A new national curriculum launching this September will bring the voices of America's post-9/11 security leaders directly into high schools, universities, and civic organizations across the country. The timing coincides with the approaching 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The “America After 9/11: A Living History Curriculum,” produced by Homeland Security Today, features twelve professionally recorded sessions with the officials who responded to the September 11 attacks and built the systems that protect the nation today.

The curriculum addresses a significant gap in American education. Only fourteen states currently require schools to teach about 9/11, meaning most American students born after 2001—now adults themselves—have limited understanding of how the attacks reshaped national security. The program aims to ensure future generations understand not just what happened on September 11, but why America responded as it did and what lessons emerged from that transformative period.

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Learning From Those Who Were There

The curriculum’s strength lies in its direct access to decision-makers. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who led the department from 2005 to 2009, guides students through intelligence reform and the creation of modern security infrastructure. Former FEMA Administrator Brock Long shares lessons from managing multiple catastrophic disasters. Former TSA Deputy Administrators Patricia Cogswell and Holly Canevari explain how aviation security evolved after the attacks.

“We believe there is no substitute for hearing directly from the people who built America’s homeland security enterprise—why they made the decisions they did, what they learned, and what they want the next generation to understand,” the curriculum states. Rather than learning solely from textbooks, students hear firsthand accounts from the men and women whose leadership transformed tragedy into a new era of preparedness and resilience.

The roster also includes former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who served as the first Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Border and Transportation Security, and Dr. Kimberly O’Connor, current Director of Arizona’s Department of Homeland Security. Matthew Fodor, Director of Operations in the FBI’s National Security Division, provides insight into counterterrorism operations. Mubin Shaikh, a counter-extremism specialist who worked undercover infiltrating jihadist networks, offers a unique perspective on terrorism prevention.

Comprehensive Coverage of Post-9/11 America

The twelve sessions cover essential topics: the events of September 11 itself, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, intelligence reform and information sharing, counterterrorism and prevention strategies, aviation and transportation security, emergency management, border security, community resilience, cybersecurity and emerging threats, leadership during national crises, and the importance of public service.

Chief Sal Cassano, former Commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, shares the first responder experience from that day and its aftermath. Former DHS Under Secretaries Francis X. Taylor and Kenneth Wainstein explain how intelligence agencies learned to share information and coordinate responses. Robert Stephan, former Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, discusses safeguarding critical systems.

Each session is professionally recorded and designed as an “evergreen educational resource” that educators can use in full or in part for years to come. The flexible format allows teachers to integrate the material into history, civics, or current events classes.

Preserving Institutional Memory

The curriculum arrives at a critical moment. The program preserves their insights before that institutional knowledge disappears. Students today increasingly view 9/11 as distant history, similar to how previous generations learned about Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination from those who weren’t there.

The program is free and available to high schools, colleges, universities, civic organizations, libraries, museums, youth leadership programs, and public safety academies. Homeland Security Today, which produces the curriculum, serves as the premier news and information resource for the homeland security community and operates under the Government Technology & Services Coalition, a nonprofit association serving the homeland security sector.

Educating the Next Generation of Leaders

Beyond historical education, the curriculum emphasizes public service and civic responsibility. Many of the featured speakers devoted their entire careers to protecting Americans — some continuing that work today through consulting, advisory roles, and mentoring the next generation of security professionals.

The sessions encourage students to consider careers in public safety, emergency management, intelligence, and homeland security. They demonstrate how individuals can make meaningful contributions during national crises and help build more resilient communities.

As the 25th anniversary of September 11 approaches in 2026, the curriculum ensures that “Never Forget” becomes more than a slogan. It becomes an educational foundation, passed from those who lived through America’s darkest day to students who will inherit responsibility for the nation’s security.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization, has asked New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend the 25th anniversary 9/11 ceremony next month. In an open letter dated August 3, 2026, Catholic League president Bill Donohue — a U.S. Air Force veteran who has led the organization since 1993 — writes that after 9/11, his staff contacted the FDNY and NYPD to determine how many of the fallen first responders were Catholic. “No official data were available, but it was estimated that 85 to 90 percent were Catholic.”

Over the next six pages, Donohue names Mamdani’s father, mother, wife, chief counsel, campaign staffer, mentor, endorsed candidates, and personal friend — and quotes each of them defending, minimizing, or celebrating terrorism against the United States and Israel. He also documents Mamdani’s own record of what he calls a “reluctance to speak negatively about the role of radical Muslims in fostering oppression and warfare, including the attacks on 9/11.” The Catholic League joins a separate petition from 9/11 victims’ families, now past 65,000 signatures, that has also asked Mamdani to stay away.

The Precedent Mamdani Set Himself

Donohue’s letter opens with a point that has drawn less attention than the family petition: Mamdani has already set the precedent for skipping civic ceremonies. “As Mayor-elect, you did not attend the Veteran’s Day Parade, and as Mayor you did not attend the Israeli Day Parade,” Donohue writes. He also documented that Mamdani excluded Catholic clergy from his own inauguration — the first NYC mayor to do so since at least 1939 — and skipped the installation of the new Archbishop of New York despite being invited and being a short walk up Fifth Avenue at the time.

The organizers of the 9/11 ceremony have made clear that no official in attendance is permitted to speak. “It is an act of witness, not a public forum,” Donohue writes. Nonetheless, he argues, Mamdani’s presence “will be awkward, to say the least, for the surviving family members of the first responders. Catholics, in particular, will be incensed.”

“Something Happened That Morning”

The letter also addresses Mamdani’s own words about 9/11. Donohue quotes Mamdani’s public recollection: “My experience of 9/11 is one I share with many New Yorkers. My teacher let me know something happened that morning and I might be bullied because of it.”

“’Something happened that morning’?” Donohue writes. “You couldn’t even summon the courage to say that radical Muslims attacked the United States to advance their cause. Indeed, you appear to be more concerned about ‘Islamophobia’ than you are the bombing.”

Donohue then debunks a tearful story Mamdani told last year — that his aunt was so afraid of Islamophobia after 9/11 that she wouldn’t wear her hijab in public. “False,” Donohue writes. “Your aunt was in Tanzania on 9/11, and photos of her showed her without a hijab. The woman you referred to was your cousin.”

Donohue ties that evasion to a broader pattern. "Why can't you unequivocally condemn Islamists who want to destroy the U.S. and Israel?" he writes. "This is significant in light of your refusal to condemn many of your supporters who continue to scream, 'globalize the intifada.'"

The Family, the Staff, the Endorsees

The heart of Donohue’s letter is a cascade of specific people around Mamdani and what each has said.

Mahmood Mamdani, the mayor’s father and a chaired Columbia professor, argued in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim that suicide bombers should be “understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” He drew a moral equivalence between the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the 9/11 attacks. He has called for a “Third Intifada.”

Mira Nair, the mayor’s mother, complained after 9/11 that “people like me, who never felt out of place, suddenly were made to feel like the ‘other.’” Donohue notes she did not cite a single instance of harassment directed at her, but there is no public record of her condemning Islamists. Nair’s films have been funded with over $15 million from Qatar since 2009.

Rama Duwaji, the mayor’s wife, allegedly “liked” Instagram posts celebrating the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre. In 2026, she drew an illustration for an essay by an activist who called the barbarism of October 7 “spectacular.”

Ramzi Kassem, Mamdani’s chief counsel at City Hall, said his primary concern after 9/11 was not the attack but “what would be the response towards people like me, towards Arabs, Muslims, Arab Muslim males of a certain age.” He has called the war on terror “a blunderbuss reaction” and “an indiscriminate overreaction.”

Hassaan Chaudhary, a Muslim-engagement staffer on Mamdani’s campaign, praised former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the man who declared Israel “a cancer” that “will be eliminated very soon.”

Linda Sarsour, described as Mamdani’s friend and mentor, is a proponent of Sharia law. Cross Currents has previously documented that Sarsour shared a stage with convicted terrorist supermarket bomber Rasmea Odeh and refused to condemn Louis Farrakhan.

Aber Kawas, whom Mamdani endorsed for a New York State Senate seat, dismissed the 9/11 attacks as the work of “a couple of people” and argued that what was really to blame was “U.S. capitalism, racism, White supremacy and Islamophobia.”

Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Mamdani endorsed for a New York congressional seat, has said her goal is “the total eradication of Western civilization.” She calls American veterans “child murderers” and once bragged that she “wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”

Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer who campaigned for Mamdani, has stated that “America deserved 9/11” and said he doesn’t “have an issue” with Hezbollah.

Siraj Wahhaj, the Brooklyn imam Mamdani called “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders,” was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and served as a character witness for the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman. Wahhaj has said his goal is to “raise an army of 10,000 men in New York City.”

The Families Behind the Petition

The Catholic League’s letter reinforces a parallel effort by 9/11 families. Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace Catherine died on the 105th floor of the North Tower, launched a petition with another widow that has since crossed 65,000 signatures. According to the New York Post, Galante estimates that between 3,000 and 7,500 signers are relatives of victims. “We felt that having Mamdani there would show a disrespect to our family members because of the people he supports,” Galante told CBS New York.

Monica Iken Murphy, who lost her husband on the 84th floor of the South Tower and sits on the 9/11 Memorial’s board, signed the petition. So did John Feal, the FealGood Foundation founder who lobbied for the James Zadroga Health and Compensation Act. “Until he does something proactive for the 9/11 community, he should just sit there in City Hall,” Feal said.

Mamdani Plans to Attend

Mamdani has said he will attend the ceremony. “I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration,” he told CBS New York.

Donohue closes his letter with a simple appeal. “Your reluctance to speak negatively about the role of radical Muslims in fostering oppression and warfare, including the attacks on 9/11, makes you unsuitable to preside over the ceremony honoring these innocent Americans next month,” he writes. “Please do the honorable thing and skip this solemn ceremony.”

Author and cultural critic Rod Dreher sat down last week with with Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and former CEO of the Daily Wire, for a nearly two-hour interview discussing his forthcoming book, Weimar America. Weimar Germany was the fragile democratic republic that governed Germany from 1919 until Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 — the classic case study in how a modern constitutional society decomposes into totalitarianism through social atomization, collapsed institutional trust, and a conservative establishment that believed it could tame the radicals.

The conversation, released July 27 on the The Jeremy Boreing Show, is the most direct defense against the “woke right” to date by a prominent Christian conservative — and it names names. Dreher tells Boreing that Tucker Carlson privately disclosed his now-famous demon-attack story shortly after it happened — just months before Carlson was fired from Fox, and roughly a year before the story became public — and that Carlson's public trajectory grew 'darker and darker' in the months that followed. He also warns that Vice President JD Vance and other Republican leaders are making “the Von Papen mistake” by believing they can co-opt Nick Fuentes and the Groyper movement.

The Weimar Thesis

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, Dreher argues the United States now exhibits the same pre-conditions. “She said by far the most important factor was social atomization,” Dreher tells Boreing. “It was that people became disconnected from traditions, from places, from institutions, of society.”

He points to the speed of the Nazi rise as the warning. “As late as 1928, the Nazi party only got 2.6% in the national elections… Then comes the Great Depression of 1929. The 1930 elections, they shot up to 18.7%. The point is that it can fall apart just that fast if the rot has spread so deeply.” His conclusion is blunt: “I don’t think we’re necessarily going to get Hitler 2.0. We might. We might get Stalin 2.0.” The thesis expands on arguments Dreher previewed with Ross Douthat in The New York Times earlier this month.

The Tucker Carlson Timeline

The interview’s most consequential passage concerns Tucker Carlson. Dreher tells Boreing that Carlson texted him privately about the demon attack shortly after it happened — roughly a year before Carlson publicly disclosed it on Halloween 2024 in a trailer for the Orthodox-produced documentary Christianities?. “When Tucker came out and told the world that he had been attacked by demons, people laughed at him. I didn’t,” Dreher says. “He had told me about it right after it happened. He texted me because he knew I was a serious Christian being Orthodox. I do have a demonology.”

Dreher’s response was to offer help. “I said, ‘Wow, if this really happened to you, you need to talk to an exorcist.’ And I connected him with an exorcist I know. And the exorcist also brought in a second exorcist to work with him.” Carlson refused. “He said, ‘I’m too Protestant for that. This seems like witchcraft to me.’ That’s his actual word. I went back, I still had the text saved. I went back to read them recently.”

Dreher was baffled by the logic: “Wait, you think you were attacked by a demon, but a Catholic or an Orthodox exorcist coming is witchcraft?” Dreher says he even offered to arrange a Protestant deliverance pastor. Carlson turned that down too. “He told me he’d be fine, just him and the Bible.”

What Dreher describes next is a trajectory the public would come to see in the months that followed Carlson’s initial disclosure to him. “He gets fired from Fox a couple of months later in the Dominion settlement. And then that fall he launches his own network and goes really dark really fast,” Dreher tells Boreing — pointing to Carlson’s interview with historian Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War.”

“You’ve seen as well as I have. It got darker and darker and darker. And then he gets Fuentes on, and that’s when I finally felt like I had to speak out and say something. I just said this was a big mistake — you shouldn’t do this. We ought to keep the firewall there.”

Carlson’s response was to end the friendship. “Tucker texted me ending our friendship. That’s that.”

“The Demon of White Identity Politics”

Carlson is not operating in a vacuum. Dreher, who reported from Washington that senior Republican staffers estimate 30 to 40 percent of young conservative men in D.C. are Fuentes-aligned, describes the ideological terrain in explicitly theological terms. “They have called forth the demon of white identity politics. It’s here.” He adds: “They have legitimized and called forth a demon of white identity politics that they’re not going to be able to get away from.”

Asked what these young men want, Dreher recounts the answer from a senior Republican source: “They don’t want anything. They want to tear it all down.” That constituency, in Dreher’s telling, is the raw material any politician willing to court it can inherit.

The Von Papen Warning

Dreher’s central political argument invokes Franz von Papen — the German conservative who convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor in January 1933, believing radicals could be tamed by proximity to power.

“I fear that we’re going to have people like JD, maybe Marco Rubio, whoever runs for president, they’re going to think that they can bring these radicals on side and control them,” Dreher tells Boreing. “It won’t work. And we have a historical example.” Recounting how von Papen told Hindenburg he could make Hitler “squeak like a mouse,” Dreher concludes: “If people on the right — institutional leaders — think they can compromise with the Fuentes types, they’re making the Von Papen mistake. And I don’t want to be part of any Von Papen conservatism.”

The Vance Falling-Out

The warning is not theoretical. Dreher tells Boreing he flew to Washington late last November to see JD Vance — a man he considered a friend — and ask him to publicly break with the Fuentes-aligned wing of the right:

“Because of your background, because of your age, you’re uniquely positioned to draw a red line there. Say no, we are not going to accept that. And I asked him to do it.”

Dreher declines to disclose what Vance said in reply. What he will say is what happened after. “I don’t know that we’re friends anymore. He cut me off after I went to visit late last fall to talk to him about this very thing,” Dreher says. “After that November meeting where we disagreed, I just never heard from him again. He didn’t answer my text. And that was like — what — seven, eight months ago.”

In the interval, Vance has said nothing publicly. “JD Vance has done nothing to distance himself publicly from Tucker as his remarks have become more and more aberrant,” Dreher tells Boreing. “It’s very troubling that the vice president hasn’t weighed in on any of these topics.” Dreher is careful to defend Vance's character — "I do not think JD Vance is an anti-semite. I do not think he's a racist at all" — but his political indictment is clear. The man best positioned to say no has, to date, chosen silence.

The Fake and the Real

Dreher extends the diagnosis to technology, arguing artificial intelligence functions as what he calls a “dark re-enchantment.” He describes watching a pastor train an AI on his own voice to deliver sermons in his absence. “When people come to accept something they know is fake, but it gives them good feelings, we’re in real metaphysical trouble,” he tells Boreing.

Dreher’s counsel closes the interview: “Get offline, search for God, learn to suffer well.” Quoting Christian dissidents he interviewed across the former Soviet bloc for Live Not by Lies, he adds: “If you don’t know how to suffer and suffer well, then you’re not going to be able to escape the lure of totalitarianism.” His warning to the coalition that once employed him at Fox News: “Never again is now.”

The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed bipartisan legislation this week banning foreign nationals from financing state and local ballot initiatives, referenda, and recall elections—closing a loophole that has allowed foreign corporations and billionaires to pour millions into American policy fights. The Stop Foreign Funds in Elections Act (H.R. 3535), authored by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Jared Golden (D-ME), now advances to the Senate, where a companion bill has yet to emerge despite parallel Republican efforts introduced last year.

The measure would use the FEC’s existing enforcement system rather than create a new regulatory body. Violations would be subject to the civil and criminal penalties already available under federal campaign-finance law. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that implementing the legislation would cost the FEC less than $500,000 from 2027 through 2031.

The timing matters: foreign money has already influenced critical state votes from Montana mining regulations to Maine energy projects, with one Canadian utility alone spending over $22 million to shape a single referendum. The shock is institutional: the Federal Election Commission has explicitly urged Congress to fix this gap, acknowledging that foreign spending on ballot measures falls “outside the purview” of current federal law.

The Loophole

Federal law already prohibits foreign nationals from financing candidate elections at any level. But the Federal Election Campaign Act contains no explicit ban on foreign contributions to issue-based elections—ballot initiatives, referenda, and recall campaigns that can rewrite state constitutions, enact laws, or remove elected officials.

The FEC has interpreted this gap to mean foreign spending on ballot measures is legal under federal law. In 2021, the commission dismissed a complaint against Sandfire Resources, an Australian mining company that spent nearly $288,000 to defeat a Montana water pollution measure. The agency concluded foreign campaign contributions tied to ballot questions fell outside its jurisdiction.

Then-FEC Chair Shana Broussard, a Democrat, wrote in a statement: “Until Congress expands the Act’s foreign national prohibition to encompass state and local ballot activities, which I urge it to do, the Commission is bound by the law as it currently stands.”

The recommendation later gained the support of the full commission. In December 2024, the FEC unanimously designated extending the foreign-national prohibition to ballot initiatives, referenda and recall elections as one of its highest-priority recommendations to Congress. The commission had issued the same recommendation in 2022.

The Money Trail

In Maine, a U.S. subsidiary of Hydro-Québec, a utility owned by the government of Quebec, spent more than $22 million beginning in 2020 to fight referendum efforts targeting a proposed transmission line. The political battle culminated in a November 2021 referendum in which Maine voters rejected the project.

According to a 2022 University of Maryland survey cited by America First Policy Institute, 80 percent of voters favor Congress banning foreign individuals and entities from influencing ballot initiatives. In Ohio alone, more than $14 million in foreign money was spent on ballot measures related to drug penalties and abortion—despite 85 percent of Ohio voters opposing foreign influence in such campaigns.

Senate Uncertainty

The House bill now advances to the Senate, but its fate remains unclear. No direct companion legislation has been introduced to match H.R. 3535.

A separate Senate Republican effort exists: the Preventing Foreign Interference in American Elections Act, reintroduced in November 2025 by Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Ted Budd (R-NC). That bill includes a provision barring foreign nationals from donating to state ballot initiatives but also contains broader restrictions on foreign-funded get-out-the-vote activity and protections against government disclosure of nonprofit donor information—elements not present in the House version.

Whether Senate leadership will take up the House bill, the Hagerty-Budd legislation, or negotiate a hybrid measure is unknown. The FEC, meanwhile, has recommended Congress act to close the loophole.

The Broader Picture

Federal campaign finance law strictly prohibits contributions, donations, expenditures, or electioneering communications by foreign nationals in connection with federal, state, or local elections. The ban covers foreign governments, foreign nationals without permanent residency, and foreign-controlled entities.

But enforcement remains challenging. The FEC recently deadlocked 3-3 on a case involving American Ethane Co., a U.S. firm 88 percent owned by Russian nationals that made political contributions using foreign-sourced loans. Republican commissioners voted against enforcement, characterizing foreign loans as “investments” rather than prohibited foreign money.

A November 2023 FEC inspector general report found that identifying unlawful foreign contributions “continues to pose a significant challenge.” From 2010 to 2023, the agency’s workforce shrank by 12 percent while transactions under its oversight ballooned from 2 million in 2000 to 590 million in 2022.

At least eight states—California, Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Washington—have enacted their own bans on foreign money in ballot measures, though restrictions vary.

Three Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed congressional candidates swept New York City Democratic primaries on June 23, unseating two sitting members of Congress in what observers described as the most significant socialist electoral victories since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joseph Crowley in 2018.

The wins came as DSA reported its membership has nearly doubled since New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign in October 2024, growing from approximately 50,000 to over 92,000 national members by December 2025. Days after the primary results, President Trump called socialism “the biggest threat to our nation since our founding,” equating democratic socialism with communism in remarks given to evangelical supporters.

DSA Candidates Defeat Two Incumbents

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani-endorsed candidates won all three contested Democratic House primaries. In New York’s 13th Congressional District, community advocate Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who had represented the district since 2017. State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez won the open primary in New York’s 7th District to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez, defeating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Former City Comptroller Brad Lander unseated two-term incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the 10th District.

All three candidates ran on platforms emphasizing “housing affordability,” “universal healthcare,” and in favor of illegal immigration. Reverend Jordan Wells, for his part, pointedly noted that “The radical left is winning primaries and reshaping the Democratic Party while pretending it’s all about ‘affordable housing.’”

Polling Shows Democratic Support for Socialism Exceeds Capitalism

The electoral victories come amid shifting public attitudes toward economic systems. A Gallup poll conducted in August 2025 found that only 54% of Americans view capitalism positively, down from 60% in 2021 and the lowest level Gallup has recorded since it began tracking the question in 2010. Among Democrats specifically, 66% viewed socialism favorably while only 42% viewed capitalism favorably — the first time favorable views of capitalism among Democrats have dropped below 50%.

The poll also found that perceptions of socialism have remained relatively stable at 39% positive among all Americans, but Democrats’ favorable views have increased from 50% in 2010 to roughly two-thirds in recent years.

Trump Equates Democratic Socialism with Communism

Speaking at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event on June 26, President Trump characterized the DSA primary victories as evidence of communism’s spread in the United States. “I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding,” Trump said, referring to what he described as socialist and communist candidates. “These ruthless communists will attack all religions, but in particular Christianity. They always do.”

Trump specifically criticized a two-year rent freeze in New York City that Mamdani proposed and the city’s Rent Guidelines Board approved. “These buildings will soon turn into ghettos and slums, and as it spreads throughout the country, the country itself will be taken down,” Trump said.

Catholic Bishop Warns Against “Collectivism”

Bishop Robert Barron, who leads the Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, told Fox News Digital that he views the “extreme leftward shift” in Democratic politics as dangerous. Barron criticized Mamdani for praising the “warmth of collectivism” in his mayoral inaugural address, stating he is “against socialism precisely as a Catholic” and that “the church’s social teaching unequivocally condemns” socialism.

Catholic social teaching on economic systems has evolved through multiple papal encyclicals. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum defended the right to private property while asserting that “the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good.” More recently, Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas addressed artificial intelligence and technological power while reaffirming principles including “the dignity of work, private property’s social role, workers’ associations, fair wages, and subsidiarity.”

Membership Surge Coincides with Mamdani Campaign

DSA membership data published by the organization shows significant growth correlating with Mamdani’s political rise. In October 2024, when Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign, the national DSA had 50,713 members and the NYC chapter had 5,910 members. By December 2025, national membership had reached 92,912 and NYC membership had grown to 13,145 — increases of 83% nationally and 122% in New York City.

The June 23 primary victories represent the organization’s most significant electoral success since helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018 and Mamdani to the mayoralty in 2025. With three additional DSA-aligned members potentially joining Congress in January 2027, the organization’s influence on Democratic Party politics appears likely to grow further.

In May 20, 2019, an armed man walked into Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, threatened employees with a firearm, and stole $195,000 from the vault. Police had surveillance footage and witness accounts but no suspect. So they did something that would have been unimaginable a generation ago: they drew a digital circle around the crime scene and asked Google to identify every person whose phone placed them inside it.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that this technique — known as a geofence warrant— constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. Writing for a 6-3 majority in Chatrie v. United States, Justice Elena Kagan held that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location records, and that police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information from a tech company, even if the data covers only a short period.

The decision sends the case back to lower courts to determine whether the specific warrant used was constitutionally valid, but it rejects the government’s core argument: that two hours of precise location history stored with Google falls outside Fourth Amendment protection entirely.

The Ruling and What It Changes

The Court’s answer rests on its 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States, which held that accessing cell-site location information (CSLI) constitutes a search because individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Kagan wrote that Google Location History implicates privacy interests even more than CSLI: it pinpoints location within roughly 20 meters rather than within sectors of one-eighth to four square miles, records location every two minutes rather than sporadically, and can estimate elevation to reveal which floor of a building a phone is on. It also functions, in Google’s own description, like a personal journal—users consult it to remember a restaurant, a friend’s home, or a vacation route.

The government argued that because users can choose not to give companies like Google their location data, that data is not constitutionally protected. Kagan rejected that logic. Google repeatedly prompts users to enable Location History, often warning that devices will not “work correctly” otherwise, without disclosing in that prompt how frequently location would be recorded, how precise it would be, or how it might be given to the government.

“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” the majority wrote.

The Requirements Were Not Met

The ruling forces police and prosecutors to meet familiar Fourth Amendment requirements when they seek geofence data: probable cause, particularity, and a scope tailored to the justification for the search. The Court specifically flagged weaknesses in the Virginia warrant’s later steps, where officers could choose which anonymized users deserved more scrutiny with very little guidance from the magistrate.

Future warrants will need to answer questions that are no longer optional: Why this radius? Why this timeframe? Why is there probable cause to believe the database contains evidence? Who decides which users move to the next stage? What happens to everyone else’s data?

The Loophole the Court Didn’t Close

The decision carries particular weight because Google has already changed the playing field. In December 2023, the company announced that Maps Timeline data would move to on-device storage, with cloud backups encrypted so that even Google could not read them. As of July 2025, Google told the Supreme Court, Location History data previously stored on its servers had been deleted or migrated to on-device storage, and Google could no longer respond to geofence warrants based on Location History.

That does not make the ruling obsolete. It sets the legal framework for the next surveillance fight. Police may turn to telecom companies, app developers, vehicle telematics, license plate readers, payment apps, or — most troubling — commercial data brokers. The data broker problem is especially acute because it lets agencies buy what they might otherwise need legal process to obtain.

What It Means for Americans

The ruling matters for Americans who will never rob a bank, attend a protest, or visit a politically sensitive location. Geofence warrants commonly cover private homes, apartments, hotels, and places of worship, according to information Google provided to the Court. A geofence around a bank can sweep in a church next door. A geofence around a riot can sweep in journalists, legal observers, and peaceful protesters. A geofence around an abortion clinic, synagogue, mosque, gun show, union hall, political meeting, or hospital can reveal facts the government has no business collecting without specific constitutional justification.

The point of the Fourth Amendment is not to protect only the innocent or only the guilty. It is to preserve a civic order in which the government must justify intrusion before it rummages through the private patterns of ordinary life. In a democracy, that principle matters whether you live in Virginia or Vermont, whether you use Google Maps daily or never open the app. The Constitution requires that police suspect you before they search you — not search first and decide whom to suspect later.

The Department of Justice released the draft version of the Religious Liberty Commission report on June 26 on the premise that American society has wrongly treated religion “not as a protected and valued contribution to public life, but as a problem or annoyance to be managed, restricted, or sidelined.”

The 224-page report, based on testimony from over 100 witnesses, calls for the Department of Justice to issue guidance “clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state,” repeal the Johnson Amendment restricting political speech by religious leaders, and guarantee faith-based institutions equal access to federal funding without requiring them to “renounce their religious identity.”

The central argument, religious liberty erosion stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that the Constitution requires religious voices to be silenced, when in fact, the Founders established protections precisely because “religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society.”

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“Building Bridges Between Church and State”

The report’s Chapter 2 traces how courts built “walls of separation between church and state” in the mid-20th century, wrongly claiming the Establishment Clause requires erasure of religious perspectives from public life. The commission argues this interpretation contradicts the Founders’ intent, the Declaration of Independence grounded rights in being “endowed by our Creator,” and early state constitutions explicitly referenced “the duty we owe our Creator.”

The report frames current doctrine as “building bridges between church and state” rather than enforcing separation, citing recent Supreme Court decisions that have expanded religious expression rights in public settings and protected faith-based institutions from discrimination in government programs.

“When government authorities prevent religious individuals and perspectives from contributing to public life, they diminish the quality of freedom for all citizens,” the report states. The commission asserts that “the Constitution neither requires nor permits religious voices to be silenced.”

Faith-Based Institutions Under Pressure

Witnesses testified that faith-based organizations increasingly face pressure to modify missions or redefine beliefs to participate in public life. A women’s homeless shelter in Alaska was nearly forced to close when it refused to house a biological male, a Vermont couple was denied foster care approval because they would not support “harmful gender transitions for children,” and Christian and Jewish schools face laws that “require them to compromise the mission of the schools.”

The report’s Chapter 3 emphasizes that faith-based institutions “contribute precisely because they are faithful to their religious convictions, not despite them.” Consulting executive Oriel Ekşi, a human trafficking survivor, testified “Faith-based organizations are often among the first to show up, the last to leave, and the most trusted by the people they serve.”

The commission recommends guaranteeing faith-based institutions “an equal opportunity to participate on an equal basis in funding opportunities” and clarifying through litigation that state and local authorities cannot discriminate on the basis of religion.

Students, Parents, and Military Service Members

The report dedicates separate chapters to religious liberty violations in K-12 schools, colleges, the military, and healthcare. Elementary student Shea Encinas was bullied for his Christian faith after being forced to read a peer a book saying he could choose his gender, the school “refused to help and doubled down on pushing gender ideology.” Teacher Marisol Arroyo-Castro was told to remove a cross near her desk or lose her job.

Navy SEAL Blake Martin lost his pension three years before retirement eligibility because he objected to the COVID-19 vaccine on religious grounds. The report recommends the Department of Defense “streamline and improve the religious accommodation process” and continue efforts to restore retirement eligibility for service members who lost benefits over vaccine mandates.

12 Key Recommendations

The commission’s top recommendations include, instructing DOJ to issue Establishment Clause guidance, requiring public officials who allege improper religious expression to provide written explanations within 30 days, creating religious liberty violation hotlines for students, parents, teachers, and healthcare workers, establishing a DOJ religious liberty task force to prioritize litigation, repealing the Johnson Amendment to allow political speech by tax-exempt religious organizations, and creating a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty to “honor the courage of religious liberty heroes.”

The report is open for public comment through July 12 prior to the release of the final version of the report.

On April 19, 2026, two U.S. citizens — Lyle Prijoles, 40, of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, 26, of Steilacoom, Washington — were killed in Barangay Salamanca, in the Negros Occidental town of Toboso, during a twelve-hour series of firefights between the Philippine Army’s 79th Infantry Battalion and the Northern Negros Front of the New People’s Army (NPA).

The NPA and its parent body, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), have been designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the U.S. State Department since 2002. Prijoles and Sorem were not tourists who wandered into a war zone. Both had been groomed over years inside a network of diaspora organizations that recruit on American campuses and ferry their cadres into the Philippine countryside on “exposure trips.” The shock is not that two Americans died. It is that the pipeline that placed them in the line of fire of a U.S.-designated terror group operates openly in the United States, unregistered under federal foreign-agent law.

The Toboso encounter

The Philippine Army reports that troops recovered roughly two dozen firearms at the site and killed Roger Fabillar, the Northern Negros Front commander on whom a one-million-peso bounty had stood for four years.

The CPP itself acknowledges ten of the nineteen dead as its own armed revolutionaries; it disputes the status of the rest, including Prijoles and Sorem, whom its U.S. affiliates call “civilians” doing community immersion. The Philippine Commission on Human Rights has opened an investigation, and the forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun has raised procedural questions worth taking seriously. The narrower facts of that morning are properly contested. The wider facts are not.

From SFSU and Central Washington to Negros

Prijoles chaired the San Francisco State University chapter of the League of Filipino Students (LFS) and, in 2012, was elected founding Solidarity Officer of Anakbayan-USA at its founding congress in Chicago. He later served on the U.S. council of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines.

Sorem’s own organization recounts that she was radicalized in 2020 as a music student at Central Washington University, came to “see a future for her people in the National Democratic movement,” co-founded Anakbayan South Seattle, joined the Anakbayan-USA “Exposure Trip” in 2025, and returned in 2026 to live among “peasant farming communities.” This is not gossip; it is the network’s own promotional language.

A documented front network

The structure these two moved through is not a mystery. A 2025 report by Kyle Shideler at the Center for Security Policy, drawing on CPP defector testimony compiled in the Philippine government study Unmasking the Myth of Communism in the Philippines, documents that Bayan-USA (founded 1994) and its student wing Anakbayan are controlled by the CPP’s National United Front Commission through the Leninist discipline of democratic centralism.

Above them sits the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), founded in 2001 by CPP chairman Jose María Sison and overseen by the CPP’s International Department; it claims more than 350 member organizations in 40 countries. A declassified CIA study catalogued the same front structure decades ago. None of these U.S. affiliates is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The American blind spot

The Philippine government has now formally warned of “terror-grooming” of overseas Filipinos, and NTF-ELCAC executive director Ernesto Torres Jr. stated that recruitment “has expanded beyond Philippine borders, exposing individuals from the diaspora to the dangers of armed confrontation.” American institutions, by contrast, treat the U.S. nodes of this network as ordinary ethnic advocacy. Faculty at San Francisco State, Cal State Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and Vassar publicly advertise affiliations with Bayan-USA, Anakbayan, or ILPS on their official pages.

A May Day rally by the Georgia Revolutionary Student Union featured an NPA flag and a burning American flag; Center for Security Policy analyst Kyle Shideler observed the obvious — that a comparable display for ISIS or al-Qaeda would have generated immediate federal interest.

What the deaths actually expose

Whether Prijoles and Sorem personally fired rifles on the morning of April 19 will be litigated by the Philippine human-rights commission. What is not in dispute is that they had been formed inside organizations that publicly venerate the founder of a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, that travel back and forth to its operational areas, and that face no scrutiny under American counterintelligence law.

The pipeline did not end at Toboso; the pipeline runs through American classrooms. Two coffins are coming home from Negros. The networks that filled them remain on the syllabus.

On May 16, 2026, President Donald Trump announced what has become a pattern in his counter-terrorism record: results.

U.S. and Nigerian forces killed Abu Bilal al-Minuki, a senior commander in Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), in a joint operation targeting terrorist infrastructure in Nigeria’s Lake Chad Basin. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu confirmed Minuki’s death alongside “several of his lieutenants,” describing the operation as disrupting a network responsible for kidnappings, attacks on civilians, and the 2018 Dapchi schoolgirls abduction.

It was another data point in Trump’s consistent approach to Islamic terrorism: find them, target them, eliminate them. From Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to al-Minuki, the administration has demonstrated that jihadist leadership can be hunted down wherever they hide whether in Syrian compounds or African swamplands.

One day after announcing the operation, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared at Rededicate 250, a gathering on the National Mall that brought together Americans in prayer and reflection on the nation’s 250th anniversary. The juxtaposition wasn’t accidental, it reflected something the administration grasps that previous governments avoided: clarity about what the United States defends, and why it matters.

The ISIS Record: Promises Kept

Trump’s first term delivered what his predecessor couldn’t: the destruction of the ISIS caliphate. In October 2019, U.S. special forces killed ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a Syria raid. By early 2020, the territorial “caliphate” that once controlled populations the size of Britain had been dismantled. These weren’t symbolic victories- they were operational defeats that ended ISIS’s ability to govern territory, collect taxes, and project the image of an ascendant movement.

But ISIS, like all jihadist movements, adapted. Following its collapse in Iraq and Syria, the group reconstituted operations in sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately 90 percent of its attacks now occur. Islamic State West Africa Province emerged as one of the continent’s deadliest factions, controlling swaths of the Lake Chad Basin and terrorizing civilian populations across multiple countries.

Trump’s second-term approach recognizes this reality. Rather than declaring victory and withdrawing, the administration has pursued ISIS into Africa, partnering with regional governments, deploying intelligence assets, and conducting precision strikes. The Christmas Day 2025 operation and the May 2026 Minuki killing demonstrate strategic follow-through. When the president says ISIS will be defeated wherever it operates, he means it.

Naming What We Defend

Critics have questioned the administration’s willingness to describe attacks on Christians as attacks on Christians. On Christmas 2025, Trump announced strikes targeting ISIS militants who had been “viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians.” Hegseth stated plainly: “The killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end.”

This honesty represents a departure from decades of strategic ambiguity that refused to acknowledge religious dimensions of jihadist violence. ISIS explicitly targets religious minorities — Christians, Yazidis, Shia Muslims — as part of its ideology. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make us more sophisticated; it makes us dishonest.

Are Christians the only victims of ISIS in Nigeria? No. Muslims and tribal groups suffer enormously from jihadist violence as well. But acknowledging that Christians face targeted persecution doesn’t erase Muslim suffering. It simply states a fact that matters to the United States, a nation founded on religious freedom.

When ISIS burns churches, kidnaps Christian schoolgirls, and executes believers for refusing conversion, the United States has both a moral interest and a strategic interest in stopping it. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of Western civilization. Defending it isn’t sectarian warfare, it’s defending the principle that people shouldn’t be murdered for their beliefs.

Moral Clarity, Not Theocracy

The day after announcing the Minuki operation, Hegseth appeared at Rededicate 250, an event organized to mark America’s 250th anniversary through prayer and reflection. The gathering, which brought together religious leaders and citizens, represented something increasingly rare in American public life: an unapologetic articulation of the moral and religious foundations that shaped the nation.

This isn’t theocracy. It’s acknowledgment of inheritance. The American system of ordered liberty, individual rights, and limited government didn’t emerge from nowhere— it grew from specific moral and philosophical soil, much of it Christian. Recognizing that heritage isn’t establishing a state religion. It’s historical honesty.

Hegseth has launched monthly prayer services at the Pentagon, reflecting his understanding that military service involves moral questions that secular bureaucracy can’t answer. Soldiers who risk their lives deserve to know what they’re defending. Telling them it’s merely “international norms” or “rules-based order” is insufficient. They defend something deeper: the civilization that makes freedom possible.

Strategic Seriousness

The Council on Foreign Relations noted that Nigeria operations reflect an “America First approach” focused on protecting U.S. interests. Exactly right. American interests include preventing jihadist networks from establishing safe havens, protecting populations vulnerable to religious persecution, and demonstrating that terrorism has consequences.

Nigerian officials have welcomed U.S. partnership in confronting ISWAP, describing the cooperation as necessary given the scale of the threat. When Trump says the U.S. will work with partners to dismantle terrorist networks, he’s describing coalition-building—not unilateralism.

Some observers worry that acknowledging religious dimensions of the conflict “hands ISIS a propaganda victory.” This is backwards. ISIS already believes it’s fighting a religious war. Our refusal to name that reality doesn’t confuse them—it confuses us. Moral clarity about what we’re defending strengthens resolve. Evasion weakens it.

A Record That Speaks

From the elimination of Baghdadi to the destruction of the caliphate to the ongoing pursuit of ISIS leadership in Africa, Trump has delivered measurable results against Islamic terrorism. The Minuki operation represents the latest in a series of successful strikes that have degraded jihadist networks and protected vulnerable populations.

The administration’s willingness to speak plainly about religious freedom, civilizational defense, and moral purpose doesn’t undermine counter-terrorism—it clarifies it. Americans understand what their military defends because the administration tells them. That honesty, combined with operational effectiveness, is what distinguishes this approach from the strategic drift that preceded it.

ISIS thrives in ambiguity and retreat. Trump offers the opposite: clarity, persistence, and results.

On Monday afternoon, President Trump greeted King Charles III on the South Lawn of the White House with the usual pomp: military band, 21-gun salute, ceremonial inspection of troops. The troops, however, were unusual. Standing at attention in full Continental Army regalia; tricorn hats, blue coats with buff facings, muskets at their shoulders, were Revolutionary War reenactors. The soldiers who fought Charles’ great-great-great-great-grandfather George III were now serving as the honor guard for his descendant’s state visit.

The White House billed the visit as commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence, which explains the historical costuming. Still, there’s something undeniably pointed about the specific choice. Other symbols were available — the current military, the flag, the Constitution under glass. Trump chose the guys in the same Revolutionary dress who beat the British Empire.

The Revolutionary War soldiers weren’t there by accident. They represented the beginning of something genuinely remarkable: the first successful implementation of Enlightenment political philosophy at the scale of an entire nation. What the philosophers of the 18th century imagined, government by consent, natural rights, separation of powers, the American revolutionaries actually built.

The achievement starts with the improbability of the military victory itself. When the Continental Army formed in 1775, it consisted primarily of farmers, merchants, and artisans with no professional military training. They faced the most powerful navy in the world and a battle-tested professional army. The colonies had no capacity to manufacture arms in quantity, no financial resources, no unified command structure. The British controlled the seas and could land troops wherever they chose.

Standard strategic analysis predicted certain American defeat. Colonial militia had never defeated British regulars in pitched battle. The resources were laughably mismatched. Yet these farmers and merchants, wearing whatever uniforms they could assemble, fought an eight-year war and won.

Then came the harder part- turning military victory into lasting government. The revolutionaries didn’t just declare independence; they created an entirely new form of political organization. Federalism divided power between states and national government. Separation of powers prevented any single branch from dominating. A written constitution, ratified by the people themselves, established the rules everyone would follow. These weren’t just innovations; they were the operating system for the first large-scale republic in modern times.

And it worked. The Constitution ratified in 1788 remains the operational framework of American government 238 years later. The same document, with amendments. The political system bent under pressure, survived a civil war, adapted to massive territorial expansion and demographic change, and kept functioning. The peaceful transfer of power between parties, John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in 1801, set a precedent that has held through 46 presidencies.

The intellectual architecture matters as much as the military victory. The Founders took abstract Enlightenment principles, natural rights, popular sovereignty, limited government, and translated them into concrete institutional design. The Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach. Federalism allowed both local autonomy and national coherence. The separation of powers created friction by design, making tyranny difficult even when attempted.

These frameworks became the template that shaped modern democracy worldwide. When other nations wrote constitutions, they studied the American model. When revolutionaries articulated their goals, they echoed the Declaration of Independence. The specific mechanisms, bicameral legislatures, judicial review, enumerated powers, spread because they proved functional at scale.

The 250-year anniversary commemorates not just independence but endurance. A quarter-millennium is substantial for any political system. The American republic has outlasted monarchies, empires, and ideological experiments that rose and fell in that span. It survived industrialization, urbanization, multiple wars, economic collapses, and profound social transformations while maintaining constitutional continuity.

This makes the Revolutionary War categorically different from a typical colonial uprising. Independence alone isn’t exceptional — many colonies achieved it. What distinguishes America is what came after: building institutions that actually worked, protecting rights that actually mattered, creating a system that could adapt without collapsing. The revolutionaries didn’t just reject British rule. They constructed something better and made it last.

When Charles addressed Congress later that day, he invoked shared heritage and “checks and balances” on executive power. Gracious words from a constitutional monarch visiting a republic that rejected monarchy as its founding principle. The moment captured something worth celebrating: two nations that went to war 250 years ago now maintain one of the world’s most important alliances, united by principles the American revolutionaries pioneered.

The Continental Army won a war everyone expected them to lose, then built a republic everyone expected to fail. Two hundred fifty years later, that republic hosted the heir to the British throne for a state dinner celebrating the anniversary of rebellion against his ancestor. The sheer improbability of that outcome, not just independence, but success, stability, and global influence, makes the Revolutionary War worth commemorating with a bit of theatrical flair. The guys in tricorn hats earned their place on the South Lawn.

In 1994, sitting in a room with journalist Dan Baum, John Ehrlichman said something he’d been holding for decades. Nixon’s former domestic policy chief explained that the 1970 drug war, the legal architecture that classified LSD, psilocybin, and eventually ibogaine as Schedule I substances with “no currently accepted medical use,” had nothing to do with science. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black,” Ehrlichman admitted, “but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

Last weekend, President Trump signed an executive order directing the FDA to fast-track those same Schedule I psychedelics for medical approval. The mechanism was strikingly informal: podcast host Joe Rogan texted Trump about ibogaine after learning about it from a guest. Trump replied within hours, ”Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it.”

What’s happening isn’t a vindication of evidence-based drug policy over political manipulation. It’s a reminder that drug scheduling has always operated through political channels, regardless of the direction of travel. The difference now is we can see the machinery in real time, stripped of the bureaucratic facade that once made it look like science.

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The Research That Never Stopped Being Promising

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychedelic research was the most exciting frontier in psychiatry. Researchers at Spring Grove State Hospital, Harvard, and institutions across Canada were studying LSD for alcoholism, depression, and end-of-life anxiety. The Saskatchewan studies on LSD for alcoholism showed significant improvement in outcomes. Spring Grove’s work on terminal cancer patients found that a single LSD session, combined with therapy, could reduce death anxiety that had resisted every other intervention.

Then the drugs escaped the lab. By the mid-1960s, LSD was synonymous with Timothy Leary, campus protests, and the counterculture Nixon was determined to suppress. Research didn’t stop because the science failed, it stopped because the politics changed. The 1970 Controlled Substances Act placed psychedelics in Schedule I, ostensibly because they had “high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use.” But as Ehrlichman’s confession makes clear, those criteria were applied through a political filter that had little to do with pharmacology.

For decades, the evidence base remained frozen in the 1960s: tantalizing but incomplete. Then, starting in the early 2000s, researchers at Johns Hopkins made what the institution’s own staff called a “risky” decision to resurrect psychedelic research. Their 2006 study showing that psilocybin produced meaningful, lasting positive experiences in healthy participants is often credited with launching the “psychedelic renaissance.” Stanford, Harvard, and UCSF followed, all studying compounds that were still, technically, classified as having no medical value.

The VA has been quietly running psychedelic trials for years, particularly for veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD. The results have been striking enough that researchers keep using words like “dramatic” and “life-changing” in ways that academic caution usually forbids.

What Works for Veterans With PTSD

For special operations veterans, the numbers tell a story that conventional treatments struggle to address. Before the recent Stanford ibogaine study, participating veterans averaged a disability rating of 30.2 on the WHO scale, equivalent to moderate disability affecting daily functioning. One month after ibogaine treatment combined with magnesium, that rating dropped to 5.1, indicating essentially no disability. PTSD symptoms decreased by 88%, depression by 87%, anxiety by 81%.

These aren’t marginal improvements. “Before the treatment, I was living life in a blizzard with zero visibility and a cold, hopeless, listless feeling,” one Arizona veteran with six combat deployments told researchers. “After ibogaine, the storm lifted.”

The therapeutic mechanisms appear tied to neuroplasticity, quite literally rewiring how the brain processes trauma. Stanford researchers found that veterans who improved in executive function after ibogaine treatment showed increases in theta brain waves, associated with learning and cognitive flexibility. Those with reduced PTSD symptoms showed decreased complexity in cortical activity, suggesting a quieting of the heightened stress response that characterizes post-traumatic stress.

Similar patterns emerged in MDMA trials before the FDA’s 2024 rejection: in phase 3 studies, participants receiving MDMA-assisted therapy were twice as likely to lose their PTSD diagnosis compared to placebo groups, with effect sizes (Cohen’s d = 0.91 in the first trial) that would be considered exceptional for any psychiatric treatment. For veterans whose suicide rates have exceeded 6,000 annually for over twenty years—more than twice the rate of non-veterans—treatments that can produce this degree of change this rapidly aren’t just promising. They’re answering a question about survivability.

The VA’s observational study of 86 special operations veterans who received ibogaine followed by 5-MeO-DMT found sustained improvements in PTSD, depression, and anxiety lasting six months after treatment. Importantly, participants also reported significant reductions in suicidal ideation—the outcome that matters most when baseline suicide rates are catastrophic.

The Political Coalition Has Shifted; The Evidence Hasn’t Changed Much

Here’s what makes the current moment historically revealing: the scientific evidence around psychedelics hasn’t fundamentally transformed in the past five years. What’s changed is the political coalition backing them.

Peter Thiel has invested heavily in psychedelic pharmaceutical companies—Compass Pathways working on psilocybin, AtaiBeckley on various hallucinogens. When Trump’s executive order was announced, both companies’ stocks spiked. Texas committed $50 million to ibogaine clinical trials in March 2026. The Mercer Family Foundation, instrumental in Trump’s 2016 election, has donated over $1 million toward psychedelic PTSD treatment for veterans. Former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, whose memoir became the film Lone Survivor, stood behind Trump at the signing ceremony alongside the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine.

This is a different coalition than the one that created Schedule I—but it’s still a coalition defined by political relationships and financial interests rather than by FDA advisory panels systematically reviewing Phase 3 trial data. The scientific review process still exists, but it’s increasingly beside the point. The FDA rejected MDMA for PTSD in August 2024 despite phase 3 trials showing strong efficacy, citing concerns about masking effects and study design. Four months later, an executive order directs the agency to fast-track ibogaine, which hasn’t completed Phase 1 safety trials and faces FDA resistance due to cardiac toxicity concerns.

The pattern here isn’t “politics corrupting science” in one direction and “science correcting politics” in the other. It’s that drug policy has always been shaped by which political coalition controls the levers, with scientific evidence serving as post-hoc justification for decisions made on other grounds.

Why the Official Pathway Wasn’t Enough

The uncomfortable question this raises: If the VA’s psychedelic trials were producing such dramatic results, why did policy change require Joe Rogan’s text message rather than those clinical findings?

The answer suggests something about how institutions actually process evidence versus how we imagine they do. The FDA’s priority review voucher program, designed to accelerate promising treatments, theoretically could have fast-tracked psychedelics years ago based on the mounting clinical data. There were reports that Compass Pathways’ synthetic psilocybin was on the initial voucher list in February, but the White House removed it. The new executive order now explicitly directs the FDA to provide these vouchers for psychedelics with breakthrough therapy designation, sending a signal that the prior resistance was political, not scientific.

This isn’t unique to psychedelics. The history of drug policy is filled with substances whose legal status bore little relationship to their actual pharmacological risk profile. Cannabis remained Schedule I for decades while demonstrably more dangerous substances sat in lower schedules. The rescheduling of marijuana is happening now not because new research revealed it was safe, that research existed for years, but because the political coalition supporting legalization finally gained enough power.

The current psychedelic push follows the same pattern in reverse: a political coalition with access to executive power can move policy faster than any amount of clinical evidence flowing through official channels. Rogan’s podcast reaches millions; his text reached the president. That’s a more efficient pathway than publishing in Nature Medicine, however rigorous the methodology.

Four astronauts returned to Earth last Friday after traveling farther from home than any humans in history. The Artemis II mission was a nearly 10-day test flight that took Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking Apollo 13’s 1970 distance record. The Space Launch System rocket performed flawlessly. Orion’s life support systems worked in deep space. Reentry at 25,000 miles per hour went exactly as designed.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the achievement clearly: “With Artemis II complete, focus now turns confidently toward assembling Artemis III and preparing to return to the lunar surface, build the base, and never give up the Moon again.”

That last part, “never give up the Moon again,” is where the real work begins.

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The Difference Between Visiting and Staying

Apollo was flags and footprints, demonstrate capability, collect samples, come home. The entire program from Kennedy’s speech to the last lunar landing spanned eleven years. Artemis is attempting something fundamentally different, permanent infrastructure that requires institutional commitment measured in decades, not presidential terms.

Consider what “permanent” actually means. The International Space Station receives resupply missions roughly every two months. That’s with launch facilities on Earth, established supply chains, and orbital mechanics that allow regular access windows. A lunar base at the South Pole introduces problems an order of magnitude harder, radiation shielding, thermal management across 300-degree temperature swings, toxic dust mitigation, closed-loop life support without regular resupply, and resource extraction from water ice deposits whose abundance remains uncertain.

NASA’s base camp plans include surface habitats, pressurized rovers, power generation systems, communication networks, and construction equipment capable of building landing pads and roads in one-sixth gravity. The agency projects spending roughly $20-30 billion over the next seven years on base infrastructure alone, separate from launch costs.

Each SLS launch currently runs between $2-4 billion when including spacecraft and ground operations. The base requires not just crew rotations but cargo missions delivering habitation modules, construction equipment, fuel, spare parts, food, and scientific instruments. The ISS required hundreds of launches over two decades to assemble. Lunar construction operates under harsher constraints with longer supply lines.

How Multi-Decade Programs Actually Survive

Here’s what’s remarkable about Artemis II, it happened at all. The program began in 2004 under President Bush as Constellation, survived Obama’s restructuring in 2010, continued through the Trump and Biden administrations, and delivered under the current government. That represents sustained institutional focus across five presidencies and multiple Congressional compositions, precisely the kind of continuity that contemporary discourse insists American governance can no longer achieve.

This wasn’t inevitable. NASA officials explicitly lobbied for program continuity during each transition, arguing against the pattern where new administrations cancel predecessors’ space initiatives. The fact that Artemis survived repeated budget scrutiny, schedule delays, and cost overruns reveals something about how legacy programs maintain momentum, they create sufficient stakeholder investment, contractors across fourteen countries, Congressional districts with jobs dependent on the program, international partnerships with binding agreements, that cancellation becomes politically costlier than continuation.

This is not inspirational. It’s bureaucratic ballast that prevents course changes. But it’s also the mechanism that allows civilizational-scale projects to outlast election cycles.

The Boring Stuff Nobody Photographs

Artemis III, scheduled for 2028, will attempt the first lunar landing in over fifty years. If it succeeds, astronauts will spend perhaps a week on the surface testing equipment and procedures. Then comes the tedious part nobody makes documentaries about, iterative construction missions, systems integration, redundancy testing, supply chain establishment, emergency protocol development, crew rotation logistics.

The crew on Artemis II captured striking images of earthrise and documented lunar topography around the South Pole landing zone. Future missions will photograph foundation pours and power cable installations. The difference between visiting the Moon and maintaining permanent presence is the difference between a summit expedition and building a research station in Antarctica, one generates awe, the other requires plumbing.

What made Artemis II notable wasn’t the distance record or the imagery. It was the demonstration that the institutions responsible could deliver on two decades of accumulated promises despite everything working against sustained focus. The harder test is whether those same institutions can maintain attention through the unglamorous phase, the fourteenth cargo mission, the third habitat module, the supply chain for replacement parts nobody thinks about until they fail.

Fifty-three years after we last reached lunar distance, four people traveled farther than anyone before and returned safely. The impressive part wasn’t the flight. It was that the systems existed to attempt it, and that they worked. Whether similar institutional persistence can turn that capability into enduring presence depends entirely on our willingness to fund the boring parts.

When the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer landed in January, most commentary focused on the predictable findings about institutional decline. Government trust remains low, media credibility continues eroding, the usual diagnoses for a fractured age. But buried in the data was something more unsettling than another year of disappointing scores for Congress or CNN.

The new crisis isn’t that people distrust the powerful. It’s that they’ve stopped trusting each other.

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Seven in ten respondents across 28 countries reported unwillingness or hesitance to trust someone with different values, different approaches to social issues, different backgrounds, or different information sources. In Japan, that figure reached 90 percent. In Germany, 81 percent. In Canada, 73 percent. The insularity cuts across income levels, age groups, and geographies. This isn’t polarization, which at least implies engagement across a divide. This is retreat.

What Insularity Actually Means

The researchers at Edelman are careful with terminology. They’ve tracked trust for 26 years now, and they distinguish between phases. Polarization characterized the 2010s—people on opposite sides shouting at each other. Grievance marked the early 2020s—shouting turned to resentment, a belief that the other side was not just wrong but deliberately destructive.

Insularity is qualitatively different. When people feel aggrieved by those who disagree, they at least acknowledge the other camp’s existence. Insularity means checking out entirely. It’s not “I don’t trust what they say”—it’s “I’m unwilling to engage with them at all.”

You can see it in where trust has migrated. Over the past five years, trust in national government leaders has declined by 16 points, major news organizations by 11 points. Meanwhile, trust in “my neighbors, family and friends” rose by 11 points, “my coworkers” by 11 points, “my CEO” by 9 points.

The pattern is unmistakable: trust is becoming hyper-local, retreating from the abstract and institutional toward the immediate and familiar. People trust those they can see and know personally. Everyone else is suspect.

The Collapse of Optimism

What makes insularity particularly alarming is what accompanies it. Globally, only 32 percent of respondents believe the next generation will be better off than today. But averages obscure the extremes. In France, just 6 percent of people think the future will improve for their children. In Germany, 8 percent. In Canada, 16 percent. In the United States, 21 percent.

These aren’t developing economies wracked by instability. These are wealthy, stable democracies with centuries of institutional continuity, and their citizens have essentially stopped believing in the future. When asked whether tomorrow’s generation will fare better, nine out of ten French respondents essentially said no.

Robert Putnam spent the 1990s documenting the decline of social capital in America—the erosion of civic groups, bowling leagues, church attendance, neighborly interaction. His work in Bowling Alone demonstrated that interpersonal trust had been falling since the 1970s. The share of Americans who believe “most people can be trusted” dropped from 46 percent in 1972 to 34 percent by 2018. What’s happening now is that decline reaching terminal velocity, crossing into a regime where the question isn’t whether you trust strangers but whether you’re willing to interact with anyone outside your immediate circle.

The Forces Driving the Retreat

Four dynamics are fueling insularity, according to the research. Economic anxiety tops the list—two-thirds of employees worry that trade policies and tariffs will harm their employer, while more than half of low-income respondents believe they’ll be left behind by generative AI.

The collapse in optimism is the second force. Third is institutional distrust with a widening class dimension—low-income respondents see institutions as 18 points less competent than high-income respondents rate them. The trust gap between rich and poor has more than doubled since 2012, from six points to 15 points globally.

Fourth is the information crisis. Sixty-five percent of respondents worry that foreign actors are injecting falsehoods into national media to inflame divisions. Only 39 percent seek out news from ideologically different sources even weekly. People aren’t just siloing themselves physically—they’re doing it informationally, constructing epistemological bubbles where existing beliefs never encounter friction.

What the Pattern Suggests

This moment feels different from previous cycles of distrust. The 1960s and 1970s saw massive institutional skepticism—government, corporations, universities all faced legitimacy crises. But that era’s distrust was accompanied by civic engagement, by protests and movements and attempts to build alternative structures. People didn’t trust the establishment, but they trusted each other enough to organize.

What’s distinct now is the passivity of the retreat. Insularity doesn’t generate mass movements because it’s fundamentally individualistic. When you don’t trust people with different values, you don’t build coalitions. You withdraw. The energy goes into curating your immediate environment—your neighborhood, your workplace, your friend group—to minimize exposure to difference.

This creates a reinforcing loop. The less you interact with people unlike yourself, the less you trust them. The less you trust them, the less you’re willing to engage. Meanwhile, economic and technological forces driving division—algorithm-sorted information feeds, geographic sorting by education and income, the decline of shared institutions like churches and unions—continue operating, making the next interaction with difference even less likely.

High-trust societies and low-trust societies function differently at a structural level. In high-trust environments, people cooperate with strangers, institutions operate with lighter enforcement mechanisms, economic transactions happen more efficiently. When trust erodes, you get more surveillance, higher transaction costs, less cooperation. But you also get volatility.

Researchers studying civil conflict note that social fragmentation doesn’t cause violence directly, but it removes the buffers that prevent escalation. In a high-trust society, disagreements get mediated by shared institutions, by people who know each other personally, by norms that assume good faith. In an insular society, those mechanisms don’t exist. Conflict has nowhere to go but up.

The Question Worth Sitting With

There is nothing inevitable about where this leads. Patterns are not prophecies. But ignoring the pattern because you don’t like the precedents isn’t a strategy either.

What the data describes is a society—many societies, actually—losing the capacity for dialogue across difference. That capacity isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. The question worth sitting with is what institutions can actually function when seven in ten people are unwilling to trust anyone with different values. How do democracies make collective decisions? How do markets operate when parties assume bad faith? How do you maintain rule of law when different groups stop recognizing shared rules?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re practical ones that societies throughout history have had to answer, usually under worse conditions than we face now. But the starting point is recognizing what’s actually happening. This isn’t another round of complaints about media bias or government dysfunction. This is a shift in the basic architecture of social trust, from the institutional and abstract toward the local and interpersonal.

And that shift, historically, has tended to precede something rather than resolve it.

Election night 2024 felt like vindication. Conservatives who’d spent years feeling sidelined by establishment Republicans finally had their champion back in the White House. The crowds at Mar-a-Lago chanted “USA!” as results rolled in. Tucker Carlson called it a mandate. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared it proof that Americans rejected endless foreign wars. The promise was clear: America First, no more Middle Eastern conflicts, resources spent at home instead of abroad. The celebration lasted for months.

Then came the Iran strikes.

President Trump ordered Operation Epic Fury after concluding that Iran’s nuclear program and terror networks posed an imminent threat that diplomacy couldn’t resolve. Whatever calculations he made in the Situation Room, whether about uranium enrichment timelines, Revolutionary Guard capabilities, or regional stability, he decided the threat couldn’t wait. The administration’s stated rationale focused on degrading Iran’s missile capabilities, destroying its nuclear infrastructure, and dismantling terrorist proxy networks before they could strike American soil.

The same voices that had celebrated his election became his harshest critics almost overnight. Carlson posted a video viewed two million times calling it “Israel’s war, not America’s war.” Greene, who’d campaigned for Trump relentlessly, wrote that he’d “betrayed his campaign promises of no more foreign wars.” His own base—the people who’d chanted his name on election night—were now questioning whether he was still their champion.

They’d wanted one thing; he gave them something harder. They wanted domestic corruption confronted—the administrative state dismantled, resources redirected to American communities. What they got was a president who looked at intelligence assessments and concluded that a different threat demanded immediate action, even if it meant spending the political capital they’d just given him.

Today marks the anniversary of an eerily similar moment in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago. On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the city to extraordinary celebration. Pilgrims lined the road with palm branches, shouting “Hosanna”—save us. Under Roman occupation, messianic expectations ran high. The crowds believed they were endorsing a military campaign against their occupiers. They wanted Rome conquered, the empire’s grip broken, Israel restored to sovereignty. The triumphal entry seemed to promise exactly that.

The next morning—those same crowds still in Jerusalem for Passover week—watched him do something completely different. Jesus walked into the Temple courts and confronted the merchants and money changers. He overturned tables, drove out those buying and selling animals for sacrifice, declaring they’d turned his Father’s house of prayer into a marketplace.

This wasn’t what they’d signed up for. They wanted the foreign occupier defeated. Instead, he confronted corruption within their own sacred institution, during their holiest week. The Temple commerce served necessary functions—pilgrims needed currency exchange and unblemished sacrificial animals. But Jesus had entered Sunday evening, “looked around at everything” according to Mark’s Gospel, left for the night, and returned Monday morning having concluded that this abuse dishonored the Father and couldn’t be tolerated regardless of the crowd’s expectations.

By week’s end, the religious authorities were plotting his arrest. The crowds who’d celebrated Sunday were nowhere to be found when he needed them. Their approval had been conditional—conditional on him delivering what they wanted, not what he determined was necessary.

This is the loneliness of leadership when you conclude that the right thing contradicts what your supporters expected. You walk past people who chanted your name yesterday, knowing they won’t today. You had their enthusiasm, their trust, their mandate—and you’re spending it on something they didn’t anticipate because circumstances demanded a different response than the one they wanted.

The calculation isn’t about popularity. It’s about looking at a situation, intelligence briefings about nuclear timelines, or a Temple filled with exploitation, and concluding you can’t ignore what you’ve seen just because acting on it will alienate your base. Trump faced this when advisers presented evidence about Iran’s advancing capabilities. Jesus faced it when he observed Sunday evening how the Temple system had become corrupted. In both cases, the leader had to choose between maintaining the crowd’s approval and addressing what they’d concluded was an urgent threat that couldn’t wait.

The cost is immediate and severe. Isolationist conservatives who championed Trump now accuse him of betrayal. The religious authorities who should have supported Jesus’s defense of Temple sanctity instead saw him as destabilizing their carefully managed system during Passover. When you spend political capital on what your supporters didn’t ask for, they don’t typically say “well, he must have good reasons we don’t see.” They say you’ve abandoned the mission they thought they’d endorsed.

Whistleblowers keep emerging who’ve calculated that what they’ve witnessed matters more than what revealing it will cost them. Leaders in every generation face the same question: whether the crowd’s expectations yesterday bind your judgment today.

Sometimes this means courage—acting on difficult intelligence assessments even when it contradicts campaign rhetoric. Sometimes it means catastrophic miscalculation—mistaking your own conviction for wisdom. History sorts that out later. But in the immediate aftermath, the dynamic is identical. The crowd that celebrated you for promising one thing is now questioning why you’re delivering something else.

The question Monday morning, whether in the Situation Room or the Temple courts, is whether you can see something and choose comfort—or whether having seen it, you’re compelled to act regardless of cost. Trump looked at assessments about Iran and concluded the threat was real enough to justify military action despite knowing his isolationist base would revolt. Jesus observed Temple exploitation and concluded it dishonored God enough to confront it despite knowing the authorities would retaliate.

Whether either decision was right remains debated. But both faced the same calculation: the crowd’s approval yesterday doesn’t change what you believe needs doing today. And when what needs doing contradicts what the crowd expected, you spend their mandate without their permission.

The anniversary isn’t about vindication or condemnation. It’s about the moment when leaders realize that popularity and principle sometimes diverge—and that choosing principle means losing popularity, even from people who elevated you specifically because they thought you’d never make that choice.

Trump still has 77% Republican support for the war, but the voices that once sought to define his movement are now his critics. Jesus had the crowds’ celebration Sunday, then walked into Monday knowing what came next. Both discovered that acclaim is conditional—and that doing what you believe is right but unpopular means the crowd that cheered yesterday won’t tomorrow.

The pattern endures because the dynamic never changes: leaders face situations that demand responses their supporters didn’t anticipate. Then comes the choice—maintain the approval or address the threat. And the crowd, still there from yesterday, has to decide whether they trusted your judgment or just liked your promises.

Usually, they liked the promises.

On March 29, 1848, Niagara Falls stopped flowing.

Residents awoke to silence where there should have been thunder. The Horseshoe Falls had been reduced to dripping cliffs. The exposed riverbed revealed muskets and bayonets from the War of 1812 lodged in mud. Locals walked across the dry gorge with torches, peering into the abyss where millions of gallons should have been cascading.

Many believed it was the end of the world.

It wasn’t. A warm spell after a brutal winter had fractured ice on Lake Erie, and winds drove the floes into the Niagara River’s mouth, forming a natural dam. Thirty hours later, the ice gave way and the Falls resumed. But for those who lived through it, the silence must have felt apocalyptic—not because they were foolish, but because the permanent had become temporary without warning.

The interesting question isn’t why people panicked. It’s why humans are so consistently terrible at distinguishing actual collapse from temporary disruption.

When Science Fuels the Fire

In May 1910, astronomers announced that Earth would pass through Halley’s Comet tail—which contained cyanogen gas, a relative of cyanide. The response was immediate and global. German farmers stopped planting crops. Creditors defaulted on loans. Snake-oil salesmen peddled “comet pills,” while bartenders promised that enough scotch would protect you from cyanogen.

Astronomers pleaded for calm, emphasizing that a comet’s tail was sparser than a cloud. The reassurances went unheard. In Puerto Rico, a 15-year-old named Fernando Colón-Vásquez and his family trekked two hours through thorny terrain to shelter in a remote cave. Deep inside, Fernando scratched a drawing on limestone: a five-pointed star with a sweeping tail crashing into a tomb topped with a cross.

The comet passed. Nothing happened. Fernando lived another 40 years.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: science amplified the panic. Camille Flammarion, the Carl Sagan of his era, mused in a Paris newspaper that hydrogen in the comet’s tail might strip oxygen from our atmosphere. He prefaced this with caveats, but once the cinematic horror was printed, it took on its own life. Prestige gave weight to wild speculation.

The Y2K Paradox

The Y2K panic was based on a real technical problem—computer systems storing years in two-digit format genuinely risked failure. The United States spent over $100 billion preparing; worldwide, nearly $300 billion. When midnight struck and nothing catastrophic happened, many concluded it had all been hype.

That’s backwards. Y2K didn’t cause chaos because of the massive remediation effort. Yet the dominant cultural memory is of people stockpiling canned goods for nothing, which makes it harder to take subsequent warnings seriously. We learned exactly the wrong lesson.

The Confidence of Partial Information

What’s changed since 1910 isn’t human psychology—it’s the speed at which partial information becomes confident narrative. In Fernando’s era, panic spread through newspapers that reached towns days later. In 2026, the same process happens in hours.

The structure of modern media rewards certainty over comprehension. Someone who watched a 90-second explainer on the Strait of Hormuz crisis can sound remarkably authoritative while missing the previous decade of sanctions policy, the economic relationships that make simple narratives impossible to sustain, or the historical precedents that would complicate confident predictions.

Now everyone has access to enough fragments to construct a plausible-sounding story, and platforms amplify whichever stories generate the most engagement—which tend to be the ones offering the most clarity about inherently complex situations.

We have more information than any generation in history, yet our collective ability to distinguish between “I’ve seen part of the picture” and “I understand what’s happening” seems to have deteriorated.

What Real Collapse Looks Like

When civilizations actually collapsed, contemporaries often didn’t realize it was happening.

The Fall of Rome wasn’t a single cataclysm—it was decades of institutional decay, tax erosion, and military defeats. Many Romans assumed things would stabilize as they always had. The Black Death killed between one-third and one-half of Europe’s population, yet society adapted in real time, reorganizing economic structures even as mass graves filled.

Real collapses happen slowly enough that humans keep adjusting their baselines. We’re remarkably good at normalizing catastrophe while simultaneously panicking over temporary disruptions.

The Current Catalog

In March 2026, Americans are processing several “unthinkable” disruptions simultaneously. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for weeks—a chokepoint we assumed could never actually be blocked, much like Niagara Falls in 1848. Institutions that seemed permanent fixtures of American life—from major banks to federal agencies—are operating under constraints that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

Which represents temporary disruption, and which represents genuine structural failure? We won’t know for years. The Strait will eventually reopen, or energy infrastructure will route around it. Institutions will either reform or decay past repair.

What we can observe is that our calibration mechanisms haven’t improved since 1848. We still oscillate between normalcy bias—assuming permanent features can’t possibly fail—and availability heuristic panic, where the most vivid recent example dominates our sense of probability. Fernando crawling into a cave and millions currently doomscrolling aren’t separated by psychological sophistication, only by the medium through which they consume their fears.

What We Don’t Know

The pattern across these episodes suggests a simple lesson that’s surprisingly hard to internalize: confidence in the moment is no substitute for historical context.

Fernando’s family didn’t know that comet tails are too sparse to affect Earth’s atmosphere. They had fragments of scientific information filtered through newspaper speculation. The Germans who stopped planting in 1910 didn’t know how atmospheric chemistry actually worked. They knew cyanogen was poisonous and Earth would pass through the tail—two true facts that, without the full picture, pointed to the wrong conclusion.

The people declaring with certainty what the Strait of Hormuz closure means for global order, or what AI development means for human civilization, or what any given conflict’s trajectory will be—most are working from the same kind of partial information. A few data points, a plausible mechanism, confidence in the narrative. What they’re usually missing is the decade of context that would reveal why simple stories rarely capture complex systems, or the historical precedents that would show how similar situations actually unfolded.

This doesn’t mean all warnings are false or that skepticism is always warranted. It means that in the absence of comprehensive understanding, the appropriate response is usually not the certainty that dominates our current discourse. The Falls stopped flowing, and they started again. The comet passed, and nothing happened. And somewhere, right now, someone is constructing a confident narrative about 2026’s crises from fragments of information, unaware of what they don’t know.

The ice always melts eventually. The question is what we do in the thirty hours of silence before it does.

In the March 2026 edition of Studies in Intelligence, the Agency’s internal journal, portions of which are declassified for public consumption, a former case officer named Thomas Mulligan makes an argument that inverts everything you’ve heard about artificial intelligence rendering human work obsolete. He argues that as AI becomes more sophisticated, the oldest techniques in the intelligence trade become more valuable, not less. Dead drops. Brush passes. Face-to-face meetings. The tradecraft that existed before electricity, now returning as cutting-edge methodology.

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The Marginal Advantage Problem

Mulligan’s core insight is about what happens when sophisticated capabilities become cheap and widespread. High-resolution satellite imagery that once required billions in government infrastructure now costs hundreds of dollars from commercial providers. AI can process surveillance footage that previously required teams of analysts working for months. The problem isn’t that technical intelligence becomes worthless. It’s that when everyone has it, nobody gains an edge from it anymore.

His unexpected analogy is horse racing betting markets. In the 1980s, professional gamblers with statistical models and computing power crushed casual bettors. Within a generation, those tools became so accessible that the advantage disappeared. The edge migrated back to qualitative judgment, the kind of insight that comes from a well-placed human source who knows which general is actually making decisions, or which weapons program is genuine versus a budget decoy. Mulligan notes that certain intelligence can likely never be captured by AI, including information in air-gapped systems, leadership intentions, and the location of “off-switches” designed to control rogue AI (which would be hidden from the AI itself).

Signal and Noise

The second dynamic is information pollution. Mulligan describes a theoretical “fog of war machine” that floods environments with AI-generated disinformation, including fake phone calls, synthetic documents, and fabricated video evidence. An adversary could use AI to generate ten times as many plausible-but-false communications as real ones, rendering signals intelligence useless or worse. Deepfake technology has already reached the point where criminals stole $25 million from a Hong Kong firm whose finance worker believed he was video-calling the CFO.

He warns that fabricators, intelligence sources who provide false information, can now use locally installed language models to generate unlimited plausible reports, fine-tuned on real organizational details. In such conditions, a human source who can identify which signals are genuine becomes invaluable.

When Technology Eats Itself

The most interesting argument reveals how technology can undermine itself. AI-powered surveillance is making electronic espionage increasingly dangerous. Mulligan describes autonomous drone swarms and nano-drones small enough to follow case officers into buildings undetected. Counterintelligence services are deploying facial recognition to identify “operational acts” like brush passes.

But here’s the paradox. AI makes it trivially easy to generate convincing deepfakes of anyone, meaning electronic communications become inherently low-trust. If you receive an email or video message from your intelligence contact, you cannot be certain it actually came from them. But if your contact hands you a physical object in person, or leaves it in a pre-arranged hiding spot you can verify wasn’t surveilled, you have much higher confidence.

The Limits of Omniscience

Which brings us to the paper cup. Mulligan uses this as his example of AI surveillance limits. “Every day, in every city, scores of people casually toss paper cups on the ground. Nearly all of them are litterers. Occasionally, one is a case officer conducting a dead drop. It’s not clear how any surveillance system, AI-powered or otherwise, could discriminate between the two.”

While AI excels at pattern recognition, certain operational acts are designed to be indistinguishable from mundane civilian behavior. A memory card glued inside a disposable cup and tossed near trash looks exactly like littering. These techniques survive because they exploit the fundamental problem of false positives. Unless you know in advance someone is an intelligence officer, you cannot identify which of their thousands of daily micro-behaviors constitute espionage.

The CIA doesn’t publish this journal to entertain outsiders. The decision to declassify this particular article suggests the Agency wants its people focusing on what remains scarce at a time when technical superiority is becoming democratized. That would be trusted human relationships that can filter truth from an ocean of synthetic information.

In a world of ubiquitous sensors and algorithmic omniscience, the most sophisticated espionage technique might be the one that looks most like mundane human carelessness.

On this day in 1775, Patrick Henry stood in St. John’s Church in Richmond and delivered the most famous ultimatum in American history. While the phrase “Give me liberty, or give me death” is remembered for its passion, its true function was to collapse a political middle ground that had become logistically and institutionally untenable.

At the second Virginia Convention, the delegates were paralyzed by a fundamental disagreement over the nature of reality. One faction sought to continue diplomatic reconciliation, viewing the rising tensions as a series of misunderstandings that could be managed through further petition. Henry’s oratory sought to galvanize the delegates by arguing that the oppressive actions of the British government—specifically the physical arrival of fleets and armies—left no room for hope in reconciliation.

Henry wasn’t just making a moral argument; he was pointing to a physical shift in incentives. He argued that when an adversary has already transitioned to a posture of force, “hope” is no longer a policy; it is a delay that grants the opponent a tactical advantage. The undercovered detail here is the Virginia Militia. Henry’s resolution was a formal proposal to arm the colony, forcing the convention to stop debating abstract rights and start managing the concrete logistical constraints of a closing window for action.

This highlights a recurring mechanism in institutional realism: the moment when the pursuit of peace transitions from a virtuous goal into a failure to recognize that an adversary has already changed the rules of the game. Henry understood that if one side is preparing for conflict while the other is committed to diplomacy at any cost, the latter is not “keeping the peace.” Instead, they are witnessing the erosion of foundational assumptions—the very norms and minority protections that constitute a civilizational achievement—in favor of managed subjugation.

When the meaning vacuum of a decaying status quo is filled by an adversary’s mobilization, the survival of a self-governing society depends on its ability to see the map as it is, not as they wish it to be. His speech served as the catalyst that shifted Virginia from a state of deliberation to a state of mobilization just four weeks before the “shot heard ‘round the world” at Lexington and Concord.

The passing of Chuck Norris on March 19, 2026, at the age of 86, has triggered a predictable wave of digital nostalgia, from viral “fact” memes to retrospectives of his 1980s filmography. Yet the reported death of the martial artist and actor marks more than the end of a Hollywood career; it signals the final closing of a specific American archetype: the analog hero.

Norris, alongside peers like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, defined a “Golden Age” of American action cinema that thrived on a foundation of moral and physical certainty. In films like Missing in Action and Lone Wolf McQuade, the conflict was rarely structural or systemic. It was personal, physical, and resolved through individual competence. Unlike the protagonists of contemporary cinema, Norris’s characters didn’t rely on multiversal resets or high-tech exoskeletons. The resolution to any given crisis was located entirely within the hero’s physical discipline.

This “pre-ambiguity” era of heroism reflected a world where threats were understood as external and legible. In the 1980s, the “bad guy” was a recognizable silhouette—often a Cold War proxy or a cartoonish criminal syndicate. Norris represented a stabilizing myth: the idea that a single, disciplined individual could restore order to a chaotic map through sheer force of will and a roundhouse kick.

This onscreen persona eventually merged with a distinct political identity that positioned Norris as a Hollywood outsider. Though he began his career as a Democrat, he famously argued that the party had strayed “off the trail” of American values, leading him to become a foundational figure in a burgeoning conservative movement.

His close personal friendships with leaders like Ronald Reagan were an extension of his personal “Code of Ethics,” which emphasized loyalty to country and respect for authority. For Norris, these values weren’t just for the screen; they were essential for a republic he believed was built on the “God of our Founding Fathers” and the preservation of individual liberties.

The shift in American storytelling over the last two decades reveals a deepening discomfort with this model. Today’s cinematic heroes are increasingly specialized, tech-reliant, or burdened by “deconstruction.” From the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s reliance on nanotech and magic to the tortured interiority of modern “prestige” action, the hero has moved from being a pillar of certainty to a node in a complex system. We no longer trust the lone individual to fix the world; we expect the hero to be as confused by the system as we are.

This transition mirrors a broader institutional shift. The 1980s action star was a proxy for an era of high institutional confidence, where the “rules” of reality felt fixed. As that confidence has eroded, replaced by the fragmented information environment of the 2020s, the “analog” hero has become an impossibility. A hero who is “always right” now feels to many audiences like a relic—or worse, a provocation.

What we are mourning in the wake of Norris’s death is not just a celebrity, but the legibility he represented. He was a symbol of a time when the path from problem to solution was a straight line, and the tools required were ones a human being could actually master.

Something shifted in 2025, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. The most significant cultural movement of the year wasn’t on social media, it was the departure from it.

Not the dramatic kind. No manifestos, no announced Digital Sabbaths, no “I’m taking a break for my mental health” Instagram stories. Just… withdrawal. The kind where someone you used to follow posts less frequently, then barely at all, then you realize you haven’t seen their content in months. When you check, their account still exists, technically active, but abandoned in every way that matters.

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I’ve been trying to understand why this feels different from previous waves of social media fatigue. The answer, I think, is who’s leaving, and what that signals about where cultural authority actually lives now.

The Numbers Hide What’s Actually Happening

The aggregate figures look stable, global social media users increased by 259 million between October 2024 and October 2025, reaching 5.66 billion identities. But that 4.9% annual growth rate represents a dramatic deceleration from the double-digit surges of the early 2010s. More revealing is what’s happening beneath the surface.

Engagement is collapsing. Average interaction rates on Facebook and X now hover around 0.15%. Instagram’s engagement dropped 24% year-over-year. Even TikTok, the platform that seemed immune to gravity, is plateauing. Roughly half of American adults now rate information on social media as unreliable, down from two-thirds a decade ago, yet they continue scrolling, not because they trust what they see, but because the alternative feels like exile.

That’s the key tension, social media has achieved something more elegant than addiction. It’s made non-participation a form of social illegitimacy, available only to those who can afford its costs. The worker who deletes LinkedIn excludes themselves from professional networks that exist nowhere else. The small business without Instagram watches customers drift toward competitors. The teenager who refuses TikTok can’t parse the vernacular that constitutes their peers’ shared language.

But here’s what the raw user numbers miss, while total adoption remains high, who uses these platforms and how they use them is changing. The American Psychiatric Association found that among 18-34 year olds, a significant proportion deliberately stepped away from social media in 2024, citing mental health. Newsletter platforms reported median time-to-first-dollar for new creators dropping to just 66 days, suggesting real money is flowing toward depth over virality. Substack and Beehiiv aren’t just growing, they’re attracting precisely the knowledge workers and tastemakers who made social media culturally mandatory in the first place.

Status Has Reversed Polarity

Twenty years ago, social media presence signaled cultural relevance. By 2026, absence increasingly signals the opposite, that you have better things to do than perform for algorithms.

This isn’t a moral judgment, it’s an observation about how status markers evolve. The people setting this pattern aren’t retirees or Luddites but precisely the class whose approval once made platforms valuable, writers, academics, professionals whose attention constituted endorsement. When they retreat to newsletters, podcasts, and private Discord servers, they take their cultural authority with them.

What remains is an increasingly bot-mediated wasteland. Research shows tens of thousands of AI-generated accounts flooding major platforms with engagement-optimized slop, vague inspirational quotes, AI-generated images like “Shrimp Jesus,” affiliate marketing disguised as advice. Average interaction rates fall while content volume explodes because what counts as “content” has fundamentally changed. It no longer means human expression, it means anything that generates clicks.

The feed has become a mood-regulation device, not an information source or social space. Scrolling is ambient dissociation, half-conscious scratching of an itch you can’t name. People know it’s fake, they just don’t care enough to stop.

Where the Conversation Moved

The successor to mass social media isn’t another platform, it’s a thousand micro-communities. Group chats. Paywalled newsletters. Discord servers. Federated instances of Mastodon and Bluesky where moderation happens through shared norms rather than algorithmic enforcement.

These spaces share a characteristic, they’re opt-in, not ambient. You choose to be there, and that choice creates accountability absent from algorithmic feeds. A writer with 10,000 devoted newsletter subscribers can earn more and burn out less than someone with a million passive Instagram followers because the relationship isn’t mediated by a black box optimizing for engagement over everything else.

Even major platforms sense the shift. Instagram emphasizes DMs now. X is pushing subscriber-only circles. TikTok experiments with private communities. Behind these moves sits an acknowledgment, the infinite scroll, stuffed with synthetic content, approaches the limit of what humans will tolerate.

What Comes After

Social media isn’t dying because we lack content, we’re drowning in it. It’s dying because the attention economy has exhausted our capacity to care. Novelty became noise. Outrage fatigues. Even virality cannibalizes itself.

The quiet exodus isn’t about rejection. It’s about rediscovery, that meaningful conversation requires shared context, that trust emerges from continuity, that some things worth having don’t scale. The people leaving aren’t giving up connection, they’re looking for it in places where it might actually exist.

As the Federal Reserve concludes its March 18, 2026, meeting with a widely expected rate hold, the underlying economic data reveals a constraint that interest rates cannot easily fix: a deepening “Brain Trust Cliff.” While financial markets focus on stagflation and oil shocks from the Iran conflict, American institutions are facing the physical exit of their most experienced workers—and finding that their digital replacements are not yet ready to take the wheel.

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The Exit of the Experts

The reality of the “Silver Tsunami” has shifted from a demographic forecast to an operational crisis. As of January 2026, the labor force participation rate for workers aged 55 and older has stabilized around 37.9%, but the concentration of these workers in critical infrastructure is perilously high.

In the Utilities sector, for example, 80% of all employment is now at firms where at least a quarter of the workforce is over age 55—up from just 35% in 2006. When these individuals retire, they aren’t just leaving a vacancy; they are taking the “unwritten rules” of the grid with them. This isn’t a simple hiring problem—it is an institutional memory leak that threatens the stability of foundational U.S. services.

The AI Implementation Gap

To bridge this gap, 88% of organizations have deployed AI as of early 2026. The goal is to “capture” expert knowledge into agentic systems that can guide the next generation. However, the 2026 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report reveals a stark “readiness gap”: executives are struggling to manage the human-AI interaction effectively.

Instead of a smooth transition, many firms are accumulating “culture debt”—the friction caused when complex, human-centered processes are automated without regard for the social fabric of the workplace. This has led to a “blind flying” period: the experts are gone, the AI is generating errors, and younger workers are spending significant time reworking poor AI-generated content. According to Workday’s 2026 research, while 85% of employees report saving one to seven hours per week using AI, nearly 40% of those time savings are lost to correcting errors, rewriting content, and verifying outputs.

The “Leapfrog” of Generation X

The most significant undercovered detail of this transition is the “leapfrog effect” on Generation X. Often called the “bridge generation” for their comfort with both analog and digital eras, Gen Xers are being overlooked for leadership roles even as they are expected to manage the crisis.

The 2026 Mather Institute Gen Xperience report found that while Gen X now holds a smaller percentage of executive-level positions compared to millennials and even boomers in some cases, they are the most likely to stay with their employers for 10+ years—with 38% intending to remain that long. By “leapfrogging” these stabilizers in favor of younger “AI-native” talent or aging-in-place Boomers, companies are accidentally destroying the very bridge they need to transfer institutional knowledge safely.

In the coming months, the public will be watching for a shift in corporate spending from “AI tools” to “human-in-the-loop” mentorship programs as firms realize that software cannot replace context. Additionally, there may be specialized recruitment drives targeting the “unretired”—Boomers brought back as consultants specifically to train AI agents and Gen X leaders. The success of the 2026 economy may depend less on how much society automates, and more on how well it protects the knowledge transfer.