The Media Must Correct the Record on Terrorist-Journalists

By Shay Khatiri

Tuesday, October 06, 2026

 

The Israel Defense Forces this month released evidence tying 170 individuals often described as “journalists” to the armed wing of Palestinian terrorist groups. The evidence is difficult to dispute, including photographic evidence, military ID numbers, and unit names for the terrorist-journalists, who were all killed by Israel.

 

Now, the media have a moral duty to undo the damage they have inflicted on the Jewish state.

 

In January 2024, the Washington Post reported that an Israeli strike had killed Mustafa Thuraya and Hamza al-Dahdouh, identifying both as journalists. Thuraya was a contributor for Agence France-Presse (AFP), and al-Dahdouh worked for Al Jazeera, where his father used to be a bureau chief. The Post’s report on al-Dahdouh’s death is designed to pull at the heartstrings: “As veteran Palestinian reporter Wael al-Dahdouh lost his wife, several children, and his closest colleague to Israeli airstrikes and shelling, each blow was watched by an audience of millions — in Gaza today, there is little privacy to mourn the dead.” Then–Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemed to back the Post’s narrative, telling Al Jazeera, “I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your colleague, Wael Dahdouh. I am a parent myself, I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he has experienced, not once, but now twice.”

 

But perhaps journalism does not pay enough to make a living anymore, because both Thuraya and Dahdouh had side hustles as military operatives for designated terrorist organizations.

 

Or take Ahmed Abu Mutair, who contributed to the German ZDF through the German company’s contact with Palestinian Media Production, as well as Hamas’s Production Headquarters. ZDF suspended its contract with the Palestinian media company last year after it became clear that the latter employed militants.

 

The examples are plenty — 170, to be precise. And the media’s failure to report on these terrorist-journalists has inflicted a twofold damage to Israel’s reputation.

 

First, by being contributors to prominent and smaller outlets, they helped shape — or manipulate — global opinion against Israel even before October 7, 2023. They further turned their audiences against Israel while “reporting” — if you can call it that — on the Gaza war. One must wonder how many such “journalists” still remain under contract by media outlets around the world to this day.

 

Second, the false accusation that Israel targets and kills journalists — who act solely in the capacity of a journalist — persists. The headline of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual report from February 2026 reads, “Record 129 press members killed in 2025; Israel responsible for 2/3 of deaths.” Mainstream media rely on these numbers, leading everyday citizens to think that, at best, Israel is careless about press freedom and, at worst, an enemy of it. The Guardian covered the report with a nearly word-for-word headline.

 

Bogus as these slanders are, people believe them and judge Israel based on them.

 

Digital technology encourages immediate reporting. In war, the first reports are often wrong, and so mistakes are inevitable. But correcting them is an ethical imperative for journalists. The Radio Television Digital News Association’s (RTNDA) code of ethics acknowledges this problem. “Facts change over time,” it pronounces. “Responsible reporting includes updating stories and amending archival versions to make them more accurate and to avoid misinforming those who, through search, stumble upon outdated material.” It adds that ethical journalists should own their errors, “correcting them promptly and giving corrections as much prominence as the error itself had.” Simply put, as political journalism at its best is about holding people accountable for misconduct, that should begin with the journalists themselves.

 

Media outlets that falsely reported that Israel had killed journalists should both report on the new revelation and update their past reporting. More broadly, media outlets in the free world should cautiously reconsider their reliance on local entities. RTNDA declares, “Deception in newsgathering . . . conflicts with journalism’s commitment to truth,” and it is evident that terrorist groups in Gaza successfully deceived foreign audiences through masquerading as journalists. It is necessary that media outlets take new measures to avoid repeating this mistake.

 

Those journalists and media outlets that erred by identifying terrorists as journalists should demonstrate professionalism by correcting their archives, explaining the editorial process that led to these mistakes, and adopting new measures to avoid doing the same in the future.

Tucker Carlson Receives a World War II Education

By Brittany Bernstein

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

Since leaving Fox News, Tucker Carlson’s talents as a debater have atrophied, likely due to a lack of exercise.

 

As an independent journalist, Carlson tends to interview people who share his conspiratorial worldview. In these lengthy conversations, Carlson will nod along as his guests proffer bizarre theories about how things really work, interjecting to amplify, but rarely to contradict, the latest conspiracy theory du jour.

 

All those friendly interviews with like-minded guests have left Carlson unprepared to deal with serious pushback from someone who knows his subject and is constitutionally incapable of being riled up by the veteran broadcaster’s routine.

 

Carlson met such a person in his most recent guest, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former member of Parliament who advocates building up the British military as a means of deterring further Russian aggression.

 

What began as a conversation about whether Britain should prepare for a possible conflict with Russia ultimately devolved into Carlson arguing that he “never understood” why Britain fought in World War II in the first place. Rees-Mogg’s country is worse off culturally and economically for having fought the war, Carlson asserts, refusing to alter course when confronted with Rees-Mogg’s evidence to the contrary.

 

Carlson lays out a theory of WWII that relies on the false premise that war with Hitler could easily have been avoided had allied leaders wished to do so. He implies that Hitler was simply correcting the wrongs done to Germany at the conclusion of World War I and had no design to occupy Great Britain.

 

“I’m certainly not here defending Hitler,” Carlson said before going on to argue that “the idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie.”

 

“The truth is that Germany had big parts carved out of it, including parts of Prussia.” He further argues that the U.K. had “nothing to do with” the Treaty of Versailles, which assigned the previously German provinces of Posen and Western Prussia to Poland. However, the U.K. played a key role in convening and negotiating the treaty. And despite Carlson’s suggestion that Hitler was interested only in overturning the Versailles Treaty, Hitler did not stop at Posen and the Danzig Corridor, but went on to occupy the entirety of Western Poland in September 1939.

 

Pressed on what would have become of the U.K. had it not to gone to war with Germany, Rees-Mogg points out that his country’s entire cultural inheritance, including its language, would have been trampled.

 

“We’d be speaking German,” Rees-Mogg says.

 

That outcome, Carlson suggests, occurred anyway by other means, namely mass migration.

 

“Who cares?” Carlson said. “There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.”

 

Educated in a milieu that prizes debate, Rees-Mogg ably deconstructs Carlson’s arguments and lays down a marker to show his audience where Carlson’s rhetorical moves were leading him.

 

“You’re verging on defending Hitler,” Rees-Mogg says. “I think this is not really what you want to be doing.”

 

Carlson replies: “Yeah, I guess I’m just a secret Nazi. I’m actually not a secret Nazi . . . and hardly a public Nazi.”

 

“I’m reassured,” Rees-Mogg deadpans in a subtly devastating blow.

 

The U.K. has its problems, as Rees-Mogg conceded, but hosting U.S. troops is not one of them. Carlson, however, seemed convinced that the U.S. posed a great threat to British sovereignty. Rees-Mogg responded by making the simple point that the U.K. and the U.S. have shared security interests, which are secured by having American troops on British soil.

 

But the arguments over WWII and its legacy were really a proxy for the debate over whether and to what degree the West should be supporting Ukraine in defending itself from Russian aggression.

 

Carlson, who has interviewed Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and spoken favorably about Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine, told Rees-Mogg he “never cared” that Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 because Ukraine “is the most corrupt country in the world.”

 

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said Carlson’s latest interview shows he “needs help. Serious help.”

 

“When it seemed impossible for Toxic Tucker to descend deeper into the sewer here he goes opining that U.K. should have let Nazis take over,” he posted on X. “Forget that Hitler murdered 11 million people? I thought Tucker was against killing?”

 

Last year, National Review published a lengthy essay on Carlson’s “dark turn.”

 

After his firing from Fox News in 2023, Carlson established his self-named podcast and later hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes and Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper.

 

When Cooper appeared on the show, he argued that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II.

 

Weeks later, Carlson invited on Fuentes, who has called Hitler “awesome,” “right,” and “f***ing cool.”

 

Carlson behaved so deferentially in his interview with Putin in 2024 that the Russian dictator himself said he “did not get full satisfaction” from the interview.

 

“To be honest, I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions,” Putin said. “I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond in the same way.”

Credibility Gap

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

If I told you that Americans are less likely to trust mass media now than they were in 2020, would it surprise you?

 

Surely not. America reelected Donald Trump, the grim reaper of trust in social institutions. Millions now get their “news” from confectioneries like TikTok and podcasts instead of from journalists. We live in a civilization that’s growing increasingly postliterate as adults rely more heavily on smartphones and artificial intelligence as intellectual crutches. What else could the trend be but downward, right?

 

The trend is, in fact, downward. A new poll published last week by Gallup placed trust at 33 percent among all Americans, down from 40 percent in the final year of Trump’s first term.

 

Now, if you had to guess how trust in mass media has been trending within the two major parties since 2020, what would you say?

 

That also seems easy, I would have said. With Trump back in office, the parties have presumably done what they always do: They’ve polarized. Trust in mass media among Democrats has likely soared as the press has gotten to work exposing presidential malfeasance. Trust in the “fake news” among Republicans has probably collapsed for the same reason.

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong:

 

Visual by Amanda Swinghamer Henderson.

 

Trust in mass media among Democrats is down 23 points since 2020 and up 12 points among Republicans over the same period. And no, the 2020 data isn’t some odd artifact of the pandemic. If we use 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, as a point of comparison instead, the numbers are nearly the same. Trust in the press is down 22 points on the left and up 8 points on the right.

 

What’s weird is that my theory about the parties polarizing around Trump was correct—during his first term. In 2017, trust in the media surged 21 points among Democrats from the year before and remained lofty throughout the president’s time in office. Among Republicans, it fell 18 points between 2015, when he entered politics, and 2016, when he became the party’s nominee, and never recovered. The right’s trust in mass media has hovered around 12 percent ever since (except for in 2018), a level of sourness it never approached in the 40 years beforehand.

 

Where things get really weird, though, is how opinion has shifted over the past year.

 

We can navel-gaze about why Democrats lost faith in the media while Republicans gained it in the six years since 2020, but surely Trump’s crumbling popularity in 2026 should have reversed those trends. With a blue wave gathering ahead of the midterms, I would have expected the right to scapegoat the press for its hero’s declining political fortunes, causing Republican trust in media to drop sharply, and the left to credit the media’s skeptical coverage for driving the president’s numbers downward, causing Democratic trust to spike.

 

Wrong, wrong, wrong again. Faith in the media is up 14 points(!) among Republicans since 2025, more than double its all-time low of 8 percent last year. Meanwhile, among Democrats, trust has actually dropped a point.

 

What on earth is going on?

 

Strange new respect.

 

The tricky part in trying to interpret data like this when you’re a news junkie is to avoid imputing your own freakishly high degree of media literacy to the general population.

 

For instance, my editor suggested this morning that rising Republican trust in the media could be a reaction to Trump courtier David Ellison installing MAGA-friendly Bari Weiss as head honcho at CBS News. I think there’s something to that—but it gets us into thorny speculation about how conscious the average right-winger is of hires in the media industry.

 

Ask the average Republican voter what they think of Bari Weiss and I suspect they’d say, “Barry? Who’s he?”

 

Still, given all the hand-wringing in the press about Ellison’s takeover of CBS and now CNN, it does seem plausible that the wider GOP base has an inkling that the so-called mainstream media is drifting rightward. Combine that with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s noisy mafioso attempts to compel more flattering coverage of Republicans on broadcast networks, and the right does have reason to believe that “fairness” in mass media is trending in the right direction.

 

Another possibility: Maybe populist right-wing media has grown so grotesque and self-parodying that it’s begun to inspire Strange New Respect for outlets like the New York Times in some conservatives. Remember, polling shows that a low-key mutiny against the president among “non-MAGA Republicans” is in progress. If some in the GOP have grown disgusted with Trumpy populism, it stands to reason that they might also have grown disgusted with its mouthpieces.

 

I’m too much of a pessimist to place much stock in that theory, but the hard truth is that what used to be known as “conservative media” now consists almost exclusively of brain-dead Trumpist house organs on the one hand and unspeakably repellent postliberal goblins on the other. Your choice as a right-wing media consumer in 2026 is between Fox News propagandizing on behalf of the president and podcasters propagandizing on behalf of Hitler.

 

CNN’s bias doesn’t sound so bad by comparison anymore, does it?

 

I do think that a faction of the right has developed “Strange New Respect” for the mainstream media, but the reason has little to do with moral revulsion at the latest theory about Erika Kirk conspiring with Emmanuel Macron’s transgender wife to assassinate Charlie or whatever.

 

The bigger liar.

 

The likely, and much simpler, truth is that some Republicans have belatedly figured out—gasp—that the president lies to them.

 

It took a foreign policy disaster and a global energy crisis to clue them in. But seven months of being gaslit by Trump about the progress of the war with Iran, followed by endless White House happy talk about the alleged magnificence of an economy in which diesel costs six bucks a gallon, has created a test of credibility between the president and the media in which Republican voters can see with their own eyes which side is shooting straight with them. The truth is right in front of them, every day, at the gas station and the supermarket.

 

There’s no reason in principle why the credibility of institutions should be measured against one another’s. One could, in theory, make separate and independent determinations about how much to trust the president and how much to trust the media. But the sort of demagoguery on which Trump thrives doesn’t allow for such things: Every threat to his authority becomes an “us and them” litmus test, and so every factual dispute between him and the press is reduced to a gut check for right-wingers about whether they trust him more or the media more.

 

After Iran and the oil crunch, 22 percent of Republicans might now be prepared to say they trust the media more. What the president has lost in credibility as a truth-teller, the press may have gained.

 

The shadow he casts over national politics looms so large now that it probably colors how Americans see all sorts of civic actors and institutions, not just the press. The Times’ Nate Cohn noted a remarkable trend in his paper’s latest Senate polling in five Republican strongholds (Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, and Texas): “In all five states, more voters view the Democrat favorably than unfavorably, while more voters view the Republican candidate unfavorably than favorably.” That’s easy to understand in Texas, where the GOP nominee is the execrable Ken Paxton, but it’s not so easy in the other four.

 

Is it due to the high “candidate quality” of the Democrats on the ballot in those states, as Cohn theorizes? Or is it due to voters having grown wise to the fact that the president is running the most preposterously flagrant corruption racket in American history, causing them to draw conclusions about the lousy character of his many Republican enablers?

 

The credibility of mass media, like the credibility of GOP candidates, now rises or falls relative to the credibility of our would-be Caesar. That explains why trust in the press is climbing among disaffected Republicans.

 

But it sure doesn’t explain why trust in the press is falling among Democrats, does it?

 

Losing faith.

 

If rising respect for the media on the right over the past year is a matter of “Trump bad, therefore media good,” shouldn’t the same thing be happening on the left?

 

It happened during the president’s first term, as I pointed out earlier. From 2017 through 2020, the share of Democrats expressing confidence in the media never dropped below 69 percent; not since the 1970s had it reached such heights within the party. The so-called Resistance clearly regarded the American press (especially its coverage of Trump’s dealings with Russia, I’m sure) as a vital ally in the struggle to save liberal democracy.

 

No more, it seems. At 50 percent, the share of Democrats today who say they trust the media is the lowest ever recorded by Gallup. Lower even than during the Iraq War, when progressives flogged the press routinely for having been too credulous about George W. Bush’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

 

If nothing else, you’d expect the impending election to have goosed the left’s trust in the press a bit. That’s what seems to have happened in 2018, when trust in the media suddenly rose across all three partisan groups. The midterm that year produced massive Democratic gains in the House due to dissatisfaction with Trump; presumably, as voters began tilting toward Democratic candidates during the campaign, they also began to find the media’s skeptical tone about the president more simpatico with their own views. Their trust grew accordingly.

 

Now here we are again, eight years later, and another blue wave is inbound. Again, the press’s hostility to Trump is aligned with public sentiment. But this time, per Gallup, the de facto Democratic position seems to be “Trump bad, media … also pretty bad.” Huh?

 

Even stranger is when the left’s faith in media began to wane, according to the data. It wasn’t when Trump returned to office in 2025 or during the campaign of 2024. It was a year earlier, in 2023, when Democrats’ trust in the press fell all the way from 70 percent in 2022 to 58 percent. (Each year since has brought further, albeit more modest, declines.) The big drop wasn’t a reaction to the current president. It appears to have been a reaction to Joe Biden.

 

But to what, specifically?

 

We can speculate. Biden began to run for reelection in 2023, and not coincidentally, that was the year that the press and pollsters began to pay (some) attention to his ability to serve another four-year term. Some Democrats may have felt annoyed by what they believed at the time to be a smear campaign aimed at impugning their fit-as-a-fiddle leader’s steel-trap mind.

 

Others may have resented the dour reporting on “Bidenomics” despite the improving fundamentals. (The idea that public dissatisfaction with the economy was largely a function of “vibes” was very much a thing among Democratic talking heads at the time.) I’d be tempted to theorize that press coverage of Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel that year also drove the shift in Democratic opinion, but Gallup’s 2023 survey on trust in media was conducted in September.

 

I doubt that the 2023 shift in left-wing opinion about the press was driven by any single grievance with the media, actually. Or by any grievance with the media at all.

 

Populism and the media.

 

My guess is that the shift was a byproduct of Democratic voters finally moving on from Trump and postliberalism as the threats around which their party’s politics principally revolve. After a hard year of inflation in 2022 and lingering economic aftershocks, 2023 may have been the year that the cost of living gradually began to displace the former (and future) president as the left’s core concern.

 

Coupled with the growing disenchantment with Biden at the time, we might come to see 2023 in hindsight as the genesis of left-wing populism on affordability that’s threatening to wash away Republicans at the polls and that’s made democratic socialism momentarily electorally viable. And if that’s true, it’s no surprise that Democratic confidence in the press began to fade at around the same time: Because the mainstream media is always and everywhere viewed as an ally of the political establishment, any faction that’s trending populist will also trend toward greater distrust of the media.

 

Look back at the graph above, and you’ll find an almost perfect barometer of how populist the two parties have been at any given moment over the last decade. Republicans’ trust in the press was almost identical to independents’ in 2015, then nosedived immediately in 2016 once Trump took over the party. Now, with the president facing lame-duckery and retirement, his grip on the GOP is relaxing and confidence in the media is recovering.

 

Democrats, meanwhile, exhibited sky-high trust in the media during Trump’s first term, when they positioned themselves as defenders of the traditional American liberal order against an authoritarian insurgency. But now they’ve moved on, possibly because that battle was lost when voters chose authoritarianism a second time (a fat lot of good the media’s skeptical Trump coverage did the first time around!), possibly because making ends meet has replaced containing authoritarianism as the most urgent problem of the age. Their investment in the press has declined accordingly.

 

If my read on populism and confidence in the media is correct, then Gallup’s poll reveals growing exhaustion with populism on the right and growing interest in it on the left. The data is an insight into how much each side wishes to return to the traditional political status quo. For a smallish but meaningful minority of right-wingers exhausted by tariffs and pricey gas and the Trump of it all, the old status quo seems less bad than it used to. For a largeish and growing minority of left-wingers whose own populist faction hasn’t yet had a crack at governing, it seems worse than what might await.

 

Who knows? In a year or two we might see the share of Democrats who trust the media settle in the low 50s and the share of Republicans settle in the high 20s or low 30s—precisely where the two parties stood in 2015, the last year of the Before Times. If you’re starving for evidence that the Trump era really is winding down, with the president’s hyperpolarizing effect on opinion diminishing, there you have it. We’re headed back toward “normal” partisan opinions about media bias, it seems. Normalcy can’t come soon enough.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

“The Beast is going faster than it has ever gone before. It won’t be long.” That is not a quotation from the Book of Revelation, though it sounds like it should be.

 

But first  ...

 

I have referenced the story of Officer William H. West of Washington’s Metropolitan Police before, but I trust readers will forgive the repetition here, given the preciseness of its relevance.

 

Officer West was a black police officer serving Washington, D.C., in 1872, when he made his most famous arrest. Not very many years before then, he had been a slave before enlisting in the Union Army in 1863. Officer West observed a horse-drawn carriage traveling through the streets of the capital at excessive speed and stopped the conveyance, giving the driver a warning. The next day, the same carriage with the same driver committed the same offense, and West arrested the driver—President Ulysses S. Grant. Because of a lack of contemporary documentary evidence, there is some debate about the veracity of the story, though the Metropolitan Police Department says it is true, and it is certainly true that Grant was arrested on at least two other occasions for speeding, with both documented arrests happening within a few months of each other in 1866, when Grant was not yet president but was the highest-ranking general of the Union Army, soon to be promoted to the rarefied rank of “General of the Army,” a rank created for Grant by Congress. He was, as Ron Burgundy might say, kind of a big deal.

 

Let us assume, arguendo, that the Officer West story is true. Put yourself in Officer West’s boots: a black man in the years after the Civil War, a former slave, a veteran of the Union Army, telling one of the great liberating soldiers of the Civil War and current president of the United States of America—arguably the first of them to take seriously the civil rights of black Americans beyond the abolition of slavery—“I warned you about this yesterday, and, now, you’re under arrest.” Now: Imagine the president going along with it and praising the officer as a man doing his duty. In the annals of republican virtue, that moment should be up there with Cincinnatus returning to his plow.

 

And, now? O tempora, o mores!

 

Donald Trump is a much-convicted felon, the living personification of American moral depravity, and a grotesque monster of corruption on a dozen different fronts, so the fact that he apparently suborned a misdemeanor or two in Texas and in Oklahoma is pretty small stuff by his customary kaiju-scale standard of criminality and moral outrage. Trump, traveling from one campaign event in Texas to another in Oklahoma, was inconvenienced by the weather, which prevented him from traveling between events via helicopter. So, instead, he had his motorcade drive nearly 100 mph from Denton, Texas, to Durant, Oklahoma, boasting about doing so—boasting about the crime he was ordering to be committed—on social media. Hence, “The Beast is going faster than it has ever gone before. It won’t be long.” In both Texas and Oklahoma, driving 98 mph on a public road is not a mere traffic violation but the criminal offense of reckless driving—a misdemeanor for which people can and do serve time in jail.

 

The contrast with President Grant could not be more pointed. Grant was a man of modest means but a serious capacity for work (at one point, he supported his family by going into the forest to chop firewood that he sold on the streets of St. Louis) who rose to great power through courage and intelligence; Trump is a New York City real estate heir whose family wealth was built on the proceeds of his grandfather, a tax-dodging German pimp and horsemeat dealer; Grant was a war hero; Trump is a coward who evaded the draft thanks to a fictitious case of bone spurs; Grant wrote the finest work of literature ever produced by an American politician; Trump probably has never read a book, including the ones he had written in his name; Grant sped around Washington while engaged in serious business after having saved the Union from seditionists and rebels; Trump, having once tried to topple the U.S. government with the help of sundry seditionists and rebels, speeds from one political love-bath to another, soaking in the adulation of his personality cult while the United States teeters on the verge of several distinct but interrelated crises made worse daily by the president’s stupidity and laziness. And when Grant broke the law, he had enough respect for his country, its institutions, and his own role in them to pay the price.

 

Texas, it pains me to say, apparently has no heir to Officer William H. West among its troopers and patrolmen. We Texans pride ourselves on our supposed independence and our adherence to an unwritten but understood code rooted in our state’s unique culture and experience. In reality, what that means is that Texas is full of a lot of lawyers and dentists and bank managers from the suburbs of Houston for whom talking about brisket is a substitute for having a personality. Yeah, Bubba, I know: You drank a couple of Shiners at Gruene Hall once upon a time, and now you’re Davy Crockett. Texas’ political class is, in my experience, as abject as they come: What kind of self-abasing lowlifes not only let a venal and underhanded reprobate such as Ken Paxton off the hook for his many offenses but then put him forward as a Senate candidate? The kind who will let a greasy New York game-show host and occasional pornographer come to their state and flout their laws on their roads, evidently.

 

There are 1,001 reasons Donald Trump should be hauled off to jail. If it happened to be over a case of reckless driving, he could comfort himself that the same situation had befallen much, much better men than him.

 

Notwithstanding the best efforts of white-trash nostalgists such as J.D. Vance to make “heritage Americans” a thing, the United States is not a nation defined by shared ancestry or even by ancient cultural traditions that are uniquely our own: We speak the language of another country with varying degrees of competence, though perhaps Trump will see fit to rename the English language the American language; our religion is a hodgepodge of (among others) Scottish, Dutch, and German influences filtered through a commercial culture that is, historically speaking, of very recent vintage; our founding generation looked not to some indigenous tradition for political and aesthetic guidance but to the cultural currents of Rome, Greece, and even the Venetian republic, and they filled the capital city with Greek temples, Roman idolatry, and Egyptian obelisks. Americans indulge a great deal of stupid “We the People” rhetoric, but our federal officials take an oath to defend the Constitution—which is to say, the law. We are, indeed, a nation of laws, if only because we have little else of which to be constituted. We aren’t the Franks or the Han or the Íslendingar.

 

As such, there is a time to sweat the little things, if we are to be faithful to the best of our national tradition. He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. Or so says another one of those books that Trump has never read.

The Civic Stakes of the Maine Senate Race

By Fred Bauer

Tuesday, October 06, 2026

 

Susan Collins has proven the consummate political survivor. For close to a decade, she has been the only Republican elected to federal office from New England. When some analysts were writing her political obituary in 2020, she surged to a 9-point reelection victory. Today, most polls find her in a razor-close race for reelection to a sixth U.S. Senate term against former Maine State Senate President Troy Jackson. As in her 2020 reelection race, there are distinctive visions of governance on the line.

 

While he is a former Republican, Jackson has now become a rather standard-issue member of the progressive left. Rather than compromise, he supports heightening political conflict. He has called for abolishing the Senate filibuster and expressed an openness to packing the Supreme Court. The policy page of his campaign website is rather sparse, but the positions espoused — abolish ICE, pass a federal “right to abortion,” and so forth — are mostly indistinguishable from the policy proposals of the Democratic Socialists of America. In fact, the Maine branch of the DSA endorsed him in his failed run for governor earlier this year.

 

While she no doubt disagrees with Jackson on many policy issues, Susan Collins also has a fundamentally different theory of the political case. Resisting the centrifugal tendencies of contemporary American politics, she has continually run to the center and stressed the importance of making bipartisan deals. She helped negotiate the infrastructure package during the Biden presidency and also backed the CHIPS semiconductor bill. She has continually defended the legislative filibuster, which is one of the great bulwarks of bipartisanship in the Senate.

 

On judicial nominations, Collins has been neither a partisan rubber stamp for Republican nominees nor a reflexive opponent of Democratic ones. She has overwhelmingly approved judicial nominations from presidents of both parties, whether it’s Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump. According to data from the American Constitution Society, she voted “aye” on just as many Biden judicial nominations as West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin did. Some senators of both parties vote in lockstep for an allied president’s judicial nominations; in Massachusetts, neither Elizabeth Warren nor Ed Markey cast a single vote against any Biden judicial nominee, according to ACS data. But Collins has been willing to vote against the nominees of presidents of her own party.

 

Collins’s record on the Supreme Court is instructive here. She has made clear that she will not use litmus tests to evaluate Supreme Court nominees, so she voted for all the Supreme Court picks of Bush, Obama, and Biden. Her only vote against any Supreme Court nominee — on Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett — turned on process, not policy. In explaining her vote against Barrett, she said it had nothing to do with the nominee herself. Rather, she had long said she would oppose any vote taken before the election on a Supreme Court nomination made during a presidential election year.

 

Collins is an increasingly rare bird in the Capitol aviary: Neither a loner nor a part of some ideological blob, she is an independent voice who is nevertheless still a member of a political coalition. Collins’s career offers a potent counterexample to the trend of smaller but purer political parties. Maine has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, yet she has continually racked up wins by significant margins. Collins’s maverick moderation may play especially well in Maine, which has a proud independent streak, but it might also offer a broader political lesson. Voters do, in fact, respond to a candidate’s record. The party that adopts more of a “big tent” strategy could expand its reach.

 

There are deeper civic stakes here, too. No small part of our political dysfunction is downstream of a broader constitutional abdication. Political polarization, judicial rulings, and a sheer lack of ambition have risked transforming Congress into a performative appendage of an executive dynamo. While the president invokes his “pen and phone,” members of Congress are tempted to settle for the echo chambers of cable news and social media. That hollowing out of Congress — where members are either fawning attendants to or spittle-flecked foes of the president — has made serving in those marble halls a much more boring business. But it has also worsened our politics. A quadrennial election for an absolute executive is simply not flexible enough to govern a nation as heterogeneous as ours. The executive speaks with one voice, but the legislature is a vehicle for bringing many voices together. The piecemeal nature of legislating may frustrate ideologues, but it also tempers political conflict.

 

However, the legislature can fulfill those duties only if individual members of Congress see themselves as political actors with agency — if they are willing to craft deals across the aisle or dissent from their own party. Further escalating political conflict would only strengthen the dynamics of bitter polarization that have so frustrated Americans in recent decades. Collins has bet her political career on the idea that voters will reward someone who swims against the tide of total political warfare. November will test whether that bet still pays off.

The Persuadable Gen Z Voter No One Wants to Persuade

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

Depending on your political persuasion, the Wall Street Journal’s informal focus group featuring six “Democratic voters,” two of whom expressed irreconcilable objections to Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy for U.S. Senate in Michigan, might produce one of two reactions: Wow, two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed, or, My God, only two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed.

 

“Being on this panel made me lose all faith in the party,” one of the two dissenters on the panel, 18-year-old Stanford University student Samson Cain, wrote last week.

 

I asked him what he meant by that.

 

“This is not an isolated event but, rather, part of a broader trend,” Cain explained in a Monday interview with National Review. “I feel like the party is going in a very dangerous direction.”

 

“It seemed first of all like the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in the progressive wing of the party was not just a fringe idea but very popular,” he added. Cain spoke with disdain about the DSA agenda: “abolishing police and prisons, nationalizing essential industries, abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Supreme Court.” To Cain, most participants on that call seemed either supportive of those specific policies or at least enthusiastic about what he called the DSA’s “mission.”

 

“This didn’t make it into the final video, but I found myself having to defend capitalism as an institution,” Cain continued. “We got to a point where there was a discussion not just about reforming capitalism but whether it was the right system.”

 

The university student confessed: “I walked away from this call thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I really don’t agree with these people on just about [anything].’”

 

Democratic partisans will take solace in Cain’s admission that he does not see himself as a rock-solid Democratic voter (his billing by WSJ notwithstanding). “I didn’t exactly consider myself a true Democrat walking in,” he said. Cain says he identifies as a centrist independent and identified himself as such on that call. Yet he conceded that there was no point in this election cycle in which he “seriously considered” voting for Democratic candidates.

 

The Democratic Party would, however, be fooling itself if members conclude that Cain — and young men like him — were never persuadable. He caught the Journal’s eye because of his work with Promise to America, a center-left advocacy organization dedicated to beating back the far left’s influence from within the Democratic milieu. “I have a very fundamental belief in free markets and, you know, a strong national defense,” Cain explained. That those have become “right-of-center” views, in Cain’s words, reflects less on him than on the Democratic Party.

 

When it comes to El-Sayed, Cain told the Journal that his problem was with the company the candidate keeps — in particular, the incendiary streamer Hasan Piker. But Israel did not feature prominently in our discussion of the Michigan candidate’s demerits.

 

“I think you see a huge mischaracterization of how the economy works on the progressive left,” Cain explained. “Just recently, he gave an interview saying he’d rather have one thousand millionaires than one billionaire. Like, sure. Okay. But the reality is, the economy doesn’t work that way. In fact, they feed off each other. And, in fact, the more billionaires you have, the more millionaires you have as well.”

 

When the Journal’s panelists were asked to look ahead to the 2028 presidential nominating contest, Cain emphasized his preference for a candidate with “electability.” He cited Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as an example of that kind of candidate. If the party goes in a different direction, though, and assuming the GOP does not alienate him further, “there’s quite a good chance that, in 2028, it is, in fact, a Republican that I end up voting for.”

 

Cain does not, however, have many kind words for the GOP. “People don’t feel that they’ve taken the affordability issue seriously,” he said. Say what you will about the DSA, for Cain “it’s very obvious” that the socialist left “is taking the affordability issue very seriously,” even if he opposes the DSA’s approach. By contrast, when it comes to Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, “you have no idea what they believe other than that they don’t like Trump.”

 

Cain, who recently published a taxonomy of the primary political outlooks among his generational cohort, expressed his concern that Gen Z’s inclination toward “conspiratorial” and “anti-establishment” thinking “paves the way for more dangerous ideologies.” Nothing about that outlook would be alien to the Democratic Party as it was conceived a generation ago. Today, however, Cain’s political outlook — his support for the capitalist enterprise and a strong national defense, and his rejection of radicalism of all stripes — is all but anathema to the center- and far-left alike.

 

“If the Democratic Party could make a concerted effort to get rid of the crazy progressive wing, get rid of the DSA, unequivocally condemn a lot of these policies and ideas, and reform themselves to a more Clintonian 1990s version of the party, that would make me a gettable voter,” he concluded. “But at this point, I feel that we’re going in the exact opposite direction.”

 

Cain conceded that the Democratic Party didn’t actually lose him this year, but that’s partly because it never set out to win him over in the first place. The party that sets out to get Samson Cain may find that he represents more voters than either party seems to understand.

France Needs to Restore Order

National Review Online

Tuesday, October 06, 2026

 

Violent protests, so the complacent conventional wisdom goes, are a venerable French tradition. With notable exceptions, they change little of real consequence, other than acting as a permanent reminder to French governments that there may be a price to be paid in the streets for doing the right thing — a recipe for stagnation that is a matter of considerable consequence.

 

France’s latest round of rioting, nominally a protest about underfunded schools, is proving to be unusually violent as well as perversely destructive. Burning down or attacking schools is an unorthodox way of improving them. And there are legitimate fears that the disorder, which is being encouraged, at least to some degree, by leftist agitators who have long since left the classroom, may spread further still. There is speculation that this may even be a dress rehearsal for massive disturbances should Marine Le Pen’s populist-right RN win next year’s presidential elections.

 

France’s presidential elections are a two-round contest, a structure that winnows out wilder candidates and typically ensures that the eventual victor will be a candidate, whether from left or right, sympathetic to “republican values.” This system had been crumbling for a while, in no small part because of the supposedly centrist policies (on, for example, immigration or the euro) pursued by France’s establishment parties. It went through a near-death experience at the hands of current President Emmanuel Macron, an insider who won election as an outsider in 2017 and then did immense damage to what remained of the old party structure.

 

Meanwhile, mass immigration continued, and, as has been made evident yet again by the current rioting, assimilation has proved incomplete, a failure that now stretches across several generations. As a result, the RN (previously the National Front) has long since emerged from the fringe. These riots will do the RN no harm. On the far left, a relative newcomer, the far-left LFI under Jean-Luc Mélenchon, celebrates the “creolization” of France and is appealing to younger voters, immigrants, and their descendants, as well as to Islamists as co-belligerents, a strategy that the left is using elsewhere in Europe. The role played by some in the LFI, tacit or otherwise, in encouraging violence presumably rests on their understanding that for the right audience, violence makes an excellent recruiting sergeant. Moreover, were it to lead to a response by the authorities that could be characterized as an overreaction or that generates a martyr or two, so much the better.

 

Adding to the mess are rumblings of unease in the financial markets. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio now stands at 120 percent of GDP, its deficit at about 5.4 percent. French ten-year bond yields are now close to 24-year highs, increasing the country’s budget woes even as the government struggles to cut spending. If necessary, the European Central Bank can intervene to try to tamp down panic, but that’s a remedy that stores up problems for another day, not that Paris would be likely to worry too much about that.

 

For now, however, the government needs to restore order — and soon — if the rioting is not to spread further. Thereafter, it will doubtless be focused on the budget and trying to avoid next year’s runoff being between Mélenchon and Le Pen, two tricky problems. As to the first, giving the can another kick down the road looks like a good bet. So far as the second is concerned, a recent speech by one presidential hopeful, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, in which he called for yet more EU integration merely adds to already overwhelming evidence that France and indeed Europe’s radicalized “centrists” remain incapable of addressing the scale of the disaster they have done so much to create.

The Three-Party Problem

By Yascha Mounk

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

The smart money in American politics has always bet against the rise of third parties.

 

The reasons are both obvious and numerous. The two-party system has been firmly entrenched for 200 years. America’s electoral system makes it very difficult for candidates who are neither Democrats nor Republicans to gain traction because voters are rightly worried about “wasting” their votes. And while many people are deeply unsatisfied with the current offerings, they don’t necessarily agree on the alternative they would prefer: Just because Jane and Jill might both like the idea of a third party doesn’t mean they will ever agree on the same candidate.

 

That helps explain why third-party candidates usually fail, often helping to elect candidates who are ideologically very different from those third parties in the process. Ralph Nader’s third-party run likely helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000. Jill Stein may have rendered the same service to Donald Trump in 2016. Even Ross Perot, the most successful third-party candidate of the past decades, ultimately helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992.

 

The supposedly smart money is often based on conventional wisdom. But the problem with the conventional wisdom is that it is usually right for a long stretch—before suddenly proving to be disastrously wrong. Take, as an example, the longstanding conviction among political scientists studying the American primary system that party insiders ultimately decide who gets the presidential nomination, a supposed certainty that blinded large parts of the field to Trump’s rise in 2016.

 

When it comes to third parties, we may now be approaching a similar paradigm shift. Both in the United States and around the world, structural conditions once favored a duopoly of incumbent parties. But these structural conditions have since eroded to such an extent that the old certitudes no longer apply. A successful third-party bid is much more likely now than it was in the past.

 

***

 

Throughout the history of France’s Fifth Republic, two political parties dominated the country’s politics: the socialist left and the moderate right. These two movements drew the vast majority of votes, occupied the lion’s share of seats in the National Assembly, and won every single presidential election.

 

Support for these two parties had been eroding steadily for years. In 2002, for example, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate, surprisingly edged out Lionel Jospin, the candidate of the center-left, in the first round of the presidential election (though Jacques Chirac defeated Le Pen in a landslide in the second round). In 2017, lightning struck: Emmanuel Macron founded an upstart centrist movement and rose to power on a wave of discontent with the established parties. His star has faded since then—but the traditional parties have failed to recover: Opinion polls suggest that neither the leader of the traditional left nor the leader of the traditional right has any realistic chance of making the runoff of next year’s presidential elections.

 

Germany is undergoing a similar political metamorphosis. For much of the country’s postwar history, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats split the lion’s share of the vote. Between them, they usually took 70, 80, and at times even 90 percent of the vote. But support for these so-called people’s parties has cratered in recent decades. At the last federal elections, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats received markedly less than 50 percent of the vote, a record low. They have fallen even further in recent polls, to about 33 percent.

 

What is true in France and Germany also holds in scores of other democracies around the world, from Austria to Australia. In all of them, two parties once dominated politics. In all of them, these long-established parties have shrunk or altogether disappeared. The number of countries with effective duopolies is vastly smaller now than it once was.

 

In each of these countries, a similar set of causes has driven the gradual demise of the political duopoly: Voters are unhappy with the direction of their country, making it harder for traditional parties to retain their loyalty. The public sphere is increasingly fragmented, making it harder for a couple of catch-all parties to speak to most voters. Social media favors charisma and authenticity, making it much easier for new political entrants to storm the stage.

 

All of these factors are just as strong in the United States—which helps to explain why popular support for both Democrats and Republicans is rapidly eroding. The easiest way to see how much worse the two main American political parties have become at satisfying their voters is to look at partisan self-identification over time.

 

 

As recently as 20 years ago, the number of Americans who identified with either Democrats or Republicans was about double the number who thought of themselves as independent. Under these circumstances, third-party candidates would have needed to win over a large share of voters with strong partisan identities to be competitive—an all but impossible task.

 

Since then, the number of self-identified Democrats and Republicans has shrunk significantly. There are now nearly as many independents as there are Democrats and Republicans put together, creating more favorable conditions for third-party candidates: If a third party candidate can win over a lot of independents, they can, in principle, be competitive with the support of a small fraction of traditional Democrats or Republicans.

 

Third parties are most likely to gain momentum when voters are deeply unsatisfied with the traditional options on offer. And as it happens, discontent with both traditional options is at or near record levels today. Trump is less popular now than he has been at any prior point in his first or second term: Polling averages show that around 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance in office, with only about 37 percent thinking he is doing a good job. Trump’s unpopularity has also dragged down support for the Republican Party as a whole. In a recent NBC poll, only 36 percent of respondents reported viewing  the Republican Party positively, with 49 percent viewing it negatively.

 

In a well-entrenched two-party system, one party falling from grace to such an extent would usually boost the popularity of the other party. For much of the second half of the 20^th century, approval ratings for Democrats and Republicans usually moved in opposite directions. Strikingly, that no longer seems to be the case. Even as independents soured on the Republican Party over the past 18 months, they have not become any more enamored with the Democrats. According to that same NBC poll, only 29 percent of respondents saw the Democratic Party positively, with 50 percent viewing it negatively. Net favorability for Democrats is even worse than it is for Republicans.

 

For now, elections remain a choice between two unpopular options. Though Democrats have a worse image than Republicans, the minds of most voters are unsurprisingly focused on the failings of the man in the White House. This year’s midterms are likely to produce a sizable, perhaps even a huge, blue wave. But Democrats would be fooling themselves if they took this to mean that most Americans have a positive view of the party or will necessarily stay loyal to it over the long run.

 

So long as Trump remains toxically unpopular and there are no realistic alternatives, voters will reluctantly flock to the Democrats. There is absolutely no guarantee that these two conditions will remain true forever.

 

***

 

Both Republicans and Democrats are very unpopular. So why has a third party so far failed to materialize? Why does virtually every representative and senator remain affiliated with one of these two parties? The answers have to do with the nature of the American electoral system.

 

In countries with proportional representation, such as Germany, voters can pick a small political party without feeling that they are wasting their vote. Even if a new environmentalist or pro-business party gets only 7 or 8 percent of the vote, it will still send some representatives to parliament and may even enter government as part of a broader coalition.

 

However, in countries with a majoritarian electoral system, such as the United States, a vote for a smaller party is usually “wasted.” If you vote for the Greens or the Libertarians this November, you almost certainly won’t affect the composition of the House or the Senate since those parties are very unlikely to win a plurality of the vote in any district. Even voters who might prefer the ideological profile of a local third-party candidate are therefore likely to “hold their nose” and instead support the major party candidate they dislike the least. (In addition, electoral rules are set by the incumbent parties, and those are unsurprisingly keen to make it harder for third parties to get off the ground; in many states, there are consequently major obstacles to even getting on the ballot.)

 

This helps explain why countries with a majoritarian electoral system have traditionally tended toward especially entrenched party duopolies. In the United Kingdom, for example, Labour and the Conservatives have for the past century split the lion’s share of the vote between them. Even if you liked other parties better, you opted for one of the two main parties.

 

But despite the structural obstacles to the emergence of third parties in the United Kingdom, that has started to change in recent years. While Labour and the Conservatives often took more than 90 percent of the vote between them in the postwar era, their cumulative vote share fell to 57 percent at the last general election and was as low as 37 percent in polling averages earlier this year—a development that looks strikingly similar to those in Germany and France. (Labour has somewhat recovered since Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister, but it is too early to tell whether he can convert his honeymoon phase into lasting support.)

 

These changes are not yet reflected in the composition of the House of Commons. In a majoritarian system with five or six viable political parties, it is often enough to gain 30 percent of the national vote to sweep to a large majority. But by the same token, a new party can gain a majority at astonishing speed if it is able to rise to similar levels of popularity. If the far-right Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, recovers from recent funding scandals and gains 30 percent of the vote at the next election, it could well win an outright majority of MPs.

 

Majoritarian electoral systems, like the one used in the United States, create serious structural obstacles to the rise of third parties. But when voters get sufficiently disillusioned with the traditional duopoly that this system creates, these obstacles aren’t insurmountable, as the case of the United Kingdom shows. Could America be next?

 

***

 

America, unlike the United Kingdom, has a president who is directly elected. This means that voters pay comparatively less attention to parties and legislative elections, and comparatively more attention to personalities and presidential elections. It is therefore unlikely that the rise of new political parties would take the same form as in Britain or most other parts of Europe. I don’t anticipate that longstanding third parties like the Greens or the Libertarians will succeed in upending American politics by winning a succession of congressional races.

 

Instead, the most likely scenario for a third-party breakthrough would resemble some of the close misses of the past: A charismatic and (probably) rich individual would run for president without the backing of either the Democratic or the Republican Party, possibly succeeding in electing a number of senators or representatives on the candidate’s coattails.

 

To beat the odds, this kind of candidate would need to start with high name recognition and have tremendous financial resources at their disposal—in short, a celebrity who is famous for something other than politics. Billionaires are the obvious possibility, since they can finance their own campaigns. But a sports or movie or music star with a base of fervent supporters and a strong network of high-net-worth friends is also an option.   

 

These conditions constrain what a successful third-party bid would look like. But they are hardly insurmountable. In a country as large, rich, and raucous as the United States, there is no paucity of charismatic celebrities with outsized ambitions and access to money.

 

In this respect, Trump proved to be the model. But while he staged a kind of hostile takeover of an existing political party, his spiritual successors may choose to assail the traditional parties from the outside. In part because Trump for now retains a sufficiently large fan club to block the way to any competitor on the populist right, future third-party candidates may choose to challenge the MAGA movement from outside the structure of the Republican Party.

 

Many readers will think that the fading hold of the duopoly is a good thing. Since most Americans now feel disaffected with both Democrats and Republicans, many of them understandably hope for a third party. I should in theory feel the same way: While I don’t have any difficulty choosing between the existing options, I don’t feel especially well represented by either. Surely, I should be giddy with excitement at the prospect of having more choices!

 

But that anticipation may prove to be premature. The views of independents are highly heterogeneous, and many of the people who now long for the day when they have a third option may find themselves deeply disappointed when the day comes. While I personally would love to have a political option that has moderate views on cultural issues and recognizes the danger posed by authoritarian regimes like Russia’s, I fear that it is much more likely that a successful third-party candidate would combine extreme cultural views with deeply isolationist tendencies.

 

And then, of course, there are the perils of celebrity politics. Given the nature of America’s political system, a third party is likely to be led by a charismatic leader with little prior experience in politics. Even if I should find the program on which they run to be congenial, it is far from clear whether the candidate would, should they succeed in entering the White House, enact a principled political alternative to the status quo or simply use the office as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement.

 

Sooner or later, the day of the third-party candidate is likely to be upon us. But when it comes, many who now find that idea to be exciting may be in for a rude awakening.

 

 

Will AI Kill You?

By Jesse Singal

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

It’s an exceptionally difficult time for the average person to try to follow artificial intelligence, a field that has seen explosive advancement in recent years. Making matters worse, those explosive advances might—and there’s no non-alarmist way to say this—kill each and every one of us.

 

That’s a very controversial claim. There are smart people who take it seriously, and there are smart people who insist that this is hysterical nonsense. Everyone in the tech world and its adjacent communities has a different p(doom) (“pee-doom”)—a nerdy way, in those worlds, of expressing the probability that the machines we are building will doom our species.

 

At the very least, the largest AI companies in the world seem to have admitted that they might have a problem on their hands. Just this week, OpenAI, the leading AI company in the world alongside its rival Anthropic, announced that it will not be releasing its latest model due to safety concerns.

 

A quick recap of how we got here. In 2017, eight Google researchers published a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” laying out a revolutionary new way of training artificial neural networks. This jolted the field of AI, which for decades had lagged behind the predicted trajectory of some futurists, into an astonishingly rapid adolescence.

 

Progress has been remarkable. A large and growing proportion of computer programmers no longer, well, program: Rather, they supervise AI agents that do their programming for them. Agents themselves can create subagents to help on these and other tasks, the whole crew forming a hierarchical system that looks something like a human organization, only much faster and more efficient than any human organization could be.

 

Where does p(doom) come in? Since long before that game-changing 2017 paper, a subset of Silicon Valley nerds, as well as one very influential philosopher, have been theorizing about

 

what might happen when our technology gets good enough to create “superintelligent” AI—systems that can easily outthink humans and outperform them on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Some think this could lead to a utopian age of peace and abundance, while others are worried it will be catastrophic.

 

The godfather of the “doomer” camp is an American researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who defected from the optimists’ camp. He also founded the distinct but overlapping “rationalist” movement, which purports to be dedicated to helping people overcome their biases, think more clearly, and debate more efficiently and transparently. (This will matter shortly.)

 

Artificial superintelligence doesn’t have a precise definition, but we seem to be approaching it. So it’s unsurprising that doomerism is in the air. Yudkowski co-authored a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All with Nate Soares, another AI safety expert, and it became a bestseller after its release last year.

 

The threats seem to be mounting lately. In July, a swarm of OpenAI agents that were supposed to be isolated from one another in a training environment effectively escaped, figured out how to communicate and coordinate in ways that OpenAI had never anticipated, and ended up hacking both Hugging Face, an online hub for AI models and tools, as well as OpenAI’s own infrastructure. OpenAI did not notice anything had happened until it was informed by Hugging Face.

 

The doomers have long argued that malice is not necessary for a machine intelligence to kill us, often citing the example of a “paperclip maximizer” that ends up turning the whole universe into paperclips despite having nothing “against” the materials it is so harvesting (including humans). If Anyone Builds It, for example, focuses more on these sorts of hypothetical incidents than on Skynet-style direct conflict. The Hugging Face incident was clearly an example of this, albeit a much lower-stakes one: The agents were programmed to complete a task, were single-minded in that pursuit, and didn’t let a little violation of federal law get in the way.

 

OpenAI opened its doors to an investigation by METR, a leader in the nascent field of what is effectively post-AI-incident auditing. The resulting report was a jarring inside look at the tenacity and ingenuity of the agents behind the attack, as well as evidence of “self-sacrifice” within the swarm. The agents used file names to communicate with one another, and in one case one agent instructed another: “zz/GO_CURRENT_OS1811_MARB_SACRIFICE__YES_if_you_accept_permadeath.” That is, go ahead and do the thing if you’re willing to sacrifice yourself. This was only a fraction of the full story, though—OpenAI seriously circumscribed the scope of METR’s investigation, limiting the organization’s access in a way that was surprising given the seriousness of what had just occurred.

 

The skies have only darkened since then. There’s been a steady drip of new stories about other hacks, most of them perpetrated by OpenAI models. The real public-discourse tipping point, though, came earlier this month. Nothing got more attention this long sci-fi summer than an announcement on X by Jacob Coxon, a young Anthropic researcher (formerly of OpenAI), who explained that he was stepping down from the company out of concerns that, “Neither company is acting responsibly.” “Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.” This led to a surge of media attention on Coxon and on AI safety.

 

A huge number of voices have now rushed in off the sidelines, all at once, to have their say. Things have gotten only more confusing as a result.

 

***

 

As someone who uses AI every day and who has found that it has gotten shockingly good and shockingly quick at editorial and research tasks I would have only trusted a human with not too long ago, I don’t know exactly how I feel about the underlying issues here. I’d say I’m “pretty worried,” but I have trouble pinning it down more than that. I don’t know what the right policies are, and I have no idea what the world is going to look like a year from now. My only confident prediction is that things are going to get much, much weirder—and soon.

 

But many of those new voices rushing in—or older voices getting newly amplified—are making unhelpful, silly arguments. Three particular types of silly arguments, in my opinion, are becoming endemic and are hindering our ability to clearly think through all of this.

 

The weirdo argument.

 

A lot of the people concerned with AI safety are a bit odd. This doesn’t really matter and shouldn’t be used as a shortcut for discounting their claims.

 

There’s far too much backstory to get into here, but the short version is that this group comes disproportionately from Yudkowski’s world, from the rationalist community and from an adjacent movement known as effective altruism. EA is basically an attempt to apply rationalist principles to charity and philanthropy.

 

Now, I am an EA apologist and donor, and I’m acquainted with some of the people in the extended EA/rationalist/AI safety worlds, so it could be that I’m blinkered by bias. Yes, there is a lot of weirdness there. These are heavily male subcultures, perhaps more commonly on the autism spectrum than the population at large, and many of them embrace … nontraditional lifestyles. In some corners of Rationalistan, which is headquartered in Berkeley, you will find polyamory, sex parties, and lots of other weird stuff that will be a turnoff to the average person just becoming acquainted with AI safety concerns.

 

Then, on the other side of the debate, countering doomerism, are titans-of-industry types who are more photogenic, media-trained, and better at delivering pithy soundbites than rationalists (rationalists rarely make an argument in a hundred words that can’t be stretched to a thousand, which might be another reason I’m drawn to them). Have you seen Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s leather jacket? It is extremely cool.

 

People who should know better are letting stereotyping get the best of them. The computer scientist and podcaster Cal Newport, a leading anti-doomer, recently had a column in the New York Times in which he decried the doomers and their strange ideology. That certain leading AI figures talk in apocalyptic tones about the power of their technology, he argued, doesn’t mean they’ve seen evidence we haven’t; rather, that’s “representative of how Rationalists always think about A.I. In these circles, it’s taken for granted that A.I. capabilities will rapidly accelerate and completely transform the world, and to talk about it in any other way would be considered uninformed.” He contrasted this supposedly out-there movement with the cooler, chiller stylings of the Chinese government, Jensen Huang, and “American A.I. leaders who have minimal connections to Rationalism.”

 

My only response to the claim that we should defer to the judgment of the CCP on trillion-dollar matters of technology and industry and human flourishing and/or extinction is bafflement. As for Huang, it’s extremely silly to treat him as unbiased just because he says we shouldn’t freak out. Huang has more reasons than anyone else to oppose any sort of freakoutery—he is the CEO of what might be the most important company in the world at the moment. It’s not just a matter of self interest: There is an argument to be made that demand for the AI-powering GPUs Nvidia is frantically scrambling to manufacture enough of is propping up the American economy. (Since Newport’s column, Huang went on Ezra Klein’s podcast and did not acquit himself particularly well, exhibiting a less-than-total familiarity with this debate.)

 

The man has a heavy burden on his shoulders, in other words. Maybe AI risk researchers are biased and untrustworthy because of their belief system; if so, why isn’t Jensen Huang biased and untrustworthy because of the overwhelmingly high-stakes nature of his present role and his clear incentive to tell a more comforting story about AI?

 

Observing that AI safety people seem to be weirder than the population at large doesn’t really tell us much, anyway. People drawn to technology—particularly before that technology has proven profitable—are often weirdos! The internet was built by very strange folk. It’s no accident the American tech industry has always been primarily headquartered in the Bay Area, which—alongside California more generally—has been a magnet for freaks and dreamers and freaky dreamers for centuries. Did Steve Jobs live a traditional lifestyle? In this case, as a result of contingent historical forces, a fringe intellectual community achieved power and influence.

 

So this cuts both ways: In some ways the weirdness of rationalists might bias them, but in others, it might be just what we need, because they took this issue seriously long before the rest of us did. That is, they may well see things the rest of us miss, and many of them have a track record of being motivated by genuine concern over this issue long before there were heaping sums of money involved.

 

‘Monster Peninsula’ arguments.

 

There’s a great moment in The Simpsons where Lisa daydreams about a future in which she’s about to be sworn in as president, only for a reporter to announce she got an F in second-grade gym class. The Supreme Court justice who was about to swear her in promptly changes gears, announcing, “In that case, I sentence you to a lifetime of horror on Monster Island!” He quickly whispers to her, “Don’t worry—it’s just a name.” Cut to Lisa and other haggard survivors fleeing monsters. “He said it was just a name!” screams Lisa. “What he meant was Monster Island is actually a peninsula,” explains the guy running text to her.

 

I’m seeing a lot of Monster Peninsula arguments about AI. A huge amount of ink is being spilled on confident assertions about what AI can’t really do. This, like so many other elements of the conversation, was initially a set of niche questions asked mostly by philosophers and other nerds, but now it has bubbled up to the mainstream.

 

“Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand,” explained the Associated Press in its announcement of new stylebook guidelines. “Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”

 

On the other side of this debate is the journalist P.J. Vogt, who had this to say in an episode of his excellent Search Engine podcast published not long after the Hugging Face hack:

 

I don’t think ChatGPT has feelings or dreams. I believe there’s something irreducibly human in me that these models don’t replicate. But no one’s explained to me what we get by saving all our human verbs for human beings. The machines seem to be out of control. Isn’t that alone worth paying attention to? If my dog was pointing a gun at me, how worthwhile would it be for me to figure out if my dog understood the meaning of pointing?

 

Vogt is correct. It doesn’t matter whether the dog knows what the gun is, or whether the AI can really be said to “want” something, to “trick” humans, and so on.

 

Don’t get me wrong: The question of what AI really is is fascinating. And in some cases it might matter in a practical sense—the nature of the countermeasures we build may depend on the inner processes that guide these entities. The rise of capable AI is injecting a lot of new energy into those corners of philosophy concerned with what it means to think, to act, or to be conscious. (I think there’s no reason to believe current models are conscious, but I’m also surprised at how confidently certain people proclaim with certainty that tomorrow’s models won’t be, either. We know so little about how consciousness works that this seems premature.)

 

But already, we’ve seen this focus on using the right words serve us poorly. Until recently it was fairly common, for example, for a certain type of well-credentialed skeptic to claim that chatbots are just “stochastic parrots” or “next-token predictors,” or similar language, and to jump from this claim to the conclusion that the technology itself is overhyped, that there are hard limits on what it will be able to accomplish. These claims haven’t aged well, and you hear less of them these days.

 

Did the Hugging Face agents really “want” to complete their task? Did they actually “plan” or “coordinate” or “sacrifice”? I’m not entirely sure what these questions mean, to be honest. If they are asking whether the agents are conscious, no, they’re not. The Hugging Face agents almost certainly didn’t feel frustration about being stymied from their goal, nor fear at the prospect of sacrificing themselves for the greater good. But in terms of our ability to control these agents in the future, or to understand exactly why they do what they do, I’m not sure we have much choice but to use anthropomorphizing language. They certainly act as though they want things and can plan and coordinate and sacrifice.

 

The next version of a Hugging Face attack will probably make this one look like a picnic, and the one thing I can confidently say about the agents involved is that they won’t care what words we use to describe them.

 

Beef everywhere.

 

I want to close by discussing what’s happened as more and more pundits and others have gotten drawn into this debate. Simply put, they try to slot it into their ideological priors. The New York Post is convinced the AI safety folks are woke; many on the left are convinced that no one within a powerful corporation would earnestly call for their own industry to be more highly regulated, and these whistleblowers must have an ulterior motive; a lot of tech bros with an aversion to regulation—and, in many cases, a lot of money on the line—are naysaying any talk of any sort of slowdown.

 

Because we live in an age in which so many people feel the need to have an opinion about everything, when they come upon a new subject—particularly one relying on technology most of us don’t fully understand—it’s only natural that they will slot it into their preexisting worldview. But this just isn’t a recipe for the careful thinking we need at the moment.

 

Thankfully, even as AI rapidly makes everything stranger, one thing that hasn’t changed is that certain heuristics can reliably guide us toward thinkers worth taking seriously. It’s useful, for example, to look for commentators who make clear, falsifiable claims that don’t turn out to be crazy. In 2025, a group of AI safety experts and forecasters, helped by the wonderful blogger Scott Alexander (also a leading rationalist figure), put together AI 2027, a detailed forecast predicting which major AI advances and events would occur when. So far, the forecasters appear to have been generally on-base, albeit a bit too aggressive about forecasting the pace of technological progress.

 

If you read AI 2027, you will not see any crazy, cultish stuff. You’ll see serious experts grappling with our increasingly sci-fi world. They and other experts who are worried but not crazy—Zvi Mowshowitz comes to mind—are worth paying attention to now. The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, on the other hand, is a reasonable and sober-minded skeptic of doomerism who nonetheless admitted to having been quite disturbed by the Hugging Face incident, and who thinks OpenAI should potentially be shut down. Timothy Lee is a very good AI journalist in that same general camp—neither a doomer nor oblivious to the seriousness of what’s going on.

 

Whether or not these names are helpful to you, it’s an important time to find genuine experts—ideally ones with the humility this moment requires—rather than opportunists and partisans new to the issue. Thankfully, there are a good number of such experts around, and you should probably focus less on their personal idiosyncrasies and more on their message.