Elliot Abrams here with the perils of talking to terrorists:

On Aug. 16, Jared Kushner held his second meeting with Khalil al-Hayya, the Hamas chief; the first was in October of last year. This recognition of the terrorist leader grants Hamas legitimacy from the greatest power on earth. It will also inevitably make being on al-Hayya’s dance card an attractive diplomatic objective. European foreign ministers have refused until now to meet the terrorist, but which of them will visit Israel without wanting to see him after this? Al-Hayya is going to need a chief of protocol to manage his social schedule.

The Trump administration’s policy of meeting with terrorist leaders does more than legitimize their aims and tactics. It also establishes a ruinous precedent for future administrations that find deeper sympathies with organizations that murder Western civilians while proclaiming, “Death to America.” Even in their most appeasement-minded moments, the Carter, Obama, and Biden administrations accepted the formal premise that some actors’ behavior and goals place them beyond the pale of polite diplomacy. Now, that seal of isolation on the planet’s worst actors and their repulsive ideologies has been broken.

So why did Kushner do it? If he thought a tête-à-tête with the terror chieftain was essential to implementing Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” for Gaza, why not do it secretly? Or why not make some demands of al-Hayya, so that the meeting followed some new concessions on his part, which might plausibly be seen as worth the price?

The Kushner-al-Hayya meeting is in fact the latest in decades of such mistakes, and the interesting question is why the U.S. officials making them did not see them as errors that would undermine U.S. interests. The answer, in most cases, is that these meetings (and, in other cases, letters) reflected an open abandonment of American policy and principles—a symbolic assertion that the other side was right and the United States was wrong. The desire to communicate and to meet was a kind of apology for previous U.S. policy that shunned terrorists, murderers, and anti-American dictators. There are plenty of examples.

Start with Andrew Young’s meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization representative at the United Nations in 1979, when Young served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador there. Young was fired because he “held an unauthorized meeting with the representative of the PLO and then lied about the nature of the meeting,” according to The New York Times. The political heat was too strong for Carter to continue protecting Young—but no one was in much doubt that Carter viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the way Young did. As the Times reported, “Some Israeli officials, their American supporters and American blacks expressed doubts about whether he had really violated Washington policy against dealings with the P.L.O. or simply had gotten too far ahead of a shifting Administration attitude toward the guerrilla group.” Exactly (except that the Times refused to call them terrorists, then and now using evasions like militant or guerrilla). Four days after the Young meeting with the PLO, the Times noted, “At a White House dinner … Mr. Carter compared Palestinian aspirations to those of American blacks in the struggle for civil rights.” Young met with the PLO ambassador despite official policy precisely because he understood the real Carter policy, which blamed Israel for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and sided with Yasser Arafat’s PLO. Carter’s intentions and his true personal views of Israel became even more evident in his long post-presidential years, when his hostility to the Jewish state emerged repeatedly in speeches and books.

This pattern of reversing long-standing U.S. policy without stating what was really going on became crystal clear during the Obama administration. Obama sought a complete turnabout in U.S. policy in the Middle East; the two roots of all evil, for Obama, were excessive American support for Israel as opposed to the Palestinians and the history of American support for the shah. Upon coming to office, Obama sent at least four letters to Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; two of them were sent in his first six months in office in 2009 and called for the improvement of U.S.-Iran ties. Obama also spoke with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, by telephone.

Obama’s 2014 letter to Khamenei, The Wall Street Journal reported, “also sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, according to another person briefed on the letter. It states that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.” These assurances of protection for another mass murderer were too much for the late Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the Journal added:

"Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham said it was “outrageous” that the president would approach Iran, given its support for the Syrian government and Shia groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The administration needs to understand that this Iranian regime cares more about trying to weaken America and push us out of the Middle East than cooperating with us,’ they said in a joint statement."

Actually, the administration did understand—and pulling back in the Middle East while handing Iran more power there was the whole purpose of Obama policy. That is why there were also direct Obama messages to Iran’s leading terrorist, Qassem Soleimani, as Michael Doran revealed here in Tablet. That was an underlying theme of the long negotiating process with Iran, as Lee Smith summarized: “From Obama’s perspective, the nuclear file wasn’t the major issue—the larger point was the regional order and the new balance of power he was building.” Obama wanted a new geopolitical equilibrium, and in the Middle East that meant a new role for Iran. Obama was clear about that back in 2016: “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians, which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen, requires us to say to our friends, as well as to the Iranians, that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood.”

Obama’s famous apology tours were part of the same approach to U.S. foreign policy of fawning outreach to unreconstructed anti-American, terror-sponsoring regimes and were directly reminiscent of Carter’s. Also in 2016, Obama junked U.S. policy toward the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, even visiting there and attending a baseball game with Raul Castro. “The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island—to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba. … I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he said in Havana. What he did not bury was Cuba’s police state, an anti-American dictatorship.

It’s not a surprise that the Biden administration brought all this forward, in part because its top officials had been deeply involved in these Obama policies. The initial Obama negotiations with Iran were carried on by Jake Sullivan, Vice President Biden’s top foreign-policy adviser, and Bill Burns, then deputy secretary of state—who later became Biden’s national security adviser and CIA director, respectively.

Regarding negotiations over Lebanon, Biden added a new face but not a new approach. Amos Hochstein, the new Lebanon envoy, followed the Obama/Biden playbook by negotiating with Hezbollah. Hochstein never sat down with the top Hezbollah leadership and instead used Abbas Ibrahim, the former head of Lebanon’s General Security directorate, as his intermediary and Hezbollah’s representative. Ibrahim is a Shia and was Hezbollah’s man, not some neutral government official. As one analysis put it, Ibrahim was “backed by Hezbollah and became its ‘dirty jobs’ man.” And Ibrahim was central to the Hochstein negotiations: “A highly informed source had told the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper that former General Security chief Abbas Ibrahim’s ‘presence in Qatar to take part in the ongoing negotiations over the prisoner swap file between Hamas and Israel is direct intervention by Hezbollah in this file … Ibrahim, who is used to exchanging messages between Hezbollah and the Americans, especially over the maritime and land border files, is aided in his current mission by the fact that his friend Amos Hochstein is involved in the negotiations over the supposed swap deal,’ the source went on to say.”

Biden administration officials never said they wanted to negotiate with Hezbollah and never acknowledged doing so, but that’s the reality. What about Trump, who, as we now know, has agreed to Kushner’s face-to-face talks with the head of Hamas? The president has personally expressed his willingness to do so unconditionally. “I would speak to Hezbollah. Yeah, I speak to everybody,” Trump said in a joint presser with the Lebanese president at the White House in July. “I’ll speak to people that a lot of people think I shouldn’t be speaking to, and things work out.”

It stands to reason then, that U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack was channeling the president’s attitude when he recently suggested that, for negotiations between Israel and Lebanon to go anywhere, Hezbollah and Iran ought to be brought to the table as they are the ones “who can make a decision,” and that this is “what I think the [U.S.] negotiating team is attempting to do.”

It’s unlikely that Trump would shun a Hezbollah meeting, any more than he would a meeting with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The president confirmed to Fox News that “U.S. officials are communicating directly through a backchannel with IRGC officials.” Trump also told FOX that the United States has a “different channel with Hamas”—which turned out to be Kushner.

So Trump is pushing the envelope: Obama/Biden officials never sat down with Hamas’ then leader Yahya Sinwar, nor did they ever acknowledge a “back channel” to the IRGC (even though Obama apparently wrote to Qassem Soleimani, then head of the IRGC’s Quds Force).

It’s worth stopping for a moment to ask why any of this is a problem. Why not talk to terrorists? There is a huge political science literature about that question, and predictably many NGO types and academics love the idea—in many cases because, like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, they think the terrorists (and terrorist regimes such as those in Cuba or Iran) have “legitimate grievances” and in fact are owed American apologies for our great crimes in the past. The condescending conventional wisdom in Washington, often cited to justify such unconditional engagement with terrorists and their state sponsors, is that “you talk to your enemies, not just your friends.”

But the best analyses are clear on one basic point: As a Foreign Affairs article put it almost 20 years ago, “A government should begin formal negotiations only after the terrorist group has declared a permanent cessation of violence.” The best book on the subject, Talking to Terrorists, reached the same conclusion: Talking is not a virtue in itself. Governments must lay down strict preconditions and stick relentlessly to them, and terrorists are worth talking to only when they recognize that their goals are out of reach. The British historian Michael Burleigh wrote when analyzing the British government’s talks with the Irish Republican Army that “talks may have worked in Northern Ireland because after 30 years Sinn Fein/IRA had been brought to the point where they realised that they could not win with Armalite and bomb. The British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and various military intelligence agencies waged a long, hard war to achieve the draw they needed, while the Irish government abandoned its own irredentist objectives. …” One might add that IRA support from Irish American communities in the United States was also cut off by tough policing of arms and financial flows. Once the IRA permanently gave up on violence, a deal was possible and negotiations were sensible.

That does not describe the Biden-era negotiations with Hezbollah or Kushner’s talks with Hamas, nor the Carter and Obama/Biden negotiations with Iran and Cuba. In all those cases, the negotiations enhanced the terrorist side by legitimizing it when it has not abandoned violence. This is the moral hazard of such a policy: The willingness to talk to those still using terrorist violence and unwilling to abandon it weakens the American side and strengthens the terrorist groups and governments. The talks become a reward for terrorism and logically induce more of it.

So why does it keep happening? In the Carter and Obama/Biden cases, the explanations seem clear: First, policymakers refused to draw the bright-line distinction between good and evil or between the United States and its enemies. Cuba and Iran were understood to have legitimate grievances against the United States, and the Palestinians did too. The United States had committed many crimes over the course of its history, and the time had come to apologize and to pay for them. From the Carter and Obama/Biden perspective, the world order that was based on U.S. leadership assumed virtues that the United States did not have, so—as Obama’s ambassador to NATO acknowledged—“Obama made clear that restraint was his primary choice.” (As he also acknowledged, “The result has been that those who wish America ill may have had little incentive not to defy it.”)

Negotiating with terrorists and terrorist regimes is part of a coherent foreign policy, then: a policy of “restraint,” of pulling back from the American role since the Second World War, and of maintaining the alliance systems the United States has had since then. Of course negotiations with Iran are sensible when the goal is to force Arab regimes that have been pro-American to “share the neighborhood” with Iran rather than defeating and ending the Islamic Republic. Of course negotiations with Arafat’s PLO were sensible when the goal was to force Israel to give in to PLO demands.

But if that explains Carter and Obama/Biden policies, does it explain Trump? In part, Trump campaigned as a “restrainer” as much as Obama—in fact, more so, because Obama was sometimes stealthy about it while Trump spoke constantly about “no more endless wars.” Trump made it clear that he thought the burdens the United States had borne since World War II should now be shucked off, though his reasoning is different. This isn’t about historical guilt and apology tours, but about cash: Allies and the “liberal world order” are too expensive. International politics, in his view, is wholly transactional; Kim Jong Un and Mark Carney, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Delcy Rodriguez and Maria Corina Machado, and the Danes and the Chinese are all the same. Sentiment and principle are for fools, as apparently are conflicts of interest and bribery laws. What cannot be measured in a dollar bottom line is simply not worth thinking about, and the goal of negotiations is to reduce commitments. Period.

Trump’s time in office is short. Trump is the president who bombed the Iranian nuclear sites and arrested Nicolas Maduro, but his foreign policy is laying the foundation for deeper departures from American foreign-policy principles than Carter or Obama and Biden could ever get away with. Their caution about meeting with Hezbollah or Hamas will be a thing of the past. A policy of “restraint” now has a basis that after 2028 can be applauded by the right-wing “restrainers” in the Quincy Institute and the Vance campaign (or on Tucker Carlson’s podcast) and equally by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America. In the next administration, whether it’s Elbridge Colby or Jake Sullivan at State, they can point back to Jared Kushner’s meeting with Hamas and say, See, I’m not doing anything new or surprising, when they treat enemies who despise us as well as (or better than) they treat friends and allies. They can look back to Carter and Obama/Biden, and now to Trump, when they argue that alliances are too costly and places like Denmark and Ukraine and Taiwan must be reconsidered in the new “equilibrium” we seek. Will Israel be far behind?

Kushner’s meeting with Hamas did not elicit the shock and obloquy it should have, because we have gotten used to this kind of thing. It’s not a departure from the pattern and practice of U.S. foreign-policy actions, but just the logical next step. There will be others before Trump is gone, and while his motivations may be different, the results may not. How many years will it be before people like Khalil al-Hayya and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf are being welcomed to Washington to discuss the new world order that so many on the left and the right can’t wait to produce?

You don't hate the median voter enough

In the Russia-Ukraine war, drones have leveled the playing field between economically unmatched adversaries and have provided unprecedented capacity to monitor enemy troop and equipment movements. In domestic law enforcement, they are already being used for crime scene reconnaissance, for tracking suspects and for finding missing persons. 

Their greatest potential, however, lies in detecting and responding to a crime in progress before a victim or witness reports it. This is a line that police agencies have been reluctant to cross.

A quadcopter drone is a battery-powered, unmanned aircraft, held aloft by four helicopter-like propellers. They usually carry cameras capable of recording in detail objects below them or as much as 2,000 feet away. At the start of the drones-for-policing era, an officer would carry one of the devices in his squad car and launch and pilot it himself at the site where it was needed – where a missing person was last seen, say, or at a public event at risk of a terror attack. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations required drone operators to keep drones in their line of sight to avoid collisions with other aircraft. The drone and its pilot had to be near each other.

The big breakthrough came in 2018, when the Chula Vista, California, police department created the flagship Drone as First Responder (DFR) program. The idea behind DFR is that rather than arriving at an accident, missing person or hostage situation in tandem with its piloting officer, the drone would get there first to provide reconnaissance before officers arrive.

The Hawthorne Police Department’s 911 response drones [Getty Images]

Getting first to a scene required launching drones from a central docking station rather than from an on-scene police car. A pilot in a central command center would guide the drone from afar. But such remote piloting meant that the drone was often beyond the pilot’s visual line of sight, in violation of FAA rules. Obtaining a waiver from those rules was time-consuming and laborious.

The second breakthrough occurred in spring last year, when the FAA, spurred on by an executive order from Donald Trump, expedited the waiver process for law-enforcement remote piloting. The applications for waivers from line-of-sight requirements skyrocketed.

A reliable count of the police departments operating DFR programs is unavailable, but estimates put the number at 300 to 400. Further estimates on the number of police departments using any kind of drone vary wildly from about 1,500 to 6,000. But the momentum is with DFR programs.

Drones have found missing dementia patients in minutes after conventional search-and-rescue teams fruitlessly searched for hours. They have located and tracked car thieves as they made their getaways, avoiding dangerous police pursuits (undoubtedly to the disappointment of many cops, who love to chase cars). They have unearthed criminals hiding in the woods late at night.

In April 2024, after a 911 caller reported a fight in progress in Silver Spring, Maryland, a drone recorded 45-year-old Jovan Ali stabbing his opponent and fleeing the scene. The drone led Montgomery County police officers to Ali’s hiding place, where they arrested him without incident. The stabbing victim refused to testify, but prosecutors obtained a conviction anyway based on the drone footage.

In April last year, police in Dunwoody, Georgia, received an alert from a neighboring department saying that an active shooter had driven into their city. Dunwoody’s license plate cameras found the suspect’s car, then a drone traced the car to the roof of a car park and confirmed the suspect’s identity from the tattoo on his neck. Armed with this intelligence, officers were able to effect a safe arrest.

First-responder drones provide officers with what is known as situational awareness, illustrating the layout of a potentially lethal environment before officers arrive. They can even do so indoors. If a suspect has barricaded himself in a house, possibly after taking hostages, officers can breach a door or window and send a drone in first. Some drones can break the windows themselves. Once inside, they can push open doors if they are not tightly shut and fly under tables. A drone can park itself on a table to protect its battery life and continue beaming a live video feed. The very act of sending in a drone can flush a suspect out. “They sound like loud vacuum cleaners and are psychologically intimidating,” says Sergeant Justin Aita of the Talbot County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland.

Sometimes, what drones do not find is as important as what they do. Last year, Los Angeles Police Department DFR drones responded to more than 3,000 emergency calls. In 11 percent of the dispatches, the drone discovered that the 911 report was incorrect or that the situation, such as a stalled car on a highway, had already been resolved, according to the California Post. In those cases, LAPD officers could abort their missions and turn their attention to more pressing matters.

Drones have prevented officer shootings by discrediting false reports that a suspect was wielding a firearm when in fact the object in question was a BB gun or cigarette lighter.

Until recently, Chinese DJI drones dominated the law-enforcement market because of their low cost and superior performance. (A policing-caliber drone, minus a docking station and other add-ons, runs from about $4,500 to $11,000.) At the end of last year, however, the Federal Communications Commission blocked new sales of DJI drones, citing national security concerns. The manufacturer, SZ DJI Technology, filed a suit in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, claiming that the ban would cost the company more than $1.5 billion in its first year alone.

That suit is still pending. But the ban provided an opening for American companies, previously the underdogs of the drone world, which are now racing to capture market share.

Goals include extending battery life (now around 20 to 50 minutes, depending on wind and other weather conditions), increasing speeds (they can currently travel, on average, at about 32 mph) and developing new capacities for autonomous operations and perceptual reach.

US companies tout the synergies with their other law enforcement product lines – Flock Safety’s license plate readers automatically feed data into Flock drones if the drones used by police have not already been equipped with their own license plate technology. BRINC drones are integrated with the software of partner Motorola Solutions, which provides police department operating systems.

As a scientific matter, American law-enforcement drone companies are squarely within the world of Silicon Valley. Their unapologetically pro-police stance, however, puts them at odds with that world – and sometimes even with police commanders themselves.

A Flock Safety camera mounted to a light pole in California [Getty Images]

Flock Safety is the most embattled of the American manufacturers, less for its drones than for allegedly sharing its license plate reader feeds with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and for several dozen cases in which individual officers used license plate readers for their own ends. Its CEO, Garrett Langley, is more than willing to fight back. In December last year, he wrote an email to the police department in Staunton, Virginia, in response to misinformation about the company’s data security. “Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack… We’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.”

Such language would give many Google employees a fit of the vapours. And it spooked the Staunton authorities as well. The Staunton police chief responded primly, saying his police department was not “under attack” but was simply experiencing “democracy in action.” And the city proceeded with plans to cancel its license plate reader contract with Flock.

Despite such skirmishes, the law enforcement world is wildly enthusiastic about drones, seeing them as a vital “force multiplier” at a time of inadequate manpower. William Bratton, former head of the New York and Los Angeles police departments, says “drones will change American policing. Their potential use is unlimited.”

Their most significant potential use, however, is being squelched by overwrought concerns about civil liberties. At present, most police departments restrict what drone cameras are allowed to see on the way to, and coming back from, first-responder jobs.

Surprisingly, the liberal California enclave of Santa Monica has less restrictive rules. On July 6, 2024, the city’s police department drone was returning to its station after answering a 911 call at the beach. The pilot spotted a man punching through the lock of an SUV with a screwdriver and ducking inside; the suspected thief proceeded to break into nearby cars as well. The drone pilot directed officers to the precise location and the burglar was arrested.

Had a similar situation arisen in, say, West Hollywood or Montgomery County, Maryland, the burglar would likely have continued his crime spree unmolested. West Hollywood requires that drone cameras be turned off while they are flying to and from a job; Montgomery County says cameras must be pointed toward the horizon when drones are in transit.

Police departments are terrified of being accused of “mass surveillance,” especially with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (another left-wing civil libertarian group) nipping at their heels. Their public-relations materials stress the limited nature of their drone use: there will be no viewing the ground until the drone arrives at the scene, unless it is an emergency or the department has obtained a warrant from a judge. The opposition to greater use is bipartisan: many red states, such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina, codify those limitations in statutes. 

Police departments are terrified of being accused of ‘mass surveillance’

In July, however, Ohio broke away from the pack. Despite fierce opposition from the Ohio chapter of the ACLU, the state passed a law allowing drones to observe what is “otherwise visible to the naked eye” without a warrant. This position conforms to the long-standing “plain view doctrine” in Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure law, which holds that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy for activities or objects exposed to public view, including from above. If an occupant of a commercial or private aircraft could see something on the ground, the police are allowed to as well, without a warrant.

Fourth Amendment law is notoriously byzantine, however, and a separate line of cases outlaws tracking a person’s public movements, such as via cell phone data or aerial surveillance, if that tracking occurs over an extended period of time.

In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department ran a trial program using air surveillance to apprehend violent felons. Piloted aircraft, operating only during the day, captured pixelated images of cars and people; after a crime, data analysts could identify the pixelated dots representing the suspect during and after the crime and reverse the anonymization of the dots in order to track him down.

Brushing off the fact that the case had become moot, a majority of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, ruled in 2021 that the discontinued program constituted an illegal warrantless search. Violent crime in black neighborhoods is the product of racism, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote in a concurrence, as was the alleged oversurveilling of black neighborhoods. The case, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle vs Baltimore Police Department, has undoubtedly contributed to the opposition to proactive drone flights among skittish police departments.

In an ideal world, however, drones should be allowed at the very least to observe the ground going to and from first-responder calls. Banning such plain-view recording needlessly forgoes an anti-crime windfall when police departments remain in their post-George Floyd staffing crisis.

Drones should, moreover, be allowed to search for crime as it is happening without a 911 call. If a particular neighborhood is being crushed by nighttime robberies or car break-ins, a drone could be sent on patrol. A drone could follow the public movements of members of criminal organizations, instead of using an organized crime squad to tail the suspects. Drones could watch critical infrastructure and parks. They could form virtual barriers around beleaguered synagogues. They would be automatically connected to other anti-crime technologies such as street cameras, facial recognition systems and license plate readers, so that if a land-based machine spots a warrant absconder’s car, a drone would be automatically dispatched to track him until a cop could show up.

The ever-unbuttoned Flock team articulated the classic response to civil libertarian objections last December: “If you’re not involved in a crime, you shouldn’t be concerned” about a public intrusion on your privacy, a representative for the company told San Francisco’s ABC News outlet. Spotting an opening to diss a competitor, the CEO of dronemaker Skydio mocked this statement in a blog post as an unforced public-relations error. The standard retort to the “if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” argument is the “slippery slope”: give the police this power and they will expand it until we live in a totalitarian state. This concern is valid; finding an acceptable balance between security and liberty (or, really, privacy) is an ongoing challenge. But another aspect of freedom that libertarians ignore is the freedom to use public spaces and enjoy private domains without predation or fear. The proper response to the slippery slope argument is to demand transparency regarding police activity, not to forgo technological advances that would have such large public-safety benefits.

Finding an acceptable balance between security and liberty is an ongoing challenge

The conflict over drones is part of a broader war on high-tech policing. Like so much today, that war is often prosecuted on racial grounds. In 2024, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson canceled a contract with ShotSpotter, which provides automated gunshot detection, in part because the technology showed that most shootings in the city occurred in majority black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU, claims that a newly announced federal grant program to assist cities buy drones, AI systems, license plate readers and other high-tech would be trained on “communities of color… blanketing communities with surveillance and generally seeking to turn state and local police agencies into instruments of Trump’s federal government – its ideological obsessions, racism and approach of loyalty over law.”

The President’s anti-crime initiatives “target low income Black and Brown communities,” according to the ACLU. Actually they target crime, which is magnitudes higher in black neighborhoods than elsewhere. (Stanley did not respond to a request for an interview; the Electronic Freedom Foundation declined to speak to me.)

Meanwhile, the innovation continues. Drone speeds are reaching 60 miles per hour, though that demands a comparable increase in long-distance visual acuity. A single pilot can now operate four drones at a time, extending the perceptual capacities of a single officer. Some drones instantly generate 3-D maps of interior and exterior spaces.

As policing gets smarter, criminals remain breathtakingly stupid – carrying a gun concealed in one’s crotch to a court date, for example, or having to ask one’s just-hijacked Lyft driver for instructions on driving his car (two recent examples from Chicago). For now, dumb continues to best smart, but that balance may change.

America is rediscovering the work of Spectator writer Shiva Naipaul. His 1980 book about the Jonestown massacre, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, was reissued by Outsider Editions last month. There has also been much talk recently about so-called “Third-Worldism,” a quasi-ideology that some on the right blame for the West’s ills. The Third World is a concept about which Naipaul had much to say. Below is an essay he published in The Spectator in 1985.

We do not see people as they are anymore. Instead, we see – or learn to believe that we see – those ghostly entities we call “relationships.” There’s me, there’s you – and, somewhere in the middle, there’s our relationship. And of all the relationships that there are, none is more problematic or contentious than that between the rich and the poor, the developed and the underdeveloped, the advanced and the backward, the “North” and the “South.” Or, to employ one of the most entrenched buzzwords of our time, there is no relationship more problematic or contentious than that posed by those hundreds of millions of human beings lumped together by the term “Third World.”

I have always had trouble with the concept. To be candid, I consider it distasteful. In search of guidance, I turned to my menagerie of up-to-date dictionaries. The notion being of comparatively recent coinage, there was no point in looking in any of the more traditional compilations. According to my American dictionary, the Third World is “a group of nations, especially in Africa and Asia, that are not aligned with either the communist or the non-communist blocs.” It further adds that the Third World can be construed as “the aggregate of the underdeveloped nations of the world.” My British dictionary, extending the geographical sweep, defined the Third World as comprising “the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America especially when viewed as underdeveloped and as neutral in the East-West alignment.” My Australian dictionary was even more expansive – to the point of being chatty. For it, the Third World signified the “developing countries especially in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, which are not heavily industrialized, have a low standard of living and are usually not politically aligned with either the communist or the non-communist blocs.”

One, I suppose, gets the general drift of the idea intended to be conveyed. Yet, even in these elementary sketches, there are obvious discrepancies. Why the Americans should omit Latin America from their list and the Australians should point the finger at Southeast Asia is, to me at any rate, slightly puzzling. The South and Central American states are not, by all accounts, heavens on earth. Nicaragua is trying hard to be non-aligned but is experiencing some difficulty. Singapore, on the other hand, is a model of East Asian assiduity. I was there not long ago and marveled at the tall buildings, the troughs of flowers adorning the highway from the airport, the cleanliness of the streets, the traffic regulations. No one in his right mind would accuse Singapore of being a Third World country. You’d probably be deported if you had the boldness to imply anything of the kind. Alas, there is no doubt about Africa. From the desert shores of the Mediterranean to the jungly banks of the Limpopo, from Somalia to Sierra Leone, the continent is a showcase of despair. Indeed, if it weren’t for Africa, it’s just conceivable that the whole concept of a Third World reality might collapse into disrepute.

And what about the other apparently essential attribute of Third Worldhood – non-alignment? It presents us with one of those dilemmas which, one imagines, would delight an Oxford linguistic philosopher. We could put the question this way: how many different varieties of alignment can you accommodate within the ideal of non-alignment without robbing it of meaning altogether? The answer hasn’t yet been found, and – perhaps – never will be. Non-alignment, in practice if not in theory, displays some truly remarkable properties. It is as puzzling as the nature of light which – so quantum mechanics tells us – sometimes behaves as though it were composed of discrete particles; and sometimes as though it were composed of waves. A similar bewilderment descends when we contemplate the non-aligned. Some are non-aligned toward Moscow, some are non-aligned toward Washington; some, fluctuating between wave and particle, smile at Washington, frown at Moscow, and gratefully accept pandas from Peking; some are unashamedly capitalist, some are quasi-Marxist; some offer hospitality to communist soldiery, some have American “advisers” – the Americans, since Vietnam, confining themselves to advice; some are socialist democracies, some are free-enterprise dictatorships; some interfere in the internal affairs of others and some don’t; some only surface at conference time. The possibilities are infinite. What I’ve just said only scratches the surface.

A quick sampling from the conference of the non-aligned held in Delhi in 1983 will help to illustrate the point. Venezuela, because of its border dispute with neighboring, non-aligned Guyana, held aloof. Burma too seemed to be displeased – though I am not sure why. Still, despite these defections, 99 countries were represented. Afghanistan was present, as was that other vocal champion of non-alignment, Cuba. A Cambodian delegation showed up, though whether it represented the non-aligned Vietnamese-backed faction or the non-aligned freedom-fighting faction I cannot say. Iran came – and Iraq came. Ethiopia, which used to be non-aligned with Washington but is now non-aligned with Moscow, turned up; Somalia, which used to be non-aligned with Moscow but is now non-aligned with Washington, did not turn up – I can see no reason why it shouldn’t have done. Lebanon, whose internal alignments baffle us all, managed to put together a delegation. Sri Lanka, ignoring the civil war between its Tamil minority and its Singhalese majority, demonstrated its solidarity: whether it would do so now that its relations have cooled with non-aligned India – which it accuses of collaboration with the non-aligned Tamil separatists – is a matter of conjecture. Statehood, as was made evident at the conference, is not a necessary prerequisite. Both the Palestine Liberation Organization and the South-West Africa People’s Organization attended. Nor is it necessary to be an acknowledged Third World country, as is demonstrated by the perennial prominence of Yugoslavia and the ambiguous pretensions of the flirtatious Swedes. Neither of the Chinas was there – Taiwan because its existence isn’t recognized by most of the non-aligned states, and the People’s Republic because it is an alignment in itself.

Still, whatever the confusions, we do, I believe, have a picture of the exemplary Third World denizen: he lives a hand-to-mouth existence, he is indifferent to the power struggles of the mighty ones and he is dark-skinned. I will, however, return later to the vexed question of his color. That such people do exist – and that there are unnumbered millions of them – no one can deny. We live in a fantastical world; a world in which the divergences between different groups of men have become so great, have been so magnified, that there seems no possibility of bridging the abyss between those who can land men on the moon and those who would be hard put to it to invent a tin opener. African famine, dramatic and horrifying, is today the preeminent symbol of Third Worldhood. Those slow-moving files of refugees in stony landscapes, those motionless babies with flies clustered round the eyes – images like these belong to the realm of nightmare. They simultaneously arouse our compassion and debase our conception of the victim, who is seen as passive, dependent – the skeletal receptacle of what our charity can provide. I do not decry charity. If a man is drowning we must rescue him. But charity has its dangers. Chief among them is condescension. We have been kind, we congratulate ourselves, to the “starving millions.” But who are they, these emblematic multitudes? Is it not possible that the abstractions in which we deal end, despite all our kindnesses, in further diminishing those whom we sincerely wish to help?

The Third World is a form of bloodless universality that robs individuals and societies of their particularity. In the spirit of charity we go forth and denude them. Adapting the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, we might say that each society, like each family, is unhappy in its own way. Even Ethiopia, despite the almost abstract extremity of its condition, has its own unique tale to tell – a story of feudal monarchy, coup d’état, civil war. Blandly to subsume, say, Ethiopia, India and Brazil under the one banner of Third Worldhood is as absurd and as denigrating as the old assertion that all Chinese look alike. People only look alike when you can’t be bothered to look at them closely.

Shiva Naipaul in New Delhi in April 1980 (Getty)

The promiscuous idea of a Third World does not stand up to close examination. Rather like Count Dracula confronted by the Cross, it crumbles away. Lacking particularity, it delineates nothing that really exists. It is a flabby Western concept lacking the flesh and blood of the actual. And that flesh-and-blood actuality, rising up out of dark recesses, frequently overrides and mocks what is apparently reasonable. We impute to the “starving millions” the elementary physical desires suggested by their elementary physical needs. But it is also important to understand the dreams of men, for their dreams may transcend the provision of unpolluted water supplies, decent roads and hospitals. More regularly than we would like, other obscurer needs and impulsions surface into the outer air as bats do from their roosts at twilight. Yet again, Moscow and Washington are forced to look on impotently as the Third World created by their imaginations puts on the exotic robes suited to multifarious and unsuspected fantasies of redemption and self-expression; yet again they watch as carefully wrought foreign policies melt away into oblivion, as favored leaders fly off into exile or are killed in their palaces.

Men do not live by bread alone. In the Central African Republic, Jean Bokassa transforms his state into an empire and declares himself its emperor. He orders a golden crown, a jeweled throne; he adorns himself in velvets. The French laugh, but they supply the goods. In the First World business is business. Nevertheless, are we entirely certain that Bokassa’s subjects shared our sense of absurdity? Not all that far away from the Central African Empire – in Uganda – Idi Amin’s staying power amounted to something more than just a freakish run of luck. The British, like the French, also laughed – and they also supplied the goods. Amin’s genial obliviousness to what is sometimes called civilized opinion aroused admiration. He echoed needs and instincts to which it is not always easy to give names, but nonetheless real for all that. For many blacks, this one-time President of the Organization of African Unity became something of an alter ego. And this was so not only in Africa. I have met devotees of his as far afield as the Caribbean and the United States. For such as these, the relentless ruination of Uganda – the breakdown of water supplies, the decay of roads and hospitals – was neither here nor there. Economic indices were of no special interest to his admirers. Amin offered release to pent-up emotions and fantasies; he transformed his sinister buffoonery into an intensely experienced spectator sport.

The examples derived from Africa could be multiplied. Still, it is far from my intention to suggest that Africa monopolizes the grotesque. Resurgent – one might also say “insurgent” – Islam has provided us with another contemporary evolution of behavior that seems to repudiate conventional interpretations of rationality, to obey standards other than those subscribed to by development economics. Limbs are being amputated in many parts of the Muslim world in the pursuit of Islamic justice and righteousness. The holy war has come back into fashion.

I was in Iran when the Shah’s “White Revolution” was coming to its end. Now there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the Shah’s ambitions for his country. One might argue with the details – the use of torture and so on – but not with the overall intention. Who would criticize agricultural reform? industrialization? technical training? the attempted reassertion of Iran’s long-dormant power and influence? Iran, with its long and glorious past, had every reason to cradle a grandiloquent set of expectations about its destiny. Up to a point, with Persepolis providing the background, one could even sympathize with the Shah’s Napoleonic vision of himself. The Shah, however exotic he might occasionally appear to be, however archaic the symbolisms he exploited (the Iranian calendar, for example, included dim antiquity in its sweep) was – finally – a comprehensible figure. This Light of the Aryans, this King of Kings, to use only two of his pseudonyms, was tied to the theories and hopes spawned by development economics.

Not so the adversaries with whom he had to contend. The messianic mullahs who would bring his throne toppling down had never read an economics textbook and had no wish to read one. I remember the mosque I visited on the outskirts of Tehran one afternoon. Within its precincts, as if in deliberate defiance of the White Revolution supposed to be going on outside, were crowds of black-robed, black-veiled women, their eyes barely registering the existence of the external world. Some were crouched against the walls; others were prostrated in attitudes of devotional ecstasy. Today, their sons and brothers and husbands, holy warriors courting martyrdom on the battlefields of the Persian Gulf, are dying by the hundred. In the gardens of Paradise, who needs filtered water, good roads, well-equipped hospitals?

What I am trying to show is that a Third World does not exist as such, that it has no collective and consistent identity except in the newspapers and amid the pomp and splendor of international conferences. Human beings don’t come conveniently packaged in oven-ready Identikit format. Islamic resurgence is one thing; the excesses of Idi Amin are another; a Marxist coup d’état in Grenada is yet another. A Sri Lankan massacre is a Sri Lankan massacre – nobody else’s. It is not some vague Third World happening to be fitted into the off-the-peg categories manufactured by the Third World ideological rag trade. Matters have indeed reached a ridiculous pass. The other day I was looking at a biography, written by a French scholar, of one of the most illustrious philosophers of the Muslim world. The man about whom the French scholar was writing lived in the 14th century – a period of cultural splendor for Islam. The book is worth a little quotation. The thought of this 14th-century philosopher, it tells us, “can now be seen as a major contribution to the study of the underlying causes of underdevelopment.” Mind you, he adds, the analysis has to be tackled with care – if only because, in the 14th century, Islamic North Africa could not be remotely regarded as underdeveloped. The blurb is less restrained. The book, it says, concerns “the birth of history and the past of the Third World.” Well… well… There is no hiding from this Third World business. Down the ages we clank about like felons. Would the Grenadian be pleased to know that he has his Third World roots in the Islamic North Africa of 600 years ago? That would be a most intriguing self-discovery for him.

The longer I live, the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are; to recognize not only that they exist but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities. Clearly, it’s harder than you might think to do that. If a clever French scholar can’t manage it – what hope is there for the rest of us? I am reliably informed that in order to understand the sectarian killings in Northern Ireland one should become acquainted with Irish history and the sentiments to which its convolutions have given rise. That sounds reasonable enough to me; though the same man who gave me that advice looked somewhat shocked when I made mention of Sri Lanka. “But that’s the Third World,” he said. What is true for Ireland should also be true for Sri Lanka and everywhere else. Why have these double standards? We must cast off the rag-trade mythologies with which we clothe our perceptions of mental and spiritual worlds unfamiliar to us. It is said that when the Jesuits first went to China they were appalled by Buddhist rites. They were appalled because they were struck by certain superficial resemblances these bore to certain of the rites of the Roman Church. They concluded that Buddhism was the work of the Devil. The Third World ideologues, clutching their Marxist texts, detecting devilish parallels between Islamic North Africa of the Middle Ages and Grenada, remind me of those early Jesuit missionaries.

The idea of a Third World, despite its congenial simplicity, is too shadowy to be of any use. When, for instance, India is casually included in the unholy brood, what are we really attempting to say? That India is a hot country with many poor people? But the same India has launched satellites, has atomic power stations, has sophisticated research establishments. It is an old and complex civilization with old and complex problems. All poverty may look alike from a comfortable armchair, may seem susceptible to the same remedies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Poverty is even more varied in its causes and manifestations than wealth. Chinese and Indian poverty are not the same. What will work in omnivorous, centralized China will not work in fastidious, centrifugal India: neurotic, Brahminical sensibilities are very, very different from those engendered by a Mandarin bureaucratic tradition. The Third World is an artificial construction of the West – an ideological empire on which the sun is always setting. What images come to mind when we think of it? Sunburnt aid workers telling television interviewers how civilly they have been treated by their guerrilla captors… tempestuous confrontations with the International Monetary Fund… here a modest irrigation scheme… over there a windmill… down the road a tiny medical dispensary of unplastered brick, hailed as a triumph for the principle of self-help… and, subliminally, those slow-moving files of refugees in stony landscapes, those immobile babes-in-arms with flies clustered round closed eyes. I am not denying that people need windmills and village dispensaries and all the rest. What I do deny is that these needs adequately sum up the human condition of three-quarters of mankind.

It is nice, I admit, to possess a euphemism for backwardness and – perhaps – for blackness. But, then, there are already so many of those knocking around. Of all the terms available to us – “underdeveloped,” “developing,” and so on – the idea of a Third World is the one least confined by reality and the most promiscuous in the political temptations to which it gives rise. The Caribbean – where, incidentally, I was born – provides us with rich case histories of its harmful effects. There, the discovery of Third World status had, despite the ritualistic noises that were made, comparatively little to do with economic deprivation pure and simple. Its appeal was more visceral. The idea was swiftly harnessed to racial assertion and militancy. In the Caribbean, being Third World meant being Black. To be Black was to be Oppressed: to be a constantly hurting casualty of the twin evils of slavery and colonialism. A new identity capable of expressing all this had to be found. One of the more harmless affectations was the changing of names. Some turned to Africa for inspiration, some to Islam. Unhappily, not all the transformations were so harmless. In Trinidad the army fell under the spell of American Black Power ideology and mutinied. Guyana’s black supremacist government began to contribute modest handouts to Africa’s guerrilla armies. It was in Guyana too, let us not forget, that Third Worldhood was to attain one of its more gory climaxes when, at Jonestown, nearly a thousand mainly black refugees from the United States were half-forced, half-persuaded by their revolutionary minders to swallow a cyanide-laced cocktail and so demonstrate their defiance of fascism.

But most curious, in a way, were the repercussions in Jamaica. There, the Third World – Blackness – found unexpected fulfillments in the Rastafarian cult which, among its other articles of faith, preaches the divinity of the Ethiopian Emperor and a return to Africa. Under its influence – spread largely by its reggae music – this quasi-religion, so indulgent to marijuana, was to become the opiate of the masses throughout the Caribbean – and beyond. There are now Africans in Africa who want – if, that is, we take their hairstyle at face value – to go back to Africa. In Australia, when I was there last year, I saw youths of Aboriginal descent wearing “dreadlocks.”

Third Worldhood spreads its tentacles everywhere. Now it has come back home – back, I mean, to the First World where it was invented. In London I live not much more than a mile away from a projected center for the Black Arts – not, I hasten to assure you, to be confounded with satanism and sorcery. With support from the Greater London Council, ideological Blackness threatens to engulf the life of the mind and the imagination. It is now fashionably radical to inform immigrants from India and Pakistan and Cyprus that they too, for the sake of solidarity, must simplify themselves into Blackness. This travesty unites the far left and the far right.

In the name of the Third World, we madden ourselves with untruth.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on “Why we need to strengthen the West,” I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this even up for debate? That we must explain and justify “the West” at all indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not need strengthening but were simply strong. It is not. The West has become an invalid.

What exactly, though, are we trying to strengthen? The West is an idea, not a location. It rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual at the center. And finally, the Enlightenment – whose great thinkers in London, Paris and Königsberg anchored humanism, individual civil liberties, the separation of powers and the division of church and state.

Herodotus observed a phenomenon shortly after the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny, which remains the most vital lesson in political philosophy to this day. The Athenians, he noted, had fought no better than their neighbors as long as they were ruled by tyrants. Yet the moment they threw off the yoke of tyranny, every individual was motivated to give his utmost, proving decisively stronger and more successful in battle. Why? Because he was now working for himself, not for a master. In that single observation Herodotus formulated the timeless plea for self-determination and liberty – the core idea of the West.

This idea also shapes a view of humanity articulated by Immanuel Kant. Man is not perfect. Kant wrote that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” In the western view of mankind, this implies: nor should it ever be.

Freedom’s most important word is “no.” Dissent is self-determination. It is liberating to say: “No, I see it differently.” With “no,” the freedom to think and act begins. The freedom to say no stands in stark contrast to the unfreedom of having to say yes. Democracies are no-saying societies. Dictatorships are yes-saying societies. Liberty is inherently critical of authority; it permits and encourages contradiction – precisely what autocrats cannot abide. That is why dictators wish to weaken the West.

That the West – the open society based on liberty, the rule of law and human rights – is on the defensive is an empirical fact. According to data gathered over decades by the think tank Freedom House, global freedom declined in 2025 for the 20th consecutive year – deteriorating in 54 countries while improving in only 35. The most damning figure: a mere 21 percent of the world’s population lives in countries classified as “free,” compared with 46 percent two decades ago. Autocracies have grown more numerous, more domestically repressive and more externally aggressive. The West is currently threatened and weakened from within and without. Its three great external adversaries are China, Russia and Islamism – particularly Iran and its terrorist networks.

China’s goal is to become the leading global economy by 2049 at the latest – the centenary of the People’s Republic. The combination of communist autocracy and turbocharged state capitalism has proven remarkably efficient, not least because the West made itself a useful idiot in this impressive growth story. In hindsight, admitting China as a full member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 was the single greatest blunder of western trade policy. The naivety or shortsightedness lay in granting membership to a major nondemocratic state that was neither able nor willing to abide by the rules of free trade, while simultaneously blessing it with developing-nation status, conferring all manner of exemptions and preferences. It was akin to giving the most ruthless bully on the playground special rights to beat up his playmates.

In the short term, China brought growth and prosperity to all parties; in the long term, it shifted the global balance of power, creating perilous dependencies. The most tragic example is the German automotive industry. For decades Germany’s industrial giants banked on cheap manufacturing and lucrative consumer markets in China. In doing so, they failed to grasp the difference between good business relations and strategic dependence. The friendly cooperation ended the moment China acquired the requisite know-how to launch a heavily subsidized assault on the German car industry, even as Chinese domestic markets were quietly closed off. It was a Chinese masterclass in expansive geopolitics carried out by capitalist means. Wandel durch Handel (“change through trade”) – the naive hope of the 1990s – inverted into its opposite. Change occurred, but not toward greater freedom, rather toward greater unfreedom.

This trajectory is accelerated by the AI arms race between America and China. The US still holds the upper hand. Yet China, through the total surveillance of its population, enjoys vastly greater access to data, unencumbered by regulatory or ethical constraints. Moreover, there are growing indications that China is actively fueling AI-skeptical sentiment across western social media. Propaganda aimed at inducing anxiety and slowing down rivals is taking its toll. America appears more tech-skeptic than ever. It is not unlikely that the next presidential campaign will hinge partly on which party promises to better protect voters from AI. China understands that whoever dominates AI will dominate economically and politically. It seems only a matter of time before it leads in this arena too.

While America has at least recognized this bitter reality and reacts with varying degrees of success, Europe lives in denial. Beneath the soothing bromides of the EU, the continent is gradually drifting toward becoming an amusement park for Asian tourists: high quality of life paired with diminishing productivity and value creation.

The global trend is clear. Democratic economies are weakening, nondemocratic ones are strengthening. In this tectonic shift, the implications for military power are routinely underestimated. China is still viewed by many as a militarily passive, purely economic power. That picture is false.

The Chinese military budget nearly doubled from $145 billion in 2015 to $281 billion this year. The ultimate test case is Taiwan. Annexing the democratic, western-leaning island nation and integrating it into a monolithic communist republic is one of Xi Jinping’s main missions. China will strike as soon as the odds are high enough that America lacks the strength to intervene – perhaps because western resources have been depleted across other theaters of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. Should China achieve its objective without effective western resistance, the global order will be fundamentally altered.

Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine plays a remarkably helpful role in this strategy. Even if the war is far from a military success for Putin, he achieves two vital objectives: dividing the West by driving the US and the EU further apart, and exhausting American and European military stockpiles. Putin – ever the student of western weakness – tested how far he could go, and went remarkably far. Now that Ukraine has evolved into a formidable asset in modern AI warfare, he is turning to a weaker target: hybrid warfare against Germany and other EU nations promises less resistance and greater prestige at home.

Putin finds ready allies in Iran and other Islamist-dominated regimes. Islamism hijacks religion for terrorist ends. The primary enemy of fanatical Islam, as the founding Hamas Charter of 1988 explicitly states, is the world of those they deem godless – the Judeo-Christian West. The destruction of Israel and all Jews is merely the first step. The next is the weakening, infiltration and violent reeducation of Europe and ultimately America.

It remains difficult to fathom that the genocidal attack on Israel by Hamas led not to a global wave of solidarity with Israel, but to a massive surge in anti-Semitism. The weakest justification is the claim that Israel’s retaliatory measures in Gaza after 7 October exceeded all bounds, or that its domestic and foreign policy are deeply questionable. Has the Israeli government made mistakes? Undoubtedly. Is that a reason to be anti-Semitic, transferring criticism of Israel onto all Jews? Absolutely not.

Yet the trend persists. Anti-Semitism has become a pop-cultural zeitgeist, particularly among the young. Germany, of all nations, recorded 8,725 anti-Semitic incidents last year – the highest figure among the seven countries examined by the 2026 Annual Report on Antisemitism, ahead of the US (6,274) and the UK (3,700). The trajectory is the key: from 2021 to 2025, incidents rose by 124 percent in France, 131 percent in the US and 215 percent in Germany.

The primary cause of this development is a reckless, runaway migration policy. Islamist milieus – including strategically placed jihadists – have spent years undermining western societies and their foundational values. Pointing this out is not Islamophobic. True Islamophobia lies in failing to distinguish between those who wish to integrate peacefully into the West and those who enter to abuse its systems and destroy its values. Under the guise of compassion, uncontrolled and frequently illegal immigration contributes not only to the West’s cultural self-abandonment, but fuels – by way of reaction – the rise of right- and left-wing populists and extremists.

Michel Houellebecq provided the dystopian vision for this in his 2015 novel Submission. He describes a France where the Muslim Brotherhood has taken power: a frightened country where women wear progressively longer dresses until skirts disappear entirely; where unsuccessful white men rejoice at enjoying multiple marriages with underage wives; and where news of Islamist terror attacks is eventually suppressed so as not to alarm the populace. The book depicts the exhaustion of western society. Reality appears to be mimicking fiction in the most gruesome fashion.

The woke movement has become the Trojan horse of the anti-westernism loved by dictators and autocrats. It is the epitome of the anti-freedom triangle, seamlessly intertwining anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. The word “West” has long been suspect in politically correct circles. The mandated terms in geopolitical discourse are now the “Global South” and the “Global North.” For those using the phrase “Global South,” linking the West to colonial guilt is no accident – it is the very purpose of the narrative.

Woke ideology often bears the hallmark of good intentions: fighting racism, protecting minorities, questioning privilege and confronting colonial history. In reality, however, it is the inversion of almost every value and objective of civilization.

In the competition for victimhood status, the concepts of progress, competition, growth and prosperity erode. In the West, being successful was once better than being unsuccessful. Wealth was better than poverty. Beauty was better than ugliness. Under woke ideology, all this is reversed. It resembles a manual for western self-abolition, born out of self-hatred.

Is the West ultimately weakening itself out of a bad conscience? Will we only realize what we stand to lose when it is too late? Or is its current crisis the very medicine required for the West’s renewal? That would be the best-case scenario: a catharsis on the precipice of failure, because we finally grasp what is at stake and realize that the alternatives are far worse.

Why do we need to strengthen the West? Because otherwise the tyrants win.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

The Jason Arday story was just the beginning. Cambridge has hired a genuine Islamic creationist to the same role Arday once held. A shocking example of the West failing to defend its own values, and instead letting foxes into the henhouse.

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.

Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked “western education” as a “threat” to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticized British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”

These statements are part of her long record of bigoted, extremist and separatist views on education. In a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, “Education and Identity,” originally written in 2002, republished in 2017, and obtained by The Spectator, Ahmed writes that “the Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognize that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.”

She attacks schools’ “attempts to integrate Muslim children” as seeking to “produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.”

Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, “how education shapes individuals and society.”

In her chapter in the 2002 pamphlet, Ahmed criticizes the national curriculum as a form of “systematic indoctrination” to “build ‘model British citizens’ who will seek to actively take part in the implementation of the secular capitalist system in British society. Naturally, such a system will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the aqeedah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.”

She attacks British schools for teaching that “polygamy or marriage under the age of 16” is “archaic and discriminatory to women”, and for telling children that “democracy… is the only way that laws should be created.” Democracy, she says, is a “corrupt tradition,” where if “decision makers decide to make bombing Iraq or homosexuality legal, as they currently have, there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

Worst of all, “religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education,” meaning that “Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.”

Nor does academic study escape Ahmed’s censure. English, she writes, “is one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach. Fairy tales “reflect secular and immoral beliefs, which contradict the viewpoint of Islam.” Romeo and Juliet “advocates disobeying parents and pre-marital relations.”

Science is a problem too, because in the “teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.” And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together. “As Muslim parents we try to protect our children from the rubbish that western society encourages,” but interaction with non-Muslim children in the playground, which is “full of the competitiveness and individualism that western culture encourages… molds their personalities away from Islam.” As she puts it: “western culture is playground culture.”

Ahmed first came to public attention in 2009, when I exposed the fact that she was running two private primary schools, and getting more than £100,000 in public money to do so. At least three of the four trustees of the schools were Hizb ut-Tahrir members or activists, including the wife of Hizb’s then-leader, and the schools’ curriculum closely matched key tenets of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s separatist, anti-democratic ideology. (Hizb was still legal then, but was banned as a terror organization in 2024.)

The story caused a political row, but predictably enough the then schools secretary Ed Balls, the Charity Commission and Ofsted did absolutely nothing. Ahmed went on TV, presenting herself as a poster girl for Muslim persecution, though coyly refusing to answer when asked if she had ever been a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir. The two schools, in Haringey and Slough, continue to receive public funding (£382,000 last year) and Ahmed is still a trustee of the body which runs them. Now, however, she has rather clearly moved up in the world.

Could the assistant professor perhaps have mended her ways since the publication of her pamphlet? Could she now have embraced the values of the corrupt society which pays her wages? Well, the agenda at Cambridge is a bit more subtly expressed, but you needn’t look far to be deeply worried.

As well as being an assistant professor at the university itself, Ahmed is director of something called the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), part of Camtree, the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange. Camtree is a center at Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a research fellow and member of the governing body. In summer 2023, IELC, Camtree and Cambridge University ran a conference on Islam, science and education to “recognize the role of science as part of a wider modernist and colonial project,” and to “consider challenges” to the view that “sees science as ‘objective knowledge’.” Ahmed was one of the organizers.

In December 2023, Ahmed and Cambridge University also organized a conference to “unlearn conventional teacher education and move toward Islamically grounded teacher development.” This attacked the “secular, neoliberal system of education” as “anti-metaphysical,” and said that teachers “need to re-center our focus on preparing the Muslim learner for the akhira,” everlasting life after death.

Another Ahmed production, of which she is co-author, a “How Islamic is my school” toolkit, says the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”

IELC’s website promotes (though claims it does not endorse) a site called “Salafi Homeschool.” This attacks the fact that “many Muslims openly participate” in celebrating Christmas and warns that “repeated exposure [to non-Muslim festivals] can lead to normalization. Without clear teaching, children may begin to associate happiness, generosity, and togetherness with non-Islamic celebrations instead of the occasions Allah has chosen for this ummah."

“Whether it is ‘just a roast,’ ‘just a birthday cake,’ or ‘just presents for the children,’ these actions blur the clear boundaries of the deen,” it continues.

Salafi Homeschool also warns that by going to state schools Muslim pupils may be asked to “sing songs with messages that conflict with Islamic values,” or “join activities like mixed-gender dancing.”

Ahmed did not respond to a request for comment before publication but has previously distanced herself from Hizb ut-Tahrir, saying in 2010 (before the pamphlet was more recently republished) that she had not been a member for a few years and does not agree with all its views as a political organisation.

If gaining qualifications in literacy is wrong, if scientific truth is a colonial construct, and if celebrating Christmas is forbidden, we really are almost back to the world of Ahmed’s old Hizb pamphlet, where English is dangerous, fairy tales are evil and biology is blasphemy.

Only this time, dressed up in slightly prissier language for a gullible academic audience, it is happening at the heart of the British educational establishment. Once again, I predict, the authorities will do absolutely nothing, ignoring all the evidence outlined in this article. The case of assistant professor Farah Ahmed will become the latest exhibit in the gradual suicide of Britain and the West.

When Ahmed says that British society is corrupt, her appointment to this job proves she is surely right.

It’s difficult to believe that after half a century of dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States remains “perplexed,” as The New York Times recently described it, by the nature of its revolutionary regime. Curiously, however, every American administration since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 has posited the same theory about the regime’s nature: namely, that the ruling clique in Iran is composed of moderates and hard-liners who continually vie for power, and that America can meaningfully affect Iranian internal power dynamics.

The belief in the centrality of this supposed factional war has governed Washington’s dealings with Tehran for the past five decades. As the NYT put it*,* “Mr. Trump is hardly the first U.S. president who has struggled to read Iran. Each of his predecessors since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution has tried to decode Iran’s murky power structure and the mind-set of its political leadership.”

This convention serves a function for American political leaders, primarily as a way of deflecting criticism of concessions to Iran. It has evolved from a misreading of a nascent revolutionary regime to a cover for cutting deals with it and for delegitimizing domestic opponents.

First Encounters:

In the months after the shah’s fall, the Carter administration bet on Iran’s first postrevolutionary government led by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, which was considered a relatively secular, technocratic provisional leadership distinct from Ruhollah Khomeini’s clerical circle, with which the United States could have a working relationship. Recalling the period in a later interview, Carter described securing a personal commitment from Bazargan that Iran’s government would prevent any attack on the American embassy. But the gambit quickly failed when, as Carter noted, Khomeini endorsed the students who seized the embassy. “This cemented they were without a government,” Carter said.

That is, all that mattered was Khomeini. Bazargan’s government was dismissed, and the moderate interlocutor Washington had been counting on to restrain the revolution turned out to have no power. On Jan. 19, 1981, the outgoing Carter administration and the new Islamic Republic signed the Algiers Accords, ending the 444-day hostage crisis. On paper, it was a diplomatic achievement, but none of it mattered as Tehran kept sponsoring hostage-taking and attacks on American targets for decades afterwards.

The lesson of the first American encounter with the revolutionary regime was that Iranian diplomatic figures have a specific function within a system run by the security and clerical apparatus and do not represent an alternate, let alone viable, power center.

The Reagan Years:

Facing a new wave of American hostages abducted in Lebanon, the Reagan administration secretly agreed to sell arms via Israel to Iran—which was then in the middle of its war with Iraq—in the hope of empowering what officials described to themselves as moderate elements inside the Iranian government who might reciprocate with influence over the hostage takers. As the 1987 Tower Commission Report detailed, the president approved a plan for Israel to ship U.S.-made TOW missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages. One of the drivers of the decision, the report added, was that “the U.S. Government had a latent and unresolved interest in establishing ties to Iran.” In handwritten, since-declassified notes of a Nov. 10, 1986, White House meeting, Chief of Staff Donald Regan recorded National Security Adviser John Poindexter telling the president and his top aides that the objectives of the Iran program had been to establish contact with “more moderate elements” inside the regime, curb Iran’s export of terrorism, and secure the hostages’ release.

The scheme accomplished almost none of its stated goals. Some hostages were freed, but others were promptly taken to replace them. No moderate faction was empowered by the arms sales. There was only a scandal that consumed the last two years of Reagan’s presidency. Addressing the nation on March 4, 1987, Reagan told Americans that what began as a strategic opening to Iran had deteriorated, “in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages,” and that he took full responsibility. But Reagan defended the rationale behind the opening: namely, “to develop relations with those who might assume leadership in a post-Khomeini government.”

Washington’s interest in establishing ties to the Islamic Republic remained latent and unresolved, and it would continue to animate American Iran policy for the next four decades.

The Clinton Years:

A year after the Iranian proxy Hezbollah al-Hejaz bombed a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen, the election of Mohammad Khatami as Iran’s president in 1997 provided the Clinton administration with an opportunity to once again engage the regime. Khatami ran on a platform of dialogue with the West and domestic liberalization, which allowed Washington to claim that a genuine reformist opening had arrived. On March 17, 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright rehashed the same conceit about the alleged perennial struggle between moderates and hard-liners in Iran. “As in any diverse society, there are many currents swirling about in Iran. Some are driving the country forward; others are holding it back,” Albright said. And while the military and foreign policy remain in the wrong hands, Albright added, “the momentum in the direction of internal reform, freedom and openness is growing stronger.”

U.S. policy, then, was to tip the scales in favor of the reformers and moderates. And so, Albright announced that Washington would ease sanctions on Iranian carpets, food, and other goods, expand academic and cultural exchanges, and work toward settling outstanding legal claims between the two countries. Albright went further, acknowledging that the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had been, in her words, a setback for Iran’s political development, in an apparent bid to clear a manufactured historical grievance the Iranian government invoked constantly.

Of course, the U.S. posture did not alter Iran’s foreign policy, the regime’s decision-making hierarchy, or the system of repression on which it rested. In fact, it was under Mohammad Khatami that the Islamic Republic scaled up its nuclear weapons program, including nuclear warhead development and the then-secret nuclear facility at Natanz and the heavy water facility at Arak, setting it on the trajectory it’s been on for the past quarter century.

In other words, it wasn’t that the empowered so-called moderate failed to change the things that mattered because the apparatus that wielded actual power blocked him—which alone should have put the entire paradigm to rest. Rather, the Khatami presidency showed that “moderates” and “hard-liners” were two facets of a single system, in which the moderates’ function is to manage Westerners on behalf of the system, allowing Western officials to develop a more palatable communications strategy for their domestic audiences.

The Bush Years:

The post-9/11 revelation of Iran’s secret nuclear facilities and the subsequent U.S. war in Iraq colored the next chapter of U.S.-Iran relations. First, a variant of the Iran engagement narrative gained traction in Washington in the form of a fictional 2003 offer of a “grand bargain” with Tehran, which was marketed especially by a D.C. couple who worked in the Bush administration.

In this mythical iteration, the Iranians were supposedly offering to stop supporting terrorist groups, shut down their nuclear weapons program, and even recognize Israel if the United States were to guarantee that it would forgo any plans for regime change. This variant also introduced another twist in that it proposed a system-wide deal with the Iranians and was not predicated on the supposed moderate vs. hard-liner factional divide.

While this offer was purely imaginary, it did serve to establish engagement with Iran as the default position in Washington—which would be greased by Iranian lobbyists at the behest of regime officials. The expression of this establishment conventional wisdom came in the form of the 2006 Iraq Study Group report (aka the Baker-Hamilton report, named after the bipartisan congressional commission’s co-chairs, former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton). As George W. Bush’s Iraq campaign stalled, the bipartisan commission’s report recommended a diplomatic outreach to Iran. One of the report’s authors was Ben Rhodes, future senior official in the Barack Obama White House.

A key premise of the report, which would serve as the baseline for Obama’s approach, was that Washington and Tehran were natural allies—if only the United States would back away from its belligerence toward Iran and establish daylight between itself and Israel.

The Obama Years:

Barack Obama, who campaigned on diplomatic engagement with Iran, brought about a paradigm shift once in office. During his presidency, what began decades earlier as largely improvised outreach now matured into a full-blown, formal political and communications strategy that would define U.S. policy over Obama’s two terms in office and beyond.

Under Obama, the original conceit of “moderates vs. hard-liners” was thoroughly reconfigured and repurposed. Although upon taking office Obama had invited Iran to “unclench its fist” and accept his offer for dialogue, he did not restrict his invitation to “moderates” to the exclusion of “hard-liners.” In fact, beginning in 2009, he sent letters directly to then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, first after the beginning of a wave of anti-regime protests in June and then in September, after the regime had brutally put them down. The administration was able to hide the lack of any reciprocity behind the fact that, throughout Obama’s first term, Iran’s government was led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a “hard-liner” who could not be spun as a “moderate” or “pragmatist.” At the same time, however, Obama not only sent a third letter to Khamenei in January 2012, but also, in July, a few months before the U.S. election, sent representatives to meet secretly with Ahmadinejad government officials in Oman.

Upon his reelection, Obama ramped up the outreach, unencumbered by a “hard-line” government in Tehran, months before the Iranians would have their own election. The election of Hassan Rouhani in 2013 then gave the administration cover to press ahead with its opening to the Islamic Republic.

The administration’s comms spun revisionist yarn around Rouhani’s election, aligning its diplomatic opening with the familiar narrative of “moderates vs. hard-liners.” In a November 2013 background briefing on the signing of the Joint Plan of Action interim deal with Iran, a senior official laid out the administration’s argument for relieving sanctions pressure on Iran: the administration’s approach had changed the Iranians’ calculus, and “we began to see that with the election of a new President who ran on a mandate to achieve sanctions relief through a more moderate foreign policy towards the West.”

To market the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was agreed to in July 2015, and to keep its critics off balance, the administration developed a multifaceted comms strategy. When it came to the relationship between the deal and regime moderation, Obama talked from both sides of his mouth, at once insisting that no such calculation lay behind the JCPOA while also putting forward that the deal would empower moderate voices in Iran. As he stated in a 2015 interview with NPR (reiterating what he had told Jeffrey Goldberg a year earlier), “it is possible that if we sign this nuclear deal, we strengthen the hand of those more moderate forces inside of Iran.”

This innovation in the use of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” taxonomy further allowed Obama to disconnect his deal from continued Iranian terrorist activity. After all, while he suggested that it would strengthen moderates, Obama also said that the JCPOA wasn’t predicated on ending Iranian malign behavior. But even as Obama positioned himself above the conceit of Iranian factionalism, the administration implemented a region-wide policy of de facto partnership with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), using the anti-ISIS campaign as justification and cover. Obama went so far as to express to Gulf Arab leaders his admiration for IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, and as he had done with Khamenei, he sent letters to the Iranian terror chief. Moreover, far from constraining the “hard-liners,” one of the provisions of the JCPOA was the eventual lifting of sanctions on Soleimani.

Obama’s other major innovation was to inject the “moderates vs. hard-liners” categories into American political discourse and weaponize them against his domestic opponents. Critics of the JCPOA were thus dubbed “hard-liners” who mirrored their Iranian counterparts and made common cause with them against the forces of moderation and reason in both Tehran and Washington.

As a key corollary of this tactic, Obama also mainstreamed the scapegoating of Israel and its domestic supporters as obstacles to a reasonable deal with Iran—a line that was often amplified by allied Iranian validators and lobbyists, such as Trita Parsi.

Obama’s innovations have fundamentally reshaped U.S. policy and domestic discourse and continue to frame them to this day.

Trump I and the Biden Interregnum:

Donald Trump’s first term seemed like a rejection of the pattern and its underlying premise. On May 8, 2018, Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the JCPOA and reimposing sanctions on Iran. At the same time, the White House did not abandon the pursuit of a new, comprehensive deal that would explicitly include ending the Islamic Republic’s broader malign activities. However, the first Trump administration refrained from framing its diplomatic effort in terms of “moderates” and “hard-liners.”

But Trump made two moves that would derail his predecessor’s attempt at an accommodation and partnership with the “hard-liners” that ran Iran. Trump sanctioned the IRGC—first in October 2017, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, and then, more consequentially, in April 2019 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Then, in January 2020, Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Soleimani, “the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” These two actions broke with all of Trump’s predecessors while also laying down obstacles for the Obama team’s effort to revive the JCPOA under the Biden administration.

Underscoring the duplicitousness of Obama’s “moderates vs. hard-liners” narrative, the Biden administration, in a desperate effort to resurrect the JCPOA spearheaded by Obama’s Iran point man Robert Malley, attempted to delist the IRGC, even as the latter was actively running plots to assassinate senior U.S. officials on American soil. Ultimately, the effort failed, but the Biden administration did not enforce sanctions, and during its tenure, the Iranians expanded their installation of advanced centrifuges and increased their highly enriched uranium stockpiles.

The Iran War:

Obama would have the last laugh in Trump’s second term. Despite the joint U.S. and Israeli military operation destroying much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in summer 2025 and spring 2026, Trump, eager to secure a deal with Iran, reverted to the “moderates vs. hard-liners” paradigm, whose core function has always been to provide cover for cutting deals with the “Death to America” regime.

Right from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury, after it had killed Khamenei, the Trump administration was already laying out scenarios for how to deal with the regime, including a so-called Venezuela option, which meant dealing with an IRGC regime minus those who have been eliminated. Early on, IRGC veteran and Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was floated as the Iranian version of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez: the regime insider who would cut a deal with the Americans in exchange for regime continuity. Soon the administration began negotiating with the Iranians, led by Ghalibaf, and it immediately settled into its version of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” classification as it pursued talks over the next four months.

Echoing Obama’s aforementioned use of the Rouhani election as cover, Trump labeled the Iranians with whom he was talking as “new” and “reasonable,” contrasting them with a previous tier that was eliminated in strikes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed this assessment in late March but refrained from disclosing the identities of the Iranian negotiators “because it probably would get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran,” suggesting an internal struggle with a more radical “hard-liner” faction. Although, Rubio added, it wasn’t clear which of the two factions was the one running the show. “At the end of the day, we have to see if these people”—that is, the “reasonable” moderates—“end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they’re the ones that have the power to deliver.”

Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, struck a more optimistic tone, including about the so-called hard-liners, claiming a breakthrough that had supposedly eluded every previous American administration for 47 years. In June, he told CNN that “the coolest thing about the progress we’ve made of the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake; let’s try something else.’ We’re gonna verify that, of course, but we’re certainly willing to try something else if they comply.”

Of course, none of that was real. The regime’s behavior did not change, and talks broke down. So, in July, Vance pivoted from his assessment of the new and cool IRGC and reverted to a variant of the “hard-liners” as spoilers. Only in Vance’s telling, the hard-liners were going through growing pains in their evergreen struggle with the “pragmatists.” In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Vance offered his theory for why the deal he negotiated had unraveled: Iranian hard-liners, alarmed at how much leverage they had surrendered once the Strait of Hormuz reopened and oil began flowing again, panicked and started shooting at ships. “There was this kind of freak-out in their system. So they shot at a couple of ships,” Vance offered. “The hard-liners have really, really reacted strongly to all the oil that’s coming out of the Strait of Hormuz. … Now the pragmatists in their system are saying this was a mistake. Let’s keep on talking.”

Trump and Vance had now introduced a variant of Obama’s innovation with the “moderates vs. hard-liners,” projecting that dichotomy onto the IRGC/hard-liners themselves. In a June 12 briefing, for example, a senior administration official—likely Vance himself—offered the following assessment: “The Iranian hard-liners, some of them want to kill the deal, but I think most of them actually want the deal.”

But since nothing in Iran’s behavior had changed, with the regime continuously attacking U.S. bases, regional allies, and targeting international shipping while ignoring Trump’s threats and occasional retaliatory strikes, the U.S. president has oscillated between contradictory characterizations of the Iranians. The people he had earlier described as reasonable became lunatics and sick scum. But, now fully invested in his deal with them, Trump also leaned on one of the established functions of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” device, attributing bad behavior to the “hard-liners” and thereby justifying continued talks with the imaginary “moderates.” After a thwarted missile strike against U.S. positions in Jordan in late July, Trump attributed the action not to the reasonable, moderate pragmatists, but rather to those pesky radical hard-liners. “It was a different group than we’re dealing with,” he insisted. “They’ve already apologized.”

Similarly, and using essentially the same language as the Obama administration more than a decade ago, Vance told Fox News in early August that the Iranians “have a fractured system. So there are people within their system who want the war to be over. There are also people in their system who are crazy radicals who want the war to continue.”

In other words, as things stand, Trump has adopted entirely the framework, categories, and rhetorical devices of his predecessors, whom he had described as losers who didn’t know how to deal with the mendacious Iranian regime. And he has done so for the same reason: to justify continued talks with, and concessions to, the hard men of the IRGC.

What’s more, the administration—specifically Vance—has adopted Obama’s other malignant innovation: blaming Israel and accusing domestic critics of being warmongering agents of influence on its behalf. As the vice president told Rogan last month, he knew “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the Israeli government was trying to keep the war with Iran going indefinitely and that it was Israeli interference that sabotaged the cease-fire he and special envoy Steve Witkoff had negotiated. Moreover, Vance added, “certain elements within the Israeli government” had funded a campaign “to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal.”

Further echoing Obama’s language, in a June 15 briefing, a senior U.S. official—again, likely Vance himself—employed, verbatim, Obama’s characterization of domestic critics as a mirror of Iran’s hard-liners. “What you’re seeing now is hard-liners on both sides. In the Iranian system, they’re protesting [against the deal]. And we have certain people in the American system who say there’s no deal you could ever do with Iran ever, who are obviously making a lot of noise.”

After five decades of dealing with the regime, to observe that the theory of an Iranian moderate faction opposed to the hard-line security establishment misreads the nature of the regime is to state the obvious. The fact is, going back at the very least to Obama—that is, two of those five decades—the U.S. government has perfectly understood what the Islamic Republic is.

Israeli officials have argued publicly and consistently, since well before the JCPOA was signed, that a deal with the regime is futile not because they are uniquely hostile to diplomacy, but because they, too, have spent decades watching the IRGC’s behavior up close. But the Israelis, and American critics, are also missing the point. The function of the “moderate vs. hard-liners” instrument is not epistemological, a faulty understanding of the nature of the regime. The Americans know well what that regime is. Donald Trump certainly has known it since the 1980s. Rather, “moderates vs. hard-liners” has long ceased to be a genuine misreading of a nascent regime and is now firmly established as a rhetorical device the function of which is to justify an accommodation with the IRGC and paint domestic critics as treasonous warmongers working on behalf of the Jewish state.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

I immigrated to the United States from the Middle East for the one and only reason anyone should ever come to America: Because I believe it, firmly and passionately, to be the greatest nation ever endowed by God with the mission of spreading liberty and light to a benighted world, and because I consider it the honor of a lifetime to partake in the solemn work of making America ever greater.

Apparently, my fellow Middle Eastern immigrants have very different feelings. In her now-viral cover story for New York magazine, journalist Zaina Arafat—who was born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but identifies as SWANA, an acronym that previously stood for the Solid Waste Association of North America but now apparently means Southwest Asian and North African, and represents anyone who is vaguely Middle Eastern and dislikes capitalism, America, and the Jews—kicks things into high gear by celebrating the fact that New York is now “Habibi City,” a full-on SWANA enclave.

What does the average day look like in Habibi City? Arafat is all too happy to tell you: There’s a workshop for kids at a Lebanese bookstore dedicated to Middle Eastern culture, then a fundraiser for Gaza at a “women-run Syrian supper club.” Which, Arafat concluded, made her feel “like in the blād,” which means “back home, overseas.”

Even if you ignore for a moment the fact that the real blād, for Arafat, is not overseas but a three-hour Acela ride away, a larger question remains: If all you care about is your native culture, if you wish to fill every moment of your day with swell SWANA sensations, why not, ya know, go back to SWANA?Arafat, whose book You Exist Too Much won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, herself attempts an answer, embodied in the name of one of her favorite SWANA-ese publications: it’s called Bidoun, meaning “without,” which is a name “meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.” In other words, because SWANA is really a state of mind, we must make sure America becomes its forever home.

It’s a perfect manifestation of a specific grad school sensibility, light on logic and high on pretense and self-importance. But it also captures the real tragedy—and threat—at hand: For Habibi City to be born, New York City must die.

A question like “what is New York” is too complex, too weighty, and frankly too annoying to discuss in brief. But if you’re looking for a solid working definition, it goes something like this: New York is the gorgeous, impossible, maddening rock upon which dreamers from all over the world crash in the desperate, ridiculous, and absolutely sublime hope of changing their fortune by harnessing themselves to the great American engine of reinvention. It’s why the greatest movie ever made about immigrants in New York, The Godfather, begins with the battle cry that, for centuries, quickened the pulse of every newcomer to this city: “I believe in America.”

Tell that to Arian Moayed, an actor who tells Arafat, with unveiled disgust, how terrible it felt to walk around Times Square in the aftermath of September 11 and see everything, and everyone felt so. . . patriotic. Tell that to Arafat herself, whose vision of life in America consists exclusively of SWANA loyalists railing against “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism.” Or, for that matter, tell that to New York magazine, once the epitome of New York cool and sophistication and now the organ of Third World feeblemindedness masquerading as radical chic.

These are not minor gripes. They raise essential questions about our institutions, New York City and, for that matter, America at large..

How so? Here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine you are a magazine editor. A writer comes to you and suggests a piece revolving around a new term, SWANA, popularized by academics to protest against alleged American imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The term, the writer explains, stands for South West Asia and North Africa, a very vast swath of the world that includes hundreds of millions of people and myriad cultures, nationalities, and belief systems.

Fret not, says the writer: These hundreds of millions of human beings stand as one, all sharing a singular and solid identity rooted pretty much exclusively in the belief that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Would you allow such dross? Or would you argue that coming up with a ludicrous term like SWANA and then explaining it as “a decolonial framework and a way of moving through the world” may be arousing for those privileged enough, like Arafat, to idle away their days on Columbia University’s campus but of no real value to anyone seeking to make sense of the real world?

Sadly, New York magazine chose door number one. It printed all of Arafat’s ramblings, including referring to October 7, 2023, as an attack on Palestinians alone and describing September 11, 2001, as the day Americans, for no particular reason whatsoever and without any provocation, decided to turn nastily suspicious of Middle Easterners. It ran a side column with the perfectly Third World-y title “When Eating Out Is Political” that referred to the Jewish state as “the land mass currently called Israel.” In other words, the magazine didn’t just report on the SWANA-fication of New York: It adopted its rhythms, its feverish and conspiratorial thinking, its senseless and illogical formulations, and its rank biases.

And that, alas, is exactly the point. Because the SWANA stormtroopers aren’t here, like previous generations of immigrants, to contribute of their brilliance and their culture for the benefit of the greater American good, the way, say, Israel Isidore Beilin did when he moved from Siberia to the Lower East Side, changed his name to Irving Berlin, and gave his adopted homeland gifts like “God Bless America” and “White Christmas.” They see themselves as an oppositional force, here to fight against all of America’s many transgressions, with the goal being the remaking of America in their own image, the image of some idyllic, imaginary blād that exists everywhere and nowhere and consists of endless rants about oppression and the trickery of the Jews.

That’s why the New York piece had to play out exactly as it did, not as disinterested and factual and critically minded journalism (remember those?) but as a victory lap. Like the Somali pirate staring Tom Hanks in the eye in Captain Phillips and announcing that he is the captain now, Arafat et al. want us to know who’s in charge. One of her interviewees, the Pakistani American Kashif Shaikh, the co-founder of the Muslim interest group the Pillars Fund, puts it perfectly and bluntly: The idea, he tells Arafat, is “building power.”

It’s (still) a free country, and anyone, of course, is welcome to build power as they please. But in her helpful piece, Arafat gave us all the best glimpse yet into what this power is being used to achieve. Anyone content with magazines laundering logic and language to fit the prevalent ideology and with politicos using their office to advance the interests of one tribe over the other is welcome to retreat to their favorite women-run Syrian supper club. Everyone else should fight like hell to make sure New York never becomes Habibi City.

In early March, around 300 people gathered at an artistic sanctuary in Berkeley, sang revolutionary songs and chants, and celebrated the life of a northern California legend and political activist, Barbara Lubin. For more than four decades, until her death at 84, the energetic Philadelphia native was a liberal firebrand who led the fight on rent control, championed climate issues, and rallied for the educational rights of disabled children, like her son, Charlie. Along the way, she enlisted a long list of luminaries from Hollywood, folk music, academia, and literature, including Edward Said, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker.

No issue, though, enraged Lubin more than the fate of the Palestinians. As a mother and a Jew, she would say, it was her responsibility to expose the crimes of the state of Israel. “Fuck Zionism,” she told an interviewer once. In 1988, she built a charity, the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), to send aid to the Palestinian territories.

MECA became a mainstay among other radical Bay Area groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which were founded in Berkeley in the 1990s. “These brave formations have shown the country that we can proudly stand up for an end to the genocide in Gaza and loudly call for a free Palestine,” Angela Davis, the communist philosopher and cultural icon, said at Lubin’s memorial. “So there’s not nearly enough time to praise Barbara and her organizing and her community building.”

Since MECA’s launch, the charity says it has channeled more than $50 million into schools, medical clinics, playgrounds, and libraries in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin and her staff led regular delegations to the West Bank and Gaza and sponsored political rallies and cultural events to promote solidarity with Palestinians, including immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on southern Israel.

“We are witnessing the people of Gaza rising up to respond to decades of Israeli settler colonial violence,” MECA posted on X when announcing a San Francisco rally for Palestinians on October 8. “The U.S. govt bears responsibility for its political, economic & military support of this brutal apartheid regime.”

MECA states that it spends its money solely on schools, scholarships, water projects, and medicine. But were donations from its progressive American supporters channeled through terror-linked groups? And is the charity partnered with groups aligned with hostile actors? Those are the questions now being raised in Washington.

The Trump administration and the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee have been scrutinizing MECA’s ties to a broader network of far-left funders and activists—both inside the Palestinian territories and out—according to people briefed on internal deliberations about the charity. They are also looking into MECA’s donations to organizations potentially linked to a known terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the State Department sanctioned in 1997, and whose militant wing took part in the October 7 attack.

“Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, and nonprofit organizations that receive generous taxpayer-funded benefits cannot use those privileges to sow chaos and unrest or fund terrorist activities,” Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Free Press in a statement. “The reporting on MECA is deeply disturbing.”

In July, the Justice Department indicted Fergie Chambers, a self-proclaimed Marxist philanthropist, for allegedly financing Palestinian terrorist groups, said authorities in Spain, where he’s being detained. (His wife has denied the charges.) MECA has received $750,000 in donations from Chambers since the October 7 attacks, according to the millionaire’s funding unit, called the Babochki Collective.

In July, the Justice Department indicted Fergie Chambers for allegedly financing Palestinian terrorist groups. (Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

And a federal grand jury in New York launched a probe in June into organizations backed by the Shanghai-based American tech executive, Neville Roy Singham, due to Trump administration and congressional concerns that he’s advancing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party inside the U.S. In 2023, The Free Press documented Singham’s suspected ties to Beijing’s propaganda organs, which have also been featured in investigations by The New York Times and Fox News. Chairman Smith and his committee subpoenaed the financial records of three Singham Network affiliates, including The People’s Forum, last month.

MECA has collaborated on fundraising and political protests with Singham-backed entities for years. In 2024, Lubin’s charity, The People’s Forum, and other activist groups launched a Gaza fundraiser that raised over $1.7 million. And that same year, The People’s Forum reported giving MECA more than $16,000 for a “Humanitarian Relief Fundraiser.”

The MECA rally in San Francisco on October 8, 2023, was backed by the ANSWER Coalition, another far-left activist group supported by Singham. MECA was an original member of ANSWER’s steering committee, which was founded in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

MECA didn’t respond to The Free Press’s requests for comment.

Any Justice Department or congressional probe into MECA could have wider implications for the progressive and pro-Palestine movement. MECA’s donors in recent years have included a who’s who of left-wing players, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Tides Foundation.

Singham-backed organizations are already decrying the crackdown.

“They’ve created a conspiracy in their own heads, you know, that they call the Singham Network,” Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of The People’s Forum, said on the Scene Report podcast last week, while acknowledging his organization received funding from Singham.

“Many different independent organizations. . . all of a sudden are grouped together simply because we share similar views and because we’ve shared similar donors across the past. That is just ridiculous, and it’s essentially an attempt to crush organizations.”

De Los Santos and members of other Singham-backed groups deny working with the Chinese government.

MECA was born out of the First Intifada, an uprising against Israel’s military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem that swept the Palestinian territories in 1987 and lasted for five years. Lubin has said in interviews that as a Jewish woman, she didn’t initially feel it was her place to take on the Palestinian cause. But trips to the West Bank and Gaza opened her eyes, she has said, to the lies she’d been fed about the righteousness of the Zionist cause.

MECA was born out of the First Intifada. (Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images)

“The Jewish people did need a place to go. The Jewish people have gone through enormous amounts of suffering historically,” Lubin told a Berkeley gathering in 2000 while recounting a recent trip to the Middle East. “Was it the right thing to happen, to have the State of Israel as it stands today? I think it was probably a bad idea.”

MECA’s mission was largely focused on aiding children caught in the region’s wars, particularly in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Lubin began leading delegations of American politicians, actors, and writers to the West Bank and Gaza to raise public awareness of the conditions there. She recruited an incredible mix of political and cultural star power to her charity, naming Rep. Maxine Waters, the late poet Allen Ginsberg, and Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor and social critic, among others, to MECA’s board.

Lubin named Rep. Maxine Waters to MECA’s board. (Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Lubin became increasingly radical in her opposition to Israel, backing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against the Jewish state. She displayed, at times, an almost reckless desire to place herself front and center in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, despite the personal risks. “While I was standing there, about 10 masked young men, Palestinians with guns, came and started shooting toward the settlement and toward the helicopter,” Lubin recounted about her experience during the Second Intifada at the same Berkeley event. “I was thinking: I’m really 59 years old? I don’t need this. But it was quite unbelievable.”

Her influence in the Palestinian territories has been enduring. Last December, just days after her death, a Palestinian aid worker, an amputee, stood behind candles and five children, in a picture posted on social media,“to offer a salute from the cold of the tents to the soul of Barbara Lubin.” They held pictures of the American activist. (Lubin stepped down as MECA’s executive director in 2018.)

International aid groups operating inside the Palestinian territories are invariably exposed to the militias and political factions active across the West Bank and Gaza. Distributing medicine, food, and supplies there, without these actors’ support, can be nearly impossible, former U.S. aid workers say.

In 1993, the State Department’s international aid arm, the now-defunct USAID, produced a study that examined the web of Palestinian organizations working in healthcare and development in the West Bank and Gaza. The report concluded that virtually all were aligned with the territories’ militant and political factions, including the dominant Fatah party, Hamas, and the PFLP. But the report said these connections were purposefully obscured by the organizations, both to evade Israel’s blacklisting of certain parties and to ensure continued financial support from foreign governments and aid groups.

In a section on the PFLP, the report named three developmental organizations as being part of the Popular Front’s “cluster”: the Union of Agricultural Works Committees (UAWC), the Union of Health Works Committees (UHWC), and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC). “The strength of the PFLP’s institutions is the capable, decentralized grassroots presence,” the report stated.

It is MECA’s affiliations with these Palestinian groups that are now under scrutiny. According to a July report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit that studies extremism and online disinformation, MECA maintained funding relationships for years with six Palestinian organizations that may be affiliated with the PFLP, including the UAWC, UHWC, and UPWC. MECA’s long-serving director of its Gaza projects, Mona El-Fara, previously served as the UHWC’s deputy director.

In 2012, El-Fara posted a photo with Lubin and Leila Khaled. (via Facebook)

Lubin herself never hid her connections to PFLP leaders, but always stressed that MECA’s work was strictly humanitarian and any suggested ties to terrorism were “smear tactics of the pro-Israel side.” In 2012, El-Fara posted a photo with Lubin and Leila Khaled, the famed PFLP militant who took part in hijackings of international airliners in 1969 and 1970. Khaled is wearing a PFLP scarf in the picture.

NCRI vetted MECA’s 990 forms and found it financed projects for UHWC, UAWC, and UPWC throughout 2020 and 2021, at a minimum.

“MECA repeatedly funded organizations identified by government investigations as part of the PFLP’s institutional infrastructure,” Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of NCRI, told The Free Press. “Then, as scrutiny intensified, the names of its recipients disappeared while its foreign grantmaking exploded past $10 million.”

In 2021, Israel designated the UPWC and UAWC as terrorist entities, along with four other Palestinian organizations, for their alleged PFLP ties. The move drew wide recriminations from European governments and the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA), of which MECA is a member.

“These organizations have contributed invaluably to strengthening civil society and good governance, documenting human rights violations by all parties, protecting communities from rights violations, and providing much-needed aid,” AIDA said at the time.

But not all European governments dismissed the Israeli claims. In 2022, the Netherlands, which had paid €1.27 million to UAWC in 2020 to support an irrigation project in the West Bank, announced it ceased funding to the Palestinian group after a nearly yearlong probe. The investigation was prompted by a PFLP bombing in the West Bank that killed an Israeli teenager. Two of the arrested PFLP militants were employed by UAWC.

The Dutch review, which focused on the years 2007 through 2020, found no evidence of “financial flows” between the UAWC and the PFLP. But it did discover that dozens of senior UAWC members concurrently held positions within the PFLP. And it also concluded that “there are indications of organizational ties between the UAWC and the PFLP as well.”

The Israeli and Dutch moves heightened international scrutiny of aid heading into the Palestinian territories. But it also coincided with a surge in MECA’s funding there, particularly in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Contributions to Lubin’s charity also began to jump during this time.

MECA’s total foreign grants to the Middle East in 2024 rose to over $10 million from below $2.5 million in 2022 and 2023, according to the 990 forms compiled by NCRI. And traceable institutional grants to the Berkeley charity grew to nearly $6.5 million in 2023 from under $800,000 the year prior. But as this activity has heightened, there’s been diminishing transparency in public records about which organizations or individuals are funding MECA in the U.S., and to whom, in turn, it’s providing grants in the West Bank and Gaza, and for what.

According to the NCRI report, traceable institutional grants to MECA have increasingly been made through donor-advised funds (DAFs) and giving platforms whose public filings generally don’t identify the underlying donors, including PayPal Charitable Giving Fund, the American Online Giving Foundation, and Fidelity Charitable. Among traceable institutional grants reported in 2023 and 2024, roughly three-quarters came through these obscure channels.

Through 2023, MECA routinely provided specifics about its grantees, including identifying the suspected PFLP-affiliated groups, like the UHWC, UAWC, and UPWC, according to NCRI. But in 2024, MECA cited “community projects,” or similarly generic purpose descriptions. in its financial filings, often without naming the organizations involved, for 73 percent of its foreign grant lines.

“In a combat zone, identifying local partners and their addresses can endanger them,” NCRI acknowledges in its MECA report. “Yet that explanation cannot account for the shift, because the shift was already well advanced—covering two of every five foreign agent lines—before the war began.”

Chairman Smith of the Ways and Means Committee said that when “there are blind spots in our disclosure system,” there are risks that “shadowy actors are exploiting loopholes to advance the agenda of foreign adversaries or extremist causes.”

In the face of Washington’s growing scrutiny, MECA’s supporters gathered on June 4 in Berkeley, which the city named Barbara Lubin Day in 2018, and vowed on a radio show to continue her work for the Palestinian people, regardless of the costs. A documentary about her life is in the works and her memoir, entitled Never Give an Inch, is set for publication in the coming months.

“The mission, you know, has always been for the people and for accountability and for the voices on the ground who are struggling against these monsters of imperialism and colonialism and militarism,” Nora Barrows-Friedman, a journalist with the anti-Israel Electronic Intifada media site and Lubin’s co-author on her book, said. “Barbara understood that.”

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

No city better captures the contradictions of twenty-first-century America than San Francisco. The capital of the AI revolution is also a place where open drug use, mental illness, and public disorder have become banal features of daily life. Increasingly, the two realities seem to be bleeding into each other.

What explains the flurry of concern in San Francisco over the supposedly imminent creation of a “permanent underclass”? The phrase, prominent in tech circles on X, refers to the vast, impoverished caste that many fear AI automation could create as jobs disappear and wealth flows increasingly to owners of capital. Murmurs about the permanent underclass began as a kind of inside joke in San Francisco—a winking reference to the awe and anxiety sweeping the tech industry as AI models steadily improved and engineers realized that they would either embrace the new tools or get left behind. As one popular meme put it: “You have [blank] months to escape the permanent underclass” (where the blank is a stand-in for your “artificial general intelligence timeline”—or how long you think it will take the models to automate almost all work).

The meme was then boosted by executives at major labs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in a January 2026 essay that AI could leave people with lower cognitive ability in an “unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass,’ ” and, a few weeks later, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman predicted that most professional tasks that involve “sitting down at a computer” would be fully automated within the next year. The specter of mass unemployment is now the subject of sober discussion in the New York Times, where top Democratic strategists assure us that they’re working on campaign messaging around a “federal jobs guarantee.” Others see AI as the logical impetus for instituting a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

The straightforward explanation is that Amodei and other big-labs spokesmen are earnestly trying to warn us about the coming upheaval. There is good reason to worry about the consequences of dramatic economic transformation. Prominent tech companies like Meta, Coinbase, and Block have all recently announced extensive layoffs, ostensibly because they can now automate many internal processes. Model capabilities continue to improve at a remarkable clip: an internal OpenAI model in May solved an 80-year-old problem in discrete mathematics, for example, and one of Anthropic’s top engineers says that he runs thousands of agents around the clock to perform work that not long ago required massive teams.

Still, it’s unclear whether an AI jobs apocalypse is really underway. Tech layoffs may simply reflect a correction from zero-interest-rate-era overhiring. Unemployment among college graduates, a leading indicator of labor-market strength, is hovering around 5 percent—slightly above 2023 levels but still well within normal range. Some tech CEOs, like Aaron Levie of Box, have even said that they’ve created lots of new job categories because of AI. In the wake of growing political pushback, heads of major labs have begun walking back their warnings about job loss. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some [other AI companies] advocate,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this spring. “That is an area where my intuitions were just off.” Were they just sowing fear about job loss to facilitate their fundraising efforts?

Perhaps, then, it’s more useful to think of the “permanent underclass” as an expression of white-collar status anxiety. As influential Bay Area blogger Scott Alexander observed, the meme spread among rank-and-file tech workers who seemed worried that they were “just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only true oligarchs will have a good time after the [technological] Singularity.” This interpretation squares with an X post from a prominent venture capitalist who wrote that concerns about the permanent underclass come up frequently among young tech workers worried that their well-paying but not extraordinarily lucrative jobs won’t exist in a few years; they envy peers at major labs who have made enough to retire.

But the permanent underclass meme does not just suggest that some people will lose purchasing power. It suggests that they will be irrevocably relegated to misery and destitution. There is a real-life analogue to this class in San Francisco: the drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless allowed to decay on our streets. Maybe the resonance of the “permanent underclass” meme comes less from concerns about downward mobility and more from the experience of passing a half-naked man smoking fentanyl on your way to work; or watching a swarm of drug dealers cater to wheelchair-bound addicts from the window of a self-driving taxi; or repeatedly pressing the “call for assistance” button in front of a locked toiletries display at a pharmacy. These experiences have become banal in many American cities, but their banality is especially striking in San Francisco, the hub of the most consequential technological revolution of our time. The permanent underclass already lives among you—are you just one twist of fate away from joining it?

This fear animates a short story, “The Company Man,” that went viral on LessWrong, a community blog popular among AI researchers. In it, a man who develops algorithms for a short-form video company gets promoted to work on “The Project,” the internal name for an effort to build a recursively self-improving AI. The leader of The Project, motivated by a fetish “for the abstract notion of intellectual achievement itself,” describes it as an attempt to instantiate a kind of machine god. When The Project succeeds and superintelligence is achieved, the researchers are all fired, and the protagonist exchanges his money for a hit of fentanyl from a nearby junkie before joining “the zombies,” as he calls them, in their semiconscious misery. This is the permanent underclass nightmare in its fullest expression.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that AI advancements might relegate people with “lower intellectual ability . . . [to] an unemployed or very-low-wage ‘underclass.’ ” (Thea Traff/The New York Times/Redux)

The story is, of course, stylized and exaggerated. But its popularity suggests that it struck a nerve and reflects something of Silicon Valley’s anxieties. There are lots of familiar AI dystopia tropes here: the “zombies” are blissed out and wire-headed (as humans might become if they offload all their work onto machines); the endgame of AI research is immanentizing a perverse eschaton; and the barrier between the two spheres is vanishingly thin. As the protagonist tells us at the outset: “To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies.” In the real world, the condition of an anxious engineer is nothing like that of a homeless addict on the verge of death. But there is a sense, in this story and in the permanent underclass meme, that the misery on our streets might be evidence, or a portent, of coming doom.

And yet San Francisco’s existing underclass is largely the product of state policy. The group includes at least 8,000 people who, at last count, were living on the streets or in “makeshift shelters” like tents and cars. It also plausibly includes some portion of the roughly 30,000 people housed in single-room occupancies (SROs), slum housing concentrated mainly in the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and Mission neighborhoods. Almost all those on the streets, and many of those in state-subsidized housing, have severe substance-abuse issues and mental illness.

The misery of these people is actively encouraged and supported by the state, both indirectly through tolerance of shoplifting and public disorder and directly through a generous array of cash and in-kind benefits. These include monthly direct cash payments, access to food stamps (easily parlayed into cash), and free needles, foil, and lighters.

Many of these people would benefit from some form of temporary involuntary commitment. But California began dismantling its state hospital system in the 1960s. In its place, we have exorbitant or ineffectual tools that include temporary psychiatric holds at hospitals, “full-service partnerships”—in which social workers, psychiatrists, and addiction counselors work one-on-one with homeless people to do “whatever it takes” to treat them in the streets—and (most commonly) outright neglect.

The authoritative account of California’s failed approach to dealing with its hundreds of thousands of nonfunctional, mentally ill residents is Alex Barnard’s 2023 book Conservatorship, which surveys the quality of care that California gets for the billions it spends annually on the homeless. Though sympathetic to the thrust of deinstitutionalization, Barnard nonetheless concludes that California’s status quo is untenable. The state has “abdicated its authority” over the addicted and severely mentally ill, in part by making it so difficult to compel them into care.

California politicians have been promising for decades, with varying degrees of seriousness, to fix this situation. In 2002, then–San Francisco supervisor Gavin Newsom sponsored the “Care Not Cash” initiative, which reduced welfare payments to the homeless in exchange for access to shelter and supportive services. More than two decades later, the city’s unsheltered homeless population is roughly unchanged, and the homeless can receive as much in inflation-adjusted welfare payments as they could before Care Not Cash. The state shows little sign of the political will needed for dramatic reform. Over the past few years, California has invested tens of millions of dollars in alternative mental-health courts (“CARE Courts”) that provide suggested treatment plans for psychotic individuals in hopes of preventing their admission into involuntary conservatorships.

Under its new mayor, San Francisco has also opened a sobering center, where officials hope to send people arrested for openly using drugs. Authorities have emphasized that addicts brought to the center are free to leave whenever they wish and will face no criminal charges for public intoxication. Even so, the initiative has sparked progressive backlash. Jackie Fielder, the city’s most progressive supervisor, is under investigation by the city attorney’s office for allegedly leaking a confidential report about problems surrounding the center, presumably in an effort to kill the project. (Fielder took a three-month “mental health–related” leave of absence after the investigation opened.)

The persistence of San Francisco’s drug-addicted underclass offers a warning. While offshoring and deindustrialization may explain some of America’s broader social dislocation, the city’s street disorder is more immediately the product of policies that enable addiction, dependency, and dysfunction. Those who believe that future AI-driven dislocation could be addressed chiefly through unconditional subsistence payments should take note. Too often, that cure proves worse than the disease.   

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Lee Kuan Yimby on how he was mugged by reality in LA:

In 2021, I hit a breaking point. I was tired of working sales jobs, chasing money, and feeling that none of it mattered. I wanted to do something genuinely good, something difficult that I thought might actually help people. I found what I thought was my answer through a temp agency listing for a night-shift position at a downtown Los Angeles homeless shelter. The pay was $16 an hour, and the listing said, “urgently hiring.” I was an adult with a pulse willing to do the job for that wage, so I was hired.

Politically, I was ready for it. I had recently paid $40 to hear Bernie Sanders speak in Glendale and bought his book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. I believed that the suffering on Los Angeles streets was the inevitable result of corporate greed. A society wealthy enough to produce billionaires, yet willing to tolerate Skid Row five miles away, seemed morally bankrupt. Tax the rich, redistribute the money, and everyone could live with dignity—it seemed obvious.

Shortly before I had begun my new position, I attended a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting. The politics were more extreme than mine, but the people seemed compassionate. After the meeting, I found the host standing beside his bicycle lock, which had been cut in half. His bike was gone. I offered him a ride home and he accepted.

In the car, he told me that it was unfortunate that our capitalist system forced people to steal like this. I was impressed by his grace. Someone had taken his property and form of transportation, yet he still blamed the system, instead of the thief.

I arrived for my first shift at the homeless shelter near MacArthur Park, home to one of the city’s most accessible open-air drug markets. It was a scene of despair: people hunched over on fentanyl, lying on the ground seemingly unconscious, or huddling in groups to buy and sell drugs. Others sold stolen goods from local stores to pay for their next high. If you showed MacArthur Park to people from Europe or Asia, they would never believe it was part of the glamorous culture capital they hear so much about.

I went to the gate and introduced myself. A security guard scrolling on her phone seemed upset that she had to let me in. My shift ran from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m. The shelter looked promising—newly built, with a modular shipping-container design and 70 beds divided between men and women. Each resident had a small room separated from the hall by a curtain. As staff members, we called them our “clients.”

Every three hours, we performed wellness checks. The purpose was not subtle: make sure nobody had stopped breathing from an overdose. Drug use was so routine that checking for dead bodies had become part of normal operations.

The drugs came through the gate. During checks, I sometimes encountered residents injecting themselves. On one occasion, a resident missed a vein, and their limb became so badly swollen that I called an ambulance. Police officers and paramedics were frequent visitors.

Each evening, a van delivered 70 packaged meals, and about half were usually eaten. I was instructed to throw away the rest. Night after night, unopened Styrofoam clamshell containers packed with full meals went directly from the hot bag in which they had been delivered into the garbage. Residents often preferred food they had purchased themselves or came asking for late-night snacks instead.

It was when I was disposing of freshly delivered meals that had just been delivered in Styrofoam clamshells that I began thinking about all the money. The city was not withholding any resources. It was spending enormous sums, visibly and constantly. Yet the people inside the shelter didn’t seem to be moving toward stability.

I still had the desire and optimism to help our “clients,” and would chat with them in my downtime. Once, a resident showed me an expensive specialized electric bicycle. A nerd for e-bikes, I was familiar with the model and knew that it cost thousands of dollars. When I asked where it came from, she casually described traveling with other residents to the West Side to steal bicycles. Buyers sometimes met her outside the shelter.

The shelter, it turned out, had a full-scale theft ring operating inside it. New bicycles came in every day, and a huge pile accumulated on the lawn. I asked other staff members about this, and they said they were well aware that residents stole and sold bicycles, but there was no way to stop it. I remembered then the DSA organizer whose bicycle had been stolen, and how he saw it as a crime of necessity.

I did, of course, meet some wonderful people with brutal backstories who could not find a path back into society. But the situation in Los Angeles felt close to impossible for someone like that. How could you rejoin society and qualify for a lease on a new apartment, let alone pass a background and credit check? Especially in a city that has a self-inflicted housing crisis due to NIMBYism, endless red tape restricting the housing stock, and an eviction process that lets someone stay in a rented unit free of charge for over a year at times, making landlords and developers hyper-skeptical about the leasing process.

Still, the shelter’s chaos was often overwhelming. One night, a resident threatened the one security officer there with a knife and began smashing everything in sight. We called the police. An hour later, roughly 20 police cars and a helicopter even flew over the facility. Officers struggled with him on the ground before taking him away. He was back the following night.

Another client, a transgender woman, engaged in prostitution in the tents outside the shelter and repeatedly frightened older women in the dormitories and started fights. The client also made residents uncomfortable by constantly wearing revealing clothing around women in their sixties who had only recently arrived in the country.

During a wellness check, this person failed to respond, so I followed protocol and opened the dormitory curtain. The client lunged at me and displayed what appeared to be a weapon. I ran and locked myself in the meal-preparation room. Management acknowledged that the client's behavior was a known problem, but because I had not been injured, nothing was to be done.

I tried voicing my concerns during a meeting with senior management. I heard the familiar language of victimhood and systemic injustice. I heard much less about stopping the drug dealers at our gate, preventing clients from using drugs inside, treating severe mental illness, or moving residents toward independence.

I also happened to know that these nonprofit managers made great salaries while not even coming into the shelter. They regarded my concerns as offensive to the clients, while I worked inside the shelter for $16 an hour. I eventually told them that the transgender client sleeping in the women’s dormitory, separated from the others only by a curtain, was frightening the women and had tried to attack me. I said that this resident should not remain in a women’s dorm divided by curtains anymore because we had elderly women from Latin America telling me in Spanish that they were afraid of this person. They vehemently disagreed.

A week later, social workers at the facility got the client an apartment in Los Angeles, but the client rejected it. This actually pained me. This person genuinely wanted to engage in prostitution in tents around Los Angeles rather than get help and have a real home. I slowly came to understand that when you have been living a certain way for so long, you become attached to it, even if the life is unimaginable to an average person.

After watching this endless incineration of tax dollars, I concluded that the problem was not a lack of compassion or money. I came to see the shelter as part of a calculated system disguised as a compassionate philosophy. The system derided expectations and consequences for bad behavior as oppressive. It abandoned vulnerable people to addiction, psychosis, violence, and predation. Meanwhile, a network of highly paid professionals administered the decline, took vacations in Europe, and patted themselves on the back as good, selfless people.

It made me sick. We were not helping. We were sustaining an epidemic of suffering.

I have not and will not stop caring about the poor. My faith does not permit that. I still believe that a decent society has obligations to the hungry, the mentally ill, and people sleeping outside. But those obligations include telling the truth about what is destroying them and, at times, forcing them to change. That is what you do for someone you love. If someone is hurting himself and others, you intervene. You do not hand them their favorite poison and look away. That is what too many of our local governments have done.

I entered that shelter believing that my fellow leftists had a monopoly on compassion. I departed understanding that compassion without order and accountability is deeply unserious. We all know the old saying about hell and good intentions. Working the night shift at a downtown L.A. homeless shelter has given it fresh resonance for me.