find ourselves in.

It won’t have.

American higher education is thoroughly and fatefully configured around scarcity - scarcity of knowledge, scarcity of access, scarcity of credentials.

Universities burgeoned and flourished for a long while because they controlled privileged access to those scarce resources. Scarcity is what guarantees elevated price points. The overwhelming majority of Americans have been tethered to the conviction since days of yore that if you want succeed financially over a lifetime, you go to college, because then you will have something others in varying measure do not possess.

AI liquidates these scarcities virtually overnight.

As Luke Lango writing in InvestorPlace quips, “when a company can replace a $120,000-a-year manager with a $20-a-month AI subscription, it’s not a choice; it’s fiduciary duty”.

Americans have already lost confidence on higher education, and will not regain it any time soon. An NBC News poll from November 2025 found that perceptions of the value of a college degree are “plummeting.” Only 34 percent of Americans now believe colleges have a salutary effect on the country, down from 57 percent a decade ago.

Employer trust in higher education has decreased for five consecutive years. With a few exceptions the professional “career pathways” majors to which students stampeded for generations are now becoming instantly obsolescent before our gaze, as AI algorithms supplant the very jobs they were carefully crafted to train people for.

Furthermore, the accreditation system, which was designed to guarantee that higher ed offer real value to students and of course to ensure that federal student loans were not going to prop up predatory proprietary schools, is rapidly losing credibility. It has become a Hieronymus Boschian hellscape of bureaucratic self-dealing and conniving camouflaged as quality control.

As the Century Foundation notes, “the public trusts accreditors to be both effective and consistent in their decision-making, but in reality, weak accreditors have permitted many underperforming institutions and programs to slip through the cracks.”

But here’s the plot twist that the apocalypse mongers fail to follow.

The presumed cataclysmic impact on higher education is not necessarily going to leave post-secondary learning in smoking ruins.

Quite the opposite.

What the emerging literature is showing - and what Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has articulated better than anyone else - is that effective and productive management of AI demands precisely the very same kinds of skill sets that traditional liberal arts education has always cultivated.

These are what might be considered the “holy trinity” of genuine AI competency, not just literacy. They come down to critical thinking. contextual reasoning, and ethical judgment.

Moreover, they consist in the capacity to ask the right questions rather than simply concede the first plausible answer.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger drove home this point with his famous but cryptic line: “questioning is the piety of thinking”.

Mollick’s concept of “co-intelligence” - the collaborative partnership between human and artificial intelligence – does not scotch the necessity of human cognition. It bolsters the premium on what are undoubtedly human capabilities.

As Mollick explains, “the best way to work with [AI] is to treat it like a person…at the same time, you have to remember you are dealing with a software process.” To navigate through the shoals of sophisticated AI depends on the capacity for sophisticated critical judgment.

Of course, that is what higher education could be teaching, if it weren’t so busy defending its credentialing racket.

According to an August 2025 study by the American Academy of Colleges and Universities, 93 percent of hiring managers rate “written and oral communications, critical thinking and ethical judgment/decision-making” as the most important abilities they are looking for in recent college graduates.

Let’s ponder that. Not coding. Not data science.

Critical thinking!

McKinsey projects that by 2030 the demand for social and emotional intelligence in the United States will rise by 14 percent, as employers seek graduates who can “think critically and bring a human touch to complex challenges.”

The 2023 Workplace Learning Report from LinkedIn confirms that management, communication, leadership, research and analysis remain among the most in-demand competencies across industries. “These are precisely the abilities that liberal arts education develops.”

Even tech executives have climbed on the bandwagon.

Many CEOs at major technology companies - the very people building AI systems - have degrees in history, literature, or social sciences rather than technical fields. Their liberal arts backgrounds have afforded them “the tools to guide teams, anticipate social consequences and make decisions that reached well beyond the boundaries of technical expertise.”

The AI revolution will inaugurate, as one education researcher puts it, “a real renaissance for the humanities.”

Why?

Because AI cannot really think. It can only respond.

AI can generate complex answers, but it cannot assess their truthfulness. AI can obey ethical rules, but it remains bereft of values or intentions.

AI can mimick empathy, but it has no lived experience. It can synthesize information, but it cannot determine which problems are worth solving to begin with.

As a recent academic study that examined 640 documents on AI concluded, “critical thinking is conceptualized as a purposeful, evaluative, and self-regulated process that must be preserved despite increasing reliance on AI tools.”

The study identified key challenges including “uncritical dependence on AI, digital literacy disparities, lack of system transparency.” Its solution was both surprising and unsurprising: “inclusive and adaptive instructional frameworks that integrate AI in ways that support critical thinking.”

This is where liberal arts education, done properly and not weighted down with “woke” advocacy, becomes indispensable.

Courses that teach students to critique AI “outputs” and “strengthen their own reasoning and critical thinking skills” are the wave of the future, according to an article about “AI in the Core” at Gonzaga University. Students realize that “AI technologies don’t ‘think’ the way we do and that they don’t have a serious concern for the truth.”

Gonzaga faculty stress that “students need to know when and how to use AI critically and responsibly, how to challenge its destruction of our environment, and how to interrogate and transform its flaws.”

The irony for credential-obsessed administrators and HR managers is that those institutions that will survive the AI transformation are precisely those which have the courage to abandon the pretense of job training and return to their original mission - teaching young minds how to think.

They will not long focus on how to memorize information that can be “googled”, or how to perform tasks that machines can do, but how to teach their charges the talents for exercising sound judgment. It will simply become a matter of teaching how to distinguish truth from automated or meme-themed fabrications.

It will come down how to ask questions that AI would, or could, never think to pose.

As David Meerman Scott observes, “AI can summarize data, but it can’t yet decide which problems are worth solving. It can write code, but it can’t imagine entirely new categories of products and services. It can analyze financial markets, but it doesn’t understand the human motivations behind economic decisions.”

Universities that figure this out, and that pivot from credentialing to curating co-intelligence — will not only survive but thrive.

The dinosaurs munching on their swamp grass and watching the asteroid descend have a choice - evolve or perish.

Some will figure out they’re not actually dinosaurs at all.

They’re the new species in “academe” waiting to inherit the earth.

Share

Is the much vaunted “rules-based” international order now dead? Or on its death bed?

The signs are everywhere.

On Friday United Nations General Secretary António Guterres warned that the pre-eminent international governing body was in danger of “imminent financial collapse” – a prospect that has never been seriously raised since its establishment more than eight decades ago.

The second coming of Donald Trump’s Presidency, reviled by the mainstream press as a “chaos agent” who has broken the Atlantic Alliance and revels in gunboat diplomacy, along with the rise of populist movements around the world have ignited intense debate about the future of the global liberal – or she we say “neoliberal”? - order.

Mainstream news commentators and political scientists have routinely pointed fingers at Trump’s “America First” agenda as well as nationalist leaders from Budapest to Brasília as the culprits responsible for the accelerating disintegration of decades of international cooperation, free trade, and multilateral institutions.

Subscribe now

Yet this narrative, while convenient, fundamentally misread the diffusive dynamics of a globalized world itself. Those who blame Trump, or populism, or “authoritarianism”, or “fascism” – throwaway epithets for self-important, cognitively challenged, slogan-spraying, ideologically inebriated, think-bots - remain snared in the sugary delusion that the very post-war liberal order that has nurtured the very affluence that has enabled them to secede from the real itself was somehow permanent and self-perpetuating..

The “inconvenient truth”, as Al Gore once labeled it, is that the liberal international order, like all civilizational arrangements prior to it, was begotten from specific historical circumstances and was forever destined to evolve or dissolve as time marched on and circumstances mutated.

The German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler understood the seasonal rhythms of civilizations with remarkable prescience and clarity.

In his monumental work The Decline of the West Spengler argued that cultures and civilizations go through organic life cycles, transitioning from birth through maturity to inevitable decline. He wrote that “every culture has its own civilization...Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable.”

For Spengler, civilizations necessarily ossify, losing the vital creative energy of their cultural youth and becoming taut, mechanistic systems that inevitably exhaust themselves.

Viewed from a Spenglerian angle the liberal international order is not coming apart because of Trump, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Republicans tout suite, or commensurate populist interlopers, but is simply reaching the conclusion of its natural lifespan, its internal contradictions, and rapidly changing historical conditions that have left it unsustainable.

To grasp why the current order was never permanent, we must acknowledge its deeply contingent origins. The liberal international order was never somehow what political theorists would call the “state of nature” from which everything now is devolving.

It was rather a specific response to the catastrophic failures of global governance during the initial half of the twentieth century.

After two devastating world wars and the Great Depression demonstrated the perils of unrestrained nationalism and economic protectionism, America in partnership with European leaders constructed a system designed to prevent such disasters from recurring. The Bretton Woods institutions, the United Nations, NATO, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade emerged from the unique “civilizational” precarity of the year 1945.

A unscripted update took place in the early 1990s following the sudden collapse of world communism, but it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium and a set of new debacles – what the social and economic theorist Nassim Taleb dubbed “black swans” - that the old world was unraveling and a strange new one percolating inside it.

Crucially, the old “liberal” order was only ever partially liberal and never truly global. From 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world was split into competing spheres, with roughly half the planetary population living under totalitarian communist regimes that explicitly rejected liberal economics and liberal democracy.

The liberal international order operated primarily within the Western bloc—North America, Western Europe, Japan, and their allies. Even within this sphere of influence, the system relied heavily on American military and economic dominance, not the uniform embrace of liberal norms by equal partners.

The Pax Americana underwrote the global political and economic system and in implementation it was effectively more imperial than multilateral.

The neoliberal turn in the 1980s and 1990s - the shift toward deregulation, privatization, and financialization - intensified ingrained contradictions that are now speeding the collapse of neoliberal globalism as we know it.

Economist Dani Rodrik has articulated what he calls the “fundamental political trilemma of the world economy”. According to Rodrif, we cannot simultaneously have globalization, democracy, and national sovereignty. We must choose two out of three.

The neoliberal project attempted to square this circle by privileging hyperglobalization while constraining democratic governance through international agreements and institutions that insulated economic policy from popular pressure.

Neoliberalism generated extraordinary wealth for some while creating devastating dislocations for the rest. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, the United States lost approximately 5.7 million manufacturing jobs. Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have shown that the “China shock” of import competition accounted for a major share of this decline.

Meanwhile, financialization transformed the economy in ways that concentrated wealth and power. As celebrated economist Thomas Piketty has documented, the return on capital has consistently exceeded the rate of economic growth) in recent decades, leading to spiraling inequality.

Mark Blyth, another leading global economist, has argued that austerity policies imposed after 2008 essentially delegitimized the neoliberal order in the eyes of millions, if not billions. Rather than acknowledging that deregulated finance had precipitated the crisis, political elites insisted that ordinary workers acquiesce to pension cuts, wage freezes, and truncated public services to pay for the sins of bankers.

The “Great Recession” of 2008-10 proved to be the Achilles heel of neoliberalism and the beginning of its ending. Neoliberalism required continuous legitimacy through prosperity, but it failed spectactulary.

All the while that economic contradictions hollowed out the neoliberal world order from within, the emergence of a coordinated “axis of resistance” among so-called “authoritarian” states such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea challenged it externally in a manner inconceivable during the unipolar moment of the 1990s.

These highly militarized regimes forged what amounted to what amounts to a counteralliance, united not by shared ideology but by mutual opposition to American hegemony and the liberal international norms that sustained it.

The ascent of China proved that liberalism was not a vital prerequisite for development. But over time China moved beyond merely exploiting the liberal trading system. It began aggressively challenging its strategic architecture.

According to a 2023 report by the US Department of Defense – now the “Department of War” - China’s military modernization has led to the People’s Liberation Army Navy operating the world’s largest fleet by number of ships. China has also developed anti-access denial capabilities specifically designed to counter American power projection, and it has expanded its nuclear arsenal significantly.

Perhaps most critically, the United States itself - that resplendent paladin and guarantor of the liberal order—is fragmenting internally in ways that make continued global leadership increasingly implausible. Americans now occupy two mutually equal and hostile spheres of reality, with a combative and violent politics that amounts to low-intensity civil war. This hyperpolarization is not merely partisan disagreement but reflects fundamental incompatibility in how Americans understand their country, its legacy, and its prospects.

The traditional narrative blames right-wing populism almost exclusively for this breakdown. But this autonomic reflex of the chattering classes obscures a more complex situation.

Left-wing “populism” has become just as, or recently even more, disruptive, particularly among what sociologist Musa al-Gharbi terms “symbolic capitalists” - the “knowledge class” of journalists, academics, consultants, and other credentialed professionals whose labor produces and manipulates symbols rather than material goods.

These white-collar workers have experienced their own status anxiety and economic precarity, propelled an increasingly radical politics that mirrors right-wing populism’s intensity while embracing a caricatured vision of what “justice” might actually mean.

President Trump and recently elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani consist in bald personifications of these utterly converse social constructions of reality.

The economic guardrails that for several generations have ensured safe driving for this aspirational and hitherto prestigious, well-educated social cohort – what New Left theorists John and Barbara Ehrenreich in a famous 1977 essay dubbed “the professional managerial class” - are now dissolving before our very gaze, largely because of a twin juggernaut of “black swan” phenomena that have come into play quite recently.

These are the unaffordability, albeit the putative necessity of higher education,and the runaway downstream effects of artificial intelligence (AI), which in the view of John MacGhlionn “is gutting entire sectors with hurricane force”.

The bloated national debt, exceeding $38 trillion, constrains government spending that has historically subsidized many knowledge economy jobs in education, healthcare administration, and the nonprofit sector. Furthermore, artificial intelligence threatens to automate or dramatically reduce the value of cognitive labor that symbolic capitalists perform.

Just as manufacturing workers saw their bargaining power evaporate when their jobs moved to China or were automated, knowledge workers now face similar displacement. McKinsey estimates that generative AI could automate up to 30% of hours worked across the US economy, and will have outsize impact on precisely the educated, white-collar professions that have hitherto felt most secure.

This status threat has produced a radicalization among symbolic capitalists that manifests as an aggressive identity politics, institutional capture of universities and media organizations, and a quasi-religious hypermoralism that brooks no dissent.

The resulting culture wars over race, gender, history, and national identity are no longer mere epiphenomena, or distractions. Instead they reflect genuine “class conflict” in the Marxist sense over resources, status, and power. Each side views the other not as legitimate political antagonists, but as existential threat.

Universities, once sites of relatively open inquiry, have become ideological monocultures where deviation from progressive orthodoxy can end careers. A report by the American Council of Trustees in its introductory state laments:

There is nothing more central to the life of the mind than the robust exchange of ideas. In recent years, however, there has been increasing evidence that this exchange has been under attack and that, in many respects, the academy has become one-sided and coercive—indeed, even hostile—to a multiplicity of viewpoints.

Study after study has documented the politically one-sided nature of the faculty. And ACTA’s report found this imbalance to have serious consequences. Nearly half of the students at the top 50 colleges ranked by U.S. News & World Report reported significant political pressure in the classroom, nothing short of a direct attack on their right and ability to learn.

Media outlets function no longer as neutral information brokers than they do as partisan belligerents in a daily redoubling and exacerbated series of “culture wars”. The culture wars are simultaneously class wars.

Even more destabilizing is the doom loop dynamic between left and right populisms. Each side’s excesses provide justification and fuel for the other’s further radicalization. Legitimate right-wing grievances about cancel culture, promotion of open borders, institutional bias, and contempt from coastal elites drive support for increasingly extreme figures and policies.

Right-wing provocations then confirm left-wing narratives about racism, authoritarianism, and democratic backsliding, instigating ever more perceived “atrocities” that are framed by each side’s unyielding moral absolutism. The end result is a self-reinforcing cycle where compromise, let along dialogue or negotiation, becomes impossible.

An internal political fragmentation of America, therefore, subverts the country’s capacity to sustain the liberal international order. A nation which cannot even minimally agree on basic facts about its history, or its own elections, and which treats domestic political opponents as sworn enemies, and whose institutions are increasingly perceived as illegitimate in the eyes of swelling segments of the populace, cannot credibly promote democracy abroad or maintain global leadership.

The bipartisan foreign policy establishment that crafted and upheld the liberal international order ha been scattered to the four winds. Foreign policy has become nothing less than just one more front in the domestic culture wars. The economic resources necessary to maintain global order are consumed by domestic dysfunction

The second government shutdown in less than six months, this time over the enforcement of immigration policy rather than any serious disagreements over budget priorities, is a telltale reminder of how dangerously dyspeptic politics has become. As the renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama warns, liberal democracies face a calamity of governance when peak polarization has set in.

It is a pitiful pathology of our politics today that a frustrated, but guileless electorate continues to vote over and over in turnstile fashion for one party over the next, and then vote back into office the very party they just rejected in the last go-round, in the tragic belief someone, anyone, or whatever candidate party awaits entry into the revolving door, can somehow fix America. But the problem is polarization itself. Every time we shift our vote we make the problem worse.

The same goes for our seemingly irrepressible instinct to blame one party for the state of the nation – and of the world.

We viscerally single out an “enemy” to point the finger at. But as the famous quip from the cartoon character Pogo goes – words that were quoted repeatedly during the Vietnam debacle two generations now ago – “we have met the enemy, and it is us”.

Share

On the morning of Saturday, January 24, in ten-degree-below-zero cold, federal agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital.

Video shows federal officers wrestling Pretti to the ground before multiple shots ring out. The Department of Homeland Security claims he approached agents with a 9mm handgun and violently resisted as they tried to disarm him.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed Pretti was a U.S. citizen, a legal gun owner with a permit to carry, and had no criminal record beyond traffic tickets.

His father told the Associated Press that he cared about people deeply and was upset about ICE operations in Minneapolis. His ex-wife said he was a Democratic voter who had protested after the George Floyd killing in 2020 – almost six years ago.

President Trump posted a photo of what DHS claims was Pretti’s gun, loaded with two additional full magazines and ready to fire. He asked, “What is that all about?”

Subscribe now

This is the third shooting involving federal agents in Minneapolis this month. Four years ago Minneapolis gave America George Floyd. What is happening in Minneapolis today appears to be the runup to something far more dangerous.

Yesterday, in the sub-zero cold of January 23rd, as wind chill temperatures plunged to minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, upwards of 50,000 people flooded the streets in what organizers called an “economic blackout” - a day of no work, no school, no shopping - to demand the removal of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from their city. Less than 24 hours later, another person lay dead.

Operation Metro Surge, as it is officially known, has transformed Minneapolis into a laboratory for the collision between federal authority and local resistance. Since December, more than 3,000 federal immigration personnel have descended on the Twin Cities in what the Department of Homeland Security calls “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.”

The results: two civilian deaths by ICE agents in less than three weeks, mass arrests exceeding 2,400 people, schools transitioning to remote learning, and a burgeoning confrontation that bears all the hallmarks of genuine insurrection.

What’s happening in Minneapolis is not protest. It is a dress rehearsal for civil war.

Three weeks earlier, on January 7th, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. The administration claims Good attempted to weaponize her vehicle against federal agents, arguing that she was, in the words of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, “a leftist insurrectionist.” DHS characterized her actions as “domestic terrorism.”

Democrats and protesters paint an entirely different picture of both shootings: unarmed or legally armed civilian observers murdered in cold blood. Hillary Clinton posted that “an ICE agent murdered Renee Good.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the f--- out of Minneapolis.”

These are competing narratives. These are mutual accusations of terrorism and murder. There is no shared reality. This is the combustible material from which civil wars are built. But these deaths may be spontaneous flashpoints -- the broader confrontation is anything but spontaneous.

Kyle Shideler, director at the Center for Security Policy, cut through the fog in a recent interview. For months campus radicals and pro-Hamas activists had focused obsessively on Palestine, directing fury at the Democratic establishment. Now, Shideler notes, “we’re seeing the onus of street action shifting from the Palestinian angle to the ICE/immigration/Trump angle, which is where the establishment left would much rather have the conversation... an attempt for the traditional American establishment left to reclaim control of the street radicals.”

Investigative journalist Asra Nomani has documented the infrastructure behind what media present as organic outrage. Her research reveals 198 groups coordinating demonstrations, all aligned with the Democratic Party, many claiming tax-exempt status. She’s tracking what she calls a “$2.1 billion machine” weaponizing identity activism to undermine civil society.

In her 2023 book Woke Army, Nomani describes “an unholy alliance of Muslim radicals with mostly radicalized elites from the professoriate and professional classes, indoctrinated college kids, anarchy-inclined Antifa thugs, and perpetual race-baiters.” Their business, she warns, “is a radical transformation of America in which noble-sounding ideas like ‘social justice’ and ‘equity’ are code for upending the very pillars of American democracy.”

The Minneapolis protests fit this pattern with disturbing precision. News spreads through rapid response networks on Signal. The Target Center rally filled a 20,000-seat arena to more than half-full in weather that should have kept anyone rational indoors. Organizations with enormous funding are orchestrating confrontation as strategy. This is not grassroots protest.. This is AstroTurf warfare.

If the left is coordinating escalation, the Trump administration seems determined to meet them where they are.. An internal ICE memo from May 2025 asserts ICE officers have authority to forcibly enter homes with administrative warrants - search and seizure without judicial approval (although such warrants are constitutional if the target is not an American citizen). Federal agents have used tear gas and stun grenades against protesters.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem defended the operation: “These sanctuary cities such as Minneapolis are extremely dangerous for American citizens. Since we’ve been there we’ve arrested dozens and dozens of murderers and rapists.” By January, ICE claimed 2,000 arrests, though only about 5 percent - 103 people - had records of violent crimes.

Vice President J.D. Vance visited Minneapolis on January 22nd to tell the city to “stop fighting” ICE, declaring he’d come to “turn down the temperature.” The temperature did not turn down. The very next day, 50,000 people marched in sub-zero cold. The day after that, Alex Pretti was shot dead.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department sent subpoenas to Governor Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and other state leaders, investigating whether they conspired to impede immigration operations. The State of Minnesota and City of Minneapolis filed federal lawsuits arguing the operation violates the Tenth Amendment.

We are watching two sovereign authorities - federal and state - claim exclusive jurisdiction over the same territory. History has a name for what we are witnessing, that is, a constitutional crisis.

What makes the situation in Minneapolis so volatile – and menacing - is the complete absence of any shared narrative, shared facts, or shared moral framework. To one side ICE agents are heroes protecting Americans from rapists and murderers. To the other they are a paramilitary and “fascist” occupation force oppressing and murdering civilians.

For one, protesters are domestic terrorists. For the other, they are freedom fighters defending their neighbors.

Both sides invoke the language of self-defense and existential catastrophe. Each shooting is simultaneously an act of homicide and justified self-defense, depending entirely on which narrative ecosystem you inhabit.

It is no longer a policy disagreement, even an intense one, that can be resolved through argument and difficult negotiation. It is an all-out war between incompatible realities.

The corporate silence is deafening. Minnesota is home to Target, UnitedHealth, 3M, General Mills, Best Buy, and numerous Fortune 500 companies. Not one has issued a public statement about the immigration raids tearing apart their city.

The business elite have calculated there is no safe position because there is no middle ground. You’re either with the federal crackdown or against it. The center has collapsed into a bleating rubble of

We are hemmed in by historical echoes we refuse to hear. Americans love to believe we’re exceptional, that internal collapse could never happen here. But Minneapolis is showing us what happens when institutions no longer command universal legitimacy, when the Constitution is invoked by both sides to justify opposing actions, when the very concept of lawful authority is contested.

The Civil War began not with Fort Sumter but with years of escalating confrontation over slavery and the scope of federal authority. Bleeding Kansas. John Brown’s raid. The caning of Charles Sumner. Each incident hardened positions, radicalized constituencies, and made compromise unthinkable.

We are recreating that pattern. For the left in America, open borders now functions as the analogue for the abolition of slavery. Minneapolis ha become their Bleeding Kansas. Renee Good and Alex Pretti have become their martyrs., their deaths interpreted through a diametrically opposite lens from those who voted for President Trump in 2024.

Federal and state authorities assert mutually exclusive claims to sovereignty. Organized networks on both sides mobilize for confrontation rather than reconciliation.

The Trump administration sees no need “right now” to invoke the Insurrection Act. That qualifier is perhaps the most ominous two words in this entire crisis. It acknowledges the invocation of the act is under serious consideration. It telegraphs that continued resistance will be met with military force. It sets the predicate for calling out federal troops against American civilians.

Most Americans are still incapable of imagining a real civil war. The phrase “civil war” itself sounds hyperbolic. We think of the 1860s - uniformed armies on battlefields, clear front lines. That is not all what modern civil conflict would like, as the 2024 movie Civil War suggests.

As the film underscores – and the character of 21^st century foreign adventures should remind us, present day civil conflict is para-militarized law enforcement facing organized civilian resistance in urban areas. Sound familiar?

It is state and federal governments asserting competing constitutional authority. It is schools closing, businesses shutting down, normal civic life becoming impossible.

It is funded networks on both sides coordinating action. It is the utter disintegration of shared truth and shared legitimacy.

Minneapolis is the poster child for this looming debacle.

The polling data should chill us. In spring 2024, Republicans were most fixated on the possibility of civil conflict. Now that Trump is president, Democrats hold the same fears in equal measure. The expectation of violence has become bipartisan. What has changed is that only which side expects to be the aggressor.

Both sides are preparing for war because both sides genuinely believe the other represents an existential threat. When that belief becomes ubiquitous, existential proves becomes inevitable.

If Minneapolis is the laboratory, what experiment are we running? We are testing whether a determined federal administration can impose its will on a recalcitrant major city through force, and whether organized networks can make that imposition operationally impossible.

Every escalation prompts greater escalation. If ICE succeeds through overwhelming force, it establishes a template for other cities -- guaranteeing resistance will be even more organized and violent from the start. If ICE fails or withdraws, it emboldens resistance movements nationwide and humiliates an administration that cannot afford to appear weak.

The third option – mediated or negotiated settlement -- appears impossible because both sides have burned all the bridges that might lead to compromise. The administration has labeled protesters as “terrorists”. The protesters have labeled federal agents as assassins. Neither party can back down without admitting fundamental error or miscalculation.

Meanwhile, calls for general strikes are spreading. UPS workers in Minneapolis have expressed support for citywide work stoppages. If immigration enforcement can be shut down through coordinated economic resistance, we enter entirely new territory -- not protest or civil disobedience, but organized sabotage of federal operations through mass non-cooperation.

This is how civil wars begin in the 21st century. Not with declarations and manifestos, but with the gradual realization that normal politics has failed, that institutions no longer resolve conflict, that force is the only currency that matters.

The greatest danger is not that one side will win. The greatest danger is that both sides are correct concerning the ultimate stakes.

If you believe immigration enforcement is protecting Americans from violent criminals, then resistance genuinely threatens public safety and constitutional order. If you believe ICE is conducting an unconstitutional occupation and murdering civilians, then cooperation makes you complicit in tyranny.

Within their own moral frameworks, both sides are acting rationally. The administration cannot back down because doing so would abandon core supporters and invalidate the mandate from its base. The resistance cannot stand down because doing so would abandon vulnerable communities to what they perceive as state violence.

We are currently face to face with a set of historical circumstances that satisfies precisely the very definition of irreconcilable conflict.

It is no longer a disagreement about tactics or policy, but has morphed into a profound split vision – a “schizoid” national perception about what is happening, what it all means, and what is to be done.

Not too long ago events in Minneapolis ignited nationwide protests that integrally reshaped American politics and culture. Today’s events have been more organized and histrionically framed from the stat. All players are now more ideologically hardened, more explicitly defiant, and less amenable to any outcome that does not allow for total victory for one faction or the other.

If Minneapolis in 2020 gave us the racial reckoning that followed, what is history about to spew forth in early 2026?

We are watching the proof of concept for sustained confrontation that can only give us civil war.

The question is no longer whether this can happen in America.

It is happening.

It comes down to whether anyone with the proper power or authority is prepared to step back from the precipice before the overture lapses into the main act.

Alan Adler is a researcher and investigative journalist from Oklahoma City. He can be reached at alan.adler@globintel.net.

Share

Pursuant to CNN’s bombshell report earlier this week that investigators had purchased and been testing for a year now a mysterious device allegedly responsible for “Havana Syndrome”, the spook world – not to mention the entire pop Jason Bourneosphere – is all atwitter.

You ask, what exactly Is Havana syndrome?

The locution refers to a cluster of unexplained medical symptoms first reported by U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Havana, Cuba, starting in late 2016. Impacted personnel described the sudden onset of excruciating headaches, dizziness, nausea, ear pain, mental impairment, and balance difficulties.

These symptoms were frequently paired with perceived loud sounds and sensations of intense pressure in the head.

The phrase “Havana syndrome” has increasingly in recent years been replaced by the more professionally sounding, but teasingly ambiguous and generic phrase “anomalous health incidents” (AHI).

Subscribe now

Estimates vary as to the specific count of purported victims, but it probably has a high ceiling of about 1,500 cases.

In late March 2024 CBS News’ “60 Minutes” aired a report, fronted by anchor Scott Pelley and developed in collaboration with Germany’s Der Spiegel and the Latvian investigative outlet The Insider, suggesting a “Russian nexus” behind anomalous health incidents.

“60 Minutes” brought forth evidence that Russian GRU Unit 29155 had possessed and toyed with non‑lethal acoustic, or directed‑energy, weapons.

The segment concluded: “Russia may be responsible for Havana Syndrome, ‘60 Minutes’ finds.”

The CBS report contradicted what America’s intelligence agencies had been contending all along. A 2023 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) insisted that it was “very unlikely” that Havana Syndrome resulted from the use of sonic or directed energy weapons, hypothesizing that the symptoms were due mainly to somatic or environmental factors, an assertion numerous medical experts have since then debunked.

The House Intelligence Committee, which has been dogging the agencies in recent years for a satisfactory explanation of what Havana Syndrome might be, pushed back aggressively in December 2024 against the ICA.

In their own published findings entitled “Investigating the Intelligence Community’s Conclusions on Anomalous Health Incidents: Is the Intelligence Community Hiding the Real Reason for This Phenomenon?” the House Intelligence Committee wrote:

…the Subcommittee has uncovered evidence that the ICA lacked analytic integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation. It appears increasingly likely and the Chairman is convinced that a foreign adversary is behind some AHIs.2 The Intelligence (IC) has attempted to thwart the Subcommittee’s investigative efforts to uncover the truth at every turn. Despite this, the Subcommittee has uncovered information illustrative of problems with the ICA’s creation, review, and release. The Subcommittee recommends that the IC expeditiously release a new ICA on AHIs in which all information collected by the IC is appropriately considered.

Of course, the IC to this date has not released an updated report.

In light of CNN’s news story this week, the House Intelligence Committee sent a letter yesterday to Department of Homeland Security director Kristy Noem asking for more details about the “device” in question as well as the circumstances of its covert purchase by national security personnel during the Biden administration.

The mainstream media has dithered for a decade concerning not only the reality, but also the origins, of Havana syndrome. Nonetheless, the confusion is not due to any lack of data, or dearth of plausible hypotheses.

In fact, responsible and savvy professionals have known such a threat of what are technically known as “directed energy weapons” (DEWs) tracing back to the late twentieth century. In the aftermath of release of the ICA “consensus” in 2024 I myself wrote the following:

One of the major hurdles in uncovering the truth about what lies behind the Havana syndrome is that the public has been conditioned over the …to react almost instinctively to the suggestion that directed energy weapons might be deployed by shadowy personnel against their adversaries as a “conspiracy theory.” The word “conspiracy theory” is increasingly dredged up by enemies of the truth in such a manner that it functions semantically as what experts in psychological warfare refer to as a “thought-stopping cliché”, the mere utterance of which stifles all serious discussion.

Fortunately, we now have a ground-shaking, impeccably argued, and exhaustively researched lengthy book by a well-known, internationally regarded security expert with scientific credentials that put to rest once and for all the “conspiracy theory” nonsense.

Blandly entitled Havana Syndrome: A Threat to National Security, the book was published last fall in the United Kingdom by the prestigious publishing house Bloomsbury Academic. The author is Armin Krishnan, a professor at East Carolina University (ECU).

Krishnan’s bio reads as follows:

Armin Krishnan is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. He was Director of Security Studies from 2016 to 2025. He has previously taught intelligence courses as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the National Security Program at the University of Texas at El Paso and held research associate positions at the University of Southampton and Salford University. He has academic degrees in political science, intelligence studies, and security studies from the University of Munich and Salford University, UK. His research has focused on novel aspects of contemporary warfare, including the privatization and outsourcing of military services, the ethics of military robotics, targeted killing and drone warfare, military neuroscience, and psychological warfare.

In the introduction to his book Krishnan observes:

Governments have been developing DEWs since at least the 1960s, which amounts to over sixty years in research and development. All major military powers are developing DEWs, including the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, Iran, and many others. Various types of DEWs are known to exist, including acoustic weapons, millimeter wave weapons, lasers, particle beams, and high-powered microwave weapons. They are currently presented to the public mainly as anti-material weapons, which obscures other potential applications.

Krishnan adds that “the amount of public information on DEWs, especially their capabilities and any bioeffects that they may have, is very limited as governments prefer to keep the existence of certain weapons and capabilities secret, hence the mystery”.

Krishnan in both writing and conversation is the master of dry understatement. But what his book proves searingly and definitively is that there has been a systemic and - clearly in some instances - deliberate whitewash by those in the know throughout the intelligence world.

Because the IC has not been able to sustain, especially in the follow-on to the “60 Minutes” disclosures, the tiresome canard that Havana Syndrome is nothing more than urban legend, overheated imaginations, or exotic iterations of well-known natural or social phenomena, it has clung to the fallback excuse of “we still don’t know”.

They do know.

Either they do in fact know, or they somehow sink to the level of gross incompetence that thoroughly undermines their pretension to expertise that scholars like Krishnan are not shy about displaying.

On the other hand, the persistent meme conjured up by social media and the conspiracy industry that the government refuses to be transparent about such weapons, chiefly because they are shamelessly deploying it against the citizenry itself, happens to be egregious disinformation designed to obscure the truth as well.

It really comes down to an emperor-has-no-clothes sort or reality-hiding-in-plain sight sort of impasse among the vast majority of our patriotic servants and protectors of national security.

All the “adults” know.

Yet they are terrified of speaking out on account of a clutching their own reasonable doubts that have been brutally enforced through clueless or corrupt corporate media as well as the political agenda-driven administrative state (think Wuhan and the Covid pandemic).

Or if do see what appears to be the case from a professional angle of vision, you’ve been so gaslighted for so long you come to question your own judgment.

Krishnan’s analysis by the way is comparable to the child in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale that finally and innocently speaks the truth that emperor is naked. No matter what thinks of the political leanings of CNN, its dispatch on the IC’s purchase of the secret weapon was a true godsend.

Which brings us to the question of what the current flap over Havana Syndrome and DEWs, which probably will have a quite short theater run amidst the virulent churning of the obsessively sensation-sated daily news cycle (unless of course there are more “bombshells”), genuinely signifies over the long haul.

The hard question our “savants” in their sundry security and ambassadorial bailiwicks need digest is the one Krishnan himself calmly and methodically poses: are we really dealing with a serious national security risk?

If Krishnan’s argument and evidentiary account is as solid as its depth and breadth indicates (and no reasonable reader could retort “no”, let alone “maybe”), well, what can you say?

Uh. Duh.

It is one thing for a mainstream media narrative to concentrate, as it has for years, on the physiological and psychological damage that Havana Syndrome in all its cryptic eccentricity has inflicted on those serving in the diplomatic core. We react with sympathy, but at the same time with a certain jaded wave of the hand.

Well, soldiers die in foreign wars. Secret agents are expected to be zapped or taken out from time to time by the baddies lurking in the crepuscular cubbyholes of overseas metropoles.

Diplomats can safely thrive for a stint in distant Shangri-las while getting paid to devote their careers to the hardscrabble life of attending elegant balls and receptions. So what’s the difference between suffering Havana syndrome and getting mugged on your walk back at night from the Parthenon in Athens?

But the “threat”, as it turns out, is not just to them but to us.

One disconcerting factoid that emerged in a phone exchange I had with Krishnan this past autumn is that there is a rising wave of cases of Havana Syndrome among U.S. citizens who are not, or who have never been, in the government per se.

Some of them are highly reputable professionals who are singled out simply because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or crossed paths with domestic terrorists, or organized crime contractors to foreign terrorists, who may have access to such weaponry.

In his book Krishnan describes this phenomenon as a critical example of hybrid or asymmetric “cognitive warfare” wielded by certain US adversaries. At the same time, the disinformation machinery seems concurrently to be amping up in real time to convince us none of this is actually happening.

In my last communique within this space I outlined from information that has long been fully public about the influence operations and likely terrorist-adjacent infrastructure that has been cobbled together in recent years while we pretend not to notice.

The chickens may be coming home to roost, as the rather hackneyed saying goes.

Yet what is clear is that the fox is not only in the henhouse, he has the wherewithal to cause havoc if we refuse to do something about it.

Share

New Year’s Day sometimes yields events that alter the course of human history.

The most famous one occured on January 1, 1959.

While Americans remained glued to their television sets watching the annual parades and bowl games, a relatively obscure and ragtag troop of Cuban guerillas, who had been battling the corrupt, mafia-allied Somoza regime in the Sierra Maestra mountains for years, unexpectedly burst into the capitol Havana and transformed the Cold War into a scorchingly hot one that rapidly escalated to a near-miss nuclear apocalypse three years afterwards in October 1962.

The latter is remembered to this day as the “Cuban Missile Crisis”.

New Year’s 2026 may very well turn out to be similar, although we won’t know right away to be sure.

Subscribe now

Ironically, two significant but seemingly disparate, if not contradictory, developments could be cited on this occasion.

The first was the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, the new Democratic Socialist mayor of New York City. The second was the acceleration of economic protests against the theocratic leaders of Iran into a full-blown revolutionary tremor which as of this writing seriously threaten to topple for the first time in almost half a century the Islamic Republic itself.

On the surface what happened Jan. 1 of this year appears significant, but not necessarily consequential. But we should also remember that Fidel Castro’s triumph 67 years ago could have been characterized at the time in precisely the same manner.

Few of us have the patience, the discernment, the curiosity, or the historical imagination to descry the complex underlying as well as interlocking factors that ultimately shape the so-called “defining moments” of our age.

But let’s take perhaps a more nuanced look at what is happening as we speak.

The latest crisis in Iran has the real potential to explode into a planetary firestorm in the same way that lighting sparklers during an overly exuberant New Year’s celebration at a bar in the Swiss ski village of Crans-Montana set off a tragic blaze that killed dozens and injured hundreds.

The exigency was amplified the morning after New Year’s when President Trump threatened Iran over the protest crackdown, and a senior Iranian official immediately retorted that U.S. military personnel were “legitimate targets”.

The situation is further aggravated by a very recent report from the investigative journalism site Jewish Onliner that President Trump’s incremental military confrontation with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro may have more to do with Iranian penetration into the Western hemisphere than either the public or most experts recognize.

While the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 is now a spent force, and Iran’s projection of military force throughout the Middle East has been shattered by both Israeli and American bombers over the past year, the regime’s ideological infiltration of Western institutions and its indirect, albeit appreciable influence on civil society and its intellectual elites is highly consequential.

Iran’s “soft”, yet malign, power has spread its tentacles into many surprising corners.

One major region of impact, harking back several decades, is a bevy of state-linked charities and front organizations that promote the official Iranian agenda within this country and possibly even launder moneys from overseas.

For example, the independent news service Iran Focus in a 2010 exposé showed how the New York-based Alavi Foundation, accused by the federal government repeatedly as a being a front for the Iranian government, has donated millions of dollars to numerous colleges and universities around the country.

The Alavi Foundation’s own website itself confirms this fact.

According to Iran Focus, its investigation discovered that “the activities of the foundation were in fact directed by Iran’s then-ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif.”

Zarif himself is American-educated, and his children were reportedly born in the United States. A CNN news article notes that Zarif received his bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University and his master’s and doctorate from the University of Denver.

For several decades now Zarif in various high-level Iranian positions has functioned as the putatively friendly face of the Iranian mullahs’ extensive American influence campaign.

But even more significant than Alavi’s fraught philanthropy has been Zarif’s “Iran Expert Initiative” (IEI), which was brought to light in 2023 by the global news website Semafor.

A massive trove of leaked emails obtained by Semafor detailed how Iranian diplomats recruited and leverage European as well as American academics for political support and coordination on public messaging. The initiative sought to ensure these academics’ research, media work, and policy advice would align more closely with the Islamic Republic’s preferred narratives.

As two opinion writers from The Hill put it decisively in May of 2024:

Imagine if Russia attempted to infiltrate the U.S. government and prestigious American universities. Imagine that, by developing relationships in such high places, Russian agents facilitated the hostage-taking of U.S. students by the Russian FSB security service. Were that to happen, there would rightly be an outcry, of course. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is happening and has happened with Iran. Yet somehow, no one is talking about it, despite the obvious threat to U.S. national security.

Given the events of last June along with the real ongoing danger of Iran-sponsored terrorist “sleeper cells” bruited by federal agencies in recent months, people are now indeed talking about it - finally.

According to the Tactics Institute for Security and Counter Terrorism, the menace continues to grow and is on the radar of most sectors of the federal government.

An analysis dated September 12, 2025 states:

US homeland security strategy is undergoing renewed scrutiny amid escalating tensions with Iran, particularly in 2025. Intelligence assessments warn of sleeper cells covert operatives or sympathizers embedded within the United States as growing vectors of risk. The Iranian government, facing pressure from sanctions and regional isolation, is accused of expanding its asymmetric playbook to include low-visibility threats across US soil.

Following targeted US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and militias in 2024, Iran’s retaliatory posture has sharpened. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bulletins now regularly refer to an “elevated threat environment,” flagging sleeper cells as a credible component of Tehran’s overseas retaliation strategy. The 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment names Iran as the primary state sponsor of terrorism and outlines its deliberate cultivation of foreign networks including potential assets within US borders.

What is even more troubling, as pointed out in an investigative news piece from the New York Times this past July, is that the threat increasingly may not come from direct Iranian covert actions but locally contracted thugs. Previously Iran has been known to “hire criminals — including Russian mobsters, Mexican cartel hit men and a Canadian Hells Angel — to carry out violent acts in the United States”.

A 2024 George Washington University study has catalogued Iranian activities in America under three different rubrics - propaganda, procurement, and lethal operations. It argues that religious centers, media outlets, and regime‑aligned NGOs disseminate Tehran’s worldview, glorify its allies, and undercut U.S. policy while simultaneously aiding procurement and selection of targets.

These broader, subtle, opaque yet ubiquitous activities have most likely played a major role in infecting the once secular American left with the kind of rabid antisemitism and pro-Palestinian obsession that has overtaken so much of radical American academia and the activist underground in just a few years.

There is also strong, but circumstantial evidence of an Iranian nexus in the plot just by a strange anti-Israel and faux indigenous terrorist group known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front to set off bombs across Southern California on New Year’s Eve.

Through an informant the FBI foiled the plot, but if successful the operation could have caused massive casualties.

The nexus overall can be inferred from the way in which Iranian agents of influence have co-opted – something they have been well-known to do for years - the disparate agendas of a long-fragmented American political left and mobilized them around the one overriding foreign policy objective of the Iranian Republic since its very inception.

That, of course, is the destruction and annihilation of the state of Israel and in the long run the United States itself as we know it.

The strange alchemy behind this unprecedented political process, which of course has its genesis among American academics, is outlined in an essay of mine published on this site last autumn.

As the year 2026 unfolds, we should all remind ourselves that yawning and looking the other way is never an option.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “he who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it”.

Share

There is an Chinese proverb that goes something like this: “when the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.”

That is what’s happening with the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution upending all the staid wisdom about education, work, and careers that has been the norm for many generations.

The temptation is to build walls – that is, devise rules, regulations, and even detailed and bureaucratic blueprints for institutional implementation which ultimately fail to shield against the winds of change.

But the only authentic alternative is to build windmills that will convert the same gusts into novel and beneficial forms of power that can transform how we live.

Subscribe now

AI, of course, is not in any way a panacea.

Current AI systems recycle ideas rather than generating novel scientific hypotheses, limiting their role in advancing research. For instance, efforts to produce AI-generated papers often yield tangential or unoriginal content.

Second, complex reasoning remains a major challenge for customary AI models.

Third, overreliance on AI in scientific research, according to Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri, can lead to “illusions of understanding and enable stifling patterns of groupthink among investigators”.

Many widespread fears about the perils of AI are unfounded. As AI actually becomes a “thing” not only in business and commerce but in everyday life, it becomes obvious that the fear, nurtured among tech boosters for years now, that the accelerating proficiency of AI platforms and systems with conjure up a Golem-like “superintelligence” capable of replacing or subjugating the human species, appears to be more fantasy than reality.

The present day limitations of AI are for the most part derived from their excessive dependency on “large language models” (LLMs).

LLMs were first theorized by information scientists in the 1940s and have become the key features of the data processing architectures of artificial intelligence algorithms.

These models deploy “deep learning” techniques that serve to predict and produce coherent text derived from patterns learned from billions, or trillions, of parameters. The mathematics governing these techniques is based on probabilities that are embedded in the fundamental structures of all languages.

In other words, the “grammar” of any given language allows you to make only a finite level of utterances, and LLMs with their astronomically fast computational capacities can search enormous bodies of archived texts in a short interval and generate intelligible answers.

However, their output is constrained by written “knowledge” that is already available online or in scannable documents.

LLMs cannot innovate. No LLM could have ever come up with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

LLMs are wizards at summarizing, paraphrasing, and correlating information, but they are thoroughly incapable of engendering significant new insights.

But the immediate trajectory for the application of artificial intelligence, at least as it exists today, at a “whole society” level is quite promising. AI already is rapidly transforming business activity and business models.

Language models with their extraordinary data-crunching facility are already revolutionizing marketing, predictive analytics, and operational efficiency.

In the legal profession AI accelerates contract review, research, and case preparation by analyzing documents and predicting outcomes, freeing lawyers for strategic work. AI bots draft motions and manage discovery, with usage jumping from 22% to 80% in certain firms.

In medicine AI enhances diagnostics through imaging analysis for early cancer detection and personalizes treatments using patient data and genetics. It speeds drug discovery by sifting vast datasets and supports decision-making with real-time evidence-based tools, easing workforce shortages.

And it also is projected to bring about futuristic changes in essential industries such as agriculture.

But the overshadowing challenge for AI will be how it impacts the educational system. The litmus test will ultimately apply to higher education.

Recently I moderated a panel of educators entitled “The Existential Crisis of Learning and the Future of the Knowledge Economy”. The panel included K-12 and post-secondary learning professionals as well as corporate specialists.

The agenda for the panel discussion was intentionally designed to avoid as much as possible use of the word “education”. There was a good reason for that decision.

The word “education” connotes a formal and voluminous infrastructure of diverse but centrally regulated instructional practices as well as transaction-based criteria for social and economic advancement.

“Learning” in the richer, classical, and more imponderable sense of personal self-development invariably becomes a secondary priority.

That is especially true when it comes to a college education. The perennial parental question of “what are you going to do with that degree” always intrudes into any conversation about the purpose of a college education.

For millennial and GenZ with their steep, cumulative loads of student debt and the rapidly deteriorating job market for entry-level employees the question is becoming particularly consequential.

Various recent studies matching workforce with educational trends show that a college degree is increasingly becoming less relevant in the hiring process for career professionals.

The “PwC 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer”, as an example, examined nearly one billion job postings and thousands of company financial reports across six continents. The most striking finding was that formal degree criteria are declining across all jobs, but the drift is even more pronounced for AI-exposed occupations.

A key metric indicates that skills sought by employers are changing 66% faster in occupations most exposed to AI, up from 25% the previous year. Wage premiums for AI skills reaches 56%, a spike of 25% from a year earlier.

Such data strongly suggests that practical competencies now command greater compensation than formal credentials in a broad gamut of cases.

Historically the typical “career-minded” college degree has been modeled as an expensive workplace preparation system that relieves employers of the responsibility for serious on-the-job training.

But employers are now assuming that job applicants already have the talents employers demand and that they can acquire them on their own time. Even if the new employee does not have those basic competencies, AI can more cheaply carry out the same tasks anyway.

But what employers are demanding in the era of AI is the singular ability to think.

The most authoritative institutional assessment comes from the World Economic Forum’s “2025 Future of Jobs Report”.

The report ranks analytical thinking as the top core skill employers require, with seven out of ten companies identifying it as essential. “Critical” and “creative” thinking ranks in the top among related proficiencies among the 26 identified core skills calculated for workplace success.

Despite concerns that AI may replace higher level cognitive and deliberative tasks performed by white collar employees, the report explicitly names critical thinking and analytical reasoning as competencies in which demand is accelerating faster than supply in today’s economy.

How do we learn to think? Not through career-minded – and costly – specialized, post-secondary technical training regimens but through what have historically been known as the “liberal arts”.

That is not to say higher education should not focus on advanced, technical curriculum, especially in the “STEM” fields – science, technology, engineering, mathematics. It should do everything it can to train computer scientists, engineering, and pre-med students in what they need to know about developments in their respective disciplines.

But career pathways for so-called “professional degrees” need to be recalibrated to de-emphasize what is the equivalent of job training and more systemically emphasize the development of “critical intelligence” in learners that will enable them to productively handle AI tools.

One of the roadblocks that this strategy will quickly encounter is the state of the liberal arts apart from STEM fields. A sizable number of academic studies in recent years have shown that the humanities and social sciences, which historically have always tilted left politically, now have become entrenched “monocultures” of left ideology that automatically exclude even slightly deviant viewpoints.

So-called viewpoint diversity” in higher education is, therefore, virtually non-existent.

Writing in the journal Inside Higher Ed, distinguished New York University psychology professor Jonathan Haidt lambastes this state of affairs. He remarks:

Taboos, blind spots, groupthink and the politicization of scientific standards haven’t just made academic research narrower and worse, these trends have alienated the general public and reduced public confidence in higher education since 2015, not just on the right but across the ideological spectrum. Unsurprisingly, the increasing ideological conformity of the professoriate is reflected in the decreasing range of ideas that students encounter in the classroom. A recent national study shows a narrow range of perspectives included on undergraduate syllabi on such controversial topics as the conflict between Israel and Palestine, racial bias in the criminal justice system, and abortion.

Unfortunately, monocultures do not weaken of their own accord. They tend to reinforce themselves over time.

Yet, even if rebalancing the views of professors may not be a viable option in the short run, the internet and the explosion of cheap AI solutions available to the general public may force change despite the resistance of the academy.

As one of our panelists in the aforementioned symposium has underscored, the internet itself has revolutionized access to potential “knowledge” acquisition which, if properly leveraged, can circumvent the inveterate political biases of conventional cognitive gatekeepers, including professors.

Ever since the accession of the internet in the late 1990s education futurists have been predicting the decline of the “sage on the stage” in the persona of the flashy faculty celebrity.

I myself laid out this vision a quarter century ago – the details of which naturally are now dated – in my book The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University. The vision has been deferred several decades because the internet until now has been a wilderness of inchoate information rather than an exhibit hall of disciplined and refined “knowledge”.

AI is rapidly changing that. For simple tutoring and baseline instruction in most fields both existing and emergent AI platforms, if appropriately prompted, can replace the drudgery and inefficiency of rudimentary “transactional” learning.

Both students and instructors, who have mastered the elementary skill sets for more advanced inquiry and sophisticated problem-solving, can now be loosed to tackle the kinds of creative and “critical” thinking that successful administration of AI requires.

Universities will still have an important role to play as emporia for the sorts of “critical intelligence” that the AI future foreshadows. But the current excessively bureaucratic federally enjoined regime of credit and “contact” hours is a major headache for reformers.

The sclerotic educational establishment continues to throw up walls. Yet there are many inside and outside that establishment that are quietly constructing windmills.

Despite all the frenzy to maintain an “industry” that is the last surviving citadel of feudal economy and culture, the ground is shuddering.

And the walls are coming down.

Share

Ever since the off-year early November elections the prime morsel of mediaspeak du jour has suddenly become something called the “affordability crisis”.

Zohran Mamdani, despite his soft-pedalled and unctuous style of trendy antisemitism, won as expected the race to become the next mayor of New York on the promise that he would make America’s most populou…

Read more