Behold the Military Solution

By Seth Mandel

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

The New York Times reports a few curious facts about the Strait of Hormuz that seem to contradict one another. Traffic through the waterway has increased greatly, nearing prewar numbers, but attacks on ships have also increased. The U.S. is committed to protecting vessels as they sail through the strait, but the U.S. has also lately not been firing back at those who are attacking the ships.

 

What gives?

 

It turns out there’s a surprisingly simple answer to this riddle:

 

“Confidential data shared with The New York Times by a Western security official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters shows that Iran has been launching dozens of drones and missiles at commercial ships in the strait each week, largely out of the public eye, though it has often failed to strike its targets.”

 

How did the Iranians suddenly become such poor shots? Well, one explanation is that the U.S. has destroyed much of their offensive capabilities along the strait.

 

In May, the U.S. destroyed Iranian ground-control systems. In June, U.S. forces took out several Iranian radar stations. In July, the U.S. destroyed Iranian air-defense systems and a whole fleet of small boats the IRGC used to menace the waterway, and then a few days later hit ammunition depots, missile sites, and surveillance systems.

 

After a lull, in late August and early September, the U.S. again struck Iranian radar sites as well as systems that enabled Tehran to lay mines in the water.

 

Elsewhere in the Middle East yesterday, Gaza produced two news events that are highly relevant to the Hormuz riddle. One was that Gaza had now gone one full year without firing a rocket into Israeli territory. It was the first time this happened in the 21st century.

 

The rarity of such a period raises the obvious question: How was this made possible? The answer can be inferred from a different, seemingly minor news story yesterday. From the IDF’s social media:

 

The IDF attacked yesterday in the Khan Younis area and eliminated the terrorist Bilal Mahmoud Suleiman Samri, a terrorist in the rocket section of the Khan Younis Brigade, in the military arm of the terror organization [Palestinian Islamic Jihad].

 

The terrorist advanced terror plots while systematically violating the ceasefire and carried out ambushes against IDF forces operating in the Yellow Line area. The terrorist was eliminated in order to remove the threat he posed.

 

That last line again: The terrorist was eliminated in order to remove the threat he posed.

 

The Yellow Line is the line marking where official IDF control of Gaza ends, which totals slightly more than half the enclave. In other words, if you push the rocket launchers far from the border, and you also kill the men in charge of firing the rockets, you will greatly reduce the number of rockets that land in your territory. The better you get at doing this, the closer the number of rockets will get to zero.

 

It has been deemed by the world controversial for Israel to evacuate large areas of Southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah rockets and drones away from the northern border. That may not be a permanent solution, but it is an action taken as a direct result of Hezbollah’s preceding actions, just as Israel’s actions in Gaza were the result of decisions made and carried out by Hamas.

 

This raises a very uncomfortable fact for the modern West: There are, in fact, military solutions to military problems. Sometimes there are only military solutions to military problems.

 

The Iranians are struggling to hit ships in the Strait of Hormuz because we destroyed their preferred weaponry and guidance and communications systems. We took their toys away. And now, traffic through the strait is nearly back to prewar levels.

 

In Gaza, a series of nonmilitary solutions failed to stop the rockets. Military solutions would be under way, and then nonmilitary solutions would intervene and eventually undo the progress made by the military solutions.

 

Israel will do what works and what is within its rights in Lebanon too. Just as the U.S. has been doing in Iran. Perhaps the U.S. will go wobbly, as so often happens, before its military solution can be completed. But it is increasingly clear there is no nonmilitary solution to some of these problems, so we’ll be right back here again soon enough.

The False Comfort of Going ‘No Contact’

By Noelle Mering

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Prior to 2020, Sarah, a thoughtful young writer from Chicago, spoke daily with her close friends about everything from work and relationships to music and politics. After 2020, and the political upheaval that that year contained, that open range of conversation seemed to contract to the dimensions of a snow globe. Their formerly unguarded discussions became self-conscious and circled the same subjects: masking, anti-racism, gender, sexuality.

 

The change was not simply in what the group talked about, but in the militancy with which they talked about it. One friend derisively described her aging father as “ableist” because he felt sad about the physical limitations that came with growing old. Another recounted a fight with her mom because the daughter refused to come home for Thanksgiving as she considered it a settler-colonialist holiday.

 

Amid this contraction and escalation, Sarah, like many others, began questioning the speed and substance of the social changes unfolding around her. Her hesitation began with the rise of gender interventions for minors. But vocalizing her uncertainty made her anathema within her friend group. It turned out the shared history of friendship she assumed could accommodate disagreement no longer could. One by one, they began to ice her out.

 

When I spoke with Sarah about losing her friend group, she initially concluded that those friendships must not have been what she thought they were. Later, she reconsidered. The friendships had been real. What changed were the terms under which they could continue. “I think there really was a time when nothing — especially nothing so impersonal — could have come between us. And then something changed, and all of a sudden it was possible to imagine such stupid fractures.” Her friends demanded conformity to beliefs that just a handful of years earlier none of them had held and treated her hesitation as grounds for ending friendships that had lasted far longer.

 

Sarah’s experience is one familiar to many — and it’s part of a disturbing trend I document in my new book. It’s often called going “no contact” — discarding family and friends over political or ideological disagreements. Though in some ways those hot button topics have receded or been replaced, many people, like citizens in a war-torn city, are still navigating a lingering obstacle course of rubble long after the bombs stopped dropping. With approximately 68 million Americans estranged from a family member, such ruptures are now quite common and affect friendships and families alike. Estrangement is nothing new, and sometimes, it is entirely warranted. But something has changed in both its justification and its direction — not to mention the frequency at which it now occurs.

 

At the heart of that change is a profound shift in our concept of family. Traditionally, the family was understood as a natural and pre-political institution, befitting the human condition. We come into the world in existential poverty, radically dependent upon particular people. Our need calls forth their care, and those relationships make claims upon us. Family unity doesn’t depend upon agreement or perfection. The inevitable friction of living in intimacy with imperfect people helps us grow in our capacity to love.

 

But if family is understood instead (as many progressive academics have long held) as a social construct nested in power differentials, family friction begins to look like oppression. Family bonds become brittle and conditional under the weight of such a reduced and suspicious rendering.

 

Into that vacuum enters the political tribe, which tends to become inflated and inflamed as the familial tribe weakens. Once a populace has effectively transferred their identity and loyalty to the political tribe, they will inevitably judge their most intimate relationships according to its exacting demands.

 

In families now, that judgment tends to be at the instigation of the young toward the old. This is a reversal of the old archetype (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) that long populated our movies and moral imagination of the authoritarian father cutting off a wayward son or daughter over morally transgressive behavior. The newer direction of ideological estrangement inverts these roles, with the adult child in the authoritarian role cutting off a parent over politically transgressive beliefs.

 

One father I interviewed for my book summarized his experience of this shift: “Overnight it seemed the conversation with my [progressive] daughter turned into ‘I don’t want to hear any reasons why you voted that way. I don’t want to hear your side of things. I only want to hear you tell me that you were wrong.’” To him, the divide was one of disagreement. To her, she received news of his vote as a personal threat. The recourse then was not argument or persuasion, but penance and contrition. The daughter’s message to her dad was of looming excommunication: Affirm the correct things, or you lose access to me.

 

Sadly, estrangement rarely ends there. It has cascading effects, disrupting proximate and secondary relationships and reaching into generations to come. Many older parents who have been cut off by their adult children also endure the grief of losing relationships with their grandchildren. And those who initiate the cut-off often find themselves without an easily replicable support system amidst the precarities of life.

 

Why has ideologically driven “no contact” become so normalized? There are plenty of explanations. Social media habituates us into relational habits of muting and unfollowing. TikTok psychologists with short-form videos invite viewers to search their relationships for signs of toxicity. Therapy-speak can catastrophize ordinary friction, freezing a difficulty into a diagnosis: narcissist, toxic, traumatic, manipulative. And our political divisions too often now are not disagreements over the best means of achieving shared ends, but what those ends should be in the first place.

 

All of these are real and consequential. But beneath them lies something deeper: We have impoverished the very things that once protected us from political cannibalization. Without a deeply human — and therefore deeply spiritual — principle of unity animating family and friendship, we try to manufacture through rigid uniformity the unity that we no longer know how to sustain.

 

Anyone from any point on the political spectrum can become politically belligerent in ways that fracture relationships. But an ideology that continually finds new ways to pit the individual against the family — as though the flourishing of one were definitionally at odds with the flourishing of the other — supplies that belligerence with justification, direction, and a delicious sensation of righteousness.

Rama Duwaji’s Radicalism Is the Media’s Blind Spot

By Becket Adams

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Our news media tell us the spouses of public figures are fair game for investigative reporting.

 

Just ask any conservative Supreme Court justice.

 

Yet, for some strange reason, this generally accepted convention tends to run only one way.

 

Take Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She’s an unhinged ultra-left-wing radical, a superfan of anyone dedicated to the mission of humbling the United States and erasing Israel from the map, yet she is nevertheless a media darling.

 

A shiny penny says this would not be the case were she a radical in the other direction.

 

Duwaji just wrapped up attending an overseas wellness retreat known as the “Women Sanctuary,” her third visit this year, hosted by organizers who have called for “abolishing Israel” and “cleansing” it of Jews. To be fair, if this were an isolated incident, it’d be silly to hold Duwaji responsible for the retreat organizers’ rhetoric, as if she were answerable for every word they posted.

 

The thing is, Duwaji is constantly in the company of these types of people, to the point where one feels justified drawing assumptions. The retreat is only the latest in a long string of choices and preferences on Duwaji’s part that all point in one direction.

 

Recall that she skipped America’s 250th-anniversary festivities this year for a “Plants of the Quran” retreat in Mallorca, hosted by the same “cleanse Israel of Jews” group. She also co-hosted a “Mary in the Quran” retreat in Corsica, which recast the Virgin Mary as a “Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation.”

 

Duwaji and her husband staged a big to-do this year where they hosted agitator and anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil and his family at Gracie Mansion on the anniversary of his 2025 detention by ICE.

 

Khalil, who is not a U.S. citizen, helped lead the 2024 anti-Israel protests at Columbia. He has called the U.S. government a “killing machine” and once bragged: “The top echelons of the United States government are coming after me; that means I’m doing something right.” Or he is simply an unbelievably lousy guest. Try telling that to Duwaji and Mamdani, both of whom treat him as a martyr for the cause.

 

And let’s not forget about Duwaji’s social media presence, including a spree of “likes” for posts celebrating and justifying the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians. One liked post called the New York Times’ reporting on the October 7 sexual violence against Israeli women a “mass rape hoax” that had been “fabricated.” Other liked posts described the attack as resistance, accused Israel of a “vile land grab,” called the Sde Teiman prison a “concentration camp,” and labeled former President Joe Biden a “butcher” over his support of the U.S. ally.

 

Neither Mamdani nor his wife has offered any serious defense of those “likes,” aside from maintaining that she did all this in her capacity as a “private citizen.” That defense has so far satisfied most of the press.

 

Duwaji also provided an illustration for a collection of essays edited by the activist Susan Abulhawa, who called October 7 “a spectacular moment that shocked the world.” Abulhawa has also called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls” and Israel a “cultureless, rootless human aberration in the form of a manufactured ‘nation.’” And she’s complained that “we live in the time of Jewish supremacist demons.”

 

There is more from Duwaji, including social media activity from when she was much younger: sharing a tribute to a Palestinian bomb maker, sharing the message “F*** #TelAviv. Shouldn’t exist in the first place. They’re occupiers,” and boosting allegations that U.S. soldiers are guilty of “mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians” to maintain “American hegemony.”

 

There is quite a body of evidence for Duwaji’s radicalism, all of it pointing to her intense hatred of Israel and her more than admiring regard for actual terrorists and murderers, including those intent on doing the United States harm.

 

Yet, for reasons that are probably as clear as you suspect, you will find hardly a word of this radicalism described in, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. The scrutiny has come almost entirely from right-of-center outlets.

 

Perhaps the Times cannot bring itself to look too closely at a potential ideological ally, especially when Duwaji’s view of the war lines up so neatly with the paper’s own framing of it.

 

Or perhaps the news media simply do not have the resources and manpower to pursue the matter, having committed the bulk of their investigative assets to tracking which flags Mrs. Alito flies above the family home on holiday weekends.

On the Education of Children

By Hannah Anderson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Over the course of their educational journey, my children have attended public school and private school and have been homeschooled. This means that I’ve made and agonized over more decisions about their education than I care to remember. So, when I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay on the struggle to make educational choices for her daughter in keeping with her values, I immediately empathized.

 

Hannah-Jones, a long-form journalist with the New York Times whose work focuses on school and housing segregation, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and founder of the 1619 Project. But when reflecting on her own daughter’s journey over the last 10 years, Hannah-Jones confesses regret, or at least uncertainty, about her choice to keep her daughter in a struggling New York City public school as an act of solidarity with other black families—a choice she named as an attempt to “challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system.”

 

The essay raised more universal questions, though, ones I’ve asked myself multiple times over the years: What responsibility do I have to my child? What does it mean to stand in solidarity with my neighbors? Would removing a child from public school mean I was abandoning those neighbors and betraying my own values of community? Unlike Hannah-Jones, I am a white mother in broader Appalachia who chose to remove my son from our local public school and enroll him in a prep school on financial aid. I made this decision, in part, because I became convinced that fighting for my own child’s education was not a self-serving decision but was, in fact, my moral duty within my community.

 

Still, the decision was not obvious. My son spent his elementary years very happily in a Title I school that was the heartbeat of our rural working-class community. His father and I were both heavily involved, volunteering in different capacities, serving on the PTA, and supporting a program that organized shelf-stable food for kids at risk for hunger. By middle school, however, the kids in our community transitioned to a county school about a 40-minute bus ride away. That’s when the cracks began to show.

 

The distance meant that we were less involved, both as parents and as community members. Grade size more than quadrupled, and days were spent almost exclusively indoors in an industrial-sized school building. By sixth grade, my son had also been diagnosed with Level 1 autism (a reality we overlooked, in part, because the thick community of his elementary school had supported him in ways that weren’t obvious until they were absent). Halfway through the year, he began coming home in tears, exhausted and anxious. The classwork itself wasn’t the problem. If anything, it was that the classwork was not sufficiently stimulating to justify what was required to participate in the educational process. He was leaving home early, coming home late, expending tremendous attention and  energy to cope with overcrowded hallways, windowless rooms, and sensory overload—all while his mind craved academic challenge.  He didn’t have words for it in this way, but he was quickly becoming discouraged and disengaged, disillusioned with a system that asked more of him than it seemed to be returning. He was a bright kid for whom the physical experience of school was very difficult, and if it was going to be hard, he needed a return on his investment to believe that it was worth his effort.

 

To be clear, I don’t think the school, teachers, or administration failed my son, but I do think the system as it was set up couldn’t meet his needs. I was looking at a kid whose education and love of learning were at risk. I knew I could force him to continue in the environment with promises that it would get better and that he just had to find the way through. But I wasn’t sure I believed that myself. I wasn’t confident the system would be adaptive enough to ensure that he didn’t slip through the cracks.

 

So, as a mother, I faced a dilemma not unlike Hannah-Jones’. At some instinctual level, I knew that removing my son from the public school meant more than switching educational settings. It was, in a way, removing him from a particular community—the “public” in public school. It meant charting a course that would separate him from our neighbors, and after so many years of being invested in our small community, that truth made me sick to my stomach. I knew that removing him from the system that almost everyone else participated in meant setting him on a trajectory away from them.

 

But then, wasn’t that already happening? When I put him on the bus every morning and let it take him to a school in a different part of the county, wasn’t he already leaving? Wasn’t part of the problem a crisis of community—that his community wasn’t reciprocal, wasn’t able to show up for him as much as he showed up for it?

 

Over the next few months, I scoured the internet for options. Homeschooling wasn’t possible for different reasons, and I wasn’t confident that online schooling could adequately meet his needs. I was open to the idea of a small faith-based school, but finances were prohibitive. Then I clicked on the most elite private school in the broader region, only to discover that it offered heavily discounted tuition for those who qualified. We started the process of admissions, and my son began seventh grade in a uniform.

 

I am happy to say that he thrived in his new school in much the same way he had thrived in elementary school. The smaller class size meant more dedicated attention. Students had a form of recess through middle school, so he was regularly outside and active. Because the school had an open-roster policy, he was able to be involved in team sports and discovered a love of running. He sang in choir, spent five years in Latin, and participated in Model U.N. School was still challenging, but his investment was rewarded, and that made all the difference. By the time he graduated, his interest in physics had led to the establishment of a new level of mathematics instruction—despite his being the only student in his class who wanted to study multivariable calculus.

 

While the school was racially, religiously, and ethnically diverse, it was not economically diverse—or at least, not visibly so. My son, who had once sat in class with the children of truckers and waitstaff, was suddenly surrounded by the children of doctors and lawyers. I distinctly remember the moment I realized that the children of our congressman were on my son’s cross-country team. The school also hosted a boarding program for international students, and some of my son’s peers were dropped off by private drivers.

 

The culture shock was dizzying. To this day, my son lives between worlds, never fully fitting in either the working-class community of his early education or the elite world of his prep school classmates. But the complexity of his experience also means that he is very sensitive to wealth inequality, having seen both sides of the spectrum. He also knows the truth about education in the United States—a truth that, ironically enough, can be obscured in the public school system.

 

The promise of public education is that every child has a right to learn and that democracy depends on an educated populace. The reality, however, is that the education a child receives in the United States is highly dependent on ZIP code. So much so that real estate agents sell homes partially based on “great schools.” These fault lines are predicated by a complicated history of zoning, redistricting, redlining, and gentrification. We speak of universal public education, but it is a parochial system with location too often being the primary factor in whether a school can succeed in the mission of educating every child. With a private school, that pretense is stripped away, and the cold, hard facts of the matter become clear: In the United States, education is deeply tied to wealth.

 

Perhaps it was my relative lack of resources or keen sense of powerlessness that made the stakes clear for me in a way they weren’t initially clear for Hannah-Jones. I could only afford to pay a certain amount to improve my son’s education, but I also couldn’t afford to leave him where he was. The question wasn’t whether he could survive in public school, but what survival would cost him and whether it was fair to ask him to sacrifice for a system that couldn’t reward his sacrifice. More to the point, keeping him in his public school would have had negligible effect on a problem of this scale, but it would have had a significant effect on him.

 

So, when the opportunity came, I took it.

 

It was humbling to accept that the challenges were bigger than my own will or ideals. But it was also clear that if I could not improve educational opportunities for other children, I could improve them for one child. And in some strange way, I became convinced that failing to do that would be a greater moral risk than placing him in an elite school where the inequality of the American educational system was on full display. Because at the end of the day, I was the one responsible for my son.

 

Our children are not concepts, projects, or the manifestation of our ideals. They are living souls whose first community is the family to whom they have been entrusted. Correspondingly, what distinguishes a parent-child relationship from other relationships in a community is that the primary responsibility for a child’s well-being falls on parents. This does not mean that I don’t have a responsibility to my neighbor’s children or that I can harm my neighbor’s child in order to care for my own. It simply means that when responsibilities to your child and community do not neatly align, the question of seeking a child’s well-being should not be cast in opposition to being a faithful member of a community.

 

Being a faithful member of a community includes being a faithful parent to my own child. It is also undoubtedly more than this. But at a basic level, it was no one else’s job to know my child, to see what he needed, and to move heaven and earth to make sure that he got it. It was my job to advocate for him as an individual. It was not the system’s job. It was not my neighbor’s job. It was mine—and if I failed to do it, I would fail my responsibilities to both him and my community. After all, part of my job as a parent is to care for my child in the ways I can and not pass that responsibility off to other members of the community. And hopefully, by meeting my son’s needs now, he will have a better chance of maturing into a faithful member in his own right, contributing his particular gifts and abilities to help others flourish as well.

 

Not every child or family faces the dilemma I did. For many, public schooling provides what children need to thrive. I also know that many children who need different options can’t follow the path my son took, both because of a lack of resources and because many loving parents are themselves unable to navigate the complex puzzle of American schooling. It is not lost on me that my son had parents who were educated enough to find the solutions he needed for his own education. But because we had the solutions, it was our duty to implement them.

The Rise of Dumb, Anti-Innovation, Job-Saving Laws in Blue Cities and States

By Jim Geraghty

Sunday, October 04, 2026

 

Our James Lileks laments the City of Minneapolis requirement that self-driving cars have a $31.50/hour nondriver sitting in the driver’s seat, even though they are not driving the car:

 

You expect that they will find new ways to protect jobs threatened by societal advances. Think of all the entry-level pump jockey jobs lost! When people were permitted to refuel their cars on their own! The city should require all gas stations to have someone stand by every pump, doing nothing. After a year at this position, they will be eligible to be promoted to stand by the electric car charging stations, doing nothing.

 

Oh, James! Let us turn our eyes to the Garden State of New Jersey, where pumping your own gas has been illegal since 1949. Raised in New Jersey (Exit 10), I never learned how to pump gas until well into adulthood. Then, while stopping there many years later, I got out and started pumping my own gas like a regular Billy the Kid outlaw until the attendant rushed out and made me stop. Heaven forbid I do something I’ve probably done hundreds of times in other states!

 

Why does New Jersey still require “pump jockeys”?

 

The exact role of a pump jockey is outlined in the New Jersey Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations, in which they describe a pump jockey as someone who pumps gasoline and prevents others from pumping gasoline. They are generally minimum wage jobs, earning 16 dollars an hour.

 

The ban is enforced with fees which are primarily intended for gas stations in violation. For pumping your own gas, the first offense ranges from 50 to 250 dollars. There is a 500 dollar fine for each subsequent offence. Attendants, themselves, will also act to prevent consumers from pumping themselves.

 

The primary motivation to keep the ban in place has been to protect jobs and provide a better service. There are estimated to be about 7000 gas station attendants employed in New Jersey. Lifting the ban would cause the loss of these low requirement jobs.

 

If a local or state government could ban assembly-line robots, automated telephone switchboards, automated teller machines, online shopping, self-operated elevators, and pinboys (the folks who used to reset pins at the bowling alley by hand), they would do so.

 

I was going to add banning self-checkout to the list of ridiculous ideas, but California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Washington have contemplated legislation that would require a balance between employee-operated and self-checkout stations, a certain number of employees per self-checkout station, and/or stricter limits on the number and types of items that customers can bring through self-checkout. (This is an anti-shoplifting effort.)

 

Rhode Island passed its law; starting January 1, 2027, any grocery store in the state that provides self-service checkout stations must have a ratio of one manual checkout station for every three self-service stations. Heaven forbid we let the grocery stores decide for themselves! Heaven forbid we allow customers to decide which option they want to use!

Your Data Center Life

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

We are in the midst of a passionate debate over the desirability of “data centers.” Thus far, this debate has been stained by a profusion of silliness, superstition, and cynicism. But more than anything else, it has been notable for its profound tardiness. In 2026, data centers are such an inextricable part of American life that to discuss whether they are welcome is the equivalent of agonizing over what we think of this newfangled “television” thing. The public, we are told, has become anti–data center. If so, it is upset by the “center” rather than the “data” part of that equation, for whether they know it or not, Americans now rely on data centers in much the same way as they rely on their lungs. In every moment of every day, data centers are humming away behind the scenes, making the modern world possible. In 1973, Arthur C. Clarke suggested that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Were he writing today, he might have gone further: once that “magic” technology has been widely adopted, wonder can turn to contempt.

 

Certainly, we wildly underestimate the extent to which we rely on data centers. Take my actions today. This morning, I sat down with my coffee and looked through National Review’s website. To get there, I typed “nationalreview.com” into my browser, and before I’d even hit “Enter,” my computer used a data center to look up where that site was located on the web. Once that location had been discovered, my browser then contacted the website via its primary IP address — which, in the case of a popular site such as National Review, meant a digital “visit” to whichever one of the many “proxy” data centers happened to be geographically closest to me. After a secure connection to that data center had been established, my browser then started assembling the text, images, videos, podcasts, fonts, scripts, advertisements, and other elements that made up the page I hoped to see. Because this involved all manner of different content types — some cached, some dynamic, some streaming — and required the use of application servers, database servers, and distributed content-delivery networks, it invariably required trips to multiple data centers, all playing different roles. Thus, before I had read a single word, my computer had been served 150 web requests, across 34 domains, having contacted roughly ten data centers spread across networks operated by nine different companies. Because everything worked as it should have, this process was invisible. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Without seeing it, I had taken a remarkable journey around the world.

 

And that’s just for a visit to the homepage of a website. Presumably, like me, you have a smartphone. Have you ever thought about how it works? At the same time that I was visiting nationalreview.com today, my phone was relentlessly pinging data centers across the globe. An email arrived, a message appeared in the family group chat, a video from yesterday finished uploading to the cloud: those actions were the result of data centers, data centers, and — yep — data centers. When my weather widget refreshed its forecast, my calendar picked up a change to an appointment, one of my apps downloaded an update, and my stock ticker moved: data centers did that. Each one of the little conveniences that I have slowly stacked over time involved computers in one or more data centers doing work on my behalf. Magic? Not on your life.

 

Having had my coffee, I ran some errands in my car, and as usual, I used Waze to avoid the traffic. In so doing, I blithely connected to an unfathomably impressive piece of infrastructure — all of which remained out of sight. My phone accurately calculated its position on Earth by listening to a series of precisely timed signals sent from a bunch of satellites up in space and comparing the data issued by each to determine where I was. At the same time, its internet connection linked it to a host of servers that, among other things, supplied the requisite maps, calculated optimal directions, and processed real-time traffic information that had been collected from other drivers. To obtain even the simplest of instructions — “turn left” — I was the beneficiary of signals from space, mathematics in my pocket, and information that had been processed by distant computers in data centers across the world. While driving, I turned on Apple Music, and thanks to a data center nearby, I had at my disposal virtually all of the music that has ever been recorded. On my way home, I made a phone call to my wife and thereby relied on a data center in my carrier’s network to connect us and route my conversation to the right place. Had I driven through a toll, a data center would have matched my transponder to my billing record. If I’d stopped for gas or lunch and paid by card, the payment would have been authorized by my bank’s data centers. All this, for a simple trip to the barber!

 

We take all this for granted. Once, we had to go to the bank to cash a check, wait on the phone to buy a plane ticket, take a trip to a shop to buy a light bulb, drive to a video store to rent a movie, call theaters for showtimes, and consult encyclopedias to find the most elementary of facts. We don’t now — because of data centers. On Sundays, during NFL season, I watch the games over the internet on my TV, which requires a lot of data centers; I participate in two fantasy football leagues and one pick ’em league, all of which are hosted in data centers; and, like many others, I text my friends during the games — via a data center, naturally. So reflexive is this behavior that we have forgotten how it works. But we’d notice if it went away. If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

 

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another data center, that is maintained by another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

 

I am not deaf to the criticisms of the architects of our present artificial intelligence boom, many of whom have inexplicably decided to sell their product by telling people that it will put them out of work or perhaps even kill them. But I cannot accept the argument that America’s many data centers have been built despite the public rather than because of it. Whether they wish to admit it or not, Americans love the internet. They have filled “the cloud” with baby pictures, wedding videos, group chats, school assignments, tax returns, saved games, and emails stretching back 20 years. They expect their entire photo library to survive a lost phone, their documents to appear on whichever computer they happen to be using, and the 107 videos of their child’s first steps to remain available indefinitely.

 

In aggregate, the scale of data storage may be vast, but the items that make it up are invariably personal. The retention of this information has required an extraordinary amount of physical infrastructure, and there is no good reason to expect that AI will be any different. Pew reports that half of American adults have used AI, and that a quarter — that’s 65 million people — use AI every day. In computing jargon, this translates into antiseptic terms: “exabytes,” “teraflops,” “megawatts,” and the like. But that’s a distraction from what matters — which is that when someone types “How do I fix my dishwasher?” into his iPhone, he expects to receive an answer.

‘Just Say It’s a Genocide’

By Noah Rothman

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not even bother to disguise her wholly justified irritation with the far-left agitators who, in the spring of 2024, chased her and her then-fiancé around a Brooklyn movie theater in pursuit of a shibboleth.

 

“Just say it’s a genocide,” one of her pursuers demanded. “Just say it. Just say the word. That’s all we want.”

 

AOC’s harasser deserves points for honesty, at least. At the time, amid the fog of war and with so many global institutional interests invested in portraying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal, the activist class was as inclined toward intimidation and violence as it was to persuasion. The movement’s members sincerely believed that they had the evidence on their side. After all, everyone worth listening to insisted that they were right.

 

But the campaign to delegitimize Israel predated the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, and it continues today — almost one year after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza concluded in an ambiguous cease-fire. Still, the charge of “genocide” persists, but it does so in the absence of either the fog or the evidence. Today, we know that the so-called famine that was said to prevail in Gaza has been replaced with a minor outbreak of childhood obesity, and the Gazan population (according to even the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry) experienced more growth than almost any other country in 2025.

 

Either Israel is executing the most incompetent genocide in history, or the allegation is and always was unsubstantiated.

 

With contrary evidence mounting, the activist class has placed a peculiar emphasis on just saying the word “genocide.” Indeed, they do so with an urgency that suggests they sense a closing window of opportunity.

 

Maine’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Troy Jackson, recently apologized for telling an interviewer that “It’s unfortunate that there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term [“genocide”] only because they’re Jewish.” But as Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Jackson has been hounded by the activist class to say the word “genocide” as often as possible, despite having long ago checked that box. “Pass the ‘genocide’ litmus test, and you might be forced to re-take it, again and again,” he wrote.

 

In his bid to replace retiring Representative Nancy Pelosi, California State Senator Scott Wiener failed that litmus test earlier this year during a debate when he failed to hold up a sign affirming his support for describing Israel’s actions as genocidal. “Shame,” the crowd chanted. The abuse that followed seemed to teach Wiener a lesson. “Days later — under fire from progressives — Wiener released a video,” KQED reported. “He acknowledged that genocide has occurred.”

 

Michigan Representative Haley Stevens was similarly abused by an irate activist who sought only a declaration of fealty to his preferred myth. Stevens admirably brushed off his hectoring even as she was bombarded with fabrication after fabrication, including the still-unretracted claim published by the New York Times in which it was alleged that Israel had trained dogs to perform sodomy on prisoners.

 

The activists’ demands carry imperative weight. It’s as if they feel they must force as many people as possible to commit themselves, rhetorically at least, to the notion that a genocide didn’t just happen but is ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

 

The hectoring activist class regards mouthing “genocide” as table stakes, and every Democrat must ante up if they are to be taken seriously in progressive politics. In this way, they force their representatives to make a reputational investment in the existence of a genocide that they cannot take back lest they admit they lied or were muscled into promulgating a lie.

 

In this, however, we see the activist strong-arming campaign not as strength but as weakness and insecurity. The evidence for their outlook is elusive while the evidence against it is plain to see. There’s precious little time left to maximize the political effect of the hysteria that accompanied Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre, and the anti-Israel crowd seems to know it.

Howard Zinn and the Failures of the Left

By Jeremy Black

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by Dave Zirin (Dutton, 320 pp., $33)

 

This biography, an apotheosis of Howard Zinn, begins with the words, “What would Howard say?” Apparently, for each major social or political event, people want to hear “the analysis of an activist-historian.” And that is what we are offered: sage as saint, plus Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, as amanuensis and guardian of the Sacred Flame.

 

There are various ways to write about historians. For example, David Hayton’s portrait of the British historian Lewis Namier (who, rather unlike Zinn, was outside of the establishment), offers possibly the best combination of personal and intellectual biography; it addresses contexts and contingencies, the play of professional connection and the role of patronage. Hence Hayton does a good job of explaining the political reasons why Namier did not get an academic post for so very long.

 

And then there is Zirin. All he can say about Zinn’s academic career is, “Given what we know about the complicity of ‘the Academy’ with the FBI, the Red Scare may have scared away his teaching prospects.” Zirin’s subject is a hero. The author is fired up not only by his perception of the past (he did not meet Zinn until the mid-1990s) but also his urgent concern about the present, directed at “Trump and his cabinet of reality-show contestants, pro-wrestling executives, and fascist-fanfic authors.” These villains, Zirin says, “lock away the works of Zinn not because they loathe the historian but because they fear the history.”

 

In a scene-setting introduction, Zirin uses the tired concept of false consciousness to explain why the Black Lives Matter protests were followed, a few years later, by 77 million voters’ choosing to reelect President Donald Trump. The book’s prospectus promises engagement but not necessarily debate or nuance. In other words, exactly what might be anticipated of a work about Zinn:

 

Think of this book as ‘A People’s History of Howard Zinn’: it’s a story about the small acts and grand struggles of the twentieth century that shaped him and the ways he shaped those struggles as well. A closer look at his life also provides insight into how to tough it out during the worst of times and why we can never let the bastards steal our hope.

 

And so we start, in “a jungle of terrible odors” where Zinn was born, Brooklyn in 1922. The author’s emphasis is on the city’s poverty even though, especially at that time, it was far better to be a Jew born in New York than in Eastern Europe. Having worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and enlisted as a bombardier during World War II, Zinn returns home and becomes part of a radical milieu that, Zirin argues, resisted paranoia: “Because Western powers no longer needed the Red Army to fight the Nazis on the Eastern Front, the USSR was quickly branded an existential, godless enemy.” Tell that to the Poles. Besides, as Zirin has to note, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s perception of domestic radicals was widely shared in America.

 

It is not only Hoover who is criticized but also “anti-communist liberals.” Zinn in 1948 backs the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, candidate of the Progressive Party, against Harry Truman. He gets a post at Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. There, “intersectionality” (avant la lettre) and “Black feminist activism” play out, with Zinn as an active participant opposed to the “paternalism” that does not accept his views. He is dismissed in 1963. In 1964, he joins Boston University. Old academic quarrels rarely retain their relevance or interest, but Zinn’s clash with Boston University’s president and later chancellor, John Silber — a conservative Democrat critical of many left-wing nostrums — provides Zirin with an opportunity to employ his subtlety to go after Donald Trump. He writes, of Silber: “The ego on display was truly and even impressively ahead of its time. The man was born fifty years too soon. And just as with a certain modern, far more powerful, far less well-read individual, the students knew how to hit him where it hurt.”

 

The book makes much of Zinn’s involvement in the “Black Freedom Struggle,” with an emphasis on his support for “modes of leadership that didn’t come from the top down, but from the bottom up.” The rest of the 1960s find Zinn occupied with civil rights and the movement against the Vietnam War. Zirin sees “anti-liberalism” as the common theme that linked the supporters of the war with those who opposed civil rights: a somewhat warped presentation. That leads him to a hilarious question: “Why wasn’t the entire country in the streets?” He also continuously snipes at others who might share Zinn’s limelight: RAND Corporation whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, for example, is “a smooth talker” who enjoys fame and is always willing “to go to the press with bravado.” Alan Dershowitz is “the future publicity-addicted defense attorney, now disgraced for his association with notorious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.” Judgment is absent and histrionic language is spread thick. Meanwhile, Zinn’s intellectual influence is exaggerated.

 

Given the great noise that Zinn made relative to his little insight and nuance, it might be asked why one should bother with a new biography of the man. The fact is that Zinn would make a worthwhile topic for a good book: one primarily about the misleading character of so much historical “analysis” (e.g., as Zirin mentions, “When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Zinn attempted to theorise the traumatic event by speaking about it in the context of President Johnson’s war agenda”), the divisions and failures of the left, and the successes of capitalism — not least in the sales of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zirin is incapable of such analysis and does not appear to understand the questions.

 

The biographer’s focus is the notion of “this land’s five-hundred-year ongoing fight between progress and reaction.” So much for other historical themes. So much for urbanization, economic growth, and religion: the latter conspicuous for its neglect by both Zinn and Zirin, and a subject handled far better by Philip Jenkins in A History of the United States. Indeed, in terms of works that are far better than Zinn’s, Walter A. McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy, complemented by his Promised Land, Crusader State, deserve close attention.

 

Zinn was, of course, a polemical political scientist rather than a historian; a master at leaving out of his scholarship what did not really suit his purposes. He was no Fernand Braudel in his scope and interests but a shouter, one without particular insight or originality. Read A People’s History, if you must, but do not bother with Zirin. He does not illuminate his subject’s problems and deficiencies. He magnifies them many times over.

Don’t Be Like China

By Judson Berger

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

You might not have heard of the case of Guo Degang. He’s a popular comedian in China who recently was investigated for the offense of modifying the lyrics to a Chinese revolutionary song in, of all places, Wuhan. Reportedly, he changed the line, “The sun is about to set in the west; all is quiet on Weishan Lake,” by swapping the lake for “the Forbidden City.” You had to be there, I suppose. For this lyrical tweak, “he was reported to [Wuhan’s] culture and tourism bureau,” according to the New York Times, and fines followed.

 

Now, before you say, “but Jimmy Kimmel” — if only Kimmel could have been so subtle. Yet the Guo episode is one of many reminders lately that the China model is nothing to emulate.

 

For the record, the FCC’s Kimmel fit was “preposterous,” as we’ve editorialized, and the court system is taking up that fight. And that is a crucial detail, the independent judiciary. Ask Jimmy Lai. Jianli Yang, writing on Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, cites a more recent administration fight with the media to point up and appreciate our differences in that regard:

 

Here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.

 

The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.

 

Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.

 

Jianli goes on to argue that, in the emerging AI debate, America must hold onto its values and not adopt, for instance, “China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management” in pursuit of technological goals.

 

Yet Beijing’s command of economy and society continues to hold a certain allure among Western policymakers and provocateurs alike: whether seen in the New Right’s pursuit of an industrial policy of our own or the far left’s fandom toward (in the words of one noxious host) “Chinese-style Communism” and “Cultural Revolution sh**” or, going farther back, the media’s early praise for China’s Covid response.

 

Thérèse Shaheen, addressing other misconceptions, explains that the country is not doing nearly as well economically as is often portrayed. She writes,

 

The Chinese Communist Party has been working overtime to present China as an unstoppable economic and technological power. Artificial intelligence has become particularly useful to this narrative. China’s advances in AI are real. So are its accomplishments in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, drones, solar panels, and advanced manufacturing. But the Trump administration, along with other Western governments, much of the business world, and many economic and political analysts confuse the technologically sophisticated portions of the Chinese economy with the Chinese economy itself. China remains a mostly poor, mostly uneducated, aging society riven with internal inconsistencies. Only a sliver of its population is involved in the tech sectors that have the world so mesmerized.

 

Despite Trump’s praise for Xi as a “great leader” and his touting of their “fantastic relationship,” Jim Geraghty also lists the myriad ways China and its entities have tried to (almost literally) blow up that relationship: sending components to Iran that can be used in drones and missile guidance systems, providing satellite images to Iran of a U.S. base in Jordan before a fatal attack over the summer, allegedly conducting a cyber-espionage campaign that compromised federal agencies, and so on.

 

But most important, the personal liberties we take for granted remain unrealized in China, certainly by comparison. Guy Denton published a startling profile this week on a member of the long-persecuted Uyghur minority. Read it:

 

When Mihrigul Tursun arrived in the United States, nothing around her made sense.

 

The food, clothes, and buildings that permeated her new life were unfamiliar and disorienting. Insomnia and anxiety haunted her. When she managed to sleep, she was plagued by nightmares of what she’d escaped. In moments of distress, she would withdraw to the bathroom to scream and weep in privacy, running the shower and playing loud music to conceal the noise from her young children.

 

Slowly, however, she adjusted. And while the trauma of her past life will never fully disappear, America has come to feel like home. “I am safe here,” she told National Review in a telephone interview. “Nobody can hurt me.”

 

Tursun, a Uyghur Muslim, fled China to escape the government’s relentless campaign of religious persecution. Her arrival in America came only after years of abuse in China’s vast network of Uyghur internment camps. And her story is emblematic of a broader crisis unfolding in China that the Western world seems reluctant to address. The Chinese Communist Party does not simply wish to exterminate the Uyghurs — it seeks to purge China of all forms of religious faith.

 

As Guy reports, Tursun was detained in a Xinjiang camp several times, held once “in a roughly 45-square-foot cell with more than 60 other women,” conditions that led to several deaths: “The prisoners were frequently tortured. Tursun was once strapped to a chair and electrocuted. Others, she learned, were forcibly sterilized. Before she left China, Tursun was injected with a mysterious substance. She fears that it may eventually kill her.”

 

By all means, Hasan Piker, keep ranting about the model of Chinese-style imprisonment.

As the Hamas Narrative Disintegrates, Can Its Devotees Rejoin Reality?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

The following sentence in the Telegraph contains an absolutely gobsmacking statistic:

 

“The BBC has reported the deaths of 53 ‘journalists’ in Gaza who have been claimed as terrorists by Hamas and other groups.”

 

Fifty-three. That’s out of (in the BBC’s case) somewhere just north of 180.

 

And counting, by the way. That 53 number is more likely to go up than down.

 

I’ve written about this particular problem before, but the Telegraph’s reporting has implications beyond just the obvious.

 

The fact that every facet of the “genocide” accusation against Israel has fallen apart, along with the disintegration of numerous other false claims, raises a serious concern. The debunking of the claims of genocide, deliberate starvation/famine, mass targeting of journalists, and others, plus the near-halving of the number of war dead that can be reasonably attributed to Israel, means that the war that happened was entirely different from the war that much of the media-consuming population thought happened.

 

Therefore the test put before the public is the following: Can these folks admit they were wrong about their whole impression of the war and acknowledge that they were fooled—willingly or unwillingly—by a global propaganda scheme on a scale we’ve probably never seen before?

 

This question is especially relevant in democracies. A self-governing people must inhabit a shared reality. The villainous portrayal of Israel during the war was exactly backwards. Can these folks join the rest of us here, where the truth lives?

 

Over the weekend, I read Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Exit Party. Ever since her novel Station Eleven, which was about a global pandemic, Mandel has been obsessed with alternate paths and realities. Exit Party tackles the idea of dimension-hopping, and there is a moment when we meet a character who has just arrived from an alternate version of the same physical location, and he has to get briefed on what life is like in this timeline.

 

That’s how I feel about everyone who bought into the post-October 7 anti-Israel narrative.

 

First of all, welcome. Acclimating to reality will be disorienting, but it is essential that the totalitarian ideology of the Western Hamasnik cult be punctured by the truth.

 

Stalinism is probably the closest relative this toxic ideology has. Stalinism was a way of speaking that eventually became, for all too many, a way of thinking.

 

When the supposed genocide “consensus” was found to be a mirage, Israel-haters only clamped down further on dissent. It was shocking to witness just how important it was to these people that the word “genocide” be used. But it wasn’t hard to figure out why the specific use of that word had suddenly become all that mattered. “Genocide” was a way of ending conversations before they started. You might object to the extremism of someone’s political tactics, to which they would respond well if you won’t make exceptions for GENOCIDE then your norms are worthless. The point of saying “genocide” was twofold: First, it allowed you to say and do whatever you wanted to the “Zionists” in your life. Second, it stopped you from having to defend your worldview.

 

If you replaced the word “genocide” with what actually took place in Israel-Gaza, which was “a war,” you would have to discuss and debate the complexities of that war. Since the “pro-Palestinian” movement in the West’s preferred victim was the one who started the war, that would get uncomfortable real quick.

 

The obsessive, Stalinist insistence on using only the word “genocide” was to prevent as many people as possible from understanding what actually happened.

 

But the truth broke through anyway. It’s there, it’s easily accessible, and even the purveyors of the Big Lie are finding it difficult to avoid. So the BBC doesn’t refute the claims made against it, but rather meekly insists its reporting was “based on the information available at the time it was published.” The UN’s affiliated food agencies post statistic-rich reports in which the lack of starvation in Gaza is made clear and unambiguous. And so forth.

 

Reality is steadily intruding in such ways. How, and to what extent, the adherents of the anti-Israel propaganda cult can welcome its arrival will tell us whether we all can in fact inhabit reality together.

The Cornell Seven Case and the Perils of Sexual Liberation

By Caroline Downey

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

The frat bros involved in the pending Cornell University sex abuse case are dirtbags — and many other epithets that I cannot use here. Let’s just get that out of the way. They are not necessarily criminals, however, even though the internet has condemned them as such in a knee-jerk reaction to the gross details that emerged this week.

 

On the night of October 19, 2024, and into the wee hours of the morning, seven male students engaged with one female student in an orgy, while all were evidently heavily inebriated and high on drugs. Two years after the woman signed off on an official statement, sent to the local New York district attorney, testifying that the debauchery that transpired was consensual, she has filed a complaint alleging rape.

 

Her original statement gave the prosecutor no reason to escalate, as she did not present evidence to him of criminal wrongdoing. But the mere fact that Jane Doe launched a new lawsuit, in which she significantly changed her story, sparked a firestorm. Much of social media, pivoting from the rabid defense of self-professed child-murderer Lindsay Clancy, is saying these men are felons. People on Instagram and X are lambasting the school for giving the men a slap on the wrist by allowing them to write an apology essay as disciplinary action when they really deserved life in prison. Case closed.

 

Unfortunately for the online mob, that’s not how due process works.

 

As my colleague Dan McLaughlin points out, for it to be first-degree rape under New York law, the victim had to have been physically forced into the sexual act or unconscious or unable to communicate as it was happening. Doe’s original statement does not say that.

 

For it to be second-degree rape, the victim had to be mentally incapacitated. For someone to be deemed mentally incapacitated, New York law says they had to be drugged without their consent. But Doe voluntarily consumed the ketamine, alcohol, and marijuana on the night of the incident, even snorting a substance off one of the guy’s sexual appendages, according to her own statement.

 

For it to be third-degree rape, the victim must state that they do not consent. According to the DA’s review of Jane Doe’s original statement, she said both yes and no to various sexual acts throughout the night. She verbally said yes to two group-sex overtures, no to another, and the men at each point obliged.

 

So, according to the legal standard of consent in New York State which we just outlined, Doe was capable of consent and both exercised and withdrew consent during the multi-hour stretch.

 

None of this morally excuses the men’s conduct, which is reprehensible. The screenshot of the fraternity’s group chat in which one of the defendants advertised “free p****” and another later asked, “shop still open?” makes one lose a lot of faith in how young men are being raised and behave. All the students there, both Doe and the men, were intoxicated and on substances, so it’s safe to say all their judgments were impaired.

 

They didn’t respect her dignity, and they didn’t respect their own, quite frankly. Still, no man in a drunken state should see a girl in her drunken state and think it’s a good idea to participate in a sex marathon alongside other drunken dudes that, let’s be real, is uniquely degrading to her.

 

The accused men, regardless of a verdict or settlement, will face the consequences of their decisions in the job market, in the dating pool, and beyond. If you lose your livelihood because proof that you are a scumbag was telegraphed to the public, that’s the price you pay. But prosecuting and convicting someone of rape means something entirely different — it means depriving them of their constitutional liberty. So, the court better be sure that rape is clearly what occurred.

 

We’re told that under modern feminism the sexes are totally equal, as are all the many sexual lifestyles. Anything goes in the sexual arena, with the one caveat being “consent.” Doe said in her original statement that she gave that consent at each step of the way. Yet, many on social media are still upset by what happened.

 

Perhaps that’s because, deep down, they know that just because it may have been consensual doesn’t mean it wasn’t messed up. Adult entertainment star Bonnie Blue had sex with over 1,000 men in twelve hours for some twisted challenge that ultimately earned her a ton of money, at the expense of her soul. It was consensual. Still, should so many guys have lined up to take her up on the offer? Should she have made this offer in the first place? No. Even the most fervent of feminists could not deny there was something sinister about it.

 

The drama at Cornell lays bare the perils and false promises of sexual liberation. It opened Pandora’s box, from which sprang hookup culture on college campuses, OnlyFans, and rampant pornography, which no doubt influenced the seven men’s behavior that October night. With consent as its only moderating principle, the sex-positivity movement invited a world of depravity with blurred lines and infinite regret.

 

While the Cornell case has not resulted in anything resembling criminality yet, one thing is for sure: This is radical feminism’s chickens coming home to roost.

The Mob Never Learns

By Justin Dillon & KC Johnson

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

The mob has now come for Cornell. And this time, it even has a superhero.

 

Last week, a female Cornell student claiming to have been gang-raped by members of the Chi Phi fraternity almost two years ago sued Cornell, Chi Phi, various Cornell administrators, and — by name — the seven Cornell students who were allegedly involved in the rape. The case quickly went viral, and the reactions have broken down along predictably partisan lines — with everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Hollywood actress Florence Pugh (who plays the Black Widow–esque Yelena Belova in the Marvel Universe) weighing in, and most people immediately assuming guilt.

 

The lawsuit was filed by a plaintiffs’ firm that has previously sued Harvey Weinstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs.  There is much in it that should raise some eyebrows — but not necessarily for the reasons the plaintiff wants.

 

Here’s what we know: In 2024, almost three weeks after the incident, Jane Doe filed a report with the Cornell University police. According to the local district attorney, who would later decline to file charges in the case, what she said then is not what she’s saying now:

 

Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual. My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later. Furthermore, I have never been contacted by Jane Doe’s attorneys. Not to inform me the original statement was inaccurate and not to ask me to reconsider our decision. Rather, I reached out to Jane Doe’s attorneys after the lawsuit was filed to understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit’s allegations and the proper path forward in light of the lawsuit’s allegations.

 

District attorneys almost never release statements like this — much less include, as he did, a lengthy excerpt from a statement Jane Doe gave his office two years ago.

 

It’s unclear whether Cornell had access to the DA’s legal analysis that the conduct, as alleged, did not constitute sex without consent when the university went forward with its own Title IX investigation. (While a Title IX process uses a lower standard of proof than does a criminal trial, the underlying factual question — did Doe’s allegation, if true, constitute a sexual assault — was the same in both matters.) Subsequent statements from both Doe’s attorney and Cornell indicated that the university’s investigation found all seven of the male students responsible for at least some form of misconduct. Two of them were expelled, and the other five appear to have received suspensions or some other form of punishment.

 

We don’t know why Cornell expelled only two of the students, because no one has (yet) leaked the investigation report in the case. Doe’s lawyers could have included the report as an exhibit to their complaint but chose not to do so. They also failed to mention texts showing that the accuser told one of the young men just two days after the incident that “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” And we also don’t know if Cornell was aware of those texts, which most reasonable people would consider highly exculpatory.

 

We do know, however, that Cornell is almost the last school in the country that would bend over backwards to help a male respondent beat a Title IX charge: It is in the top five of universities nationwide that have faced lawsuits by male respondents who claim their cases were handled unfairly. There is simply no reason to believe that in a case involving allegations of a gang rape by fraternity members, Cornell suddenly decided to favor respondents.

 

Yet the plaintiff has sued Cornell and the seven accused students, almost two years after the fact. Why the wait? The answer is almost certainly the vulgar screenshotted text that was pasted into the complaint, which the New York Post reported was leaked much later by someone in the group chat. That text doesn’t shed light either way on whether or not the plaintiff consented or whether she was too drunk to consent. But it does indicate — as the DA later noted — that “the behavior of certain Chi Phi fraternity members was without question disgusting and morally reprehensible.” Her skilled attorneys clearly understood its PR value — and they were right.

 

For years, accusers’-rights lawyers have been trying to convince courts to make a positively dystopian legal ruling: that refusing to find a respondent guilty and expel him can — standing alone — violate Title IX. So far, they have failed — in the Sixth Circuit against Michigan State, in a district court decision involving the University of Nebraska that the Eighth Circuit declined to immediately review, and most recently in the Seventh Circuit against the University of Wisconsin.

 

That may be why the plaintiff here filed not in federal court — which has been uniformly hostile to some of the claims she brings here — but in state court. (And oddly, in Manhattan — even though Cornell is located in Ithaca, N.Y., more than 200 miles away.)

 

Other strategic choices she made raise similar questions.

 

For one, the complaint is littered with inflammatory or misleading statements. The plaintiff claims not to know whether the Title IX process against the accused students has been completed — even though, under federal law, Cornell had to tell her that, and one of her lawyers has admitted that the process ended with two expulsions. She insinuates that some of the punished students only had to write a reflection paper, which is almost certainly untrue and likely referred to reflection papers that are submitted as part of a typical sanctioning process. And she took the highly unusual step of identifying the accused students by name, knowing full well that doing so would set a mob upon them.

 

Indeed, the mob responded as expected. The Cornell student newspaper threw any semblance of objectivity to the side and authored a grotesque house editorial that literally began by listing all the male students’ names. The editorial added that “if Cornell follows the law, then we should have access to a public deposition issued from the school.” But the Title IX process doesn’t involve sworn depositions, and in any event federal law requires that campus sexual assault hearings be closed to the public.

 

AOC, meanwhile, traveled to Ithaca to denounce Cornell’s “culture of rape,” shown by an incident in which “seven men drugged and gang-raped a 20-year-old woman.” (The New York City congresswoman did not indicate how she reached this factual conclusion.) She castigated Cornell for only expelling two of the male students, while making “the rest write essays as their form of punishment.” Even Doe’s lawyer hadn’t made such a claim, which Cornell publicly denied. And for good measure, AOC’s rally opened with the student sponsors leading the crowd in a chant for a free “Palestine,” “from the river to the sea.” (Because of course it did.)

 

All of this is happening as Democrats are poised to take over both houses of Congress — and possibly the White House in 2029 — and call for a return to Obama-era Title IX policy, when respondents had few due process rights and bias toward complainants was seen as a feature, not a bug. So voilà, we have an allegation that Cornell somehow swept a gang rape under the rug, even though the facts seem to suggest no such thing.

 

We have seen high-profile college gang-rape allegations before, and we don’t yet know how things will turn out. At one extreme were the Duke lacrosse case from 2006 and the 2014 UVA/Rolling Stone case, both utter hoaxes where no sexual contact of any type occurred. At the other extreme was a 2013 gang rape by several Vanderbilt football players that led to several criminal convictions and the two ringleaders’ receiving long terms in Tennessee prison.

 

At this point, the Cornell incident most resembles an allegation of gang rape against members of the 2016 University of Minnesota team. In that case, the school immediately suspended (and thus publicly identified) ten of the players right before a bowl game. Only later did it become clear that at least some of the players were wrongly accused — even if the general conduct of multiple players having sex with an intoxicated woman in their dorm room was, to borrow from the Cornell DA, “disgusting and morally reprehensible.” The university ultimately paid $500,000 to the female complainant — while arguing that at worst its Title IX policies were biased against all accused students, and not just accused men, to defend a lawsuit filed by the accused football players.

 

The point of due process is to sort the sheep from the goats, so that guilty people can be held responsible and the lives of innocent people will not be ruined. Allegations are not evidence, and mob justice is no more real justice than Florence Pugh is a real superhero.