A Dubious Quest for ‘Reparatory Justice’

By Ebenezer Obadare

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

From 1987 to 1990, an African millionaire set out on a personal mission advocating reparations to African countries as a form of Western atonement for the transatlantic slave trade. M.K.O. Abiola was a Nigerian businessman who traveled extensively in the United States and elsewhere to convince audiences of what he saw as a moral imperative to compensate Africa and its vast diaspora for the evils committed against them. His effort foundered, but it did serve as a valuable test run for the African reparations initiative that is now underway.

 

Abiola’s spirited transnational campaign culminated in two major high-level and widely publicized conferences on reparations, the first in Lagos (1990) and the second, billed as the “First Pan-African Conference on Reparations,” in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja (1993). These successes—along with Abiola’s relentlessness—caught the attention of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), an intergovernmental organization made up of 52 countries. The OAU went ahead and installed him as the chairman of a 12-member Group of Eminent Persons to “pursue reparations for slavery and (perhaps) other wrongs perpetrated on Africa.” This was the high-water mark of Abiola’s work. He died mysteriously in government custody in July 1998 after leading a campaign to reverse the military’s annulment of his legitimate election to the Nigerian presidency in 1993. Lacking Abiola’s intensity and financial backing, the reparations campaign petered out.

 

Today, an elite group from Ghana has decided to pick up where the Nigerian philanthropist left off. Addressing the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 2023, then–Ghanaian President John Akufo-Addo agonized about what he called “the historical injustices that have fashioned the structures of the world,” including that “much of Europe and the United States” was built using “the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood, and horrors” accruing from the transatlantic slave trade and colonization. Akufo-Addo used this observation to make a case for “bring[ing] the subject of reparations firmly to the fore,” even though he acknowledged that “no amount of money will ever make up for the horrors.”

 

Akufo-Addo’s successor, John Dramani Mahama (this is his second presidency; he previously served from 2012 to 2017), has shown similar gusto in his pursuit of reparations for Africa and its diaspora. With support from the African Union (the successor organization to the OAU) and some Caribbean nations, Mahama spearheaded a March 2026 United Nations General Assembly resolution “dedicated exclusively to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.” Citing “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity,” the resolution noted that “in various historical contexts, reparations and other forms of redress have been provided in respect of other grave crimes committed against particular groups, reflecting the principle under international law that international wrongful acts entail a duty of reparation.” The resolution called on member states to “engage in inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology, measures of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition and changes to laws, programs and services to address racism and systemic discrimination.” It passed with 123 votes in favor, although the United States, Israel, and 52 other countries—including European Union members and Britain—either opposed or ​abstained.

 

Britain’s abstention is interesting when you consider that, back in 1993, 63 members of the UK Parliament had supported a motion that “welcomed” the Abuja Proclamation issued that year. Along with others, Britain had also called on “the international community to recognize that the unprecedented moral debt owed to African people has yet to be paid” and pledged support to the OAU “as it intensifies its efforts to pursue the cause of reparations.”

 

In any case, President Mahama followed up the March resolution with a high-level consultative conference on “the next steps.” Held in Accra in June, the event was attended by heads of state from Namibia, Liberia, Senegal, Barbados, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It ended with “a 19-point global framework” that demands “full, formal and unconditional apologies” from “states and non-state institutions” that played a “role in the trafficking of enslaved Africans and African Descendants and the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans.” Attendees also “resolved to ensure fair and adequate compensation for the people of Africa and People of African Descent, including those affected by the legacies of enslavement, colonialism genocide [sic] and apartheid.”

 

Before we consider the merits of the case for “reparatory justice,” it is important to understand why Ghana is leading the contemporary campaign. In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain formal independence, and it has always seen itself as a “beacon” for the complete liberation and unification of Africa. Its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, set this conviction in stone with his statement that Ghana’s independence “is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.” If, for Nkrumah, Ghana’s independence meant nothing without freedom for all of Africa, similarly, African independence meant little unless understood as an aspect of liberation for black people everywhere, especially in the United States. That’s where Nkrumah, who had attended the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1940s, had gotten a taste of what life was like for the average Negro of that era.

 

There was an ideological affinity between Nkrumah and major African-American civil rights figures of his time. This is evidenced by the fact that Ghana’s historic independence celebration in 1957 was attended by Martin Luther King Jr. This came after Louis Armstrong had visited the soon-to-be-free country and met with Nkrumah in May 1956. W.E.B. Du Bois first visited in 1960 before relocating there permanently the following year at the age of 93. Malcolm X visited in 1964, where he encountered another relocated American, Maya Angelou, and spoke to the Ghanaian Parliament. Subsequently, generations of civil rights activists and political malcontents of various stripes have embraced the country as a kind of political home-cum–spiritual retreat.

 

Because there is arguably nothing dearer to a Ghanaian leader’s heart than being viewed as extending the legacy of Nkrumah, successive Ghanaian leaders have continued to toe the line, touting the country as the birthplace of Africans in the diaspora. There was President John Kufuor’s 2001 “right of abode” law allowing Africans in the diaspora to settle in Ghana; the Joseph Project, launched on the occasion of the country’s 50th anniversary, in 2007; and the declaration of 2019 as the “Year of Return” to mark “400 years of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia.” All of these were intended to advance the idea of Ghana as the spiritual motherland of a putative “Global African Family.”

 

One indication of the success of this outreach is that, since 2014, more than 1,000 Americans and Afro-Caribbeans have obtained Ghanaian citizenship—Stevie Wonder became a Ghanaian citizen on his 74th birthday, in 2024—joining an estimated 5,000 African Americans who currently call the country home. Ghana has also opened its doors to third-country deportees from the United States on condition that they are citizens of other West African countries.

 

All things considered, Ghana’s leadership of the reparations campaign is an extension of its heritage diplomacy.

 

***

 

Nonetheless, neither the goodness of its advocates’ intentions and their seemingly illustrious pedigree, nor the favorability of the international political environment suffices to alter the basic fact that the demand for “reparatory justice” is both intellectually implausible and morally dubious. The Accra “global framework for reparatory justice” portrays “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity” in “its unparalleled scale, duration, systemic brutality, and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property, and capital.”

 

The kernel of this claim is that Africa deserves reparations because of (a) the unprecedented nature of the transatlantic slave trade, and (b) the fact that, even today, its consequences continue to reverberate, mainly through the operations of capital, which is what the reference to “racialized regimes of labour, property, and capital” is meant to capture. From this perspective, not only is capitalism the contemporary version of “chattel enslavement,” hence continuous with it morally and materially, but “reparatory justice” for Africans is impossible unless capital, “racialized” or not, is totally abolished.

 

While the elemental inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade goes without saying, and while the Accra document is right to underscore it, the point remains that the framework gets nearly every other thing about it—especially its fundamental character—wrong. Take the charge of the trafficking and enslavement of Africans being “the gravest crime against humanity.” History being “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,” as Gibbon puts it, it is necessarily replete with victims and perpetrators. Accordingly, every victimized group in a specific historic context could reasonably conceive of itself as being on the receiving end of “the gravest crime against humanity.” My point is not to deny that enslavement was hideous; rather, I am arguing that a crime (against Africans or any group of people for that matter) need not be “the gravest” before it arouses our moral revulsion. If everything hinges on a particular crime being “the gravest,” and given that there is no objective criterion to measure such, the argument is lost and the moral high ground surrendered the moment some other victim of a historical injustice comes forward to advance a similar plea.

 

While it is not a straightforward matter whether the transatlantic slave trade was “the gravest crime against humanity,” surely it was a crime. It was a crime and a monumental tragedy from the perspective of tens of millions of black human lives that were sacrificed on the twin altars of greed and human stupidity. That said—and this is a crucial point—there is scant historical support for the tacit assumption that it was an organized and systematic assault against hapless Africans who, but for lack of military wherewithal, would have risen up against and repelled their enslavers. The historical evidence is more sobering. As John Thornton wrote in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (1998): “African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves.” This conclusion is not controversial among serious historians of the transatlantic slave trade. It also helps explain the historical absurdity of those newfangled European abolitionists who, as it were, had suddenly started seeing the trade through a different moral lens and began struggling to convince African traffickers, until a minute ago their trading partners, of the wrongfulness of the enterprise.

 

If European abolitionists did not become saints overnight, African chiefs who insisted on business as usual were hardly Satanic. They were instead agents following a brutal social logic: So integral was enslavement to the internal workings and moral order of most African communities in that period that it is difficult to conceive of their functioning without it. Historically, a pre-colonial African kingdom that did not extract slaves from a vanquished vassal was as rare as one that did not regularly engage in slave raids. In the 1840s, Gezo, king of the West African state of Dahomey, told the importuning British, “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.… The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.” In this, he echoed a sentiment that was not uncommon for the time.

 

Indeed, not only was trade in human beings par for the course, many believed that it was God’s will. After Britain declared all slave trading illegal in 1807, the King of Bonny (now part of Nigeria) doubled down in a tone not all that different from that of King Gezo: “We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.” Nigerian historian P.A. Igbafe observed about the pre-colonial Benin Kingdom that the institution of slavery was “one of its main props.” This could well have been said about every single pre-colonial African kingdom. The Asante Empire, with its capital in Kumasi—located in present-day Ghana—was a slave-owning one.

 

Rather than a “definitive break in world history,” therefore, the transatlantic slave trade was coextensive with it. That it was egregious in its brutality is without question, but it was a trade involving two sides and, crucially, seems to have unfolded within a moral and social calculus in which you were either traded or trader. It is one thing to recognize its sheer ugliness and another thing entirely to misrepresent it, which the campaigners for reparatory justice flagrantly do.

 

The transatlantic slave trade, moreover, is just one of three momentous episodes of human trafficking in African history, the other two being the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. Consider this: The transatlantic slave trade lasted roughly 400 years. The trans-Saharan lasted for 1,300 years, and it preceded, overlapped with, and continued long after the transatlantic slave trade had ceased. Focusing solely on the transatlantic trade leads one to think that those behind the ongoing campaign are less interested in historical accuracy and more interested in exploiting the supposed “lingering trauma” of the transatlantic slave trade for purposes of political flagellation.

 

***

 

Following the March UN General Assembly resolution, analysts were quick to point out that, although the resolution was adopted by a majority, the United States, Israel, and 52 other countries either opposed or ​abstained. But the stance of these dissenting countries is less significant than the fact that Arab countries overwhelmingly endorsed the resolution. Several, including Qatar, were among the resolution’s 58 co-sponsors.

 

The naked hypocrisy of Arab countries passing judgment on a matter on which they should be standing trial is duly noted, but it raises another matter: Why did the countries that voted in support of the resolution do so? My intuition is that many simply wanted to avoid unnecessary controversy. After all, why vote no when you can blend with the furniture by voting yes? If I am correct, it means that the broad support that the reparatory-justice campaign takes for granted may not be there. Perhaps the large number of those who are apparently on board with the resolution understand, deep down, that the campaign is heading nowhere. They therefore have nothing to lose and everything to gain from identifying with a cause that has the added advantage of being regarded as just.

 

Beyond questions of historical accuracy, the campaign betrays a staggering lack of imagination on the part of its proponents. While in recent decades conversations about Africa have been dominated by a need to take African agency more seriously, the advocacy for reparatory justice reveals a nagging moral extraversion whereby many African leaders continue to obsess about the role of the outside world in their affairs. Wittingly or not, the campaigners are sending a misleading signal that Africa cannot develop until it is reimbursed for an injury that Europeans once ganged up to inflict on it. This is the flip side of the abject idea that other regions of the world, Europe and North America especially, have succeeded at the expense of Africa and Africans. To say that this is the last attitude Africa needs is an understatement. The campaign is an exercise in futility that can only divert from the region’s real problems. In the meantime, it is allowing corrupt and ineffective leaders to disguise their incompetence behind the facade of “historical reckoning.”

Elite Formation Is Fueling the Socialist Project

By Raleigh Adams

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

The revolution will not be televised, perhaps, but it will most certainly have a really good résumé.

 

Contemporary American socialism is primarily embodied in the national cultural imagination by the Democratic Socialists of America, and its highly educated quality is often treated as evidence of hypocrisy: These revolutionaries attended such elite institutions as Bowdoin, Yale, Columbia, and so on. But the educational pedigree of the DSA’s leaders may reveal something more consequential. America has produced a large class of educated, ambitious young people whose credentials promise status and influence that the economy often fails to deliver, at least for them. The DSA offers frustrated young elites something enormous to build.

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin, a selective liberal arts college, with a degree in Africana studies in 2014. New York State Senator Jabari Brisport earned his undergraduate degree from New York University (NYU) and his graduate degree in fine arts from Yale. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended Boston University for international relations and economics.

 

The academic accolades of the DSA’s members extend to its younger ranks as well. Grace Ryan, infamously known as “Lulu Lenin,” graduated from NYU in 2025 before emerging as a recognizable DSA activist. Gustavo Gordillo, already a New York City DSA co-chair, earned an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree from Yale. A cultivated group of young people is rising through the ranks behind them. The DSA is actively advertising itself as a pipeline to political action for ambitious students by hosting workshops such as “How YDSA Can Run a Zohran on Your Campus.”

 

An obvious explanation for why young elites are flocking to the DSA is that socialism is “simply a game for rich young boys to play.” There is, of course, something inherently comedic about a collection of NYU, Yale, and Bowdoin graduates rallying for the proletariat. The charge of “champagne socialist” practically writes itself, and conservatives have been more than happy to make it. But hypocrisy, however amusing, does not explain the DSA’s political appeal.

 

In fact, these are young people who have been selected by elite institutions. They have been educated to think seriously about politics and society and encouraged to imagine themselves as capable of shaping both. Whether or not the economy has actually failed them, they have been conditioned to expect their lives to carry a certain degree of consequence.

 

In other words, the most interesting question at play is not why people with elite educations become socialists despite their privilege. It is what will happen when a society becomes extraordinarily good at producing educated, politically literate, and ambitious young people — and considerably less certain of what to do with all that ambition.

 

In his work, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, the social scientist Peter Turchin offers the metaphor of musical chairs to explain the overproduction of “aspiring elites.” Society has rapidly increased the number of credentialed young people — the players in musical chairs. But the amount of perceived elite positions and jobs — the chairs that can be claimed when the music stops — has not expanded proportionally. Thus, competition for status, prestige, influence, and desirable professional positions has intensified, and frustrated aspirants have become a source of political instability.

 

The signs of elite overproduction are not particularly difficult to spot. America produces an ever-growing number of people with college and graduate degrees, funneling them into brutally competitive fields such as academia, journalism, law, politics, the nonprofit sector, and the arts. But the number of positions offering genuine institutional authority remains relatively small. Many of those professions then concentrate their employees in extraordinarily expensive cities, where even respectable salaries increasingly struggle to deliver the homeownership, family formation, and material stability that they expected professional success to make possible. These people are hardly poor. Today’s graduates of elite universities can be objectively comfortable and nevertheless discover that the life of influence, status, and autonomy they expected is exceedingly difficult to obtain. The strange problem is that America has become very good at educating people to expect status, influence, and consequence while producing far fewer chairs for them to securely occupy.

 

But the musical chairs metaphor can only take us so far. A chair is ultimately a position to occupy, and elites often seek more than that. They want influence, distinction, and the opportunity to leave some mark on the institutions they enter. The problem, then, is not merely what happens when there are too few prestigious jobs for too many qualified people. It is what happens when a society produces an abundance of people who expect to matter but not enough opportunities for them to feel that they do.

 

Nearly two centuries before Turchin gave a sociological account of that problem, a young Abraham Lincoln approached it as an issue of political ambition. In his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Lincoln looked upon a generation that had been born just slightly too late. The great acts of the American founding had already been accomplished. Independence had been won, the Constitution written, and the republic established. Lincoln was left facing a generation of Americans who — unlike the Founders before them, who had been fortunate enough to find an object for their ambition in the creation of a republic — were faced with a different temptation: If there is nothing left to build, distinction may be found in tearing down what has been built.

 

Lincoln was under no illusion that the most ambitious of the men before him would be content simply to tend what their fathers had built. “Towering genius disdains a beaten path,” he warned. “It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.” Someone of such ambition sees little glory in “adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others.” He wants not merely to serve beneath a great man but to become one himself. He “thirsts and burns for distinction,” and he “will have it,” Lincoln warned, whether through “emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”

 

There is, then, a deeper American anthropology behind the DSA’s connection to college campuses. The movement has recognized something real about the young people our institutions produce. They want to exercise influence. They want their education to amount to more than a credential and their lives to be defined by more than professional advancement. Most of all, they want something consequential to do. In light of the Founding, these are deeply American impulses if harnessed and fostered well.

 

Socialism has an obvious advantage in satisfying that desire. It can offer the ambitious young person something that an old order always struggles to provide: the exhilaration of founding something new. The graduate entering finance can hope someday to become a portfolio manager; the young lawyer can hope to make partner; the political staffer can climb the ladder of an established party. These are perfectly respectable ambitions, but they are examples of what Lincoln described as “adding story to story” upon monuments erected by others. Those who pursue them will still recognize that they are standing on the shoulders of giants. The potential socialist is offered a grander project. Capitalism itself can be replaced. Existing institutions can be remade. The young activist need not merely inherit the world; she can participate in creating whatever comes next.

 

This does not mean that every wannabe Zohran Mamdani or Grace Ryan is secretly motivated by such a thirst for glory. Rather, radical movements have an enduring advantage in the competition for ambitious young people: They give them direction, people to organize alongside, responsibilities to take on, and the promise that their work is building toward something. The DSA seems to understand this. Its campus organizations do not merely hand students a reading list and hope that they vote correctly in November. They invite young people into a movement where their work is meant to culminate in something larger.

 

Conservatives should be considerably less amused by the glitzy résumés of socialists.

 

To steer ambitious young Americans away from this path, we cannot simply tell them that their expectations are excessive, that their degrees were foolish, or that they should be grateful to inherit institutions built by “better men.” Nor is it enough to offer a politics almost entirely in the language of preservation: of the Constitution, the family, the free market, Western civilization. Those aims are worthy and important and must remain at the core of conservatism, but preservation alone can be a difficult summons for the young person who is desperate to create.

 

Conservatives need to compete with the socialist left not merely for young people’s votes, but for their ambition. And they must follow Lincoln’s instruction by channeling that ambition toward a worthy object. That means offering a formative vision of political life in which young Americans can become authors rather than merely custodians: Give them institutions in which they can exercise real responsibility; communities they can help govern; and businesses, publications, schools, churches, and associations they can build.

 

The DSA’s rising generation is being told that history remains unfinished and that they can change the institutions around them. Conservatives can laugh at the Ivy League degrees and the revolutionary affectations of these privileged radicals. But when the joke is over, the DSA’s activists will remain ambitious.

 

The question for conservatives is not how to teach an ambitious generation to want less. It is how we can offer them something better to build than the DSA’s destructive and hoped-for creations.

Military Tech Cooperation With Israel Is Less Radical Than Critics Claim

By Ashley Dowdney

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

For nearly 20 years, the United States’ military aid to Israel has come in the form of foreign military financing. A provision in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act would deepen the military ties between the two countries at a time when many Americans are increasingly skeptical of the relationship and some members of Congress would prefer to cut aid ties entirely.

 

Section 219 of the legislation, known as the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, would shift the U.S.-Israel relationship from that of donor and aid recipient to a more collaborative system designed to expand and accelerate defense technology development and manufacturing between the two countries. It would establish an executive agent, an office that reports to the secretary of defense or his deputy, to identify areas of collaboration in the defense technology sector. The office would establish frameworks for co-producing certain technologies and for manufacturing partnerships with Israeli companies, according to the text of the bill. Once technologies are developed, the office would also coordinate joint training exercises to make sure that each country’s military is ready and trained to use the technology.

 

The legislation comes at a time when the current basis for aid to Israel, a 2016 memorandum of understanding, is set to expire in 2028, and support for the country among congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans has weakened. At the same time, a 2025 Pew Research poll found that 53 percent of U.S. adults held an unfavorable view of Israel; by April of this year that number had climbed to 60 percent.

 

Supporters of the legislation believe that it will help the United States rebuild its defense industrial base, but critics of Section 219 have framed the provision as a “merger” of the U.S. military with Israel that would constitute a “betrayal of our sovereignty.” In June, Reps. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, tried unsuccessfully to introduce an amendment to strip the provision from the NDAA. Khanna said in an X post that the legislation would integrate the militaries of the United States and Israel. Tucker Carlson used similar rhetoric in a July podcast episode, claiming the provision would “merge” the militaries of the two countries; the Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank that has been accused of antisemitism, used similar language in a June 2026 policy note. That’s a false representation of the legislation’s text, according to experts.

 

“This bill would be important, but still less impactful than either its U.S. supporters or critics claim. As with most everything else in American political debate nowadays, people will read into this bill whatever they want,” Jonathan Ruhe, the fellow for American strategy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told The Dispatch.

 

The NDAA, which authorizes each fiscal year’s appropriations for the Defense Department and establishes defense policy, passed the House on July 22 and still needs Senate approval. Senators have less than two weeks in session before the start of the 2027 fiscal year, but it isn’t unusual for the NDAA to gain passage after the start of the fiscal year.

 

Drones and air defense.

 

Since 2007, the United States and Israel have operated under memoranda of understanding, the latest of which gives Israel $3.3 billion in security assistance and $500 billion in cooperative missile defense programs each year through 2028. Nearly all that money is used to purchase American-made technologies.

 

Section 219 would not replace the MOU but would provide for joint research, investment, development, and integration of defense technologies by the two countries. Though Israel attempted to push forward negotiations for a new MOU in July, it’s uncertain whether a new MOU can be agreed upon during the current Congress. If implemented, Section 219 “will allow U.S.-Israeli defense cooperation to move from the U.S. handing American dollars for them to buy American weapons to the United States and Israel funding together technological programs that are relevant to both,” Nitzan David Fuchs, a national security strategist and senior researcher at Israel’s Argaman Institute, said in an interview with Jerusalem News Syndicate.

 

Just as Ukraine has developed expertise in drone warfare and counter-drone technologies, Israel knows more than the United States about missile defense, applying artificial intelligence, and other capabilities, Bradley Bowman, director of the Center for Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Dispatch. That knowledge, coupled with Israel’s proven ability to quickly bring a tech concept to battlefield capability, could benefit the United States. The partnership increases “the sophistication and capacity of the American defense industrial base,” Bowman said. “It is allowing us to benefit from Israeli technology, and it is helping deliver weapons and capabilities more quickly to U.S. service members.”

 

Some analysts believe the relationship between the two countries must capitalize on Israel’s experiential knowledge of a rapidly changing defense sector. The existing MOU was written for “a world of fax machines and F-16s. The next one has to be written for a world of frontier AI, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing,” a report on the proposed alliance from the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan organization studying the effects of emerging technologies on national security, noted. “Israel fills critical gaps with precision. … The result is a battle-tested ecosystem validated in adversarial conditions directly relevant to U.S. economic and national security priorities.”

 

“[Israelis] improve on so many of our defense capabilities because they’re always at the risk of an imminent war or in a war, and we just learn from each other,” Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, told The Dispatch.

 

Israel’s skill at turning technology concepts into battlefield capabilities has led more countries to turn to it for weapons, with the Israeli Defense Ministry reporting earlier this year that 2025 arms sales had increased 30 percent over the previous year.

 

“Israel is not an industrial superpower, but in some areas they are a technology superpower,” Bowman said. Israeli technologies like the Iron Beam, a directed-energy air defense system, are one example and could be an area for manufacturing collaboration with the United States, according to Ruhe. Countering drones with traditional air-defense systems is expensive and resource-intensive, but Iron Beam can theoretically eliminate an unlimited number of incoming drones, according to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the Israeli defense company behind the technology.

 

Section 219 is intended to facilitate faster development of such battlefield technologies. On average, the U.S. defense acquisition process takes 12 years to put a technology into the hands of a warfighter, according to a 2025 Government Accountability Office report. The report said such a time frame is “incompatible with meeting emerging threats” and often delivers “obsolete” programs.

 

“If [the United States] can’t go more quickly from concept requirement to field a combat capability, we are going to pay an even higher price for that, I fear, in a future conflict,” Bowman said.

 

Shifting political sentiment.

 

Some American lawmakers, mainly progressive Democrats and a few Republicans wary of the country’s close ties to Israel, are having second thoughts about continuing the relationship after the surge in anti-Israeli sentiment that followed Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack and the ensuing war in Gaza. Almost half of all House Democrats voted to end the $3.3 billion in foreign military financing to Israel in July, though the amendment, introduced by Massie, failed.

 

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, who voted to cancel foreign military financing to Israel, initially saw Section 219 as a way for the United States to benefit from Israeli technology, but changed his mind because of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and military actions in the West Bank and Lebanon. “There’s no end to it. This was not the appropriate way to strengthen our relationship with Israel if they are unwilling to change anything,” Smith told The Dispatch.

 

On September 3, 56 civil rights and advocacy groups, among them Amnesty International USA and the Quincy Institute, sent a letter to the House and Senate Armed Services committees that urged them to strike Section 219 from the NDAA. The letter states that “Israel’s grievous violations of U.S. and international law” and use of American weapons to do so should prevent the expansion of military cooperation between the United States and Israel.

 

Meanwhile, leading critics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship have made unfounded claims about the nature of Section 219. On Carlson’s podcast, former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich claimed the move would “integrate the U.S. and Israeli military” and was “a direct attack on American independence, a direct attack on American sovereignty.” Yet the bill’s text contains no language about ceding decisions on military operations to Israel and addresses only cooperation in the defense technology sector.

 

While Carlson’s claim in an accompanying Substack post is correct that the provision, should it be passed into law, would provide some level of institutional integration between the two countries’ militaries and survive “administrations, elections, and shifting public opinion by design,” Congress could dismantle the initiative. Since 2021, the transfer of Israel from U.S. Europe Command to Central Command has “deepened operational collaboration” between the military forces of the two countries—a move that allows Israel and Arab countries to better collaborate and counter Iranian aggression, according to a JINSA report at the time.  

 

Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, wrote that the legislation would shelter the current U.S-Israel relationship “from regular congressional votes and oversight,” but the text of the bill calls for the executive agent to provide a yearly report on its activities and recommendations to Congress. Additional oversight of the executive agent would come from the defense secretary and the deputy defense secretary, who could overrule the executive agent’s decisions, and Congress, which would control appropriations for the office.

 

“Neither the U.S., nor Israeli governments, nor defense companies in either country, want to give one another the types of control that this bill’s critics say it does,” Ruhe told The Dispatch. “Israelis’ sensitivities about such issues are innately high, and have only risen higher amid tussles with Biden and Trump over arms resupplies, Gaza, Lebanon, and a potential nuclear deal with Iran.”

 

Moving away from aid.

 

Indeed, Israeli leaders themselves have led the turn away from the aid-based relationship. In a January interview with The Economist, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “[Israel] wants to be as independent as possible” and that he wants to “taper off military aid within the next ten years.” The current aid-based relationship has “a very low chance of continuing under any future administration,” and that there must be “a new basis for the relationship that is a transition from aid to partnership,” former Israel Defense Forces military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin told the Times of Israel in May.

 

Tensions in Israel’s relationship with the U.S. have also affected Israeli public opinion, largely because of how the war with Iran and continued fighting in Lebanon have played out. A June 2026 survey conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that only 12 percent of Israelis believe that President Donald Trump is highly committed to Israel’s security interests. The majority of the Israeli public believes that “when a gap exists between Israeli and American positions on political-security issues, Israel’s ability to act according to its own considerations is limited.” There is a widely held consensus in Israel supporting a shift away from American aid, Raphael BenLevi, a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security, told The Dispatch.

 

Dependence on the United States turns Israel’s war fighting “from a military matter to a political one,” wrote Eric Mandel, director of the Middle East Political Information Network, in a January 2026 op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. Mandel argued that Israel should phase out military aid and shift to joint ventures, since America does not necessarily view existential threats to Israel through the same lens as Israelis.

 

Not everyone in the pro-Israel camp agrees that shifting away from a solely aid-based relationship would help Israel, since it would necessitate bearing a larger share of the cost of defending itself. If Israel does not dramatically increase its defense budget to cover the elimination of foreign military financing, “there’ll be gaps in Israeli military capability that will make them less secure and will undermine American interests,” Bowman added. That’s because Israel helps the United States neutralize threats in the Middle East without Americans having to get involved.

 

Netanyahu wants to eliminate aid “for political reasons that are contrary to the interests of Israel,” Bowman told The Dispatch. Israeli defense industrial base independence “plays really well politically, particularly on the right, but it’s completely unrealistic, and it’s not going to happen anytime in our lifetime.”

J. D. Vance’s Disingenuous Defense of Tucker Carlson

By Jonathan Chait

Saturday, September 05, 2026

 

When J. D. Vance was asked at a press conference on Thursday about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, the media personality and ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist, he displayed a surprising side of himself: human, vulnerable, almost touchingly naive.

 

“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” the vice president said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go. And if you have a disagreement with somebody politically, even over a deeply held issue, you should still be friends with that person, because the whole republic depends on people of different perspectives being able to talk to one another.”

 

This was a matter not of politics, Vance was at pains to emphasize, but of friendship. If Vance were to renounce Carlson over a matter as trivial as, say, Carlson’s oddly positive assessment of Adolf Hitler, what hope is there for society? The bonds of affection between Vance and Carlson are the very glue holding together the American experiment.

 

And yet, tempting though it might be to imagine Vance clasping hands with the children of the world and teaching them to sing in perfect harmony, some notes of skepticism are warranted. Perhaps Vance’s affection for Carlson has more to do with holding the loyalty of his friend’s enormous audience.

 

For one, Vance is not known for cordially disagreeing with people. He has accumulated an unusual number of bitter enemies by flinging insults at people—including Senate Democrats (“You’re full of shit, and everyone knows it”), reporters (“scumbags”), and “childless cat ladies.” Last month, Vance hurled himself into an obscure debate over burrito prices to make a gratuitous swipe at a conservative Washington Post columnist’s weight.

 

At the very same press conference where he waxed so earnestly about open dialogue, Vance mocked the idea that he would talk to former President Biden at the 9/11 ceremony (“I’m really looking forward to hanging out with Joe Biden. I’m sure that we’ll have many, many intense intellectual conversations, and it’ll be great”) and dismissed the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as “a crazy person.”

 

Vance’s dig at El-Sayed, and the context in which he made it, revealed a lot more about his reasons for maintaining the alliance with Carlson than did his encomium to friendship. Vance was trying to illustrate that he and Carlson do not agree on everything. Carlson had recently praised El-Sayed as “America First” and “literally Trumpian,” apparently calculating that the candidate’s anti-Zionism outweighs his many left-wing positions.

 

That view was the one Vance chose to highlight as his point of disagreement, rather than several other controversial remarks Carlson has made. Examples include but are not limited to his endorsement of “Great Replacement” and other conspiracy theories, his expressions of sympathy for Russia and its war against Ukraine, and his sympathetic interviews with figures such as Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, and the World War II–revisionist historian Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War” and described much of the Holocaust as mistaken deaths resulting from poor planning.

 

All of these statements have left Carlson teetering at the edge of respectability within the Republican Party. He has become one of the most prominent exponents of a strain of right-wing populism that flirts with and in some cases embraces isolationism, anti-Semitism, and general crackpottery. Vance has courted this faction of the right. He and Carlson have a partnership that has lasted nearly a decade and has yielded dozens of interviews.

 

In the course of this partnership, they may well have formed a genuine friendship. But Vance has discarded plenty of friends as he has cycled through various political identities. The difference between Vance’s ex-friends and Carlson is that Carlson is still a useful ally in a Republican factional conflict. When Carlson upset Fox News in 2021 by endorsing the Great Replacement theory, which holds that Democrats are using illegal immigration to replace the current electorate and cement power, Vance wrote on social media, “Tucker Carlson is the only powerful figure who consistently challenges elite dogma—on both cultural and economic questions. That is why they try to destroy him. Don’t fall for it this time, or any other.”

 

Vance went on to endorse the same theory in advance of the next midterm elections. “Democrat politicians who have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here” are orchestrating lax border enforcement, he said on Carlson’s show that year.

 

The Carlson-Vance partnership has generated more conservative blowback over the past few years as Carlson has progressed from skepticism of Israel into anti-Semitism, which Carlson denies. Traditional Republicans who have supported, or at least gone along with, the party’s attacks on Muslims and immigrants and its rejection of democratic norms have spoken out against cracking the door open for anti-Semites. Building an authoritarian, ultranationalist party that marinates in populist conspiracy theories but that abhors anti-Semitism turns out to be tricky.

 

Vance, heading into his expected 2028 presidential campaign, has a strong incentive to try to harness this right-wing energy. His political interests would be served if Republicans were to stop attacking Carlson and if Carlson were to tone down his criticism of the GOP. Hence, he seemed less concerned that Carlson had crossed a moral line than that, in the Michigan Senate race, he had crossed party lines. Carlson praising a member of the Democratic Party is more threatening to Vance than Carlson praising an apologist for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

 

At this week’s press conference, the reporter asked Vance, “What do you say to those who are uneasy with your close relationship with Carlson and claim that you’re avoiding addressing a lot of these issues, which may be causing divisions within the GOP?”

 

“What a travesty it is that in the United States of America, we let political disagreements define who our friends are going to be and not going to be,” Vance said. “So, yeah, Tucker is a friend of mine.”

 

Suppose Carlson decided to support someone other than Vance for president in 2028. Does anybody think their friendship would survive?

We Should Call It ‘Economic Growth Day’

National Review Online

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

Every Labor Day, unions claim responsibility for much of modern America’s cushy living standards. They argue that the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek wouldn’t exist without their valiant efforts against the mighty industrialists. We are supposed to thank unions for minimum wages and workplace safety laws, too, and for banning the scourge of child labor. If not for organized labor, the story goes, we would essentially still be living in the Gilded Age.

 

The comforts of working in today’s U.S. economy are nothing to scoff at. But to attribute these improvements to labor unions — ignoring the underlying force beneath them all — is to engage in historical revisionism. At best, organized labor ratified improvements in living standards that were already enabled by rising productivity.

 

It is crucial to remember that mankind’s economic baseline is universal grinding poverty, with life sustained only by subsistence. All improvements in material welfare, from the First Agricultural Revolution onward, must be forged through investment and ingenuity. The Industrial Revolution, the era that unions decry, was an extraordinary advancement in human welfare. Daily economic life has only gotten better since, as free peoples have developed new ways to arrange capital and labor to yield greater wealth for all involved.

 

Begin with labor hours. Since the 19th century, the number of hours worked per lifetime has more than halved worldwide, while leisure time has increased fivefold. Weekly hours worked by men in the United States have also gradually declined, even as the unionization rate rose and then collapsed. The same is true of American seniors.

 

The now-standard workweek — five eight-hour days with a two-day weekend — was not a union creation. Rather, it was innovated by Henry Ford at his company’s strictly non-union Highland Park Plant. The productivity revelation that was the assembly line first permitted Ford to give workers one day off a week in 1922, then two days off in 1926. With mass production came the free time needed for mass consumption.

 

Wages for production workers were rising steadily for decades before the advent of unions. When the first federal minimum wage took effect in the 1930s, at 25 cents an hour, most unskilled workers were earning nearly twice that amount.

 

As for safety conditions, the rate of workplace fatalities in America has been falling since at least the 1920s, as factories became increasingly automated and more workers shifted into the service sector.  When we look at a graph of deaths over time, it’s impossible to tell when federal workplace safety rules were enacted. Child labor was almost nonexistent by the time Congress prohibited it in 1938, since it had plummeted in the prior decades.

 

Time and again, laws pushed by labor unions were enshrined only after economic growth made them feasible — and after such standards were already being adopted voluntarily. When businesses must compete for employees, they have every incentive to boost productivity and share the proceeds through higher wages and more attractive working conditions.

 

Most champions of organized labor are ungrateful for the very mechanism that enables the common worker to flourish. To the extent they succeed in forcibly pushing wages and benefits above fair market levels, they discourage investment by slashing its return and thereby retard growth at the companies they unionize.

 

This Labor Day, remember that no improvement in living standards is possible without the economic productivity that lets Americans provide ever more goods and services to one another while requiring less work. Don’t let the unions take credit for your weekend.

Labor Day Is a Triumph of Capitalism

By Ben Connelly

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

Even in 2026, when only 10 percent of American workers are unionized, we tend to think of Labor Day as a celebration of organized labor. For that reason, union-skeptical conservatives and libertarians sometimes feel ambivalent toward the national holiday.

 

But there is good reason for free marketeers to celebrate Labor Day — even those of us who frown at organized labor’s ties to the Democratic Party. From the very beginning, free-market capitalism has been about free labor. Those of us who oppose unionization generally do so on the grounds that unions restrict the freedom of individual workers. It is the free market, rather than the closed shop, that best respects workers’ rights to make decisions about their careers.

 

Indeed, given that 90 percent of American workers don’t belong to unions, when we celebrate the freedom of American workers rather than labor activists, we can rightly say that we better represent the interests of American labor.

 

Free labor has a long and proud tradition in the Republican Party, going back to the very first presidential campaign of John C. Frémont in 1856. Founded in opposition to slavery, the Grand Old Party championed the right of workers to own their own labor. Southern slaveholders not only rejected this right in the case of their slaves, but they saw their society as fundamentally at odds with the capitalism of the Northern states. Perhaps shockingly to modern sensibilities, they did so on the grounds that the slave system was supposedly gentler and more humane than the dog-eat-dog labor markets of Northern states. Southern writer George Fitzhugh attacked the supposed exploitation of Northern free labor and argued that “slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” As Pierre Lemieux put it in an article for the Cato Institute, Fitzhugh believed that “competition reduces individuals to economic cannibals, making the weak no better off than slaves — and, in fact, worse off because they lack the protection of a master.”

 

Thus, the contest between North and South was a contest between the capitalist system of free labor and the Southern system of slave labor. The Confederacy even tried central planning. Northern victory in that struggle was a triumph for the idea that individuals should own their own labor.

 

This is a bedrock principle of free-market capitalism. It is what made capitalism a radical disruption to the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Thinkers such as Adam Smith rejected notions of serfdom and noblesse oblige, preferring “the system of natural liberty” in which human beings could change their circumstances through hard work and effort, rather than remaining stuck in the station to which they were born.

 

Free labor is inextricably linked to property rights and freedom of contract. If I own my own labor, the fruits of my labor belong to me. If I own my labor, I get to make my own decisions about what jobs I’m willing to take and what compensation I’m willing to accept. I can choose, for instance, to take a lower-paying job that allows me the freedom to write, or study, or make music. I can choose to move across the country and change careers. As Deirdre McCloskey points out in The Bourgeois Virtues, in precapitalist England, not only could workers often not change occupations, but they were often prevented from moving to other cities, because if too many blacksmiths moved from Manchester to Birmingham, they might compete with one another.

 

Socialists talk a big game about labor. Karl Marx argued that the free market pitted labor against capital in a vicious struggle that resulted in exploitation of the former by the latter. According to Marxists, socialism will finally usher in a workers’ paradise, in which people aren’t alienated from their labor and politics no longer serve the interests of capital.

 

But what many don’t realize is that it is capitalism, not socialism, that is premised on the principle of free labor. And it is socialism, not capitalism, in which people do not own their own labor. Indeed, in a socialist economy, people cannot own their own labor.

 

The sharpest anti-capitalist minds across history have recognized this. In order for any society premised on the notion of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” to function, there must be harsh penalties for slacking. Otherwise, human nature will encourage free riding.

 

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote, “The slacker, the idler, who, without performing any social task, enjoys like others — and often more than others — the products of society, must be pursued as a thief and parasite. We owe it to ourselves to give him nothing; but since he must nevertheless live, to put him under surveillance, and compel him to work.”

 

A socialist society can’t leave it up to the individual to determine what his abilities and needs are. If men and women are free to own their own labor, they may choose to work less, or to go into some line of work which doesn’t directly contribute to the needs of society. Louis Blanc, who coined the phrase “from each according to his ability,” explained that “the more one can [contribute], the more one must.”

 

This sounds noble when we imagine self-sacrifice. But it sounds a great deal darker when we consider the reality that sacrifice will often not be voluntary. For a socialist society to meet all of the needs of its citizens, it cannot leave it up to the individual to determine what his or her needs and abilities are. It can only hope to survive if it compels sacrifice, rather than waiting for voluntary sacrifice in the name of the greater good. Suddenly, George Fitzhugh’s observation seems more accurate. In a socialist society, nobody can own their own labor. And if society owns your labor, any time you take off is stolen from your fellow man.

 

Edward Bellamy put it this way: “The one who evades or scamps his work robs every one of his fellows. A man had better hang himself nowadays, than get the reputation of a shirk.”

 

According to Bernard Shaw, under socialism, “The idler will be treated not only as a rogue and a vagabond, but as an embezzler of national funds, the meanest sort of thief. The police will not have much trouble in detecting such offenders.”

 

What all of these socialist thinkers (and many others) share is the view that human beings ought not to own their labor. If we own our labor, we might not use it for the benefit of humanity. Individuals, therefore, ought not to be trusted with free labor.

 

It is capitalism that rejects this. It is the capitalist society that allows individuals to make their own decisions about how and when and where to work, and for how much, and whether to work at all. It is capitalism in which ordinary people are not slaves to society but sovereigns unto themselves, in charge of their own time and talent.

 

We hear often that capitalism is cold and harsh, in need of unions and regulation to soften the rough edges of the market. The truth is that, more than any other system, free-market capitalism is premised on the dignity of individual workers and the freedom of people to make their own decisions about their labor and to be rewarded for their time and talent. That’s something worth celebrating this Labor Day.

Smart Phones or Smart Kids: Pick One

By Guy Denton

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

When Anya Meksin began searching for a kindergarten for her child, she was excited by the wealth of options in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). As she toured various public elementary schools, however, her enthusiasm was swiftly overtaken by distress.

 

“I was completely shocked to see, in eight of the ten schools, the kindergartners and first-graders sitting on devices during the school tour with headphones on in a darkened room,” Meksin tells me. Most of them, she added, seemed to be mindlessly browsing YouTube. “I was just like, what is this dystopia?”

 

Seeking other concerned parents, Meksin discovered Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group founded in Los Angeles in 2025. The organization, which began as a small collective of local parents and teachers, now has members in more than 100 school districts throughout the United States. In June, its activism helped encourage LAUSD to place strict limits on screen time for children in the second grade and above, and to ban the use of screens outright for younger pupils.

 

Meksin says that the group has found such success because “parents across the country share this urgent concern of, Are my children being harmed by excessive device use in school? ” Educational technology, or “EdTech,” has become increasingly prevalent in American education since the turn of the century. In 2010, more than 3 million laptops, tablets, Chromebooks, and other tools were shipped to K–12 schools. That number had increased to nearly 14 million by 2017. Today, 88 percent of public schools provide every student with a laptop or tablet for online learning in class and at home. This new reality, Meksin believes, is a “public health crisis” of our own creation.

 

The rise of EdTech was hastened by the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant lockdown measures, which forced Americans to adopt almost entirely virtual lives. To navigate the crisis, schools embraced online education, and devices that were already commonplace in classrooms became ubiquitous. Even as the pandemic eased, remote learning endured as new variants of the virus emerged. When the Covid era finally ended, schools remained dependent on digital tools.

 

Many parents and teachers with whom I spoke believe that schools rushed to adopt EdTech without implementing appropriate guardrails or considering its potential for harm. By every standard metric of educational success, America’s children are falling behind. Students of all ages increasingly struggle to read proficiently or perform basic mathematical tasks. Test scores are declining. A recent report by the Education Scorecard — a group of education researchers at elite universities — concluded that America is firmly in the grip of a “learning recession”: Today’s students are performing significantly worse than students did in 2013, as Nat Malkus discusses elsewhere in this issue.

 

Jared Cooney Horvath, an educator and neuroscientist whose work focuses on the relationship between technology and learning, recognizes that multiple factors are to blame, including the advent of smartphones and social media and the decay of the nuclear family. He is certain, however, that EdTech is the primary culprit.

 

“One of the weirdest or hardest facts that I’ve had to contend with as a psychologist is Gen Z is cognitively less developed than their parents,” Horvath says. “The more schools started to embrace tech, that’s when you could almost start to watch scores and development start to drop.”

 

Horvath argues that the correlation became unmistakable in 2015 as schools slowly abandoned physical textbooks, handwritten essays, and pen-and-paper exams — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic. Digital tests and assignments are now so pervasive that even the SAT can be taken online. Yet screens and devices are not designed to encourage the kind of deep concentration that learning requires.

 

“Anytime people are asked to do analog versus digital when it comes to learning, 90 percent of the time they will do worse on the digital,” Horvath tells me. When we read from screens, we are less likely to maintain focus or grasp complex details. In physical books, words and paragraphs are placed in fixed locations on a page, and this spatial quality helps the brain comprehend and retain information. “Space is a huge aspect of our memories,” Horvath said. “When you read on a screen and you’re scrolling, there is no three-dimensional location. . . . An entire aspect of human memory just gets dumped.”

 

***

 

Such concerns about EdTech are supported by an abundance of research. One 2022 study, for instance, determined that “even small daily amounts of use of digital devices” in classrooms were negatively related to reading comprehension. A 2020 analysis of more than 900,000 fourth-graders, meanwhile, found that school computer use was negatively associated with test scores. Parents and researchers have been especially vocal about these issues, and the movement to limit EdTech is taking hold among teachers. “Almost every educator I have talked to has sounded the alarm about students’ social and emotional development, attention spans, all of these concerns,” says Meredith Coffey, a teacher turned senior policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank.

 

Beyond the mental effects of screens, Coffey, who witnessed the rapid expansion of EdTech firsthand while teaching English during the pandemic, believes that efforts to streamline learning through technology have instead introduced new complications. Before the digital era, teachers typically relied on physical textbooks and handouts for assigned readings and homework. Now, however, readings are “coming through in all these different formats. Maybe it’s a photocopied chapter from a book, maybe it’s an online textbook, maybe it’s a reading literally pasted on lecture slides,” Coffey tells me. “And they’re all in these different places within the learning management system.” For students, keeping track of these sources can be overwhelming. Coffey “talked to a school psychologist who says that this is an added skill set that we need to teach students — how to combine that information and synthesize it.” But “that’s something that schools have just not thought about.”

 

Technology can also contribute to bullying and antisocial behavior. Popular classroom tools such as Google Docs and Google Slides can be used to share hurtful messages and otherwise distract from lessons. These problems are magnified in schools with permissive smartphone policies. If phones are accessible during the school day, students can use text messages to harass or exclude one another. Even among close-knit friend groups, “I find it still comes with a lot of anxiety, because things are always being reported and recorded or pictures are being posted,” a teacher based in western Pennsylvania tells me. “And people are judging them and they’re laughing and it’s being passed around. . . . I saw a lot of just general anxiety about, What’s going on? Who’s posting what? ” Indeed, numerous studies have demonstrated that reducing screen time can improve children’s happiness while lessening behavioral problems.

 

Anderson Jay, a middle school student in Maryland, has been familiar with EdTech since kindergarten, when he learned the alphabet on a laptop. Some of his classes employ devices infrequently, but others, such as math, rely heavily on computers and digital learning platforms. Smartphones are permitted in his school as long as they are kept out of sight throughout the day. Not surprisingly, his peers often find ways to circumvent that rule. He tells me he’s seen “countless times” when “drama” was caught on video and shared online. “Any fights that happen are usually recorded and then posted on Snapchat, TikTok, and it spreads really fast.” Teachers seldom discuss the problem, and much of the bullying confined to social media escapes their notice.

 

While Jay believes that a certain amount of technology is necessary in schools, he is concerned about its effects on memory and attention. If he could transform his school, he would make sure that teachers, rather than devices, were responsible for guiding lessons. “Humans can relate to humans,” he says, and teachers can offer a far richer understanding of life than any technological program. He would also introduce a blanket smartphone ban and strike a balance of “75/25” between traditional and digital learning methods.

 

Many of the teachers and experts with whom I spoke agreed that finding such a balance could reverse much of the damage done to K–12 education. One popular suggestion is that schools should restrict the use of devices to computer labs. “A computer lab is great,” says the teacher in western Pennsylvania. “You go in with a purpose. You’re learning certain skills. You’re all in there together working on something.” Although a broad return to face-to-face learning and physical materials would be desirable, the teacher recognizes that a certain degree of exposure to technology, and how to use it, is essential.

 

The prospect of widespread change seems increasingly likely. This year, six states have passed legislation to restrict screen time and digital instruction in schools. Lawmakers across the country are attempting to follow suit. A groundswell of activism among concerned parents and teachers has helped influence these policies, and the movement for reform is gaining momentum. Advocacy groups are attracting members at an impressive pace, and their leaders are optimistic that school districts will take notice. “We have the science and the research on our side,” says Kristen Beddard, co-leader of PA Unplugged, a statewide coalition of parents, educators, and medical professionals. And though change may come only gradually, day by day the case for reform grows stronger.